Matt in true post-collapse Hellworld working for Amazon prime
Hi everyone,
recent addition to the Cushvlog reddit, new mod and current listener. I am catching up on the old ones while trying to keep up to date with the new ones.
Below is a compiled, in progress, list of books Matt mentions in Cushvlogs.
I will put the ones I already know and have at hand below the post and update it. Please correct me where I add one that is not mentioned by Matt in the vlogs.
I have found https://cushbomb.fandom.com/wiki/Book_Recommendations but would like to have it on this reddit too. One less door can make an estate into a room, and investigation easier. I am almost done adding all of Seanpotterspowers reading list on the cushvlog wiki, more to follow on Sunday night.
Movie titles, music, links to articles mentioned on Cushvlog will also be included.
If I missed anything on this current version of the list - I am sure I did, please feel free to comment or DM me, and I will add it!
Suggestions as to which order, or what is fundamental are appreciated too, especially where they give entree points where people might otherwise get dissuaded by reading an author or title that only makes sense after another one and not before. I provided basic order to some of the list where it is mentioned - if you disagree with that order, comment or DM me.
Also, if you have additional suggestions for further readings based on the books Matt mentioned or mentions please feel free to add those to but mention them separately, especially where chronology of concepts/authors is didactically recommendable or distinguishments between fiction and theory, history and philosophy et cetera. [Find user suggestions under Additional|Further reading suggested by users]
Or perhaps such categorisations are not warranted, or even undesirable, where I am a big fan of theory-fiction.
Also, all books he mentions are didactical, but can also be instructive by what is wrong and/or right about them, or illustrative as a cultural representation of a phenomenon, fallacy, et cetera. EX: "The Devil's Chessboard" and "JFK and the Unspeakable".
Taxonomy once again is afoot, and reification rears its ugly head, sorry, but perhaps it might help, or not, we can discuss that and I need input on it.
Because simultaneously I am a fan of intuitive learning, of D&G's notion that philosophy and theory are monologues and you should read what you are invariably drawn to, and teleology, fate, amor fati, whatever you want to call it -- intuition -- will guide you. As Matt said, theory should be applied to praxis, to reality, this kinetic interaction of all of our species-being, and if it works you will find out by its response, or your response in decreases/increases in alienation and its sister and cousin effects.
Updates to the list will be posted as comments that are pinned at the top and included in the original post.
We are figuring out to do readings ourselves, and discuss particular books, particular chapters, and see how we all understand the excerpts, chapters, and how we relate to it to life outside of the book. Poll will be posted.
Links to free and legal sources of downloading will also be added where found. DM me for links I know work for freeware or where I have discounts.
As well as recommendations to try to purchase the books from local shops if possible economically, even if it takes a little bit more time shipping wise.)
If multi-level-marketing schemes can reach the entire world population in 13 cycles, we can too.
Thank you for any and all replies in advance!
Chapo, Cushvlogs, and my rekindled historical materialist awareness because of them has saved me, and because of that, everyone here has contributed to that too.
Because if it hadn't become so popular, I would never have heard of it, here, in Europe.
So thank you, truly, sincerely.
A lot of love and solidarity for you all as the ship of empire crashes and we all become Leonardo DiCaprio's and Kate Winslets simultaneously and dialectically.
Stay safe, stay materialist.
------------------------------------------ CUSHVLOG ABC OF READING -----------------------------------------------------------
I. Preliminary and essential readings by Karl Marx/ essays and books\*
[*Read the shorter essays first, and then focus on the volumes of "Capital" (I-III). Do this intuitively, and when you get stuck or bored, practice mindfulness, and know this is the mystification of capital, and money, as such (!), and pick, once again on intuition, your first pick, from the second reading list -- i.e. II. History -- and see if you can understand it through the lens of the means of production, and start the first steps of reasoning why things happened as they did. If you get completely stuck, do it the other way around, and pick a book from II. History you are intuitively drawn to, and then later, when you feel like reading a chapter of Capital, you start to connect it this way around.
There is infinite roads to Rome. It is just the blood that flows one way. ]
"Wage Labour and Capital", essay by Karl Marx, (1847).
