Ross Wolfe Contra Domenico Losurdo

What if the renewed fascination with Domenico Losurdo says more about our appetite for stability than about Marxism’s future? We sit down with Ross Wolfe to unpack how a Verso‑to‑Monthly Review pipeline, a revived faith in China’s statecraft, and the polemical stretching of “Western Marxism” built a Dengist common sense on the contemporary left. The story runs through publishing politics, bad categories, and a philosophical move that recodes the twentieth century’s defeats as proof that the state must be forever.

We press on the scholarship: where Losurdo distorts Perry Anderson, ignores Russell Jacoby’s tighter frame, and sidelines entire currents like British Marxism, the Situationists, and Johnson–Forest. We reopen the Italian debates—Operaismo, Tronti, Althusser—and ask whether Sartre’s and workerist priorities were really blind to anti‑colonial struggle or simply refused to romanticize models that never fit advanced capitalism. From there, we tackle the hinge: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Does it license a permanent state, or did Marx and Lenin get it right that the state’s existence tracks class antagonism and should wither as class society is abolished?

The conversation widens to strategy. We examine the labor‑aristocracy thesis, the quiet third‑worldism that relieves organizers of responsibility at home, and the way China’s present contradictions—major trade with Israel, BRICS diplomacy, GDP slowdown, regional rivalries—undercut claims that socialism can be national. If history “could only go this way,” what is left to change? We make the case for rebuilding class independence and international coordination in the core and periphery alike, not lowering horizons to match yesterday’s outcomes.

Subscribe, share, and leave a review to keep these long‑form dives alive. Then tell us: should the left reclaim the withering of the state—or retire it?

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stakes: Losurdo’s Appeal
• 4:27 From Liberalism To Stalin: Translation And Reception
• 9:37 Verso, Monthly Review, And A Shift Toward Dengism
• 15:27 Why Dengism Rose And How China’s Image Changed
• 22:47 Rockhill, Red Sails, And The CIA Thesis
• 30:17 What “Western Marxism” Even Means
• 39:17 Omissions, Misreadings, And Sloppy Citations
• 46:47 Eurocommunism, Operaismo, And Sartre Revisited
• 56:17 The Hegel Problem: State, Law, And Withering Away
• 1:05:17 Neo‑Stalinism, Socialism In One Country, And Defeat
• 1:14:17 Labor Aristocracy, Third‑Worldism, And Strategy
• 1:25:17 China, Israel, Trade, And Present Contradictions
• 1:34:47 GDP, BRICS, Tariffs, And Global Rivalries
• 1:45:47 What Real Internationalism Requires
• 1:54:47 Closing And Where To Find Ross Wolfe

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:49

Hello and welcome to Varnblog. And today we're talking to Ross Wolfe on a series of pieces he wrote for the New International, which I believe are kind of consolidations and concentrations of a very long piece that you wrote a while back. Um uh on Dominico Lacerto, or specifically against Dominica Lacerto, um focusing on uh well, actually it's hard to say exactly all that you focus on, um, but it starts with a critique of the Western Marxism book, um goes through a little bit of his stuff about Stalin, and then you talk about his book on Hegel's philosophy of right, which um I'm glad you noticed because I have said this too, uh, is a almost anti-Marxist text, which I uh which I think most people don't tend to internalize. Um that I know there's gonna be people responding to that pretty pretty uh uh strongly, but uh I wanted to ask you because uh I went gosh, uh back when you and I first met each other, I think um so over uh like 14 years ago, you interviewed Dominico Lacerto for um and on his uh liberalism book, which was kind of the rage in the early 18s. Um and I wanted to ask you, like at the time, I did not see Lacerdo becoming like a calling card for any faction of the American left, even the Marxist-Leninist faction were not particularly spouting the kinds of lines he spouts at that time. Why do you think he became so popular?

SPEAKER_00: 2:46

Yeah, so it's a great question. Um, in fact, like going back through everything, I discovered that you were actually the person who brought Lacerda's work to my attention. I think it was January 2012. And yeah, his book on liberalism, I think it was in the works then. It had maybe just been published. Um and he came to uh give a talk at the left forum in New York, and so I interviewed him as part of that, you know, focusing on the liberalism book. But yeah, it really, you know, made a lot of waves at the time and had this kind of broad-based left appeal, I think, you know, having been picked up by you know the big publishing house on the left, which was and remains Verso. Um, there was he had a couple other books that already were out by then. He had his book on Heidegger and uh his study of Hegel focusing on the philosophy of right. But um the liberalism book was kind of like that's where he came to the attention of a lot of leftists, I would say. And at the time, like, you know, I think the views he espoused in that book were I think had had a broader base appeal to leftists rather than leftists of a particular stripe, uh particularly a Marxist-Leninist stripe. I think that that really only became clear as further of his books uh were translated. I, you know, fairly early on, because his book on Stalin already had come out in Italian and had been translated into Portuguese, I believe, uh, I became aware that he, you know, was a fairly well-known apologist for uh Stalin and his regime. Um but really that only you know became clear over the course of the next like 10 years. Um and really, you know, because Verso continued to publish several of his books, I believe they published his book on revisionism, um, uh under the title of War and Revolution. And then uh long forthcoming only came out in the last few years. Uh the massive, massive tome that he wrote against Nietzsche. Um it became clear, like, especially, you know, as further of his articles and interviews came out, partially the interview that I had, and as well as with others, translations of his other interviews, that he was really a Dengueist. Like he um and on that basis he became championed by um thinkers associated with the website Red Sales and uh this figure Gabriel Rockhill, um his student Colin Bodale, uh who are part of the uh critical theory workshop. Um so yeah, whereas he had this like I would say larger appeal, um, that was less like discriminate. Um he's since like especially since um since Verso has shut down the idea of publishing the book on Stalin, that was published by um this press Iskra, which is explicitly Marxist-Leninist. And now um the Western Marxism book having been taken up by Monthly Review, which is continuing to publish Rockhill, who's like one of his main promoters now. Um, I foresee probably some of Lacerda's books continuing to be published by Monthly Review, which has always had, and I try to spell this out in the piece, a more positive appraisal of actually existing socialism than let's say Verso and New Left Review, the uh journal on which it's based.

SPEAKER_02: 6:34

Although I would say the flavor of that defense of actually existing socialism has shifted over the past 20 years. I mean, um uh they were I mean, they flirted with much more standard Maoism, third worldism, all kinds of things have come through monthly reviews doors. And this particular dungism is interesting to me because I think one of the things we have to deal with is like why was things like red sails so popular when Maoists like when you you when you and I met each other, the the provenamic forms of Maoist were like the RCP, Baba Vakian's people, the split off the split off from the from the RCP of the Kasama project, uh various traditional Maoist parties uh that were like remnants of 70s parties, like the various progressive labor parties, and then yeah, then the monkeys bash is heaven people who became the LLCO, the third worldist. You know what wasn't very popular was dungism, like particularly in 2012. And that kind of leads a question is why has that form of Marxist-Leninism become so dominant that when someone calls him a Marxist-Leninist, I kind of just assume they're a dungist and they actually don't know that much about Stalin. Like, you know, like like like you know, when I talk when I remind them, like even Stalin thought that you had to eventually get rid of markets in the state, like, you know, like um uh why do you think that is?

SPEAKER_00: 8:12

Well, I mean, part of it might have to do with uh Xi and uh Xi Jinping's uh sort of embrace of the Marxist heritage of uh of the PRC in a way that um his predecessors, especially after the death of Deng, um, you know, had kind of let the Marxism of uh of the People's Republic fall by the wayside. Um the anti-corruption campaign that Ji led was seen as like you know hearkening back to the roots of uh of Mao's Marxism-Leninism. Um yeah, it really was not sexy uh in the early 2010s. Like uh people really didn't care that much about BRC. It was largely there was a general consensus that uh that socialism with Chinese characteristics was in fact just socialism with capitalist character characteristics, especially with the market reforms of Deng. And in fact, uh the Monthly Review Press um largely mirrored that. Um, Monthly Review, again, it has a long history, it actually predates the New Left going back to 1949, but um it was you know had a very positive appraisal of the USSR, uh despite people like Paul Baron's um distaste for Stalin personally. Baron is a very interesting figure who actually has like biographical connections with the Frankfurt School. Um, but he had studied in the US, he was from the Russian Empire, um, having been born in 1910. Um but he studied with Preobruzhenski and who was a major left oppositionist, had a lot of his university friends killed by Stalin uh from the early 30s, but nevertheless maintained this kind of he he he viewed it as having played this heroic role, which you know, in fact it did in the struggle against fascism. Um I would say that that was largely despite Stalin. Uh but nevertheless, um after uh the Sino-Soviet split, the monthly review school uh tended to side with um the Chinese side in that split. Uh several of the uh its major economists, like uh Charles Bettelheim and um of course uh Samir Amin were Maoists of various stripes. But and Paul Sweezy, um, who was the editor-in-chief, the co-founder of it, you know, uh was an enthusiast of China up through the end of the gang of four, but ha having seen it gone down what he thought of as the capitalist road. So really it's a very recent shift uh back towards um uh more positive, uh positive appreciation of the uh People's Republic. And I view, I view, in fact, I mean, there was an editorial uh on the new Cold War and um that where the monthly review editors tried to sort of chart the back and forth um that uh their magazine has had on the issue of China. I view them the decision to public publish um Lacerdo, whose Dengueism is you know very well publicized uh as part of its consolidation towards a pro-China um stance.

