Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
From Dawn To Decadence, part 1: Cultural Shifts and Economic Myths
What if modern society is hurtling towards decadence just like the Roman Empire, yet we remain blissfully unaware of it? Join us as we embark on a journey with the Regrettable Brothers, Chris and Jason, to explore this possibility and unravel the complexities of societal progress through a Marxist lens. We bring you an insightful discussion that contrasts the lack of unifying structures in today’s capitalist excess, with the historical context of the Roman era's Catholic Church. With references to historical thinkers like Jacques Barzun and Giambattista Vico, we challenge the idea that technological advancement equates to moral and societal progress.
Our conversation takes a provocative turn as we examine theories of social decay and revival, weaving through Marxist perspectives and historical milestones like the Protestant Reformation and the fall of the Byzantine Empire. We scrutinize the evolution of capitalist theory, delving into the continuity of monopolistic practices and the critiques of Marx's views on capitalism's origins. Alongside our guests, we question the very fabric of modern society, examining economic stagnation, technological decay, and the specter of capitalist decadence. From theories of surplus value to the revolutionary role of the proletariat, we leave no stone unturned in our quest for insight.
Finally, we turn our attention to cultural decline, economic stagnation, and the complexities of nationalism in Eastern Europe. Our guests, Jason Moore and Phil Neal, offer perspectives on modern economies, labor rights, and the illusion of meritocracy. We also tackle the intricate tapestry of ethnic identity and nationalism in post-Slavic regions, navigating sensitive topics with a blend of humor and critical reflection. This episode promises a comprehensive exploration of historical transitions and their theoretical underpinnings, providing a rich tapestry of ideas that will leave you questioning the state of our modern world.
Sources:
Morley, Neville. "Decadence as a Theory of History." New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, Forms and/of Decadence (Autumn, 2004), pp.573-585
Decadence: The Theory of Decline or the Decline of Theory?
https://libcom.org/library/decadence-aufheben-2
Revolution or Decadence?
https://monthlyreview.org/2018/05/01/revolution-or-decadence/
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon
Hello and welcome to VARM Vlog and Regrettable Century minus two. So we have the brothers Regrettable with us, regrettable Chris and Regrettable Jason, the outreach department of the Regrettable Century.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right. And the HR department.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we were going to call you the Diplomat and Managerial Corps.
Speaker 3:Perfect. I accept the.
Speaker 2:Professional Managerial Corps, if you will. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I was going to call you the DMC, which is, but anyway, we are starting a new series. This is not part of the no Royal Roads series, though, because well part of the Some Royal Roads series this is more like.
Speaker 1:The Royal Road has decayed and gotten all wonky and half of it's gone because it wasn't good. Roman roads, uh, and basically, uh, whatever happened to the roman empire in the in the sixth century is what's happening now, but, um, but not really, and that's, that's what we're going to get to today. Capitalist decadence is different than roman decadence, as comes up a couple of places in a couple of different of these articles that we're going to be discussing this is uh no funding for public infrastructure as opposed to no royal road one major difference between the collapse of the roman empire and the collapse of whatever the decadence of this moment and in all in all of the world, is that there's no Catholic church to hold together any of the traditions.
Speaker 2:No bishops to rally retainers around to act as feudal lords.
Speaker 1:Oh man. And on that note, we're done Are you wearing a Deaf of the West t-shirt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I thought it was appropriate for today.
Speaker 1:I'm wearing a Deaf working from home t-shirt.
Speaker 2:It's the same thing.
Speaker 3:I'm wearing a Vulcan Stone shirt and I guess in a sense it's kind of the same thing.
Speaker 1:So, the title of this series is from Donda's Echidnas and it's named after the somewhat infamous 1990s Jacques Barzon book. Right, we're not actually discussing, but it is. It is kind of on my mind.
Speaker 2:I was looking over that today like I hadn't heard of it until recently and I was kind of like perusing it's oh, there's a baby yelling in the other room. I mean, we go close the door. So anyway, I was kind of perusing the premise of the book and just to see what it was about and it looks like it might be worth reading.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's. I mean it's not. It's not a Marxist text at all, but it is interesting. Barzun, for example, in a different book on academia, called that the reliance on, on graduate student labor was going to lead to a crisis in education eventually, by overproducing elites, um, and also by creating a highly exploitative, a system which ended the democratic spirit of the tenure system, by making tenure more exclusive and making it dependent upon backbreaking work by adjuncts. And he he predicted that in like the late sixties.
Speaker 2:So he was correct.
Speaker 1:So, uh, barzun is an interesting man, If a conservative one, um, one of the last great old liberals, um. So, uh, I am naming this in his honor and also, maybe, maybe, we should talk about the book. I love that book. I read that book when I was in college. I like had it by my bed for a long time when I was a good conservative. I just checked out the audio book.
Speaker 1:But we need to talk about a couple of different theories. When we talk about from dawn to decadence, because, as I will say that, while I've never, I've never believed in moral decadence, because I don't have a moral like, I don't have a, a divinely sanctioned set of virtues that I think are ubiquitously socially shared I have never lived in the world where that was the case anyway, lived in the world where that was the case anyway. Um, I will say that I have believed in social and economic decadence uh, my entire life. At no time have I been an optimist and in fact, uh, some of my old conservative friends, when I became a left w used to say to me we don't understand why you are, you're not, you're you're, you believe too much in the tragic cycles of history. You know, how can you believe in progressivism?
Speaker 1:And my defense was Leftism is not inherently progressivistic. Leftism is not inherently progressivistic. It does believe in certain kinds of progress. But the idea that technological progress equates to moral progress is Whiggish history. When people try to make Marxist unequivocally Whiggish, I always feel like they're doing a disservice to marxism. But it is very common in two ways both in, in which marxists are seen as, uh, in common cause with whiggish liberals and progressives, but also in the productive forces arguments, right right, which seems to argue unilaterally that centralization and production can go on forever um, which is just kind of the way most american leftists see the world at this point.
Speaker 1:Right, it's like the stephen pinker version of marxism um yeah, it's like the most depressing sentence anyone has ever said well, I mean, and now that everyone's moved away from gay space luxury communism, now they believe it for, like, getting rid of once you like I don't know uh, mass deport 98 of the population, including all of themselves, to unnamed and unspecified other places. Um, that you will somehow, you know, reach, I don't know. I, I actually can't understand, because actually I think you're right, but I also think there's an anti-enlightenment streak in the current left too. That is even more pernicious, because it's it not, you know, not that we should defend everything about the enlightenment. I think we should have a dialectic about it. It's a mixed bag thing, right, right, um, nor is it just european. And it's weirdly, it's actually, I think it's weirdly, it's kind of it, kind of weirdly. Uh, takes, uh, the the french and english.
Speaker 1:You know philosophers and philosophes at their word that it's just a white man's game to say that it is. It requires Islamic contributions to early modern culture. It requires technologies being reappropriated from India, china and the Middle East. It requires thinking, and stuff from the Ottoman Empire is a big contributor to the beginnings of the Enlightenment, as is trade reopening with China. I think these are things that and people inverting the kind of bombastic Eurocentric claims of the Enlightenment they ignore.
Speaker 1:But all that aside, that's not what we're here to talk about today. This is not. Varn says hey, the Enlightenment isn't all bad, you don't have to just invert Steven Pinker's idiocy. There is a way in which everyone thinks that things are just going to continue to get better, and it's even implied in stuff like. I've been thinking a lot about the BFO comment that was made infamous or famous by Mark Fisher, the slow cancellation of the future and the hauntology of the now, and in one sense I was like like well, that misrecognizes the problem. Right, the problem is not that the future has been canceled. That makes it sound like you had a future in the first place, like that, that this was infinitely growable and you're just mad that it's not anymore.
Speaker 3:And in the if you, if, like the communist, can seize it, they can start it over again and right, like I feel like with fisher's uh perspective I I embrace it fully, but only on this one condition that it was already true before he recognized it sure, I think that when I think of the slow cancellation of the future, I think of like a literal canceling, Like oh crap.
Speaker 2:Well, it turns out that we were never going to be able to do any of this stuff anyway, so we might as well just go ahead and cancel any expectations of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a cultural cancellation. Yeah, it's a recognition of reality. It's not like, oh, we shouldn't do that anymore. It's really more like we shouldn't think that we can do that anymore.
Speaker 1:It's really more like we shouldn't think that we can do that anymore. Yeah, I think that the problem is we've also changed the language. So even when Fisher said it, counseling meant both actively being canceled, as if being canceled by a force, which is true, instead of oh, shock of recognition, hey, this show isn't going so well. Let's just call the quiz before we sink any more money into it.
Speaker 2:Right, right Like. The network is just not allowing you to do anything and it's going to go into reruns now.
Speaker 1:So so, but I think in another sense, decadence has has two implications, because the other thing about decadence is that if something starts to grow in the muck, the muck is actually nutriently useful for something else. Right, yeah, but you can't see that if you're the fruit that's rotting into soil, can't see that if you're the fruit, if you're the fruit that's rotting into soil. Um, so the decadent image is actually interesting to me because the the implication actually is, and it is even in conservative decadence theory. So we're going to talk about some of them first. Um, is that new things?
Speaker 1:In spengler's case it would. New civilizations emerge with the death of something else, like you know, like flies emerging from a corpse, but then, you know, being eaten by birds that go off and live a full life and go do their own thing and they have their own cycle. And they go do their own thing and they have their own cycle. In Marxism, decadence theories get a little confused because a lot of people have trouble telling them, apart from breakdown and crisis theories, which are not exactly the same thing and we'll have to get to that too.
Speaker 3:I will even say that in recent years I was even a person who would say to say they were the same thing. Like I went we, let's. We did an episode about this like three years ago. I went back and listened to it and I basically contended I think incorrectly that they're basically the same thing and they're not.
Speaker 2:I don't think anymore yeah, I went, I was in that episode and you know that's not one of our best, because I think that we misunderstood a lot of what we were reading, or actually we kind of took at face value some of what we were reading. Yeah, I think that's right. That's what it was, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so did you read the same articles? Then Some of them.
Speaker 2:Not all of them, the Alf Heben article. We read those, the ones from Libcom.
Speaker 3:And the Samir Amin one too Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3:Because I remember Kevin really liked it. Yeah, he did, he would, I mean I kind of did. But we'll get into that later. But I wouldn't reject it entirely.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't reject it entirely. I wouldn't reject it entirely, but I think we have to be honest about how much that particular sub school of world systems theory is is using marks as just a justification for having having a discussion of modes of production, but that it basically believes there's a trans-historical mode of production and it is the Asiatic mode of production which is renamed a tributary mode to remove all the racial connotations.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I actually think that what Amin does there is he takes an idea which is useful, and even it's at least interesting and worth contending with, and he blows it out of proportion and makes it something to reject entirely.
