Unraveling the Esoteric Threads: Exploring Marx, Hegel, and Modernity with Dr. Justin Sledge

What do Hegel, Marx, and esoteric traditions have in common? Join us for an enlightening episode featuring Dr. Justin Sledge from the Esoterica channel as we explore this fascinating intersection. Dr. Sledge shares his insights into the influence of figures like Hegel and Marx on political theology and esoteric traditions, while also addressing Adorno's critique and the resurgence of conspiracies about Marxism. We'll uncover Dr. Sledge's motivations for his unique content on esoteric Marxism and Hegelianism, and discuss the intriguing influence of Hermeticism on Hegel, alongside Marx’s reluctance to speculate about the future.

From graduate school struggles to dissertation triumphs, we delve into the unresolved tensions in Marxist metaethics and their catastrophic implications for later Marxist implementations. Hear about my personal experiences grappling with the complexities of Marx’s moral theory and how Victorian virtue ethics played a significant role in shaping his thoughts. We'll also challenge the tendency to impose rigid orthodoxies on thinkers like Marx, illustrating the flexibility and adaptability of Marxist theory through historical examples.

In our final segments, we broaden the scope to examine class analysis, early Christianity, and the profound impact of esotericism on modernity. By applying class analysis to historical figures and movements, we gain fresh perspectives on events and ideologies. Dr. Sledge’s unique qualifications provide an unparalleled view into the overlooked dimensions of mystical experiences on rationalist philosophy, urging a more nuanced understanding of philosophical development and historical materialism. Don't miss out on this comprehensive exploration of history, philosophy, and socio-economic contexts!

Chapters

• 0:00 The Intersection of Marxism and Esoterica
• 10:20 Unresolved Tensions in Marxist Metaethics
• 25:08 Challenging Marxist Orthodoxy and Legacy
• 41:53 Analyzing Marxist Thought and Religious Influences
• 51:36 Analyzing Class and Religious Consciousness
• 1:06:27 Early Christianity and Gnosticism Analysis
• 1:17:59 Rethinking Historical Materialism for Marxism
• 1:30:01 Influence of Esotericism on Modernity
• 1:35:18 History, Western Terrorism, and Modernity

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

Hello and welcome to VarmVlog, and today I am here with Dr Justin Sledge of the channel Esoterica, and we are talking about the somewhat unexpected intersection of dialectical and historical materialism, esoteric topics and politics, Something that I was recently reading, Minimum Moralia, where Adorno goes off on the esoteric for like I don't know a chapter, and so it's not immediately obvious that those three categories have anything to do with each other. Also done an episode on the resurrection of a certain conspiracy about Marxism, going all the way back to an Austrian anti-communist whose name has slipped my mind, the Imanizy Eschaton guy. Yeah, I know who you're talking about?

Justin Sledge: 2:43

I can't remember.

C. Derick Varn: 2:44

Yeah.

Justin Sledge: 2:45

Von Mies or whatever.

C. Derick Varn: 2:46

No, it's not Von Mies, but it's like Von Ludin or Von Kuhn Ludin or something like that. James Lindsay's the stupid version of it, no right.

Justin Sledge: 2:58

Yeah, Lindsay's the kind of yeah, he's resurrected it, and some of the people as well.

C. Derick Varn: 3:05

So we'll start there for the overlap, because you've recently done an episode on the esoteric Marx and how there probably isn't such a thing, and the esoteric Hegel, which there probably is, but it's a little bit overstated.

C. Derick Varn: 3:18

You went through the work of McGee and his book Hegel and Hermeticism, a book I really like actually, but you seem to think that McGee probably takes the argument a little bit too far. I have found it actually increasingly important, though, to understand the Christian and religious notions of a lot of things that would later become political notions In German idealism. You kind of can't get around Christian theology running through it in various ways, in various ways. So in that sense I do find it interesting that there's been a renewed interest in the theological underpinnings of a lot of what we might call modern politics or political theology or something like that, although I'm hesitant to say political theology a la carl smith, because I don't like smithian arguments. But I wanted to ask you a little bit like um, what, what prompted you to make that video on esoteric, uh, marxism and esoteric hegelianism? And um, because that's literally probably the only time I've seen you touch on politics on the channel.

Justin Sledge: 4:40

Yeah, very rarely do I touch politics on the channel, just because it's not the mandate of the channel and I think we could all use spaces that stay in their lane. If your channel's a political channel, great, but if it's not, don't make it one in my opinion. I don't know, it was Mayday. I have a background in Marx, I've written on Marx, I wrote a dissertation on Marx, so he's someone I know pretty well, so one it was kind of easy to do because I know that stuff pretty well, and it was the week of May Day, so I decided to make a May Day episode. And also, I just get constantly these questions about hey, what about this guy who says that Marxism and wokeism is all Gnosticism or Hermeticism or whatever? And it's such a bizarre argument that I had to check it out and of course it's completely specious. You know it's funny that I mentioned Hegel and the Hermetic tradition by Glenn Alexander McGee and after the episode he wrote me a very long email, uh, which I'm going to respond to at some point and I'm going to bring him on the show Cause I want to really, uh, accurately represent his position and he's updated that. He's updated, apparently, things in his argument since that book has come out, um to to to strengthen his position to his mind. I'd like to get more into that.

Justin Sledge: 6:01

But the basic argument is that yes, there is some influence of Hermeticism in Hegel or the occult in Hegel. There's actually the influence of that on basically everyone at that time. It's not unique to Hegel, it's Schelling and even Schopenhauer and other people were deeply influenced by what we might call esoteric currents. So it's not unique to Hegel at all and I don't know that. I don't know if it's central to the degree to which maybe McGee thinks it is. But again, he's a scholar, he's the expert on that. I'm not, so I want to want folks to hear his argument out.

Justin Sledge: 6:59

But yeah, I think the which I do think it is very much baked in with a kind of materialist apocalypticism, and I don't think those kinds of apocalypticisms are totally divorceable from one another. And I think even Marx knew that and I think that's why you see him very rarely speculate on the future of things. He does it for a couple of paragraphs in the German ideology and then basically by Das Kapital. You don't see anything like that at all anymore. He doesn't do that kind of speculation and I think he knew it too. I think he knew that it had this kind of apocalyptic tenor that he wanted to avoid.

Justin Sledge: 7:37

That really emerged in the Second International in a really dramatic way. The Second International, I think its economism was baked in with messianic expectation and things like that. But yeah, that's basically why I made it and again, I think I made that episode. I don't think I said anything terribly extraordinary. It's honestly just like if you understand Marx's project, it's not going to be the case that any elements of esotericism to be found in Hegelianism are going to survive into the system. And frankly I don't even think that if they were in the system which they are, I don think marx ever understood them. I don't think he had the acumen or the historical background to really even, you know, tease out what's a theosophical yakov bermian kind of element operating in hegel's logic or something.

C. Derick Varn: 8:36

I don't think marx would have known that if it had bit him yeah, this, that's something that has occurred to me too, when marx's writings on religion are um, scant, somewhat insightful to some degree and easily misapplied, like this sort of my, um, my take on it. I mean there, if I was gonna parse out like structural weirdnesses and marxism, I would be far more interested in looking at like the way lingering epicureanism might be affecting it wrote his dissertation on, on epicurus, right, yeah, and he's not even that world.

Justin Sledge: 9:14

He certainly has a good understanding of lucretius and democratus and those guys. But again, like does he? Does he know the first thing about joachim of fjor?

Justin Sledge: 9:22

I'm very doubtful, yeah I highly doubt it too, like um, but is he operating under a rubric that's influenced by joachim of fjor via hegel? Yeah, of course he is, and we all are at some level. I mean the fact that we refer to a time period as the middle ages, like there's the idea that that was the middle and we're at the end, like that is a Waukegan way of parsing time. So even the idea that there's a Middle Ages to be talked about at all, the fact that we even use that language, shows that we have been, how deep that influence is actually gone, shows that we have been, how deep that influence has actually gone. And most people would never have never heard of Joachim of Fjord, but they live in his world, whether they know it or not.

C. Derick Varn: 10:09

So you mentioned to me off air that you wrote your dissertation on Marx, right yeah?

Justin Sledge: 10:13

that's right.

C. Derick Varn: 10:14

What elements of Marxist thought interest you, and then we might talk about how that relates to esoteric stuff.

Justin Sledge: 10:20

now, so there's a long story and a short story. The long story, or the short story, rather, is that by the time I was finishing graduate school, basically I was a bad for the department and the department wanted to see me go and I wanted to be out of there. And they basically said, look, you need to write something and get done and get out of here and, like our, your best option is to write on a major figure. That's going to be your best chances for getting a job. You know, dissertations are weird. They want them to be obscure in some sense, but they have to be marketable on the other. So you have to pick something very obscure and something that's very well known and you have to be able to go to to the philosophy conferences or whatever, and give an elevator pitch and hopefully someone will give you a job, which is a pipe dream. At any rate, I wanted to be out of there and the easiest way for me to write a dissertation was either to write a dissertation on Western esotericism, which is something I knew a lot about, and I knew that road was going to be immediately blocked, and it was. It was no doubt blocked, no chance of doing that, and the was no doubt blocked, no chance of doing that. And the other thing was like, oh, I knew a lot about marx and so I was like I'll write in marx. And I did sort of a literature survey which I knew the literature pretty well and I come to.

