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
Exploring Leftist Stability, Political Trends, and Global Conflicts: A Deep Dive with Amogh Sahu
Ever wondered why smaller Marxist groups are financially stable while larger organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America struggle? Our guest, Amogh Sahu, brings clarity to this and other enigmas within leftist movements by pulling back the curtain on the role of wealthy individuals and funding transparency in these organizations. Explore the ethical considerations of independently wealthy leaders in Marxist organizations and the impact this has on their credibility and operations.
Shifting our focus to the broader American political landscape, we navigate through the evolving dynamics within the Republican and Democratic parties. From the rise and fall of alt-right movements to the unpredictable behavior of the "don't care" voters, we scrutinize trends that could reshape future elections. We delve into the changing voter composition, particularly among Zoomers, and the public's growing desire for a third party, despite historical voting patterns.
Finally, we traverse the complex terrain of modern warfare and geopolitical strategies, comparing historical and contemporary conflicts like Russia-Ukraine and Gaza. Our discussion sheds light on the brutal realities of counterinsurgency and the critical need for local population support. Reflecting on global political shifts, we examine China's dissatisfaction with Russia, the complications within BRICS, and the evolving nature of the global proletariat. Join us for a comprehensive and thought-provoking conversation on the critical issues shaping today's political landscape.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf
Hello, welcome to VarmVlog, and today I'm here with Amogh Sahoo candidate.
Speaker 2:You candidate? Yet I'm a candidate, yeah.
Speaker 1:Alright, you've set for comps For a PhD in something useless, no um. And philosophy, history, philosophy, critical theory, which thing is it?
Speaker 2:I think it's philosophy, now, straight up, all right.
Speaker 1:And today we're talking about this is more playing off the theme of our last couple of well, last reflection on the left in the 10 years since we started, Although today I'm going to be focusing more on the contemporaneous moment. I think we might even talk about the nature of war and how people are misunderstanding some of the things I'm saying about that, because it's going to be relevant, but there's lots of things we can talk about.
Speaker 1:Dsa running out of money um uh we talked about that a bit last time well, I didn't realize the strategic limitation as thoroughly until I actually looked at the recent letter of your labor statistic numbers and realized that all the union concentration and density are all in New York, california and Hawaii.
Speaker 1:Two of those states are are DSA strongholds, which means if people think that the DSA is getting out of being limited to New York and California by using its labor strategy, they are fundamentally incorrect, because that's where there's the most labor union density, both public and private sector, and on top of that it is where 17% New York and California together make up approximately 17% of the workforce. Those states make up an even larger percentage of wealth holdings, though, of like socialist or where the downwardly mobile middle class emerge in light of the over-rich, and that they tend to be concentrated, a la Benjamin Studebaker, in the same areas as centrist Democrats, so their political importance is nullified. But it led me to a couple other things I started looking up. Okay, so why is the DSA losing money? But other sectarian organizations on the left which are a lot smaller and still manage to do more media outreach, which is expensive, and I noticed a disturbing trend, and that is many of the sectarian left organizations, whether they be Trotskyist or Marxist-Leninist or, in the case of the PSL and the WWP, both.
Speaker 2:The PSL and Maoists, aren't they?
Speaker 1:They're Marciites, I see they're Marciites turned Dingus Maoist, I see. So they are a split from the WWP. They did not denounce the WWP. They see the split as coming from something other than politics. The WWP has massively declined because its most vocal leader has been Caleb Maupin and all that other communism stuff. He's been out of the WWP for almost a decade now, but he was the last major few they had.
Speaker 1:But if you look at a lot of these sectarian organizations and you start asking where they get their money from, I mean there's the, there's the conspiratorial stuff around sigmund roy um, you know which he was. You know through people's forum getting money via Goldman Sachs into People's Forum and indirectly to things like the PSL. This led to a backlash in India where a lot of people receiving Sigmund Roy money are actually rounded up by the government for being potential foreign agents. But that doesn't explain a lot of it. And then I I actually was like well, maybe we don't need a conspiracy theory to explain it. Let's look at their key, their key national figures, and look up their publicly stated income, cause a lot of these people have ran for office so they have to disclose, and I found like six or seven millionaires, yeah like, and even a lot of the, a lot of the left academics. They're some of the highest paid academics in america yeah which is an interesting phenomenon.
Speaker 1:So, while the dSA might have Bosh, carson, cara um and TYT and Sam Cedar are independently wealthy, a lot of these, uh sectarian organizations have stayed around because they're probably taking percentage dues of millionaires, uh uh, personal income, which is why it doesn't matter that they don't have membership of above 2,000, 3,000 probably, we don't know, because they also don't disclose all that.
Speaker 2:The problem with this whole discussion is that no one ever tells you what the right kind of membership base and the right kind of funding sources are supposed to be, except there's this like vague sense that it has to be the bottom 10% or something. But like you need to have some you know, like what's the, what's the sort of good case here?
Speaker 1:Right, Like the Bolsheviks had both German Kaiser Reich, money and uh and stolen gold and a millionaire. Right.
Speaker 1:However, I will say you do not want your central committee to be, as a Marxist organization, to be predominantly millionaires. No, I'm with you, because that's one thing I have actually noticed is, a lot of the people who are the forward facing of these organizations are also in their leadership, in their central committee, and they are independently wealthy, which is just kind of wild. And they're not independently wealthy from being leftists either, but when people go, there's no money on the left, they're just wrong.
Speaker 2:There's plenty. Yeah, it gets spent on all kinds of random stuff. I mean, part of the problem is okay, great. How much money do you want and what would you do with it Is the question to ask those people.
Speaker 1:And watch them give you very detailed and helpful answers. Well, I mean, the thing is, though, picking the PSO is a different thing. Let's take this side by side. That's a good money for running a media campaign that can make it look like you have a lot of influence on social media. You can, right, you can invest even in I'm not saying anyone's doing that but you can invest in bots to get your numbers up artificially so you can then get them up organically. That's gaming, a gaming system. You can do that with Patreon too. You can backdoor investors and foreign influence that way as well.
Speaker 1:It's a very opaque money apparatus. This is one of the reasons, and if you think I'm talking crap about the sectarian organizations, I think most sectarian organizations are actually very poor, yeah, but if they can feel the candidate, even in a front group, they have to have a war chest of millions of dollars. They have to like. There there's, you know, even assuming that, let's say, gloria La Riva only spent like $40K on her candidacy, which I highly doubt the Robert Kennedy Jr people estimate that it takes about $5 million to get your name on every ballot in the country, independently ofa party and the psl have done that year after year since when 2000, at least earlier right no, no, they've only been around.
Speaker 1:They were part of the wwp before that. Um, they've done it since 2004, right, um they. But the other thing is they run candidates with the Peace and Freedom Party in Indiana and California Significant candidates. They actually probably run more. They are probably almost as big at the local level in some ways in California as the DSA is, because the Peace and Freedom Party has been around since the 60s at least. I mean, it's a new left-holder over in this iteration of it.
Speaker 2:I mean and we're just talking about the sectarian people, right, if you expand a bit, you've got union money, you've got NGO money, you've got lawyer money, you've got you know, etc. There's plenty Anyway, you got NGO money, you got lawyer money, you got, you know, et cetera. There's plenty Anyway, you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, there's plenty, there's plenty, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So the idea that the left doesn't have money or that you need a Soros-style conspiracy theory to explain how the left has money. It's just there is a tendency that we talked about last time for leftists to fundamentally lie to themselves about where they are in society in order to distance themselves from their own failure and to build up a narrative that, because they've been defeated, they need more people as a counterpower and it's not their fault that they've been ineffective. That is the benefit of that style of argumentation. Left wingers aren't the only people to do it. The libertarian party does this shit too, and sometimes they're the same fucking people, both in the case of Mike Gravel or in the case of my former friend, michael Michael Rettenraud, who's apparently running for Libertarian Party president these days.
Speaker 2:So we're going to say, Derek, you and I are going to run his campaign. That's what. That's what you're talking about.
Speaker 1:I highly doubt he would speak to us. That's what you're telling me.
Speaker 2:I highly doubt he would speak to us. But yeah, those fuckers have got as much millionaire funding much more millionaire funding than any left group.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean so there is more money on the right. I want people to hear this, but people conflate the different kinds of right. The paleo conservative right having money is basically a result of turkle carson's relationship to the mercer family. It is not actually organic, um, and they also not as much.
Speaker 2:They don't have as much as the libertarians. You know, it's like, yes, there's claremont and there's the intercollegiate studies institute, there's first things, but it's not that big, frankly.
Speaker 1:Anyway, right, well, I mean they can. They can buy off a few formerly left-wing podcasters, like uh from brooklyn, who've who've gotten all conservative in their millennial vocal fry, but I cannot listen to that podcast. I do not understand why anyone listens to that podcast.
Speaker 2:It's not still around Red Scare.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and they definitely get Claremont money, but it's nothing compared to Coke money, right, or any of that. Now, sometimes these, these power players overlap. I mean, what we've seen is that the neoconservative military establishment types they haven't gone away, they have departisanized themselves again. Yeah, like they have. Just, you know, they sell themselves as Peter Zion and the John Morsheimer are all in some way a variety of neoconservative foreign policy realists. None of them are new American century people, because not even Francis Fukuyama has been that since the middle of the Bush administration.
Speaker 2:So like the new American century. People are part of the Biden coalition. They're not a distinct thing now. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they're not. They're also not really the neoconservatives as we knew them in the arts. They have softened, mellowed out, et cetera. Because they've had to, they've been defeated effectively, both domestically and abroad. Yeah, bill crystal is a damn.
Speaker 2:Now he's just like a straightforward damn, like he's. I mean, he pretty much says this I mean david french same thing.
Speaker 1:I mean, like you think about, so rob amari's war with david french? Um, uh, I mean, it is the neoconservatives. Let's. Let's like back away from the culture conf. Versus. It's hard to characterize Trump. One of the things that I would tell people about Trump is Trumpism. Being demagogic is actually probably not as right wing as a lot of people say and I know I'm going to get pushed back immediately for saying that but like trump, for example, actually takes a right center position on abortion. Yeah, um, trump, trump does not believe in bullshit like the gold standard or even though that is in the project 2025, but it's not something he believes at all. Um, and it was scott horton, the libertarian, who came on my show once. He pointed out to me that if you listen to trump speak on a conservative platform, he, he knows how to pepper his speeches in ways that appeal to all factions of his base, even though he's contradicting himself in doing so. I mean, he's the head of a coalition.
Speaker 2:Right Like this is the thing I mean. Did you see David Stockman? I was at a. You know there was a book launch the other day. David Stockman, the Reagan budget director, had this book out Trump's War on American Capitalism and reason. We're hosting him. So it's like he's the head of a coalition and the libertarians are not all fans. In fact, most of them, a big faction of them, aren't fans.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean and let's also be honest if you were a libertarian, you were having your heyday during the Obama administration administration and now that that's gone, you're basically the libertarian. Participation in the trump coalition pretty much liquidated them, just like the alt-right racial nationalists were liquidated and in their flirtations would being the the radical writers on to the trump coalition right um, and my talks with jg michaels going back to 2018, I was warning people that like, hey, you're fighting the losing end of this. It's losing already. It's losing already. It's losing. Naturally, everyone knows that to win in America, you're going to have to win a middle class coalition with a bunch of people in color in it. Even Sam Francis realized that in the fucking 90s. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Sam Francis realized that in the fucking 90s. Yeah, he got kicked out by William Buckley for being too racist. This has been known. The alt-right white nationalists were basically an online phenomenon, and the moment they manifested and everyone saw how big they were, it was clear that the counter-protests were much larger. People, however, wasted their energy on fighting that as a reason to be sucked into the Biden campaign. Ultimately, instead of seeing that the real threat was national conservatism, which spoke a different game, picked up on some of the same talkingatism, which did not, which spoke a different game, picked up on some of the same talking points, but did not limit itself to a rump of declining white people yeah like, and so that's a very different thing to fight.
Speaker 1:Similarly, when people think they're fighting christian nationalists, now they are, uh. Part of the reason why Christian nationalists are obvious, though, is because it's not the fucking generic assumption of the country. Right In the 80s, when I was a kid, soft Christian nationalism was basically assumed, and the moment it wasn't assumed, you had Pat Robertson running for president. Yeah, and this has been forgotten. So you know, yes, they're a small part of a dying coalition, but the trends that we you and I I don't know if you predicted this, but I predicted that the Democrats' assumption and you want to talk about having your cake and eating it too Like, yes, the Great Replacement was a conspiracy theory, but it was a conspiracy theory, as we said before, born out of Democratic rhetoric from 2008 to 2000 and basically 2016, uh, 16, which was that the racial demographics of the country was going to settle the political demographics of the country, and the democrats were basically going to be in charge forever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I and I just remember going that's not like asian and latin voters being on the of the Democrats as a post-2006 phenomenon, actually, and so, yes, you know, yes, my Zoomer kids, it's all of your lifetime, but not all of anyone else's.
Speaker 2:I mean, it was this, the demographic thing. It was a real. It is a real problem for the Republicans, but it's one they're trying to solve. This was the mistake. Yes, there's this sort of I don't know exactly how to put it. There are all these demographic changes and there's deaths of despair and all this kind of stuff, but that just means the composition of the Republican coalition is changing and not its size.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah. Well, here's a poll that blew my mind, listening to FiveThirtyEight, to get a feel for what the normies are talking about. Um, it seems like, uh, zoomers who will come, um, who have come of age under the Biden presidency, are much, much less likely to be Democrats than zoomers four years ago, or than any cohort of millennials. The predictor there is the regional popularity of a president predicts what party you're likely to enter at adulthood, and that, barring a change in situation and there's a big asterisk because there's always changes in the situation, right, that that's actually fairly predictive. So, as long as conditions remain roughly what they are when you become 18, that's where you're probably going to stay until maybe your fifties or sixties.
