Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Decoding the Transformation of Leftist Thought: An In-Depth Analysis with Amogh Sahu
Embark on an intellectual odyssey with us and our esteemed guest, Amogh Sahu, a formidable doctoral candidate at Columbia University, as we traverse a decade's worth of leftist thought and its profound transformations. Reflecting on our shared history of dialogue and discovery, we delve into the nuances of leftist influence on culture and politics, challenging the myths surrounding their impact. Through a blend of nostalgia and critique, we revisit our interviews, particularly the poignant conversation with the late Erik Olin Wright, and examine the legacies left by major Marxist figures and debates that continue to shape the contours of leftist theory and practice today.
Join the conversation as we dissect power dynamics and the sense of powerlessness that pulsates through the political spectrum, scrutinizing the strategies employed by the left—from Marxist-Leninism to Modern Monetary Theory. We confront the subtle but significant contributions of leftist ideologies to societal evolution, while grappling with the fragmentation within heterodox economics and the complexities of integrating economic theories into policy-making. This episode isn't just a dialogue; it's a comprehensive examination of the evolving landscape where leftist strategies intersect with the contentious dynamics of political movements and the broader implications for American politics and society.
As we wrap up our conversation, we ponder the future of U.S. politics and its intricate connections to economic and social issues, reflecting on demographic shifts and the evolving needs of the military, alongside the left's ongoing struggles to align its ideals with labor market realities. With Amog's insights, we dissect the impact of leftist thought on the elite and the paradoxical relationship between a vibrant American democracy and the seeming degradation of its political center. Tune in for a candid and in-depth exploration of the currents that shape our cultural debates, political discourse, and societal trends, as we strive to understand the promise and the pitfalls of navigating leftist ideologies and strategies.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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twitter: @varnvlog
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Hello and welcome back to VarmVlog, and today I'm here with my erstwhile former co-host, amog Sahum, doctoral candidate somewhere in New York. Where are you at? Doctoral candidate again, columbia, columbia. I thought I was one of those big fancy schools. Amog and I have known each other a decade Actually a little longer than that but we started working together around 2014 now, uh, I was a much younger man, um, by definition. Yeah, uh, by definition, and so you are not yet a man. Um, I think you were like 18 years old when you approached me the first time.
Speaker 1:Um, now, we've gone over some of this in our uh, symptomatic redness and review. Um, symptomatic redness, I feel like, has become sort of a cult fascination, like the og episodes of pop, the left, which is actually, as we talked about in our discussion about this man. Even that discussion is almost two years ago. I was prompted by the fact that I'm about in the archives for when we ended the first run of Symptomatic Redness and I realized that it has been almost as long since we ended it than since we began it. The reason why it was ended, frankly, was I was thinking about leaving podcasting altogether in light of my divorce and had talked Doug Lane into letting me do an art show was to eventually renegotiate and have me do Pop the Left, which was a return to a prior form. Now, since we've talked and uh, and that's happened, pop the left has also gone on, uh, an incarnation without me for a little while between Pascal Robert and and Chris Catron as co-host, which I think became the Catron zone.
Speaker 1:There was several attempts by Doug Lane and sublation to resurrect pop the left again with me. Doug and I have not made that work for whatever number of reasons. Sometimes I'll pop in and talk to him, but our politics have drifted further and further apart over time. They were never that close. However, I think that's one of the things that people have realized only in retrospect that people read Doug through me and me through Doug, and I've always said if you wanted to understand what I was on, you would listen to my discussions with Amog way back in the day.
Speaker 1:Now, one of the things about that and there are some lost discussions that I don't even have the archive for so there's this long discussion where we went through I think it was varieties of cultural Marxism, where I went through the various cultural Marxism theories with you when we went through William Lind. That episode's completely lost. There is an awesome interview we did with Eric Owen Wright and that episode died on a computer. It's now become infamous because my Apple laptop of the time got water on it when moving from.
Speaker 3:Egypt right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, from moving from Mexico to Egypt. One of the last things I did when I lived in Mexico Back when Mark Fisher was still alive See how long ago this was Was End my relationship with the North Star and record for you A piece with Eric Owen Wright On his understanding class book. I always wanted to redo that conversation, although in hindsight I think you and I both agreed that that conversation was a mess. And it is funny because we're now like I feel like we have to be careful. We don't want to slag off on a dead man on a podcast that's never released and you can't get it.
Speaker 3:And also it wasn't just because of him that it was a mess. I guess we have to say.
Speaker 1:No, we were unable to rein him in. I think I would be able to now, because I've read that book like three times, as opposed to then when it was fresh and came out and you and I were just kind of like flying by the seat of our pants on a book we just read. Sure, but I was going to ask you. You went from policy MMT-er and I want to talk to you about where MMT has gone since you sort of moved away from that heterodox policy world, because I think it's gone off a cliff, even since we have talked last.
Speaker 1:It is facing a cul-de-sac of its own allegiances um that have had theoretical repercussions as well. Uh, and you became, you, became you. Look, you started looking for the source of marxism, and I went to koski for a little while and you went to lukash uh and you went to lukash almost and you went to Lukács almost.
Speaker 1:When you told me you were a Lukács scholar, Amogh, I almost took it personally. It could be worse. You could have told me you were an Althusser scholar, which I would have taken personally. I'd be like, well, this is obviously the anxiety of influence, some weird Oedipal stuff you got going on here, but in a real sense, like Lukasz for me, and I'm glad that through you and through my engagements of reengaging with Platypus, I've had, to like in my conversations with Daniel Todd, I've had to face him, come to terms with both Lukasz and Aut Seyer as these paradigmic figures that are paradigms for a time in history that you and I aren't, but that, until very recently, I really do think, define the left, the crisis of the humanism, anti-humanism and the crisis of Hegelian Marxism, which is a misnomer, versus scientific Marxism, which is also a misnomer misnomer versus scientific Marxism, which is also a misnomer.
Speaker 1:Which are these baits that kind of collapsed into either post-modernism or Alvin Gouldner, depending on which way you went in the 1970s. You know through what I think, and as a genial, as an intellectual, genealogical history, I think two things happened. One, Zizek became a phenomenon. Two, zizek became a phenomenon partly in response to the financial crisis, but also partly in response to the fact that, while Foucauldian and Deleuzian forms of post-structuralism are still kind of viable academically, the Derridaian Horace Mann, paul de Mann, horace Mann all that stuff exhausted itself pretty quickly in the middle of the aughts, when I was in grad school and you were in high school when I was in grad school and you were in high school, and these things interestingly corresponded with one another.
Speaker 1:Like the turn against Derrida happened partly because of death, but also partly because that style of leftism didn't speak to people. Even before the financial crisis, it was already beginning to feel tired.
Speaker 1:And we think of it as a 90s thing. Yeah, really. Yeah, I mean, I was talking to a scholar at an intellectual history um conference, uh, a scholar of post-modernism and she, she was like you know the iron. The irony of now is I'm the only post-modernist in the room and now I'm the dinosaur. Everyone else even thinks that periodization doesn't even hold, you know. So I find that interesting, yeah, but you know and I'm blabbing, I haven't let you intervene yet. So you have also completed basically a scope of higher education from undergrad to. You're completing, you know, you're nearing the end of at least probably your funded portion of your PhD there you go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, you're now into the. I got to work and finish my diss land Um, um I. I have not been there, but a lot of people close to me have so knowing that about you and you've also gone through a period of and in some ways you and I have stayed in touch with each other to some degree of responding to various trends on the left. When you and I talked all the way back in 2014, when you were interested in Stephen King and Philip Mirowski, and I will say you brought Philip Mirowski into my life and he, of these post-Keynesian types, is the one that stuck.
Speaker 1:I was going to say those two, don't put them on the same oh no, I mean people should go back and listen to our interview with murowski and stephen king, which are some of our very earliest interviews, and it's a night and day difference. Like steve king is, I think, sabotaged by the realities that are about to hit syriza. That I'm not. You know that early period of european populism in the early aunt teens, I was one of the few people on the left who was strongly skeptical of it and now people are like well, if we only had listened to yannis verifakis, I'm like. But they did kind of listen to yannis verifakis and he got backstabbed.
Speaker 1:But he kind of got backstabbed because his plan didn't make sense yeah like um, the plan was kind of based on not having to pull the trigger and and, uh, you know yannis would have pulled it. We don't know how it would have turned. I don't know that what it turned out. Seeing how bad, you know, the, the, the conditions of the core of the eu ended up for greece, I'm not sure that it would have been worse for them to collapse their economy and try out semi autarky um, but it could have been um. So you know, but you know, I, I, I now no longer see it as as as necessarily stupid, because both things ended up being so incredibly hard because they did not. It was one of those things where, if you swing at the king, you best not miss, and they missed. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, maybe taking their bomb going home would have gone well. So you hear that with with Keane Keane's analysis is very like of the moment has completely changed my view of what neoliberalism was. Yeah, um, the the way that the left back then and to a large degree the left now, although it is less, it is less, uh, problematic, unless you're reading someone like bong chow han than it used to be. People do kind of realize that neoliberalism is not just deregulation or it's not just anti-Fordism, that even someone like Gabriel Winnant has has picked up on the Murawski stuff and like pointed out how it actually worked and healthcare and whatever, pointed out how it actually worked and healthcare and whatever. And that there is a sense in which neoliberalism is dependent on either Keynesian social democracy or us Fordism, with a little bit of Keynesianism to even happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, and people have figured out the paradox of what I like to call the Naomi Klein's dumb book paradox, or why the shock doctrine. Was Naomi Klein avoiding the history that she actually spelled out, which her history is? Well, these social democratic and Keynesian policymakers seem to capitulate to the right more in the long run than Peronists, et cetera. Therefore, we need to double down on non-dogmatic leftism, aka Keynesianism, because it'll help us fight the conspiracy of the Chicago boys who are causing people to. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah yeah, also the story about Chile I won't even get into. I mean, everyone knows it's. It's crazy to think that it was the Chicago boys who made that happen. You know I'm not saying they didn't play a role, but you know that kind of.
Speaker 3:Well then, tying it to the Iraq war was was particularly yeah, like different material situations, like whatever, and you know the IE, and I mean this is all the way of not talking about the IE regime which, like you should, we should talk about. That's not not to say you know, everything was fine, you know on the finish, or whatever, but like it's this, the Chicago Boys thing has always annoyed me because it's a sort of like ex nihilo, like oh, these bad people came in from nowhere and transformed you know a great situation into a pad one right.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, what I find interesting is, in some ways, the left has completely changed since you and I entered this term. You know thing, but that tendency that tendency to find an externality to focus on as opposed to focusing on even your role and how the externality was able to play a role in the first place. That's become worse, actually, since 2012, 2014. Right, like what is it now? Right, like what is it now? I mean, what's funny is you have this perpetual rolling back, and that wasn't you. You and I were talking about people trying to go further and further back in socialist history, like, oh, we can get past and you left. If we can only jump to um, the 1920s or whatever our pure marks are, you know what, what you know, we just have to skip the old left. What, what got?
Speaker 1:What I learned in from our shows actually and I really did learn this in the process of doing the shows with you, which got me back into Christopher Lash and all that was that that wasn't true that actually we were recapitulating the same things the new left did, but often with opposite assumptions. So we came in with initially like criticizing the new left but having new left assumptions, like we can separate marx from ingalls and and katsuki from from, from pre-katsuki, and socialism and linen from katsuki, and yeah, and we can, you know, and stalin from linen, etc. Etc. Etc. Like we can isolate these key figures and completely divorce them from later figures we find problematic right, um, that has stopped, I think.
Speaker 1:But I do think that was the influence of new left historiography on Gen X and millennial leftists and so much that there were any at the time we're talking about. But that's manifested even in competition with a kind of anarchism that became dominant in subcultural spaces in the 90s and early aughts. Yeah, that kind of begins and manifested in the out. The globalization movement, which is where I entered like my real relationship with the left, enters at that time it was a kind of coalition of those two things, which is what was very weird.
Speaker 3:Like it took, it took occupy and then it took the sort of harringtonite dsa and then it took a bunch of trot tendencies and kind of mushed them all up together. Like you know the dsa stuff DSA stuff is, I mean I'm sure you know the ISO DSA pipeline or you know the trot sec DSA pipeline, right.
Speaker 1:So it's yeah. I mean I've done whole episodes about American trotsky World. Trotskyism is dying, except in Latin America, I guess, because it's a large dissident tendency that it, that that has a long tradition and is still reacting to the same things, whereas in in Europe it liquidated itself into Corbinism and in the United States it liquidated itself into the DSA and only recently has tried to re-emerge from that um and failed. And the prior forms of of, let's say, anti-social, anti-democratic, socialist uh forms of trotskism have just become anti-revisionism slash uh. Become anti-revisionism. Slash uh. Marxist leninism. That like, if you really push the, the leaders of the psl and the wwp they'll admit that mark that they're inspired by sam marcy, but they'll try to play down that he remained a fraud all of his life right um, but what's interesting about that kind of like, that kind of intellectual genealogy doesn't interest me as much now, actually, as it did when you and I met.