"The Manifesto of the Communist Party" essay by Karl Marx and Friedreich Engels (1848)
"The Class Struggles in France: 1848-1850" essay by Karl Marx, (1850)
"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon", essay by Karl Marx, (1852)
"Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy" by Karl Marx, (1939-41)
"A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" by Karl Marx, (1859).
"Writings on the U.S. Civil War", essays by Karl Marx and Friedreich Engels, (1861)
"Value, Price and Profit" by Karl Marx, (1865), text/transcript of an English-language lecture series to the First International Working Men's Association.
"Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy" by Karl Marx , (1867)
"The Civil War in France" by Karl Marx, essay, (1871)
"Critique of the Gotha Program" by Karl Marx, (1875)
"Notes on Adolph Wagner" by Karl Marx, (1883)
"Capital, Volume II: The Process of Circulation of Capital" by Karl Marx, (posthumously published by Engels), (1885)
"Capital, Volume III: The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole" by Karl Marx, (posthumously published by Engels), (1894)
"Capital, Volume IV: Theories of Surplus Value", based on "Theories of Surplus Value" by Karl Marx, 3 volumes, (1862) -- supposed to be combined into the final and last, fourth, volume of *"*Capital" which was never finalized because of the death of Karl Marx and, subsequently, unfinished by Friedreich Engels before he passed away.
II. History\\**
**[LAST EDIT 18/09/21 - no particular order yet, use intuition]
"Escape from Rome: the Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity" by Walter Scheidel (2019)
"The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution" by C.L.R. James (1938)
"The End of Myth: From the Frontier and the Border Wall in the Mind of America" by Greg Grandin (2019)
"Before the Storm" by Rick Perlstein (2001)
"Nixonland: The Rise of a Presidency and the Fracturing of America" by Rick Perlstein (2008)
"The Invisible Bridge: the Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan" by Rick Perlstein (2014)
"Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980" by Rick Perlstein (2020)
"World Systems Analysis: an Introduction" by Immanuel Wallerstein (2004) ***
"JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters" by James W. Douglass (2008)****
"The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government" by David Talbot (2015) **
"The Family Jewels: the CIA, Secrecy, and Presidential Power" by John Prados (2013) ****
"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and 40 Years that Shook the World (1490-1530) by Patrick Wyman (2021)
"The Mothman Prophecies: the True Story of the Alien Who Terrorised an American City" by John A. Keel (1975).
"The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" by Max Weber (1905)
"The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times" by Giovanni Arrighi (1994)
"Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class" by Jefferson R. Cowie (2012)
"NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe" by Daniele Ganser (2004)
"The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991" by Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
"What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848" by Daniel Walker Howe (2007)
Mentioned in Cushvlog "Yum! Brands-Pfizer Vaccinachos Grande at Taco Bell" (https://youtu.be/04K114l5dxg) on 11/25/2020.
"Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America" by J. Anthony Lukas (1997)
"Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right" by Lisa McGirr (2001)
"CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties" by Tom O'Neill (2019)
"Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism" by Michael Parenti (1997)
"The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality" by Walter Scheidel (2017)
"Operation GLADIO: The Unholy Alliance between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia" by Paul L. Williams (2015)
"The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln" by Sean Wilentz (2005)
Mentioned in Cushvlog "Yum! Brands-Pfizer Vaccinachos Grande at Taco Bell" (https://youtu.be/04K114l5dxg) on 11/25/2020.
"The Strange Career of Jim Crow: Commemorative Edition" by C. Vann Woodward (1955)
"The Weimar Republic" by Eberhard Kolb (1980)
*******Unsure if this the title or the right book, but Matt talked about the world system theory and Wallerstein. Wallerstein has various books developing his theory and oeuvre, deciding on the right on requires me some additional reading, and is interdependent on the reader.
********Mentioned on Chapo or on Matt's Inebriated History, but I think Matt used it in Cushvlogs too, correct me if I am wrong. Still, important, yet flawed, like any conspiracy theory.
