Speaker 1: And today I'm here with the two of the three founders of the Platypus affiliated society. We're talking about the origins of Platypus as well as its implications. This conversation kind of comes out of a re-engagement that I've had with the platypus affiliated society in the last two years, but also a show where I was kind of unexpectedly asked to talk about platypus on a Colin show by Ben Burgess who I don't think he minds Me saying that he's not a fan And I repeated some things that were not entirely true, that they were kind of rumors in my far, far, far, far, far satellite chapter of platypus many years ago. So with that I wanted to turn it over to Chris and Spencer to talk about where the platypus come from. I've read the initial document on the website when I joined about its relationship to the anti-war movement, about its relationship to Trotskyism, but I was unclear on the specifics. 

Speaker 2: Well, that document, of course, came at the request of Spencer and also our other friend, sinit Singh, who were attending the SWP UK's Marxism Conference in the summer of 2006. And the reading group had already started several months earlier than that, based on our students from the University of Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And then, yeah, they sort of said we need something to intervene with. And so, you know, consulting with them and with Richard Rubin and also with some of the platypus, the early reading group participants, my students, i drafted that what is a platypus in the short history of the left? First it was what is a platypus? And then they said, well, this needs an explanation. So then it was the short history of the left, and the statement of purpose of the organization was drafted the following year by Marco Torres and Pam Nogales and Laurie Rojas. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i met Pam Nogales and Laurie Rojas. I believe I have interacted with Marco Torres. I don't know if I've met him in person. 

Speaker 3: One of the things that Chris is kind of glossing over there is that he's really the founder of platypus. I wasn't around. We sometimes refer to Chris and Richard and myself as sort of the Gen Zero of platypus. I wasn't part of the first generation of platypus. I wasn't there. I was in far-flung places like London At some point on Earth. I've never done it before Chris On Earth. All of the emails that we used to exchange Right, chris and I had a long friendship before platypus was founded And there were people in our circle like Sunit that Chris referred to. 

Speaker 3: So I was and I don't know what I was educating Sunit in When I think about it. I took him to the SWP conference. He was reading Marx and Hegel. I remember bringing Chris to help. They wanted to talk about Hegel. I said I've got this friend Chris You should talk to. So Sunit and I were friends. He was friends with Chris. But the founding of platypus was really it was undertaken by Chris together with the students that recruited him to teach the Marxism. It kind of had roots and discussions that he and I had had. But anyway, what I was trying to say is that I was in far-flung places and I would get these reports from Chris, these long emails. Back then I had to go to internet cafes in India and I would read these long discussions about the formation of platypus and, i guess, give some kind of feedback or whatever, serve as a sounding board. I really sort of returned to Chicago, in that sense to platypus, around the time of the election of Obama. 

Speaker 2: Right, no. So Spencer and I were talking about what we might discuss with you, Derick, because I guess this is in the wake of you feeling like you misrepresented platypus on a podcast, and so we were thinking, okay, well, what's the backstory that you may not be aware of but that people have a sense of in some way, spencer, and my friendship as graduate students at the University of Chicago. We were talking about the University of Chicago and how it has a reputation. It has two different right-wing reputations. It has the reputation of the Chicago School of Economics, the kind of neoliberal economics, but it also has the reputation of a kind of neoconservative, especially cultural conservative, like Alan Bloom, closing of the American Mind kind of thing, committee on Social Thought and the Leo Straussians. 

Speaker 2: I was warned by Adolf Reed when I was in Chicago and we met up. He's like you got to watch out for those motherfucking Straussians. They're everywhere, they're everywhere you look. He's like I'll be talking to a woman at a bar and thinking I might get lucky, and then it turns out she's a fucking Straussian. So anyway, we did not have that experience. We didn't. 

Speaker 2: That was not our experience. Our experience was much more standard academic culture in terms of it being very liberal, very PC, very Democratic Party And the conservatives were safely sequestered in these other places that no one ever went to. There was some point of contact with the Committee on Social Thought but its heroic days were behind it And the Committee on Social Thought was no longer Straussian. It was being run by Robert Pippin who brought a very different kind of energy to it And really the University of Chicago experience that Spencer and I had, that was formative but was as much the basis of our friendship as anything was teaching in the college, the college core curriculum. So that's what I guess people call the great books, kind of approach to kind of primary literature education for undergraduates And Spencer Stay with us, we'll be right back. 

Speaker 3: I am Jeff Ado. This is Lunacy, a podcast where we discern the sacred from the insane and admit that, whether we like it or not, we are all profoundly affected by the cycles of the moon. Join us each week as we wax philosophical on the underlying nature of reality, discover new ways of raising our consciousness and deliver on swapping out our inherited fear based operating system for love operating system. Welcome to Lunacy. Wherever you get your podcasts. 

Speaker 3: Chris has gotten frozen. I'll pick up until he gets back on. You know he and I were in classes together with with much for stone primarily. but you know we really I, you know, i think it. you know our friendship has been intellectual and mean intellectually mediated, of course, from the beginning, you know, and the discussions that I really remember with Chris at the dawn of our friendship were things like dark Right Where we were teaching it together and just sort of conceiving, you know, you know, and of course, things like Adam Smith we were teaching together. 

Speaker 2: Interestingly, we ended up teaching together under Moish Postone's supervision, but initially it was actually a different sequence. It was power, identity, resistance, and it was liberalism and its critics, and so we were teaching other things that Moish actually doesn't teach, like Nietzsche, right, which I hadn't taken Nietzsche seriously since I was in high school, when my friends were really into Zarathustra And I was like, yeah, what is this bullshit? But then I found like a new appreciation of Nietzsche. You know, much later I was aware that he was in the background of the Frankfurt school, but really Spencer had an appreciation for Nietzsche, going back, that, but teaching it, you know, like you don't I, i feel you don't really know something until you teach it, mm-hmm. And so you know a very different education. You know, i had wrote Adam Smith in college but it left no impact on me And I was taught it in a kind of typical, kind of left, kind of Marxist kind of way Take it seriously, but to sort of again, sort of coordinate off in a particular way. 

Speaker 2: So when you're teaching this stuff directly to undergraduates, it's a very different thing. And And so, yeah, i mean Spencer and I had the shared experience of taking Moishpa stone's class. We met in his famed Capital course, but then we took other courses on the Frankfurt school and on more contemporary leftist Critiques of neoliberal capitalism. You know, we read like David Harvey together and people like that. But really I think we bonded over the teaching In a profound way because we were, we were very much interested in teaching this material honestly, you know, and and really freeing it from all the accumulated baggage And not not teaching it in a tendentiously leftist way, but, you know, but really being open to it in a way that you know Our colleagues were just not there, just were not open to these things anymore. You know these thinkers from the 18th and 19th centuries They were not or the early 20th century. 

Speaker 3: And we had to struggle a lot with Moishe. 

Speaker 3: Oh yeah do that because You know what it was that I, i, he had. He had closed these books for himself in a certain way and Obviously that was the case, you know, through his reading of Marx. There were certain, you know, i think, tendentious things that that flowed from that. For instance, we had to really fight to teach Rousseau and and to teach a certain Oh yeah, i'm gonna teach Adam Smith in an honest way, you know, or what we view this in honest way, you know. 

Speaker 2: But stuff is forbidden from the 20th century. I mean, moish was a, he was himself a product of the University of Chicago undergraduate education as well as graduate education, and so he had himself experienced this education that we were trying to give to undergraduate students now, and It very typical new left kind of biases about all these things. I mean it's very ironical That Moish had a kind of anti-traditional Marxism you know kind of framework, but then his perspective was actually in many respects quite traditionally Marxist When it came to bourgeois society and bourgeois thinkers. And so, yeah, i mean, like what Spencer said, these were kind of closed books, you know he'd acknowledged things sometimes, but mostly under our pressure For him to do so. Yeah, we also taught Freud together, you know. So Freud I had been familiar with, but again, not really Until I had to teach it. And we have the benefit of a guy, Bert Kohler, who was himself a psychoanalyst, who was an older, older generation Faculty, and he might have even been Moish's teacher at some point. Was that right, spencer? 

Speaker 4: There's some like I can't say, i can't say about that for sure. 

Speaker 2: He was almost a full generation older than Moish. 

Speaker 4: Right, i should defer to him. And and therefore the conversation about Freud had a kind of different dynamic, moish otherwise led. You know what was also happening, derek, is that, of course we were, you know, pursuing dissertations. You know, chris was, you know, looking at, in effect, the intellectual aftermath of Marxism via the Frankfurt school and adorno, and I Was looking at the intellectual aftermath of the 20th century from the point of view of like what it had done to early modern history, you know. And so we were both kind of leveraging the, the attitude that we were, you know, in the energy that we were drawing from teaching, a kind of, you know, powerful impulse to revisit The past and, you know, the text that were sort of covered with the detritus of the 20th century, sweeping that off, these texts and trying to read them again. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, i hadn't thought about that, that it's almost like book ends because you were working on, you know I guess you'd call it early colonial India. You know, in the 1700s and I was dealing with the Frankfurt school, with adorno, who's like the youngest member of the Frankfurt school, the first generation, and so really was book ends on it, you know, on this kind of historical period. 