Speaker 2:You might have a shift, Um but yeah, I mean, we don't want to this isn't? We don't want to just flip the flip, the flip, the democratic story on its head. You know there's the Republicans haven't got it inevitably made either.
Speaker 1:No, no. Well, one of the things about the other thing about this is no one can predict what the, what the, the voter makeup of these 19 to 24 year olds are going to be. My thing is, I predict it's going to be like that. There's two trends that are changing.
Speaker 1:One less and less young people are going to college. Two, both presidents are effectively hyper unpopular, but also and unlike in the 90s and aughts, everybody. It's just like with unions. Actually, everybody says we need a third party in america, but the percentage willing to vote for them are lower than than his, than historical norms, yeah. So for all that, people think that they can get around this situation and the uncommitted campaign you know from Michigan and the DSA, I think, more or less formally endorsed that didn't end up mattering. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, so you know Biden's going to lose. Now, from the communist perspective of Moe, I don't think we should give a shit. But I, you know, I think I'm the minority and just saying, like you know, not even like why not Trump? Or like I'm like we just shouldn't care about this whatsoever. It's it, it it? It might make our conditions less favorable under Trump. It might not also conditions for the under Trump. It might not Also conditions for the left in the short term and conditions for the left in the long term could be radically different, as illustrated by all the left populist movements of the last 15 years. Where it looks like short term, we had a left descendancy and in the long term, in most of the places, the left left did ultimately completely collapse. The united states is actually late on that game.
Speaker 2:Yeah no, we're stuck. It's just. You know, in some ways, this really really simple division, you know which is really misleading, but something like 25 percent of population left, 25 center left, 25 center right, 25 right. You know which is really misleading, but something like 25% of population left, 25 center left, 25 center right, 25, right. You know that, it's just.
Speaker 1:I think it's actually more like 14, 14, 14, 14, 50%, don't care, but yeah, oh, exactly, yeah, no, I'm happy to.
Speaker 2:That's fine, but the don't cares I mean this is Jonah Goldberg, of all people made a good point about this is that, sadly, like everyone, each, all of these groups think that the don't cares are on their side, but like the boring truth is probably that they might break pretty evenly.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean the don't cares are. What is interesting about that, though, is that was the long duray of American politics until 9-11. 9-11 flipped that towards the consolidation and a movement conservatism which collapsed under under the weight of its victory Right. I think we forget about that. Like the left and democrats did not defeat movement conservatism with obama, movement conservatism defeated itself and fractured into like. The reagan coalition wasn't maintainable anymore. Uh, you had pre-astro toTurf Tea Party, post-astroturf Tea Party. Revenge of Moral Majority. White nationalists, neo-confederates all kinds of crazy-ass groups emerged in the aughts in the right.
Speaker 2:I mean arguably the Reagan coalition was kind of. I mean, there's talk about the decline of the Reagan coalition in 1988. I forget.
Speaker 1:It's like there was a sense of crisis in the first HW Bush administration the second post, uh, post, mass media president, to not get a second term by losing, as opposed to, um, by stepping down, or actually the third we got forgot about gerald ford.
Speaker 1:So you got gerald ford, jimmy carter, you have the 70s, where no one can hold on for very long yeah um, you have the 80s, which is a consolidation of a right-wing coalition, although it took for I mean, people also forget this about Reagan America it took them forever to get the Democrats out of office. In fact, it really took Bill Clinton coming to power to get the Democrats out of the legislature. Yeah Well, this of the legislature.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, this is the thing for whenever. Whenever people talk about, you know, reagan's big deficits and so on, everyone's like, well, the Democrats had both, both house, house, house and Senate, you know, um, and they had, we're till the mid to the early nineties, right, the probably.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, um, the problems of the Obama administration were actually the problems of the first Clinton administration too, except the Obama administration came in on what was truly unlikely will not happen again, uh, for a long time a, um, a, a victory slate. I mean they had a super majority in the Senate. Yeah, they had a a victory slate. I mean they had a super majority in the Senate. Yeah, they had um, uh, they, they had a tie in the in SCOTUS. They actually at the time had pretty good holes on certain districts of the federal judiciary as a whole. They wet, they. They had a lot more governors too. The opposition to them, like the opposition to Clinton, actually swooped out tons of Democrats on the state level, particularly after they gave up the Howard Dean strategy, etc.
Speaker 2:And the Bush administration. This is the thing we should mention, because the big exception to this it looks like the Bush administration, but the Bush administration and the House Republicans. They didn't have a domestic mandate to do very much.
Speaker 1:No, they did not and in fact, they kept losing their domestic mandate effectively. They barely had it in 2020. They did, I think, legitimately. I know there are some left. I know people forget this, but when left-wingers were more conspiracy theorists against the government, people like George palace were claiming that that the 2020, the 2004 election was stolen. I think people forget that. I mean, and people like Matt Taibbi and stuff remind people of it when they talk about the Trump conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1:I do think that the right has a tendency for more vulgar conspiracism than the American center left, but they have both become largely conspiratorial. And this and I think there have been tendencies for this going all the way back to nixon, um center consensus in america. I mean, this is this is a weird thing that when a lot of like a lot of marxists just so thorough worries about like empire and uh, the american working class, so that on one hand, they'll try to say that like fordism came from the height of american empire, and it's true that fordism came at the height of american uh ownership of the percentage of wealth in the world, that's true. I think George McKinnon puts it at like 60% of the world's wealth was in the United States, just because the rest of it had been destroyed in World War II. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But the weird problem with that is that people then talk about how neoliberalism emerges out of the crisis of profits, which is true, but then they think that somehow equals a weakness of American empire. But the height of American empire is the 90s. Yeah, the American empire of the assumption of the head of the Anglo establishment world was actually a fairly modest imperial project.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. Well, exactly talk is that post-World War II? In effect? You have domestic elites who are very happy to outsource the responsibility for keeping domestic class conflict down to Americans, and the Americans get lightweight empire they don't actually have to govern anywhere. The Americans get lightweight empire they don't actually have to govern anywhere. And domestic elites get in a bunch of Latin American countries all over Europe.
Speaker 1:They get military force and economic power for free or at a very low cost, and they do it at a different way. So what? Paul Mattoatic points this out the united states builds up its actual, its own initial competition, which is interesting. What is the thing that causes the first crisis of us capital in the late 60s? It's actually the germans and the japanese who built them up and I'm not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. And why did they do it? Well, they didn't do it out of the kindness of their heart, it was a keynesian imperial project like uh, what, what?
Speaker 1:what paul matic calls the keynesian international yeah you know what someone like danny besner calls the beginning of the transatlantic super state, which I think people like. When people say, oh well, these, the you know, these countries are just, you know um, shills for the U? S empire, I think people forget that that was a rational thing for these countries to do, yeah, um, and they weren't forced to like um. Now, in latin america, it led to corrupt elites, you know um, helping the us with what became basically agricultural and mineral extraction regimes which were nowhere near as generous. Yeah, so then you just have the cia, your Contras for you and your anti-communist forces. But also, you know, you don't bring the benefits of the Keynesian international South. And Paul Maddock predicted that too, and he said it's just because it would be too expensive to do. It wasn't that, no one would have thought about it. It wasn't. It wasn't that no one would have thought about it. It's just that the infrastructure build up, while it would help the us in the beginning, would require so much state investment and support. The state probably wasn't willing to do it. Ironically, the american empire probably could now, but it has no interest in doing so. So it's so, it's. It is what it is.
Speaker 1:This also when people like talk about like I was talking about the decline of the poverty draft, and people like well, you know, the United States military is desperate. And I'm like well, that's true, because the unfortunate reality is the US military thinks in decades most of the U? S public stakes in two year cycles, like um. But decades is still a short term project. When you're talking about developmentalism, like um. So if you have the, you know, if you have drones, reducing the need for the US to have manpower, I want people. Somebody came back to me. It's like well, doesn't the Russia-Ukraine war disprove that? And I'm like well, the Russia-Ukraine war is a different kind of fighting than what the US has gone into in the last since Korea, gone into in the last since Korea, and that's actually contesting territory where you actually have to hold it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they don't want to do that. The one time they tried to do that, you know, since the, they tried to do that in Vietnam and they tried to do that in well to some extent in Cambodia and Laos, and it backfired massively. And they don't want to do that in well to some extent in Cambodia and Laos, and it fucking backfired massively and they don't want to do that again.
Speaker 1:Well, that led to the thing of fourth-generation war studies, which also, by the way, means that people over overpredict the performance of insurgencies and territorial wars. And you might go. Well, what do you mean? And let me explain it to you. The calculus for how many losses you can take per side is radically different depending on whether or not you can actually lose your own territory, all right, or if you think you can. This leads to like the most vicious kinds of wars are.
Speaker 1:Are either, um, civil wars, are settler wars that are not occupations but finishing off a smaller population, um, and either force integrating them or genociding them. Frankly, um, those operate under zero sum rules, right, and either force integrating them or genociding them. Frankly, those operate under zero sum rules, right. That's when you do stuff like you lay waste to the land because you want to just kill everyone on it and you'll build it later. All right, that requires 19th century style fighting techniques, all right, it's still less.
Speaker 1:To this day, we see this in Russia and Ukraine, where the return to needs like basic artillery and artillery production gives Russia an advantage and just quasi-Wishian troop movements. But that doesn't affect the US at all, because the US would have to want that kind of territory, claim to want that kind of military. So yes, if the US decided to invade Canada or Mexico, or if it or if I don't know, mexico decided it wanted texas back or something, then you would need 19th century style warfare strategies. Um, when you're fighting a counterinsurgency, the only way to really win is to turn the general population against the counterinsurgency. That is the hearts and minds stuff. And it's very, very, very hard to do if you're an occupier. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So the counterinsurgency has an advantage, but the way you break a counterinsurgency, I think we're seeing in Gaza, is decimation, if not genocide, if not genocide, um, which is why you're seeing a return to early 20th century percentage of population casualties and these things that amount to actual territorial wars. Yeah, the us doesn't have to worry about that, knock on wood for now, um, and neither russia nor china would want us territory. They realized that they would not be able to probably hold it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, uh you know, um, I think these two things are just two sides of the same coin though that in general there is no appetite for these big 20th century style clashes, except when it is made necessary and drives both sides to extinction by the geopolitical conditions, right? Either in Eastern Europe, right, I think you were partly thinking of Bosnia and Milosevic and all that stuff but also in Gaza.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, and although the equation gets very different in the Yugoslav wars, the moment America steps in because they don't need to rule that territory. Yeah, exactly, that's the difference.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but in the background, you know, if we take all of the sort of successful example, you know a bunch of the cases for counterinsurgency or the case studies like what you see again and again is you know large occupying powers not exactly losing but not having the either the economic or the military strengths to carry on. And then you know insurgents declaring victory. So Soviets in Afghanistan of a population.
Speaker 1:That's in support of them, that they do not have to worry about a massive insurgency. Yeah, um, that radically changes once they leave that area and I don't think they want to, I mean, but but that would actually it would. They would just roll right over the official ukrainian army, but then you would be dealing with a guerrilla, total war, insurgency in the west, which, uh, which putin's not dumb and well, I, I, well, I shouldn't say that we said yeah, we yeah uh, I david graber.
Speaker 1:Uh, david graber says many, many stupid things, but one thing he did say is people who are structurally protected, uh, from violence but have the means to use it, aka the structurally powerful, they tend to get very stupid over time, and that's clear in the American political leader class and the non-fighting units of the US Army. You can definitely see that in the, in the non fighting units of the U S army, uh, you can definitely see that when you see the actual fighting units of the U S army and people who still have to work with them, you see less erosion of skill. So I don't want to say that, like, violence makes you stupid, it doesn't. Uh, and power makes you stupid, it it doesn't, um, but power, power removed from skin in the game, does really seem to make you stupid. Yeah, um, and that's that's the problem with all these bonapartist moves the people are having today is.
Speaker 1:It is, if you want a bonapartist figure like that and you want to concentrate power like that, um, which is what classes that are basically not coherent want, because they basically want a strong patron. You know that's a, that's a pre-modern theory of caesarism, right? Um, the problem that you have with that historically and for people who like this hobbesian worldview that you can have, like a one singular sovereign and it's stable, they kind of miss that. They either have to fight the wars themselves to stay sharp or literally you'll have one leader and then everything will collapse afterwards. Because until you have another kind of leader like that, usually coming from the collapse, because they have been insulated from from, you know, failure for so long, yeah, the the difference in the west, I think, is we have entire classes of people, not just one or two people, insulated from failure like that. We have a glass floor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the thing is, it's just this is what war looks like in like a low profit rate world right.
Speaker 2:Where like no one has enough resources, enough domestic political consensus, enough even just straight up military manufacturing strength. I mean, I'm happy to make this case about China as well. Actually, we're in this really weird situation where, you know, hostility is rising, everyone's getting more suspicious of each other, but also the example of Russia is a big warning sign to everyone that, like you know, you can, you can try big global conflict, even like small global conflict, and it's not going to go well. So we have this weird combination of stasis in the sense of, like people kind of, you know, not having the appetite or the ability to really win any conflict and rising hostility giving giving more people more incentive to fight.
Speaker 1:You know, it's really weird. Well, it's one of the things that we you and I have talked about the left for a long time, and we used to talk about it more in abstract terms, with people's arguments about the Soviet Union, but now I think we see it in real terms, where the left is always laying out principles and then immediately betraying them for necessity which which is and then making the betrayal by necessity somehow a good that you should model um like. We should be like linen, who wasn't cynical. He couldn't deliver on his promises and stay in revolution for practical reasons, but also he had to be cynical, which is like okay. So what you're saying is we should follow the guy whose plan worked in the short run but failed in the long run yeah, uh, and was obviously flawed from like year, from like 1922 forward.