SPEAKER_02: 11:37

Yeah, I mean uh I will say that in general, I think most of the left today is is more defenseless towards China uh than I mean, I would even say this about myself. But at the same time, I have been taken aback by some claims made by Western scholars for China that even Chinese Mao supporters would not like validate. Um, like uh so for example, like when I had Dong Ping Han on my show, uh I mean he still spits venom about Mao. I mean, but not about Mao, about about Dung uh and Mao and Mao's leaving the nothingness in charge so Dung could take over. Um even though we had a f uh like an 80% good, 20% that appraisal of G. And so I I was very interested in like, okay, so even Chinese scholars are not as enthusiastic as these new uh dungist um apologists. And with the dungism has come some things that I found very strange, such as trying to rehabilitate the Khmer Rouge, trying to rehabilitate uh trying to rehabilitate Stalin more than most Maoists have historically done. I mean, uh, like, you know, you know, Mao's famous, you know, what 80% good, 20% bad. It like he was willing to talk about the 20% bad. And if you were to read Lacerdo, uh it the the historical nihilism charge, which you know, I've always pointed out that has nothing to do, like ruthless critique of everything but things that might have been under pressure from Western powers is not at all what Marx was talking about. Like, nor is it a way to uh be honest about your need to change your policies. I mean, even from a communist point of view, if you were to assume you wanted the Chinese state to succeed, hiding your failures would not be a way to do that. Um so I've been very confused by this turn. I first encountered it uh before even monthly review. I mean, I encountered Rock Hill uh pretty early on and was like, I mean, I uh uh even though Colin's been on my show, I like Colin Badell personally, but I have said that like uh the way Rock Hill presents some things around, for example, um the Frankfurt school, like why aren't you bringing up that there were all kinds of Marxist-Leninist in the in the Roosevelt administration because the USSR was an ally? I don't like like uh if if you're gonna go back and pretend that this was a CAA plot back all the way when the CA was didn't even exist yet, but we're talking about the OSS, I mean he goes even farther than that, implying that like the State Department helping people to get over in 25 was somehow like a proto-CAA thing. Um I find this to be uh extremely problematic. But what I found even more interesting is when I read the Restern Marxism book, it wasn't even that. It wasn't focused on things like the Congress of Cultural Freedom or you know, commentary magazine or things that I'm like, we really could talk about like okay, how the US state could get these Marxists to capitulate this much. Lacerdo's book was more almost a uh I've called it a theodysse for why socialism failed. It doesn't make any sense when you think or what excuse me, why why socialism became unpopular, because he wouldn't say it failed, um, on the West, by uh just stating that basically uh academics, half of whom were not even Marxist, somehow prevented the reception of Eastern Marxism to the West. I I don't know how that's a justifiable assertion. Like it's just like, well, you know, there were things going on like like uh stuff that happened in the Comintern in the 30s, stuff that stuff that Stalin encouraged in the 50s, the Sino-Soviet split. I mean, you know, and while obviously their cerdo picks a side on the side of Sino-Soviet split, he also doesn't want to talk about it. Like um, and his disciples, uh, Rock Hill, uh Carlos Garrido over on over from uh Midwestern Marx. Midwestern Marx, which became associated with MAGA communism, and that's the distance from Rock Hill and Co. But they just you know, I read the I read their book, their book on Western Marxism. It was just basically a crib of Lacerdo with a little bit of Rock Hill in it. You know, uh that was pretty much all it was. Um so much so that I even went and looked at his Marx citations and saw that he cut off citations and cut out citations at the exact same places Rock Hill and um and Lacerdo had done, and often, frankly, dishonestly. And I'm not even sure he realized he was being dishonest because I'm not sure that the scholarship indicated that he had read the entire text. Um, so I've been kind of shocked by this tendency because it has struck me as also getting a lot of accolades for being philosophically significant, even by friends of mine like Daniel Tutt. And I'm just like, well, I can see that for the liberalism book or the Bonapartism book, but some of this is shockingly bad scholarship. Um, and it's just being promoted on face value. Uh and I think you you spell that out, particularly in the Western Marxism book. Would you like to talk about like what in Lacerdo scholarship was like called attention to you? You know, that you should be paying more attention to this.

SPEAKER_00: 17:52

Yeah, sure. Um, and just to backtrack and just uh a few of the things you said, um, I understand that Lacerdo's book books have had wide influence and appeal, and certain books more than others, uh, in terms of their reception. I am planning to have uh in uh uh talk with Daniel uh on his podcast, uh kind of friendly but antagonistic um back and forth about Lacerdo's uh various claims and assertions. But um, yeah, in terms of like Gerido, it's almost like, and I again I haven't really read his book, but you know, from what you've just said, I read it went from and checked all the citations. Yeah, so it seems almost like two steps removed, like based on Rock Hill, who himself is basing himself loosely on Lacerdo. Um, I do try to distinguish between Rock Hill and Lacerdo. Like Rock Hill, and again, I've only read his two of his long articles about like the Frankfurt School and the CIA and you know French theory and whatnot. Um, but I understand that he's got this uh trilogy coming out from Monthly Review Press in which he's gonna bring the receipts, I guess, and like bear it out uh in greater detail uh in terms of the um the archival work that he's been doing over the last few years. But to me, it it like his thing, like you know, who belonged to the OSS, who was publishing in like a CIA funded journal, Dormonot, um, as Adorno did once, or who did they bring over for the structuralism conference, or did uh you know, all these things that the CIA had its hands in. And again, the CIA American intelligence agencies broadly they throw their money around rather indiscriminately, often to undermine particularly in the 50s and 60s. Like yeah, I mean their their modus operandi was really to, if they saw a conflict anywhere around the world, their their MO was to fund both sides and have whatever side came out on top feel like they were indebted to them. Um obviously they they did favor certain outcomes um and uh you know were looking to undermine Soviet uh Soviet communism, Soviet Marxism, and perhaps I guess had some vague interests uh in certain quarters to promote alternative forms of Marxism, which is seems to be Rockhill's main contention. Lassurto at least tries to thematize it, right? Like he he views it and he's like he's using um he's using Perry Anderson's book on Western Marxism as a foil here, and um we can talk about a little bit about that. But one of the main ways that uh Western Marxism, which again is a term that I think is fairly shaky conceptually, um uh one of the ways it's been conceptualized is as a product of defeat. And this is by figures who are more or less ambivalent about it, figures like Kerry Anderson writing in a more Trotskyist vein in the 70s, figures like Russell Jacoby, uh, who was writing in a more council communist uh vein, who was very appreciative of it, who had a very positive view towards uh Western Marxism, and then you know Lacerdo writing some some 40 years later uh from a Marxist-Leninist um perspective, who had a very negative um stance towards Western Marxism. Um views it as a product of defeat that ignored the real successes of actually existing socialism and um was insensitive to the struggles that were faced by it, that compromised the sort of pure vision of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, and also as tone-deaf or um neglectful of the um the anti-colonial revolt that was breaking out along the periphery of capitalism. So he doesn't he doesn't try and uh like paint it in terms of like you know being funded by all these shadowy agencies of the way that Rock Hill seems to be really interested in. Um but there is nevertheless that confluence. And it seems like if Lacerdo or if Rockhill is kind of a pale imitation of Lacerdo, then Garrito seems to have been like a pale imitation of Rock Hill's, so at a at a double remove. Um but any any case, um yeah, so Western Marxism um again, it's kind of like one can begin with the kind of uh poor interpretive, um like some of the strong interpretive claims that I think are rather shaky. Um just even just by looking at the way that Lacerdo um frames his own book as a response to Perry Anderson's um considerations on Western Marxism. Because considerations on Western Marxism was really was written as kind of a critical balance sheet of the first 15 or so years of the New Left Review's activities, in which it was publishing all these translations of continental uh Marxists from Adorno to Althuzer to Gramsci to uh Calati and Delavolpe. Um really like what um what Anderson wanted to do in that book was to say that yes, like they made important contributions, like they uh were very innovative theoretically, but time to put all this to bed, like they really failed on their own terms and were handicapped by their by their divorce from the workers' movement. We think that Trotskyism is the only theoretically like serious way to both recognize the uh limitations of Marxism-Leninism, which he was Anderson, you know, under uh Trotsky's influence was willing to call Stalinism. Um like we can acknowledge the limitations of um Soviet Marxism without falling under the sway of the sort of dead end that is um Western Marxism. So the way that the way that um Lacerdo characterizes Anderson's position is that he's just uncritically celebrating um the great, you know, the the ingenuity of the theoretical ingenuity of the Western Marxists, when that's quite far from the case. Um again, like there's appreciative words here and there for various figures, you know, especially more so Altuser and Coletti in the book, but he is quite far from considering himself an adherent of any of the those schools of thought, especially by 1976, which is when uh considerations on Western Marxism came out. So even like the sort of framing device that Lacerdo adopts is, in my opinion, um a distortion. Like Anderson is is not he's he's not endorsing Western Marxism at all. Like he's he's trying to weigh its uh relative um strengths and weaknesses, but on the whole, he views it as kind of you know uh something to be abandoned.

SPEAKER_02: 25:13

Well, one of the things that's interesting, like reading the Western Marxism book, given its clear like dingest orientation, when the two books that uh I don't know that that uh uh I actually should be careful this. I don't know how how versed um uh Lacerdo is and and Jacoby um and Dialectic of the feet, but um he definitely was versed in Anderson and and yet yeah the it I have agreed with uh the other Anderson with Kevin Anderson that perhaps the Perry Anderson book probably set us back by accident, but that um because you know the for example when I'm like okay so the the Western Marxist uh supposedly is Lukash, who's tied to an actual Soviet government at one time. I don't like like I don't know how we parse this exactly. It's um it's not like Lukash was a big supporter of the Hungarian uprising, for example. Um so it it is interesting to me how that's all left out, but also the figures that that Lacerdo focuses on, only about half of them come up in either of those books. And like he doesn't get like you know, and uh Jacoby, there's whole sections about like the left communist and the KAP Day, and I mean, really, it's only the last what fourth of Dialectic of the Feet that even talks about um like Sartre uh Sartre and a lot of the French uh the French new left. Um, and you know, I kind of uh my one interaction on my blog when I published about uh uh Jacob Jacobi's book trying to repopularize it like many years later was like, well, you know, he was a little bit too optimistic about some of the stuff we saw in the 60s and like like read it too outside of the context of of uh Marxism Lenimism in France. Um uh and he, you know, his response to me was like, it was a long time ago, and I was like, well, that's fair, we couldn't have known. Like, you know, fair point. But that you can't have that excuse when Western Marxism was released. But I've been somewhat taken aback also that like some figures who were very critical of that book, David Broder, for example, um, over there at Jacobin, um, they kept that criticism somewhat behind the paywall. Like, if you were to read uh Broder's uh eulogy for Lacerdo and Jacobin, you would not know Broder's own critiques of of uh West of the Western Marxism book, um, which was published for for the for the New Left Review, but uh specifically not in its public section. So uh what do you make of that? Like, why has there been an unwillingness of a lot of people to to even share the opinions that they published on uh about La Cerda?

