Greetings, Comrades! As I’m recoding my news episode now – and that’s a difficult one – I’d like to present you our discussion with our friend Andrew Heaton from the Political Orphanage podcast and our recurring sidetracking expert, and current Mad Baron of California, Alex from History Impossible. We tried to understand what Socialism really is, what it means in the west and in my side of the planet – and in the end, why do we keep calling new phenomenon using 19th century terms and what is says about us.
Also, note that this is the first episode with our new theme song! I hope you like it, because…you know, a year in the war, it just felt wrong to keep using a Soviet army song, as kitch and ironic as it is. We’re not throwing that one away, it’s just that we have a new one, composed to us by a talented Estonian music writer Kristjan Thomas Haaristo.
Enjoy!
News coming soon – I’m using the fact that Anete just finished editing this to buy me some time for a better episode!
As a pragmatic consensualist (yes, I did make that term up myself; no, I do not feel like elaborating), I consider “socialism”, “communism”, “leftism”, and “fascism” to be noncepts, at least as applied to generic modern political discourse. Where a concept is an intellectual label that clarifies and structures thought in a logically coherent way, a noncept is a label that creates confusion and pushes against coherence by eliding genuine distinctions and introducing false boundaries in what you might call “fact space”.
Heyhey! Normally I don’t log in and check comments here much, but after a conversation where -isms play a central role, I must acknowledge that being a Gazeboist in this day an age is pretty awesome 😀
Ha! The typical American English reading of my handle (“gaze-boist”, two syllables; thanks videogame buddies) has so thoroughly embedded itself in my brain that this connection didn’t even occur to me, even though it actually was my original intent when I first came up with it.