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
The Many, Many Deaths of the Millennial Left with Alex Gendler
Is the millennial left crumbling under its own weight, or is it poised for a groundbreaking resurgence? Join us on VarmVlog as we dissect the intricate evolution and fragmentation of the millennial left post-Bernie Sanders. With insights from Alex Gendler, we reflect on the legacies of Mark Fisher, David Graeber, and Michael Brooks, and how their contributions continue to shape contemporary leftist politics. We compare the vibrant political ecosystems of New York and California, exploring how their unique industrial landscapes influence local leftist movements.
We'll navigate the treacherous waters of U.S. electoral politics, scrutinizing the left's response to Trump-era strategies and the current state of the Democratic Party. From the decline of Graeberite anarchism to the rise of semi-reformist Marxist-Leninist tendencies, this episode uncovers the fractured nature of leftist groups like the DSA and the complex challenges of modern political organizing. We also examine the reactive nature of leftist politics, particularly in relation to international crises and domestic policy shifts, and question the feasibility of certain ideological perspectives.
Finally, we confront the uncomfortable truths and strategic missteps that have plagued leftist movements. From the perplexing support for figures like Alexander Dugin to the organizational flaws within movements like BLM, we dissect the multifaceted challenges of forming a coherent and impactful leftist movement. We also explore the potential for revitalizing the workers' movement, addressing the generational wealth disparities, and examining the subtle manipulations within leftist media. Tune in for a comprehensive and critical analysis of the millennial left's past, present, and possible future trajectories.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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twitter: @varnvlog
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Hello and welcome here to VarmVlog. And today I'm with Alex Gindler and we are talking about the many, many, many, many, many deaths of the millennial left, a phrase that I came up with this morning to encapsulate the discussion about the end of the Bernie period, what I used to call the Great Burnout of the Bernie period, what I used to call the Great Burnout, but in some ways it's a larger story. I recently and we're going to be talking, we're going to be using this article as a launching point did a long series on Alex Hochili's Omelettes with Eggshells on the Millennial Left, which summarized the three kind of post-mortems that we have right now that have recently come out. But I have also been going through a lot of my own relations to this and reflecting on Mark Fisher, on David Graeber, on other key figures who were really of the Gen X left but who died and whose inspiration majorly inspired the current millennial left.
Speaker 1:And I guess the elephant in the room and the people that I have the most controversy about for both defending and also criticizing at all, is the late Michael Brooks, who was in some ways paradigmatic of both the good and the bad of the millennial left as it existed. But we're not going to go into Brooks's legacy. There's been lots of people both praising him and hagiographically and spitting on his grave, and I'm kind of not interested in either. But he is in some ways a paradigmatic figure whose very real death has become very symbolic in a lot of ways of the post bernie left fragmentation. Um, alex, uh, what's your relationship? How do you get on my show so much? What happens? I mean, you haven't been on in a couple years but still uh, I mean short answer.
Speaker 2:Is you invite me, but um?
Speaker 1:but the long answer is why do I invite you? And I guess I know that, but you should try to guess.
Speaker 2:This is like one of those teacher tricks um uh, is it because, uh, I'm, uh, I think, I think, uh, I think? Maybe you see me as, like your sort of eyes and ears, in the epicenter of, like you know, in the cesspool of the megalopolis from which the millennial left emerged?
Speaker 1:emerged.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in some ways I have a few friends in New York, and you and Sean, basically, of Antifada fame, and Andy, and to some lesser degree, my old comrade Ross Wolf and Sean's ex-wife, jamie Peck, are kind of my eyes into the cesspool of Greenpoint Brooklyn leftism.
Speaker 1:Eyes into the cesspool of Greenpoint Brooklyn leftism. My other eyes is just following DSA politics, which is ostensibly not just about New York and California but in reality is mostly just about New York and California, as in that's where the large branches still are and those places can still make quorum. But there's a way in which it's also interesting to me, because california, while it's part of the broader imagination of the left, actually doesn't say that much about the bernieite left, um, while bernie was popular in california, uh, and while the our friends over at chapel trap house have all but retired to silver lake, um, uh, it is in a real sense the left has never really had a lot of pull in california's real politic around the bay area and and that sort of thing at least not the left that we're talking about today um, whereas it really has in new york for a variety of reasons, um right, we've got.
Speaker 2:You know, we have representatives elected and all that stuff. I didn't. I actually didn't know if california does or doesn't, but I guess, yeah, I haven't heard about any like dsa candidates getting elected in california uh, at the local level they have, but not beyond that.
Speaker 1:And, um, california's democratic party is way more of a gerontocracy than new york's, and new york is pretty bad, but like there is than New York's and New York's is pretty bad, but like there is vitality and contestation in New York's there is not really in California. So it's in some ways it just has a different horizon. And I also think, if we think about the difference in industry you know, I pointed out to people recently 70, 17% of all US economic activity goes through either New York or California and like, the GDP perspective of California is like one fifth of the country and I don't know, new York's isn't quite as high, but it's still pretty high, but in a real way, like california is about rentierism and new york is about finance, capital and um, those things have different relationships in the way they inspire people to be attracted to the left and I think that's something that we kind of have to look at about. Like you know, one of the big things of the millennial left is the rediscovery and rejection of the california ideology as it was formulated, I don't know, uh, almost literally two decades ago. Um, uh, you know and really read, you know, our friends alex o'cheeley, bunga Bunga crew have been talking about that essay for a long time, for good and ill.
Speaker 1:But I do think the turn against tech which has been part of the millennial left has actually put it in a way not as related to what's going on in California, and the turn towards workerism has also limited it in California, although most of the formal unions are in and are the strongest and the most have the most density in New York and California respectively. In Hawaii, like those are the places where they do, and Hawaii's got such a low population it's hard to know what to make of the fact that its union density is so high. So these are all the facts that make New York interesting to me. Also, as a side note, despite the fact that I threaten to nuke your city on a regular basis as a joke, terrorist watchers Californians are my largest I watchers. Californians are my largest audience. I mean not Californians. New Yorkers are my largest audience and California is my smallest metro audience. So for some reason, that is the way it is, even though I'm a western guy these days and have been for the last half a decade.
Speaker 2:Californians have better things to do Go outside, enjoy the weather.
Speaker 1:Be homeless Anyway. Well, I mean, and one thing that the interesting dynamic of California is both New York and the Bay Area and LA are all unaffordable cities, but there is more social infrastructure in New York State than there is in California, weirdly, it's decaying to all hell, but it's there infrastructure in New York state than there is in California, weirdly, um it's decaying to all hell, but it's there still.
Speaker 2:We're kind of just coasting on the achievements of uh, you know, public policy from like the early 20th century basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, basically, most of the stuff that you guys are coasting on, uh is stuff that was established before Cal, before New York even went bankrupt, like your housing policies and stuff like that. You have one of the better ways of treating homelessness. However, that's being tested by migrant dumping and stuff like that. That's happening in New York and Chicago, that that's happening in in new york and chicago. Um, interestingly, of the sanctuary states, I've actually find it funny that the, the southern states, don't fuck with california, with that shit, which is kind of interesting in and of itself, as if they know there's no infrastructure for them to break um. And so you know that's been a thing.
Speaker 1:I've recently talked to Benjamin Studebaker, who is not mentioned in the Alex Hochele essay, but he's also one of the diagnostic diagnosticians of the problem, except that his concern is broader than the three books that Hochele mentions. His concern is the total impasse of American democracy, tote court, and so Studebaker has been talking about that, so the he'll also come up on our discussion. So, yeah, you're my eyes and ears in New York. You have a lot of connections, you, you know a lot of people I won't out all who you know and you've done, you've done back in media work, which I can you know, and you've done back-end media work, which I can you know. I'm not going to talk about what specifically you've done, but you've done back-end media work for both left-adjacent and non-left stuff, so you're kind of in the epicenter of the beast.
Speaker 1:How do things feel right now? I mean, one of the predictable ironies and I kind of predicted this in 2017 when I first came back to America is that all these counter systemic movements in the United States, when their ally wins office, they actually lose steam. So, like the alt-right is a pre-Trump phenomenon. Trump's victory actually guts it, and it seems like that's happening with the social democratic left and their relationship to Biden in a way that it doesn't seem like stuff like the you know and it's.
Speaker 1:I think it's barbaric to talk about this in these terms. Like the war the war in Gaza being perpetrated by Israel, like revitalizing the US left is like well, that's not something we should actually care about as far as the war of Gaza is concerned. Like well, that's not something we should actually care about as far as the war of Gaza is concerned, but it doesn't seem to actually be revitalizing the US left, despite the fact that left wing positions on Gaza are broadly popular for the first time in my fucking life it is. We're in a very weird place where some left-wing ideas are popular. Other ones that were popular just three years ago have been completely jettisoned. Defund the police is almost never discussed anymore, and if it is, it's discussed on the operating table of an autopsy. Medicare for all and others still have been.
Speaker 2:Like, a lot of the sort of, you know, economic nationalism ideas have actually been adopted by Biden. You know in, you know we can quibble over. Okay, yeah, not to the same extent, but like, yeah, he, he did take on a lot of the kind of, like you know, anti-free trade, anti-globalization platform. So, and that in itself kind of weakens the left because it's like, well, biden's doing stuff. Right, you wanted the government to do more stuff, biden's doing it.
Speaker 1:And it doesn't look anything like what you predicted.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:I agree with you, although I would add what's uncomfortable about that is that it also implies, if you look at policy consistency, that trump was doing things the left wanted to, and you can't get anyone to admit that. And I don't say that because I'm a like why not? Trump fan. I'm not pulling the katron thing, but in a very real like. If your concern was economic nationalism, trump accelerated a pivot that had already begun under Obama and Biden has maintained it and cleaned it up and made it acceptable to the mainstream of US discourse. That's a continuity that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, I think, because, one, as Chris Katron says, I think rightly, it shows that the right actually adapted to the conditions of of the decay of neoliberalism faster than the left did. And two, it means that the relationship to the Democrats and getting what you want isn't just pushing Biden to the left, it might be just reality forcing certain kinds of things and then the limitations of that national approach becoming very clear very quickly, which hurts the social democratic project in a lot of ways, and you and I have privately talked about the problems of the social democracy a lot, because a lot of these people who are pushing back on Angela Nagle et cetera rightly, I think, but missed it. Their own politics are really somewhat copacetic to that. Like that. They were methodologically nationalist in a way that made like the Nagle's big sin for a lot of them until recently where she just outright like made excuses for anti-immigrant programs in Ireland and shit.