Speaker 1:What interests me is the conditions in which those things are no longer viable, because Trotskyism in America, with the exception of kind of the IMT and a few other orthodox Trot organizations, which are all tiny has completely collapsed. Just collapsed in the light of the dsa. Um, but as we talk this very day, amog uh, the dsa is facing fiscal dissolution. If it's not careful, it's going to have to completely restructure its finances to survive. Um, and that that means that we are, in a very real sense, come full circle. From where the left that you kind of entered in, that caused you to come to me all those years ago, like I think you've actually seen it arise and fall, but what's? But it's also taking other things with it. So, like this heterodox economic space that you came into this for right and that I was like a counter, a little counter devil screaming in your ear, um, like that's also gone full circle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in light of economic changes in in global economy and like you know, I know people will defend Michael Hudson or whatever, or Nathan Kankis. But I've really noticed that their predictions have gotten more and more ad hoc and that they can't explain basic things. And there's this kind of dialectic with someone like Hudson where one week he's pronouncing the imminent collapse of the American uh economy because of the problems of finance capital, on the next week trying to like stall and not people notice that the that the same slowdown has affected China. And the only way you can explain that that isn't like oh, they're becoming more and more, you know, in in decoupling, they're actually becoming more and more like the United States, but now a middle income country and not a high income one. Then you know it makes it like oh, all this actually was a bunch of a smoke without fire, like, and we have to not look at the actual trends on the ground.
Speaker 3:You know yeah and yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe we should start with a question yeah, well, I mean, this is a long long preamble, right? What do you think happened like this 20 minute uh preamble to a question among um it's good to be back, derek, it's good to be um, uh, uh.
Speaker 1:No, seriously, what did? What is your experience like? I find that corbin is. If we look at corbinism as kind of something that may presage what may be happening to the US left in the victory of Biden, it's actually quite weird, because the British left that used to dominate the American left when you and I first came in here has completely dissolved. It's like gone from the world stage. It's almost like it never happened.
Speaker 3:I mean it's like there are. I mean it's not completely gone, but it doesn't have like a world historical thing. Like you know, alex Kalenikos, no one's reading. Alex Kalenikos, I think you know, but people used to.
Speaker 1:What I find interesting. I think I might have a contestation, Like I think people's effect affection for same mark fisher is actually a sign of the same kind of hauntology that he was critiquing. Like they have nostalgia for his nostalgia and critique of that nostalgia that he was feeling like, and yet you know, mark fisher's only been dead what? Five years, Six years.
Speaker 1:I mean he died right before I quit doing symptomatic redness. So I bring all that up. I'm going to let you. What have you seen? You're in the epicenter of of global leftism. I mean there's two. There's the California form, in which there are two different varieties, the southern and the northern. Northern leftism is no longer leftism. I don't think I would also say there is the. There's the New York form. You're in the belly of the beast and there was the London form, but I mean it kind of exists. But I mean it seems like there's more left is probably writing for Compact Magazine and complaining about wokeness from the UK, just trying to like, uh, basically tail what defeated them. Um, then there are anyone actually seriously doing anything of an independent left wing there and if things go for the dsa the way they seem to be going, they're going to collapse just slightly faster than they grew.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I guess the question is what happened over the last decade to the American left? Okay, let's see, I guess, lessons learned. The first thing is is don't fixate on any particular organizational form, because that's not going to tell you much about where the left is at. What the left is is this big section of society. We can talk about what the class fraction is, that isn't so important. But what's important right now is that for some structural reason, it isn't organized. It manifests in organization, sometimes the sa, bernie, whatever the fuck doesn't matter, right um, but the organ.
Speaker 3:But what the organizations don't stick um we've seen this on the radical left, but this is true for the social democratic left more broadly actually that, like um, organizations either dissolve outright or they just kind of, you know, uh, push on with no organizational momentum, right um. And there's just so this whole kind of like you know, ml kind of idea that you look at the organization to see the politics right or to look at you, look at the party to see the politics right or to look at the party to see the politics. That's not how it works. Your brain is going to explode, if you like, track the underlying strength of the left by, like the 50,000 different organizational shapes that rise and fall, right. So that's the first thing, right? Same thing with the DSA, like, like you know, uh, if the dsa collapses back down to its you know pre-2014 shape or whatever the fuck um that you know, to some people that will mean reformists left gone away. But that's stupid, let's not. We can't think that way.
Speaker 3:Right, the point is just organization's not sticky um the Hard to organize anything, first thing. Second thing Left big enough to not be ignored, but not big enough to do anything. And this kind of sucks. It sucks if you're a doomer because you know, every now and then, the left done not as much, not as much as it wants to get done. Uh, not as much as that. You know they expected, but enough. So that if you're a doomer, you will just continually be annoyed, right? I'm not saying you'd be wrong, it's just you'll be annoyed because new things keep cropping up and people keep getting hopeful, right?
Speaker 1:right, exactly, so we can't go. So, benjamin studebaker, yet exactly so so do.
Speaker 3:Left is big enough to annoy doomers, right, uh, but left is. Left is small enough to uh annoy teleologists and theory of history, progress people as well. Because you know, anything that gets done isn't is never the first win in a long series of wins. Um, it really, you know, um it's more stochastic than that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we can't predict what we.
Speaker 1:We actually often can't predict what you know.
Speaker 1:If you were to ask me what the left was going to get done, I am completely right about what it's going to get wrong more often than not, but I'm actually not right about what it's going to get right, um, and, and a lot of it doesn't make sense, like, for example, uh, you know, yes, the early uaw was very democratic, but it really hadn't been democratic since I don't know, the 1940s, right, um, and this leads us all the way out um, uh, um, how do I say this?
Speaker 1:This leads us all the way out towards, you know, to now, I would not have expected that the UAW, even with its, its orientation, the wars within it which I knew about, would go back to actually fighting on the factory level, right, but I can predict that the left will take that as a fait accompli, that it isn't, particularly in light of, probably, bureau of Labor Statistics, probably going to hit again that we've seen even less union density than we had last year. That's what we can predict, right, and what I find interesting about that is, you know, the Marxist-Leninists may talk about, the reformist leftists and the doomers may talk about the you know the dumb copers, but the most honest person I've talked to about this is Ben Fong, the Jacobin Labor reporter guy. Yeah, this has been.
Speaker 1:Fong, the Jacobin labor reporter guy, and yet also one of the people who's most infuriated me on this, on their kind of like blind pragmatism, and in the starting opinion, has been Ryan Grimm, the intercept slash Jacobin labor reporter guys. So it's been like like the the counter tendencies haven't been where you see people tracking this either, right Um?
Speaker 3:so when I say big enough to do stuff, I absolutely do not mean big enough to execute a program, I mean literally like big enough to have some kind of political impact which is, you know, like meaningful in some way. I don't mean, you know. So it's like, as I say, big enough to annoy doomers, that's my measure. That's my measure.
Speaker 1:Big enough to give people false hope about the squad. Big enough to give to, to to help that out. Big enough to get you know what is it DSA claims, claims like 100 electeds at city council levels and whatnot and you know um, but not big enough to even stop that. Stop there from being reprisals in new york city against dsa. You know the dsa uh machine there by the, by the democrats at all, like they're now getting crushed in that as we speak. So it's like it's. It's actually very similar to what odorno was you know it was complaining about six in the 60s where it's big enough for you to feel like you're making movement, get addicted to that feeling, not actually change anything and tread water. I guess maybe it's and, and unfortunately for adorno, you don't ever hit the point where, like we collapse into the you know totality of post-Fordist administrative state fascism.
Speaker 3:That he has. Well, that's annoying because he's wrong about that too, in the sense that, like it doesn't, it's not one that, like it would be nice and easy if society was one dimensional. You know, set aside whether Adorno said this, don't really care about that right now. The point is just that you know, this idea that the left is a subculture is just kind of wrong. It's a subculture relative to where it needs to be or whatever, right it's like. It's a subculture relative to what it thinks it is right, in the sense that if your comparison is like the world spirit or, like you know, the subject, object of history, then yeah sure it's a subculture. It's like one part of a political coalition which you know it's the kind of, you know the unruly kid in that coalition and you know, if your aspirations are to like, run the world or whatever, then yeah sure you're a subculture, but like, objectively it is not a subculture.
Speaker 3:If you want to understand American national politics, you have to have an understanding of what the left's going to do and what pressure it's going to put on, blah, blah, blah, right. So that's why you also, that's why you know the kind of Duma subculture position is just like you know you're basically you're deciding not to think about the thing you want. You want you're talking about, you're just like it's a kind of nostalgia of its own, because it's like, because it's not what lenin would have wanted in 1918. You know it is a subculture, um, but the annoying thing is this doesn't mean the optimists are right, because saying it's not a subculture doesn't mean it's like this rising political movement of the left believe it or not.
Speaker 1:Um is that the left can and does have an outmoded effect on the culture of liberal radical discourse. Yeah, like, and, and. It is not the same as that subculture. Like it like kids on tiktok doing dumb, doing dumb left-wing things? Yeah, um, and, and in some ways that is very different from the nineties. Like we talk about campus culture.
Speaker 1:I didn't meet high school students who were speaking about heteronormativity in the mid 1990s, right Given the way that the left was talking in the 1990s that I inherited later. Occasionally you met someone for who read a zine that put that spelled women with a Y, right Um, and you had no idea exactly where that came from, but you had a sort of idea that those language shifts had reflected something going on in academia that probably went back to the 70s, etc. I mean there's a real sense in which, you know, the Combahee River Coll collective now actually had an effect on AP black studies in a way that actually backlash but meant that it rippled throughout the entire culture. That would have not happened in the seventies, eighties, nineties at all. It would have happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s at all. It would have happened in the 60s. But even then, when you go back and look at popular culture. The popular culture was not really talking about new left ideas from 65 to 68 until after the fact, and even then it was mostly about how they were dying in yippy and hippie subcultures. So I think that's to me that's interesting to think about. And it's also interesting because the left had an effect there too, but not enough of of effect to change, say, neoliberalization. It had a, it had a way in which it was actually changing the way people talk.
Speaker 1:Way back in an early episode of of the the show, when we interviewed Alex Sasha day, alex Sasha day corrected my assertion that like, oh, there had been all this malice influence on um, on liberal thinking, through the new left, you know and I was getting that from mike mcnair he complained about that too. And uh, alex sasha day said, well, uh, that's not entirely fair. What you have is convergent thinking, of which malice vocabulary was picked up by the new left and popularized and gave people a way to speak about it. But the developments were actually already happening convergently right, and that was from our early interviews.
Speaker 1:Like the philip morowski thing. That's something I've taken forward. They really look at that like the left has a way of reframing, but not setting the terms of, but changing and shifting the terms of general cultural and political, economic debates in a way that has an effect but doesn't have an effect of mass politics, doesn't you know? And in a real sense, like the kind of call of, like matt chrisman style, mass politics. To me it misses that mass politics really are only normal when things are falling apart, like in in. By falling apart I don't mean like now, not slowly, like acutely falling apart very quickly yeah in ways that hundreds of thousands of people are dying now.
Speaker 1:you know, tens of thousands of people are dying right now. Hundreds of thousand people died during covid, but even that's not enough to really recapitulate what happened in the beginning of the last century.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean just a quick thing on neoliberalization. I think this is another one of those myths, myths that, like people, the left didn't I mean I don't want to say victories, but the left had an effect. So you know, welfare spending did not get rolled back to 1900 levels. That did not happen. You know, we did this idea that there was this like complete reversal of everything that happened post-war. No, there was not.
Speaker 3:State bureaucracies are big and they exist in Western countries. You know, welfare states are again not threadbare, being attacked, being whatever, whatever all this stuff, they still exist. You know, there's still stuff for libertarians to talk about and be angry about, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and that happens through, you know, ineffective resistance, piecemeal resistance, call it what you like, but you know, and that happens through, you know, ineffective resistance, piecemeal resistance, call it what you like, but you know it's like the idea that suddenly, in 1978, the left just like disappeared, packed up and went home is just nonsense.
Speaker 3:You know, it's the sort of large vested interests that, like you know, um, professional workers, worker, nurses, doctors, you know all the, all this stuff who were, I mean, now, I guess, are becoming more radicalized or whatever. But, like you know all of the all the sort of let's call it professional elite part of, like the liberal coalition, um, and big trade unions like they. They got integrated into the system but through that they held their own more than they would like to admit. You know this is Kleiman has been making this point for a while, but yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I mean, well, we're going to have to. Kleiman ends up defending them, though I mean, we're in this weird place where, like, one of the things that Kleiman was good at pointing out is, okay, he doesn't deal with wealth inequality that much, but he did deal with the fact that there's the income inequality was not actually maybe not as bad as you think, because welfare standing was never really cut back, it was privatized, but it was already privatized in Fordism. Kleiman kind of doesn't talk about that. He doesn't, he doesn't accept those periodologies really. He considers them as a regulation school uh, intervention uh, and I kind of think, like, well, just because the regulation school gave us names doesn't mean it isn't useful, right, um? But because when you see how that operated, you see this crisis.