Justin Sledge: 11:27

There came to the realization that no one had ever done an analysis of marx's metaethics. Well, there's been a lot of written on marx and ethics but not marx's metaethics. And so basically what I did is I went to the Gesamtratsgabe and just basically tracked Marxist metaethics from very early on all the way to basically the end, and then showed how tensions in Marxist metaethics tensions he never resolved and probably was never even totally conscious of how those tensions actually played themselves out later on in the development of Marxism. We had used some of Lukács, some Trotsky, other kinds of Marxists, some folks writing on Marxism and the law, how the law is to be like, vouchsafed, especially in the early Soviet Union, and so I really look at how these unresolved issues of Marxism had a kind of butterfly effect into the development of Marxism, especially in its development philosophically in the second and third internationals. But also those questions began to keep cropping up, um, and thinkers like you know, for things like trotsky and stuff like that. So I think it's an interesting dissertation.

Justin Sledge: 12:50

I don't know it'll ever see the light of day, I don't know anyone cares to read it, but um, it is again. It's one of these. You know, whether we like it or not, there's a lot of people moldering in their graves because of, you know, being killed by Marxists of various kinds, and that there are millions of people on the ground because Marxists killed them, and they killed them because they were doing the business of building up socialism to their mind. And I find that, you know, when a bunch of people end up in mass graves which, again, like they did, we should ask ourselves questions about what are the kinds of reasons why they ended up in those mass graves and if we can trace that back to unresolved philosophical problems at the very beginning of the project.

Justin Sledge: 13:32

I think that's non-trivial and maybe even essential, and so that's kind of why I decided to do the dissertation that I did. Anyway, I wrote the whole damn thing in like six months and I was out. So I was like all right, pull, pull the bandaid off. Be done with graduate school. Get the letters by your name tip out.

C. Derick Varn: 13:56

Wow, it's impressive that you got the dissertation done that quickly. I didn't even write my master's thesis in that amount of time.

Justin Sledge: 14:04

It was a quick write and it's a question I thought about before, and it was just again interesting that lots of people had tried to write books of Marxist ethics either, practical texts like Tactic and Ethics and stuff like that by Lukács, where they were just like this is how we do ethics, like you know, on the ground, which is not a terribly great time to be figuring out your ethics when you're like deciding whether or not you should shoot people, and Lukács did have people shot, and so you know you don't want to build your ethics in a rush. It's not a great idea. And you know you have Trotsky stuff on the dialectic of ends and means and stuff like that. And, um, you know it's interesting that people had attempted to build a Marxist ethics but no one had thought about what are the underlying principles out of which any Marx ethics could be built, and, and to my mind, um, marx himself never resolved those issues.

Justin Sledge: 14:57

They remained. He was totally happy to critique utilitarianism, totally happy to critique Kant, but he was never capable of building out a robust, systematic moral theory. And again, there's something interesting about that, because so much of what he does is capitalism is bad. Well, on what grounds? On what grounds can you morally judge the capitalist as a class? And I think that's a fascinating problem and Marx never solved it.

C. Derick Varn: 15:33

I think it remains unsolved. Basically, the metaethics of Marxism is interesting. I tend to myself end up being some kind of virtue ethicist. However, figuring out the constellation of where your virtues come from in the Marx world is actually kind of more fraught than obvious.

Justin Sledge: 15:51

No, you're absolutely right. And ultimately I come to the conclusion that Marx himself was a kind of a virtue ethicist. His favorite character in history is Spartacus and he always talks about virtues and again, this is also a function of him being a Victorian gentleman. That was a very virtue, ethics-driven type of society. Victorian ethics were very virtue-driven, and Marx himself, I think, was influenced by that kind of what we might call ideology, you know, or whatever. So, yeah, I agree with you. I think that, because of the material theory of history, marxism is neither moral relativism nor is it the kind of logical, deductive, moral logic that you get from utilitarianism or deontology, but it actually is a kind of relatively hard virtue ethics.

C. Derick Varn: 16:53

It's interesting you come to that conclusion. It's been my intuition as a person who's taught ethical philosophy for a long time and tried to deal with the way Marxists have and mostly have not handled it, which ends up in a morass of amoralism a lot of the times, where the ends justify the means, without really dealing with the fact that ends and means start collapsing at a certain point.

Justin Sledge: 17:18

Right this is what Tosca Right. Um right yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 17:22

And it's uh, I mean I think that the big Trotsky book on that, the the debates he had with Kotsky on the terror right, like um.

Justin Sledge: 17:34

Trotsky wrote a whole book, uh on, on ethics.

Justin Sledge: 17:38

Um, oh yeah, a whole book uh on ethics, um, oh yeah, I guess he did nothing. Going back through my trotsky in my head, he wrote against one of these weird things where, yeah, and his argument basically was that the ends and the means have a dialectical relationship, which I'm fine with that, um, but the question is, what establishes the ends? And you know, um, and so if you don't have a, a moral justification for the ends, then the dialect doesn't start, and so I do. I do think it collapses in amoralism and again, that's not a thing that you know, I want, yeah, it's not a thing I you know, as a jewish person who is pretty dedicated to a world in which, having been the victims of mass murder politically motivated mass murder and actively now engaged in the genocide of the Gazan people, we've been both victims and perpetrators of kinds of genocide. And I don't know, I don't want to sail into thinking through these problems in a way that you get the political suspension of the ethical. I think that's a disaster, it's a real disaster.

C. Derick Varn: 18:43

Well, I mean, the political suspension of the ethical is even somewhat obvious in trying to figure out the USSR's stance towards, say, israel historically, which a lot of people are surprised when I point out that the Soviet Union actually supported the creation of the state of Israel more than the US did initially. And Stalin's reasons for that are complicated, partly seemingly having to do with the failed Jewish old blast, partly seemingly had to do with Lenin's answer on a national question, except that he goes further than linen and recognized jews as a, as a people having a nation, but also partly seemingly tied to anti-semitism and stalin himself. That's all. Those are all seemingly evident.

Justin Sledge: 19:29

So it's all, it's all wrapped up together, and stalin and I do agree that the, the usrs um quite violent oscillations on what to do with the Jewish question, from basically nearly sanctioned anti-Semitism to clear statements against anti-Semitism and Lenin and things like that. Yeah, it's a super complicated thing, and I think this is also a place for me where I think about the Soviet Union, where what I want to do with the Soviet Union is let it be complicated, and I think that's where people on the left and certainly many other liberals just can't let it be complicated. But it was incredibly complicated, and when you're building socialism, something that has basically never existed before, who knows what you're going to come up with. And I neither want to overly celebrate the soviet union nor do I want to be in a position where everything it did was bad and it was just a deformed worker state and you know, whatever, I don't know whatever. The thing you're supposed to say about it is um, but I think today it's that it was good, um, it's just unequivocally no.

C. Derick Varn: 20:37

I mean, like trotskyism is on the is on a worldwide decline right now, so yeah, of course.

Justin Sledge: 20:42

Yeah, trotskyism is, I mean, it's never been a popular thing really. Um, but yeah, again, again, I think these like for me as a leninist, right concrete analysis of concrete conditions. You're not going to get out saying it was good or bad. It's not concrete analysis of concrete conditions like, uh, you know, the soviet union of the nep is a is a very different thing. The soviet union, brezhnev and um. So I think you just have to, you know you have to analyze it where it was at that time, on what issue you're trying to do with, whether it's the treatment of the jews or you state atheism or central planning or whatever. And so you know the Soviet Union went through more tectonic changes in its history than most other nations did at the same time because of the massive social, economic changes it was undergoing. So yeah, I don't, I'm not going to get on the it was good or bad train. To me that's just just not good historical materialism.

C. Derick Varn: 21:41

When you're accelerating through what took other countries three to five hundred years to develop in about 40, stuff is about to be a little bit tumultuous. I think that's a fair assertion. Yeah, absolutely.

Justin Sledge: 21:54

Same is true with China, right, you know, um, yeah, I think we just, I think for me, for me it's like a methodological question. If I'm going to be a Marxist and try to look at it through the lens of historical materialism, um, it's kind of it's going to require a lot of really careful study, which, frankly, we don't have. We don't have good studies because the Soviet Union itself wasn't terribly honest about what it was up to. The Western powers weren't honest about what was going on soviet union. So we have a lot of really unreliable data and um, which also makes me glad I'm just not in that world anymore. Like I'm the, I've become just like the most boring kind of marxist imaginable. I'm like, uh, I was talking to some friends of mine, uh, in spain and uh, they were like you remind me of my like great grandparents. Like you're just like, uh, you're like a, you're a marxist from like 1925. I'm like, yeah, that's, that's my marxism. I like my marxism, like I like my wine, real old yeah, I, I, I, uh, am also of the.

C. Derick Varn: 22:57

I'm your great granddad's Marxist, yeah just like an old trade unionist.