SPEAKER_00: 28:23

Sure. Well, I mean, I think that there was just generally from the Verso crowd, the new left review Verso crowd, uh, an uneasiness with his uh Stalinodongist politics. Um they obviously were quite embarrassed by the Stalin book, and you know, when very Marxist-Leninists of various stripes continually petitioned to have Verso translate the book, uh, they shut it down. And that, you know, the controversy around that has been you know fairly well documented.

SPEAKER_02: 28:54

Um, I wish they had published it so that people would shut up about it.

SPEAKER_00: 29:00

I agree. I think they should have published it. Um, but I mean, like mostly just because I don't think that it's qualitatively that much worse than um his other books. I mean, he recycles a lot of the same arguments that he employs in the books that they did publish, and the method that he employs uh in that book, the sort of comparative method or comparatistics as he uh terms it, uh it's the same exact method, just applied to a different object, which is like the narratives surrounding Stalin, this black legend of Stalin. Um, but yeah, to circle back to the point about Jacoby and uh dialectic of defeat, I'm fairly certain that he did not read he was not a that Lasserto was not aware of Jacoby's book, which um anyone who's ever interested in Western Marxism, I I always try and tell them that you know, if you're gonna read one book on Western Marxism, this this thought figure, make it the Dialectic of Defeat. It's a great book, it's short, it's very well written, uh it's conceptually, I think, uh more rigorous uh than either Anderson or uh that is Perry Anderson or uh certainly Lacerdo. Um and just uh full disclosure, I actually met with Jacoby in LA uh as I was writing this piece and just trying to figure out all the different politics of different left-wing publishing houses from the 60s through the 80s, um, you know, around this term Western Marxism. Um But yeah, I mean Kevin, like I would say, like, and just to, you know, kind of put this to bed, Western Marxism, I think, at its most coherent, like in its most coherent use or sense, um, is rather narrowly defined as like. Centered around the fallout from two sort of foundational texts in the 20s, which are explicitly Hegelian Marxist, which are, of course, Long Essay Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch, and the essay collection, History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukatsch. His London book was also important. He also had a defense of the history and class consciousness book that was only unearthed like 70 years later. The Taylor book. The Taylorism, yeah, and the dialectic book, which is an excellent, excellent text. But I mean, it was not really it was like rotting away in an archive. Um but uh the way that uh Maurice Merleau-Ponty, uh, who really popularized the the phrase uh uh Western Marxism in a very famous essay uh in his book Adventures of the Dialectic, and the way that then Jacoby picked it up, and then Kevin Anderson, um, was they use Western Marxism really to refer only to this sort of Hegelianized Marxism. Uh so figures like the Frankfurt School and uh in France, then Henri Lefebvre and Jean Ponsart. Um they I mean they there was some like parallel between especially like Lefebvre and um the Frankfurt School, stuff that Alfred Schmidt, who was a student of Adorno, pointed out, the kind of um parallel course that they were kind of on. Um but what they all had in common in common, Merlo-Ponty, Sartre, um, Lefebvre, and the Frankfurt School was this reference to Lukac and the Korsh, um, which was very, very influential for them. Anderson adding on like Gramsci and um structuralist Marxism, all uh Althazer and his students, and then the anti-Helian Marxisms of Coletti and his student, or Della Volpe and his student Kaletti, um really turns Western Marxism into a kind of unmanageable figure because it just houses too many uh divergent tendencies within it. And then the way that Lacerdo uses it is even more nonsensical because he I mean he adds in other figures that are uh that are self-declared Marxists, like uh he he talks about the operismo, people like uh Tranti and Negri, um uh then of course Badu and uh Zhizek, but he also talks about figures who were not only non-Marxists, um very yeah, vocally anti-Marxist. Like, I mean, apart from a very short flirtation with Maoism, Foucault was pretty hostile to Marxism. He dismissed uh Marx himself as a minor Ricardian. Uh Arendt was like virulently anti-communist, even if she did uh have some sort of appreciative nods towards Marx in her book on the human condition and the first couple volumes of uh the origins of totalitarianism. She was uh uh she was a Cold War liberal. Um, and in some ways, uh even fairly reactionary. Uh depends on when we're talking about. But then of course, uh Agamben, too, um, whose can whose treatment in the Western Marxism book is just like almost laughably um short and like indirect. He like Leserda takes issue with him writing a sort of um uh laudatory uh introduction to a book by Levinas, which is very anti-communist. Um like at least like you know, even if I even if I found Perry Anderson's definition of Western Marxism to be uh unmanageably broad, it at least had the virtue of including only avowed Marxists. Whereas like with Lacerdo, it just goes all over the place. And even within that, like the the scholarship, as you mentioned earlier, is is is pretty pretty poor throughout.

SPEAKER_02: 34:46

I mean, we we could talk about that. Uh one of the things I was gonna I was gonna bring up is do you think what motivated what was in inclusion was from a specifically Italian context? Because I was thinking about okay, what weird things were Eurocommunists trying to synthesize in the 80s into their melange of post-Marxist Leninism that Lacerda was reacting to. And I just I but even I'm like I don't know anyone who would have cited Hannah Arendt positively, so I'm just uh I was at a loss for that. I was like, okay, I can kind of see Foucault because you have those flutations du Negri and you have the kind of post-operismo post-autonomia period in the 80s and 90s, and then you know, left populism with Laclau. Uh fine, I can see that trajectory from Eurocommunism to left populism, but that has nothing to do with the with the Marxism of the that's being critiqued in the 1920s. I mean, it really is. I mean, you talk about we were talking about Garrito being like two steps removed from Lacerdo. When you're talking, when you're trying to link uh 90s Hart Negri and LaClau to I don't know, Ernst Bloch or Carl Korsch, that's like 25 steps removed. Um, you know, I in fact, in fact, honestly, one of the one of the the big screaming things in the room, and something Losterdo is not breaking up, is a lot of the a lot of the things that he's talking about are kinds of divergent Marxist Leninisms. They're not even like Trotskyism or or Hegelian Marxism, you know, purely. They're some there are things that happened in from former Marxist Leninists or active Marxist Leninists in some cases in the in the in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Um and that seemed obscured in his book, you know. Uh so uh I didn't know what to to to do with that. Um, you know, I remember, for example, uh reading um Garrito, who again is like you know, basically a watered down version of this, but in some ways the watering down actually amplifies the implications, and they're not hidden, they're just stated outright. Where like there's an attempt to make Jay Sakai a CAA agent and an anarchist, there's an attempt to make Badu some kind of anarchist because he doesn't believe in the state, etc., etc. etc. And I'm like, Badoo's a weird platonic Maoist. I mean, you know, I don't know how you like he's actually part of your tradition. Um and the only thing I think they share is they're not uh they are not um Chinese or uh or Russian thinkers. But then the other thing I will tell you is there aren't a lot of Chinese or Russian thinkers cited positively in any developed way in any of the Lacerdo texts I've read. So it's not like there he's presenting that other than official state statements from Dung, Mao, etc., yeah, as having a developed tradition because he just doesn't seem to know it, or if he does, he's not sharing it.

SPEAKER_00: 38:17

Go ahead. This is this is true. And yeah, politically, I mean, again, the the different figures who've been grouped together under this rubric of Western Marxism are all over the place. And that's even just strictly speaking, the ones who considered themselves Marxists. So the Frankfurt School from its foundation, the Institute of Social Research, um was, you know, it was designed to be sort of a non-denominational Marxist uh institution because it had to play this, this it had to walk this tightrope essentially between the Social Democratic Party in Germany and the uh Bolsheviks, because the Marx-Engels uh institute wanted to publish all of Marx's works and the archive was held uh by the SPD. Um they they couldn't come out strongly on one side or the other. And indeed their members like were all over the place. So Marcuse, of course, was at a very young age, as a teenager. In fact, he was part of the he took part in the Spartacus Uprising in Berlin. Um Horkheimer was very close with members of the uh Bavarian Soviet in in Munich. Um you know, they had various uh USP Day members, so part of the independent Social Democratic Party that was anti-war um or opposed to the war. Um, but then you had figures, and again, that's just the Frankfurt School, um, which I would say is more interesting than you know the French and Italian figures that he talks about, because they recognized the crisis of Marxism earlier. But when you look at the French and Italian contexts, especially, um, those are figures who were heterodox but largely remained within under under the under the wing of uh of the uh PCF uh in French, so the uh official common the official Marxist-Leninist Communist Party and the PCI in Italy. Um so Al Tusaire, I mean he joined rather late. He joined after the war, he was not a partisan in the way that Sartre was, or the way that his wife was. Um, but he was a card-carrying member of the PCF uh from 48 until his death. Like he never renounced it, he never strayed from the party. Um he some of his writings, some of his interpretations did not sit well with the with like figures like Roger Gharadi, who was like the official uh theorist of the PCF, uh, who was more of a humanist, Hegelian humanist. But he never he never left the party. And he did, of course, his pro-mal statements, his endorsement of Mao's on contradiction essay, of course, that was provocative, but was still within the bounds of acceptability. Um in Italy with Operismo is a bit interesting because Mario Tranti and various other figures who began in the PCI, um they did kind of stray from it for a little while, but they eventually made their way back in 1967 and remained in the party up until its dissolution in 1991. Della Volpe never left. Coletti, of course, became like a virulent anti-communist, eventually a supporter of Berlusconi. But um, I mean, he's obviously like an unusual case. And that's that's another thing that like was just mind-boggling to me. It's just like in terms of um the objects of critique that Lacerdo chose, like, if you're gonna critique Western Marxists, like why are you looking at texts by Lukac and Bloch from 1915 through 1917 when they were not Marxists? And uh Lukash became a Marxist by the early 20s. Bloch really only became a uh Marxist in the early 30s. Um, and then also looking at interviews and lectures by Horkheimer from the 70s, which is like after he had completely di disavowed Marxism, and Colletti um from the 80s, like again, totally total disavowal of Marxism. So, I mean, unless you want to say like there was something within their thought, uh incipient within their thought when they were Marxists that led them to eventually embrace anti-Marxism, which is not the case that Lacerdo is trying to make, or if there was something residual within their pre-Marxist writings that carried over into their Marxist days, which again is not the argument that he they make that Lacerdo makes, then why include these texts at all? It seems to be outside the scope of um the inquiry, or what should be the inquiry.