Speaker 1:So we'll come back to that. We'll discuss that one in detail, but I do think we need to get these definitions down. Um, in general, decadence theories are a theory that, uh, any given entity has a natural life cycle. Um, right, that the best analogy for um a social entity and I'm using vague terms because this does not just apply to marxism, so people who wonder why I'm using non-marxist language here is because I'm trying to get a grok of the of a decadence theory before we get into the marxist specific varieties um, that any social entity, um, in totality, is a totality for one thing, that, even though it is not a totality in the sense of being monolithic, because an organism is not monolithic, um, okay, uh, an organism, you have organs, you have cells, you have things within you dying and living, like um, so it is not, but it is that the the best analogy for a social unit is an organic, aka a living being, and living beings have life cycles.
Speaker 3:Well yeah. Despite the fact that some stuff is living and some stuff is not, at a certain point, that quantity makes a qualitative difference and enough things. Dying means death overall.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, despite the fact that certain things are not dying, even though you lose all your cells every seven years.
Speaker 1:if your organs start to fail, you're going to die right and similarly, after you die, your hair keeps growing yeah, yeah, and some of, in some of your cell tissue might still be kind of living, yeah, um, for a while. Yeah, um, so so that that is the basis of decadence theory. Uh, decadence theory is probably, if we're quite honest, one of the oldest social theories. You see it in plato and polyb, you see it in even Condun, you see it in Aristotle, that there are natural phases of the polis, that you go through these phases because of what we would, in modern parlance, call path dependencies. Um, you know, um, the way that you know, plato and aristotle talk about it is, uh, um, tyrannies emerge from republics, which which lead to rebellions into democracies, but democracies, uh, decay into oligarchies, are, or, uh, because democracy had a more negative connotation in the ancient world, democracies or republics decay into democracies, which they meant as rule of the demos, which is just rule of the mob, and tyrannies emerge in response to that.
Speaker 1:And thus the cycle continues. And for people who thought this was just some kind of platonic norm, because they also had, if you go back into Hesiod and whatnot, you had your Golden Age, silver Age, stuff and you had your Lat-Sarianism. You see this all over the ancient Near East and in early modern Europe, but it's not just there. If you look in, uh, um, if you look in indo-european myths in general, you see kala yuga cycles and um.
Speaker 2:So or just in christianity, you know, there is the, the, the end time cycle, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, the thing that makes christianity difference is there's no starting over, or once things are started over, it doesn't restart the cycle. It's a static cycle. After that point, right. But it's a very common cycle In the early modern period, and I'm using that word advisedly because it includes both the Renaissance and early modernity, whatever the fuck that means. Chris, as a historian, you know how hard those things are to pin down.
Speaker 2:You basically just have to come up with a hard line and stick to it, regardless of how artificial it is.
Speaker 3:It's the Chomper Revolt.
Speaker 2:When modernity begins in the 12th century.
Speaker 3:That's the early, early part of early modern history. Yeah, yeah I actually know, actually it's. It's actually the protestant reformation.
Speaker 1:That's what I would actually say I tend to think the religious wars are what begins early modern history. Yeah, and I, I just put it before the bourgeois revolutions, and I guess I'm the you and I agree, like us agree with that, but I, I think the rest of the Marxist world is like no, it starts with France, or maybe the English Civil War.
Speaker 2:Okay, so the Champy Revolt was 1378. I would put that as a little bit too early. I would call that pre-modern, in the sense that it's about to be modern, but I would say, like by 1500, you're in early modernity. Well, yeah.
Speaker 3:You know what it actually is. It's the discovery of the new world, because by that point, that's when all the processes which you would equate with modernity all begin as a result of Columbus landing on Hispaniola. Is it Hispaniola? I think it is, is it Hispaniola.
Speaker 1:I actually my timing is the late 14th century or late 15th century, for these reasons too. The fall of the Byzantine Empire and the end of Rome, the beginning of the idea of Europeanness. Europeanness is not an idea that's really broadly adopted, until Byzantine falls and you don't have a Rome anymore.
Speaker 2:Europeanness replaces Christendom, Right exactly.
Speaker 1:Right, the beginning of the transatlantic trade, moving from the Mediterranean trade system into the transatlantic system, and the competition between absolutist and republican uh theories of governments, because the multiple estates, uh that had polycentric, you know, emergence is in in the end from the late antique into the middle ages, whatever, uh, all that is ending and you have console and you start having consolidated nation states, because it's really hard to talk about nation states before the 15th century.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it really is impossible.
Speaker 2:And you got the advent of pike and shot warfare.
Speaker 1:By that point you're clearly in the modern period you have the democratization of warfare. Yeah, exactly so it is. You don't need massive amounts of serfs to maintain a knight who has to train all the time to be able to use his war materials Like it's. There's so many things converging at once, and that's if you look in Europe. Now, if you're not looking in Europe, I don't know, it's harder, then you could go a little earlier, I think for simplicity I would say the 1500s.
Speaker 3:That whole century is the transition into what's called modernity.
Speaker 1:Right, and, by the way, I'm just going to say it's Eurocentric. Well yeah, it is necessarily Eurocentric.
Speaker 2:Well, europe is about to unleash itself upon the world Right and forever alter literally every aspect of life for the entire planet. So I think, when you're talking about modernity, being eurocentric is okay, because we're talking about processes of like epochal epoch shifting processes right, right all right like it?
Speaker 1:yeah, it's fair and this is why when everybody wants to un, you know, like, like, undo, settler colonialism, they basically freeze the picture at about 1401. And fine, I get it Right. So I think that's a fair statement. By this time it is clear to the people living at the end of the 15th century, in the 16th century, you know, once the florentine republics have failed, and blah, blah, blah, blah, you actually start getting a return back to these classical theories of cycles. So polybius starts being read again.
Speaker 1:Um, people start reading even kundun, which is the islamic version of that um, and you have something that we might call the day like proto-sociology or proto-anthropology, and you get it and it gets manifested a little later and people like Gambi, gambitista Vico, right, who tries to work out a series of cycles and civilization and and barbarism and this and the other, so, so Gambitista Vico is probably where it starts in in Europe. Um is when you get modern decadence theory. But this gives us to, I think, the two biggest um proponents that are kind of known in our world, which is Spangler and Toy and Bee.
Speaker 2:Right. And Spangler is heavily influenced by Nietzsche, Nietzsche's ideas of decadence as well. So you cover both by dealing with Spangler. For those of you who are going to say, yeah, but what about Nietzsche?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, and Nietzsche doesn't systematize it, because Nietzsche doesn't systematize anything. So I mean, one of the things about Nietzsche is Nietzsche's like hey, the moment you can talk about decadence, you're already in the decadent period. I mean, it's like that's his thing about ancient Greece. The moment you can start rationally talking about the systems of decadence, for Nietzsche too late You're already there, it's already too late.
Speaker 3:You can kind of see his point. It kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1:What's the hour? I mean from the Hegelian perspective, which I know Jason's going to like, it's the hour of Minerva, you know, like it always.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean. That's why I said it kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1:There is a weird way. There is a weird way that Nietzsche is dark Hegel, even though there's not a lot of evidence that they had any knowledge of each other's work. So yeah, so yeah. So there's something in the water in germany, you know, after after the french philosophes fell, that led to this kind of thinking.
Speaker 2:Um, you look at, when you look at, like arthur moeller vandenbroek, it's the re, the reunification of dark hegel and regular hegel in coming up with uh, you know the uh, the homegrown fascism of the uh, or pseudo and proto-fascism of the conservative revolution yeah, um.
Speaker 1:So, but because I think spingler and toy and b are our sources for this theory in the modern world, and because religious cycles that we mentioned earlier are so common but progressives hate them, there is a tension where decadence theories were always seen to be right-wing and indeed I saw so myself for the early part of my life and I want to get your, before we get into the articles here we're pulling today from three articles. I will cite them or link them, depending in the show notes. One is Decadence as a Theory of History by Neville Morley from New Literary History in 2014. One is Off Hebeling Collective's Decadence a Theory of Decline, or Decline of Theory, parts 1 through 3. You can find it at Libcom.
Speaker 1:It's from 2005,. You can find it at libcom. It's from 2005 and it actually very much feels like it's from 2005, because I'll talk about why later, um, and then we're going to talk a little bit about revolution or decadence. Thoughts on the transition between modes and production. On the occasions that marks his bicentennial, by samir amin, when he was hanging out um in senegal uh, before his death. I don't think this book ever came out like this?
Speaker 3:no, I don't think so, but it's the most recent article because it's from 2018 yeah, but he died very shortly after.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, um, and what matters also, because you know, samir, I mean kind of got in hot water during the Egyptian revolution for backing the, for backing the, the Mubarak successor regime, prematurely, when the brotherhood was ascendant, which I think a lot of people will be surprised by.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I didn't know that. Yeah, I mean that's a really bad. That's not a look that anybody wants to have. That's about.
Speaker 1:Well, he has a brotherhood. One of the things about Samir Amin that people don't realize. It might strike people as weird today, given you know third world's going to be kind of soft and Islamist. He hated Salafist.
Speaker 3:I mean, I kind of you know sure. Like so that's the reason why sometimes you just have to be a pessimist. You just look and say, oh, everything sucks right now, rather than picking a side based on what there is, the lesser evil is always still just evil.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, so I think that's something to note Now. Okay, so we got a definition of decadence theory. Now we're going to touch on two things as we discuss this. I think we have to discuss more the conservative part of this, but I think we're going to discuss more of the conservative part of this. But, um, but I think we're going to have to distinguish some things, because in a lot of Marxism, there are capitalist decadence theories, capitalist breakdown theories and capitalist crisis theories, and a lot of people, including Marxist, do not realize they are not the same things and they are associated with things like accelerationism and miseration thesis, etc.
