Interview on Alpha2Omega

I recently had the privileged to appear on Tom O-Brien’s excellent podcast Alpha2Omega. We discuss, among other things,  the Occupy movement, Marx’s critique of labor-money. The interview can be heard below. Alpha2Omega is a really excellent podcast. Tom has really top-notch guests on each week, he asks excellent questions, and does a great job of editing the interviews. I don’t feel like I was able to be as spontaneously articulate as I’d have liked to have been during our interview but so it goes.

The interview:

http://fromalpha2omega.podomatic.com/player/web/2013-03-09T03_20_41-08_00

The podcast

Here’s the paper by Seth Weiss that Tom asks me about.

It’s a great paper. I’ve referenced it several times on this blog.

Also, listeners interested in thinking more about ‘socialist labor vouchers’ should know that there is currently a heated debate happening on the topic on Libcom. I have not had time to read through it all but it looks like a spirited and sophisticated discussion. Here is a recent summary and response to that discussion.

Discussing Class with Doug Lain

The DietSoap podcast kicked off 2013 with a discussion between Doug Lain and myself about class. Click the picture below to be magically transported to the DietSoap site where you can hear all about it.

DietSoap Interview Part 2

In the second part of my latest interview with Doug Lain I discuss the different levels of abstraction at which Marx discusses value relations and the particular approach I’ve taken in my Law of Value series. I’m sorry the interview ended when it did as I think we had some miscommunication about real abstractions toward the end of the video. It seemed like Doug was making the point that any society uses abstractions in the way it agrees upon common language, viewpoints and philosophical orientations. But this is not the same as the real abstraction of abstract labor that Marx is dealing with in a capitalist society. Abstract labor is not a commonly agreed upon mental abstraction that unifies the mental orientation of social subjectivities. Abstract labor is an objective abstraction imposed upon subjectivities. Rather than producing some unified, socially agreed upon, mental abstraction in subjects it creates contradictory and confusing subjectivities that fragment the social body.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The interview.

 

 

DietSoap- Robots, Abstract Labor, Etc.

In A Recent Interview on the DietSoap Podcast.  I discuss robots, value, abstract labor, and other matters with host Doug Lain. As always, it was an enjoyable interview. Doug is moving his podcast to a new host, so stay tuned to douglaslain.com for more info on how to follow the podcast in the future.

I also highly recommend Doug’s past interview with Alan Freeman.

 

 

 

 

 

The Failure of Capitalist Production- Interview With Andrew Kliman

 

In late January of 2012 I interviewed Andrew Kliman about his new book on the economic crisis, “The Failure of Capitalist Production.” I am still working on getting a good method of recording Skype interviews so the audio is a bit scratchy, but still useable.

It’s a great interview, full of insights and challenging ideas.

The book can be found here.

Bertell Ollman Interview: Dialectics, Abstraction, Internal Relations

This is an hour-long interview with dialectical scholar and Marxist philosopher Bertell Ollman. Ollman is a professor of politics at New York University and author of “Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method” and “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society”. Both books are great reads (and available for free download at the above links), very accessible, and quite helpful in getting one’s head wrapped around the dialectical method. Fans of left trivia might also recognize Ollman as the creator of the board game “Class Struggle”.

The topic of Abstraction (also the topic of my next video in the Law of Value series) is an easy one for Ollman to talk about as he has devoted a lot of his intellectual activity to an understanding of what it means to make abstractions. I barely had to ask him any questions over the course of the interview in which he explains many of the key concepts in his book Dance of the Dialectic.