Speaker 3: But I think that on you know, the revelation for us and Marx was very much in nexus, oh yeah, accessing the history of bourgeois, the rise of bourgeois society. So I drew very heavily from Marx to try to reopen the history of the 18th century. And of course Chris was drawing on Marx and Marxism in his reading of Adorno. Sorry, chris, go ahead. 

Speaker 2: That's okay, you know, because I do think that part of our kind of reputation, if you will, in platypus is this kind of liberalism and socialism thing and You know a kind of you know, bourgeois social basis for the struggle for socialism, and You know which again, would not have been Remarkable or certainly news to anyone in an earlier generation of Marxism, in a much earlier generation of Marxism, so a hundred years ago or more than a hundred years ago, none of the things that we were trying to raise about the relationship between bourgeois society and the struggle for socialism Would have been controversial to anybody, to Rosa Luxemburg, lenin, trotsky, kautsky, none of them would have. You know, stalin and now wouldn't dispute the points that we're making right. And so it's only very recently. It's only after the new left, and really after the collapse of the new left, because the new left itself also Maintain this consciousness. 

Speaker 2: After the collapse of the new left, then the left became very anti bourgeois. In a particular way. It's really a kind of a postmodernist thing. That then I Mean it ironically, even though postmodernism is like a kind of anti-Stalinism french fries are kind of chafing under The weight of the French Communist Party but actually postmodernism assumes a lot of Stalinist Perspectives like it's. 

Speaker 4: Yeah, you know the, the Attempt to. You know, i don't, you know it was either. You had a critique of the Enlightenment, right, this was the kind of language that people would talk in in the 1990s In intellectual circles. That was, of course, permeating the left. I Think on the left a lot of it was authorized by sort of Althusser's critique of humanism, mm-hmm. 

Speaker 4: And You know the idea that that that marks and Marxism were like something else, right, that they were not, you know, imminent to the Enlightenment or imminent to bourgeois society. But You know it was a standpoint of epistemology, it was the point of view of the oppressed. You got, you know these weird things like bad do, right, a kind of eternal Critique, communist critique of the from one of you, of the downtrodden. You know this sort of thing. So, yeah, you know, at this point, you know, sometimes it feels like the wreckage and the miseducation of young people is just so vast because they're The people in our generation. Derick were educated in this secondhand way. They had no idea what motivated the ideas that they were being taught, right? 

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, i definitely experienced that when I was in grad school, like, like we were, like we be handed Baudrillard, you know, post Simulation of simulacra, and we would be given no context of like his relationship to the French Communist Party, are his fallout with that or what all the you know, we were taught it actually and and This delusion way, that's like the worst kind of pragmatism, like the idea that, like, any concept is just free-floating and you can grab it and use it, completely removed and reappropriated   and That's how we were taught these things and From. For me, it was a conservatizing experience. I left. I left undergrad as like a militant paleo conservative. 

Speaker 1: Reaction yeah, totally in reaction against that, because I was just like that's all nonsense, like it's not useful, i don't see what it's doing. 

Speaker 2: I mean that happened, by the way, because I feel like I was in some kind of strange laboratory for those at Hampshire College. Okay, because, um, you know, i was taught by Marxists, like kind of Marxist, new leftist, like people who thought of themselves as like really Marxist and who were not postmodernist But who were deeply demoralized in the 80s really coming out of the 60s and 70s. 

Speaker 4: I mean it was still sort of fresh, the trauma was still fresh. 

Speaker 2: For them and they were like You know I mean I think that I talked about it in my paths to Marxism Margaret Cerullo, who was the editor of radical America, that was the legacy journal from the students for a democratic society. You know she like. You know she was like yeah, you know she's a lesbian. You know she's like yeah, you know I'm a Marxist, but I feel like I'm a dinosaur. And you know, kids are into Foucault now, and so maybe we should take Foucault seriously, even though Foucault said that rape shouldn't be treated as a crime. Right, she had this kind of feminist thing about Foucault and but you sort of capitulated, right, she's just like well, what are we gonna do? right? so the grab-bag approach to ideas Really had to do with losing the plot. I mean, they had very much lost the plot politically and it was very hard for them to maintain it intellectually. 

Speaker 1: I. So I am Personally in an odd generational chasm and that, like I, somehow I have one foot in the Gen X Left whatever the fuck that is, and another foot in the millennial left, whatever the fuck that is. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that generation And I feel like I kind of went through this, this period of which Foucault was super dominant in universities. Even in I was in a fairly conservative university We still had like Foucault shoved down our throats. I know, like the the, the idea that I would have met Marxist in college who weren't it idiot undergrads Was like, not that would, that wouldn't even be an occurred to me. And So we have that. And then, as I was finishing up grad school and applying for jobs, bad news Jejeque To less degree Laquan and move. 

Speaker 2: They were there already. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, they were there already, as was heart and a Geary, i mean, as I kind of remind people hard. And a Geary was a bestseller when I was 19. We read it with voice believe it or not, whoa? 

Speaker 2: Yeah, we read it with Moish because we were reading a course That he taught was called the present as history. It was basically trying to deal with the post-soviet world And or the neoliberal world. So we read David Harvey, condition Modernity, but we also read heart and negrie, empire. We didn't do multitude and Commonwealth, we just did Empire. and You know, moish would always say Because you know he would he would in a sense give people license to dismiss a lot of the stuff with his own ideas. But then in teaching a course like that, he said, well, we're not gonna, we're not gonna wrap it up and throw it in the bin. 

Speaker 2: Let's take it seriously, all right, so it's a big impulse of his own students who would be like, oh well, there's no commodity form analysis, so it's just Whatever fetish forms. And he would say, oh no, but this is the way capitalism really appears now. Right, so hard and negrie. I mean, Yeah, you know we can kind of make fun of it now, But you know it did capture the zeitgeist. 

Speaker 1: And. 

Speaker 2: Michael Hart, who wrote the introduction to the verso publication of Thomas Jefferson. Whatever happens to that Right? No words. Thomas Jefferson, revolutionary by Michael Hart. Okay, then That's in the rear view. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, and so then there was this return to mark you're talking about what like 2000. Yeah, oh, for me. For me It's actually saw as in. I was in Georgia in a conservative school, so it's probably gonna be about four years later. So for this is 2000 to 2005 for me. 

Speaker 3: Yeah, so, and it's like kind of concurrence, absolutely the years in which Chris and I were. 

Speaker 2: Came friends. Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm about a decade younger than you guys, so And I was going through that at the time I Got pulled into pay like conservative role. I've talked about this a lot, even, son, the stupid Houston manifesto as a. 

Speaker 2: Is that paleo? 

Speaker 1: con it. No, it's a weird. It was a weird mixture of people. It was like that's like liberal like centers rolls. There were some Sam's dot libertarians and then some of us Some paleo con signed it off of the idea That we would be because we were anti-war but we didn't want to endorse it, like You know. Hugo Chavez and Bath as a man, iran, like all that was like very different. 

Speaker 2: Very right, right. So all three of those very different things, right? Bolivarian Revolution, bathism, arab nationalism, quasi fascist Arab nationalism and then Islam Islamic revolution. Very different things. Exactly What was paleo conservatism for you? 

Speaker 1: for me It was Pat Buchanan or late period reform. Yeah, like anti war. 

Speaker 2: Trump quit the reform party because he didn't like that Buchanan, because he was to right wing. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah, I came into that after the Trump, the Trump Buchanan war Why even sir it's you yeah, him and Trump left because they couldn't stand that Buchanan's right wing shit and specifically what got me into that was anti-war calm and Because I was involved in the anti-war movement and that's actually kind of how I got to you guys ten years later And my experience of the anti-war movement was that, like international answer was profoundly Unserious and or quite serious, but just bad right, depending on where you were at Right, but like dude still running around. 

Speaker 2: Who's the guy who's like an ex US government official, ramsey Clark. Yeah, he was. Ramsey Clark was still running around. What's his background? Spencer, he's like Nick Sinera. What is his deal? 

Speaker 3: I forget, but he started speaking at like RCP events or something. 

Speaker 2: No, he's also. What do you call it? answer He's also workers world. He's like kind of standard fair, like anti-war, kind of anti-military industrial complex kind of guy. You know, he's like the lib. 

Speaker 3: I would have known 20 years ago. 