C. Derick Varn: 23:05

I guess the interesting thing about ambiguities I obsess over ambiguities in Marx, it's not just like the meta-ethical question has actually occurred to me but I've never tried to systematize it occurred to me but I've never like tried to systematize it I've been more interested in um ambiguities and marxist theory of mind, um, which I think is related to the meta-ethical question, because there's a lot, you know, there is this idea of, of emergence, and then there's this idea of structure which I think both the like marxist without the hyphen, because that's a very specific group of Marxists go through our various. This is like dealing with Protestants. There's just too many, that's the alphabet soup of Marxists. But it emerges from the natural world and humans kind of recognize things for what they are and their use and and how they fit into their particular mode of social reproduction in any given time. And then, but that's it is that that's a very hazy, worked out notion of where ideas come from.

C. Derick Varn: 24:14

And then you have the structural notions that get more worked out later by people like Bukharan or Althusser, and not that they are one to one with each other at all, but that's what they're trying to do, and it seems to me that both things are in Marx, like there's just a lot of ambiguities and Marx that people don't want to deal with as ambiguities, and this brings it up to what I see you do on your channel actually a little bit ambiguities, and this brings it up to what I see you do on your channel actually a little bit. And this is one of the things that's related is trying to strip away later even academic presumptions. When you read a text, or even reading a text like we know that this author thought this 20 years later. Let's read this back into this text in the early period and marxists are notorious at doing that with marks like we're reading like stuff from like critique of the girth of program all the way back in like 1844 or some shit right, and it's it's orthodoxy it's, it's, yeah, it's.

Justin Sledge: 25:09

There's a tendency toward, uh, in the same way that greek writers came back and said, oh yeah, everything plato and aristotle said was with one theory that never had contradictions, and also plato and aristotle said was with one theory that never had contradictions, and also plato and aristotle agreed with each other. Like these bizarre impositions, because it was the development of an orthodoxy. And this is one of the things that marx went through, was the development of an orthodoxy, which is hilarious, considering that, you know, the political and economic manuscripts of 1844 weren't even printed until the thirties. It's like I didn't never even saw those. Um, so, and it's also just like I find it just a grading, because it's the idea that Marx, like, had like a mystical revelation of socialism and then, like, never changed his mind. You know, it's the most immaterial theory of intellectual development. Uh, it's just the imposition of orthodoxy upon a thinker, which I find bizarre.

Justin Sledge: 26:07

Um, because it's again, that impulse is not an actual marxist impulse, that is a religious impulse to like the gospel of marx, marxianity. You know, and I agree with you that it's, it's, there's not only their ambiguities, marx just changes his mind. I mean, and even the things that we say that we I love when people correct Marx like see people say things like you can only get to socialism through violent social revolution. That's the only way to do it. Violence is the only mechanism by which to achieve socialism. And Marx clearly says like. He says like. I think the French could just vote it in.

Justin Sledge: 26:43

He says that in the Brumaire like it's like the French are an advanced enough society they can just vote socialism in. It could be achieved through parliamentary means. And because that disrupts what Marx is supposed to say, marx really didn't say that, you know. Or the same thing happened with Lenin. You know, when the fascists were really coming to power in Kerensky's government, lenin told the Bolsheviks to vote for Kerensky Because he was like you can't build, you know, fight fascism and build. So like no, we got us to build socialism on the foundations of civil society and Kerensky of civil society, and korinsky represents civil society.

Justin Sledge: 27:18

Now, obviously, he's not the end all of it. We're going to overthrow him eventually. But we can't build socialism top of fascism. And there's a moment where, like you hear marxist, like I never would do this, that and the other, and I'm like lenin told them to vote for korinsky. Like, are you more of a Marxist than Lenin? It's just. These kinds of orthodoxies strike me as just again, they're born out of a religious impulse and it's not surprising to find people who are often deeply religious convert to Marxism because it can function as a, as a kind of religion.

Justin Sledge: 27:59

That reminds me of Althusseris air, actually, who was a deep catholic like you know, I, I think, altis, there is a perfect example of a person who really wanted to have it several ways, three ways really. He wanted to have this, this grand unified theory that reconciled catholicism and marxism, and also he wanted to do it along this very odd line where he wanted the sort of younger Marx and the later Marx to be distinct in very absolute terms, which I'm still sympathetic to that analysis, maybe not as sympathetic as the early altruistser was enthusiastic about it, but I'm still. As you know, I identify as a structural Marxist. I think there are three of us left. We are the dinosaurs of Marxism, for sure.

C. Derick Varn: 28:52

Yeah well, structural Marxism has kind of to some degree fallen away. I think part of that has to do with Team France's turn to post-structuralism and being blamed on Atusserre and I think the other part of it, you know, I think about a friend of mine who asked a professor why he wasn't an Atusserrean and he, I think, responded like well, he killed his wife. It's a bad look that. He, I think, responded like well, he killed his wife, like it's a bad look Like and and Nicholas Palancis killed himself.

Justin Sledge: 29:24

So maybe, even if it's true, it's not, I mean not just that, I mean the one of our students uh shot himself, uh there's a wave of suicides and and stuff like that around. Also say and stuff like that around.

C. Derick Varn: 29:43

Althusser, it was a very yeah, a lot of tragedies. I think he was dating Lakhan's daughter or something. Oh yeah, Well, I mean, which gives?

Justin Sledge: 29:48

him this weird relationship to Bataille too, but anyway, right, well, yeah, bataille had his life stolen by Lakhan.

C. Derick Varn: 29:52

Yeah.

Justin Sledge: 29:54

He's still your girl, yeah, you know. Yeah, those are all bad optics, but also authors had suffered from severe mental health problems. I think we need to. Everyone tells a story about how he killed his wife, but we also have to talk about that in the context of you know, authors are never taught an entire semester class without being institutionalized, ever. He was institutionalized at some point in every semester. He he suffered from severe mental health challenges and I think it's yeah, you know, it bleeds, it leads like. You know, he killed his wife and that sort of like. But I think we have to put it. Put that in the context of a much longer arc of his, of his mental health, which was terribly fragile. And also his mental health was very fragile and he was basically reinventing not reinventing Marxism, but he was wrestling Marxism away from orthodoxy.

Justin Sledge: 30:58

And it's easy to, it's easy for us to forget that this is a you know what authors there in the late, what, in the mid 60s? This is when stalinism and all the things that stalinism did were becoming clear. It's like the whole, like syncoism, all that stuff. It's it. There was a moment where you could no longer just be an Orthodox Marxist. That was simply not possible anymore and there was no other theory to replace it. It's something kind of like the Galileo moment, where Copernicus had shown that the Earth was not the center and that Aristotle was wrong, but we didn't have any other new theory to fix all that stuff. We just knew that Aristotle was wrong and Copernicus was wrong.

Justin Sledge: 31:48

Imagine having grown up in a world of of Lysenko is Stalinist orthodoxy, with the rare exception of the. You know, rando Trotsky is out there somewhere in the wild. But imagine growing, having grown up in a world of a pretty radical Marxist orthodoxy and all of a sudden that's not available to you anymore, really, and Althusser took it upon himself to you know, read Marx and to be like you know what, what, what, what is going on here. And I find that to be extremely heroic, and I don't know that anyone's done that since, with the exception of maybe the analytic Marxist folks, like the no bullshit Marxist guys. But I find it to be a terribly heroic thing he did, and even if you don't agree with him, I mean he really started a research program to be like all right, let's reread Marx and let's try to rebuild a coherent scientific theory of history and social change out of the ashes of Stalinism, and he did that on top of the fact that he was suffering from profound mental health stuff.

C. Derick Varn: 32:51

To me it's quite heroic. It's interesting to me too, because one of the things I remember the critiques of Althusser is that he was really a Stalinist and I remember accepting that for a long time and then going through his late works and talking about no, what he was trying to do was like wrestle the critique of Stalin away from this more rightward oriented social democratic, concessionary stuff coming out of Khrushchev. But he felt like he needed to put the groundwork in first and he found some hope in Mao. But what the French really knew about what was going on in China was actually not particularly great. So he's operating from that perspective and I'm with you. My critiques of Althusser tend to be more based on what he thought science was. My critiques of Althusser tend to be more based on what he thought science was, which was very common in the 50s and 60s in France, but it's kind of foreign to us now. No one's going to go to 19th century structural linguistics as a model for science today.

Justin Sledge: 33:52

I don't know. I guess this is where I might respectfully disagree and just say that linguistics is a science and that it was a conceptual framework by which to. It was a scaffolding by which to build something else. And I think Althusser admitted as much, but also I think he couldn't do it, admitted as much, but also I think he couldn't do it. Um, and I'm not sure that that you know that. Uh, I think that scaffolding went a long way and I do think that the kind of movements that Althusser made um to me, I think they're accurate, I think that they're they're, they're representative of a of an authentic, of an authentic Marxism.

Justin Sledge: 34:38

And I think that you know, palancis and those guys gave some of the best analysis of, of, of of fascism ever made, and that ain't nothing and it's, these, are, they're, they're real gains to be, to be made out of all. You know all this. There's development of ideology, isas and RSAs. You know there's just of ideology, um isas and rsas, that you know there's just no modern. Those ideas have even gotten down into liberalism, where we can talk about, you know, kind of uh, no one's going to call it false consciousness, but you know the kind of jajekian thing he does. Uh, I think even people now liberals can admit that the capitalist mode of production has the ability to engage in some kind of mind control, and that's much more derivative of Althusser than it is from orthodox Marxism.

