Dig: Conspiracy of Equals w/ Laura Mason
Jacobin Radio
Jacobin
4.7 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2022
⏱️ 137 minutes
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Summary
Featuring Laura Mason on her book The Last Revolutionaries: The Conspiracy Trial of Gracchus Babeuf and the Equals. Mason discusses Babeuf's call to abolish property, his radically egalitarian conspiracy against the Directory government, and the end of the French Revolution. How a centrist government turned its back on popular democracy, presided over growing inequality and working-class poverty, and abetted the rise of the reactionary right that would ultimately overthrow it.
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com |
| 0:04.7 | and by University of California Press, which has loads of great titles, perfect for dig listeners |
| 0:10.6 | like you. One that you might like is The War in Court, Inside the Long Fight Against Torture by |
| 0:17.5 | Lisa Hajar. The book traces the fight against US torture policy by lawyers who brought the war |
| 0:23.2 | on terror into courts. Hajar outlines why challenges to the torture policy had to be waged on the |
| 0:29.6 | legal train and why hundreds of lawyers joined the fight. Drawing on extensive interviews with |
| 0:36.4 | key participants, her own experiences reporting from Guantanamo and her deep knowledge of international |
| 0:43.3 | law and human rights, Hajar who reveals how the ongoing fight against torture has had transformative |
| 0:49.2 | effects on the legal landscape in the United States and on a global scale. The War in Court |
| 0:56.3 | by Lisa Hajar, out now from University of California Press. Learn more at ucpress.edu. |
| 1:14.0 | Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. My name is Daniel Denver and I'm broadcasting |
| 1:20.6 | from Providence, Rhode Island. Grakis Bebuff, born Francois Noelle Bebuff in 1760, |
| 1:28.4 | was the French Revolution's most famous ultra radical. In 1797, Bebuff was tried and executed |
| 1:36.3 | by the directory government. He and his compatriots had been captured while hatching their conspiracy |
| 1:41.5 | of equals. Their quicksotic plan was to overturn the centrist order that had governed since Thermador |
| 1:47.6 | overthrew Robespierre's terror, install popular democratic rule, and astonishingly abolish property. |
| 1:56.2 | That last idea being Bebuff's striking theoretical innovation. Marx and Ingles would later credit |
| 2:03.0 | Bebuff for helping to give quote, rise to the communist idea. However far-sighted his intuition, |
| 2:10.0 | Bebuff's conspiracy was doomed to fail because in Marx's view, the historical conditions were not |
| 2:15.7 | ripe. Bebuff had anticipated a form of radical egalitarianism, communism, in an epic in which |
| 2:22.7 | the bourgeoisie still possessed its revolutionary vocation. But for Marx famously, if Bebuff was |
| 2:30.0 | ahead of his time, in a sense, Robespierre and St. Juste were historical reenactors looking to the |
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