A Shareable World

“We have to be 'objective,' but objectivity can only be about what exists; you cannot be objective about what doesn't yet exist.” —big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 What is a revolution in the flow of history? What does history have to do with what is possible, or rather, what is thought to be possible? 11:09 How do ‘bourgeois' historians do history in a way that makes present concepts seem eternal or ahistorical (e.g. the ‘market')? If bourgeois historians are attempting to merely ‘describe' the past, what are the descriptive laws a socialist historian uses to tell history? What is history really about for a socialist? 22:03 How can history itself be a practice? What is the purpose of the practice of history? If history is a practice with certain goals, can it still be objective? Is bourgeois history objective? 31:00 What are the hidden premises and aims of bourgeois history? What does it have to do with assumptions about counterfactual situations (i.e., “if x didn't happen, then y…”)and how does this limit or expand our sense of what's possible? 40:58 How are we meant to deal with history in educational institutions? How should history be taught to young people so they can go on to solve problems? Further Readings: G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit Phillip Pettit, On the People's Terms: A Republican Theory and Model of Democracy

“…we like to think it's the opposite and we claim it’s the opposite, but I think a good case can be made for the fact that social, the social media have become more and more an alienating rather than a collectivizing element in our society. And we'll pay for that alienation.” —big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 What are revolutions? What historical examples do we have to draw on—like the Spartacus rebellion—and what do they have to teach us? How have the ideas of liberal democracy, which saturate the present and our vision of the past, obscured or warped our ideas of revolution, or made revolution seem historically unnecessary? 13:16 How do we view revolution today? Why do we fear it? How is it depicted as violent, and why should we consider it in relation to the normalized institutional violence of the conditions that lead to revolution? 19:45 In America particularly, why haven’t we seen more revolutions? What is specific to our political conditions—as compared to others across history—that inhibit revolutionary action? How has the idea of revolution been domesticated, particularly in our distorted view of American history? 32:05 What is the process of revolution, and how can its processes lead to brief utopias, as in the case of the Paris Commune? How do revolutions model themselves after one another? 42:03 What are the limits and possibilities of contemporary movements, like Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street? How have class politics been evacuated, and what does this have to do with a Cold War intellectual project? What is the influence of anarchism on contemporary movements? What is the impact of new technologies—most especially, social media? Further Reading: Luciano Pellicani, Revolutionary Apocalypse [on violence and revolution] Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence

“…all of this is important because it's about how I, or you or anyone else has to live one's daily life. In other words, all these theories are just that there are things that intellectuals play with. But the problem is how do I live my daily life? How do I justify what I do when I get up in the morning? How do I treat my children, and my grandchildren? And so forth. That's where it has to be considered.”—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 How do utopian forms of thinking change, looking into the 16th and 17th centuries, towards justifying current power structures as opposed to opposing them? What does this have to do with competing strands of emerging socialism and capitalism? How does private property emerge as an idea and practice? How does it relate to theories of the social contract? 13:29 How are different justifications for (or attacks on) private property derived from different concepts of the ‘state of nature,' or fables about prehistory? How does Locke's theory about property anticipate the labor theory of value in Marx? 28:10 What are labor theories of value? How did they allow people to articulate utopian forms of society, based around valuing the worker? What ideas do people have around the management of wealth and the planning of society? 37:44 What are the assumptions about human beings built in to stories about private property and the social contract? How does this have to do with earlier discussed stories around the Bible etc.? What does socialism assume about human nature? 43:13 How do questions around human nature enable us to think about what education should look like in a new society? Further Reading Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun Peter Chamberlen, The Poore Man's Advocate Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan John Locke, Second Treatise on Government