Speaker 1:Etc. Etc. Et cetera, et cetera, right, um, uh, imperialism thesis, uh, state monopoly, capital, um, the various theories of imperialism, uh, when Hobson first came up with his theory of imperialism, which, uh, you know, when Lennon and Bacar are coming up with their ideas, they're seeing two tendencies that are discussed in Marx. One is capital crisis and breakdown and two is monopolization. And, uh, they know that states are playing a larger and larger role in the monopolization and granting charters, and they see the beginning of something like what we would later call fordism, um, beginning to happen in europe. Um, and as a way to mitigate crises, the states are actually sanctioning monopolies. Now, one historical thing you can say about this analysis it kind of misses that, like most of the corporations that existed were also started as monopolies, like these India company and stuff like that. That. That was how that was actually an early modern phenomenon during what liberals call the mercantile period.
Speaker 3:Anyway well, yeah, mercantile is defined by monopoly and the merger of state and, uh, and private monopoly.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it's always been there it's always been there. Neoliberalism is a particular form of it, but fordism is too. Like um, it's always been there, uh, and in fact, one thing that's commonly leveled at Marx that may be true, may not be true is that Marx took the entrepreneurial system that Smith was describing but describing almost as a way to bring it about in response to the monopoly rentier system, too much at face value, and that commodity exchange was the beginning of capitalism. Right, like that's actually a common critique, even by marx system. Marx, um, okay so, and you know that's fair. Yeah, so lennon's theory of imperialism is different than, say, kotze's theory of imperialism is different than, say, katsi's theory of imperialism. In fact, that's one of the two differences. One is the embrace of of um of the imperialism thesis versus Kotsky super imperialism, where he thought the capitalist world was going to coalesce into larger and larger trade blocks. It would not. It would not be likely to fight each other directly.
Speaker 3:Like he thought that 1984 was real instead of kotsky.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, well, I mean uh, except that that's completely historical to go see that like uh. But here's the thing in a way, kotsky is right after lenin's right, which is a weird thing to think about yeah that does, that does happen. Yeah, the you know, I think the Soviet Union and the development of the atomic bomb is why it happens. And until that happens, the the cost benefit ratio of war still in the favor of capitalist state, right, yeah, and even I mean it's not so weird.
Speaker 2:It's only weird if you, if you don't think it, you know history can happen in spirals yeah, I mean, I was about to say like it's like, if you it kowski was right for the wrong reasons and uh, if you let him being right for the wrong reasons completely, just uh, if you dismiss everything he said because he was right for the wrong reasons, then you're you're missing what's useful, and I think that's something that we do a lot is like completely dismiss people for being partially incorrect yeah, and we also uphold things said that are correct in a particular time as if they're eternally true right like should we still be upholding london's imperialism?
Speaker 2:because, uh, that's what we did in the iso. I would say no yeah, I would say no as well um, yeah, uh, I.
Speaker 1:I think we have to think about. But you know where did he get that? We got it from hobson and he got it from Hilferding. Hilferding was coming up with a theory of monopoly capital. It was going to further play out the stuff that he said that is in Ingalls. But unlike Lennon, he actually took the classical Ingalls line that well, you just let the capital completely monopolize and you just take over the state democratically and you're done.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right, and you just democratize the workplace too, and then you're done. That's all you have to do, like Lee Phillips. Yeah, lee Phillips actually has. I've just had him on the show. This will probably come out right after that. That's pretty much what he believes. Yeah, you're right, and Lennon goes after that. That's pretty much what he believes. Yeah, you're right, and Lenin goes no, that's not going to work because there's too much intercompetition. Now this gets us to the various decadent cycles. I will I mean and breakdown theories and crisis cycles. I will say that you do not have a theory of capitalist crisis in say that you do not have a theory of capitalist crisis in in Capital Volume 1. It's not there.
Speaker 3:No, it takes until the third volume.
Speaker 1:There is a theory of capitalist crisis in the revolutionary or the communist cataclysm, if it's called the revolutionary, whatever the precursor draft to the manifesto written by Marx and Engels and Engels wrote by himself. You get a theory of capitalist crisis caused by the efficiency of machines early on and it is revised out of the manifesto when they go and write the manifesto. That theory is revised out of the manifesto when they go and write the manifesto, that theory is taken out. But in Capital Volume 2, it comes back, but in a different form. It is the tension between fixed and constant capital, as picked up from Ricardo and William Pettis, and what this has to do with surplus value. All right, we know from letters that Marx believed in the 1850s there was going to be a final crisis of capitalism, but when it didn't happen, that's part of what prompted him to write Capital. You know he had this big according to write capital. You know he had this big, uh, you know, according to hal draper, he had this big project, um, that he was going to try to map out all bourgeois society and he wanted to deal with the economic. Literally he calls it the economic ship first and it ends up being his entire rest of his life work.
Speaker 1:He never gets to the other parts of the breaking up, breaking down bourgeois society, and also because he thinks to understand the other parts you have to understand the economic part. But that's why we don't have, for example, a fully articulated marxist theory of state or even a clear, singular definition of what class is. Uh, you know, um, these things aren't. I mean, we know class is related to the mode of production, that's clear. But like, like you know, famously he just abandons the chapter uh, when he's writing on the in volume three, on the definition of the working class or the proletariat, and just drops it uh, works through it, he, he keeps on hitting a wall where he can't, where he keeps on saying, well, productivity to capital can't be definitionally of who's part of the proletariat, but he can't figure out how else to parse it and he just leaves it unfinished.
Speaker 3:He remains hopeful about the fourth, fifth and even sixth volume, which he just never gets to. But I do believe he intended to and I think that he thought he was going to get there. He just didn't do it.
Speaker 1:Sometimes we call what theories of surplus value in Volume 4. But again you have an attempt to explain the business cycle. It is partially based off the Ricardian and Smithian notion that there is a tendency of the rate of profit to fall because of the tension between fixed and variable capital, and that this tension is why there's problems in the market. Now this leads to, I think, a tension in Marxism Period. And here's the tension One. We believe that the proletariat has to be the subject of history because it's got to be the subject of revolutionary change, and the reason why it has to be is it's the only class that has no vested interest in the system and can socially reproduce itself. Right, those two things together, right. But when you read capital, that's not really part of the equation. It's not there part of the equation, it's not there, it's everywhere else. You can read it back in there, because we know Marx believed it, but it's not actually in the theory. I've read the book, I can't find it. So then you also have the breakdown theory. The breakdown theory is capitalism is its own undertaker. All right now.
Speaker 1:The first theory about the proletariat already has that thesis capitalism is its own undertaker because it creates a proletariat, which is a class that can socially produce itself but has no vested interest in it because it's parasitic upon. So it can overthrow it. Um, different from the peasantries, who do have vested interest in property ownership. So, uh, you know, even though they're an oppressed class, and you know we should, we should make common cause with them. In certain cases they aren't going to be the subject, right? Um, okay, so you have that, put a pin in. Then you have. Well, capitalist rates of profit lead to more and more destabilizing economic crises, causing depressions which make the system unstable. Put a pin in that, all right. Later on, the Austrian economist, who also had a relationship to the Marxian and the German historical school, schopenhauer, would actually use that to come up with a theory called creative destruction. That actually no, marx is right about this, but it's good it gets rid of the dead weight. Schumpeter, yeah, schumpeter.
Speaker 2:Schumpeter, schumpeter.
Speaker 1:Schumpeter my, not Schopenhauer.
Speaker 2:Schumpeter, did I say Schopenhauer?
Speaker 1:Oh, excuse me, I got my ass Germans confused. I was just trying to save you from someone correcting you later. I appreciate it because as I reach my 40s, I find that I know the right person and grab the wrong name all the time. Anyway, same.
Speaker 2:Anyway, same yeah. Jason's really good at doing that.
Speaker 3:I'm awesome at doing that.
Speaker 1:Like Robin.
Speaker 3:DG Kelly versus.
Speaker 1:Robin D'Angelo, Robin DG Kelly versus Robin D'Angelo versus R Kelly. Like I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Versus Robin Hood.
Speaker 1:Man. Robin Hood's theory of white fragility is pretty funny Anyway.
Speaker 3:It's all about how white people suck and you should take all their money.
Speaker 1:Fair.
Speaker 1:I would disagree. White people suck. I don't think white people are coherent. Subject anyway um, okay, so well, what does this mean? Okay, so.
Speaker 1:So two theories of thought come out of this school. Uh, one is a theory that leads to the development of the business cycle. Marx actually contributes he's the primary contributor even to neoclassical theory, even though they don't admit this. His crisis theory is the basis of the business cycle, right, right, yeah, put a pin in that.
Speaker 1:But in the second international, kotsky and company start talking about the imminent demise of capitalism, and it built into the second international. The Offheban article mentions that those assumptions are maintained until the 1950s in the third international and in the bolshevik party. Right, um, I? I find the off-heel article really frustrating because it doesn't mention that.
Speaker 1:But a capitalist breakdown theory is why third periodism was justified, it's how the popular front was justified, right or not, et cetera. Like there was an economic theory. It is only when the predicted crisis that both Trotsky and the Soviet Union predicted in the 1950s didn't happen, that the crisis in the thirties didn't immediately come back after the war, that you start seeing an abandonment of that theory and what you start seeing a focus on in liam tov, in the soviet union and in the late 40s, uh, in both the frankfurt school and in uh. Paul sweezy and baron's theories is a theory on monopoly, a theorem, monopoly capital as finally getting advanced enough to end the crisis of capitalism, meaning there will be no more business cycle right, I mean like um, what's his name?
Speaker 3:uh, paul sweezy. No, no, um prosecute american james cannon.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, american.
Speaker 3:James Cannon. He was so convinced of the inevitable breakdown that it's like well, obviously the Second World War hasn't ended yet because the Great Depression hasn't come back yet. It took a while for everybody to finally recognize oh, maybe we're wrong. Like in an absurd way actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I mean recognize, oh, maybe we're wrong, like in absurd way actually. Yeah, um, so so I mean, in some ways, actually the reason why they throw this at trotskyists and left comes more than they do at which call them post-left communists. It's hard to know what to call the socialism or barbary. Are the Marxist-Humanist or the Situationist-International? What to call those? Guys because they're not in either tradition.
Speaker 3:They just kind of exist in this constellation of what they are is they're non-denominational. At a certain point that becomes a denomination, but they're not. It's just very weird. It's impossible to categorize them.
Speaker 1:They're the pre-'68 precursors to the new left is what they are Sure, sure, yeah. And in the case of socialism or Barbary, what it devolves to when they give up on the decline cycle and we'll get into this is we'll get into this in the off-feet. When we discuss off-feet but I think it's fair is how do I say this? It is that they eventually become Euro-communists and they even give up eventually on the working class, like Leo Tard comes out of that group. A lot of the post-structuralists come out of that group, the Situationists. They think that the spectacle whatever the fuck that is and media capital solves the problem.