Speaker 1:To cut for me in the long duray of the 20th century into the 21st century, you have the following kind of phases you have, uh, monopoly capital as understand by by bakuna not bakuna, bakaran um, which was state monopolies having to adjudicate between different forms of capital, which was actually very old but like was becoming a bigger and bigger part of the economy. It was actually returning to like this mercantilist style centralization in the beginning of the 20th century. That's what he thought was going to lead to imperialism. What he and anyone else didn't see was the bomb. Then you have the like Lenin, classical imperialism. That's World War I. They think that's going to be solved by an imminent financial crisis, once the imperial offset stops happening. It's not. That doesn't and never happens.
Speaker 1:And there is, there is this shift to what you know, what we now call the Fordest, or the post-war social compact period, or the fortest period. The post-war social compact period covers a bunch of things, yeah, um, but there's a crisis in the management of capital. Claire matai writes about this and matai it doesn't spend that much time talking about the non, uh, the the non-fascist version of that. But basically there is a real sense in which the james vernon's thesis is slightly true. You have this structuralization of capital which leads to empowering management and that you see, this empowerment of a center nomenclature, even in quote, non-capitalist societies, uh, like, um, the ussr.
Speaker 1:Actually, during our time of the show, since we're doing this tenure, I moved from a strict believer in kind of raya dania sky, a state capital theory to being like well, there's got to be a difference between what china is right now, which I think is clearly state capitalism, um, and what the ussr was doing, because there was. There's huge differences in how that actually works. So the ussr seems to be acting as a capitalist actor on the global stage but does not seem to be internally, which means that, like, it's not consistent, and that led me to the. Well, maybe it's not really a consistent mode of production because it's being forced to act like a capitalist in one place and not another and that's actually causing it to be, you know, chaotic.
Speaker 3:But internally. Internally, it's not acting like you know full body abolished the market, whatever. It's acting like a crazy manager, you know. Right. Yeah, all right. Yeah, so you know right. Yeah, all right. Yeah, so you know it's, uh, but yeah, no, I did.
Speaker 1:I just wanted to say you're, I just want to finish that thought that it's like it's it's capitalist outside, but doesn't we shouldn't it's communist inside, if you know what I mean, you know yeah, I mean I to me it gets you get into this situation of not being able, like I don't have a way to categorize the exact situation of the USSR Because if I look at it from certain perspectives right, dennis Guy and co are right it is acting. It is particularly after 1935, which the initial industrial development is done. It is acting like a capitalist society. It's also pursuing an incoherent national policy national, internal and external that leads to massive population resettlements and all that which is totally why they were okay with israel. It's not, you know, like um, it it's. But also what's driving that is fear of war. But the original feel of war is not like the stalin who was playing 85th degree chess and saw that he was going to be fighting the fascists. He literally thought he was going to be fighting the fascists. He literally thought he was going to be fighting the British empire and was setting up for war with them. Then the fascists betrayed, betrayed him early. He seemed to be sincerely blindsided by their timing because it was literally irrational, didn't feed any of the movements of history stuff which which also broke open a whole other series of problems for the Soviet union. So you get this kind of interim period in which it's resolved, fascism is eliminated.
Speaker 1:But these other forms of management and capital Keynesianism and Fordism which are related but not entirely the same. One is more private than the other but they're both relying on public-private partnerships and marketizations et cetera. Not market socialism, even Market manipulation and asset manipulations. Um, and canes is very actively interested in like an elite level, and by elite I don't mean like loose pmc college educated, I mean he thinks like rich elites having socialism to embed the working class so the working class doesn't take power because he thinks they're incompetent, right, like so. So you have that from canes and then you get 20 years of that.
Speaker 1:The united states, however, you know, does the keynesian internationalism a la palmatic. That's what I consider the 50s. Um, that does throw the communist into total disorder because they're predicting that all the the collapse forces that were stalled by the war are going to immediately come back. And that's true for trotskyist and it's true for the soviet union. They both predict that and it doesn't happen, um, which then leads to people who are kind of independent of the Soviet Union Trying to figure out why the Soviet Union can't get a handle on this, to come up with the monopoly capital theory, which is that in the administrative apparatus theory, which one is kind of a more purely Marxist One is a Frankfurt School Marxist adaptation to this, by the way, which is popular right now.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, but that argues that you know without saying it that james burnham was kind of right, but it you know. But it's just because we've settled the contradiction of capitalism through management. All right, the 70s throws that off. Because fortism doesn't settle it. You start having stagflation, you start having capitalist dynamics seem to wear their heads um, neoliberalism starts. It seems to go. It seems to have gone through three different phases in my mind, like this early phase, which is really about breaking up public sector unions. The second phase, which which is about rebuilding public-private partnerships, building up the healthcare infrastructure in this weird private hybrid ways.
Speaker 1:Not getting rid of them, not getting rid of them Because they can't, because whole cities would fall apart. The things would become socially unstable. They know that. Nor is it really marketizing them. It is in the sense that that liberal cliche that we started hearing around occupy actually is correct. It is the privatization of risk and and the well, it's the socialization of risk and the privatization of gains, right. So, like the public, private partnerships mean that people don't actually face that many consequences for their bad business institutions.
Speaker 1:That leads to this third phase of neoliberalism, which makes MMT look popular, where you start messing with currency flows because there's a real problem in unstable markets. People need investments. Investment returns are too low. The chronic rates of profits does not indicate that profits are going to nothing. It indicates that investment rates are too low for them to be really profitable for people immediately. And so when people argue with me well, how are people getting rich under this? I'm like, well, they're hoarding. That's a different thing than the rate of profit. Now, the problem that I've come to realize that I think is serious is we don't have a way to really measure the rate of profit that we all agree on, and marks didn't figure it out. Um, so we have all these things that make sense once you look at profit rates for physical commodities, then you have these countervailing tendencies, or nta forms, and for a little while I played around with this.
Speaker 1:You know, uh, right after we, we finished, um, our, during the end of the systematic redness, I didn't go full neo-feudalism thesis, but I was like there's so much rentierism in the economy, what is that saying? Right, and there's asset inflation and asset bubbles and we're stalling certain things by having asset bubbles. But eventually this stuff is either going to get someone's going to try to valorize it and it's not going to be valorizable. And we realize that that's fake um capital, which, by the way, is what fictitious capital means. When inventors laughed at us about fictitious capital, like no, if you can't valorize it, it isn't real. Like it, like it only existed in value as an evaluation until you tried to sell it. You can't actually sell it, so it's not real. That's what fictitious capital means it's not valorizable. So so we have this period of whatever we're in now, which I think is like people haven't skirted. The left has been scurrying the name in academic areas.
Speaker 1:At the same time, if we look at like the movement of what the left concerns are in our lifetime, it starts off anti-war, it's ending anti-war, but it's very different in the sense that now it's anti-war about proxy wars of which the US is not technically in direct control, whereas before it was anti-war about US direct almost colonialism, not just imperialism, and a lot of the monetary theories that it's forced with relies on somebody acting as an imperial power Right. So that's my long direct explanation of what happened in the 20th century.
Speaker 1:Then you have this kind of Can I?
Speaker 3:just pause for a second. I just wanted to. I think I agree with that history. I just wanted to replay the left bit of the last 40 years.
Speaker 1:Go ahead 68, 70.
Speaker 3:I'm using left here to encompass reformist progressive forces. Let's call it left liberal, if you like, because, because if we get to the real left, it has much less effect, you know. But you know, okay, so the left. My, my view is that the neoliberal revolution did not involve the complete crushing and elimination of this broad progressive left. Instead, it was bought off and integrated.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but but? And the fact is that it systematically seeks to deny this and, in fact, a lot of people systematically seek to deny this. You know, the libertarians, kind of like libertarian neoliberals, who want to like overplay how much they did, kind of deny this. You know, they said you know, thatcher and Reagan broke the left, right. The left wants to say, oh well, thatcher and Reagan won and so we were completely defeated. Lots of people want to skirt over this fact, but what happened was a new consensus we reached nearly was a new consensus between, like, the broad reformist front, if we want to call it that. You know, public and private sector, trade unions, the Democratic Party, urban elites, all these people. These people didn't go away. Instead, they lost a bunch of fights, they didn't get a bunch of things they wanted, but neither did the neoliberals.
Speaker 3:Reagan faced a Democratic Congress for most of his life. It's what the Republicans claim to cry about all the time. You know it's like ah, you keep complaining that Reagan spent so much, but it was the Democrats, you know, whatever, but that shows you that there was. You know there was like an elite settlement, right that there was, you know. So all this stuff we're talking about. You know, the welfare state didn't disappear, it became marketized.
Speaker 3:You know all of that happened because you know the broad left liberal forces. They didn't go away, they were defeated. And they were defeated by being split and becoming bought off Right. That's why you could never do deep Medicare and Medicaid cuts, even though you couldn't expand them, you couldn't get rid of them entirely, you couldn't. You know, even Trump talks about not being able to touch social security. All this, all this sort of stuff, right, and like I'm not saying any of this, any of this sort of threadbare compromise is like worth, you know any worth anything politically, even to reformists. But the point is just that, like you know, we keep seeing the world wrongly if we don't see the left as actors, if we just see the neoliberals have got to have the run of everything without anyone standing in their way.
Speaker 1:So what I find interesting about that narrative is that it and I agree with it by the way that it rhymes with the PMC narrative. Agree with it, by the way, um, that it rhymes with the pmc narrative, but I think the pmc narrative is actually itself a way of avoiding that. There's even from, even from conservatives, because most of conservatives who talk about it have adjacent relationships to the state or whatever. Like they. They are, they are what they're complaining about, almost always Right, but in the left it shoves the devil behind. It's a way to say that these downward, mobile people were a bad part of the left. They corrupted and got bought off.
Speaker 1:I think Benjamin Studebaker is actually correct in pointing out that there's like there's the successful elites, there's a rump elite, and there's the people who got pushed out for no fault of their own, and there's even people who got told that they could buy in, did what you were supposed to, and then found out there was no room for them, right, so you have, yes, there is, yes, virginia, there is elite overproduction to some degree, but what people forget, for the context of that elite overproduction, was that there was not the space for for traditional production to happen and for, you know, and the competition for jobs actually led for this category of what we consider professional jobs, which need education to grow and grow and grow like. So, which caused people, which caused the sector to grow and grow and grow, which totally distorts the analysis from the 70s that this was based off of right, um, and also, I think it's a way to say that well, there's a good, there's a good socialist left at the core of this. Uh, our good workers left that were secretly in the unions this whole time. Maybe it was hidden in the rank and file? And the answer is no Like no, the left was part of this. Yeah, right, it's realization that it couldn't piecemeal it anymore in 2007 and 2008. And it couldn't just be about moral crusades against war or whatever has changed. And so you have the resurgence of early 20th century anti-imperialism talk, which you heard a little bit in the anti-war movement of 2002 to 2007. But really, actually, the libertarian, conservative argument about just isolationism and whatever is really what won the day back then, right, and it didn't really win the day in the inauguration of obama. So the other thing that we have to always deal with and that people actively don't want to deal with, uh, and to put this not in abstract terms, I'm going to put it in the concrete political actors.
Speaker 1:Uh, the atari democrats emerged out of the new left. They did yeah, they are children of the new left they were reacting against it, uh, but they also were from it and thought that it was actually right on its critiques of fordism, its critiques of bureaucratic stuff, and it actually called a lot of those old, those old, those old new leftist cowards for backing down and defending the things they critiqued at the time. Then the people who responded to that got into weird nationalisms imported from Mao. After all, that was over, right. So you had this stuff in the 80s that was celebrating developments in the 50s, 60s and early 70s that was becoming full manifested. After it was already done. You talk about again our minerva dust, dust, blah, blah, right also atari democrats.
Speaker 3:Well, are not complete free market people?
Speaker 3:they are managers they want the state to invest in new technology, new industries. They just the difference is that they, you know, like, compare, you know, if we're looking at the 84 democratic primary right where, where this gets played out like so, you have Mondale, right, who's Carter's vice president, and he is the supposed old New Deal guy and he wants to. You know, he's in with, you know, the AFL-CIO and all these old, old kinds of actors. And you have Gary Hart, who's like the Atari Democrat, who's running for president, and you know both. Neither of them is a libertarian, one group of one guy, mondale, he wants to keep the old democratic consensus running and he wants to favor certain industries and he wants to, you know, undo all the stuff that Reagan was doing.
