Commodity Fetishism: An Introduction

In this video, we explore the horror of the  Backrooms through liminal spaces, the uncanny, and Mark Fisher’s concept of the eerie. Their endless offices, stained carpets, and fluorescent corridors evoke a world built for human activity but strangely emptied of human life.The Backrooms also reflect the disorienting experience of late capitalism: abandoned workplaces, deindustrialization, generative AI, and systems that continue operating without any visible person in control. More than an internet horror story, the Backrooms reveal the anxiety of living inside an artificial world that no longer appears to need us.Shoutout to Ion Powell for suggesting we do a video on the Backrooms.Check us out on Youtube

For Césaire, fascism began with colonialism. He argued that the horrors of Nazism are a reflection of European colonial empires and their violence. This relationship between periphery and center continues today where the violence of the empire always returns like a boomerang. This video examines the “Imperial Boomerang”: how violence, surveillance, racism, and military repression developed abroad return home as militarized policing, mass incarceration, concentration camps, militarized borders, and authoritarianism. What an empire tolerates “over there” eventually transforms life at home; their suffering becomes yours. Music by Fabulizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4rguCBGPP0&list=RDu4rguCBGPP0&start_radio=1

In this episode we have on Dr. Leon S Brenner to discuss his book, The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language. Through the lens of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Brenner presents autism as a "mode of being", occupying its own linguistic structure alongside the neurotic and the psychotic. A fascinating read and an equally fascinating discussion, we highly recommend you give this a listen and read his groundbreaking book. As we arrive at a definition of autistic being and its particularities, Brenner provides eye-opening insights and wonderful metaphors for some of psychoanalysis' most fundamental concepts. Any listener, no matter their familiarity with Lacan or Freud, will benefit from this interview. Here is a link to his book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08JQ4QCQY?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback (p.s. Brenner himself said he's happy to see people downloading it for free :D )Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK_VrSXB5G4gOVOcGC6INxAMusic by Fabulizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4rguCBGPP0&list=RDu4rguCBGPP0&start_radio=1

What explains the "madness" of Race? Its excessive and violent intensities? Its tenacious persistence beyond the economic interests of the ruling class? Any serious analysis of Race must take into account its contradictory, libidinal, and bodily aspects (in addition to discursive and economic analysis). To this end, Dr. Hook takes his readers and us on a body-horroresque journey through the nightmarish contradictions of race, where erotic charge and murderous hatred feed one another, where fantasy disrupts the body, and where racism sinks its teeth into the flesh.We are excited to bring you this interview with Dr. Derek Hook concerning all of this and more. Enjoy!Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK_VrSXB5G4gOVOcGC6INxAMusic by Fabulizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4rguCBGPP0&list=RDu4rguCBGPP0&start_radio=1Derek Hook's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@derekhookonlacanBuy Derek Hook's Book: https://www.routledge.com/Fanon-Psychoanalysis-and-Critical-Decolonial-Psychology-The-Mind-of-Apartheid/Hook/p/book/9781032308012

In this episode we offer an introduction to the Death Drive, starting from Freud's coining of the term, Lacan's contribution to the idea, and ending with its effects on society. The Death Drive is a fundamental psychoanalytic concept that informs so much of our worldview, how lack and excess constitutes us as subjects and our world as we experience it. This concept defines much of what it means to be human and that’s why we would like to take the time to explain it.

In this episode, we’ve invited Dr. Gerald Horne to speak about how the violent domination and exploitation of our colonial past impacts our politics and culture today. Through a discussion of whiteness, colonial history, and capitalist exploitation, we highlight the connections between the 15th century and our present reality. Dr. Horne thoughtfully answers our questions on the history of settler colonialism while frequently clarifying its connections to relevant contemporary events and policies. Dr. Gerald Horne is an esteemed historian of American, African, and Colonial History, author of some of our favorite books on these topics, including the Counterrevolution of 1776, the Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism series, and White Supremacy Confronted, and professor of African American Studies at the University of Houston. We find that no one speaks as clearly on the historical roots of Race and Capitalism in the Colonization of Africa and the Americas.

In this video we have on Harsha Walia, renown Author, Activist, and Scholar to discuss pertinent issues regarding immigration, borders, and imperialism. Harsha has dedicated her studies and activism to justice for migrants and displaced peoples across the globe. In this interview, she offers invaluable insight into how borders are engineered as a fundamental and necessary feature of capitalism. Borders are not static lines on a map, but dynamic sets of practices that, ideologically and economically, continuously reproduce the exploitable "other". Harsha argues that resisting capitalist oppression must be understood as synonymous with resisting bordering practices.

Using Marx's concept, Commodity Fetishism, we aim to answer these questions:Why are we increasingly isolated from each other, only able to relate through markets, objects? Why is production so disconnected from human needs despite our immense production capacity? What is the true cost of “freedom”? Can we be ethical consumers? How does ideology function?In this video, we give an introductory overview of Commodity Fetishism, arguably one of the most important concepts for understanding the Ideological and Economic operations of Capitalism throughout its worldwide expansion. Capitalism’s sustained grip on society rests on the centrality of the commodity and its accompanying fetishization.

Our second video on Michel Foucault offers an overview of Michel Foucault's Biopower and Biopolitics. We discuss how, with the rise of capitalism and the state, Biopolitics is employed to control and manage populations. We outline a genealogy of Biopolitics from slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, and apartheid. Finally, we imagine what a leftist biopolitics would look like.

In this video, we provide an overview of the current conflict in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. We begin with the historical development of the Congolese State and the institutionalization of graft and corruption. We analyze the far-reaching consequences of colonialism and imperialism, chronically ineffective governance, ethnic divides, and the role resources play in the DRC’s development. Throughout our discussion we highlight the West’s complicity in the Congo’s underdevelopment and structural violence. The conflicts contained within the Congo are expressions of capitalist production, extraction, and war profiteering, processes which have long and violent histories. A weak Congo is a key aspect of the West's demands for cheap sources of raw materials. If you’re looking to understand the most important aspects of the current conflict in the DRC, this is the video for you.