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 2: Samir Amin's Decadence Theory
What if the revolutions that shaped our world were never meant to begin in the most advanced nations? Join VarnVlog and Regrettable Century as we unravel the intricate tapestry of revolutionary decadence and world systems theory, exploring the profound insights of Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Emmanuel Wallerstein. We embark on a journey through Amin's critical examination of Eurocentrism and his bold stance during the Egyptian revolution, where his support for the liberal side against Islamists served as a testament to his unique ideological position. Through probing discussions, we challenge traditional Marxist narratives and uncover the complexities of proletarian stratification and imperialism's ever-evolving definitions.
This episode takes a deep dive into Marx's legacy, examining capitalism not just as a mode of production, but as a force that redefines societal structures. We tackle Marx's political integration into economic theories, appreciating Engels' contributions to anthropology and ecology, while offering a critical analysis of Baran and Sweezy's monopoly capital theory. Our conversation underscores capitalism's transient nature, urging a reconsideration of historical expectations and the need for theoretical adaptations to contemporary realities.
From the mid-20th-century socialist revolutions to the rise of neoliberal economic restructuring, we map the shifting ideologies from Marxism to Islamism and the repercussions on global political landscapes. This episode critiques the evolution of developmentalist regimes and the reinterpretations of Lenin's theories, drawing parallels between the fall of ancient empires and modern capitalist crises. As we navigate these historical transitions and systemic oppressions, we invite you to question established paradigms and engage with the ever-changing narrative of global political ideologies.
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf
Hello and welcome to both Barm Vlog and Regrettable Centuries from Dawn to Decadence series, which we're doing in lieu of no Royal Road. For probably a while I'm like the more we've been accumulating readings on decadence and we have to touch right wing ones too, and blah, blah, blah, blah blah. But today we're probably primarily going to focus on Samir Amin's 2018 article in the Monthly Review Revolutionary Decadence, which is world systems theory as third worldism. Samir Amin is a kind of joint figure for both. Figure for both.
Speaker 1:I would argue that Samir Amin probably is one of the few people who put some intellectual and marxological heft behind third world theory, particularly after the PRC, the People's Republic of China, abandoned it. I forgot when, that is, like the late 60s when they abandoned three worlds Theory, or early 70s, somewhere in there, somewhere around the death of Lin Bao. So it's an interesting topic. Samir Amin is a key figure in that he was director of the, the third world forum and dakar, senegal. He was a supporter of the liberal side and the egyptian uh revolution because he didn't like islamist. That's that, I think a lot of people.
Speaker 1:They would find that interesting, um yeah, I didn't know that until you told me last time and and I think it's very strange how you know, a eurocentrism is a problem, but this idea of like indigenous organic traditions and islam being the organic tradition of north africa and the third world is kind of a joke. Um, so it. It's an interesting thing to know, because most of the people in the west don't know his internal politics in africa like they know him from his writings in the monthly review and his association with Giovanni Arrighi and Emmanuel Wallerstein, so we can go into it. Like I said, you and I both wondered if this book was ever published. I still can't find it. It appears that he died before finishing it, so we will never get his full-fledged theory here. One thing I will find interesting. I will find interesting, I did find interesting. I'm time-challenged today, and then I'll hand it over to you guys. Is that time challenge today, and then I'll hand it over to you guys?
Speaker 1:Um, is that this article really lays out how much his form of world systems, third worldism, departs from marx, while also claiming to be, uh, to holding the tradition, but in in that vague, vulgar Lukashian way of wherever the revolution is, there is Marxism, regardless of what the content of the revolution actually is Similar to the attempt by J Sakai to redefine proletariat and nation, so a lot more rigorous than j sakai's attempt to do that. J sakai basically argues the indigenous peoples of america were a nation because reasons, yeah, you know, uh, which, what I point out? Like go go over Stalin's criteria for nationhood and then go over the indigenous peoples, like this doesn't apply, and I don't say that to to actually like shit on decolonial struggles. Um, I don't think it's that simple. I think it's actually a fundamentally misreading to like treat those groups as nations because nation itself is a European concept.
Speaker 2:So it reminds me of Sylvia Federici's misuse of the term proletariat to discuss the peasantry in the Middle Ages.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or Christopher Lash calling sharecroppers proletarians, which was also weird. Yeah, sharecroppers are it's a little bit more understandable sharecroppers but, sharecroppers to me are on the spectrum of transition from peasantry into agrarian labor Sharecroppers are almost serfs.
Speaker 2:Except for that compulsory element, everything else about them. They're basically free tenants, essentially of the medieval free tenant is the closest thing that exists to a sharecropper. But yeah, it's certainly not proletarian.
Speaker 3:It's also the case that what we think of as peasantry is fairly limited and too static compared to what the peasantry has been in any one country, let alone between countries. So the concept is very fuzzy for a reason, and I don't think you can simplify it to be like. Proletariat is a really specific kind of category, and that's actually one of the clarifying things that a capital formation has done for the world. It's just, the existence of peasantry is just a of a different order, of a different uh right form of social being.
Speaker 1:One of my arguments, when we get to varn's theory of decadence, which is probably somewhat unique, is that the proletariat and the west actually the proletariat and most of the world I wouldn't just say the West is overly complicated by internal stratification and divisions because of because it's existed so long and has been re and D integrated into capital structurally over and over and over again in ways that make many weird hybrid classes possible. And we have to remember, like the fact that we still have lumpen at all is weird, considering Marx originally thought the lumpen came from two places downwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie and then everybody else who got screwed over in the transition from feudalism and absolutism into modern liberal capitalism. And those classes were decayed and falling into, you know, in the Bermuda. That's his explanation for why they exist and why they're a problem. The issue we have today is that when we have tons of them and we're not really supposed to Right Part of that's deindustrialization, there's a lot of reasons for it.
Speaker 1:We talked before the show about an hour about my problems with most articulations of third worldism. I want to get this out clear though we all agree that purialism is real, we're not going that far and although people mean, uh, one of the things the label imperialism papers over is like we don't agree on how. No, leftist. If you put four leftists in a room and ask them what is imperialism? And they will give you an answer. And how is it bad? And they will give you an answer. But then you go, what is imperialism? And they will give you an answer. And how is it bad? And they will give you an answer. But then you go what is the mechanism that is actually working there?
Speaker 3:And you'll get 20 answers from 10 people Like I think if, if, just if, you pick a standard like a simplified, a couple of points, like, let's say, you take Lenin's imperialism as a model for the formation and the flow and the maintenance of capital in the world today, then I would say that you would have to say that imperialism is an old framework At least I don't think that doesn't exist anymore and yet some things we can call imperialism, and that means, I think, that we have to recognize we're using the term differently than it was previously used, exclusively by Marxists for a very long time.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:If imperialism exists because I think it exists, sure, but it's different than what Luxembourg and what Lenin and what Bukharin and what Hilferding and that whole generation of Marxists talked about when they talked about imperialism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny. At one point I said when talking about all these different debates about imperialism and what our definition should be. I made the joke that it's like pornography. You know it when you see it right. But Ukraine shoots that completely out of the water, where we've got anarcho-NATOists and the former ISO which are all pretty much just lined up behind NATO, calling what Russia is doing imperialism. But what NATO is doing is not imperialism, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3:the side of both Gaza and Ukraine because of anti-imperialism, but, like the side of Ukraine, is armed and funded by the exact same side that the people in Gaza are fighting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I actually mentioned the letter where Lenin chastises Kosky for for, even though he's anti-war, beginning to back off being anti-war because maybe supporting the Germans will lead to the liberation of the Serbians. And what Lenin says to that is basically we support Serbian liberation, but not under these contexts, because it would help one imperialist power against another Right Done. And that's sort of my stance towards ukraine, which I think makes nobody happy. Um, because I'm like look, I think what putin did was an unwise act of aggression. That that has a has a definite provocation historically, but the regime in Ukraine is very much hard to support the more you know about it, even if you might want to support the Ukrainian people.
Speaker 1:And it is funny, though, because I think Putin's sincere when he says I would just like to be fully incorporated into the Imperial order. He doesn't use that last word, but that's basically what he says yeah, like, like, it's, it's a, it's a kind of. To me that's an inter-imperialist war with one side being slightly more I don't even know what I would say that Cause I would say NATO being slightly more problematic in the whole equation. And NATO is being the only way Ukraine can really resist of any with any capacity, should it have happened? No, but we don't live in that world so great.
Speaker 2:And it's like it's great power politics. Whichever getting involved in great power politics is getting involved in inter-imperial rivalry and, uh, it's definitely drags everyone down in the process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean that's been my point about people who talk about, uh, about multipolarity, as, like multipolarity has poles, poles or empires, I don't know. Like like that's what Hans Morgenthau meant, that's what CH Carr meant, that's actually even what Alexander Dugan meant. I know that most people who say they support multipolarity don't believe that. They think, I don't know, maybe if the United States had whatever kind of regime, we'd all sing Kumbaya with one another and just divide up the world, as if the small powers are going to do that without realizing that that's going to lead to a ton of proxy wars.
Speaker 3:But anyway, let's actually get to the article Go ahead, go ahead. There's, there are there are a couple of different attitudes about multi-polarity, and I'm sympathetic toward one which is just that, uh, the way that things are now, the way things have been for the last I don't know 50 years, has produced, uh, that, that those things have produced a stalemate, and so a new, uh, global reconfiguration might mean new ruptures in place that we can't imagine, in ways we can't imagine, and in that sense, I get why there's a degree of enthusiasm behind the bricks and the decline of hegemony of this side, of whatever.
