Alabama Song.

How does the search for the next whiskey bar factor into Bourbonism, Greg Fischer-style?

Has Fischer resigned yet?

Brecht Was a Revolutionary, by Marc Silberman (Jacobin)

Not only did Bertolt Brecht transform German drama, but his work captured his radical commitment to socialist politics and the emancipation of working people.

... Brecht was no rosy-eyed utopian, but an artist-intellectual who developed his critical faculties through the experience of political reversals and historical ruptures. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the ossified socialism identified with it is a powerful indictment of traditional left utopianism. But Brecht’s project of a more just, egalitarian society never sought to provide answers on how to make the world better. Rather, his writings are scripts for how to ask questions, how to formulate the right questions for a given situation that is untenable and therefore must be changed.

While Brecht believed in the power of reason that enables people to recognize the problems around them and to solve them, he was neither a narrow-minded rationalist nor a naive believer in the inevitability of progress and human emancipation. Thus, his critique of emotions, which is frequently misunderstood or implemented as a dramaturgy of “coldness,” was not directed against feeling or spontaneity as such but rather against the function of emotions in traditional theater. Like interventionist thinking, Brecht’s belief in reason is a functional concept that enables individuals to determine their interest and to act on its behalf, in other words, a principle of reasoned action excluding neither passion nor emotion ...

Russell Brand's podcast Under the Skin with guest Yanis Varoufakis: "How To Construct A Global Revolution."

I highly recommend taking 80 minutes out of your day and listening to this podcast.

Russell Brand is intelligent, entertaining and a solid interviewer.

Yanis Varoufakis makes as much sense as anyone currently commenting on the world situation.

To repeat: Highly recommended.

Under the Skin with Russell Brand

My new podcast 'Under The Skin' asks: what's beneath the surface - of people we admire, of the ideas that define our time, of the history we are told. Speaking with guests from the world of academia, popular culture and the arts, they'll help us to see the ulterior truth behind our constructed reality. And have a laugh.

You can also listen to it here:

#015 Yanis Varoufakis - How To Construct A Global Revolution

In a fascinating interview I discuss with Yanis what happens when you take on the political, financial and media elite, and how radical reform can occur. Through accounts of his confrontations with the IMF, European institutions and the German government we examine where true power lies and how it is wielded.

Both Eric Hobsbawm and eras passing.

I won't kid you: I've read excerpts from Eric Hobsbawm's work, but never an entire book. The British press treated the historian's passing very much as the end of an era, while I was reminded yet again of my year and a half in the late 1980's, abstracting articles from magazines published in the UK. It will suffice to say that growing up in Southern Indiana, neither intellectuals nor Marxists were commonplace.

The Economist: Eric Hobsbawm, historian, died on October 1st, aged 95

Guardian: Eric Hobsbawm: an appreciation: Hobsbawm was the most widely read, influential and respected British intellectual and historian from the Marxist tradition, by Martin Kettle

And, from New Albany's own Professor Joel Vessels; Joel, I hope you don't mind these words going out to a wider public. I think them apt.

Let me play the obvious card here and say that for a variety of reasons we should take a moment to note the passing of Eric Hobsbawm. To cite Tony Judt (in the New York Times obit of Hobsbawm): "If he had not been a lifelong Communist he would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century."

This, though, is the stark assessment of a (Francophile) Anglo-historian who spent his culminating, presaging, (if not formative) years in the US and knew what was necessary to say in the left-handed honoring of a man who should simply be recognized as "one of the great historians of the 20th century" no matter one's political affiliation. Many of those who are generally trammeled by the educational system of the US and speak and read only one language (and many who are not) no matter their own general level of education, when they speak of such things as the Annales School more often that not, when they get beyond titles they speak of the undulations of Hobsbawm's work as it rippled across both time and topic. I enjoyed (if that is the proper word) the Guardian obit.

The Red Room might yet return to fashion.

Whatever one's opinion of Karl Marx, surely he was correct in presaging the wisdom of the bumper sticker: A working man who votes Republican is like a chicken who votes for Colonel Sanders.

Why Marxism is on the rise again, by Stuart Jeffries (The Guardian)

Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end.

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.)

Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today's."