Speaker 1:Why in the fuck would I do that? Yeah, like, and I say that, and I'm not a lenin hater, I just want to point out that that the structure of that logic. Well, now we see it about things contemporaneously. Today, like, um, the return of military keynesianism in russia means that it's a bastion for socialism, and I'm like what? Why wouldn't the U? S have been the bastion for socialism in the 19 fucking eighties. If that was the case, right Like.
Speaker 2:Oh, that is so dumb. And also, these people are probably dungists, right, these military Keynesian people. China is not happy about the Russia situation. It does not think that it is a smart move to have invaded. What are these people thinking?
Speaker 1:No, it totally scuttled China's plan for Europe. It totally set China back on the Belt and Road Initiative. It complicated tensions in BRICS, because China-India tensions mean that BRICS really can't form. There is no reserve currency to replace the Western reserve currency in any seriousness and China is not willing to do at its income level what the US does to be a global reserve currency. Nor should they. Which means that they were basically russia. When people ask me you know, oh, the west is losing in russia, I'm saying well, yeah, I mean ukraine's losing. I don't think a lot of the nato planners ever for a second thought ukraine could win. I think they thought that this would read that the chaos would do two things we would stress, test russia and see what they're actually good at and which we, you know, because the other thing is, people are- like yeah, we know, we know some more things about that now right, yeah, um, and, and it would really scuttle the geopolitical plans of Xi, which it has done.
Speaker 2:Which it has done. You don't see noises about Taiwan. You know as much.
Speaker 1:You do, but you don't. I mean Xi's clearly having domestic problems now because their economy is slowing down. They're now acting like a mature economy before they got rid of like all the peasantry, etc. So this is bad for them. Yeah, like, um, the whole ecological civilization promises and all that was based on a certain kind of prosperity that they could go back in and reinvent stuff. And I've also pointed out the people that chinese don't give, for example, uh, african nations bad investment deals. It wasn't a debt trap, but you know what they also did not do? They did not go in and like train a bunch of africans to go do chinese industry in africa without china being the one doing it all. Right, yeah, um, so, while that, that means a lot of things, but it means what it has meant when you combine it with some other things.
Speaker 1:I've been reading phil nill on this. He's uh, he will be on the show by the time I've released and he was talking about premature de-industrialization in in africa, which is crazy to think about because we've just started achieving industrialization in africa. And you're talking about premature de-industrialization because of the, the leapfrogging effects of like of industry. Um, it's good, but it means that there's fewer and fewer workers needed to do anything, which is the other thing that, like the left, is lying to itself. Right now we're seeing this return to third world ism Um on a lot of the left. I've even had people in my show lean that way. Start.
Speaker 1:Um and on a lot of the left. I've even had people on my show lean that way and what makes that really fucking funny is like what mass third world proletariat is there?
Speaker 2:And where are they? Why haven't they come to save the day?
Speaker 1:right, well, and there's also no mass peasantry anymore either, except in places like india and the philippines, right?
Speaker 2:so and we're mostly unorganized and definitely not obviously left, you know.
Speaker 1:Which leads you to this whole like, like, this strategy used is going to be increasingly like the left finding the last holdouts of the places shut out of the 20th century to pretend that they can use mid 20th century strategies which, again, that they can use mid 20th century strategies which, again, if the goal was to build communism, didn't work for that either. Yeah, so where does that leave you? And I guess people keep on asking us like, why, why? You know, why am I still a left winger? Why am I still a Marxist? For me, it's about the fact that I don't see an answer to the power problems of capitalism. I just don't. I don't see it coming domestically. I do think declining rates of profits are real. I do think that they're basically I don't necessarily agree with Marxist theory of why they exist, but I do think that they're real and they're partly anthropic a marxist theory of why they exist, but I do think that they're real and they're partly anthropic. Um, I do think that like, uh, the classical workers movement as we understand it is endangered by the structure of the social, of the, of the service sector and a whole lot of what's coming out. You know, I've been talking about the, you know pnc on pnc violence yeah right, but let's talk about that for a second, because a lot of the people who talk the most about know pnc.
Speaker 1:On pnc violence yeah right, but let's talk about that for a second, because a lot of the people who talk the most about the pnc are the pnc. But it's also because they're they. They want to posit this mass industrial, specifically industrial working class, or a mass working class that's not industrial but can act like an industrial working class. It's like yeah, that's his proxy. He knows that the industrial working class is small. He just thinks that everybody else would operate that way. And I'm like no, no, there's no reason to assume that. Like, and there's no reason to assume that these leaders you create in the labor movement are not going to get co-opted again. Um, and when you celebrate, like rebellion in france and in britain, you're actually celebrating people who are losing um at a mass scale. Like, and when you think you can answer this with national sovereignty, which is what a lot of the left is doing right now, you're using something that in some way seems very relevant, because everybody is going towards national sovereignty right now and people think we're decoupling. On the other hand, there's no one who has a large enough internal market to completely float themselves, although if there is a place place, it's India and China, yeah, like. So I don't know where people think all this is going to go. So, okay, that's my thoughts on where we are contemporaneously.
Speaker 1:I hadn't even gotten into everything I wanted to get into but, like, the harm reduction logics failed from the kind of center, uh, radical liberals, uh, I guess calling them center radical liberals doesn't make sense, but people who would like vote centrist but do so off of, like, radical moral concerns, protection of trans people and and immigrants and whatnot. Well, I hate to tell you that, on a state level, all that got worse under Biden than it did under Trump. Like, it's something I've been monitoring, so you can't even make that argument anymore. Like, we just don't know, because the state and federal calculus changes when Republicans are in power. I don't know that it's going to get better under a Republican either. It's just it's hard to predict. Yeah, the only country.
Speaker 2:the country in that sense is less centralized than that harm reduction logic suggests. You know, it's just like we keep talking about the concentration of power in the presidency and Trump's executive orders and all that stuff, and like I think all that just ignores. I mean, firstly, like Congress being deadlocked does not mean Congress has no power, is the first thing to say.
Speaker 1:The other thing I would say is the concentration of the power in the executive. However it seems to have been, we miss how much power we put in state executives. There you go Governors, right, governors and governors' leadership over their legislatures in their home states. Yeah, like so. Yes, there's been a concentration in the executive, but even on a state level, in a very decentralized country, very decentralized country, and the centralized countries Canada, the UK are also basket cases. Yeah, so it's not like you don't have like a good model, like, oh, if we could just. You know, people used to argue me oh, if we could just make the U? S a lot more like the UK, like it and have a, you know, proportionally represented parliament or something. Are like France, maybe that things would be better.
Speaker 1:There's no evidence for that, none, and in fact what it indicates is right-wing coalitions will be even further to the right. So you know, I don't know what people think is going to happen. So, so, like, there's just all these structural things that are that are that are breaking open and I I guess maybe let's talk about the ideology of the left. This is maybe you feel comfortable talking about this. I mean, you're guy, um, uh, but uh, what do you think? Like, where is left ideology right now? I can't even tell anymore.
Speaker 1:All the talking points from even like, the opposition to trump seem to have gone up in smoke. Yeah, like I don't hear anything about police abolition anymore. I don't hear anything about, I don't even hear much. I mean, the kids in cages stuff is like the anti-war stuff in the in the aughts. It was it, it was sincere as long as it was in opposition. The moment, uh, the moment you have a democrat in power, everyone loses steam for the people who are, who are still trying to maintain that, and there are plenty of activists who are, who are left wing. You don't hear about them anymore because no one's given them any fucking money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I mean, yeah, I don't think it's. I don't think it's about sincerity. I mean it's what I was saying last time that you know the left you know this does this strange thing on the left, where there is just there's a stable base of support but no fixed organizational structure that that base of support wants to live in. Right, it's like there's that 25% or whatever the number is, but they don't all want to be in the DSA, they are not even all attracted to the same cause. You know it's going to be different things, as I mean, and uh, um, so, yeah, there's like a stable pool of money, but it doesn't go to the same thing, it just goes to different things. You know, now it goes it, now it goes to, I would imagine, palestine stuff, right, um, and what's the end game on that? I mean, you see some attempts. By the way, I've read some pamphlets and things which are like, you know, palestine, harlem, yemen, all the same struggle.
Speaker 1:You know that kind of stuff it's the same shit we saw in the late 70s and the 80s, though, and the thing is it's like, oh, it's bringing the war home, but it isn't yeah like like for one that underestimates the horror of what palestine is are human for that matter.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, there we are in another. We are in a weirdly other stage, and this one's technological, of specialized military equipment, becoming increasingly democratized, but no one really knows what to do with that. Liberals can't even develop a consistent, a consistent fucking way of discussing that, because they're also pushing fear of gun violence and stuff constantly, which in the united states, yes, the baseline murder rate in the united states is like five times what it is in europe, um, but it's also like 20 times less than what it is in an urban area in the developing world. Yeah, so it's it. It's. It's hard to, you know, to put it in perspective. For example, there are areas of LA, there are areas of Chicago, the poorest areas, the homeless areas, etc. That do have murder rates that are like that of Honduras, yeah Right, but there are like favolas inzil, with murder rates that are like triple that of honduras and I bring up honduras because it has the highest murder rate for a nation in the world or at least it did, um, that's like 68 per hundred thousand or something.
Speaker 1:Um, whereas the us murder rate is six per hundred thousand. Yeah, now there are. There are areas in the us that are almost to honduras, but they're tiny, like it's like a block, or like a neighborhood in jackson, mississippi, or a neighborhood, uh, it's a block in la, a block in chicago, a neighborhood in jackson, mississippi, yeah, etc. Etc. Etc. Um, and if you're in those areas or if, like, you're near the Tenderloin and in San Francisco, it probably does feel like there's a ton of crime, but the aggregate crime, even for LA, is like lower than the national average.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, you can. Even you have political violence. I mean, I you know, just even just anecdotally, like you know, I've had brushes with let's call them, you know, Trumpish people or right wing people, and it's unpleasant, but it's also, you know, it's like weird and stochastic, more than anything, rather than, like you know, black shirts or what have you.
Speaker 1:Right and weird and stochastic political violence has been a mainstay of marginal political communities in the united states since the 1970s. Yeah, and we kind of forget because the aughts, weirdly, was a time where we didn't have it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, even even less than the 90s, right? 90s people this is the thing you know. People talk about the 90s boom and all that you know. There's City, there's Waco, there's.
Speaker 1:Anyway, yeah, yeah. There's a ton of political violence. There's attempts everywhere. Right-wingers are almost like the 70s weathermen trying to blow shit up all the time and failing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And yes, the height of left-wing terrorism is basically the early 70s in the united states. Um, it could be kind of, because left terrorism really does not work well for left-wing goals. Like it just doesn't. Like you're not trying to stare, scare people away from progressing, you're trying to like build something new. Terrorism is a terrible way to do that. So, like, pretty quickly, people realized that like assassination strings and whatnot weren't going to work.
Speaker 1:And then the prop, the propaganda by the deed, weirdly done by Marxist-Leninist groups. That's a whole other thing, because I'm like isn't that one of the things that defines Marxist-Leninist groups historically? Don't do propaganda by the deed. But they did in the 70s Blowing shit up everywhere, but they were really bad at it. The most people they killed were themselves. Like I mean, you know, uh, you can think of like the the most, the most high profile of that's the weathermen. They blew up some of their own.
Speaker 1:Um, the panthers, uh, they did kill some cops but they also got killed a lot. Um, I mean, there's the famous cases, but there's a lot of not famous cases with panthers too, and it was hard to figure out because the panthers were willing to cooperate with former street gangs. So some of that stuff is like was that political or was it street gang related? We don't know. It's probably political, but we don't know. Yeah, um, uh, let's see. Who else do you have? You have, uh, um, you have the sibianese liberation army right, which you know we just laugh at. I guess you have, like that, that kind of the last bastion of that is like the move coalition that got bombed in the in the 80s or 70s oh, do you mean the push, the, the?
Speaker 1:jesse jackson, people, yeah, no, no, no, no, no oh, I see no, there was a, there's a, there's a. A house that was bombed in Chicago Like bombed by the state.
Speaker 2:Oh, I see, Because they were domestic terrorists.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, it was Philadelphia. It was Philadelphia, it was the Philadelphia move bombing in 85, but it was philadelphia. It was philadelphia, um, it was the philadelphia, it was the move, it was the philadelphia move bombing in 85. But it was basically one of those last like quasi-maoist new left groups and uh uh, the police called the bombs on them, then they got airdropped, um, so that was 85, so, but so that's late, um, so I mean I just I I bring all that stuff up because it just seems to me like there was all this liberal talk of, I mean, I people forget it.
Speaker 1:But I guess jeff char, jeff Charlotte's the only person doing it now, although Jeff Charlotte's admittedly the least stupid argument for it, even though I still don't buy his argument, because his argument is basically what do you do if you have one rogue commander in the military who's a Trumpist and there's a contested election Right, like then you really could have something like a very small scale civil war. I admit that that's a possibility. It doesn't seem to be. It's not on my honestly. The military queuing A president seems actually higher on my possibility than that.
Speaker 2:But that is a possibility, I mean if you, if you, if you talk to the Trump, is they think it's already happened? Right, because Milley didn't didn't play ball.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, right, um, well, I mean millie also. Millie did not say this, but millie has also, you know, millie all but told trump no several times in the in his last year, and millie has also indicated that they would have done what was necessary to restore democracy if january 6th had actually been serious, which to me sounds like we were willing to to uh, like court-martial and arrest um a sitting president who we did not see as constitutionally valid, which would have been viewed as a coup. Yeah, um, uh. But that to me seems like, yeah, you're right, the right wingers say that, because I think I don't think the right wingers instincts are wrong.