Speaker 3:And then there's Hart who's like, well, let them go. And then the answer isn't do nothing, the answer is fund a bunch of you know high tech startups, whatever the fuck you know. And that goes, and Clinton takes that up, right, and it's like the thing we forget is that you know Clinton, in his first term he didn't get his agenda through. He had a big, you know investment agenda, right, and like, think of that what you will. I'm not defending any of that. But the point is just like it is just wrong to call all these people like hands off free market, whatever the fuck they had like a specific managerial agenda for how to manage capitalism and you know whatever yeah absolutely.
Speaker 1:I mean that's also wrong about the right, Like like there's a reason why Von Mises called Hayek a communist Right, is called Hayek a communist Right. Like I mean, go back to our, go back to our history, a la you know saint and patron of our old show, Symptomatic Redness, Philip Morawski.
Speaker 3:I thought you were going to say Russell Jacoby.
Speaker 1:But actually, though, if you want to understand the two thinkers who were informing us the most, when we were beginning that show with Mirowski and that was from you I was still going through my how do I, what do I? Make sense of my platypus and Adorno phase, you know. And then for me it was Jacoby and or Jacoby, I'm never quite sure, I don't know it was these 70s writers about what was happening in the new left, in the long deray of left communism. So so that left us in Lurch, and on one hand, we were trying to understand these conversations about money and economics, and I was really into Marxology, in addition to my early grand war on MMT, which I'm not returning to because I think it's not necessary now.
Speaker 1:One, I maintained a dogmatic view of money that I no longer have maintained.
Speaker 1:But two, I also think the MMT is hiding schisms within itself that make it an unviable product, like they cannot actually admit that they don't agree on key fundamental issues and that, like spectrum of sovereignty versus versus, you know, other forms of sovereignty, is actually even a reversion to medieval ways of thinking and and stuff like that. There's a whole big uh literature of mmt critique and whatnot, that that isn't just Marxist that people have just kind of ignored because MMT sounds really good. It's like oh well, the government can't run on money, so there's no reason for fiscal austerity, right, true, but the government can run out of a lot of other stuff, of which the, of which the currency is just, you know, hiding those relationships, right and and and uh. So what I find interesting about the, about the aughts and the aught teens to say so, you're right, there's this, there's this left that is integrated in right and the atari democrats very rarely, they never get their agenda accomplished, they're always kind of stalled, right, um, but they the right as well, is what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 1:And what you see with the right and the left is it actually becomes very clear that the right can only get parts of its agenda done and compromise when a left-wing president's in power, and vice versa, which is why, for right now, at this very moment, the House GOP is trying to force through a compromise on immigration that they don't think they'll get under trump, and it's why, um, for all people want to talk about you know, well, reagan didn't spend that much money.
Speaker 1:Well then, you can also say well, clinton didn't actually end welfare by himself either. It was a gop congress that helped him with that like, and that wasn't something he initially planned to do. Um, so there is an elite consensus and the the long, duray thing to go back to the 60s and 70s, it wasn't just a reformist left, it's not just a bernie sanders's, it was also the radicals, it was the gene quans and mayor of oakland, etc. Etc. The, these radical thinkers who, who capitulated into the systems and eventually became, you know, tie people into the democratic party. Uh, I, you know the people always are like oh, you know, aoc betrayed us, like nancy pelosi, and I'm like no, aoc was always nancy pelosi.
Speaker 3:You need to understand the history of nancy pelosi better right I mean like, and this means saying the scary thing which is nancy pelosi was not or was never the kind of radical, you know, red and tooth and cold capitalist that you thought she was. That like it's this. You know it's not saying she's a socialist, she's not. She is what she says she is, which is a liberal Democrat, you know. And so is AOC. And these people, you know they stick in the system. They put some sand in the gears and they get one oroc.
Speaker 3:And these people, you know, they stick in the system. They put some sand in the gears and they get stuff, get one or two things done. You know, um, and that's their politics, that's what they want, you know. So it's. It cuts both ways right. It's like if you admit that the left didn't lose every battle before 2007, then you have to admit that everything 2007 didn't change everything. Same thing with the bernie thing. Like bernie sees himself as being on the same team, as you know, someone like biden, and people point this out as if it's a criticism, and it is a criticism, partly, but also, you know, um there's a criticism made by of him in specific context in verm in 1985 by Murray Bookchin, as much as it is by Alexander Coburn in 2012, as much as it is by Jimmy Dore in 2021.
Speaker 1:It's not new.
Speaker 3:It's not new. Yeah, it's not new, and it's you know. Again, I'm going to sound like I'm defending these people. I don't want to defend the Democrats. I'm going to sound like I'm defending these people. I don't want to defend the Democrats. I'm just saying they exist and are a viable political party which does things and is not crazily irrational. This doesn't mean I endorse their politics, Right?
Speaker 1:Well, the idea that it was just bad actor-ness. Okay, yes, there's bad actor-ness, but we assume that politics is bad actor-ness. We actually totally should do that. It's why these electoral coalitions can't work. That's just an assumption that's never been particularly Like. That's never been particularly particularly true.
Speaker 1:Like the Democrats are not any more bad actors than the Republicans, Both of their bases see their leadership as bad actors because the incentives are bad right now, and they're both promising something they can never give in the current context and a lot of what the left has done and the far right actually has been to it simultaneously admit that they can't do it but also say we should demand more but provide no means outside of dealing them as a way to do that, which means that, for example, the DSA isn't getting betrayed by the Democrats. The DSA was a sucker Right and it was a sucker in a way that I think even back in the day, you and I were kind of hinting at this, like look, look, if you think you're going to be able to control the electives with a hundred thousand people, you're wrong. But it's also not true that you had no effect on this in the first place. You changed the way these people had to pivot themselves. Now you no longer have that effect, right? Uh, because you have been integrated right right and integrated.
Speaker 3:By the way, integrated means I mean integrated means you don't change the structure, but integrated means you do have some effect. You know, this is it sort of cuts both ways right, in the sense that you know like, but neither political coalition gets enough done to satisfy itself, but it gets enough done to get the other side angry. If you want to. You know, if you want to know what the Republicans got done, you talk to a Democrat. If you want to know what Democrats got done, you talk to a Republican. Because that's the thing.
Speaker 3:It's the Republican who will tell you like Biden's communist trillion dollar, blah, blah, blah. You know Democrats will compare Biden with what he hasn't done Right or like whatever it is Right. Same thing with Trump, like it's, like. You know the Republicans will tell the Democrats will tell you oh crazy, tax cut ice. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, the Republicans will tell you, you know, oh my God, we were obstructed here, here and here. You know this is the weird thing about the elite compromise it's like enough progress happens to create more conflict, but not enough happens to make anyone feel like they're getting anything.
Speaker 1:So one of the things I guess to break this up one left theory has an effect on elites Alvin Gildner style C, wright Mill style Two. Because of that we can't say left theory is irrelevant. Three left institutions exist, but they are largely incorporated into the state apparatus or they're downstream from it. Occasionally they will break out UAW, but most of the time they actually have to exist necessarily to control. One of the ironies of a union formation and this is something Marxists realized all the time even though they still had to use them is that the power of a union is also in having it not strike and be able to control its most militant elements. Otherwise, how can they represent themselves to get a contract?
Speaker 1:Yeah right, there's, there's no way they can if they actually cannot control elements of their actors, uh, uh, for those of you who who always like to give me well, well, you know, china can shoot jack ma and and as somehow proof of its inherent anti-capitalism, like that's capital controls. Now I would make a defense's case for china that there are still anti-capitalist aspirations and elements in it, but it's, it's very thin, all right, and that and the fact that, like it's now mirroring in its uh gdp growth the west and um and decoupling seems to have, seems to have proven that it hadn't, it was not ready to uh try to be even a region, like it's going to be a regional hegemon, but like a regional hegemon and the way the us is, etc. That all this was premature, has been something that the left hasn't dealt with. Because in the, the other thing that's happened in the time that you and I have entered the left and so I got 20 years on you, and well, so I got 10 years on you really goes. But like um the, the difference between our obsession with foreign politics in my 20s, because we were obsessed with domestic relations of all politics, which we still are, I mean, and yes, like. If biden really wanted to, he could probably force uh Netanyahu down.
Speaker 1:The problem is is that the weakness of the world's base international order, which, which is just code for NATO and UN cooperating, is that, is that now there is a small risk that Netanyahu just says no? And then what do you do? Because it's it's removed the fig leaf of the international order entirely? Um, it is just a fig leaf because the united states itself, as soon as the soviet union was gone, immediate, you know, pretty much immediately, uh, by the end of the yugoslav wars, and yugoslav wars were still under international order capacity. I know they didn't go through the union security council exactly, but they still were sanctioned by un sanction etc. They, they went properly, even if we disagree with them.
Speaker 1:Um, which also tells you the the fig leaf of the international order back then. But as soon as it became inconvenient in the, in the sudanese bombings and some of clinton's stuff, and definitely during the bush administration, those are dropped. But again, that's an elite consensus. That isn't just the personality of george bush. Um, similarly, today, about elite consensus that I think people have not dealt with but I and this is different than when we talked two years ago um, the substance of a lot of Bush, uh, a lot of Bush to Obama, to Trump, changes, right, uh, that we see reactionary, have been maintained by Biden, partly from the the vociferousness of opposition and the Biden's willingness and the Democrats willingness to trade on that, and partly because it's now part of Lee consensus, as long as it's managed by somebody that that people feel like is more stable, like um, and I think that's part of where this electoral weirdness is right now, where both people are very passionate for two candidates that nobody actually really likes.
Speaker 1:Um, well, how, what is the left playing that? Well, the left was not powerful enough to really force Biden's hand or to overtake the Democratic Party, but it was powerful enough Ironically, this was proof of its power to pick up your thing to save the Democratic Party from from depoliticization, depoliticization, and I actually think in this next election we're going to see that start to stop. So I think we're going to see and I don't just think it was because of cold days in Iowa I think we're going to see decreased voter participation for the first time since the Obama era, which is actually back to the historical norm, but it's been a historical norm. That's been off most of my adult life since the second round of the Bush administration, most of my adult life since the second round of the Bush administration, and basically what that means is that the constitutional compromises or whatever, going all the way back to the Bush v Gore decision, have really come to play. But if you want to see how the left has had an effect, right Like.
Speaker 1:I listen to elite liberal podcast all the time. They speak our language now, like that's something that people don't deal with, they can't like. Like the fact that, like the top selling, you know the top grossing Patreon podcast are leftist ones, sure, patreon podcast are leftist ones, sure, but they're also like liberal ones. But they speak the language of the far left, even though they are substantially closer to biden than anything even the reformists would want. Um, that does indicate that there's been real power, but not enough. What? What you don't have is a mass movement. You don't have any way to build one either. You have mass discontent, you have mass disformation. Often you have mass popular support for leftist stuff, but it translates not at all to left power. However, the left has enough power to set the terms of elite liberal debate, which, which is? Which does mean it does have power, just not very much.
Speaker 3:That power works against it. I'm not saying any of this in an optimistic tone of voice. This is actually horrible. This middle position between complete irrelevance and complete influence.
Speaker 1:It's time of monsters, to use Gramscian terms.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, because this is what you said it's. It would be better if people didn't listen to you because in terms of the left, in the sense that you know, then you could. Then some of this strategy would work some of this mcnair stuff or whatever about like building and building a base and all all of these different things you know going. You would, you would be able to detach yourself from the elite consensus and then do some you know and then like have debates about organization, which actually mattered. But now that you're in this feedback loop, it's horrible. You would seem counter-systemic right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, we are neither. And the right seems counter-systemic, although I'm going to say that, like, except for the very, very far right, it isn't. And even the very far right, I mean, one of the ironies of right now is, like, in the left's fight against Alex Jones and their obsession with, with loons like Alex Jones, they've normalized lunacy. Like Alex Jones, and I'm not going to say leftists are the only reason that's happened, but like, like left liberal opposition to people like Alex Jones is why Demi Dore and other contrarians will try to pick it up. And while you can hold Dore, you know, and people like that fairly, people like that, uh, fairly, uh, we can hold door accountable for, you know, whatever shenanigans he does, and like letting Alex Jones falsely clean his record or whatever, and we can call him Craven and, and you know, in luge to right-wing money or whatever. I don't know. I can't prove some of that. I can prove others of it.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's actually particularly relevant, though, to be current Frank. What it shows us is that, at least in the perception of people who used to feel sympathetic to the reformist left, even if they wanted it to be more hostile to the Democrats and they still have left, even if they wanted it to be more hostile to the democrats, and they still have. And you see this from janet roy gray and people downstream and maybe less uh, cranky than door um, that there is a need to be counter systemic and the only place they can go is people like alex jones. But now alex jones's weird patriot conspiracy world is also no longer counter systemic. It's tied to a real powerful part of the republican base and it does have an effect on it, like, even if, like, from our standpoint that effect seems completely craven, like, um, and in some ways it is kind of mirror world where I would, I, I talked to a friend of mine where it feels like we're spinning the left and right, spin the far left and the far right spin. It creates a momentum in the center left and the center right and the center of politics seems to degrade, but it's actually still doing stuff, all right, because the spinning things are creating this feel of movement, but they're they're not actually affecting that much of the policy here, but they are affecting people's attachment to that policy, right, so people also can't disattach from contemporary politics.
