Hello and welcome to Varmblog. Today I'm read Ribbologi and we're going to talk about your tenure at the Anarchosyndicalist Review and what you think are the main misunderstandings that Marxists have about anarchists and anarchists have about Marxists. One of the things that I was kind of taking them back by reading a lot of this material is that I find that when I read some of the anarchist critiques of Marxism and I'm trying to be charitable here that they are actually often there are some that are insightful. Wayne Price is particularly insightful, but he's almost a Marxist anyway.
Speaker 1:I find some of Ron Tabor to be sometimes insightful into particular problems in Marx, but his answers to it are his extensions of it Go into borderline anti-communism. But in general, you sent me a couple of articles and I was looking through these old issues, the Anarchosyndicalist Review, from when you were there. I guess in the middle-out teams seemingly that there's a bunch of mutual misunderstanding. But I also find it interesting too that if you were to ask me how do I tell an Anarchosyndicalist from, say, a council communist or even certain kinds of Maoist, the answer is going to be kind of thin as to the difference. There are differences, but to anyone who's not in the radical milieu. They're going to seem super minor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I would say yeah, you're right, the differences are not that great. I guess the main difference would be partyism, which is basically support for the formation of a political party joining it, that type of thing.
Speaker 1:Just as I said, that's not true for all Marxists like council, communists or anti-party and even anti-fucking union Right, right.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I mean in general. I would say the main misunderstanding that Marxists have is that anarchism is a unified ideology whereas there is quite a bit of diversity. Yeah, and in general the anarchist critiques of Marx quote unquote Marxism are strawmans Like. For example, one issue, as we discussed earlier, was that they don't distinguish between the Serafian formulations of Marx and non-Serafian formulations. The other critique that I've seen frequently is that the transformation problem issue, so all of the theoretical critiques, are kind of weak sauce.
Speaker 1:Well, the transformation problem issue seems to be straight out of early Austrian school stuff and I mean I've talked to you. I feel like there's about four different ways to answer that problem that are logically consistent. I mean, I do think there are valid critiques of Marx In fact I even have some but that one always struck me as dumb.
Speaker 2:It's just like yeah and like, if you, there's quite a bit of literature on this already. So it's weird that like people sort of latch onto that. The other thing I've seen frequently excuse me, when it comes to something like analytical Marxism, they have a unique sort of conceptualization of historical materialism which is different than sort of like a Hegelian understanding. So they don't distinguish between the analytical Marxist formulation of historical materialism as opposed to the Hegelian understanding of it. So in general, I would say it's a lot of strawman attacks.
Speaker 2:And yeah, and I mean this is kind of a recent development, but the recent anarchists have started to sort of position themselves as anti-Marx, which is which wasn't the case, like for early anarchists. Like, if you read sort of the letters between various people who identified themselves as anarchists and Marx, they're like complimenting Marx, they're like saying, wow, this is great, capital is great. Now, all of a sudden, you have like these anti-Marxist anarchists who are like you know, on the one hand they're not, they don't have a good understanding of Marx's value theory, but on the other hand they're sort of like doing a lot of brand, building a lot of sectarian language, like one person was saying like you know why? Why should we, as anarchists, read Marx? And you know he would say things like that. I mean we should read Marx because he has a good critique of capitalism.
Speaker 1:Right and what this is this is my like, my normative critique is is always like there are problems with Marx's. There are problems with the whole category of economics, but Marxist economics is at least at some level aimed at something beyond what we would consider the nation state right, whereas like the amount of anarchists that pick up stuff like strange forms of Keynesianism or something which you can't actually not have a nation state in due, is a little bit shocking to me because it does betray that like this is purely a moral response, and I don't mean that in that the moral critique of Marxism may be legitimate. That's not my that's, that's not what I'm aiming at. But like you're positing alternative economic systems that are state dependent and still calling yourself an anarchist and this has come up multiple times, both with MT and post-Keynesianism in general, with anarchists, and yet they will use they, and all this is in quotation marks, all right, because there is no day when we talk about anarchists. Anarchists are more diverse than Marxists. Marxists are pretty damn diverse in our ideology. That's another thing. I get kind of frustrated with anarchists. I'm like I'm like you know yeah, the Stalin was a Marxist Like I'm not one of those people who pulls the no true Scotsman on that, but so is Paul Maddock, I don't really know. Like, like what you think you have by just identifying people who pull from a very broad tradition that really splintered after the, really splintered after the mid and the middle of the Secondary National right Like, and those critiques often seem some of them, some of them, actually pick up a straight up like Cold War, anti-communist talking points. Yeah, some of them are fair enough. I mean, you and I have gone back and forth privately, know a whole lot about these different critiques.
Speaker 1:Let's get into the economic critique though. You mentioned. You mentioned not distinguishing between Shafryan and non-Shafryan Shrafyan. Yeah, yeah, for those of you who know, shafryan was an economist, a friend of Wittgenstein, who kind of came up with what some Marxists consider a physiocratic hybrid of Marx for calculating all sorts of stuff that was very popular in the 1950s and incorporated into people like Paul Sweezy and a lot of the 50s, 60s monopoly capital stuff and a lot of people who also, like abandoned labor theory of value, used them. But what is in your mind? What is Shafryan Marxism? Because Shafra is, I will say, like people not distinguishing. That is often also interestingly, I don't think a lot of Marxists could tell you the difference, if they're not Marxist humanists with the hyphen.
Speaker 2:Right, so Shrafa was kind of like a British Italian economist and I actually didn't know he was friends with Wittgenstein, so that's interesting that you said that and yeah, and he developed something called the physical quantities framework and it's sometimes called the surplus interpretation. And yeah, the intellectual sort of background of that is kind of like a neo-physiocratic, neo-physiocratic system and yeah, the framework was quite popular 50s, 60s, even 70s, and it developed a new sort of school of thought within economics Neo-Ricardian economics is sometimes called, shafian economics is sometimes called. But they themselves like to refer to themselves as classical economists and yeah, like played a huge role. If you read some of the older history of economic thought books by Daub or Meek, they are heavily influenced by Shrafa. Yeah, when you get down to the technical details you're talking about apples and oranges really, like their concepts of value, price, profit are not comparable at all to Marx's concepts and yeah, there's a whole list of things that I can list that differentiates them.
Speaker 2:But basically they measure value using physical quantities. So value is two tons of irons measured using two tons of irons, or five grams of corn, something like that, three bushels of wheat. But Marx, he generally expresses value and Marx and the classical economists. They express value using sums of money. So capital it's actually British pound sterling, I think. So all of his value and expressions are in sums of money. So it's actually not like the. It's quite. It's different sort of accounting, yeah.