Speaker 1:We also must remember that while the united states military has the lowest approval rating it's had since we kept up with approval ratings, um, it's still the only institution in the united states at all that has an above 50 approval rate. So like they would probably get away with shit if they wanted to. Yeah, that's been my, that's been my response to all the liberal like civil war talk. But they've all dropped that too, and what's interesting is they're not reviving it in this election, even though they know that set was something like 70 of republicans now believe that the election was stolen. Yeah, which, for all that I was saying that like oh the you know, there was the left conspiratorial world and the arts there was, like I said, was up talking about how Bush stole the election in 2024 and was making claims about diebolt election machines. Right.
Speaker 2:Bush and Al Qaeda. You know there's that book house of Saud house of Bush.
Speaker 1:You know there's that book House of Saud House of Bush, you know yeah yeah, yeah. But that never became a 70% narrative for Democrats.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it also wasn't part of the Democrats like you know, democrats' legislative agenda in 2006. You know they didn't anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, they didn't. They weren't really that interested in holding Bush accountable for crimes that he actually did, much less for crimes he didn't do, and during the Trump administration, Bush's image was basically laundered by liberals. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Even I still find that to be morally grotesque. Sure, um, as someone used to tell me that. Like well, but what about you? Know you would? You used to be able to say that bush killed more people, but what about covid? Then I was like well, if I count covid deaths by the president that was overseeing them, by Biden? Yeah, anyway, biden actually looks the worst. Yeah, so I don't know if you want to go there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean no, yeah, no, it's a longer conversation, but it's the thing is, it's as with a bunch of the stuff we're talking about, like we're seeing kind of some objective markers of crisis. You know we're seeing some lights flash really brightly, but also there's no appetite to do anything about it. I say this is the same thing as with China. It's like, you know, there's more hostility, people are less and less satisfied. You know the state is less and less legitimate, but objectively there is no appetite.
Speaker 1:People vote with their feet for the status quo yeah, and I think we need to also ask ourselves a couple of questions, like stuff is bad in the united states in the way that was bad in the 70s. Yeah, even people as smart as uh as freddie deborah have been defending biden on his economic crisis because our GDP growth rates have been good, but I've been like dude, have you seen what the average household spending looks like right now? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, and then people are like oh well, it's just partisan, it's partisanship, that's explaining the difference. Partisan, it's partisanship. That's explaining the difference. And I was like only 17 of anybody say that their life improved from from policies by biden, and that includes democrats in that poll. So no, it is not just partisan, it is very I mean the the.
Speaker 1:The Republicans have a point here when they go after the Democrats Under the last three Democratic presidencies. Now we can caveat that, but they all began with Democratic Congresses. Wealth and equity got worse under the Democratic president than under the Republican one. Equity got worse under the democratic president than under the republican one. That's true in clinton's administration and obama's administration, and now in biden's it is true, yeah, which is also why the argument that that people try to resurrect, although unsuccessfully, that these are just people voting against their interest, doesn't work, and it also doesn't work now that the people doing it are not just white. People are a lot less to say this about, like black men not identifying with the democratic party anymore. We'll see, though. We'll see if that stays or if you start, if, if, if that trend expands. I don't know what you think about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know, I mean I think. I just think you know it's all the racial stuff. You always have to cut it by age, although you're pointing out the age thing is getting more complicated. You have to cut it by urban-rural and you have to cut it by education, right, it's never just race on its own.
Speaker 1:Well, the biggest predictor right now of voting Democrat is making what? Over $250,000 a year, and or being, or making under $80,000 a year, yeah, and or being, uh, um, educated, and it seems like the under 80 crowd, the democrats are beginning to lose. Now there's been some talk I mean, I see jackman and all this like, oh, the democrats are losing the working class.
Speaker 1:here's the thing I've heard, that is the working anyway, right, yeah, like who are they defining as a working class? But also like the democrats have been losing the working class somewhere. For what? All the time that we've been alive, I've heard that narrative over and over again yeah it does seem interesting to me that that, like for the majority of my lifetime, I heard that it was educated people who were Democrats, but apparently that wasn't true, and now it actually is true. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know this all goes and I feel less and less capable of predicting where, like a electoral politicist is going to go. The other interesting thing that I saw is, even though joe biden is not popular amongst democrats at all, uh, 69 of democrats think that he will win the next election. And trump is not popular with the general population at all, although his, his, uh, his positive indicators with the under 30 crowd have gone up by five points. But that's like. That's like him winning like 25 of the youth vote as opposed to 20.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly like it's.
Speaker 2:It's yeah, and that's also true with the black vote too like it's like his, even his growth, his growth in the black vote's been massive, but it's coming up from like republicans basically not having um uh, yeah so yeah and I just tend to think, I mean, there's most of the know, most of the partisan ship is negative and so it doesn't, in that sense, really, you know, really matter what what Trump will do in that, you know it's like I don't think I mean it's not so much that people will turn out for like lesser evilism. I think what they'll do instead is that you know it's they just hate that there hate. There's a lot of people who just, you know, who hate Trump and who just hated the noise, who just hate all of the tumult. You know, and they'll turn out for that. I don't really think that there'll be much of a pro-Trump vote or a pro-Biden vote.
Speaker 1:I think it's just anti-coalitions. One of the things I would actually my thing is the reason why I put the bet slightly on Trump in the next election, but only slightly, I don't feel comfortable. And the next election, but only slightly. I don't feel comfortable making this, you know, calling this next election like if I weigh the pros and cons of the past of how you normally adjudicate who wins an election, I got nothing right. Nor and I'm gonna say this, nor do I know either which victory would be good for the left yeah, yeah, or good for calm. I have no idea. Yeah, like, cause I don't think we would have another round of popular frontism with democratic socialist characteristics, like we saw in the arts, just like we didn't see that in the nineties. Yeah, like it's not going to come immediately back. I don't think so. Like some people say well, the DSA is going to want Trump to win because that's when they grew. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I don't know that it'll work a second time. It didn't work a second time for the original DSA with Reagan.
Speaker 2:I just don't know. I think what happens is, but also I think I mean I don't. I don't want to say the growth of the DSA was nothing, you know, but like I do think a lot of it is just like a labeling of, like this is too strong, but I'll say it and you see what you think A lot of. There is not that much difference between a kind of the a radical fringe of the Dean and Obama campaigns and a bunch of the a radical fringe of the dean and obama campaigns and a bunch of people who then from there went into the dsa right.
Speaker 1:My my reading of it was the follows amog uh was that we didn't make socialism clearer. We made it more popular by accepting that progressivism, as existed in the aughts and 90s, was socialism. Yeah, if we added some kind of workerist populism back to it and like. This is one thing I noticed that ho chile didn't talk about ho chile uh ahmuts uh with eggshell article, which is his review of the the millennial left postmortems. He didn't really pick up on the fact that the resistance went from being a marginal left position to the dominant position of the democratic party as a, as an orientation, during the social democratic period, not during the anarchist period yeah the recuperation of radical language for centrist policy wonks, as we talked about last time, was real and it was mutual and it was a long, duray thing.
Speaker 1:that manifested really fast, I think, with the rise of social media because all this stuff that had kind of been carteled and elite subgroups was no longer cartel than elite subgroups, which also hurts these people who think this is all just a PMC thing. I have 16-year-olds talking to me about systemic racism. That did not happen in the 90s. I mean very rarely, not in a middle-class school in Utah. That would not have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but also you know the limits of right, what. What do they think we need to do about that politic? I mean, anyway, you, you know what, you know what to ask there, yeah, yeah no, no, I'm just.
Speaker 1:my thing is that rhetoric has it has infiltrated society right, so much so that I don't even think young people see it as political anymore.
Speaker 1:Hmm, like, if you ask 19 to 20 to 29 year olds, they are more likely to know of tick tock Controversies in they are of what's going on in Gaza, even though support of the Gazans is relatively popular, but like the actual following of what's happening there has dropped off precipitously in the last months. Yeah, which we'd expect. Frankly. Like how, how many like major humanitarian crises have you heard about that people know about? For like it for like six months and then like, yeah, like the people who care are the leftists or the activists or the college educated continue following it, but like the general public does not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, I mean the thing. The thing here, derek, is that we just live in a fucking undialectical world. You, you know that's the problem with all this. The world just doesn't seem to want to follow the dialectic. Consciousness and being have no relationship to each other, not even a dialectical one. You know, ideology is going all over the place and being is just, you know, sort of stochastically stable People's material existence. You know it's not completely stable, but you know there's this like baseline stagnation, right, and all the while, you know, people think government's illegitimate, you know, and then big powers are making threats against each other globally and all kinds of weird noises are happening in the culture about, you know, radical politics and cleanse, ethnic cleansing and genocide. You know, it's fucking undialectical, you know, I don't like it.
Speaker 2:I don't like it, derek you know, um, it's you know anyway is this your post for?
Speaker 1:uh, frankfurt school talk coming out um it's? It is interesting to me that the frankfurt school response to this was basically to declare that the entire world was fascist yeah, I don't think I quite said that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is, this is.
Speaker 1:I think this is the useful thing about you know and then and then, when that got too bleak, they just kind of became like what? Like discourse liberals like um, which in that way they actually mirrored the, you know, the french post-marxist, just they were slightly less flamboyant about it, um, and we've seen the, we've seen this anti-critical theory thing emerge even amongst you know, like we've seen the return of of stalinist larping in a way that was not popular when I was a kid, like you didn't see it, um, and you see it even amongst occasionally respectable people like that's, you know, and that shows up. I mean, it shows up even when we were talking about how these sectarian groups have money.
Speaker 1:Like it actually takes some marginalized but well-off, like you know generational wealth to do that, but how much effect can they have? I don't know. You know generational wealth to do that, Um, but how much effect can they have?
Speaker 2:I don't know, Um, I mean, this is the annoying thing.
Speaker 1:Some not not as much as they want but more than I would want to deal with. Exactly. Like, um, not because I, like I honestly sometimes like, if they had a political, like political effect in a material sense, I might not hate them as much, but since they don't, I just find them to be annoying and alienating yeah um, uh so, and they also don't.
Speaker 1:Like there's a freezing of analysis in a lot of these places. Like you know, you pick when you freeze it, but you freeze it Like. I mean, in some ways, like the democratic socialists are the most pathetic because they both know that they live in neoliberalism conditions but they want to pretend they can build a Fordist coalition. And if you just get rid of that dastardly PMC, they'd be able to do so. And then you realize like but motherfucker, you are the PMC A and B. Like how are you going to build a politics off of the what like 10%, non-managers, non-logistics and industrial production? Yeah, there's literally more evangelicals in the country than that right even now.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just you know I mean, this is my big disagreement with the, with the banga banga people, like I totally agree with them. You know, politics in the 20th century sense, or whatever their idealization of the 20th century, I think they idealize it a bit, but like that's not coming back, no one can do it, and one of, and that's the reason, you know, everything's in stasis. We don't have big wars, big conflicts, you know, of the sort we've been talking about, because no one has the money, no one. You know you can't mobilize a constituency. I'm with them, right, mass politics is dead in that sense. But the difference is they think that it's. You know, there's some outside. There's some outside to contemporary politics, like I mean they were. I don't think they quite call it the social. I don't know if they go, like our old friend Joe Scortino and all these fellas, but yeah, I don't think there is an outside.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, the Australian school of anti-politics is represented by our old friend Joe Sorrentino and a bunch of people whose names no one's heard of in a long time, because they really just joined society and more power to them for doing that, um, uh, but uh they, they always. I always was very frustrated with them because they always both found the social, but the social was always weirdly right wing populism, and they were right. That right wing populism was out franking the left in a anti in a counter-systemic, anti-political mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but they were wrong, that that was actually an anti-politics, that what we, what they call anti-politics, is just negative politics. It's not actually an anti-political move. The anti-political time was actually the 1990s, yeah, and and that's a very different analysis, I think, than what they end up doing- and they didn't succeed.
Speaker 2:This right-wing populist coalition, I mean arguably they they even at the time they weren't as powerful as the anti-politics people made it seem. And also, even at the time they weren't as powerful as the anti-politics people made it seem. And also you know all these political victories we're talking about the dsa, you know the right-wing populists. I don't quite want to say they're just sort of shuffling deck chairs around coalitions, but a large part of it just is that, yeah, it's like changes in the composition, ideological and material of large coalitions.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and like the most radical elements of the Trump administration were sidelined. Yes, they're back today, but like. The irony is like the paleo conservatives had to deal with the fact they were in coalition with, with, with their primary enemies. Like, like, because for paleo conservatives, you got to remember they even at one point would rather vote for barack obama than a northern neocon yeah like so, and that only shifted in 2012. Yeah, so I mean, I think that there's a fundamental like one.
Speaker 2:The left does not even try to really understand the right. Two, yeah, listen to Know your Enemy. You know, yeah, the most misnamed show in history.
Speaker 1:Why do you say that Amogh?
Speaker 2:Well, because it's not about knowing the right. It's about endlessly telling us how horrible these conservative and paleoconservative figures are, and you don't leave with any material understanding.
Speaker 1:Anyway, they basically any conservative figures up, figures up, and you don't leave with any material understanding anyway. Well, yeah, I mean, they basically have, they basically see them as ideological blocks and they don't really try to understand them on their own terms either. Yeah, um, which, when you try to people come out, I will say, I mean, I'll admit, like people get mad at me when I try to like, like, say that you like, for example, when I say that, like you, like, you can't call Alexander Dugan a fascist. He's a post fascist, he comes out of fascism, he has fascist esque assumptions. But calling him a fascist is like calling Baudrillard a Marxist. It's, technically speaking, not true, and it's not true for some key reasons, and everybody gets mad at me for saying that. But I'm like you can't understand what his people think if you don't understand how they justify their position to themselves. Yeah, um, you might not think that's important, but then you also often don't understand their coalitions either. So it's.