C. Derick Varn: 35:33

Oh yeah. Well, I mean, when we talk about orthodox Marxism, everyone always puts Althusser and Lukács up against each other, and I actually found that kind of funny because I'm like Lukács is not particularly orthodox either.

Justin Sledge: 35:44

Yeah, no, he was denounced. He was denounced as one of the professors by Zinoviev. And again, this is a place where I have to admit I think I may even say this somewhere is that the sober me is very much an Althusserian structuralist, but there's something about that. The more mystical, religious part of me is very much driven to Lukács, although I will say this, that everyone reads History and Class Consciousness and that text does read very, very Hegelian and very kind of loosey goosey. But if you study Lukacs later, stuff in terms of, like your social ontology, it reads much more structuralist.

Justin Sledge: 36:29

Oh yeah, and so, and also maybe the other thing I'll say about, about Lukacs, there is that there was, there was a Lucian Goldman makes this, makes this argument, and I think he's right that the 20th century was going to be a, a metaphysical debate between Lukacs and Heidegger, and Lukacs lost Heidegger one, and I think that was like if, if people want to talk about how philosophy went off the rails, heidegger, yeah, but it's it's heideggerian move that heidegger won the day and that, that this kind of uh, language mysticism masquerading as metaphysics uh, that won the day and that led into the, the uh, what I think is the intellectual gutter that is post-structuralism and and uh and uh, deconstruction and all that that is dolled downstream of the fact that, um, that at the end of the day, when liberal intellectuals had to choose between changing the world or living in a dream, they decided to live in a dream and Lukács was thrown under the bus and history and class consciousness was not the modality by which people began to analyze the structure of being in consciousness consciousness.

C. Derick Varn: 38:00

Well, I was recently rereading the massive tome that is destruction of reason, which, I agree with you, is a lot more uh symptomatic, uh systematic and structural than history and class consciousness there's not as much stuff about like emergent totalities that I have to figure out, like how you could possibly know when they were beforehand, and it doesn't seem like there's any way to that.

C. Derick Varn: 38:17

You get in history and class consciousness where it's just like okay, so we know when the workers revolution has happened, when the workers revolution has happened, yeah, like, um, like hegelian stuff.

Justin Sledge: 38:29

Yeah, it's right.

C. Derick Varn: 38:30

Yeah, it's a very hegelian stuff um, which well, and the hegelian stuff makes sense when you're reading hegel through the lens of like religion are when you remember that the absolute idea is like like freedom manifested in the world through divine intervention. But since it has to be divine intervention negatively, because you still have to be free to act, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and like that makes sense In a materialist framework that's harder to make sense of.

Justin Sledge: 38:57

It's a lot harder, you know, but it's still not impossible. Materialist framework that's harder to make sense of, it's a lot harder but it's still not impossible. I tell people there's a whole class I would love to do with a bunch of Marxists that I'll never do, which I would teach Hegel's philosophy of right, because that's the real whipping boy of Marxist critique of Hegel. It's the big thing, we have an actual. We actually have commentary on the last chunk of it. I just read it backwards and see if anyone disagree with it.

Justin Sledge: 39:27

It's like, all right, let's start with the actual society and go backwards and reading the philosophy of right, which is Hegel's last book in an important sense. Now it's hard to find where exactly I totally disagree with it. You know, reading it one direction and, yeah, I I think that, um, what's the when with Lukacs, applies that stuff back in or interpolates that stuff back in? Um, there's a kind of intellectual coziness to it because that is, it is the framework out of which Marxism was, was born. But, um, it has this mystical feel to it which, again, I'm seduced by, and it's I am very seduced by it, which should be unsurprising.

C. Derick Varn: 40:15

As a person who comes out of a Marxist background and who analyzes religion through you talk about this as a dialectical and historical materialist analytic of religion, which I did not get from your show. I've watched your show for about two years and I did not get from your show. I've watched your show for about two years and I did not initially get that Um, but uh, I I get it more now because you're always historically contextualizing these um, somewhat obscure religious movements and figures, that really, and trying to get back to how to read them in their context, in their material history and then walking through both kind of material history and the reception history and how those are interacting and changing these ideas. And when it comes to the history of like esoterica, interestingly, a lot of people do that um, which is which I find fascinating because these are religious ideas and it wouldn't, uh, unless you are a mystic, most people would not do that, but the scholarship on that tends to be fairly materialist, right. What I find interesting when we do that would say Marx, lenin, stalin, etc. We don't tend to do that. There's not this, tend to go back and recontextualize the debates.

C. Derick Varn: 41:33

The first person for me who kind of tried to do that that I read those two was Alta Sare and, from a completely different modality, hal Draper, trying to go back and like find the debate that was actually leading to this term to emerge, et cetera. And I guess I was going to ask you do you see a relationship in the methodology that we're talking about here? We're dealing with trying to figure out what Mark's thought, or how that changed over time and led to these orthodoxies and new theories, et cetera, et cetera, and how these esoteric ideas play out, because your show and then the Secret History of Western Esotericism, and then me actually reading the books that come up on those shows have really changed my view of the way we should study philosophy in light of both. They almost always have more religious content than we recognize initially. For these reasons, like, we're reading them decontextually.

C. Derick Varn: 42:32

And two, uh, we often don't recognize the shifts in religion's thought in them because we don't recognize the religious thought at all. And that comes from the same bad methodology. And while what happens in marxism isn't the same as that at all, um, there is this tendency to be like well, you know, mark said x. This comes from this tradition. We can find it in, you know, from a decontextualized quote from X and Y and then bracket out all the debates I mean the famous one is like trying to figure out what dictatorship of the proletariat meant originally versus later. Do you think that these two things interrelated at all?

Justin Sledge: 43:10

I think they should. I mean, I've, I've always been a I guess I can say maybe this way, I I, I didn't come out of a Marxist family. I came out of a working class Mississippi family and I came to be a Marxist because I, like, poured the sweat out of my boot one day and I read Marx in high school because we had to and you know, my teacher just railed against Marx and his evil communism and I just remember reading about this guy talking about how, you know, production mattered and workers mattered, and I remember pouring the sweat out of my boot and being like I like this guy, like you know, and so I kind of came into working class politics and Marxism as a, as a working class person and and I really bought the whole, you know, and it's also skeptical of Marx. I didn't trust the way he dressed and I didn't trust the way he looked. He looked too fancy, like. He didn't look like me. He looked like my dad and I and it's a guy that's like, yeah, this is one of those kind of people that gets it right, but he's probably not trustworthy. And for me there was never a desire to do hagiography of Marx. He doesn't need to be a saint. I don't need Trotsky or Stalin or Mao to be saints, I need them to be revolutionaries. And that's a messy business and and for me it's always a question of if I really want to understand these guys, I have to get into the mess. And that was always like the case because I didn't trust them like I just I don't look like how many days in a factory to trust you work. You know first thing about factories, um, you know just similar vase point. So it's easy for me to to, it's always been easy for me to go to Mark's and say like, all right, I think he gets this right, but he's not God, he's not the damn Messiah, he's just some guy and he's punching in the dark half the time as much as any of us are, and when he's right, he's right, and when he's not, he's not, and it's fine, it's not and it's fine. And when I I just apply that same sort of or rather I should say that again.

Justin Sledge: 45:18

This is where I come to the structuralism kicks in. Um, I don't analyze history in terms of individuals. That's like a liberal great man of history way of telling history. It's not a Marxist way of telling history. But individual people are nodes, they're intersections of historical structural forces, and those historical structural forces economic forces like political forces, religious forces the individuality, the individual subject is only intelligible as an emergence from that, that, that field, that an excitation in that field of force. And to think that somehow they figured it out is a betrayal of historical materialism. It's bizarre. And so, in the same way that you know, you don't understand that person because there's nothing there to understand, because a person is just a cipher of that that tangle of forces.

Justin Sledge: 46:14

And so whether it's marx or trotsky or whatever, hildegard of bing in, or to me it's all the same thing. And so when I, when I go to study marx and marxism, or when I go to study mechtel de magdeburg, I'm always asking the same questions, like, you know, what's their class position, what's their class origin, what's their class trajectory? What are the economic forces? What are the military forces? What are the? How much? How does Mechtild get enough calories in her body to survive?

Justin Sledge: 46:44

And I begin to build a story, an analysis of the vectors of the forces. That is, that she is the emergence of, and you know, at that very, the very tip of that emergence is her. But when we pretend that she's more than that. We miss, we, we don't understand her in her concrete conditions, and so that's what I do and that's why, you know, when I analyze stuff on the channel and this is maybe a fault of mine, maybe I could do a better job of this is that there's no interiority for many of the people I study on the channel.

Justin Sledge: 47:23

You don't get a sense of them as people like you never get, like I never tell, like fun stories about their personality or something, which is what I think a lot of other YouTube channels do. When it goes to historical figures are like like you never get, like I never tell like fun stories about their personality or something, which is what I think a lot of other YouTube channels do. When it goes to historical figures are like let's talk about how Grant was a drunk when he was bored, or it's always like. It's like what does their Facebook profile look like? If they were a person, I'm like I don't want to look, I don't care about that at all, cause that's none of that's real, and so I don't analyze these characters and people that way. I say like this is the historical context and they're an emergence out of that context, and they're nothing other than an emergence out of that context, any more than anyone else Any other subject is anything other than an excitation in a field of forces.