Speaker 2: I've forgotten We went by the way. So before platypus, of course we went to the anti-war demos. We were there from the beginning and of course we were against the war. You know very much so. So Papi Cannon was against the war Right. I was kind of unaware. 

Speaker 2: Papi Cannon like kind of didn't register for me. Like he was either I had the sort of typical silly leftist kind of whatever, like Christian fascism You know, like. In other words, he was either like a Reaganite or he was some kind of Christian fascist And so I just had no real sense of him, like whatsoever, you know. And so again, paleo con is a kind of a funny thing, so it's kind of anti-neo con, right, but it can be Reaganite, yeah, sometimes, yes, yeah, even though Reaganism is like neocon, neolib, christian evangelical in a way that I don't know. Maybe the paleo cons are, maybe their arms. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, the paleo cons have their Catholic branch. They're really weird. Oh, jewish branch around Paul Godfrey, which is kind of what I was more attracted to, and they're they're Protestant, you know, kind of know nothing branch. 

Speaker 2: I don't know how, But you know, I think that's a very cultural conservative right Like Americana or what. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i mean it's cultural, conservative Americana, although the person who got me into it, to be completely honest, was a professor of mine who was a Hegel scholar. 

Speaker 2: He was a very conservative Hegel scholar, america. So I mean there's, there's a, there's a plausible case to be made for it. 

Speaker 1: He was speaking to me because I kind of came out of you know relatively undereducated working class background and ran into like a lot of like Tromsky quoters and the punk scene was initially attracted by that. But then during the antiwar years, you know international answer particularly in this. I mean we are in the South or not, you know. So it's a little bit different, but was just so. 

Speaker 2: RCP was World Can't Wait, yeah, world Can't Wait, world Can't Wait for Bush to be out of office. 

Speaker 1: Right, I mean, and like you know, Bush is a fascist Preparing fascism for 3000 years. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, Like they would have their amazing sound system And it would be like monster truck rally type voice Boom out. They're trying to establish not the 1000 year rake but the 3000 year rake. 

Speaker 1: And you know you can and had done this weird thing like my one venture into leftism as a teenager was going all the way out, driving my happy ass all the way out to the to the battle for Seattle, before it was called that out to protest, it out to protest the the G8 back then And I it had left. You know we just come as Zine kids. We had saved up. 

Speaker 1: There were conservatives that the Seattle protests there were, and that's what I was like. the first, the first crack of that idea was actually Pat Buchanan was there, yeah, and so he wrote this book a Republic, not an empire. I got a hold of it. it seemed plausible. I was studying a lot of Hegel, nietzsche And kind of you know marks was read with real kids gloves where I was at like it was like, oh, we're going to talk about the manifesto, and isn't that cute. Now go read Bozeryard and and Derrida. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it was. It was kind of like that for me in college. I think that Spencer had a better, in some ways, undergraduate education and more kind of expansive view of things And I think that was really a little bit of a hot house environment. You know, spencer, you got sort of inoculated against things with Richard wordy and right. 

Speaker 4: Right, i mean, i went to, you know, i guess, a conservative institution which the University of Virginia, which I'm pretty grateful for And I wasn't really encountering, you know, leftism, and was able to have a fairly intellectually sort of rich, your education and just lots and lots of science. And you know, i think I took like six years of college courses and for, and you know, i experienced the 90s. You know, i don't know, you know where your sort of Gen Y experience sits here, but I experienced my generation as like allowing for like a long education, you know, like like patients to think things through. 

Speaker 1: In college, yeah, in college, right, i mean you know we had an undergrad, but it was over by the time I was in grad school. 

Speaker 4: like I literally went through that transition, Like yeah, when Chris and I met, like there wasn't like any exact like urgency to like I don't know what, join something or determine the line, or we were dealing with the ideas at a pretty high esoteric level without really you know, worrying about you know what the implications were. 

Speaker 2: We had time to think about it. 

Speaker 3: We had time to think about it And you know there would be, you know, and our professors were not like I mean, someone like Moise Pistone was, i think, really thrown by 911 and the war on terror. you know, and I remember, you know people, you know his close friend, andrew Arado, was very thrown by it and you know, i remember the liberals, you know, i remember reading like Paul Berman, Paul Berman you know going and reading like the Muslim Brotherhood. 

Speaker 2: That's how Doug Henwood turned against us, because we invited him to speak on a panel with Paul Berman And Doug Henwood decided that, like he couldn't be on a panel with all white people, and but of course there was a black man from the RCP on the panel And there was a, i think, indian American, and plus one author I'm forgetting now. 

Speaker 1: Oh, I was actually am platypus when that happened. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it was Yeah, And so. 

Speaker 4: I don't remember Nikhil's last thing. 

Speaker 2: I don't remember his last name either, But but you know. But somehow he just saw Paul Berman and he's like it, platypus is all white guys. And even though all the people he was dealing with in New York were women, and many of them women of color, They became, as he called them in a indelible phrase, Chris Cotrone's hordes of secretaries. Yeah, Of course, these people are just as racist and sexist as they accuse others. 

Speaker 4: Yeah, but I remember, like you know, discussing, like you know, there was like what was it? the UN development report on the Middle East. You know Moise was shocked at, like, the rates of unemployment, about poverty Yeah. 

Speaker 4: And then you know the unemployment in the Middle East. Like, really like you know, and like making a very elemental liberal points to his classroom, like well, you know, this was an attack on civil society And like the state's supposed to protect you from that And he would. He was like rediscovering I don't know what a liberalism that he couldn't assimilate. 

Speaker 2: No, I mean he was sort of thrown in. One of the one of the early experiences that Spencer and I had was seeing Christopher Hitchens speak at the University of Chicago. And at the University of Chicago, you know, Hitchens was whatever, And you know we were in the audience and full for off. He was in full for off, for sure, And Moise was on the stage with with Hitchens right, And we're in the audience, and then the ISO came and denounced Hitchens from the audience, the International Socialist Organization, They were want to do that. 

Speaker 2: Yes, I mean I, I expected that behavior from, like the Spartacists, I wasn't sure about the ISO, Right. And then afterwards, you know, and Hitchens kind of gave a bullshit response to them, And afterwards I said to Moise, you know, like Hitchens was horrible and he made the ISO look good. And Moise was like, oh no, no one can make them look good, You know they're so bad. You know, for all of Hitchens problems, you know he can't make them look good because they're so bad. And I was like, yeah, get real, Moise, you know. So I mean Moise, it's a funny, it's a funny thing because I think that he gets thrown in with a kind of like Zionism and therefore kind of neoconism, something like that. And you know he just wasn't that he belongs to the anti Dutch right in some ways. 

Speaker 2: He is appropriated by the anti-Deutsch for sure, but he does not like them Right. So there are two tendencies in Germany that Moise is assimilated to, that he does not like Vert critique and the anti-Deutsch And they don't like him either. The vert critique people don't like Moise either, because they think he's an idealist and not a materialist. So it's a kind of a fascinating thing. When you dig deep There's actually a great deal of hostility there, and so you know he's a kind of a sui generis kind of character, both in terms of Marxology but really politically. But then he would be sort of pigeonholed. 

Speaker 3: A good representation of the Moise that we, that we're talking about, of that period, who you know I was his research assistant and there were like fairly advanced disagreements at that point But also you know a lot of exchange. you know a lot of intellectual exchange is in a paper he wrote called History and Helplessness, from 2006, which kind of grew out of his thinking around this time that Chris and I were referring to. 

Speaker 2: So first thing I had the kids in Plotopus before it was Plotopus like the extracurricular reading group. 

Speaker 2: You know, when they approached me to establish the extracurricular reading group, i sent them History and Helplessness and I think that it was in manuscript form and hadn't come out yet At that time. And you know we had our differences with that article but generally agreed with the basic point. Right, you know we might have disputed. He kind of throws Fanon under the bus a little bit, doesn't he Is that right. Yeah, it's Hans Hansen critique of Fanon which is a little bit off. Yeah, right, and so. But basically you know his point regarding, like you know, you can't. You can't draw a line between the New Left and Al Qaeda. Right, as like resistance. And you know the New Left would never have done, for all of their terrorism, they would never have done this kind of terrorism. It's a totally different beast. You know, and you know his invoking what I was familiar with from the 80s left, which is the ANC. You know South Africa and also the Central American struggles from the 80s. You know, when he was like the Mennonistas in the FMLN, the ANC in the South African Communist Party and not even Fanon's like inspired group, the African consciousness movement. You know, steve Biko, none of these people would do what Al Qaeda does. Right. And so you can't like say, oh well, the state always calls resistance terrorism and just leave it at that. And so you know Al Qaeda, which is kind of the Tarak Ali kind of whistling out Right. 

