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
Revolutionary Pessimism: A Deep Dive into Marxist Theory
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Chirs and Jason of the regrettable century return. Is revolutionary optimism just delusional wishful thinking? Join us as we dissect the tension between revolutionary optimism and pessimism within Marxist theory. We scrutinize Maoist and anarchist influences on American leftist thought, revealing the struggle between human agency and material conditions. Reflecting on the 20th century, we challenge the idea of historical inevitability in Marxism and consider Marx’s nuanced perspectives on societal contradictions.
Explore contemporary leftist geopolitics and the concept of multipolarity as we critique modern third-worldism and its outdated models. From the decline of U.S. hegemony to the peculiarities of the Gen X left, we trace the evolution of leftist thought and the legacy of anti-Stalinism. We also delve into the complexities of unionization, the state of the workforce, and the disillusionment post-Bernie Sanders, questioning the viability of social democratic initiatives and the realities behind the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.
Finally, we navigate through the rise of anarcho-primitivism, post-Marxism, and their transformations influenced by 90s punk rock culture and the Occupy movement. Analyzing the impact of military technology on modern warfare, we reflect on the socio-economic factors behind past conflicts and the persistent allure of nationalism. Concluding with a critique of both revolutionary optimism and pessimism, we emphasize the need for a pragmatic understanding of Marxist theory and the continuous challenges of revolutionary change.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Hello and welcome to VarmBlog slash Regrettable Century, at least half of it, and we are talking about a broad, overarching topic and one that I get the most pushback on. The two things I've gotten the most pushback on lately is one not talking about war all the time, and that will be actually discussed in our discussion today. I think about why I don't talk about geopolitics constantly, even though I think geopolitical education is important. And two, my pessimism.
Speaker 1I've been increasingly critiqued by everybody, from Marxist to Platonist.
Speaker 1I mean I know I Platonist with hate me anyway but that I am too pessimistic, and it's interesting because I do not interpret what I'm saying as particularly fatalistic or despairing. So I wanted to parse out what we meant by pessimism as opposed to revolutionary optimism, which for me I'm just going to lay out the cards Revolutionary optimism, for me, 99.9 of the time, is delusion, um, are, it is voluntarism on speed. So I find that when I'm like reading things, like like you know, I don't know Everything from David Graeber's, david Graeber and David Wingrove's, everything to contemporary, like Marxist-Leninist material, I tend to find that there's just an active ignorance of counter forces and unforeseen consequences, that that's like blatant um and that a lot of emphasis is put on will. Um, yeah, in a way that you know. I don't think any of us here like die hard materialist in the strictest sense of that term. I think we all are methodologically materialistic, you know um, but in a way that just seems anti-materialist to me, like that that it sees human agency as unbounded.
Speaker 3Right. That's sort of the like. One of the Maoist contributions to the American left, I think, is that just assertion of will in place of ripened material conditions or, instead of a reliance on ripened material conditions, the idea that you can force things to happen.
Speaker 2There's also a very teleological kind of understanding of history as being unidirectional and and basically automatic, like there's no dialectic at work, it just happens, and also, in addition to the fact that everything happens and it's just, it's always positive. If we will it to be so, then it would be even better still.
Speaker 3That's it and I would say I said maoist and I think that that is definitely a part of the, the maoist contribution, but it's also the anarchist contribution to american politics. Um, it's just to, to which a certain extent, I appreciate, right, the reinsertion of human agency into uh, into the equation, because I think that and I will probably talk about this uh, a lot of the, the marxist view of, of uh revolution is based on inevitability, right, and there's a lot of sitting around waiting for the crisis to break things open. That is part of that, be it like the left communists or the uh marxist leninists in the past, right well, I mean, marxist leninism is a tradition, that's.
Speaker 1That goes, that kind of waffles all over the place. It's a problem with the state. Tradition is this. There's other things? Right then, philosophical consistency driving a lot of its, uh, its pronouncements, but there is a sense in which, like both in the late 40s and also in the 1920s, there was a sense that a crisis was inevitable, war was inevitable, and Stalin ended up being right about that. War was inevitable and not right about who it was going to be with. And because it's pretty clear to me that Stalin's war preparations were to fight britain and uh, yeah, the, the western allies, the western allies. Yeah, he actually seemed somewhat shocked by hitler forcing his hand early.
Speaker 3Yeah, he uh I think, was uh planning on the nazis and the western allies to bleed each other to death. He was hoping for that. He was very surprised by, first of all, hitler's successes in the West and then Hitler being able to turn East as quickly as he did.
Speaker 1So the entire 20th century in many ways was a challenge to the inevitabilism that became soviet doctrine. Um I have read a ton of marks now and I I see both marks. Marks has this way of talking inevitableistically in public but not in private, which is very interesting to think about um. In his letters you see him like going after the espay day and stuff in ways that make it very clear that he does not think their victory is guaranteed. Um, that is also true in his writings of the us civil war, like right um.
Speaker 1But when he writes his philosophical and analytical treatises he does seem to think that the only way out of the problem is communism, and in that sense it's inevitable or the common ruin of everything that's the part that gets left out in a lot of people's formulations and I think that last bit is interesting to like deal with, because the one thing I get from reading from reading Marx maybe more than Engels is that on one hand, he thinks that the contradictions of capitalism mean that, for you know, the promises of bourgeois society to be delivered on, you're going to need something beyond bourgeois society. At the same time, you're getting like a, and look at what bourgeois society does the moment it has power. It's a reversion to a prior norm. You know. That's why the brumaire ends up being such a crucial text, because the brumaire is the indication that marx and it's a polemical writing, so we can, uh, we can take it seriously because it's public, but that marx is not a whiggish thinker, because if he's whiggish you can't make any sense out of what's going on in france after the um, um, after the revolution, and I think that's interesting.
Speaker 1But I I do think by the time you get to like, say, the mid-1920s, once lenin's dying, this optimism and this inevitability thesis is pretty much it's super normalized in all, I mean in all parts of the, of the, of the communist left, like. So if we look at it in a spectrum, let's say, let's talk about the council communist, like you know, they actually think that history's progressed so far. We don't need a spectrum. Let's say, let's talk about the Council of Communists. Like you know, they actually think that history's progressed so far.
Speaker 2We don't need to party our trade unions anymore, right, the workers are just going to spontaneously just make socialism and all we have to do is just acknowledge it and that's it really.
Speaker 1Acknowledge it and provide them Soviets.
Speaker 3Yeah, organize the Soviets once the crisis, them Soviets, yeah Right Like. Organize the Soviets.
Speaker 1Once the crisis produces the revolutionary situation, right which is, which is one of the interesting things about say, uh, heinrich Grossman thought All right, the the areas. Once gross men leaves the Frankfurt school, the people who pick him up are dissonant Marxist-Leninists on one hand and council communists like Paul Matic on the other. So that's something to notice. Now, later on, grossman gets rehabilitated in the 1990s by Trotskyists Actually as early as the 1970s by Trotskyists, j as early as the 1970s by Trotskyists. Jairus Banerjee translates him into English for the first time, which is wild to me that a book that was literally published in America was not translated fully into English until the aughts, and the first translation in the 70s was done in india.
Speaker 1Yeah, like it. It's crazy, um, but so so grossman, you know, to me is the like, negative form of cold marxism, and this is why we talk about how in cold marxism, as opposed to scientific and unscientific, because there's also the positive form of cold marxism, which is a productive forces form. Yeah, but they're like. They have different mechanisms, but they both operate effectively the same way. Something is going to happen at which there's a tipping point either immiseration and crisis or, uh, productive forces development and all we really have to do is take the reins of the state and then start to devolve the state by doing so right and which is sort of, I guess, like the.
Speaker 3The first is tragedy, would be that grossman's type thinking, and the second is farce, would be the fully automatic luxury communism. Uh, meme slash group of, I don't know, it's not really a tendency, but sort of. It's more of like an internet meme that people took seriously.
Speaker 1Yeah, accelerationism right, but like let's. If we look at this, that's what counts as the tendency.
Speaker 1Now that's the closest to a tendency that there is is an internet meme that people take seriously I mean that's true, but like if we, if we look at like chinese developmentalism, it does operate off. Like like after the 1970s we revived the economy by dropping all this will stuff from maoism. I mean that's what they're effectively doing, yeah, particularly after the whateverist school loses. Uh, and literally that's what it's called. It's a center tendency that mao points to like deal with the gang of four and and the dungas faction and the dungas faction and the Dungas faction actually appeals to much of the left in China, at least according to Ralph Ruckus, to take power from the center and then proceeds to do stuff like get rid of education for girls in the countryside and de-socialize all medicine.
Speaker 3Right, which is one of the wildest things. I had gone most of my entire life thinking that china at least had socialized medicine. It wasn't until like maybe five or six years ago when I actually realized that they didn't no, they have a system closest to the united states of any other country.
Speaker 3It's so it's it was so wild for me to find that out I was just like wait a minute what the fuck. I consider, myself relatively well-educated on stuff like this and I didn't realize that, Because it's something that China apologists just don't touch. They never touch it.
Speaker 2Yeah, like almost ever.
Speaker 1China apologists.
Speaker 2Well, go ahead. Oh, just Xi Jinping thought. If you really study it, you really look into what the kind of stuff that people are around that school of thought, what they write about, it's very, very it's the coldest possible stream. It's like ice cold.
Speaker 1Yeah, oh. Xi Jinping thought is basically like we're finally going to do in the 21st century what the Americans did in the 1930s, which is like build a social safety net, reintroduce elements of socialized medicine but not fully socialized health care, um, uh, rein in some of the lack of controls over stuff like education. I mean one of the things about china, as I used to say as a foreign educator we used to consider it the wild east um, add some ecology to their developmentalism. I mean, you know, I'll give them credit for that. Like, yeah, um. But that leads me to say the following oh, china's just the most responsible capital's power.
Speaker 1Um, you know, which is most, most successful bourgeois revolution yeah, um, and yes, you know, I do think china has people in it. I mean by china, I don't just mean chinese people, I mean the pr the pc people's republic, yeah, yeah. And the PR the PCP People's Republic, yeah, yeah. And the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Yeah, I mean the CPC. Excuse me, I said that wrong.
Speaker 3PCP I said the.
Speaker 1PCP, no, the CPC, Although that bit of branding is weird to me when they're like oh you Westerners are trying to ruin us by making it sound like the CCP or whatever I'm like, so you're ashamed of being related to the USSR.
Speaker 2Right.
Speaker 1I mean, I think, they are, though. They are yeah.
Speaker 2Because the USSR didn't last and they will last.
Speaker 1You know, but there's a lot of optimism coming from that. That's that is dying because China's growth rate is now married perfectly the West and they have now had a a real estate crisis that is actually larger than the one that happened in the West, but won't affect us. It's more. It's a larger crisis, but in a bigger economy. Um, and it's unclear if the, if the chinese are going to let it like roll out to all society and to the extent that it did in the united states, although if they do and we're still learning, as it's happening right now um, that might be real interesting for everyone's growth plans, I mean officially, that's their plan.
Speaker 2Officially, they're trying to achieve a moderately prosperous society, but who knows what the actuality will be?
Speaker 1Right.
Speaker 3They should expropriate some of their billionaires.
Speaker 1I mean they do have more than the United States does.
Speaker 2Right, they have lots to spare, yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. So the optimism that people were trying to get out of Xi seems to be stalling, and they're looking for it everywhere. I mean, some people look for it in the modern Russian state, which seems to me the wildest of the options, Like like trying to like sure, like NATO getting egg on its face over turning Ukraine into a pit, which, by the way, I tend to think waso's goal of the whole time I, I absolutely think it was.
Speaker 3I think that nato, I said this multiple to turn ukraine, uh, ghanistan, yeah yeah yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1Uh, the which, just you know, ties, ties Russia up for a decade.
Leftist Geopolitical Hope and Third Worldism
Speaker 3Yeah, right, I mean they've admitted to it, like the several people in that are in positions of power among the American ruling class of the United States have admitted to as much.
Speaker 1It's like oh yeah, we're just we're killing Russians and destroying Russian equipment without having to expend American lives, which you know leads to a very dark view of the immediate future, particularly when you look at the growing persistence of proxy wars. But then again, if you're a people who's not a proxy war, let's say the Palestinians you don't have a whole lot of hope of anyone helping you either.