Speaker 1:We need to go into that a little bit, but you're absolutely correct. Like Marx, one of the biggest things that got me to understand the problem when people were trying to help get me to see the transformation problem was realizing that if I used a single system analysis. There's a bunch of different single systems analysis. People might hear of SSI TSSI that's associated with Andrew Klyman but and econophysics is a kind of single systems analysis too. Yeah, that you could figure this out Like there is no transformation problem If you're assuming value is somehow either an aggregate that's in TSSI or a statistical value that you get by running statistical analysis.
Speaker 1:That's econophysics and you don't have to try to do weird stuff like transfer it back into like physical quantities of individual goods and to pretend that like for like and this causes all kinds of problems. I mean I don't know how you figure out the value between goods when you're going back and forth from the goods like that in this physiological way. It seems like an unnecessary step and it really confuses the math, whereas if you understand accounting math and assume you have a single system, most of what Mark says makes sense. I'm trying to remember the book that really made this clear. It was in the same series as Andrew Cleiman's Defending Mark's Capital, but it's not that. It is one that goes through and just explains the accounting math in detail. I'm trying to remember the book Like reclaiming.
Speaker 2:Mark's Capital by climbing.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, no. It's in the same series as that book, though it's not reclaiming. Reclaiming gives you a hint to use accounting math, but there's actually a book on understanding capital in the same series as that that takes that and that insight about accounting and goes through explaining capital and how to use it pretty consistently. I also go ahead, yeah.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say with the transformation problem. It's important to remember that this issue has been discussed in various ways over the years and sort of the Swarovian understanding of the quote unquote transformation problem is not the same as sort of like other people's understand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and yeah, and so like it's important, like there is no like one sort of transformation problem issue, the issue, this issue and I haven't like written a paper about this or anything. But this issue goes back to Burkowitz, as you know, and yeah, like his he's you could, it's a, it's a. That sort of formulation is different from sort of the modern Like if you read the source, contemporary Swarovian economics economists, how did how they talk about the transformation problem, they, the way they talk about it is not the same as how Burkowitz talks about it. And with the econophysics stuff like it's they are using, like I know one person in right I think he uses the and extension like a variant of the Swarovian framework and problem with that is he's accepting the premise that transformation problem is an issue with Marx and then he proceeds to provide a solution to it and it's. It's weird and like this.
Speaker 2:I think Samuelson is also like the main sort of person. Paul Samuelson is the main person who sort of popularized the idea of the transformation problem. And then the Swarovian economists sort of like embrace state and then they sort of like they're like develop this over the years. And then the complex issue. If you don't know, like if you aren't familiar with, like some of the specialty literature on it, it's easy to get confused about what's going on.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. I mean different economists has had different answer to that far. June and Mac over are not the same as in right?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, far June and Mac over try to provide kind of like a probabilistic solution to it, and that's a whole sort of approach. Different approach to it we're talking about like random variables, probability, those sort of things. That's a whole different formulation. So that's a great example of how people have talked about this issue in various ways. Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and we're not even getting into value form theorists because they don't. They kind of don't think these calculations are important. I mean one of the things about Perero I think that's how you say his first name, shraffra is he's also super influential on Keynesian economics and post Keynesian economics. Steve Keen pulls from him. I remember I think my first encounter with Shraffra was many, many years ago and the repopulization with book that's now over 20 years old, the bunking economics. Steve Keen yes, steve Keen, and he uses a lot of Shraffra. I mean Keen Keen's Keen has a critique of Marx that there's also similarly problematic, I'll say the least. I mean the main one is like he said well, you guys say that machines don't produce value, but machines definitely produce value. See how much more stuff we can make. And I'm like dude, no one's saying machines don't reduce labor time or socially necessary labor time, which allows you to extract more value, but what you're extracting value from?
Speaker 2:is work. And like here again, this is a great example like when they talk about, like the whole issue of mechanization and labor saving, technological change. Like they are not talking about the same concept of value as Marx.
Speaker 1:Like they mean value as just individual item price to which is yes yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:And yeah, steve Keen, like he, he, he talks about the transformation problem in his book and then he's also like using the Shraffian framework to represent Marx. And like, I have read Steve Keen a fair bit and I think he in one of his papers he says, like use value, the classical economist rejected use value, which is wrong. I mean, yeah, that's just flat out wrong. Yeah, like and like. There's a lot of like weird stuff he says and I don't know, like he he's been confronted, like I know a couple of people who confronted him, but I confronted him on air In my second or third issue of my old show, way, way back, and if you're a subscriber it's still available.
Speaker 1:But I think this episode is actually available for free on MixCloud because I put it there Okay, Probably eight years ago, so if it's still there. There's a discussion with me and Steve Keen where I kind of asked him to go through his critique of Marx and he gets to that and I'm just like that's not how that works.
Speaker 2:No, like, yeah, go ahead. And no, I like, I don't know, like I and he just kind of like. He just wants to do his own sort of like, and even this sort of presentation of Keynes is also built on. I mean he does it. Basically, what it boils down to is that he's not very like, he's more interested in interpretations of these people than sort of like. You know the real people, the real people's actual views, you know what I mean. And yeah, and like yeah. I mean there's kind of a united front of anti-Marx economists where you have people like Steve Keen and then they collaborate with sort of other people. They're basically all ignoring the TSA size. What it boils down to.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, me, I've talked to you about this, I am. I have a history with Andrew Klineman personally which makes me far from objective. I do find his criterion in that book, though, particularly convincing on some things. What I what bothers me about it is some of his epistemological assumptions I think are faulty, like no it is. You cannot deduce that just because this one method clarifies a problem in a text does not mean it's the only right way to interpret the text if other texts also clarify the problem. What I think he's right on, though, is like, if there's ways to clarify the problem, and when the transformation problem I think there are actually multiple ways to clarify that problem Then then people who insist on that problem are not doing a charitable reading, and I think that's all you can and can say.
Speaker 1:I do think, however, with Marxism there is a further complication and this is not from Shafra is that you have to look at what the Soviet and the early Soviet and Mao and Maoist economists in China thought you had to do too, because those are interpreted schools that existed and policy was made by, and they were not Shafrend. So it's and I actually have brought that up in discussions about the SSI and TSI. And for those of you who don't know, ssi means single system interpretation. There are other SSIs who are, like, mortally opposed to climate. For example, richard Wolfe is an SSI. I said some ecoma physics, some ecoma physicists seem to be SSI. Tsi is Temporal singles.
Speaker 1:Yeah, temporal single system, and I did find it explanatory because when you account for time, a lot of stuff that's going on in Marx it seems weird makes sense. All that said, I actually think like that's just dealing with the logical consistencies of his interpretive. I mean, if his a critique of Adam Smith and Ricardo and capital, he doesn't answer all these questions. The Shafrend debates are huge ones. There are other debates. I mean we have the growth degrowth debates. There's all kinds of debates around Marx. I find when I deal with Critiques of Marx, the smarter ones tend to be from modern monetary theorists. They're not based on this at all. They're based on critiquing Marx for assuming too much from the neoclassical and classical not neoclassical classical economics, particularly Ricardo, and on the nature of money and not developing out theories of money beyond commodity money and some credit money in capital volume to. Interestingly enough, when I used to ask, when Andrew and climate and I still talked, which was a long time ago he, when I would ask him about this, he would tell me go talk to other people.