C. Derick Varn: 48:13

Yeah, that makes sense, I think about you know. You mentioned all too, sarah. I use back teen a lot for understanding this, like understanding the utterance of you know an individual and the context that in that utterance is all this other social stuff, both their material surroundings that you've talked about, but also like the social consensus around these words at the time they're being used and and the fact that people often have counter registers and what they're saying. I mean, we talk about this a little bit. I think it's indicated a lot of marks Like there's these is ambiguities that you can kind of piss uh, piece apart and they can go in multiple different directions, like I'm not one to say, for example, that stalinism or soviet orthodoxy or our mal, our maoism, uh, our maoisms, which there's at least five now formally, or something like that I've tried to like, like map them out before um, that that any of those aren't related to marxism.

Justin Sledge: 49:13

Because of some small deviation, because in some sense I'm always like usually it's not a deviation, it's an ambiguity that leads to a shift in time right, um, yeah, it's a butterfly flag, that there's some ambiguity marks, that's worked itself out in some kind of bizarre way, and and the actual application of these ideas.

C. Derick Varn: 49:31

Right. Well, it's interesting to me because I, you know, way, way, way, way back before I decided to become something really lucrative like a poet and a teacher, I was training to be a religious, a religious anthropologist, so anthropologist of religion actually, that's a confusing way to say it and I do think, even though I do not think Marxism is a religion in any, if religion has any meaning at all star, I'm not sure that it does. On star, marxism probably isn't one. But that way in which unintended ideas and counter registers and stuff show up in time, um, is really interesting because the way I do go about this and the way I would go about something like analyzing developments around bible verses or something like that there are, they are weirdly similar. You're just like okay, so there's this ambiguity in this part of this text and we don't know this, but in this political context it's going to work out in a certain way and now we have a tradition and it's going to you know, boom Like, do you? So you know boom like um, do you? Um? So, and and thinking about the class content of it's actually interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 50:57

I, about five or six years ago, I started thinking about the class of like. How do we understand the class of biblical authors, asterisk? We can't understand them in classes that we know, because the classes that we are predominantly in today barely existed, if at all, in, like you know, the first century ce, um, so um, how, when you, when you approach some of these figures, how do you figure out their class origins? And all this to figure out what their meaning may have been?

Justin Sledge: 51:27

yeah, I mean I locate them in the system of production. Right, we know a good bit about, I mean, europe is pretty well understood in terms of the system of production. But I mean even we can go back further than that. I mean, one of the best books ever written in my opinion, a book I rely on heavily is Class Struggle in the Ancient World. It's one of the most amazing pieces of scholarship, marxist or otherwise. So I do think we can do class analysis and I think we do class analysis by understanding the forces and mode of production, the social relations of production, and we began to locate these figures in that.

Justin Sledge: 52:01

And I can think of someone like Mechthilde Magdeburg. Right, this is a woman who's living in a world where there are certain kinds of forces of production, but also she's who's living in a world where there are certain kinds of forces of production, but also she's able to live in a sort of micro society where there's cottage industry and stuff like that. And so it's a sort of a part of a really a really early version of a kind of bourgeois consciousness, and I mean bourgeois in the very progressive sense of that term. When marx calls the bourgeoisie the most successful revolutionary class in history. People like Mechthild are some of the very first people for whom that radical subjectivity is also very much linked to their social independence because of the fact that they have access to communally owned cottage industry within these Bechinhofen. And so it's unsurprising to me that these Bechins all begin to develop this crazy radically independent religious poetry because they're there's something like bourgeois intellectuals are very early, very early examples of of something like bourgeois intellect, intellectuals for whom radical, their subjectivity is the object of endless interest, in the same way that the Dutch, early Dutch capitalists were some of the first people to endlessly want to see themselves depicted in art. That there's an obsession with their own subjectivity, that there's an obsession with their own subjectivity. So yeah, I think that one can. I think it's just a question of doing the difficult work of trying to sort out, you know where they fit in the again, the their class origin, their class position, the class trajectory, those three things mapped onto the forces and relations of production. And yeah, it takes some work but it's certainly not impossible.

Justin Sledge: 53:47

But and also, again, like looking at again I'm thinking of Mechtel because I just did an episode on her but thinking about where she came from, like okay. What does it mean to come from a minor aristocratic family? What does it mean to leave that family? What are you going to leave it for? Why does she not go to an enclosure? There are places for aristocrat girls to go. You know, cistercians were packed to the brim with aristocrat girls. Like, why does she go to the Bechenehof, not to the Cistercian enclosure? You know what's going on there.

Justin Sledge: 54:18

So, yeah, you can begin to ask these questions and I, you know I can tell you that I lay in bed, uh, thinking about them and you know it's, it's. I don't talk about those, those questions on the channel, because there's a lot of like speculation that go my part. But I can definitely guarantee you that by the time I'm writing an episode, I've come to some kind of conclusions about those, um, about those questions, at least as best as I can, given the evidence I have access to. And, yeah, it lends to the analysis that I provide. I think people find it to be an interesting analysis and I've gotten emails from lots of scholars being like I watched your episode on this and didn't really think about this that way and I'm like, yeah, just, you're probably a liberal. I'm thinking about it as uh and and and exactly the same way that I am.

C. Derick Varn: 55:13

Um, I was. I think about that a lot. I do think, you know, when we're talking about like late, late medieval, early modern mystics, it is a little easier than when, like, we're dealing with like trying to figure out, uh, the, the class orientation of, like the jesus movement. I remember reading a book that we published over at zero when I worked for them, as one of the last books I accepted. It was about, like you know, uh j, uh, uh, jesus's relationship, the class struggle, asterisk, you know, and when they're not really talking about Jesus or talking about the early Jesus amendment, cause we don't really know anything about Jesus, the person, um, but it was interesting, you know, trying to figure that out.

C. Derick Varn: 55:58

Because on one hand, there is this, you know, a tradition, even in socialism go back and read Kotsky's like Christianity and socialism, whatever, and he's basically, you know, christianity is a religion of the little guy.

C. Derick Varn: 56:12

When you actually read it you're like, well, sort of, but it's not aimed at like. These texts are not aimed at the little guy, for one, they're texts, you know, they're aimed at somebody. The theory that I've seen around some more recent Marxist scholarship is they're like they're aimed at they're coming from a merchant class speaking for a peasant class aimed at, like the outliers of the elite. That's who they're targeting right, and that creates a very complicated picture for analyzing those texts, because it does explain like the first will be last stuff, but it also explains, like why there's this weird like there is not a vision of like inverting or getting rid of empire, there's only like universalizing empire and making it more humane and under God, as opposed to some ruler right and stuff like that. So you, you start, you start looking at that and a lot of it's highly speculative. We can't really know.

Justin Sledge: 57:12

Yeah, you have to be able to figure out what you think Jesus really said.

C. Derick Varn: 57:15

Right, or at least what early Jesus movement thought he said.

Justin Sledge: 57:20

No right, right, right. And I, he said no right, right, right. And I do think a lot of that's recoverable to some degree. I tend to be a bit more lenient with that stuff, but yeah, I think we can. We can we get some sense of like where jesus as a individual, we have a sense of his, the historical jesus, and I think that the jesus movement as it begins to emerge in the in the second century, that's a whole different ball of wax, because they're, by the second century, even by the gospel of john, they've, they've escaped, uh, their jewish origins right, they're no longer. And even by paul they're beginning to shake off that stuff. And so you get a sense that, um, even by the time of the composition of the Gospels, there's already a rewriting of the story, specifically in the exoneration of Pontius Pilate, where they're more self-consciously courting empire than resisting it.

Justin Sledge: 58:17

I don't think that was true of Jesus, a kind of apocalyptic anti-imperialist, not actively thinking of overthrowing the empire through armed struggle, but basically thinking that God was going to do it through some messianic character, perhaps himself. But yeah, you can, I think you can see this and I think you can see it, you can do the class analysis again thinking about. I mean, this is where, again, I think that some malice stuff is really useful, uh, to really think about sort of center and periphery of empire and the kind of contradictions that emerge. And at the periphery of empire, fano is useful here as well. So I think those tools are useful.

Justin Sledge: 58:58

And this is where I'm quite a more heterodox marxist that when, when I think Trotsky gets it right, I think Combine and Even Development and Primer Revolution are correct. I think that Mao's understanding of dialectics as contradictions is also correct. I'm not going to get shoved into some thing where I can't, you know where I can't at some level appreciate where, where I think the tradition gets things right and where I think they get things wrong. But again, I think these are places where we can do those kinds of analysis. But admittedly, as the data becomes scarce and the data is scarce, as you point out our analysis becomes lower and lower and lower resolution and so, yeah, our level of analysis of Jesus is always going to be a relatively low resolution analysis.

C. Derick Varn: 59:49

But that's fine. We do have hints. I mean like, for example, the complications and even grammatically in the gospels like they amp up significantly between mark to matthew and luke, and then like way significantly in john, where like there's no way that john doesn't know some neoplatonism, like yeah, or absolutely no, I mean, or just where we get the jump from blessed are the poor to blessed are the poor in spirit.