Speaker 1Right, yeah, like, and that is the rub right now. So I find it interesting that a lot of leftists are going to geopolitics for hope, which, which I mean I get that multi-polarity implies that the that the us empire is dying down. Um, it's still one. It's still going to be a poll. Uh, probably the poll, just it is not the only pole in a world of fighting poles. That's implied in multipolarity. Unless you have a stabilized multipolarity, no one seems to have figured out how that would happen.
Speaker 2It's not going to feel any different If you live in Detroit or wherever. It's going to feel the same during the explicit multipolarity as it did when during the period before you know like it's a tangible benefit or difference really well, yeah, that's that.
Speaker 1This is one of the things about another source of lefty hope these days that I consider eschatological, which is third worldism. You know, the most exploited, poorest workers, who, a lot of cases, are not even actually workers, they're. They're people shut out of work through things like labor arbitrage and precarity. You have mass unemployment, mass lumpenization, and somehow they're going to overthrow the capitalist regimes of the core like if you would have made an argument about third worldism in the 1960s.
Speaker 3I might want to listen to it, right, right like just check out as one, two, three, many, uh, vietnams or whatever, to tie up the american imperial war machine and collapse the united states. But I might have listened to that idea that to me it doesn't make now. It doesn't make any sense, especially with how secondary and tertiary the profits from extraction are to the core. Yeah, I think that third-worldism operates on a model of extraction and a world economy that doesn't exist anymore no, I, I think they're.
Speaker 1Basically. Their model is 19th century economics and the 1960s politics, right, and that's that's. Uh, yeah, that's not gonna fly like so, so you just have it as an external rating. It seems like when people hit this despairing point, instead of giving up on inevitableism, what they do is they revive some idea of the past. I mean, old Third Worldism was basically a revision, a revival of an old idea.
Speaker 3Sort of. I mean it's sort of a revival of an old idea, right? Sort of. I mean it's sort of a revival of early thoughts that sprung out of the foundation of the Comintern long after the collapse of the Comintern. But the Comintern thought it was going to happen in the Far East, not Africa, south America and maybe a couple of spots in southeast asia I feel like, uh, when was zinoviev head of the common turn?
Speaker 2because, uh, as far back as like sometime in the mid-1920s there was a official peasant, a turn toward the peasantry and the and the far east. So it's really the. By the time the 60s comes around, it's really the third iteration. By the time the 60s comes around, it's really the third iteration.
Speaker 1Right. So we get that. When the 60s comes around, you get third worldism, you get J Sakai thought. When that fails and let's talk about how that failed, because it was a very specific movement through the unions in the 1970s, when the new left failed, there was a faction of the, the new communist movement, which we often talk about as if the new left and the new communist movement are the same thing, just like we talk about the hippies and the new left is the same thing and none of us think they're really the same thing they're related, but they're definitely not the same thing.
Speaker 1Right, right well, when people talk about the new left's anti-stalinism, that doesn't apply. The new communist movement?
Speaker 2no yeah not at all. I guess you could talk, if you talk about the new left, anti-stalinism, that doesn't apply.
Anarcho-Primitivism and Post-Marxism
Speaker 3The new communist movement, no, I guess you could talk, if you talk about, like the progressive labor party, uh, which start off as maoists and then become like hyper stalinists.
Speaker 1They become like hojist or something right exactly they're like stalinist communizers, really, really they're like you know.
Speaker 3we need to skip over the, basically apply a Stalinist, a hyper Stalinist regime, to skip over socialism and go straight into communism.
Speaker 2Right.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, this is where the historiographies of the left that gave us what we have today gets interesting and weird us. What we have today gets interesting and weird because we we always bracket out the gen x left. All right, let's talk about what the key luminaries of the gen x left were, all right. So you have these former marxist leninists who get frustrated with with uh, sectional barney bargaining in italy because of screwing over their own workers and.
Speaker 1And that leads to operismo and autonomism During the days of lead. A lot of those people flee into French academia and hook up with post-Marxists in France who are very frustrated. And I want to contextualize this because we're always complaining about post-modernism. But let's remind people that post-Marxism didn't come out of nothing.
Speaker 1It came out of the, the french communist getting on the reformist side of the mitzvah, wrong government and basically allowing themselves to be liquidated right so it's interesting that the people angry at that, instead of like becoming more marxist, they give up on Marxism entirely, or they go into the ultra-left and then eventually give up on Marxism entirely. So you have another tendency that leaves the Situationists and this kind of quasi-cancelist but artsy tradition, which is uniquely French, goes into Bordigist and Council Communist currents, tries to combine the two. That's where Communization comes from.
Speaker 3Is that my cat coughing? Are you guys picking that up on the microphone? I'm sorry, it's okay. I think she's on my desk purring and coughing, but I'll mute myself it myself.
Speaker 1So so, then, you have what this leads to interestingly as this, this inversion of teleology, and it gives you the beginnings of what would become anarcho-primitivism all right, yeah, um, which comes back to America in weird ways.
Speaker 3So anarcho-prolativism is wild in its myriad of formations. I mean it's myriad of incarnations in the United States, everything from just like right-wing nationalism but like ethno-nationalism right-wing ethno-nationalism to like of course you know, and a weird turf, uh like what was his name the guy from? Uh, um, there we go, yeah, like weird turf, anarcho-primitivism that I mean it's it's all pseudo-reactionary, but like, some of it's pseudo-reactionary, some of it's straight up reactionaryreactionary, some of it's straight-up reactionary. But yeah, anarcho-primitivism is wild. I would love to do an episode about that one day, just because of how fun it would be to dig into all that.
Speaker 1I mean, what's interesting is when you and I were coming up, that was a dominant on campus intellectual tendency.
Speaker 2Absolutely a dominant on campus's intellectual tendency. Absolutely, that was the left. For, like all of my teenage, teenage and early 20s, that was what the left was we were in austin and it was like that's where derrick jensen was was in austin.
Speaker 3So, like we, we dealt with, uh, those people all the time yeah, I mean so I'm.
Speaker 1But so there's that, mo, you in the in the, in in the odds, and that comes out of specific train of failure, out of the new left. I I find that a lot of people tend to start and stop at the new left and then jump to like occupy, as if there's nothing in between.
Speaker 2Um, because a lot of this stuff, everything in between, it's very confusing. Yeah, so if you just jump from the new left to occupy, it's very straightforward. I mean it's it's wrong, but it's it's easy to make sense of yeah, and it's.
Speaker 3It's sort of like like people get mad at us for the way we talk about anarchism, but like when we talk about anarchism we're talking about the legacy of what's left over from the 90s, which is based it's like ad busters, shit. You know it's all based around consumption politics and we're like Earth first and first yeah, what's that journal?
Speaker 2That's like a green anarchy. I mean that works too. I can't think of what it's called. I'll remember later later.
Speaker 1Yeah, the thing is one thing that we have to admit.
Speaker 3If social democrats revive the democratic center anarchists. Revive marxism.
Speaker 1Um explain that one to me because it is ad buster ideas that brought about occupy wall street. Sure, yeah, it was david graber that brought his gray variety ideas that brought about occupy wall street. Um, the trotskyist and the maoist sex that existed at the time of occupy largely died. There are exceptions, all right, um, but there aren't many. So what did that actually do? Well, it proved to people on a scale because, because of the nature of these populist revolts, it proved to people that the adbostic politics didn't mean anything. But those people didn't go away. No, me klein didn't go away. The anarcho-liberal didn't go away. The people that bashkar sankara were writing about in descent magazine in 2008 are the people that write for him in 2020 sure, okay, they just, and that makes a certain amount of sense yeah, I was thinking of crime, think, there we go.
Speaker 1Yeah, crime, remember, crime thinks yeah yeah, the crime think guy made fun of me for not speaking good enough mandarin at occupy when I was visiting from new york from south korea. He also went to sarah lawrence, I just want to point that out.
Speaker 3Um I have some real good friends who were uh crime think, uh anarchists. Uh, back in the day I mean because we grew up in like the punk rock and hardcore scenes like a lot a lot of those people were like crime think and anarcho individual. Not anarcho individualists, not like sternerites or anything, but like the that's stripe of 90s. Uh, anarchists that were really into squatters, squatters right, the that were really into like anti-work politics and uh and, at the very best, were like anti-racist action. Yeah.
Speaker 2Yeah, but that was kind of a smaller world actually.
Speaker 1Right? Well, it's interesting to think about, you know, coming out of the punk scene, cause, you know, I ended up really homeless, falling squats around like, like, actually dangerously homeless, falling squats around when I was 18. And I had been. I had been precariously homeless before, but like, uh, that politics I rejected because I literally ended up like hanging out with like people dying of aids, like on the streets of of of uh, atlanta, in 1999, and then went to a Buddhist monastery to get shelter.
Speaker 2So you live like a 15 song yeah.
Speaker 1Well, the thing is I got sucked up in that world and I was a working class kid without resources and I didn't know, I didn't really understand that it was very stupid to do without resources and most of the people I knew who were doing it were middle class and had resources.
Speaker 3they were just hiding it from you, right right, we had a friend from, not a friend, a dude that we knew from back home, whose parents were both like doctors uh that uh yeah, used to, you know, find a coffee shop every once in a while and upload his photos on his laptop that he took with his digital camera from train hopping.
Speaker 2And you know, call us petty bourgeois because we were in college he also really, really hated like people who are homeless but not by choice. Yeah, he called them scum fucks. His. His homelessness because it was adopted, that was okay, but the people who were homeless because they had no other choice, they were actually a problem yeah it's.
Speaker 3There's real weird sort of like hostile conservatism that's all mixed into that milieu because I think there's no, there's no sort of ideology that anyone actually sticks to outside of, like a small group of uh, anarcho, um, anarcho punks that were based or like sort of congregated around the hardcore scene back then yeah, it's all downstream of protestantism.
Speaker 2The individual matters a whole lot and nothing else matters at all yeah, there we go.
Speaker 1Well, I mean, I would. Uh, what was interesting is I wrote a. There's an essay I wrote when I was 22 years old it's available on the internet somewhere. Good luck finding it About apocalypticism, where I wrote about gutter, punks and stuff like that who would go in and they would become Pentecostals or they get involved with weird forms of Christian orthodoxy like father seraphim rose shit, yeah, like the death to the world movement, uh, and stuff like that.
Speaker 1Um, and for me, you know, talk about it in in the way that the kids today talk about it in the, in the way that the kids today talk about it was a primary form of trauma. Um, uh, as a person with PTSD I'm being sarcastic Like it wasn't really that traumatic, it's something different, but everything is trauma. Um, the. The way I would say I adopted and moved from that was to become conservative, but a weird kind of conservatism. And what was interesting about what I was? I didn't hate the poor, I didn't hate homeless people. I didn't see them as scum was. I didn't hate the poor, I didn't hate homeless people. I didn't see him as scum.
Speaker 1Um, I kind of thought that we needed to revive some kind of national subjectivity and we needed a new one because, like the race one was stupid yeah um, uh, but I didn't have any idea what it was going to be and, um, and I also, like, didn't have a good grasp on any kind of economics at all, even when I went through college. But mostly what I responded to was the Hart and Nagiri and then the Derrida-ian hyper-ironic post-structuralism of the 1990s, early aughts, which I think like we've kind of forgotten about. Like they were, like it was de rigueur. Then everyone attacked it in a stupid way, I mean, you know, in a way that like removed it, like, oh, just pull around. Like there's all this marxist for marxist form of like almost jordan petersonism, like, oh, post-modernism is ruining us.
Speaker 2And and uh, I was just a little bit too young for that.
The Shift in Military Technology
Speaker 1I was aware of it, but like barely I think you had to be in the academy. One of the things that changed um, that kind of made me more pessimistic actually was that I think and this is the thesis that that, I think, makes people uncomfortable whenever we complain about the pmc or whatever, we pretend that those ideas have not bled out to the general public now in a way that affects working class people, because everyone has access to it through blogs and shit, like it's no longer an elite discourse alone. Now there's plenty of people who have no idea any of this stuff. Um, I guarantee you that, like a teenager who works at a gas station who talks about privilege does not actually know who Kimberly Crenshaw is. But these ideas now are like in the broader cultural milieu and the way that like, say, existentialism was in the 80s and 90s.
