Send us a text Nathan and Stephan discuss C.L.R. James' "Every Cook Can Govern," the Johnson-Forest tendency, democracy, and sortition.

Send us a text We return with our new *weekly* episode release schedule! In this episode, we discuss Jean-Luc Melenchon's "Now, the People!: Revolution in the Twenty-First Century."

Send us a text We discuss Jodi Dean's new book Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle.

Send us a text We discuss Jane McAlevey's contributions to the labor movement and two of her books: 'No Shortcuts' and 'Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell).'

Send us a text We discuss a selection of Kollontai's writings and speeches on women's oppression, the family structure, and new ways to conceive of sex and love in a liberated society.

Send us a text We discuss Yanis Varoufakis' new book 'Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism,’ in which he argues that capitalism is dead and has been "replaced by something fundamentally different."

Send us a text Not unlike the Paris Commune, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, which held power in that country for 133 heroic days in 1919, exerted influence through example in greater measure than its brief lease on life would suggest. Not only did it raise the profile and recast the soul of Georg Lukács, but in its own time, it was recognized as a failed example of communist revolution worth learning from. Soviet communism came to Hungary in the golden hour between the Bolshevik succes...

Send us a text We kick off our new 'beach reads' series with a discussion of Bukharin's 1921 text, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology.

Send us a text We are changing things up here at Measures Taken HQ! In this new series (which will supplement but not replace our former episode track) we discuss what's being talked about on the contemporary left.

Send us a text We discuss Lenin's "'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder" as well as the responses and political positions of some of the pamphlet's main targets. We also examine the concept of left-wing communism itself, asking whether or not it is a category that can clarify our political lives today.

Send us a text What components of Marxism can most successfully help us to understand the appearance and shape of the phenomenon of ‘Red Terror?’

Send us a text The seizure of state power by Russian social democrats, and the success of their party in developing military and administrative capacities, forced the class-conscious worker the rest of the world over to decide to what extent it was appropriate to accept organizational leadership from the first and only proletarian dictatorship (if one does not count the inspired and brief experiments in Paris 1871). The choice all but made itself, especially if bearing witness to industrial w...

Send us a text The climax of the World War would present socialists with the actuality of revolution and result in a new North Star for Marxism, but its immediate effects were to irrevocably destroy the fabric of the international socialist movement, and in doing so inaugurate a period of painful soul-searching. In this episode, we will trace the responses of socialists to the war, as well as responses to the existential crises it provoked.

Send us a text Ben is editor and translator of a number of important collections of primarily source documents from the Second International period, including Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism (Haymarket). He is also the author of Oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline (Berghahn Books). You can support his translation work on Patreon by searching for his project, Marxism Translated.

Send us a text The question of Social Democracy’s role when it came to peasants and agricultural laborers opened the floodgates to a wide range of theoretical and tactical debates. In this episode, we will dive into this era’s landmark texts and strategic, Party-level debates and decisions on the agrarian question— a question that will arise and be contested many more times as we proceed through the history of Marxism as a political tradition.

Send us a text It has hardly been lost on convinced readers of Capital that the book contains no blueprint for building an organization, one that might sound the “death knell” of the capitalist mode of production, expropriate the expropriators, and usher in the free association of labor. In this episode, we will open up the organizational question to see what we can learn from our traditions best planned failures.

Send us a text Questions of the bourgeois state, democracy, and the proletariat’s conquest of state power were the subject of a number of debates and attempts at theoretical formulation in the Second International. In the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the dissolving of the Constituent Assembly, the stakes of the debate became even more pronounced, with figures such as Lenin, Kautsky, and Luxemburg focusing especially on the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat.

Send us a text The most popular book produced by a Second International figure was August Bebel’s “Women Under Socialism.” It introduced scientific socialism to a question prominent on the political scene, namely, that of women’s oppression and emancipation. For decades, Marxists would argue, both amongst themselves and with their opponents, on the relationship of the so-called “woman question” to class struggle and the social revolution.

Send us a text Despite the simplicity and strong appeal of the slogan “Proletarians of all countries unite,” the early Social Democratic movement would find themselves divided on how to carry out this task. Alongside controversy over Revisionism and the early debates on Imperialism, the National Question would be hotly contested across the Second International.

Send us a text From the moment Social Democracy was compelled by virtue of the maturity of its institutions to formulate policy and strategy, Marxists have feared for the timeliness of their theoretical commitments. Efforts to brings Marxism up to date most often manifested themselves as theories of "imperialism." In this episode, we do our best to unpack this capacious concept, with an eye to learning what we can from its use by Second International social democrats. And since this terrain c...