SPEAKER_02: 42:50

Right. I mean, even if we took a really broad brush, as in your first article against Lassardo, you mentioned that why doesn't he deal with the British Marxists like E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Wyman Williams, uh Rodney Hilton, etc.? Why doesn't he deal with the situationists and post-situationists like Lefebvre de Boer, uh uh uh Vanegim, which the name who I cannot say, uh, why didn't he deal with the post-Marxists like Castoratist or Leotard or I mean, like, there's lots of like you know, I would go after some of those people.

SPEAKER_00: 43:24

Um, or the Americans, like uh the Johnson Forrest tendency. I mean, Dunaevskaya. I mean, obviously he would object to Clr James and Dunaevskaya for their for their one-time Trotskyism, but again, that's they're at least Marxists. That's more than can be said for Arent or Foucault or Agonben.

SPEAKER_02: 43:43

Right. Well, I mean, I I guess you know, CLR J CLR James is a notorious notorious eclectic for a Marxist because he's like got Marxist Spingaliism uh at certain points. But you know, one of the things is you can't accuse him of ignoring the third world revolts and decolonial revolutions. He wrote several books about it and supported it. So, like, you know, it's just go ahead.

SPEAKER_00: 44:09

Yeah, you can't do that for Sartre either. I mean, obviously, he's he was the poster boy for criticizing French colonialism in Algeria and in other parts of the world as well. And Sebastiano Timpanaro, again, um, who is not as well known in uh he's not as well known in the States or not as well remembered. He was briefly promoted during New Left Review's Trotsky's phase of the 70s, him and Livia Matan, and of course uh Ernest Mandel. But um Timpanaro was like also very outspoken in his anti-colonialism. So the way that Lacerdo tries to um what he finds them guilty of is not of is of not adopting his own prescribed uh anti-colonial um stance, which is he he outlines this in his book on uh class struggle, which is again if one wanted to read one book to get like an overall sense of Lacerdo's like theoretical outlook, class struggle is probably the place to start. I think you can get a lot of it just negatively by looking at um Western Marxism, which is of course the book that I chose. Um that's the book that I chose to use as um my point of departure polemically. But um in his class struggle book, he outlines this two this two-step, this two-phase uh anti-colonial uh revolt. The first phase being military and political, the second, and that's uh you know, basically the revolt, the uprising, kicking out the colonizers. And then the second part uh is this sort of state-led industrialization, the economic phase. And because I guess he thinks that Sartre in his book on uh dialectical reason was too enamored of the uh the fused group, which is like the which is associated with like the revolution at its most political and its most uh exuberant phase, um and you know, was less interested in the sort of institutional and organizational phase out that that Lacerdo sees as necessary in the post um post-military phase. That's why that's why um that's why Lacerdo thinks that um his theoretical uh outlook is actually at odds with his own stated anti-colonialism. And similar thing goes with um with Temponaro. But again, I suspect personally that what Lacerdo really had an issue with with Temponaro was his Trotskyism.

SPEAKER_02: 46:48

Well, I mean, you know, this is one of the things I try to s to point out is like but between Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist on international questions, I can find Marxist-Leninists agreeing with Trotskyist versus Marxist-Leninist and other Trotskyists who've taken the opposite position on almost any question, um, particularly after, particularly after 1965. Um and so, you know, I mean, and there are the great ironies of the world, like you know, one of the largest anti-revisionist Marxist organizations in the United States today has Trotskyist origins.

SPEAKER_00: 47:23

Um, and that's the organization to which Rock Hill briefly belonged, though I understand that they he left, yeah. Kind of bad terms. Um, but yeah, so I mean, and that that's uh school, uh the PSL, uh the Marciites that uh I would see is largely receptive to um it's kind of um to Lacerdo's brand of Marxism-Leninism, obviously the CPUSA. Um and guarito, like I'm I'm actually not sure. I think he probably does have some um still have some affinity for Lacerdo, but other figures within the ACP, it's interesting they take an issue with Lacerdo's anti-Americanism. Um, because of their patriotic socialist disposition, um, they want to celebrate uh the American Revolution as uh authentically revolutionary, which I actually believe is probably uh in line with Marx, Engels, and Lenin's own appraisal of the remote.

SPEAKER_02: 48:27

Even in line with Stalin's appraisal, to be honest. I agree.

SPEAKER_00: 48:32

I view the the stance that um the CPUSA has taken in PSL and beyond um the sort of Lacerdo and Gerald Horne line of um casting aspersions on bourgeois revolutions outside of the French Revolution, uh, and specifically the American Revolution. That I I view that as more um an outcome, an artifact of the new left, um than of you know classical, even classical Marxism-Leninism or classical Stalinism.

SPEAKER_02: 49:04

Yeah, no, I mean it it like if you read Stalin on the American Revolution, it's actually very clear that you would not agree with Gerald Horn. I mean, and the problem that you that you have is ironically, for all their talk about dialectics, is it actually is an undialectical position that if you compare the French Revolution to the American Revolution, where you can say, well, the American Revolution had comprador factors, uh settler colonialism, etc. And I'm like, that's all in the French Revolution. It's all there in the French Revolution, it's undeniably there in the French Revolution. Otherwise, the Haitian Revolution doesn't fucking happen. Right? Like, so it's um I I just think you you you this is a very one-sided view of revolution that seems to me to come out of, you know. I mean, I'm not gonna say that they're wrong about like the contradictory values of bourgeois society, but like that was true in the French case too. And that doesn't mean it's not a revolution, particularly it's not a bourgeois revolution.

SPEAKER_00: 50:05

Um but another case they never never bring up is the Krayol revolutions in Latin America, which had a similar uh dynamic of being led by really the upper crust of colonial society, so the richest, wealthiest Crayols uh who were not mixed, they were not mestizo, they were not mulatto in in the sort of hierarchy of the racial hierarchy of Latin America as such as it existed. And many of them were slave owners and continued to have slaves um long after um long after separating from the Spanish Empire. And again, like you don't see them, you don't see them um like casting doubt upon the sort of revolutionary status of Bolivar or uh Martin, like which Marx explicitly did, by the way.

SPEAKER_02: 50:51

Like Marx wrote a whole article about how light was terrible, like yeah, in fact, it's interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 50:57

Yeah, yeah, that's the one bourgeois revolutionary who he really did view as kind of um a kind of pale imitation of uh uh Napoleon, right? And disliked on that basis, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 51:11

Yeah, I mean, I I have actually on my show, I uh on the patron side of my show, I actually read that article, and I was like, that's harsher than I would be.

SPEAKER_00: 51:19

Oh, yeah, it's very harsh. It was like for an encyclopedia entry on Bolivar, and it's like it it's like, yeah, Marx was wilding out, it was crazy.

SPEAKER_02: 51:30

Um, and what I find fascinating about that is it's just sort of not dealt with, or or what I'll be told is like Marx was racist, and I'm like, well, so is Bolivar. Like Bolivar, like tried to introduce the race, like tried to keep keep the racial caste system. It's not like we're dealing with like La Cosmica Raza and Mexico and you know, a hundred years later, like this is something completely different.

SPEAKER_00: 51:53

That's why that happens a hundred years later, is because that that hierarchy was still in place, right?

SPEAKER_02: 51:58

So it it's just like uh, you know, but I mean everybody leaves out Latin America. I can't really I can't really to be fair to Lizerdo, it doesn't get brought up enough, period. Um but you know, you you really come at him on some of his on some of his weird readings. I mean, um, and w what I found surprising is some of the most confusing readings seem to be like uh Tampanaro and and other Italians, which again is hard to argue that this is he doesn't understand the context because he might have knew some of these people.

SPEAKER_00: 52:39

Um yeah, I'm sure he probably knew uh he knew Tranti and like because Tranti was like an elected official for the Communist Party and you know and the post-communist aftermath. Um yeah, I mean it's just strange. I mean, uh like he takes issue with stuff like that he wrote in like the book Workers and Capital, which I mean again, like, and I've said this on uh I said this on Asked Horizon too. Like one thing that I can perhaps thank Lacerdo for is that I'd long been putting off reading some of these foundational theoretical works. Like I'd never read um the Critique of Dialectical Reason before, uh undertaking this uh this review or this series of articles. I'd never read Tranti's Workers in Capital. I found myself quite impressed by them. Uh I mean I think uh Critique of Dialectical Reason has some serious problems with it, uh, but it's still a laudable effort. And Workers in Capital, I was I was very, very impressed by uh Tranti's book. But what do you like specifically to to get to the the point you were um zeroing in on, like his objections to the workerists, uh of which Tranti was uh the most visible and most uh articulate um you know representative, um really are very confusing to me. Like one of the things that and I guess it's just because like because Lassurdo felt that um Western Marxists should genuflect before actually existing socialist states and statesmen figures like now. Like I guess Tranti in his book um in his book Workers and Capital, because he is so laser focused on the opposition between workers and capital, the sort of fundamental class antagonism of capitalist society, um, he he thinks that um that Tranti neglects like the colonial question, other other struggles like in the domestic sphere and whatnot, but really the colonial question. So, you know, in that book, like he says that the struggle between workers in like uh heavily industrialized zones is like more important than the revolts of all the colonial peoples put together, which again, it seems like a hype hyperbolic statement, but Franci was trying to like, he really had was quite ambitious about the idea of like fomenting a European revolution even in the 60s. Uh, and then in a this 2009 introduction that he wrote to it, where he said we were never Chinese, we were never interested in like this long march or like you know the countryside against the city. Like, why is Lacerdo faulting faulting him for that? I mean, were were the workers supposed to adopt a protracted people's war in heavily industrialized northern Italy, which is like where the bulk of their activities took place? It's just it makes no sense. The context is absolutely different.

SPEAKER_02: 55:34

Like, and I think Maoism under I mean, we we do have the problem of the divisions of Maoism, which is again something that Lasserdo doesn't even deal with, right? But like classical Maoism, by by the time it's codified in the in the in the mid-70s, would say the Italian shouldn't be doing that. It was only uh in Latin America, separate from China, where there was a form of Maoism that tried to universalize it to the entire world.