Justin Sledge: 1:00:13

Yeah, yeah, that's a hell of a change, you know? Um, that's, that's from matt.

Justin Sledge: 1:00:18

I think that's from mark to matthew and so clearly, like Matthew, is already on the trajectory away from a kind of radicalism, social radicalism, that that Jesus spoke, although I don't I don't buy the whole Jesus stuff. I think Jesus was a very uh, very militant, very, um, very elitist, uh Jew like elitist Jewish supremacist of a certain type and I don't buy the whole. He was expecting a universal reconciliation. I mean, you see some of the discussion with the Samaritan woman where he's like I'm not going to help you and she's like, well, don't even dog eat the crumbs that fall from the table. He's like, oh, I'll give you the crumbs.

Justin Sledge: 1:01:05

That's Jesus talking. That's the historical Jesus talking. That's the Jewish ethnocentric theology that, yeah, you'll get the crumbs but ultimately we will inherit the world. And I think that the Kumbaya Jesus that we get in John, but also the Kumbaya Jesus that we get out of Hegel and Jijic, where you get this sort of universalized, that's not Jesus, that's not what he actually thought when you actually read the texts that we think are relative pretty likely by him. He's not on your team, he's much more on the team of apocalyptic settlers in Palestine right now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:01:52

Yeah, well, I mean the Jesus that I tend to believe existed, the Jewish Buddhist. I don't believe in Jesus as a metaphysical thing at all, but, um, I I tend to agree with ep sanders like that. He was an apocalyptic. Yeah, rarely ethnocentric, uh.

Justin Sledge: 1:02:15

Uh, probably closer to kumran than not, like you know, that's, that's my take, yeah I mean, yeah, his, his cousin, john the baptist, certainly was quite close to that community in some. In some ways, it seems like, uh, and also we know that the qumran community was a, was an extreme version of the essenes they were. It seems like they were a strict version of a movement that did have popular out branches and also, again, like peasants, are quasi-peasant people like jesus. You know, we never see jesus in a major city. He's always in the countryside, he's always out somewhere. He's never in, like teaching in nazareth, or he's at capernaum.

Justin Sledge: 1:02:55

He's, you know, he's in the synagogue once or twice. He's always kind of in the countryside and you get the sense that that he, you know, I mean again not the Maoist version of him, like raging up a you know countryside, army or whatever, but you get the sense that he's at the periphery of the society he's in and that he's sort of touching to these radical movements. And you know, people at the periphery of societies come up with a lot of strange ideas and they often can be very charismatic and um and I think jesus was one of these characters and we see a lot of those in history um, it's a lot of these messianic characters are able to convince a lot of people to do a lot of weird stuff yeah, well that's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:03:43

It is interesting. One of the things I've looked at in anthropology is just looking at where people are physically. You go to the mountains and you just meet. There's probably a thousand different radical epistemologies in two mountains, because no one agrees on anything. The only thing they agree with is they want to be left alone. That's why I'm on the side of mountain in the first place, like um, and the core and periphery stuff is very useful for understanding even those dynamics. Um, the further away from the city you go, uh, the less homogenous people get, despite what you might think.

Justin Sledge: 1:04:20

So yeah, and the less and the more intellectually daring, and like unhinged, um, I tell those, and the less in the more intellectually daring and like on on hinged, I tell those people go out in the countryside anywhere and just like talk to people. There's, there's a weird bizarre idea that and this has been so much more true because of mass media, but you know, back before the mass media, urban centers were the intellectually much more homogenous than the countryside, because you're left alone for long periods of time to think and people got up to all kinds of weird beliefs. But yeah, I think that. Yeah, I mean again, there's like this Maoist Jesus that I think some people have adopted. I don't think that's true. But yeah, I do think that we can do again low resolution class analysis, given the paucity of the data, but still some analysis.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:16

This leads me to an interesting question. When you're dealing with groups like the Gnostics and I'm going to put Gnostics in quotation marks because I've got to put like 50 asterisks Gnostics where and I'm gonna put Gnostics in quotation marks because I got to put like 50 asterisks and like like whether or not they're even real as a category see this in this book um but like yeah, but like like say let's, let's pick one, let's say Marcion. Like what kind of class money are we dealing with there?

Justin Sledge: 1:05:40

well, we know Marcion for sure.

Justin Sledge: 1:05:42

Marcion was a owner of a shipping business, so he was, he came from, he was uh, good old proto-bourgeois right, I would say, yeah, I mean like really sort of like the closest thing the roman empire ever produced like to a bourgeois class. I mean he, he was, he was a captain of industry. So you know he really he ran a, he ran a shipping business. You know he was able to. Uh, I think he, when he came to Rome, he donated like 200 Cistercians to the church. It's three years wages or whatever for a craftsperson, it was real money and he basically was able to bankroll his own church. So we know a lot about his class background. So we know a lot about his class background.

Justin Sledge: 1:06:28

It's he's he's sort of the you know second century equivalent to I mean I don't know exactly some kind of Gilded Age. You know Gilded Age guy, I think he inherited the business from his father. So you know we know a good bit about him. And but again, this is an interesting place right where the church wasn't able to be bought off. You know he basically said like hey, I want you to do this, that and the other, and the church was like no, we're not doing that, and they gave his money back. So you know this is an interesting moment where the early Catholic, proto-catholic church could not be bought by this guy, and so he had to basically buy his own church and it did survive. I mean, marcionite churches existed in the in the Eastern Mediterranean and fifth or sixth century or something like that. So yeah, we know, we know a good bit about his, his class background and him.

Justin Sledge: 1:07:23

When it gets more, mercury is like you know, we know a good bit about his, his class background and him. When it gets more, mercury is like you know, valentina's like. I mean, he obviously is literate, he is, um, he's able to compete for the, the Bishop seat of Rome, in the one eighties, I think, one seventies. He's, he's, he's in competition for the Bishop of Rome. That's, that's no small thing. It's not the Pope as it is now, but that's no joke.

Justin Sledge: 1:07:48

And it scared Irenaeus enough that Irenaeus went back to Leon and wrote the Ad Hereris. So yeah, valentinus is coming from some kind of money, we don't know exactly what. So yeah, we know a good bit about him. In general, it seems that so-called Gnosticism was a relatively, I would say, elite but literate group of people, and part of what I would say about that is that, if you one, the texts survive in some number, but also those texts are complicated enough that they would require a good deal of education to have a grasp of what's going on in them, and so, yeah, we have some sense of those guys.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:41

Well, I bring it up because there's a lot of people who read gnosticism. I think this was more popular and like the popular scholarship 30 years ago. I remember when I was in high school, like the elaine pagel school of interpretation. Yeah, it makes it sound like they were a besieged minority and and they might have been, but they were, they had to be from a relative like a relatively elite position. When you go through and like, okay, there's all this symbolism there. The more I've studied it as an adult, there's all this relationship to neoplatonic philosophy. So these people have some kind of relationship to, like, official state educational institutions that they're dealing with are quasi-official. I mean, it's hard to talk about official state educational institutions in the first century, in the third century, but something like that.

Justin Sledge: 1:09:28

I think even more to your point that there isn't official institutions of higher learning and they have access to education, which means they're procuring it through private contracting, often through buying slaves. People forget that slaves in the Greek and Roman world often could be educated, were often educated. If you wanted to learn to do poetry, you would often hire a slave that could teach you how to do poetry. So this was not the chattel slavery of the American South, but rather a quite different kind of highly skilled slavery often, of course, some of it was menial slavery and chattel slavery as well. Of course some of it was menial slavery and chattel slavery as well. But yeah, it's definitely the case that these they may have been a beleaguered minority, but that's also because Christianity was just a minority. I mean, most of this stuff is seemingly being generated in Egypt, alexandria.

Justin Sledge: 1:10:23

We don't know in absolute numbers how much Christians represented a percent of the population, but they weren't a majority and they wouldn't become a majority for quite some time and they wouldn't exercise enough authority until they got imperial power in the 4th century. So you know, when so-called Gnosticism was being developed in the 2nd and 3 third centuries. Yeah, they're all. All these groups are relatively small. But we don't know. I mean, you know you can try to generate some numbers from the papyrological remains, but then you do that and you're like, you know the survivorship bias is going to haunt you. You're never going to know. You know whether or not something survived because it was numerous or survived because of an accident.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:09

Survived just because it was in Egypt, where the conditions are good for a ship to survive.

Justin Sledge: 1:11:12

That's why everything survived in Egypt. It's definitely the case that we should. And again, also, when you measure things based on what you find in Egypt, can you apply that to Gaul? Can you apply that to Rome? Are intellectual conditions in rome similar to alexandria? I mean, and can you, can you derive something about the conditions in in alexandria from what survives in, in, you know, in one grave in nakamati? I think it's bad, that's bad, bad, bad methodology.

Justin Sledge: 1:11:42

Um, you know, b Nogre has a great book on um, uh, books. You know, the earliest, earliest Christian archeological evidence we have are books. That's the earliest evidence we have of Christianity. There are no churches from that time period. Everyone's meeting in houses, and so we don't know what's a house and what's a church and there's probably no difference, uh, frankly. And so we don't really have a lot of archaeological evidence of Christianity in the first few centuries of its history. What we do have are books. We have manuscripts, and so what can we learn about that? What can we do with? You know, again, this is sort of where Marxism kicks in. I like those studies because they start with what we have, and what we have are books. So what do we know about how long it takes to make a book? How much do books cost? Who are buying them? Who's selling them? Who's reading them?

