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 4: Aufheben's Decline of Theory
Capitalism's crisis theories reveal more about leftist political failures than economic reality, as deterministic approaches miss the cultural dimensions of decay while simultaneously failing to deliver the promised revolutionary outcomes.
• Examining Aufheben's' "Decadence, the Theory of Decline or Decline of Theory" as a framework for understanding how leftists conceptualize capitalism's decay
• Crisis theories traditionally mark WWI as capitalism's turning point toward decline, though interpretations vary widely among Marxist traditions
• Neoliberalism is fundamentally misunderstood by leftists who equate it with laissez-faire policies rather than recognizing its public-private partnership model
• Conservative decadence theories correctly identify cultural symptoms but propose solutions that accelerate the problems they diagnose
• Contemporary manifestations of decadence include declining literacy, rising obesity, and political systems that increasingly cannot function according to their own principles
• The business cycle's reassertion after periods of apparent stability challenges deterministic theories of capitalism's inevitable collapse
• Multipolarity's emergence in global politics creates new instabilities but also potential openings for change
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, DRV, Kenneth McKee, JY Chan, Matthew Monahan, Parzival, Adriel Mixon
Hello and welcome to VarmVlog and Regrettable Century Co-Product man. That sounds like a corporate merger.
Speaker 2:It does.
Speaker 1:On decadence theory and we are going to be responding to the response to the ICC's Decadence pamphlet. But we're really referring to Off-Hebun's Decadence, the Theory of Decline're really referring to off humans decadence, the theory of decline or decline of theory, parts one through three. I highly doubt we'll finish it today, but once we get through this series, yes, we will start talking about Ron Ross Dunn hats book on decadence. So we're going to go over to the conservative land for a second on something other than boundless and bottomless, um, and talk about decadence, uh, and conservative thinking, which I've become fascinated with, because I kind of think that conservatives are gonna have a hard time, uh, with the fact their politics accelerates the decadent spirals they're complaining about. But that's not a new observation. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think that I'm looking forward to getting into is the since conservatives are obsessed with culture. Since conservatives are obsessed with culture, there's a lot more about culture included in their decadence there, and I'm interested in diving into that. And then also just like other things that leftists don't generally tend to talk about like demographic decline and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, usually it's like Mark Fisher or Davidid graber and that's about it. Yeah, yeah, my two bet norris um I mean, there's a reason why, though?
Speaker 2:because so, because nobody else covers ever oh yeah, yeah, I mean it's interesting.
Speaker 1:I think we go through waves of like. I was thinking about like, reading jacobin articles in different time periods and what the obsessions were, um and like during trump won jacobin, but trump won. But the ascendance of the dsa to it's but Trump won. But the ascendance of the DSA to almost 100k members back in 2020, which they are probably down to between 70 and 50k, depending on what source you look at. It's very interesting to think and talk about it.
Speaker 1:But my point is, the left seems to be culturally focused when it's culturally ascending and when it's culturally descending, it gets all either foreign policy driven or materialism driven as kind of a defense to the fact that it can't do anything in cultural hegemony anymore. That's my reading of that cycle hegemony anymore that's my reading of that cycle. But, um, you know if I find it fascinating that leftists have a heart, they have no problem being determinist about everyone else, but they have a very hard problem being determinist about themselves. So, um, but I, I, you know, I'm gonna say what I said when we started this series. So so, for those of you who are following along, you can find this off-heben article in the show notes Deaconess, the theory of decline or decline of theory, because this has an agenda, but I'm not quite sure what its agenda is, because this seems like it's part of the communization debates, italian left-com, adjacent council-com tradition that doesn't have that many people and can be super annoying when you encounter them.
Speaker 1:This much theoretical heft and also why pretend that this was mostly a left-com or Trotskyist thing? Because it's not like these crisis theories weren't all in Marxist linearism land until the 1970s, where they gave up on trying to make economic predictions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they really gave up on economic like developing new economic thought at all.
Speaker 3:And likewise this is the second international has its own sort of decadence theory, that sort of evolves into Bernsteinism or whatever revisionism, and that is also not really touched on it comes up as like a paragraph in part three.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then we don't really dig into it at all and I was like, ok, so we're not going to talk about why. Because third periodism in Soviet Marxology for those of you that appear between 1927 and 1936 in the soviet union, specifically where they base, and I find this funny, actually, we're basically outside of bolshevizing the party um, marxist leninists believe the same thing as bordigas, like that we were in a criminal decline, that we need a party dictatorship, uh, um, that the only united fronts that were viable were united fronts from below and through unions you couldn't work with other political organizations. But what people forget is that wasn't just justified as a response to fascism, which it partly was, but it was also justified as a response to the fact that they thought that fascism and world war was actually for stalling and crash like grossman. Is not that out of step with soviet marxology actually? And I, and that's uh, henrik grossman, um and uh, this article doesn't touch that.
Speaker 1:So just bringing that up immediately, because I was like, okay, we're not going to talk about the fact that these theories were mainstream until there was a revision of monopoly capital theory in the 1950s, which ML is all adjusted to, which is why the monthly review has always maintained that weird Baron Sweezy monopoly capital stance, pretty much unwaveringly even. Uh, which is about denying the tendency of the rate of profits to decline. Um, and I find all of these interesting because I I end up fighting with people about, like um, what defines neoliberalism, and when I say it's like public-private partnerships and whatnot, people act real stupid as if they don't understand what I mean.
Speaker 3:I think people's understanding of neoliberalism like most leftists' understanding of neoliberalism is either David Harvey's fault or just a symptom of the same understanding of neoliberalism that David Harvey has, and that is that it's libertarianism right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that it's just laissez-faire, which is just not remotely true when you actually look at policies. Right, like, the percentage of people working for the government has done down. The percentage of money and influence spreading throughout, spreading through government contracts and stuff, has dramatically increased. So, uh, while there's less people working for the government than in the fortis period in the united states, there's a shit ton more people dependent on the government. Um, and I don't just mean like in in terms of welfare, also mean I'm like, uh, our tech oligarchs are not possible without government contracts for a decade and a half after, and qe making um venture capital investments a way to hide money from taxation. Um, and the reason why I say qe doing that is qe made those investments, even when they were poisonous, not actually fall apart, and people use a ton of money immediately.
Speaker 1:How it does that is a matter of debate between MMTers, marxists and anyone paying attention. I find all that interesting. I find it interesting, though, because this is a purely economic theory of decadence. I will repeat that it's like the only reason they're calling this decadence is that the icc, the international communist current, called it decadence. Otherwise, everyone else refers to this as crisis theory. Yeah, right, right, and it's either final or terminal crisis theory or crisis cycle theory, so like um. So I found that frustrating because I was like hoping that there would be a more materialist understand of decadence, of decadence on culture, but leftist aside from their their talk about professional, managerial class stuff and I feel like I'm asked to talk about this all the time and I don't really want to anymore, but they don't have a theory of decadence anymore, even though they have a class theory that they try to use to explain decadence. I think.
Speaker 1:I think, the TMC is a thesis to explain the decadence of the Bernie Partist movement, as I now call them. But okay, so let's at least get into number one. People should find this on Limcom. It's old as fuck too, so there's a whole lot of. I was thinking about this In 2005,. You could think the business cycle was mostly over, because there'd only been the dot-com bust. In three years, the business cycle is going to reassert itself like a motherfucker and then theoretically disappear for another decade.
Speaker 2:It's going to disappear for like the 10th time and then reappear with the well.
Speaker 1:I mean you know if I'm looking at the stats right now and look, I've been wrong about the economic stats before, this is what I think we're going to have to get into today. But there's a lot of recession indicators, yeah right the thing that you sit, I ahead.
Speaker 3:I was gonna say I whenever you said, oh, this is really old, and I was like it's from 2005, it's not that old. And I was like shit, that's 20 years ago yeah, we're.
Speaker 3:I've been having that realization too all the time, chris I was like yeah, and and even then I was fully an adult and like living on my living on my own in a house that I was renting, you know. I mean, yeah, I've been an adult in in a leftist for over 20 years now and I got to tell you, man, I should have just been a normie.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's the that's the thing about leftism is that it's pretty decadent yeah, not a cool decadent either, like where you know, where we like lounge on couches and gorge on uh you know fancy food and stuff.
Speaker 1:It's a lame decadence that sucks yeah, it's fin de ciclo without any of the fun.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, so quickly, um. So this is, I find I find this article interesting and that it does give you kind of a historical development of crisis theory, with the caveats that I said that it under looks at the second international, even though it mentions it, um, and, and what that did? Um, and the debates that caused, uh, so it led to bernsteinism, because it was this idea. To explain how it led to bernsteinism, because it's not immediately obvious, but, um, basically, they thought that proletarianization of society should be a lot more of society. They define proles as almost strictly industrial workers. Uh, so that that mistake is not new or unique to contemporary leftists. It was what the second international really believed, um, although it's interesting that they believed it, because when, the more I'm reading capital volume two and three, the more I'm like why would you think that marx is just talking about formal sector industrial workers? There's actually no reason in the book to think that it's easier I think, it is Well, they're easier to organize.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's right, old shop floor organization is way easier to do. I mean, one of the ironies that I haven't heard anyone talk about is centralization of the economy has also led to hyper fragmentation of production, even though the administration of that production is hyper centralized. Now, yeah, and, but it's just the administration of production. It's not like the actual physical production mechanisms. They're all over the place.
Speaker 3:So yeah, um, I mean it's. Oh, matt chrisman made a funny comparison. He talked about like the. Uh, the american proletariat isn't, isn't like the, the, the peasantry that uh, marx referred to as potatoes in the sack it's. We're still individualized, we're like you know, but we're what? We're processed and stacked like pringles. We're more like pringles in a can. Yeah, well, I thought it was funny Pringles were more like Pringles than a can. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I thought it was funny. So, going back to the, no, I do think it's funny. I have a hard time when people ask me right now, when people talk about, like, the reason why the, the long march to the academy has happened, and and I always tell people, well, well, leftist it, the new left, didn't start really doing workerism until the late 70s and that happened to correspond with a financial crisis, high, high levels of distrust between different sectors of of the working class, um and uh, the beginnings of de-industrialization. So you know, when they actually tried to do it, it was already too late.
Speaker 1:Um yeah, yeah, that's, and that's I would love a deck mystery that dealt with that, yeah, we're gonna have to come up with one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean because I do think, like the frustration thing I'm getting from these left decadence theories is, frankly, is either denying that the concept has any validity whatsoever, which I find bizarre, or it's hoping that the tendency of the Red Prophets to fall leads to a decadent scenario which will lead to probably immiserationism or accelerationism as a thing that makes people go into depending on whether or not you're a communizer or a normal Marxist a working class revolt or whatever the communizers are talking about riot, comm or whatever the fuck.