Speaker 1:Um was saying the quiet parts out loud and uh, and for me it was clarifying about why I wasn't a social Democrat. But you know, everyone told me to be quiet about that in the in the Trump years because we needed to put up another good college try to defeat Trump, which is going to be interesting things that were kind of bubbling up in very sectarian ways but were becoming slightly more popular through the Internet. They got liquidated, partly out of fear of Trump. That doesn't seem to be happening again now. Like if I remember the ramp up in 2015 and 2016,. It's nothing like what's happening now. The left can barely make itself ramp up to this. It doesn't know how to respond to the current situation at all. You get stuff like the uncommitted campaign, which I theoretically endorse, but then I'm like, but why are you even remaining loyal to the Democratic Party at all at this point?
Speaker 2:remaining loyal to the democratic party at all at this point. Like, yeah, I mean, it's. I mean I think the organizers of the people backing the uncommitted campaign essentially say that it's mostly a symbolic gesture, um, you know, intended to send a message which, like you know, fine, uh. But yeah, um, I mean right, we've ended up in this kind of I mean, uh, I mean gaza has kind of like somewhat rightly overshadowed, um, everything lately, um, you know, because it is sort of by some metrics just the biggest like mass atrocity since world war ii.
Speaker 1:Uh, but um, yeah, it does have world war ii levels of portions of the population dead almost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the rate of deaths per day, uh, but, um, the the fact that like, basically, we're locked into this constant back and forth of like, well, uh, this means you can't, you know, morally like make a case for supporting Biden, but and then versus, well, trump is going to be even worse on, you know, supporting Israel and not pushing back against them. So it's just becomes this like constant back and forth which shows that basically we have, we've, there is no, like, we failed to build any kind of viable alternative outside of that, that framework. Right, the fact that in 2024, we're having the same old argument again from like 2000 of like, well, like, how can you morally support the Democrats? Well, the other guy's worse. And then you know, just like elaborations on some versions of those two arguments, like ad nauseum, yeah, so I mean it's pretty bleak, that's.
Speaker 1:I said that one of the things about right now is even the same groups that I considered that seemed to die after the Obama election. International Answer, the PSL and its millionaires. All of this together.
Speaker 2:Millionaires.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my favorite thing right now is one of the things that one of the reasons the DSA is dying is it doesn't seem to have as many millionaires on a central committee as the other groups. So that's. I'm going to make a lot of people mad with that, but I think we should be honest about it. The the way in which the ecosystem also has created a bunch of media, and I always thought about this Pat Buchanan quote and I brought it up a lot two years ago, three years ago, but I'm bringing up again no-transcript.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you see this today. The other tendency that I think is not discussed and we can go into Hochili's article a little bit in more detail is that you've had people trying to differentiate themselves by posturing more radical than the thing before them, but the Graeberite anarchism kind of died with Occupy, despite people's attempt to bring it back. Left communism seems to have had a brief resurgence right up to during the end of the obama administration in weird marginal spheres, but seems to have immediately kind of liquidated out. Um, now it's not. There's never huge, but like, if you think about the way in which, like people talking about vortigo was part of the discourse in 26, 2015, 2014, versus now it that was that way is also foreclosed off. So what's left?
Speaker 1:Various weird semi-reformist forms of Marxist Leninism is to show you you're not a member of the DSA, but the thing is, now even the DSA is filled with that shit. So, like what? That doesn't even get you that. So it's hard to know where a lot of people are going to go. Some of them are just becoming right-wingers outright, um, uh, because that's where the counter-systemic movement seems to be. Some of them are becoming anti-imperialist, but can't tell dugan from from linen. Um, some of them are, uh, just becoming good old liberals. I mean, one of the things about the DSA the left winning in the DSA was a sign of the DSA's precipitous decline. So the DSA left, you know not to shit on our Marxist unity friends, our Red Star, but it was actually an indication that the people with power had pretty much given up and already left, and so you had some weird herrington hangers on and you have these new movements largely coming out of a smallish chapters, um, actually with little access to local power, as opposed to the new york coteries which do have access to power, because the DSA has effectively been a caucus, informally in New York since the eighties.
Speaker 1:So, and in fact you know, I would say, the only the, the Harrington at DSA only really mattered at all in in New York, like, but nonetheless. So where are you seeing things now? I mean, yeah, gaza has taken a lot of steam out of things and it's vital that it do so, although you know I also have to ask you a question, alex what the fuck do you think anyone can actually do about it? No, no, I mean like that's the thing Like, like it's like you can thing, like like it's like you can like, broadly speaking, um, this war in israel, uh, in israel, gaza is not popular in the united states, even amongst conservatives, kind of. I mean, it's more like I was reading something now that how you feel about that if you're a conservative it has to do whether or not you're a protestant or a catholic, like and see, like weird stuff like that. It's like okay so. So like there's divisions popping up everywhere along israel and gaza, but politically I don't see what it leads to like at all.
Speaker 2:Like, um, yeah, I mean like especially. I mean because you know there's there's a difference between. I think people conflate like there's something the us could do to stop it. Right, there's something biden could do to stop it, but what can you do to make the us or biden take that step? Um, that's a totally separate question, right, and I mean it's it like I do think the like public sentiment isn't in some places at least it's not completely worthless. Right In Ireland, in Canada, it's actually led to some kind of meaningful parliamentary action to like stop weapon sales or whatever, whatever. But there's just so many structural, there's just so many structural inertial, which is generally the case when we're talking about the US. Right, it's both like the biggest prize that everyone is fixated on and also, for the same reason, kind of the hardest thing to move.
Speaker 1:Well, let's ask ourselves why. Like, basically, the us legislature is fucking broken. It can only do stuff when capital is directly threatened um, uh, and approve military budgets, but that seems to be all it can do, except meaningless symbolic politics about impeaching this or that person, and that includes Democrats, by the way. It's not just a Republican problem. The Republicans seem particularly sclerotic, though. I mean, one of the things about this current moment is they might win the executive and they are probably going to get the Senate, just because the way the map is drawn, but they're collapsing as a legislative force, like in front of everyone's eyes. Despite that, and despite Biden and and the Democrats being, broadly speaking, unpopular, it hasn't actually led to an uptick in popularity of conservatives that much, I mean. There are things that you can see. For example, zoomers are more frustrated with the Democratic Party. Zoomer boys are slightly more conservative than women, but not much, I mean. So they went from extremely left wing to slightly less left wing, yeah, and that's predictable.
Speaker 2:actually, that was also true for millennials somewhat in the first half of the obama administration, um, yeah I think the overwhelming trend is just generally that, um, the population, like this is, I think these two candidates now are like the lowest, like least popular like history, uh, in terms of like both candidates just having like very low popularity and approval ratings. Um, and yet, and yet you know, nothing actually changes, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and yet they seem more inevitable than than any two candidates we can think of Um. Another thing that the posit is I was reading a people the other day that, like 70% of the population, thinks we need a third party, but nobody is really willing to vote for one, because I think it's throwing away your vote.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So it's like we are in these cul-de-sacs where more and more people think we need change but they also literally think change is impossible. So it's, um, it's a situation where, yes, the us is a declining hegemon but, like, economically speaking, if you look in the world scale, we're not doing too bad in for our bourgeoisie. I, I know, before people get mad and talk about, like, the everyday person and the economy for the everyday person, I realized for the everyday person it's getting shittier and shittier. But from the bourgeois perspective, which is a perspective of empire, anyway, things are actually not that bad. And yet this declining internal incoherence is continuing to go out of control because our institutions are totally fractured. Go out of control because our institutions are totally fractured. It does seem fair to say that the millennial left really fucked up, since it couldn't take advantage of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean because you would think that in a moment where, like this, yeah, where both major parties have historically low levels of popularity, there's just general. This is also like a weird time when, like the fact that even a majority of people who identify as Republican or conservative basically are like down on, like capitalism as such, without necessarily identifying it. But you know, like it used to be, that generally only one party would complain about the economy and the other one would be like it's doing, uh, you know, no, actually, like we like everything's fine and we just need to, you know, like support businesses or whatever. Uh, I think that's generally broken down. It's been breaking down essentially since 2008, but much more sharply since COVID.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've looked at the polls. There's a 2019 poll that everyone cites about the increase in popularity in socialism, and then they don't cite the 2022 follow-up poll, which actually says socialism's decreased in popularity, but capitalism has decreased more in popularity, which is actually kind of terrifying, because I'm like well, what are your options if you're not dealing with socialism or capitalism?
Speaker 2:I'm like well option.
Speaker 1:Uh, perhaps right their third ways uh have have appeared many times, or maybe even fourth ways, um, and they've almost always been bad um, so, uh, you know. So here we are with that um, uh. So you have a right, and I think people underestimate this, and when I bring it up, they think that I'm like trying to excuse the left. So I just want to get this out of the way. The left is really fucked up. We're gonna look at this, but I think that leads people to believe that the right is in a better position and it's not. Like that's the thing. Like the right is super fragmented right now. They're just like american conservative uh, running articles about trump running again in 2028, um, and getting you know, getting rid of the arbitrary. That's them also realizing they have no backbench at all. Like that, trump doesn't hasn't groomed a successor uh, there's no. Like this is a, a demagoguery that hasn't institutionalized and or ideologized and or, um, uh, like, even made a clear succession run. Trump doesn't seem to be interested in a legacy like that, uh, which means that since trump kind of is the gop right now, um, that there is not a clear answer as to what comes after him at all. Uh, santantis was a dry run and that's uh, that's also clearly going nowhere. It's too extreme for even most republicans, and while a lot of the liberal uh the left liberals like tried to pretend that desantis was somehow less extreme because he was a, an establishment figure, he's actually proved that the establishment's pretty willing to go there, and more if, if, it's the right person doing it.
Speaker 1:Um, so, uh, you know this is all to say to get that out of the way. Uh, this should be grounds for a left to be able to do something. And instead you see your representative there in New York, uh, aoc, pivoting away from not even just the dsa but also the justice democrats. Um, that, uh, we. This ups, this upswing of municipal left populism is very clearly dying. Um, um, cory bush is most likely going to get creamed in her in her reelection campaign.
Speaker 1:Um, in general, it looks like, uh, the, the, the social democratic progressive, uh, detente is going to lead to both getting creamed um in in the, in a moment where left-wing ideas are, broadly speaking, should be, are more popular, and yet we're not seeing them take on anyway anywhere, partly, I think, because people don't believe the left is ever going to do them yeah, I mean, ideas are one thing, but it's uh, I mean, and you know, like, yeah, if we go back to huchuli's article and, uh, the sort of the various diagnosis, like what's um, what's kind of the common thread here, right, which is that, uh, basically, I would think there there's a weird kind of um.