Speaker 2:I mean, by the way, if you don't think that's important, you might want to revisit all of this stuff you want to say about being dialectical and wanting to do imminent critique and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:You know which people you can't have both people you know, somebody asked me recently, you know I uh for patrons only um, I replayed, uh, our um, and I had not replayed the end of the systematic redness um thing, which was like I think we said it was five episodes. I can only actually find four of them and so, like um, there may be a fifth episode somewhere. I can't find it, but my point about that is the following I said the irony of five years ago in 2018, early 19, when we were wrapping the first round of that up, was that we had a bunch of dialectical thinkers but no historical thinkers. Now, I think the irony is that we have a bunch of people who think they're historical thinkers, who are also not historical thinkers, nor are they dialectical thinkers, but they throw around the language of both. What I was going to ask you is do you think that's important?
Speaker 2:I don't know, I think, why do people throw around dialectical language?
Speaker 1:I mean, I think one reason is, you know, no one understands it and it's an easy way to win debates, exactly you know, no one understands it and it's an easy way to win debates exactly.
Speaker 2:But also, but also, you know, dialectics promises you a lot. You know it's like we're going to give you political strategy, we're going to give you social theory, we're going to give you philosophy all in one fell swoop, you know, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna actually collapse the is-ought distinction exactly.
Speaker 1:um, and we're gonna make, we're gonna to actually collapse the is-ought distinction Exactly and we're going to argue that you can objectively know scientifically where society is going to go. But we're not going to do it through positivism, because that's all bourgeois and shit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly Exactly, and you know you want. So I guess, why do people use dialectical historical language? They use dialectical language but the world isn't dialectical. Um, I'm just going to say that as a thing. I think that is what, what we have been describing, right, that the contradictions, you know, move around, they don't sublate themselves. You know, that's just if you listen back to the past hour and a half, that is what has been, that's what we've been talking, talking through again and again and again. So world isn't dialectical. What do you do about that? You can, you know, often you just give up analysis, right, like a lot of people. Just, you know they, they talk dialectical and then they do punditry where punditry just isn't analysis, right, look at you, brianna Joy Gray, and you know, or you, yeah, I mean you say people are historical thinkers. Say more about what you mean there, because I just don't see any historical analysis.
Speaker 1:Well, when I said that, I said I think they think they're historical thinkers, so everyone's looking at the history, but they're looking at the history in a 20-year block, whereas I'm like, no, you need to look at the history back like five fucking thousand years, right? The other problem that you have is historical thinking itself has, by and large, rejected systemizations and narrativizations. Um, like someone doing something like Cleo dynamics or or dialectical materialism or something like that is going to our, our historical materialism is going to be, uh, kind of laughed at the room.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, not because people are idealists, necessarily, but just because they're very theory light. Like you have fear quotes, unquote theories. You have people like touchingurchin, right, but Turchin does not give you a theory, he gives you a bunch of data series.
Speaker 1:Right, and he does have kind of a theory. His theory is generational cycles plus Malthus after the Industrial Revolution. No, malthus, that's it. That really is like like his entire explanation, like one generation over produces or leads. I mean turchin's basically joseph tainter for for smart, dumb people, um. But the other thing is like he predicts collapse all the time, but he's often redefining what collapse is, because his trauma is Russia of the 1990s, right, and that's what he's basing most of his theories on. But what he calls collapses historically don't all look like that at all. And he also doesn't have a theory of the inter interplay between nations.
Speaker 1:He's entirely nationally bound, like and that's true in almost every one of his books, right? So I've read like five of them now, and so you start seeing problems once you uh, I've read, you know, ages of discord. I've read his new book about the. You know the beginning of the end. I've read all that. You have someone like peter zion who can think systemically but doesn't add his systems together like he has. He doesn't try to see how the systems interrelate. So, for example, he thinks about population rates and production, but like he thinks that china's fucked because his population is just going to drop precipitously. Yeah, like that's also why he doesn't actually pursue a militarily aggressive stance on china, even though he basically agrees with john morsheimer about the threat. He's basically like, well, we don't need to, because they're just gonna die of old age and uh, then they're gonna have a bunch of problems and we don't have to worry about it.
Speaker 2:That's, that's his basic analysis like yeah, but that's, that's too biological reductionist for me. You know it's maybe, maybe that's right. I don't think the problem anyway go ahead, finish.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, I don't. I mean one like, like, uh, it's biological reductionist in a weird way. I mean, because it basically you, you would basically assume like, well then, why would any? Why would lower population societies ever have gotten to the productivity to lead to the populations that we have? Right, like, and I do think marxists have a problem themselves, and I haven't talked a lot about it, but when Marx defines materialism, they're inconsistent about whether or not they just mean economics, or whether or not they mean economics, geography, geopolitics, etc.
Speaker 1:And also, marx is very inconsistent on whether or not he thinks, and it shows up in engels in some big ways yeah, um, that, uh, like, for example, he talks about the end of political authority, but there'll be no end of, like, economic authority and his own authority. And people tell me don't over generalize from that, it's a bad paper. Blah, blah, blah. I get that, but like, it is an example of what, of what engels thought and marx didn't correct him on it. Um, yeah, my, my point here is pretty is, uh, is is the following um one for all their understanding of dialectics, marx and engels thought production and politics could be centralized infinitely without, without regress, even though their own theories and capital volume three, which they spell out, indicates the opposite.
Speaker 1:So when people are always like, well, marx predicted this and Marx didn't predict this, I'm like Marx predicted this and then he ignored his prediction later on, like he's not consistent, um, which you know people are okay with, but then they want to make the inconsistency consistent althusser style and you really can't like, uh, and you know we wouldn't expect a, a sociologist today, like I don't go and read eric ow, eric Owen Wright's entire corpus to find where he contradicted himself, because I know his thought changed in the course of his life. I talked to him about it. Yeah, so did you before he died.
Speaker 2:Let's not refer back to that again.
Speaker 1:The infamous loss episode, by the way, guys, I wish we published it, but I also at the time said the interview was a mess.
Speaker 2:It was yeah it was yeah yeah, I mean because, yeah, go ahead. No, I was just gonna say I mean the thing about just to move on, move back, say a thing about the marks again, like in a strange way, our discussion is vindicating, uh, at least one element of marxism, which is that you, you know, marxism, I think, has a dead-on, accurate theory of revolutions, wars and social upheaval that you only get them when you have strong class conflict, class mobilization and class power. We don't have those, we don't have, you know, we don't have any class strong enough to rule, rule well, we don't have any class strong enough to any class strong enough to revolt, and we don't have any class strong enough to be, you know, and as a result, we don't have economic growth strong enough for, you know, know, countries to finance long wars, countries to finance occupations are to extract themselves from quick wars, which is also becoming a problem, because these wars are getting longer and longer, but they're not really going anywhere.
Speaker 2:Well, exactly no one and no one wins because no one has the ability to win. Because you know, this is the thing. You get all that from class struggle and development that class struggle brings about, and on all that, marxism is passing with flying colors.
Speaker 1:I would argue, it's just that, well the thing is, though, according to Marxism, we're never supposed to be in a situation where there's not enough class conflict for that to happen, or at least that seems to be the a in a situation where there's not enough class conflict for that to happen or at least it's yeah, that seems to be the initial assumption.
Speaker 1:I'd actually say I don't know that marks actually spells that out that clearly. But like, yeah, the assumption is, you know, there is no history without class conflict. Well, the assumption is there's always history. Exactly, and one of one of my things against the alf bungaunga people has been like you guys keep on saying history restarted and I'm not seeing it. No, it didn't, I just I'm straight.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I used to be skeptical and now I'm just, I just reject the view, you know, I just think it's history. This is, this is the reason it's so important to push back against, like you know, the idea, the sort of ideology both of democratic socialism and right populism. Right, that like this is this is their argument for why history restarted. Right, history restarted because Bernie and history restarted because Trump.
Speaker 1:And history started returns of basically political, executive branch, political epiphenomenons Exactly, which is like, like that's. That's a weird view of what history is like.
Speaker 1:yeah, and you know these are, these are people who are all about class struggle and, you know, not just looking at the political and all this kind of stuff except the one thing that you can say is we went from like in the, a kind of vulgar either collapses our developmentalist economism although that's kind of coming back, ironically, um uh, into like this idea of like political first marxism. And I don't think you just get that from the social democrats of the left populace, I also think you get it from the neokowskians. I think, weirdly, you get it from the communizers even right um you have to get political first mark.
Speaker 2:I mean, I remember you saying a while back like people on the left switch wildly between politic, like politicalism and economism. You know, um, this is, either you have doug lane's value theory right or you have. You know, I mean this is from a few years back. Obviously we have to.
Speaker 1:Now Doug Lane himself has actually switched in this way.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm so glad you talked about developmentalism. If I was, you know, if I wanted to write a piece for American Affairs or something, I'd probably call it, like you know, developmentalism without development. Right, because that's I think that's what we have. Right? You have ruling. You have ruling elites in developing countries and to some extent even in the US, right About, you know, trying to do developmentalism, but there isn't the kind of growth, massive growth, increase, growth potential characteristic of 20th century development, 20th century economic development. Instead, you have basically all this neo-Mercantilist shit about semiconductors and so on, right, which is like people have developmental aspirations but the growth isn't going to come.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean people misunderstood when I said uh, when I was critiquing brenner's thesis on bidenism, which I was, like brenner's way, way too soft on bryden and misses the fundamental continuity between but and he comments, him, and I should say him and Dillian Riley comment on the fundamental continuity and then like immediately like yeah, like drop it and say it's not real, even though they just admitted it. I couldn't figure out if that was like because Dylan Riley and Brenner don't actually agree or if they're just being incoherent.
Speaker 2:Well, they think so. So with that, I think what's going on is they're really invested in pushing back against bidenism and I think they sort of want to exaggerate the kind of imperialist and like you know this. Just they want to exaggerate bidenism as like a big like, as a really bad ruling class ideology.
Speaker 1:Right, do they? I thought they went it read to me like they wanted to have it both ways, like like I guess yeah go ahead.
Speaker 1:When I was reading it it read to me like they wanted, like they wanted to bitch about bidenism but also saying like it was a real progressivism against the incoherence of trumpism. I actually agree with them about the ideological incoherence of trumpism. Yeah, that's actually weirdly. Its fucking power is that it's so incoherent that anyone can project anything they fucking want on it, like it's not even fascism, it's just old-fashioned demagoguery. Motherfuckers, like, like, like.
Speaker 1:I literally take tiktok ban all Literally take TikTok bad. We have the vote to censor TikTok. That may end up on a ban, probably won't. It's a bad idea. As much as I hate TikTok, I think it's a threat to society. I actually don't think we should ban it. Blah, blah, blah. Nonetheless which is funny because it might actually abdicate gen zers to do something um, but um, nonetheless, it's not like.
Speaker 1:The tiktok ban is is interesting for me because trump trump comes out and critiques it. Right, trump also tried to do it like and people have already forgotten that but like during, during the beginning of the covid shit, he tried to like, you know, he tried to do what biden's now doing with tiktok, um, and now he's he's, you know he's opposing it because trump is a savvy, reptile brain, lizard man. I mean, like there's a how would I put it in the most insulting way possible A barbarian's cunning in that man Right, in that man right, um, which I actually do think comes out of his particularly weird, like quasi nouveau reese, bizarre con man sector, the economy, which is high-end real estate, like um, you have to be kind of lizard brain to succeed at that, yeah, and then his other success is being a media figure, which was what our anti-political friends picked up on, was the like, the dominance of the media. But I was also like, why are you taking the media as a social? Why? That's a weird Like you know, like you won't, you know. So it's an anti-skilled elite. So you know, like you won't you know, so it's an anti-skilled elite. So you know, I guess this is a pro unskilled elite. I don't know.
Speaker 1:The thing is, the anti-political people either have kind of joined common life or they just became conservatives. So like, where do we see a lot of this going? I was going to ask you, maybe and maybe this will also be the our next session, cause I'm going to have you back on in about another month when do you think this? And who knows by the time, like I'm, I'm recording this a day after I released the last conversation we had six weeks ago. So, for people who want to like figure out the record, to release date uh, timeline uh, which means also, if you're hearing this on the podcast, it's like we recorded this like four months ago. It's been on YouTube for four to six weeks and it's now coming out for you Podcast, uh, free podcast people.
Speaker 1:Um, there's a long delay um but nonetheless, uh, I was gonna ask you, though, where do you see this going? Because you know, uh, I know spencer, leonard and the platypus people think we've just, you know, gotten to the same regression point with the millennial left. The new left ended on it. I think it's pretty much gonna stop there. But I'm like, but we haven't talked about where those people ended up. They didn't just die or go away. They were a major political force during the late 80s and 90s right yeah, they became part of the liberal coalition yeah or they became conservatives or they became like the other thing.
Speaker 1:We forget that, like, the 80s and 90s were particularly depolitical period, like, like, when people talk about anti-politics, I'm like anti-politics was pretty big in the 80s and 90s, although maybe it was a different kind of anti-politics and what the anti-politicals like it was the anti-politics of things not being terrible. So you know whereas now things are just, things are kind of Remember we used to talk about this. Historically, the best time for rebellions is when you have wealth and then a small tick down, like you've had a good period and a small downtick period. You've never had it in an immiserated period and I also don't think you've had it in a long decline period.