Speaker 2Right.
Speaker 1Even though it was like 30 years out of date in academia, yeah, um. So in that sense there is like a cultural power effect, right, and that made me actually kind of depressed because I didn't think these ideas were going to serve people very well who came up working class. Because a lot of what they end up doing and this is one of the reasons why I became more and more in the revolutionary pessimist vein is leftist ideas often start from a good place and with a grain of truth, but they encourage maladaptive values because they assume they already have power.
Speaker 3Right, right, yeah, they already have power, right, right, yeah. Well, I mean, it's like like our, our criticisms, that we're making a about the third camp, right, like the, the impulses that lead people to align with third campism are good impulses, right, you know that that is exactly the problem. Is is is acting like, uh, that there is actually something to be done and that's what ends up aligning most third campus in the first camp, in the first, in the first place yeah, yeah, we were talking about that like, like, because I was like I think you're coming down too hard on third campus.
Speaker 1You know, zimmerald west, this, the zimmerald left, is a third campus position. That is also the classical Marxist position. That is the good third campus.
Speaker 2The problem is when the third camp doesn't exist and you still maintain that absolute fealty to it and you have to act in its name. But it doesn't exist, so you have to substitute one of the other two for it.
Speaker 1Yeah, I guess that makes you guys's position actually, with the exception, not to speak for kevin. I'm gonna have to bracket kevin out here because he has a different position than you two yeah increasingly. Uh, uh, you guys are no campest, yes, well, hey, if everyone's over here in the camp.
Speaker 3I'm'm by myself over here just sleeping under a tree.
Speaker 2When it comes to an empirical observation of the world, you have to recognize that the third camp is not currently constituted. But if I have a much more complex and dialectical understanding of what could be and what is to be, I maintain my hopes and my aspirations for that third camp.
Speaker 3But right now, yeah, there's, there's just not one yeah, I mean, and like it's the, it's not, it never is a, it never was like oh, the problem with the third camp never was that you needed to pick a side. The problem always was that by opposing the Soviet Union, and actively opposing the Soviet Union while living in the West, you're essentially just being, you're just in the first camp, right, right, and in a place where you can't really affect the outcome of these conflicts, like specifically right now, what's on my mind is thinking about Ukraine and Russia. You can't really what Jason.
Speaker 2Well, just think about during the Cold War. You have some unions, large groups of workers who are in the Communist Party's orbit, and then the AFL-CIO is officially in the State Department's orbit, and so the organization of workers has already decided. And so, by virtue of trying to act against the second camp, you are automatically picking the first camp Right.
Speaker 3Yeah, and it's the same type of situation, that's that it's going on right now, except for without any sort of ideological battle.
Speaker 1it's like the the cold war is farce where it's yes, way dumber now it's way dumber, but yeah, I like to think of it as the 19th century with Cold War characteristics. It's the great game and I feel like we've been in great game world since 9-11, actually, that's my.
Speaker 3Yeah, absolutely. And which side do you come down in in the 19th century standoff between Russia and Germany, right?
Speaker 1Right, the reason why it has cold war characteristics is nuclear weapons and drones, like, and the drones are really becoming an equalizing battle. I remember arguing with someone like in 2010 it was some fucking obama's drone policy is good, it risks less american lives. And I'm like, well, what happen? You know, just from the standpoint of empire, you dipshit when the Houthis I didn't use the Houthis, but I'm just going to use them because they're a perfect example of the day A stateless people who are basically under international law, acting as both insurrectionaries and pirates that's what they'd be classified as Under international law because they don't have a state um, who are fighting a civil war and also fighting us trade with drones. Right, yeah, and I was like, eventually, drone drones are not that hard of technology. They're basically just souped up like souped up remote airplanes.
Speaker 2They're kind of like muskets in the sense of before you had to be very wealthy in order to make knights and make armies of knights. Then all of a sudden you just have any random poor person with a musket.
Speaker 1It's like knights don't matter anymore. Muskets were the beginning of people's militias again. Yeah, you know which which we had moved away from from, from combat specializations which required massive amounts of both physical and and literal training, resources and stuff. That took a lifetime of stuff and made a whole class of people who were basically murder hobos, a whole class of people who were basically murder hobos.
Speaker 3But you know the Fricor of the.
Speaker 2The first Fricor.
Speaker 1The first Fricor and the second Fricor I've gotten really into studying the material conditions behind the Crusades and I do think there's sincere belief behind the Crusades, but a lot of it's like we got all these murder hobos that are just killing each other, let's go throw them at some saracens so that so they're not killing all of our peasants.
Global War and Political Ramifications
Speaker 3so we don't have any food um, so you, you know that like uh, at the beginning of the russian invasion of ukraine, there was a lot of talk about whether or not armor was obsolete because it was being taken out super easily by small teams that were coordinating with drones to just annihilate armor columns, that that conversation went away when armor adapted its usage, the uses of armor was adapted to deal with that. But like, yeah, I mean, it's just like this is a revolution in military affairs that's going on right now and it's like sort of leveling the playing field in a way that we haven't seen since, probably, the intervention of the machine gun.
Speaker 1And we saw hints of it in the Wars on Terror. Yeah, but now we're really seeing it. Um, but, but now we're really seeing it.
Speaker 3what, ironically though it's it, it's interestingly turning into is early 19th century tech, like basic fucking artillery, is beginning to matter again right, which is why we've got basically a world war one uh style trench warfare going on uh in the donbass uh, which is chewing up the the youth of ukraine and russia right now. But russia's got a bigger population to spare, ukraine doesn't right.
Speaker 1Well, one of the things that I was trying to tell someone that really shocks me a little bit is like I know almost the exact dead in the israel-palestine war and that's horrifying, but like it's also very clear, like there's like 600 idf soldiers. If you include the, maybe 700 now, um, if you include the, um, the dead on october 7th, you get like 2000, and then it's like 30 to 35 000 palestinians, right, all right, which is awful. I mean it's, it's, it's almost it, almost 1.5% of the Gazan population.
Speaker 2Yeah, and fewer than 5,000 of those are actually Hamas or fighters in any way Like 80% of them are more non-combatants.
Speaker 1Effectively. Right, it's a massacre, it's shooting into a locked room. To call it a war is actually kind of a farce. But I want to compare that with the Russia-Ukraine war, and this is when Clausewitzian logic starts to reapply. It's somewhere between 200,000 and 400 ukrainian dead and somewhere between 200 000 and 300 000 russian dead and, by the way, the fact that there's an order of 100 000 vagueness on both sides, it's pretty impressive it's because they're both lying their asses off right um, but what it really?
Speaker 2comes down to officially. Officially, ukraine is like they're admitting to only 30,000 losses, right which is bullshit.
Speaker 3Nobody believes that at all. No one believes that, including the United States.
Speaker 1The United States doesn't believe that either. You don't get up to your average soldier age being 41. It's higher now I believe it's 43.
Speaker 3Fuck me.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3To be fair, they are not conscripting people in their late teens and early twenties yet because they're, uh, you know, they the the war has been so brutal, uh, that they don't want to kill off the future of their country, uh, but they're going to have to because they are out. They're out of troops, they're out of conscription age population, so they're going to have to start recruiting the younger people, and it's an untenable situation. Right now they're losing a war of attrition and no one wants to admit that.
Speaker 1I don't. Nato has a problem with that, though, because I think that they want an insurgency, which won't happen as long as the russians stay east of karthik, but becomes very different once they go west of it. Um which?
Speaker 3I don't know they will, that's. I don't think they will either, that's not at this point. I don't. I mean putin wants to sit on top of what he's gotten and eventually extract himself from the conflict, from a war of attrition that he wins and he can pretend like that's what he was trying to do the whole time, because there's no winning this in a conventional way, there's no regime change that's ever going to happen.
Speaker 1So this is my Point about modern war, another reason why I'm pessimistic When's the last time someone actually Achieved their fucking war goals?
Speaker 2When was the US invasion of Grenada? 1980? There we go, yeah, 83, something like that.
Speaker 1So an obviously Farsically uh, uneven war. I I guess maybe in a dark sense, it looks like israel may achieve what it wants to do in palace and gaza I don't think so.
Speaker 3I I highly doubt it actually 124 000 people live in Grenada right now. That's like half the population of Lubbock, texas. You know.
Speaker 1I don't know.
Speaker 2I don't know. I mean certainly in part, but I think that the after effects, the ramifications of that victory are going to be enormous. Oh, no. So much more far reaching than the Israelis are prepared for and will accept.
Speaker 3They've lost the public relations war With everybody. Yeah, I mean as a person who's been following Israel-Palestine relations and has been a hardcore partisan for the Palestinian cause since I was a teenager over 20 years ago. This is the only time in my life where, across the board, everyone is fed up with Israel, except American Zionists, obviously.
Speaker 2Yeah, I was going to say, except for American liberals, nobody else in the world is even partially a little bit kind of pro-Israeli.
Speaker 3Even then, man there's like the Democratic Party's base is oh yeah, I guess that's true.
Nationalism, Protest, and Workers' Movement
Speaker 1Yeah, I was about to say Establishment liberals, though Sure, it's establishment liberals over 50. Talking to uh um anon hussein and we, we said it looks like it, like the general population has now swung pro-palestinian, which this is the first that's ever happened. That's wild to me the general population is. I mean, although I don't think it has anything to do with what the left is doing, I think it has everything to do with what the idf post of fucking tiktok yeah but um I mean it's gonna fucking.
Speaker 3It's very possibly going to lose Biden the election, which is fucking nuts to me.
Speaker 2He deserves it In a sense. Yeah, it's funny, it is.
Speaker 1It's also illustrative of what people have been getting mad at me about, about this on this issue. Is me going like you know, you putting pressure on on politicians for this may matter on this one issue? All right, it may, because popular opinion is in your favor, um, but uh, your protest is really only for the people here. Yeah, that's what it's for. I'm not saying not do it, but like be be completely clear that there's no fucking protest anywhere in the goddamn world that's going to be world historic on ending a war. That isn't really what happened in the sixties either, but we've lied to ourselves about that for a long time, and I'm and I know I'm one of the few people's like the the anti-war movement in America didn't matter that much.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean again the anti-war movement in America didn't matter that much it really.
Speaker 2In Vietnam they do have monuments to the American anti-war movement, but it's not because they think it mattered, they don't think it helped. It's just that they say, oh, at least that's good that you did that, that's it.
Speaker 3It's like a participation trophy, you know what defeated the United States at Vietnam was the Tet Offensive.
Speaker 2It was Vietnamese people deciding I would rather die than live under this regime.
Speaker 1That's what did it so he never does anything right. I mean, um, it's just a fundamental misunderstanding of of what protest is for, and and so the other thing I don't really love doing is like there's a lot of real misunderstandings that go on with perpetuating moral sentiments about, like, the nature of nationalism and all that, um, where I'm like, yeah, you know, you know, palestinian nationalism is totally legitimate because, you know, because it's facing I mean, you're talking about people facing what amounts to what was a slow ethnic cleansing, what has now become an attempt at a quick one, and by international law, that's genocide, the. And by international law, that's genocide, the. I do wonder, though, in the long duray, what we're going to think about all this, because there has this, this, this discourse has been kind of stuff like indigeneity and land.
Speaker 1Indigeneity and land in a way that I wonder how people are going to deal with when we're going to have to deal with mass movements of the population in response to climate change. We are going to live in the age of mass movement. The ages of mass movement are historically hyper destabilizing. The Bronze Age collapsed as an age of ass movement, um, you know, even if you don't think it was actually a collapse like, um the, the germification of the, the germification of europe, that's all those I mean. I know we, we forget this, but Germans were at one time Asian steppe peoples Right, probably.
Speaker 2The Celts used to occupy most of Western and Southern Europe and the Slavs at some point. They came from the East. The Huns came from very far in the East. There have been huge population transfers and there's never been a peaceful one ever.
Speaker 1No, it also usually isn't genocidal also. I mean what usually happens generally not.