Speaker 2:I guess there's a weird kind of like um assumption even inherent in the question of like, where, where did the millennial left go wrong? Or where, um, what mistake did they make? And I'm not sure that, like, there ever actually was something called the millennial left in the sense of um, in the sense of a coherent subject, um, which is actually like, that's kind of, like that's the spoiler, like that's, that's sort of the failure, right, it's um, and this is, of course, easier said than done, right, but it's the failure to construct, like, uh, an independent center of gravity. Um, and you know to, I'm not a bordigas, but uh, you know, this is uh, the sort of recurring thing, is something that, uh, you know what, like bordigas would call it tailism, right, which is just that um, and I think what julie kind of has a sense of this in an article which says that it kind of always seems like the crisis arrives too early and we're too late.
Speaker 2:Uh, because what was happening was basically, um, people who consider themselves on the left, um, by and large and I think this applies to this, doesn't apply to any particular faction um have just been basically in a reactive posture, like reacting to crises and events after they happen, after the fact, and trying to kind of glom onto sort of these kinds of things that seem like they present an opportunity and like, okay, if we just like grab onto this, we can, you know, increase our popularity and use something else as a vehicle to advance our ideas. And, you know, electoral politics is just like one example of that. But even, like, with the counter hegemonic stuff like um, like when, like, as you mentioned earlier, like the fact that um, you know, this has echoes of, like, the anti-war movement in um, like in the 2000s, where, just because there's a war going on, that's like wildly unpopular and the idea that, okay, yeah, you can just make um a blotch onto opposition at this war and use that as like a vehicle to advance the left. Um, that also, like that wasn't true in the 2000s and it's not true now because, um, for one thing, you're like there's plenty of. Just because someone let's put it this way just because someone is against Israel does not, as we've learned time and time again, does not necessarily mean that they're a leftist or even sympathetic to any other left ideas.
Speaker 2:Candace.
Speaker 1:Owens, also some Nazis. Any other left ideas? Uh, candace owens, uh, also some nazis. Like it's just, you know, right, it's, uh, it is what it is, I mean, um, well, this is the problem with trying to base the leftism on, like, I've complained in both ways during the 2016 to 2020 period, the left just forgot the rest of the world fucking existed at all.
Speaker 1:Like it was. Like we talked about us domestic politics and that was about it. We ignored, uh, what was going on in afghanistan for most of that period. Uh, sometimes we even, like, took soft defenses of the military establishment by liberals as a given and didn't push back on it, which was kind of fucked up. Um, then it's, and I think, predictably historically, if you look at what happened, uh, with the 50s left, which is a little bit different because it came out of a period of hyper anti-communism, but like, uh, the loss led to a focus on milquetoast domestic politics but wild, almost pacifistic, idealist international politics.
Speaker 1:And I think we've seen that again, where I'm big on the ceasefire right now and that's one of the big things I care about politically, because we need this massacre to fucking stop. However, when I hear about people talking about what comes after that, I'm just like. I'm sort of like are you guys really like? Are you even trying to be to function in the reality in which you actually live, as opposed to this construction of a moral framework in which you work in live, as opposed to this construction of a moral framework in which you work in like? Because what is likely to happen right now, if we don't have a ceasefire, is that the northern part of gaza is going to be occupied and no one's going to be allowed back and you're going to lose even more of the population than you have, which is which is ridiculously high.
Speaker 2:And I like to remind people who, some people who thought, like Hamas, could win this in a traditional war footing on October 8th and I heard that from leftists- and I think some people are still claiming that like there's, like claims that, like you know well, there's there, they're winning, they're kicking the IDF's ass on the ground which, like you know, I don't know, I don't, I don't even really I haven't gotten involved in that because I don't see even even like to push back against that. It's just like what's, what's the point?
Speaker 1:what's the point? Right, because it's so clearly delusional. When you look at the death rates, it's like, uh, the idf has lost a few hundred people since, since october 7th, like its biggest losses were on october 7th. And like, uh, and the palestinians have lost what fucking portion of their population, mostly of women and children. It's insane, like uh. So to pretend otherwise, it's just like. The level of cope is astounding to me.
Speaker 1:But I think that's also the other trend that we need to talk about is this turn towards workerism, in this belief that, like we're, we're living in this massive union reorganization moment. And, uh, if we are, it is not happening at the national level in a way that which will show up in national statistics, like, just that's it. And I do see workers militancy. I do see, like there's a big teachers union victory in wisconsin and I think that's a big deal. I do see this pivoting by sean fain, which is pretty smart, but then also by sean fain, I see him totally doing the let's get back in complete bed with a, with an unpopular democratic administration at the moment of their peak unpopularity, like, and so I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? You just, you know, broke that cycle and you seem to be re-entering it. Um, so what do you make of that? I mean, so you have this worker stuff. The, the bureau of labor statistic numbers, do not support what leftists are saying is happening for the most part.
Speaker 2:Right. I mean I guess people were sort of excited about the changes in the NLRB under Biden which you know it's just compared to like the baseline for the past few decades. I suppose it is pretty good.
Speaker 1:It hasn't led to new unions.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Like in so much that there are new unions. They are completely new unions and we are seeing still this stagnation and decline of union density in the private sector in the united states, and the most unionized two areas of work are teaching, our teachers unions, and then right beneath it, um, cop unions and then nurses unions, and nurses unions are a little weird because they're kind of public private hybrid thing. But the, the thing that about I want to point out about all those, none of those does the nlra and thus the, the nc, the national labor relations board, apply to. Um, and I also think the railroad strike was a fucking wake-up call for how positive, uh biden was actually going to be on organized labor.
Speaker 1:Like, so, um, and I think a lot of people, like our our friend ryan grim, uh, uh, hadn't known how to deal with that. Like it's the, the messaging coming out of the essay around that was absolutely kind of like schizophrenic, you know, um, it was a realization that they didn't have the power to actually do anything. Um, and there's a lot of people, like a friend of the show, david Griscom, admitted that like we can't hold our electives accountable, so what are we going to do? But on the other hand, it's like well, if that's true, what the fuck was your project this entire time?
Speaker 2:Like right, because that that was. That was always the rhetoric right Like, but hold their feet to the fire. Okay, how are you going to hold their feet to the fire? What leverage do you actually have to do that? Which I think we I just got deja vu now because I think we might have even talked about this before. It's just like. This ties back to like you haven't built an independent base. You're essentially just like what the electoral left has been is basically a constituency that Democrats can take for granted and that provides free, like you know, campaign volunteer labor when the time comes, um I mean.
Speaker 1:For me, the irony is in a very real way, the social democratic left created an illusion of counter-systemic movement that actually tied people back to the most decrepit wing of the democratic party and and that reality is now. Yeah, it's becoming obvious. Yes, people like everywhere you know, jimmy dora finally said it, but that was predictable. I mean you and I think you and I even mentioned this as a possibility before I even have my own show on a symptomatic redness thing where we were complaining about greenpoint like that. This was still. That's the day job you're having. That was a conversation we had almost five years ago.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I know it's make us all feel old, but nonetheless, man, I've been podcasting for 14 years Like that. That realization was like I up, like, but uh, uh, nonetheless. Um, so I guess to get the hachiles article. I find hachile was actually useful in breaking down the problems of this. Um.
Speaker 1:I wish there was more given to katron's positive analysis than his negative analysis. Katron is one of those people who's very useful when he's critiquing the left, but when you talk about what he actually seems to believe is the answer to it, you got a lot of vagaries, something, something. Fulfillment of bourgeois revolution, something, something, something, something. Why not Trump something, something we're totally not tailing the right, but maybe we are something, something, something. Why not trump something, something we're totally not tailing the right, but maybe we are something? Something like um, and that's going to be popular right now because it speaks to the alienation that a lot of people have in regards to the dsa, these, the return of weird marxist, leninist sectarianism although interestingly, this round of Marxist-Leninist sectarianism seems to be the PSL and the CPUSA and then a bunch of weird internet formations that actually don't seem to form up to do it MAGA communism.
Speaker 1:MAGA communism. The spectrum of weird ML thought right now is actually kind of interesting to to look at. But um, outside of the psl, which seems to have a lot of money, um, uh, it hasn't translated to anything on the ground really. It really does seem to be an individual identity and online phenomenon for the most part, like these people aren't. They might organize an anti-war rally with some other people or something, but they're not. They don't really have any sort of actual political program like um. So and that also feels very similar to me, like I remember that shit from the aughts Like you know, you had these weird sectarian groups who are the new left in the 70s and 80s, like when they were dying, like we've seen this before.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean insofar as, like what I'm still thinking about, like what actually what unites all of these seemingly, you know, opposing and diverse kind of manifestations right opposing and diverse kind of manifestations right From the, from like the DSA left uh the ones who were still like invested in the democratic party, to the uh, the Jimmy Doors, the uh, cutrones, uh, and you know, some section I won't make.
Speaker 2:Uh, I won't make, I, I I'm actually not really sure what Platypus, as like an organization as a whole, believes. But you know people like Patron with the why not Trump stuff and some other plats that I've interacted with, kind of making basically arguments that are indistinguishable from like what the GOP is putting forward is putting forward. And to these weird ML cults that are either latching on to Russia or China or both. The common thread is basically looking for something to latch on to and looking to, I would say, substitute another entity for what would have been the interest of workers. So it's either well, you kind of do this mental shortcut where you're like well, obviously, the Democratic Party is the only thing you know, know, protecting workers from trump and whatever, right. So from then on, all your reasoning is whatever helps, the democratic party is what we're going to support.
Speaker 2:Um, same logic for, you know, the um for the marxist leonardist. So it's like okay, well, china is the only uh geopolitical force, uh, counter to uh us hegemony. So, whatever China does, like, that is the only way to defend the revolution, right? I mean this dates back to the USSR, right? The kind of substitution, okay, like well, now that the only hope for the global revolution rise in Russia, russia's geopolitical interests are the left's interests and yeah, with with control which I'll give control in a little bit.
Speaker 1:He isn't doing that, no, but what they're?
Speaker 2:doing. What he's doing is he's found another substitution agent, which is, uh, the American bourgeoisie right. Because then there's this weird like plat idea that, uh, the bourgeois revolution is incomplete in the U? S somehow, which I find pretty doubtful unless you're talking about, unless you're talking about reconstruction, and but that's not what they're talking about, and so that you know the, you know correctly, identifying the neoliberals and the sort of leftist formations around them as uh something holding us back, uh, then the idea is that, like, no, actually, uh, american small business is what's in the interest of the workers. So therefore, uh, defending the interest of american small business is, uh, somehow a left project, that, or a marxist project.