Speaker 1:In a different discussion I will defend the concept, but for now I'll just say yeah, my thing is, I think the spectacle is interesting but it is so under theorized in the situationist that it's hard to like do much with. I mean, I think the frankfurt school does more with it.
Speaker 3:Um, I I also think a lot of people take the concept and they run with it. When they run with a part of it, whichever part they like the best, and they make it far less clear than it is. So, instead of making it more clear and further elaborating, they do the opposite.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you have that response. And in the Marxist-Leninist circles and the reason why I'm going over this separately from the Afibian articles, I think we do have to talk about this In the Marxist-Leninist world what that leads to is various theories of national liberation replacing class struggle, like uh, like formally, um, and this gets accelerated for political reasons in the side of soviet split, um. So okay, we have those theories and this is a very basic gloss. We're 45 minutes in and I've just covered the gloss. What's decadence theory then? When we have this theory of decadence that has pre-Marxist origins and we have this theory of decline and breakdown, well, okay.
Speaker 1:So some people go on the monopoly capital, then the 70s happens, all right. And then people like the Johnson-Forest tendency and the Marxist-Humanists say, okay, well, the crisis theory is true, the crisis theory is true, but the capitalists can find a way to either expand markets the Rosa Luxembourg theory, which we haven't even talked about or destroy surplus production or increase consumption. They can do all of these things and restart the cycle so that you return back to a theory of business cycle. All right, really, only at this point, trotskyist and very specific kinds of left comms like council communists like paul maddock maintain that capitalism's going to collapse tomorrow. But, but in the 70s, the return of the business cycle in a big way really does lead to these collapse theories coming back. And you see that with Mandel in his late capitalism book and you see it with uh, you know a bunch of stuff, uh.
Speaker 1:But one of the interesting things about this, about this period of trotskyism, is that, weirdly, even though they have to explain why trotsky's predictions in the transitional program were wrong, because in the transitional program he says capitalism's gonna end in, because in the transitional program he says capitalism's gonna end in 1950, by the 1950s, he says it right. Yeah, you know, everyone just kind of brackets that out. There's no, we don't talk about that part of this anymore. Um, but so you have a question, and, and one of the things that starts coming up in left communist circles, and particularly in the council of communists, who are fueled by people like Maddox, was that, okay, they start thinking well, the cycle theory is true, but maybe we're wrong about the breakdown, maybe it can decay into barbarism, right, and that is the beginning of capitalist decadence theory, as opposed to just break down our crisis theory. Um, okay, now what does?
Speaker 2:that mean Well, for one, it means, I think, regardless of what else it means, it at least means a lot more nimbleness on the part of thinkers trying to think their way out of an impasse that they shouldn't have been in the first place right, and it jettisons uh the teleological aspect of uh marxist view of history, right, like, if we can just devolve into barbarism, then that at some point you have to, uh, if you think that there, that we can just devolve into barbarism, you have to admit that there is uh a possibility of the stalling out of the dialectic right and you have to, uh, basically just exercise yourself of that, uh, that whiggishness. That's not supposed to be there anyway, right?
Speaker 1:and this is why, and let's talk, let's talk for a second marxist, lindonist, trotskyist, etc. Even even second international social democrats. Uh, until after the war. All maintain before world war ii, communism is inevitable. Right, it will happen. It is not an act of. Will you know? That famous quote is a force to be, you know, to which the world must reconcile I mean that's.
Speaker 3:that's why uh kowski could say that the social democratic party is a revolutionary party. It is not a revolution-making party. All we're supposed to do is just be revolutionary and then, at some point, history will vindicate the way we're being.
Speaker 2:And Hilferding seems a little less insane, right.
Speaker 3:Right, and Lenin's the one who says well, history might need a push.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah, he was right at the time.
Speaker 3:He wasn't right for all time, but he was right for his time.
Speaker 1:I mean, Lenin is one of the most insightful Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. He's also one of the most all over the place, though, Like if you actually read him, he changes his mind all the fucking time.
Speaker 3:There's not a thing that's actually. There's no such thing as a Leninism because, he doesn't have one position on any one question. He always has at least two, depending on the year and depending on all kinds of circumstances.
Speaker 1:one position on any one question. He always has at least two, depending on the year and depending on all kinds of circumstances. I mean, what is it that Eric Bonnery accuses all the Marxist of doing is trying to make Lennon more consistent, when they're all quoting Lennon accurately against each other, like Stalin's quoting Lennon accurately against Krosky, who's quoting it accurately against Kamenev? Who's quoting it accurately against Zinoviev, who's quoting it accurately against mccartan? Like it's um, like you know, and they're all just pretending that linen wasn't vacillating, to try to figure it out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there was a linen, wasn't saint paul?
Speaker 2:you know he's a different, different kind of person one year at the socialism conference there was a big argument between paul d'amato and um uh, what's his name? Jason the uh, the uh. Lars lee lee uh because lars lee talks about how lennon changes his mind at this point, and then he changes his mind at this point and, uh, paul domato is just like, no, let it never change his mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah I mean, I got that. That was my big fight with the marxist humanists. I'm like, yeah, I don't agree with all to say about like there being a clear epistemological break, but the idea, idea that from Marx's beginning to the end of his life that it was all the same, it's nuts, it's stupid.
Speaker 3:It's not even a standard that you would want to hold any other living person to.
Speaker 2:Right, right and well, that's the thing. It's just like he's elevated to the level of a prophet rather than a thinker. Right, if you look at the red words in the Bible, man, there's some contradictory stuff in there.
Speaker 1:I think this gets us to where we are today, though, because after the 1950s, the question doesn't become is communism inevitable? The question is is is it just a political matter or is it a political economic matter? Why? And today we get to stuff like I don't know how people who believe in techno neo-feudalism which you and I all think is an incoherent concept, but how that isn't actually just a decadence theory. Yeah, right, and for people who want to know where we get the decadence theory, there is a place in Marx to get it. It's the Brumaire, it's not the economic theories. Right, right. What is it that Marx says about what liberals start to do when they start to lose and hit economic or political problems? They go back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they return to the old order yeah, they turn to a strong man to reassert the old order and stabilize things correct, that's the theory of bonapartism.
Speaker 1:So bonapartism is a political theory of decadence, but right, but it's just a political theory of decadence. We, we can hold marx accountable for not working it out all the way across, because, well, this is a totality in marxism, or it isn't. Like, if, if, if the mode of production is not a totality, you have to abandon marxism altogether. I'm just going to say that outright, like if you don't believe market relations are totalizing not that markets are totalizing, but that market relations are under capital, right, totalizing you don't, you're not a marxist, because you don't actually believe that the mode of production is the base of society, right, yeah, okay, that makes sense, right? Um, so, so okay, this gets us to a question then. Well then, what does decadence mean here? Now, here I'm going to actually get us into one of the articles.
Speaker 2:One hour in, we're going to start talking about one of the articles. Honestly though, this is one of the least meandering episodes we've ever done.
Speaker 3:It's just a necessarily long prehistory.
Speaker 2:That's important, and we had to start off with defining what modernity was.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always feel like whenever I go to people like Varn, why do you front load your interviews and stuff? I'm like, have you ever taught a class? And you realize like y'all don't know what any of these words fucking mean. Yeah, I have. Y'all don't know what any of these words fucking mean. Yeah, so so we have. Yeah, Speaking of decadence, you and I are both teachers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, dude, we are in uh in a stage of decadence now that uh makes the the, the collapse of the Roman empire uh relatable.
Speaker 3:Really.
Speaker 2:You know that is how how that makes the collapse of the Roman Empire relatable. Really, you know that is how many almost a thousand year long collapse of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it depends on which part, and fuck, if you really want to, sometimes even like you know what, let's even include the Ottomans as the Romans. I don't know why not the group.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's not include the ottomans as the romans I don't know why not the group.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, so it's not like the religion of the roman empire didn't change a couple times anyway yeah sure, why not? Why not right?
Speaker 2:the one that stuck around and was conquered by the ottomans. They were all greek, anyway, right, yeah, exactly. It even changed ethnicities they just changed languages.
Speaker 1:That wouldn't even be the first time that's happened. So if we go back to the Neville Morley piece and I'll just read this, the concept of decadent, especially when applied to a society or a culture, but in many cases, when applied in well, when also used in terms of aesthetic criticism, it's closely related to a temporal, to the ideas of temporality and historical change. It rests on a sense of difference between past and present and on a sense of the meaning of that difference. All right, so when we talk about the way everyone today feels like, oh, the future has been canceled, our people talk about the American empire is declining, and I'm always like, okay, but like everywhere in the capitalist system has had better days recently. Yeah, yeah, I mean, except for, like the people in the biggest periphery who are still coming up like, uh, and if people don't believe me, go look at China's gdp rates right now. Yeah, like, um, so sure, yes, america's declining and it's declining. It's declining internally, culturally too, I agree, but so, but a lot of places are declining.
Speaker 1:This whole vision of steven pinker that we were never going to have another world war ii like, and that, like, violence was going to decrease forever, um, you know, I think that's here's my funny take, I think what a lot of people go oh, fukuyama was wrong. What they really mean is steven pinker was wrong, because fukuyama just said oh, we're just stuck in animization, right, um, and things are going to get more and more animized and even and I'm going to say this kind of interestingly Fukuyama implies a theory of decadence.
Speaker 2:Yes, he does Like Fukuyama's end of history is one of the most maligned and not read, yeah, Like he's actually kind of right and he kind of accidentally agrees with us.
Speaker 1:I actually pointed this out when I was reading the Dugan book. Dugan agrees with Fukuyama. He just thinks Fukuyama's bad. Fukuyama doesn't seem happy about the end of history.
Speaker 3:I think that's a major misunderstanding. He's writing about a thing and he's not celebrating it at all.
Speaker 2:Fukuyama and Gorbachev. Both are people who Gorbachev was trying to stabilize the Soviet Union to live on for another 70-something years, and then Fukuyama was lamenting the collapse of a concept of progress in the future. And then both were welcomed wholeheartedly by liberalism and changed their grift in order to fit in Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the interesting things about Fukuyama is he recognizes something inherent in liberalism, going all the way back to Hobbes, the first authoritarian liberal, the right, the beginning of the right wing of liberalism. Right, hobbes is a shadow underbelly of liberalism. He's the absolutist underbelly of liberalism that people want to bracket out and say is not liberal. Yeah, but he accepts everything that liberals accept Human equality. In fact, he accepts human equality so much that he has a theory of atomizations and monads. He accepts everything that liberals accept Human equality. In fact, he accepts human equality so much that he has a theory of atomizations and monads. He believes that people are like cells are to bodies and atoms are to matter, that people are individuated, free-floating units.