Speaker 1:I mean, I find that I can't. I still follow the fucking polls. Sure, like even though, do I care, you know? I mean people are like, oh, if trump, if Trump wins, the Republic is done. I mean, on one hand, okay, there are some stakes that have been opt in a way that I can see that as a viable argument.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, I'm also going to say that, like I've heard that for 20 fucking years, so like I don't even know myself which thing I actually believe, because I've heard both for so long, this is a terrible place to be because it gives me no moral clarity, even from the standpoint of like OK, we say we're going to drop the popular front, we're going to go back to United Front stands that's one of my big organizational things but I have no idea who to form a united front with at front, with like um in in that. You see that, I think you see that on the left now, because people are searching for counter systemicness anywhere and what they're liquidating into is populist nationalism that's losing on, like capitalist internationalism. I mean, they are losing in that war, but they stand, they have more effect than they've had in the past.
Speaker 1:Right, and I say they're losing in it, though, because for all the talk of how Trump was that in his movement in 2016, really was that they immediately liquidated towards more concessionist stuff.
Speaker 3:As long as they got their tariffs through. Yeah, yeah, this is going to be my biggest hot take ever, but I think you know, I think what all this shows is that American democracy is really healthy and vibrant and in the sense that, like You're, going to go full anti-Studebaker.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:No, I mean in a very specific way that like interest group management, like we're really good at it. We're really good at it. The system is like very, very, very good at co-opting big interest groups and and changing bit in bits to to integrate them. Yeah. It turns out, the system can integrate Alex Jones, we, we, we wouldn't have thought that, some people wouldn't have thought that in 2010,. You know.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't have. No, I would not, yeah um and you know, apparently facebook didn't think that either, but now they do. I mean they haven't undone the ban, but I mean, like they're also not really you're not seeing that strategy pursued in the same way right um, uh.
Speaker 1:and yet you know I'm we're still going to hear people both on the right and on the like, the regressive, the, the left, complaining about the regressive left, part of the left, our old friends um uh who are going to be like, proing on about how like we have this massive censorship machine in facebook and and uh and twitter and and and it's just like uh, but twitter is good now because of who runs it or whatever. And I'm just like you guys are huffing fumes and repeat like and not looking at the way power actually works. I actually think maybe you are the dialectical opposite of student Baker in the true sense, and that you said what he said, but framed it in a way from the standpoint of, of the powerful, as opposed to standpoint of the semi-powerful right, right and we have to.
Speaker 1:Both of us have to be sublated, yeah like, because, steve baker's, like you know, you can't defeat capital flight and us elites. And and uh, the right is is descending into explicit, the left is descending into cope Right. And you're saying like, yeah, and that's proof that American democracy does exactly what the American democracy has been designed to do since at least 1950s.
Speaker 3:Right right In the sense that you can't stop capital flight, but you can annoy the capitalists a whole lot by making capital flight inefficient. And you know, you can stop Jeff Bezos a whole lot by making capital flight inefficient. You can stop Jeff Bezos from headquartering in Queens or whatever. This is the annoying thing. No one is happy, no one, and this means that democracy works.
Speaker 1:It's something very, very. It is something very like uh, you know, very, um, um, the citadian. It's like yes, democracy equals stasis, that's what it equals. I don't know why you don't like listen to plato, for fuck's sake. Like blah, blah, blah. Iron law, the oligarchy, blah, blah, blah. This is what always happens and you know, I think that's that's. That came out more after we quit doing the show.
Speaker 1:But when I'm like I want you guys to go back and look, not just at james burnham like I've been talking about my weird obsession with james burnham for 20 years, um but with robert michelle's, with the people james burnham sought with, like the italian elite school, with the, with the Italian elite school, with the German historical school. There's a reason why I've been trying to get people to look at that, because these were answers to Marxism that I think were insufficient, but did point out the obvious to me. And to me there's an almost trans-historical tendency for the real powers in society to blame the middle guy, pretend the middle guy is actually in charge. They can appeal to the other guy to help them overthrow the middle guy that they're both annoyed with, even though their interests aren't really co-aligned together. You see that that's not a capitalist tendency. That's like a structural thing going all the way back to non. It's a structural thing in hierarchical civilizations. You don't see it in egalitarian ones. But, but yeah, that's because you don't need it like.
Speaker 1:That's one of the things about egalitarian societies that I pointed out that people made people uncomfortable. They're violent. Why are they violent? Because you're equals, like um, uh, and you gotta keep it that way, um, and, and that's also leads to like provisional hierarchy. But how you decide provisional hierarchy not always, but often violence, um, and and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:I like, like there, there are trade-offs here that are deeper right, um, but yeah, I'm with you on this elite, and I think what that's forced me to do is to try to reconcile my view of the way capitalism works, which is specific and comes out of marxism, my view of the way system somatic works, which are not trans, historical, but some trends are like it's just like well, this is something you can see emerge and what I find interesting in marxism, and I think this is the reason why we go back to the theory of bonapartism. So much is the only place marx really deals with, uh, powerful people appealing to marginalized people to beat up on the, on the middle of society, and maybe alienate workers who are just slightly above the marginalized um oh boy uh, yeah or maybe not yes the bernier.
Speaker 1:It's the bernier and maybe the civil wars in france. That's it. It's not worked out anywhere else and so like you can kind of see it in the letters on strategy. And the way like, like marxists are, so like you can kind of see it in the letters on strategy, in the way like, like marxists are really like you can see this in the letters on strategy in so much that marx is really afraid of socialists doing that, that they're going to appeal to aristocrats to fight the bourgeoisie in a way that will make them not powerful. Um, it's not actually put in terms of bonapartism in those letters, although it's very similar. It's put in the critique of la salle and la salinism and actually also some critiques of liebknecht from marx himself when he was talking about other members.
Speaker 1:Um, and why they also don't want socialists to do like basically, what Marx wants socialists to do is what, like, the Freedom Caucus was supposed to do, which is just fuck shit up. That's all it's supposed to do. So but the thing is it assumes a parliamentary system where socialists are not going to we're not ever going to be in power electorally. They're going to stop people from being able to administrate power electorally and then take over. That's the military end. Kotsky holds out the idea that maybe you can take it over with a fail. Swoop democratic process. Go in one vote, get enough majority. But the reason why the Bernsteinian revisionism happens in my mind has a lot to do with the fact, uh, that, um, they never got the majorities to do that none of that was on the table.
Speaker 3:None of that has ever been on the table.
Speaker 1:I mean, might be, who knows, but that's yeah well, I mean to me, way back when we started the show I was pondering a question that I kind of wish we got back to was like what does it mean that social divisions amongst what we call classes, habitats between classes, in this way in which Eric Owen Wright was trying to answer, to try back with him but why is there so much division within the working class if we define the working class as wage laborers right now, I think eric owen right actually hurts his argument because he throws out labor theory of value, because he's a analytic marxist and does that almost dogmatically. Um, but he's got a point that there's alienation from inter-class competition that actually creates what stratas of classes? I know that people like half from Lou, don't like to talk about strata Cause they, I guess they find it in aesthetic, but but that in a real sense that like, well, they're still workers. But you have, are there petite bourgeois? Are there bourgeois? Are there outside of the system, peasant lump and whatever.
Speaker 1:But the great majority of the population now, but 80% of it is in predominantly wage relations and even a lot of the people who aren't in wage relations look like they're in wage relations, like you have to really look at their benefits to see that their actual pay is in stock options, which is ownership in structuralized forms of capital. But if you're not among the group of people, you are dependent on the general welfare fund and unless you work for the state which puts you in a weird category, according to Marx, that he can't really even figure out you are you're a worker in some sense. Now, why has it become so stratified? And I guess my point about this, about why this doesn't happen, why this unifies is new divisions start to emerge that are serious, real, substantive and not just a blinkered ideology or lack of class consciousness.
Speaker 3:I mean, put the question the other way. Why wouldn't it be stratified? What's the expectation the other way? And because, be stratified, what's the expectation the other way? And because, well, we have this thing that, you know, when more and more people become proletarianized, somehow they magically gain. You know, they get immiserated maybe no, we don't think that anymore, uh, but you know, or they maybe gain the ability to run the system, because the way capitalist development works, it relies on blah, blah, blah and eventually, you know, workers party.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, well, it's interesting to me because I was reading on authority and I realized that's not the best thing to read from Ingalls, and that was part of my point. But Ingalls just assumes that everything in that text, even though capital itself, you know, assumes that everything in that text, even though capital itself, you know, capital, volume one and two, actually makes it clear that this is not possible. Um, and I don't mean in the like cohe, uh, cohe, seto, like secretly it was all about soil erosion the whole time. Um, I mean in the, in the like, there's a contradiction in the centralization that also leads to framutation simultaneously. Marx acknowledges that and in times Engels acknowledges it, but he doesn't acknowledge it when he's really annoyed at anarchists, at the end of the Second International apparently, and you just see this kind of Whiggish view of centralization. But what I realized is a lot of Marxists, including Marx and Engels, sometimes do actually fall prey to that where're just like oh, this is going to centralize forever and that's how, what you like, all we have to do then is like, get rid of the minority it's in control of it and flip the switch. Yeah, that's literally what they think. I mean like, and marx and engels kind of, and they're more theoretically rigorous work, realize that they can't really do, but that they default to that a whole lot. Now what makes that interesting to me is that means if you universalize the working class, well what's going to happen? It's going to subdivide amongst itself. So that's the rational, I talk about the rational core of these incoherent class thesis.
Speaker 1:To me, pmc't it's not a class thesis like what consistent role of production or relationship to capital, or even like income strategies to have none, none. It has a certain cartailing effect. That's it and you can find that cartailing effect and non-pnc positions. It's just done three different things like licensure or guild, guild unions, et cetera. The other thing you have to realize is, for all that we hate guild unions, they're actually super effective. They've survived and the industrial users haven't. I mean they've had, but in some ways you could argue that the industrial unions have survived by acting like guild unions. You could argue that the industrial unions have survived by acting like guild unions. It's not like the UAW is trying to organize all the auto industry, including franchises, downstream. Right.
Speaker 1:Like they're just trying to organize a factory, and since the factory now is so small, it's such a small part of production that it effectively does operate like a guild. So and I think that that's going to make people really uncomfortable to deal with. But there's this way in which your thesis seems to be that leftists are in denial of their own power because they're in a center position. That center position is actually really painful to look at, honestly. Yeah, because it does make you culpable for part of what is happening. Yeah, but not, but not powerful enough to truly reverse it and get what you want. So you want to say we're not culpable for any of this, we're not participating in it.
Speaker 1:We're losers, you know, but also we're winners, secretly, this whole time yeah, yeah but we should know from like when christians tried this shit in the 1980s, like in the silent majority times uh, that's a stupid strategy, it's just, it's. It's self-dishonest in a way that actually will eventually lead you to not having power at all.
Speaker 3:Right like this is a bit of this is a bit of a digression, but I want to universalize that, that you know. This like disavowing your own culpability. I think that's true of the liberals and the right as well. Everyone thinks they're secretly losers, but they all have culpability. I mean not to the same extent, but, like you know, everyone sounds like they're whining about politics now you know like you know everyone sounds like they're whining about politics.
Speaker 3:Now, you know that, like you know, the right is like oh, we live in this hellscape of, you know, cultural liberalism, you know, and, and liberals are like extremes populism. Wow, what's going on? We don't have control.
Speaker 1:You know it's but, yeah, I mean, that's just an aside well that's when's when I interjected Joseph Tainter after we quit doing the shows. I was like maybe things are too complicated for anyone to feel like they could possibly win this and they're not looking at. The reality is that no one's in control anymore because no one can be Right. It's too complicated for you. Which then makes the left this is kind of left exceptionalist in a way that I think should make people uncomfortable. Uh, it doesn't put the left in a particularly delusional relationship because most of our strategies mmt is a strategy and management. Marxist leninism is actually a strategy and management.
Speaker 1:I know people don't like that, but it's true yeah like um uh, you know their obsession with, like, prussian central command, which, by way, isn't even that militarily effective, but whatever.
Speaker 3:Famously won World War One anyway.
Speaker 1:But their obsession with this. You know that's a mode of management, not even really a mode of production, not even really a mode of production. Uh, the great debates but but between marxists before then was basically do you, do you uh, try to have a bourgeois and socialist revolution kind of simultaneously? Is, do you do that democratically, a la the spd and the, the second international right? Uh, that was the socialist labor party's critique of them is like you are trying to confuse a bourgeois revolution and a socialist revolution. Do you go the the Leninist route and say, oh no, we have the socialist revolution because we have the peasants on our side to do that, although we don't for very long, the red terror wouldn't have been necessary. So then we do it that way. Is that how we do it? Or is there this other thing that we have to do, um, which is this linen, that is, to do capitalism ourselves, kind of what plakonov was losing sleep about. Um, uh, so, um, uh. So what do we do?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's this tricky position where you know, in terms of the, in terms of like, if you're doing the usual Marxist being in consciousness, you know social being.