Speaker 1:Um, which Fox News, shit yeah, the gold standard in shit Like it's just you know and I think you know. I think one of the things that you have to know about their dialectical moves there is that they separate bourgeois from capital. They say bourgeois culture predates capitalist culture, so we can't say that they're the same thing, which I find wild to try to justify marx like um. And then they take this rhetoric about finishing the bourgeois revolutions from germany, which, I should remind you, was about a place that had not had an actual bourgeois revolution even when it consolidated into a nation state.
Speaker 2:They were literally an imperial monarchy. Right.
Speaker 1:So it feels like a weird reappropriation of rhetoric. It's a reappropriation not unique to the Plats, though, because it was something that you saw out of McManus and to some degree you know my, you know my friend, ben Burgess friends of the show, but nonetheless they were arguing that, but actually from a completely opposite point of like, well, we need to get on this Rawlsian liberal project, which, of course you know they're using the same ideological justification at the Platts, but their, their actual projects ends up being like, like, uh, keynesian technocracy or something. So it's just, these bait and switches are everywhere and I think, uh, jaeger, and what's his face?
Speaker 1:um, boreal boreal in their populist moment, like, seem to realize the limitations of the populist moment. But also, let's be honest, that was a substitution to like that was itself a weird talism of an anti-political moment that actually is from a prior time period. I mean, I, I'm looking at, you know, the rhetoric that led to pro demos was this weird social democratization of anarchist movements. You know, um learning the lesson that maybe, like, total consensus politics isn't possible, so let's go back and do some kind of populist electoral politics. But then when they go to do it, um, they end up doing pretty much the same thing as any uh party in that position would do, and of course they become unpopular and don't stay in power long.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, but I think you know even one of my critiques of alex hochili's piece that he implies but doesn't state. Is he kind of? He kind of somehow thinks that, like, left sovereign nationalism was possible, like, and in fact like, uh, grexit would have been a great idea and legs, it would have been a possibility in the uk, and I just don't think that's viable. Like, like, uh game. Theoretically, I don't think it's viable. I think adam krasowski saw the problems with this a fucking half century ago, like so you know and it's. And ultimately, even though these people want to admit it, populism is class collaborationist and will tend right wing because of that. Yeah well, I mean, it's fundamentally.
Speaker 2:it's fundamentally nationalist in orientation. There's no, or at least I haven't seen, such a thing as internationalist populism. No, it seems like a contradiction in terms. Basically, if there is such a thing, it's actually right wing, right, right, right right, yeah, the, uh, the, the international, like far right collaborating, you know they're, they have their. You know summit in hungary, uh, where they all agree on the need to stop wokeness. Uh, yeah, that's, uh, that's international populism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it does very little even for their own politics. I mean, that's the irony of this, but a lot of left-wingers have been caught up in that Like, let's not lie about like left-wingers being, like, maybe the national conservatives aren't so bad. And again, if you are a class collaborationist, the only thing stopping you from jumping on the Sohrab Amari train honestly is you might not agree with him on criminalizing homosexuality and divorce, like you know, which is a big deal, but like, like, if you are ignoring that, I remember in, uh so Rob's um you know book tour on left-wing podcast. Uh, people did not bring that up and then they didn't point out that his politics was fundamentally class collaborationist.
Speaker 2:And ostensibly there's wasn't, because in reality there's is also class collaborationist, like yeah, I mean, you'd be surprised at how many former leftists seem like OK with you know, if not, it's like the, the whole gamut of social conservative positions. You know, in this kind of like winking maybe I'm being ironic, maybe I'm not like well, oh, like, maybe we should make abortion and divorce legal. You know, like what? Are you some kind of liberal? It's, yeah, it's really tiresome and I guess, like you know, the sort of wing of the Bernie left that went in that direction. If I had to diagnose it, I would say, I don't know, maybe I've said this before somewhere, but like it's uh, it's a sort of uh, elder millennial, like younger gen X pose.
Speaker 2:Where we were, uh, we were brought up in a kind of like culture that prized irony and this in distance, and I think it was.
Speaker 2:A lot of people felt deep, ended up feeling deeply embarrassed over having um, dropped the uh ironic thing and like sincerely lent their support to the Bernie movement and it was like the first time in their life that they actually sincerely believed in something that uh could succeed. And then, you know, once it failed and was kind of uh, you know, whatever remained of it was kind of co-opted by these like sort of protests like neoliberals, um, you know it, the the kind of like deep embarrassment over having sort of like having been cringe right or over having like seriously believed in and supported something that ended up, you know, not being a thing and ended up losing uh, leads to this kind of weird like sort of like fetishistic disavowal, overcorrection kind of thing, um, that's like by sort of armchair, uh, psychoanalyst diagnosis, um, but it's, it's been weird because, yeah, it was like. Well, like you know, if nothing else, then uh, the obviously like sort of christian fundamentalist, social conservative shit will keep people from going all the way right wing.
Speaker 1:Apparently not. No, it won't. I mean it also like the fact that I see leftists sincerely defending Dugan, even though Dugan explicitly in the second chapter of his fucking book, says he would use Marxism as a fifth column strategy. He says it explicitly. It's just wild to me. Are these people that desperate? Are they that broken?
Speaker 1:You know what's funny when I talk about the millennial left, you know what the first defense I get of the left? Oh, you shouldn't talk about generations. The generations are socially constructed and they're arbitrary. They're made by brands, and I'm like what else do you think? What isn't socially constructed? Dipshit, like, you know, like, if you're arguing that gender is socially constructed, but real race is socially constructed, but real class may or may not be real, depending on who you're talking to that day, but generations are not real, but they're also socially constructed. Why? Why Like? Because in terms of wealth commanding, generations really matter in our economy in a way that they didn't.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the things that someone pointed to me, pointed out to me about Marx, is Marx wrote in a time where like inflation and deflation was relatively stable, for like, like, literally like, two generations. And um, you know, you can't say for all of marx's insight, and he even has insight, I think, about inflation and deflation. That that, uh, that he would have understood the way time plays in speculation the way it does now, because, like right now, you can literally be rich by when you enter the housing market or not. Like it's it, and that's that's effectively. The only non-arbitrary factor is when you hit the right age to buy a house, and if you had some capital to do it yeah right, like like when you graduated college, and if you entered the job market before 2008, um, that's a huge cutoff.
Speaker 1:Like all right um, and the next huge cutoff is uh, uh, how fucked were you if you did own anything? Um, in the subprime lending crisis, which is which, by the way, I pointed this out uh, if you look at the wealth gap between between poor, white or not poor, like under 120k, um, white people and under 120k, uh, black people, it's all explainable in terms of wealth loss from the, from the great recession, in terms of housing, entirely explainable according to that, and, yeah, that's proof of systemic racism, but it's not the way that you hear it explained that it really is a matter of two things White people the richest white people had a longer time to accumulate, and poor people who were able to keep their house during the Great Recession have greatly benefited from it in terms of wealth. And poor people who were not and predatory lending was racialized really got fucked on that which, you know, if I was a black person, I would consider Obama the great traitor to my race, but I, you know, whatever, like you know, I don't get to make those decisions. Um, uh, and I don't see this, you know. I guess the other elephant in the room is like we lived through mass riots on stuff.
Speaker 1:I remember arguing with anti of anti FADA very softly. But when he was like, well, this Floyd thing is going to continue into the Biden administration, I was like no, it's not. Like I don't know why you think that, like for one, you guys are going to eventually have to go back to work and that's going to limit the capacity for these kinds of mass, but demonstrations like this for two, uh, the systemic support for this is going to run out, um, from ngos and stuff them. You're not going to have doctors saying that we should violate, um, uh, covid protocols because the, the saving black lives, is going to be more important than covid deaths, which is absurd when you look at what's happened since then. Like, uh, and that was predictable at the time um, the proliferation of blms as formal organizations, of which they're like.
Speaker 1:When people like, oh, the BLM, I'm like there's like 20 and some of them are scams like the big one turned out to be a scam, right, right, yeah, and and the left will not talk about it, they, they let it fester in right-wing media and I'm like that's a mistake, like that's a huge mistake to not address it head-on. Um know, even when I was talking about the legitimacy of some of the Hunter Biden concerns, like, and I'm like, look, you know, I don't think it's that important in the grand scheme of things, and it definitely. I mean, when you look at how corrupt Trump is, it's ridiculous. But on the other hand, you saying that there's nothing there. When there is something, there is a bad look.
Speaker 1:When you're trying to argue that we aren't just partisan. In the same way, um, and whenever I would bring that stuff up, even on the far left, you're like, well, that sounds like a right-wing talking point. I'm like, well, maybe it is, but maybe it's right. You guys can't tell the difference between cynically taking up a right-wing cultural talking point, which is not a matter of factuality, and taking up one that's about facts.
Speaker 2:But, like the fact that I mentioned the fact, you're like, oh, no, okay, what is true? How, how do we, how do we, as like socialists or whatever, uh, have, uh, an accurate and complete description of the world as we see it? Um, like you know, as we, and you know, provide, try to provide an accurate and full description of the world as we see it? It's like, okay, no, well, what's this side saying? What's this side saying, how do we counter signal that? Um, and it's just like you know, I keep it's like okay, no, well, what's this side saying? What's this side saying, how do we countersignal that? And it's just like you know, I keep saying it's countersignaling all the way down.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I mean even weird stuff like free speech becoming a countersignaling thing, are now like this stuff, with the ACLU potentially joining in with the Amazon Trader Joe's anti-whack, that uh, anti um faulkner act, uh, uh, uh movement that could literally undo the entire post-new deal union apparatus. Um, and I don't know, I really have no idea how this court's going to decide on it. Honestly, I have like no clue, and I think you know the elephant in the room. I mean, let's be honest about this. We were told that we were doing harm reduction by supporting the Democrats on the national level, and in no area of life did the right get what it wanted more clearly than after the trump administration. Um, the anti-trans stuff kicked up and was effective at a state level in a way that never would be at a federal. Anti-abortion stuff was federalized in a way that now makes it a culture war, which the democrats have no incentive to fix either, because they see it as a wedge issue they can use in red states. The healthcare situation the healthcare is just falling apart. We're not even talking about socialized medicine anymore. We're talking about the fact that we don't have enough doctors and nurses to maintain basic services, even in cities. Um like, uh, the schools are completely falling apart and the left is just digging their head in the ground on this.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, the crime. Okay, crime is not as high as people think it is, that's absolutely true. But where it is high, it is really high, like it's. So, people, you know social media is leading to this fear-based and I am going to blame social media here for once. I think it's actually true. Social media, just like television, gets fear clicks, so focusing on these high crime areas. But it's also true that the left has nothing to say, not even defunding police anymore, about how to fix these areas. There's literally nothing.
