Episode 74- Nights at the Quarancinema 4: Okja & Pig Semen As Property (ft. Kevin Ha & JR Murray)

In the newest installment of the Nights at the Quarancinema series, we covered what may be one of the most Hog Planet movies of all time: Bong Joon-Ho’s Okja. This is more than just a simple excuse for Sam to spew his usual vegetarian nonsense. Joining us are Kevin (@kevinjunha) and JR (@carl-marks), real-life Marxists who help us unpack the way that the movie strips away the layers obscuring the social relations endemic to the meatpacking industry. We also dove deep into the way that the movie explores concepts such as use-value and exchange value, globalization, and eco-terrorism. Be sure to follow our newly established instagram account @hogplanetpodcast for weekly streams and other visual hog content. Show Notez: https://theintercept.com/2017/10/05/factory-farms-fbi-missing-piglets-animal-rights-glenn-greenwald/ https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/big-agribusiness-finance-farming/ https://theoutline.com/post/8633/smithfield-pork-tar-heel-north-carolina-industrial-farms-lawsuits Check out JR's work at Cosmonaut Magazine (@CosmonautMag), Here’s an abridged version of the Cosmonaut mission statement: Direct action after direct action, dedicated leftists put their bodies on the line without anything resembling a convincing vision of a better world. This is no one individual’s failure, but an inevitable result of the collapse of working-class power and socialist politics in the late 20th century. Communism—the vision of humanity emancipated from class society—is generally disregarded as a fantasy, or even as undesirable in principle. At best it is the silent God of a negative theology, a desperate mantra of abstract negation with no plausible hope to be found in the existing tendencies of capitalist society. Consigned by post-structuralism and marginalist economics to an obsolete micro-niche in humanities departments, academic marxism—even on the rare occasion it can genuinely help us understand the world—is as detached from the goal of classless society on paper as it is in reality. A leftist politics this disoriented is about as likely to achieve basic democratic reforms as it is to implement a world socialist republic. It is necessary for Marxists of all backgrounds and skills to develop intellectual institutions independent of academia, wherein communists can develop their vision, strategy, and overall critique of capitalist society. Cosmonaut aims to be one of (what should be) many different platforms of debate, where scientific socialists can develop an analysis of history, critique the prevailing ideological “common sense” of our time, and conceive a programmatic communist politics relevant to our circumstance. We seek to develop a Marxism for the 21st century which will be based on a scientific inquiry of history and present conditions through a process of collective discussion and debate, not dogma based on fidelity to what this or that Great Man said so many years ago. Our organizing principles are internationalism over all standing armies and borders; building class-independent, democratic institutions; and a vision of a future where the world is a classless community of humanity, finally free of exploitation and oppression—communism.