Speaker 1:yeah, but that's a lot of asterisks, you know yeah, I would say, I would say you know my stance, that and I've said this a billion times. So much so that, as I mentioned as we were talking in our last Dugan episode that Chris wasn't with us for but in the time period that we've been covering the first half of the Dugan book, we've seen the rise and fall of left Duganism.
Speaker 2:Right, I listened to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a good episode Duganism, right, and I listen to that. Yeah, it was a good episode and and so, like I think I've also noticed that Marxist Leninists are using multipolarity a fuck lot less than they were just six months ago. So it's just, it's like, oh, we don't like where this is actually going and I'm like, well, I told you what it meant, but nonetheless this is not going, and I'm like, well, I told you what it meant, but nonetheless, uh, this is not marks, this is not. Marx is right, and he didn't talk about model of polarity or varn is right, and he's gloating. Although I am doing that, um, this is decadence hours and I thought this was interesting because, uh, this samir amin article is interesting because, like its initial impulse, I think is interesting and I want to, I actually want to read this One thing that this actually ironically gets into my one of my debates with Chris Katron, where everyone talks about Marx talking about capitalism.
Speaker 1:I go, marx rarely uses the word capitalism. Normally, when he refers to capitalism, he's referring to bourgeois society, which he also sometimes calls and I think wrongly, because it was poorly translated civil society. Right, like civil society against the state and those ideas there. What he's talking about, like, because burger is what is the word being translated to civil, and burger is pretty much the german word for bourgeois, so like um, what he's really calling and ingles actually commented this to a translator it should be translated as bourgeois society, and that's what he's aiming against, in that that bourgeois society produces, in its contradictions, what we now call capitalism. Weirdly and it was actually surprising to realize this, if you read a good translation of marx or read him in the german, it's not that he never uses the german word for capitalism, but he doesn't use it a lot. Like it's, it doesn't come up a lot, I'm not even sure, like barely at all.
Speaker 1:The other thing I'll say is that, while we have some clarity on proletariat versus peasants I will point out, though, we still have the problem that marx never actually defined proletariat, which is what all these people seize on. Yeah, um, uh, because when he gets to defining the proletariat, and and and and capital, volume three he stops, he just, he never goes back to it, it's never finished, and I think part of why that is is because we, if you go through theories of surplus value or even parts of capital about productivity, he kind of gets stuck on whether or not productivity should be a marker of the proletariat right? Um, a lot of people they think it should be, but that. But it leads to weird arguments like, for example, the biggest, most stupid one is baristas aren't productive, even though they literally serve a commodity to you. It's a physical commodity in which they make and give you like serve a commodity to you.
Speaker 3:It's a physical commodity in which they make and give you like right, right, it's this argument that it's not productive of value. But you have to go, like you have to basically do some algebraic equations to discuss what value is likely to where it can be actually found. I just feel like at a certain point that stops just being the the point of the categories, uh, um and it is productive, yeah, and also it's.
Speaker 2:It sounds to me like what third positionists use to like justify including the petty bourgeoisie, uh, among their um, their uh, revolutionary subject, you know, because they're a productive class and, uh, you, you can like parse it any which way you want to exclude who you want to exclude and include who you want to include and to be like an edgelord. American third world is, you can exclude the, the, the SJW, blue haired baristas, you know, and there's, and I know there's more to it than that, but I, but that's why it's appealing, yeah, yeah right.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, uh, there's a lot. There's both a lot more to it and nothing more to it, right, but this samir, I mean, doesn't do any of this, it's just. This is where a lot of people has taken his ideas.
Speaker 1:Now that he's dead, he can't right, don't do that, um, uh, everybody likes world systems theory, even me, uh, even though I think it's, uh, it is a flawed paradigm and the people who use it often miss the point that wallerstein was making that you can't just look at nations when you're doing this, like there's cores and peripheries within nations, within capital, etc. Etc. Etc. Now, unfortunately, I would actually point out that I think Wallerstein himself doesn't always pay attention to his warning there, but nonetheless, that is what he says. This is interesting, though, so I just want to start off here. Let's get into the actual article. Marx never reduced capitalism to a new mode of production. Huh, he considered all dimensions of modern capitalist society, understanding that the law of value does not regulate only capitalist accumulation, but rules all aspects of modern civilization.
Speaker 2:So wait, how do modes of production not rule all aspects of civilization?
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, that question is a very important one. I think, more fundamentally, it's just like Marx starts by talking about a new mode of production and then from that he talks about the kind of society erected around that new mode of production, and then that is what we call capitalism.
Speaker 3:So it's right. It's not reduced only to no new mode of production, only in the sense that there there are peripheral developments out of that new mode of production. But right, but it's not even technically right, he this, this is just wrong on the face of it right.
Speaker 1:I mean like I could, I could argue away, like, yeah, I could do what jason just didn't try to charitably say that that was true. Like, like that, he never. That is what I do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, like, like uh like, yeah, he talked about the capital estate. I mean, he had this big project.
Speaker 1:You know how draper, that is what I do. Yeah, right, like, like, like. Yeah, he talked about the capitalist state. I mean, he had this big project you know how Draper talks about in Marxist the revolution that capital from the letters was going to be a much bigger thing and he was going to start with the economics and then go through the politics et cetera. Except the importance of the economics, as he went through it seemed more and more important to Mark for explaining everything.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like State was supposed to be Volume 4 and then it was going to be eventually Volume 5, maybe and probably it would have become Volume 6. If Mark's lived to 90. It would have become Volume 7.
Speaker 1:Right. I mean we kind of have what ended up being sort of kind of Volume 4 theories of surplus value, which is itself three volumes long, exactly, but it. Theories of surplus value which is itself three volumes long. Um, but it. It is interesting, um, that we never really get there. And one thing you can really fault marx for and marxist for and we know this from his biography that he was never comfortable with the political aspect of political economy. He normally farmed the journalism on that out to Ingalls and would go in and gloss it with economic interpretations. With few exceptions we get hints of Marxist theories of the capitalist states and the civil wars in France and in the Rue Mer, and that also gives us hints of what could be called Marxist decadence theory, which is that the progressive notions Of liberal bourgeois subjects Hit the wall in trying to maintain property and, quote, regress back to feudal forms of government um wait, you mean that that brand new thing which just started happening, which has made us, uh, into a techno neo-feedalist society under our noses?
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh, okay, yeah, I think that's the beginnings of a theory of the capitalist state. But we have to basically say that Marxist theory of the capitalist state as the ruling committee of the bourgeoisie is woefully underexplored. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, let's get to the other things he said. Uh, but rules all aspects of modern civilization. Civilization talk is also weird. I mean, I know we have all this civilization in anything it's like. Don't we take civilization as a given? I don't know.
Speaker 3:That's one of those words that just I guess I don't have a problem with it, but again it's like I might be injecting all of my own interpretation, and so, in order to make it clear, it should be developed, there should be some like a line, even just to indicate exactly what that means.
Speaker 1:That unique vision allowed him to offer the first scientific approach relating social relations to the right of Rome of anthropology. I mean, anthropology barely existed when he wrote, but okay, in that perspective, he included in his analysis what today is called ecology, we discovered after marx. John bellamy foster, better than anybody else, has clearly developed this early intuition of marx. Uh, kohei seto has complicated it anyway. Um, so we have here, hey, that thing you think that marks does. He didn't do that. Um, marks was also in anthropology and ecology, which is true, although I would also argue that, like you know, he wrote more about both of those things, for both good and ill.
Speaker 3:Ingalls, not Marx, yeah yeah, marx was only interested in those things very peripherally, in the sense that, because there's a new mode of production which is still unfolding, and because there is a new form of class society being crystallized around it in order to strengthen it and to preserve it, questions of anthropology and ecology which are peripheral to the thing which is peripheral to the thing which is central to Marx, which Amin says he didn't do. Right, he didn't do.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah, I also share, and I'm skipping a paragraph about, you know, baran and Sweezy, because for those who know me, you should know that I think those are the accidental two worst Marxist scholars in human history. Yeah, I don't think that they trying to marry the bakaran view of monopoly capital to fortism and then people maintaining that even after fortism's long gone has been kind of a disaster in marxist analysis, because, yeah, yeah, one of the assumptions of baron and sweezy is that the primary contradiction of capitalism was solved by, basically, management.
Speaker 1:I mean that's more or less what they're saying. Uh, I also share another intuition of marx, clearly expressed as early as 1848 and freely formated until his last writings, that according to which capitalism represents only a short bracket in history. Oh, I hope that you are. I mean in so much that all of human civilization that isn't hunter-gatherer represents a short bracket in history.
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, I mean on the what is it? Anatomically modern humans appeared about? Like what 100,000 years ago?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we've had civilization for like it might be more than that actually. I think that's wrong. I think for like it might be more than that actually, but I think it. I think that's wrong. I think it's 200,000 years ago and I think we even have evidence of uh, of like abstract uh thinking and burial rights and stuff as early as 200,000 years ago 233,000 years ago yeah, yeah thought I remembered stuff from when I was an anthropology student.
Speaker 2:All right, I took one anthropology class with you, Jason. Remember when we took that class together?
Speaker 3:Oh, that was actually a really really good class, because it was about it was physical anthropology. It was about magic, witchcraft and religion.