Speaker 1:All right, um, you don't have the social service. You don't even have the workers to provide. Like, even if you wanted to fund them, you would have to fund them at such a level to pour people out of the private market into social services I own, and my life cannot imagine that happening. Like, like, it's just um, uh, the the talk of, um, mutual aid. Well, so much of that mutual aid stuff which I think is important for building good power people. I can already hear my anarchist listeners getting mad at me for what I'm about to say. I'm not saying this for electoralist reasons. But if your mutual aid becomes NGO-like charity, well it's actually really bad, because it doesn't empower workers. It makes independent on other workers who don't have anything.
Speaker 2:Right, it's like the Go know the, the go fund me. Like health care model where it's just poor people begging each other for like small donations to aggregate.
Speaker 1:Maybe, you know, win the lotto on being able to pay for this cancer surgery, like um and that's. You can't build a politics off that, like that doesn't empower the working class at all. Like um, uh, you know, and I find it ironic that the left is still fighting the left and the and the right are still fighting the work, the woke wars. But I can tell you, I've noticed democrats have moved on like yeah, two, yeah, two years ago Biden may have gotten trapped for saying something like birth, having people or something, but I haven't heard any of that out of the administration in two years. Like it's all that signaling has gone away, partly because it even alienated the people who was protecting supposedly like, and yet you see this kind of Twitter debates between the far right and elements of the left that pretends that this is still a highly relevant issue to the majority of people and it, quite frankly, in my daily life, is not.
Speaker 1:I just don't hear about it that much in person anymore. I heard about it a lot more two, three years ago In either direction. Like it's just uh, so we can still cap, we can still fight the stupid council cultural wars, but that's really been over and done with for like six years. I think like, uh, maybe I I put the death of it or you know sooner than other people, but I I think like the moment it was recuperated by the right as a talking point, it was already effectively over.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean now that Musk literally owns, the platform where all these debates were happening is now actively owned by a guy who is at least like sympathetic to a far right conspiracy theory, shit, and um you know. So it's like what's there even to talk about it anymore?
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, I mean, the collapse of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones into effectively the same person is actually not a good sign for anybody's future. Um, it including the far right, I mean, like it's. It's just a very pessimistic place. I guess we haven't talked so much about the substance of the Hachili article. One of the things I found interesting is I gave the Vincent Bevan stuff the hardest time because I'm just not convinced that there wasn't a whole lot of verticalism in the left. I think this caricature of it all being secretly horizontalist, anarchist, um, is like it's true in the initial instantations of activist groups who begun these things, but by the time any of these things had any size at all, it wasn't true anymore oh yeah.
Speaker 2:No, I think it's the opposite, uh more, if any more, the opposite of anything um. No, I think it's the opposite, uh more more of the opposite of anything Um, especially if you look at the way that, like a lot of um, I mean even you know, like the NGO isation of the left is a verticalization right Um. And then you know, even you, you get the other stuff, like you know, the PSL doing their like entry as I'm into the DSA, like these, the other stuff, like you know, the PSL doing their like entryism into the DSA, like this is all like vertical forms of organizing. The Horizontalist stuff really just had, I think that's had its moments.
Speaker 2:You know, there was Occupy, of course, and then everything that came after was like almost like a reaction to Occupy and it was the same critique that like Occupy was too disorganized and horizontalist and we need to organize around actually, like you know, having leaders and winning elections, which is the kind of that's the millennial left moment that is really being described here. And then the horizontalist stuff kind of came back with, like at the peak peak of, I think, the BLM protests, the George Floyd uh stuff and uh, I guess now the kind of like center of gravity, for it is the Atlanta forest, um sort of uh, the defend the forest, defenders stuff that you know some of my friends are involved in.
Speaker 1:Um, and God bless them, like as far as it goes. But let's be honest, that feels very much like all the activism I remember from 1993 to about 2000, until Occupy. Honestly, that's ultra-globalization movement stuff. That stuff can feel like it has a mass import because you go and you, you, you walk around and there's lots of activists there, but then when you actually look at it in the grand schemas game they're not winning and um, uh, it's not, it's not even got that broad of a discourse pattern outside of a very small section of the far left. Like it's it. It's not even really discussed in popular culture and in that sense that reminds me of, like you know, uh, defending anarchists who got arrested in the aughts on anti-terror charges or right or seattle.
Speaker 1:Uh, yeah, yeah I mean, I remember you know people declaring seattle a victory in 1998 because of some mild concessions given by the WTO after the protest, and I just was thinking like that's absurd. And then, as early as 2004, and I know this because I was just reading an early book by Graeber Graeber's already talking about this as the model between between Seattle and the Zapatistas, as the way we're going to diffuse this mode of power. And while I'm not actually a verticalist, I think that shit usually becomes weirdly sectarian and collapses into itself and becomes a plaything of patrons. Basically, I have to admit that I find it absurd that people thought that not having demands was going to be a thing. But what I find interesting is if you look at the key figures and I kind of wish these books had done this you look at what I like to call the social Like. You look at the what I like to call the social democraticization of Mark Fisher All right, read capitalist realism, where he thinks that social democracy is actually like a capitalist stooge, and then read even as early as a vampire castle essay, he's like, oh no, but this is how we're going to bring joy back to politics and shit Like, like and, interestingly enough. I'm like that's absurd, like, and it was such a quick shift.
Speaker 1:I also see it with graber, not in electoral politics, but with mmt and modern monetary theory, which is a statist form of organization of which he was advocating as an anarchist like um, and you just see like these people were making concessions to social democracy immediately, like, so this idea that was that was promulgated at first by people like Malcolm Kuna, that what ruined the Bernie movement with all these fucking anarchists was like, absurd to me. Like um, you know, if anything, in the movement of like a, an anarcho-liberal like naomi klein, the person which bosh carson literally coined the term for bosh car, naomi on the same side now like, and so none of that has ended up being actually all that substantive. And I think you know I get tired of people beating up on anarchists as if that's why the social democratic and Marxist-Leninist left is failing and not because they're generally unappealing, have no strategy and smell weird. Like, like what else?
Speaker 2:to do yeah. So I mean it's like okay, we've, so we've identified all these like failure points, right.
Speaker 1:Where would you push back on the like? I'm not sure I'm convinced that the millennial left is totally dead, though, so I like, I want to like talk about that.
Speaker 2:Well, I guess, like the weird thing is, like, does anything really die in the age of, like the internet and social media? Because, like you can just exist as these like zombie ideas, right, like hell. Like I mean, you'll still run into people like repeating like bush era talking points about like the iraq war, for example, like it's not like huge anymore, but it still exists, right, the the reason libertarians, like you know, the the very, the small section of libertarians that haven't like gone alt-right or outright fascists, uh, like they're still hanging on somewhere, they still publish in Reason Magazine occasionally and sometimes at antiwarcom.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so like I mean, you know, like you can, to the extent that the millennial left was really characterized by a lot of these like launches of podcasts and media outlets. You know the sort of like the tech collapse of like 2022, where a bunch of you know the sort of like the tech collapse of like 2022, where a bunch of you know a bunch of stuff got. A bunch of the new media outlets got kind of consolidated or closed down.
Speaker 1:But you know.
Speaker 2:I mean, it still exists. It's just a question of what's, what's kind of what's going to be the next step, like what's going to be the sort of next trend and, um, unfortunately, I think, like it's just like people are, like we talked about this at the beginning, um, there's no shortage of like sort of shiny objects, um, for people to glom onto and try to chase, try to tail and try to like chase as a shortcut to, um, you know, getting something like socialism popular again. Um, and I don't know, I mean, I know, uh, I know you've like, uh, you're probably like aware of this somewhere, but there's, I think tentatively and I'm very hesitant to be like um optimistic about anything really um, if there's sort of a proposition in the works of like, well, if we identified the problem as being like the left hadn't actually formed as a subject but was trying to tail all these movements and trying to take positions on this and issue statements on that, like, what if we actually just forgot about that? Right? What if we actually forgot about um sort of oh, what position do you have? An electoral politics? Or how, what position do you have on like X foreign policy issue and actually focused on even constructing a coherent left subject that would be even capable of having meaningful positions on these things in the first place.
Speaker 2:And, um, actually like intervening in politics as workers rather than as free, volunteer labor for the democratic party or the ccp or, uh, you know whatever. Fucking russian handlers are funding this through proxies. What would it be like to actually? Can we even envision like a distant future in which workers are organized to act independently as workers? And so I know like I mean, you've talked to Sean, you know there's like something. There's something very early in the works in this regard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I've identified three kinds of workerism that has emerged, emerged, emerged it got all Middle Englishy for a second. Right now there's the right-wing adjacent populist, like left populist emergence. But it's very willing to like, go and write for Compact Magazine, pretend that nationalism, national subjects make sense and maybe we're okay with all the shenanigans that conservatives are pulling, even though it hurts, arguably essentially, sections of the working class. Um, there is a kind of center jacobin that's really lost its way. I mean it's a workerism. I mean, I'm actually gonna say it's a workerism. They're always talking about labor but like they've been kind of gaslighting us and where the labor movement really was for a decade and people have caught on to it, um, and they also are fundamentally unwilling to give up positions of safety in relations to the democratic party because it's made some of them rich. Like, let's be honest about that like there are people who we have made rich by this and their silence on the problems with dealing with Democrats is how they don't have a lot of opposition. Like, you know, whether or not you like Sam Seder or not like, and Sam Seder wasn't made rich by this, but that style of politics has a limit and that limit is your actual ability to be honest about what the Democrats are, and the Gaza thing has blown them the fuck up like um. Then, lastly, there's kind of a a leftish workerism. That is kind of a mixture of people fed up with social democrats and people coming out of like communization movements and stuff and getting over the anti-worker orientation of communization movements. But they are running into some real problems with the fact that. Like, what do you do? Do you use informal unionization to get around this? Are you dependent on formal unions, like there's? There's all kinds of issues. Do you work in both? And I also think there is a real social depending on formal unions, like there's? There's all kinds of issues. Do you work in both? And I also think there is a real social reproduction element.