Speaker 1:Another, more liberal than that Right, and all his theories you know all his of like state control are actually based off that right. And he believes this so thoroughly that, even though he's not an atheist, he I mean he's actually a kind of stoic christian. And when I say stoic, I don't mean stoic in the sense of like, oh, he doesn't have emotions. I mean stoic in the sense that he believes in a literal, material god, like that god is made of matter, because everything is made of matter, um, and, and you know, and he believes in the demiurge, yeah, um, so I? He's a weird heretic, but nonetheless that's implied in his theory.
Speaker 1:Uh, one of the things Fukuyama realizes is that by the time we are today, that beginning instance of the atomization metaphor that you see all the way back in Hobbes and at the end of the English civil war, that's all that's left of liberalism. There is no grounds of agreement on anything else. Now we can see that ideologically, but we are not just ideological. If we were just ideological reductions, we'd all be conservatives, in fact we might even be far right, yeah, right, yeah.
Speaker 1:So like why Our question is yeah right, yeah, yeah right. So like why our question is if this is true and we can see this today, like we can see this breakdown into, I talk about this in the way liberals talk. They talk about systemic systems, but then they talk about everyone's individual choice and right. Recognize that's how liberals believe in systems. Right is everyone's individual choice Right.
Speaker 2:That's how liberals believe in systems the aggregate of everyone's individual choices.
Speaker 1:They don't see part of the choices as the feedback loop which creates multiple people at a time. They believe in individuals, not persons. They talk about bodies, not persons. Um, and you know they talk about bodies, yeah, not persons. Um, what is a person? A person is a is a is an. They are individuals, right, but your language does it come from you? No, no, your culture does it come from you?
Speaker 1:No, and that's not just like obvious stuff like, oh, you're white or black or whatever. That's you know what we focus on, because those are categories that we think have. And that's not just like obvious stuff like, oh, you're white or black or whatever. That's what we focus on, because those are categories that we think have. But that's about everything. Right, are you, are you from Texas or from Georgia? Are you from the city or not? Like what? What's the weather like when you grow up? Are you exposed to too much sugar as a child? What's your relationship like to your mom? Much sugar as a child? What's your relationship like to your mom? Like all these things are, because you are not an atom. You are an ever-changing thing that can only be understood in terms of your context. And what are the most important context social relations, right, right.
Speaker 1:So we have to ask ourselves today, and I think, and to get back into these articles um, why are we decadence theorists and not just breakdown theorists, are not just crisis theorists and remember, we've already said that there is a slight difference. But you can be a crisis theorist and not a breakdown theorist. You can say there's no final crisis, there's nothing that's going to prompt the breakdown, and then I think I am that. But then I say, okay, if nothing prompts the breakdown, if Grossman's wrong, right, and the immiseration thesis is wrong and accelerationism is wrong, well, what does that mean? And for me, it means we have to look at the effects of this system, continually restarting and breaking down, because entropy is a thing, right. You cannot restart from the same starting point every time. You cannot rebuild. You know when, when an economy was doing good in the 19th century and 20th century. What kind of gdp growth are we looking at? 20, 30 percent, right, yeah, an economy is doing good in the 19th century and 20th century. What kind of GDP growth are we looking at?
Speaker 3:20-30% right, yeah.
Speaker 1:An economy is doing good. Now, if you are a mature market economy, I'm going to use market to make the people who don't believe China's capitalists happy. What is the best, absolute best fucking GDP you can expect, like 6%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to say 4%. Yeah, and it's not like 4 or what is the best, absolute best fucking gdp you can expect like six percent.
Speaker 3:yeah, I was gonna say four, but yeah, and it's not like four or five yeah yeah, yeah, right like somewhere around five.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what is china's like optimum goal for itself right now? Five percent. It's not even do that, but that's five percent. We we've been talking about how the economy is amazing. Uh, well, we haven't. Uh, democrats have um, because the net economy, mostly for the super rich, is growing out. What?
Speaker 2:about five percent yeah yeah, right, and I was told the other day uh, stupid me. Um that uh, the economy is a thing that's completely different from the, the, the buying power of the poor.
Speaker 1:It's not the same thing.
Speaker 2:You need to quit conceptualizing it like that. The buying power of the poor and wages. That's not the economy.
Speaker 3:The economy is the sum total of all human activity, I know.
Speaker 2:No but if you're just trying to say that the economy is good, then you can't consider any of that other stuff. You can't consider real wages, you can't consider buying power, you can't consider like inflation, uh, food inflation, you know well, yeah, but why do they want you to focus on that?
Speaker 1:well, the problem is, the economy is is good. Uh, it's not good for you because you're losing it of a class project, motherfucker like, and they just don't want to say that last part like, and which, by the way, uh, we have to also be honest. One of the one of the things about the, about modern life, that is super frustrating is things are bad for the poor, uh, under republicans, but they barely claim the care and think that you can deal with it by private charity, right, um right.
Speaker 3:Things are bad for the poor under democrats, but they do claim to care and often, uh, democrats create so many renta systems and things that require you to game systems that they actually get worse for the poor yeah, I mean, I was thinking about this, uh case of point california yeah, well, there's lots of different examples of this, like uh, maybe my favorite one or at one point it was my favorite one to point to was that if you lived in a conservative state and that your governor rejected the Obamacare mandate, which means that you were no longer forced, if you live like Alabama or Texas, you weren't forced to buy health care that you couldn't afford. That makes the Republican Party the lesser of two evils to buy health care that you couldn't afford.
Speaker 1:that makes the Republican Party the lesser of two evils.
Speaker 3:I mean this is At least in that context.
Speaker 1:yeah, Right, although also they tend to turn down money that help the poor. But anyway, we can get it. My point is that it's bad for the poor pretty much no matter what in this Right Right Exactly. It's just that one party doesn't lie about it as much.
Speaker 2:So I found it. I just thought an easy way to conceptualize what a decadence theory is. And as if you've ever seen the movie multiplicity, you know where the copy of the copy of the copy just keeps degenerating into a worse and worse form and it finally comes to the guy who puts like pizza in his pocket and talks about having sex with the dolphin or whatever.
Speaker 3:That's about where we are right now that's where we are.
Speaker 1:Right. And when you see this, we talk about hauntology and we talk about repetition, compulsion, and another thing that implies decadence is first as tragedy, then as farce yes, right, yes, absolutely. And another thing that implies decadence is first as tragedy, then as farce yes, right, yes, absolutely. Uh, well, now it's not even farce, like first as tragedy, then as far as thin, as tragic comedy, then a stupid fucking meme, and now it's some dumb tweet, like I mean, like it's like we're on the travesty yeah yeah tragedy farce travesty tragedy, first travesty.
Speaker 1:I mean, like you think about, um, you know, think about the tech, the life-changing technologies. You've been sold as life-changing at the end of the 20th century, in the beginning. I know people push back. I remember listening to you guys show on uh, secular stagnation, all right, and people are, oh, my god, there's so much stuff going on in communications technology and I'm like, no, there's not. The biggest innovation in communication technology is now two decades old. This has not fundamentally changed that much, other than getting better cameras.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I'm still using the iPhone 8 right now and you know it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Now think about computers from the 70s to the 90s Mm-hmm. Cheaper, massively better.
Speaker 3:Go ahead, computers from like 89 to 92 even.
Speaker 2:Right Dude computers. Yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like are from the 60s to the 90s. Like a computer in 1960 takes a whole fucking room like it, has a display like this large and you can do punch cards like um it. Actually I don't know why. We thought it was more efficient than just using people, but nonetheless we haven't seen innovations like that at all, even in light of war. Okay, um, I had this really horrifying. You know how I've said that the military is really the only people in the room that still, like, has any sense because they have feet in the game. The hooting situation is actually making me even re-question that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well that was that. One of the articles that we read for that episode that we did talked about how drone technology and stuff like that is actually really just rehashing the same thing they've been working on for 20 years and isn't nearly as advanced as we think it is.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, and also like you could figure out drone technology from like remote radio cars. I mean like you look like out drone technology from remote radio cars. I mean you look like the base technology of it. It's not anything.
Speaker 3:It's not all that different. It's not supremely significantly different from basically the drones that the Nazis used in the late part of the Second World War.
Speaker 1:When were your grandparents?
Speaker 3:born your grandparents, I think. I think well, depends on what, but roughly the 30s, no I was in the 20s okay, late 20s yeah early 20s.
Speaker 1:Early 20s, yeah, um, oh, yeah, I guess. So I guess, if you're yeah, right, right, my father, my grandfather, worked at a brick mill, most of his life still making bricks. That was very constant, but, like when he was born, there were still horse and buggies on the road when he died. You were beginning to have, like I think he died the year Tesla started, like now, I do not see in power production and logistics. Yeah, you know, we've seen some. Uh, there was a lot more hope about genetic technology um 10, 20 years ago than they're using. A lot more fear about it too. You notice, people aren't afraid of that anymore. Right, like crisper babies, you mean people aren't afraid of that anymore. Right, like crisper babies, you mean people aren't afraid of that anymore yeah um, you know why?
Speaker 1:uh, or vr. Do you remember when everyone thought the vr was gonna really change the fucking world? Mm-hmm, like, and yeah, the vr headsets kind of cool, but like, like it was supposed to be cool in 1992, like right okay, vr is just about as cool as it was in the late 90s.
Speaker 2:Right, it's fairly advanced. Except for that, the graphics are better Are better Because graphics in general are better.
Speaker 1:But then like have there been massive improvements in graphic card technology since the mid-aughts?
Speaker 2:No, no, no, I'm still running the same video game graphics card in my 2010 computer now and playing new games.
Speaker 1:So the question is, why? Right, and I've heard a lot of people say, oh, china is going to fix this for us. No, they don't seem to be right, as people who study. Jason Moore came on my show. He's one of the socialistic colleges, kind of broke with both seto and bellamy. Um, he's neither in the bright green nor the, nor the degrowth side of that. Uh, he's just pointing out the like, you know, the, the easy stuff is gone, the low-hanging fruit is gone and it's even getting hard to leapfrog. Phil neal came on the show and like, look he's like, automation has made it to where, like, people are fighting for production but you don't actually need that much production anymore. Um, uh, the, the stuff is super automated. It's labor efficiency. You can't get much better and be profitable, right, um, and also it means that like, oh, you get a factory and it might help you know your city but it's not helping the entire region of the country anymore.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:And then the military right now is so driven by profits that they can't even figure out a way to mandate cheaper supply lines to fight a fucking war, oh man.
