The Measures Taken: Recent Episodes
Stephan, Jason, Matthew, and Nathan
The Measures Taken is a project to survey and reconstruct the history of Marxism from the development of mass Social Democracy to our own moment.
Recognizing that Bolshevism has lapsed as a living political tendency, those of us who remain committed to revolutionary communist politics and convinced by the Marxist critique of political economy are left searching for a past capable of orienting us in the present. Mindful of the threat of eclecticism and all too cognizant of the infelicities of sectarianism, the hosts of this podcast embrace a non-denominational Marxism.
Our purpose is self-education, never the display of expertise. We hope that our listeners extend to us the same principled courtesy we do our forebears: not to judge too harshly.
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In this episode, recorded in the fall, we discuss the late Joshua Clover's book 'Riot. Strike. Riot. : The New Era of Uprisings.'
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Is left woke? Has woke left?
Susan Neiman's "Left Is Not Woke" provokes us to consider these questions and more.
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We discuss the positions and influence of the Workers' Opposition in the Soviet Union.
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The high-profile assassination committed by Luigi Mangione, the enraptured public response, and his impending trial all demand a coherent political response from Marxists. Paired with discussion of the famed trial of Vera Zasulich in 1878, we take up the contemporary left response to Mangioni's actions and discuss how Marxists should understand and respond to the challenges of individual 'terrorism.'
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The three of us reunite to discuss E.P. Thompson's 1967 essay on the "new time-sense" that came into being with the rise and development of industrial capitalism.
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Nathan and Stephan discuss C.L.R. James' "Every Cook Can Govern," the Johnson-Forest tendency, democracy, and sortition.
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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."
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We discuss Jodi Dean's new book Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle.
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We discuss Jane McAlevey's contributions to the labor movement and two of her books: 'No Shortcuts' and 'Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell).'
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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.
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."
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 success, and that moment expectation of World Revolution was fully extinguished in the minds of communists everywhere. The Marxist politics of Hungary 1919 is our subject in this episode.
We kick off our new 'beach reads' series with a discussion of Bukharin's 1921 text, Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology.
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.
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.
What components of Marxism can most successfully help us to understand the appearance and shape of the phenomenon of ‘Red Terror?’
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 warfare had made it difficult for any worker to desire a return to a past within living memory or, indeed, imagine that the political and economic status quo might persist. If they had heretofore modelled their organization on its German counterpart, the Russian party now served as the living example of successful Marxist revolutionism. Having adopted a new program in the Spring of 1919, what now called itself the Russian Communist Party delegated to Nikolai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky the task of expositing its contents. The text they produced, rather wonderfully named The ABC of Communism, remains the most important source for understanding what Communism entailed at its birth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 contains an unusual number of sacred cows, we've come armed.
The battle over Marxist orthodoxy was not long in arriving. Almost as soon as it emerged, it was subjected to a sustained theoretical assault from within, most notably and thoroughly by Eduard Bernstein, the foremost protagonist (or antagonist) in what was called ‘the revisionist controversy.’ This episode examines the political motivations and theoretical repercussions of this period of debate.
The emergence of ‘Marxism’ as a ‘worldview’ and political tendency was not achieved during Marx’s lifetime, but remains the achievement of his epigones. This episode establishes what was meant by ‘Marxism’ when it forged its first orthodoxy by examining the popularizing works of Engels, Kautsky and Plekhanov.
Despite its obvious centrality to the entire corpus of historical Marxism, Capital remains contested territory on the left. We examine its publication history and how we can understand what’s at stake in competing readings and approaches to the text.
Our first episode attempts to justify the act of bringing another Marxist podcast into the world. This is an introduction to the project and ourselves, and we explain our shared orientation towards the contemporary left.