Speaker 2:Oh, there were two anthropology classes.
Speaker 3:And about how a typical linear way of thinking goes we graduate from magic into witchcraft and we graduate from that into religion and then we graduate from that into science, and he was like a better way to understand. It is a way which I now would say is dialectical.
Speaker 2:At the time. No but we took two classes then, because the one I was thinking about was the physical anthropology class, where we looked at all the different skulls and we had exams on trying to categorize which one was which oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:When people was asking me like well, if evolution is true, then where are the missing links, I was like dude, they're fucking uh, everywhere, everywhere all the time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, this is another problem I have with david graver. That that's I'm not going to get on, but his hostility to any form of evolutionary thought like really pisses. It's so weird, like I don't understand that at all and people don't even pick up that he's hostile to it and I'm like, oh yeah, he's very hostile to it anyway.
Speaker 1:Uh weird but, um, all right. Uh, I share another that represents a short bracket in history. It's All right. I share another that represents a short bracket in history, it's historical function being to have created a short time a century the conditions calling for moving beyond communism understood as a higher stage of civilization. That's kind of true, except that, I'll be honest, I keep on putting the birth of capitalism earlier and earlier, our bourgeois society earlier and earlier.
Speaker 3:Didn't we say last time? Well, I said last time that an easy date is 1500.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's pretty much where I put it. It's like shortly after 1492.
Speaker 3:There's so many things that develop around that time period, although, I think to have it be a recognizable like, no matter where you look, it's really more like 1650 is when it starts to develop. Well, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go ahead, I would say you've. I mean, of course, people who've listened to this to listen to us all together have heard me bring this up several times before. The northern Italian city-states right in the high Middle Ages are developing what clearly looks to be a bourgeois society, but it's abortive.
Speaker 1:Yep, I'm with you on that. I've read Brundale talk about that. You also see similar capitalist developments in monasteries in the 13th century, but they don't go very far because they're still in a largely feudal context. That's the birth of capitalism. I'm no, that's just. That's just market relations.
Speaker 2:Beginning something that would look like it but like that's like that's closer to to like a uh collectivist, uh collectives engaging in in a in a market, than like anything close to capitalism.
Speaker 1:And if you like, a libertarians and B Jairus Banerjee think that any market with any form of currency equals capitalism, you start moving merchant capitalism. I mean Banerjee does this he moves merchant capitalism all the way back to the fucking end of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2:I mean Banerjee does this he moves merchant capitalism all the way back to the fucking end of the Roman Empire. There are elements of what becomes capital of the Roman Empire. I will, but it doesn't go anywhere.
Speaker 1:The reason why Banerjee does this just to completely explain them. He says that if whatever relation predominates, even if you're other relations, you are that thing. He doesn't really believe in hybrid forms. But then that means whenever he sees markets, which I don't think is actually the good marker for capitalism.
Speaker 1:I think wage labor plus banking are the two markers of capitalism yeah yeah, uh, but as a as a staunch wickamist, I have to disagree with him yeah, um so, but I tend to think marx was overly optimistic about how long, how quick it was going to be to overthrow capitalism. And I also think it's interesting that even marxist leninists will say this without realizing that's what they're saying, when they're constantly saying, oh, we had to develop productive forces more. And I'm like well, the more you say you had to prevent productive forces, you're actually contradicting ingalls while also citing off in the same book with it, and sometimes I'll even slight the paragraph I'm talking about without this part of it where Ingalls says oh, we need to develop productive forces, but by 1888, we already had enough to have communists.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think that the world that Marx was describing and the predictions which people like Kautsky made were all true from around the 1840s till around the 1940s, but the existence of the soviet union and the allied states and the development of nuclear weapons, all of that changes the calculus. And so if what marx was talking about is inevitable, was inevitable and it did happen, and then it didn't happen, and then it started to change, and nothing else afterward can be said to be this of the same. Uh, you know, whatever we have was inevitable and it did happen, and then it didn't happen, and then it started to change, and nothing else afterward can be said to be this of the same.
Speaker 1:Uh, you know, whatever we have to change our political calculus when conditions in the world changes, and I think the 1917 revolution is a world historic event and that means that the world before it is different than the world after it well, I mean it is funny because they say when, when you meet people who argue that we already exist post-capitalism and they'll find Engels in 1844 writing about Owenites and Fortierists in America as proof of the efficacy of communism, and then acting as if that's what communism means to later Engels and Marx post the manifesto, which is really funny because then they're like means to later ingles and marks posted manifesto, which is really funny because then they're like then you're saying that they already thought america was a communist society in 1844, which is kind of a ridiculous claim like well, right, and also like the owenites and the fuyas, like at the, at the furthest, the last remnants of the last expression of that of that kind of experimental attitude was like the great depression and really it's more like the first world war.
Speaker 3:So like, if that's uh proof of some something about communism, that then what we have is proof that communism fails all right, so let's get into what he thinks decadence is.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to read a whole fucking section. The workers and socialist movement has sustained itself on the vision of a series of revolutions beginning in the advanced capitalist countries. From the criticism which Marx and Frederick Engels made of programs of the German social democracy to the conclusions derived from Bolshevism, from the experience of the Russian revolution, the workers and socialist movements had never conceived of the transition to socialism on a world scale in any other way. However, over the past 70 years, the transformation of the world has taken other paths. The perspective of revolution has disappeared from the horizons of the advanced West, where socialist revolutions have been limited to the periphery of the system. My answer to you is why have there been no more socialist revolutions since 1970 that have been successful?
Speaker 1:If that's true, 78 is when is literally when the name of developing national liberation movements moved from things like pan-Arabism and marxism into stuff like islamism and stuff like that, and most of those Revolutions also fail, right? So it's just this claim seems like. Well, history has changed, but we're also Stopping history around 1975. Shut the fuck up Like. Anyway, these have been integrated, integrated developments of sufficient ambiguity for some people to see them only as a stage in the development of the expansion of capitalism to a world scale. Well, I wouldn't say some people in most of these cases. What happened to these former colonies, even when they claim to be marist, with the exception of five countries Vietnam, cuba, north Korea, although it's hard to say what that even is, china and what else is left? Yeah, nobody.
Speaker 3:It depends on the year because, like uh in ethiopia, they maintain some fealty to marxism, leninism until the 90s and angola is the same until, like the late 80s.
Speaker 1:I want to say but this is written in 2018, my friend.
Speaker 3:Well, by the time you write this. It's very clearly. Uh yeah, you have to ignore a whole lot of history in order to make this argument right.
Speaker 1:I mean this feels like these are arguments I saw in the 60s and 70s, where they were defensible, right, but yeah, yeah, it's hard to defend this now. Um, and I think it's ironic because, remember, as I said, uh, samir Amin was highly ambivalent about the Arab Spring because he distrusted Islamists. So it's like, okay, but the major form of revolution in your area of the world now is not one you would support so how was he, what was his stance on, like, the Islamic Republic of Iran?
Speaker 2:I actually don't know.
Speaker 1:I don't know he may be one of the many people who talked about the Islamic Republic of Iran as like Islamist Leninism without any Marxism, which I actually think is kind of probably true.
Speaker 1:At one point, sure, yeah, I don't think it's true now, but I think it was true. No, no, no, I think it was true from like seven. And I mean this because the other societies I could think that did Leninism without Marxism. So they copied Leninist sales structures and developmental plans but remain completely capitalist. The National Action Party of Singapore, I mean this is another example, another.
Speaker 3:This is another example of the reason why I think that, uh, our inability to properly reckon with the neo, the neoliberal restructuring of the world economy in the 1970s, has been like fundamental to our uh, miscalculations of everything else. Because, because you can be, you can make, there are some excusable reasons why you could say this or that about a developmentalist regime, even in spite of it not being technically a workers' movement, but it's kind of statified and it's kind of allied to the socialist world and whatever. You can make that case for a while, by the, by the eighties, look around the world and everybody's just they're in the same trap. And that means the political calculus has to change again.
Speaker 2:And we just haven't changed it since the fucking right. It's sort of like, uh, like MLs talking about Assad like he's his father, right, right, and syria like it was the syria of the 1970s and 80s instead of the syria which participated in the gulf war on the american side, right?
Speaker 1:well, just, I mean, you just told you don't trust the Americans, yeah.
Speaker 3:That is part of the need to change our political calculus. Look around the world and see what you actually have to do now. So far, it's just doing the same thing, still, no matter what. I would actually argue that Gaddafi expelled 30,000 Palestinians from Libya and participated in whatever. All these developmentalist regimes are on the other side of the great divide at a certain point.
Speaker 1:Also, none of them are really that Marxist at all.
Speaker 3:No, none of the two that you mentioned.
Speaker 1:We could talk about Angola or Ethiopia, right, but it's hard to talk about syria, right?
Speaker 2:uh, I mean syria had some vague, uh you know, program, developmental program that was uh socialist, uh in the way that arab, so arab nationalism, postured itself as socialist. But that's it, definitely not Marxist.
Speaker 3:The same thing under Egypt, under Nasser. You can make a case. It's tangentially related. It might grow over into socialism, but by Sadat, which is still in the 70s, by the 70s, across the board, all over theat, which is still like 70s.
Speaker 2:Yeah in the 70s.
Speaker 3:By the 70s across the board, all over the world. That is proving to be a pipe dream. Basically, by the time that all the anti-colonial revolutions are done, they're no longer a thing to be hopeful about.