Speaker 2: I think that we saw Tarak Ali also, didn't we? He came around, i mean, and then, and then I interviewed him early on in platypus, but he came around I feel like before that. So we saw Hitchens and Ali, not at the same time, but they were. They were around, and so this whole crack up of the New Left over 911 was very present to our mind. I don't know how much it was a formative experience in a sense, but I feel like it was already a kind of just an exemplar of something. In other words, we already had like our outlook, and then the sort of bad leftism, if you will, was just an example. It wasn't like we defined ourselves with respect to it. We were sort of a little bit horrified at how bad the left did become in that context. In other words, we sort of, you know, were girded against like the bad left, but then I think we were still shocked also. 

Speaker 3: I mean, chris and I, sometimes, would you know, i guess one way you can think about platypus in terms of like these older people is members of Gen X who were overshadowed by the New Left, who were in a sense recruited to reproduce the New Left in the 80s. And Chris and Richard and I are sort of peeling off of that and saying, like you know, especially in the context of like the very direct intergenerational reproduction of the left that was taking place before our eyes in the anti-war movement, where of course, the older generation was the boomers, was the New Left and their organizations. 

Speaker 2: The ISO was very Gen X. 

Speaker 3: And we were basically saying, you know you don't have to do this. Like you know there's a problem here and this project doesn't fully cohere. And you know it was like very much. you know, this is where I feel like the classroom sort of pre-platypus experience. We had the experience of talking to young people who were prepared to entertain like a really different and, i think, a much more sort of high wire approach to history of recovery of a without a net and a much older and I would, i would argue, much more radical approach to history. 

Speaker 3: And, of course, where we were now, you know, confronting the accumulated catastrophe that you know, the very idea that you had to unearth some of these, like what you know, in a seminar with Chris or with me, could seem like a very straightforward reading of Adam Smith or something like that. And yet they knew this is not what anyone else would have learned. Right, they had that sense, and so it was that idea that, like, look, the young people might be open to, like a fundamental reconsideration and that needs to be facilitated. 

Speaker 2: Oh yeah, i mean for sure, like that's what summoned me to, you know, to, platypus was okay. So you want to look at things differently? you're open to looking at things differently. It was in the air, you know it wasn't. It wasn't unique to our students by any means it was. It was the early millennial generation, i think that they were. 

Speaker 2: You know we went Spencer wasn't there for that but that same summer that I wrote those documents for Platypus, the kids from the reading group and I went to the founding convention of the new SDS which was held at the University of Chicago and in the summer of 2006, and you know what all of us remember from that was when people like Carl Davidson and others who had been in the original SDS said look, don't follow us. In other words, you know we're here to advise you. We're here mostly to tell you don't make our mistakes right and don't don't assume anything that we assumed. So you know they, and Carl Davidson especially, said you know, for instance, our generation has an experience of racism and the struggle against racism. That may not be appropriate to your generation at all. You might have a totally different world that you're trying to engage and therefore, you know you can't listen to us because you know we're stuck in the past. That was forgotten pretty quickly. In other words, the, the millennials, like desire to approach things de novo, really kind of vanished, and you know I mentioned the ISO being like a lot of Gen X kind of cadre people older, a little bit older than me and Spencer, but not much right, so definitely not baby boomers. 

Speaker 2: And you know Boscar Sankara, who I do feel like we have to claim some influence on Spencer, because you and I were talking to him and you met him and you know, there was a lot of correspondence going on and there's a lot of like flirtation going on between Boscar and platypus. 

Speaker 2: He spoke at the ISO's annual conference here in Chicago and he said you know, we're having to reach over a generation back to the 60s. He said that to the ISOers you know very much, saying you people are in my way and you know so it is fully reversed by that point. In other words, it went from we're not going to follow the 60s to we want to follow the 60s, but we have this Gen X that's getting in the way right, and so it just. It's an interesting. It's an interesting moment with respect to that, because I think that now our generation is in the driver's seat in corporate America, in government, in academia, right, and so you know, and the baby boom generation and the left generation are either dying or retired unless they're Democrats in an office, because they're like 80s oh sure, those people sure but yeah in general. 

Speaker 2: I agree with you and I do and even, even so, they are like it's a funny, like even those like septuagenarian, octagenarian, you know, they're basically puppets of their staff and their staff are Gen X, you know, look at the Biden administration. I mean, there are millennials too in the Biden administration, of course, but I feel like there is also the sort of Anthony Blinken Gen X type of a lot of the way, the person I did. 

Speaker 4: You know, if I think about my own intellectual trajectory right, the, the three biggest influences on me were where Richard Rorty, jürgen Habermas and Moish, and what they all had in common was that they were all dissidents or critics of the new left. And you know, i, in other words, i, didn't have just a straightforward, especially sort of postmodern doxa, concept of what that intellectual inheritance looks like. You know, nobody, or few people, would have thought of Moish as like a major thinker of his generation when I encountered it. Right, he was an outlier, he was a hidden treasure at the University of Chicago, he'd been denied tenure at the University of Chicago and was a kind of refugee in another department. 

Speaker 3: You know his friends rescued him, you know, but he wasn't a name to conjure with, you know, in any wider world and Adolf too. 

Speaker 2: By the way, adolf was a total like marginal gadfly kind of figure when I was close to Adolf. You know he was not. 

Speaker 3: I mean I feel like it's funny he's become this kind of like canonized figure now, but not at all then right, and you know, of course, a lot of my early friendship with Chris was this deep dive into all that he could show me in terms of Trodskyism right. 

Speaker 1: I guess this is one of the things where I misidentified, because I had said that you were an IBT and actually I think I had attributed to Spencer actually not you, not Richard or Richard somebody because when I had gone through the reading group I have been given a lot of IBT materials oh, because it's Spartacist stuff that's posted on the IBT website. Oh It's a website. 

Speaker 2: It's under a heading called Spartacist materials from when they were still revolutionary. 

Speaker 1: Okay, that's funny. So when I had gone through I had asked the chapter head in Korea who was from your group and they said Carrie, yeah, carrie, carrie Graham and Carrie Graham. And said like, oh, you know, it's because Chris and I'm pretty sure she said Chris. I think I slowly over time transferred to Spencer in my brain. 

Speaker 2: Me and Richard were a Spartacist youth club at Hampshire. Yeah, richard was he likes to say he was a member only for a month. 

Speaker 1: Right and I think just because she said that organization I didn't put together that she was referring to the fact that that was Spart material and I listed it as IBT. But that's what a lot of people throw at you is like a lot of trots, and I'm having a couple of symposiums on why Trotskyism seems to be dying and I will probably invite some of your people or you on eventually about that. But a lot of trots really fucking hated the Spartacist league. 

Speaker 2: Well, right, of course, the Trotskyists all hate each other with a passion. Yes, you know it's pretty intense. What I'd say about this is also, in the background, if they were on terror was the idea that somehow the neocons were all Trotskyists. 

Speaker 1: Yep, i got told that in paleoconservative circles all the time. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it was like the Trotskyists were pursuing their agenda of world revolution through the US government. And you know, i mean I guess we can't neglect any of this, because who knows what people out there think? Right, certainly the Stalinists think that Trotsky was a fascist wrecker. 

Speaker 1: I have heard conspiracies about Trotskyism and the Frankfurt School from Marxist Leninist. Now that I've heard from, yeah, the whole. 

Speaker 2: TIA, neocon, something or other right And or Cold War liberals or Cold War conservatives, max Schachman, and this and that, and you know it's just, it's funny because you know the world doesn't actually make that much sense, and you know I think that. So I remember and Spencer, i think, remembers it somewhat differently But I remember having like really passionate arguments with Spencer over Trotskyism, where I was, you know, somewhere between Stalinism and anarchism. 

Speaker 4: Right, i had been to, you know, world Social Forum. You know I'd been to. 

Speaker 2: I went to some of that stuff too. 

Speaker 4: I went to the one in Mumbai. You know I had fully. You know I'd read Tromsky. Of course you know. But really what Marxism was to me was some kind of Maoism and I felt the attraction of that And I was getting that very strongly from my education in India and in. 

Speaker 2: Naxalism. 

Speaker 3: Naxalism in Indian history. Right, and you know, i remember one of the One of the formative experiences that we used to be able to have, right, is that you could see, like the history of the world as curated from different sectarian perspectives. Oh yeah, right, so there would be like an ISO, and I was also recruited to the ISO, which was I was going to say didn't you smoke some weed with the ISO, or something like that. 

Speaker 3: Yeah, they tried to get me to take bong hits in like silk screen shirts with them in Wicker Park in Chicago And I was like I don't need Marxism to take, you know, to smoke pot. 

Speaker 2: That's where we came up with our phrase bong hit Marxism right. 