Speaker 1:Long decline periods are weird. Like there's a long decline period in france, for example, starting in 1970s, where and they're weird in the sense that, like people feel apocalyptic about them but they don't deliver on the apocalypse either. So so you just have like a propel, a propelling bad vibe. But where do you see all this going? Cause I think, like I've been trying to figure it out myself and I have no idea Like, like identitarian politics seems to have run out of steam. Like elite identitarian, like people who are worried like yes, it still exists in universities and shit, I'm sure you can talk about it. Sure, yes, every university does its ritual land acknowledgement now, but I don't see it going anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you know what? I'm going to give you an objective reason to think why I can't predict anything, because I mean, as I said, there is just. You know, we know there won't. I mean, I'm going to make some pretty big predictions. I know there won't be 20th century style wars. There might be massive conflict. It'll look different, it'll be more stalemate-y and more stochastic, and I know there won't be 20th century style revolutions, or even, you know, let's see, even sort of post. You know, if we want to draw a big post-French revolution arc, that's gone. I don't think we're going to see that again. Um, there might be social upheaval. That's different, you know, which is more chaotic, um, um.
Speaker 1:But I mean the they're going to be no more 19th century revolutions was a stance taken in the 1950s and 60s by new leftists too.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, I think, and I think that position still still holds. I'm not, you know, the daniel, the daniel bell.
Speaker 1:End of ideology the dan, yeah, the daniel bell slash, uh slash, chris furlash's revolution obsolete.
Speaker 2:If there is a revolution, it's not going to look like the 19th century exactly, I think I think dead on and uh doesn't mean the liberal center gets to have it its own way. I mean, the problem with that conclusion was always that, like revolution is over and that means like there is an administrative class that can make everything okay, and you know that's not right right, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1:Well, that's, that's what the I mean. People kind of forget where the Sidney Hook and the Hockstetter and the who's the guy in the Kennedy administration. Schlesinger.
Speaker 1:Schlesinger, all those guys started. And Niebuhr, reinhold Niebuhr they all started as Marxists and people forget that. They all started as marxist and people forget that, like they all started as marxist. Now you had, the betrayers were the pragmatists, which is why, when everyone talks pragmatism, I'm always like you're gonna, you're gonna betray us. That's what pragmatists do. Pragmatists just betray, that's all they're good. But when it comes to the, I mean it's interesting because you see these paroxysms of moralism that still kind of happen. The end of the odds in the anti, in the, in the, the new, the, the anti-war coalition, except it, except frankly, even though public opinion is in the palestinians favor for the first time, like in general, um, people who care care about it, they really care, but most people don't. Yeah, I mean like because honestly and I and I don't know, I don't know how to say this like for most people they're kind of like what can we do about it?
Speaker 1:that's not even our country there you go I mean like and yes, actually we could do something about it if you could get a uS president to stop funding it. But even then, like I've told people, I do think that, yes, biden could call Netanyahu and end it, but I don't, but I'm not 100 percent certain on that, right yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean there's stuff like this, that there are just independent things in the Middle East. You know which are which of the. I mean not out of the control of US. This is semi-independent of US presidents. You know like. You know, the Israelis have a domestic economy.
Speaker 1:You know which is which is taking a kicking right now from their war sands. Yes, yes at kicking right now from their war sands. Yes, yes, like um, even though, as I've said to other people, like, okay, let's say the palestinians win, and you know I definitely want to cease fire, absolutely. But let's say the palestinians win and they got. You know they got there from what is it? Not from the ocean to the sea, but river to the sea. They got that right. And then they have to incorporate all the surviving Masrahi Jews that they can't send anywhere into their polity to build a technological infrastructure without the investment of Europe or the United States, the way it was in the middle of the 20th century. And then they're also a nation that, frankly, is in an area that, as an independent country, has been an imperial, been a war target for fucking 5 000 years, because it's useful for troop movement but doesn't really like it's other.
Speaker 2:It's it's, uh like, local economy is basically fishing and olive farming yeah I mean like this is where we come back to this thing about american empire. Right, yes, the, yes, the Americans play a role, but American empire people, countries calling on the US for, you know, depending on the US in order to survive, and, you know, israel to reproduce a military machine. That is a symptom of a pre-existing and deep conflict in the region, right, um, which won't go away if the americans go away. Right, this is what with what's so weird about this, you know, left-wing isolationist foreign policy thing. It's like, yes, the us does all this stuff and it messes all these things up, but like the idea that, you know, you just leave, right, and then suddenly all of the oppressions become anyway.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, it's never been realistic. I used to have Deep State Kubla and I used to talk about this like even the most pragmatic democratic socialist when it comes to world policy all of a sudden pretends that global revolution is just going to make every problem go away, as if global revolution was even on hand. Like anti-imperialism is important. But anti-imperialism like to put it to you in another way if you think that we can't just automatically shift from a state society to a non-state society and that's why you're a communist and not an anarchist, even though you do think state it's a class society blah, blah, blah blah yeah yeah, do you think you can move to a purely non-imperial society?
Speaker 1:because let me be clear with you, multi-polarity is still an imperial society. It's. It's it just got multiple empires. Yeah, like, and it's potentially a bloodier one. It may not be, it depends on how it's set up. There's all, like you know, multiple empires, my friends, is actually the historical norm. So, but it actually does seem weird to me that people like there's a lot of leftists like, oh well, that's gonna fighting the us empire is gonna just make the left more more immediately. I mean people I respect people who come on my show all the time now believe this. And I and I'm like, yes, no, no, self-respecting leftists should support nato. All right, yeah, but the idea that, um, that we think there's gonna be any good guys in a multipolar world, just seems to me to be naive. Like it just it's like, dude, do you like? When the Habsburgs were fighting the British, was the world better?
Speaker 2:like, yeah, I mean, it's not just. The thing is. It's not about, you know, it's not just about, like, recognizing the chinese and so on, the bad guys. It's about recognizing, kind of always the weird, weird cooperative kind of disorganized thing. Us hegemony was right, right it, and it's just you. All of this talk about us empire. Like, I don't want to. I'm not a neocon, I definitely don't want to whitewash, whitewash this. It just kind of just overstates how centrally controlled this was and just gives the us way too much credit for things that domestic elites were responsible for. You know, domestic elites I mean in other countries, like in italy, or yeah, exactly yeah um, no, we were basic.
Speaker 1:we were basically the bumbling idiot hegemon, which also, frankly, historically, is what most hegemons are. I'm again, I'm going to agree with david graber Usually the hegemon is stupid. Sure, like they don't start that way. But even Kandun is right, like you. You build it. I hate to say it. Frank Herbert was right, cause Dune is basically just even Kandun in space. But you know, like there is a sense in which that kind of power makes you stupid. And so, yes, for example, when people talk about dumb Americans, americans are not innately dumber biologically than any other group. Sure.
Speaker 1:Right. Why are they dumb Americans? Because we're hegemons and we're not as dumb about the world as we used to be. We actually aren't. This is one of the things I talk about, one of the weird ironies of kids today. Kids today do not know as much international politics as I would like them to know, but the fact that they know any at all compared to me, barely knowing how the British system worked when I was 16 in the 1990s tells you that we are in a less hegemonic position. So we have to care about these other countries in a way we did not in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
Speaker 2:We just didn't right and even I mean arguably, by the way even in the cold war, some were the people who had skin in the game. You know elites like that, yeah, I mean I don't I'm throwing that word around but like you know the people in the know, they did talk geopolitics and they did know, know, they didn't know what was going on. You know, um, you go to, you know my roommate, um is uh, is you know an ex? Uh, you might actually know who this is, by the way, is one of the old leading lights of the new communist movement. Um, this uh guy called Dennis O'Neill.
Speaker 1:Um, yeah, so, dennis. So I'm, I live with Dennis O'Neill, yeah, so.
Speaker 2:Dennis, I live with Dennis O'Neill, you know, and he was telling me about how he was educated in this private school, hotchkiss in Connecticut, and you know they were learning about Vietnam back in 63. You know. So the people in the know, they were learning about Vietnam back in 63. So the people in the know do know about foreign policy. The people are just getting the?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean also. I also point out, to this day when people are like, oh, all this non-mainstream media, and I'm like, unless you're talking about Alex Jones, you know, uh, the mates are, are, are nepo babies for with an elite education, like I'm not saying they're not doing good reporting, because you know, but I'm just saying, like, the idea that the son of uh, of a blumenthal uh, is somehow not from um, um, an elite family, is a laughable proposition and um, you know, I'm not here to get into speculating about, you know, the gray zone. Are the multipolaristas funding? Because I truly don't know, but I can tell you that their funding changed when alternate ran out, when we're growing alterman, and alternate ran out of money because, you know, graystone started as an alternate, like aughts liberal, aughts liberal thing, uh, in opposition to the war, um, and when a lot of that shifted, uh, after Libya, I think for both, for for geopolitical reasons, probably for funding reasons, although again I'm going to say I don't know that uh, you saw Blumenthal and Mate's politics change.
Speaker 1:I mean so much that, like, ben Norton actually like erased a lot of what he wrote for fair about the Assad regime, like that's a fact, so it's, you know. Do we know if it was sincere or not? I suspect you know that was sincere in some way. It's you know it is you know if you're going to be involved in any kind of agitprop for or against the regime, whether or not what you're saying is true, it helps to believe it. So to think that these people are entirely cynical even if it was cynical, is to actually just not understand people very well. And again, I would even say you know, these people occasionally drop good news too. I mean, like, particularly on stuff like Israel-Palestine. But the issue at hand is like you can't build a domestic politics out of purely foreign policy. Yeah, you can't build a domestic politics out of purely foreign policy. Yeah, you can't. No one's ever done it Like, particularly if the foreign policy is really really foreign, it's just not a viable proposition.
Speaker 2:I mean they don't even really have a foreign policy. You know that's exaggerating it. What they have is, you know, a documentary of the crimes of American allies. I guess, yeah, sure.
Speaker 1:Which they're apparently like correct, sure and like. People misunderstand me too. I've been accused of being an anti-anti-imperialist because I'm like no. Me too I've been accused of being an anti-anti-imperialist because I'm like no, I'm like. Anyone who supports NATO like is basically supporting a ghoulish organization, like a world villain in history. But I'm like you. I think other shit would fill it just as villainously. It would be a little different. Maybe it's a little bit more humane, Maybe it's not, I don't fucking know, but it would be a little different. Maybe it's a little bit more humane, maybe it's not, I don't fucking know. But it would not be in the favor of the proletariat, that's for fucking sure. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I mean you know I hate to point this out that you know there are oppressed peoples around the world. They are not communists. You know so. You know so. You know Gaza, but the way Gaza and West Bank is not a group of you know. Jacobin reading. I mean not that Jacobin is particularly. You're not a group of Jacobin reading reds.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, although what's interesting is, the Palestinian resistance at one time was, yeah, not now, but not now at one time was, yeah, not now, but not now. I mean, in fact, that resistance has largely been discredited and in so much that it still exists, it does so as a junior partner to Hamas. Yes, there are left-wing people, but they're fighting for survival. If I was in a similar situation, let me tell you I would probably join up with anyone who could give me guns. Sure, like um, there was also a lot of. You know, there's a lot of celebration for resistance for resistance sake, without looking at the longterm cost, and that sometimes bugs me. I mean, adorno complains about this in the 1960s. It's just like okay, so like you had this resistance, but now, like triple, the people are dead. You know what did you actually win?
Speaker 1:And I'm not here to tell people like what the equation should be. I'm definitely not here to tell palestinians that, uh, but maybe leftists in the west really should ask that question when they're talking about things like what is the likely outcome? And not not from the standpoint of what I want, but from the standpoint of of historical analysis of war as an insurgency. Yes, hamas stands pretty good ground as long as Israel's not trying to take territory and treating it like a territorial skirmish. The moment they treat it as a zero-sum territorial skirmish, those insurgency and counterinsurgency plays don't don't matter anymore. Yeah, you're dealing with raw population numbers and raw firepower and yes, there there is. There is a way in which and it might already be happening where hamas can exhaust that to the point of ceasefire and maybe get some political prisoners back and Hamas itself will still exist. But what does it mean for, like God's and freedom? I have no idea, but it's not likely good. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, and that question seems to just slip people's minds. Like if the left is going to talk about war, we have to talk about it seriously. I felt like when we were talking about ukraine and russia on both sides, it was fundamentally unserious for a while and even my like I said I made predictions that I should not have made because because I like was actually I was giving all sides more credit than I should have. What did you predict? Remind me, I predicted that Solinsky would actually try to cut a deal with Russia earlier rather than later, but that it would, because his appeals to NATO to actually join NATO and stuff would never happen, no matter what macron might say when he's having his playboy moment and no one actually thinks that's going to happen ever. Um, that, um, and that maybe by acknowledging crimea and, and you know, maybe donask as independent and wrecking out some kind of deal, uh, that he could hold off any further incursion into form, into russian-speaking parts of ukraine, um, but that he would also have to immediately leave the country because his right wing would probably try to assassinate him. Um, that's what I predicted. All right, now, some of that stuff is actually beginning to happen now, but I predicted it way early.
Speaker 1:I did not think about, like boris johnson, trying to talk them out of, you know, scuttling a peace deal. I did not think of, um, I did not think of russia going back to 19th century war tactics and just pure artillery, even though I should have. That should have been obvious to me that this was that kind of war. I did not think of the fact that Ukraine wasn't like super prolific before war, like it wasn't like they had a lot of young people, period. Um, you know, uh, that Russia doesn't either, but Russia has more than Ukraine does just because Russia is so much fucking bigger. Um, I did not think, uh that. So I predicted that the sanctions would not work as expected but that in the long run the russian economy would not do well, but that we might see a tick up of the war economy. You know, briefly, in the, because you always see that in the building war, particularly a big one like that's right I think that's right.
Speaker 2:The sanctions haven't been good, but also they haven't had the effect. They haven't had the intended effect.
Speaker 1:Right, I predicted that, but I didn't predict that Russia might do military Keynesian-style spending and try to go on a war-footing economy, because they were in such denial in their internal rhetoric about the war for a long time. I definitely didn't predict the Wagner group liquidating itself and that shit. I actually didn't predict Ukraine doing as well as it did in the beginning of the war either, because I basically said there's no way Ukraine can win this in the long term.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I think you were also right that they don't have to win.