Speaker 1:Right. An analysis of the system of unequal development gives us a different answer. So we have the system of unequal development gives us a different answer. So we have the system of unequal development. I want to point out and I pointed to this to you affair that I am supportive of the idea that the developed world has been primitive, accumulating in the developing world for forever, um, and that that's both what drives lenin's imperialism, but also what we see today, which I think is actually closer to katsuki super imperialism even now, because a great fire, the great powers are not directly fighting, right, um, they're indirectly fighting, which is is is kind of what Kotsky predicted.
Speaker 1:Now Kotsky's writings on colonialism are shit. So I don't want to sound too pro-Kotsky on this, but it is interesting that as soon as you get the weapons, the situation that Lenin was creating, and Lenin was combining Hobson's liberal theory of imperialism with Bukharin's theory, and it's close to Bukharin's it's not exactly the same and it solves two problems, which is the tendency of Reddit to profit the fall and the tendency towards monopolization and the accumulation of capital and organic composition. Those things seem like contradictions in capitalism because they are like, but everyone thinks, everyone always focuses on one of them, but not the other. Either people either focus on organic composition and the and you know capitalist development of forces, or they focus on the tendency of rate of profits per all, but those two things interact, and Lennon was trying to see how that would affect a political economy. The interact, and Lenin was trying to see how that would affect a political economy, um, the, the. The problem that you have, though, is people read that text as if it is true for all time.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, which is weird Sort of the problem with all of, uh, Lenin's texts and Marx's, et cetera. Trotsky.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, yeah, Like um, you know, you encounter people who say what is to be done. They're like well, that's why you have to do this and what is to be done, says this Lenin argued that what is to be done is outdated by 1907.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sorry, lars Lee. Anyway, also, you and I have both read a lot of Eric Van Rien. People should really read and I'm going to do in my theory book group we're eventually going to do the Political Thought of Joseph Stalin by Eric Van Rien. But it makes it very clear that one of the problems when you have like Kaminan fighting Trotsky, fighting stalin, fighting bukarin, is they're all legitimately citing linen. Yeah, because, linen changes his fucking mind and they're all trying to erase that. Linen changed his mind all the time right.
Speaker 3:What's funny is, like linen's uh inability to be pegged as a single, as having a singular line of thought is one of the things, that which marks him out as a genius. And it's actually funny that, by virtue of trying to prove that he's a genius by sticking to one kind of thought versus the other, they kind of uh misuse not just misuse Lennon, but they make Lennon seem very wooden and very static and very much the opposite of a genius.
Speaker 2:Yeah, right, I mean, it's like talking about talking about Lennon like a political figure rather than like a saint. You know, like trying to write a history of Lennon rather than a hagiography is what our demonology that's the other demonology yeah, that's the other thing Right Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's, that's what I encounter whenever I see who's someone who's not talking about St Lenin is not some weird trot, usually because MLs only recently started writing books again in english uh, being a dick, but kind of true, um, kind of yeah um, I guess you could consider what does.
Speaker 2:Lucerto writes in italian originally.
Speaker 3:It's just translated to english yeah, trots have really uh cornered, uh the linened the literary space for the last couple of generations, for sure.
Speaker 1:Part of that's anti-communism. I will grant that Part of that's also that the internal rules of the CPUSA really have them not engage in debates with liberals or with trotskyists. So then, what the fuck were they going to say? Who the fuck?
Speaker 3:is left.
Speaker 1:And then you get a proliferation of weird writings about this stuff in the sectarian new communist movement of the late 60s and 70s. But like, those, people don't sit down and write a fucking book, they don't. They write screens and pamphlets and then drop out and we never hear from them again. Let's get back into this because we got distracted Over the past 75 years. The transformational world has taken over the past. Blah, blah, blah. We already read that, beginning with the contemporary imperialist system, the analysis obliges us to consider the nature and meaning of unequal development in previous historical stages and meaning of unequal development in previous historical stages. So instead of like analyzing what's happened since the 70s in the beginning of world systems theory, we instead go. We are going to compare the United, the U? S, to Rome. All right, the comparative history of the transition Go ahead.
Speaker 3:I'm sympathetic to that. That uh need, or that uh that declaration of a need, but only as a second order. The first order is still to analyze the conditions that we're actually in right now and then, yes, then compare them to uh previous uh, compare them to previous systems, previous most production and so on.
Speaker 1:You and I both I mean all of us here both agree that you should compare. I mean otherwise, why would we have done a whole series talking about Christopher Wiccan and Hinton and all those people? I mean like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if we don't think the end of the comparing stuff to Rome.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am one of those people who, like, thinks a whole lot about the Roman empire, but I also think about the Parthian empire and the Seleucid empire and I'm kind of a empire thinking dude actually, but I'm always like you know, the problem with middle-aged men when they get into either Rome or Nazis is that they don't go deep enough and weird enough, like there's so many more weird empires to study.
Speaker 2:Therein lies my PhD concentration. I got into reading about Nazis and then found some real weird guys that were way more interesting, yeah.
Speaker 1:Thus, the similarities to the current situation and 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 the other hand, a certain dogmatic interpretation of Marxism has used the terminology of historical materialism to obscure a thought on this theme. The Soviet historians spoke of the decadence of Rome, while putting forward the socialist revolution as the only form of substitution of new relations of production for capitalist relations. Yeah, that was a Soviet problem, I agree. Fuck, it's a problem for a lot of Western Marxists. I hate the term Western Marxist and you know what? I don't even blame Lacerdo for me hating it, I blame Perry Anderson. He should have never done that.
Speaker 2:Anyway.
Speaker 1:Because now a stupid insult has been flipped on its head. And you know what happens when you invert a stupid paradigm it remains stupid, but it's also different. It is now differently stupid. Alright, it's not to say that everything Lacerdo says in that Western Marxism book is bad, for those of you who asked me yes, I've read it. It's more that it's kind of based on a caricature of a few particular Marxists, often quoting from their non-Marxist writings. It's very strange. Anyway, back to this. I've never read it. Yeah, I would suggest reading it, the Lucerto one, not the Garrido one. I've read both. Unfortunately, the Lucerto one made enough good points that I didn't feel the need to throw it against the wall. But there were entire chapters where I was like why are you citing Ernst Bloch before he was a Marxist and not mentioning anything afterwards? And why are you pretending that Tagliati didn't lead the Euro communism? Oh my God.
Speaker 3:You could say why you could do the same thing with lenin, except for that, uh, lenin historiography has been uh retroactively fitted in such a way as to make lenin a perpetual genius, according to whatever the, the line of the author is yeah right, so so if you're a soviet influenced marxist during the cold war, or if you were, you know, no matter what if you're a Soviet-influenced Marxist during the Cold War, or if you were, no matter what if your Marxism is pegged to what the Soviet Union taught, then you can make those kind of mistakes, because you can look at a figure at different points in their life and pick any one random moment to be like that's who they are forever. Because that's what I do with Lenin and that's true.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, they do that a lot. It's a bad historiography. Um, also, it's part of the the general socialist activist confusion of historiography with history. Like they can't tell the difference between, uh, claims about interpretations of history and historical facts. Um, anyway, back to the text.
Speaker 1:Although this is a historiography problem, believe it or not, the following comparative analysis of the form and content of the ancient and capitalist crisis in relation to production addresses the issue. The differences between these two crises justify chaining one in terms of decadence and the other in terms of revolution. My central argument is that the definite parallel exists between the two crises. In both cases, the system is in crisis because the centralization of the surplus it organizes is excessive. I think that's true. Okay, that's true. Fair enough, that is, and that's not a cap. But see, that's not a critique of capitalism, that's just a critique of hegemony, and I think people miss the difference that is is in advance of the relations of productions that underlie it. Okay, so this is where he tries to make it a critique of capitalism. Thus, the development of the productive forces in the periphery of the system necessitates the breakup of the system and the substitution of a decentralized system for collecting and utilizing surplus. Okay, so that's the central thesis here, which I don't have a problem with.
Speaker 3:I know that you hate this line of reasoning and I don't hate it. I know that you hate this line of reasoning and I don't hate it With.
Speaker 1:Asterisk. I kind of can get something out of it as a meta critique of Hegemon. I don't hate that. We'll get to what I hate. That's not actually it. As a meta critique of the breakup of the system, I do think the system is going to break up, sure, but I don't think that's going to just look like the developing countries All of a sudden being flipping and they become the core of the world because reasons.
Speaker 3:I think I think that's insane, it's just totally, it's totally ludicrous yeah.
Speaker 2:I remember reading through the Go ahead. I'm sorry, just in. Totally it's totally ludicrous. Yeah, I remember reading through the go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I remember reading through the beginning of this and wondering how the hell this has anything to do with decadence theory. It really doesn't.
Speaker 1:None of it does except that he's basically arguing he's trying to argue. I think, that marxism was right about the 19th century if the revolutions had popped off, but since they didn't, partly because of the pressures of imperialism this is me fixing the argument. The capitalist system has gone decadent, as has any revolutionary potential in it, because they're all in that system. But somehow the periphery in China has any revolutionary potential in it, because they're all in that system, but somehow the periphery and china. The periphery is china, which is very much yeah and very much not part of the capitalist system.
Speaker 3:Right well, right, and even allowing, even bracketing that argument, which is, you know, pretty central, but even bracketing that off, which is pretty central, but even bracketing that off, the peripheral nations are where. What are the peripheral nations? Well, basically, in the 1960s, they can't be China or Vietnam, they can't be Brazil.