"If you believe that change is necessary, you may believe the change is necessary but not necessarily know what direction that change will go. But change is inevitable. We change all the time. Nature is changing and we have, you know, change is part of the response mechanisms is over with and so on. We need perhaps to think about educating our children for change rather than for stability."—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 Dispel any questions of anachronism, or linear progress—socialist ideas are ancient, and have presented themselves at other historical thresholds. How do historical changes change the way people think? What examples do we have to draw on to consider the interaction between a change in material conditions, and a change in thought? 05:24 What are the changes of his time that compelled Thomas More to write Utopia? What is the system of thought that More is coming out of? What material conditions are compelling More to write this critique? 11:28 How does the theme of private property show up in Utopia, and shift the way we think about democracy currently? What are the political and power implications of private property? How does this allow him to anticipate many problems of the coming capitalism? 22:03 What does education have to do with More's vision? How and what was taught? How does this compare to the ways we educate today? 27:16 In a utopian society, what is the role of discontent? What is the role of discontent in our society today? How does capitalist culture want to redirect our discontent, resentment, or unhappiness? 29:56 How does the way capitalism treats discontent teach us to think about—or rather, antagonize—change? How do we deal (or not deal) with change in capitalist society? How do we educate to deal with change? How would a democratic socialist society organize change? 33:11 Shifting gears: what are the merits of localized change versus large-scale change? How has the barrier between local and global come apart in recent times, demanding large scale change? What does that have to do with the larger scale of political life, in the time of nation-states? 36:53 What does Bacon's New Atlantis have to teach us about another kind of property, foundational to life in this country—intellectual property? How does knowledge production relate to capitalist exploitation? How do we in our sites of conventional knowledge production—schools and universities—reflect capitalist values? Further Readings: Thomas More, Utopia Francis Bacon, New Atlantis [on questions of change and education] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy & Eli Meyerhoff, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World

“We talk about curriculum these days and about education these days as if it existed somehow apart from the social, the society in which we live. And I'm arguing that when we talk about education today, we're talking about education for capitalism. And we need to start talking about education for democratic socialism.”—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 Greg and Mike reflect: what is the point of this podcast? 03:32 If we primarily read Plato's Republic today as a moral document, what are the other ways in which we can read it? What does the Republic suggest about the relationship between individual morality and social institutions—which needs to be changed first to transform the other? What do we need to understand about Plato's historical and social context? 10:56 What can we learn from Plato's ideas about his ideal society? How do they reflect or challenge our own ideals about society? 14:39 What about education? Why was education so important for Plato's ideal society? How is that related to the structure of his society—more provocatively, how is education related to the structure of society in general? How does the social structure of the Republic give citizens a definition of what it is to be human? 20:52 How is Plato's outlining of a social system we now call eugenics still relevant, if uncomfortably, today? How does this relate to his (and our) idea of equality? 24:26 What is Plato telling us about the nature of the self, and how does that relate to questions of society? In what ways are questions of the self also social questions? 26:38 Extrapolating from Plato to our own world, what education would be demanded by a democratic socialist world? 30:06 What does Plato have to tell us about how to change society—through the institutions that already exist, or by tearing down those institutions? How does this relate to his definition of what it means to be human? 36:45 Shifting gears, what does an old Roman division between the law of nature and the law of man have to tell us about our current environmental crisis and, therefore, the crisis of capitalism? How do Marxists fall prey to this division? 43:25 Shifting gears again, why is our impending crisis so unbelievable, in the literal sense of that word—why do people refuse to believe it? What does this have to do with historical time(s)? What does it have to do with the myths we believe in, we live by? And, circling back one last time to the question of education, discarding the premise that it's ever objective—how do we transmit new, different myths? How are the myths we transmit in education related to the structure of society at large? Further Reading: Plato, Republic [on Greek philosophy and its intrinsic relationship to social theory] Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule & Kojin Karatani, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy [on education and eugenics] Ansgar Allen, Benign Violence: Education in and Beyond the Age of Reason