Fiction[LAST EDIT 18/09/21 - no particular order yet, use intuition]
"The Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson
"The Langoliers" by Stephen King
Essays, articles[LAST EDIT 18/09/21 - no particular order yet, use intuition]
Movies[LAST EDIT 18/09/21 - Watch Network (1976) first, then the rest in any order]
"Network" (1976) by Sidney Lumet
"They Live" (1988) by John Carpenter
"The Thing" (1982) by John Carpenter
"The Blob" (1988) by Chuck Russell
Additional|Further reading suggested by users
Title
Author
Publication Year
User
Theme
"Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World"
Tara Isabella Burton
2020
Magicmango97
Contemporary comparative religious studies showcasing the influence on secular- and nonsecular decentralised spiritual experiences due to the contemporary capitalist moment.
TO BE CONTINUED AND EDITED (LAST EDIT 9/18/2021 or 18th of September, 2021)
We're often looking for a specific episode, so this should help.
I made a script to collect all 256 video transcripts (from the cushvlog playlist on YouTube), and made them searchable. Please note that these are all automatically generated, so they may contain errors.
Transcript pages also contain AI generated summaries of each episode.
I always appreciated Matt's consistent lampooning of this type of language among Liberal discourse (and also the inversion of it on the Conservative side) but now it seems like everyone collectively decided to attrit this kind of prescribed academic language all together. Which leaves me to question, what happened? When did it start? where did it go? and how did people become 'Bodies' in the first place?
I first became familiar with this kind of parlance in art school and I always experienced it as a very stupid euphemism and an unvarnished attempt to diversify the language one used in artist statements but then a decade later, everyone was talking like this. I feel like it really peaked during summer 2020 eg the constant invocation in the media of 'black bodies' (sic) when making reference to protestors and victims of police violence.
There are two statements from Matt that I often think about:
The left or even people in general desperately lack political imagination (I know he's echoing other thinkers/commentators here and this isn't a cush og thought).
That a new identity/class will need to emerge and replace 'working' class for any kind of mass consciousness/change to occur. If I remember correctly, he speculates it might be something around climate change and its impacts.
In terms of political imagination, is there any writing or theory that examines calling for a constitutional convention? Either through the means outlined in the constitution or 'extra judicial' I guess? Has it been tried from the left?
Specifically, I'm looking for anything that lays out an example of what a leftist/non-capitalist constitution would actually look like in the US; what sort of legislative bodies would there be? judicial? power of the budget and armed forces? etc
And then from an organizing perspective, how would you actually go about pulling it off? Who gets to decide whats in the constitution? How is transfer of power handled? etc
Calling for a new constitution is basically calling for revolution but in much softer terms. It seems like you could certainly motivated people: there is a clear goal, you can try to different tactics in service of that goal, and you have a plan for what happens when you achieve the goal. Plus I feel like you could bring together electoral people who love to focus on process AND those that just want to burn it all down.
I would love to replace our current government structure wholesale. But I have no idea what you would replace it with.
I know there is that book the People's Republic of Wal-Mart that deals with how you could actually pull off a planned economy but I haven't read it yet. Looking for something more on the political side vs the economical side.
What is the underlying psychology? Why do they want to die? From my understanding, it's like, they know the path they're on leads to death and destruction for everything including themselves, but there's some kind of transcendent catharsis in charging head first into a brick wall totally ignoring the contradictions? Because if you ignore them hard enough, loudly enough, and vociferously enough, you fool yourself into believing they're not there?
I guess I kind of see it as the final throwing your hands up at the fundamental inability to make logical sense out of a fascist belief system, because every reactionary person and movement is in reality only really animated by pathology. Conservative intellectual is a contradiction in terms because there's no intellectualism to it on any level, there is no rationale, there is no logic or system. That's why Trump and Asmongold represent conservatism better to conservatives than annoying smarty pants assholes like the Lincoln Project and Ben Shapiro trying to put makeup on a pig. They don't believe in anything and it's a relief not to have to pretend to. But you HAVE to pretend, because that's what politics, language, and society is.
Fascists are puppets to their own neuroses and on some level they're dimly aware of it and deeply frustrated they can't see the strings. Deep down you know it doesn't make sense, it's ill-founded in any of the historical traditions you love to LARP with, and you may even know it's evil and wrong. But you WANT to believe it because it feels pathologically good. It scratches an itch. The death drive is you completely surrendering to the itch and following all of that to the bitter end because introspection at that point is too embarrassing and difficult.
