Speaker 1: Welcome to VARN blog. Our aim is to give you the best in analysis and philosophy, political economy, history, art, culture and geopolitics from a left wing and socialist friendly perspective. We aim to bring you different perspectives from different walks of life and to have you educate yourself what to do with what you learned here. We do not aim to give you prefabricated and easy answers. Abandon all hope. You subscribe here, for you will learn and it will be your responsibility what you do. And with that we end today's episode. Hello and welcome to VARN blog. And today I'm here with scholar of Marxism and psychoanalysis, daniel Tutt, host of. I guess it's just kind of like your channel now, though it still shows up on aggregators as Juson's vampires, but I don't think that's the Yeah, that's right. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, considering changing the name, because it was obviously a joke of a name that came out of the Trump period, with the whole backstory I'm not going to get into. But no, i actually have another name for it. It's called study groups on psychoanalysis and politics, which is something we started during the pandemic, and it's the same thing. It's just my program, which public education seminars, video essays, podcast interviews, just a whole range of things. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i would strongly suggest that your episode on Christopher Lash with Oh, what's his name? Lorenzen Lorenzen, yes, is actually quite good, although I learned a ton from it, but nothing new about Lash, which is not an insult. I actually think Lorenzen did a great job representing Lash's ideas, but he contextualized some things for me that I had not before thought about. I'm like, oh yeah, why wasn't I thinking of Lash in terms of Henry Miller? I knew to think of it in terms of John Updike. That's obvious. It's even direct. So my example of why people should listen to your show because I got a lot out of that interview. Even if it didn't tell me anything specific about the main topic, i learned a lot from the subsidiary topics around it in the context. 

Speaker 2: Yes, well, i mean, you're pretty unique when it comes to Christopher Lash. 

Speaker 1: Well, yeah, i mean I'm like the guy who's been obsessing about him for five years, who's a leftist and not one of the students, so it seems like all his left wing defenders are literally his students. and then like three people. 

Speaker 2: That's right. I guess I count myself among them. Well, we've talked about that before, but sure It is. well, i don't know. I mean there is a contingent of the kind of former Trotskyist, somewhat borderline, post-left contingent of thinkers that are younger, even people in Europe, even outside of America, who are drawn to a lot of his work, people that are historians are drawn to his work. So it's not too marginal, i would say. And I also actually think that part of what I have been doing, and what you and I think others have been doing, is also to, if you like, redignify the actual project and to re-clarify the actual project of Christopher Lash, to take it away from the culture war mix and to situate him as a person of a high level of integrity on the left And so yeah. so I think that there may be small amount of people who are trying to center his thinking, but I think it's growing. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think. Well, you know this is on the topic of today's episode, although it is directly related, so we'll let it fly. Yeah, sure, I have been interested in Lash because Lasch does something that really gets tried from the Lacanian-French perspective all the time, which is, you know, to figure out the tensions and exact dynamics between psychoanalysis and Marxism, and it was attempted in the Frankfurt School. Lasch is kind of unique in that he's rooted in the Anglo-American Freudianism for that project And that actually produces some very different things. We've talked about that a little bit on our show a few months ago. But I think it's interesting how, while I have a critique of some of the economic assumptions of Lash in his middle period, I think he does a better job than, say, a lot of the Frankfurt School in actually tying large-scale social psychological trends to actual economic trends in a non-simplistic, non-reductive way, and that's actually really rare. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point. I think that he does that. But he also functions to clarify what even someone like Philip Reif, who we're going to talk about in a moment, diagnosed earlier before Lash in the triumph of the therapeutic as basically the new left was undergoing a cultural revolution that they thought was a political revolution And that Freud, for them the primary philosopher, was actually Freud. But it wasn't the. According to Reif, it wasn't the correct Freud. We'll get into that in a moment. But it was actually the kind of libertine Freudians Lawrence and Wilhelm Reich in particular who, amongst many others Marcuse, of course, is a part of that who basically justified what he called a rich person's form of revolt, i mean his. Well, we'll get into it. 

Speaker 2: But Reif's critique of the cultural revolution in the West 60s and 70s is way more scathing and thorough than was Lash's. I mean, lash was a part of the left. We can discuss that too. But you're right, I mean I think Lash emerges there as a kind of offering a corrective to some of the forms of Freudian Marxism that he saw as infantile and out of touch, specifically out of touch to American dynamics specifically. And you know, I mean I think also Lash was not. We should not be too. We should be clear that Lash didn't wasn't probably familiar with Lacanianism. 

Speaker 2: He had a very superficial understanding of De Los Anguateri, for example, and he allowed that superficial understanding of their project just to simply just to discard them in a very perfunctory way. He wrote a brief new left review essay on the counterculture and I think reference them just in a few sentences, Sort of. It's always a criminal thing in scholarship when you discard a major text or a major author with a kind of bravado that leads your reader to think that you've done the homework when you haven't Right. And I'm thinking here of Lukac and his dismissal of I'm sorry, i'm thinking of Adorno's dismissal of Lukac's destruction of reason as a case in point where it's like, okay, i'm going to say a few paragraphs about this work, but I'm going to do it in such a strong way that I lead all of my readers to somehow agree with me that I, that you can just trust me, and that that's unfortunate. That should never just as a pure yeah. 

Speaker 2: A pure etiquette form, you know. 

Speaker 1: There is a strong critique one can make of what's called the first generation of the private school. I call it the second generation because there's the there's the borderline Austria Marxist generation before Horkheimer and Lukacian. We always forget that they existed. I mean not Horkheimer and Adorno See, i did it too there. But there is a tendency for dismissals, in particularly Horkheimer and Adorno, that are flippant and or coded. So, for example, the reason why they kick Heinrich Grossmann out of the Frankfurt school is not the reason why they said like almost explicitly it seems to be from hints that the accusation of positivism is really about him becoming soft on Stalin. And Grossmann wasn't a pure Stalinist either, but he had thought it was like he had taken up defense's position after 1936, which the Frankfurt school at least Hork. it's actually very hard to generalize about the Frankfurt school because there are so many scholars that aren't really part of our discussion of it that were tied to it. 

Speaker 2: You're right, it's very, it's very difficult. I mean, even if you take Horkheimer's publication of the eclipse of reason in the I think, early 1950s in the United States, which was effectively, if you read it, it's a thorough indictment on American pragmatism and neotomistic philosophy, which is basically like St Thomas Aquinas, the tradition of Aquinas, which still permeated a lot of American philosophy and academic departments And he took on various forms of James Ian thought. Basically everything distinctive about American philosophy he trashed as justifying a kind of normalization of a society of rampant exploitation, having nothing to say about capitalist realities or oppressions at all. Anyways, some people argue that eclipse of reason got them kicked out, And it is true. That's part of the reason why they wanted to find a home in an American university. They never found one. 

Speaker 2: So there's that dynamic. Then there's the other dynamic which I was just talking to, john Bellamy Foster, who was also on my program, and he reminded me something I had forgotten, which is that the CIA did help fund some of their reentry into West Germany, because West Germany in some sense was a pseudo occupied colony of the United States, in some sense after the Marshall plan. So in a sense I don't want to take Gabriel Rockhill's position to say that their concepts were co-opted by the CIA. I think that's no offense. 

Speaker 1: I also like to be very careful because, not to be too much of a stricter, I mean, mark, who's a, literally work for the OSS, and when we refer to the CIA here, we are actually referring to the OSS, but it is, there's a continuity of the organization. It's interesting I do think, however, the interesting thing about Makuza. And they had two other. I can't remember who they were. They're not Horcimer and Adorno, the people that we know worked for the OSS, because it was publicly acknowledged. They only did it during the war to fight the Nazis explicitly. 

Speaker 2: No, i'm talking about everything I'm talking about is all after And it is. But it is also well established that Adorno did choose to publish even that famous essay I mentioned a moment ago, taking down Lukacs. That was published in a CIA funded journal, yes, for which he was aware of that. You see, that's the interesting point. It's not that he wasn't aware of that. Like, for example, today I publish different places and it actually matters a lot to me, like where I publish. Like I publish a cosmonaut, because I believe that the readership of cosmonaut, from a standpoint of class consciousness, is, like, extremely important. You know what I'm saying. So it's just odd Oh yeah, it's a little odd why you would choose to do that. 

Speaker 1: It very much feels to me very similar to the Congress of Cultural Freedom stuff. Like for those of you who don't know Lash, actually I started studying that because Lash called that out in the 60s before we had the proof Like I've actually think about how Britain It's in World of Nations. Yeah, world of Nations is a whole section about the Congress of Cultural Freedom. 

Speaker 2: That's such a nice set of essays. Yep, it really is, Because I was reading the biography on Lash when it came out a few years ago and after he published the New American Radicalism. The reason that book came about is because he was invited to write all these book reviews and that's kind of It's basically the greatest hits of his book reviews in some ways. 

Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you can kind of tell too, because there are some times in that The book is very well structured so that you don't notice. but there are some times where I'm like I got to go and find this book that no one has mentioned since like 1965. 