Speaker 1:The reason why the right wing cares about sex and stuff is actually because it's about the reproduction of society. That is what is at stake at that. Unfortunately, a lot of the less framing about sexual liberation and stuff has been about, like, individuals and individual liberty, and that's a mistake. But we totally talked about it that way and we still talk about defending individuals from. You know, are defending individuals as representations of oppressed identities in this way and it's not in like how do we want to reproduce society and what do we think that will bring? Like? And you know I'm very much of the your sex isn't radical position, but I'm also of the but that also means that having conservative positions on sexuality is not actually really anything other than having a conservative position on sexuality. It's not really affirming anything, because the current way that we have to organize society is based off certain units and we want to end that and we should be honest about that. I'm not talking about facile family abolition either. I know that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Sophie Lewis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've read those books and I'm like I don't know what I mean is. We do have to just reconceive all this stuff, right? That genie's out of the bottle. Even if you thought you could put it back in, you're not going to be able to. I don't see the point in trying to revive the worst parts of 1950s Marxism's regressions on sexuality, because it might make you popular with some conservatives who are going to hate your guts anyway. I don't see that point.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah. So I mean, the sort of the gambit is that you start at like a pre-political level, like the way to rebuild what we call, what we could plausibly call the left, um, although even you know, like not to be applied, but just even like even calling it, the left already presumes. Like all this um kind of baggage, just like rebuilding something that could one day be called a workers movement, um would start at the pre-political level, like it would start with um, you know what we would think of as like fraternal organizations or just like social clubs, essentially um and uh sort of uh just build, like, build the kind of free association, um, and the idea that you can organize independently as workers, instead of um using something else as a proxy for that um, that's the uh, that's sort of the kind of I the only like, it's one of the only like, at least like it's not a new idea, uh, but it's a coherent one that doesn't fall into like these traps, that traps that I think are pretty well outlined in the Ho Chi Minh article.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and something that isn't outlined in the Ho Chi Minh article but I think we need to talk about allows for the opportunity of left internationalism, as opposed to our weird concession to nationalism, of which we're going to lose to right-wing nationalists. They're better at nationalism than we are. I just want to say that, hey, they kind of didn't invent it, but they've been steady on this nationalism stuff and we've been incoherent on it for 100 years. We have been strategically nationalist and then and then not able to defend when we are and aren't. Yeah, the thing is they don't need.
Speaker 2:They don't need to be coherent on it because uh, like, just the inertia and structure of capital favors them, like the. Basically it doesn't matter who's in power, they're gonna, uh, they're gonna implement economic nationalism when it suits, uh, when you know the capital cycle goes a certain way and uh, you know they're gonna blather about free trade, uh, at other times. And, like, the right doesn't need to be consistent on this, uh, because they're like you know they're already starting from a position of victory, essentially well, this is what I this is.
Speaker 1:This is both the. There is an advantage we have as a left, and it's actually ironically I learned this from Demestra, the ultimate rightist but conservatives are already in power. But the fact that they have articulated themselves as conservatives means they are already from a defensive position. However, we have to realize that we are an offensive position oriented towards the present and the future. We, you know, our orientation towards the past is going to vary depending on us, on the groups and individuals. Right now. One of the ironies is, I think the left is totally hauntology to death, like we are all obsessed about the past. What past we pick is based on our, our particular obsessions, and that's been true this entire time period. You know, you and I used to make the joke about how do we learn what someone's ideology is? When do they think? Everything went off the rails Like um, and then we've. You know, you've made the joke that the you know the the right wants to live in the fifties and the left wants to work in the 50s.
Speaker 2:That's a you quote and I think I stole that from um. I stole that from some libertarian writer, but uh yeah but that libertarian writer is correct, like um and the.
Speaker 1:The hardest thing to point out to people and this is something that actually the plats are good at, I'm gonna give them credit for this is like we don't actually want fordism back. That's what you think you want, but it led us here in the first place. The entire apparatus of neoliberalism isn't the natural state of capitalism. It is a development of neo, of fortist development. Once you kick the workers off the table and they were only ever going to be there temporarily anyway like like that's what class collaborationist politics leads to. So if, if that's your model, your model is something where you're just setting yourself up to get Lucy footballed again, and we have to be aware of that.
Speaker 1:I mean, and I kind of realized that whenever you know, like four years ago, when everyone's like G and or FDR as fdr, as our great victory paradigms, and then I'm like that's absurd, like uh, you know g I kind of get at least he comes out of a real communist background, but like fdr in some ways was our death nail, like, and it was really weird reading. I remember reading that book that choppo wrote way back um, and I couldn't figure out if this is because like uh, chrisman and like uh, the others are not in agreement. But there was this like weird ultra left position actually articulated explicitly on fdr in that book. But then this flip and like, but we have to do fdr ism again through bernie and I was like, yeah, but you just actually showed the problems with that in the first half of your own fucking book like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a weird, um, I guess the thing is okay, like people, like people like feeling. Uh, like people like the feeling of victory and they like feeling, like they like they have a chance, right. So that that explains why you would sort of try to attach yourselves to figures like of dr or she, um, but there's a weird unwillingness to like yeah, just deal with the basic. There's a basic question of like, okay, when you're, you're choosing to like, uh, you know, collaborate with, uh, this other force that's more powerful than you, um, even the collective view, as, whatever your little faction is, um, what are you going to do when, inevitably, they do something that you disapprove of? Like, have you?
Speaker 2:Are you even thinking about building an independent center of gravity or building up any kind of leverage that you would have over them to make them do the things you want? Uh, or is it just you're? You're along for the ride, you're along for the ride, you're along for the ride. Oops, suddenly they don't need you anymore. Um, and it's just weird that that's something that so little occurred. Like they and every faction basically is good at spotting that in others, and you know seeing how other factions have done that, but their proposed solutions all just fall to like, fall in the same pattern, and it's it's just weird that people don't see it right.
Speaker 1:Well, it doesn't help that the people who respond to it tend to be sectarian weirdos. Like, in some sense, uh, to quote a friend of mine, reality should be fuckable, um, and if your sectarian politics is unfuckable, you're doomed, um, and uh, you know that's uh, that's not my quote, but it's. I think there's a truth to it. And the sectarian, even though they are often right about the situation, they, whether you're a counselor or a board guest or whatever, like they have never. Like you know, I literally recorded something on board ago. The other day I just went through his biography and I said the icc claims some relationship to a italian, uh, ultra leftism, their council is no origin, and I immediately got that.
Speaker 1:I started getting comments about, like the real left comms, which is only de mentis, and I'm like this level of, uh, obscurantism and um, absolutism isn't even sexy and fucking cults and you're not even that.
Speaker 1:So, like, like you know, I don't care how right you are actually, uh, the rightness matters, but if you present it in a way that that is so inflexible and so unappealing to the vast majority of the not ultra alienated, you are dead on arrival and just raiding for the masses.
Speaker 1:To just come to the mystical agreement with you, which is a lot of these people's strategies is absurd, like so you know, it's one of these reasons. Like the reasons why I left the left communists or the ultra left wasn't because I even disagreed with them, it was because the way they presented themselves was like they're not interested in actually doing anything a lot of the time, and the ones that are often are fine until you touch on some weird point that you don't even know and they explode at you because you've hit some weird sectarian thing. And now it's easy to pick on this with left communists, but I think this is true for most leftists. Honestly, like Trotsky has kind of collapsed under the weight of this shit. Today you have all these like third worldist slash, dungus malice, but if you actually talk about historic malice positions they start freaking out Like I mean they have no idea what to do with the Sino-Soviet split, even.
Speaker 1:No, I mean one of the. You know, one of the things I've noticed is they want to erase it from history while also maintaining the critique of Khrushchev, which is insane, right, Right. And I still love the Khrushchev dirty revisionist who was a capitalist, rotor Dung.
Speaker 2:But also was correct to invade Hungary in 56. Right yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's all those Western Marxists. Nevermind that a lot of people that are calling Western Marxists literally lived in East Germany. It's absurd and this absurdity is common right now. It is popular on YouTube and shit. I don't know if it's actually popular. I also remind people YouTube stats are easy to gain. I also remind people YouTube stats are easy to gain, Like you can pay someone 250 bucks to get you know 10,000 views on a video pretty easily, Just you know, should we do that for this video?
Speaker 1:No, we should not, but it is a sign. If you go to a website our channel and you see that, like, most of their videos have like 500 views or whatever, like a bad day for me, um. And then you see that one of their most recent videos in a day has 5 000 views, that ain't organic. Even if that person is famous, that's not organic. You don't get in the algorithm that way. Um, that is most likely someone in that cycle and it may not be the owner of the channel actually helping by paying for bots as part of getting their name out, and it's real easy to do Like there's no. Now, is that good for your channel actually to get into this? Actually, no, it's not. It'll give you like weird, like you'll become popular in in Bangladesh because that's where your views are actually coming from, that's where you're going to be fed. It looks good and we'll get that individual video in the broader ether. If you don't know these games, you're at a disadvantage in trying to interpret the actual popularity of anything, because the numbers actually don't tell you that much.
Speaker 1:I realized that back when I worked for Northstar and I realized how many of these magazines that had secret patrons and they did back before. Patreon actually kind of democratized that in some sense Paid for clicks. Back then it was on Facebook. You'd pay for Facebook likes, you could just pay for them outright. What you would do is you would pay for ads, but the ads would come. You could just target them as some weird demographic and you could just pay for that to get like. You know, 400 cricks from India or something like that. You just do that. And that's when I knew how fixed these fucking numbers were like there's no, there's no ad Like. So we can't tell how popular something is.
Speaker 1:But even by Twitter engagement particularly now, I mean Twitter engagements like becoming less and less relevant. But I would always be like, how are these people like? So you know, the incentives on Twitter were actually really fucked up too, because a lot of that is organic. It wasn't probably all bots, but the more likely you were to trigger hate following was, the more likely you were to have a huge audience. And I was just like that's a terrible incentive.
Speaker 1:Like um so, but the internet left which is a big part of the millennial left, we have to be honest about that strived off those incentives and those incentives built its media market like um and there's a kind of weird audience capture where you get that way by getting hate followers, but then you keep your audience by basically blowing smoke up their ass like um, and you see it over and over again. There's a limit to that. It eventually collapses, but nonetheless, like um, there were a bunch of people who were pretending in 2019 that, like stalinist who worked for the gray zone, and social democrats and trotskyists could all just magically get along if bernie sanders won oh, people are still pretending that I mean you know, yeah, I'm not gonna name names but, it's still.