Speaker 3: I was very weird, derek. They were like listening to like CDs of like the Soviet Army band, you know, playing the the international. I mean, it was just awful. In some loft in in in Wicker Park they used to dangle like the prettiest girls in the organization in front of young men. Right, they would like put them out on the street corner to sell the newspaper. And then they'd call you up and say like, oh, i met you earlier, i met you last week on the street corner. Would you like to have a cup of coffee with no. 

Speaker 3: In Bucktown, huh. 

Speaker 4: Yeah, you know they wouldn't mention like Marxism or the ISO at all. Right, they would be like a young woman calling you know, calling you to ask you on a date, and I was like this is fucking weird. But anyway, you know it was Rad Libbism right, it was 90s Rad Libbism that that had this kind of ambient Stalinism. And you know I was much more academically educated and you know Chris's Trotskyism, if you will, was really much more of a roadmap to the history of the 20th century. Right, it was a much clearer set of ways of thinking about, which, ultimately, you know, i don't think I adopted or I don't think Chris was trying to get me to adopt, but you know it was breaking me of things like Moises, like social theories, because the kind of a historical character of some of Moises thought his approach, to quote unquote, traditional Marxism. 

Speaker 2: No, i remember you saying and this is the typical thing, isn't it? 

Speaker 2: that it's like, well, you know, people aren't going to become Marxists, like this revolution is just not going to happen, right, like you're not going to get a majority of people to be Marxists, and I was like, yeah, well, that's not really required. But then, you know, we start talking about things, and it was in the context of not only our teaching but the war on terror type stuff. And so I think that you got a subscription to workers vanguard, and so we would talk about the Spartacists and and, and also our dissatisfaction with the Spartacists, and I even wrote some letters to the workers vanguard, like expressing my displeasure at some of their formulations. And so it was a thing, you know, it was like an object and it was. You know, i think that that idea that it was a kind of a roadmap to the 20th century, in a sense it was, it was a, it was a, an estranging mechanism right to get you to sort of look at things, consider them and not naturalize them, so like the new left especially. 

Speaker 3: But you know, yeah, things like that because we were really at that point engaged in like a highly developed agonistic relationship with Moish and other professors, right, we were really struggling to be intellectuals of our generation, right, and that meant we had a drunken argument. 

Speaker 2: Spencer Richard and I had a drunken argument with Adolph and Ken Warren at Jimmy's in Hyde Park about the Iraq invasion, you know, because they were just taking a very standard line, you know, against the war, against the invasion and everything, and and I just said, you know I was like playing devil's advocate. I was like if, but what if the US does establish a liberal democracy in Iraq, however a neoliberal, farcical version of it? and you know, and they had a hard time sort of answering that, in other words, like what if this doesn't? you know, i mean it did become something like a hard time answering that right, because they have to. 

Speaker 3: They have to argue that you know, somehow the invasion by the United States created the crisis in the Middle East right everything fine, everything until the US knocked over the sandcastles, mm-hmm there was a lot you know so I think that you know another figure that was in the mix was our friend James Vaughan, and you know a lot of my conversations with Chris were also about you. Had a deep historical engagement with, you know, with Moish and really the new lefts, hostility to bourgeois society and their whole history background on James. 

Speaker 2: James was in the ISO right in college at Cornell, and he was also a student of an acquaintance of Robert Brenner, who was not in the ISO but in solidarity, and so he he had like what the sparses would call the Stalin phobic and the Stalin philic right, like aspects of Trotsky ism in the background and and you know Robert Brenner exactly how he met Robert Brenner, because Robert Brenner was a UCLA, i think at that point. 

Speaker 2: But somehow, you know, they had crossed paths and it maintained contact and so James also came at this like question of because he also studied, you know, 18th century right Britain and so it was very much like yeah, what about the Marxist view of bourgeois society and the Brenner? the Brenner thesis about the origins of capitalism, right was something that he was wrestling with and that's about yeah, all of that crap like the Brenner debate, you know Wallis Steen and world systems theory right right, political Marxism. 

Speaker 1: This is all this, all a heady brew from the late 70s to the 90s. 

Speaker 4: Yeah all the Miscans would all that stuff like Marxism yeah, yeah, james and I, you know, processed that. 

Speaker 3: We were in, you know. Again, i was in in the UK doing research and he and I were both working at the British Library together for felt like six months or more and every day we would just have coffee together and talk about what we were reading in archives and the books that we were reading that night, and and platypus, the formation of platypus and Marxism, and why, you know, the entirety of our education had to be reconsidered and the whole, you know, and, and you know, really it always took the form of like a recovery of an earlier approach to history. 

Speaker 3: That Marxism used to have yeah, i mean, i literally the conclusion. My dissertation, derek, was basically like it's been all downhill since Adam Smith on, you know, on the conquest of India and you know, the question of early modern empire. You know it was gestures like that that our advisors were just reeling from right. They were like, is this? 

Speaker 2: D Peshachar Barti. 

Speaker 4: D Peshachar Barti. 

Speaker 2: I mean, you know, they couldn't recognize what they taught us, yeah, and what we were doing with it and what we were doing with it yeah, but we did, you know, we did have an education and we did use it, but we sort of took it to the next level in a way that again really had to do with uncovering the presuppositions and reopening the books that they thought were closed. Yeah, reopening those books, and so it's a funny thing, i mean. I know that like it's a little strange now because again there's a total collapse going on. It's like now Gerald Horn and Dominico Lissardo are gonna have the final word, you know, on the Marxist approach to the bourgeois revolution. 

Speaker 1: No, i mean seriously right, and the revenge of the revenge of the Marxist line in a slash doneness. 

Speaker 2: Basically, totally you know and I just feel like you want to kill myself well, but you know we're gonna survive, we're gonna proceed, you know we're gonna persevere through and you know we'll get the last laugh. 

Speaker 1: I mean it's weird. To me, though, even like I've gone through and read a lot of early Marxist line in this text and and gone, like this is what you're dealing with now is largely unrecognizable, because it has a hodgepodge of, i mean, you know, if you, if you are so unfortunate again on Twitter, you're incurred, your encounter things that I am not sure actually exists, such as Mecca and Maga, communism, post left but yeah, i've met some of the Caleb Mopinites. 

Speaker 2: I unfortunately I have to, but they definitely exist and they they have, they have numbers, they do. There's like that kind of thing definitely is out there. But you know, i mean Reed settlers, do you remember that read? I mean I remember being in college and thinking that it was gonna be like that old Star Trek series, you know with Richard Shatner excuse me, william Shatner where it's the Yangs versus the Combs on the post apocalyptic planet and I was like, yeah, it's gonna be the Trotskyist versus the Maoists at the end of the, you know, in the post apocalyptic wasteland. And it does seem like it. You know, from their perspective it might be true. You know, in other words, if we're Trotskyists, you know, because it it's. It's a funny thing. 

Speaker 2: I would never have thought in the 90s and in the zeros that we come full circle to the 80s and the late 70s. You know the J Sakai Reed settlers, you know, and the MIM notes, maoist international movement. You know that that was distributed covertly at Hampshire College. You know, when I was in the Spartacus youth club and I was selling workers, vanguard and MIM notes was sitting there in the library, a lobby, and I was like the counter-revolution. There it is, and I'm sure that of course, they wrote about how the Trotskyists are, like you know, eurocentric imperialists, and we're the counter-revolution. You know they were celebrating the shining path and the Spartacists were saying that the shining path were quasi-fascist, like the, like the Khmer Rouge. And you know we're on full circle. 

Speaker 3: Like you know, i agree with you, derek, that the Marxist-Leninism of the past, the Maoism of the past, was much better than what we're dealing with now. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, i'm not a Marxist-Leninist fan. I want to make it clear but Deep past Spencer. 

Speaker 2: The deep past the 80s version? I'm not sure. 

Speaker 3: The deep past and you know obviously it's merits or its liabilities. It was eclectic and incoherent and you could, you could like, for instance, the pamphlet that Chris gave me that had the deepest influence on me, was, or told me to get from the Spartacist League or something was the Stalinist school of falsification. The critique of Carl Davidson left and form, right, in essence his criticism of Trotskyism from the 70s, right, and you know, i don't know, like I don't know what. I recommend that to young people from time to time and they never come back to me. You know they never say like how that made sense or whatever. Like I feel like like the Maoism today is too unrecognizable and scrambled and indistinguishable from just general Rad libism and Or general conservatism, or whatever I mean it seems to have to do with In the matter of communist people. 

Speaker 2: it's an interesting thing, you know, like infrared right, mm-hmm, and I mean he's like he's very anti-DSI, i suppose. right, he's very like anti-social Democrat. 

Speaker 1: But he's anti-, but they were pro-CPUSA, which I've never really understood why you would be. 