Speaker 1No, no, one side conquers the other and then they intermarry, but, um, I mean, like, genetically speaking, the difference between germans and celts now is like pretty thin, yeah, even in like scotland, but, um, it's you know, but, but, but it is hyper destabilizing, right and um. So here's why I am pessimistic in in the broad sense that I want to turn it to, why this pessimism might be dialectically useful for a positive turn in politics. Um, I think the stressors of contemporary society are going to lead people to double down on things that make them feel safe, and that, for the most part, is the false security of borders and ethno-nationalism. Um, might, I do not think racial nationalism is going to be the dominant form of ethno-nationalism. I don't actually, I think like it's, it's too divisive in most societies to keep the societies together. Um, but you probably will see something, like you know, american chauvinism come back, but with the old, like, not biologically racialist, but like anyone can become an american.
Speaker 3I mean we that's what we're seeing now, right, I mean like the, the big, the, the big swing of uh, south texas latinos towards trump in this last election. It's like a guaranteed demographic, for the democrats has now gone over to trump because of like border concerns.
Speaker 2Quote, unquote, it's also a very important part of a brexit the very, very big uh aspect of valence, of brexit. It wasn't entirely that, but it was a huge part of it.
Speaker 1Well, I think the alt-right was kind of a distraction from the larger rebirth of nationalism. Yeah, because racial nationalism is easy for everybody to hate. But most liberals are. They're nationalists somewhere deep down in their bone because, because they're methodologically nationalists, it's nothing else. All their programs are based on nation states. Yeah, yeah, I mean, when they try to buck up against that, like with abolish borders are abolish the police, it becomes immediate that they're being somewhat insincere yeah because, like they don't ever try to do like sure you could do that, it becomes immediate that they're being somewhat insincere.
Speaker 1Right yeah, because, like they don't ever try to do like sure you could do that, like you know, you want to abolish the police. You know the best way to do it Universal conscription militia. You know, by the way, all my anarchist friends, if they're honest, honest, that's what they think would have to happen that's what George Orwell proposed, that before the US entered the second world war.
Speaker 2That was the idea. It was like, well, we don't have a big enough army to handle a Nazi invasion, but if everybody had to do something, maybe we could do it, and then afterward we could make socialism or whatever.
Speaker 3Yeah, he wanted to make universal conscription into the Home Guard and then use the Home Guard as a workers' militia to institute socialism.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 2He had some wild beliefs. There's a lot of stuff wrong with George Orwell.
Speaker 1Just to point out that this is part of like the cosmonaut platform and the socialist republicanism. They want that too.
Speaker 2I actually think it's a good idea. You know it's not by itself, but it's not a it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand altogether.
Speaker 3Like using a universal conscription to overthrow the the state. No, no, not that okay, like that I.
Speaker 1I mean I think that I think cosmonaut may actually kind of want I'm gonna let them represent themselves on that because the mug tendency they do want to use something, both electoral and non-electoral, to overthrow the Constitution.
Speaker 3So like. I mean, I don't disagree with them on the Constitution. I want to do that too, but how you know, that's the thing there, the Marxist unity group's idea of a double pronged sort of like you know. I mean like it's early Kautskyist version of how to take state powers to use the state and movements movements from above and below. Yeah sure, that's a great idea, but like, like how.
Speaker 2I mean, yeah, my thinking about this is a lot like the third camp. Yeah, sure, it's a great idea, it's even the only one that would be possible and would work, but where is it?
Speaker 1well, my, my thing is you're still. You still haven't revitalized the workers institutions to make a workers party yeah, right, exactly right, yeah exactly.
Speaker 3I mean that workers are you want to do?
Speaker 1yeah, I know they do, but it seems, it seems to me. I know and I know their theory, I know I, I believe I understand the theory again, I'm probably going to call them up and have had 100 years of the workers movement first, and all kinds of nascent institutions that fought together and apart and had various goals, but they came together. That built the groundwork for the unity congress and the s pay day, and even then it was only in one fucking country. Yeah right like so.
Speaker 3So it's like the, the idea of the workers party emerges organically from the workers movement, right, and like, I think that recreating the situation where a workers party is going to emerge from a workers movement again is a sure, that's a great idea, but like, how do you do that? Workers movement again is a sure, that's a great idea. But like, how do you do that? And and this, okay, like, and the only thing that I could come up with as a way to do that was is to rebuild the workers movement. And where does that start? That starts with, I guess, organizing your workplace, right, and that that's a bit steep hill to climb at this point, and like I don't know if we have the political conditions to do that. We're such an alienated and sort of our subjectivity is so isolated from one another.
Speaker 2We don't have the vision of a collective future that we used to, or any like collective relationships between peoples anymore yeah, I mean people anymore there's a lot of stuff, but, uh, the one place I don't think you do start is, uh, assuming that that's all been figured out and that what is necessary is a plan for whenever we are 50 steps away from where we are right now.
Speaker 3Right, which would be like the sectarian idea, like the sectarian Trotskyist tradition that we came out of.
Speaker 2Or like how the RCP they already have a draft constitution for the new republic.
Speaker 1I think the PSCO might have something like that too.
Speaker 2Yeah, like stuff like that is just insane. That's exactly how you make sure that nobody will ever take you seriously.
Unionization Challenges and Wage Relations
Speaker 3I, and that's where my pessimism kicks in. It's like, yeah, I, I don't see a way through this. That isn't like I mean, I'm not an accelerationist, but by any means, but I don't see a way through, through what's going on without something resembling collapse. Yeah, I would like for there to be another way, but I don't know how.
Speaker 1Yeah, I don't think collapse even gets you there.
Speaker 3I mean it's not inevitable?
Speaker 1no, yeah, I mean Chris, you just basically when did you become a communizer?
Speaker 2uh well, there's no, there's no single fixed point. You became a communizer in the same way that uh, you know that time works. It's like because it's happened now, this happened right now. And if you think about it in that way, yeah sure it happened right now, but really, but really it kind of in that way yeah sure it happened right now, but really, but really it kind of already happened before and it kind of came to fruition Now am I a communizer?
Speaker 3Am I, am I an anarchist? Or am I a nihilist communist? Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1I mean the nihilist communist guy announced me two guys Muncher DuPont was two people and they apparently knew each other.
Speaker 3And honestly, that's the thing that I would like to make perfectly clear to everyone who listens to. Anything that I ever have to say is I am admitting freely constantly that I don't know what I think about a lot of things. Yeah me too, and I'm not offering plans.
Speaker 1I have no idea what I think about a lot of stuff. So I had this horrifying realization going through the Bureau of Labor Statistics for numbers for 2023 in a live stream and it never occurred to me before. But we complain about how the labor movement can't like. Benjamin Studebaker pointed out that Bernieites were actually strongest in the places that voted for Hillary Clinton. That's where they were structurally the strongest and they could not overcome the Clintonite dominance of those political machines. That's New York, california, the upper Midwest, etc. That's where they were. I made a realization about unions, too. Not only are unions not growing, they're not, by the way, like all that growth talk. There's no evidence for it in the numbers. No, yeah, it was.
Speaker 3It was all speculative it was an exciting possibility and that was it slight slowing of decline, yeah, but not growth yeah, so basically, in there was an uptick.
Speaker 1After there was, weirdly, there was growth between 2012 and 2016. Interestingly, not much. I mean, we're talking about like 1%. There was a massive decline post COVID. There was an uptick in 2021, but then immediately dropped down to pre-COVID levels and this year was the same. So what I was pointing out even with the UAW being all aggressive and everything, they're running a wet cream game. They're just doing more and more stuff to stay at the same place. Private sector unionization. However, this is what. This is what I realized. Guess where it's all? At new york and california.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's not even a big surprise it's new york, the the highest union density is new york and hawaii. Hawaii's got the most, but that's because it's federal, federal workers mostly and they're mostly unionized. Yeah, and then, and then now I want to say this 17 of the entire uh workforce in the in the united states is in new york and california. Um, they're big states, but when you think about what you need to like rejigger the labor movement to start taking over federal power, you're concentrated in places where you already have power. You're not building new power with that, and that's what people do not understand. And then let's talk about the nature of alienation. We talk about this in abstract terms. Let me talk in very like specific, real terms. What is the most common uh profession that a person can have if they're not college educated?
Speaker 3Service industry Trucking.
Speaker 1Trucking, by the way, is inherently. I know I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but I do think truckers are workers. That's not my point, at least if they're not Petit Bourgeois, and about half of them are.
Speaker 3Yeah, a lot of them are independent contractors that own their own rigs right, but the ones that aren't our employees, they're workers.
Speaker 1My, my point is, though there is hardly a more alienated form of labor on the planet. You're in a car driving alone well, not a car. You're in a giant truck driving alone well, not car. You're in a giant truck driving alone, you know, six days a week, and you're not even sleeping there, right. You're not even embedded in a community, much less a workforce, like. Okay, there's that one. Next thing down there was a petite visualification of the us economy during neoliberalism, and I think we underestimate this. What do I mean by that? Everything became fucking franchises. Yeah, yeah, you know how hard it is to unionize a franchise shop it's, it's damn near impossible.
Speaker 2That's been the real lesson that I think very few people have learned from the starbucks union uh campaign, which is not franchise, but like they're just shop sites, right yeah right.
Speaker 1So you get a franchise shop. You can't do it. You can't. They're they're dying on. On unionizing a corporate owned shops where they're like, yeah, there's individual owners but they're not franchised out, they're still kind of technically corporate owned and they can't you you're dealing with like contracts at 16.
Speaker 3You start dealing with franchises where you don't even have a corporation really to deal with yeah, right, that's why, like you've got to unionize every single individual franchise yeah, that's the reason for the iww's uh brief resurgence uh, several years ago yeah, because of how many shops regular unions wouldn't even touch because they just it's a waste of time we had an active uh austin iww in austin back in the day and there was like uh uh drives to unionize co-op grocery stores and locally owned businesses and stuff like that. But that all died out after about four or five years of like frantic activity. Yeah.
Speaker 1The service sector is only like 1.7% unionized. Yeah Like um. The industrial worker, by the way, also is only is is only like 15% of the population If you include logistics and management and tech.
Speaker 3Right, that's about as big as like, uh, the agricultural?
Speaker 1yeah, it is yeah, well, I know, I think agricultural workers are like three percent, so is it? Yeah, agricultural workers are. Historically they are like 15, now it's like three percent.
Speaker 3I was thinking 12 for some reason. Yeah, I mean that's probably right.
Speaker 1I think if you look at agricultural dependent services you probably get there, but that includes like grocery stores and shit.
Speaker 3Okay, well, that's a lot. That's a lot different, right, and I know sometimes agricultural worker statistics include, like, fishermen as well.
Speaker 2Yeah, and also in forestry. Fishing, farming and forestry is all one category, Is it? Well, it is often one category.
Speaker 1And also we don't have good data for anything before 1983. Because the Bureau of Statistics didn't really keep it.
Speaker 2Yeah, before that we just have the memory of the vague notion that it was big, and we don't even know how big yeah, we, we know what the organization's record says they have if they were public, but like yeah so reviving the farmer labor party is probably out then.
Speaker 1Huh well, this is the thing like. When people like, oh, let's revive populism, I'm like where are your sharecroppers? What's your class base?
Speaker 2yeah, yeah, like, honestly, farmer Labor Party was already kind of based on a dying idea in the 20s and by the Depression, by the Depression for sure, that's just. It's over.
Speaker 3My great-grandpa was a cotton sharecropper. I wonder he was also a populist.
Speaker 2Was he a populist? He was because he was in Williamson County and during the years whenever the family lived there, every household in the entire county was registered as populist. I don't know how active he was, but he was at least as a voter. He was at least aligned toward the populist, and I like that a lot. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1It was actually weird. When I grew up, there was, uh, my grandfather, um, uh was a bricklayer and he was, he was a new dealer, um, but the only anti-new dealer in my, in my broad family was my irish catholic grandmother, who was an anti-racist activist and hated Roosevelt for siding with the Klan.
Speaker 2That's a decent reason actually, which is that populist background is, I think, a big part of why they moved down where they moved and they bought into the land trust. They became cooperative farmers because of the populist precursor period, or whatever.
Speaker 3He was an immigrant. I don't even know when he became a citizen, but back then it was a whole hell of a lot easier to get citizenship. He got here before 1921 when the quotas were put into effect. He got here just under the wire, basically.