Speaker 3:Instant communism yeah.
Speaker 1:And it is important to point out that Aufhebung some members of it became the British section of Endnotes, so this is tied to this is proto-communization theory.
Speaker 2:That makes some sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one thing that you have to remember about communization is they don't. They tend to be iffy on whether or not they think the working class is going to be a universal subject, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, the broad gist of this seems to me to be sort of admonishing people to uh completely ignore any ideas of uh, of like, uh, of a decadence theory and rejecting crisis theory uh, instead of decadence theory, which is what they're actually doing um, and then advocate for creating revolution.
Speaker 1:I think that's what this is, yeah yeah, so this is a hyper-voluntarist notion of revolution, right?
Speaker 3:rather than you know the way a normal marxist would look at this and think well, at the point in history where it is applicable, human beings should assert themselves to help ride the wave of change and push it in a certain direction.
Speaker 2:Yeah, to give history a push, but also recognize the moves even when you don't push it.
Speaker 1:Right, I guess maybe we should have a conversation, before we get into this, about the difference between voluntarism, determinism and whatever the fuck Marxists are doing. Because I do think, classically speaking, marxism is a deterministic but not determinist philosophy, meaning that we do think human agency and something like mitigated will I wouldn't say maybe free will, but mitigated will in aggregate can change the direction of what otherwise seems like arbitrary events, so that you can actually manifest changes in history instead of them being stochastic. Actually manifest changes in history instead of them being stochastic. So the promise of communism is that the technological and social forces are developed to the point that you can start actually planning for the future instead of just letting it happen to you.
Speaker 1:Right, right, uh, you know that's the old marxist gamb, but it's hard to get people to understand that, because there's this binary between deterministic and voluntaristic thinking, not just in Marxism but in, like everybody's thought, right, like you got, like the naturalists who believe in agency and the ones who don't, and you have the compatibilists who believe that, like, well, we have agency but we might not have free will, because free will is a stupid idea, uh, etc. Etc. Etc. Um, the other thing that you have to remember in these debates is marxism doesn't say much about individual consciousness. Um, historically that's a, or at least not early on. That's like like a Lukács Second International focus. It matters to Marx.
Speaker 2:I mean there may be a few others there's like Labriola and there are a few people who comment on the sort of around the edges, but really it is like a post-World War II concern.
Speaker 1:Right and what defines post-World War II Marxism? Expl explaining why crisis theory was wrong. Right, that's literally like that you can literally follow. The socialism is inevitable to. The socialism is something we have to build debates. The socialism is inevitable is winning that. For most of the 19th and early 20th century, the socialism as an act of will becomes much more of a bigger deal after the Bolshevik and Chinese Revolution and after the prediction of an economic crisis after World War II doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:The fortunes of social democracy as a distinct tendency are very much a. You could peg it to that, because you could watch the inevitable march become a march in a different direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So let's talk about some of these concepts that you're going to have to get through before even getting to this article. Because the one thing I will say about this article is, if you don't already have a fairly adroit understanding of socialist history and basic concepts, this article is not going to make any sense to you. Yeah, you guys agree with me on that. Like I don't think this actually, like I don't think this by itself would actually be a good way to understand crisis theory if you didn't have some understanding. So maybe we do need to talk about it, sure, yeah, I think that's right. So what do we mean by the tendency of rate of profits to fall?
Speaker 3:okay, so the tendency rate of profits to fall is that, for whatever reason and the reason given in Capital Volume 2, which may not be true to be fair is that the organic composition of capital a, the um, the, the well, um, I am not an economist and, uh, not the most well-versed in marxist economy economics, but, uh, I always thought of the rate of profit to fall manifesting itself, uh, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall manifesting itself to us as being pretty evident. But you know, I mean there are lots of arguments as to why it's not, and I'm not super well versed in those, but that is what the underpinning of what crisis is, that inevitably there will be. You know the means of, I mean, the profit will have declined to a point where it is, capitalism can no longer squeeze anything out and starts cannibalizing itself and then causing it to go into crisis.
Speaker 2:Right, right and there's a basic instability, there's just like all of the countervailing tendencies which allow for the system to kind of readjust itself, and so there's a bunch of that that I've never really been super good at and comfortable with. It doesn't really matter, because basically what it suggests, what it says to me, is that capitalism is an unstable system and so it's to stabilize itself is inhuman. There's all kinds of things that are inhuman as a direct result. That's about it, though. It's just it's. It's one of the many things about the structure of our economy which I just find to be detestable, about the structure of our economy which I just find to be detestable.
Speaker 1:I will say that part of the problem is most people don't define profits the same way Marxists define profits, right.
Speaker 1:So a lot of people will say well, there's some massive individual accumulation of wealth in the stock market, so we have profitability. But that may only be profitability by, for example, dealing with the fact that commodity costs in one area, because of divided and uneven development, are much lower than commodity costs in another, and that looking at profits in terms of individual income or even individual wealth, belies the fact that you may be seeing declining profits in per unit sold physical commodities, which I think is undeniable, because it's the only thing explains all this move towards rentierism. Again, because it's the only thing explains all this move towards rentierism. Again, you have a hard time explaining why everybody's trying to turn everything into a rent. If you had a highly profitable commodity market, right, right. But where I do agree with the criticism of crisis theory, I don't think there's any reason to assume that it automatically to a socialist revolution at all right, there's nothing about that at all um yeah, and I don't think it's necessary go ahead.
Speaker 3:Good, I was gonna say I don't think it's necessary to uh think that decadence or crisis theory is correct. Uh, I mean, I don't think it's necessary to believe that revolution and socialism, communism, whatever, is inevitable, to look at decadence and crisis theory and think that it's at least partially correct that there is this tendency for capitalism to become unstable cyclically and that we might be past the point of capitalism having any sort of progressive value at all.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah, yeah. So the other thing I was going to say was that the tendency, the desire or the tendency to see it as an inevitability has historically led to some really, really bad practices, or the lack of practice at all. Sure, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's what Off-Heatbook is getting to in this essay that we're going to finally start discussing. But I also think the hyper-voluntarism is also not really going to help. It's just yeah If all we do is convince everybody that you know they're gonna have to live in some commune form, and then whatever crisis but not an economic crisis, interestingly enough, for for the EndNote people, usually it's the ecological crisis will force us. I actually don't see how that's that different from this form of crisis theory either, but it's just, we don't need the working class anymore. It seems to be the implication.
Speaker 2:All right, which is seen as convenient for some people, I guess, but I don't see how it is. It seems very illogical.
Speaker 1:Right. So let's get how Off Heabung defines this, because one thing I'll say is they actually do explicitly intertwine three different concepts. So this is from the first part of the episode, introduction. One understanding that has been dominant among critics of capitalism is that the capitalist crisis, especially a prolonged and severe crisis such as we are presently in, is evidence that capitalism as an objective system is declining.
Speaker 3:Were we in a long and severe crisis in 2004, 2005? Well, there was the downturn after 9-11.
Speaker 1:And it was, I remember it being people talking about it it was severe, but yeah, it was a recession.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, and it was a recession. I think that it wasn't severe and it wasn't long, but I do think things leveled out relatively quickly. But they never adjusted themselves back to the way that they were before.
Speaker 2:there was like, like there always is in any sort of crisis, a massive transfer of wealth upwards that never comes back down, and then everyone is there's inequality is just adjusted that much more so things are a little bit harder, moving forward forever for yeah, like I think that you could uh, from a certain perspective in the mid-2000s, you could say crisis to talk about if you were talking in terms of the overall crisis of the culture, but in the terms that this person's talking about, no, I don't think so at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I find this fascinating because, on one hand, you can argue that we've been an economic crisis since the end of fortism in the 1970s. Right, yeah, uh, because that was hidden not by mass unemployment, but by stagflation, and stagflation leading to a doubling of the workforce, almost because most women entered the workforce in the 70s. You know like what one of the things that christopher lash is right about is, like corporate feminism was a good way to cover up the fact that you were actually, uh, inflating your way into much lower, uh a variable capital cost in labor.
Speaker 3:Um, it's an uncomfortable truth that, uh, adding women to the workforce allowed everyone to be paid less right, um?
Speaker 1:and and they hid that because of the discrepancy between nominal and real value, which is another. Another problem when the talking about the tendency of the rare profit to decline is that we don't have a world currency standard to which to measure all this stuff, other than fiat currencies, trading potential, which which is that's like the MMT critique of Marxist crisis theory, although they don't really believe that value exists, so it's just Euclidity. Anyway, let's read this the meaning of decline is either that it's created a basis of socialism and or that it is moving by its own contradictions towards a breakdown. Capitalism, it is said, is a world system that was mature in the 19th century. Again, what are we going to say was, I don't know, as a world system? I don't think capitalism was mature until the middle of the 20th.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would definitely say it took World War II to make capitalism a world system. Right I?
Speaker 2:mean, in this particular case it kind of depends.
Speaker 1:I mean in this particular case it kind of depends. The development of capitalism between a few Western European states is relatively advanced enough to where you know, like Engels could say you know, we're ready now. Yeah, he actually did say it in the 1880s and that's also why Sombart was calling the late 19th century late capitalism, which seems hilarious to us, because we're like, well, if you start capitalism in the 17th century, we're like a century and a half out from when you guys thought it was late.
Speaker 2:So there's an old social democracy which is rooted in a a certain understanding which says that this is mature, developed capitalism, but it's also not worldwide, and so from Luxembourg on, you have to kind of update a lot of these things then they assert it might be.
Speaker 1:It seemed a bad time to critique a theory of decadence. In the face of widespread disillusionment with the revolutionary project and with a lack of understanding of working class offensive, there is an understandable temptation to seek refuge in the idea that capitalism as an objective system is, after all, past its prime, more about heading towards, and actually towards, collapse. Well, one of the things I want to point out about the tendency of the rate of profits to fall is that, and one theory at least, the capitalist breakdown. But there's another theory, equally valid. That, I think, is an equally valid reason. Uh, reading a marks that it's just what drives the business cycle. Yeah, like you have a profitability crisis and then you have to get rid of all this overproduction, and you do that through, uh, basically slashing capital value, laying off workers, etc. Etc. Etc. Which also means there's less consumers, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1:This leads to the under-consumptionist, over-productionist debates, which seem like they're arguing the same thing, but they're actually not. While the answer to overproduction would be to increase consumption, it matters what order you think that happens in, as to how you economically answer the question. So, to get to what I'm talking about, if it's overproduction, for example, you can fix it by capital destruction, including war or anything that's going to destroy a lot of capital. If it's under consumption, you stimulate the economy so more people eat up surplus and thus cause more liquidity to enter the economy, which both sound like they mean the same thing, but if you kind of think about what their implications for policy, they're actually very different. Because if it's overproduction, stimulating the economy won't really necessarily lead to a decline in the pace of production.