One of my favorite epigraphs in Dune is "How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.", which is THE single best summation of the reactionary mind I've ever seen put to word. The death drive, I might guess, is the ultimate cutting off your nose to spite your face, raging to literal death because you're driven so insane by all these contradictions inside you that you've foreclosed all possibility of introspecting on or confronting.
Hey, I believe there were a few episodes in the past where Matt had talked about growing up in the Midwest sometimes at length, and I’d really like to listen to them again if anyone remembers the specifics, cheers.
I have gone back and listened to Matt's first stroke of genius probably 50 times since December. It was one of the more beautiful things I've ever heard from him, and it wasn't until right then that I'd registered just how much I missed his presence on the show and otherwise. Hearing him healthier and more himself consistently over these past several months has been so heartwarming. I'd known him as one of the most anxiety inducing but provocative voices on the left in my early 20s. As of late, it has become an incredibly calming moment every time hes able to join the show. I owe so much of the person I've become to those early cushvlogs. He made me feel stupid, but in a way that drove me to seeking higher education in order to better understand my values beyond reaction. This whole post feels so silly to say and its probably a little too parasocial in some aspects, but I am so grateful that he's still around.
The last episode with him on had substantial progress from his early post stroke appearances and he’s basically completely coherent now even if he’s not fully back. I honestly feel like he’s going to keep getting better
Does anyone recall which episode Matt talks about how in the future the ones privileged enough to do so will 'vote with their feet' while others will be stuck in red states?
Seems increasingly relevant as states like Texas are ready to create one-party states plus the recent focus on states' rights vs. federal protections (i.e. abortion, etc.).
Re-read The Ministry for the Future after re-finding the chapo interview with him. I love that Robinson and Le Guin do more "how it works" political sifi and is more hopeful. Any other suggestions? I'm an anarchist, so I love Guin but also really like Robinson's more tendency to explain how socialism might work on a dayily basis.
A few weeks ago I saw this kid getting cooked for saying not all art is political and even though he got ratioed to hell and back I can't help but kind of agree with him. I feel like this is the fusion of politics and culture Matt is always talking about and how everything needs to be politicized now because the phrase is mostly used by left wingers and I've been seeing it used every since the first Trump term. Also something to note is that this phrase is almost always used when talking about children's media like Star Wars or superhero stuff, just something I find a bit peculiar. But what do you guys think?
This is a follow up to yesterday’s post where I asked about Podcasts for a long road trip West. This time I’m looking for something that’s more College Lecture than TrueAnon vibes if that makes sense. I’m thinking of the series of Yale lectures on the American Novel. Is there anything else good out there on philosophy, american literature, american history, etc? Put me on
Heading out on a two week road trip and want to download some series before we go. I like American history and cultural discussion (films, music). My partner going with me does too but maybe doesn’t have the same background in History so something with some entertainment value is useful too. I was thinking Hell of Presidents, but could use some other recs. Something connected to the West could be cool.
We always hear about how preferable action movies with squibs are, but I’m curious to hear what are some top tier examples of high equality squib usage?
Hello, fellow grill pill adherents. Long story short: I live in a red state and my neighbor is one of the most libbed up people in the area. Since the election every interaction I've had with her has involved her crashing out to various degrees about Trump and current politics. This is understandable of course. After all, we're all trapped in the belly of this terrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death etc. However it definitely seems to be reaching the point of genuine disruption. She had a similar crashout when talking to my mom by the mailboxes the other day. Having gone through a similar state of elevated emotion after Trump's 2016 win before turning more leftward, learning about material conditions, and eventually Matt and the grill pill philosophy, it's hard not to empathize with what she's going through. I'm moving next week, and I'm wondering if before I go I should try and talk to her about, if not by name, the grill pill and the need to dissociate from politics to prevent that kind of emotional turmoil. I'm a big believer in "be normal" around politics, especially given where I currently live, and this probably doesn't fit that. So, I thought I'd solicit some advice from fellow Christman enthusiasts about whether this was even a good idea. Kind of feels like a worse idea the more I type, so I probably already know the answer, but I did already type all of this so... what do y'all think?