The Decline of the Millennial Left
Speaker 1Alright. So I guess this leaves us in kind of a lurch, because one of the interesting things that I've pointed out for a while and I think it's led to all this PMC discussion and people know how much I hate it, but there's some truth to parts of it but the wage relations are damn near universalized, like it's like 80% of the population has some form of wage relation Right, which means that the basic relation of how you get your income looks like a proletarian relation, but the relationship to work varies dramatically. And unfortunately, the only people I saw really try to deal with this seriously was the Eric Olin Wright analytic Marx, analytic Marxist, and then, you know, probably Eric Olin, right, as he doesn't believe in labor theory of value and like thus kind of undermines the entire claim of exploitation that he's basing his class categories on. Like it doesn't, like I don't know what he thinks. Exploitation is All right. Now that's an intellectual problem, but it seems like something that we just immediately gave up.
Speaker 1So, instead of trying to really map out this terrain, what the left did in response to largely the bernie campaign was to resurrect ideas from the 1970s, I mean specifically from the failure of the new left. That's where the aaron reich pmc thesis came from, yeah, um and guldner, etc. And to divide themselves based off of whether or not you thought that your office workers that you probably knew were annoying or not. Never mind that, like most of the key communist figures in leadership outside of the d, they're literal millionaires. So I'm not going to name too many names here, but, like, if you look, look at leaders of parties and whatnot and look at their net worth, yeah, so what do we do with that? Like how do? How? Are we at a time period where people are coming to me in despair but also getting angry with me for being honest with them, when, like, when you start speaking really honestly about the conditions on the ground, people cannot and do not want to hear it like like aoc's betrayal.
Speaker 3I put it in quotation marks because I'm like that's the most predictable thing ever is it a betrayal if she was never really on our side to begin with, right, yeah I don't.
Speaker 1I mean, I don't think I put betrayal quotation marks for a reason. Are uh, cory bush, who's just going to be primary to oblivion down 22 points?
Speaker 1that bad, huh, I didn't realize that yeah, the social democratic movement was basically the useful idiot for keeping the center of the democrats around, and they're being and they're being organically disposed of in their unpopularity. And what I mean by that is, like everyone knows, they weren't really that serious about what they were promising. They couldn't be. They never had, they never had the power to do that also even what they were promising.
Speaker 2If you take it, if you're very serious about it, it's actually less than a social democratic program, because those were hopes that were foisted upon them from the outside. Their actual promises were just to be progressive and a voice for the common people, and even that is a false promise. But beyond that, all the rest of the hopes, those were just projections from from below the progressive democrats.
Speaker 3Uh version of uh that that uh the dsas were willing to fight for was like the green new deal. Right yeah, green new deal medicare for all yeah, which. The green new deal is just so inadequate it's like why even do it?
Speaker 2and also I haven't heard those, those words in a very I mean what? Two years.
Speaker 3It's because it was a non it was a non-starter that the democrat that I like establishment democrats were 100 never going to go along with right getting getting something like the green new deal passed using the democratic party as the vehicle was never going to happen and even then it was totally inadequate I mean to be fair to the left for a second now.
Speaker 1I want to talk about the right, because they did the same shit, like the right's making all these promises right now, and they're actually enacting. Well, this is one way in which they're different than the left they're enacting reforms on a state level. Actually, the left did some of that too. They only do it in opposition to the president, though.
Speaker 1The moment there's a Republican president, I bet you a lot of the worst shit we see at the state level calms down a bit. It's not going to get reversed, but I bet you it slows down.
Speaker 3There's less of a need for stunts right, like the border stunt that's going on in Texas right now.
Speaker 1Yeah, it's an election how much worse things got for trans people at the state level as soon as Biden was in office.
Speaker 3actually, that's another example of that. Yeah.
Speaker 1It seems like in America, to pick up a Matt Chrisman, that nothing happens except for negative partisanship, unless it goes to the fucking military Right.
Speaker 3Yeah it's like what motivates people to pass policies, to vote for initiatives, to get out and knock on doors is spiting your enemies.
Speaker 1It's spiting fear which is a very bad way to grow a positive political I mean it's a very good way to get people politically activated, but it's a terrible way to have a political subject.
Speaker 3Yeah, um, because it's really inconsistent which is perfect for mainstream partisan politics.
Speaker 1Well, basically it's interesting. You know I was thinking about I recently read Alex Ho Chile's review of the Vincent Bevan's book and the the Anton Jaeger and Borello book and the Chris Katron book, which are all postmortems for the millennial left, Right, yeah, and again, if we're writing postmortems for the millennial left, why are people calling me a pessimist? Um, but, uh, I mean, I am, I'm gonna, but like as an insult, um why are people?
Speaker 3I was.
Speaker 1I was telling you that, yeah, I was telling you guys that this was not going to work. You know, 15 years ago, um, you guys can vouch for I don't know. Yeah, I think you can vouch for that because you actually once one of you actually like listened to everything I ever said and put it in a master document.
Speaker 3So oh yeah, one of us in the iso back then. Yeah, yeah, I didn't have any idea who you were. I knew that north star were somebody, some people that we were supposed to hate, but uh I didn't write that.
Speaker 1I didn't write the iso hit piece, unfortunately. Who?
Speaker 2was, that was uh fam being fam band, there we go yeah, that was like the persona non grata, like number one yeah, yeah, uh.
Speaker 1After that, like the I, their iso members who had like would comb my blog for typos.
Speaker 3They got real petty.
Speaker 1I mean, give a liberal an internet connection he's going to find a reason to cancel you. That was the weirdest thing about the ISO, though, because one, a lot of them just became Marxist-Leninists as soon as they were out. I'm like, okay, that doesn't make any sense, and the others have become just kind of liberals yeah, which makes more sense yes, it does with the yeah, like with the liberal talism.
Speaker 1I mean that it would be a very easy transition yeah, um, but it is interesting to see what has happened now, because you know my point about the millionaires. That's a slight point, but it is kind of an important one. The reason why I pointed out is that's why those organizations are surviving is because they have leadership patronage a lot of the time. The money problem the idea that there's no money on the left it's not true. The idea that the money's coming up organically, though that's not happening, um, and if people are willing to spend stuff on the left, they're not willing to spend it even on the dsa. They're willing to spend it on podcasts which, by the way you know, keep giving me money, but like, um, hey, we need a patron. Um, yeah, and give it and give, uh, and give the regrettable century money. You guys aren't even that expensive no two bucks.
Speaker 3That's it I mean, you get what you pay for. But yeah, still it's two bucks, um uh.
Speaker 1But my point is like it becomes a consumer politics, right, like it becomes an. It becomes an identity in the consumer identity vein, which I think, broadly speaking, fits partisan politics today in general. Yeah, definitely, because you don't have to give up anything to be a republican or democrat like you, just put a deal on a registration card. It doesn't even cost you money.
Speaker 2So I mean, even that is actually doing work. A lot of people don't actually even register as anything. They just become either Democrat or Republican because of what their personal kind of a what's a good word Affectation, what they present as and that's it.
Speaker 1This leads us to a certain kind of problem of American politics today. For example, the stereotype that liberals were college educated and conservatives were not has been a stereotype my entire life. It's actually true now.
Speaker 3It wasn't used most of my life like right right, like when we were in our in undergrad, uh, you know, I mean you would constantly hear uh conservatives harping on about the, the liberalism of the of uh, of higher education, and I was like where are these liberals, like all of my professors, like rabid right-wingers, you know?
Speaker 1yeah, but now it's true all my right-wing professors in philosophy and english left. All of them, yeah, all of them. They all retired early like.
Speaker 3there were a couple of professors in my undergraduate in the history department that are still there, that were right-wingers, but most of them have either died or retired.
Speaker 1Yeah and people are like, oh well, that's a good plan. I'm like, no, it's kind of not, Because in one sense it does indicate that the conservative theory going back to William Buckley and when William Buckley was saying this, this was absolutely not true. That liberal education was like a sneaky left-wing conspiracy theory full of communists. Left-wing conspiracy theory full of communists right, there were a lot of communists, the communist party, in that recruiting of millionaires and stuff. That was a communist party in the 40s popular front thing.
Speaker 3it was um but buckley's in that in the 60s right, but those people were gone by the 60s.
Speaker 1They were largely marginalized in the 50s. Are they? Are they betrayed?
Speaker 3I mean like well, yeah, buckley's talking about nine-tenths of them buckley is falsely uh calling new deal liberals, communists, right, right, and uh, that's because he went to yale with a bunch of people that were new deal liberals and I mean that just kind of puts the lie to what he's talking about, because a lot of the people that he went to Yale with ended up being in the state department Yale and Harvard right.
Speaker 1For Eisenhower. Exactly For Eisenhower and Nixon Right.
Speaker 3Yeah, but Buckley was part of that group of right-wingers in the 50s that was attempting to pull the Republican Party away from the moderate conservatism quote unquote of Eisenhower he didn't want to touch Social Security, he didn't want to touch the New Deal.
Speaker 1But also as a buffer against the birchers and, by the way, known cia asset buckley right, right yeah known cia asset and uh closeted homosexual buckley right like um, I mean god, I remember watching Gore Vidal with utter contempt, like basically imply that Anyway, the joys of our childhood.
Speaker 3Gore Vidal is awesome.
Speaker 1But the that that stereotype is now true. All right, absolutely Working class liberalism has more or less died. There have been people who try to argue that that's gonna. You know that's a problem for the democrats, but I hate to tell you working class people, even in areas in eras of mass enfranchisement, what I mean by right now. In the last since obama you've you had a reversal of the general trend from the 80s forward of fewer and fewer people voting in elections. Yeah, that got reversed, but still the working class does not vote very much and I predict that the next election is going to go back to the 90s norms oh, absolutely.
Speaker 3There's going to be an enormous enthusiasm gap that's going to make it look like back when everyone hated the government and didn't want to vote and so why am I pessimistic?
Speaker 1well, it seems like we're back. If you look at the left today and the left in 2007, it seems like we're back in 2007. Except now, some of the people that were on our side in 2007 are on the right, on the new anti-imperial right train.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think that's probably right.
The Left's Global Political Transformations
Speaker 1So what did the electoral turn and the Graeverite turn and all that actually do? And it seems like blow smoke up people's ass for a decade and a half. And now, now that's ending and it's over and they're feeling despair and where I'm like if you had a little bit of hard-nosed pessimism, you wouldn't be despairing right now.
Speaker 2Right From 2008 to 2016 or whatever was basically the 90s, and now we're just back to the early aughts again. The aughts.
Speaker 1Except we got to the early aughts, through this weird period of pretending we were to the order, through this weird circuitous period of pretending we were in the 1960s again too right, like, like, because the new left was, broadly speaking, a social democratic left, like sure, yeah, you know. Then you can, and but like you saw all the same things emerge. I'm writing an article right now. So this is so Occupy. Okay, well, what happened with Occupy? You started getting these weird ultra left tendencies coming back up. Like you know, the resurrection of Bordigas and the resurrection of cancel is in the resurrection of situations. I know that hadn't last very long.
Speaker 3And then communization theory was super popular right I remember when everybody was a communizer for like a hot 15 minutes even I would do that phase. It happens, I'll admit it um, I think when that was happening, I was just becoming a post trotskyist from being a trotskyist.
Speaker 1I was coming out of platypus affiliated society and the end notes speech at a platypus plein air was really impressive. So I actually kind of thought that they were, they were going to be a way out. But immediately, I mean like we're talking 2015, I was already thinking about writing an essay called 13 Ways to Explain a Lack of Working Class Revolution, which is admittedly a play on Wallace Stevens, where I went through the various theories of why there is no working class revolution the left-com theories. Decadence, which I believe in actually I'm a decadence left com theory is decadence, which I believe in actually I'm a decadence theorist. But decadence, uh, uh, regression, um.
Speaker 1Third world is um, the various forms of third world ism labor theory. Value negating third world is a non-labor theory. Value negating third world ism um over developmentalism. Uh, there's a bunch like right, a reactionary worker consciousness. New, new revolutionary subject, students. New revolutionary subject, um, people of color and, by the way, most marxist humanists, even though they say that they don't actually see the uh, marxist humanists with a hyphen, even though they say that they're not identitarians, they believe the advanced part of the proletariat are people of color, innately yeah and uh.
Speaker 1So they end up being that way anyway, which explains why so many of them became just democrats. Like what was this weird tendency where you had anti-stalinist and cpusa stalinist both having the same position in the democratic party around bernie in 2016?