SPEAKER_00: 56:02

Um, yeah, exactly. Mao himself, like like he, if you, you know, and I imagine he was fairly well informed on the state of class struggle in various European countries, like that, you know, like he he would look at that and say, like, no, like, you know, there are you can't have a theory of four classes, such as we tried to use in in you know China in the 30s. It just doesn't make sense. That was historically specific moment.

SPEAKER_02: 56:34

Like you're not you're not in the periphery in the same way, you know, your job is to to foment class struggle in the core. I mean, like he wouldn't use the core, he would use it in the first world, but like, you know, and and again, I say he would have used it in the first world in a certain time period because he because Mal's frameworks changed like five times during his life.

SPEAKER_00: 56:56

Um, yeah, three worlds theory era.

SPEAKER_02: 56:58

Yeah, um, three worlds theory, new democracy. I think new democracy is never completely denounced, but um but again, I mean, I was actually surprised in all this promotion of Chinese thought that there was no real dealing with like I mean, even the stuff about Dung. Like Dung was not Mao's successor even after the crushing of the Gang of Four. It was the nothing, the people we now call the nothingness are the center of the party. Ho, and and and and that group. And uh, I mean, I will admit that that uh Western historiography and Western history of this is so bad that even it like I've checked it on online, they don't mention it. But I'm like, no, Dung doesn't Dung's rehabilitated, but he doesn't come to power until 1982 in the reinstatement of the new constitution. So like like uh what are you even talking about here?

SPEAKER_00: 57:50

Why there's a blank spot. There's a blank spot from 1977 through 1982.

SPEAKER_02: 57:56

It's just like we just don't talk about those five years.

SPEAKER_00: 57:59

Um yeah, I mean it's it's kind of similar, it's kind of similar with like I mean, supporters of the I mean the various like Western communist parties, like you know, after Brezhnev, before Gob Gorbachev, there's like you know, a five-year period where Brezhnev was clearly on the decline, then there was on drop off. And like only later does Gorbachev then emerge, and you know, obviously there's a lot of humming and hawing about you know what he represented. Um, but yeah, I mean there's all these different gaps. I mean, that that you know, Western communist parties and Western Marxist Leninists just have to kind of you know leave uh unaddressed um so as to maintain what I view as a sort of untenable um uh apologia for these states and the course that history eventually took. And really polemically, I mean, beyond just sort of like the misreadings and um uh sloppy citational practices of uh Lacerdo, which I try to document uh in a fair degree of detail, um, the broader polemical point of my argument against Lacerdo is against what I call his neo-Stalinism. And I understand like Stalinism um is a contested term, and probably my use of it is most consonant with uh certain versions of Trotskyism and the historical tendency to which I'm most sympathetic, even if I don't think that any of these tendencies are vital tendencies in the present day, uh left communism, uh the communist left historically. Um they understood Stalinism, and I would say that uh certain parts of the Frankfurt school, insofar as they were conversant with like council communist uh positions, adopted a similar uh attitude towards Stalinism. They understood it as basically an accommodation to defeat, a rationalization of the course that history took, and of the failure of the world revolution of 1917 through 1923. Um I understand that there are people who uh define Stalinism more narrowly as just referring to sort of period of high authoritarianism under Stalin himself and um you know forced all the things that are associated with that, like the purges, forced collectivization, etc. But I think understand like zooming out and understanding Stalinism as a sort of world historical phenomenon, defined by certain certain uh characteristic positions, that you know, the most obvious of which is socialism in one country, um, I think that it's fair to characterize uh Lasserdo's entire sort of philosophical historical project as uh underwriting this sort of this worldview. Philosophically, uh intellectually. Um, you know, basically justifying the course that history has taken, uh, apotheosized in the present-day Chinese state with its sort of extended market reforms, um, its its large bureaucratic apparatus superintending the commanding heights of production, you know, to use the traditional language that they use. Um and yeah, I mean, he in some ways, like he even goes further than Stalin. Um, I tried to say this toward the end of the piece, like, whereas obviously Stalin almost accidentally came up with the slogan of um of socialism in one in one country and the debates of 1925. He wasn't the one to really theorize it, actually. Bukharin took it from Bukharin did it. He was the one who yeah, like Stalin came up with the slogan, but then Bukharin really fleshed it out, you know, gave it some theoretical meat, um, put theoretical meat on the bones of that slogan. Um but you know, at least verbally, um, you know, Stalin continued to pay lip service to the doctrine of the withering away of the state. That I mean, again, it's just unavoidable. Lenin wrote an entire book on it and you know, documented it in great, great uh detail, all the different statements. I mean, in his what I think of as kind of his book report on Marx and Engels and the state, uh state and revolution. Um so Stalin, you know, even if in practice he continued to sort of uh build up the state apparatus, um, you know, as part of his like socialism under siege, um, you know, combating imperialism, he at least still held to the letter of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, saying that in a fully communist society the state would dissolve. Lassurdo goes a step further than um than Stalin in revising Marx, Engels, and Lenin's uh theory, uh, not only revising it in the sense that Stalin did with uh socialism one country, uh, but also by saying that the entire notion that the state would ever disappear uh was from the very outset misguided. And that's kind of like the entire third part of my essay, which is certainly the most marxological of the of the three, uh tries to reconstruct the logic of you know coordinated international proletarian revolution on the one hand, and then the notion that society would reassume some of the powers that have been alienated in the form of the state in a fully socialized society after class antagonisms have been done away with.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:32

Well, I guess this brings me to what I what I can say is the the part of this that interested me. When I started really suspecting something of Lacerdo, uh it wasn't the Stalin book, um, although I knew about it. And I read one of the bootleg translations before it even came out from Iskoro. Um and it wasn't the Western Marxism, which I did not read until it came out. I I knew about it, but I didn't read it. But it was the Hegel book, which was already available in English. Um, because I saw it as a refutation of State and Revolution by Lenin, just a flat-out refutation of that, and a flat out refutation of Marx specifically on that text. Like, you know, the the the text that Marx actually published his critique of, as opposed to you know, the critique of Hegel's philosophy in general. You can say that Marx never finished it and thus didn't publish it, and maybe that's not part of like formal Marxist thought, fine. Um, but you can't do that for his critique of philosophy of right because that was published. Um, so what what do we make of Lacerdo's thing there? Because I I personally, when I read it, I was like, to me, this is an anti-Marxist book, in so much that it's basically arguing at core that a classless society, as defined by Marx and Engels, and Lenin, and even Stalin and Mao, is impossible. Like, this to me feels like authoritarian liberalism with with anti-colonial characteristics, but that's all I really got. Um, but what is your take on that book?

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:19

Yeah, so interestingly, and I think you raised this um in a conversation that you had on the topic of Western Marxism recently, I forget with who, but um Jacoby defined um or he one of the ways that he understood the split between Western and Eastern Marxism was in terms of which Hegel um different figures focused on. So whereas um whereas the foundational text for one strand of Eastern Marxism, the Deborah Knights, who were like the premier Hegelian Marxists in uh the Soviet Union, they eventually met with a with a tragic end. Uh they were purged uh by Stalin. But for them, um they really stressed the dialectic of nature, Engels' dialectic of nature, and for them the Hegel text that they looked to, you know, going back to Placonov was uh the science of logic. The Western Marxists that um are the topic of Jacobi's book, figures like Lukac and Korsh, for them the their focus was on subjectivity, on problems of consciousness, the dialect of subject subject and object. For them, the by their Bible was the phenomenology of spirit. For Lacerdo, it's really the elements of the philosophy of right. But also, I mean, like this is a recurrent theme in Lacerdo's work in general. He's interested in problems of self-censor sense, yeah, self-censorship. Uh, so he has a book uh which has not been translated into English on Kant's self-censorship, which obviously was extensive. You know, he had to hide his sympathy for the French Revolution, he had to hide the extent to which he was critical of uh religion. Um, then obviously the self-censorship of Hegel. Um, so what he does in that book, um, and you know, I will give some credit where credit is due, I think it he does establish pretty well that there is a higher degree of radicalism in Hegel's unpublished um notes for his lectures, and some of the stuff that was recorded by his students that was not eventually translated or uh published in uh or compiled uh in Elements of the Philosophy of Right. So there's a disjuncture between what he was saying in lecture halls and the book that he eventually published, where famously, you know, the realist, the rational, etc. But really, like the sort of, if you're reading between the lines, um, you know, and really trying to understand what Lacerdo is taking away from uh Hegel's uh theory of right and theory of the state, is that the state is like the sort of culmination of rationality that Hegel thought it to be. And that that again, as you point out, is like that's one of the premier reversals that Marx does in his critique of Hegel. Is like he sees he sees the state, first of all, as an expression of and as the expression of an antagonism within uh civil society, and sees it as determined by the state rather than determining the state determining civil society. So the state is determined by civil society rather than civil society determining the state. That's one of Marx's like you know formative criticisms of of Hegel. Uh for him, and like really like it's like a long and winding book where he talks about you know various disputes within Hegel's scholarship, but the main takeaway there is that he supports a kind of like strong state interventionist regime that exists to curb the excesses of civil society. So the kinds of poverty that arise within civil society due to property relations. And like he has this whole discourse on the figure of Not Recht, uh, which is like you know, this idea of like kind of necessity, um, that you know, this sort of absolute necessity that is expressed by you know extreme immiseration, that you know, you know, people are justified in in uh you know seeking to uh amend you know their their condition of penury. Like um, so for him, like the state becomes a kind of like ineliminable feature of every mode of production, um you know, from earliest origins of you know recorded history up through even the potential um abolition of capitalism, as you know, as Lacerdo understands it. It's unclear. He doesn't really say whether or not class uh antagonisms can be uh overcome or not, but it seems like he thinks that even if and it's unclear how he defines class, really, uh he seems to have this kind of um expansive understanding of class and class struggle. But regardless of that, he believes that some sort of entity has to, you know, still maintain an existence in order to uh guarantee the rule of law, which he you know views as something that cannot be eliminated either. So law itself will persist. And I think inevitably one has to think that um like you know this the stuff that Lenin understood by the state, the sort of special bodies of armed men, like figures like police forces, um perhaps a standing military, would never go away. And again, to me, like this, like to me, like you know, between the Hegel book and between the book on class struggle, where he talks about what he views as the sort of utopian holdovers in Marx, Engels, and even Lenin, um, all these all these different institutions that they predicted would wither away. Um they found like he just looking at the history of actually existing socialism, he says, Oh, well, you know, they may have thought this in their naivete. Uh, but you know, things like the market, the family, the state, um money, like they've persisted. There's not even been any progress in eliminating them. Hence, you know, we have to correct this uh misguided prediction of uh Marx, Engels, and Lenin, which he which he conceptualizes as the idealism of practice. And it's a strange philosophical move, but he also, and this is a kind of a way to tie it back to the his understanding of Hegel and the later Bukach, um, he views this as uh sort of residual Fichtianism, um, this idealism of practice. So Fichte and Lasserdo has written three books untranslated on Fichte, which you know, Fichte is a complicated figure, went through different phases himself. Um but in his the phase of his greatest enthusiasm for the French Revolution, he viewed the French Revolution as kind of um uh a full a political analog for his philosophy. His philosophy sought to get rid of the Kantian ding on sik, the the thing in itself, which is kind of a limit concept for for Kant. Um he believed that reality was sort of mutable and susceptible to transformation through conscious action. And for Lacerdo, uh, to the extent that he believes that Marx, Engels, and Lenin adopted this fictian position, um, he believed that this was robbing or depriving uh historically congealed institutions of their social being, of their thingness, of their independence from like practical manipulation. So he appeals to the philosophy of the later Lukash, his ontology of social being, where he views uh where he tries to tries to theorize the kind of durability of various institutions from once they arise and whatnot. I mean, Lukac, I don't think, ever um ever renounces the idea that the state would eventually wither away either. But again, like Lassurto is just sort of drawing willy-nilly upon different theories, whether it's from the late Lukash, whether it's from Hegel and his philosophy of right, that is supposed to talk about the rationality, the enduring rationality of these different institutions, the nation, etc. And for him, like he he points to the history of actually existing socialist states and says, oh well, this helps to explain why, you know, why the Sino-Soviet split occurred. This helps to explain why Yugoslavia, the USSR, became estranged. This helps to explain why there was a war between Cambodia and Vietnam. This helps to explain why Vietnam and China went to war. To me, obviously, it's just a much simpler answer. Uh, these states, you know, despite their socialist pretensions, are not the kind of emancipated society or even a sort of way station toward the kind of emancipation emancipated society that Marx, Engels, and Lenin envisioned. Obviously, history took a different course than the one that they anticipated, but I don't think that it um I don't think that it invalidates their original prescription.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:42

