65 | Gramsci's The Modern Prince

In this episode we talk about Antonio Gramsci’s book The Modern Prince. Written while imprisoned by the fascists in Mussolini’s Italy, the work is a reflection on the party as a form of organization and the importance of leadership for revolutionary socialist politics. We discuss Gramsci’s realist approach to politics as an art and science, his insistence on partisanship as a condition for objectivity in socio-political analysis, and what he might have to say about the sad state of leftist movement today. We are also joined by Owen’s adorable baby Eleni, who makes her presence known on more than one occasion.
⬇️ 𝙂𝙚𝙩 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚:
𝙋𝙖𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙤𝙣: / leftofphilosophy
𝙏𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧: / leftofphil
𝙒𝙚𝙗𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙚: www.leftofphil...
📚𝙍𝙚𝙛𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚𝙨:
Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971)
🎶𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘: "Vintage Memories" by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
🎧𝙁𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙥𝙤𝙙𝙘𝙖𝙨𝙩:
𝘼𝙥𝙥𝙡𝙚: apple.co/3SOfGZ2
𝙎𝙥𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙮: spoti.fi/3HJEiLQ
🎙𝘼𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙋𝙤𝙙𝙘𝙖𝙨𝙩:
What’s Left of Philosophy is a podcast where four leftist friends get together to talk about concepts, thinkers, and texts from the history of philosophy and political theory.
Sometimes we talk about how good and useful certain ideas are for left theory and practice. Sometimes we mercilessly dunk on bourgeois idealism dressed up as radical thought. Sometimes we’re joined by extremely cool guests. We love concepts and long for an emancipated existence!
Episodes come out every two weeks on all major platforms. Most episodes are freely available for everyone, but supporters on Patreon get access to exclusive episodes and bonus content.

[@ReggieMeisler]

I love your work folks, but I do gotta challenge you on the leaderless movements. If you want to attack this fundamental idea of anarchism you gotta make a real argument against it, otherwise it just feels like a knee-jerk reaction. It's ok if you don't know how leaderlessness looks, but I think there are some really interesting and effective methods of building movements (e.g. affinity groups, spokes, spokes councils, community care networks, etc) without trying to just democratically centralize everything and vie for state power and then reproduce issues we don't want reproduced because large majoritarian democratic structures are inherently alienating and unresponsive to minorities in the group (and therefore often reproduce issues of racism, sexism, classism, and more). I think a combination of anarchist and abolitionist organizing without the loss of marxist analysis of capitalism, obviously, is a good path forward. The community care concept within abolition gives us the ability to use direct action and mutual aid to move the base forward as we also move the superstructure. It also allows us to move these things forward without alienation or hidden contradictions that cause systemic issues that are incompatible with anarchist-communist aims (e.g. universal public healthcare for all, but being done by hyper-exploiting healthcare workers, or creating a state socialist society that is incapable of escaping the capital-labor relation and instead just shifting it into a state-labor relation)