Speaker 1:Even Wallerstein says that those are semi-peripheral right.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, in the 60s those were semi-peripheral and there is an argument to that.
Speaker 3:They're complete.
Speaker 2:Oh, go ahead, go ahead. I said now that they're completely integrated into the world economy and china is like, uh, completely integrated in the world economy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, now there is there's a separate argument that uh port back when it was an empire. Back in the 1970s, when it started to lose its empire, it became recognized as peripheral to the core of European capital concentration, and so in that sense, a lot of countries are peripheral, but either way, china is just not, but either way, china is just not.
Speaker 1:So I would say, like, central and western, china is peripheral to capital, as is, as is, the Rust Belt and the Southern and the Bible Belt, basically in the United States. Yeah, sure, and Wallerstein's analysis does not, as I mentioned earlier, actually break this down in the nations, although he kind of does sometimes, but mostly he actually does say that we're only talking about nations as shorthands, because we realize there's cores and peripheries in nations too, blah, blah, blah. But if you do that, then this third world thesis is really hard to believe, because then like, oh, there's cores and peripheries within the capitalist core, then why are we talking about this as a geographic problem?
Speaker 3:That's the reason why I think that third worldism is only kind of applicable in an imperialist framework in which a nation acts as a. You know, there's a national capital, there's a national army that's designed to break open barriers, to suck from the periphery back to the core for the benefit of the national capital. This national army that's designed to break open barriers, to suck from the periphery back to the core for the benefit of the national capital. Neoliberalism changes all that. Now it's become very clear that the difference between the core and the periphery in the US is kind of the same as the difference in Brazil or in China or anywhere else.
Speaker 1:It's actually way worse, as we mentioned earlier. It's way worse than in china. Like china, does actually do things to mitigate its core and periphery differences, but it knows it has them.
Speaker 2:You have to redefine what periphery means for it to work.
Speaker 1:Now, yeah, right, yeah yeah, well, the thing is you can't core and periphery stuff I used to accuse of being crypto malism and I still think a little bit is, but like I think it is. Uh, samira means the only person who explicitly ties it to third worldism, because we have to remind listeners that what third world thesis used to be, as represented in its most recent instantiation by now trader zach cope, who's become a neoliberal. That's funny. Um, you guys saw that right.
Speaker 1:Maybe you didn't the guy who wrote the definitive economic text on third worldism, which was not very good. Zach Cope has become an ardent neoliberal Huh.
Speaker 3:Well interesting Sure, why not?
Speaker 1:He has rejected all of his prior writings on the topic, etc. Which means that. But for those of you who don't know what the argument was in the 80s, all right, so there's been three phases of third worlds and there's three worlds theory in china, uh, during when mao and limbao were getting along, and that stated that the us and the soviet union were the first world. I know, weird, weird Europe was the second world because it was contested territory and the non-aligned movement was the third. These were political categories, not developmental categories.
Speaker 1:Exactly Right, the shift, according to J Mafwad Paul and I'm probably I know I'm mispronouncing his middle name, it's indigenous and I don't know how to say it but his book um, continuity and rupture, actually, I think, honestly argued that maoism is re-new. It uh developed in the early 80s after the fall of the new communist movement, and they picked up three worlds theory and went and they said, okay, well, the Western proletariat is not exploited because of super profits from the imperial core and the developmental proletariat is hyper exploited. A lot of scholars, including Charlie Post, point out that if you look at productivity rates and profits from productivity rates, that's not true.
Speaker 3:Right, and again it's. I mean, our criticism of neoliberal restructuring and austerity measures is precisely the opposite of an argument that the first world workers are bought out by the super profits.
Speaker 1:You can't be living under austerity and also be, uh, the beneficiary of the things which you are not getting because of austerity right, which the reason why this all starts to fall apart and a lot of third worldists move to world systems theory to justify their thinking. As I mentioned, world systems theory is vague on whether or not the problem is exploitation, hyper-exploitation of the workers in the third world or extraction. They don't talk about class relations in core, periphery stuff. They don't.
Speaker 2:It's mostly developmental levels of development in world systems theory.
Speaker 1:So it gets you out of the disprovable claim. Now I can go into, like John Smith's discussion of imperialism where he talks about how, when we talk about the difference in productivity, that's real but it's because of legal arbitrage and force. I think a lot of those arguments are actually correct, but that still does not mean that the first world proletariat is on exploited while the third world is hyper exploited. What that means is nation states are getting, are doing extractive trade. Yes, so you are dealing with two interrelated but not entirely the same systems in the third world. Just want to flatten them out. The it's also, you know, the whole primary and secondary contradiction thing, which is a weird thing because there's none of that in hegel armor. There's no like primary country. There's no numbering of contradictions. Like contradictions don't work like that in hegel and early marx.
Speaker 3:They only work like that for mao because of of a political calculus right, if there there's a series of contradictions which one deserves our attention most. That's all it's saying, and I don't even, I don't even agree with that. There's, there's a shift, there's a slide from mao's uh, you know, let's say real politic all the way over to this is how objectively the world is on a scientific basis. It's like those are two different kinds of argument.
Speaker 2:Well, Mao was incredibly opportunist in his application of a universality to um his realpolitik. Yeah, and I think it uh was a net negative for the world communist movement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely created the sign of soviet split. But I also think he was trying to uh paper over the difference between uh, between chin do zoo, who gets kicked out of the party for being eventually becoming a petrotskyist, but and lee does out. Uh, who was the other founder. Lee does out concurrently to mussolini at about the same time says well, if we're talking about national development, why are we, why don't we just apply proletarian, why don't we apply class statuses to countries? Yeah, yeah. And mal does not pick that up.
Speaker 1:Mal does not talk about china as a proletarian nation as such, but he does say well, national development and national borders is is necessary for the international blah, blah, blah. And the one thing we can thought like, even if you believe and I I'm, I'm actually one of the people who believe there are real communists in the chinese country. I don't think it's like they all want to be capitalists. I think they mean what they say. I think they think they're doing a giant NEP. Sure, I don't know how they're going to get out of it, but I think they think they can. Contradiction being political calculus was also an explicit attempt to justify including, just like the kwame don had done priorly, chinese capitalist in the spectrum of the party. Yes, that's why there's four stars in the fucking flag that's's exactly right.
Speaker 2:Right, the four stars represent class collaborationism.
Speaker 1:Class collaborationism, right, and it's real weird when you see American dunghast try to argue that we need to do that, because even Mao would have been like no, the developed world doesn't need to do that. They've already done their capitalist development. They need to dispossess their bourgeoisie, and we're like no. You see people now using dung and mow to argue that we need a national consolidation project in the United States.
Speaker 2:Oh my God, so that we could rebuild our crumbling infrastructure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the thing about living in this time of monsters. You know, Lots and lots of very weird hybrid forms appear.
Speaker 1:Right. So I I do think that there is something to what I mean is arguing here, but I he the fact that he sees himself in the third world is and yet he doesn't believe in like what we would see as like Western third world ism, but what he pop posits is even vaguer, Like the thing is my point about, about, about world system theory is it's not wrong about cores and peripheries existing and it's not wrong about uneven development being necessary for capital, because the tension between organic capital composition and inter-class bourgeois conflict leads to the necessity between globalization, on one hand, and capitalism has always been fucking global people. It was from like that's like one of the reasons why the italian city-states didn't become full capitalist countries is they never went imperial I mean.
Speaker 3:That's part of the reason why I pegged the the dawn of a new era, of the. What becomes recognized in retrospect as the bourgeois era is the 1500s, because it's when capital becomes global right, that's the whole point that's, that's that's the primary distinction, I, between the old world, the old order and the new order is that, oh, we hit a limitation at home, we just go abroad, and that's the. Everything else is downstream of that, and that's yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And that leads to tensions. I mean, it leads to tensions in the capitalist order itself itself, like, but anyway, um, okay, the most commonly accepted thesis within historical materialism is a succession of three modes of production the slave mode, the feudal mode and the capitalist mode. We all know even I agree with samira mean that this is way, way, way vulgar. Um, uh, in this framework, the decadence of rome would be the only expression of the transition from the slate, from slavery, to serfdom, although, as you and I have both talked about, it's hard to know when a slave becomes a serf. Even in the fucking language that was used, it vaguely happens somewhere between the 9th century and the 13th century.
Speaker 2:So, well, I think that in the Roman Empire, also in the late Roman Empire, you see that category being modeled as well, because if you remember Wickham, he talks about the Latifundia switching to systems of rents. Right, yes, yeah. And so in that transition to switching over to a system of rents, you've got bound laborers becoming free laborers, who are contractually obligated to stay on their land. So it's sort of a semi-serfdom.
Speaker 3:And that still doesn't take into account the continuing condition of slaves in the centers of the city. If you can be a slave who would be an artisan in a different mode of production, but in one which allows for slavery formally, it doesn't go away until the whole empire goes away.
Speaker 1:So let me tell you another problem with Samir Amin away until the whole empire goes away. So let me tell you another problem with Samir Amin. While I'm actually sympathetic to one of the things he talks about, about the various absolutist empires, like in China, the Islamicate ones, etc. And I think he has a point about just calling that Asiatic despotism is flattening Right. One other thing I will say, though, is he doesn't seem to mention this. Does this, does other damage to the modes? Because, uh, slavery is essential to some of those absolutist empires and not others, including the caliphates, right?