Speaker 1:But he also thought that people like Marxist gold bar bugs which there are some are weird.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I mean with the money stuff I can't comment too much, but I'll say that this much the classical economists subscribe to what is known as quantity theory of money and Marx rejected that. And yeah, that's about like all I know about money. And then with with the MMT, I think it's important to distinguish between two things. Quantity theory of money was reformulated over the years, so in I think it was what's his name, milton Friedman, that reformulated quantity theory of money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, monetarists have a, have a modified version of quantity, of quantity theory.
Speaker 2:And so what I've noticed over the years is that MMT people maybe like I'm not. I haven't, money is not my area, but what I've noticed in general is that they don't distinguish between Ricardo's quantity theory of money versus the neoclassical one. So it's important to distinguish between those three those things. Yeah, that's all I'll say.
Speaker 1:So this is. You know, I think this is all kind of important. We're getting into the weeds here, but the weeds here is actually kind of I think we have to, and for those of you who don't know these debates, you should look them up. I'm not going to settle them for you today, but when, when a lot of anarchist critiques, say, marxist economics and this was one of the Ron Tabor parts that I thought it was really weak on he had some strong points about, like modes of production being not particularly coherent except for capitalism, fair enough, I actually think there's some truth to that. Asiatic despotism is a here be dragons of categories, but when he talked about, like the, the authoritarianism inherent, and like Marxist economic calculations, because they were basically just Smithian, like when you're miscategorizing Smith actually really Smith fucking hates renties and you aren't understanding the point of Marx, you get anarchists like Chomsky, who doesn't deal with the economics at all, and his critiques of Marxism, and I will say they tend to be critiques of Marxism, not always critiques of Marx.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the other thing that people should keep in mind is that, like, when anarchists are critiquing Marxism, they're critiquing sort of like post Marx developments and yeah, like a lot of like all the the charges of authoritarianism are actually like more levy towards sort of the Leninism, the Stalinism, those sort of things, not necessarily with Marx, although there are some people who sort of say Mark was also authoritarian, which I think is kind of weird argument.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean particularly considering, like, if you like you can go back on for fun. You know you think is right in the Marx-Bakunin debate, but parts of Marxist critique of Bakunin is that like, hey, this this small group terrorism thing is not actually democratic at all.
Speaker 2:What was the Kuhn? And he I think he himself was aware that he's not as knowledgeable about political, like classical political economy as Marx. And the main sort of issue that Marx brought up was not recognizing the state as an element of the superstructure and because, like Bakunin, had no sort of understood, bakunin and Proudhon both didn't have any understanding of historical materialism, the base superstructure, those types of things. So in that sense I think Marx was quite right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, someone once asked me there's been a kind of even with analytic Marxist and I think this is actually a little strange. There's been a kind of re-interest in going back and reading Proudhon, and Proudhon has a similar critique of wage slavery. And someone asked me this the other day and I was like, yeah, but he has a completely different answer to it. Basically, Proudhon thinks we could all just become what Marx would consider petty bourgeoisie, we could small proprietor, way out of, out of the problem, and Marx just thinks that will lead to massive people starving. I mean like, and so there's a whole lot of debates around anarchists and Marx is particularly around.
Speaker 1:You know the early Marx Marxist, you know poverty philosophy has big fight with Perot and Sterner, and then middle period and late Marx, which is the first international when I think and to be fair to the anarchists and I'm gonna give anarchists this credit the Marxist also tend to misrepresent the anarchist positions, so much so that that one of the things about Italian Marxism that I find very interesting is that Italian Marxism mostly comes out of the Bacoonanist international, not the second international, which I find fascinating. Are you talking about, like Bordega, those?
Speaker 2:types of things.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no, no I'm talking before that, like you get into the figures between Bordega and after the first international split that their lineage comes from the Bacoonanist faction if you go into the history of Italian Communism.
Speaker 2:I'm actually not sure. Maybe you can tell us what you know.
Speaker 1:Well, there's just a bunch of figures whose names have skipped me. I was reading a book on the history of Italian. I knew Italian socialism and communism and most of the key figures of the Italian youth socialist movement were mentored by people who came out of the Bacoonanist international, because the first international, as it existed and became the second international after the Espadae, kind of consolidated, really didn't have a lot of representation in Italy, because Bacoonan was really attached to the Italian sections of the first international, because he was also a big proponent of the first wave of Italian nationalism, as was Marx, but, like Bacoonan, came into the first international through that path. So the reason why I bring that up is, like for a lot of Italian quote anarchist they kind of became a couple of different things, one of which we don't like to talk about because it's fascist, the national syndicalist, the circ prodon, which has the anarchist and Marxist in it. There's a lot of stuff there. But then you know there's the Italian anarchists and there are plenty of them too. But there was also a bunch of people who were part of this Bacoonanist international, like the black international, that became key mentors to key Marxist figures.
Speaker 1:So there's a real way in which Italian Marxism has a lineage on the other side of the first international split and that is interesting to me, like because it tells you in a lot of ways that even though there's this big nasty split in the first international and both sides are very the two, birth about it that the idea that they were completely a separate movement even after the instantiation of the second international and the consolidation of the espadae and the consolidation of the other national social, the other socialist parties and other nations versus the national socialist parties, that's wrong man words. You can see how like this is that that hard line between Marxist and anarchist really doesn't entirely exist. Now, the espadae was not known for its love of German anarchism. I'm not going to lie about that. But there's a lot of people who celebrate, for example, the right of the espadae's crushing of anarchists, who also ignore that they use that to crush socialists later and that's part of what led to the socialist communist split that was never really overcome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean in the first international. My understanding is the main sort of difference of opinion had to do with two things inheritance and state atheism as I understand. And then beyond that, I don't think there was. I mean, there were like significant differences but like. There's an interesting book on this first socialism by Wolfgang Eckhardt which I highly recommend and it goes over in detail. But there was some sort of the internal fighting. It was kind of like silly sectarianism in my view, excuse me, yeah.
Speaker 1:I think you're right, but well, yeah, because part of what was at stake was actually like procedural things as much as the two things you just mentioned, and like Mark's fearing that Bakunin was trying to stack the international with his own people. Yeah, I mean at one point.
Speaker 2:I think Mark's accused Bakunin of being a Russian agent and I think Wolf Eckhardt like shows that's wrong and yeah, like silly things like that. And then beyond that I don't think there is like a significant difference. And then, like, the other thing people will find is that a lot of the anarchists like agreed with Marxist critique of political economy. You know what I mean, like Marxist critique of capitalism. So there's not too big of a difference. So I'm just emphasizing what you're saying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, I think the distinction really comes like, really comes after the early part of the 1920s in Russia and also the Spanish Civil War, I would say Right, although the Spanish Civil War. If I'm going to be honest, I don't think a single side of the left actually like, because if you, if you were to listen to anarchists, you would think that the that the anarchists dominated the Republican coalition, which is just not true. No, why.