“The idea of class conflict doesn't start with Karl Marx. It starts in the Old Testament and some of the earliest writings in the Old Testament.”—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 Why is it important for the left to explore and rediscover utopian ideas within culture—particularly, religion? Why do we have to think about capitalism as not just an economic system, but as a culture, which is different from, say, a democratic socialist culture? 05:24 We often read religious texts in moral terms today—what if we took, say, the Bible on its face and considered the moral protest as also a protest on a social, economic, and political level? How does the Bible express issues around class that are still relevant to us today? What aspects of utopian thought exist in the Bible? 15:55 How does the Bible express a political tension that remains on the left today, between a kind of anarchism (governance by law and culture, with no central authority) and a more centralized power structure? 23:39 How have historical religious figures, like St. Augustine and Savonarola, seen religious institutions (like churches) as sites of utopia in the material world, and tried to fashion them as such? What can we learn from these historical attempts about what actually causes and provokes change? Is it the idea of God, or power? Is it threat? 34:45 How do we balance acculturation—changing individuals—with the changing of social systems—overthrowing governments, for example? How do we deal with the fact that one of these processes seems to occur much slower than the other? How do we balance different kinds of time in the attempt to make historical change? 41:08 Do we need the idea of God, or a divine authority, to make change? What about different ways of relating to divinity—seeing it as created by human beings, or, seeing human beings as potential expressions of the divine? What if the divine isn't something out there, outside of human beings? Further Reading: Book of Amos, Book of Isaiah Augustine, Confessions [on the relationship between religion and class struggle] Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation [on the contrast between historical times] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time

“It's not about rearranging the chairs on the deck of the, of the Titanic, uh—because in fact, capitalism is the Titanic. And no matter how you rearrange those chairs, it's going to go down, right? It is doing so as we, as we talk, we've seen this, we have these crises, we've run into the icebergs that play the game of that metaphor. So maybe a little bit of imbalance is what we, what we require. I want to defend a certain kind of, of metaphysical extremism as it were.”—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 How have conceptions of a fixed human ‘nature' limited humans' conception of what's politically possible? How does the history of thinking about human nature reveal how unstable a concept it really is? Why is it so ideologically powerful to make a contingent political system aligned with human nature, be it ordained by biology or God? 14:02 Should we be questioning the existence of human nature? Does that open up certain possibilities for us? 19:38 When we think about utopia, is it an end goal, or a process—the good place which is attainable, or the ‘no-place' which, by definition, never is? What does this subtle difference have to do with how capitalism is foreclosing our sense of time? 33:04 How do we deal with the distance between what may in fact be possible and what appears possible to us based on the facts we have now? What do we do with epistemic systems, like evolutionary biology, that appear to limit what is possible for humans? How do we deal with the brute fact of utopia when it fails? How malleable is reality, really? Further Reading: [on the impossible negotiations of political possibility] adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds & Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“We're engaging in utopian thought every day of our lives. ‘Oh, I wish it were better.' That's a utopian statement.”-big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 Returning to the question of political pragmatism, why and how is it that thinking about utopias has become disparaged? What does capitalism have to do with this ideological shift? What even is utopia? What can we learn from the history of utopian thinking? 12:27 How does utopia engage with human problems that seem fundamental, like greed? What historical examples do we have of utopias—that is, attempts at making a better world, or a world that doesn't exist? 26:38 A little more provocatively, what if utopia isn't just something over there but is already all around us? What if ideologies that naturalize the political present—like capitalist economics—are themselves fictional and, in a way, utopic? What if all political thinking is utopic? 37:24 How is the disparagement of certain kinds of political thinking over others as ‘utopic'—and thus, impractical—limiting our ability to discuss political issues? How are the moral stakes of political issues being elided by the insistence on political practicality? 42:04 What is it precisely about capitalist ideology that is being naturalized, made impossible to attack intellectually? How do we start to open up the idea that the premises capitalism rests upon are not part of human nature? Further Reading: Thomas More, Utopia [on reopening political possibilities from the Cold War headlock] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology

“Our political structure is no longer responsive to the people, even in the narrow way of defining the people that the American constitution in its original draft did. In other words, we may have democratized the society by having more and more voters—the right to vote spreads more and more throughout different groups in the society. But that doesn't mean that the structure works anymore democratically. It probably works much less democratically than ever before.”-big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 How radical a change do we need to survive? How are beliefs around political pragmatism getting in the way? How can we distinguish between political strategy and political tactics without losing sight of the big picture? 09:21 What does the history of the commons have to teach us about new ways to organize society? What areas of political and economic life need to be ‘recommonized'? What practical challenges face us in trying to implement the commons, and what can we learn from history about facing these challenges? 22:21 Whose responsibility is it to facilitate and initiate these massive changes to society? How has the American experiment of representative democracy, in which the state purportedly acts as the surrogate of the people, failed? What historical changes necessitate a change in the way we think about democracy? 28:36 How can we start to grapple with a question that is, historically, very dangerous—that is, whether democracy can bring about the immediate mass change that we need? 31:23 What can we learn from China, considering it not as a rival but as an alternative solution—one that, perhaps, we want to avoid? 36:24 What does education have to do with democracy? Why does the number of voters, or the number of people who have access to voting, not tell us much about how democratic a society is? Why is profound educational reform necessary for the making of an actually democratic society?

“One of the successful moves Western capitalism made in the Cold War was to so identify the Soviet Union with anything that was non-capitalist. Then once the Soviet Union fell, it obviated the possibility of any reality other than capitalist reality.”-big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 How did the political climate of the Cold War—that is, an overwhelming rebuke to anything associated with the USSR, including any form of communism and socialism—influence supposedly objective and rational intellectual discourse, subtly or not? How does the legacy of its impact on the intellectual discourse of the time—particularly the splitting of the social sciences—remain with us today? How did this affect even cultural production, particularly literature? 13:45 Examining closely what the Marxist concept of class really is vs. how it's perceived, how does Cold War anticommunism influence the terms of political discussion today? 22:38 In what ways is the broad association—formed deliberately during the Cold War—between the set of ideas called Marxism, the lived regime of the Soviet Union, and the ideas of communism and socialism misleading? How did that association influence political and intellectual discourse? 32:04 How did that association lead to the intense strengthening of capitalist ideology in the US, and how did its nature as an ideology conceal itself? More broadly, how does ideology come to seem natural, and how does this influence our thinking about how much we can change the world? 41:12 When the re-association of words—like ‘socialism' and ‘Marxism'—with ideas and practices they did not originally contain becomes a political project in itself, how do we clearly and meaningfully articulate ‘democratic socialism' in a way that is useful to us? Why is democratic socialism not just about the restructuring of society—the means of production, etc.—but also the way in which society is restructured? What does and doesn't have a place in democratic socialism?

In this guest episode hosted by Greg and his daughter, Erica, they pick through the atheism of Richard Dawkins to find and better understand how modern atheism is a limiting worldview, the mechanisms that lead us to truth, and the uses of religion that go beyond it as a metaphysical description of the world. Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript

“I find Mexico to be incredibly interesting because we witness the disintegration of Western political institutions. The state is disintegrating in Mexico in front of our very eyes, and it's being replaced by the so-called cartels… We haven't seen that kind of thing in the world—because these cartels have no political depth. They don't have any ideology, right? They're strictly economic institutions. They do represent—and I think this is a very interesting point worth thinking about as we go on—the cartels represent the ultimate economization of politics.”-big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 What about the conditions of the USSR—so integral to the Allies' victory in WWII—made its post-war behavior and prospects so different from the US? How did these challenges lead to the post-war solidification of its authoritarianism and its occupation of many countries in Eastern Europe? 19:30 How did ideology function in the process of the Soviets' development of their state, and the US' development of an image of that state? In what ways did the US, in antagonizing the Soviets so intensely, accidentally accept some of their ideological presuppositions? In what surprising ways did communist ideology spread, other than direct Soviet occupation? 25:02 What about the Middle West [big Mike's term for Western Europe]—what challenges did they face post-WWII? How was its development influenced by the legacy of democratic socialism, much stronger there than in the US, and fascism, which was homegrown in many more European countries than we remember? How did their vulnerability allow the US to step into its position as world superpower, as we know it to be today? 37:55 What about the ‘third world' or ‘developing world'—problematic categories that betray the influence of Marx? How did imperialism and its volatile endings lead to surprising consequences for both West and East, who both tried, often violently, to influence the way peoples across the world were trying to determine the course of their own lives? What value do the experiments of various ‘postcolonial' countries have for us today?