Speaker 3:It's actually not super hard to explain a bunch of the like, like in terms of the objective balance of forces. Yeah, I mean, I'm with you on the like. Use a bit of Burnham, use a bit of Weber. You know some kind of Marx Weber synthesis. You know does quite well in just explaining stasis. That actually is not super hard to explain. We've been doing it for a while.
Speaker 3:The harder thing to explain is why, you know, consciousness in all sides just seems to be completely ignorant of the underlying stasis, like it always wants to look away from it on all sides. I mean, we're talking about the left, right, but on the left, you know, it's like it's. There is a structural tendency to not want to pay attention to your culpability and integration in the system, and that's why the dialectic doesn't get started. That's why you know, because there's no, because you can't, you know, because that's the way. By the way, that's the way the dialectic is supposed to work. Right, consciousness adjusts to being, being. You know which changes being, which changes consciousness. You know, but we don't have that. Consciousness and being are just apart. How you interpret the world and what, what there is it just you know they aren't coming into contact. Theory and practice are just fucking separate. Um, and, yeah, because it's, it's too hard. I mean the reason. By the way, I mean I'm I don't completely disagree with the Studebaker thing and I sort of have put things in a sort of optimistic way because that's the harder thing to hear, right, like the Studebaker thing is, in a way, easier to hear from a left perspective, because you fucking think everything's falling apart anyway, right? So it's like Studebaker tells you that what's harder to hear is that, like you know, I mean not that I think everything's not falling apart, but like fuck it, fuck it, I'll say that.
Speaker 3:Let me say that, that like things are not falling apart in quite the way you think they are, you know, and it's very, very hard to look at that. It's very hard to look at that. But I think the place to start has got to. You know, the thing we have got to stop doing is to pretend there's some outside to all of this craziness that we can occupy and build from right. There's some like pure outside right and it's. Yeah, it's hard, I don't know how you do that, but that's got to be the first step to try to like you know, to have some kind of amor fati, you know, to have some kind of fucking sense of like. You know we're all stuck in this mess and there's no social outside this political that we can. You know we can kind of run to right. So sorry, anti-politics people.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, they've kind of gone away, if it makes sense. Yeah, I mean there are still a few people trying to discuss it. But the idea that you could construe, I mean the idea that you construe the political away from the economic or the economic away from the political, which leads to the false binary of political determinism and economism, is also predicated by the false binary between the social and the political.
Speaker 1:Like that's not. Those binaries are not real, like legal-informed relations of production and all that actually do inform the other way around. And your wants to make it soft and squishy so that you can separate it out. Uh, are are foolish. Yeah, I mean, for me like to take the to phrase it optimistically is to say like, like I've been kind of doing this a while, you know, I've been talking about hudson and I've been picking on hudson a little, a little bit. Hudson's a very smart guy. I actually take his analysis quite seriously, but there's a way in which, like, he's been predicting the fall of the US for 20 years and the Peter Zions of the world have been telling you, yes, globalization is ending, you're right, but that doesn't mean what you think it means. It doesn't mean the elite consensus falls apart anywhere. Actually, and oddly good ship North America is in a better place to deal with it, just materially speaking.
Speaker 3:Our problems are our own political incoherence and our own social malaise, which are real problems which are real problems, but also not as work, not as you know, it's not as unique as we think. They are Everywhere's politically incoherent, Everywhere has social problems.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean. Well, this came up in my in my discussion with uh uh on a climate Leviathan, which a lot of people have. You know, you know how it goes. But the Quiet Levitan guy pointed out that Trump was actually a manifestation of stuff that had been happening in Europe and Asia for like 10 years. It just came late to the United States. The United States was exceptional in that it was late to actually deal with the end of its form of politics.
Speaker 1:But when it happened, you still hear people like, oh well, you can't have the Republican Party of 2012. I mean, as if, yeah, 2012 is more than 10 years ago, but, like in the long array of things, that's not that long. Like, um, and it actually is similar to the way after Goldwater, you can't have Eisenhower's Republican Party. Yeah, Um, but what does that mean? We don't know. All right, because on one hand, trumpism is counter systemic, on the other hand, it's not. I mean, that's the dialectic of Trumpism. Like if you actually listen to, like Trump's caveats and things like abortion or dictatorship or whatever. He's a, he's a moderate when he needs to be a moderate, when that's in line with his, with his base, he's lizard brain on that stuff. He is truly a demagogue in that sense, but also in some ways, so.
Speaker 1:Is Biden Right? Like Biden's? Like we're going to return to normalcy. That's what Democrats wanted to hear. Everyone knows that was not possible, right? That's what Democrats wanted to hear. Everyone knows that was not possible, right, but that's what Democrats wanted to hear. It was weirdly like the Democrats trying to do the morning in America thing, like, except that's real hard to do from their perspective. And it's real hard to do when you haven't figured out a way to reset the economy, even though the yes, because the economy's not doing as bad as you think it is, and and no, it's not, but it is stagnant for most people right um, and you know, honestly, the people that it's doing pretty good for are the very poor and the upper middle class, which, lo and behold, I wonder who.
Speaker 1:That's the base of what party that is? Yeah, um, and by the way that's.
Speaker 3:I'm not, you know, I won't go so far as to say that that's a left win, but, like you know, the child tax credit and a bunch of stuff that like lifted the incomes of the very poor, like that's, that's for sure, a reflection of the. You know that that wouldn't have happened as a that wouldn't have been as big as it was if the DSA and Bernie weren't part of the coalition.
Speaker 1:But also it proves how limited it is, because that's already gone. Exactly, that was one year.
Speaker 3:That was one year. The Biden-LBJ comparison is unfair to LBJ.
Speaker 1:Well, people are always like. You know, biden's the most progressive president since FDR and I'm like why in FDR isn't that progressive? Two LBJ quit doing LBJ eraser because you didn't like his foreign policy. You're not going to like Biden's either, ha ha, now we're there. It just took you three years to really really for it to really sink in right um, so it's you know, it's just like as like you know, and hey um the op, never mind, I'm not gonna say, say that that's too dark.
Speaker 3:I think You're saying mourning in America. It's weird. His message is mourning in America and it looks one shade leftier than it used to before the crash. That's his thing. Because it's like job recovery with more unions, with less inequality, blah, blah, all this kind of stuff. So it's like sad thing. Is you know, you believe it or not? Left, the system is trying to give you what, what it thinks you want right.
Speaker 1:The thing is that it can't and you don't know what you want.
Speaker 3:Right, because you asked a lot of like reformists, you know, and they they would have settled for the year in, in 2008, in 2009. This is all the stuff they wanted obama to do. They wanted a bigger stimulus, they wanted more explicit support for union stuff. Biden went on a fucking picket line. Now I'm not gonna say you know whatever, but, like you know, a lot of reformists would have been very happy with all this and I would say they still are my, my, uh.
Speaker 1:My pickup on that would be um, in a way that should probably make the left uncomfortable. Uh, you know who else did the same thing. I mean trump has more anti-union rhetoric because of the incoherence of his coalition.
Speaker 1:One of the ironies and I fucking hate that, I got this from Nate fucking silver while he was in Vegas doing whatever the fuck he does now gambling, which is what he does with politics too, but you know he said something offhand is like, well, the Republican Party, for all its idea, it's, it's, it's emotional v, you know venements after trump is actually a coalitionary party. Like, yeah, it's, it's one idea, it's, it's, it's like a coalition of groups, um, rumpus, elements of labor, rumpest elements of petite bourgeois Sunbelt businesses, the better business community, a small part of the, of the frustrated part of the defense mechanism. Usually it's actually tied into homeland security and not into the military. Like that's their coalition. It's actually a very small coalition. Like that's their coalition, it's actually a very small coalition.
Speaker 1:One that is going to be less white though, which is something that's going to drive Democrats up the wall, cause that story didn't work out for them either. You know, in a way that's the irony of success. If you start like normalizing groups, ability to integrate into the United States, they're going to start looking and acting like other groups in the United States, like D'Souza ends one of his films with like you know, when you know you've become an American, when you become a Republican.
Speaker 1:And so I'm just like are you surprised, right, that like that's what would happen. Do you really have the? I mean one of the things that's ironic about the left and the Democrats. I mean Democrats don't operate off a theory of Bonapartism because they're in power. They don't have to operate off a theory of anything, but the left does. But the left can't like see the like blatant Bonapartist logic about its own relationship to, to sub demographic groups, and I'm like well, but what happens when you succeed? You're going to divide, like the divisions of which are alighted now you know which you can flatten out, and like this racial you, you know which you can flatten out, and like this racial, you get rid of the. You actually start succeeding on racial grounds and other divisions which are deeper come up. Like what do you expect from a basic sociological calculus? That's what's going to happen. And yet, like everything was always like we're gonna like rule it going to be progressive forever because of demography and youth people. And I was like well, why do you think the Baby?
Speaker 3:Boomers didn't start out, that's not going to get you wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the Baby Boomers didn't start out as a centrist either, like you know, actually, the irony of theirs, they actually started out as conservatives. But most people don't know that. They buy a false narrative about what the baby boomers were um, yeah, the new left was like a bunch of people.
Speaker 1:They were older than boomers, yeah, they were silent generation and they were tiny, like that's the thing, like they were a tiny generation, you know. And yeah, I mean, I guess you and I are actually like we're being meta doomers in a way, because I'm framing this optimistically. It's like aha, you think you get out of it with your doom?
Speaker 3:You don't, yeah, you don't. You and Ezra Klein are in the same system. You and Ezra Klein are in the same system. You and Ezra Klein are the elite. Consensus is all of us, and that's horrible.
Speaker 1:Right, it's all of us, from a spectrum of Alex Jones and Greenwald all the way over to Rachel Maddow, and we are somewhere in that mix.
Speaker 3:Derek Vaughn and Joe Biden are hand in hand, part of the American flag.
Speaker 1:This was one of my frustrations. The other thing that happened during our tenure was me getting more. I've been told I've been moved to the right. I don't think I have um, but I got more and more frustrated with the language of left communism, because it was consciously positing what I considered to be like an, an idealist and I don't mean this in the insult, I mean this literally like an idea of something in the world of which you know doesn't exist anymore. So, for example, uh, the left of capitalism.
Speaker 1:When you also say that everything is capitalist, well then, that's just the left. And you're like, oh, I'm not part of the left, I'm part of this other thing. What other thing, what system are you actually participating in by being outside of the left of capital, when you also don't think that even China is outside of capitalism, meaning that you are the left in ideal form, like of some kind of platonic form of the left that does not actually exist and act in the world. Maybe you want it to be, but it isn't. And the in framing it as if you exist as a left that exists right now as an alternative to the left of capital, because there's five of you in some sect somewhere is fundamentally self-dishonest in a way that makes you unable to actually do any kind of left-cognitive misintervention, because it's so clear that you're a part of something that isn't right right like you know, yeah, I mean, I don't know, I don't know how exactly to remedy that.
Speaker 3:But one starting point that sounds not crazy is okay. Why don't you? Let's admit, let's assume the worst we are the left of capital. What now?
Speaker 1:yeah right yeah, exactly like. What are you gonna do to convince the left of capital to be whatever you want it to be? Oh, you're not. You're gonna convince the workers. Well, you're like, I can tell you there's less of the workers who are not, who are part of what you are, than a part of the left of capital, even though you're like. Well, the workers are depoliticized. Absolutely, they are absolutely true, absolutely true. Um, and and honestly, in so much as they, they are politicized, they're probably politicized reactionary, because you can stop something easier than you can build something right, um, but workers are not depoliticized doesn't mean you can do an end run around the political system.
Speaker 3:Because, by the way, this is the scariest fucking shit I heard. You know I was reading Jonah Goldberg of all people Anyway, this is a much longer conversation and he was talking about how, like, both political parties are really idealist about people who don't turn out. You know they're like the assumption is always oh my God, elections would totally change if voter turnout was like way much higher, right, and like the scary thought is that they wouldn't. You just, you know, the people who didn't turn out would just divide in the same way as the existing electorate. Now, I don't think that's true, but it's like, I think it's something worth thinking about. But like, maybe there isn't this outside of politics that's going to massively swing things one way or another. You know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh man.
Speaker 3:Because what do we know about people who don't vote? You know, we know, like, how are we so sure that they're going to vote for PSL or whatever, whatever, or even they're going to vote for fascist fascism?
Speaker 1:you know, it's just the Overton window is both true and false simultaneously.
Speaker 1:Is the rhetoric shift does matter, like it does actually matter that that Trump talks in a different way and that AFC talks in a different way, and yet it doesn't actually change the horizons of possibility that much?