Speaker 2:It's just annoying, fucking. It's just fucking annoying. Like the level of like gaslighting that exists with some of the youth, or like like who are these stalinists you're talking about? I've never met anyone like that. What are you talking about? This is all in your imagination and this is coming from like people who have like written for the gray zone like come on, just just like have like some respect for like people's intelligence and like just just at least like be level. You don't have to like yeah um, yeah, I mean.
Speaker 1:Well, I also like to point out that, like mate and blumenthal probably aren't stalinist.
Speaker 2:Um, uh, who knows what blumenthal is anymore, uh right or mate for that matter.
Speaker 1:I mean, uh, what? What I can say about them is they're both nepo babies, um and um. Their, their, their particular brand of politics seems to have emerged when Eric Alterman ran out of money. So you know, I and I don't like talking about them because you want to get people Like they're crazy people In your comments. Talk about that shit honestly.
Speaker 1:But I hate engagement that uh, that drives, uh, clicks right well, I mean, the other thing is, like I'm going to say the gray Zone occasionally breaks good news, like that's the thing with any of these organizations, like, right, you like. I used to talk about this in terms of al jazeera.
Speaker 1:Al jazeera english and al jazeera in arabic are radically different things yeah, it was the same thing with rt and rt russian and rt english right yeah, it's like very progressive ish in their english, uh, hiring, you know, dissonant, and one of the things we have to talk about about, about all this, is like this this turn towards journalism in this way happened when mainstream journalism basically gave up on giving a shit about doing actual reporting and they started reporting on fucking twitter. So real journalists had to go where there was money and you know, uh, a journalist operation on the standpoint of a state is nothing like that's no, even if you're a shitty, like borderline bankrupt state, you can afford, um, a pretty decent media operation on a scale of a state, whereas, like an individual, you know, yeah, it's, it's almost impossible for you. Um, but I was talking about, like you know, substack. I'm like you know it's almost impossible for you, but I was talking about, like you know, substack. I'm like you know, I'm glad Substack exists because we get real journalism for it, but it's actually a sign of decay because there's nobody fact-checking that. So, like, it's just a flood of info.
Speaker 1:And I don't want to go back to the old, and when I say this, I sound like a liberal. Go back to the old, I, I, I. And when I say this, I sound like a liberal. Like. The old system was good. It was terrible. Like it, it defined a consensus by setting up two oppositions and that was the consensus politics and it was highly dishonest.
Speaker 1:But what we have now is not any more honest.
Speaker 1:It's just more varied, like, and you can basically find whatever you fucking want to believe.
Speaker 1:Whatever you fucking want to believe, whatever you fucking want, like we were talking about earlier, people who are trying to convince you that an organization without a fucking air force and that's taking 15 times the losses of the army that it's fighting, will somehow just win a traditional military victory without an intervention from a foreign power, which is not likely to happen because it would start world war.
Speaker 1:Three Like and and you know these other powers are nuclear armed or quasi nuclear armed. What do you think is going to happen Like that? And the failure to deal with the nuclear part of this is actually kind of like blowing my mind that people aren't even bringing that up, except maybe that there might be an exchange between Israel and Iran, and I'm like you don't see how this changes this entire dynamic, which is weird because people were really ready to bring it up with Ukraine and Russia, right yeah, although in a weird way that made it sound like NATO was either going to do something there was no way NATO was going to do or that Russia was going to do something that like, there's no way.
Speaker 1:They mean that guys Like, like, like, ironically, one of the things about nuclear deterrence threats is, if you really want to, you really want to make them dangerous. What you don't do is talk about them Like you. If you want someone to take the bait, you're quiet about it, like, and that's an irony that people just don't seem to get because they don't think games strategically but, like, when you talk about nuclear deterrence is when you actually probably don't intend to really use it. Um, and you know, I've always pointed out that, uh, powers weaker than the united states tend to talk about their nuclear weapons a lot fucking more than the united states does. And there's a reason for that, um, you know it's, it's reminding hey, we can hurt you, like, but we don't plan on it, we're just reminding you that we can thank you. Good day, like, um, because in reality, if you get to that point, both sides are dead, but you're probably more dead than the United States is. So, like, um, it's, it's, you know, it's basically a weird suicide pact reminder. It's basically a weird suicide pact reminder.
Speaker 1:What we have seen, though, in the last five years has proved to, and I think the Syrian Civil War was and you've talked about this on your Facebook and stuff the Syrian Civil War was because the number of people who died in that war has been not discussed and it's still kind of going on, I mean, like um, and I've also pointed out that, like all kinds of powers in the middle east just literally use syria as a pin cushion for bombs, depending on what they want to do that day. Like um it just because the us isn't as involved as it was before, we don't talk about it as much. But, uh, that that was to an indication that this whole idea that we were in this American software, we weren't going to live to mass casualty wars anymore, that that was going to be ending soon, and I don't know that the left has any way to talk about that, really, because I think the pain of realizing, hey, motherfuckers, you don't actually have that much control of the executive. You do over the legislature, but the legislature doesn't work and you've been trying to dominate politics through the executive instead of rebuilding this legislature thing are any parapolitical power either. So, like, popular opinion might have an effect, it would only have an effect if, if, uh, if biden loses.
Speaker 1:But let's like be quite honest about this. Like the anti-war movement didn't do shit about the afghan and iraq wars either, like, and if we're completely honest that I know that I'm unpopular for saying this, but the 60s anti-war movement didn't do shit about vietnam. Like the vietcong won, like that's that, that's what did something about it. Quit lying to yourselves. Like, and yes, there's a nice statue to american anti-war protesters in ho chi minh city. Um, you know, I'm sure they appreciate your moral support.
Speaker 1:As I've said, vietnam is one of those places that doesn't suffer from anti-Americanism, like other places that fought American loss, because they fucking won. They don't need to be bitter, um, uh, but uh, nonetheless, um, this, this narrative I wish we took took more seriously. I think the other thing I'd like to talk about, maybe a little bit as the end, is uh, ho Chi Lee seems to have this softness for mass politics without realizing that, like, historically speaking, mass politics in the way that happens after world war ii is incredibly weird. Like that is not a historical norm, um, and it's not like we lost some historical norm and should go back to it. That was a moment of like every like. The world just almost blew the fuck up, like like everybody had to care about politics all of a sudden.
Speaker 2:Well, what about the mass politics of late 19th century to World War I?
Speaker 1:They are not as mass as people think they are. That's part of the issue. I do think the mass workers movement was real. The one thing I will say, though if you think it was verticalist and a clear movement with clear goals, you haven't read the history at all. They were all over the place and there was all kinds of infighting.
Speaker 1:One of the things about a class-based mass movement is it's going to be at war with itself. I don't mean in a literal Civil civil war sense, but I mean in a ideological sense, like, like, if you and I got all the workers in america and we all acted together like there would be on issues of almost anything of import that isn't economic, we would have to hash it out. It is not clear how it would go. Like, um, I kind of think that the working class is less reactionary on race and sex and people kind of pretend that it is. I've seen that in my daily life also. You know this whole weird thing about like, somehow there's no blue hairs and mass, and like the working class, they're all college educated. It's bizarre. I you know how many lesbians have I known worked down at the 7-Eleven? Like, come on, man. But at the same token, I don't know how it would be settled. I mean, this is one thing that the Platts are kind of right about. I don't like.
Speaker 1:We have critiques of their weird bourgeois mystification story, but that, like socialism or communism as it emerged right now in the world as an international movement, probably won't look like it did in the past at all and we'll have to answer questions that are going to make us uncomfortable. Um, what do you do about children? Like, if you don't have an answer to that as a workers movement, you don't have a future like, literally, and that's out of the gate. We don't have an answer to that. As a workers' movement, you don't have a future Like, literally, and that's out of the gate. We don't talk about that shit hardly anymore, except to talk about, like, protecting some minority group of children which we should protect, like, but that's not a full politics of social reproduction, it's not Like the right talks about that. We tend to have no answer.
Speaker 2:Or we have really fantastical, like kind of theoretical utopian answers.
Speaker 1:Kinder communism and like artificial wombs for everybody and shit like that. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I would like to tell people that even since Plato came up with the idea of breaking kinship bonds, no one's ever actually done it.
Speaker 2:Well, the only thing that has done it is the relentless march of capital.
Speaker 1:And even there it didn't do it entirely Right. And also, what are examples of it happening? Residential schools, like anti-Black family codes, I mean, like, come on, like the idea that found family and that kind of social engineering are the same is weird to me. But I mean we also just like, what is the left saying about the failure of school systems today? We should have free college. Well, we can't even fucking get decent elementary schools right now. Like, what are they? What are they saying about, um, about health care anymore? Like I will like, yeah, there's still some whole holdouts talking about Medicare for all, but for the most part everyone shut the fuck up about it at a moment where we just saw where it would have been really fucking useful to have, although I mean, the caveat is so whether or not you had socialized medicine was actually not a good predictor of whether or not you handle COVID well.
Speaker 1:So yeah yeah, yeah, um, you know it helped to be have socialized medicine and be an Island, hopefully, with a low population and low population density, a la New Zealand, um, like, and which is like great if you're New Zealand, but that's not like most of the planet, nor could you import those policies anywhere else. But that's not like most of the planet, nor could you import those policies anywhere else. So it's it. You know, china handled it better than the West after, I mean, as I reminded people, after lying about it, right, and you know, no one really knows the Chinese stats because it quit cooperating with the who, even though it's a major funder.
Speaker 1:So you know, I mean, I think, like we have to be honest, that we saw an international breakdown around this stuff and I think the COVID response was a proof of how facile a lot of these people were in a lot of different directions. Like, some people cut right wing immediately, some people cut a very pro state while they were claiming to be anarchist. Um, some people pretended that some of the concerns out of the right about, uh, about like this medical establishment, that was kind of fucking fake. Um, uh, like, uh, the like this medical establishment. That was kind of fucking fake Like. I do think it's really damning that the left was really on it on opposing Trump's politicization of the COVID response but really off it on Biden's and except for, except for a group of the left that has tried to also pretend that we needed to mask and hard social isolate for years and years and years, as if that is possible oh yeah, that's like um, no society on earth has ever done that guys.
Speaker 1:No, none, never. Like so. I don't know what you're thinking like, what you know. We needed to do more to protect the vulnerable and we didn't. But pretending that we could all lock down forever doesn't actually do that I mean the cat's out of the bag.