Speaker 2:I just watched a video the other day about the littoral combat ship and how it was supposed to be. Like a shallow water vessel that was meant basically for fighting the Houthis essentially is what it was meant for, and it is, first of all, just completely unaffordable and doesn't work. It's a total, complete piece of shit, and they're going back to destroyers. Now, as a result of that, and using destroyers, they have an entire fleet of combat ships meant for fighting against the Houthis that they're not using in this engagement at all Because, first of all, the technology that was used to build it didn't pan out. It's too expensive and everything's a piece of shit falls apart, and that is a perfect example of decadence in the economy applied to the one area of technological innovation that's not supposed to be affected by it.
Speaker 1:Right, and let's also talk about this. We all know that meritocracy is bullshit, but we used to know that there was relative meritocracy because the ruling class needed to have the competence to rule, so they would pull people out, and that was also a way to maintain the ideology that meritocracy was real.
Speaker 2:Right. And if you look at, like you know, the wise men right of the of the 1940s and 50s Right, and then you look at Joe Biden and his cabinet, his cabinet now like, well, right, there used to be some relative meritocracy because, like you know, uh, those guys were, if nothing else, incredibly smart and competent and and that was, and that couldn't even be explained by stuff like term limits and like.
Speaker 1:So, like people try to do like, oh, like, oh, yeah, like well, g and and putin don't have that problem, they don't have term limits and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, uh, they seem to be having problems, not as bad as ours. Mike davis dies and uh, you know, but now two years ago, um, and he wrote that thanatos ascendant piece and he's like, look, collective leadership's gone everywhere because no one trusts it anymore, even in the places that are traditionally collectively leaders. And and, yeah, some people are trying to valorize the strong men as ways out of it, but it's all he, you know, he strongly applied. It's all renegade bonapartism. We have no reason to hope, right?
Speaker 3:No, I mean like, like not long ago I mean I guess it was a People like James Burnham when they talked about the managerial revolution, all the concerns about the ways in which technocrats, layers of very, very highly specialized people, would run things, and that's you know. According to some, we even call that desirable, but now it's like it's a delusion. I couldn't even imagine thinking of that now.
Speaker 1:Joseph Tainter and the rise and collapse of complex civilizations a book that if you have not read it's not Marxist. He's got some pretty big men. So I understand he's a Marxist actually, but if you want to like, get his his view of systems like this and it's based off of ecology you know as much as anything else he's like yeah, these things run their courses and sometimes they cannot restart. He does say there are societies that can do it and then sometimes there are societies that collapse where other societies grow out of them immediately and most people just attach to the new society, but sometimes they just stall out and die. All right Now I think.
Speaker 1:I think that theory is kind of a problem for Marxists, but we see evidence of it everywhere. The thing is that most people are so parochially tied up in their own immediate domain of it that I have a hard time imagining. This is just like the way Americans talk about everywhere else is somehow it's way more vital than the United States. Have you fucking seen Europe Right? Yes, it has slightly more humane labor laws and stuff, but for now, in some places for now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the European Union in general has yeah.
Speaker 1:But yeah, for now, and yes, I'd rather be a worker in, say, sweden or Denmark. And yes, I'd rather be a worker in, say, sweden or Denmark than France. I'd rather be a worker in France than the United States, and so on yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah and so on. Don't let Mir hear you say you'd rather be a worker in Sweden. No, mir's not going to hear it though.
Speaker 1:Well, mir and I talked about it because he's like well as bad as it is in Sweden. I'm always amazed that it was that bad and I'm like the thing is we're not declining, we've always kind of been this way. Yeah, like our period of that it was very short, and if also in the beginning of the 20th century, if you were going britain or france or germany or the united states, who's going to have better labor laws?
Speaker 2:well, I mean the united stuff. It would seem like the united states is going to, based on the strength of the labor movement, the strength of the labor movement, the, the reform movements.
Speaker 1:Uh like, a lot of the british reforms are actually based off american reforms, both in the bad racist sense but also in the good work protection sense.
Speaker 2:Right. I mean, it took a whole hell of a lot of fucking violence to get to where we are, absolutely At the beginning of the 20th century, like the utter just smashing of the labor movement, jailing of its leaders, deportation of its leaders, you know.
Speaker 1:And in Europe they were so afraid of that, plus the recent major wars and mass politics that emerged in Europe in the early 20th century, and also the communists, that they just made the concessions preemptively, Not to say that there was not a militant European labor movement, and there's still more of a militant European labor movement in the United States. But if I was going to guess where the labor movement was going to be strongest, well, if you think about the history, you would have said maybe the United States or maybe Britain. But then let's think about decadence.
Speaker 1:Actually, before we think about decadence, let's take a bathroom break all right, okay, so I'm gonna ask you guys a question as we get into this. Um and uh, I mentioned the three articles that we're gonna base this first part of the series. I think we're also probably going to just start adding stuff to this series and this might be a fairly wrong long running series. Uh, for the show, um, for both our shows. Uh, so sorry, double subscribers, you're gonna get it twice um, but, uh, because I do think it really needs to be talked out, parsed and and dealt with, because one of the problems with talking about decadence is that one, uh, historiography historiography right now is terrified of this. Yes, liberal historiography is fucking terrified. They don't believe in progress anymore either.
Speaker 2:I mean like no, they don't believe in progress, but they don't want to believe that there's. No, that they don't believe in progress, but they don't want to believe that there's a possibility for degeneration, but they want to believe in stasis.
Speaker 3:Yes, maintaining whatever is, is the, is the uh, whatever.
Speaker 1:That's what they want to do and actually, weirdly, now they go, they do it to the point that you like that, you know, and you see this in david graber too uh, where, like, basically, because this has origins and that's like, you know, the state has origins and family, and family has origins and kinship bonds, and that's both symbolic and a little bit biological, etc. Etc. Etc. Uh, therefore, the state is nothing but kinship bonds, which is absurd, like it's like, yeah, in that that you see this a lot of time. Oh well, you know, guilds, uh, you know, colin drum, friend of show smart man, I, I'm not saying this is a degraded, but he once made the argument the guilds are basically special interest groups and I'm like, yes, that's true, but also they're in a completely different context and they had more social control, so, and they weren't just about lobbying the king or whatever Like. So there's this there.
Speaker 1:There is, right now, a historiography of flattening out in every direction, right, right, that's bad. I think that's, I think that's unequivocally bad. I don't think, for example, I don't think that modern humans are, you know, have uh, this. I remember, uh, for example, um, you guys remember when all the liberals were talking about the Flynn effect as the thing against all the race and IQ people. So the Flynn effect, sorry, the Flynn effect, yeah, the Flynn effect is that if you look at IQ stats, oh, they're increasing, they're going, they were increasing every half generation from the 1930s until the early aughts, and then everyone shut.
Speaker 1:Even though liberals discovered the Flynn effect around that time, they didn't mention that the Flynn effect has stopped.
Speaker 2:Right. Iq is supposed to measure innate ability.
Speaker 1:Right and it doesn't, basically doesn't know what it does.
Speaker 2:Measure is education right broad.
Speaker 1:It measures education. It also measures um social adaption. Social adaption, stress, I mean. Like stress affects iq, um, which is part of why race does I mean, to be quite honest, which?
Speaker 2:is why, when I was a little kid, my IQ was off the charts, and now I'm an idiot, right.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's why I mean, there have been studies where if you take someone from a wartime country into a non-war time country and you gave them an IQ test in both scenarios, believe it or not, you know, like the the, the thing your IQ raises Okay, some of that also. There's no way to to give it any kind of test. It doesn't have social and cultural biases in it, cause language always does. Um, uh, you know, that's fair, uh, but one thing that I'll say is that they, when, when they dropped the Flynn effect, they basically just turned on testing entirely. Uh, andreddie deborah, you know you can agree, disagree with him on a lot of stuff, and I do, actually, but he's right about one thing. Uh, they replaced it with something worse. They replaced it with like grades. But you know what grades tie to your zip code and your skin color more than anything else right yeah, more than even success after, after high school.
Speaker 1:Um, uh, but although your zip code is a big predictor of yourself, so you can look at that, uh, that was not always true, all right, um, the comp, the complexity of this system. Uh, in a very real sense, in the 19th century, if you were a robber Baron, you could have really been born from nothing. A lot of them actually were. I know people disbelieve that, but it is true right, yeah.
Speaker 2:There actually used to be a little bit of truth to the Horatio Alger bullshit. There was a kernel of truth that was there.
Speaker 1:Only a very, very few people could do it. Society wouldn't function if everybody could do it. But some people could. Now, it's not true at all. No, not at all. Right.
Speaker 2:Literally no billionaires exist on the planet right now that didn't inherit wealth, their wealth, a majority of it anyway, yes, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I read that stat recently and it blew my mind Right. I'm like how can we not think so? This is when I was like OK, we have our problems with the-neo-feudal thesis, because it doesn't. Not because it's wrong about capitalism, because he's wrong about what feudalism was it's?
Speaker 2:a category error.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't think people caught that. Why we agreed with Morozov was that, like this was a category error. Now this is going to bring me to the Samir Amin piece, and I'm going to talk about the truth of it, because I do think there's a little bit of truth of it here. Capitalism is more but I know this is going to make Samir Amin uncomfortable Capitalism is more dynamic in the periphery than the core.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wait, does he not say that? Yeah, he does.
Speaker 1:He does say it, but he thinks that's why there's socialist revolutions there.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Then he's like well, okay, I admit that they're not actually living up to socialism, but they can always go back and I'm like how, this is the thing, to believe this, we're getting this article. Then let's talk about this, because this is the one I want to get out the way, um, because I don't hate samir. I mean, and I think, as we read this, uh, although there's some assertion, there's a, there's some assertions in this that are just wrong. Marx never reduced capitalism to a new mode of production. He didn't talk about capitalism much at all. He talked about bourgeois society, but he did say bourgeois society was a new mode of production.
Speaker 3:I don't even think he ever actually used the word capitalism. He talks about bourgeois society all the time. He talks about capital. He talks about capital. He talks about bourgeois society all the time he talks about capital.
Speaker 1:He talks about capital.
Speaker 3:He talks about bourgeois society, capital, and he talks about the private mode of production.