“In the West … there was a very strong reassertion of capitalism. Now I say reassertion of capitalism. And the reason I say reassertion is because during the Second World War—US society for the few short years of the Second World War was radically changed.”—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 Why have we already forgotten about such a recent world-historical event as the Cold War? In the post-WWII climate, what are the four world regions that are at odds with each other? What was the influence of communist ideas in each of these four regions? How did the Third World function as a battleground between West and East? 13:59 The Cold War was fundamentally a competition for power. How did this competition happen ideologically? How did this inform the military and economic competition? 20:04 How was the war fought culturally between East and West? How do different practices around the interaction between intellectual and political life allow us to see how important the cultural war was? 29:32 How did the cultural war in the US—which attempted at all costs to de-emphasize class—try to respond to state cultural messaging around WWII, which inadvertently helped spawn a homegrown anti-capitalist movement? How did the US state's attempts to control culture and ideology influence those in the Middle West and Third World who were disillusioned by both capitalism and communism? 37:57 Rewinding a bit, in what ways was the US functioning as essentially a socialist state in WWII? How did its ideological promotion of military service during that war (accidentally or not) align with anti-capitalist ideas, particularly by emphasizing the value of democracy? Why did these material conditions make such a severe re-assertion of capitalism and capitalist values necessary? How did this bleed into the consumer capitalism we're familiar with today, and the concurrent evisceration of labor's power? What does this tell us about the power of ideology to change and even negate people's experience of material conditions?

“…social democracy recognizes the need for the state to put some band-aids on some sores, right? Democratic socialism comes along and says, that doesn't work. That's not enough. That really, that we need to change society institutionally.”—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 A brief recap of last episode: how can the uprising of communism and fascism in the 20th century be seen as responses to the crises of capitalism? 05:26 Why is it important for us to think about the history of the Cold War, and how we think about the history of the Cold War (and beforehand)? Why was the Russian Revolution such a massive, world-historical event? 12:50 How does the Western response to the Russian Revolution (and the ensuing civil war) shape the trajectory of Soviet communism towards state power? How does the need to accumulate capital lead to a communism that, when lived on the ground, is essentially like fascism? 26:14 How does the brief, tenuous alliance between the Soviet Union and the U.S. during World War II collapse into the Cold War? Post-WWII, how and why do perceptions form, at least in Northern and Western Europe, of communism as more viable and powerful than capitalism, a perception immensely foreign to us in the U.S.? How does this lead to the rise of social democracy, or at least social democratic party and policy, in Europe? 35:26 What's social democracy, and how does it differ from ‘ameliorated capitalism'? How is the role of charities in ameliorated capitalism similar to the role of the state in social democracy? 39:29 What is the move that takes us from social democracy to democratic socialism? Why is a fundamental restructuring and redistribution of resources necessary to democratic socialism, and what are some historical examples of this? 46:31 If America is heading towards further and further privatization, how does that create problems over who has the power to make decisions over economic and political life? How do those tensions over equality of power also exist in a democratic socialist society in which the state has control over resources and distribution? 56:26 If we're going to have the structural changes needed to face our crises and still respect everyone's autonomy? How will this require changes in the way we live, and the way we think about how we live?