Speaker 1:Well, my thing is, I thought NATO was trying to bait them into trying to take Kiev and if they try to take Kiev.
Speaker 1:Then you have Afghanistan and Europe. That was what I thought the goal was, which is a very dark thing to think about, if you want to think about, like casting nato as a villain, that we are deliberately doing a sacrifice play with ukraine, letting them think that they're going to be sacrificed, and I was like, clearly selenski understands that. I don't know. I I guess I was wrong, or maybe he doesn't feel domestically trapped. I don't know, I guess I was wrong, or maybe he does and feels domestically trapped.
Speaker 2:I don't know, like or I mean one thing here is just to say the Russians miscalculated and they fucked up oh, I, russia, did fuck up at the beginning.
Speaker 1:The thing is, did they fuck up now?
Speaker 2:no, like well, the reason they don't have kiev is they fucked up?
Speaker 1:yeah, but if they got kiev, then what would they have? They've had, they'd have an insurgency on their hands, and I think putin does know that. Yeah, that's why. That's. That's why I thought they were going to pull what they did in georgia, just like john mersheimer mersheimer and everybody else, like most people on the left, like yeah'll do something, but it'll be like the Georgian campaign.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that would have been. I feel like if they'd done the Georgia thing, they wouldn't even have invaded them quite the way they did, because I think the equivalent of the Georgia thing here would have been shenanigans and information warfare and all that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it would have been maintaining the status quo. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, and I, I just don't know Like my, my thing is in war you often don't know as much as you think you do. Neither side has acted as predictably or as recklessly as possible I mean there were things that I said I was like dude Putin or as recklessly as possible I mean there were things that I said I was like dude. Putin's threats of nuclear war are, frankly, you don't threaten that if you mean it. If you mean it, you just do it. To threaten. It is actually stupid. If you intend to do it, you threaten it specifically because you don't intend to do it, just to remind people that you have the capacity to do it. Yeah, why would you?
Speaker 2:want. Yeah, why would you want to give you know the other side advance warning? You know anyway, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, it's just like I'm like Putin's not. I've also thought the American portrayal of Russians as irrational was totally fucking unfair.
Speaker 2:I love that. I don't know if you've seen those YouTube videos. There was this guy, sarcasmatron or whatever. He just did a frame-by-frame comparison of the American domestic attitude to Iraq before everyone turned south and the Russian attitude to like Iraq before everyone turned South and the Russian attitude to Ukraine and I thought it was like a really nice, you know, like Vladimir Soloviev and Bill O'Reilly, like it's a really it's a really interesting kind of frame by frame.
Speaker 1:But I also like the left's obsession with this was going to get old because there's not a clear like from the standpoint of the left really, other than NATO bad. There's actually not a clear perspective for them to take.
Speaker 2:And if there is, it's really bad, which is the pro-Russia stuff.
Speaker 1:Right and I predict a lot of those people are going to become A lot of people who went that far are going to become a lot of people who went that far are going to just become right wingers. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Um, tell me, one thing I'm really curious about Is this like, uh, what do you call it Reactionary international? Like you know, russia, hungary and all this kind of stuff like that, I mean it just seems totally fake to me. Like I mean it just seems totally fake to me. What is this idea of this Orban, putin and Trump holding hands?
Speaker 1:I think it is harder for liberals to imagine that their enemies in other countries are just as rational as we are, um, and also domestically, um, uh. Then it is for them to posit that somehow francis yaki secretly ran, won the cold war after being dead for 60 years and being marginal for all of it. For those of you who don't know, that's the idea of fascist internationalism, like through russia, as was the initial vision by yaki, um, so, yeah, that's a far right trope for a long time. The problem that you have is, well, a lot of these right populists.
Speaker 1:Why they're way more successful and useful than left populists. They're not actually successful on their own terms either. They're just more successful than the left ones, but that doesn't say much. Yeah, they manage to stay in power, they manage to not completely ruin the economies of their country usually, um, but they don't manage to, like, deliver most of what they promise. So you know, I mean putin's actually weirdly kind of the exception that he's delivered on a good bit of what he promised, but like, and a lot of the reactionary stuff is almost completely negative.
Speaker 2:Um, you know it's like okay. Yes, you know, orban is funding all of you know rod dreher and whatever it is you know I don't even know.
Speaker 1:Uh, uh, uh. Frank for rudy, you know, whatever he gets money but it's toad to me.
Speaker 2:It's totally incoherent, all counter-programming like. I just don't see what christian civilization a la urban is supposed to be positively like. It's a lot of you know. Yes, he can beat up on soros groups and he can beat up on, you know, liberal opposition in his own country, but what's the fucking positive politics? I don't understand.
Speaker 1:I don't. I don't know that there is any, and nor nor does it actually seem to be as effective at having like paramilitary movements and mass support as fascism, which is what everyone keeps on comparing it to. It is a post-fascist politics, yes, but sometimes you need to look at the post as much as you need to look at the fascist.
Speaker 2:It's almost completely reactionary. People focus a lot on the homophobic stuff and the anti-abortion stuff, but what is this traditional family that they're trying to bring back? I don't even know what the project is. The nuclear family didn't disappear because of left-wing propaganda. Anyway, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know. I mean we're going to see the same thing get weird here as it's happened in Alabama, with them getting weirdly consistent on IVF and banning that because of embryos. But that's just going to limit their own project in the long run.
Speaker 1:Right, you know, and what I took, what I told people about the abortion ban has made people uncomfortable, because I'm like, look, the abortion ban, probably like one. We can't talk about it in terms of electoral calculus because it was a judicial ruling. Let's be quite frank. Two Roe v Raid was literally probably the worst way to grant that right ever, and I mean that in the sense that it was a bad ruling which even like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, admitted that they needed to sure it up on better grounds. It was basically only standing because of stare decisis, which we. But when you start talking about, like, what the national gop is going to do, I'm just like they could ban abortion.
Speaker 1:Uh, I highly doubt it would be a band that's. That's like the florida band or the, or the alabama band, though that's not even popular in republican circles. Um, and yes, that would be a fucking national tragedy in a lot of ways. Um, but also it would. It would solidify opposition to them for a long time. Uh, I can tell you that only 10 to 15 percent of the population of the united states thinks abortion is the biggest issue on the docket for us politics. That's, that shows up at poll after poll after poll. Yes, it motivates women to come out in red states, where it's more of a live issue for them. But blue states aren't going to lose it unless there's a national ban, and a national ban would probably actually turn that into a much bigger issue. Yeah, all right now, which means that as a domestic politics for the entire country, it just doesn't seem that likely. I'm not saying it's impossible.
Speaker 1:Now you start looking at what the like the, you know, this christian civilizational right wants to offer. Um, which is like getting rid of gay marriage, getting rid of ibf, getting rid of surrogacy uh, getting rid. And I'm like I don't even know. You know that's all negative. Right, it's all negative. Some of it's like we're going to encourage women to to stay at home and join families through social policy. You know the same social policy Sweden social Democrats used to fucking do. I mean not social Democrats, because they're fascist. Sweden, no, social Democrats. What's the what's? Is it Swedish Democrats?
Speaker 2:Swedish Democrats.
Speaker 1:Sweden Democrats? I think Sweden Democrats, yeah, yeah yeah. I'm like sorry.
Speaker 2:I thought you were doing were social fascist thing.
Speaker 1:No, you know, that's the one time I'm sympathetic to Stalin, though, oh where, where I?
Speaker 2:I think that, no, I don't actually think social fascism is true, although I do think the right wing of social democracy created the leadership cast of fascism yeah, so I mean that's just historical, the fact the, the, you know the affinities between you know, like, anyway, yeah, the affinities between ebert and the freikorps are many um and the german historical school. You know the first national socialism for the other one does not mean, as the kpd said, that a support for social democrats was support for fascism, that's yeah, it's not.
Speaker 1:I don't actually believe that, even though there are days where that feels fun to say, um, uh, no, I actually what. I mean, I was just Sweden Democrats.
Speaker 2:But yeah, Sweden Democrats.
Speaker 1:But like that social policy like they want. It's just they want. The difference is they want to tie it to marriage and not just childbirth. Yeah, I mean like, okay, good, you still got to make it cheap, like. So from what we can tell in Hungary, it hasn't had an effect on the population, hardly at all. Those policies have not had that much of an effect. What is funny is, every now and then you'll hear left-wingers try to normalize that talk on our side too.
Speaker 2:People don't have kids because of capitalism or something, right? Yeah, some of that's true. People don't have kids because capitalism or something, right? Yeah, and some of it some of that's true, it's true.
Speaker 1:but you know, if someone's trying to say that we should embrace Orban like patriarchy, as the left, because capitalism once gone away, that's just kind of funny yeah. I mean, but that's politics now.
Speaker 2:You know that's what you can do. What you can do is you can give goodies and legal privileges to your coalition, or the sort of advanced tip of your coalition, and you can take money from and legally ban or just mess with the other person's coalition you can't actually get rid of the other person's coalition entirely, though, because then you don't have a productive economy. That's why you can poke them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can.
Speaker 2:You can poke them yeah, you can poke them. Um, and if you're really clever, you know and this is probably as far as the right wing populists and to some extent you know, the Biden that you know you can, you can triangulate and you can, you know, build, you can kind of restructure your coalition and gain a majority for a short time, I mean the thing about the the the Britain rally thesis that I think is true is that profit rates are are low enough that it's hard for new businesses to come up without government contracts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, and that's true everywhere. When Trump threatens Sean Fain or the UAW that the UAW might get slammed if they endorse Biden, which Sean Fain does endorse Biden, I'm not, you know, I like Sean Fain in a lot of ways, but I don't think that was necessarily the smartest thing to do. What does that tell you? Well, the US car industry is really dependent on domestic protectionism. Yeah, really, really dependent on domestic protectionism. Like we've been stopping, you know, a flood of chinese cars from the market, unlike what we see in europe, where we see, like, chinese electric cars just flooding in because they're cheaper by a lot. Um and uh, which you know I I actually think it's bad that we don't let some of those chinese electric cars in. But, yeah, we're, you know, uh, but nonetheless, uh, I promise you that that uh, the uaw is not going to be pro release. Uh, letting down the tariffs on chinese car production so that we take in chinese electric cars that are way cheaper than than domestic uh oil ones, I promise you. And so, uh, if trump removes that protection out of spite which I don't think he'd do it cuts against too many of his other messaging, because specifically about China and specifically about electric cars, you know. But but he could All right.
Speaker 1:Someone pushed back on me recently about, like the difference, like why do you think there's a public private distinction? Why do you think it's real? I'm like it's a legal reality, it's a legal reality, but in a real sense that legal reality is less important than it used to be. Yes, that's true, but that's not one of reality but substance, because there's still certain things you can't do when you're dealing with informal partnerships and public-private partnerships and shit like that. Yeah, there are different limits, um, so you know, it's hard to give the uaw a lot of money, or not the uaw, but like the, the industry, the uaw is in a ton of money directly and except by, uh, you know, military, buying american-owned vehicles or something, um, but it's easy for them to pass laws to protect the market. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And obviously we think that's not necessarily a bad thing. Right, yeah, right.
Speaker 2:You know the market's not divine, but you know you don't want to. Anyway, yeah, I mean, this is the thing. You can let all the Chinese cars in, but then you have to. I don't know. You've got to do something. The trouble is always with this free trade stuff is that the assumption is always either you protect or you just lose the jobs. Trade stuff is that, like, the assumption is always you know, either you, either you protect or you just lose the jobs. There's never a fucking third option, you know. Anyway, not going to run that debate through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I mean. Well, I mean this is you protect or you lose the jobs? That's, that's developmentalism, that's what it is, and everyone can kind of do it. The problem is, however, you're going to lose the jobs anyway. You're just not going to lose them as fast. This is the thing that, like Aaron Benyadev and Phil Neal, I've talked about. You do piggyback on prior developments, and that reduces socially necessary labor time. It does so. You just need less and less workers for the same production. Like the US could reshore at 1950s levels and it would employ a fourth of what it originally employed, or maybe, probably not even a fourth, probably more like a ten.
Speaker 2:I mean which in some objective sense doesn't have to be a disaster, but probably will be under the current mode of production.
Speaker 1:Right. I mean, that's the front. This is why I'm not a capitalist. It's because I don't think it works, or at least because I don't think it works forever in the way that people think it works. But I also find it weird for people to basically argue that well, marxism's political and all this is just political will, but capitalism does or doesn't have. I don't know if they think capitalism has limits or not, like they seem to talk out of both ends of their mouth about that it has.
Speaker 2:I mean, I still prefer to use the term contradictions rather than limits, you know, because it's but you can. But it can pass them around and it can shift them around. Um is the problem. Yeah. Yeah and uh. You know cause limits makes it sounds like, makes it sound like you know limits to growth like inevitable collapse or something. You cross the limits and you're done. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the issue, I think I think that's the big issue, and I know you and I are running out of theme because we've been talking about everything. But, like I mean, the issue is, I think communist politics is going to be back on the horizon. But I think and the weird thing is, I'm inclined to disagree with the communizers about everything except for this that communist politics may come back, but it's not going to look like and this is actually something that platypus says it's not going to look like, um, what communist politics did in the past. It just won't, and we're trying to make it do so, and in doing so, we're taking we're taking any potentiality of communism meaning anything away.
Speaker 2:So why call it? When you say communist, you mean like anti-capitalist, why call it communist?