Speaker 1:To fix the problem Under consumption was Rosa Luxemburg's theory Overproduction is kind of Lenin and the Second International's theory, I think. Overproduction is also, I think is Marxist theory. That doesn't mean it's right, but it's something we have to deal with. And again, I bring that up because this article at first doesn't make that distinction.
Speaker 2:I feel like for a very long time we kind of treated them as the same. A very long time we kind of treated them as the same, or at least I kind of treated them as the same.
Speaker 3:Marxist and. Lenin's theories, you mean.
Speaker 2:Well, overconsumption and, I'm sorry, overproduction and underconsumption is basically different ways to describe the same phenomenon.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the thing the Marxist humanists and that's the Marxist hyphen, humanists, not just Gramscians or whatever this is their politics are based totally on this and they're really like. That's why they also slag on Rosa Luxemburg so much, because they're like she ruined Marxist value theory and let something like MMT happen in Marxism. Uh, marxist value theory, and let's something like, um, mmt, you know happening marxism, um, okay, so they're like well, we, we are at a. I think. I think one thing we can say in the aughts the left was in a crisis, was general society in a crisis? That's a different question.
Speaker 3:Yeah that's a very different question right, right, um, like the left and the odds. Oh man, that's. That's when I came into the left right.
Speaker 2:The left was in crisis.
Speaker 3:The left was in crisis because the general society was not in crisis right, right, and because the left needed to be in crisis, right Just when we thought we were getting somewhere, as the collective left thought it was. With the, with the anti globalization movement, 9-11 happens and everyone becomes just the most slavering right wing imperialist, like even your good comrades, you know right-wing imperialist like right, even your, your good comrades, you know right.
Speaker 1:And then there's an overcorrection to that where everyone becomes slovenly, marxist, leninist, uh, campus kind of yeah um right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's the hard overcorrection and and as in us in the iso, we were were good third campus, which means that we were good, you know, first campus, right, arguing constantly against people who were like no, we should like what's going on in Libya is actually bad, and we're like, no, it's good. Just not the NATO part, like that fucking can be separated from what was going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's definitely to our eternal shame.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're doing, we have to do penance for the rest of our lives for that well, I also think you guys are in a like, like you guys were in the iso, which was by far at the time probably the largest revolutionary quotation marks organization.
Speaker 3:Uh, on the American West In the US, for sure, yeah.
Speaker 1:And it had been largely revitalized by a British component. I can tell you, as a person who dealt with Code Pink in the early PSL, that they were like critical support for Al-Qaeda and not Majin Adad in some ways.
Speaker 1:So it was just like yeah, it was a plethora of very confused there are bad options, right like it's like right um, pretending that like the cluster of countries that were not able to integrate into the new world order and and we're not talking about china here um, we're somehow really really existing socialism. That was a thing that's come back.
Speaker 3:It's a dumb move, but uh yeah that's back back in a big way now. Yeah with, uh, with the success of bricks, the recent success of bricks, the recent success of bricks.
Speaker 1:Well it's. It's interesting to me that we seem to be in a time period where the vices of the left of the nineties, eighties and aughts, and maybe the late seventies all exist simultaneously in the same group of people, which is a heightened contradiction. Simultaneously in the same group of people, which is a heightened contradiction.
Speaker 2:It's part of the way in which everything's kind of stalled out, so, like fashion, music, technology, politics, it's all just rehashing of what's already been. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Although I'm'm gonna push back on that a little bit, in the sense that, like, that's only not been true for capitalism during the middle of the 20th century right, I mean, I think, that's true also in its most dynamic era.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, Because when I think about part of what we're experiencing because I think about this in an occurrence of the capitalist realism argument that we can't imagine we can more easily imagine the end of the world or the end of capitalism Well, actually, we're not even there anymore. We can more easily imagine the return of feudalism than the end of the world.
Speaker 1:Than the end of the world, right, right, so even that's wrong. Fortis period, which are objectively the height of capital, the height of capital mitigation of its own crisis theory. Although it hit a, it hit a wall within a generation, um and um, ironically, uh, from a geopolitical standpoint, we're also not in a unipolar or a multipolar world. We were one of, we are one of those few times in history where you had a bipolar world.
Speaker 3:Right, um, right now.
Speaker 1:no, we in the mid 20th century we had a bipolar world and we only became multipolar when China broke off from the Soviet Union Like that, created three poles, and that's when everything got really unstable Right.
Speaker 2:Not for very long either.
Speaker 3:As it is now. Yeah, yeah, we're back to the three pole system. Interestingly enough, I would have, if you would have asked me in 2005, who I thought if there was going to be a multipolar world, I would have for sure told you that Europe, a strong, united Europe, would have been one of the poles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, maybe that'll happen now, but I doubt it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I kind of did yeah 20 years worth of rebuilding their industrial capacity before they can even be anything like a military power ever again.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the thing, though I mean Germany does have industrial capacity.
Speaker 3:It does. It's been consciously dismantling it, though, for the past decade, so they're going to have to redo it. You know, I mean, they could very easily, but I don't think germany is enough, is big enough and has enough as much of an industrial capacity as, say, like, maybe china or russia certainly not russia or china or the united states, but yeah, maybe europe under a united economy could but like good luck, uniting europe right, well, I was about to say it seems more like it's the tensions within that block are going to break it up.
Speaker 1:Oh for sure, like I feel like because the eu in some way is kind of a nightmare formation and that it's like not very democratic, um, but allows internal democracies to exist. So you have a lot of internal contradictions between the undemocratic nature of of Brussels bureaucracy and the democratic nature of other quasi democratic nature or whatever, of the parliamentary democracies who still have sovereignty over everything but their economics.
Speaker 3:Um, that's like a terrible idea if, if europe gets, I mean if the you know european warmongers get their way, uh, and europe does increase its uh military spending to create a united european army. Um, it's going to take some severe austerity, uh and uh cutting of social programs to get to that, and then they're gonna just we'll just see how how well europe sticks together once they start cutting all their social services in order to fund a european army.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah because I I don't mean to agree with trump on much of anything, but uh, he was right that we were fronting a lot of the cost of nato. To be fair, yeah, I mean, it's our imperial project, so we should but it's like 80, 80 of it, though, you know.
Speaker 3:I mean like like, uh, americans, we, you know we don't have social welfare so that we can have the most ridiculous military in the world. So I guess it's Europe's turn.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean again, that's part of when I say there's an aspect of this multipolar emergent world that I think is good. It's different than saying, well, whatever. It's just that we should recognize that to continue on with what has been is the only way to guarantee that nothing changes and nothing good is ever going to happen. The multipolar world I'm for it, not because I am not of the political bent which sees anything else in it other than just new chaos and thus new uh formations and new opportunity sure could be worse good I said.
Speaker 3:I mean it could be worse. We could just have a much more unstable world and then always be on the brink of war well yeah, I mean I think that's part of statistically speaking, that is the most likely outcome.
Speaker 1:I mean, just like, looking at periods of multipolarity, they are, they are conflict prone. Oh yeah, I mean that's I think that's part of what I mean um, and I think it's also the sides are going to have I don't think any side really feels totally comfortable with the other Like there's uh, but Europe is unfortunately caught in the gristmill. Um, and in some ways I hate to be this way, but as a return to pre-capitalist historical norms, because for most of human history Europe didn't really matter that much.
Speaker 3:But if the Libs are right, trump is going to be the new emperor of the United States and he's going to be subservient to Putin, so we don't have to worry about nuclear war.
Speaker 1:That's true. Yeah, oh man, that's true. Yeah, oh man, that's good. I'm not touching any of that.
Speaker 1:My funny thing is it seems to me very clearly that if you don't believe in decadence, you have a hard time explaining what you're watching in the United States right now. Absolutely, it's like you have a legislature willing to give up its rights that constitutionally it can't, but the Constitution doesn't seem to work anymore. You have a legal system that is totally incoherent at this point and really has been incoherent since the 60s, but only we've only been using a dictatorial supreme court, mostly from the liberal side of things, to shore up social peace. Um, and that's being undone. So eventually we won't have social peace.
Speaker 1:The people think, oh, the conservatives are just gonna like become a dictatorship. I'm like that's not gonna um, for a variety of reasons, one of which is uh, just like during the Bonapartist classic days of the of France, during the various back and forth between the you know, the first, second and third Republic, and and uh, the various, uh, french empires, uhires, the central government, even when it represents reaction, it's not actually all that internally coherent at all, right, so, whereas I will say, one of the things that we have to talk about is like. This is where I push back on like three worlds theory, because they're like, oh, you know, uh, labor aristocracy. I'm like, well, why wasn't labor aristocracy? The height of capital is the 1950s, but the height of american capital control of the world is actually the 1990s, which is not a period of like labor aristocratic period of privilege. It's just not. You can't make that at all no, um.
Speaker 1:So it means that that argument which was articulated in the 1980s sort of made sense, but like it's kind of been refuted by economic development since then um, I mean it sort of sort of made sense yeah, I mean, it never made sense the.
Speaker 1:The idea that labor aristocracy was somehow, uh, workers in the in the developed world were not exploited at all, that, yeah, that seems impossible. But but the idea that, like um, the productivity of the global south was being siphoned into things that helped American workers, that was true in the fifties, maybe in the beginning of the sixties. It's not true after that.
Speaker 2:That much though, yeah sure, like like we think about, like United fruit and right the Arab ends government.
Speaker 1:There's a there's a kernel of truth to that but American labor didn't benefit that much from the next round of imperial negotiations um for during globalization like that actually didn't help the american labor movement at all yeah, it's actually again.
Speaker 2:It's like I don't.
Speaker 3:For some reason this is really absent, but like part of what neoliberalism has meant has meant that anything about a global economic assessment from from the 1950s has to be reassessed from the 1970s onward look at what looked to be the, the hope of the third world, which was that the, the revolutions, would cause chaos in the first world because you would all of a sudden remove uh, these colonies, or pseudo colonies, from the market that they needed to exploit in order to maintain the living standards of the first world, and then, in every single instance, removing the, the giving liberation to these countries, not giving them earning their liberation through. You know, revolution and bloodshed didn't disrupt the first world. The shifts to neoliberalism merely integrated these countries back into the world economy. You know, like Vietnam and China, and everything.