Speaker 1:What it changes is your possible contextual understanding of the horizons of possibility. But the irony is this entire time I mean the irony of the of the 21st century and of the end of the 20th century, um, that I don't see leftist deal with again is that political polarization is more and more endemic across the spectrum, but also elite consensus is actually pretty damn tight. Um, endemic across the spectrum, but also elite consensus is actually pretty damn tight. Um, they want you to think that you're fighting over big things, over small things and and you're like, who are they? Well, I mean, honestly, like whoever's running structural capitalism is very happy with you thinking that, like things that really matter on margin, and they, the thing is is they do change people's lives on margin. They do like, like the reversal Roe v Wade makes life very harder for, for, for people in about, you know, 40% of the States. Right.
Speaker 1:But what it doesn't do is it's not going to lead to. You know if, if it really was going to change stuff substantively, we'd see a population boom. We aren't going to see a population boom from the end of abortion. Does that mean it's not bad? It absolutely is bad. Like I'm not, I don't want to demean what that means, but that's the biggest change in American life I can think of and what I've turned it out, what I've tried to point out to people. That's a systemic compromise that is good for both sides, because the conservatives can continue to try to push a national ban, which some of them are sincere about, but they're not going to get through. And the liberals now have a way to motivate people to act in red states they didn't have before. Yeah, why would they fix that like that? Like it's just, like it's the same reason why, uh, the conservatives have never really tried to actually, when they were in power not through a judicial fiat to to force a conflation by nationally banning abortion in a way that was significant? Why? Because it would actually undo one of the few motivating factors that got their evangelical base to stay loyal to them Right Now.
Speaker 1:Let's put this in the context of production. All right, none of this matters that much for production. All right, none of this matters that much for production. The places, the places where abortion is going to be banned, are places, with the exception of the West, like Utah and not Colorado, but Utah and a few other places are places with dying off and declining populations, right like it's almost projection. Um, for, for, for, for women who are victimized, it's going to be a nightmare, right, but in aggregate, um it, it actually it's, it's. It's interesting how, how like it's not like we're. You're not seeing zoomers becoming into TradCaf lifestyles or all becoming Andrew Tate. You're just not. That's not happening. And the question is why, if this policy really did change American life that deeply, that deeply, um, uh, similarly like, uh, you know um the minimum wage is now something that no one actually even gets.
Speaker 1:Um, because you're gonna have more and more uneducated labor, blah, blah, blah. So, like, like there's real competition in the bottom part of the sector that actually is eating out the lower middle of the sector of workers income sector it is. It's actually weakening. They're the people getting hurt the most by inflation. Um, because their wages have not gone up with inflation quite as much as the low end of the of the sector are. As professionals like those, like it's just not happening.
Speaker 1:Um, the left has nothing to speak to. That, I mean. And weirdly, that is the area where you're like you know, if you talk about, like, blue collar workers, that's who you're talking about. The other thing that the left can't really deal with is it wants to be anti-productivist, for good reasons, I'm not even denying that. But then it wants to be like we, everyone's going to have good, clean jobs. Like we, everyone's going to have good, clean jobs. Well, they would for a little while, unless you actually like really take over the state, but you don't have the capacity to do that. So what are you actually saying? So we're gonna like get some some good, clean jobs for like 10 years, and we'll figure it out later.
Speaker 1:That's what led to the health care debacle and one of the reasons why we can't fix the health. This is this is my hot take, I've said it now for 10 years, but I think it's true one of the reasons why we can't fix the health care. This is this is my hot take, I've said it now for 10 years, but I think it's true. One of the reasons why the United States in particular can't fix the health care debacle is not just that you have an entire urban industry that would collapse if you actually fix the problem, and it is one of the ways people get out of deindustrialized workspaces other than the military. The military doesn't need them anymore. You don't need the poverty draft anymore. You got drones for that. Like, unskilled combat is about as useful as unskilled labor, and we can romanticize people who make it skilled. And there are people who are good at combat, who can outdo a drone. Sure, but in aggregate the drones are more useful or more efficient, I mean doesn't even matter more useful.
Speaker 3:Just you know it's capitalism we're talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, yeah, I mean, well, when you shoot a drone, you can repair it. Yeah, um, when you shoot a person, maybe they get repaired, maybe they don't. Um, I mean you just you think about that and and that's just from the standpoint of treating a person like a cog in the machine, sure, um, so these are things to think about. The left really has not. And I guess this leads me to the last question. We've been talking for a while. I think we're going to have a couple of these conversations among um, I've been wanting to have you back on for a while because, uh, you started this long journey with me more sunny and bright-eyed than I was, and you're like varn, you were too negative and now I think you may be the darker minded of us from the left of you.
Speaker 1:Sure, yeah, yeah exactly, yeah, like well, I mean ironically're like there's no social world. Also, politics is actually working as it's designed to, which has sort of been my implication of a lot of my talks about. I'm no longer quite as big on cybernetics. I see problems with it, but a system is what it does, not what you want it to do. Right, and I'm like, well, the system's doing what it's, but what it's been doing for and surviving pretty damn good actually, and it's been and it's had plenty of chances to crash.
Speaker 1:Now it doesn't mean it's going to last forever, but what's surprising is, like, I mean, this might be called the long you know, called the long, you know, the long strange death of america is that it's not totally dying, even as it's declining. It's just, like, you know, gleefully going into its donage with pretty good provisions, um, uh, and that the left, the left can't handle that. I don't know, you know, you know, and that seems to be partly systemic, and it doesn't seem to just be about the left either. Like, like the right can't. I mean, I think the right is going to get weirder and weirder and weirder because it has less sophisticated ways to adjudicate things.
Speaker 1:That can't make work, and so it's, and also there's a larger division of like leftists for all their elitist impulse. Have any garrett, any egalitarian impulse in that? Like we think anyone can learn our weird jargon and be part of the game if like right, like, uh, elite conservatives do not think unelite conservatives can even be elite conservatives. That like we need our idiot shock troops and we'll be the secret masters behind the scenes, which is also why, by the way, when people go, why don't we see conservative intellectuals? Why would they want you to see them like in Claremont doing whatever the fuck yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like, exactly Like. Their theory of how power works is not based on you knowing. Aren't even their own people knowing who they are? Right. Like come on.
Speaker 3:Right, I mean another thing to draw out by the way of the point of this optimism. This often means that left organizing efforts on the ground will go quite far. So it doesn't even help you to be a doomer on the ground. Right, this means there's like a systematic disconnect between the on the ground, local organizing perspective and like global stasis, and that's why, like the machine's going to keep wearing on, you know.
Speaker 1:Right, and that's also why you have these flip flops between localism and nationalism nationalism horizonalism, horizonalism, verticalism, horizonalism, verticalism is because actually there's a stasis that that neither one of those things can get around Right. And as long as you're playing those games, you can have an effect on that stasis.
Speaker 3:you can and you are actually, but what you can't do is actually take control of the totality at all you can't yeah, um, and and in fact, there's this weird realism that people end up in which is like this stasis, like is this real politics?
Speaker 1:uh, yeah, well, politics becomes something. I mean, this is the theoretical construct. This politics becomes something else. Modernity becomes either the same as, or so fundamentally different from the ancient world that we can't talk about any continuity, etc. Etc. Etc.
Speaker 3:Yeah, this is Weber's the long, the long hard boring of hard boards or whatever, except it's. You know what that looks like now is like a million stupid debates on X or whatever. The fuck yeah.
Speaker 1:I guess my last question, though we've talked a lot about the left in specific, we've kind of dipped in the specific left-wing tendencies.
Speaker 1:We'll probably go into this in a conversation in a month or so, talking about what we've seen in these tendencies, because I have a feeling this reunion about 10 years of us working together and ranting about this is also probably going to alienate a lot of people, is also probably going to alienate a lot of people.
Speaker 1:But we have a lot to talk about because a whole lot has changed and a whole lot of meta stuff has stayed the same, and I mean that even in, like, fundamentals of the economy have changed and yet, like some basic capitalist dynamics have not changed. I mean, that's why I was so mad at the technological, the techno neo-feudalism in the capitalism thesis. That's even to me, even like more problematic than the monopoly castable thesis was. It's like, oh, so so we can fight this other thing, um, as opposed to capitalism changing right, right, like, like, if we're not fighting neoliberalism and we have to be fighting something fundamentally older and, you know, like some regressive core, and I'm, and I'm sort of like, yeah, but like pixels don't farm food, like, like, like the internet, like the internet actually requires physical infrastructure, physical materials and all that. It's not like you can go into cyberspace without energy inputs and physical infrastructure anyway.
Speaker 3:That doesn't mean the internet doesn't change anything. We're not saying that.
Speaker 1:No, we're not. It changes a ton. It creates new NTA opportunities, it creates all kinds of stuff, but the same token, like weirdly, if the second neo-feudalism thing was was serious, then like AI would have been a bigger threat to the economy than it's actually ended up being so far, right, and you know.
Speaker 1:And then, like I don't know, etrea could do mnt policy on some um, because the physical barriers would be gone, um and so bt, mmt, that's where we're going um, so my, my thing is like my last question, I guess was a question I handed out in the beginning is you came out of one menu, you ended up in another, but looking back at the menu, you came out of the kind of heterodox economic policy sphere. It seems in total disarray. I mean, like now you have mmt stalinist and mmT and MMT nationalist and like MMT anarchist, like people who believe fundamentally contradictory things but also somehow believe in a charterless theory of the state. Like you have increasing insistence that economies are our target, even though, like we're really watching in real time, attempts to make economies a target aren't working. Um, uh, you know they're not truly, they're not truly self-contained like that and they never, like you're not in a closed system with tokens like and so that realization, um, seems to have driven some people into incoherence.
Speaker 1:And these people who, in 2019 and 2020, seem like they were literally about to take over the economic discussion of both parties in some ways Right, they seem so utterly beaten back now, even even though, like I'll give them some defense, not everything they've said even been disproven, it's just.
Speaker 1:It's just like, uh, they were not prepared for a the moment at hand, even when they have a theory for it, although increasingly when I read them they feel their, their theories feel really ad hoc and they're kind of in denial about that right, um, but heterodox economics I mean even what modern monetary theory is like? Yes, randall way and stuff have been around for a long time. Some of the stuff, like learner goes back to the 60s for uh, freddie, uh, freddie lee goes back a long time too, but, like when we entered this, that was minsky and post-minsky ites. And then, like by 2019, that was like a neo-chartalism and and we're not dealing with minsky and canes anymore, and uh, and then there was this conflation of, like marcel mouse and and david graber theories of of societal money that became theories of state money, as if they were the same thing that's fucking.
Speaker 3:That guy Are you talking about, like the gifted, like Charles Eisenstein, like that? Yeah, he's a RFK guy now, well, I'm just saying like their politics.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm just saying like their politics. They've gone from like from like, almost tasting what they thought was real power, to being just as discombobulated as the Marxist in the 60s Right. Why, what is?
Speaker 3:your experience of that as someone who comes out of that world more than me. I think it's so. I think it's split. It was always like a coalition of a bunch of things, right, it was like. You know, it was a bunch of like how to put this? So. So Liz Warren was a part of the heterodox economics coalition Right, and originally all the way back in 2007 or whatever, right, and it was so. It was a coalition of kind of like you know people, academics and so on, on the edge of the democratic party, with other weird heterodox economics academics, with different people from different groups. You know some people who called themselves marxists, like duncan foley and anwar sheikh.
Speaker 3:We would have thought of as back then, as like heterodox economics in some way, you know, because they didn't have I mean, they may have had party affiliations back in the day, but they didn't have them, you know, in the 2000s. So they just got lumped in right and then a division happened, the kind of weird MMT savant types, I think they went in the direction that you were talking about, a bunch of the sort of academics and policy people. They just went into the Biden administration, right? So the FTC, the anti-monopoly FTC, that's happening based on quotes, unquote, heterodox ideas about monopoly and whatever, whatever. You know it's like the stuff about, you know, there's that, michael Pettis, you know, and Matt Klein, trade wars as class wars. Like that shapes the way, like liberals, around the Biden administration. Think about China, right, you know, so it's so.
Speaker 3:So the wing that I'm most familiar with in New York are people who have gone straight from the fringes during the financial crisis to the center of the democratic policy debate and who she was shaping kind of like Biden's, like I don't know what to call it like neo-mechanicalist, you know, decoupling, whatever. It is right, that's heterodox econ or one bit of it anyway. The people you're talking about are kind of like they were part of the coalition but now they've split off into fucking what I see as Twitter weirdness and craziness. You know they have no effect, but like the more, like the lawyers, the policy journalists, the economists, you know a lot of them are just like their libs now, their mainstream libs now, and they've been integrated. You know that's what's happened to heterodox economics which is what happened to Keynesianism too.
Speaker 1:really, yeah, exactly. It's exactly the same process and strangely enough, it maybe happened to Marxists too.
