History is a Weapon #1 (TEASER): Historical Materialism w/ Sean KB

The Antifada

Sean KB and AP Andy

Music, Arts

4.2 • 970 Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2018

⏱️ 2 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the first installment of our new history and theory series "History is a Weapon," Sean breaks down historical materialism, a thing we talk about a lot but have never really explained.

Why does the history that we all learned growing up suck so much? Why does it seem like we are at a historical dead end? How do we contextualize our present moment? And what tools do we have to analyze - and ultimately confront - the current state of things in this neoliberal hellworld?

Dialectics, baby!

Transcript

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0:00.0	With the successive rise and fall of each great civilization, human progress was being perfected across time and space.
0:08.0	Now, it should come as no surprise that Hegel found the highest, indeed the perfect expression of political, economic, and cultural
0:16.4	development and freedom in civilizations like the United Kingdom and his homeland of the German
0:22.3	Confederation of the 1820s.
0:25.0	This wasn't merely Western chauvinism and best of all possible world shit dressed up in a spooky story.
0:32.0	No, no, no.
0:33.0	This was the end of history for these historical idealists.
0:37.0	It would be a thousand-year Reich of freedom for Germany and humankind.
0:41.0	What could possibly go wrong? So jumping back to that ambitious
0:45.9	Chad Fukuyama, it seemed in 1992 that Hegel's ghost guy was ripe for a resurrection.
0:53.0	Had not the so-called communism of the USSR
0:56.2	collapsed under its own contradictions?
0:59.0	Had not the so-called West
1:00.9	triumphed on the world historical stage.
1:04.0	Notwithstanding the trillions of dollars spent on nukes and napalm and racism, hadn't the United States
1:11.0	shown its social and political model to be the most resilient,
1:14.4	benevolent, and free to me of all human civilizations?
1:18.4	For those of us who want to change the world for the better,
1:22.2	an idealist understanding of the world is worse than wrong, it is dangerous.
1:27.0	In a sense, history has been weaponized against us.
1:30.0	Fortunately, we have access to a method of analysis that flips this idealist bullshit on its head.

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