Speaker 2:That was the whole point.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, everywhere. That was the whole point. Yeah, yeah, exactly, um, so on to the third. There is that, well, that and that. That takes us back to sami. I mean, what that we did last, uh, last time we were discussing this? That that's sort of his whole decadence theory is just based off of that.
Speaker 1:Uh, weird third world misunderstanding of decadence theory yeah, although also anti other third worldists, because I'm like, well, this doesn't believe in liberal aristocracy theory, that doesn't believe. I mean, like I actually don't exactly. Even after reading his stuff about tributary modes of production, don't exactly understand if he just thinks that all economies are just really probably naturally tributary mode like um, uh, except for socialism and capitalism. But only reason capitalism isn't according to.
Speaker 2:That was like an accident of timing actually I do think that's right socialism so capitalism, the, the rise of bourgeois society is what breaks us from this trajectory of various tributary modes and creates a possibility of the socialized mode. So that's exactly right. There are three in his conception, three possibilities.
Speaker 1:Right, and I actually think that's not right at all um I just think, I think tributary mode's too vague. Yeah what? Yeah, like I don't think the code of the, uh, the court of, like the callous in the ninth century works the exact same way as, like um, merovingian France are like the Byzantine empire, like it just uh. And I also think it like doesn't deal with mercantile marketization, which was a thing as early as the 11th century.
Speaker 2:So um, it's just too simplistic. It collapses.
Speaker 3:Too many things together yeah, it flattens it out to make it easier to talk about, and then it basically loses all meaning, right?
Speaker 1:yeah, I mean, yeah, that's the thing. It's like. It fixes one problem but creates two more that are worse. Um, yeah, so I don't want to throw like samir mean out, but I just also was like so what does he think? The other thing is like, what do they think the answer to this is well, it's like decoupling plus world revolution. I'm like well, how do you decouple if you still have to build up your, your uh, up your industrial base, which I'm going to go out and speculate here.
Speaker 1:I'm not an anti-degrowth in the sense that I do think, yes, we have to stop wasting resources for stupid shit. But I think one of the reasons why a lot of people in the ML world like degrowth is it gets them out of the problem of being dependent on, uh, the the capital world market for their internal development, uh. But then they have to explain why no one ever does that like, why aren't like? Why? Why does no one follow the Khmer Rouge model? Because that's actually the implication of some of that politics, so like. But back to this.
Speaker 1:So in the theory of decline, a number of issues are intertwined, and here's the funny thing is, I think they're the people intertwining this, they're being the writers right, right, price is automatic breakdown, the periodization of capitalism into ascendant and decadent phases, the notion of transition and the ontological question of the relations of the subject and opposite.
Speaker 1:At a general level, we might say that a theory of decline represents a way of looking at the crisis of capitalism that sees expressing an overall downward movement. The complication, looking at the theory, is that it has numerous versions. Among these presenting themselves as revolutionaries. The two principal variants are those of the trotskyist and left communists, which are some which are similar in origin uh are substantially different in their effect on politics. For some left communist, politics is virtually reduced to propagandizing the masses with the message of capital decadence, aka that's the ICC stance Right, while for many other Trotskyist theories, often more in the background and forming the theory of crisis than organization, if not their agitational work is he just talking about Mandelites there? Who else has a theory of crisis, like I guess the Sparts do, I mean, I mean I guess the Spartans do I mean it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think it's when you talk about the Trotskyists. Mandalites are Especially in Europe. They're the main ones by far.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, here's the thing. Like you guys were, ISOers Cliffites are the dominant in the English-speaking world for a long time. They're not anymore, but they were for a whole long time, right? Yeah, Cliffites have a weird definition of capitalism.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's literally everything, except for like four months in 1917. Right, right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's like barely an exaggeration, actually, which?
Speaker 3:is why?
Speaker 2:well, yeah, whatever, yeah, yeah, whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean, they have the. They're not just a state capitalist theorist which they took from anarchists and left comms. They have the Vegas notion of what that means. Yeah, like, it's like. What's the element of capitalism? Value production. But where's the value being about? Where is the happy valorize that? We're not answering that question. The fact that's valorized at all is what matters. I'm like right, but then like why are you marxist in the sense that, why would you think a transitionary program was necessary? Because it would still be state capitalist by your definition, like no matter what.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I just don't understand what, whereas some of the council communists and stuff, they just deny the transition. They're like that's part of Marx, they throw out.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean to the, the I mean to the, the, I mean the, the. So it's, you know, is you could have a transitionary program right where there's like elements of a market economy and that's still not state capitalist. What makes it state capitalist is the uh, the surplus value being extracted by the state. So, as long as it's the state attracting surplus value and not, I guess, councils, which to me is a state, but whatever, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's. It's very convoluted and weird and I don't think t Tony Cliff was anything approaching a theorist.
Speaker 2:I mean it basically just boils down to how decent the people in the state are.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there we go. Are they nice? Do they have the correct leadership? Actually, Exactly Is the important question.
Speaker 1:But we do have to remind ourselves that trotsky was a breakdown theorist. Yes, we wouldn't use the term decadence, but he was a breakdown theorist and like. One of the things when people clean up the transitional program document is they always drop the fact that trotsky predicts that the capitalism is going to collapse. So it's on a chord in the 1950s and that's why the transitional program was necessary. Yep, right, yeah, and everyone just drops that out. There's like not going to talk about trotsky being wrong, about the prediction he made and the death of capitalism and the blah, blah, blah, because that's where our traditional, our transitional program definition comes from. Also, none of us agree on what it means. Some of us think it's the same thing that marx argued against g'day to do, which is to pass reforms that are impossible and piss everyone off when they don't work, and somehow that leads to a left-wing revolution yeah even though it's the left-wingers fucking everybody over.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's never made any sense to me. Like I understand why marx was like I'm not a marxist, if that's what marxism is, and then watching the iso trotskyist bring it back. That's always been like what? But yeah it's. I know we're all shooting on Trotskyist because two of us are former Trots. One of us is former Trot adjacent.
Speaker 3:You're a former post-Trot, we're former Trots.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I started where Trotskyism ended.
Speaker 2:It is also just the case that at least in the amer, in the us, the american left is trotskyist or trotskyist adjacent, or formerly trotskyist right like literally, that's just yeah what defines our left, that's what defines?
Speaker 2:all of it, from the dsa to the psl, with the exception of the cp. But you know, yeah, yeah, anything critical, anything that, uh, if you ever encounter anything which is like nominally an independent, critical, uh, socialist anything, it's just in in some and to some degree is informed by trotskyism yeah, I was about to say, even if you're not a trot.
Speaker 1:There's so many people who, even on the marxist-leninist side, who actually have trotskyist conceptions of politics and don't realize it and they just, they just slack on trotsky all the time but don't realize that like their politics is actually closer to trotsky's than it is to like the official common, common turn communist parties of the 50s or whatever, like yeah, um, uh, the other thing I I would also say that the american left has been dominated by trots and maoists forever, because they're both. While maoists now are copacetic to a socialist state, historically speaking, they were both opposed to the official communist doctrines coming out of the common term or common form for different reasons and, yeah, most of the Maoists were Stalin defenders or Stalinists, but they were not. The CPUSA was markedly unsexy.
Speaker 2:The Maoists were just the anti-Trotskyist Trotskyists.
Speaker 1:Right, there's a good argument in both France and in. I have a whole book that argues it. Actually it's back there, both France and the United States and Britain. Maoism and Trotskyism both serve the same role, which is to actually pick up activists more tied to the university student and also to be an explanation of why the Soviet Union was beginning to look so decrepit. So you had a Maoist like Soviet defensist, but also everything's bad in the Soviet Union after Khrushchev line, and then you had a Trotskyist. Well, it's been fucked up since either 1921 or 1927, depending, you know. Yeah, so there you go, I just.
Speaker 1:And left communism is interesting because it seems to rear its head whenever there has been an anarchist movement or a social democratic movement that failed. So it made sense that you started seeing left communism coming back at the end of the alter globalization movement, started seeing left communism coming back at the end of the alter globalization movement, um, and that it stayed back until the dsa replaced the, the kind of anarchist left, and we'll probably see it come back again when people get burnt out for being. Well, let's also be honest a lot, of, a lot of marxist leninists today are actually ultra in their politics, but not in their rhetoric. So it's yeah, because they're not doing electoral work or anything like not in any meaningful sense yeah, all right, so let's continue here.
Speaker 1:Um, I don't think it's fair, however, how much you threw together in this, and it was, uh, why I shouldn't say see, they they're like all this is tied in the theories of decline, but they're all different, and I'm like, okay, yeah, but if you acknowledge that they're different, why are you all calling them the same thing?
Speaker 2:yeah, like, a few more explanatory notes might only make this too uh, too dense, but really it's like this paragraph is a couple of paragraphs, maybe a couple of pages to explain and to defend.
Speaker 1:Yep, I can kind of tell this was written in three different settings, though, because one of the things I noticed rereading these is that they repeat themselves a lot from section to section. So as we go through this, it'll get easier, because it's like well, they've already stated this, we don't have to recover this again.
Speaker 3:That's true.
Speaker 1:The crisis of capitalism are seen as evidence of a more severe underlining condition the condition, the sickness of the capitalist system. Capitalist develop brings about a steadily increasing socialization of productive forces and at a certain point, the capitalist forces of production are said to have moved into conflict with the relations of production. The concept of the decline of capitalism is bound up with the theory of the primacy of productive forces. The driving force of history is seen as a contradiction with its relations of production. It is quintessentially a Marxist theory in its understanding of the basic Marxist position and the preface to contribute to the contribution to the critique of political economy. For most versions of this theory, the change from mature to declining capitalism is said to have occurred around the first world war. Is that true? I feel like a lot of people think it's actually the second world war.
Speaker 2:Um it depends, because, uh, I think it's largely true, or at least it was like um uh. Hilferding, luxembourg, bucarin, lenin they all mark the first world wars as at the beginning of a crisis, and trotsky calls it a terminal crisis.