Speaker 3:Well, the thing about the heterodox econ who got integrated is that they think about things not a million miles away from you. And I, in the sense of you, know like what is the world. The world is this like big power contest between groups not a million miles away from you. And I, in the sense of you, know like what is the world? The world is this like big power contest between groups, between like big states and, like you know, basically, how do states win the global war? They do developmentalism or whatever you know, and it's, it's this kind of like bonapartism as like economic, positive economic policy. Yeah, Well.
Speaker 1:Well, it is a kind of it's a concession to political reality, for a kind of economic reality, but they can't do the kinds of things that the far end of mmt promised they would do, whether exactly those are rights or the tanker sites or whoever are. Um uh, because you know you're not going to get a job, guarantee, as I pointed out, that that that affects power dynamics too much, and they know that if you start doing that kind of stuff it's actually going to divide the nation and they're afraid of the decline of national competition, right, et cetera, et cetera. So, like they have a very corporatist policy, now I don't say this to say that MMTers are fascists, that was young me, that's not me now they're not, but they are corporatists in the same way that fascists were corporatists.
Speaker 1:Their means of managing, to bring it back to your point about management, their means of managing society, as opposed to I don't know vitalist terror and racial purification, are in classical fascism, which is very different than Hitlerism, anyway, right, or are in integral state theories that makes the state manifested in a leader, a singular leader, almost like a king, but popularly elected. So blah, blah, blah. Uh, these kind of corporate schemas aren't going to work for them, so they're not the same. But, like from the marxist position, what they're trying to do actually is kind of the same, which is like manage capital, which is an international force that has to be managed nationally, um, and deal in trade-off between sectors of capital, which some of which are going to be more internationally oriented and going to be a problem for you, some are going to be more nationally oriented and going to be a problem for you, and they also, uh, want to do what the old fascists did in this other sense too, is they want to man, they want to manage leftist orientations and rightist orientations while keeping them in the system and not leading to massive social fragmentation dysfunction right, but a lot of everyone's discovered that, uh, that like fundamental polarization within the society, actually seems to keep people invested in politics right
Speaker 1:at least a certain class of people, although I will say it seems to be a high risk strategy that is beginning to exhaust people in a way. Like I like people who think like we're gonna have 2016 era anti-trumpism I think they're just wrong. I think the social, I think I could be wrong about that, but I think a general society is exhausted by all that now and it's not going to be able to run it up a second time in the same way. It's not that we won't see opposition.
Speaker 3:We'll see a lot of it, but Just to say a quick thing about the heterodox econ people. Their bet, you know, the sort of smarter ones in around the sort of around Biden is that they're what they're trying to do is they're trying to ride all, ride the tiger of all of these dynamics just long enough to keep the Democratic coalition together to, you know, piecemeal reform their way to some of what the MMT people want. Now, that obviously is shitty in a bunch of different ways, but that is actually doing politics. That's, you know, engaging with some of the global dynamics there are to get what you want, or some of what you want. Right, See, I've become a Lib now, that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:Yeah that's what I'm saying. You got to work for the office of Management and Budget. That's where all the communists have to go. No, anyway, this is not an endorsement. I'm just saying that this is the reason people gravitate to this stuff, because this is the kind of impact that people think you can have. You ride the you, you ride the tiger. If you've just put the right sanctions regime and the right tariff regime, you can get just enough jobs in swing States to get that, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you're more bipolar than me, no, no, no, I'm not saying this is the only way, I'm just. You know, it's just like this. There there's a reason that a bunch of people who started out on the left are now trying to pull this shit in the white house. You know, it's just, that's all I'm saying, that's all there's always a reason for it, like the, the.
Speaker 1:This is why the anarchist and left communist and even like certain elements of old marxist, have always been like you have to be careful with this. If you're going to engage in it, you have to engage in it only negatively, right, because the moment you start trying to trade off politics of it, you're actually granting it legitimacy. Sure, right, um, but the, the, the way that the reformers can respond back to that, and this is a fair response. I want to tell people this is a fair response. I don't like it, but it's fair. Um, what have you done with your, with your, with your, with your dual power institutions that want to work outside of it? Uh, we do see those exist in the world. They exist in places like lebanon right like they're real, you know, we but.
Speaker 1:But you can't build them. And when they do they do build, it's because the center has screwed up so completely that both government and civil society have basically fall apart and you have stepped into the gap, the the kind of elephant in the room of the problem of marxism. Right now, right is like that's going to lead, that you always going to the most marginal places with the least effect that are going to need the most help, and saying that that's going to be the people who solve everything for everybody.
Speaker 3:Right, which is doesn't make sense, right the strange thing is that the reformists only get their momentum from revolutionaries doing things on the ground. That's the fucking strange codependency that, like and and people, some people, you know that some of the jacobin people think this is a good thing, that this is like broad front or whatever. That, like, you know, it's, uh, you know what, what was, what was that atlantic piece? You know the biden's coalition, bill crystal and angela davis, you know, you know, and it's, this is the thing. You know, it's like it's kind of true that, like, the reformists don't get any space without any, you know, grassroots action that is not driven by them. They do not drive grassroots mobilization. The people who drive grassroots mobilization, you know, I was about to say the people who listen to this, but probably not actually.
Speaker 1:But you organize and are often in unions, but they're not out. They don't usually do that kind of organizing Right. But yeah, I mean grassroots mobilization. I think one of the things that we have to deal with is the fundamental change of what grassroots is, now that, uh, media organizations have changed and that also seems to bother people, because everyone wants to say the internet's not real and in some sense they're right. They're, they're right, but in another sense, like, but that's where all the dialogue happens. So that's where your access is. And if you think you're gonna like build it through local newspapers, you're fucking diluted. Or even through, like the dsa, let's canvas forever because you're gonna run out of money which, by the way, they are yeah, um, or you're gonna exhaust your. Unless you have a truly mass movement behind you and multiple organizations doing it, you're gonna exhaust your membership base, um, which they apparently are. So you know that's where you're at and so you are kind of based with, with.
Speaker 1:You know, I guess the same reason I talked to student Baker maybe your maligned optimism is student Baker's hopeful despair, or whatever can both get us into to thinking about, like, what does it mean to truly stand independent of that and when also realizing that in some way you'll never stand completely independent of it, for the reasons like we said before. Like you exist in a totality. In that sense You're not going to like we live in a society. That's a very real thing. You can't just pretend that you don't, um. So in that sense, you do have to work with what you're given. This is why I'm like not arguing that everyone needs to rebuild every union from the ground up, right, um, but on the same token, you got to realize what you're doing and you got to have an orientation. That's not just about immediate concessions, because you're going to get into these problems almost immediately, because what's going to happen to these MMTers when Biden goes down, which looks increasingly likely?
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're going to become Democratic Party hacks and they're going to know it Absolutely and they're going to be on the losing end of being democratic party hacks too, they're going to be the old hacks that were discredited.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely absolutely, and this is the tricky thing, it's I mean, I haven't put, I haven't said this as well as I could, but the thing is that we have to think within the system, not independently of the system, but outside of all the existing subject positions. We can't think you know this, this, we can't think in terms of this reformist way of reformist approach. We also can't think in terms of this revolutionary approach. You know, these are all poles within the system that just reproduce things. You know, it's like it's a strange kind of thought position, it's like we're not independent of all these dynamics but we also can't play the role we're given, you know, and so it's weird, it's yeah.
Speaker 1:I can just gesture at it barely All right. All right. Well, we'll probably have you come back on in a month because there's so much to talk about. We haven't even gotten into the specific tendencies we've seen emerge. Uh, we haven't gotten into, uh, why our concerns have changed, and I'm not sure yours and mine are in the same spot. You're deeper, deeper in academia. I'm deeper and deeper in, uh, bureaucratic teacher life. Uh, we are both in the United States, which we were not when we started. Neither one of us. Um, you, you happen to not been born in this accursed land and I happen to have been born in this accursed land, but that doesn't really change. We were both actually abroad when we started and I do think that may change.
Speaker 1:Like I find that my attitude and fear of certain left-wing tendencies that I used to really bother me, these cultural left-wing tendencies that I found really annoying, like when I'm actually here, I'm just like, well, that's unaffected and actually it does have effect on larger culture. I'm not denying that but this idea that it's like I recently read something at sublation that basically implied that it was like an equivalency to communist conspiracy and we should be like Norman Thomas and the socialist movement and oppose the conspirators and fighting intersectionality, and I'm like, hey, like that's, that's like a 10 years ago fight anyway, like, like react, like their victory was also their defeat, as so many things are in this system and B, as so many things are in this system, um and b, um, uh, uh, um, how powerful do you think they are and how powerful do you think you are? Like, some of these things come from trends, like they're going to change. I mean, one of the one of the ironies is that, over and over again, uh, left-wing critiques of left-wing stuff, uh are inter or inter. Uh, minority critiques of stuff or whatever, like woke shifts in in into debate, into where it's used nebulously by the opposition. And this happens over and over and over again.
Speaker 1:Um, going all the way back to, like the fucking birchers. Um, you know, the birchers were both conspirators, literally, and conspiracy minded um, and they often used linen cells and leninist logic to also define leninism everywhere and fight it this and the other, and they justified that fight off of the conspiracism of the other side. But what that is is a mutually enforcing feedback loop that can't be disproven. Like the radical left is motivated by the radical right and vice versa, like there is one of the for all of of Christman's millenarianism and I tend to like of the Chapo boys and Amber the, the, the one I've always kind of respected Christmas, but there is kind of a prophetic slash millenarian element to him and I'm like he's aware of it.
Speaker 1:But it is sort of like slash millenarian element to him and I'm like he's aware of it but it is sort of like I'm like I don't know man, like your view of mass movements like kind of almost sounds like eschatology to me. But, um, because he is one of the people who does the. The leftist lost politics is always something else in what we're doing, right, right, right right like.
Speaker 1:Uh, and I'll admit for the reasons why you say I've done that in the past too, because it's appealing, sure, like it's totally appealing, um, but but this chrisman is, is kind of right on and that is like negative partisanship has been the primary driver of things for a while. If you pair Christman's thoughts about negative partisanship with something like Michael Sandel's critiques of the administrative state and how you meant it from republicanism to administrative state to like to like, I think in a crisis of the administrative state, the permanent, like to like, I think in a crisis of the administrative state, the permanent and I'm like. Well, the reason why it's permanent, michael Sandel, is because it's actually easy for legitimacy the elite consensus can be washed by by seeming like it's not a consensus, by having two warring factions that get everyone caught up in it and which they don't really have any actual substantive political effect. Uh, particularly once you remove them from the local context. I mean, one of the ironies of always speaking against localism is it really makes national politics are even more importantly because, as I, as I believe, the structural way out of national binds is international, otherwise you're fucked, no matter what, um, that stuff that suda baker was talking about definitely applies between countries, um, is that if you can't do localism, you actually can't do national politics either, and this has been a bind um, and, weirdly, democrats are now learning what they learned 20 years ago under Howard Dean, but it's weird, and the left is kind of like, oh, I'm seeing people doubling down on the left, like, oh, you know these concessions to localism, we need to go back to that, but you don't have an apparatus for national politics and you don't have apparatus for national politics and and you don't have, like, uh, I guess this is another place where your point and so your base point co-align a different way.
Speaker 1:Um, steve baker points out that, uh, the dsa is popular in areas where hillary clinton knights are the predominant political force, and I'm like, yeah, but that makes sense because they're an internal opposition. Um, and that's real, yeah, uh, uh, they also are doomed by that very fact, the way steve baker points out, because they don't have a lot of appeal in those areas where they don't accept her radicals and marginalized people who are going to have, who are going to be way more radical than the mainstream of the dsa right, um, because they are pushed further out of their own society, but they can't do much except for the DSA itself, which is going to be seen as obstructionist and going to lead to all kinds of problems, right?
Speaker 3:So I mean, I think the thing I would say there is that, like here's a way of hearing my blackfieldness, I want to say there is no alternative to internal opposition. But by my blackfieldness I want to say there is no alternative to internal opposition, but why that? I mean, like I don't mean that you do the same thing. There is no alternative to thinking about the same tactical and strategic questions. That's what I mean. Like you have to live in the same space, you don't have to do the same thing.
Speaker 1:I'm down with that. Alright, on that note, we're gonna adjourn Amogh. Come back on in a month. I know you might have dissertation or whatever right bunch of things, but I'll make time. Alright, we'll come on and we'll talk a little bit. Hopefully we can talk about this in some more specific terms.
Speaker 1:It's been a wild decade in Moog. It's been 10 years that you and I have been analyzing the left from the left, to the point that you and I both think analyzing the left from the left is actually a bad strategy. Yeah, yeah, it's like nope, like it's like nope, uh, yeah, that actually weirdly makes you stuck in a cul-de-sac that you can't get out of because you are also denying your own relationship to the rest of this. Maybe you should go back to to analyzing society as a whole, of which the left is a symptomatic. To go back to our original title of our show, manifestation of like. It's actually showing us something about society as a whole, not just a dysfunction of the left, right, and that is kind of worrying to a lot of people. So, on that note, I'll see you in a month.