Speaker 2:It's just like it's not. The other thing that people sort of say is that, like the anarchists started fighting the Republicans, which is only true, like, maybe like on the peripheries, but vast majority supported and sided with the Republicans. Well, the.
Speaker 1:I think.
Speaker 1:I think one of the things that we have to do, because the Spanish Civil War is also an interremarked this fight, because the Trotskyist even though some most Trotskyist do support the Spanish Civil War, because Trotsky himself does, and it's hard to argue with that Some of them tried to stay out of it because they were like, well, it's a Republican government, as capitalists they're sure we should think of the third campus position and Trotsky was there to intervene and say no.
Speaker 1:So everybody had to shut up. But you have the, the Trotskyist kind of siding with the, with elements of the anarchist and what was going to happen in the popular front. All of this is sort of a clips by the fact they lost, and most of our accounts of that loss are from people on one faction or the other. This is not to say that I don't think like there weren't Marxist, leninist shenanigans during the war and a lot of attempts to a kind of subordinate anarchists, particularly after some of those attacks that you mentioned on on, on some periphery anarchists who who were not really in line with the broad movement. And again, this is a problem with anarchist because it's hard to say like who's in line with what movement at any given time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean that's yeah. Here the discussion gets a little bit complex because if you look at, I would say the Soviet Union didn't really play a good role in the Spanish Civil War because they, the generals they were sending, weren't like competent and they didn't know what was going on. The equipment they were sending weren't wasn't like, was very old, out of date, and then, once the war turned in favor of the nationalists, they there's this famous incident where they seized gold from the, the bank, the central bank, and then, yeah, I mean like with the yeah, like I mean, this is also to put this in some context for people from the Marxist perspective, and this isn't to defend Stalin or anything like that, but the Spanish Civil War is when it is officially what ends their periodism.
Speaker 1:And so, before that there's a communist, don't collaborate with anyone who won't agree to the 21 these disease, which is basically everyone who's not a communist of the 21 conditions, that these disease which is which goes all the way back to the 1918 program and it it's what splits the second international once. It kind of dissolves reforms twice. There's two more second internationals and then the third international in 36, the common turn is kind of dissolved. But well, the common turn doesn't officially get dissolved until, like I think, the early 40s, but it's unofficially dissolved. It just doesn't meet anymore after 36.
Speaker 1:And they declare a shift from their periodism into the popular front. But they weren't preparing for this at all. Like they have been preparing for like a grant, they've been preparing for this grand, like stand down with capital in which they were going to finally get like their other revolutions that were supposed to happen in the rest were going to happen organically. That was what they were telling themselves, right, like so. So they end their periodism, they start saying, ok, you can collaborate with socialists, you can collaborate with other kinds of radicals, you can collaborate with bourgeois governments, even to fight reactionary governments, and that's the beginning of the popular front. And you're white, they don't do a very good job of it at all, like it's something you can kind of tell they care about, but not really not like they do later. And there's so many like international volunteers there.
Speaker 1:It's kind of a chaotic mess. You know there is infighting between multiple factions and the phalange kicks their ass. I mean like, and that's where you know in history's history there I think that I mean one of the things about that, you know, when you talk about the Spanish Civil War is there's also like the left oppositions plus left communist Plus. I don't think there's that many left communists involved actually, but there's already several splits of different kinds of Marxist socialists. You know like now there's a split between the second and third international, the socialist international and communist international. There's different kinds of Marxist also in these factions also sniping at each other in this scenario, and so it's a huge mess that gets brought up a lot.
Speaker 2:And then the Machno's army gets brought up a lot yeah.
Speaker 1:Mark knows army.
Speaker 2:This is one where this is also the other thing where, like, anarchists tend to sort of like glorify sort of cross, that and Machno, those sort of anarchist movements, and I think like, yeah, there's a difference between sort of learning its history versus like sort of like I mean, they were at the end, like it's important to remember, like they were undermining the Red Army. So it's complex. Like I'm not saying like what the Red Army did was justified or anything, but you have to make complicated decisions sometimes.
Speaker 1:I'm actually slightly more on the side of the of the Kronstatters, but but only slightly, like I actually get that there there were reactionary elements, there were conservative kind of elements in the insurrection there. I think that could have been avoided, just like I think, like the, the abolition of the SRs and 21 probably wasn't totally necessary. There's things that I am that I take you know, amongst people who are more sympathetic to early linen, that probably make linen as uncomfortable. I do see some anarchist points on that. On, on on Machno. Here's the problem I have with that and this is not a problem of me like picking sides. The historiography on Machno is so the way the reports of what happened are so absurdly differently framed that I have no idea what the true events were.
Speaker 2:Exactly, yeah, and I mean like sort of one after Machno. There was, I think, this person named Bolin and he has this interesting book and there's like no way to confirm what he's saying is correct, and I mean it's interesting and fun to read about, but corroborating some of the claims is quite difficult.
Speaker 1:The one thing I can say that I studied from one of the things I learned from the say Korean anarchist just, you get out of Europe for a moment and the key figures of the Korean anarchist movement are. Some of them are revered both in the North Korea today and in the South, but a lot of the Korean and this is something that left communist women they're going to say anarchist A lot of the Korean anarchist actually sided with right wing nationalists eventually, but they were fighting a foreign power but still like. I mean, in fact it's an anarchist who comes up with, like, the racial myth of Korea. There's also these problems with like. When you read about Kropotkin, I tend to like as a, even though I'm Marxist I didn't actually respect Kropotkin, but I read his late stuff, like, like and I'm like, oh, I get why the Marxist are mad at him. He sounds like a raving nationalist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean Kropotkin, remember he, what was it? The manifesto of the 16, something like that. He endorsed that right and he endorsed the allies allied victory over the Germans and yeah, that I think was an excess sort of overstep. And Kropotkin, I know it's interesting to read about, but I think that was probably a mistake and I think most anarchists agree, like serious ones, agree, that that was a mistake. By the way, kropokhin is despised by sort of like the early. I was reading, I've been reading lately Plakhanov, sort of the founder of Russian Marxism, and he hated Kropokhin and the early Bolsheviks also sort of hated Kropokhin because he was very critical of the sort of Bolshevik leadership, bolsheviks in general, lenin in general, and yeah, like Kropokhin has a kind of like a mixed legacy, I would say, among Marxists.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, yes, I mean, it's one of these things where you know a lot. When I encountered a lot of anarchists pushing these, these thinkers, they tend to read their best books. Like you know, kropokhin does write really interesting things on cooperative revolution and group evolution and this and the other Stuff that's really hopeful and useful for anarchists and puts it in a biological framework that you can defend, I mean, however, there's implicit nationalism and even like slight cultural Darwinism and some of that stuff that's ignored.
