Our first class starts by examining various definitions of fascism in order to foreground how it has functioned historically as a concept-in-class-struggle, while also emphasizing the importance of a dialectical approach. This will allow us to situate fascism within the deep history of capitalism and its imperialist expansion. We then analyze how the Italian fascists and the Nazis rose to power within the constitutional parameters of bourgeois democracy--by receiving abundant funding from big industrial domestic and international capital--to run populist electoral campaigns and whip up certain sectors of the population around an ultra-nationalist and colonial program. Since every capitalist country had fascist movements in the wake of the Great Depression, we also examine what happened to these movements in the cases when they fully consolidated state power. Finally, we discuss how an internationalist, materialist perspective can help us make sense of the capitalist ruling class’s decisions to favor hegemony or repression in specific instances, and what this concretely means for fascist political practices and their visibility as such.

Course materials:
Daniel Guérin, Fascism and big business
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/guerin/1938/10/fascism.htm
José Carlos Mariátegui, “Biologia del fascismo”
https://www.marxists.org/espanol/mariateg/1925/escena/01.htm
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on colonialism, trans. J. Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2007), 35-46.

Class 1: Classical fascism, colonialism, and international political economy

The Chosen Boy an audio film by E1 and Wererat Studios

Werecut - The Chosen Boy

Sophie Lewis returns to This Is Hell on Tuesday, October 4th to speak with host Chuck Mertz about her new book, Abolish the Family, out on Verso, October 2022.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/4075-abolish-the-family 

Sophie Lewis is the author of Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (Verso, 2019), hailed by Donna Haraway as “the seriously radical cry for full gestational justice that I long for.” Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (Verso, 2022) is her second book. As a member of the faculty of Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Sophie teaches courses on feminist, trans and queer politics and philosophy, including family abolitionism, Shulamith Firestone, and Kathi Weeks. With the Out of the Woods writing collective, Lewis contributed to the collection Hope Against Hope: Writings on Ecological Crisis (Common Notions, 2020). With Blind Field Journal, she has helped foster communities of Marxist-feminist cultural criticism. Previously, Dr. Lewis studied English Literature (BA) and Nature, Society and Environmental Policy (MSc) at Oxford University; Politics (MA) at the New School for Social Research; and Geography (PhD) at Manchester University. Her doctoral dissertation, “Cyborg Labor: Exploring Surrogacy as Gestational Work,” sought to reframe the political economy of contract pregnancy for the purposes of an antiwork polymaternalist utopianism. Sophie’s essays and commentaries appear in venues such as n+1, Boston Review, The Nation, The Baffler, Mal, e-flux, the New York Times and London Review of Books; her papers appear in, e.g., Signs, Paragraph, and Feminist Theory. A Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, Sophie is nevertheless a freelance writer dependent on public speaking and Patreon (patreon.com/reproutopia). Her lectures are archived at lasophielle.org.

Abolish the Family / Sophie Lewis

Ed takes us on a guided tour of Odin Intelligence, SweepWizard, CloudFactory and other tech bullshit that sounds like embarrassing nonsense while also contributing in their own way to monetizing, mobilizing, and heightening the eschaton.

Stuff we reference:
••• Police Contractor That Promised to Track Homeless People Hacked https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgyjnq/odin-intelligence-hacked 
••• Crime App ‘Citizen’ Fires Overseas $2 an Hour Workers https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkg5nk/citizen-fires-overseas-kenya-nepal-workers-cloudfactory
••• CNET pauses publishing AI-written stories after disclosure controversy https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23564311/cnet-pausing-ai-articles-bot-red-ventures 

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Grab TMK gear: https://www.bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ 

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

227. Don’t Bootstrap the Eschaton

Part 1 –– We welcome returning champ Nick Chavez – mechanical engineer, marxist political economist – for a long conversation about his new essay examining the real nitty-gritty aspects of production and labor, knowledge and management. Time to step down from the ivory tower and onto the shop floor. We talk extensively about different modes of manufacturing and the stratification of technical expertise within capitalist production – and what needs to be kept, changed, and abolished in a transition to communist production. 