Speaker 2: Well, you know it's a funny I mean, stalinism is a funny thing. But I remember there was the moment, wasn't there a moment, when the so-called Red Guards were like heckling the DSA at various locations, like in Texas and places like that, i think, austin, texas, the Red Guards showed up to like break up the social fascist meeting or the social imperialist meeting of the DSA And I thought, okay, it's on, yeah, but not really. It didn't last very long. Right, it was like a half a second, but I feel like, you know, instead it's mega-communism. Now, You know, and you know that's a funny, it's whatever, it is right. I don't see that right. But I think, intellectually, when we think about what is there to read, right And the counter-revolution of 1776 and liberalism, a counter-history like these things have the unfortunate benefit of being very well-distributed books that I'm sure some fools are teaching in their classroom. 

Speaker 1: For Christ's sake, yeah, well, i mean liberalism, a counter-history, actually got into my bloodstream for a little while while I was in Platypus Filier society, And then I sort of struggled through it separately, mainly through actually reading other stuff Lusardo wrote in, realizing what his background assumptions were, and then going back in reading liberalism and counter-history and realizing, oh, there are other things hidden in this that I was not informed of, And I mean that book was published by Obstensible Trotskyist. I mean that's the other thing that like it's hilarious, It's Verso. 

Speaker 2: They're not Trotskyist, they're like Trotsky's song. 

Speaker 1: Well, yeah, i mean Verso's, you know. 

Speaker 2: Verso has been a Trotskyist in a long time. 

Speaker 1: Right Verso is its own thing and it's really a corporate thing now. 

Speaker 2: Coming up with perspective. They're Trotskyist. I remember that we went to a historical materialism conference up in Trotsky and there was a strong South Asian contingent, probably faculty, like academic Marxists, who at a certain point just had enough and they were like enough of this Trotskyism. Like they just sort of got up and yelled like you know the Trotskyism, and I think that it sort of. You know, sebastian Budgen was there And I think that he was a little bit chagrined because he's like but I'm not a Trotskyist, and they're like you know he didn't say that, but you know, in other words, you are Trotskyist and you don't even realize it, right, because the background assumptions And you know, of course, they were thumping the table and saying what about the global South? And there was some Filipino leftists there who were also Malists, right, and basically They did this during our panel, didn't they? 

Speaker 3: Wasn't it like-. 

Speaker 2: They might have it might have been They meet up. 

Speaker 3: They and I I think we're speaking and they thought that they were coming to like to hear the opinion voice of the third world Marxists in the, in the metropole, together with their you know ally, And they were getting something different And I think they They might have been. 

Speaker 2: They might have been responding to you, but I feel like it was at a certain point in the conference where they had had their fill at the conference. Yeah, you know it had like reached a point where they were just like enough of this Trotskyism, and. But maybe it was you guys who put it over the edge, maybe it was, and and certainly Budgen was like well, we're not, we're not them Right, like but they also won't publish a L'Ossetto Stalin book because I don't think they want people to deal with what that says. 

Speaker 1: Why-. 

Speaker 2: You know it's funny, but they should. I mean, after all, they published a song in Vennladen's writings. 

Speaker 1: That's true, actually. 

Speaker 2: Oh, i don't know why they draw the line at L'Ossetto on Stalin. I mean, you know, got to feel for my old country. People like these Italians, and I, like Italy, you know, had a pretty traumatic experience after World War II. What is it? The? the strategy of stress? What is the? or the strategy of? what was the? the preemptive, like a terrorism that the right did in Italy against the left? Hmm, do you know what I'm talking about, spencer, it's in the cell. The CIA, you know they had what was their. They had, like a plan in place to like have a coup in Italy If the communists ever, like, were elected And but then they had this strategy, they had that in place. 

Speaker 4: Since World War II. Yeah, yeah. 

Speaker 2: But they kind of like you know, really were like strategy of tension. 

Speaker 1: Right Yeah. 

Speaker 2: Not strategy of stress, strategy of tension, but they were going to like crack up the communist party by making them lose their nerve. So they did, like right wing terrorism, like just that's, nations against the communists. And you know like Lusardo had to live through that, you know. So, you know, and it's so, you know. no doubt he thought John, it must, it must all go back to John Locke, like these CIA motherfuckers using the mafia to bomb us here in Italy. It must, it must be in John Locke somewhere. It's in that second treatise of government What's happening to us, you know. 

Speaker 1: I mean it's, it's a. it is funny to me, though, because if you did ask me in 2010, when I was first getting interested in Marxism, i'm like okay, if there's going to be some kind of Marxist Leninism, it's going to be like old, pre-1978 Maoism, and I was not expecting to encounter. 

Speaker 3: you know, it's hard to What extent do you think these young people just think that Trotskyism's the DSA? 

Speaker 1: Well, there's a lot of that. 

Speaker 1: I do think that there's a lot of because because, except for the IMT although the IMT does do some interest stuff with it and the Sparks and the Norfites everybody else has collapsed into just sub tendencies, little you know, was it caucuses within the DSA And interestingly it has ended tensions between people who had tensions that I never understood anyway. Like I couldn't tell that much of a difference between solidarity and ISO. I know there was a difference, but I mean the Shackmanites and the Cliffites had already collapsed into one thing anyway and they were pushing, all to say, for Christ's sake, i didn't understand what any of it meant anymore. 

Speaker 2: I mean Harrington was Shackman's pupil, you know totally, and so you could just say the DSA is Shackmanite social democrat, like Cold War social democrats and just you know have done with it like that. I mean, obviously Harrington opposed Reaganism in the 80s. 

Speaker 2: So, he had his kind of leftist bonafides. you know he did the whole. you know he had no problem supporting the Stalinists in Central America or South Africa. You know he wasn't a Stalinophobe like that Right. So, but I do think that these are the ways that people's discontent with the state of the left is going to be expressed And it's going to be. it's going to be sort of it's just going to assume a lot. It's going to assume like history has led us to this point and not reconsider like the deep background, not reconsider the history, but just accept it as this is the outcome, right. 

Speaker 1: I mean one thing I can say as a person who had flirted with the late Secretary and left, and I'm really from it. I came from a before I got in the platypus. I came from a S P USA. I was in a. I wasn't even a full member because by half time I was in the country And I was associated with the what was it? the radicals tendency or something which was a weird like now I know to be kind of Marciite, but I didn't know that at the time like Kasama slash Trotsky as hybrid group And they kind of got their asses kicked against, i believe, the McNally, more social democratic faction, reynolds what was it? Mac Reynolds? Mac Reynolds, not McNally. Yeah, mcnally's a Marxologist, right, yeah, mac Reynolds. Kind of faction leading between 2008 and 2012 and I started talking to you guys in 2011 and then Occupy happened and I was like you know and I'm not going to mess with this S P USA stuff because it's clearly Occupy- had some paleo cons too. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, there were paleo cons in the anti-war movement. There were paleo cons in the Occupy movement. 

Speaker 1: No, the deputy was, and so there's all kinds of weird shit in the Occupy movement. 

Speaker 2: I mean that you know, but that might be a virtue of it, right? 

Speaker 2: In other words, i think that you know, kind of, i do think that there were only a couple of authentic upsurges of leftism in our time, in the time that Spencer and I had been friends, in the time of Platypus, and it would be the anti-war movement in Occupy. 

Speaker 2: You know, i really don't think that the Sanders moment and the DSA moment was that, because I think that what had been prepared by Boscar and others was to, you know, to the point where the anti-war movement came out of that experience, came out of the anti-war movement, came out of Occupy, but they sort of prepared this funnel to channel it into Sandersism and DSA, even though you know they had a whole way of thinking that was prior to that right, prior to the Sanders moment And so, but they didn't give the younger people the benefit of understanding that right. You know the fact that there was all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork, discontented with the war on terror, discontented with the Great Recession, discontented with Obamacism, i think spoke well of it. I mean, you know, of course we went to Occupy too. They had Occupy in Chicago. 

Speaker 3: It just felt like you know. to me it just it's felt like since 2015, 2016, there's a great narrowing on the left. you know this. you know this, this horrific world that we're experiencing now, right, this deep authoritarianism on the left and or what passes as the left, like it was just foreseeable, like you just knew, right, okay, this is where this is going to go, right. 

Speaker 3: Like, as soon as the Sanders movement took off and the left started glomming onto it, you could feel the intellectual oxygen kind of energy just being sucked out and a lot of other, you know it, conversations felt much more like some kind of psychological contest, like you were appealing to, to people to think, or to not be afraid, or to think outside of the, you know, confines that they were imposing upon themselves. It. It it Trump of course did that. Obviously, trump consolidated all of that. 

