Emancipations Podcast

I am joined by the philosopher Mladen Dolar, one of the most important Lacanian philosophers working today. A founder of the Ljubljana school of psychoanalysis, Mladen Dolar has written important works on Hegel, Marx and numerous works on Lacanian thought. In this podcast, we discuss his experience studying with Lacan in Paris and the legacy of the 1960s on today's politics. We then turn to a discussion of Dolar's new book Rumors, a philosophical essay on the persistent problem of rumors from the time of Socrates to the present. We examine how Socrates, Rousseau, Kafka and Kierkegaard each faced the problem of rumors and sought to overcome the stain of rumors on philosophy. Dolar writes that “rumors present another face of the big other, not the face of knowledge and truth but something that nobody quite believes to be true yet it unfailingly works and is given a questionable credence and general currency.” Learn more about Mladen Dolar's new book https://amzn.to/4b7WlJJ

I am joined by political theorist Jodi Dean to discuss her provocative new book Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Jodi Dean is one of the most vocal proponents of the "neofeudal thesis", the idea that capitalism has regressed to a neofeudal arrangement characterized by the delinking of capitalist accumulation from production, the end of competition, rent-seeking, predation and plunder. No longer can Marxists rely on a developmentalist theory of capitalism and a proletariat tied to productive labor as the means to abolishing capitalism. Dean argues that we must completely re-think the proletariat and that the global service sector points the way to a renewal of working class agitaiton and revolutionary activity. Jodi Dean is a political theorist and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York state. Her books include The Communist Horizon, Crowds and Party, Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging , Blog Theory and several others. Please check out Capital's Grave and order a copy here. Join our Patreon to gain access to our interviews before they go live to the public and become a member of our study group collective where we read important books in Marxist thought and philosophy https://www.patreon.com/c/torsiongroups 

My guest Russell Jacoby is credited with coining the concept "public intellectual." He has written extensively on socialism in America, western Marxism and Freudian Marxism. We begin with a discussion of his criticism of Domenico Losurdo's recently translated work Western Marxism, we then discuss his recent Jacobin article "American Marxism Got Lost on Campus", the work of Christopher Lasch (Jacoby's Ph.D. advisor) and how Marxism can become "plain" again. Jacoby offers advice for Marxist scholars and writer to better reach the public and transcend academic specialization. Russell Jacoby is the author of seven books including The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe, Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America and Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism. He is Emeritus professor of History at UCLA.

We welcome socialist thinker and writer Nicolas D. Villarreal for a discussion on the thought of Louis Althusser, and how to navigate the political and ideological problems of the petty bourgeoisie. We begin with a discussion into whether professionals qualify as a class and what their precise function is for the perpetuation of the bourgeois state. Villarreal takes the view that professionals do not constitute a class but that they rather play an ideological function. This conversation clarifies many outstanding debates on today's left around how to understand the PMC, the working class, the function of the state, and how the state controls and represses the citizenry. Nicolas D. Villarreal is the founder of the CASPER Forum, Palladium Magazine contributor, a contributor to Cosmonaut Magazine and he is the author of the novel “Caeruleus”, two time winner of the Howard Scammon Drama Prize. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary specializing in Government and Economics. Subscribe to Nicolas' Substack A Pre-History of an Encounter at (https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com).

My guest Michael A. McCarthy joins me to discuss his critique of "class abstractionism" or the tendency to theorize the working class in ways that result in vulgar and reductive conclusions. While McCarthy directs his critique to Vivek Chibber and his work The Class Matrix, we also discuss class abstractionism more broadly and how it appears on today's left. We speculate on ways to better theorize class while remaining critical of left-liberal identity politics. McCarthy, along with co-author Mathieu Hikaru Desan published their critique of class abstractionism in Sociological Theory, “The Problem of Class Abstractionism" in 2023. McCarthy is a critical sociologist and his work is on class structure and class formation. He explores the past and possible futures of radical economic democracy. McCarthy is faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz and he is the author, most recently of The Master’s Tools published January 2025 with Verso Books. Learn more about the book here.