Justin Sledge: 1:12:28

When we notice that the Apocryphon of John has been translated into two different dialects of Coptic, what does that tell us? That's conspicuous. That means that we have a Greek original that's been translated at least twice into Coptic, into one dialect at one point of the Nile, then at one dialect a little bit further up the Nile. That's interesting because that means that and the dialects are relatively mutually intelligible. But it's interesting to note that that means that someone, two people that seemingly didn't know one another, decided that it was important enough that this text be translated into that regional dialect of Coptic. What does that mean? And I think those are interesting questions, I think those are like to me. That's really where you get the materiality. Like, what does it mean to choose to do that, translate that book into that dialect of Coptic as opposed to the thousand other things that person could have done, dialectic Coptic as opposed to the thousand other things that person could have done? And then we begin to get, I think, a richer picture of the complicatedness that is early Christianity or Gnosticism or whatever.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:36

Yeah, early Christianity, gnosticism I think we can do this even with like Pharisaic thought too. I mean like, when do we get manuscripts? Where are they coming from? How are they being preserved? Why is the babylonian one more important than jerusalem? One that's not immediately obvious to non-jews and people who don't understand the history, like you learn a lot about, like relative status of diaspora populations, for example, based on what you find in the different talmuds like, yeah, yeah, the fact that the Jerusalem Talmud has a section on agriculture is three times bigger, right, and you're like.

Justin Sledge: 1:14:11

You begin to think, oh, yeah, because they're living on farms. Like Jewish farming is a thing in Israel-Palestine in a way that it wasn't for the urban elite living in Babylonia, who were living in what is now Fallujah. They didn't have questions around what to do with farming because they weren't engaged in. They were buying their food rather than growing it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:35

And yeah, that's exactly right and it means something different there too than when we look at late medieval Jewish manuscripts in Europe, where they can't farm Right.

Justin Sledge: 1:14:47

It's interesting. Why would they preserve sections without farming when that's not even possible? Right? What is the impetus for preserving a text that isn't even applicable any longer and won't be applicable in the conceivable future? I think these questions are again like and again. This is when I do my work. I proceed very slowly to think through these questions, because I do think that they are revelatory of the actual people and their actual history. The texts again are an emergence out of a system of interconnected forces and until you get a good grasp on those forces, all you have is a cipher and the text doesn't really mean anything or it can't mean anything. So this is why I think that historical materialism for me is so important as a methodology.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:42

I guess this is a good place to talk about and this will be the last section of our conversation but why study esoteric stuff in a historical materialist framework? You and I are both in some way quasi religious. I don't actually know. I mean, I would assume you're an observant Jew, but um, uh, by observant probably in like the reconstructionist tradition, right?

Justin Sledge: 1:16:12

Yeah, I'm a very, I'm a very, very old school Kaplanian. Uh follow of Monica Kaplan.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:18

Yeah, for the. That's a. I have that book back there somewhere.

Justin Sledge: 1:16:22

Judaism and Civilization. Yeah, that's a great book. That's my.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:27

Yeah, that's one of the few books that's ever got me to step into a shul. Oh, really yeah.

Justin Sledge: 1:16:36

Well, thank you, baruch Hashem.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:40

But nonetheless, why is it why I'm not saying it actually is important, actually, but why could it be, in theory, important to study these ideas this way?

Justin Sledge: 1:17:00

I guess a couple of reasons. One reason is that a lot of people who've studied esotericism have studied it either to dismiss it as not worthwhile of being historical, like it's just not, like it didn't happen, or who cares, or it's like not an important part of history, which is empirically false, like these ideas have had an enormous impact on the development of Western thought, whether that thought be religious or philosophical or whatever. So the erasure of it is simply a historical mistake. The other side that people tend to be is credulous. They go to this material because they want it to be true. They go there because they think that magic is real and if they study John Dee's manuscripts they can summon angels and get a girlfriend or something I don't know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:49

I wouldn't go to John D for relationship advice. No, no.

Justin Sledge: 1:17:52

I wouldn't either. You can ask John D about that, and I guess. Another third position is that there's sort of like there's just an army of liberal historians.

Justin Sledge: 1:18:03

another third position is that there's sort of like there's just an army of liberal historians, and I don't think liberal historians, you know, especially like with these, like the rise of like history, history, um, I don't trust that stuff. I don't trust that. I don't trust the sort of post-structuralist, uh fucodian shift toward so-called genealogy or whatever they made up stuff they call it genealogy, epistemes and those fun little like all that stuff.

Justin Sledge: 1:18:31

Yeah, I don't like, I don't get down with that and cause I don't think that that's really history. Um, I don't know what that is it's. It's like historical fiction, I don't know what it is, um, and so I don't. This is, I don't trust any three of those ways of doing history.

Justin Sledge: 1:18:49

And it just so happens that, for whatever reason, as a quirk of my personality or whatever, I just happened to be interested in this material and I happen to have a skillset that allows me to do it. I read Latin, I can look at, I can, I'm a calligrapher, so I can, like, read medieval manuscripts. I just it just so happens that I, I have the weird skill set that makes it so that I can, I can do this work at a granular, at a relatively granular level, uh, and if folks have watched the channel, like I'll show you the manuscript that I'm reading, like on the screen, like, and I'll zoom in on it and be like that's the part, and and so I just it just so happens that I have a, I have a weird, uh, skill at this, and so if you have a weird skill at something and you can benefit the field, then you should do it and it just so happens that I'm able to do it and, and, you know, thankfully I'm I'm able to do it and, and you know, thankfully I'm I'm able to, you know, make a living at doing it, which is not true for a lot of academics. So, yeah, that's my, that's my bit, I mean, and I guess the other side of it is, you know, not only has this material had a a pretty decisive impact in history, a pretty decisive impact in history, but many of the ideas are very current. They're with us now.

Justin Sledge: 1:20:09

You know my fellow Mississippian, william Faulkner. Bill Faulkner said that, you know, the past isn't dead, it's not even past. We're still living. As I mentioned earlier, we're still living in Joaquin Fiore's world. We still talk about the middle ages, like, like. That language is earlier. We're still living in Joaquin Fiore's world. We still talk about the Middle Ages. That language is apocalyptic language. It's baked into the way that we interact with our world and the more that we have an understanding of the historical processes that have generated the present, the more that we might have some ability to shape this historical processes and in the interest of human liberation.

Justin Sledge: 1:20:45

And if we, as chauvinist Marxists, turn our nose up to the history of esotericism and the history of mysticism, the history of magic. Ironically, we're turning our nose One. We're turning our nose up at history, which is about the least historical materialist thing you can do, but also you're turning your nose up to an important dimension of how ideas were formed and how they shaped reality and how they were shaped by reality. But also I'll give the example of magic You're also turning your nose up about how common, everyday people, working people, dealt with their reality. And like I think that when you, when you're, when your Marxism means turning your nose up at working class people, peasants, laboring people I don't know what kind of hell Marxism that is. I don't have anything to do with that, and so part of what I'm able to do is in my work I'm able to center common people, regular people, and say, like this is a kind of, this is a place where religion was functioning at this very weird way, and that we think that we tell the story that the Catholic church had a Jiminy and blah, blah, blah, blah. But that's not true. There were peasants who clearly were not impressed by the hegemony of the Catholic Church and were using magic to try to get stuff done. That shows you already there's an intellectual insurrection against the hegemony of the Catholic Church.

Justin Sledge: 1:22:15

So if we're going to do the history, we need to do the history, and if we're going to do it, then I think we should do it in a way that centers people and common people, regular people, minority people, like Mechthild of Magdeborn, who's a woman writing a daring book in the 13th century where she knows that a generation later her colleague Marguerite Perrette will be burned for writing something similar.

Justin Sledge: 1:22:43

Later her colleague Marguerite Perrette will be burned for writing something similar. These are really heroic people and they're doing something that really is disrupting the hegemonies around them, whether that be patriarchy or the hegemony of scholasticism or the church as a hegemonic power. There's some revolutionary energy there and again, again not to get all micro revolution stuff, I don't want to go into that kind of stuff but I think that there's revolutionary energy there and I think there are moments where we can really get a glimpse into how radically important these figures are and these movements are. And I think that any marxism that doesn't want to get granular like that, that isn't really historical, isn't really historical materialism. It's some liberal, positivist, whiggish. History is all about dudes on battlefields yeah, that's not true.

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:34

I mean, that is weirdly an implication of a lot of marxist studies, as we study philosophers and statesmen and often not actual people like. The number of Marxist who judge the Soviet Union off of daily life in the Soviet Union and what they were and were not achieving an absolute terms is actually pretty pretty damningly rare yeah.

Justin Sledge: 1:24:01

You know I agree.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:02

I agree. I remember studying calorie inputs in the USSR and being fascinated by it because it told a very different story, even from the Soviet Unions on records, which is harder and harder to get access to. Thank you, putin. Unfortunately, we had a bright spot in this period of Soviet scholarship, from like 1996 to like 2009. And it's back closed off again.