So from 1929 on through the end of the Second World War, we can see very clearly how seeds planted a little bit earlier blossomed into alternative ways of organizing society. And I want to briefly look at that ‘cause I think that's, we live the consequences of that to this day.-big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 A brief recap: we know by now why it's important to study history. How did socialism arise concurrently with, ‘as the twin of', capitalism? Why was the concurrent shift in material conditions—the discovery of electricity—and ideology—that nature could be extracted from—necessary for the birth of capitalism? What are the major successes of capitalism? 11:07 What are the major failures of capitalism? How are these failures exacerbated by other material conditions, such as urbanization? What do these failures have to do with capitalism's fundamental instability? What does that instability have to do with our day-to-day experience of living in capitalism? 18:08 How do we deal with some of capitalism's failures? Is it by limiting or stopping growth—if that's impossible, what do we really have to accomplish? 22:11 If capitalism did cause many enormous improvements for human life, was it necessary as a stage of history preceding a better system, as Marx thought it was? 27:33 What were the attempts to make a better system than capitalism even at the beginning of capitalist history? What can we learn from the fact that even before capitalism was in full swing, people were worried about it? 31:31 Jumping forward, what can we learn from the Great Depression about the fundamental instability of capitalism in its full force? How did the Great Depression lead to the three very different responses—ameliorated capitalism, fascism, and communism—that defined world history in the 20th century? 34:09 What are the workings and ideology behind what Mike calls ‘ameliorated' capitalism, exemplified by the New Deal in the U.S.? How does it function as a response to the issues of capitalism? 39:54 What about fascism—how can it be considered a response to the issues of capitalism, particularly as it manifested in Italy and Germany in the 20th century? What were the massive cultural shifts that ensued? 44:30 How was communism—which often went by the name socialism, but we'll call communism to differentiate it more clearly from ‘democratic socialism'—a response to the issues of capitalism? What were the cultural changes necessary there? 48:35 How can we view the massive, world-historical events of the 20th century as a manifestation of the conflicts between these three responses to capitalism? Why did ameliorated capitalism and communism band together to defeat fascism in the Second World War? 52:12 Why, particularly, is 'ameliorated capitalism' not enough; why does it fail as a solution? What does this have to do with the cultural changes it does (or doesn't) provoke? 57:22 Looking ahead: what makes a society like Scandinavia a democratic socialist one, as opposed to a social democracy? What are the cultural changes democratic socialism entails?

"I can prove to you historically that private property didn't always exist! And the fact that it didn't at a certain point exist means that it's also possible for it not to exist now. That's exactly the point." —big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 Recap: why is history important? What can historical failures teach us that historical successes can't? How can an attention to that failure foster a feeling of solidarity, of humility? How, despite everything, can history be a source of hope? 09:27 How did history as a discipline form? What does this have to do with the division of the social sciences in the middle of the 19th century? 15:07 How does the figure of the statesman—as opposed to the politician—allow us to conceptualize a total vision for a new world, as opposed to individual solutions? How does the fragmentation of the disciplines prevent us from having vision in our day to day lives? 24:22 How did the current discipline of economics derive from the formerly integrated notion of political economy? What does that have to do with the concurrent rise of capitalism and nation-states, and the consolidation of state power? What does this teach us about how the production of knowledge is always shaped by power structures? 33:23 What are the historical conditions we're in now, in terms of the relationship between wealth (economic) and state (political) power, versus the middle of the 19th century? How does this relationship illuminate for us a conflict between the market and democracy? 42:39 What might the discipline we need look like? Where might it lead us? How would it allow us to think about our fundamental problem, which is our relationship to nature?

“Capitalism was not written indelibly into the future of the middle ages. The decline of the middle ages takes place and there are many responses to it. One is the rise of capitalism and one is also the rise of socialism, if I understand socialism to be the search for reasonable alternatives to capitalism, and indeed that turns out to be the case.”—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 What even is history, and how does history as we in the West think of it today arise alongside capitalism? If history as we think of it today arises alongside capitalism, what does it do for capitalism? 15:21 More broadly, what does history do in the world, who does history serve? How can history give legitimacy to different views of the present? 18:54 How do conceptual questions about how we study objects in history—such as, for example, questions about how we should define an ‘event'—allow us to use history for different purposes? 22:10 If history is always a construct, then how do we start to construct a democratic socialist view of history, as opposed to the commonplace (capitalist) histories we are commonly confronted with? How does allow us to rethink the relation between socialism and capitalism? 37:30 If history is constructed ideologically, how do we weigh the validity of one history as compared to another? How do we allow the ‘debris' of history to surprise us despite our preconceptions? 39:51 Looking ahead, how can we use history as a set of tools for creating a new mental structure that takes us towards the world(s) we want?