Speaker 1:I mean that it is a communal form of production that is also classless, I see. So, yeah, I mean the classlessness of it is communist. I do not think the classlessness is inevitable, in fact I think it's actually kind of unlikely. But I do think people do not like being in subordinated classes and you cannot have classes that don't subordinate others, like um and while in the past sometimes common prosperity, I mean, this is a, this is another place where marxism was right, like so. I was reading bakunin recently and bakunin thinks that humans move from unfreedom to freedom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and marx actually argues the opposite, kind of he actually thinks humans move from unfreedom to freedom, yeah, and Marx actually argues the opposite kind of he actually thinks humans move from freedom to unfreedom, to more unfreedom to more unfreedom to more unfreedom to freedom. Freedom, yeah Right, that's the Marxist argument. Marx's argument is we started free and we can get back to being free. It's a dialectical movement. That's where you and I probably think that marks. But there is a fundamental truth that like no, we didn't start in unfreedom, we didn't start suppressed. Like like low surplus societies are equal. They are, and there is a truth that Mark saw that's correct.
Speaker 1:I mean, daniel, daniel, from what it's all Politics has talked about this. We have less of a notion of the difference between people in class stations today because we interact with more people who are fundamentally equal to us. Yes, there are high levels of inequality, but you don't deal with them on a day-to-day basis, frankly, a day-to-day basis, frankly, yeah, um, and that's different than in the recent past. It is more like the very, very far past. That is something that mark's actually predicted. Where mark seems to have been wrong is that that this would lead us, when we get immiserated, to rise up and overthrow our capitalist overlords by violence yeah we don't seem to do that anymore, like in some ways, I almost think you know.
Speaker 1:Uh, alvin goudner talks about this, this ambiguity in marx, where marx thinks the stronger capitalist gets, the stronger the working class will get, but he doesn't deal with the fact that the capitalists themselves also get stronger, have more power, have more guns, have more guns can outweigh them, etc. Even though they can't destroy the working class and they have to placate them in some ways, they also can if in a true war of attrition they're in a better position.
Speaker 2:They're in a better position. I mean also, the other possibility that you don't mention is that both sides can get weaker without any match winning.
Speaker 1:Well, I didn't mention, but I think that's what we're living through Exactly the pro-career and the bourgeoisie seem both less in power. That's why there's all these weird class theories about who's actually running everything. Right.
Speaker 1:And all these weird class theories about who's actually running everything Right, you know, and all these weird monetary theories and like this, this kind of view that that governments are hermetically sealed or whatever, that that's common on both the left and the right, methodologically, frankly, well, that's just. There's no evidence for that and there's no evidence that we're even that. You know, people in the 90s thought nation states were going away. Now they don't feel that way anymore. But there's no evidence that the nation states are actually stronger. In fact there's a lot of evidence to the contrary, that the strong states of the early 20th century, they're weakened by their own success. There is a decadence there and I guess they're weakened by their own success.
Speaker 1:There is a decadence there, and I guess what I'm saying is like, in the reshuffling of the way class allegiance is going out, communist politics, egalitarian, power, egalitarian, not true egalitarian true egalitarian politics is impossible. The power egalitarian politics will emerge over and over again. I one, I don't think it just emerges on the quote left as we understand it today. I do think there is an egalitarian impulse in right-wing populism, even though there's also a counter impulse that's defending the status quo in a way that contradicts that status quo, in a way that contradicts that. I mean, in this sense, dialectics, as we said, is still an apply in place, but it's not being worked out by history in any clean way at all. Yeah, Like it just seems like a bunch of fucking contradictions that just get worse and worse and worse.
Speaker 2:Dialectics in the sense that I meant it earlier on, was this idea that you know. The sense that I meant it earlier on was this idea that you know, consciousness and being interact in a sort of synergistic way. There's some kind of learning process, you know. It's like people's ideas and their material existence kind of begin to become in sync.
Speaker 1:I mean ideally the sort of assumption of the, of the dialectical materialism, right, but remember my first critique of Marxism as a Marxist. But my first critique of Marxism was we've never had a theory of mind that made any sense, oh yeah, that we have both tried to have it.
Speaker 1:And this is in Marx too. Marx realizes that individuals are not their aggregate, and you can't deduce from class aggregates to what an individual thinks. He realizes that he's not stupid, but as to why that can happen, he actually doesn't seem to have entirely worked out, because he does seem to think that the ideas of individuals are somehow fundamentally related to what is materially possible, and that's basically an economic project yeah, right like yeah and I, I, I'm, I'm sort of like I'm not sure that that's true.
Speaker 1:That's the part that I'm not sure of, that like, I'm like, what can? What can become popular may be limited by material, but like right now, for example, in this decadent time period, nothing positive seems possible, and it's not just in the us. I think the us is probably the worst. Maybe europe is probably the worst, but in the us it's, it's probably one of the worst. Maybe Europe is probably the worst, but in the US it's probably one of the worst, but it's not just in the US. So people can't imagine what a positive world-changing politics would be. They can only imagine what a negative one is, and that, for everybody, puts everyone in a structurally conservative position.
Speaker 2:Yeah, All tactics. We live in a world of tactics.
Speaker 1:Right. It gets real absurd when you look at Breedroy Gray talking about force the vote. That's a parliamentary tactical argument, right, you're presenting as the key debate of social democracy. What does that tell you about where we're at? Even if that's right which I don't think it would have been but even if that was right, like the idea that if you force the vote and the Democrats change, people will just go and become free the fundamental question is what I started off in the beginning with all those numbers. Almost 70% of the population thinks we need viable third parties, but almost no one's willing to vote for them. You see the same thing with unions. Almost everybody thinks unions are cool again, but almost nobody's in them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know the Marx. In a sense that's a big. These two things are undialectical. The thought is, is people respond to the material situation and do not just what's in their individual material interest but in their class interest?
Speaker 1:and the answer is well, I mean, the whole crisis of marxism in the 20th century and the whole focus on consciousness was actually about that not being the case.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that didn't resolve itself in any direction. That's the point. People observed this and then Marxism just fucking split. That's what I think happened. People noticed this and then they kind of had a conniption about it and, like they kind of had a conniption about it and didn't you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean the, the. The Gouldner answer is Marxism split into critical Marxism and scientific Marxism because of ambiguities and Marxism. And I think, well, they split because, like, this is a, this is a contradiction, it's not just an ambiguity, almost dialectically, and Marxism itself that is unresolved. The entire project of the 20th century was an attempt in some ways to resolve it and they all panned out weird. Yeah, you know, which is why, until very recently, everyone said marxism was disproven. Yeah, now you know, a lot of what you hear is the reason for that are stupid, like, but, but when you think about this element of it, like, I have a conservative say this Well, the conservatives say well, the working class is supposed to come to the consciousness that you do and they don't.
Speaker 1:And you might be Carl Bayer or some weird DSA member who's trying to argue that you know state centralism is good, member who's trying to argue that you know state centralism is good and that's in the working class interest, even though, like you, can't actually have red marks and really think that he thought that that was the case, um, but that's been the kind of. You know, the democrats are the party of the working class. I mean, carl beyer was trying to say that with a straight face yeah, wow, you know, and it's like no one's a party of the working class, particularly if you mean the industrial working class, but even if you just mean wage earners. There's people who are parties of parts of that, but no one's a party of all of it, and they're part of coalitions and, honestly, right now, weirdly, uh, the democrats, the democratic coalition, used to be a coalition of identities and various different economic groups. Now it's a coalition of, like, the very poor and the upper middle class, um, and it's the urban of both.
Speaker 1:Actually, too, it's basically an urban party, whereas I think Michael Lynn's right the conservative coalition is like petite bourgeois rural industry, sunbelt productive industry, et cetera, and the petite bourgeois elements of rural and ex-urban areas, and so you know it does lead to like, yeah, if you make over $100,000 a year, you're more likely to vote Republican, but if you make over $250,000 a year you're more likely to vote Democrat. It's just there's more people in that 200, 100, particularly now that, like, if you live in a city, you as a family, you basically need almost 100k to fucking survive. Sure, you know? Um so it's, it's just. Uh, it's just the way things have gone. Um so yeah I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think the thing the thing to maybe end with is your, your prediction that I'm still not sure how much I want to sign up to of, like the return of communism I don't think it's going to call itself communism.
Speaker 1:That's like I don't like. My thing is classless politics. By that, a politics which aims at a relatively power, egalitarian society, will try to emerge. It will probably emerge historically Like, if Robert Michelle's is any indication. It emerges generally as a as the idea that you could have a dictatorial oligarch I mean, excuse me, a dictatorial executive fighting oligarchies which right now would look right wing. That is where the counter-systemic but seemingly egalitarian nature of parts of the right come from. That's not communism, it's a perversion of it because there's still classes there. But it comes out of that impulse.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what all this is leading up to, Derek is why not trump? Oh no this is what katrine I mean. I I mean, I think this is some of what katrine was saying, though yeah, he was picking up on this.
Speaker 1:Do you remember what I said in 2016? Do you remember? What I said in 2016?.
Speaker 1:Remind me, I said it to Doug Lane and it wasn't a why not Trump argument. It was like we should not care that much about who wins the executive office, that it will matter about what we have to do tactically to defend vulnerable people. It will, but for the long duray it makes very little difference as to where we are going, and people did not attack me because I didn't word it in this trolly way of why not Trump, but it was sort of like independence means independence or it doesn't mean anything at all. You know, and right now it doesn't mean anything at all If you have 70% of the population effectively says we need an independent movement, but no one's actually willing to do it or risk it, then it doesn't mean anything. It means that people are basically accepting a system that they don't like and candidates that they don't like Because they are afraid of anything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. This goes back to consciousness and being. Why is it impossible for people to be incoherent? It's like people say all this out loud because they imagine that logic rules politics. It's like, oh, people can't have attitudes that conflict with their actions. That logic rules politics. It's like, oh, people can't have attitudes that conflict with their actions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know this is one thing that I find Chomsky's weirdly prescient on, but then argues against in everything else he says. But I have pointed out yeah, chomsky's right, social democratic policies are always popular. Big Rock, candy Mountain is always popular. Do people think you can do it? Yeah, chomsky's right, social Democratic policies are always popular. Big Rock, candy Mountain is always popular. Do people think you can do it? Though, is a whole different question, right, that leads to the whole like why are social Democratic policies always popular and social Democrats are never popular? Well, I mean, I think that's been obvious to me for like 15 years. Social Democrats don't do what they say, so who should give a shit what they like, what they propose it's? You might as well go with your local, your local bourgeois or whatever, because at least that made it sure you have a job yeah, and also you and you know it's.
Speaker 2:The choice is not between bourgeois and social Democrats. The choice is between you know, your coalition and the people, the people who support the other guy, the other coalition, you know, and and those don't cut neatly across ideological lines. So Trump will throw you some money if you're in his coalition.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, he might, he might not, who knows? But you know that Biden didn't, yeah, and here's the thing I was like. I've been reading the stuff on like who thinks that they benefited under Biden? And it's very few people, it's very few people, so.
Speaker 2:So that's the other thing, don't get me wrong, I don't think we're crashing either. You know, I don't think we're.
Speaker 1:No, we're not. Everyone's been predicting this major recession, including sometimes me, and it ain't happening. All right, I mean. One thing is is even the Federal Reserve forgets that that if you, when you take in high interest rates, you also have to pay it out to somebody? Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's not just removing money from the economy, it's just moving it around Like it's. It's a really, really inefficient, regressive backdoor redistribution mechanism between one part of the rich and another, like, uh, and it affects poor people, but probably not a whole damn lot, like um. But then you have all this. You have a whole lot of left who wants to argue that, like, inflation doesn't affect poor people at all and stuff like that too, and it's just like and what world yeah, yeah, yeah but anyway, and on that note, I guess, uh, you could, I guess you know, I'm gonna say, since I've started being more direct about my politics, uh, people have found me much more depressing.
Speaker 1:And I'm never, you know, I've never been one of those people to end a show with like left his best. You know, you know, uh, michael brooks adage, because I've never thought it was true, not because I didn't think the left was better, but it was like you're best at what exactly like is it your moral dictums.
Speaker 1:Okay, fine, but who cares? Yeah, are you better at winning? Clearly not, um, are you. Are you better at winning? Clearly not, are you. Are you better at being coherent and thinking things through? Are you better at even analysis? There are times where I think we were, but I don't think we.
Speaker 2:Lately, I don't think that's true either to say what I'm against and say what this, what I think the situation is like. You know, class domination, bad um, but also impossible to get anything done beyond tactics and coalition poking in contemporary politics. You know, yeah, that's the situation and that's been. You know, to be honest, I think that's been the situation for as long as we've been talking to each other, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, the difference is, you know, when you started this you thought there were technocratic fixes to it, yeah, and when I started this, I thought maybe we could, you know, rebring about the science of Marxism or something. And today I'm like, uh, no, um, yeah, I do think. I do think a communist politics is on the horizon. I I want people to think when I say, though you're seeing that in the conservative impulse, I do not mean that we should tail the conservative impulse. I'm just saying it's proof that that element of it is proof that it exists Like and it exists on the left too to some degree, even in the most obnoxious, you know, identitarian politics in some ways. But everybody is pretending that these coalitions and identities are more stable and more coherent and more solid than they are, as you and I have been talking about for like 10 years too.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and this is the thing. I agree with you that power, egalitarian ideology will come back, but the trouble with our situation is that no ideology ever coalesces around a movement.
Speaker 1:I suspect movements will happen again. The thing is, Amogh, that I'm not willing to predict what that is, because anyone who's tried to in the past has been wrong. Look at Marxist predictions about those movements. It's not not. Not look at when they were able to take advantage of those movements, Cause they did do that, but look at when they said they were going to happen. They're almost never right. Like that's probably going to get me in trouble, but like when does Marx predict? Like the, the major revolution is probably going to happen. It's like 1856. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. And on that note, Amog, I would say where can people find your work? But they can find it here. Yeah, Is there anything you want to plug?
Speaker 2:Not really, maybe in the future alright.