Speaker 3:It's only when that doesn't actually of uh marxism's, uh decadence theories that they discuss are, you know, early 20th century. They move on to to, they move on to later ones, but like for this first section, for the first section of that they discuss, it's almost all first world war, uh, the currents of thought that just came about right before, during or after the First World War.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Alright, so I'm going to read what they list as these theories. The present form of capitalism is characterized by declining or decaying features. Features identified by the change are a shift from laissez-faire to monopoly capitalism. That's Bukharin. That's why I'm surprised they keep on saying this is mostly Trotsky and left communist. The dominance of finance, capital that's Bukharin and Lenin. And the increase in state planning, war, production and imperialism that's Bukharin and Lenin, and maybe other people too. But monopoly capitalism indicates the growth of monopolies, cartels and the concentration of capital, which has now reached the point of giant multinationals disposing of more wealth than small countries. That's not what they thought monopoly capitalism was before the 50s, though Right, they thought it was the state very different. Yeah, it's very distinct.
Speaker 2:It's almost like it. Whatever it's, just again it's like a need. This needs explanatory notes right.
Speaker 1:You need a note saying that uh bucarin's definition of monopoly capitalism, which informs leary lennon's theory of imperialism, is actually not identical to the Baron and Sweezy thesis or the Friedrich Pollack Frankfurt School thesis which Heinrich Grossman was arguing against.
Speaker 2:Right, just because it says the words monopoly and capital doesn't mean that it's the same.
Speaker 1:At the same time, the phenomenon of finance capital. Large amounts of capital are seen to escape the link to a particular labor process and to move in short of short-term profit. That's mandel. And mandel doesn't say that happens to the fucking 70s. So, although it was a theory in the common turn used to explain fascism at one point. So, which was funny to me, because fascists were also complaining about finance capital because jews right um, right.
Speaker 3:So um, and that's I mean the the come and turn idea of what fascism was was just capitalism in crisis right just a complete flattening of any sort of explanatory power that that might have had.
Speaker 1:I hate to say it, but if I and I think you guys came to this conclusion when you did this episode on what fascism was that God? You did this. You must have been seven years ago now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like our second episode or something, or, third episode.
Speaker 1:But going back and looking at it, it does seem like if you split the difference between the left and right opposition and the bolsheviks, uh, between the trotskyists and zinovianites on one end and the love stone and bucar nights on the other, you actually do have a good theory of what fascism was, which is basically bonapartism and crisis mode as a way to manage a capital crisis, which is much more clear than what the fucking commentator was talking about.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, that was our uh uh marxists in the face of fascism series that we did. That's actually a really good book yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it made me less sympathetic to the Frankfurt School. So the Frankfurt School basically says everything's fascism anyway.
Speaker 2:Well, that's also what most people on the left say today, basically what most people have said since the Frankfurt School.
Speaker 1:Right, they won as far as their popularizing their, their version of what fascism is anyway it's funny that people think when I call stuff um bonapartists, that somehow that that is nicer to these people than calling them fascist and I'm like.
Speaker 2:Well, except for the nazis, bonapartists killed probably more people than fascists sans the nazis, which is a pretty big asterisk, I'm not gonna lie, but like, because that's like 10 to 15 million right there but um, I think I think the reason why people think it's nicer is because fascist just is has been so uh, it's been used as such an epithet for so long that it sounds like the worst thing that you could say. Like when it will? I forget the comedian, but he said something like you know, some people say when you say midget, that's like saying the N word. But the difference is pretty stark, because the first word you can say, the second word you can't say.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I mean it's got like a fascism, has like a demonic quality, almost. It's like, yeah, it's where you elevate it, uh, above the, you know, any sort of conceivable regular realm of politics, into a thing that is just the ultimate enemy. So, like you know, giving a pass to pretty much all of american history by making the thing that's happening right now into this foreign entity, you know right or, conversely, trying to pretend that the confederacy was fascism, because fascist still elements from it more that we have some people say, like america tends toward fascism.
Speaker 1:I was like, okay, sure, no, we tend towards bonapartism and racism and sometimes authoritarianism and and and and, but those are all kind of separate from fascism.
Speaker 2:Fascism is a unique blend of all those things, plus some more stuff. Yeah, fascism is a unique blend of all those things Plus some more stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, yeah, I just I find it. I have a theory. My theory as to why people do this is that it's similar to yours is that fighting fascism is the one time anarchists, capitalist, liberals, capitalist, skeptical liberals, um, communist, uh, of all variety, except for Trotskyists we're not going to talk about that too much we're all unified together to fight something.
Speaker 2:Right, well, right, that's the birth of and the longevity of the term left. When you say the left, what you're referring to is the broad collection of everybody who says that everything else is fascism. If you abandon that notion of fascism, you also have to kind of abandon that notion of the left. I think you should. I think we should be in favor of socialism, not the left.
Speaker 1:It's an interesting problem, but I also think what people tend to focus on is like the left as opposed to the right, and sometimes I'm like maybe we should just be focusing on what these people's policies, agendas and ideologies are like. Like Trumpism might be fascistic, it may even be fascist. I don't fucking know Part of it. I'll tell you the two, my two theories. That's one theory. My other theory is people like semantic debates because you, because you can be smart about them and still know nothing, like if it's about the logic of a word, you can argue that indefinitely in a intelligent way without a whole lot of actual research or facts my theory is is that, um, being anti-fascist is much easier than having like positive politics, right you?
Speaker 3:you could just be against the bad thing and you don't ever have to come up with a way to keep the bad thing from happening you know, plus it's fun.
Speaker 2:It's fun to larp yeah, it's kind of like how, ever since 1999, the anti-capitalist was like that's the thing. I'm against capitalism, I'm anti-racist, I'm anti-capitalist, I'm anti-fascist. What are you for?
Speaker 1:Well, I want to actually, even when you do spin this positively and I want to use an example of the MAGA people here they're not really for anything either. Even though and I want to use an example of the MAGA people here they're not really for anything either. Even though they have a positive framework as opposed to the left negative one, the details of their positive framework are self contradictory, don't make any fucking sense and, like we're going to have austerity and right wing populism at the same time.
Speaker 1:That's going to fucking happen. So I bring that up in relevance to decadence, because to me it's proof that we live in a decadent time period yeah, well, and, and like you said, trumpism might be fascist.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's like, in as much as it's got any coherent elements, then sure but yeah, but there's a lot of stuff that doesn't actually match historical fascist movements oh yeah and we just have to then go have a semantic argument about which ones were the most essential to fascism, and then by the end of it, I'm like I you. Ironically, if you do that enough, you do end up at the frankfurt school position.
Speaker 3:Well, it's all fucking fascist anyway, because, like the other elements of fascism and everything, and I think I maintain that the most important element of fascism that makes it uh so dangerous is the uh sort of uh anti-finance capital portion of it, like the, the corporatist element of it, which none of these modern, like fascist or post-fascist movements actually have. You don't have the thing that circumvents the left critique of capitalism.
Speaker 2:And they don't even pretend to. There's no posture in that direction either.
Speaker 3:Right, it's like Orban and Bolsonaro and people like that. They're like oh, they're fascists. Well, they're certainly strongmen that sit on top of a democratic state and probably abuse their constitutional powers in the process, but they don't have this sort of populist critique of finance capital and they're essentially neoliberals in every single way yeah, well, here's the thing is, ironically, the first trump administration kind of neoliberal.
Speaker 1:Second trump administration so far ultra neoliberal. Yeah, like, like, like neoliberal ways neoliberals weren't happy with in the past, like right um, so I don't know. To me, I will say, one of the frustrating things about this is I want to be like why don't we talk about how capitalism made everyone smarter than made everyone dumber? Or why don't we talk about how capitalism made us all live longer but then made us all fat, and now we're not living as long anymore?
Speaker 3:Well, decadence, there we go Back around to decadence again. It gave us. It gave us all of the things that we needed to be able to live longer and have healthy, full, fulfilling lives, and instead we can't access it because we can't afford it and we're all fat and falling apart and dying early.
Speaker 2:And also cancer.
Speaker 1:Cancer. But like being raised poor is actually the strongest correlate to being overweight.
Speaker 3:Sure yes.
Speaker 1:It's just, it's like come on, you took a group of people who historically were starving and you somehow made them fat and yet also not healthy, right?
Speaker 3:Now, getting getting gout is something that happens to poor people instead of like medieval nobility Right Right it's, but if you ask the left, actually all the bad things are good. All the bad things are good. All the bad things are good Because they happen to poor people, which are a category of virtuousness.
Speaker 2:So they're actually good.
Speaker 1:I actually do see this a lot of left-wing research that I've pointed out. If you look at the left-wing research on metis, which is like the Aristotelian category of cunning which they see in poor people, like, poor people have the metas to navigate the system. They have this inherent almost standpoint knowledge, right? Yeah, I've actually pointed out that like, well, when you do that, what you're saying is you don't even have to reform your stupid system because the poor people already know how to secretly navigate it and they're secretly somehow doing well, despite all objective indicators to the contrary. Humanity's conceptualization or like it is funny to me how and this is a Frankfurt school thing, but so much of the love of the underdog is actually also being like but we don't really have to change the system, not really. Like, uh, since fat shaming doesn't work, we can't talk about, um, obesity rates. Even because bmi is bullshit and it is we, we shouldn't talk about obesity rates. Um, you can be healthy at any size except well, uh, that's actually harder to prove than either way, than anyone thinks Right.
Speaker 3:Some individuals are healthy and overweight. That is true, right, I mean, that is an undeniable fact. But, like overall trends, if we're going with the only things that we could possibly do to make generalizable conclusions about things, we would have to conclude that generally, it's not. You know, but yeah, and I've also seen the idea that burning calories doesn't actually cause people to lose weight, which is the wildest thing I've ever heard in my life.
Speaker 2:I've never heard that, yeah.
Speaker 1:That's I have I have.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's out there, it's. It's a common trope on the left. I mean, I don't think we should fat shame people. I don't. I think we should give people healthy options. Yeah, affordable healthy option. I'm just saying, and also quit talking about affordable, healthy options when you're not talking about time expenditures sure, sure yeah hey, who can afford to buy expensive food and then who has the time to go home and cook it?
Speaker 1:right, even even if you like my thing. It's like I can buy some healthy, cheap food, and often do, but then I have to spend an hour and a half cooking it. And who has that fucking time?
Speaker 1:it's way it's takes way more time to cook uh whole foods that you buy at the store than it does to just microwave something or pick up like fast food or whatever um, and there's so many things about this, like people celebrating the decline of literacy as if that's a good thing, right, but for me that's like the, the most obvious thing where decadence really matters, because, like yeah, that's where the the right wing decadence theories are kind of also.
Speaker 2:That's where the the right-wing decadence theories are kind of also true a little bit right, yeah, they.
Speaker 3:There are elements of them which are absolutely true yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:well, it's funny to me that like when, like when I talk to educate about education, I'm like this has become a right-wing talking point and people go, no, uh. And I'm like, well, why don't you talk about it? And why am I listening to liberals tell me why? People, being a literate is actually a good thing, right, because I have plenty of? And leftists just don't talk about it at all, they just avoid it. Did you see that?
