Rhyd Wildermuth: The Birth Of Capitalism, Dead Labour, & Karl Marx The Animist
Channel: Last Born in the Wilderness Podcast
Date: 2019-06-05

This is a segment of episode #197 of Last Born In The Wilderness “All That Is Sacred Is Profaned: Marxism, Paganism, & History As Process w/ Rhyd Wildermuth.” Listen to the full episode: http://bit.ly/LBWwildermuth

Pre-order ‘All That Is Sacred Is Profaned: A Pagan Guide To Marxism’ from Gods & Radicals Press: http://bit.ly/sacredprofaned

In this segment of my discussion with Rhyd Wildermuth — writer, political theorist, and co-founder of Gods & Radicals, we discuss his soon-to-be-released book ‘All That Is Sacred Is Profaned: A Pagan Guide To Marxism.’ We examine the various ways capitalism — as a social, political, and economic system — directly informs the ways we relate with the land in which we live upon (and the spirits that reside there), the bodies we inhabit, the labor we perform, the rituals we engage in, and the various ways these relationships and perceptions either highlight or obscure the exploitive qualities of the global capitalism system we are all embedded within. In Rhyd’s book ‘All That Is Sacred Is Profaned,’ this examination of capitalism is framed within a Marxist analysis of the material conditions that inform these relationships (defined as “historical materialism” by Marx), and is then overlaid with a pagan, or more precisely animist, examination of these relationships as well. Rhyd, in being able to wed an animist perspective (the understanding that all objects, places and creatures possess a distinct spiritual essence) with a Marxist analysis of capitalism, is able to define more fully the conditions that have led to the rise and persistence of the capitalist system up to the present moment. One of the major themes of this discussion is to examine the “Progress Narrative,” or how capitalism informs our perception of time by imposing values on the past (bad), present (better), and future (obviously better), versus the “Process Narrative,” which poses that “the conditions of life are constantly in flux, changing according to larger processes (forces) which conflict with each other.” 

Rhyd Wildermuth is a co-founder and the publishing manager of Gods & Radicals Press. He’s also a bard, poet, and theorist. He has written numerous essays on paganism, anti-capitalist political theory and analysis, and is the author of  ‘Witches In A Crumbling Empire,’ and most recently ‘All That Is Sacred Is Profaned: A Pagan Guide To Marxism.’ He is the co-host of Empires Crumble, a podcast on politics, culture, history, and magic with Alley Valkyrie. After spending much of his life within the borders of the United States, he now reside in Rennes, France. 

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