Well, I to me it like I get arguing that we don't see these things in society as they are now, but it if you look at how like say Ingalls defines class and what the state does and what the state is, if if there is a body of our men who do not come from general society and have special privileges, that is a class for for for for Lenin, excuse me, I said England, but for Lenin um in State Revolution. Um and you might go, okay, well, you know, that isn't happening, and the you know, and our answer would be it's either not a liberal society or that Marxism is impossible, but Lacerdo doesn't want to do that. And that's what confuses, I mean, I guess that's what confuses me because when you like when you go through what he would retain from uh current liberal society, it's almost everything except a more interventionist thing. That's really the only thing that's different between what he's advocating for as the ultimate goal. Like, this is not like the Marxist-Leninist uh or even Trotskyist view that like some of these things will be necessary in transition, but your goal is they're necessary forever. Right. They're necessary forever, according to Lacerdo. Yeah, they're absolutely necessary forever because civil society has to be controlled. And I'm just like, that's just to me, that's more Hobbes than Marx, and even if he gets to it through uh an interesting reading of Hegel. And to get back to your thing about Hegel, I agree with you that Hegel is more radical in his private correspondence, but there are leaps that Lasterdo and Lasturdians make with Colin Baudell and I actually got an argument about this where I was like, I do not believe you when you keep on asserting that Hegel was an atheist and that he does not believe in the religious propositions he put forward. I know that's convenient for a lot of people today, but there's no evidence for it, not even in the not even in the the private notebooks. You have to deduce that. And at this point, you're basically just doing like um a dungest version of Leo Strauss, which is what is unstated equals the worldview that I think was already there, but it's hidden, but it matches with my worldview. And I can't argue that one way or another because it's a high it's basically a counterfactual.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:01

Um agreed, yeah. I mean, like I would say that like the most productive readings of Hegel was it as an atheist, but I understand that to have been the sort of willful distortion on the part of the young Hegelians, like Bauer and Stern. Like it was an interesting polemical, I mean, especially because you know Hegel's philosophy was taken up by all these prominent Lutheran theologians. Um, as I think probably like in his private life, he was a Lutheran. I mean, there's there's just no evidence to the contrary. I I agree with you 100%. I mean, one could perhaps construe uh, I mean, obviously Kant had Pietist origins, um, like his family was Pietist, but at most you one could maybe think of him as a sort of deist. Uh but I mean, really, for I think it's pretty clear from Hegel's um just body of work, both published and unpublished, that he remained a kind of Lutheran. That obviously for him Protestantism had this great philosophical significance, Luther obviously, as expressing like the principle of subjectivity, cutting out the middleman of this, you know, the church as you know the intercession of the church, um, in uh communicating with the divine. But yeah, I mean yeah, I would agree with you a hundred percent there. Um in terms of like the special bodies of armed men, like like even if like even if one would uh construct it as not a class, it's still a symptom of uh you know the persistence of class antagonism. Like to me, like the existence of police forces, like prisons, standing armies, this to me is symptomatic of an unfree society. And I think to to eliminate that is to lower the horizons of social transformation that Marxism uh really envisioned. Uh Lassorto to his credit, partially, I think he he's willing to make that. He's willing to sort of say what uh Stalin Stalinists like in their fidelity to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, at least what they wrote, um, their verbal uh verbal fidelity to that, uh they're unwilling to part with that. But um he's willing at least to sort of and in that respect, Lissert is quite useful because I think in adopting this forthrightly, he opens himself up to a sort of reasoned criticism that um other Stalinists perhaps, like by keeping this as a more guarded position, um, are unwilling to uh open themselves up to. Um, but there is a certain honesty in that respect, even if I find um Lacerta's mode of argumentation and his citational practices, his scholarship broadly speaking, often quite dishonest or disingenuous. Uh, he at least has the honesty to um to adopt these positions rather stridently. And the analogy that he uses, and again, this it's curious to me because uh his choice of analogy just is given um that this figure's reputation, one would think that it would be quite unpopular as a choice, but he uses this analogy first of all in an article and then in the book against revisionism, um, the War and Revolution book, he analogizes Marx Engels and the various Marxists whom they inspired uh with the figure of Christopher Columbus. Columbus, of course, set out in, you know, you know, in search of the Indies, uh, but stumbled upon America. So the the analogy for Lacerdo is that, you know, these Marxists like set out in search of this radically transformed world. What they ended up with was, you know, all the stuff that ended up happening with actually existing socialism. Hence, you know, we have to come to terms with reality, we need to shed these uh these kinds of uh utopian, unrealistic holdovers of Marx, Engels, and Lenin themselves, and admit that you know the course that history took was the only one it ever could have taken, and we should adopt our expectations accordingly.

SPEAKER_02: 1:21:19

Uh I would say, though, that that makes his argument against Rust and Marxism to be somewhat nonsensical. Because if the if the course of history is the only one it could have taken, then that is also the only course that could have been taken.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:33

Yeah. And I mean, this is part of like, I mean, it's like, and again, here uh I think Rockhill is more explicit than Lacerdo. Because Rockhill also tries to tie Western Marxism to this whole uh you know figure of the uh labor aristocracy, which um Rockhill construes Western Marxism as a kind of intellectual expression of the labor aristocracy, in a rather strong reading of the labor aristocracy that I would say consigns the entire uh proletariat in uh Western Europe, North America, etc., to this this figure, uh, you know, the global figure of um a late labor aristocracy and hence unrevolutionary, uh untrustworthy, uh thus we have to the the task of Marxists is really just to cheer on revolution in the third world, which is the only place that revolution can occur.

SPEAKER_02: 1:22:29

It is a soft third worldism that Lassotho is actually promoting. I mean, I say soft because he does not he will not say things like there's no such thing as a revolutionary proletariat in the developed world, but he will imply it. Um, you know. Uh now I will also say because I've done recently been doing readings on the third worldism, third worldism is not particularly coherent on this. There are third worlds who do believe that there's a revolutionary proletariat in the developed world, but the the labor aristocracy theory, which you know, for those of you who don't know, it takes it's it's a it's a comment about labor aristocracy originally referred to in the classical socialist movement like uh leaders of unions and other people have privileged positions that put them above the rest of the class. And this uh Ingalls remarks that that this really explained the lack of activity in the British uh movement because of the core of empire. That is expanded a little bit and uh with Lenin, because Lenin talks about it a bit in imperialism, uh the highest age of capitalism. But again, he is not saying uh that there is no real proletariat in the cores of capital. He's just, you know, he's talking about the dominance of a certain strand of labor. Um by the time you get to the 1980s, um, and uh you have people going back to these statements, or maybe the 1970s around J. Sakai, for example, although he completely racializes this. Um by the time you get to the 1970s in race or the 1980 uh 1980s with nations, you get this idea that that the that the developed world paralyter has been bought off, that it gets paid more than its value, uh there's a bunch of other stuff. Eventually they even start rejecting labor theory of value, um, which you know Monthly Review had already had the standard of doing. Um with Sweezy and Viran. Right. But uh but you see this amongst uh the the the third worldist, and Rocky picks a lot of that up, but doesn't pick all of it up, and um I'm not sure what to make of his selectivity there. So he seems to think that you know laborist autocracy is a problem in the developed world, and all we need to do is cheer on these third world revolutions. And my response is like that's not a violent. I mean, even if you believe it, which it which is such an inversion of classical Marxism as to basically just say all of most of classical Marxism is just wrong. Um But if you do believe that, then I what viable politics do you think you could possibly have? Like like because there's no there's no action you can take in your own country, and yeah, and there's not much you can do to support the third world revolution to either. So it's like okay, so so what? Like that doesn't like basically the status quo stays the same if this is your logic. Like if you take it to the extreme.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:38

You're kind of um relieved of any responsibility to organize the working class in wherever it is that you happen to be. I guess if you're like Roland Bohr, who's a kind of Australian stalling odegist who moved from Australia to China, I guess that's one possible move. You can just straightforwardly be employed by the Chinese state.

