The first episode of the rebooted ProlesPod just dropped today and it was mostly focused on explaining a perspective of how things broke down for the podcastand what the game plan is this time around. Personally very excited to see ProlesPod reboot. I only discovered the podcast after it discontinued and reading about the esoteric drama that halted it was unfortunate.
I’ll just say that getting a taste of the ProlesPod vibe really made its absence today in the left media scene loom rather large. While RevLeft is a great work, it’s also a distinctly big-tent left unity podcast and it was unfortunate that every time MLs got invited to talk about figures like Stalin, Breht had to spend a quarter of the episode time soothing the audience so that some Ultra or Trot listener didn’t get upset. Similarly, Deprogram is limited by its baby leftist approach and the wacko freaks that sometimes get invited like that Russian “Marxist” doomer lib. Having a relatively unapologetical AES-upholding ML podcast has been sorely needed and I think the only active one in existence that existed besides ProlesPod was Brian Becker’s Socialist Program.
Having Tony from the fantastic "Actually Existing Socialism” podcast onboard this reboot is a great sign IMO that the podcast won’t be mired in spending half the time doing that “hear me out” routine like other left pods always do, needing to highlight the “controversy” of socialist figures or endlessly retreading tiring baby leftist old grounds like “Stalin maybe good?” or “China maybe socialist still?” to prevent the lost lib that wanders in from freaking out.
The conditions they set out for the reboot seem promising and it’s exciting to see that MLs finally have a group talk podcast for MLs once again.
Can’t wait to give this a listen after work!
The original incarnation of the pod made me have epiphany when they discussed nature and colonialism which was that what we tend to think of as “virgin” or “untouched” nature is actually a settler colonial construct.
Tony’s voice
What happened to Mango Press? I remember they were active for a while and picked up the “AES is good actually” torch.
I recall that their Twitter account got suppressed back when the collective West was in full mask-off censorship repression mode regarding the Ukraine War. They continued after that and moved onto Telegram but I think that stunted their outreach momentum quite a bit.