Justin Sledge: 1:24:35

So maybe A real pity. But yeah, I agree with you that you know, I think we Marxists have to start, in my opinion, with the forces and relations of production, the mode of production, and you build your history from there. Because, like you said, if you can't get calories in your mouth, well, you're not going to have a society much longer. And, like I said, I agree with you and that's the kind of history that I want to do. And I don't see that kind of history much on the internet.

Justin Sledge: 1:25:08

Most guys who do history on the internet they just want to do like um, battlefield reenactment, like this is the battle of australis. Let's talk about the battle of australis for five hours. I'm like I want to talk about the. I mean, the bottle of astralis obviously matters, but what matters just as much of that, in fact more than that, is how all those guys ended up on that battlefield and who's feeding them. Like where does that gunpowder come from? Who made those cannons? There's a pyramid of causality and without understanding the foundations, the substructure of that causal network, you don't get a battle of Austerlitz, you don't get cannons, you don't get food, you don't get uniforms.

Justin Sledge: 1:25:54

I mean, yeah, and again, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I really don't. I don't want anyone to hear me just hating on military history people, but there's often this weird presumption that that, like you said, it's philosophers, scientists, statesmen and generals that make history. But that's, those are not what make, those are not what are ultimately decisive of historical shifts. Class struggle is what is ultimately decisive of historical shifts. And, uh, if, insofar as marx is right, that class is the unit of social selection, in the way that the gene is the unit of biological selection, if the class is the unit of social, social, social selection and class again is about position, origin and trajectory, then we have to be studying that at the very beginning of what we're doing. Otherwise, I don't know what it is otherwise.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:49

It's doing bourgeois history oh yeah, although a lot of people that we were talking about wouldn't have a problem being called a bourgeois historian, even if they knew what it meant.

Justin Sledge: 1:27:01

Yeah, but again, they're not. Again, they're not. What I'm saying is they're not, they're not wrong, but I think that it's not that. And again, I'm not calling them out. What I'm saying is Marxist historians start doing Marxist mystery. I'm just saying, like we need to do our job better. Not that they don't need to do their job Military history obviously is very important it's just that we need to be doing. Marxists need to be doing their job better, absolutely. That's who I'm. If I'm calling anybody, it's myself.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:45

I mean. Well, you know Marxist historiography. To me there's two areas where Marxism should be strong, and that is economic analysis and historiography and history. And while Marxist historiography is still actually weirdly kind of respected by a lot of bourgeois historians, even though they consider it outdate now, now moated, it's not shut on like Marxist economics is. It is weird to me that what we have now is critical. I like Fredrich Jameson as much as the next person, but I don't actually need another literary understanding of capital. To me, that's the opposite of what we should be doing. Yeah.

Justin Sledge: 1:28:22

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean if we could have 15 more books like cluster, on the ancient world, um, you know, books like that. That's the kind of stuff we need.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:32

Yeah.

Justin Sledge: 1:28:33

And I don't know, I maybe I'll, I'll write some class, you know, sort of like some Marxist thing about less necrotism at some point, but I don't know, it's not, not, not, not in the near future. I can tell you that, yeah, just getting the basic texts out there is that's going to be a lifetime's worth of work for my own, my part.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:52

So, on that note, I'm going to like have you plug your stuff. So, on that note, I'm going to have you plug your stuff. The weirdest part about doing a political socialist podcast is the fact that, because it's a podcast, we still have to do Renier Relations part of the show. But nonetheless, where can people find your work? And also, maybe I would add to that work and also maybe I would add to that. Um, in addition to your work, what would you suggest? People who are, who've been, who've had their curiosity piqued, they go to your channel. Uh, what would you suggest? What other channels would you tell them look at? And what? What might you tell them? The read that we haven't mentioned in, uh, in the interview today?

Justin Sledge: 1:29:34

and the only social media that I have is just my youtube channel. It's just, uh, esoterica. That's smart my thing. Yeah, social media scares the hell out of me, so I don't do any of that. Um, but yeah, you can check out esoterica. You know I have a lot of channels that I work with pretty frequently that I think are good scholars and you know who are not marxists, but they're great scholars and they do great work and I, you can see, can see that I work with them. Um, they'll their links are there on the on the channel. They do great work.

Justin Sledge: 1:30:01

Um, I'll tend to say films is another guy I'll push. Um, andy is a good friend of mine and, uh, he just did a great historical, what I would consider. I don't know that he considered himself a Marxist I don't, I know that he doesn't but he did basically a historical materialist analysis of the Salem witch trials. That was fantastic. He just released it a couple of days ago and I was watching it last night and I was like, andy, I don't know if you're officially a Marxist, but you're doing it. You know whatever Marx says about ideology, right that they do it even though they don't know that they're doing it. Andy is like the opposite of that. He's like a Marxist, even though he doesn't know who he is. So it's great. It's a fantastic episode he did on the real material conditions of the Salem Witch Trials.

Justin Sledge: 1:30:45

But as a book I mean, if you're interested in Western esotericism as a field so there's magic and mysticism and the occult and all that I always tell people the best place to begin is Walter Honegrath's Western Esotericism the God of the Perplexed. He's going to be releasing a new edition of it, but the edition that exists now is just really good. And I will say that Walter is definitely not a Marxist but he is a good historiographer and so, insofar as one of the strengths that Marxism has is good historiography, voucher is a diligent historiographer. He's a great hero of mine. I've admired his work since I was a young person and I've been honored to sit across the table from him and have chats about stuff. But I think that's the best place to start if you want want to get into this field in a non-woo way where you're really getting into it in a, in a historic, in a historiographically rich way.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:49

Yeah, I that that book. I think I got it like 2017 or something, and it blew my mind, Like it was just like, oh, okay, Like there's a reason why this weird obsession that I have actually has some this is like validity for understanding the world no, you're, no, it's.

Justin Sledge: 1:32:07

It's a funny moment where I think people and I said people said this about the channel they're like I had a weird feeling this mattered a lot more than than we then people make it out to be. And then they, you know, after they watch some of my content and they are they read voucher's book they're like, yeah, that's really weird that that intuition proved true and I think that everyone kind of knows it that like these weird occult ideas played some pretty deciding again. We don't want to go down the road. I think of the Francis Yates thesis where she basically says that all of modernity can be laid at the feet of her medicism or something like that. I don't think that's true, but she's not totally wrong either, and I think that that's a moment where I mean I read Francis Yates' book when I was in college and I was converted.

Justin Sledge: 1:32:59

I really believe the Yates hypothesis and then Valtter tore it apart and but I've not yet I think Valtter goes maybe a little too far in his dismissal of it, but I do think that I do think there is no modernity without it. It is, it is. I don't know that it's either necessary nor sufficient to produce modernity, so I'm not a yatesian there, but I do think that there is no modernity in the way that we have, modernity without it. Um, and you know, again myalthusarianism kicks in and says you know, history is overdetermined, and this is one of the, this is one of the. This is aleatory moments where the, the degree to which history is overdetermined. We can never know exactly what has gone into causing X, y and Z, but I, you know, I would suggest and argue for that the western as a terrorism has had um a disproportionate impact in the development of modernity in a way that, um, I think most people don't uh, know or appreciate.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:10

Yeah, like we mentioned all the way back in the beginning, you kind of it's not necessary for understanding german idealism, but it sure as fuck helps.

Justin Sledge: 1:34:19

Like yeah, well, I will. I think it is actually necessary for german saying german idealism I do think yeah I do. I do think that you can't get schelling and other folks without it. Yeah, I do, I would go.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:30

So I would go so far as to say I don't think you can also understand the renaissance without understanding it no, no, I, and also I would say you can't understand ancient greek philosophy without having an a notion of the esoteric either so, yeah, yeah, this is a point I've made.

Justin Sledge: 1:34:43

Uh, and even, even rationalism. You know, I have an episode where I talk about the dirty secret of dick cartesian rationalism. Is that rationalism born out of a mystical experience of bizarre dreams that descartes had, where a divine being revealed to him the nature of rationalism? And you know, uh, the fact that we can't even have a conversation about that, uh, in philosophy departments, where, if you bring that up, you'll get, you'll get. No, no, no, no, no. We don't talk about the dreams, we talk about the Kogito. Um, so, yeah, I think there's no. Like I said, I I think I think history is over determined. So I'm not going to say, like you know, I'm not going to go full yatesian on this, but I will say that I, that westerners of terrorism, has played a decisive role in the development of modernity, uh, and, to your point, to ancient greece as well, and that if we don't, if this dimension of the history is ignored, we're not doing history. We're doing some Whiggish positivist interpolation of what history should be, and that's not doing history.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:49

Yeah, it's awfully cleaned up. Well, thank you so much, dr Sledge. I'm going to put a link in the show notes. I actually have no idea how much our audience overlaps, but it overlaps more than I thought because you've been requested multiple times and I was going to ask you anyway cause I'm fascinated with your channel. But like I was like, okay, weird, I had no idea that anyone else in my show and my audience cared about this. So, but if you're new, go check it. It's, it's I, I, I, uh, I patronize you. So, uh, it comes endorsed, um, and thank you so much.

Justin Sledge: 1:36:26

yep, absolutely man, thank you for having me on great conversation.