Speaker 2: Trump really did that And that's that's the part that you know, rallied me to my second controversial existence or something, because I think the first controversial existence was that we were, in the context of the anti war movement, willing to entertain a broad left perspective on the questions raised by the war And, you know, just willing to say, look, these are not settled matters. You know someone like Paul Berman, who we didn't agree with, or Christopher Hitchens, for that matter, who we didn't agree with, we're still raising points that you had to deal with. You had to deal with. You can't, like, pretend these don't exist. And again, occupy was a little bit different, like it wasn't polarizing in the same way, but the Trump moment, i just knew, okay, trump's going to be the big excuse To not think. 

Speaker 3: And and our and our entire youth right Reagan was the bugbear. 

Speaker 2: Reagan was the excuse not to think back then. 

Speaker 3: Right, and you could just see it happening again. 

Speaker 2: What's happening again? I mean, you know, adolf was good back then, for example, like he refused to stop thinking. Even though he gave up the socialist project to fight Reaganism, He still refused to stop thinking through that period. You know I mentioned my old professor, margaret. 

Speaker 3:  The Jesse Jackson phenomenon Jesse. 

Speaker 2: Jackson phenomenon. Yeah, i read that and it was brilliant book. It's quite brilliant And but I remember at Hampshire the Clarence Thomas hearings, the Anita Hill versus Clarence Thomas hearings. The Marxist professors were enthralled. They were enthralled by this, like they were totally like team Anita Hill, you know, like contra Clarence Thomas And you know, and it was out of that anti Reaganism because that came fairly late in the game in the Reagan era, you know it's, i think that was under. was he nominated by Reagan or by Bush? Herbert Walker Bush? It's pretty late in the game, isn't it Herbert Walker Bush. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's Herbert Walker Bush. And so, you know, i just thought, wow, you know, because I I kind of didn't think much of it really, to tell the truth, and I was like, oh, this is what they care about. And then when, when Bill Clinton was elected, you know, they spent the whole year before he was elected Complaining about how he was attacking black people by going back to Arkansas and like executing, you know, a learning disabled black man and by condemning sister soldier, right. But then when he was elected, they were ecstatic. They were ecstatic. 

Speaker3: My Marxist professors, derek do you think that this, that your podcast and audience has really grown in that context of being like a kind of I don't know what, how you would describe your relationship to like the DSA and the Sanders left? But is it a the Trump era? Is it a Trump era phenomena? 

Speaker 1: I think my particular brand is actually sort of a post Trump era phenomenon, but I do think that the reason why I exist is as a kind of counter 2020. 

Speaker 3: Thing. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a kind of a counter response to that, because I started saying like, look like. Actually I'm surprised this has not been thrown at me, because when I was in, i was in Egypt and people you know. So I was not in the United States at the time, but I said during the Trump, the Trump election, i was like he can win. It's not as far fetch as you think And what you guys are afraid of I don't think is possible under our current regime And I think he's gonna be a lot more like George Bush And Trump. 

Speaker 1: Trump, yeah, and even Doug Laine back then was like he thought it was crazy, like, and I was just like I just you guys are like positing that he's gonna pull out some dark magic, right-wing Keynesianism and like and like all these paleo-conservatives are gonna radically alter the military, and I just don't believe that's gonna happen. If the military alters, it's because its generals have decided regardless of whether or not it's being framed in in Pap-You-Canon world or in John Rumsfeld world, how that the that their imperial limits have kind of just reached a nadir, that they can't push any further there. And I started talking about Hadrian's walling it. So you know I was a counter voice, i also-. 

Speaker 2: Obama promised that too. Let's-. Yeah, I know. Trump basically promised to deliver where Obama had not. 

Speaker 1: Right. 

Speaker 2: Especially on the war, as on the war on terror, but also on other things like immigration reform. Let's not forget that George W Bush and Obama had both promised immigration reform and that's all Trump wanted to achieve, and the wall was just a tactic in that negotiation, rather than you know, but the you know, you're old enough, but certainly Spencer and I are old enough to know that every Republican president is called a fascist. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, I am. Like-. 

Speaker 2: And so just to see through that, right. But you know, but Trump was such a kind of out of left field, so to speak, that I don't know this time it's plausible. I mean, spencer, didn't you meet George W? 

Speaker 3: Bush. It's amazing also that every Republican is a fascist and every Democrat is a disappointment. Right, right, it's like How You know how many times can you see this repeated? 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing. Well, the only one who's not a disappointment is the one who got assassinated JFK Right. But he wasn't a disappointment. Up to the point where he was assassinated He was a disappointment, but then he got off the hook for that one. But, spencer, didn't you meet George W Bush when he was a young man? 

Speaker 4: Yeah, he came to. I mean, it wasn't that long before he ran for president. He came to my-. 

Speaker 2: But he wasn't governor of-. 

Speaker 4: I think maybe Not yet. I think, maybe not. I was living in Washington. Yeah, he wanted to-. 

Speaker 2: It was before he got dry. 

Speaker 3: Yeah, he was definitely drunk and he wanted to talk to my cousin. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, i think you described it as showed up drunk at her doorstep, and so that was before the evangelism, before the going sober, right. 

Speaker 3: Yeah. 

Speaker 1: One of the things that has been just like also kind of shocking to me as a person who still feels like the George W Bush regime was actually more brutal than the Trump regime in a whole ton of ways. 

Speaker 2: The war on terror. The war on terror. Let's truth be told, the war on terror was worse than Vietnam. 

Speaker 1: Right, I mean it's more damaging, It's-. 

Speaker 2: Domestic and in the world, like in the Middle East, like, yeah, in Vietnam was bad, of course, but the war on terror in many respects was more destructive. 

Speaker 1: I mean absolutely, And I have-. 

Speaker 4: And the Democrats under George W Bush were just awful. Right, yes, they could not be outflanked on the right, right, it's hard The voting Hm. 

Speaker 2: Swift voting. Swift voting on Kerry. Did John Kerry deserve his purple heart Right? Hillary Clinton Like he definitely deserved his purple heart. 

Speaker 4: Like getting like the unions to stop, like a bunch of Gulf countries, from buying up like certain dockyards right, and like wrapping themselves in the flag. I mean it was awful, right, just straight up xenophobia. 

Speaker 2: But meanwhile, on the background, a whole generation of millennials went through the military experience and came out very anti-war, but totally independently of the left. 

Speaker 1: Right And also I mean that's one of the things is like, whatever we mean by this term Voting for Trump in 2016,. 

Speaker 3: Right, all mean numbers. 

Speaker 1: Right. Well, whatever we mean by this term, but I even know like old Christians who now talk about American empire and the problems with it. So it is no longer. That is no longer like a weird dissident thing, but it's just. It's also the recapitulation. I work with some fairly conservative people. I also work with a bunch of, like you know, biden liberals And I've seen a guy get weepy about George Bush and I'm just like he's, like you know, when the conservatives were so much then I'm like, i'm disgusted, just it seems to just be. I don't know. 

Speaker 2: I mean We're always on the next thing in capitol politics right. 

Speaker 1: Right, it's just you move on. We pretend that, like none of this ever happened, we don't deal with the fact. I mean, you guys were actually. We'll give you credit for this. Now that that burners thrown around I'm gonna have to end after this point, but now that burners throwing around, stuff like political capitalism and there's been all these people talking about techno neo feudalism, a concept that like kind of drives me out the wall, but-. 

Speaker 2: Jodi Dean and Yanis Varousfakis. Yep, they're going techno feudalism. It's like, yeah, another excuse. 

Speaker 1: Right, but I'm also sitting here just thinking like, okay, we keep on coming up with excuses, we've turned back to the kind we've und-. One of the reasons I left Platypus was I didn't believe in regression. 

Speaker 2: Do you believe in it? now? I do, i do. 

Speaker 1: I'm still trying to come up with my exact framework for why I? believe it. But I'm just like. I've just seen all these tendencies just go-. Just stop talking about it. I'm just like. I'm just like I've just seen all these tendencies just go backwards, just go long enough, just go long enough, and suddenly the regression thesis will make sense. 

Speaker 1: It's just like why are we pulling from? I mean, there's this wild period immediately after Occupy failed where people are like going to stuff like Georgism, But then I'm like wait, I'm literally watching us roll back to the beginning of the new left, Like, and then, but then also simultaneously to it's like farce dregs in the 80s, like simultaneously, And it's just-. 

Speaker 4: It's the rank and file strategy. It's the you know the hysterical reaction to Reagan Right All of like they're not gonna miss a single box. 

Speaker 2: Yeah. 

Speaker 1: The rank and file strategy ironically I can go along Ironically has you know cause? I worked a lot in trading and stuff And the rank and file strategy to me has actually created a whole lot of staffers who've done the exact same thing. That like led to unions becoming unpopular in the 70s and 80s. And when you point that at people they're like well, that was just ideology. And I'm like No, it's structural. It was structural And you re And you recapitulated it without realizing. You recapitulated it almost step for step. 