Speaker 1:I used to think that Werner Sombart invented the word capitalism, but I actually discovered it earlier. I think it's somewhat, actually somewhat, contemporaneous to Marx.
Speaker 2:I started reading Werner Werner Sombart in German just recently for a project and his national socialism that he wrote whenever he became full-fledged Nazi.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I think Werner Sombart would be important if, if he hadn't become a Nazi. And I think it's interesting. I, I was doing this thing on what we talk about when we talk about class. It was a series I was running and I hit some Bart and he stopped it because I, like, I like actually couldn't figure out like, why is he the one Nazi that no one will touch? Like, is it because he was a Marxist first? I don't know. Like, like, uh, yes, people translated his why aren't american socialists book, although it's interesting because what he describes and it's partly settled he didn't call it settler colonialism, but it's partly settler colonialism these describing. But the other thing is, like, americans actually do have some hope of improving themselves, so they reinvent. American workers reinvest in the future, whereas european workers drink themselves to death. Yeah, today american workers drink themselves to death. Yep, more than ever, more than ever more than even in the alcohol plagues of the old west.
Speaker 2:Yep, um deaths of despair are worse now than in recorded history, like because I know they didn't always record that, but you know yeah, it's bad, right it's, it's absolute.
Speaker 1:You know what? The left quit fucking talking about it.
Speaker 2:Right, they started talking about the third world well, except for to talk about how, uh, they deserve it right, because it's well, I think, I think that's true, but yeah, but I don't.
Speaker 1:I don't see that anymore.
Speaker 2:I saw that a lot more five, six years ago well I would say, okay, I, I'm specifically thinking of uh like uh, in regard to how, uh, white men are the ones who are most affected by uh deaths of despair, um, and I, in within the last year or so, I've seen, yeah, well, they fucking deserve it. Kind of talk on Twitter. Obviously it's accessible and I shouldn't be on there, and I'm usually not.
Speaker 1:I do think looking into the abyss of the id of both the left and the right is what Twitter gives you. Also, perversely, it gives you a way to have your enemies spread your own ideas. But when you stare into the abyss, it'll stare back, right, yeah, it'll stare back and then and then and then mock, share, tweet you and make you more popular. It's a weird. It's a weird weird set of incentives, but but. But I do think we can over conclude from Twitter.
Speaker 3:I heard a lot more of that, for sure.
Speaker 1:I heard a lot more of that, for sure. I heard a lot more of that from like white progressives. 10 years ago, right even for people I thought were decent. A friend of mine was like well, why aren't white people doing better? There's no reason why a white person couldn't do, and I'm like I literally almost I got so mad at him I had to leave the room. I mean, he's a good friend of mine. I almost punched him.
Speaker 2:It's still. That sentiment is still out there. I don't know if it's as prominent as it used to be, but you'll still find comedians making. Yeah, you'll hear it. How do you fail when you're given a head start?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean even that.
Speaker 2:I think that has a mis, that misunderstands whiteness, you fail when you're given a head start. You know all that kind of yeah, well, I mean even that.
Speaker 1:I think that has a miss, that misunderstands whiteness is like everybody's a wasp and that everyone came here with property the way that, the way that, uh right, you know, like, like, yes, all the all the old leadership is white. That does not translate all the way down and it never has.
Speaker 3:They need to at least recognize a gradient that starts, let's say, in the north of England and then by the time you get to the south, like in Greece, it's a different. They're white people, but not by any of the terms that you mean them to be.
Speaker 1:Well, also whiteness as a category makes more sense in the Americas than it does in Europe.
Speaker 2:anyway, Right, exactly Right, because, like technically, Roma are white right. Yeah, easily the most hated people in Europe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just reading how they were burning down Roma apartment buildings again in Germany. Lovely.
Speaker 2:Why do you look at Turksks? Turks are mostly white right, yeah, oh yeah, you're all genetically greek.
Speaker 3:But ask any european turks are not white um, well, ask any turk, and they're definitely not greek. They're greek yeah have you seen the?
Speaker 2:the, those pictures of the, the kids of the, the, the youngest generation of the Osman dynasty that still exists, all little blonde haired, blue eyed, like zoomers. Yeah, I saw that All right.
Speaker 1:So Marx never reduced capitalism to a new mode of production. No, Marx never reduced capitalism to a new mode of production. It's technically true, because he didn't use the word capitalism.
Speaker 2:but no, bourgeois relations were a new mode of production.
Speaker 1:He considered all Okay. This next line is true. He considered all the dimensions of modern capitalist society. Understand, this is false. Understanding that the law of value does not regulate only Okay, this is true. Understanding that the law of value does not regulate only Okay, this is true. Understanding that the law of value does not regulate only capitalist accumulation, but also rules all other aspects of modern civilization. I just think he doesn't know, I think Samir Amin doesn't know that mode of production implies that anyway, right.
Speaker 3:So like he never reduced everything to the mode of production, that's probably true. That's fine. Depends on what you mean by reduced and what you mean by mode of production.
Speaker 1:If you just mean yeah, yeah, I think I think samir I mean ironically is, even though he's a marxist, leninist is correcting a marxist leninist reduction of what the mode of production means. Yeah, because for a lot of marxist leninists the mode of production is just capitalist technology, right, and the social and legal relations that are super structural to that aren't important to the mode when, like, no relations of production are the mode of production Right, they like it's not just the technology, it's the social world in which the technology emerges in. Anyway, blah, blah, blah. That first sounds fine.
Speaker 1:So one thing I want to point out here the contribution of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, the two Pauls introducing the contribution of paul baron and paul sweezy, the two pauls introducing the contest of surplus. Surplus is already in marx. There's theories of surplus. Value is a whole fucking book in marx. They didn't introduce that. What paul, what paul baron and paul sweezy did, did is argue against um that one, that labor theory value is still true or was ever true, right. And two, that, uh, there's a decline, there's a tendency to rate of profits to fall right, and that led them to monopoly capital so they made it a lot harder to understand Marx.
Speaker 1:I think this is a little bit of sophistry here, but I do think he's got a point that the dynamic parts of capitalism and this is what makes it weird, because, okay, capitalism, and this is what makes it weird because okay, uh, that wasn't, that wasn't true. Yet in the czarist and chinese empires, in the qing empire and in the and in the um uh, and in the czarist empire, the roman, uh, the roman of the roman of empire, yeah, the capitalism is not particularly dynamic yet, right, can we agree about that?
Speaker 3:it was beginning to be right when world war one broke out right, it's actually the result of of the war itself and all the contractions of the economy in the world and the re, the restructuring of global capitalism that makes the the periphery dynamic over time. Right, it had not started yet. You're right right.
Speaker 1:So, ironically, what they're actually arguing here and I I think interesting, they won't say it is that well, one of the things we have to admit the soviet union did was actually you know, I don't know introduce capitalist production methods into into society and then, when it fell, just unleash. Unleash them without any tether. I'm not saying that the soviet union was state capitalist. You guys know I'm a not. I don't think the soviet union made economic sense right, like like that's my thesis. It's like there's elements of everything in there the ticket.
Speaker 3:The soviet union was a very long transition back to where it started.
Speaker 1:Yeah, although people talk about Stalin's massive literacy and education, which are absolutely real, they're totally predictable with industrialization. He just industrialized. I mean, we have to just admit Stalin's real victory was industrializing Russia in 10 fucking years.
Speaker 3:Right, well, right. And if you read Stalin on Stalin's own work at the time, that's what he was trying to do. We need to catch up to the West in 10 years, even though we actually should take 100 years right.
Speaker 1:It's very clearly trying to crash course industrialize so that we can become socialists yeah, and it led to what polkonogov warned it would lead to, which was like, okay, you're gonna have purges, social instability, random bouts of violence like this is why I'm not uh, oh, it's all stalin's fault guy, because I think pretty much if anybody had run through that period, it probably wouldn't have led to all the old bolsheviks being killed. That's cannot excusable, right, but like, and you probably could handle the purges better, you know. But uh, yeah, let's be honest, it you industrialize that fast, it's, it's kind of going to go that way. It's good there's going to be a miseration.
Speaker 2:I mean and like honestly. This is not an apology for stalin, but he was right when he said that there was going to be a big war against the west and that the soviet union had to industrialize and militarize or else be crushed. He was just wrong about which side of the world was going to be. Yeah right, he thought he was going to be against france and england.
Speaker 3:Turns out it was against germany right right, like you know, there's a, there's a version of history which says, like maybe bukarin would have been better up until the war and then, of course, then the Soviet Union would have lost instead. I don't know that.
Speaker 1:We know that, though that's the thing. I actually don't know, that we know. I do think that there's some argument that Bukharin's policies would have taken too long to industrialize. Yeah that's what I think too, but we also have to deal with the fact that the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact actually helped the german war effort or yeah, that's the thing it's like a whole bunch of uh go ahead.
Speaker 2:Stalin's horrendous political decisions leading up to the nazi seizure of power I think helped the nazis seize power yeah right, like we can't just look at the Soviet Union and say, if this person was in the same position, everything would have been different.
Speaker 3:But we also can't absolve Stalin totally. No, we can't, we shouldn't. I'm just saying that if one thing changed and one person was in position, everything else would be different too. So now we just don't know. We just don't know what would have happened, we all. All we do know is what did happen right.
Speaker 1:I mean, because the other thing I'll say and this isn't actually, if I'm completely honest, this is more zinovia than it is stalin but like stalin causing chaos and distrust in all the periphery parties in the common term, which happened? Uh, stalin taking out some of the best leaders of even the Chinese and Japanese communist parties, which happened yeah, you know, like he didn't just purge this is another thing people, he didn't just purge Russians right, like in Mongolia, like the totally different communist party emerged from the Stalin years than the one that started them right and he's directly responsible for the purge in the chinese communist party not chinese communist of the chinese communist party from its alliance with the gomundang yeah, yeah
Speaker 3:and so on, and so on, like everything would be different.
Speaker 1:Yeah actually, in some ways the sino-soviet split is actually stalin's fault, but oh yeah almost entirely, three quarters stalin, almost entirely.
Speaker 2:Three quarters Stalin, one quarter Mao. Oh yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1:That's a good point 70% Stalin, which is probably why they couldn't actually be honest about whose fault it was and had to come up with a reason to try to blame Khrushchev. But anyway, all this is to say that this thesis is interesting if you ignore the fact that that amin is implying but not stating. One of the things socialists did was bring capitalism to the developing world.