Speaker 3:I mean this might. This is, like, almost seems like just rage bait to me, but it wasn't. It was an actual article in a British newspaper, I think. Uh, that talks about how, uh, reading to your child gives them an unfair advantage. Oh, I did see that, holy shit, and I was like dude.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna read to my child even fucking more now after reading this it was like when people were talking about how middle class time preferences were inherently racist, as if somehow people of color don't have certain cultures that are more respectful of time differences than not yeah, and it's.
Speaker 3:It's the same sort of discourse about like expecting leftists to uh to read is uh racist racist and ableist, yeah, yeah that's like no. I guarantee you, like people of color, know how to read. Sorry.
Speaker 1:And value it actually, Sometimes more than white people do. Frankly, Sure, yeah.
Speaker 3:I feel like, when it comes with students that I was tutoring whenever I was a full-time tutor as a job my most determined students were generally people of color. My laziest and worst students were white kids, Right yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, which actually would stand to reason in like in a logical common sense way, right, like it is more useful, and more obviously useful, to people who are desperate, um, than to people who are relatively well off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like a lot of the, a lot of the students that I was tutoring um were only in college because they had, uh, athletic scholarships. So if they didn't do well in their courses like they didn't maintain a b average, they would get kicked out. So, like the white kids that I, like, a lot of the, the volleyball girls that I tutored were just, they just didn't give a shit at all like. But like the, the, like some of the black kids that were on the football team or ran track or whatever, were the best students I ever had yeah, I uh just like when I liked.
Speaker 1:I like I like teaching at community colleges more than universities, like personally, because my community college students actually listened to what I fucking say.
Speaker 3:Sure yeah. Like uh oh my God, like the, my, my freshmen, um, uh, I'm, uh. I have a uh, an uh upper division course this semester, but last semester I had a freshman survey course and those kids, like 80% of them, they didn't give a shit survey course. And those kids, like 80% of them, they didn't give a shit about anything, didn't show up, didn't even fully answer questions on their exams. It's wild that these people are in college.
Speaker 1:Well, another standpoint of decadence for me is like well, colleges don't make money from what they say they do, they make money from endowments and hospitals, yep, or they're going out of business. If they actually make money off of education, they're becoming harder and harder to sustain. But yeah, so I mean this is me arguing against an article while agreeing with their critique of a lot of what they're critiquing. But I just think I think this first part we're going through it slowly, but I think there's so much I can't tell if it's conflating on purpose or if it's just trying to cover too much and too short of a time space, but it does seem like a problem We'll talk about.
Speaker 1:Another thing they bring is statification is seen as evidence of decay because it shows that the objective socialization of the economy is snarling at the bits of capitalist appropriation. I do think, for example, the stock market is socialized capital ownership. It is like, yes, I have a savings, that where you can outpace inflation in a modern capitalist economy, you have to be one one billionth of a holder of capital. So you got to be like one. One cell of you has to be a capitalist for you to have any savings at all. Um, which?
Speaker 1:is why I have none, I mean, but, like I, having know how to play the stock market is interesting. That is a collectivized form of capital development. It is not entrepreneurial, um, and yet the advantages from that, for example, that we saw in the of the mid 20th century and Fordism, are all gone now. What do we have now? Short termism that doesn't just cannibalize the working class, capital cannibalizes its fucking self. Now, just like this would predict it would yeah, it would yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, why would you be running your actual businesses into the ground to increase your stock holder, your stock inputs, if this was not a decadent system? At this point, like, and we have like, and leftists don't talk about this, but I think partly because marx doesn't talk about this, but, um, well, I shouldn't say leftists don't talk about this. I think partly because marx doesn't talk about this, but, um, well, I shouldn't say leftists don't talk about this, marxist don't talk about this. Um, like, talking about the ways in which, uh, corporate capitalism really is kind of a different beast in entrepreneurial capitalism. At this point, it's super fucking raceful. In fact, if you want to have fiscal discipline in the United States, where do you look? Do you look to capital or do you look to a local government. You look to a local government because they're actually limited by their revenues and no one else is.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Government isn't. Large corporations aren't like venture capital, startups aren't, but local governments actually work efficiently because they have to, which is the opposite of what you would predict from classical capitalist theory. Why, um, all right, um, alright. War production is a particular for those of you. I'm skipping around the key points. I think this one's actually fucking super valid. War production is a particularly destructive form of state spending where large amounts of the economy are seen to be taken up by essentially unproductive expenditure literally unproductive, because they blow up, like if you actually use your munitions. Unproductive expenditure, literally unproductive, because they blow up, like if you actually use your munitions, they go away. And thus, interestingly, the whole Fortis development was kind of built on war economy because you could like, if you're developing stuff for war, that is necessarily going to be less given to overproduction because it's not really on a market for normal goods, it's on a market for people who want to buy it to destroy it effectively in its use. That's different from a commodity, any other commodity anyway, like, like, um.
Speaker 1:The epoch is in fact said to be initiated by division between the great powers, since they fought two world wars to redistribute the world. Market wars and third war, seen as evidence of capitalism is only way of continuing to exist by its destruction. I don't agree with it that even that, even crisis theory says that wars and the threat of war are the are the only way of continuing to exist by destruction. I actually don't think that's true. We destroy all kinds of other shit all the time. One of the things I'll say today is capital valuation gets destroyed in valorization all the fucking time. So let's look at the example elon musk, the richest man in the world. He is actually, from what I can tell, for the amount of wealth that he, that he that he owns, quote unquote, actually fairly cash poor yeah yeah, yeah, so he leverages the cost of debt to to write off the cost of taxes.
Speaker 1:But also it means that, since his valuation is on stock, if that stock drops or actually gets traded in mass amounts not for its valuation we discover that the value never existed, it was fictitious. But we can't actually discover that until someone goes to sell capital or you have a market collapse that destroys plenty of shit without war, like yeah.
Speaker 3:No, but look at 2008.
Speaker 2:This is a very commonly held position, though, that the war and threat of war as evidence of capitalism's only way of continuing to exist ironically, it's something that left communist and uh marxist, leninists tend to both both believe.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's why you have, every time that there's like a capital crisis, you have people freaking out that there's going to be a war automatically and you're just like why do you think that there's plenty of other ways to get rid of capital?
Speaker 3:one way is just to transfer it up like like so right so like if, looking at the uh, I mean, one of the things I always thought was uh just sort of threw a wrench in uh, that way of looking at uh, you know, the reasons for going for war would be the war on terror, right, like the uh, the minuscule little wars save for. Save for the, the war in iraq, because that really was a massive, massively destructive war that a lot of people got really rich off, the destruction of that cap and rebuilding of that capital, yeah, but like the, the world, the these miniature police actions all over the world, just cost people money.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, they were tremendously expensive. Like 20 trillion is what we spent, uh, last time I looked like.
Speaker 1:And another thing is like this also assumes that there's mass participation in the organic composition of capital. Okay, right, and for those of you who don't know what I mean because that's a weird way of phrasing things for non-Marxist but that you need more physical overhead than you need labor right now to get something off the ground. But once you do that, you don't actually employ that many people, so it's not a way to spread out, um, uh, capital dividends to a market that can just reabsorb all the production. Right, because so that's why fordism doesn't work anymore. Right, for people who don't figure that out.
Speaker 2:And that's like most people haven't figured that out.
Speaker 1:No well, most people think what the left should do, including a lot of critics of the PMC and whatever is have their 1950s back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that is the Sanders kind of vision of.
Speaker 1:Sanders and Corbyn. Yeah, that's both what they really had on offer. Yeah, okay, the crisis of social democracy and the literal collapse of the Soviet Union has been presented as a triumph of capitalism and as the end of history. In the West and East east it used to be possible to point to an exactual advance of socialistic forms, of apparently concrete evidence of the movement of history being progress towards socialism or communism. Skip a section now with the move towards privatization of nationalized concerns in the west.
Speaker 1:Yes and no, I mean it was privatized, but it isn't. It is not so. It is not de-socialized, which is a weird thing to say, but like public private partnerships really are the private profit but public risk model of capital. Yeah, um, and the privatization of the ruling class itself. In the east, the idea that there is an inevitable movement towards socialism, an idea which had been so dominant to less for the last hundred years, now stands undermined and the notion that the history is on our side no longer seems plausible. Well, I mean, people might argue that China is super efficient form of state capitalism, which I do think we can call China state capitalist, and I don't even mean it as an insult.
Speaker 3:Like no, of state capitalism, which I do think we can call China state capitalist, and I don't even mean it as an insult. No, I mean, yeah, I think that's absolutely fair. I think that they think that they're building socialism, but currently it's. I mean, I think that they believe that they're building socialism, is what I'm saying. The Chinese believe that they're building socialism.
Speaker 1:I actually had trouble reconciling Chinese statements to the Chinese Constitution in the ability of socialism. I actually had trouble reconciling Chinese statements to the Chinese Constitution in 1982 when they declared that they had actually achieved socialism. And that's still in the Constitution to this day. But Xi is always, since he's come into power, saying X date, we're going to achieve socialist modernizations and achieve socialism and then we'll move towards communism. So I'm like well, which is it? Is it what your Constitution says or what your policy statement says? Like because I say this? Because people would be like well, people come back at me saying like, have you read the 82 Constitution? And, to be honest with you, I skimmed it, but I hadn't. So I read it and I'm like oh, they do claim that they achieved socialism in the 70s, but now they're not. But now they're not claiming that when they do Politburo speeches. So I don't know what official Chinese government documentation is on this.
Speaker 2:I don't even know why you would do that.
Speaker 1:What's the point in saying we have achieved socialism? It's a legitimization factor, so the party can stay. Because, like after the great proletarian social revolution, um it, it really would have been easy for china to slip in the civil war.
Speaker 2:Yeah, very, very, very much so.
Speaker 1:Um, all right, the abandonment of the idea of the historical development of productive forces as progress towards socialism. Well, not in China, where it's still seen as so, but everywhere else. And communism has resulted in three main drifts and thought. One, the abandonment of the project of abolishing communism in turn and a turn to reformism as the existing system by the new realist market, socialist, et cetera. Jacobin Delinka after Jacobin took it over, yeah, corbinism, bernie, partism, etc.