Speaker 3yeah, like I'll admit, I got caught up in the the bernie moment too, but never because I thought that bernie was going to institute democratic socialism.
Speaker 2No, I just I just said I kind of had hoped that it would spark some new way to start figuring things out. Yeah, and it didn't.
Speaker 3Instead and instead it kind of just the staff made strong a bunch of people in the democratic party.
Speaker 2Yeah, which in retrospect? Yeah, upon reflection maybe that was obvious. Yeah, but uh, at the time it was not obvious to me anyways it was obvious as a, as a possibility, but it was not obvious as a. It wasn't like, guaranteed, it wasn't even very it wasn't even. But it was not obvious as a. It wasn't guaranteed, it wasn't even highly like, it was only possible, right.
Speaker 3We were never hardcore Bernie partisans. I mean, Jason, you might have been, I definitely wasn't. I just saw it as like hey look, a possibility of some sort of rupture. Let's fucking exploit it, let's go for it.
Speaker 2I mean, that's the way I saw it as a hardcore bernie partisan like I, you know, I knocked on doors and I you know whatever. But uh, I was like a part volunteer for the campaign twice you know, both campaigns for the same reason, but not because I actually believed that it might work, but because I hoped that all of that energy would go somewhere and right. And it did go somewhere, just only in the one direction that I definitely didn't want it to go. Well, so that's on me, you know that's my bad.
Speaker 1I think it's interesting to look at from hindsight because I was not part of the initial bernie phenomenon, but that was partly geography. I was in egypt like I couldn't have been really, um, and I was following the rise and fall of shereza, the rise and fall of pademos and the rise and fall of corbinism, yeah, and the movement of people like mark fisher from kind of quasi ultra left positions into basic fucking social democrats, which you even saw with people like david graber, even though he wouldn't admit it. Um, yeah, fuck, you see it. With chomsky. Like chomsky, making it sound like corbin was defeated by a conspiracy is embarrassing, um, and which, by the way, chomsomsky does he goes on, shows, talks about it today, my.
Speaker 1So when I came back to the States, I was really jaundiced on this, on this new populism stuff, and I was like, oh, you guys are late to the game, just like you guys are late to the game to this right wing populism that we're seeing with Trump, like this has already been happening everywhere else, that I've been for like three, four years and it's not, and it did not look promising, but everyone I knew, including hardcore communists in europe, were like corbinism, corbinism, corbinism and yeah, and I remember feeling like dude if this fails, the british left is going to be liquidated. It's just not going to exist anymore. They're gonna. It's going to be liquidated. It's just not going to exist anymore. They're gonna. It's gonna be like in the 1970s with the new communist movement or the new left, where they just walk out into their personal lives and pretend they never did that and also there's no real organized left in britain anymore. That's exactly what happened.
Speaker 1And the other thing that that has sort of thrown me for a loop as like the, like this fetishization of European protest movements, like, oh, we'd be out in the streets, like in France, and I'm like, oh, okay, you know, that's great, there's riots in France every four years, but Macron hasn't had his agenda really stopped, has he?
Speaker 2No, not at all. In fact, I have it on pretty good authority that it doesn't matter that there are protests. There are protests all the time, it doesn't matter. I mean, I knew that anyways, but just in case I was maybe wrong, I have checked and, uh, I'm not wrong well, this is the thing from the benson bevins books is actually really good.
Speaker 1he documents like we have more protests everywhere in the world because, like the entire world was pulling from this. To go back to my Gen X leftist thing, what was the left book that was on the bestseller list? It still blows my mind that it was on the New York Times bestseller list in 1999. Do you guys remember? No Hart and Aguirre's Empire.
Speaker 2Was it?
Speaker 1Yes, it was on the New York Times bestseller list.
Speaker 3Wow, I don't think I knew that.
Speaker 1So in a way both the I think there I don't want to say this is just us Anton Jaeger and Alex Ochili have also kind of came to this conclusion that kind of inchoate anarchism and the inchoate social democracy one is the unorganized, spontaneous form. One have also kind of came to this conclusion that that kind of inchoate anarchism in the inchoate social democracy one is the unorganized, spontaneous form. One is the kind of quasi horizontal, almost burn, apartist, verticalist form yeah but.
Speaker 1But they ended up being the same fucking thing, um, which in almost all cases and this is why I want to point out this is not just an American phenomenon. Right, it's easy to handle in the United States. The left is deader in Britain than it is in the US, like from everything I can tell.
Speaker 3Yeah Well, for sheer lack of news, like because it used to be in the odds, the aughts right, you looked at the british left to figure out what the american left was about to do well, you remember me saying the most progressive thing about the aught teens was that we finally gave up on our fetish on the british left.
Reflections on Marxist History and Theory
Speaker 2Yeah, like um but now it wasn't very long ago that we actually it wasn't even just that we watched the left, we actually like literally took our marching orders at one point from the british left and then, even after that, we took our cues unofficially yeah, because american we say, we mean trots right yeah, yeah, american trotskism more or less died in the 1980s and was resurrected by british influential groups in the 1990s the Cliffites, the Because.
Speaker 1I was like why is it all this weird? Why am I, why are all the Trot groups here British Trot groups? We have an organic Trotskyist tradition and well, the organic Trotskyist tradition liquidated itself in the 80s for the most part.
Speaker 3Yeah, with the sole exception of Go ahead. I was going to say to itself in the 80s for the most part yeah, right with uh, with the sole exception of go ahead. I say with the sole exception of the swp, which just made itself completely unrelatable to everyone the sparts, the swp.
Speaker 2And and then the marciites, who just became stalinist and then some minor groups like the uh, socialist action and some other post for Party. Yeah, spinoffs from the SWP.
Speaker 3Weren't they a post-SPART group, the LRP.
Speaker 1Yeah the LRPs are.
Speaker 2And then, when it comes to whatever exists now, or what has existed since basically the 80s, was the ISO and the IMT and Socialist Alternative, all three of which were literally started by people who physically moved here from Britain, and the IMT and socialist alternative, all three of which were started literally started by people who physically moved here from Britain.
Speaker 3Yeah, do you know that once the ISO split from the SWP, that there was a group in New York that stayed affiliated to the SWP and tried to restart, tried to start a competing organization against the iso?
Speaker 1at one point.
Speaker 2They had like 20 people and they were like we've doubled in size.
Speaker 3Badass dude um cliffhite splits, dude, hell yeah um, yeah, that stuff was, that stuff was funny. Um, it's depressing, dude to. It's depressing to think I spent so much time in that, in that tendency yeah, I think I actually can't decide what.
Speaker 2What's more depressing? The bernie moment, which I was already with my very low expectations, the series of moment where I was actually in athens campaigning for a series and they won, and then they still, you know, whatever oh yeah, you and I would have.
Speaker 1If we didn't own each other back then we'd have been in different sides of that, because I was like, sir, I was saying the reason was going to fail from moment one well, you were there during the vote to default right.
Speaker 2Yeah. I was there campaigning for the no vote and we overwhelmingly won that vote and it didn't matter.
Speaker 1Yeah, it didn't matter. The funny thing is at the time I was like if they do that, the Greek economy will collapse until it re-establishes itself. Like they don't have the productive capacity to like float an mnt stock currency, right, right, um that I was arguing that with mmt years at the time. But the funny thing is now is I'm like, well, they might as well have done it because they got fucked by the troika so bad anyway that it ended up the same like yeah, absolutely and at least they would have had some goddamn dignity well, there were some uh on the margins.
Speaker 2There was some speculation from within the party, within syriza including. People were in parliament about what it would take to be basically cubify, to become the cuba of europe, and they weren't very popular, but their ideas were known and it doesn't really matter because nobody listened to them. Anyways, I don't know what's more depressing those two things or what happened with the ISO, and how much of my own life Basically, I don't know 12, 13 years of my life. So, yeah, well, your sectarian formation died.
Speaker 1My sectarian formation is becoming popular again, so I don't know.
Speaker 3Yeah, I don't know what's worse yeah, um, a lot of us is very interested. It's interesting that podopus is growing and I'm not sure I'm not sure I understand why because a lot of people are burnt out on the left.
Speaker 1I I mean, they got used by. That's how Platypus grows.
Speaker 2As they have an answer for that. I will even go as far as to say that I think that Platypus was right, but it doesn't matter, because you shouldn't join Platypus.
Speaker 3If Platypus is right about some things I should.
Speaker 2If.
Speaker 1If Catron had gotten his uh attempt to revive the socialist party in the united states off, as well as platypus which is something they were trying to do before bernie I actually would have given him props, because that's what he wanted. He, like me, thought that, like, anything we had to do had to be independent, um uh. So for people who think katrina's just a republican, that's not true, oh no not at all.
Speaker 3I mean like that's. I think that they they go a little bit the. The thing about platypus that's always made me want to stay away from them is their positions on trump right, like, as funny as it is that, uh, trump is going to win again, uh, it's not good. It's not good at all.
Speaker 1I. I have a broader disagreement with them about the nature of liberalism, which they see as like, uh, you know, um, I have never, I guess I've never. I, I've never thought that the dialectic of liberalism is as clean as they think. Sure, yeah, that's where that, you know, I have. They've, they've always found me too anti-liberal, and you know what I kind of am. But so you know, a lot of people find me too anti-liberal I mean like that's I don't. Uh, I know you don't, you're more liberal than me um, and I don't.
Speaker 3I don't mean you're more liberal than me, you're more, you're less critical of liberalism than me yeah, well, I think. I don't think you're a liberal.
Speaker 1I think liberalism has done good things. Sure, it's time has been over for a fucking century.
Speaker 3Yes, it has Maybe longer.
Speaker 1For me, for me, and even then it's not uncomplicated, the reason why I kind of adopted, adopted one a lot of people who are optimistic are actually pessimistic too. Like if you read graber's book fragments of an anarchist anthropology, which seems super optimistic, he actually basically argues that there's no such thing as categorical difference between human time periods, which to me is a very conservative position.
Speaker 2It's also just absurd, Well.
Speaker 1I will defend him a little bit. And he's arguing people's basic mental structures haven't changed since you know he doesn't like the term hunter gatherers. But that's basically what he was arguing and I agree with that. But it's like I'm like. But the scale of things actually does eventually change the nature of things. Like, you can argue that nationality is a kind of symbolic kinship, but the scale of nationality makes it a completely different thing than most other forms of symbolic kinship. Sure.
Speaker 2Yeah, right, exactly. I mean, that's one of many different examples of why I can't understand how anybody can think of anything as as being other than dialectical, because I just I don't, I can't think another in another, in another way anymore well, my, you know my critique about.
Speaker 1like I know people say I over, focus on on authority, but I I do it because marxin has loved that book. Well, it's not a book, it's really a three-page pamphlet.
Speaker 2That's considerably less than a book.
Speaker 1Yeah, and it's Ingalls that is most undialectical because he's purely whiggish in that yeah, he like can't see how the centralization of um of a production will eventually actually divide up production in a way that will re-alienate. He literally does not seem to be able to conceive that in that text. And I'm like marks saw it, marks did see it, um, but katsuki didn't see it.
Speaker 2katsuki seemed to think that like industrial production was gonna like infinitely increase the education of the worker forever yeah, yeah, I mean there's there's in one sense there's too much made of the differences between Marx and Engels, but in that sense it's very much the case that the difference is huge because Kotsky and everybody that came after him, they're really they.
Speaker 1They vulgarize angles's vulgarization of what we would call marxism today I don't actually think angles is actually guilty of that in every text either, like the dialectic. No, no, I think it's a text that, like I've other than me disagreeing about the thumb um, I think it's actually a kind of brilliant text like um oh yeah, I mean, like it's, it's he.
Speaker 2He touches on a whole lot of stuff. Even if he's not entirely correct, he's at least making a very valorous attempt that very few have made uh, one of the things that I think uh gives me, though.
Speaker 1I mean, because when we look at the predictions of the 20th century, to kind of tie this back because we've gone through our personal journeys here. But mid-20th century, you have a crisis in Marxism. Really, you do People like to pretend it was just a Western crisis, but no, it was not. Because, like you have, soviet marxism looks to be dominating and it starts to slow down as dominance. Because because, basically, from the standpoint of today, we can see what they did. They industrialized what took the west 200 years, they piggybacked off of it and did it in 20.