Speaker 2:And I'm not familiar with those. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean it's if you believe that it like group cooperation, but you see your groups as, like ethnic groups, are the competing groups, right? So humans are natively, you know, sharing or whatever, but they're doing so within an ethnicity. So group evolution is not like all of humanity, it's like groups, right, and in this case, nations. There's a weird tendency in anarchism. That is not immediately obvious, but it's come up a lot of times and before people come at me, I'm going to talk about the problems with this and Marxism too. So chill out, anarchist, if I still have any of you in my audience.
Speaker 1:There's a tendency to try to find like collective agents in addition to class to them, you know, to hold your position right, and a lot of those end up being formulated in the 19th and early 20th century and the obvious units of the 19th and early 20th century, which is nations.
Speaker 1:This shows up and like Bacutin was a big supporter of Italian unification and Italian nationalism, was that for a lot of things? I believe is that for Polish nationalism as well? I'm not 100% certain on that. I haven't read his biography in about 10 years, but there's a tendency to go well, the most natural sorting groups are these ethnic groups, so like it leads to these kind of paradoxes. And you know there are right wingish people like, say, troy Safgate, who I don't think you know most anarchists would touch with a 20 foot pole that was electrified. But they picked up on this tendency, particularly in Bacutin and to a lesser degree in Kupotkin, to view nations as a natural sorter and then they kind of take nations and race and confine them together and they shouldn't be, but you can kind of see where this goes right.
Speaker 1:So, and my study of like radicalism in Korea when I lived in Korea and was working at Korean universities was one of the things that got became obsessed with. And you see, all these racial myths that came in from Japan that were partially picked up, like they changed their language to racial language because they picked up from Germany and they're trying to compete with the Europeans, and this happens in the major restoration and then the Korean anarchists try to take that, invent their own racial myths and run with it, and so this happens a lot.
Speaker 2:So are you talking about, like left wing anarchists that became right wing over time in Korea?
Speaker 1:I wouldn't even say they were. They were right wing over time. Right, I think that's a, that's a, that's a misframing. Okay, I would say they were nationalists over time. I do not. I mean we associate nationalism with right wing this, but I'm not sure they did.
Speaker 1:One of the things that this, you know, one of the things I remember when I was in more like Orthodox Trotsky circles, right is they would always accuse, they would always accuse anarchists as being the real origins of fascism, when they weren't accusing liberals of it.
Speaker 1:Right, because one of the policies actually picked up by Mussolini to incorporate these people into his state was syndicate, syndicate, syndicate and co-op running a bit of businesses and a corporate, and corporate here is, you know, all society, a corporate framework so that the syndicates represent the workers and workers firms and you would do sectional bargaining.
Speaker 1:And actually one of the things about the autonomous interestingly is like this sectional bargaining stuff was actually maintained after the fascists were overthrown, even by Marxist, and then later on the workerist, the operismo and the autonomous movements start to say, well, look, this collective bargaining like flushes out a lot of differences and needs in the workers and we need to figure that out and do workers in Korea, etc. But interestingly, it's actually the Marxist-Leninist who do that and it's something that you would think anarchists would have done. But what I'm my point is on this is there were elements of syndicalism that were moved to the right, but that tendency for nationalism is A it's not unique to anarchists or anarchists again, don't get mad at me Marxists are also given to this. Okay, but it's anarchism. Didn't preclude it, because your nation is not necessarily your state. Their problem is with the state, not necessarily the national identity.
Speaker 2:Add on to what you're saying. You're quite right that if you look at the broader anarchist movement, nationalism is. There is a kind of a subset of anarchists right wing anarchists that are nationalist but both anti-state. And the example I would give is sort of an-caps in the US where they're opposed to the US government, sort of your boo-glu boys, militia types, people where they're anarchists but they're right wing anarchists. They're sort of nationalist or patriots at the very least. And then, yeah, and again, just to emphasize what you're saying, if you want to talk about nationalism, nationalism has also been an issue within Marxists.
Speaker 1:Really.
Speaker 2:Really, you know, if you look at sort of things like your national Bolshevism, and I mean even like Marxism, leninism obviously not everyone is a nationalist but if you look at Stalin like he embraced great Russian chauvinism, right.
Speaker 1:Well, okay, you're putting me in a weird position where I'm going to have to defend Stalin, when I actually looked at the research on this and there's a researcher whose name had just left my mind, who wrote a book on Stalin and great Russian chauvinism and Russian and Russianification, that Stalin is inconsistent on it and towards the end of World War II he starts praising the Russian people specifically, but he actually plays groups off of each other. So sometimes he would turn like he'd say stuff against Russia and as much as I tend to be a Khrushchev defender, very unpopular position on the left like this is almost as unpopular as defending Gorbachev that Khrushchev is actually one of the bigger pushers of Russianification. That's not to say that Stalin never pushed Russian chauvinism. He did, he just wasn't consistent on it. Right, right, that's a good point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But to get to a bigger paradox, you're right about the Marxist-Leninists right. One of the things they do is to get rid of nationalism. There's a scholar who I've interviewed on my show who talks about this To get rid of nationalism. The Bolsheviks actually promoted nationalism. Ironically, they would help groups invent written languages. They would help groups consolidate national identity. Are you talking about Terry Martin? No, actually, but Terry Martin is actually written on this. Yilmaz, oh God, what's his name? He's.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I mean no, okay, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:Yilmaz. It's Harun Yilmaz who is a Turkish scholar on this and the paradoxes of this, but he says it goes back to Lenin. It's not even with Stalin. And this leads to this weird tension because they actually, in inventing some of these nations, these nationalisms catch on and become a problem for the Soviet Union. So, and for certain groups like particularly Central Asian groups, they're kind of inventing the nationalism whole cloth. The reason why they're doing this is they think, okay, we'll build these nations. These nations are kind of administrative oversights where there's relative democracy, party democracy it's one party but within the party, et cetera, and they can, because they all speak the same language. They can have like rational, like planning and stuff in these coordinators and this is seen as a modernizing product which they think will lead to, through cooperation in the international, a decline in nationalism. But that doesn't happen. The nationalism actually intensifies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I mean you have to give sort of the early Bolshevik leadership credit for at least trying. And yeah, I mean the only sort of book I read on this is Terry Martin's book. Yeah, and like there was a considerable effort to pursue equality between the various polities of the Soviet Union, the broader political entity, and yeah, like it was a complex political system that they had. And yeah, I mean you have to give them credit, I guess.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think one of the problems in the US mind, maybe in the Canadian and Western European mind, is the idea that the USSR is Russia, which it never really was Like. It was a much bigger thing than that. And that's not even including all the Warsaw Pact powers who were not even technically part of the USSR, like, for example. I forget that, like Tuva, you know, was a recognized sub-nationality with the local government there was sort of Armenia, azerbaijan, kazakhstan, I mean Belarus sort of the Baltic states.