Speaker 1:The postmodern rejection of the notion of developing totality and denial of any meaning to history, resulting in a celebration of what was. I actually find it interesting that postmodernism has been pretty much. It died in the mid-aughts and it's pretty much stayed dead. I was telling someone that we're still stuck in the 70s, but we were in the 80s and 90s, stuck in the late 70s, and now, theoretically, we're stuck in the early 70s, like, which is, which I also like. Isn't that a form of regression? But anyway, um, because intersectionality theory and all that shit, standpoint, epistemology, uh, sub-marxisms, etc. That's all early 70s stuff. And when that fails to articulate relatively quickly in france, you get the development of post-structuralism, etc, etc, etc, like, like, yeah, post-structuralism existed, with derrida going back to the 60s, but like it. Being so dominant requires post-Marxism to exist and Leo Tard to leave Marxism and all this and that's the milieu you and I grew up in. But ironically, we hang out with people who are younger than us who are really into, like the Combahee collective, which is an earlier form of 70s leftism, right well, I mean not to get Mark Fisher on you, but you know it's the whole obsession with retro like yeah yeah
Speaker 1:it's true. It's like well, we can still talk about the same Andre Lord and James Baldwin quotes in the 90s as we do today, 30 years later.
Speaker 3:When are we going to get a return to shitty punk rock anarchism, just making zines and everybody playing?
Speaker 1:I sure as fuck would like them more than I like some of the contemporary anarchists. Oh, absolutely, I will say. Anarchism has divided into two to two strains, which is, both of them are retro, but one of them is the? Uh, let's go back to the 19th century anarchist strain led by people like stowey baker, which I have some respect for, and then like uh, then it's like whatever the vosh is, this is a period of radicalism, before I become a normal democratic party functionary. Uh, which is the dominant trend of anarchists since the anti-globalization movement, not all, but if you're not a labor anarchist, that seems to be where you inevitably go right. Yeah, um, and, and this seems to like even smart. I'll give you an example of this Before people accuse me of being pro-Russia.
Speaker 1:I am not pro-Russia, goddammit, but I'm not anti-Russia either. Russia is just a place that exists. But my whole thing with like uh rain price, who I think is brilliant but just totally buys the NATO line on on Ukraine, like no complications, no, admitting that like NATO set set the Ukrainians up, because that would be that, would admit that maybe there was a fault in in the way Ukrainian nationalism played out. After you're in my Don he just and this, and I think in terms of theory, this man is brilliant, but in terms of geopolitics it's like well, you're just like every fucking Democrat. Like what is that? Conversely, there are quite a few Marxists who are now just fucking Republicans, but like.
Speaker 1:It is very weird.
Speaker 3:I would say that whenever I look back at a lot of the, the people that I knew from the iso, their take on what's going on with russia completely of any kind for you, just the wholesale like nato line, you know, and yeah, and that it seems to be a very, very large portion of the left is uh, takes that line um, I, I think, because I deal with marxism a whole lot, I forget that sometimes until I deal with normal liberals and I'm like, oh yeah, you guys all just like accept the standard nato narrative about this, yeah, um, whereas I critically.
Speaker 1:I have a very pox on all your houses, but maybe nato is the thing I should be more mad about.
Speaker 2:Dance, yeah, that's probably right, actually, yeah yeah, I mean that's.
Speaker 3:That's how I feel about it, too like I vladimir putin like the thing that makes me oppose Putin. It's the same reason I would oppose Zelensky. They both jail leftists who criticize them. You know.
Speaker 1:Right, and I do think we have to admit that the West and actually I would go so far as to say Europe more than the United States, which is a weird thing to say but that the that the west really set ukraine up like, yeah, and I and I say europe more than the united states because I think about that uh, what led up to euromaidan, and that's germany pulling shit as much as it is sure yeah, but as soon as it's merkel, and then johnson, and then it's the us yeah, well, I mean, as soon as my don happens, though, the us is there dumping money into the opposition yeah, that's
Speaker 3:true, to fuel it. And then you even have, like there's that victoria newland phone call, like I'm sure you've heard it where, like the that she's, she's talking to the, uh, the, the ambassador to ukraine, and they're picking uh who the next leaders of ukraine are going to be. You know, during the maidan protests, yeah and uh, yeah, I mean it is it sure, like yeah, I mean absolutely it was. It was europe, like leading up to it in europe, offering them that eu, uh eu trade partnership and everything else. That was the catalyst. But as soon as the united states realizes they could use uh ukraine as a, that could fashion, could be fashioned into a tool to use to weaken russia, then we're all on it you know, but we.
Speaker 1:That leads us to how the intelligence agencies are decadent, because old CIA would have played all sides. Yeah right, I've read enough about the CIA to be like no, in the 60s they would have funded also the right-wing response and they would have funded the pro-Russian side. They would have played all sides, which Putin does in America on the cheap. It does not very effectively, but I mean they do yeah yeah, well, I mean like it's.
Speaker 3:It's like what it was what jd vance said about romania. You know, they canceled the elections in romania because, uh, they they thought it was uh, uh, georgescu was um being funded by russia, which there's no evidence of that at all. But what they pointed to was that somebody bought a bunch of tiktok, uh paid for a bunch of tiktok ads to make it. You know, look like the russians were uh funding or supporting georgescu and it turns out, was one of his political opponents that did it, and not actually the russians at all. What JD Vance said about it, it's like if someone could spend $100,000 and completely destabilize your democracy and you have a terrible democracy. And he was right. Good point, yeah.
Speaker 1:Which, by the way, was basically a liberal argument for the US.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, and the same point applies to like Russian meddling in 2016. It's like, if that's what it takes, is that people on Facebook said things negative about your candidate, then, yeah, your democracy sucks and, by the way, our democracy fucking sucks.
Speaker 3:Right? Did you look at? Did you ever see the? They did some like analysis of how many views that the, the, the Russian ads received?
Speaker 1:Not a ton on facebook yeah, hundreds, yeah, hundreds of people looked at, saw them, it's they're kind of ineffective. I mean, one of the things that I find very funny is just like, also like why are we mad, like we know that israel and europe do this too? Yeah frankly, we know that like.
Speaker 3:we know that. We know that Israel pays American college students to post positively about Israel and it's not a secret and also we know that Americans get arrested for having someone donate on their Patreon who is located in Iran or Russia. Yeah, sometimes.
Speaker 1:Although ironically, it's Citizens United that makes that easy to do. I was actually telling someone I'm like one of the funniest things about Citizens United is like it makes it very easy to be a a foreign agent without even fucking knowing. It's like um like I really do believe that, like tim pool, had no idea russians were giving him money oh yeah, well, and, and then vosh was receiving USAID money, right?
Speaker 3:Did you see that? Yeah, literally being funded by the feds.
Speaker 1:So you know, I find this very interesting when we get into this, because this feels so divorced from now, it really does.
Speaker 3:This feels so divorced from now.
Speaker 1:It really does. I think when I'm reading this I'm like this debate feels very Would they still argue this today that there's no truth to any decadence theory in the current environment? I don't know that these people would actually no-transcript two decades ago. All right, let's go back to it. So we talked about the productive forces, postmodern rejection Okay, last one, the maintenance of an anti-capitalist perspective, but the identification of the problem as progress or civilization. Romanticism involves the decision that the idea of the historical movement was all wrong and what we really need to do is go back. That's just primitivism.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't think this nearly is a dominant hegemonic. I don't think this is very large scale. I don't think this is. I'm not really sure why this is. This is a point Number three. I think it should just be two points.
Speaker 1:But whatever, Point number three seems to be like this weird critique of a fight within 90s anarchism, which you could say is tied into the growth degrowth socialism debates. But it's not really. Degrowers don't want to kill all technology and maybe lobotomize the human race, a la John Sarazin in 1996. A la John Sarazin in 1996.
Speaker 2:But I mean, there's a more charitable way to read it, which is that what they mean when they say go back. They don't mean all the way back, Like this romanticism of going back to. Well, you know, the problem is progress. No, never mind. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1:I would say we do see a lot of revanchist left movements that are basically Soviet, Chinese, social democratic nostalgia I do think we should say that that's dominant today Going all the way back to primitivism and trying to argue that we can all be hunter-gatherers and a 99% die off of the planet is inevitable. That was a very 90s-aught thing. It really didn't last very long after that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's true, this applies to a small subsection of the anarchist left that was primarily located in the Pacific Northwest in the late 90s and early 2000s. Right.
Speaker 1:And if you weren't involved in anarchist debates or zine culture, you probably don't know anything about this.
Speaker 3:Well, we were involved in the hardcore scene and uh, a lot of, uh the a lot of the bands that we would tour with and play with were because they were like vegan, environmentalist bands were primitivists.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, I forget about how well we had Derek Jensen and Daniel Quinn were Derek Jensen, we were in.
Speaker 3:Austin, too, where Derek Jensen was a professor.
Speaker 1:Ah yes, before he got himself cancelled forever.
Speaker 3:For being anti-trans and anti-immigrant.
Speaker 2:What's funny, though, is that that all kind of started to disappear into the anti-Bush Iraq War era stuff by the mid-2000s. It's kind of diffuse. It's not nearly so concentrated to warrant a third of three points.
Speaker 1:Yeah, sure, it's like two of these points are major for the time period. One of these points is very much specific to a scene, if we're completely honest, the author of this is writing about a guy.
Speaker 3:he knows his roommate, His shitty anarchist roommate that doesn't wash the dishes.
Speaker 1:I mean it kind of reads like the way that people still talk about a Like, offshore Like we'll talk about the ACP as a major communist tendency and realize it might have 500 people involved at most.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like at most, but probably more like 50. Yeah, no, this kind of reads like the way that when, when you read people talking about the offshoring of american jobs because of cheap labor, it's like 30 years ago that made sense. I don't really know if that's should be talked about now, not in the same way. At least you should talk about as a thing which happened, rather than a thing that which is happening there is an offshoring of call center jobs.
Speaker 1:But well, sure again, but like no, I mean that happened and in fact, when people talk about reshoring, I'm like a whole lot of industry was reshored in the odd teens in the middle of the uh second obama administration. It's just that they're so odd, uh, to finish up this uh definition here, um, I'm just going to read some key quotes and then we'll. We'll close out for trots. The theory is less up front. Actually, I need to read more than that. Hold on, you can't start with the first cross part. All right? Uh, we see the theory of decline represented by the two main factions of the left question mark trotskyism and left communism. Well, why say that when you just mentioned fucking primitivism, like, like there I mean to be fair. Left communists do have a primitivist offspring in in kamat and jock kamat, but that's it, and most of those people became anarchist so this is a much lesser offspring yeah, yeah, with the hard left communists, the decadence theory is for the forefront of their analysis.