Speaker 2: Like, for example, the one on the student revolt. Oh yes, exactly, yeah, i couldn't find it. 

Speaker 1: I couldn't find it, yeah, that one. And then there was terminology that I had to go back and read stuff from the 60s and like what's this multiversity shit? I've never even heard of this Right. And there's some of that in actually a culture of narcissism too, where you're like, well, he's mentioning specific critics by name and like no one has mentioned this person in 40 years. But what I find interesting about I think you're right Lacanianism in America. I mean, i don't know, you will know the reception history better than I would, but it feels like Lacanianism in America became a bigger thing after the John Hopkins Poststructuralism conference. 

Speaker 1: Well, no, i mean yeah, okay, not that they're the same, it's just to understand poststructuralism you had to go back and understand Lacanianism, and that's when it came over here. 

Speaker 3: Stay with us, we'll be right back. 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. Listen to lunacy wherever you get your podcasts. 

Speaker 2: That's correct. But let's be more specific. Its influence was, frankly, predominantly within the burgeoning, globalizing cosmopolitan university, lacanian acolytes. Lacanian thought has not quite hit the ground in a practical sense since Gixx interventions in the early 2000s. And Gixx interventions in the early 2000s probably, if we're honest, shook up in the most interesting way. A lot of people may be too young to remember this. You may remember this, derek, i definitely probably remember it. You probably do. Here's my argument. Gixx, this kind of may sound strange to you. One of his biggest points of influence was actually in turning around the time of the Iraq war, a lot of millennial age evangelicals against the repressive basis of evangelical Christianity. 

Speaker 1: I actually think. You know, I wouldn't have thought that, but I think you're actually correct And I also think what he did for me, That's partially what he did for me, so, but I'm not exactly a died in the wool evangelical I come from. 

Speaker 2: A part of my family is partially, but I'm not like a thorough, like summer church camp, like crazy speaking in tongues. No, but I mean I'm from a very conservative background and part of it, that's part of the language you know. 

Speaker 1: I come from a very different background. I think you know we've talked a little bit about it but like very working class, but working class Catholics and Jews, which is a very different set of very different Yeah, and I think concerns. And so I have people in my family who flirted with opus d a in the nineties and aughts, and people in my family who flirted with ultra orthodoxy on the Jewish side, so like. That's the kind of conservatism So like. So the evangelical world and the neoconservative world was never appealing to me. But in my twenties and this is actually a good four way into Philip Reef I was highly influenced by paleo conservative thought and part of that thought that was presented to me was people like Philip Reef, a lot of the more conservative Perotians, paul Godfreyd MacIntyre the more conservative MacIntyre is not. I don't really consider MacIntyre conservative, but there are conservatives who like him, the conservative reception of MacIntyre and the virtue of the distribution in the Catholic Church And I was trying to play with like a Jewish version of that. What got me out of that world was a couple of things When is their economics started not making any sense to me? I couldn't figure out what they even believed Right. Was it paleo libertarianism Or was it like some kind of weird distributism or whatever? I couldn't figure that out And they were racist and anti-Semitic in some fundamental way, and I don't. You know people like that's an unharmonium. 

Speaker 1: I hid an article in like 2004 or five by Joe Sobrin that was doing blatant Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy stuff And I was like that's just bullshit. So that was like my first. And then Pat Buchanan wrote that book that was vaguely like you know, we should have just let Hitler do it Like. I think that book has largely been kind of buried, but it was like the case against World War II book that he wrote in 2004. And so, and the other thing is, you know, there's a lot of talk about the Trotsky-Tinya conservative pipeline and there is some truth to it. We could talk about commentary and actually the Congress for Cultural Freedom is a big pipeline there, sure. But if you're in paleo conservative world, they were talking about that in broach broader, conspiratorial terms about and much earlier than anyone on the left was, and so I am sort of like, for example, i thought that, like Max Schatman was a neo conservative, which is just not true. 

Speaker 2: It's not true. It's not true. But he certainly took positions very early on, even as early on as the Korean War, which were pro-imperialist. 

Speaker 1: Absolutely, And I think I mean that's why American Schatman, American Schatmanism, had to like, distance itself from him and find auspices under Tony Cliff from the UK, even though that's not their like, that's not their order. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, I mean, yeah, that's true. I mean even McIntyre. there's a new book out of all of his old essays from when he was young in the UK as a Trotskyist, and things of this nature that are quite worth reading. I think it's historical materialism that released it. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, I have it. It's quite good. There's two good books that I think the book on McIntyre's engagement and Marxism. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what he's called. 

Speaker 1: And then there's Marxism and Christianity, which is his later essays, where he's still I mean McIntyre is interesting because he doesn't go neo-conservative. He's really hard to categorize what he actually is. 

Speaker 2: And then he wrote a book like After Virtue, which is also difficult to categorize, in which you could, if you read it you can tell would become almost prophetic to both the right and the left, Oh yeah. And then he wrote by even the Benedictine option, the Benedict option, by the conservative Catholic Rod Dreyer yeah, By Dreyer is influenced by it, And even Elizabeth Brunig on the left is influenced. So there's a whole interesting and that's actually an interesting strategy for people that want to become thinkers and writers, to just have that knowledge about how to make a work that can also transcend sort of the divisions of your own present and not only speak to your present but speak. 

Speaker 1: I mean, that's actually very few people After Virtue is still actually super influential on me, like I'm still actually convinced that Virtue ethics is. I'm not convinced of the kind of Virtue ethics McIntyre wants me to adopt, but I think his argument for Virtue ethics got me looking at like well, what was Marxist ethics? I was like oh, it was proletarian, but your ethics Okay, that actually makes sense. Let's talk about it Like yeah. 

Speaker 2: I guess. Yeah, it's the same challenge that you find in a book like the true and only heaven, which is, you know, you're left with facing the question of is this an anti-politics? And that's, at the end of the day, because it's sort of a retreat from liberalism in a way, without any necessary commitments to the building of a party and also without a strong economic component. So you sort of You have to supplement it. You know what I'm saying. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i think there's the essays he wrote in Takoon also indicate, and that's written from about the same time. This is where Lash starts positing like working-class traditionalism and we're all just going what the hell does he mean by that? And he drops it. He doesn't keep that up. But that was kind of his answer for a little while was like we need a traditionalism based not in this right wing bullshit but in the habit of the working-class. But we're all like but what is that exactly? 

Speaker 2: Well, this is something that I think is a recurring necessity on the socialist left. In fact, i have an essay coming out in Ion magazine that's looking at the condition of new marriage patterns for the working-class, kind of trying to build off of this EP Thompson angles notion of what is the condition of the contemporary working-class And, based on my research, it's obviously it's not looking good at all. It's not looking good at all in terms of, i mean, yeah, topic for another conversation, but I do think I think we have to be like. 

Speaker 1: I've talked about that. I think we have to be honest about that. This is one strain of Lash's thought that's often portrayed as conservative. That, i think, is unfair, because I'm like the man the man, eugene Adams work. 

Speaker 1: He was actually arguing that like the reason why we should be critical of feminist it was the conservative feminist that get historicized and all the radical feminists in American culture are largely forgotten, like this is that's straight up his argument. But his point about, like, well, the reason why in the 70s that you found capital so conducted the feminism, it was a way to do away with the household wage, which Lash admits was never good enough, like he actually it's actually pretty explicit about that And actually lower the earnings potential for each individual worker, while seeming socially progressive. And I don't think he deals with some of the social benefits of that, because there are some. 

Speaker 2: But the thing that's happening now is a kind of post family fate. 

Speaker 1: Marriage is a class good. now Let's be honest. 

Speaker 2: Marriage is now. we see the rise of assertive marriage like we've never seen before. We see divorce lines falling along class lines like we've never seen before. But the more troubling trend that I've picked up on is the fact that working class people simply cannot enter into the reproductive promise of marriage and family and children, despite their wish to do so. But the way that that gets translated at the level of how we talk about it in the public sphere is a clash over ideals, because it does. it is true that the way that becomes internalized is often for which I think is fair a nostalgia for the kind of promise of the Fordist era. But when that promise is brought out, people are penalized for it. 

Speaker 1: I got to tell you, our best enemy on this is somebody I used to laugh at And that's Josh Hawley, because he talks about the gay agenda stuff and that's all ridiculous. But then he does this turn. he's like, well, the reason why it's popular is like nobody can afford to have a family anymore. And I'm like, oh, that turn is dangerous for leftists. Hawley's actually outflanking us on a lot of this stuff. Also, he outflanked us in the railway workers. I mean not like me and you personally, but like you know. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, i mean a part of it is that you have to ask yourself what was the success of the sexual revolution? And one of the domains like the sexual revolution succeeded, but on the term set by Margaret Thatcher Right, oh, absolutely Right, right. And so the background conditions of all of the egalitarian seeming reforms, of that moment of upsurge, which Reef, by the way, and Triumph of Therapeutic again says look, this is the culture of evolution. Sexual evolution was not a Marxist thing at all, it was a professional. He calls it a professional, revolutionary driven thing And I think, as people of the left, we should never take him at his word, you know, because Reef is a staunch conservative in some sense, and we need to get into his conservatism because, as you can see, every epigraph of every chapter is a quote from Nietzsche. So he's actually a great Nietzschean scholar in some sense which we can talk about. 

Speaker 2: But just to finish this point, like, yeah, i mean even marriages in which the homosexual or kind of non normative marriages after the Supreme Court decision, i was reading some literature on this And it's like high 90% of non heterosexual marriages claim that the motivation for their marriages is out of love And that. 

Speaker 2: So there's a kind of new, a new contractual basis of marriage which is no longer tied to, like the older bourgeois ideals of sacrifice and kind of. You know, like the notion of a familial sacrifice tied into a lineage of familial expectations and the idiosyncrasies that might come from what your grandparents want for you, etc. Etc. Like that promise, so like that old promise, is severed, is now, is now broken, and it is working class people who tend to be the ones that want it to be restored. And I think that's a contradiction that we have to face with a lot of sober glasses like face head on and and and asks it's hard questions, you know, ask hard questions about that because you do see an accelerationist position of the contemporary family abolition movement, which is something that also needs to be thoroughly discussed, You know one thing I have pointed out is like, while I am sympathetic to the historical goal to family abolition, its historical goals mean something radically different than family abolition does. 

Speaker 1: Now, much of that, many of those historical goals, have been achieved by liberal society period And so and by that we mean like open divorce and stuff like that, like stuff that that you know doesn't even come on the radar of those discussions. Now I mean it's just yeah. 

Speaker 2: I mean this was something that Philip Reath talked about again. I'm just going to copy it up and bring it up until we jump in. But because he basically argues that the chief philosopher of the new left, family abolition, orientation was of course Wilhelm Reich And one of Reath's biggest indictments of our culture. I mean, you kind of read Reath and he reads a little bit like one of those Jordan Peterson caricatures of the left a little bit, but he's obviously much more sophisticated than Peterson And so far as Peterson's always saying, and many leftists as well, oh, it's the cultural Marxism. Our culture is somehow dominated by the, by the philosophy of the far left. Well, reath kind of says the same thing in, but Reath is big on that. That's his method of historicism in a sense, which is to say, a thinker like Nietzsche, a thinker like Freud fundamentally shapes the DNA of our culture. 

Speaker 1: One of the things I find interesting about Reath, that's because this book I'm holding in my hands actually kind of hard to get now. 

Speaker 2: It is hard. Yeah, you can get it on Amazon like you pay for back, for like 35 bucks. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, it was like I paid about 35 bucks for this, so it's just not I say hard, I should actually say it's easy, it's just expensive. 

Speaker 2: It's expensive And it's not in PDF. 

Speaker 1: No, you know, there's like no ebook for it. It's not in the form of this book, but it is credited with a whole bunch of cultural reframings of Freud. You know, from Paul R'Court, norman L'Brown, habermas, marcuse, becker all get listed as like partially coming out of it in response to this book, and so I was surprised to learn how conservative it is. I mean Phillip, and you know, i know Phillip Reef. My prior exposure to Phillip Reef is the triumph of the therapeutic, and that he was married to Susan Sawtock. That's it. That's really what I knew. Well, let's so. 

Speaker 2: Okay, first of all, his conservatism is somewhat detached from the predominant movements of conservative thought that we're most familiar with. 

Speaker 1: I would totally agree with you. That's why he's so different He's singular. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, he's so singular Number one. Number two let's credit Susan Sawtock as a co-author of this book, which she was. Because you know, i am a huge admirer of Susan Sawtock, and at least I was and I still am to some extent, because I loved her notion of the cult of seriousness I tried to imbue to the best extent that I can, which is something that's so lacking in our culture in America, such an interintellectual place. But nonetheless, i was reading her memoirs and at 19, she gets married to Philip Reef, her professor, and there's one journal entry. Usually she writes effusively about her experiences of the most mundane level. When she gets married to Philip she's just like married Philip Reef Sunday April 8th period, she's like that. So it's a very strange dynamic. 

Speaker 2: Obviously, susan's son takes a part of the literati left, not the Bohemian left, like the New York literati, high society left, cultural critique left. So Marcuse wrote Aerosensitization at the home of Reef and a young Susan Sawtock. So Reef himself was. Who was he? He was a profound old traditional humanities scholar who wanted, who read everything Is a bit like Harold Bloom He read everything. It's not fair to say that he was just a specialist on Freud. You know he was a specialist in the classics. He was a specialist in many different languages. He was a specialist in American literature, european thought. He was very familiar with philosophy. 

Speaker 1: He's something that we don't have in academia now, which is a broad scale, humanist, generalist. We just don't have them anymore. 

Speaker 2: No, i mean he was a generalist. I mean he was a specialist in Freud. That's fair. He's not a psychoanalyst. He argues that Freud completes the Nietzschean project. He argues that he's a pretty interesting reader of Marx. I mean, he calls Marx a conservative. Why One? Marx wasn't afraid to be moralistic at times. So Marx rejected utopian socialists who he saw as like. He calls Wilhelm Reich a utopian socialist, not a Marxist. He said he actually thinks. I think says he says that Marx would have not not have liked Wilhelm Reich. In a sense Philip Reif writes with respect to socialism. In a sense That's why he is, like Nietzsche, a good interlocutor for the left. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, he's one of our better enemies, Yeah exactly, and even it's not exactly clear, the basis by which he is an enemy. You know what I'm saying. He's not a hysterical enemy. 

Speaker 1: But I mean it is important. You know it's funny. We were talking about this tradition and I was like I didn't know much about him But a lot of the figures I'm name dropping. Alesta McIntyre endorsed and wrote a long review of this book in The Manchester Guardian, which is largely positive. There is also a sense that his relationship to Markuza means that in some ways Philip Reif is in the direct descendant of someone like Paul Gottfried, who was Markuza's conservative student Right And a major player in the paleoconservative movement. 

Speaker 2: And well, i mean, i think that's true. I think also the other thing to note here like we were saying earlier, with Lash, there's a need You could even chalk it up to a psychological need of classification to look and rigidly put people into boxes, which is the same box that Lash has been put in falsely. So I'm not, i'm not committed to a post ideological conception, although part of why Reif is not easily classifiable as a conservative ideologically is because he argues, as a Freudian, that Freud effectively ends ideologies, because Freud discovers what Reif calls the therapeutic, which is the best solution for the predicament of what the egalitarian changes from below were bringing about into society. In that sense he's his Nietzscheanism. By Nietzscheanism I mean, like the emergence of the last man and this whole triumph of democratic struggles from below, which Nietzsche, as everyone knows or if they don't, they should know was opposed to that. He wanted to retain something, just like Reif did. I mean, why does Reif start his chapters by reminding the reader that there is no great culture that will happen unless you have a stratification of the class system? In that sense, the Marxist and socialist proposition it needs to be, needs to face that counter proposition. It's like, almost like we meet on the field of battle at that precise point and ask what would society look like? It brings us back, Derek, to the question of the equality question. In some sense right, because what Reif is going to say is that society needs to accept a condition of a stratified, subjugated class. This is a fact, he says. The cultural revolution pretends that that doesn't exist, but he actually also says that in the future, in his kind of prognostication he tries to argue in the triumph of the therapeutic that oh yeah, basically psychological man will be in a kind of naive sense. 

Speaker 2: He's very naive actually because he thinks in a kind of Keynesian. He thinks Keynesianism will be successful. He couldn't see neo-liberalism. He thinks that Keynesianism will basically give us a life of undue leisure, undue leisure. And so you know, part of that's part of his lack of economic thinking, his lack of clear materialist analysis that he couldn't see. He put too much trust in capitalism in some ways, because his ultimate argument is basically a kind of conservative, nihilist argument, that too much equal. It's very fukuyamist in some ways, very neo-conservative in some sense. 

Speaker 1: So you know, Yeah, but I actually agree with you in that. 

Speaker 1: But I do want to point out just a little bit The people who have picked up his therapeutic argument the most and I think they've done it partly to distance themselves from the alt-right, frankly, because you know they're literally their teachers But, like Godfrey has literally done four books about liberalism in the therapeutic state, managerialism in the therapeutic state, et cetera, and I think so. 

Speaker 1: I think that means Reef is like James Burnham in that he's both crucial to both neo-conservative and paleoconservative in a way that other people aren't, and also in a way that makes it very hard to recognize him in anything now, because we can only recognize parts of him in movements that currently exist, but not anything like that. Because when I read this book I'm like well, it feels it does feel very sociologically conservative, but in a way that feels so foreign to everything on the spectrum today. And so let's talk about his theory about Freud. I mean, basically, his conception is, what most people don't understand about Freud is that Freud is the therapeutic, is a way to intervene against ideology, and that his psychology is basically a moral psychology. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, so, yeah. So, unlike Marx, who didn't think in his theory of the subject, didn't think in terms of types of the, rather, marx couldn't see what Nietzsche and Freud saw, which is what Reef calls psychological man. And psychological man is a sort of, basically a kind of new form of individualism that the private bourgeois class is sort of perfecting or developing and that will become the predominant form, that will become widely adopted. And of course he kind of recognizes that Freud emerges at a point in European society in which there's a sort of profound, obvious background of the wars and the rise of Bolshevism, and all of that is present. But what the novelty of Freud is for Reef is his moderation, which is that he's offering a replacement of what Reef calls faith. So Freud is a moral thinker, but he's also a new secular prophet, a new secular religious thinker who's able to intervene in civilization and offer a cure which is not a naive cure. Like Wilhelm Reich, one of his disciples is offering a naive version of the cure. Because what Wilhelm Reich doesn't recognize is that he thinks that the Freudian discovery of the necessary basis of repression. Well then, socialist revolution should be about the abolishment of repression. 

Speaker 2: To court, reef says this is a catastrophic misreading of Freud To think that Freud, whatever suggests that the human being would somehow be more healthy in a society in which repression was absent. No, freud the moralist comes around to defend the private individual. That goes back to the bourgeois thing. That's what psychological man is. So the success of the therapeutic and the cultural revolution is a continuation of the dominance of a certain form of individualism. Ultimately And that actually is what Reef is basically trying to say say wake up, all of you professional revolutionaries on the left who think that you just did this Marxist, socialist thing. It wasn't that at all. You brought into existence the continuation of private, bourgeois individualism, but you've done so in such a way that you've sapped the vitality of what it could have been. And Freud stands as somebody who is basically saying that civilization requires a baseline, repressive set of ideals to be adhered to. 

Speaker 2: Freud is somebody who's ultimately an anti-political thinker. What does he mean by that? Well, he means by that that this is quite difficult for the feminists, perhaps, and others to swallow, maybe, or even to accept, let's say. But his argument is that Freud thinks modern society already as post-patriarchal. Why? Because every rebellion, every form of identification, whether it be an art is reenacting rebellion. We're constantly reenacting rebellion. We're constantly reenacting rebellion. But at the same time we have an ambivalent attachment to the primal scene of that rebellion. But the distance we have from that primal scene of the murder of the primal father, that was the old patriarchy, we've long since exited that. 

Speaker 2: So in a sense, freud neutralizes politics and shows, in a sense, that they can all be brought back to this necessity of deeper psychological identifications with paternal imagos that exist beyond the Edipal stage. In some sense, the Edipal stage never leaves politics, which is why, in a sense, for Reef, politics is like the Spider-Man meme of the Spider-Man all pointing at each other. That's why it's anti-politics. But Reef says that's good because politics is bad. It's a very Nietzschean point. Why is politics bad? Well, because it distracts us from the truth of what civilization should be, which is great aesthetic art. 

Speaker 1: The achievements of greatness and tied to the blonde beast here being alive. 

Speaker 2: and still, It's very much like he likes to quote Schiller and like it's aesthetic education of man. 

Speaker 1: It's all the most. it's, interestingly, I'm like it's the most reactionary part of German idealism And it's also German romanticism up to and intruding its total secularization and full blooming in Nietzsche. And what I find in this book, that's interesting and it's an indirect argument more than it's a direct one, and I think you're right, like by the Nietzsche epigraphs, this does more to convince me that parts of Freud are, at least were, a completion of a Nietzschean project, And Walter Kaufman actually is the same thing and part of his defense of Nietzsche. but this is much more convincing than that. 

Speaker 2: I agree. Yeah, i totally agree. I think that I couldn't agree more. I think that Reef is a pretty good reader of Nietzsche. I also think that in a sense, what Reef argues is basically that where Freud is not Nietzschean, there is an aspect where he's not Nietzschean and he's not Nietzschean in his commitment to rationalism. And he says that Freud's commitment to rationalism because he says you always have to read Freud as a great dualist, you read Freud like all of that anti-politics stuff is only the dualist. 

Speaker 2: It's a kind of a non-Hingalian dialectics. It's a kind of crude dualism whereby Freud's secular faith, the commitment to the cure, the commitment to the scientificity of psychoanalysis, is premised on the knowledge of the great schism that humans find themselves in in civilization, which is this unbridled, incestuous fear of the drives and how it meets a repressive culture. And it is in that conflict, in that point, where you get things like the neurotic subject, the merge, and Freud's method is to basically offer some therapy, some method to resolve that. And but one thing that Reef does say about the notion of Freud's neurotic subjects is that he says that they have very specific class and social features that make them neurotic. Usually it is Père de Bourgeois, usually it's people who are born in like a rural region and they move to the city right, or it's people who are striving, it's like. So neurosis is born from social contradictions as much as it is that it's. Neurosis is not the universal condition of all people by any stretch, but it is the most common form of psychic woes that Freud found in the bourgeois class that he primarily treated. So there's that dimension that's important. 

Speaker 2: But then Reef says that Freud wanted the neurotics not to reach nirvana, rather just to reach ordinary unhappiness, which he saw as the ordinary lot of all humans, which is the best we can ask for, which makes Freud's a kind of very compromised realist, some sense not a utopian at all, not a utopian at all. Which is why in his conversation about Freud's reading of Adler very interesting he says Adler, who was a socialist, was the most dangerous disciple of Freud. Basically because he thinks Adler internalized the resentment of the working class and put it into his theories of psychoanalysis and that Freud was opposed to it, and that Freud saw that and he was opposed to it. And so basically he said, if any working class person follows Adlerian methodologies is not going to go well for them because it's too classed Like. That was an interesting argument which I actually wanted to study that further. 

Speaker 1: I was about to say. I have a suspect I am a defender of Adler and I think a lot of people when they hear that because people associate Adler with, like, the overcoming of trauma and they're like it sounds very Nietzschean I'm like, no, but it's a, very much like a. This is how you empower yourself and this how you collectively empower yourself. Adler is a socialist. Like that. It superficially sounds like the advice you might get from a libertarian, but that's not what it is I also. 

Speaker 1: One of the things that haunted me about this book is I kept on. Part of me was going well, a lot of this feels true, but, unlike Reef, i think it's bad. Right, so you know, like Right, right, right. So it's like I'm like oh yeah, a lot of people's politics is the Spider-Man pointing at each other, because it is actually. I don't mean identity politics in the sense of like the way we commonly mean it. I mean it's literally politics as a substitute for community identity and class identity and any other thick identity, and when I'm like, oh, the individualization makes that possible. So you have an anti-political politics, a politics that doesn't actually have that much effect on the reality of politics, either for class or even administrative reasons, like it's just not particularly relevant to that. Well, i mean. 

Speaker 2: This is why. This is why I so, in his analysis of group psychology and analysis of the ego, which Reef says Freud wrote as a response to critiques he got from Todeman Tabu, by trying to show because Todeman Tabu was critiqued from the anthropological standpoint as projecting an anthropological past onto a present that doesn't fit Mass psychology or group psychology analysis of the ego was turning to an analysis of what Freud called artificial groups and showing that the logic that binds them is not a Hobbesian sort of dark sort of sense of binding of the affect through fear alone. No, freud argues that it's fear and love combined in an ambivalent identification to leaders that constitutes the libid, what he calls the libididombond of any group. But see, here's the interesting thing that Reef neglects, which is what someone like the Argentinian Freudian Marxist Leon Rosichner does recognize. What does Freud actually say about the artificial groups? Well, he's much more negative about them than Freud is about revolutionary groups. Revolutionary groups, for Freud, break the Edipal Bond with the father. They kind of have a profound liberation from what the artificial groups have. 

Speaker 2: And what are the artificial groups? It's mostly the church and the army or the corporation, business et cetera, kind of ordinary bourgeois organizations. And in those the logic is a kind of dark one. It's basically a state of infant dependency, a kind of dependency on leaders which Freud doesn't even give the leaders of those bourgeois groups the dignity to call them leaders. He calls them directors. And Rosichner says that in fact you can read all of Freud's group psychology as a scathing critique of bourgeois groups. 

Speaker 2: And the reason that that's not immediately apparent? because most of what, by the way, what Freud is critiquing in his mass psychology is Gustave Le Bon. Gustave Le Bon was a kind of pre-fascist social psychologist, was an autodidact and so on, very interesting thinker. But he wrote all of these texts on crowd control and how to, because this is at the time when you had the Spartacus uprising of 1919, where half a million people take to the streets and it's a serious threat to the social order Bolshevism, you name it. These revolutions are literally happening. It's not social media, anything like that. 

Speaker 2: So Freud's writing about these things and he's writing in a positive way. But then the question is why is it not apparent that he's positive about them? And here you have to do a lot of speculation, which I think is fair to do, about A, the fact that Freud was, that Judeo-Bolshevism was a real conspiracy and Freud could not be associated with it, and many people thought that he was a Judeo-Bolshevik, that his theory was, because one thing that Rief will say is that there's nothing in Freud that's antinomian. Okay, that may be true, but explain to me how a huge portion of Freudians are antinomian, right, right? 

Speaker 1: people thinking the pleasure principle is good does not seem unique to Eric from or Rillim Reich or any of that. Yeah, exactly. 

Speaker 2: Exactly Left. Freudianism, rief would say, is an invalid reading. That's what he would say Right, it's invalid And that's just not true. It's not true. I mean, that's the subtlety and the beauty of Freud and the difficulty of Freud, which is there is no one reading. It's a hermeneutical, varied hermeneutic right That you have to come at it from different places and get you get different things out of it. That's Marxism as well. This is why Rekhour is right to call Freud, marx and Nietzsche the great hermeneutics of suspicion, which means that their hermeneutics are open, they're not closed. 

Speaker 1: It's not a closed system, it's not about hermeneutics of rejection, but it is hermeneutics of suspicion. 

Speaker 2: I think it's a good phrase. I like that phrase. And of course, there's this queer theorist, yves Sedgwick, who has recently, well recently past 23 years, tried to basically argue that modern intellectual life should abandon the method of Freud, marx and Nietzsche, should abandon the hermeneutics of suspicion. I don't know if you've read her essays Very. 

Speaker 1: I have not, but it feels very millennial. 

Speaker 2: Yeah Well, it's extremely consequential for modern academic studies. It's what's called a reparative study. So she says we don't need a paradigm of suspicion, because she thinks Freud, marx and Nietzsche are kind of paranoid because they see power in everything, they see some deeper logic at work in things. She thinks that she tries to make an argument from a standpoint of queer theory that all that hasn't really achieved much for us and we should abandon it And so whatever, that's a whole other podcast we can discuss. 

Speaker 1: But to go back to Yves, i mean, that's a fascinating argument that my immediate response is like no, but I would have to live with it to have an actual, better response than that. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, i mean, this is something I think for folks that I'm always trying to just say you've been in academic world or adjacent to it. I've been in adjacent for a long time. One thing I've learned is you never want to reject things strongly. 

Speaker 1: No, I actually agree with you. That's why, when you posit that, i'm like let's back away for a second, because I suspect I'll still disagree with it, but there's probably elements of it where I would agree. For example, i do think a lot of the people push against Marxism for being inconsistent on its critiques of utopianism. When you apply it to what Marxists actually do, are kind of correct. And what do I mean by that? Like there's all these things. Well, we can't come up with the stuff in the future because that's got to be democratically decided in the future by the people who do it. And I'm like, yeah, but we don't actually do that. No, which is, but I don't want to go back to the old utopian socialism, because most of that was kind of to be both it was from D-class A individuals that had schemas that were, frankly, almost always based on some primary assumptions of which you could not justify, i mean. 

Speaker 2: I think that's right. I think utopian socialists exist today. I think ultra leftism exists today, Like I think that's part of what Marxism, why Marxism is open as a hermeneutic, which is that certain things do repeat not to a T, not perfectly, but there are identifiable tendencies that Lenin wrote about, which exist in our conjecture, that need to be studied. Like that's actually part of what Mao, in his notion of the importance of theoretical investigation into the conflicts in your present, is always reminding you to do that. that like, yeah, do study groups fine. But like that's why I love these podcasts, because that's kind of what these are about. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, this is also what the thing is. If you were to identify ultra today like as a former left, communist right, i think you find ultra tendencies, and by that I mean people who reject the needs of the classes they're concerned about and the class coalitions they're concerned about and how those classes actually live and organize themselves based on axiomatic principles. That's not exactly how Lenin defines it, but I think it's pretty useful as a kind of modern reduction of what Lenin's talking about. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's right. It's one part, two theoreticists. The other part, on the other hand, it's too detached. And here you run a risk. You run a risk because it's when you say it's too detached from class interests. Well, first of all, you're introducing the category of interest. 

Speaker 1: Secondly, you're introducing the category of I don't know You're not dealing with the difference to the interests or not. the same thing as for itself, from a Hegelian standpoint actually. 

Speaker 2: There's that dimension as well. There's that dimension as well, but there's also the dimension of ideologically. In a so-called post-ideological social order such as ours, you have to ask okay, well, is ultra-leftism? in what way is it distinguishable from ultra-liberalism? This is my question, one of my questions, which makes the ultra-leftists have to ask a tough question regarding their own unthought complicities, which brings us back to the Freudian question, because the Freudian question says that bourgeois groups dominate us, because they call for an eatapole, dependency and solidarity which is unconscious. 

Speaker 1: So there's one. You always talk about this, about the thin line between ultra-liberalism and ultra-leftism, and I think that's I think there's a lot of truth to that, particularly when you look at specific movements, like I've often asked anarchists to. I even agree with a lot of stuff to be like yeah, but you start referring to human rights. What the hell does that have to do with the anarchist tradition? Like nothing. It has absolutely nothing to do with the anarchist tradition. You don't have an alternate framework of framing what you think human flourishing is, and so you have to dip back on frankly, an outdated from the liberal standpoint too, because even from the liberal standpoint, human rights are incoherent these days Notion of what a good society would be and why we should do whatever. I mean this is actually part of my critique of Chomsky forever. But there is another trend in ultra-leftism that is hard to explain, and that is how many of them become flat out reactionaries. 

Speaker 2: Like There's that, there's also an implicit but under argued and under theorized importation of popular frontist ideology that justifies implicit collaboration with democratic party status quo, etc. Often under the name of an extreme specter of a coming fascism. When you ask what that fascism is, it's basically the RNC. 

Speaker 1: Right, which is interesting, because then there's a faction of ultra leftism that actually And not just left oppositionism, like there's a faction of ultra leftism that even rejects the United Front, that does stand firm against that other form of ultra leftism that is constantly running into basically opportunistic forms of the Marxist center. And I should probably define these terms for my audience, because I don't throw them around that much, because I'm not sure now that they mean what they used to mean. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree with that That's true, but historically the Marxist center is the people who deviate from concessionist and the first round of revisionist. By that we don't mean the revisionist, that's a crux, we mean the Bernsteinian economistic revisionist, and they also. So they don't pull towards the quote right of socialism, which is different from, say, the right proper, and they also avoid like entrancient positions that won't mediate on anything, such as invariance, which is why, even though like bordegist or linenist, that's why they're included in linen's infantile disorder. One of the things that we also have to deal with is all this is mixed up now, because I think all these tendencies are now in every single historical Marxist tendency. So it's no longer enough to say, well, you're a bordegist or you're a councilist, you're an ultra-leftist. Now we have to look at the fact that there's ultra-leftist in social democracy, there's ultra-leftist in Marxist-Leninism, anything of these positions that can take totally like invariant approaches to use a term from predicatism but that you sometimes see, even like, say, galanzo-white Maoism or something where, like, we're gonna send people to do certain things because we have certain positions that we hold on to with galanzo-white Maoism. 

Speaker 1: One of the more difficult ones is, for example, traditional Maoists were very careful when they reached out to peasant groups about not sending people in who's gonna immediately turn to patriarchy of a peasant group against you and get you killed, whereas galanzo-lites would go like, send young women in to go lecture the old men and, yes, they would get killed. And so it wasn't that the Maoists were pro-patriarchy, it's that they thought they were gonna have to take it apart slower. And because one thing you could say about Mao for coming out of a culture that has a strong tradition of patriarchy Mao's writings on women are pretty decent, actually, like as far as it goes. So it's. I think that's interesting. 

Speaker 1: And to tie it back into the Freudian, i think it's because I think this emerges this way, in a way that Marxist with pure Marxism have a trouble articulating. We have trouble articulating the thought processes of the, not just of the superstructure but of relations of production, right, and I think that's why things like Marxial Freudianism keep popping up. Because it's like we know we don't have an explanation of the intersection between theory of mind, because we also know the one-to-one consciousness, like the only thing determining your consciousness is your class position and what you do is not true. And we don't even have evidence that Marx believed it. 

Speaker 2: So yeah, well, i mean, there's also the line of Klaus Holtzkamp and the sort of Marxist, what's called Marxist psychology, which provides a much more sort of thorough rebuke of Freudianism as such. I mean basically says look we to summarize he says so, so he's worth looking at. It was a movement that basically died in the 90s, but it was, was it kind of around from, i think, the 50s up through the 90s? critical psychology or Marxist psychology is what it's called. And he basically says you know, even at the level of Freud's prescriptions for the therapeutic, for free association, for psychoanalytic approach, all of it has to be sort of centered on a class, exclusive methodology. It's an art form, a new stoicism for the bourgeoisie. And even the funny thing is funny thing is that Philip Reath would say yes, that's right, and that's why it's good. 

Speaker 1: Right, exactly, it's like the issue is like. 

Speaker 2: that's actually why, like when Reath in the section on religion here says a lot of the same stuff that Nietzsche says, is that the religion? 

Speaker 1: of the father chapter. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, that one yeah. 

Speaker 1: You know, he'll say. 

Speaker 2: he'll say, like you know, christianity provide. you see, because part of what he's saying is that Freudianism, for modern bourgeois life, is replacing the function that the Christian confessional had. That's the triumph of the therapeutic. In a sense it's over, a triumph over, but it's not a triumph that Freud's going to be happy with right, because it doesn't recognize what Christianity recognized, which is the capacity for discipline and for an emphasis on sin and for an emphasis on brutality. 

Speaker 2: Why do you think Nietzsche loved Pascal so much? Because Pascal understood dialectically and had absorbed the Janus face of Christianity. He knew, he says, pascal was someone whose face shined from repression and the discipline and the brutalism of Jansenist, conservative Catholicism. So repression is something that Christianity perfected. It's a great tragedy for Philip Reif that we're in the waning of that right, the notion that a society could be construed in a post-prohibitory or a post-repressive age, and I don't even want to even argue that we're post-repressive. I think that those arguments are foolish because we're differently repressive. We're exactly, we're differently repressive, although I definitely agree with some of these French Lacanians who say capitalism, finance capitalism. What I argue in my book is that finance capitalism actually creates what I call a hyper-social paternalism. 

Speaker 2: I'll give you a great example. Are you aware that when the sexual revolution first started out in the 1950s, do you know what some of the first feminist revolts were against? It was on college campuses and it was against these laws. You may be familiar with them called inlocoparentes. 

Speaker 1: Yep, i'm very familiar with local parenthesis laws. We still deal with them in secondary education. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, We're in the place of the parents and it was this effort by the fortest bourgeois law family to implant a continuation of paternal authority when kids went to college mostly upper middle class It happened, I think, mostly on Berkeley campuses, It's upper middle class kids. 

Speaker 1: That's where the free speech movement ends up being against too. but yes, Yeah, this was the early parts of it. 

Speaker 2: Now the interesting thing from a Freudian standpoint is actually that's quite positive. This is why we can think Freud and revolt, because what they're doing is they're saying there's an edible process that we are going to college to overcome. It's what college is partially about psychically is a kind of working out of these old dependencies. That's kind of what the Oedipus drama is about. So in a sense they succeeded. Those laws were reformed. But you know what? Ronald Reagan in his reforms of California education, bringing in high finance in the late 1970s, brought those puppies back in. And now, as Melinda Cooper shows in her book Family Values Excellent book, by the way Yeah, they've been intensified since Obama. And now because they have to do with the introduction of, like tort law and grievance law, yep. And now she, melinda Cooper, shows that in local parentheses laws are not fought against because each student is a little vector of human capital And that in local parentheses laws actually are what a lot of students lean on to fight for their own sense of persecution. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i was about to say it is now. I mean, one of the ironies is like this very conservative instrumentation is also part of the expansion of academic bureaucracy through what conservatives might call woke means, but ironically, it is their own reinstitutionalization of in local parentheses laws that make that possible, which is, you know, which is my whole point about the way a lot of this stuff works is, i'm like the culture wars as we understand them, are totally mutually constitutive, and you see this even in something simple like Rhonda Santis. Like everything Rhonda Santis does is not only, like uh, sensorious, that's obvious, but it's also bureaucratically expansive, which is which, from a conservative standpoint, right should be alerting Right. And that because, like they're actually used, they are using the bureaucratic expansiveness that they associate with with, uh, with cultural liberalism, which they attribute to Marxism, but don't think they actually believe that in so much they even know what Marxism is. Um exactly. 

Speaker 2: No, it's like, if you think about it, the in local parentheses part two after Reagan, like that's called, the neoliberal iteration of them have now gone, according to Cooper, to shape the discourse of how the uh student left frames social justice as grievance, as um, uh, even safe space, the notion of safe space which I mean. So again, that's an interesting psychoanalytic shift in paternal social authority, which I I think is a new social paternalism, which means that reef is wrong to think that somehow we're post-repressive. No, but this is a different, in some ways more insidious form of oppression. 

Speaker 1: Right, you and I are both on record as as being, on one hand, admitting that like, yes, we know the generations are vaguely constituted by, by marketing constructs. I get it that we're picked up by sociologists for, like, convenient reasons. On the other hand, uh, baby boomers, baby boomers are fucking real. There's material things to explain there, and that means the ripples of responses throughout society that are manifested in relationships of consumption and production. Yeah, and um do shape the most likely consciousness of the, of the children, of the. 

Speaker 1: I can't ever, i always flip silent and lost generation. I can't remember which is which, but um of the, the Gen Xers who have their own antinomian consciousness. Basically, that has gone from um kind of liberal anti-politics that was issue that it would manifest in left issues but never in a cohesive leftism at all. Um, see ultra globalization movement, see whatever you want to see. I mean it kind of dies the occupy, actually that style of politics. 

Speaker 1: And then you have a Gen X, right, uh, which is overrepresented, i think, of the generation, because, frankly, the anti-politics is so dominant in generation X, um, that, you know, is equally anti-nomian front. You know very clearly that shows up and like, oh, more Gen X in so much that they support anyone, or more likely to be Trump, or or just Santans or whatever part of that's age, but it's not ages defined by property Right. Um, and then I point out that, like I don't think we're going to see a conservatizing partisan trend amongst millennials and Zs, but I do think that the structure of their liberalism is actually in some ways more repressive and conservative than they can look at. 

Speaker 2: It is, it is, but there's a saving grace, which is that one of the things that Reef writes about a lot is and I think he's right about this This goes back to a thesis which you're probably familiar with, which I've seen a lot, and it concerns me, which is actually starting with John Dewey and William James very American thing is, you know, the, the emphasis on the child as liberator, the youth, the youth as a zone of ideal freedom, et cetera, et cetera. Now Wilhelm Reich argued that, um, theoretically, family abolition should abolish Freud's notion of the Edipal structure as a limited and temporary bourgeois imposition of character, armor and repression. Well, that didn't happen and, on the contrary, there is a phenomenon, which has been written about, of how red diaper babies actually become neoliberalized, almost Pete Buttigieg, pete Buttigieg. 

Speaker 1: Mala Harris yeah, can go through with you. 

Speaker 2: You could go through a long list, right, yeah, although I mean, it's not always the case. No, there are exceptions. There are a few exceptions, like even the person I had, um, john Bellamy Foster. He was a red diaper baby and you know, obviously he's one of the great Marxists in America right now, but so that's interesting. But listen to this. I had a feeling that generations was going to come. 

Speaker 2: I want to read this quote from Freud the mind of the moralist. Check this out. This is the anti politics speaking here You've says, quote in Freud's vision of politics, nothing qualitatively different happens in history, with the leader forced to play father Imago because his followers are his children. Politics becomes an unchanging strife between the generations. Social relations are seen through to the permanent psychological needs that they satisfy. So so what I think that indicates is the danger of reducing politics is, ultimately, this is what needs to be avoided, i think is a message I want to send here. The anti politics is not a productive reading of Freud. Actually It's not. And I don't mean that in some idealist sense Like oh, i just don't want it to be that way. No, I truly mean that, like a, you can read Freud differently than that and be the outcome of like it's. It's simply a Inadequate form of thinking through political realities to reduce everything It's. It's a psychologic It's. It's too Psychologizing, right, you know it's not a materialist reading. So I think there's much to be said. 

Speaker 1: But I'm not. So here's what I always tell people age is a material condition because of the context around it. However, if You think the defining thing in politics is your age, you don't really understand Political subjectivities very well beyond immediate context, which means you can't think of politics beyond Nebulous cultural trends and interests. And Well, i have said like you do have to take interest into account when you're like like looking at I talk a lot about, like we have to have a much more robust notion of what's actually going on in the various classes a lot of the time, because the, the, the sectoral tensions and stuff actually do change. And I am glad, finally, that someone like Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley even though I don't agree with their seven thesis is they're actually trying to deal with that. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, also also that reef says Wilhelm Reich, the heirs of Wilhelm Reich are apparent if you follow where he ended up. It's always an interesting question Is like do you judge a philosopher, a thinker, from the point of where they ended, right as the kind of pinnacle, and said I don't think you have to. But reef sort of feels that way and what he says is that Reich was destined to end in a pure masquerade Obsession with power as such, which is why he says he fell into the cockamamie organ accumulator theory of matter, which is ultimately about taking a kind of quasi religious conception of Freud's libido and Falling into this obsession with, with the kind of the pure Numeral abyss of it. So he tried to abolish power, but all he ended up with was a kind of mystical subsumption into everything, just everything is just power. So he had, he lost all dialectical mediation entirely and I actually think that reef is right about that with Reich like, right, reich, reich's project is kind of a failed project. Right, like a He's. We do need like some minimal forms of repression and We do need the creation of ego. Ideals and like things like this are like The notion of abolishing the construct of the father, for example, is too radical. It's just simply too radical. 

Speaker 2: Even if you want to entertain that idea, you're gonna have to sit down and talk. Walk me through what you mean by that. And if you don't mention class power, as You mentioned, as you talk about that, i'm not gonna take you seriously. Right, like I'll hear you out, but like I just really, and I it's. It kind of goes back to the. I Guess it's an ultra tendency. I don't. I have a hard time accusing people being ultras, because one of my motto is, as you know, is to to make peace with, with, with the radical left, even even with social democracy elements, you know which is so that's. But anyways, the generation's piece is complex. I think the other thing that's complex about it is that Freud does offer a model of overcoming of paternal dependencies, and that's how I like to read Freud. Therefore, the early protest against the local parenties is a better model than what we're dealing with now, because they they overcame it, at least for a temporary period. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, i, i think I would agree with that. I think this is a good point to like, you know, i this might seem somewhat nebulous, but it's a point I think to end off on, one thing I would say is that In Maybe in relation to the spectrum of socialist Responses, when we talked a lot about ultras people don't hear me, i don't, people will. Actually, you know that I don't even like using the word analytically, even though I do think something like that exists. Yeah, i gave you like my rough definition of it. Yeah, what I think we have to do And this like this even goes into my historical reading of like one of the problems of the Bolsheviks Being tied to the 1921 faction ban is we do have to accept That that, because I do think there's a one of the elements of Marxism think is slightly utopian is the idea And I do think Marx actually believed it that with socialism, politics ends because class conflict ends, and I'm like, but human differentiation and self alienation does go on, and so we have to have a way for these tendencies That come out of, you know, the struggle for liberation In our current class context, to be manifested and played out within the left itself and sometimes The side I like is going to lose. 

Speaker 1: But But that that is part of the conception of what like working-class politics and socialist politics, which I don't think are at this point The same thing, and I don't just think it's because of left abandoned the working class, of the working class abandoned left. I think the contradictions, and both In a kind of Like structural way, make it very hard for either one of them to be aligned with anything like. So, for example, this is a distinction that Robert Brenner brought up I actually agree with It's hard to talk about class politics today, even when you talk about class interest politics, because they're not really the same thing. There's nothing in class class interest politics. It aims to unify the entirety Of the working class, even though The the kind of gestures toward it are there, right. So like there's nothing about the way unions are going to manifest, even in more socially democratic societies that actually indicate that they are actually the organ Of total class consciousness. 

Speaker 1: But they they do Show that Workers can organize, advocate and also discipline, because that part of You know anarchists get get mad at unions for this. But it's actually part of what Union to do And if you don't keep it under control, it will become a bureaucratic tendency. But they actually do Discipline the last militancy necessarily, like Because if they, if your collective organ, can't tell you when, when not to be militant, they can't, they don't, they're not actually representing you, they're not actually giving your collective um, your collective grouping agency at all. They're not representing anything other than, like, bureaucratic aggregation or something Um, right and that's you know, but We won't learn how to organ. I think it's important when I talk to people like look the labor parties, which again, they're reformists for the most part, etc. Etc. But the Marxist parties came out of them, right, labor parties did. They came out a low point of workers organizing, but they came out of coalitions of unions. No, i think. 

Speaker 2: I think that that's a fair point. I mean. It goes back to this question regarding I mean, i'm happy that sanders Has cold feet about putting his hat in the ring this time around for the presidential race, because I don't think we need him, but no, i think in a way he's actually. If he does that, he's actually illustrating our failure. 

Speaker 1: Like no, i think he's. 

Speaker 2: I hope, i hope he sits it out And I hope that maybe this federal, i think we'll just kind of pass, because it's it's created a lot of um, exaggerated expectations, because we're sort of waiting for some divine miracle to happen, some Thing out of the blue, when in reality it's going to take a lot more local work and struggle. So, you know, labor unions are one way, one way to do that Um, but you know, i mean, the other thing is more, the only way to do it, though, yeah, they're not the only way. There's there's, yeah, we can talk more about that. But I think, to connect it back to these psychoanalytic theories for a moment, you know, part of it is that Freudian Marxism Thought at a time in the 20th century Which was a form of a kind of um, but bad you cause, a passion for the real, a passion for, uh, a militant sense of overcoming in a total sense like, like even in marcus's aeroson civilization, part of what he's militating against is against the conception of the reality principle itself. So like we should never underestimate The grandiosity by which the theory was presented Right, and a lot of that Doesn't hit the same today, the grandiosity part right, because of the material conditions, of the material conditions that we're living in. 

Speaker 2: So it's not sexy to take a more kind of moderate, dialectical approach, but maybe in some sense we need to. We need to proceed a little more Carefully. I mean, it's not to throw out the theory completely, not not at all. It's rather to engage In these traditions that we have inherited with a little more Uh nuance. You know um, because there's a lot of other thinkers that we haven't mentioned That do bring, i think, a very sophisticated Like, for example, bernard stiegler Has convinced me That marcus's thought is no longer relevant for neoliberal era At all, like it's, i would I, i think I might agree. I mean, the other thing that marcus did, of course, which was different than adorno and horkheimer, was he really replaced the revolutionary working class with a vague conception of What, after obama, is now like cosmopolitan minority interest politics. But he tried to do that Lumpen theory well, basically right, which is also what I find interesting, i think, read it. 

Speaker 2: That's also what the losing right did right, and that is not Our future. In some sense, this is anyways. 

Speaker 1: Well, yeah, but what? what? I would actually even go further about. What I find interesting About that, daniel, is like you don't even have to look in the cycle analytic tradition to see that the marcus is humanist at that too. Like that's where you see. Like clr james go to, yeah, like if one of it was valid. 

Speaker 2: I mean, part of it was Automation was created, a lumpen proletarian crisis. Um, to some extent it still is, but it's different now. So you know, but the the the point being is that the praxis, the centrality of the praxis, was put on the lumpen and it just Lacked an organizational resolve to to be truly potent as a revolutionary force, some sense. Yes, it's a whole other thing to discuss, but Yeah, well, i mean there's a whole debate of like. 

Speaker 1: One of the things is, whenever I talk about lumpen, there's a whole lot of people who just like it's an incoherent category and like, well, it is a difficult category. I will admit that, um, you might not like the blant, the branding, but when you talk about pro, precariat or whatever, you're actually just rebranding a lumpen theory. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, um, i totally follow you on that, for sure, like 100% so we do have to deal with it. 

Speaker 1: And then I think one thing that makes everyone uncomfortable except for maybe, like communizers, who have given up on the working class entirely right, um, is that There are more lump what we, the pathologies we used to associate with lumpen hood, are also rampant in a large portion Of the working class proper. Now, right, and that's that is something That when you talk about it, it's like oh, you're being moralistic. 

Speaker 2: I'm like Well, it also is an argument. It's also an argument, given that that's an empirical Happening. That also is an argument for It's incoherent. Not it's incoherent, but rather and this is something I know from first hand experience rather it's um interwoven, wulvan, inner woven tapestry within the working class, so it no longer Necessitates, as it did in fortism, a separate appendage. It's not like that, no more Right. It's, it's, it's. It's tied up and bound up with working class experience, almost indistinguishable in some. 

Speaker 1: Barriers are much more porous, except in the extremophile cases like that's right, so it's, i mean, and that's something, that's something we just have to deal with, and I don't see people like really dealing with it right now but um, what's a traumatic thing? 

Speaker 2: I mean literally is traumatic. Oh yeah, when you add the drug dimension to it, when you add the overdose dimension to it. 

Speaker 1: You add the increase of the quote. Deaths of despair, uh a class deaths. 

Speaker 2: And that's actually where the psychoanalysis comes in as a I, literally as a therapeutic, which is what Freudian Marxism also started as was one of the ironies, you know. 

Speaker 1: Um, i don't always love Catherine Lou and I don't know where she's going to go with this argument, but she started talking about the, the, the bureaucratic adoption of trauma, and I'm like I think it's interesting because I do think actually there is a real sense in where there are much more hugely openly traumatized parts of the population, not because bad stuff didn't happen in the past, because there is more community to mitigate, to mitigate incident. Anyone's ever studied trauma knows that Community mitigations can stop some of the worst effect of trauma. Um, however, i suspect that what we're finding is trauma is just being denuded of any explanatory force in this Um, i don't just suspect it, i like, i feel like I lived through it, like it's just it the while. So what is called trauma Um is expanded to the point that, like well, like no one really knows what we're talking about anymore. 

Speaker 2: Um, Yeah, that's true. Um, Well, I mean that's that's an interesting point. I mean I'm curious to see where Catherine takes that line of argumentation. I don't I. I hope that it's not down a path whereby we just deny that trauma is going on. 

Speaker 2: There's a bit of. There's a bit of that risk, because there is also a tendency to um, not deny, but to that that it be missed. And this is actually a A long-standing motif that you find in right wing Nietzscheanism, which is basically to, because one of the consequences of right wing Nietzscheanism, with reef especially, is that not only must that laboring class labor, they must also be barred from aesthetic production right. 

Speaker 1: They cannot be allowed to enjoy The, the fruits of aesthetic, because they will. 

Speaker 2: They will lower it by, nor nor can they, nor can they create it Right, right, and here you think of the Bolsheviks and all of their proletarian aesthetic work and significance of that, but Which is another reason to to rebuke right wing Nietzscheans, but um, and also why they play a very important kind of adversarial role to us. But I don't know if there's anything more you wanted to say about Philip reef, but no, i think reef. 

Speaker 1: Reef is interesting to me because When I was reading this, i at first I was like would you wanted to to convince me that, like That, the left really should? you really should try to grapple with Freud in a way that's. 

Speaker 2: I mean listen, listen to this, listen to this quote from from reef and think. Think about this in our current moment and to see How it lands with you. Culture is a form of higher learning in which It is constantly assimilated. From early infancy, human beings first begin to trust um, those familiar responses from their parents and make overtures. In every culture there therefore stands a sensor Governing the opportunity of recognizing and responding to novel stimuli. 

Speaker 2: That governor, inclined always to be sensorious about novelty, is what we may call faith. Right, faith is an synonymous with authority. Faith is what Freud brought in by bringing the authority of the psychoanalyst, and he often says that the Transference was a proof of the success of psychoanalysis as a faith. Why? because when you have a transferential connection, you have substituted the parental emago onto the therapist, so that the subject has transcended That attachment and placed it onto you. That's a faith. They've only done so because they've identified with you. That's the authority. 

Speaker 2: Now here's the interesting thing. He's saying culture requires a sensor. Now Let's look at what the sensor is in today's Culture. I mean, in some sense, the sensor Absolutely lacks any self legitimating authority. This is actually why I follow lash when he says that the sensor is socialized Like. It's a social, social super ego. It's no longer instantiated In this version of the super ego that. That's why you know what lash calls reef The party of the super ego. He is the man who is for the party of the super ego right, yes, i'm just going back over that part of yeah. 

Speaker 1: I'm literally actually preparing to do a solo video explaining that chapter of the minimal self, because I think it's very Explanatory for a lot of things. Right, and yes, reef does come up in there. I mean, there, there is, in lash, a dialectic around reef because some of his rotations were Christianity do seem. 

Speaker 2: You got to find the letters, by the way, barn, because I went and it looked and there are, uh, maybe, maybe 10 letters that they've exchanged reef and lash, i think so wow. Yes, okay, i gotta go play in the archive. 

Speaker 2: Oh, you know what it was. It was around the publications of lash's book, because, you see, when he wrote his book on the family, i think he had some exchange with him. And then I think there was exchange in culture of narcissism. Because you go to the Rochester website Mm-hmm, you see the letters, you do a fine search for reef And he appears in those sections. So I think it's letters, but I could be, i could be mistaken. 

Speaker 1: They're not digitized So you would have to go there, i think yeah, well, i think my book is going to require me to take a trip to Rochester. I've already like accepted that about my life, but um, Yeah, that would be fun. You should do it Yeah um, because I have a strange feeling There's a lot of stuff in those letters Um yeah, again, this is my, this is my premonition. 

Speaker 2: I could be wrong, but again, i just want everyone watching to think about Okay, here's a man who says The future. He says something else that's prophetic reef does. The future will be a war. He says within the elites, within the elites. So when lash is writing revolt of the elites, reef is in the background here as a prophetic kind of, in a sense, reef. I'm here. I'm talking about triumph of the therapeutic not Freud mind of the moralist. 

Speaker 1: Um Is pointing out something right here in a way, you know yeah, i think reef prefigures like michael wind, um pretty strongly, um like back early. It's like new class war, which is a class war between Between what he thinks is the elite, petit bourgeois and the professionals, and then various groups aligned with either, uh, with the over class just letting them fight. 

Speaker 2: You know reef's, reef's approach in his later work. We could maybe end, i know you, yeah Might have to go. So is it is is in his book on charisma and spawn is a total asceticism, a total retreat politics, a total. The scholar should be Not engaged with public events at all, like, like just Monastic. You know it's, it's so you sort of useless in my opinion, um, um. But you know, would this sensor of today's liberalism, what would Rief say to this? right, he's, you know it's. Probably he would be someone like the tar lady in the movie. 

Speaker 1: Yes, So we're gonna end here, but I am gonna ask you two things. One, anything you like to plug, but before you answer that two, would you like to come back on in a couple of months and make the case for Lukash? 

Speaker 2: Ah, yes So let me I mean number two first, yes, Yes, okay, i mean which Lukash We'll talk about the destruction of reason. 

Speaker 1: Lukash Yeah, because that's the Lukash that you've been more interested in recently and that's the one that I don't know as well. Sure, and maybe I think we do have to do a part of history and class consciousness to really understand, like, what Lukash means by reason, because it's not what. It's both vital, but it's not also exactly what we think by that term today. 

Speaker 2: I would love to. I would love to, and that's let's do it. All right And great. So that's one. Two to plug. Let's see here. I got my article coming up. It's called the perils of the new intimacy The perils of the new intimacy, and it's a study in Ion Magazine She'll come out soon about all of this new like literature, about the kind of liberating paradigm of modern relationships which I critique and diagnose. I critique and diagnose. Anyways, plug that. Plug my channel, the study groups channel. 

Speaker 2: I'm doing some pretty exciting interviews coming up. You can check them out. Stuff that I've done if you haven't seen is, i think, always worth looking at. The one on Lukash with Foster not only Foster's worth looking at. Pretty interesting, really tough for a lot of folks. I mean Lukash is gonna send you an 180, at least philosophically, from what you thought. It's a whole new cast of interlocutors that he's gonna introduce to you, many of whom you thought were boring or uninteresting. He makes them interesting. So I'll stop there. I mean the Nietzsche book is coming out next year. It's sweet, but really I got some feedback from a top Nietzschean scholar that was positive and I was so excited about that, so excited to obviously share that with you, derek, given your deep history in Nietzsche studies. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, my love-hate relationship with Nietzsche Indeed Like. Yeah, I mean, Nietzsche to me has always been the reactionary that we really have to answer, because the other ones are like. There are other reactionaries that we have to answer that aren't Nietzschean, but a lot of the other reactionaries we have to answer are also children of Nietzsche. So it's like One of that to me, and I think people should listen to this, because I think a lot of people would they hear us engage on this on, say, Twitter. They don't know how nuanced you are about this, because you respect Nietzsche as an enemy, Like you know. 

Speaker 2: I do, I do. I like to let off the assumption that I don't. So people come to my book and they're just ready for some super flat and boring expose. You're gonna be surprised, so Right. 

Speaker 1: And, as I'll end on this, it's way more important for us, not as a polemical exercise, and I think there's a lot of people who confuse politics with polemics and rhetoric with analysis in ways that are unhelpful. Like when I'm like hey, like, don't pick your analytic categories by what is polemically the most useful, right That comes up all the time. Like when people are like well, why are you talking this way? We could be polemically, i'm like, you can do that polemically, but you need to think this other way. It would be great if we were at a point where I didn't have to tell you the switch your language. But we are not at that point. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's possibly part of my motivation to push a certain line with a certain bravado. One, because Nietzsche did that And that's actually something he teaches us, Sorry to say, which I think is fine It's a little disorienting to be that way which can actually be good. But two, I really do honestly and sincerely think that people haven't really made aware of this perspective. 

Speaker 1: So many people's Nietzsche is the Kauffman Nietzsche. 

Speaker 2: Or the Deleuze Nietzsche, yeah, totally. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, the Deleuze Nietzsche, other Foucault Nietzsche, and I've been aware that, like the Foucault Nietzsche was often in Nietzsche, like even when I was in college, i was just like your French words do not actually what the German says. 

Speaker 2: That's right. Yeah, that's been proven. Yeah, that's true. 

Speaker 1: Like it's just like there's a French word that's actually closer to the German and you're not choosing it. So I think that's really important. But I also think like there's a tendency right now for people like, i guess, polimically to go pick lightweight. It's like we're gonna talk about Jordan fucking Peterson again, we're talking about Ben Shapiro again, we're talking about Stephen fucking Crowder or whatever, and I'm like, okay, maybe that's useful for polemics. It's absolutely useless for sharpening your mind. Like you need to pick better, even contemporary targets than that shit. 

Speaker 2: Like I don't see what you get out of that shit? Yeah, exactly because it's even before you read the contemporaries, like I mean, that's actually one thing going back to Reeve. It's an old humanist presupposition that there emerge master thinkers who shape our culture. Now it's quite frowned upon to view the world that way. I'm sorry, but I sort of still do view the world that way. So at least if you don't try it out as an exercise and see by revisiting some of these figures. I totally agree with you on that, yeah well, thank you so much, Daniel. 

Speaker 1: We'll see you again pretty soon, so have a great night. 

Speaker 2: It was an honor. All the best everybody. 

Speaker 1: Thank you for supporting FarmBlog. If you would like more, you can find our stream on YouTube under my name, c Derek Farm. You can also find us on Patreon, where you can subscribe for early audio access, additional shows, unexpared audios, q&as with me on video and other perks such as access to our archives, et cetera. There are three levels of support. One level even gets you on Patreon shows Occasionally. Here you will hear shows done with other creators. I hope you enjoy them. We'd like to thank our producer, paul Channel Strip and Bitter Lake and Jason Miles for making our intro and exit music, and thank you for all you do. If you can't support us financially, you can support us by leaving a review on iTunes or your pod Catcher Choice. Have a great evening, thank you.