Speaker 2:And yeah, like as you're saying, like the Soviets, sorry, the early Bolshevik leadership made a significant effort to curb nationalism or at least promote, like, other types of non-Russian nationalisms in response to Russian nationalism.
Speaker 1:And yeah, but they give. I mean, you're right that they basically, a in the case of Russia, give up and B don't know what to do with the nationalisms they create. Because in some cases, and some of these peoples, these were not peoples that really had anything like a national tradition. They had a language kind of like and by kind of I mean like it may have been a dialect of another language, but they like figure out how to give it a writing system, usually based off Cyrillic, sometimes based off Latin alphabets, etc. When places that didn't have one, because there was a criterion that had to be met.
Speaker 1:You know that Lenin Stalin kind of hashed out and I say Lenin Stalin and specifically because Stalin, what is not Stalin as Lenin's successor? This is Stalin as, like the guy Lenin put in charge of the national policy, who debated with, like Otto Bauer and his theories of cultural nationalism within a Marxist international, which was also problematic because it led to, like competitions between national subgroups in the same, in the same nation. This was in Austria, and so I say, like, when we talk about this in the context of anarchists or in the context of Marxist, this is what this is actually where, like when I read the material. I'm like, well, okay, you're right about the other side, right, like a lot of times the Marxist critiquing Kropotkin and Bakunin on their nationalism they're right about that. But also that there are contradictions in the national policy on the Marxist side that I think have never really been fixed and made sense of. Like it leads to a whole lot of confusion and debates, and particularly when you combine with it like state what is it state?
Speaker 1:And revolution by Lenin, where like Lenin's signing with Pana Cook at points and like talking about how we should be getting rid of standing armies and stuff like that, and I find that really fascinating for right now. So on one hand, I think you know your first claim to get back to some of the tensions, like I complain about silly anarchists doing, doing moral retreats but ultimately becoming liberals and kind of being like really the radical shock troops of the Democratic Party. I also realized that I'm not critiquing all living anarchists, because there's anarchists who are fans of me, who agree with me about that. They're always complaining about their colleagues. So that's not you know. Yes, we can agree that there are plenty of people who call themselves anarchists, who are really just liberals, who are super annoying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was just going to say like I think one thing you talk about is also like distinguishing between actionism and anarchism and actionism. If you talk about actionism, that is also. You can find that in Marxism as well.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, actionism is a word that we use to critique other Marxists, which was the action for action's sake Marxism? Like honestly, that comes for people don't know what that comes out of. That's a critique of elements of the new left who just wanted to like. I mean, some of them were like we're just gonna bomb places with no one in it to make a point. And that critique wasn't aimed at anarchists, it was actually aimed at other Marxists who we didn't like.
Speaker 1:But there was one of the readings of the New Left now and I've even had people who are anarchists say this positively and it confuses me. They're like oh, it's an anarchistic movement. I'm like, well, I mean, I guess Abby Hoffman and whatnot are kind of anarchist sort of, but not really, I don't really know what. They don't entirely fit on our spectrum right. So the actionism claim that was one made by both the Frankfurt School and by, like Marxist Lin and his party, saying, oh, you're doing stuff but you're not coordinating it for anything. It's not. It's like propaganda of the deed, which is a separate thing from actionism, and that in the 80s and 90s that critique started being applied to anarchists who would particularly black blockers and the black block has an interesting history and parts of it I would even defend. I mean, it's a tactic that goes pretty far back to the 60s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, with stuff like that like speaking for myself, I'm not too sort of inclined towards those types of things. I mean, it's sort of like a recipe to get arrested, in my opinion. And then you're sort of like okay, well, you're arrested.
Speaker 1:Well, I kind of get it. You know, the origins of the black block are like the black mask anarchist groups who marched on raw street and like in the late 60s. And then it was resurrected to hide identities from police in West Germany in the late 70s and that was actually used pretty broadly. But in the late 90s when I first encountered it and I talk about this a lot because my experience as a young working class zine writer who literally saved his money from a side job to go to Seattle to participate in that, so we heard about it and to write about it ran into black blockers and was like what the fuck is this?
Speaker 2:I get kind of like the appeal of it if you're kind of like a young person and then you see like these group of people you know, dressed in all black, whatever, taking on the police. But I mean you're taking on the police and they have so much more resources, and it's a little bit silly in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's one of these things where. So here's a couple of things I'm going to say. Like in 2013, which was before I was in Egypt, but it happened in Egypt, though, some of the people actually adopted black black tactics to attack the Muslim Brotherhood right and some of the scuffles that emerged after the attempt to re-institute another constitution, they ended up just pretty much arrested, and they were blanket arrested, like they just arrested anybody who looked like they could have been in a black block.
Speaker 2:And yeah, that's the thing, like sorry, just, I just wanted to say like it just gives the police an excuse to arrest everyone. Right, like the willingness to use violence. But I will say one thing in Canada there was an interesting incident where the police dressed up, the police themselves infiltrated black box groups. I don't know if you know about this.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, this is a thing. This is the problem with the black box that I've actually pointed out for years. If you can hide your identity, cops can do it too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Like and they started to as you probably know the story like they started to throw rocks and then the police came in and shut everything down.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, the police basically instigated the incident where it was used to shut down the. So here's the incidents that we know about 2003,. The Oakland Police Department infiltrated the black block and 2001 in Geneva no, no, no, not Geneva. The black block was infiltrated and some of the provocateurs were from the police themselves. You're mentioning is the Quebec incident, which is kind of famous. Yeah, yeah, 2006, I think 2006. Another problem with the black block is that, because of those events, now the first thing whenever you see a black block happen, I remember this and some of their formations in, like the Floyd insurrection, uprising, whatever is that. Now also, other leftists will just call you cops because this has now happened. So it's like it's not a useful tactic anymore. My point about bringing this up, but this is a common complaint about anarchists and I remember this coming up all the fucking time during Occupy.
Speaker 2:I mean that's the sort of image that people have of quote unquote anarchists when they talk about anarchism generally is sort of like the black block type of people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and now and now, like the black block is what everybody uses, would scary, you know, to use Antifa as like a secret sect that scares everybody.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I mean again like anarchism, like there's a there's a divergence of opinion regarding tactics, sort of strategies, those sort of things. And I guess, with getting back to sort of an Arcosyndic, was review, which I recommend as a venue and people should read the magazine, and so on. So for, even there, like there's quite a bit of divergence of opinion on the editorial board and sort of attitudes towards Marx, and I think that is sort of what people should keep in mind. And the other thing people should keep in mind is that, like people are reading different things, their experiences are different and you know their knowledge, their levels of knowledge regarding certain things is different. So it's all it's, it's worthwhile, sort of engaging in good faith, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I would tell people to definitely read any. I would say Marxist should read anarchist publications and vice versa. I think right now, marxism is in the populist debt guys more than anarchism, even though, even though I swear to God, every third day, I fear I hear some kind of like somebody who's going to probably end up writing for compact magazine complaining about how the anarchists are screwed up the American Marxist scene, and I'm like, do you guys know? But this is always crazy to me because they're like well, the good old American mark. I'm like the last time that the predominant left is seen in America was Marxist before 2015 was the 50s. Like anarchists have been the predominant tendency from from, from the end of the new left, mm hmm, I mean that's sort of like the common complaint right, Like you're undermining the real left.