Speaker 2: Because it's objectively conditioned and also politically conditioned. It's not objectively conditioned in terms of, like, just economics. It's politically conditioned in terms of, like, the way American politics is organized. I always like to point out, as far as the union movement is concerned, if it's a movement it's not really That the unions are much more safely in the pocket of the Democrats in the era of neoliberalism than they were before. 

Speaker 1: Yeah. 

Speaker 2: Right, in other words, when you think of like Fortist kind of New Deal coalition, the unions were there but they also were willing to endorse Republicans when it suited them, precisely to punish the Democrats. And since then, in their period of decline, right, they've lost any independence from the Democratic Party. 

Speaker 1: And the right-and-false strategy has interpreted through Jane McEvry and has interpreted through the DSA's reading of Jane McEvry has led to a focus on we have to get progressive wins through the Democrats, through people entering staffing and encouraging rank and file staffing. 

Speaker 2: It's very 80s What I experienced here in Chicago. This is before I knew Spencer. It was during the time of Adolf Reed's Labor Party activity. The Teamsters for Democratic Union, who were all Maoists, freedom Road Socialist Organization And still are right, and so they were the people who proletarianized, who marched through the institutions, including the unions right. The long march through the institutions was also the unions, and they are the basis for the progressive wing of or the labor wing, however you wanna talk about it of the Democratic Party, and the DSA is doing that. Of course they are. Yeah, they're doing just exactly the same thing, and in that context, they're not really taking their tutelage from like a herringtonian DSA perspective, but from the existing labor bureaucracy that the new left gave us. 

Speaker 1: And on that depressing note, we'll have to. 

Speaker 3: I was just gonna add, if I could, that I don't know how to put it. There's a way in which being Gen X like you didn't have a strong sense of your own generation and your own identity. You certainly didn't have a sense of insisting on your novelty. 

Speaker 2: Or our own experience. 

Speaker 3: yeah, Right, and I think that in a certain way that attuned me certainly to thinking about repetition and regression Right, that one of the things that is both fascinating and, I think, a curse about the millennials is their sense of generational identity And I think in the end resulted in them being like a farcical repetition of the past and having no identity at all. And that's to go back to this question of like protoplatopus and what our friendship was about and what Generation Zero of Platopus was about. It really was about the kind of interruption of a repetition regression pattern, right, The attempt to do that at a pedagogical level. 

Speaker 2: Well, that's rough. 

Speaker 4: Yeah. 

Speaker 2: We don't have to accept any of the wagers of the past. 

Speaker 3: And I think that it's that kind of question that maybe you and your audience certainly that it's funny now to see the Zoomers who sort of stand structurally in the position, a lot like Gen X. 

Speaker 2: In the shadow of the millennials. 

Speaker 3 In the shadow of the millennials, the way we were in the shadow of the Boomers. Yeah. So rather than just like I guess it's you said before we went on the air that the kids are not all right, derek, i think it's really about thinking how to educate a kind of overshadowed generation now And thinking about the long-term point of any such education. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, that's actually a whole lot of this return to Marxism has returned to Marxism has seemed to me to be somewhat pointless, and it's because it has recapitulated so many of the mistakes of the past in a way that also has tried to erase stuff that's even in my living memory. And it's one thing that like, oh yeah, we're 100, some odd years off from the Bolsheviks, like I got it. I understand that, but when you're talking about like we're not even being completely honest about like what American life was like pre-911. And even a fair amount of millennials remember that. I know everyone in my generation basically like we were 20 when all this shit started. So it's important to kind of reground what all this is for, particularly because there are other tendencies that we'll have to talk about another time of like both blatant opportunism but also utter apocalypticism that like weirdly reinforce each other And yet they produce nothing. Like the one thing I can say honestly to all of my DSA friends is, like, on every single thing you said you cared about at the beginning of this year, in 2015, 2016, you have failed, and I have not heard a good accounting from any of you as to why and what that means, other than like, oh, the PMC. Or I'm like, okay, fine, but most of you are the PMC, if that's even a valid category, so that's not really explanatory, at least if you're not pointing that also at yourself. You know, et cetera. You know conditions. I'm like, well, conditions are always bad. The really dumb ones, it's federal government. What do you think Marx has dealt with in the 19th and early 20th century? I mean, like, come on, most of you guys aren't getting executed. I'm just pointing that out. So it is, that element of it is just maddening in some ways to me And I've become a lot more. 

Speaker 1: I've sort of like come, not completely around, but I've come to the point where, like I understand now, going back to where I was in 2011, why, coming out of Occupy Yoedo, i went and was looking up stuff, found Kasama Project, found it kind of weird, found you guys engagement with Kasama Project, read your back engagements and then literally emailed, i believe, pam Nagalis and was like, look, can you put me in touch with somebody to go through the reading group? Like I'm in South Korea. I know that's gonna be kind of a stretch, but let's see. Like I get it now in a way that I've kind of forgotten since then. But I have also been quite wrong. I did not think that the Bashkar Sankara strategy was going to work. I didn't see neocalskyism coming out of nowhere, and yet it also seems to function as like kind of a less clear Trotskyism. And then, like I'm, you know, my this has got to be another conversation, but I now have talked to Matt Cavagrodi on this. 

Speaker 1: I have seen what quote left and Marxist economics has also become, and that was one of my initial critiques of my experience. Like oh, it didn't help me understand, but now that I've looked at what the economics that most of the left has produced, it hasn't been helpful. Like it's either explanatory but not predictive, or it's not. It's just, frankly, you know, blah, blah, blah, we can print money Also, the dollar's gonna collapse tomorrow, meh, you know like, and that's been like a consistent prediction for like three or four years. And so you know, the frustrations are definitely there. Or it's like running back to the odds, like can we find this magic Zizek moment again, where we all like kind of got through our dependence on all these deridah and postmodernism, like in the to some degree? yeah, foucault and Deleuze, oh my God, are still around, but to a different degree. That's already been one. It's an old battle. It's an academic battle too, but it is an old battle that is not particularly useful, that's also false victory. 

Speaker 3: Go ahead. 

Speaker 1: Well, I'll let you end on that point, because I do have to go do another, have another engagement. But what is the false victory there? Because I think I agree with you, but I wanna hear what you have to say. 

Speaker 3: Well, i'm just mean that you know the kind of, you know, materialism, return of the real, yeah, you know, resolution or overcoming of postmodernism, Right, it leaves all of the thought taboos in place and I think I mean I'm to the point where I I mean I'm astounded when I talk to some of these people, some of these Lacanian, zizekian characters. It just sort of how little contact they have with the history of Marxism, with Marx himself, with what they call Hegel, and what I read recognizes that It just, you know, it really isn't. The only good thing about it is, you know, that you could maybe, if you, maybe if Zizek or something was like he stepped off of the, you know of the runaway train, you know it was like some kind of exit ramp, you know, but it doesn't really get. You know, it doesn't really break with the object. That it's criticism, it's completely bound up by it. You know, and it's a more obscure sort of Althusseri and Heideggeri and Lacanian confusion and I think was there before. 

Speaker 2: You know, chris would have more to say on that but it leaves a lot of the spider-nest issues kind of unaddressed too, right, in other words, it's you know they're kind of lurking in the background, you know, waiting to come back, and so, yeah, it's a curious thing it is. You know, i almost have a kind of nostalgia for a kind of like I don't know, frankfurt School versus postmodernism kind of Moish approach. You know where Moish would be, like, you know, actually, you know the postmodernists, you know, like Foucault was reading the Frankfurt School, but did he really answer them or did he kind of dodge it, you know, and so you know, I don't know about, i don't know about the future of postmodernism in academia, but also in the general culture. I mean, derek, you probably know this from, like, you know, k through 12 education, right, a lot of people who might have become higher education academics are forced to become high school teachers. Absolutely, what they do is they subject high school students to co? right, because I get them as college students. 

Speaker 3: Which is truly a crime. It's truly child abuse. 

Speaker 2: It truly is. I'm like wait, you've read Foucault already. When was that? You know these college kids? oh, in high school. And I'm like oh, no right, i mean the advantage being that one only takes what one learns in high school. So seriously, anyway, right, but yeah. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, well, thank you too. We're definitely gonna have maybe another part too. we talk about how Platypus understands Marxism and the different Marxisms, And so we will come back to that. Have a great evening, YouTube. 

Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, Derick. 

Speaker 1: Thanks. 

Speaker 3: Derick, that was fun. 

Speaker 2: All right, bye-bye. 

Speaker 3: Bye-bye, bye-bye.