Speaker 1At high cost, At high cost of life even. But they did it Right.
Speaker 3And effectively broke the famine cycle for the first time in Russia's history, For the history of the Russian Empire and its lands so like. The human cost was enormous, but they hadn't had a famine since the end of world war two.
Speaker 1Right, even if they didn't always have plenty. I mean, like we also need to like, put, like no, they were not always doing as well as the West. We'll talk about that in a minute.
Speaker 2Um, I mean they also bore the founding of the fourth.
Speaker 1Oh, go ahead, Go ahead.
Speaker 2The founding of the Fourth International is indicative of a profound crisis of Marxism. Right, absolutely, Because the First and the Second International were founded on the basis of the strength of the workers' movement and by the Fourth they were just like. Well, you know, history is going to guarantee that the proletariat is going to come to power and its leadership is going to lead, so all we have to do is make sure its leadership is organized and the rest of it will do itself. By the time the fourth international is established, Marxism already kind of doesn't really exist anymore. It's at least on very shaky grounds.
Speaker 3And part of that, probably the problem with that, is uh or that part of what leads to that problem, is a faulty uh decadence theory that trotskyists adhere to. Well, it's it's not.
Speaker 1It's more beyond a decadence theory, it was a crisis theory.
Speaker 2Yeah, like yeah, I kind of I want to walk back a little bit. I don't want to to say that Marxism didn't exist, because I don't want to be like, oh, I get it, nobody else at all ever has. But I guess all I really want to say is that that proposition is based on a very faulty assumption and a very bad reading of what is foundational to essentially what is supposed to be the entire basis of the project itself, to essentially what is supposed to be the entire basis of the project itself.
Speaker 1Well, you have, the fight becomes I mean the fight very quickly in the 1950s and 60s becomes actually so multifarious it's hard to keep up with. So you know, we talk about the failure of the communists and the social democrats to come back, but by the time you're in the 60s you have Maoism as a form of Marxist-Leninism, hoxhism as a form of Marxist-Leninism, Hojism as a form of Marxist-Leninism. And, by the way, maoism is about to split into three different forms. Yeah, by the end of the 1970s there's like five different, radically different kinds of Maoism. Like Trotskyism is beginning to to to both to fracture immediately.
Speaker 3Well, Trotskyism begins to fracture in the 30s Right.
Speaker 1But the fractures really start mattering in the 50s. Sure, 40s, okay 30s 40s, the common turn, the priorly common turned. Aligned left is going to split between conservatist, marxist-leninistist, humanist, kushchevian parties. Euro-communism, um a resurgent form of left communism, trotskyism, maoism, um. Need I go on? Yeah, and then in the american tradition, you also had prior forms of non-Marxist socialism coming back.
Speaker 3Right. There's a resurgence of the Socialist Party of America in the 1960s, 50s and 60s. You know a little while.
Speaker 1Yeah, and the SPA, like it's kind of Marxist, but not really. Like you know, historically speaking it's proto-Marxist. It kind of doesn't help that the best Marxist we had in the United States prior to Debs was Daniel de Leon, who was a sectarian weirdo but also probably one of the smartest Marxists in existence. It's funny watching him condemn the.
Socialist Pessimism and Liberalism Critique
Speaker 2SPD as being too bourgeois in 1912, or something like uh, the problem is, of course, that everybody was too bourgeois, so like if everybody's too bourgeois, then who do you work with? And that's actually de leon's problem yeah.
Speaker 1The interesting thing about de leon, though, is de leon actually does think that the bourgeois revolution is a good thing. He just thinks that the socialists shouldn't muck it up by trying to do the two things at once, like he's not even wrong, like he's like it's gonna confuse the grounds. How are we gonna argue for socialism if we're also doing the bourgeois revolution, which, if you think that's bad in the espay day form, because you know he's talking about, you know the battles against bismarck really, right, um, and the kaiser reich, imagine how bad it's going to be in the Lenin form for Daniel De Leon, because then you're not even dealing with a bourgeois formation at all as far as he's concerned, like you know, in fact, in some weird way, de Leon's out Plakhanov being Plakhanov Alright.
Speaker 1So of course, I'm pessimistic when you look at this. The other thing that I'm pessimistic when you look at this, the other thing that I'm pessimistic about this is a broader sense, and we can maybe turn this around is I think socialists promise too fucking much. We are not promising everyone's going to be happy. We are not anyways we're not promising a life without any labor. I think we are promising a life with, without unnecessary labor, right, but we're not promising a life without work.
Speaker 2Well, some people are, but they shouldn't yeah.
Speaker 1Well, here's the thing about like anti-work, like the anti-work communism. I kind of got it when you were talking about it as like alienated labor forms, but if you're talking about it like as no work at all and we can just have robots do it, that's silly yeah.
Speaker 3It's just, it's absurd. And and for the the, the people who are insisting that we make anti-work part of how we appeal to non-socialists, that to me is just insane.
Speaker 2I mean, it's the ultimate symbol, ultimate evidence of the utterly non-proletarian character of a certain section of the left, because anti-work does not appeal to anybody who works. No, it just doesn't. Because people who work, they're proud of it because they should be, and it because they should be and they know they should be, even if everything else, about whatever they think, is utterly reactionary and reprehensible. There's something foundational about the fact that they perform some necessary service to the world and that they find some meaning in it, and they should to the world and that they find some meaning in it, and they should.
Speaker 3Being unable to conceive of a work that is disalienated and not for the profit of uh, of some owner somewhere, to me is just betrays a lack of of imagination, of a utopian imagination, which is part of the problem with the left in general, I think, because we don't actually have a utopian imagination, which is part of the problem with the left in general, I think, because we don't actually have a utopian imagination anymore no, we know and which is weird that the pessimists are the people who are arguing that we don't have a utopian imagination anymore.
Speaker 1But that's why we're pessimistic, right uh, one of the reasons anyway, but but I do think we promise too much. There's other things. I think we like one tendency that you and you guys and I have talked about privately and I'm not going specifics here because I don't want to pick a fight with the entire fucking world, but like but just everyone should just know that in secret, we definitely already have it out for you.
Speaker 1Yes, yeah, um, uh, I can't stand the attempt to a noble capitalist based, social destructive tendencies that are literally shortening people's lives. Yeah, yeah, right, um, as a good thing, like now. That does not mean that I'm a believer in, like the bourgeois, traditional family or anything like that. I'm not at all, actually, but probably the least believer in that of the three of us. But, like um, financial based divorce fucking sucks. Like yeah, um, and it's a big cause of divorce. It's also a big cause of why a lot of proletarian women don't get married ever, because they can't afford to divorce anyway. I often feel like, particularly with the lack of focus on children and social reproduction and I mean this in a broad sense that we've kind of ceded all that to conservatives, are to a certain kind of feminist, yeah, ironically, like it's either all on this end or all over here, but I'm like, if you don't have provisions for children, you literally don't have a fucking future. Like you don't, and there are provisions for protecting existing children and I'm you know, but there's not a whole lot of talk about like what, what would be a socialist way to handle children. I think we're afraid to do that because of like the, the radicalness of like certain family abolition schemes that have not worked in the past, such as even what they tried on the Cuppa team. We have not been talking about that at all. We have not been talking about people as having necessary relations to each other.
Speaker 1The entire framework of a broad, of the broad left right now is often atomized, individual, about an innate self that's not social, like the only. The only time we refer to social construction of self is as pathologies like race or whatever. But we don't deal with like, the social construction of self in general, of like the, the inability to like, deal with the fact that the individual and the and the collective uh are, are like in dialogue with each other. You're not the collective. You're also not an alienated anatomized individual. You wouldn't even have a language if you were an alienated anatomized individual like other people. Teach you how to speak. You don't survive. Babies don't survive when they're fucking up.
Speaker 3I got one of those things. I'm very aware of how fragile they are.
Speaker 1They barely can hold their own heads up.
Speaker 3My baby's getting pretty good at that.
Speaker 2I think a major problem is just. It's not just that we don't deal with these things, I don not just that we don't deal with these things. I don't think that we collectively, in the broad sense of what you know the left, I don't think largely, I don't think we even are aware of the fact that we don't deal with these things. I don't think that there's a conception of these things as even existing and mattering at all.
Speaker 1Well, why do?
Speaker 2you think that is?
Speaker 1and mattering at all.
Speaker 2Well, why do you think that is? Well, my very simple, probably simplistic, answer is the direct result of the liberalism that dominates the culture of the left, and that is a result of tailing and confusing our project with liberalism, which is, you know, there's there's lots of stuff that's all downstream of, but the simple answer is that is the liberalism of the left and it's. It's actually that simple to me anyways.
Speaker 1I would. I would say it's because we relied on students as our base for so long and that's impermanent in our culture and that, yes, that that that I mean, yeah, that's, that's an exact, that's a, that's a branch of this.
Speaker 1Yes, yeah, I mean, I like that when we talk about liberalism, which materially this manifests right, right, right. But why did we do that? I always want to say it wasn't just out of like. If we go back to what led the New Left to do that, it wasn't just out of like. Oh, the workers are reactionary, not initially. You guys know what the original reasons were given for it, right? The reactionary worker stuff came later.
Speaker 2When it comes to the part of the left that we hail from, I'll just just speaking for the, the ex uh cliff iso part was and and post 1980s trotskyists.
Speaker 2Yeah, in general, really for the post 1980s trotskyist world and really that is the left really, but it's for the. When it comes specifically to the ISO, at first the social base of the organization was in the Teamsters Union. If you were in the ISO, you were in the Teamsters Union or you were adjacent to it in some way, and part of the problem with that was that you would lose a couple of people because of some kind of difference in hiring or layoffs or something and you would lose a big part of the organization's financial base. And the student world was just a more stable foundation financially. The idea was always at some point that that financial foundation would enable us to go back into the organized working class and that attempt was just never made again.
Speaker 1Yeah, when I was reading the early 60s stuff on this, the idea was that the children of the proletarian were actually being shipped off the universities by people who got the GI bill and the GI students too, so that if you wanted to follow the proletarian since they weren't going into factories you needed to follow them into this educational space that was a priorly a very elite space. Now this, this, this justification, does feel a little diluted to me because if you look at like the, the amount of the population that was going into the universities in the 60s are still like less than 20 of the population yeah, um, that sounds like a a when, once it's already happened, you look back and you justify it in some way yeah, it's crazy to me now when you hear people like oh, we need to only focus on the non-educated industrial work in class, and I'm like that's 15% of the population, and we need to exclude anyone with a college education.
Speaker 1I'm like that's 40% of the population.
Speaker 3But we don't need numbers do we?
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean, it's just that reality has not sunk in. Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just that that reality has not sunk in. There's a reason why there's been a broader permeation of of educational culture. But here's the other thing If the left relies on that, it's dead. I mean, one of the ironies of, like the DeSantis long march to the institution is one they believe Gramsci. All this is about cultural hegemony and they can take over that way, which is funny. Yeah, and and two, um, that they're doing it through dying institutions. If they weren't dying, they wouldn't be able to take them over. Like the universities are dying for other reasons than conservative hijinks. Like kids aren't going to them anymore right, because they they used to be.
Speaker 3You know how. You got a job and now they're just a, an albatross around the neck your neck for the rest of your fucking life while you work your job that you could have gotten if you didn't go to college yeah, honestly like the least for me.
Speaker 2One, probably the single biggest mistake I ever made was going to college. I mean in terms of finance, finances anyways, oh yeah, financially was going to college.
Speaker 3I mean in terms of finance, finances anyway, oh yeah, financially, yeah, going to college was a terrible decision on my part as well. All only thing college has ever helped me do was get into more colleges, and in that instance I've been really good at it.
Speaker 1I mean so. So you have this, this, this trend, and I'm going to talk about populations for a second, because population does actually affect this. During the high points of the millennial, the younger end of the millennials, those universities were flush with students. Again, right, they, again Right. They were Okay, the baby boom's kids were going and you had all these new immigrant kids coming in for the first time and all these new, like black families, going to, like community colleges for the first time, and whatnot. So they're flush with people, all right. So they're flush with people, all right, but that's reversing incredibly quickly because the jobs for those, for those kids, really don't exist. Not, not, not in the way we were told, and the and the.