Speaker 2:so um, yeah, I mean and really like I think that which even could be defensible if they just fucking own it right I mean if, if you admit the uh, that you're actually just doing trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, which they were all doing but would never admit to because you know trotsky's were a fascist collaborator, right?
Speaker 2:no, if they were they were industrializing and carrying out the bourgeois revolution because the bourgeoisie didn't have the spine to do it right? If they just admitted that that's what they were doing, you know, then yeah, and they get.
Speaker 1:And honestly, you know, the USSR gave more generous, even than contemporary China, development programs, like you know. And if you wanted to be, if you wanted to enter the modern capitalist world ironically, the person you dealt with was a communist. So I mean, nasser figured that out, as did the Gandhis. It's just funny.
Speaker 1:It amuses me to no end and it makes logical sense from the strict stagist thinking of Marxism-Linism yeah, it does, right, right, uh, although one of the things I find interesting that this piece does is, again, samir means a marxist, leninist, he's of the malice tradition, I don't know which one, um, but he's analytically, of the of the world systems, wallerstein school.
Speaker 3:That's his analysis, I would I would say samir, I mean it analytically of the world systems, wallerstein School, that's his analysis. I would say Samir Amin is more of the ML properly understood tradition because he's more defensist when it comes to China today. He's defensist for basically every version of China, including the Maoist version, but because he's defenseless about post-Mao China as well.
Speaker 1:He's not a Maoist technically, he would be an ML who is sympathetic to Marxism with Chinese character or just socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Speaker 2:I think that we determined that he's a post-Maoist of some sort, because World Systems Theory, while it has roots, we determined that he's a post-Maoist of some sort.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he is. I mean, because world systems theory, while it has roots in Maoism, is not Maoism. Right, yeah, right, right. It incorporates a whole lot of non-Marxist thought, hey guys.
Speaker 2:I'm going to have to take off in about 15 minutes, so let's finish or at least get to a stopping point.
Speaker 1:So one of the things that I think is interesting that he brings up and this will be our last stopping point. We'll pick this up next time on part two of From Dawn to Decadence, with regrettable vlog. Thus, the similarities between the current situation and the era of the end of the Roman Empire have led those historians who are not proponents of historical materialism to draw parallels between the two situations. On one hand, a certain dramatic interpretation of Marxism has used the terminology of historical materialism to obscure the thought on this theme. The Soviet historians spoke of the decadence of Rome while putting forward socialist revolution as the only form of new, of new relations of production for capitalist relations. This is another reason why he's, he might even, we might even call him a Marxist Leninist, who's actually post-Marxist Leninist too.
Speaker 3:But yeah, he's got a point right.
Speaker 1:He's got a point like the decadence of Rome question. I told you guys, one of the reasons reasons why we started no Royal Road is that transition is baffling. Right, if you want a clean stages theory, how you go from slave mode to surf mode, you know it's. You know the crude constructions of the Soviet interpretation of the historical stages that literally got put down twice ever in Marx and Engels does not work, right, right.
Speaker 1:You have to come up with new definitions in order to make it work right and the other thing that you have to ask is like, okay, if, if, boozra, if, if, um, if all you needed for the beginning of capitalist relations were were made possible by the social technologies of the renaissance, why didn't the classical world produce capitalism? And you know, that's the question that animated, uh, our whole discussions about that, right, yeah, uh, you know that's why we started the no role role. So, because you, chris, also have been on this, like we're both the two people who like why did the ancient world go this way? And another thing I'm sympathetic to samir me on, samir mean on is why was capitalism a european phenomenon? Like why did it not happen in even byzantium? Or, uh, are the islamic empires or the caliphate china, or china, which had more resources you would think would be able to do it?
Speaker 2:more long merc work until tradition, like a long mercantile tradition. More resources, like uh a expansive trade routes uh cottage industries. You know everything that you need an advanced bureaucracy banking. They had all of it like a millennium long stable empire, up to a certain point, you know. Yeah, I think that's why actually?
Speaker 3:yes, that is why they had.
Speaker 1:They had a stable empire right, well, and that's, and that's what we're getting at here is, yeah, decadence, right, yeah so this is the question the first theorist of imperialism, who was kind of socialist, adjacent, who's almost a proto-kansan, was hobson. Right, right, uh, a modern imperialism versus you know its old forms. But hobson thought that imperialism was not capitalism, right, that that what we recognized as capitalism had already collapsed. Um, and that's why there was imperial. And lenin goes and goes. Well, you know, look at this liberal theory. He's got some things, but if we look at Hilferty we can just see no, it actually is capitalism.
Speaker 1:But this does lead me to ask the question why don't we have a theory? Why do we only have theories of crisis and breakdown? Why don't we have a theory of capitalist decadence? And I think Samir amin has a point here. Now we're going to get to where I disagree with him, you know, on the next episode. But given what we've discussed already about all the theories we get to, why is it only the council communist? And one school of the council communist, the international communist, current and like, uh, uh, world systems theory is another school that has a capitalist decadence, although what's interesting about world systems theory that we're going to get to is they basically believe the bourgeois were never revolutionary at all, which is a major departure from yeah, that's an entirely different school of thought yeah, I think it's so big that you have to say that it's different yeah, you have to.
Speaker 1:You have to ignore the revolutions right, which is uh, that's what he doesn't it's a funny way to be it's a really funny way to not be revolutionary, to just have revolutions all the time he says that they were peasant revolutions, and then I I'm like, okay, so now we have to throw out Bonapartism, we have to throw out like what are Marxisms left when you do that?
Speaker 2:We also have to expand the definition of peasant.
Speaker 3:And we also have to explain why the peasants made all these revolutions in all these places and never once took power on their own terms.
Speaker 1:Ever, and actually also a massive part of peasantry fought the fought against these revolutions in most cases, not in all, yeah, in mexico and in russia that's not the case, and in china that's not the case. But in europe it's the case in france.
Speaker 3:Right in france.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in france is definitely the case um, and it's kind of the case in the British Isles too yeah, who were more likely to be royalists, you know like I mean there were levelers. I guess in the British Isles is actually a more mixed. The peasantry is all over the place.
Speaker 2:Right, you've got a long history of radical peasantry trying to, trying to ultimately beseech the monarch for better conditions, right?
Speaker 1:radically. Yeah, right, yeah, basically, we're gonna overthrow everybody but the king, right? Because like the king can, the king can control these assholes, right?
Speaker 2:like the great peasants, revolt. They burn down the monastery, they burn down the lord's manners and they march to london and say, oh hey, king, you know, save us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the king will throw them a bone and then kill them later. I mean, that's almost what always happens, anyway. So this is a good place to stop, because we've actually gotten into the articles. We will pick this up in a month and we're going to do these first three rounds and I'm going to go ahead and warn people, this might be a long discussion because I think I don't think people understand this. When we talk about this, like I, donald parkinson asked me what I meant when I said I was a decadence theorist and I was like god, I'm gonna have to write a book.
Speaker 3:But um, I should probably should write a book, yeah we, uh, let's read it.
Speaker 1:We should add some conservative and some other marxist thinkers into this uh, into this uh thing, since we know we're going to do it for a while. Yeah, yeah, so you know, because I think you will understand our stances on revolutionary pessimism, because people like, why are you, why are you even adopting the revolutionary, non-revolutionary, uh, pessimist, optimist thing? And I'm like, well, well, like I'm not, we listen and you'll figure out. You can disagree with us, but like you're like, how many?
Speaker 3:hours. Do you do that yeah?
Speaker 1:Like there's a bunch of reasons.
Speaker 2:So I mean, we've got people on our discord all the time that are just like. I really like your show, but I don't understand why you guys are pessimists why wouldn't you be a revolutionary optimist?
Speaker 1:and I'm like, well, because I'm not a moron. No, um, no, I shouldn't use the word moron. I've been told that it was, uh, come up by a eugenicist, and we should never use words that have unpleasant origins oh no, there goes the whole english language.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say how many words can you use besides? None a, n and v all the rest of them are sus.
Speaker 2:I was chastised for using anglo-Saxon to talk about the old English. And they said well, anglo-saxons aren't real. There was a category come up with to support white supremacy and I was like, well then, what do you call it? You want me to call them the Angles, saxons, jutes, frisians, danish. You know it's a shorthand right.
Speaker 3:That represents shorthand right.
Speaker 2:That represents everyone, yeah and primarily the angles and the saxons because primarily they are largest groups.
Speaker 1:yeah, right, and also I mean, yes, it was used to come up with white supremacy, totally true, but also it was their culture that became dominant, the the white supremacist narrative that's wrong is that they killed all the Celts. They didn't, they just intermarried and the Celts took Anglo-Saxon names.
Speaker 2:It's just like what always happens all throughout history. Humans are horny. Cultural assimilation Genocide, actual genocide is a 20th century thing. Probably, probably, I think it does happen in the ancient world, but it's really rare and it's like and even then, it's theorized that it probably happened because there's no uh written records of the genocides that we think happen, like the dacian genocide right I was gonna say we don't know the closest that we have is the Roman occupation of what we now call Romania.
Speaker 3:Right that one area maybe Right.
Speaker 2:But DNA evidence shows that they're still there.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Oh well, cool.
Speaker 1:And of course, dna evidence is like yeah, I mean, DNA evidence says a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2:And so like there's a bunch of Romanian nationalists who make a big deal out of the fact that DNA evidence shows that they're still there, that we've been here forever, that kind of a thing. So I know I'm playing into a Romanian nationalist talking point.
Speaker 1:Sorry about that um, none of the man. The last thing I want to get is different slavic and post-slavic nationalism is mad at me.
Speaker 3:Those people are serious. Uh, that's true man like you say the same stuff as me. You look the same and you talk the same in your language.
Speaker 1:You've written the same and your language is probably mutually comprehensible. To mine it's just slightly different.
Speaker 2:Well, romanians are the weird. Romanians are the weirdos in that whole area, right being, uh, being non-slavic romance but actually having lots of slavic dna.
Speaker 1:Yeah, uh, well, you know, I mean so do the greeks today, yep yeah, wait, hold on.
Speaker 3:So the greeks, because you're saying they're Macedonian.
Speaker 1:Uh-oh, oh, no. Okay, so today you've accused the Turks of being Greeks, the Greeks of being Macedonians and the Bulgarians of being Turks, and those are all things I will stand by. Why.
Speaker 3:Because I don't have Twitter.
Speaker 1:On this note, we had a very small portion of the show that I will keep in for the public, where we said scandalous stuff. We're going to end this here before we actually get in trouble. Real race hours. Oh God, have a nice day.