Speaker 3:so that's why he talks about an extractive production rather than a slave motor production right right?
Speaker 2:no, he talks about a tri Right.
Speaker 3:No, he talks about a tributary mode of production.
Speaker 1:He talks about a tributary mode of production, because then you don't have to focus like slaves can still exist. But we're not going to deal with that at all.
Speaker 2:Right and that sort of papers over the difference between feudal society and slave society. Yeah, I think that's the point.
Speaker 3:I think that's the point. He's trying to basically bring them together and in some ways I think it does a lot of work. It's intellectually kind of an interesting, it's useful, and in other ways it makes new problems where the old problems didn't exist. So it takes the problems and moves it over to. You know, it creates the same amount of problems, though Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, go ahead of problems, though I mean right, yeah, go ahead. I was going to say it. It papers over the class conflict that arises under feudalism. That's not possible under slave society all right, yeah, we're now.
Speaker 1:Uh, I consider the formation to the western centered in its generalization of the specific characteristics of history of the west and its rejection of the history of other peoples and all particularities. I actually do think that's a fair criticism of Marx's writing, of the Asiatic mode of productions is that he doesn't touch non-Western society in any serious way until the fucking ethnological notebooks. Like he does touch it, like he writes about the Taiping Rebellion. And we have to remind ourselves, just to remind people, more people died in the fucking taiping rebellion than died in world war one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like like um uh, just just to remind, like four times the amount of people, the bloodiest per capita war in american history is a civil war. And it's like one 20th of the typing, like it's insane, but anyway, and so I don't. I don't say that like Marx and Ingalls didn't think about stuff outside of Europe. They did, but they didn't.
Speaker 1:I mean Marx didn't write about it seriously until really late, like and often when he write about it, he did a very poor job right like his early writings on imperialism in india are just bad, really bad um, but I mean, I do think like by the time you get to the ethnological notebooks and you start seeing his interest in, in non-european societies and him writing about the united states, um, even though the united states he considered a post-european society, he might have, like, like uh marxian used the term settler, colonial, but he probably wouldn't have thought that that was a bad historical analysis of what was going on there, because he's like he mentions that he thought that the united states was part of the European world.
Speaker 1:Still, okay, okay, choosing to derive laws of historical material from universal experience, I have proposed an alternative formulation of one pre-capitalist mode, the tributary mode, towards which all class societies tend. So all class societies forever turn into tributaries. And I think this, this is universal, because it's so vague it's meaningless. Yeah, I do think it fixes a problem, uh, jason, but I also think it's so vague that I'm like I can literally describe, like the big man, the big man, theories of papua new guinea, before we're even talking about states as a tributary mode of production, and I can describe the uh, the umayyad caliphate that way. I can describe uh qing and ming china that way, if I can describe all those societies with the same fucking mode of production. It doesn't mean a goddamn thing.
Speaker 3:Right, they start to be a political distinctions. So there's there's a tributary mode of production and then there's a private, appropriate of motor production and at some point maybe there'll be a collective motor production. So there are three concepts of production, and internal to those. Now the new designations are political designations. So feudalism, whatever else, that's now political designations, are political designations. So, uh, feudalism, uh, whatever else, uh, that's now political designation, and that means we have the same amount of work to do on this question. Right, it's like you haven't actually solved anything. You've just, like I said before, you've taken our, our problem and you moved over to where we didn't already have a problem right.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think what samin is trying to avoid is like what liberal historians do, when they're just like there's no such thing as capitalism or feudalism or any historical periodization at all um that's, that's the uh, the um, the mantra of the modern liberal historians.
Speaker 2:Like historiography that we, that we learn in, you know, historiography one-on-one as grad students. It's just like periods do not exist. Everything is a long Duree and there's. And even taking the, the NL school idea of the long Duree and then flattening that even further, so yeah, periods don't exist. There's no such thing as systems.
Speaker 3:You know, it's uh, yeah basically the thing is like if you zoom out far enough yeah, that's true if you zoom out far enough, you can't see the distinctions between uh, what we call nations, but if you zoom in close enough, the distinctions are dramatic and very visible, because they're both true.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, this is my, this is my problem with like, yes, I can do the longer a thing, and if I really start doing it, I'll start like telling you that most everything that we see in the trans Atlantic actually began in the fucking crusades. Sure, like, and I will do that and mean it, but uh, I mean I that and mean it, but uh, I mean I.
Speaker 2:I personally think that there is value in the nl school method of looking at at, uh, the long duray, looking at trends and uh, the way that populations shift and the economy shifts, because then you can tell, if you zoom in further, that long trends in the shift of uh of economics lead to ruptural moments that help to redefine things. But like, just pretending, like oh, just because, just because millions of people died and uh the world was thrown into turmoil and uh several countries shifted over to new modes of production after the russian revolution, doesn't mean the russian revolution is important, because on the long, in the grand scale of things, it it's only a blip, which to me just seems like a really disingenuous way to look at the world.
Speaker 3:That seems like if you're taking Hegel's position and making it, utilizing it to argue the opposite conclusion.
Speaker 1:I think it's also responding to a different, also popular in liberal circles historiography though, which is the episteme our views of Foucault where, like every era, is a completely foreign country. We don't know why anything transitions anywhere. They're closed epistemes into discussion. Have a good day.
Speaker 2:God man, the guy just pops up. He turns up like a bad penny everywhere, which is terrible ideas.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it's like structural Marxism without any Marxism. We're not going to try to explain the transitions, just new epistemes emerge. Have a nice day.
Speaker 3:Without Marxism and really kind of almost without structure as well, yeah.
Speaker 1:It's structuralist, but it shouldn't be't it's post-structuralist.
Speaker 2:That's what he called himself all right, um. So it's like everywhere, man. So I mean the.
Speaker 1:The interesting thing is it makes history incomprehensible, which of course, historians don't like, even though that's a popular mode too. So now we're in this weird like yes, uh, you know, graber does this and dugan does this and so many people do it. Like, uh, uh, guilds are like public interest groups. Yeah, they are like public interest groups, but the scale and function of what they do is different. Like right, they're related but they're different. And it's that whole like pretending that when scales change, and it changes the entire way you organize around the scale, that somehow, because x emerge from our y, emerge from x, that x is y is so fucking frustrating and it's super dominant right now.
Speaker 1:Um, why do you think that is because the questions of hard demarcations are hard and there aren't, and what we would all say is there aren't really like there is no, and this is different from marx, but you and I, and probably chris would agree. There's not a specific moment where I can say this is when the world became capitalist. It was over a long period and it emerged over time, just like when we talk about, like the end of late antiquity and the beginning of the middle ages, which itself has all kinds of weird Christian teleological notions in it but nonetheless has all kinds of weird Christian teleological notions in it. But nonetheless we can see that there's a long transition period after the Roman Empire into what we might call feudal and minorial times political organization in Europe, right, right yeah. And it's tied into decadence patterns, it's tied into overlapping law codes, it's tied into a bunch of things.
Speaker 3:Well, it's kind of like if you took a color wheel. They're like four colors and you zoom in close enough to where all you see are the gradations between how one shade eventually becomes another shade, and the distance between the two is the closer you zoom in, the the less is clear and as at a certain point, you could say, oh, there's no such thing as color, it's all the same. It's like that's true, but also doesn't tell you anything right and it's hard to explain stuff like I mean.
Speaker 1:Even a liberal like thomas picchetti I mean, some of this is based off of speculative research would talk about like crop yields and productivity and be able to prove there's a massive difference in productivity between the capital and non-capitalist world. And then people go, oh, but that difference is really just industrial society. What the fuck do you think we mean by capitalism?
Speaker 3:you dipshit, you just renamed it to avoid the question there's a lot of that happening yeah, I mean that's, yeah, that's, that's sort of the uh.
Speaker 2:but I had a friend of mine one day who was like, why do we need to have, uh, multiple different theories of like oppression? Um, that, uh, that further, just narrow down the question to a more and more and more specific type of oppression for every single theory? I was like, well, so we can avoid talking about like systemic oppression, right, and that's sort of the watchword of liberal academia right now.
Speaker 1:How can we hyper-focus? It's both hyper-focus and then the opposite, which is the Abraham X Kendi. Systemic racism, implicit bias and bigotry are all the same thing. We're just going to go back to calling them all racism, because it's confusing to have multiple types.
Speaker 2:But you handle them entirely different. Systemic racism to liberals is just the aggregate of everyone's individual racism right, yeah, yeah, which is like just fucking wrong.
Speaker 1:I can teach 10th graders the difference when I talk about. All I have to do is talk about wealth accumulation over time, and even 10th graders would get it like yep, like it's, it's not hard, and yet somehow our liberal friends make this all mystified. And you're right. What you see is both trends. You either see complete demarcations where there's no continuity whatsoever and we have micro oppressions on the side of the other, or we're talking about it in such broad terms that everything is everything else. All right, anyway, right, and I think I think Amin is dangerously close to that. Frankly, all right. The hypothesis views the establishment of subsequent disgeneration of Rome as a premature attempt at a tributary construction. Wasn't Rome already tributary?
Speaker 2:That's the thing I might be very confused by this claim Always, from beginning to end, always tributary.
Speaker 1:It's tributary that you're fucking literally paying tribute. The level of development of the productive forces did not require tributary centralization on the scale of the Roman Empire. What Like forces did not require tributary centralization on the scale of the roman empire? What like like? This is absurd, asserted at such an abstract level that I'm not even sure what it means why, am I.