SPEAKER_02: 1:26:00

Um, but again, you have to come up with a special category to argue that China isn't developed, which I have a hard time doing when it's the most productive society on the planet and full of billionaires.

SPEAKER_00: 1:26:08

Sure, yeah, I would agree. I would agree. And this is this is um this is some cognitive dissonance that they have yet to work through. But I mean, if you're if you choose to remain in the the beating heart of capitalism, if you know you're if you've got a professorship at the University of Urbino or uh at Villanova, um I mean I guess the most that you have to do is publish books through Monthly Review Press or uh the write the occasional article that asserts that there is some sort of revolutionary continuity between 1848 to 1871 to 1917, 1949, and current day geez China, that this is some unbroken uh revolutionary thread that, you know, perhaps there were some minor setbacks, but you know, it's still leading the way, you know, leading toward the inevitability of world revolution, you know, you know, and led by the different oppressed peoples of the world and their joint dictatorship uh with the proletariat. Um yeah, and I mean it's unclear too, because the proletariat itself becomes shrunk in this vision. Um yeah, I mean, for Engels, I mean, Marx never uses the term labor aristocracy. I think that there is like just quite obviously, you know, some empirical sociological validity to this category of um the labor aristocracy, such as Engels and Lenin um described it. I mean, if you look at the behavior of uh Union bigwigs and uh the sort of upper crust of the labor movement in advanced societies, advanced capitalist societies. However, I mean that did not in any way change the sort of strategic outlook of Engels or Lenin, who still saw revolution in the heart of capitalism as absolutely necessary, uh, sort of sine qua non for um communist revolution worldwide. Uh, in fact, the sort of labor aristocrats were the ones who were perhaps the most vital to win over to the communist position. Because if that happens, I mean, it's game over, pretty much. Um, and in fact, it depends. I like their behavior, obviously, like um the behavior in um in Britain in the 1880s, which is when when uh Engels coined that phrase, um like it was quite different from the behavior of like the shop stewards in Germany in 1919. Like it tended to be like the most skilled sections and some of the union leadership of uh Germany that were the most revolutionary components of the German working class. Obviously, certain parts of the union leadership did shift over to the Iberts and Linofskis of uh you know the social democratic government uh of the Weimar Republic, which did play a very counter-revolutionary role. But again, it it varies historically. And I think you know, observing its existence like sociologically, empirically does not, you know, relieve us of the responsibility of organizing these sections of the class in a I mean, according to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, that is like that is the task is to foment world revolution, to organize it in the core of capitalism, and you know, across national lines, you know, such that they're not siloed. And really, there needs to be an international, there needs to be class independence and there needs to be international coordination of workers, you know, throughout the world that hasn't existed for a hundred years. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:29:54

I mean, uh I had actually uh uh I remember when I was talking to Colin Baudell, and I was like, you know, I believe this about China when they call it new common turn. You know, BRICS is not a common turn, and no world is BRICS a common turn, like it's not even primarily with socialist countries, you know. Um it's an alternate trade block, which you know it might it might be good for it to exist if it if it was more formalized and a little bit but uh you know that's not it's not he it's not here to me to shit on bricks. I don't I don't think it I don't like but you you're not gonna argue to me that contemporary Russia and India are somehow like crypto socialist states. Um so it just you know to me my To me, I see the dominance of this form of, for lack of a better term, Marxist-Leninism. I don't even think it's Marxist-Leninism, to be honest with you. Like it is removed from the historical justifications of Marxist. It's an extension of it. Uh, you could argue that it is a like it is an it is like the like the the honest answer to where uh uh Marxist-Leninism went and after, let's say, the 1980s, um, because most of the other Marxist-Leninist movements have died on divine. Um, but um, you know, it would be even compared to other like like if you were to present this to the Naxalites or something, they would also find it very weird and strange. Um they oppose pigeon, they oppose pijing straightforwardly. Right. So it's just it it it just seems to me to be. Um if I am honest, it seems to be to to me to be a radicalization of a lot of the assumptions of social democrats. Um uh given a more militant edge by inverting anti-communism. Um so you know that that's where I would go with it. Um, but you have to ignore so many divisions within. I mean, even even like ignoring all the philosophical problems that we see with the the historiographic treatment of Western Marxism and the entire problems of the category, even if I accepted all that, I'd still be like, okay, but how do you deal with like the contradictions of Vietnam and Cambodia? Um, or how do you deal with uh uh the fact that you had different Marxist-Leninist parties fight fighting each other to the death in Latin America and the Southeast Asia?

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:50

Like or Nepal, too. Like Nepal, like in it just in the news. Right now, like in the in the news, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02: 1:32:59

Like, yeah, I mean, like how like this does not solve these problems for you. Like, and to and to say acknowledging the problems is the historical nihilism to me, like, you know, the the one thing I was sympathetic to in the Stalin the Black Legend book, because I do sometimes think we use Stalin to not deal with the problems of failure historically in the Soviet Union, right? Like, and like focusing on Stalin the man misses that. Um uh but the thing is that Lucerno doesn't want to say it was a failure, and then I've always go, well, then why, you know, then then why did Khrushchev happen? And then he's like, well, that's revisionism, and then I've go, like, okay, but you've said that things played out the way they played out because they had to play out that way. So how does this work? Right? Like, I just don't know. Like, it seems like it's honestly it seems like special pleading from the from the philosophical assumptions, one way or the other, and you start getting into intellectual knots, but most people haven't read all of Lasterdo or thought it all through. Like, if you like look in your first article on Lost for the New International, uh, you mentioned like the four things that that John Bellamy Foster brings up by themselves, those four concessions, I would actually agree, those are our problems that have happened. What he uses that the conclusion that he uses that for, I would not join him. But I'm like, yes, we have seen a turn away from nature science. We we have not dealt with imperialism, you know, strongly. I mean, particularly in the social democratic turn after 2023. I mean 2020. Sorry, I'm getting old enough that these decades are kind of consolidating in my head. Um uh, particularly after 2013. And you know, and there are contradictions in it today. Like, uh, you you want to watch Marxist Linus fight mention who is Israel's number one trade partner? You know, it's China, it's not even the US. Like, I mean, to be fair, China's a lot of people's number one trade partner, but it just exports so much more, yeah. Right. But like, it wouldn't even hurt China's bottom line to really stop trading with Israel, except that it wants particular technologies that the Israeli state uh state has encouraged to be developed.

SPEAKER_00: 1:35:20

Um states that are surveilling their own populations and looking to repress potential uprisings, of of course they're gonna be trading with Israel. That's that's the that's Israel's number one export. Right. Um That's why Arab that's why Arab states do business with Israel despite their official political line of you know not acknowledging its existence. Um it's just they all are looking to gain you know access to these different re repressive technologies.

SPEAKER_02: 1:35:48

But when you bring this up online, like like people you just you just see like a like, oh, you don't understand economics. I'm like, actually, I do. Uh Israel's not a big enough trade partner for it to hurt China's bottom line. Just want to point that out to you. Like um, that doesn't, you know, if you say that there's no morality to trade, well, the USSR didn't practice that in that way. You know, I I'm not here to defend everything the USSR did, but they did not do that. Like they had the Comic Con. Right. Um, so it it just seems like you you're getting yourself into all kinds of theoretical knots that even matter now. This is not just a question, yeah. You can go, okay, well, these are questions of the past, Varn. This is all from like the 1970s. I'm like, oh yeah, well, what do you think about this happening in 2025? Like, this does not answer this for you.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:41

You know, yeah, I I do I agree with you too. Like, there is a confluence, I mean, despite their own sort of um uh stated antagonism towards each other and you know the barbs that they'll throw each other's way, between like social democratic uh or democratic socialist movements in the global north and uh Marxist-Leninist uh ideology and the global south, in terms of their vision of what socialism actually positively is, there's very little there's very little um space between them. There's they're only a hair removed from each other. I mean, it's really the like it's really aesthetics like that changes them, like in terms of like Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, yeah, more military parades, I suppose. Um But in terms of what they actually think that socialism is, it's about like producing wealth inequality. It's uh about um it's about building up, you know, different welfare state programs, uh, social safety net, etc. Um Yeah, so that the actual like the actual vision is not that different. There's very there's very little left of and again, this is all stuff that you know is you know, one could trace to kind of pre-Marxian and then perhaps Lasalian socialism, like that views the ends of socialism as the buildup of the state, which is very much what Lacerdo was interested in, very much what democratic socialists are interested in. Um it's raising taxes and and whatnot. It's not fundamentally overcoming the contradiction within civil society the way that Marx and proletarian socialists, revolutionary proletarian socialists of the 19th and early 20th century were interested in. Um yeah, so I mean it's that vision of you know revolution that's kind of been lost. And, you know, despite, you know, despite the gulf that exists between them uh otherwise, uh, you know, in terms of how they can conceive of themselves, I think that they're almost identical. Um uh contemporary neo-Stalinism or Marxism-Leninism and um and and uh social democratic politics in the in the West. It's just a matter of, I guess, like where it's taking place and I guess the political means to achieve it. But even those aren't that different, um practically speaking. And the geopolitics too, like you're you're absolutely right. And I I try to point this out too, like the especially because one of the big things that um that Lister takes issue with in terms of like Marcusa and Bloch, it he leaves out Sartre in this respect, though. I mean, you could throw him in too, is their stance towards Israel. They were quite apologetic towards Israel in a way that obviously um any illusions that they may have had about it in the 60s like should by now be well and truly buried. I mean, like even the dream of a kind of liberal Zionism is just like it can't be maintained um in the present day, um, just in light of in light of everything that's happened since, but even in light of like what it originally was. But I mean, if you go like from the point that I make, you know, is first of all that the stance was rather um widely held even amongst the it was the common form stance, like yeah. I mean that again, like you know, they you know, Stalin and the USSR, it was their material and ideological support for Israel in 1948 that even that's the only reason that Israel even won its independence war. Um and then it was still held by like outspoken anti-imperialists like Leo Huberman, who was one of the co-founders, co-editors in chief of the Monthly Review, uh, even into the 60s after the after the Six-Day War. And all the way up to the present, like in terms of China's continued trade that they do, their extensive trade that you that you just mentioned, like yeah, they hate they hate when this is brought up, and of course they say they have all manner of excuses for it. But in in light of like what is clearly, I mean, I think anyone with eyes to see should recognize as a genocide occurring um in Gaza, like you know how you can justify continuing to trade with a state that's perpetrating that genocide is just absolutely beyond the pale.