Speaker 1:that's not true for bortigas, by the way. I'm just adding that that's only true for the forefront of their analysis. That's not true for Bortigas, by the way. I'm just adding that that's only true for the ICC and maybe the ICT. Everything that happens is interpreted as evidence that decadence is increasing. I also find it interesting that they're not mentioning the Marxist humanists, who are probably even more attached to crisis they don't call it decadence theory, but crisis theory than even the ICC is.
Speaker 2:Well, and also again, when you talk about main factions, the Marxist-Humanists are larger and more influential than the ICC.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the ICC is like total nerd shit. Yeah, we know what it is Once again it's kind of like your point.
Speaker 2:Number three is basically just about how a scene You're when you talk about the main currents in the. You mentioned the international communist currents. Like I don't. I just I think that this is a yeah. Like you said, you're writing about a guy that you know.
Speaker 1:Right, for whom the capitalist crisis has become the chronic. All the great movements of the proletarian struggle have been provoked by capitalist crisis. That's the ICC. This crisis caused the proletarian to act and to become accessible to the intervention of revolutionaries. I want to point out, though it is kind of interesting, that Grossman, the Frankfurt School theorist, was initially of revolutionaries. I want to point out, though it is kind of interesting that grossman, the frankfurt school theorist, but was initially super influential on trotskyism and still kind of is. It was in cliff fight traditions, like he was resurrected in the cliff fights, but he himself was a marxist leninist and he got kicked out of the frankfurt school for being a marxist leninist. Like I mean, that's not officially why they kicked him out, but that's why they kicked him out, yeah and that is significant Right.
Speaker 1:So but the reason why he's associated with Council Communists is Paul Maddox Sr Mm hmm, there's calmatic senior was basically the Grossmanite in exile until Banerjee the, the Indian Trotskyist theorist, translated Grossman into English in the 70s and then Rick Kuhn finished translating him into English in Australia in the teens and aunts, I think. Um, so I do see why it's connected to the international communist current, which is a council communist group. But like that's such a small fucking group, like they hit above their weight, but still we're talking probably about 300 people worldwide. Maybe, if maybe a thousand worldwide worldwide, not, you know, and I'd say maybe, I have no idea, but it's not a lot of people yeah, it's very much, not a lot of people um, and I, you, nobody would have known who these people were, even more than they don't know who these people are now, in 2005.
Speaker 1:Did you know anybody talking about the, the international communist current, in 2005?
Speaker 3:I didn't the only people I know that have ever talked about the international communist current are us, when we're reading this article right, I know more than that, but not a whole lot more like I've never actually heard. I really don't know anybody.
Speaker 2:I have never heard anyone say international communist current until this recording.
Speaker 3:You travel in left-comm spheres. We don't Right.
Speaker 1:So I do know some members of the ICC, but I can count them on a hand.
Speaker 2:The fact that I haven't encountered not just I haven't met anybody in it, but I haven't heard those, heard anyone say that word. And that's despite the fact that I've been on the left and in various cities and pretty, you know whatever active for my entire life. That that should say something so.
Speaker 1:So that that's uh what he gets mad at the, the council communist for. But then we talk about the trots, for the trust the theory is less up front but still informs their analysis and practice. Again, okay, which trots? Because there's a big fucking difference between different trotskists. Uh, in comparison with the purest repetition of the eternal decadence line by the left communist upholders of the theory, the, the trots seem positively current in their following a political fashion. Behind this lies a similar position, despite their willingness to recruit members by connecting to any struggle.
Speaker 2:I mean that sounds like a cliffhanger there. Yeah, that does.
Speaker 1:That actually. I mean to be fair. Trots trying to show up. What is it? The RCA used to be the IMT does that now.
Speaker 3:I guess. So they got to do intros, right.
Speaker 1:The Trotskyist parties have the same objectivist model of what capitalism is and why it will break down. They gather members now and await the deluge. When, due to capital's collapse, they will have the opportunity to grow and seize state power, might will break down. They gather the members now and await the deluge. When do the capitals collapse, they will have the opportunity to grow and seize state power. This is a position of orthodox proselytism, which cliffites aren't actually, although they heard a similar position is expressed by the founding statement of the fourth international.
Speaker 1:When trotsky writes, the economic prerequisite for the proletarian revolution has already, in general, achieved the highest point of of of, of few tissue, a few fruition, fruition that can be reached under capitalism. Main mankind's productive forces stagnate. The objective prerequisite for the proletarian revolution is not only right Ripened but has begun to get somewhat rotten. Without a socialist revolution, and the next historical period at that, a catastrophe threatens the whole of mankind. Uh, this turn is now to the proletariat, chiefly its revolutionary vanguard to the historical crisis of mankind. Reduce the crisis, revolutionary leadership, and that whole trotskyist is always the leadership fault.
Speaker 2:Weird shit that they do so what's my problem with this is that, like this paragraph, this statement, the little uh, the quotation is so close to being right on. But I think for trotsky, when he says that, uh, without a socialist revolution in the next period, a catastrophe threatens the whole of mankind, I think he would do well to have a sentence which said something like and this is a real, actual threat, because I think that the historical inevitability means for Trotsky, this catastrophe which threatens the whole of mankind is like that's not really going to happen, and he would do well to say, oh, actually, it's entirely going to happen, it actually is happening.
Speaker 1:So a significant difference between the theories of the Trotskyist vision historically identified the former Soviet Union as a politically degenerated part of an economically progressive movement of history, which I think is I actually agree with that. Maybe I am a trot somewhere deep down, because I am sort of like, even though I direct a whole lot of terminology and frameworks, I am sort of like yeah, the Soviet Union was a progressive movement of history that was also pretty degenerated in a lot of ways. We're worse without it, but it also was not super great. Like that's my stance, but like um, okay, yeah, that's.
Speaker 3:That's the correct stance, in my opinion uh.
Speaker 1:For the left communists, it has been exemplified by the decadence of the period. Thus the trotskyist theory of decline, which tended to see the soviet union as progressive and proof of the transitional nature of the epoch, has been more bothered by the collapse than left communists, for whom it is just a state of state capitalism, except for the cliff fights, who also have state capital. The thing about the cliff fights that make them so difficult to deal with is that there's elements of left communist theory, there's elements of right of right deviationist theory and there's trotskyism, all in the same theoretical morass, but none of it's really spelled out very well.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, there's some serious dishonesty when it comes to the uh intellectual um inheritance and legacy within the international socialist tradition.
Speaker 1:Despite their anthony or the parts of the left wing of capital's program. I also find that funny that we still use that as if there's something outside of capital that's readily handing out these days. It is a general statement by Trotskyists about the decadence of capital that the left communists find themselves in agreement with. In fact, the ICC even thinks that the inadequacies of Trotskyist theory stem from it not having a proper conception of decadence. The underlying similarities of both theories can be identified in the account of their history Skip a line. Both trace their heritage through the Second International and their argument is whether it is Lenin or Trotsky or figures such as Panikuk or Bodega, that the classic Marxist tradition continued after 1917 or some such date. All right, and we're going to end here, because the next one actually does get into the origins of crisis theory and the Erfurt program as far as like it being adopted and that's a bigger topic.
Speaker 3:But it's weird, go ahead.
Speaker 1:That's that paragraph that you're talking about that mentions the second international right, but it's weird to like drop it in there and be like, oh yeah, it was foundational to the second international too, and also, by implication, when he was talking about monopoly capital, foundational to lenin and bakaran and the stalin um. But we're just not going to talk about that, we're going to talk about these weirdos. I got an argument with once and Trotskyists.
Speaker 3:Well, to be fair, we're talking about their argument that they're having about weirdos, trotskyists. No, I like doing this sort of stuff. I think it produces useful conversations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's necessary. I just find it interesting because I also don't remember a whole lot of people who were final crisis of capital people until 2007, when there was a bunch of them all of a sudden, for reasons that are obvious, of a sudden, for reasons that are obvious, but I don't remember them being super common in the early aughts, which may be why he's having to bring up 20th century trotskyism and then the icc, because, yeah, I don't think that was. This was a period of crisis theory being super dominant. Am I wrong about that?
Speaker 2:No, not at all. Yeah, very much not.
Speaker 1:I'm actually thinking about this coming out in 2005, going like what prompted this to be written? Because the whole final crisis stuff really doesn't become popular on the left again until 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. That's when everyone started talking about Grossmon again right, like no one was fucking talking about him before that.
Speaker 3:really I didn't really come across it until the, you know, until, like 2016-ish Right.
Speaker 1:So that's when it became super popular. If you weren't a DSA-er, right, right. My problem is I still don't know why this is decadence and not just crisis theory. Yeah, still waiting on that. Like, because both the ICC and Afibung seem to use those interchangeably. Yeah, while they admit actually earlier on that you can't really use them interchangeably because crisis theory for them would be one part of a decadence theory. Like I don't know. I'm very confused as to what they think decadence theory like. I don't know. I'm very confused as to what that, what they think decadence theory truly is. Um, and I'm also confused at, like, how little objective economics, our cultural commentary is in this. This seems to be all marxological and um, historiographic, not anything else. But we have gotten through seven of the first 38 pages of the first essay of a three-part series, um, which is still better than something. God, how long did it take us to go through Eugenie Morafsoff's article, which was only like seven pages.
Speaker 3:We did like five episodes right Right on seven pages, or like when we did Whitman.
Speaker 1:We did like four episodes on four pages and then glossed an entire book.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we were like you know, whenever we did, who was it? That was the Rodney Hilton. We just did a whole book in like one episode after, after spending four episodes on a fricking. Yeah, like like a small article that summarized his position.
Speaker 2:Oh man, I mean that's, I mean that's the value in front loading everything, it's like. Once you get that all out of the way, then you can kind of breeze through the yeah, I do think we have to front through this.
Speaker 1:the other thing, though, is that, reading through this again, I'm just going to give people a heads up, like he'll mention somebody will go away, will go back, and then it'll come back up, almost as if new, in another essay 50 pages later, as if it wasn't already spelled out earlier. That happens in these essays a lot, and since I think this was a collectively written essay, it's probably because they couldn't agree on what to cut out.
Speaker 2:That's probably true.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so on that note, hopefully we'll go a little faster next time, maybe because there's less definitions, but on that note we're going to, we're going to end this and, guys, we will come back. I know listeners probably think we haven't been gone that long because we released these way after we record them and this might be released a little bit closer to the last recording, but for us, we haven't recorded one of these in three months.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we'll get back into the saddle and try to get caught up. Meanwhile, you guys can live real life chaos while we're talking about it. So yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3:I mean, what is? What is our political system right now, if not decadent, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's just like Imperial presidency, smegidency, Like it's just All right and on that note let's end the show.