Speaker 1:The first abortive attempt was followed by a forced transition through the feudal fragmentation, on the basis of which centralization was once again restored within the framework of absolute monarchies of the west. So, I mean we, that's kind of true in that you have complex societies emerge again that you go from. And uh, joseph tainter puts this clearly when he talks about one of the things that you can tell about complex societies in the beginnings of states and the end of just like, lordship is you. You start talking about territorial terms, but if you want to look, and it goes back and forth, but he talks about, like you know what happens when a King moves from the King of the Franks to the King of France, right, which is true. I mean, that's a very like when you start moving from a kingdom of specific peoples to a, you know, which are not territorially bound, you're a leader of these peoples who speak the same language, et cetera, et cetera, and then move into being able to demarcate yourself with those peoples being tied to a geography.
Speaker 1:Yes, that is a complex society, okay, uh, but this idea that rome hadn't developed the productive forces that required tributary civilization centralization, I guess this is actually a backdoor like look, africa was more developed than europe, although again, the roman empire was fucking all over. There was more of the roman Empire in Africa than there was in Europe. But anyway, yeah, you know my whole rant. When everyone's like, when everybody's like the Western world begins with the Roman Empire, I'm like funny because the Roman Empire kind of overlaps with the Islamicate world even more.
Speaker 2:But anyway, Sure, and also it existed in what we would consider the east right. Like what? Like a thousand years after the collapse of the western portion right, the western portion is the part that fell first.
Speaker 1:Uh, this first abortive attempt was as followed by a forced transition through feudal fragmentation, on the basis of which centralization was once it gets restored within the framework of the absolutist monarchies of the West. He tries to go through a thousand years of history in a sentence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's so broad that it doesn't work Right Right Only did then the mode of production of the West approach the complete tributary model. So he's saying that we didn't have tributary societies until the West could compete with the Islamicate and Chinese empires? I mean, he's not saying that, but that's what he's saying. Yes, he actually does eventually say it. It was, furthermore, only the beginning stage that the previous levels of development of productive forces in the West attained that of the complete tributary mode of imperial China. This is doubtless no coincidence. Of course we're going to pretend that Imperial China was one state for that long, which it wasn't. How many different Chinese empires are there?
Speaker 2:I don't know I don't know my. Chinese history, but I know there's at least a dozen more than there are versions of the Romani Empire. I don't know my Chinese history before the. I know there's at least a dozen more than there are versions of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 3:I don't know my Chinese history before the 19th century Sure.
Speaker 1:I actually know early Chinese history and then I jump ahead to the Qing, it's like, and I don't know anything until around the 1750s. I know a lot I I do know, for example, korean history, and I can tell you that knowing korean history reminds me that chinese territorial cranes have moved all over the map right like during those time periods, my knowledge of history is very eurocentric yep, I do want to say this.
Speaker 3:I I mean it's. It's a point I don't really want to. I mean whatever, I think there's some justification for talking about the West as a concept as being rooted in Rome, Although it's very important to recognize that it did not exist until after Rome did not exist.
Speaker 2:Okay, I'll buy that. I'll buy that.
Speaker 3:The concept of the West is what comes out of the collapse of Rome and is almost exclusively embodied in the Catholic Church that held it together Christendom, it's Charlemagne, it's Charlemagne's empire it's Christendom, but that also would include the Eastern Roman Empire. The West and Europe become synonymous for a reason they are because of Rome, but they have nothing. Rome had nothing to do with it, even though they're entirely because of Rome.
Speaker 2:This is like an imagined community man.
Speaker 1:To go into this more while I talk about the fucking crusade, so much um, actually not on my show, I just do in real life. Um, is that the west as we know? It is a concept that emerges with the fall of byzantine right and it goes back to rome for its legitimacy, because rome no longer exists in any form.
Speaker 3:I mean it kind of sort of nominally exists in the Holy Roman Empire, but it doesn't exist in anybody's hearts, Although it exists in everybody's minds.
Speaker 1:Right, Everybody wants to bring back the Roman Empire, so I mean there is a direct relationship between Rome and the West, but it's a post-facto construction.
Speaker 2:Right, it's an animating concept more than a political reality.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is the way a lot of these things work. I mean, I'm going to say something super controversial. This is also true for China. China as a consistent polity, not as a consistent ethnic group been a consistent ethnic group for 6 000 years, but as a consistent policy is a reverse myth. Yeah, right, I mean that's.
Speaker 2:That's like germany, italy, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, that's all the, the big national project, was to fool you into thinking they existed prior to the 19th century, like um, with the exception of the first ones, which was france and england, and they got on national myth consolidations as early as fucking milton, so like um well, I mean english and french national.
Speaker 2:Uh the cut. Their national conception is very much based on conflict between one another. Right like the hundred years war, is where english and french uh national concept is solidified right.
Speaker 3:I don't think I'm I'm not prepared to agree entirely that it's all, to convince you that it was always the case. I think that you know.
Speaker 2:You're Justin Baler on us.
Speaker 3:There are definitely some arguments to be made that there are all kinds of proto-nations which eventually consolidate themselves into nations. The myth is that they are the same thing.
Speaker 1:This is what I'm saying. That's why I use it. In modern English, we use the term ethnicity to clarify this out, because we also use nation for things that aren't nations.
Speaker 2:If we talk about the US, nation.
Speaker 1:It's not a nation. The myth is that the bretons, the occitans, the burgundians and the french are all the same thing right, right, and they were not, and this is the other thing that we are now right, uh, and and it's. But you see the problems with this when you look at the peripheries of those national ideas. So Italy gets a little bit sticky. When you look at Sicily, france gets a little bit sticky. When you I don't know talk about the Bretons, actually, that's actually where it's a little bit weaker.
Speaker 2:Or the sort of almost non-existent anymore ethnicities that exist in the apennines right.
Speaker 1:Not apennines, yeah, pyrenees right right um, england gets real kind of ticky when you're not england. Britain gets real kind of tickly when you have to deal with wells and scotland. Right, like it's. Like it's like, are they part of it or not? Yes and no, like it's.
Speaker 3:Go ahead. There's a further complication too, because you're French. You now, I mean, unless you're of the very far right. French means whoever moves to France and adopts French customs speaks the French language. So the concept of French now is much closer to the Roman concept of Roman than the old French concept of French, which was an ethnicity which, as an identification, had to be forced upon other ethnicities.
Speaker 3:Now that project has been so successful that is no longer existent so you could be from algeria and you moved to france, but you're actually a frenchman because you grew up in france, whatever, so, other than the fact that his tributary stuff is so vague, I don't know what he's talking about.
Speaker 1:I actually agree with the idea, but the idea that the See, I didn't realize his tributary mode went this far, because I don't understand then what isn't tributary and according to him, pretty much everything is Including modern Western society.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's where he loses, me.
Speaker 3:I think you can make a case for slave and serf based labor regimes to extract tribute. I think it's a lot harder to make the case that the extraction of value from labor is also tributary, because it's fundamentally different.
Speaker 1:Right. The backwardness of the West, as expressed by the abortion of Rome and by the feudal fragmentation, certainly gave its historic advantage and needed a combination of specific elements of the ancient tributary mode, of barbarian, communal modes, of characterized feudalism, and gave the rest its flexibility. This explains the speed with which Europe passed through the complete tributary phase, quickly surpassing the level development of productive forces of the west which it overtook, and passing on to capitalism. Okay, so he doesn't think capitalism is tributary. It was very unclear from the way he was writing.
Speaker 1:This flexibility and speed contrasted with the relative rigid and slow evolution of complete tributary modes of the orient, basically the, the orient Oriental, to use a racist term that I guess I don't, I accidentally used but the that the Asian societies and the African societies were so developed and so complex they couldn't move very fast. Okay, I think that's somewhat true actually, but again, and thus he had creates the ability to pass the capitalism quickly to the consolidation into, basically, the, the absolutist period of liberal, of liberal development. And again, I, that's kind of true. Yeah, um, I don't know, it's more complicated than that, but whatever, I don't think this is what I. I don't know it's more complicated than that, but whatever, I don't know what the tributary modes are actually doing when you're saying that everything in the world Works this way, except for capitalism.
Speaker 2:But he says that capitalism Devolves into a tributary mode.
Speaker 1:Yeah, eventually we get there. So basically he's a Neo-feudalist, except we don't believe in feudalism, we believe in tributarianism. So he's a neo-feudalist, except we don't believe in feudalism, we believe in tributarianism.
Speaker 3:He's a neo-tributarianist see our series on Morazo the idea that capitalism devolves into tributary is a way I think maybe not consciously, I don't want to cast that as a version, but it's very unconsciously a way of removing the locus of history itself from the class struggle to, let's say, national struggle instead, which is very convenient if you are a third worldist.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also are a class collaborationist of any variety. Honestly, yeah, Like fascists can easily pick this up.
Speaker 2:I mean yeah, I mean, this is it's way more.
Speaker 1:I'm not saying it's fascist people.
Speaker 2:but it Exactly. Well right, fascists can easily pick this up Third worldism and proletarian nationalism rhyme, you know, right yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also want to say I have, I have to, I have to add this little asterisk. This caveat is that when I told that third worldism in this way, in all its varieties, I also am somehow excluding Kevin from this because he's not here and listeners will just know that I like to say Kevin is a third worldist and that he, he gets on and we talk about other things. At some point we'll have to talk about Kevin and third worldism, but not today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can do that on your show.