Speaker 2:Right the anarchists are undermining the real left and I think just like who I mean.
Speaker 1:That to me is that is a straw man, and it's like a straw man that you're making up like, oh, the anarchist, the new anarchists, and they're neoliberal, and I'm like, what are you on, like?
Speaker 2:like there again. Like there is a kind of like again, like getting back to the divergence of opinion, like there is a kind of an, as you mentioned, like a pro-democrat anarchist left which is anti, anti imperialist, and they basically don't have a problem with like in the context of Ukraine. They are supporting the proxy war and they are not like. They don't, they don't even acknowledge that there's a proxy war happening and there's a kind of an odd united front between Marxist humanists and anti, anti imperialist anarchists. And it's small in numbers, but there's that there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's real. I mean, I think you're right about this is becoming a real tendency, for and this is honestly, this is not even completing you to Ukraine, like every now and then you have anarchists to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, syria, libya. This is, I think, a long standing tendency, I would say within socialist movements in general.
Speaker 1:Right, um, this is like yeah, because I feel like there's such a concern about not be like with Syria. I actually slightly get where the like, where the confusion comes from, given Rojava in particular, but there's been a lot of this. I mean even in Iraq war, where you just like, where anarchists take moral claims made by the government at face value. I mean exactly Like you, and I also don't like a lot of people on the Marxist left who will take other states claims completely unproblematicized, you know, while guiding everything the US does, even if they're right to doubt 99% of what the US is saying, like, um, but yeah, that's, I think, a lot of.
Speaker 2:I think you sort of nailed it there. I think they tend to take other governments claims at face value. So, for example, I remember like when Bukha happened, bukha massacre, they accepted well, in that case they accepted the US government and the Ukrainian government claims of a genocide at face value, and I think that is a lot. A lot of that is what's driving sort of. And in the case of Syria, you know, like they're sort of like affected by claims of chemical weapons usage and obviously like the Syrian government has used chemical weapons. But I think it boils down to sort of media literacy not having a critique of media, how media coverage is used to manipulate public opinion. And this is where we get into sort of Chomsky mass media, those types of things. And I find that a lot of anti-imperialists are. They sort of just reject Chomsky's analysis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been weird when people like like there's been this tendency lately to like talk about Chomsky as if he was a Stalinist. Now, chomsky's made mistakes. I think, for example, he made mistakes in the Khmer Rouge. I know I might even have some people push back on me on that, but I think he did. But, like I tend to think, if we're now calling Chomsky a tanky and that's a term that has been yeah tanky campus, whatever Right.
Speaker 1:Tanky has been a term that has even been expanded into liberal spheres and people don't know like it doesn't just mean Marxist someone. I mean, I've been called the tanky, which is hilarious. It means someone specifically who supported either tank-strung into the Hungarian push back in the 50s or tank-strung into the Prague Spring. Those are the two contexts for it and yeah, like, using it for anyone who might actually be a Marxist is kind of a crazy expansion of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean the sort of the charges against Chomsky are a little bit silly in my opinion, but I think there's a kind of an irrational hatred of Chomsky I find. I mean, yeah, again like there are legitimate criticisms of Chomsky. But I mean, I think a lot of people are not really questioning what our media is presenting and they're sort of like they're not able to recognize when a claim is politicized, especially like government claims, like, for example, they're able to like, when it comes to the Donbass in Ukraine, they're able to recognize that Russian government claims of a genocide committed by Ukraine is false propaganda, but then they don't see it for buka.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, I think we're going to have to. Yeah, I think you have to make this call not based on anyone's like professed ideology, because the one thing I will say they're anti-anti-imperialist Marxists too, like you said.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, there are also quote campus anarchists. They exist, they're rarer, but I think we have to make this call kind of on our own. You and I have gone back and forth about like and we're not going to talk about this today but like how, like Stances on what imperialism and what groups and what countries have counted historically, and like where the Soviet Union was and like that divides when people like, oh, anarchists say this or a Marxist say that, we've been pretty. I think we've both been pretty clear like actually it's pretty varied on both sides of that. Like oh, I'm someone an anarchist, or calling someone a Marxist does not actually change the answers to a lot of those questions.
Speaker 2:And even I think the term Stalinist is not very useful because, as you mentioned, like we were talking about Chotsky's in the other day, there are the fences. Is Chotsky's who were right notion that Soviet Union was imperialist. So it gets really complex and then again with Marxism, leninism, you have hoshas right.
Speaker 1:Hojas and Actually technically to do is to Marxist, leninist are different kind. I kind of find all these now I'm including like I will call someone a Stalinist if they're, if they. But even that like, like, let's like break that down to you. For example, what period of Marxist Leninist Thought and development under Stalin are you're holding up. A lot of people, for example, will pull up positions that the Stalin made on Economics, particularly in his new economic problems for the Soviet Union text I think it's comes out in 1951, but then they'll go to third periodism to critique the DSA.
Speaker 2:Call them social fascist.
Speaker 1:What they don't realize is, third periodism also has an economic Rational behind it that Is not compatible with the new economic problems from 1951 and and I bring that up it's like all the Maoists like, okay, there's, there's three basic forms of Maoist thought Mao Zedong thought, which, which Mao thought only really applied in the Chinese context.
