In this episode, we talk about the late, great Charles Mills and his landmark book The Racial Contract. Forcefully arguing that the modern discourse of egalitarianism and freedom is underwritten by a tacit commitment to global white supremacy, Mills develops an immanent criticism of liberalism that remains faithful to many of its core values. We discuss the limits and promises of liberal universalism, the potential reform of contractarian logic, and whether white people really mean it when they say they want to abolish whiteness. Rest in peace to a really real one.

This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:

patreon.com/leftofphilosophy

References:

Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we discuss Robert Nozick’s libertarian political philosophy as presented in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We consider his challenges to leftist thought, especially the sort of left liberalism championed by the likes of John Rawls. We take seriously his demand for an argument for egalitarianism and his critique of patterned accounts of distributive justice. But we also give him a hard time for some of his more absurd arguments, from those about swimming pools to those concerning wealthy basketball players and the all-important human need to feel like a very special boy. When it comes to libertarianism, this is in fact them sending their best.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we tackle the concept of violence as it appears in the revolutionary and anticolonial work of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Throughout the episode we link together Fanon’s endorsement of revolutionary violence against colonial domination with his work as a psychiatrist. How could Fanon argue for the necessity of violence while bearing witness to its regressive effects on both those who suffer violence and those who deploy it? What makes the revolutionary violence of the colonized qualitatively distinct from the violence of colonizers? Finally, what can Fanon's dialectic of violence tell us today? This episode casts Fanon as both revolutionary and care worker and explores the tensions and resonances between the need for freedom and the costs of struggle.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004).

Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

Frantz Fanon, Œuvres (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2011).

Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, eds. Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we are joined by Jeff Diamanti to discuss what it looks like to watch the climate change. Our conversation shifts from analytical, aesthetic, and political perspectives, as we turn our attention from critical raw materials to the future cartographies already being carved out. We explore Jeff’s notion of the terminal as the kind of space where capitalism abstracts matter and value becomes concrete. As it turns out, there’s more to see in the logistics than philosophers might think, from indigenous resistance and sabotage to a possible world of sustainable provision.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Jeff Diamanti, “Critical Raw Materials,” in Worlding Ecologies (2024), 135-43.

Jeff Diamanti, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Charmaine Chua, Martin Danyluk, Deborah Cohen, and Laleh Khalili, “Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Circulation with Logistics,” Society and Space 36(4)(2018): 617-629.

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we discuss essays from throughout G.A. Cohen’s philosophical career. Cohen is known as one of the founders of Analytical Marxism, so we talk about what this tradition in Marxist thinking is about and how it handles the problems of political let-down and disillusionment that affect us all. We also get into his polemics against the libertarians and John Rawls in his essays on exploitation, freedom, and justice.

This is just a short clip from the full episode, which is available to our subscribers on Patreon:

patreon.com/leftofphilosophy

References:

G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).

G.A. Cohen, “The Labor Theory of Value and the Concept of Exploitation,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 8(4)(1979): 338-360.

G.A. Cohen, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 12(1)(1983): 3-33.

G.A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

Nicholas Vrousalis, The Political Philosophy of G.A. Cohen (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we are joined by Alberto Toscano to talk about his analysis of contemporary far-right movement and ideology. We discuss his new book Late Fascism and consider the strategic and rhetorical downsides of analogizing the present moment to past instantiations of fascist politics in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We try to get a grip on what distinguishes contemporary fascism, why liberal discourse’s fixation on ‘totalitarianism’ fails to grasp the specificity of fascism, and ask what Black and third-world scholars can teach us on this score.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2023).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we are joined by Ajay Chaudhary to discuss his book The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World and the political, economic, and affective sites of exhaustion reproduced through climate degradation. We examine the expanding colonial relations of what Chaudhary calls the “extractive circuit” between the both the Global South and Global North as well as widening segments of the working classes in the Global North. We dispel fantasies of both the hope that climate change will automatically unify a coherent politics for a just transition and the fear of a human apocalypse. Given this, what would a left-wing climate realism look like as opposed to burgeoning forms of right-wing climate realism that aims to extract and protect as much wealth as possible for a vanishingly small minority? Much of our conversation concerns the role of temporality in our politics and the imperative not to wait for the future to solve our climate crises. Turns out waiting for Greta Thunberg to solve all our problems is a poor strategy!

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

thebrooklyninstitute.com | @materialist_jew

References:

Ajay Singh Chaudhary, “We’re Not in This Together,” The Baffler (2020) https://thebaffler.com/salvos/were-not-in-this-together-chaudhary

Ajay Singh Chaudhary, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World (London: Repeater Books, 2024).

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN

In this episode, we are joined by Matt McManus to discuss his research into the history and philosophy of right-wing politics in his book The Political Right and Equality. We discuss the nature of conservatism as an irrationalist reaction to modernist ideas about human egalitarianism, the rhetorical strategies of the right, and the historical conditions under which moderate conservatism turns over into extremist fascist reaction. We pay special attention to Edmund Burke’s aestheticization of politics and Joseph De Maistre’s formula for presenting conservative ideology as punk-rock counterculture rather than the argumentatively weak status-quo apologia it really is. It pays to know your enemy, comrades.

leftofphilosophy.com | @leftofphil

References:

Matt McManus, The Political Right and Equality: Turning Back the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2023).

Matt McManus, “Liberal Socialism Now,” Aeon (2024). https://aeon.co/essays/the-case-for-liberal-socialism-in-the-21st-century

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN