Welcome to VARM 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 . Welcome to No Royal Robe . We continue our long march through Eugenia Morassos , the critique of neo-feudal reason . We are now doing sections five and six . Capitalism , still and still . Yet nor capitalism . And I've decided to what I don't know , excuse forces of predation , for you know , capitalism .
Speaker 1Capitalism yes more capitalism , and so one of the things that I realized upon reading this is you know , marxist may be too optimistic about capitalism , and that's why they miss certain things .
Speaker 2Absolutely .
Speaker 1Because I'm like so these things that capital has done all the time , you sort of didn't think it did because of the necessary , you know , mode of production , whatever . So therefore , capitalism being worse now means it just not capitalism anymore , and I'm just like but , as Morozov will point out , none of this is actually breaches in capitalist logic , even from the kind of like pure Marxist perspective . So we get to section five and we finally get to a good argument protect no neo-feudalism . Right , and Morozov calls it as such . This is the work of Cedric Durant , and what is interesting is that I've not read this book by Durant , fictitious capital . But he makes a lot of the same observations I made , like around that time that like , okay , we have to deal with the fact that there are new forms of rents , so much of profitability is distorted by the fact that rents are tied into it .
Speaker 1There's tons of fictitious capital . A lot of people ask where the money goes , where . The money never existed in the first place in any , in any vialarizable sense , meaning , though the government acknowledged that no one could have ever spent it into being . Yeah , so that means it was fictitious . Then then there you know . Then there is this step on Durant also like rightly points out that hey guys , financial capital isn't always predatory like grow up , but there are cases where it is . So , instead of just assuming it's always predatory on other forms of capital , which this is a very popular argument right now . Like Michael Hudson from the MMT quasi-Stalinist world makes it . I guess I probably shouldn't call him a quasi-Stalinist because he won't . He doesn't publicly admit it , but we know the truth . But you know one of the things I was reading his book like Socialism , industrial Capitalism or Financial Capitalism , and a lot of these guys have a real boner for industrial capital , as if it's coming back .
Speaker 2Yeah , some of that .
Speaker 1I think is political , because they see China as industrial capital versus the West financial capital . But I'm not even sure that you could actually call like it's not like China is cleanly doing Fordism either , or even early industrial development anymore .
Speaker 3Well , no , that's like a view of China that's at least a couple of decades old . It's really rooted in the 80s and 90s in China .
Speaker 1Right . Yes , there's still a lot of production going on in China , but China is a middle income , middle class country with still 40% of the population is technically like quasi-peasants .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1And our rural food like subsistence agrarian labor I don't know what you'd call them , but like that's actually quite weird , i can't . like that's not a path of development pursued in the West . We did not have huge portions of our after we industrialized , huge portions of our economy still in semi subsistence , small farming .
Speaker 3Yeah , there's like a few , there's like , i think , a couple thousand small family farms now . Right In the United States .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah .
Speaker 3If you look , it's very non-influential sector .
Speaker 2When you do the census , counts all agricultural workers together , including factory farm workers , and it's like less than 10% .
Speaker 1Yeah , that's what I'm going to say . It's like between two and 5% .
Speaker 2Yeah , something like that .
Speaker 1I don't remember the exact number , it's less than also classical factory workers , which is also funny because everyone's getting their boner for productive labor out right now . By productive they don't mean productive to surplus , they mean productive as in factory workers , which isn't the same thing , right ? And even there , what you see is like , well , it's only like fucking 15% of the economy , or something .
Speaker 2You mean like the MLs and the Pat socks that are like pretend like Yeah , even some social Democrats too , honestly Okay . Like pretend , like social , that service work isn't proletarian .
Speaker 1Yeah , service work isn't proletarian . Some of them will pick up from Marx's letters and claim that they're lumpen , although ignoring stuff that Marx says about productivity in other places . So , for example , his example is a teacher , which is like a teacher working for the state is nonproductive and a teacher working for a private school is productive .
Speaker 3Apparently , as of 2021 , less than 2% of the workforce in the US was employed in agriculture , and less than well . It's like 19.18% in industry and 79% in services .
Speaker 2Right . That's a real good strategy if you really want to organize the American populace is to tell the majority of workers in this country that they're actually lumpen and have nothing to do with the process of emancipation . Right .
Speaker 1Yeah , it's a great strategy And but I think we'll see . As we talk about this , there's a reason why these people like this techno-nio feudalism thesis , like there's a reason why Ashley Ferali likes Jody D . Yeah , and it'll be . It becomes a way for them to describe these conditions without having to admit that they may be either misunderstood Marx or misunderstood capitalism .
Speaker 3Yeah , i was watching a video with Yanis Varoufakis explaining he's explained to Zizek why we're not in capitalism anymore , and I didn't watch the whole thing . So I don't know . I don't know what Zizek's response is , but Varoufakis is convinced that there's not much of a labor market anymore And I just I don't understand why he would say that .
Speaker 1Yeah , he's not even a productivist market Marxist . So let's get into what makes this predatory , because I actually got there was something that this helped me clarify Brinner's new political capitalism category , which is his , i guess , final , final boss interation , now that he's gotten past techno-nio feudalism , which the actual article articulating it's more by Dylan Riley . We all know that , but I believe the category is important for Brinner for a couple of reasons They're going to come up here . So Cedric Durant did the fictitious capital book . The fictitious capital book , i more or less agree with its observations , until he starts talking about certain kinds of non-tangibles , such as data , being important to the global data set . And I know like techno-capitalists all really believe this shit . We can just have internal economies where we just get data and then sell you stuff off of data And like , yeah , why do these economies fall apart , even when you have government contracts and moment debt costs go up , right , like it doesn't make sense . And that's because it's not that it is not productive in the same way of physical commodities as other things , not to say it's not productive . It is productive to surplus And I do think we have to kind of separate that out , but how it's conductive .
Speaker 1So surplus is basically the cost of debt versus low profits . If debt is low , you can valorize not having that much capital . Keep your profit base somewhat high by playing a low profit rate off of an even lower debt cost . Does that make sense ? So , for example , google , our Facebook . Google actually does stuff , so let's get back into this . Facebook is profitable because , even though it wasn't really selling that much but ads and data , it could actually subsist as long as the debt costs were low , because it could get capital to maintain and grow its market share off of debt , not off of its own real capital margins . But it's making enough to pay back shareholders off of the difference in the cost of debt to the relatively small profit margins that they have as long as they're growing .
And this becomes completely problematized when debt's expensive .
Speaker 1Now , this is actually true for all producers , but it shows up in these intellectual capital places because they don't have anything else to rely on . There's nothing to clear out and valorize , there's no stock to release , there's nothing like that at all . So all you can really do is command rent . But you can't command that many kinds of rents unless you start charging for the service And what we've seen with these kinds of the people are the content creators and also the providers is if you start charging for the service , people kind of realize the game And they back out . And so we've seen what happens when a lot of these things start charging They collapse . So Durant has a second book called Techno Neo Funeralalisme , which basically picks up the fictitious capital but actually interestingly , drops the Marxism for Velbanism .
Speaker 1So the framework from Marx and Lenin is given up in the Techno Neo Funeralalism which I think is interesting And I'll read what Morozov have to say here In his book the French word for Techno , Neo Funeralalism .
Speaker 2Féodalisme or no ?
Speaker 1that would be a Spanish Yeah .
Speaker 2You got to drop the pronunciation of the last half of the sentence .
Speaker 1So it'd be Techno Féodalisme , like probably .
Speaker 2Féodalisme . Féodalisme , It's swallow the M and the E , maybe Féodalisme . Sorry French , sorry French speakers .
Speaker 1Durant retains his focus on the looming end of capitalism but assigns the task of bearing it to tech firms . Fictitious capital had already examined the so-called profit investment puzzle . When capitalism is functioning well , higher profits should mean higher investments . The whole point of being a capitalist is to never stand still . Yet roughly from the mid 1990s , there was no such link , And I've noticed this too . I think this is true . Profits increase in advanced capitalist countries with ups and downs , but investments stagnated or declined . Plenty of explanations have been adduced to explain this , including the maximization of shareholder value . Growing monopolization are the toxic effects of ever-exhilaration financialization are , in my belief , all of the above at one time .
Speaker 3Yeah , None of those seem to like . they have to be unique .
Speaker 1No , in fact , two of them seem to be tied in together . Maximization , shareholder value and financialization are directly related . Like Durant does not come up with new causal factors , instead he chooses to argue that the enigma of profits without accumulation is , at least impart , an artificial one , ie a statistical illusion created by our inability to grasp the effects of globalization . And okay , so far .
Speaker 3I'm with him . I think that's true . Yeah , i think that's true , yeah .
Speaker 1Like the reason why all of a sudden , if anything changes , all the profits seem to just go up and smoke , is because they were never there , right ?
Speaker 2It makes a whole lot of sense when explaining the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank right .
Speaker 1Right , exactly , and why these bank things have to go up and why you have to , why basically , the Fed now and the federal government of multiple countries is always like , okay , we've got to shield all these assets that aren't real from the actual effects of the market .
Speaker 2Capitalism is cool . Yeah , what a good idea .
Speaker 1On one hand , some firms have found a way of making more money without additional investment . Globalization and digitization allow for top firms in the global north think Walmart to leverage their position as the Apex community , as Apex global commodity chains , in order to extract lower prices for the final immediate goals from actors lower down the chain . But this is this is what we describe in normal economics as monopsony pricing . It's not a rent , but it is a pricing power . On the other hand , when capitalists from the global north were making investments , these were increasingly went to the global south . By the way , it fucks with all the whole Third Worldist stuff . It's like oh , so you think they were just extracting stuff ? Why were the investments being made in the global south ?
Speaker 3Yeah , I mean the Third Worldist view is the only position . Well , whatever , it's not the only position , but whatever , It can't be backed up if you actually look into how anything works .
Speaker 1Right , yeah , if you back it up , the classical Third Worldist view either has to be significantly modified . I think John Smith's imperialism book actually is just viable , but it can't be the classical . It's all just labor aristocracy thesis . You have to come up with some kind of legal framework .
Speaker 2And then you also can't argue that this lens .
Speaker 1Well , it's funny , right ? I've said this before .
Speaker 1If it was ever true , it's true for the first 10 years of fortism kind of right And that's a kind of which means when the Third Worldist realized it it was already gone by a generation and a half . Because they didn't start right , they didn't like all three worlds theory wasn't about this , it was about like the Soviet Union . So when it was reappropriated in , like the early 1980s into , oh , super profits in the global north were paying off the proletariat . If it was true , it was true after World War II for 10 years .
Speaker 3Yeah , i mean , the 1980s and 90s seemed like a really weird time to like to notice how much better off the North American workers were , because they were considerably worse off than they were . you know , during again , during the kind of decade or so after the First and Second World War , they weren't well off anymore .
Speaker 2Now comparatively like much like by , especially the 80s , yeah , yeah , like , if we want to say that , like the fortunes of the American working class , like peaked in the 1950s , right , it was a slow decline for the next 40 years . Not even that slow , really . Once you hit liberalization , yeah , once you hit rapid decline , Yeah , once you hit the 70s .
Speaker 3it's not exactly a free fall , but it's close .
Speaker 1Yeah , i mean there's a reason why , for example , the family wage ends and women enter the workforce . Some of that is feminism , legitimately , but most of that is you need it to survive , and it hides how fast the actual purchasing power is going down .
Speaker 3Yeah .
Speaker 1So much is one of the things . When people talk to me about what profits , blah , blah , blah , blah , i'm like don't , you can't look at profits only in nominal values , because if you're factoring , if you're not factoring in constant inflation and purchasing price differences , then you completely miss that . Like , for example , for most workers , they actually make less than they did in the 50s . But if you are the average person , it's like well , i make $25 an hour now and in 1975 , i made $2 an hour . But then you look at what that bought $2 an hour actually bought more than $25 does now .
Speaker 2Yeah , kind of a lot even One time I was talking to my dad about how unhappy I was with one of my former jobs and we figured it out so that like what he was making as an assistant manager at a local pizza place in the 1970s is what I was making at my job where I was an operations manager for like 15 stores back when I was really in the PMC , right , and so , yeah , that was supposed to be a good wage , even though it absolutely living in Austin . it certainly was , and I could barely even pay my bills . But yeah , he was making that much in the 70s for doing I mean I would could probably about three quarters of the work that I was doing with like much less responsibility .
Speaker 1Yeah , how do I say this ? The hour of manoeuvre drunkenly crashes into the dirt at dawn . So because it does feel like not only are we drawing the wrong conclusions , we're drawing the wrong conclusions two decades late And that's kind of even true here . All right With the Technonia of Fetalism . In French book that is a growing chorus , who explained the profit investments , puzzled by emphasizing the role of intellectual property rights and intangibles , including data holdings , and allowing giant US firms to squeeze tremendous profits from their supply chains by focusing those aspects that have the highest margins . To an extent , it's an elaboration of Gerard's argument from 2014 , but with greater attention paid to the actual operations of global supply chain . That's good . I think that's actually good , and innovation , but this next part is stupid . And the role of intellectual property rights and distribution of power within them okay , that's still fine .
Speaker 1But for some of the firms he examines , the ignimia of profits for their investments is no longer artificial as it was in fictitious capital . They really don't invest much , at home or abroad . Regardless of profit levels , they either hand back their earnings to shareholders and dividends or buy back their own stock . Some like Apple to both . Technonia of Fetalism this is the part that's dumb . Technonia of Fetalism argues that the rise of intangibles , usually concentrated at the most profitable points of the global supply chain , lead to the emergence of four new types of rent . Two of them are not new types of rent . That this is me talking . Two of them legal intellectual property rents and natural monopoly rents look familiar . The first refers to rents derived from patents , copyrights and trademarks . The second from the ability of Walmart-like firms to integrate the supply chain and further infrastructure needed within it . Aka rents , just fucking rents . That's what patents are , and monopsony pricing , which we can treat as a rent .
Speaker 3Now what I- , both of which have existed for kind of a long time .
Speaker 1Both of which have existed since we have corporatization and limited liability . corporations at minimum Monopsony pricing has existed since fucking capital .
Speaker 3I was going to say it's existed for a couple hundred years .
Speaker 1So four new types , two of which aren't new . The two other dynamic innovation rents and intangible differential rents are more sound , more complex , but they too capture relatively clear and distinct phenomenons . The former refers to valuable data sets that are extremely exclusive property of these firms . That's again monopsony pricing , it's just very specific form of it , while the latter refers to the ability of firms to , inside a single value chain , to scale up their operations . Firms own their predominantly intangible assets can do this faster and more cheaply . How is that not just what JG , like what Rockefeller and Morgan did with their supply chains in the fucking 19th century ?
Speaker 3I was going to say it sounds a lot like the way the Bethlehem seal used to own the railroads , and they also built a town . You have to buy stuff from your boss .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 3Yeah .
Speaker 1I'm just people coming up with this . It's like they're noticing stuff and like this is new and I'm like the only thing that's new about it is it's happening in a digital space and it's enforced by the state .
Speaker 2The thing that's . I mean , i don't know this might be the fourth time I've brought this up I'm just having any kind of inclination towards considering that decadence theory might be a thing worth considering helps explain a lot . We're cannibalizing capital . We're like capital is like moving backwards , in some instances completely to reinventing the wheel on things that it had stopped doing a long time ago in order to try to squeeze profitability out , which we should expect . Yeah , because that's what capitalism does .
What I find interesting about this is what this implies is a whole lot of Marxists actually have a wakish view of capitalism .
Speaker 2Yes , like they . okay , it's the most vulgar view of the progressive role of capital , like refusing to admit that there might be a point where capitalism stalls , because Marx said , like you know , in the 19th century that capitalism is progressive . therefore , capitalism is still progressive . because why ?
Speaker 3Right , i mean all the debates about like imperialism , monopoly capitalism , going back to like Kowski and Lenin and that generation of Marxists . That's how long we have known that it's a no longer progressive . Whatever else you know , individuals had a theory about .
Speaker 1What would you have done ?
Speaker 3by the Vermeer . Well , yeah , that's also true , yeah .
Speaker 1It's like the progressive force of capitalism is that it reorganizes the economy pretty much immediately Once you start accumulating . I guess you could argue that up until the 20th century it still has some progressive role , but you start seeing these other things come out .
Speaker 3Yeah , Yeah , you start seeing them almost right away .
Speaker 2So you start seeing getting diminishing returns in innovation . I wouldn't say almost right away , but definitely by the middle of the 20th century .
Speaker 1It's funny because the innovation right now is all in the consumer end . A lot of people think because of cell phones we're more innovative And I know you've had to argue with people about this . But that's actually just because prior innovation you didn't see in the middle . In the late half of the 20th century it was on the back end And people are so far removed . For how fucking different it was to live in 1910 than in 1950 .
Speaker 2Yeah , i'm going to go ahead and agree with David Graber on this one . It's probably the only time .
Speaker 1Yeah , Graber occasionally gets stuff right and it hurts , but go ahead . Yeah , but just write about this .
Speaker 2Yeah , that and same with Mark Fisher , though his ideas about it are a lot less tangible , a lot less demonstrable , i mean because his has to do with innovation in music and culture , which I think he's right . but it's a lot harder to argue that because it's so subjective .
Speaker 1Agreed , i would say I'm going to also bring up Tyler Cohen . The conservative libertarian is actually also good on this , because he's like , basically outside of communication technology , we have secular stagnation for like since the 70s Yeah .
Speaker 3And I think my favorite example of this is the Air Force One . Like the kind of plane that Air Force One is based on , this Boeing 747 . It was . It went into production in 1969 . So right now , the most important plane that exists , you know , whatever the most important plane that exists in the world ? it's the exact same one as was being developed around the turn of the last . You know , whatever it is toward the , the I don't know how to say this It was the same one that was being developed in 1969 . Yeah .
Speaker 1Except for innovations in machine learning , indexing , which we're going to get to how this is actually forming capitalism in a minute from Rausoff . But like what we call the whole current AI generation thing , technology has been remarkably stagnant for 20 years . Like the fucking iPhone is 20 years old , which is both amazing because it's a it is a world altering piece of technology but also like it hasn't changed much either . You get more cameras on the back , like um , and if it was not for deliberately planned obsolescence and in the case of phones we know this for a fact Yeah , iphones for 20 years ago would still be mostly usable today . Look at , look at computer technology . I have not seen real innovations in computer technology since the mid-auts . Yes , there are still , like there are twinkling around the edges , but my laptop is basically my laptop . Now I pick up a laptop from 1985 versus a laptop from 20 , from 2000 . There are massive differences . There are not . I have a laptop from 10 years ago .
Speaker 1Yeah , you know it still works , okay . Um good , i mean exactly .
Speaker 2Whenever I was looking at buying a new gaming laptop and the innovations from the time I bought this one that I'm using now until now , are like a miniscule at best , but not price . The miniscule increase in the price increases not miniscule , but if you look at the gaming laptop that I compared to the one that I had like before , that it's just an enormous jump in quality and a processing power . Um , it's like once . once they they got to VR as being a thing that you could possibly do on your computers , it pretty much stalled out from there .
Speaker 3Yeah .
Speaker 1So so I think we do have a stalling out And I think I think I don't think this is the first time this has happened in capitalism either . I think we had to stall out and , like the 1890s , we had to stall out probably in the 1980s , 1970s , 1980s , the periods of melange , and then , you know , we don't have a start in the night in the 1920s because of war . But even war is not particularly innovative right now , like , for example , i mean , yes , we have new droning killing machines that can rain death from the sky and that's impressive . But like , if you think about the , the increases in war technology between , say , the Franco-Prussian war and war or two , Yeah , oh , yeah , that's pretty big .
Speaker 1It's massive And that's the same . That's basically the same time period between war to now , Whereas somebody was telling me today like , even with this big and very deadly war going on to Russia and Ukraine , neither side is actually even at munitions capacity of the Habsburg Empire and World War One .
Speaker 2And Russia , i think , is only spending 3% of its GDP on on fighting this war , as compared to what I think it was . Afghanistan was 6% , and then World War Two was 60% or something . Right Yeah .
Speaker 1Right , And think about this too . The casualty rate in this war is higher than in Afghanistan . Yeah Oh yeah . So this is something to really think about . Like , like , like . Even for the , you know , war is the primary function . Like what does the state exist for ? And yet it seems like even now it can't muster And that's true for the West too Like nobody can muster a lot for this .
Speaker 2Was it Graber that was talking about ? how Jason do you remember ? if it was him he was talking about how drone technology is actually . It looks like it's growing in leaps and bounds , but in actuality it's been pretty stagnant for like 20 years , like it's basically doing the same thing that it that it always has done .
Speaker 1It's just expanding .
Speaker 2Yeah , it was great , yeah , Yeah . Yeah , and then AI is a fucking joke .
Speaker 1Patriot missiles still suck .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1They're still use them , they still suck Like and so like . These are things that I'm just like . Look around you . The world feels shabby because it is The only thing that's not . Is this e technology infrastructure , by the way , which is not . When you actually look at the amount of powered infrastructure behind a lot of it , it isn't impressive . I will admit that I have been convinced that there is real innovation in these machine learning indexes , like that's real , but once that's gone , i don't know what's left .
Speaker 3Well , I , that's when we all just go live in the metaverse .
Speaker 1And here I'm going to point this out And this is not a conspiracy theory . I don't think anyone planned this , but you know why . There's innovation in the , in the , in the IE , you know space . If we're honest , some of the paranoia about it's actually hype .
Speaker 1By the way , like let's be , honest , The way people at the end of the world makes it sound like it's way more powerful . We need to invest in control anymore . The other thing that we should think about here is that we didn't have enough workers anyway , And people are talking about resuring and they want to drive labor costs down . The only way to do that would be AI . I'm assuming a lot of these AI model stuff even though the innovation is happening very rapidly now has been available and almost ready for a long time .
Speaker 1Yeah okay , probably like half a decade , because when I look at it , it's not a new technology . It's a combination of technologies in predictive software and algorithms that we've actually had for a while . It's just adding them together in a way . So I mean , i do think I have been convinced that it's not a con , that it's not no innovation at all , but I think it's like our last frontier of innovation that I see in the immediate future And it's not . What I find interesting about it is I don't see how it opens up new innovation at all .
Speaker 3Right , and that's an important part . It doesn't change anything .
Speaker 1So it's really this whole last , the last couple of decades , this entire century so far is a lot like the last one Because it's a non-human intelligence like that actually works on human intelligence too , like , for example , it's predicted modeling , even if it is not human And it does not learn like people do .
Speaker 1We know that , but it is a kind of learning . It's still dependent on what we've done in the past . Right , it simplifies things that make things easier to do . It is the ultimate , and like the reduction of socially necessary labor time , which , in a social society , would be a fucking great thing , yeah , it would Like . Oh , i get the focus on the creative stuff and all this tiddly little shit that I used to have to do . I can now have an AI do it Awesome , you know what for my podcast , and I can now transcribe it , so I don't have to pay a person to do that . Well , it sucks for a person who's not getting paid , but I don't know , i've transcribed shit . That's tedious , fucking work .
Speaker 2It is . I've done that before . You'd think it sounds easy , but it's absolutely not Mm-mm
. I think that just because of , like , the AI's potential to be a labor saving device to get rid of drudgery is really sort of helps underscore how backwards and regressive this era of capitalism actually is , and that the only thing that AI is being used for now is to automate the thing , the creative functions , like . We're using it to automate art and screenwriting and , you know , scriptwriting and things like that .
Speaker 1What's gonna be if you actually look at the data of what it's good at and I had a friend of mine who's a pro AI tell me this . But , like , if you train it to do the scriptwriting stuff , it's not actually that great at it at the creative end of it And it's quite . It actually loses other functionality . It becomes worse at things like math , whereas if you're doing coding oh my God , your life got easier with this AI . Right , our like transcribing . Transcribing software's a lot better . It writes pretty decent summaries of my show that I forget , because it listens to me and tells me what I said back at myself Mm-mm . You know it's useful , but it's not useful for what it's being sold as .
Speaker 2No , Actually I'm interested in its capacity to make NPCs in video games less dumb .
Speaker 1Right . I am also interested in like people using it for interesting art , as a creative tool , not for it generating its own . Yeah , yeah . So I don't wanna . I'm not yet fully a Neoludite , however , part of me is becoming .
Speaker 2I'm three quarters of the way there not completely but I think I'm mostly there too . Like I said , I like playing video games , obviously , So you know .
Speaker 1If I believed in techno-neo feudalism , i would say I'd be a straight up but lawyer and jihadist , like there's no , there's no way around that . All right , i'm gonna read this , because it's actually helpful , though , for understanding what's at stake here . Anaglesty to the feudal lords . They , being tech capital , are to appropriate huge trunks of global master plus value without ever being directly involved in a labor exploitation or the production process . The idea that they don't just point out workers is weird . Durant draws on Zuboff's work , uh-oh , to show the hidden domination exercised by the big other of big debt . Oh , fuck , the moment someone starts using Lacanian categories . Sorry , gizek , i just it smells of like bullshit , arguing as she does that the secret of Google's success lies in its ability to abstract , assemble and to profit from a variety of data sets . It joys an effect of monopoly due to network effects and impressive economies of scale . I don't see how this is new . It will benefit more from any new data set than any startup would , making competition much harder . Okay , i see how that's different , but like fucking , henry Ford did the same thing . Yeah , there is much wisdom as well as basic common sense in these conclusions , but the overall tenor of the argument varies too much towards userism , as Durant , like Zuboff , ignores a crucial role played by indexing in Google's overall operation .
Speaker 1It is harder to invoke concepts like intellectual monopolization here , for the third party pages to which Google links to produce its search results . Search results commodity remain the property of their publishers . Google does not own the results that it indexes . In theory , any other where capitalized firm could build a web crawling technology for indexing them , it just might be extremely expensive . But one shouldn't confuse such barriers for a rent-like situation . What is expensive for a blend startup might be relatively affordable for Japan Softbank with its $100 billion vision fund . Google's extensive data holdings are a different matter . They do merit a discussion of rent , but one cannot pretend that its business is all about its data holdings , as if Google was merely a rentier and not also a standard capitalist firm .
Speaker 1It's a pretty good point yeah , the idea that capitalist firms haven't been engaged in rentierism this entire time is sort of crazy . As if the idea that because there's any rentierism at all to profit , somehow capitalism isn't doing capitalist things anymore , that's nuts . It's like Marx talks about rents and fucking capital buying too . Yeah , like he doesn't see all the kinds of rents we do it now Absolutely , but he does know the tendency .
Speaker 3All right , so we get to It's making me think that , like all Marxists should , just they should start by reading capital , but like actually reading it , like all three volumes .
Speaker 1Yeah , you know what , though I don't know . Okay , i am torn between two stances on this . This is one of the few things I'm actually like somewhat sympathetic to Spencer Leonard from the Platypus Society . He was like , well , we've been doing capital reading groups for 40 years and what politically has it changed ? And I'm like , well , i do think you guys in Platypus need to know your Marxist economics a lot better . You make some claims that you wouldn't make if you didn't . But I am sort of sympathetic that , like I don't know , we've been fucking teaching people capital for a long time . They aren't getting any smarter And in fact they are using it to argue dumber things from like them what it says , like it's treated like a cannibal with the bit you know , it's like a polemic .
Speaker 3Well , yeah , i mean , david Harvey is definitely a person who has read capital . He's also responsible for a lot of ideas that have nothing to do with it , so I guess that's a good point .
Speaker 1Yeah , i mean , he got to talk to read capital .
Speaker 2That's true , like I mean reading Marx , just
like I hate the online admonitions to actually just go ahead and read something . You know . Read a book , right Read theory . It's really not going to help . It's really not going to help people that are determined to misunderstand it or use it in an intellectually dishonest way , like all of the fucking Patsock people , do you know , or most , or a lot of MLs that are coming into contact .
Speaker 1Fuck the social Democrats , or even Trotskyists .
Speaker 2Sure , sure , yeah right , pick whoever you want , that's true , but you know You're picking the annoying ones , but still Yeah picking the most annoying , the most topically annoying ones right now , right , but yeah , there is a certain amount of truth to the idea that , like we as a left don't actually know the theory that we get all our theory from fucking memes or from podcasts , even right , yeah , like , don't listen to us . Yeah , actually do listen to us , just kidding .
Speaker 1But actually read the fucking book we're talking about or whatever like contribute to the discussion .
Speaker 3I mean at least , if you're going to write an article like this or you're going to write a book like the way that , whatever all the two books you can see , if you're going to engage in this debate , then yeah , then you do need to read the theory .
Speaker 2But at the same time , though , like it's sort of like the Catholic argument , for like the wisdom of tradition and epistolic succession , or whatever , it's like an organization that helps like synthesize everyone's ideas into an action program and helps like to interpret these texts that are , like you know , archaic at this point , into useful . You know , into something . Useful , i think , is the ultimate goal , and we don't have that Right now . We're all a bunch of like . We're all . We're all a bunch of protestant Gnostics , right , receiving our individual revelation through individual communication .
Speaker 1So I'm going to say , though , something that's coming on like everybody , uncomfortable . If that's true , then the idea that you can just resurrect a party from will is also nonsensical .
Speaker 2Oh , I agree . Yeah , I absolutely agree . The resurrecting the party , erecting the party in the first instance , came organically through the construction of the labor movement right , which itself ?
Speaker 1yes , it is . I think McNair is right that it's a merger of , like two separate movements . Yeah , but it does have a history and , yes , it emerges at a low point , but it's a low point after a hundred years of development . And we exist at a different end of things , where people alternate wildly between , like weird localism and then like let's just build the party tomorrow or let's take over this left organization and make it the party tomorrow , oh yeah , like without doing all the other stuff .
Speaker 2Swinging back and forth between Bonapartism and individualist anarchism .
Speaker 1Yeah , kinda , yeah , exactly , and what's funny about that is one's political determinism and one's economic determinism , ultimately , but they both , ironically , end up being volunteerism for me but not for thee .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1And that's stupid . I've become less enamored with Adorno these days , but I still have my favorite Adorno quote is a right life , a wrong life cannot be lived rightly . And I'm just like , yeah , like you're not going to , like you can't fix this piecemeal Right , which I think frustrates a lot of people , because they want something that's clearly actionable And , again , that makes something like Technonio feudalism really really attractive , because if it's Technonio feudalism , all you have to do is overthrow the fucking lords .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1And nah , like I don't think that's the case , my bro . All right , get to forces of predation . We're still on Durant and this is gonna be our last section of the day . I think what I find is interesting here is like we are seeing the good argument for this taken apart , but I like the fact that we actually now finally have like well , there is a non-stupid form of this argument .
Speaker 2It's good to engage with things that you disagree with honestly , and the best way to do that is to go after the things that make the most sense not the dumbest things , but things that are easiest to tweet .
Speaker 3We'll just say the things that are easiest to make a meme from , but it's the same thing .
Speaker 1Durant's reason also draws upon . I'm reading from Morazov now Durant's reason also draws upon the important work on the information , rent and the global economy by the economists Duncan Foley . In line with Marx's perspective , foley argues that surplus value is not appropriated only at the sites where it is generated . These are the missing pages of Marx's theory that we have still to reach the Italian workerist . To reach the Italian workerist , ouch .
Speaker 3Burn .
Speaker 1Treating the vast intangible resources creeped through intellectual property rights are the way Marx and some of the classical political economists trended land renties . We see , the giant information technology platforms are not capitalist , but renties in disguise . It is not even necessary to be a capitalist in order to compete for a share of the pool of surplus value for the rights .
Speaker 1I mean , this is Foley's quote I think it's important Enforceable profit rights that permit the owner of productive forces often called land in the terminology of classical political your co-economy Man . You're having to use a met . This is me talking . Now you're having to use a metaphor to justify this . You got a problem . To exclude capitalists from access to those resources creates rents . These rents are part of the pool of surplus value generated in capitalist production , though they have no direct relation to the exploitation of productive labor in themselves .
Speaker 1They have indirect relation , though . Anyway , the indirect relation is important because that explains why not like , not hugely productive economies can't do this , yeah , yeah , and that's like . This is why I think Verifakis' error is actually similar to his embraced . His weird ass form of like post-Kansey and MT embracing in the early 20s is because it does pretend that you could do this without dealing with the productive capacity at the base of society . I'm not a stageist , clearly , but you can't just be like oh , i'm Greece , i can internally stimulate my economy with my own national markets in a closed system to be as productive and developed as the United States , even just in terms of physical fucking land , yeah , yeah ,
anyway , the owner of land resources such as Fertile Fields , was Waterfalls Miner on Hydrocarbon Reserves and the like , need not lift a finger or hire anyone else to lift a finger productively in order to share in the surplus value generated by the productive wage labor . Is that true , though ?
Speaker 3I mean , if they want to use these resources at all , then yes , i mean no the software .
Speaker 1Yeah , all right . Here the analogies are quite clear Land equals data technology , firms equal non-capitalists . their revenues equals rents . Foley makes much of the waterfall example , arguing that once a particular person or entity has established property control over waterfall , for example , a rent constituting a share of the global pool of surplus value springs into existence . What ? But he continues , there are even better things than owning a waterfall . Water is scarce , after all , and challenges , on the other hand , could be infinite . He who owns because of copyright to a popular song can draw almost infinite rents from it . That almost doesn't work .
Speaker 3The difference . there is dead labor Right . Natural resources don't work the same way as songs .
Speaker 1And you have to valorize them through fucking labor . No , labor is not the source of wealth . The world is , but the valorization of that wealth requires labor Right . Which I know is a subtle point . It's kind of an important one . Mark fixed the gale out of it .
Speaker 3That's the reason why that was as far back as the Gupta program . He wrote that like this misunderstanding is so fundamental that I have to stick to it . I have to make this a sticking point , yeah .
Speaker 2Yeah , i mean , i was just going to say that , like this ignores the point that all of the work that goes into making a song available for people to collect rents off of it . Right , yeah .
Speaker 1The physical infrastructure of Google and the Internet , the act of artists , even if it's made by AI . Artists did the shit to the AI is machine learning from eventually . So that's like , yeah , yeah , i mean , ai is the ultimate weaponization of dead labor , but you have to pretend that that labor isn't there , whereas the waterfall is a holder of a source of wealth . Yeah , but the reason why it has power is because you can charge rent off of using the source of wealth .
Speaker 2Right . Even the waterfall analogy is kind of silly because the waterfall itself doesn't have any value . Like the shirt with , the water has value .
Speaker 1But like what ?
Speaker 2Yeah , you put a mill there and then all of a sudden the waterfall becomes incredibly valuable . But what is creation of a mill take ?
Speaker 3Yeah , every and at every point . labor is the reason why anything becomes valuable .
Speaker 1Right , right . And the wealth is the water . The value is our ability to valorize that .
Speaker 2Yes , Yeah , and it's like this argument only works if , once Glenn Miller wrote In the Mood , it was floating around in the ether and people could just tap into it with their minds And then they had to pay for it . You know , it's just . This is really silly , this is childish .
Speaker 1Yeah . Now the great outstanding question I'm reading from Morales again is whether Google and its peers are like a non-capitalist owner of a waterfall who need not lift a finger in order to share in the surplus value generated somewhere else . I mean , sure they don't need to lift a finger , but someone has to lift a fucking finger .
Speaker 2Yes , fingers are being lifted all over the goddamn place .
Speaker 1Foley says they are , but if so , if tech giants are really just lazy rentiers who are ripping everyone off by exploiting their intellectual property rights and network effects , why do they invest so much money in what can only be described as a production of some kind ? What kind of rentiers do that ? R&D spending in 2017 , 2018 , 2019 , and 2020 was 16.6 billion , 21.4 billion , 26 billion and 27.5 billion respectively . Does that not count as lifting a finger ? If not , what would ? That's a good question . This is like . this is damn . Amazon , too , spent 42.7 billion in 2020 alone in research and development , while employing over a million people across the globe . In the US , the company employs more people than the entire residential construction industry combined .
Speaker 2Wow , i was not aware of that , but I guess it makes sense .
Speaker 1That's one out of every 153 employees in America work for Amazon . If these are lazy waterfall owning rentiers , they are particularly masochistic ones . Why not just rest on their loyal's fire everyone and stop spending ? And who , looking at these numbers , could really believe , together with the post-workerists , that capital is now external to production ? What , then , are they spending all this R&D money on ? I'm more telling still a close analysis of the balance sheets of Google , amazon and Facebook show that they have fewer intangible assets than other big corporations . In fact , today they own relatively fewer intangibles than they did 10 to 15 years ago . It is easy to see why All this data requires extensive physical networks and vast data centers . This is the Duane Monroe point You actually have to build stuff for this tech stuff to work , you dumb motherfuckers .
Speaker 2You have to constantly monitor and maintenance these data centers .
Speaker 1Yeah , and keep them up . Physically . It's a physical thing . Just because you don't experience that physical thing at the point of consumer is a consumer because of a different physical thing gives you access to it does not mean that there is not vast data networks and firm serves it . We require vast resources and vast people to do and , in the case of Amazon , also a vast distribution physical logistics network to get shit to people . What the fuck do you want ?
Speaker 3Yeah , it's kind of like when you buy a shirt , oh there's just a shirt as if shirts just happen .
Speaker 2The basic Marxist concept of the alienation of labor , right Yeah , or another alienation of the fetishization commodity , fetishization .
Speaker 1This is literally pretending , because we experience this at the commodity fetish level and through the mystification of the internet , which seems not to have a big physical infrastructure behind it because we don't access it through that .
Speaker 2Oh , it's in the cloud Right . Not dog , that's just someone else's computer Because of that I mean .
Speaker 1It's crazy . It's like the Marxist and leftists have forgotten the number one thing that we fucking believe , other than exploitation , is that capital relations hide where the work is fucking happening .
Speaker 2So , yep , like very , very , very , very basic Marxist concept . I'm not a super , I'm not like a super into Marxology , i'm not the best , most sophisticated Marxist theorist , but look , i know that .
Speaker 1Yeah , i'm gonna say I am super into Marxology and I may be not the best Marxist theorist and I won't even go so far to say and we can talk about this one day I think Marx is wrong about some stuff , oh sure Yeah . But I think like this is like basic shit . And then you're like well , all the fucking socialists today want to ignore this basic point . It's like it's weirdly is that they believe that capital is propaganda more than the fucking capitalist do .
Speaker 3Yeah , it's almost as though they have been like recuperated in some way .
Speaker 1All right , be careful with that , because you know my favorite reactionary is all top . Point that out about Marxist . It's like Marxist love capitalism more than we do . Shut up I .
Speaker 2Like Oswald Spengler right there Yeah .
Speaker 1Oswald Spengler , don Concho , they all say that I'm like and I hate , like they're reactionaries , but they're not entirely wrong .
Speaker 2Fucking wrong , not not completely , not completely wrong , wrong on most things .
Speaker 1I Actually I think that's one of the McIntyre Alessner McIntyre is when he breaks with Marxism attacks , so I think he's kind of right about like yeah it's like We don't take of our own critique of liberalism and capitalism deeply enough .
Speaker 2No , not at all . All right point where , like most self-proclaimed Marxists that you meet on any on a regular basis are Really not Marxists at all . They're just liberal or liberals .
Speaker 1They're liberals are to develop mentalists are there sometimes . I'm like sometimes they're just statist or not even liberals , like it's just yeah right , um sure , sure , there's all kinds of shitty things they can be . They're usually liberals because usually dominant form in our society .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah , it makes sense , but the fact that it's sort of Like whether or not you're a real Marxist , you're given a bunch of liberal shibboleths to determine whether or not you are accepted by most Marxists right And if you bring , and what's interesting about this is if you try to To break away from that .
Speaker 1Most people don't break a rate for that by insisting on Marxist categories . They break away from that from just inverting the liberal shibboleths and picking up conservative ones . Yeah , exactly .
Speaker 2Yeah , they , yeah , which is funny because conservatives are just liberals .
Speaker 1They're asshole liberals . Yeah , they're , they're , they're , they're crotchy liberals , except for the blood and soil ones , i mean , they're different .
Speaker 2but yeah , yeah , they're different . Those are not liberals .
Speaker 1Luckily , i think most of the people who think they are that also aren't , but Oh for sure , like most people , most people even self identified like fascists .
Speaker 2And You know , alt-rightists are just fucking like libertarians that think that the government should smash the left right ?
Speaker 1Yeah , then it should do nothing .
Speaker 2Yeah , after it smashes the left , then it should just chill .
Speaker 1Yeah , it's like we need to use it to get rid of the left , and because they annoy us . Yeah .
Speaker 2It's like now you're in principle but yeah and mandate tribe , wives , and then after that it can dissolve itself right , all right .
Speaker 1So back to this . Durant Surely must be aware
of these numbers . His potential escape from this analytical predict predicament , as a concept of predation borrowed from Belvin's class analysis From the belt epoch , was a amethyst your the leisure class 1899 . And to argue that these massive investment funds of the forces of predation Rather than the forces of production , fucking . I hate it when someone thinks that they've come up with a goddamn good , useful analytic just by changing a fucking word .
Speaker 2Yeah , man , this is , and its consequences , disaster for the human race .
Speaker 1All right . There are indeed many interesting ways to deploy Belvin's analytical framework his distinction between Efficiency oriented industry and potentially oriented business , for example , to argue what really drives capitalism is not profit seeking , but rather the ability to engage in sabotage Okay , belvin , i actually forgot that to ensure that today's robber barons receive only the profits they expect , not higher profits than their competitors . In the past 20 years , new approach to political economy , known as capitalist power Oh shit , yeah , i have to deal with this . I actually entertain this sometimes , but I don't think it's , it's quite right Has emerged just to do that , introducing the concept of differential accumulation to describe such dynamics . Its adherence Mostly concentrated at York University in Canada . Have credit , fucking Canadians Even a real fucking country , dude what the fuck .
Speaker 1Have criticized both Marxist and neoclassical economists , using some solid and convincing arguments for overlooking the sabotage dynamics and annoying the constitutive role of power and capitalism . I think that's fair . Honestly , i think we , like Marxist , don't deal with the political nature of capitalism and the inter capitalist competition enough . It's not because we don't have the tools to do it , though . Right Yeah , this approach has been informed . Some interesting recent research on the technology industry , including empirically rich work on technoscientific rents and assetation , including insights from the science and technology studies . The difficult fitting Marx and Belvin into a single analytical framework here , and something that Durant also attempts in a recent essay , is that Marx solved predation and sabotage as part and parcel of feudalism , not capitalism . For Belvin , these are our instincts , present in the capitalist , even those we can throw over . Intangible assets made better position to act upon . Marx , however , ultimately saw capitalist as productive . If one can speak of sabotage , it would only be possible at the systemic level of capitalism a whole and not at the level of the individual capitalist .
Speaker 3I'm not sure about that .
Speaker 1I think this is a common reading of Marx that I would have to dig in to say that I think that Marx actually thought that Durant clearly wants to stay with Marx rather than Belvin .
Speaker 1However , this requires spelling out exactly what these forces of predation are and how they relate to accumulation and all the thorny debates on predation accumulation If the erratical challenge that Durant , having engaged with the accumulation by this possession in his fictitious capital , knows all too well .
Speaker 1Otherwise , it's not clear why Marx's theory would need this highly ambiguous care of his sub predation when its own categories of profit and capitalist production , as well as rents and retirees , suffice to explain Google's success .
Speaker 1Marx himself was unequivocal about the fact that fully automated capitalist firms not only appropriate surplus value derived elsewhere on this both fully and agree but also do so as profits and not rent . These accumulated firms are capitalist as the firms that exploit rage labor directly , as Marx writes in volume three Okay , second , people who don't read volume three Capitalists to employees no variable capital at all in his peer production , hence not a single worker In fact an exaggerated assumption would have just as much interest in the exploitation of the working class by capital and would be just as much derived his profit from the airplane surplus labor as what a capitalist who employed only variable capital again , an exaggerated assumption and therefore laid out his entire enterprise on wages . Techno , neo , feudal , these systems , not from the advance of contemporary Marxist theory , but from its apparent inability to make sense of the digital economy , what exactly is produced in it and how if one accepts .
Speaker 1Google is a business of producing search result commodities , a process that does require massive capital investment . There is no great difficulty in treating it as a regular capitalist firm engaged in normal capitalist production . This is not to say that the digital giants do not engage in all sorts of other tactics to consolidate their power , leverage their patent portfolios , lock up their users and instruct all possible competition , but also by buying challenger startups in addition to their fortune spent on winning the support of lawmakers and Capitol .
Speaker 2Hill .
Speaker 1Capitalist competition is a nasty business and it may be even nastier when digital products are involved . But this is no reason to fall into the analytical swamps of cognitive capitalism , userism or techno feudalism . Right Yeah , both development marks may be needed , maybe needed if we want to understand the tactics of individual firms in the system consequences of their actions . In this sense , there's much that Marxist can learn from capital as power school , which I actually agree with . I think we can learn from it . I don't think it's all true , but I think we can learn from it . But for either approach to make great strides forward , one needs to be at least clear about the business models of capitalist firms . A question Here's my , here's my one critique of morose off . I think he's right about what Marx says in in Capital 21 through three , but he is not looking at the political writings where Marx is clear that capitalism is not always productive and the capitalist society is not always progressive .
Speaker 3Yeah , right , yeah .
Speaker 1Like in capital , he's arguing a point assuming everything in Smith and Ricardo is true , like to show that their conclusions are wrong , right , like , like , for example , he doesn't assume that the state is that involving the formation of capitalist society , even though he describes the state being involved in formation of capital society in the book . I don't think that is like because he's a moron like some people do . I think it's because he's he's trying to argue that even if we accept the ideal type of the of the Smith Ricardo world and we take it as a massive innovation and an understanding the way political economy works , that it would still not lead to the results that they think if we follow their arguments out and follow their categories out .
Speaker 3Yeah , that's why capital is called a critique of political economy . Right , it's not like a replacement for any other idea that anyway has ever had is just a critique of political economy .
Speaker 1So the idea that capitalists are always productive . I think that isn't , if you read capital like as your , as your model here . But I don't think anyone who like takes to Brumair seriously can say that Mark's always thought that capitalists were productive and not sabotaging each other . Anyway , both felt blah , blah , blah , blah blah . But for either approach to make great strides forward , one needs to be at least clear about the business models of the firms in question .
Speaker 1Fixating on aspects of them simply because one detects an excess of intellectual property rights or signs of financialization or some other disturbing process is not going to provide a comprehensive view of those models . And this is where I want to stop for the day . But let's close off on this before we get to the next part on the state . I think I'm going to not do that today because it's open in that camera . I'm going to take a couple hours . It seems pretty clear to me that Technonia , feudalism , has both a superficial understanding of the technological economy , a superficial understanding of rentierism , and capitalism In a superficial understanding of whatever the fuck feudalism was , which is actually more difficult to spell out as we , as we who might defend it as a category against , like my friend Colin Drum , would still say like , yeah , but feudalism is a lot of stuff , even in the Marxist view . Right , right , we know what's going on there .
Speaker 2Yeah , i mean honestly like Wickham is probably the best on feudalism , who explains it in the way that makes the most sense , without having to like , obfuscate or ignore categories . So I think Wickham is great on feudalism . Of course , his explanation isn't simple , though , but it's as simple as it gets and still making any sense , right .
Speaker 3And , just like feudalism , capitalism is a general term for a system that looks a little bit different from time to time and from place to place .
Speaker 2It's always in motion , Like the thing that you learn from Wickham about feudalism is feudalism is a process . Yeah , you know .
Speaker 1I like that . There's all these like pure Marxist who want to reject talk of neo-capital , neo-liberalism And I admit that term is abuse to the point of absurdity . But neoliberalism is a puritization of capital , as is fortism , as is state capital period of like the early 1920s century , as is like the entrepreneurial capitalist heyday imprint of the cumulation capitalist heyday of the 18th century , etc . I think those are meaningful distinctions in capital .
Speaker 3And they explain .
Speaker 1You know , what I think they mostly explain is how you organize the quote . What did Henrik Grossman call them ? the contradictory tendencies or the counter tendencies towards profit rates . So profitability is always a problem because in a purely market society it makes total sense that it's going to be harder and harder to make money off commodities because the market competition is going to drive the price down . But also you only need to buy shit so many times too , right , if we all buy a thing and it really fucking works , we're not going to buy it again . So two things cutting , like that's why there's a profit fucking problem . Like so how do you organize against that ? There's all kinds of ways financialization , planned obsolescence , rents , etc .
Speaker 1How the state and capitalist deal with that are puritizations of capital . Yeah , they can be quite different from each other , but what they share is there's commodities involved , relations are primary , legal and economic , and most of them happen within some kind of approximation of a nation state as a primary organizing force which , because of consistency and language and all that stuff from mass cultural production which is enabled by capitalism itself etc . And unlike , say , prior civilizations , it does not have to like imperialism , doesn't actually have to work in terms of direct colonialism , to constantly expand , and that's different . Like a feudal state , if it's got to expand , has to literally take coal of land Right And subordinate , or at least get the lords kind of on their side , etc . You know , otherwise even holding land won't , you won't keep it .
Speaker 1Okay , we have gone
through this . I think everyone knows our stance on this . I also think that , like , the world has clarified this a little bit since this was written . But damn , is this a really good . You know , i'm not even sure Marazoff is a Marxist , but it's a really good way for to get Marxist to like think about important shit . Again . We're going to incorporate non Marxist thinking , such as capitalist power or velvet , into our thinking . We need to be consistent about it and consistent about where it fits and where it doesn't .
Speaker 2Right , yeah , i think , if for no other reason , this article does a really good job of engaging with the things that it's critiquing , with critiquing and explaining them before ripping them to shreds in the last couple of paragraphs .
Speaker 3And it is nice how he rips it in shreds too .
Speaker 1Yes , Yeah , but it is actually nice to finally get some of the better forms of this argument laid out to me . Like Giannis Verifakis talks about this , i'm like shut up , giannis , no one cares about you . You fucked up Greece , go away .
Speaker 2Yeah , like yeah like I had never heard some of these arguments before and it's super easy to make fun of the dumb ones . But you know , engaging with the ones that actually makes sense is important And I'd never done that before .
Speaker 1Yeah , I noticed that he's not , for example , dealing with a lot of light wings like Technonia of Pudo-wokism .
Speaker 3Right .
Speaker 1Because that's just that's the I . you know I sometimes make fun of Ben Burgess for this , because I'm like Burgess , you don't . you don't always pick the best people to fight with Like , i don't know who actually benefits from a debate with Temple , But this picks the best people to fight with .
Speaker 2Right , all right . I mean like fighting with . The purpose of a debate or of an argument is to convince people that are watching you that your side is correct . When you are as polarized as Tim Pool and Ben Burgess , no one's going to watch it , except for the people that already agree with Ben Burgess and the people that already agree with Tim Pool , and they're both going to think that their guy won .
Speaker 1Right , yeah , there's no point . Yeah , yeah , i always tell people I want to agree to debate unless we share 80% of the worldview , because that means , yeah , exactly , we had one person's audience over another Like all right , and we're in here . Thank you for supporting FarmBlog . If you would like more , you can find our stream on YouTube under my name , c Derek Barn . You can also find us on Patreon , where you can subscribe for early audio access , additional shows , unexpredited audios , q&as with me on video and other perks such as access to our archives , etc . 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 . Catch her choice . Great evening .