Speaker 1:Marxist, leninist Maoism, which tries to take Mao Zedong thought and Expand it to other contexts and draw general rules from it Marxist, leninist, maoist. Third-worldest, who take Mao Zedong because three worlds theory is a Believe in a period of Mao Zedong thought it's and incorporate that back in, but redefine what three worlds means, because the original, the first world, was the US and the Soviet Union, mm-hmm, which you know that's gonna be fun. I Say all this because, like, even when we talk about Maoism, okay, you know, and this is not even in getting to Chinese, like the official title for the ideology of of the PRC after Dung, which is Socialism with Chinese characteristics, which is to separate it for Mao Zedong thought, like right, like this is just that's just one little branch Right, and then within this, both within the US and the new left and Internationally, like, look how many different Maoist parties there are in India.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, like there's the next lights, there's the, there's the economy's party of India and Marxist Leninist which, yeah, maoist I think in English it's like Maoist in parentheses right there, there are like 50 splits of that. Like None of these ideologies, like Like whether or not you're a fan of Joe and line, deng Xiaoping, limbao, shindu Xi, any of these people like Lu Xiaoqi, right, these are very different ideological formations, even within the same broad category. And then you start adding stuff like all too serian Interpretation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, doing interpretations of this and all of a sudden your brain explodes right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, the one thing I will get. This is this is something Graeber said that I always laughed at, but I think he was actually sort of right when you ask anarchists about their divisions, they usually tell you something about what they think is going to replace the state, like cynicalism, anarcho Communism, communes, anarcho Primitivism, nothing you know, etc. Whereas when you ask Marxist, you get. You tend to get Either heads of state or, later on after the 50s, philosophers to to parse out. You know what you mean and it's not actually all that clarifying. Like and particularly now this is why I was talking about non-sectarianism just to ask people what they believe because, like right now, someone tells me they're a Marxist, leninist, all right, they might be talking about Multipolarism or they might be talking about anti-imperialism, they might really not like.
Speaker 2:And they are Marxist, leninist, who opposed multipolarism. Yeah, there's a bunch actually yeah, and I think I was interested. It's interesting because the Greek communist party I'm not sure if you heard came out and opposed Multipolarism and they actually consider Russia's invasion to be imperialist, so that that was a kind of a break with other Marxist, leninist parties.
Speaker 1:This is a weird. Okay, this is a. This is a digression that we're gonna have to like I'm gonna end after this. But Multipolarism as a framework is weird to me because it comes into English through two places Translations of Alexander Dugan and Fried Zakaria. Now it is a category in International relations related to 19th and early 20th century British geopolitical strategy, so its origins are not and Fried Zakaria are in Alexander Dugan's use of it like it's older than that. But one of the things that's always confused me is Lenin's description of the imperial competition and imperialism. The highest stage of capitalism, which should probably be translated as imperialism, the latest stage of capitalism right, is a multipolar system.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's clearly identifying different Imperialist governments with rival sort of strategic interests, geopolitical interests. And I think here I think we have to, here I think the idea of an Anti-imperialist revolution comes into play, because the anti imperialist movement Generally tends to think Soviet Union was different or the sorry, the Russian Revolution was different, because there was an anti imperialist revolution and All of the conduct, all of its conduct, was opposed, in opposition to imperialism.
Speaker 1:Right, I think, not to get into the the whether, the, whether the USSR is ever imperialist or not debates, because that's one where I actually Don't have an easy answer like my, my, my response to you about that, as I, was like Well, how are we defining imperialism? Because from some definitions it's not and from other definitions, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think here again, like, again, like it gets very Complex because there's some people who think about imperialism as a country level phenomena, right, some people who think about imperialism as a world level phenomena and I think the latter is something is a post-Marx and imperialism is general, like it wasn't discussed in the same sense that is this discussed nowadays with Marx, but Imperialism as a world level phenomena is something that came out of the monthly review.
Speaker 1:in my opinion, Um, yeah, I think, well, I think that plus there was like a hegemonic, like transatlantic quasi-superstate, right Like mm-hmm, mm-hmm, this does not exist. Well, still kind of exist in NATO, but it's. But now there, I mean now to me, when we talk about multi polarity, I'm just always like, well, in a descriptive sense, regional hegemon's are emerging, so we are in a multipolar world. I did like, like, that's just Basic reality.
Speaker 1:That's just basic reality. That's like me getting excited about rain, like, yes, sometimes rain is good. Yes, sometimes rain is bad. It's gonna really depend on a lot of other things. Um, whereas, like, if you talk about it as a good in and of itself, I'm like, why like, like, like well, they, they in the confined imperialism to the West, right, yeah, almost purely like Um.
Speaker 2:And so why wouldn't you support, quote unquote, multipolarism? That makes logical sense in that context. Of course, this is very silly.
Speaker 1:Right, and I agree with you, it is pretty silly. Um, so I don't know. I mean like. Like in the case, for example, of, uh, of the situation in russia right now, I am going to you know I've been on the uh, we need a peace settlement. I don't know how to to do that. Um, right now, I actually just I can't really like, but I, under the terms of both of both sides, politically, they're both winning enough to continue fighting for a long time um, on both sides, which could mean this is a very bloody, protracted meat grinder of a war. And and uh, I've already read that the cash, that the casualties in this war have already exceeded russia's war in afghan and afghanistan. So like, okay, that's bad, but also like, you're talking about like the soviet union.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Um.
Speaker 1:I don't know that, uh, although I think it's only russia's casualties in afghan, I don't think it's the whole soviet union's I gotta check that stat again. But. But also, like, the ukrainian stats are real bad too. And Um, when, when I, when I bring this up, I even get responses in my comments where people are like, uh, you know what, you know russia's gonna win totally, our nato's gonna win totally. My viewers are more likely to to think russia's gonna win totally honestly, but I I see the nato total winning more. Actually, you know, um, and I'm just like One.
Speaker 1:I haven't seen a modern warfare, a modern war where that's happened, where, like, both sides just get to unilaterally Slate terms like I can't. I literally cannot think of one like Since this, since granada, um in two, um, the evidence on the ground seems very, very mixed right now. Right, I tend to go to like middle eastern newspapers for news about this because they have less you know Dog in the fight. Um, but even there, I'm often confused about what's good information and what's bad um yeah, I think uh with ukraine.
Speaker 2:I think it's a complex situation because there is no uh Sort of effort to prioritize a diplomatic resolution. Absolutely in the us Um.
Speaker 2:There's not much run in russia either, so like and I think there there was just a statement today actually that uh, the zilinski is not, doesn't want to negotiate until there's a complete withdrawal of russian forces, which is very unlikely to happen, I think, and um, chances are, I don't think it'll, it'll continue for this year for sure, I think.
Speaker 2:And uh, I think some people are saying that it'll be like a like, a like it'll continue for some time. I think, um the war, um, and I mean uh, uh, you know, after zilinski, because zilinski, you have to remember like, uh, zilinski had quite a bit of support from eastern ukrainians, sort of ethnic russians, but all those, all those people are have been annexed, now de facto annexed by russia, so zilinski's base is gone. So now I think we're going to see um ukrainian society and move towards a right-wing direction in my view. And with that, I don't think there'll be like a less effort to prioritize a diplomatic resolution and again, like with the uk and us, I don't think there is any sort of effort, sort of like a prior effort to prioritize a diplomatic resolution. Russia, I think, um, if it prioritizes it, then it looks weak, you know. So there's no incentive to prioritize it on their end. So I think we're in a very tough spot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think, I think you're absolutely correct there. All right on that note um where can people find your rork grid?
Speaker 2:Uh research gate in academia and I'm also active on twitter.
Speaker 1:Yep, I will put your twitter information um and uh, we'll probably have you come back on in the future, so thank you so much. All right, thank you. Have a good day you too.