...one needs to think about all the things a narrative does, all the ways it functions to create the world that we live. Notice I didn't say the world that we live in—the world that we live. —big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 01:19 What is a story, what is a narrative? What role does it play in everyday life? 06:08 How do narratives establish the concepts of what's normal, what's good and bad? Why do we need to change narrative to change the world? 12:35 What are the narratives at the heart of our economic and political systems? 19:52 How do stories acquire legitimacy? Do humans need stories to be legitimated from the outside? 30:21 What is the role of education in reshaping narrative? 35:09 What are the new stories we need? 40:42 How do we rewrite, rethink the story of the communist experiment?

“I want to redefine culture as that complex of thoughts, attitudes, emotions, the whole realm of the immaterial world, that helps me to define the material world.” —big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 A continued discussion of ‘culture': why do we need to make a systemic cultural change? Why is it useful to think of culture as not just the concrete practices and materials of daily life, but also the way in which we think about those concrete things? What does it mean that our ‘culture' is incredibly materialist, i.e. that we think about the world as if material exchange predominates over the immaterial? 17:26 How can we think more precisely about the distinction between the material (or infrastructure) and the immaterial (or superstructure) and how they interact, using Marx's concepts? Where did the Marxists go wrong in prioritizing the material? What are some examples, historical and contemporary, of how impactful immaterial ideas are on how we think about material things? 30:00 Questions of practice: what happens when our ideas about how we want to live run up against the material limits of the world we live in now? How do we bring principles that are not of this world to bear on reality? Does it take a collective? Does it take an individual? A small group of heroes? 44:50 Turning towards the contemporary, how are public figures talking about change, if they're talking about it at all? If they are, how are they (or are they not, to be specific) talking about changing our fundamental narratives?

…we don't live in a world in which issues can be individually separated, one from the other. That we actually live in a world which is very systemic in which everything is really connected to every everything else and everybody is connected to everybody else.—big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 Recap: why is it important for us, vital for us, to radically rethink everything? 02:03 How and why do we talk about individual ‘issues,' and how do we need to start thinking about the problems we face? How are the problems we face connected? What is preventing us, institutionally and intellectually, from grasping the full extent of those connections? 14:44 How can we define culture (opposed to how it's commonly defined, in terms of ethnicity) to start thinking holistically? Why is culture not just specific material practices and activities, but also a way of thinking about the world that emerges from and is reflected by those material things? 27:50 Conversely, what is the bearing of immaterial ideas on the material world, our material experience of daily life? Why do we have to pay just as much, if not more, attention to immaterial ideas as material conditions? 33:11 What glimpses do we have of a transformed way of thinking about the world, a transformed culture; how do we move from what is to what could be?

'A shareable world' ... I like that expression, but that expression focuses my attention on what's out there to be shared. A great deal of our problem is that we have forgotten how to share. Sharing is after all a matter of consciousness—it's not only that there has to be a lot out there to share, but that we have to develop a culture in which we want to share. Where sharing becomes part of being a human being, part of being a community. -big mike Listen: iTunes, Spotify, Mixcloud | Transcript In this episode: 00:00 The future is bleak. Why? What are the crises we're facing? Why is it that we need fundamental change? 12:47 What about young people? How are we (or aren't we) teaching them to deal with what's ahead? Why is it important that we talk about history? 20:05 What do we mean when we talk about a shareable world? What are we sharing, and how do we share it? 23:43 What is the history of the system, capitalism, we are currently living in? How do we talk and think about that history? 29:15 How does the idea of society emerge as capitalism emerges? How did people view capitalism, and how did they react to it? 33:55 How did people resist the emergence of the machine of industrialization? How does it relate to the technological changes we're facing? 37:07 What about the good things capitalism has given us? What, if anything, has capitalism taken? What changes do we attribute to capitalism or not? 45:00 What are glimpses of a restructured society, a restructured mode of production? How do we think about massive, systems change on the scale of lived experience, of human life?