Speaker 2:We'll ambush him and we'll all fight. It'll be a good show, all right.
Speaker 1:The contemporary imperialist system is also a system of centralization of surplus on the world scale. That was true until It'll be a good show through imperialism, despite what liberals tell you, because they spent more on their peripheries than they took in.
Speaker 3:But they needed. Yeah, it's the exact opposite of what is called imperialism. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:The centralization operates on the fundamental laws of capitalist mode and in its conditions of its domination over pre-capitalist modes of the subject periphery. So this is very different from Wallerstein in that Wallerstein talks about peripheries within the capitalist countries. Amin, even though they were supposedly they were allies, amin says that their you know peripheries are pre-capitalist and I'm like bullshit. A lot of this is straight up bullshit. I have formulated the law of accumulation of capital on the world scale as a form of expression of the law of value operating on the scale. Well, I'm also going to point out he uses the law of value in the Stalin mode explicitly, not in the way Marx writes about it. I'm not going to get into the differences there, but there are differences, but there are differences.
Speaker 1:The imperialist system for the centralization of value is characterized by the acceleration of accumulation and by the development of productive forces in the center of the system, while the periphery and these later are held back and deformed. I think that's true. Actually I would agree with that as a description of what's going on. Development and underdevelopment are two sides of the same coin. Absolutely Okay, skip ahead In the periphery. The socialist transition is not distinct from national liberation. Bullshit. Why did so. Many of the colonial revolutions did not go socialist at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. This to me just is wishful thinking.
Speaker 1:This is wish casting yeah, this is pretending it's 1970 and we don't know what happens in the 80s, 90s and aughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like, but he's writing this in 2018 this is essentially what the ML position on Russia and not the ML and the ML the most vulgar version of this position is taken by some MLs.
Speaker 3:Russia and not the ML and the ML.
Speaker 2:The most vulgar version of this position is taken by some MLs, and it's their position on Russia versus Ukraine, assad versus everyone you know, the Islamic State of Iran versus, you know, israel. It's that like, because they're at odds with the West, they are a vehicle for socialism.
Speaker 1:But the weird thing about this to me is that, according to this, these national liberation movements should want to be cut off from the capitalist world market. Right, but almost all these groups, they don't cut themselves off, they get cut off. Who's leading decoupling in the world today? Is it China or the West? It's the West who started the terrorist wars with China, us or them?
Speaker 3:Us Well, well, right and like. According to china, it's the west right, right, uh, so it just.
Speaker 1:it means that this does like even to the people in these countries. What amin thinks they should do is not obvious to most of them until they're forced to do it, and sometimes, like in the case of Russia today, that leads to the development of industries that they avoided developing in the past. In other cases there are real limits to it, but it consolidates national identities See Iran. Iran has major production limits that it's hitting, but, and would love to be able to reintegrate with, with more than you know, three parts of the world market. But so like. Here's the thing when we talk about national liberation, almost all socialists agree that it would be a good. In some cases Almost all cases even really like, well, it gets, it gets complicated. When we talk about, like, whether the catalans and the scottish should be free from you know whatever, um, I just I just want.
Speaker 2:I want the scots to be free from the uk, just because it would really really piss off the most annoying English people in the world.
Speaker 1:I want that too, but it's not because of any Marxist reasons.
Speaker 2:No, not at all.
Speaker 1:It's because I have historical Scottish Scotland and I have this vague distrust of the English.
Speaker 2:Blood memory of hatred of the English me.
Speaker 3:it's, it's the munich conference, right, right, um, it's gonna be, at least another three or four hundred years, before that memory subsides yeah, did we.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:We just wrap up section three yeah, let's, let's go on um, because it really I was about to say I have to.
Speaker 2:I have to dip out like I don't know if we're going to keep going. No, I think we're going to stop here.
Speaker 1:I what. I'm just finished this and we'll stop with one, this last statement. All right, it has become clear that the later is impossible under local bourgeois leadership, and thus the democratic stage is in process of uninterrupted revolution by stages led by peasants and workers' masses. This fusion of the goals of national liberation, of socialism and genders in its turn a series of new problems that we must evaluate, like why it never fully goes socialist most of the time. It seems like a big fucking problem for your thesis, for the emphasis shifts from one aspect to another, due to which real movements of society alternates between progress and regression, ambivalences and alienation, and particularly in its nationalist forms.
Speaker 1:Here again, we can make comparisons with the attitude of barbarians towards the Roman Empire. So, basically, to get to the decadence part of this, and this will be the last thing, and we will pick this back up and end it and then get on to the off even piece, and then we'll start with our next set of decadence readings, and I think we might do this for a year, guys, because I'm actually thinking like we can easily have a year of readings and just quit because oh yeah absolutely, because we get tired of talking about the same thing but, um, I do want to move on to the conservative decadence theory, though I think that it's going to be interesting yeah, so, uh, so what he?
Speaker 1:just? So we go into the next episode, we can finish this and move on to the afiboon critique of the icc, and I guess we have to talk about the icc's position as well. That's the international communist current, not the international court of criminal justice. Uh, uh, international criminal court, um the um. What he's arguing here is it took the west forever to hit a tributary mode of production after the fail of the roman empire, because it was too. It didn't develop the technology it needed to be as large as it was, for whatever reason. That is vague as fuck. I'm not convinced by that. But everything after that, which I do sort of see, that it takes the west a lot longer to consolidate uh into uh a polity like the chinese empire, the mughal empire, the islamicate world, etc. Right, uh, and that capitalism is devolving into tributary. So basically, this is neo-feudal thesis, except not feudalism because we don't believe in that, right. And it's also third worldist because the way out is in the developing world, because national liberation is automatically the same as socialism, because reasons.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 2:I even agree to a certain extent that the, the gigantic national polities that become the modern nation states, uh, you know, like france, england, etc. Uh develop later than uh than in the east, because of the reasons that he lists because they develop later they also develop on more stable ground.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely, because they can piggyback off of prior development Right.
Speaker 2:Whereas the Mughal Empire, the Islamic world, the Ottoman Empire, even the Chinese empires all crumble, uh, because of the, the lack of foundation that exists there. That's like there's a?
Speaker 1:uh centrifugal force that just pulls it apart, right right, although I would say one of the interesting things that I mean doesn't deal with is that the Islamicate empires are partially based on Roman power.
Speaker 3:The Ottoman.
Speaker 2:Empire starts off as the Sultanate of Rum. Right, Right, yes, Of Rome. Rum in Arabic or Turkish, I don't remember what language. Whatever Rum is, it's the Roman variant of Rome. I it's the Mormon variant.
Speaker 1:Rome I think it's in Arabic, even though they didn't speak Arabic, but that's probably the word they used, and when they say Rome, they mean Byzantium slash Constantinople they don't mean Rome, which actually came up during the ISIS shit in the attempt to re-establish a caliphate.
Speaker 1:But I mean, I think it's interesting. This little paragraph actually does describe why he's worried about regression in national movements. Uh, like that's why he's worried about islamism like he does. Like I want to say that, like he doesn't think that this is all good, even though he's presenting it so here. But if you actually look at what he writes in his own countries and when he was in Senegal he's originally from Egypt, by the way you get that he actually does have a much more nuanced understanding of all this than he's presenting here. But this, that's the core of his decadence claim and we'll come back to see how he finishes it.
Speaker 1:Um, I, I just think it's. It's weirdly for a guy who wrote the book on the problems of eurocentrism. He seems to really buy the myth of Rome as the development of European identity which, as we said, it both is and isn't. As soon as Byzantium falls. It is, and that's why I also talk about this. In development of race there's a Christian-shaped hole in whiteness, but it's still a problem here and I just feel very unsatisfied by this so far, even though I don't think all of it is wrong. I think it's more right than like the vulgar third world we talked about earlier, but it's still extremely limited and doesn't seem to have that much to do with marxism really at all like no not really, um, so far it seems barely at all yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:So on that note, we got to get out of here. I got stuff to do, chris got stuff to do. Sorry, you guys don't get through our episode today. We'll be. We'll be back in a month to finish this off and talk about the off he bong, three point series on decadence and also the ICC's position. So we know what we're talking about when we get to that, because it's a critique of a specific group of people, and then we'll get to conservative decadence theory for probably a while.
Speaker 2:Probably, if we do a close of reading of Ross, doubt that as we're doing of Sam samir.
Speaker 1:I mean that we're going to be doing this for years yeah, uh, sometimes I don't need to go as fast as in detail as I do. I just want to make sure we get the claims right all right?
Speaker 2:no, I mean with amin. Yeah, there's a lot packed in here. Doubt that it's writing a book for like mass public consumption.
Speaker 3:It's it'll be way easier.
Speaker 1:We could do way easier to get through it's nowhere near as intellectually sophisticated either now, although I will say, reading that book I almost asked you guys should we read from dong to dex against by jock balzam? But I don't really want you, I don't really make you guys read a 700 page book, yeah, um, but uh, but reading dot that I was like, uh, I agree with 60 percent of it, yeah yeah, I was about to say I agree with more of it than I disagree with, which I guess I just shows how red Brown we are Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yep. Even though we've been complaining about red Brown people in class collaboration this entire show. We would admit that conservatives might have a point about anything, yeah. That makes us dirty stress.