••• Nick’s essay: https://brooklynrail.org/2023/12/field-notes/Technical-Expertise-and-Communist-Production 
••• Nick’s new blog: https://designformanufracture.wordpress.com/ 
••• Nick’s new twitter: https://twitter.com/DFManufracture

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Grab TMK gear: https://www.bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ 

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

229. Capitalist Manufacturing // Manufacturing Communism – Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez)

Dimitri and Khalid return to the deep well of questions from the Grotto of Truth Discord, starting with two big ones: possible similarities between the German Wandervogel movement and today’s youth-oriented climate activism, as well as the lurking influence of eugenics in environmental discourses; then a nuanced assessment of Whitney Webb’s work on Jeffrey Epstein and her analysis of the criminal deep state networks that supported him (and some thoughts about recent critiques of Webb for being an “Alex Jones-style” conspiracist who won’t call out capitalism).

For access to full-length premium episodes, upcoming installments of DEMON FORCES, and the SJ Grotto of Truth Discord, subscribe to the Al-Wara’ Frequency at patreon.com/subliminaljihad.

[#148] GROTTO OF TRUTH Q&A XX, Part One

Nate Ruess updates Charles and Alex about his progress learning guitar and we watch DJ Khaled clips. Fortune Kit on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/fortunekit

172 - Snapping Necks (ft. Nate Ruess)

We discuss the phenomenon of the "Progressive Except Palestine," and also we introduce a new segment.

MERCH
poddamnamerica.bigcartel.com

PATREON + DISCORD
patreon.com/poddamnamerica

Pep Talk

Lucy, Theo, and Ben bring you: An avoidable giraffe mishap, a swift act of pickleball revenge, paranoia grips Armthorpe, an absent-minded gun-mailing, and the RIPing Report.
***
The handbrake episode is Episode 213: Dad Like A Hole, and the pickleball one is the bonus episode 'Allen or Whitley'.
***
Support our show and get exclusive bonus episodes by subscribing on Patreon: www.patreon.com/BoontaVista
***
Email the show at mailbag@boontavista.com! Call in and leave us a question or a message on 1800-317-515 to be answered on the show!
***
Twitter: twitter.com/boontavista
Website: boontavista.com
Merchandise: shop.boontavista.com/
Twitch: twitch.tv/boontavista

EPISODE 318: The Hyundai i30 Giraffe Killer

Bonus Episodes

Are you a real head? Did you listen to the episode from the first few months of this shit where we talked about extreme haunted houses? Do you know what a boo scare is, you sicko? Well guess what, it's time for round 2. Miss Violet Faraday joins us to discuss Hulu's new take-down documentary on legal torture enthusiast Russ McKamey, and its parallels to our respective worlds.

MISS VIOLET FARADAY
(this is porn, follow at your own discretion!)
https://missvioletfaraday.com/
https://twitter.com/VioletFaraday
https://www.instagram.com/missvioletfaraday/
https://onlyfans.com/missvioletfaraday

DOCUMENTARY
Monster Inside: America's Most Extreme Haunted House

MERCH
poddamnamerica.bigcartel.com

PATREON + DISCORD
patreon.com/poddamnamerica

Russ McKamey pt 2. w/ Miss Violet Faraday

We take a deeper look at Nvidia, a company that has — compared to software firms like OpenAI — flown under the radar for both investigative and critical analysis of AI. We discuss their meteoric rise and the monopolistic control they have over the hardware for artificial intelligence through their business for GPUs but also how they have solidified that control through the closed, proprietary CUDA system for AI development. We also get into the journalistic style of great man + myth making + ironic distance that structures how these powerful companies and their “visionary” leaders are covered by the media. Finally, we end with one word: Gooniverse.

••• How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-huangs-nvidia-is-powering-the-ai-revolution
••• How Nvidia Built a Competitive Moat Around A.I. Chips https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/technology/nvidia-ai-chips-gpu.html
••• Nvidia’s $40bn takeover of UK chip designer Arm collapses https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/08/nvidia-takeover-arm-collapses-softbank
••• SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son piles debt on to Silicon Valley mansion https://www.ft.com/content/1ea9c819-3019-47f6-b768-c92a0d06ecdf 

Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! https://www.patreon.com/thismachinekills   

Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (www.twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (www.twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (www.twitter.com/braunestahl)

311. Selling Pickaxes for the AI Gold Rush

A podcast about technology and political economy /// Agitprop against innovation and capital /// Hosted by Jathan Sadowski and Edward Ongweso Jr., Produced by Jereme Brown /// Hello friends and enemies

Listen anywhere that fine podcasts are distributed. Subscribe at patreon.com/thismachinekills to get premium episodes every week.

229. Capitalist Manufacturing // Manufacturing Communism – Part 1 (ft. Nick Chavez)

This Machine Kills

Related tracks