SPEAKER_02: 1:41:12

Right. I mean, you know, it's also like Loserdo does not deal with the fact that during the war on terror China took the US aside for obvious domestic reasons.

SPEAKER_00: 1:41:21

Like in fact. Like, you know it's out of the out of the news now, but like all the stuff with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, like very similar language to the war on terror um that they were using, um, you know, in the aughts, like is very much the same rationale that they were using for the different re-education camps in in that province. Again, to me, like this is like this is not contradictory because it's a it's a capitalist state. Like it's just I mean, despite its own um its own ideological pretensions, like it's obviously a capitalist society and uh you know represented by a capitalist state.

SPEAKER_02: 1:42:07

I mean, even if you were going to argue that um that you know, and sometimes I'll be like, yeah, I believe there's real socialists in the Chinese government, and it's not, you know, I wouldn't even maybe defend that. But uh they are still operating, you know, private firms that have produced tons of wealth. Yes, they've redistributed it a lot of it down, yes, they've done amazing things in in uh the reduction of poverty. Um, but uh at the same time, um uh you know, it like the strengthening of like the Chinese social health care system is like you know a recent reform that is not even to European standards. And when I hear, oh, they can't material do materially do that, I'm like, well, why not? Like like that, you know, China has a lot of wealth, it's it's undeniable. Um, even even people who are very sympathetic to it, like the like the world, like the world system school marks system, whatnot, will tell you like they can't call it the periphery anymore, they'll come up with some new category for it, like semi-periphery or something like that. But you know, they'll admit that. Um, and you might argue, well, that's necessary for you know almost Placanofian reasons, but then I'm like, well, that but if that's true, then socialism in one country is like you had to do develop national developmentalism first, which in some ways actually means that the you know the peasant revolutions still had to capitulate to capital, and that's your theory, so just own it, just like say, like, okay, there needs to be a state capital period, because Lenin did talk about that. I mean, like, you could be a perfectly consistent Leninist and look at certain, I mean, Lenin wasn't always consistent, but like look at certain uh texts by Lenin and and figure that out, like and argue it, but that's not what's happening now. It's like more of like, no, this is socialism. And I've even said, you know, yeah, it's true that in the Dungas uh constitution of 1982, um China says it's reached the socialist stage. But if you listen to what what every what every uh leader of the Chinese Communist Party has said since uh since Ji Min, and definitely in Hu Jin Tao and G, is that that we have not hit the necessary socialist reforms to achieve socialism until like some unstated date in the future. I think currently it's like 2050. 2050, yeah. Yeah, but it's getting a lot of people.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:37

Yeah, right. And that's that's gonna happen. I mean, in different leaders have you know proposed different dates in the past. Stalin himself in 1936 claimed that class class antagonism had been effectively overcome within the boundaries of the USSR. Um, obviously, Khrushchev tried to say that the dictatorship of the proletariat was outmoded and that because you know the proletariat itself had become attenuated and now it was the state of all people. Yeah, all the different twists and turns of uh you know different official, you know, policy by the uh Chinese Communist Party. Yeah, it's they're gonna keep kicking the can down the road. I I mean maybe they'll prove us wrong. Maybe, maybe uh in 25 years China will be a fully realized communist society. I I'm skeptical. Um I I just don't think it's gonna happen. I don't I think that's inconsistent with obvious I I believe it's first of all inconsistent with with what Marx, Engels, and Lenin thought, but even beyond that, I I just don't think it's I think the reason why they thought it is because it's practically impossible. It just can't happen. Um communism is not nationally bounded, it you know, and I don't think that the necessary prerequisites for it socially. Um I don't think that any state possesses sufficient resources, even in a vast highly populated state like China. I don't think that it it possesses the resources that it can, you know, to to realize you know communist relations within its own state boundaries.

SPEAKER_02: 1:46:16

So no, I mean it has to trade with non-communist states, like exactly. Um like as as I've told people, you know, before, I'm like China can do it can control its own can control a lot of its own billionaires, uh but um to a certain degree, but it can't tell the international bond market what to do, it can't tell international international forex accounts what to do. Um and it has disproportionate sway there. That is not there's no the I am not denying that, but it you know China has not been able to go to the to the IMF, for example, and just like you will do what we say that they they neither want to nor have the capacity to.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47:05

Um and you know, and if there's a a crisis in the world capitalist market, it's going to have ripple effects in China. There are gonna be layoffs, there are just gonna be there's gonna be Chinese businesses put out of business. Um because Chinese GDP growth has been stagnating for a decade. That too. That's too. I mean, that's something that the Chinese stands really um are struggling to come to grips with. Um, they haven't really produced and I think honestly, like I think that their whatever advantages might be claimed for their handling of the uh coronavirus virus epidemic, like it really had pretty disastrous economic uh consequences in the in the different places that were really really shut down. That's like just clear. I think that the figures that like the picture hasn't fully emerged from that yet, but I think that it's gonna bear it out that that really had disastrous economic impacts.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:04

I would also say that like um another thing that I I would say that I see is like there have like China has seen some some uh growth advantage recently because of the United States' self-imposed tariff regime, but again, that is from the actions of another country, and yeah, uh ones that I don't find particularly economically rational, but nonetheless, I mean I can um but yet being like being the global hegemon in the capitalist market because the the the Western capitalism has degraded so much is not actually an argument that you are socialist. So it's it's a strange, you know. Uh like I have I've responded to people in ways I'm like, yeah, you know, I think cat, I think as far as like international actors go, China is a responsible international actor on the world stage, barring what I've said about their trade with Israel in the current Palestine situation. But like in general, they're pretty responsible, way more responsible than a lot of Western powers. But Western powers have been responsible in the past. You you're basically just saying that like the standards of like when the West had a stronger state during like the Fortis Compact and after World War II. I mean, are you gonna argue that that was a pro a nascent form of communism? Because that's basically what you're you're arguing is is good.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:28

Um I think that's some of the I think that's some of the the uh contradictions that have maybe been papered over in light of the um in light of the recent uh trade war stuff. So like the much much publicized meeting in India between Modi and Putin and G, like uh the whole BRICS um thing that you know the tariff uh you know policies of the US have kind of served to bolster in a lot of ways. I still think that like regardless of that, like there are still basic there's a rivalry between India and China that's not going away anytime soon. Uh I think Russia, its own orientation, like it's largely a marriage of convenience. Um uh given given the war in Ukraine, like Western Europe is no longer the main consumer of its um natural gas and oil exports. So it's found it's found uh in markets in China and India, but that war's not going to go on forever. I mean, they these kinds of relations are not gonna last forever. I mean, even it even looked like especially when Trump announced the tariffs like initially, um like Vietnam, which it had over the last like 30, 40 years, has been much closer to the US than to China. Um, there was a the first time that G, uh the first time a Chinese premier has gone to Vietnam in in decades. Again, I I don't I still think that Vietnam uh fears China's as a if not a sort of aspiring global hegemon, then certainly the de facto regional hegemon of the South China Sea and um just that and just that in all of East Asia and Southeast Asia, like you know, that's these antagonisms aren't going away anytime soon. So, you know, we'll see how like the we'll see how the balance of trade shakes out, I guess, with um the tariff regime, which I I've I've been following your uh recent radical engagements with uh Jamie Merchant's texts, which have been great. Um yeah, very passionately enforced. Like it's unclear how you know how coherently they'll be maintained once they do stabilize. But yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:51:49

Well, I mean, I think we're in a period of global instability, of which China will probably be one of the more stabilizing factors. But again, you know, that's not the same as me saying like China is the model for global for global communism. It's just you know, it's just me saying that like they're relatively responsible actor on the international stage because they uh their bourgeois interests are somewhat curtailed, uh, but they still have a fair amount of profitability, even though their GDP has been declining. Uh, if that continues to decline, I do not know what that'll look like. Um, and they're like, oh, well, Varn, why do you assume it's going to continue to decline? And I'm like, well, uh, nobody's no developed economy in the world has maintained high levels of GDP growth uh above 5% after a certain level of development.

SPEAKER_00: 1:52:41

And we've seen after industrialization, yeah. After industrialization, it drops off. After proletarianization like takes its takes hold uh and is generalized across society, then the kind of like off-the-charts growth that one experience like that you saw in the 19th century in Britain and in parts of in the north and the United States.

SPEAKER_02: 1:53:03

In the 1980s and 1990s in China, that just you know falls to the floor.

SPEAKER_00: 1:53:07

Like so, and it has been, you know, and doesn't that doesn't mean that they're mishandling their economy, it's just it acts like a capitalist economy, like yeah, they're they they can be very rational actors in uh contemporary geopolitics, they can become be very rational economic actors within the global capitalist economy, but that's what they're part of. And what's required, you know, according to Marx, Engels, and Lenin, I I whatever else might have changed in terms of like the constitution of contemporary capitalism, I think that these fundamentals remain the same. Like a coordinated, um, if not simultaneous, then at least breaking out in rapid succession, a coordinated international proletarian revolution in the heart of capitalism, which you know in the 19th century would have been, you know, Britain, the United States, Germany, and France. Today it would include Russia, Japan, China, um, perhaps Brazil. Um, like a coordinated working class, you know, power in these different regional centers, that's what's required to really shepherd the transition from the global capitalist economy to toward a fully socialized society. And you know, nothing, you know, no new trade deals on the part of you know various states, whether you know they fly a red flag or not, is going to move in that direction without that kind of basic um basic political, you know, class independent movement um along international lines.

SPEAKER_02: 1:54:48

Yeah. Well, on that, no, I think that's a good place to stop. We've been talking for about two hours. Where can people find your work, Ross?

SPEAKER_00: 1:54:57

So uh I've been published in the Brooklyn Rail. Um I'm uh I'm doing this work with uh New International Mag. Uh I've got some pieces coming out for the New York Review of Architecture, writing on architecture, uh, architectural review. Um yeah, so uh find my work there. Um yeah, I should put you in touch with Jamie Merchant. You guys should definitely talk tariffs. Okay, yeah, we'd love to. All right. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much.