Speaker 1There was a tendency in the 1990s to take jobs that used to just require a uh, a high school diploma and make them require a college degree. You see this insurance and whatnot. That's being reversed now because there's simply not enough people, right, so that artificial barrier on application is being removed. So we look at that and go. Well, if the left and liberals are totally dependent on this educational bias, they're fucked right. Because even if you're assuming, um, even if you're assuming growth here, you know, uh, you know, economic growth, it's hard to see where it's going to come from with, you know, with this new industrialization and let's talk about this industrialization, though it's not employing that many people like the united states is.
Speaker 1I remember seeing people say and the odd teams, oh the you know we don't make anything right. That's not true. Yeah, we're like we're the second or third, depending on the year, most industrially productive economy. China beats us, europe beats us. Sometimes they're not beating us right now. Um, and now we are totally integrated with north america, like mexico and canada are super integrated into our economy well, yeah, and like that doesn't correlate with number of people employed in productive fields absolutely.
Speaker 1That's the point.
Speaker 2Automation has changed that yes, yeah, because the the on-shoring trend officially the on-shoring trend has been the main thing that's been discussed and reported on for like a decade at least now. The process of moving productive facilities back and moving them to the south, like the largest auto manufacturing plant is like in Tuscaloosa, alabama, or whatever, and a lot of people were hopeful that that was going to mean something that it just doesn't mean.
Speaker 1Because there's still small employment sectors.
Revolutionary Pessimism and Social Change
Speaker 1I was trying to explain to that like the uaw can be awesome, but graduate students and auto manufacturers and factories are not a huge part of the american working class right here end of discussion like hasn't been since the 80s right so can we be honest here about the, about the nature of the economy, and, and like I don't see anyone really trying to do that, like the, like the left will flirt with it. You'll get a thing on jacob and in a footnote once about the actual numbers, and, like ben fong, I'll mention it, but in general people just ignore it, like oh, there's all this labor militancy, really because they have to be.
Speaker 2They have to be optimistic about it. So it doesn't even matter if they know they can't actually acknowledge it, they definitely can't talk about it, because what is your optimism going to be based on? If your, if your growth model is based upon, you know, not changing any orientation, then you can't actually talk about why you need to change your orientation.
Speaker 1So this is why I think we have trouble organizing these days. On one hand, we tell everyone they're victims and people don't like that. That's a different problem, but it's related. And on the other hand, we try to spin everything optimistically where we're also like. This general liberal pessimism has influenced all society and yet also people like oh, but we're, you know we're on the right side of history. Yeah, there is no right side of history. Like not if you don't make it.
Speaker 3Right.
Speaker 1Yeah, Like and you don't make it just by reporting it.
Speaker 2A dialectical development of history doesn't automatically ensure anything. It's just that there will be developments.
Speaker 1That's it, yeah so this gets us to. I guess it's a long, almost two hour duray, until it's actually defining what revolutionary pessimism is for you guys. Um, but uh, this is why I think we needed it, because these trends, for me, are a long duray. I'm a downer like the thing about the thing about you guys showing a fun you guys show. It was a breath of fresh air to me because, you know, somebody else sounded like me, but when I hear your positions in like 2012 and 2016, I was like, well, I was already pretty pessimistic for that point, so we were just purging our trot hangover at that point.
Speaker 2Well, that's the power of ideology, because, you know, if I was to, if I go back through, like, if I find old articles, I read old emails I sent, uh, old things I wrote and I didn't publish old facebook posts even. I find all of the ingredients to my philosophy and my general outlook now, but I wasn't allowing myself to look at the whole picture.
Speaker 3Right. You weren't allowing yourself to draw the conclusions that should have been drawn by all of the thoughts that you had about everything.
Speaker 2Yeah, it was because I was in the ISO and I was part of the leading upper echelons of the thoughts that you had about everything. Yeah, it was because I was in the ISO and I was part of the leading upper echelons of the ISO I would have individual positions on one or another aspect of things. That it wasn't until I came back from Europe and I didn't come back to the ISO that I actually stepped away and started looking at the whole thing, and even then it took I don't know about another year or so after that to actually acknowledge in full. So it was. It's just been a very long process.
Speaker 1Yeah so what is revolutionary pessimism and how do you guys get to it? And then I'll talk about my views of pessimism. I guess I did mention that I have a darker view of like what we can promise. Like you know, I think we're going to still be working on like chauvinism after communism Sure.
Speaker 2Yeah, I think you're probably right.
Speaker 1I think, you know, I think gender relations are going to get a lot better, but they're still going to be fraught. You know, I'm not promising that everything bad is going to be undone simply by getting rid of capitalism.
Speaker 2No, no. In fact, if anything, that's when we can actually start to do something about those things, right, right, because everything that we do now just exacerbates.
Speaker 3We put a Band-Aid on something and it makes something else worse.
Speaker 2Right Worse.
Speaker 3Yeah, something, and it makes something else worse, right? So what a revolutionary pessimism is for us isn't a pessimism about the prospects of revolution per se, though that might be part of it. In the conditions that exist right now, our pessimism is a complete inability to see. It's a complete pessimism regarding anything positive coming out of the situation as it stands now Our formations and organizations on the left that exist now, the structures of our state and government that exist, our international structures with other workers, the ability of the workers movement in its current form. It's basically just utter, just complete lack of faith in anything progressing forward if things stay the way they are now, because we don't have any kind of infrastructure for moving forward. We don't have the movements, we don't have a workers movement, we don't have mass politics to deal with crisis. We just need to see our way through the world as it exists right now in order to make things better.
Speaker 3So, our pessimism is a complete and utter pessimism, but it's a dialectical pessimism because we see on the other side of all of this that there is hope. And I think it's actually a radical optimism in that we think things can get better and that we can transcend things the way they are now.
Speaker 2But you know, right and that I'm critical to that is that that means that the answer is not to just make a new group and try to build it up on the basis of anything that has been done since, I don't know since the end of Second World War, but at least since the 60s. So, like that kind of pessimism. What that means is that finally for me anyways, it means nothing that exists can, as it currently exists, can be the answer. Yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah, so I guess I'm similar and there are some things that I would probably add to that. Um, I would say that a philosophical pessimist has to take the reality of human suffering and its legitimacy as as a given. Um, what I mean by by legitimacy is not that you should suffer, it's that you do and that we should always be trying to mitigate that suffering. This is why it's not a conservative position for me. I'm not saying that we should just accept our loss stoically and just get kicked in the balls for all eternity. Yeah, exactly, um, yeah, but that any attempt to anyone's promising you we're gonna get rid of all of it, you probably shouldn't trust them. Um, two, um. There are always unforeseen consequences and over complicated systems and you're going to always have to deal with that and that's going to require vigilance.
Speaker 1So the other thing is like the post-revolutionary period doesn't end the situation and in that sense I'm a lot more like I don't know trotskyist or something um are, because I'm like you know, the marxist linearist conception is generally three stages of revolution and I'm like only three. No, you can't have violent revolution all the time. Obviously that would exhaust everything. Um, yeah, and it has. Yeah, and it has.
Speaker 1Uh, um, but do you only think there's three stages of social change? Like you know, marks is actually uh, very vague about what he thinks is beyond, you know, the first transitionary period on purpose, and we're gonna have to deal with that. Um, I guess that means, for example, when I hear answers like we need to be a horizontalist instead of verticalist, or verticalist instead of horizontalist, I'm automatically already out like, yeah, like, um, there there's nothing inherently inherent about a form of organization that's going to fix all of our problems. Right, there are forms of organization that'll fuck us up. Like, like, I can't believe how weirdly dependent Trotskyist parties were on the Bolshevik formation after based on the like post civil war Bolshevik party constitution, which is crazy to me that they insist on that forever.
Speaker 1Yeah, in some ways they still do. Yeah, I know, it's just faction band slate voting it. It's like it's a terrible way to to enter trust in your leadership actually, and it's a way to make, to make faction fight zero, some right. That's the reason why no group can even top a thousand these days right, um, I I believe in political programs, but I think if you try to form a political program too early, you're basically trying to dictate people what they should do.
Speaker 3Right, like a political program is, is an organic outgrowth of a movement. You don't make a political program in advance of a movement's existence.
Speaker 1Yeah, which, I think, puts us like this is a division between us and a lot of Marxists. It's because I'm like like, yeah, this is a division between us and a lot of Marxists. It's because I'm like like, yeah, we need a program, but you're trying to build one now, Like you know, we're near there Like well and you got.
Speaker 3I was going to say, I think that, like, unlike a lot of Marxists, we and I won't speak for you, speak for you, but I'm pretty sure that I think I think I think I've gleaned this about you as well is that we don't think that we need to have absolute ideological clarity. Order to no, of course not.
Leftist Reflections on Revolutionary Pessimism
Speaker 3Yeah, well, clarity, doing you know, if it ever comes at all right, yeah, I would agree, but I mean, I mean obviously we, there will be some, there's some ideological points that are non negotiable, right, sure, but everything I mean, that's that's one of the things, that one of the reasons why I eschew qualifiers on my Marxism is because I want, whatever I am, whatever adjective that I attach onto my Marxism, to be determined by the reality of the times that we live in and not by some tradition that I have decided to LARP on the internet, right, right.
Speaker 1Well, this is, this is my like big break with Bordigas. You know, it's not even the anti, uh, the anti democratic aspect of it. So much as this. Like the, the insistence on invariance. Yeah, I'm just like the, the insistence on invariance. Yeah, I'm just like.
Speaker 1Well, no, like, uh, like, I actually think katsuki's right that we, like we can only speak about the truth of our time, um, because it's what we can know. And I think that leads me to just say, like, we have to come to terms with the fact that our left, the left that we came up with, the gen x and millennial left, failed on its own conditions, right, and that attempts to to deny that are not deal with that, are to like, even go back to a prior form. Like marx, like old school. We're going to try to resurrect the marist lindanism of the 20s or whatever, or the 50s, depending on who you are. Um, that's not, that's actually kind of delusional like, and that also applies like, oh, we're gonna resurrect republican spain. If you're an anarchist or you know, primitive society, if you're a primitivist, I mean, very few people are that anymore. I think the half the reality of that has set in on how dumb that is. But like, I think it's right wingers are now yeah
Speaker 3yeah like exclusively I mean.
Speaker 1Well, it puts you in a position to be reactionary in the small r sense of that term, right that you're just trying to bring back a vision of the past. And I do think you can rightly accuse the left, separate from liberals, of being reactionary in the sense that we have been trying to bring back some kind of prior movement, whole cloth with no, touches incoherently yeah it's uh, it's our own sort of bastardized palingenesis right. Well, on that note, we will probably have this discussion again.
Speaker 3We didn't even get to decadence theory. That was one of the things we were supposed to talk about.
Speaker 1Yes, we are, so we we're going to have to have a sequel in a couple of months on decadence theory. Yeah, actually, what I should do is we should actually have some texts to talk about. Yes, we are, so we're going to have to have a sequel in a couple of months on decadence theory.
Speaker 3Actually, what I should do is we should actually have some text to talk about, because there's different forms of decadence theory. Oh sure, yeah, there's a really good Libcom article that's incredibly thorough. That lists all of the multiple types of decadence theory with short little explanations about where they come from and what they are. I found it to be very useful. I can send that to you if you like.
Speaker 1Yeah, let's do that and in like a month, let's let's discuss that so that we can get the second half of revolutionary pessimism, the decadence part, out. Because when a lot of people hear us talk decadence, they think we mean moral decadence and we have something against queer people or something like no, that's not what we mean at all, that's not. No, not at all whatsoever right um this is where we're gonna sound like left comms yeah, yeah it is, we are actually I, I, I.
Speaker 1But see the left comms get mad at me. You're gonna like me again for a minute until they grok.
Speaker 1Why believe it? All right, um, I'm still, I'm gonna end, I'm on this note. I find left comps too optimistic, that like that's meaningful after the common turn's gone. I just really don't understand what you're the left communist of. I mean because when, when I hear, like them accusing everybody being the left of capital, and I'm like, but what are you? It's not like you don't live in a capitalist society, like right, yeah, like you know, your ideological purity exempts you from the society you live in. I don't think so. Yep, um, and on that note, see you in it.
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