DJP
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There must be plenty of new anti-war music, you’re just not looking for it. Here’s an example from 12 years ago.
And one against the first Gulf War
But don’t we already have too many music threads?
Moral judgements trying to pass as “science” if you ask me. I’ll tell my friend they might be neurotic.
I used to love Wilhelm Reich in my teenage years. “Mass Psychology of Fascism” may have been one of the first places I read about socialism. And “Listen Little Man” is a great rant.
But as I grew older and learnt about more things, and especially as I got better at critical thinking and philosophy, I just realised more and more how most of this was just pseudo-science and assertions that don’t really stand up.
It’s a shame Reich re-wrote his early books to incorporate his later theories. I wonder what the first edition of Mass Psychology was like. I don’t think it has been translated into English?
And Reich also pointed out that rabid promiscuity and an obsession with sex are also signs of neurosis.
Did he give any indication of numbers here? Or is moderately promiscuous okay? Asking for a friend.
The difficulty with Freud’s theory is that it offers us entities (for example repressed unconscious conflicts), which are said to be the unobservable causes of certain forms of behavior But there are no correspondence rules for these alleged causes—they cannot be identified except by reference to the behavior which they are said to cause (that is, the analyst does not demonstratively assert: “This is the unconscious cause, and that is its behavioral effect;” rather he asserts: “This is the behavior, therefore its unconscious cause must exist”), and this does raise serious doubts as to whether Freud’s theory offers us genuine causal explanations at all.
Humans being the only animals which have divorced themselves from the free and natural flow of the sex instinct.
A nice story, but how would you go about proving (or disproving) it?
If someone could explain to me the levels of fear, hatred, sadism, violence and racism that brought about the holocaust and many other terrible political phenomena better than the Marxian synthesis with the theory of the death instinct then let me know.
Can you explain what extra explanatory power adding an ahistorical “death instinct” adds to explanations of these events?
If the “death instinct” is something that is always there, how does invoking it help explain the unique history of the 20th century?
Just out of interest, has anyone claimed that a “death instinct” is something that functions in other animals too? If so, what observed behaviours were they using to deduce its existence?
Don’t recall reading that article before. Thanks. That kind of music has been some kind of influence in my life, though I find all the references to ‘Jah’ and ‘Haile Sellasie’ quite depressing.
I like Adorno’s commentary on popular music and politics, but perhaps he was overegging it:
Wez – are you the person listed as the contact for Cambridge? If so I’ll email you and you could send me it to me via DropBox or similar.
‘make the show that you would want to listen to. If it fails then so be it but don’t play anything merely because you think the audience would like it.’
I’m sympathetic to that approach too. So why not grab a mic and start doing some test recordings now?
The articles of the Socialist Standard that are published every month can be read and recorded in a Podcast, that is what the WSWS is doing every day.
Yes, I think that’s a good idea. Something that should have been done a while ago. With all the articles in the Standard each month it would be easy to read and put up one article a week.
I’m not a party member and currently am very busy with other projects.
Take the ‘marketing’ comment with a pinch of salt. My point being that it will be worth some time thinking about who you want to talk to and what you can bring to them. From that you can work out a strategy for getting your message out there. If you end up reaching nobody it doesn’t matter how much you want to undermine consumerism.
OK – a podcast episode *about* revolutionary songs could be interesting if the people talking about them were well-informed and presented it well.
A programme of songs with somebody talking over them like a DJ, a socialist Radio Caroline, wouldn’t be very interesting, and not really what gets called a ‘podcast’. Think more spoken word radio. “In Our Time” rather than “The Essential Mix”
With regards with who you could reach – it comes down to marketing. You need to decide what you are going to do, who it is aimed towards and why those people would be interested in it. I think the audience would have to be the already slightly informed or interested, but not fully converted or paid up members.
Sorry, I can’t actually get involved in something like this – but if you need to learn about what gear to get and how to produce and market it I could give some pointers of where to look at.
DJP – That looks good – and we have quite a large archive of debates etc. that we could post.
I’d advise against posting old recordings, if you want to create the impression of a living and relevant organisation bad sound quality cassette recordings from 30 years ago won’t help!
Make some new material. Or read something from the latest Standard.
However the MHI website does look a bit ‘dry’ so perhaps we could add some ‘rebel music’ with a DJ and some more eye catching graphics?
A podcast gets syndicated across all the various podcast services (Apple music, Google podcasts etc) Not everyone would be looking at it via the MHI website.
Music? I’d advise against it – one person’s ‘rebel music’ is another’s trite cliche. Plus you’ll have licensing issues.
I’m not a big fan of ‘phone-ins’ but they do seem to attract audiences. We could provide movie and music reviews etc.
Podcasts are pre-recorded, so I’m not sure how a phone-in could work. I guess you could record comments from people and answer.
Movie and music reviews – that’s already an over-saturated market – talk about socialism!