Speaker 2:It's like it's endemic now, like so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's already too late and it's also it is following the pattern of an endemic disease. It's getting less and less deadly over time. Like it's going to be like flu. Like the flu is still going to kill a shit ton of people. I mean, people would be like, oh, it's like the flu and I'm always like, yeah, okay, you know how many people have flu kills a year. Like it is the only disease that's up there in the top 10 killers of people. Like you know, now that we got aids under control, the flu is the thing that you know, covid now, more than the flu, but the flu was the most likely communicable disease to get you. Um, so you know that wasn't actually the gotcha that a lot of people thought it was right um, but you know, covid was much more serious than the flu.
Speaker 1:Now, you know, if you're younger, it's probably not even as serious as flu. If you're older, it is more so. But like, pretending that we can all have the same policies around this is bizarre, like it's just weird. No one on earth has done that. Um, uh, which is not to say that like, yeah, we could.
Speaker 1:Like, I would love it if masking had not become a weird social issue because it's also useful for the flu. Is it a panacea for everything? No, like, but I masked up what I masked up during flu season and sinus season when I was in Asia. Like it was just something that you did, right, and it kind of helped, you know, as opposed to like coughing into your armpit or whatever and pretending you're still not spreading disease. So, you know, I just I think that's. You know, there's stuff I wish was normalized. But the one thing I've also learned about the millennial left and it's right is they've learned to make an identity political statement out of any fucking thing. Like that is something, and that is a kind of new development that any position you could possibly take seems to have some weird political valorization that does not logically flow from your politics.
Speaker 1:Other than like what group is implementing it at what time?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean the whole. Like there was like a, there was like some tweet that was like a really good illustration of this. It's like, you know, like a Sesame Street character reminding people to get their shots has a totally different like valence in 2023 than it would have in as recently as 2012,. Right, no one would have thought that that was a political thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a kind of I guess, to borrow sort of a theoretical phrase. It's like total subsumption, but instead of well, it is a. It's like total subsumption, but instead of well it's, it is capital. Um, it's total subsumption of everyday life by politics.
Speaker 1:Um, which is a real subsumption rather yeah, real subsumption, but weirdly, in a way that I think is it's a politics that actually isn't political right either. Like it doesn't actually affect policy that much it doesn't affect. Like the it doesn't actually empower you to act locally, like a lot of the times, like one of the things that makes like a left response to say the, the, the, the moms of Liberty are, the parents United, the conservative parents groups. Really bizarre is like they think they can just kind of run an anti-politics with that. And like what happens with a lot of these groups is when they go into a school board they fuck everything up and then get voted out because they fucked everything up, because their only pet issues, the only thing they know or care about, and then everything else falls, falls apart.
Speaker 1:This happened before. When you know the big issue wasn't sexuality, but when it was evolution, if people remember, like these people would take over school boards and evolution and immediately collapse. Um, because like you can't run a school system off of a pet issue. Um, but when you think that you can run a school system just countering a pet issue, you're also, uh, running out and I'm just using schools because that's the institution I know. But like I see this across the board like it's just uh, on the defund, the police stuff and I. I know that people are very confused. Somebody asked me if I was. You know where I stand. I'm actually a prison abolitionist and like in a hard sense. And I'm like because I actually and this is going to be really unpopular amongst left I actually think corporal punishment is more progressive than prison. I'm okay with us whipping people I mean, didn't the same argument?
Speaker 1:yeah, I, I know he did. Uh, this is one of my. They're also like right-wing libertarians who agree with me on this when I say that leftists get horrified. You're okay with beating people. I'm like it's a one-time thing, Like, and we can pay for their healthcare afterwards. Yes, I'm okay with inflicting pain, Like. But you know, on police abolition, there's a lot of bait and switch on what people mean by it, because on one side, like, if you meet people who are sincere about it, they're like oh, what we mean is not even community policing. We basically mean a militia in which all society takes part, which will serve the purpose of dealing with the most violent elements of lumpen, and then like more social stuff to deal with, to like incentivize that. I'm actually not against that like, but no one realistically puts that on the paper table. What they pretend is like oh, we're just not going to have police anymore, we're just going to have social services. No one's going to need to use force right?
Speaker 2:or on the other end of that, you basically it's like, oh, fun, social services and also basically social services just replace the police and serve the same function, do the same things, but they just have a more progressive uh, you know branding or name, right?
Speaker 1:I mean you saw this with the abolished ice stuff, where sometimes that meant a bardish border control and sometimes it meant just put ice back into the atf like right, uh, um, so, uh, it was.
Speaker 1:It's a weird moment and it's one of the things that I used to critique anarchists for, but I now critique the entire left for it, with the adopt slogans that have a radical meaning and a really vague reformist soft meaning, and they're relying on you confusing the two yeah, I mean not to sound like a philosophy, bro, but you know the the martin bailey strategy yeah, well, I mean, you know not again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not to sound like a philosophy, bro, but uh, so alex scott was his pen name or whatever. Um, scott scott, alexander, alexander, yeah, yeah, he's right about that like that that's actually a pretty common.
Speaker 1:Alex Scott was his pen name or whatever. Scott Alexander, scott Alexander. Yeah, he's right about that. That's actually a pretty common tactic.
Speaker 1:I remember realizing that about standpoint epistemology Weak standpoint epistemology is absolutely obvious. Strong standpoint epistemology is insane. But when you argue, like people are arguing from the standpoint of strong and then when you push on them they move to and it's just like stop it, you're. You're like misrepresenting what you're doing, like um, uh, and the left does that all the time. Um, but there's also the, the fact that, like the opposite end of that also happens.
Speaker 1:I think scott alex Alexander didn't pick up on this where, like there, they seem to be arguing for the strong but they're really arguing for the weak, like the. If you actually read what policy proposals for Medicare for all was, for example, you're like some of those are real fucking milk toast and would not do much of anything about the current medical situation. And some were like broad spectrum socialized medicine which which, by the way, I think is a capitalist response to the problem, just one that like, totally makes sense and we should encourage. Like, um, uh. So you know, there we go, uh, we've been talking for about two hours, and I know you have stuff to do Um so uh, ours and I know you have stuff to do um so uh, we. We talked a little bit about alex's uh ho, chile's argument. We complained a lot, um, although I do think we both agree that new forms of worker organization that are going to look a lot like inside outside groups in regards to unions but not politics, are probably where we would get the basis for building a politics up Like.
Speaker 1:When people would hear me critique electoralism, they thought I was making like this principle critique of electoralism and my critique was actually you haven't done enough to build a program to, to emerge from groups that already exist to support you politically, nor do you have the money. So your attempt to like rush to the national stage is way premature. It can only be a media campaign effectively and I think that has finally gotten through to some people because of the spectacular failure of the post Bernie left and the way like bidenism has totally cannibalized us like um, uh, almost. You know I think trauma talks overused today, but almost in a way that like seems like a post-traumatic break. Um, uh.
Speaker 1:But I also think you know, know, bernie was used to as a, as a circular, you know, uh, a circular way to get around this. Like how we need Bernie to manifest the workers movement to have the workers movement. That was always like that's not going to happen, like that's like you need the workers movement to get Bernie in, but you need Bernie to create the political space for the workers movement. Get bernie in, but you need bernie to create the political space for the workers movement. That's a circular argument where, like, basically, you have to miss the fact you need the thing that you're trying to do to happen before the thing that you can try to do happens, and you've never built a coalition up in or outside of the democratic party to really do that.
Speaker 1:And I'm sorry, a hundred thousand people in the dsa, like I would point out, like dude, there are more moms for liberty than dsa members, guys, like that has not really gotten through people's skull. And they're less regionally diffused. I mean, they're more regionally diffused. They're all over the united states, whereas the dsa is effectively in and benjamin studebaker really pointed this out democratic strongholds, that's where they are. Like, um, the largest dsa is in new york and california. Those are the most democratic states. Like right, um, you know, I mean like they're also huge states, I mean, but but nonetheless you get what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:This is a yeah, I mean literally if every dsa member in new york and california refused to vote for the democrats, it would make zero difference, right yeah?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean like when, when the left of the dsa is like we're gonna hold elective accountables and I go how the fuck are you gonna do that? Like you empowered them before you. You have the means to hold them accountable and they don't need you as much as you needed them. And I think a lot of the DSA rank and file actually kind of realized that and that's where their votes seem incoherent Like. But anyway, what? What's your closing?
Speaker 2:thought I guess I I kind of alluded to it. I guess I might as well sort of plug this. It's not an official announcement yet, but yeah, I mentioned this. You know you've had Sean from Antifada on before, kernel of um, this sort of different pre-political kind of workers organizing um, that we've sort of talked around as an alternative to all these kinds of like uh failed cul-de-sacs. So, um, you know there, uh, there'll be more kind of like formal announcements, uh coming out soon, soon. But yeah, the uh, the ilc, um the embarrassing I forgot what c stands for um but yeah, the um independent labor club. Um, you know, uh, other people will be able to talk more about it down the line. But uh, yeah, there's uh, I know Sean's talked about it at a conference in Chicago. Yeah, if you have any other questions about that, I could try to answer them, but right now it's just very much still in the early kind of planning stages.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right now it's mostly in new york, right yeah, uh, there's been some interest from uh other stuff, but I think I think we're not in the place yet of like um forming uh multiple chapters. I mean it's literally still like hammering out, uh. But I think it's really productive to try to kind of like go to this uh kind of pre-political, and not like hammer hammer hammering out basic principles in the sense of like not okay, where do we stand on this, this, this and these like sectarian issues, but um kind of more like getting back to basics, like what are we trying to do? Um how do we like even conceive of, um, you know, something like political power? Um, what do we um almost like even what would it actually mean to organize as workers? Um, without kind of trying to escape a lot of the kind of like historical baggage, while still being aware falls?
Speaker 1:of it um yeah, um, I think you are absolutely uh right to push this as a means. I'm I've told, uh, I have warned sean that this is going to lead to things he's not going to foresee. That's a good thing. I mean, like it's just it's a good thing.
Speaker 1:Like an independent labor club's gonna lead to tensions emerging in membership, because the working class, even in New York, is highly diverse and highly diverse, not just in the obvious identity ways but also in like where they're gonna stand on any issue. You know, working class people tend to be anti-war because they have to fight them, but like to be anti-war because they have to fight them, but like how they're anti-war like varies greatly, like et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think people need to be excited about that but open for the fact it's not going to be something that you can pre predict what it's going to do, and I think that is the right approach to have. Thank you so much for coming on, alex. As stuff forms up with these independent labor clubs, we'll probably be talking about this with multiple people in the future, because I don't want any one person to feel the weight of trying to represent something as erogenous as that. But nonetheless, have a great day. Thanks you too, man.
