I was hoping that my coffee would be ready .
Speaker 2I understand . Hello and welcome to VarmVlog . And today I'm here with Spencer Leonard and we are talking about his two collective volumes of Marxist journalism . First one , marx and Ingalls , on Bonapartism , and the second one is Marx and Ingalls on Imperialism and , as you stated in your introduction to both books that Bonapartism and Imperialism and Marx and Ingalls are almost interchangeable in the way they're used , can you talk about specifically what they meant by it and why they were interchangeable ?
Speaker 1Sure Well , the Bonapartism and Imperialism are interchangeable in the usage of liberals . I mean , there were other terms that were used , but these were the ones that were really landed on . So other terms that you'll see are , for instance , caesarism , but that of course has a deep liberal basis , that caesar overthrows the republic . This kind of language was used going back into the 19th century . But the simple answer to your question , derek , is that there was one empire in question and that was the second empire of Louis Bonapart . The term Bonapartism , it captures different things . I mean , there are obviously different nuances to these terms . So Bonapart is the name of a ruling house , of really a kind of royal house in European history . At this point there's a dynastic claim obviously being made by Louis Bonapart and it's in a context of competing dynastic claims . So there is the house that has ruled France since the Revolution of 1830 , the so-called July Revolution , which is the house of Orléans , which is really a branch of the Bourbonne which you'll find referred to by Marx . But Marx is just using the general terms of his day as a legitimist , the people whose claim is rooted in more traditional arguments about primogeniture and royalty . With Bonapart , you have a claim similar to the claim of Louis Philippe , the Orléanist king , who's overthrown in 1848 , in the sense that both of these houses are associated with the Revolution . The house of Orléans had , if you will , acquiesced in the execution of Louis XVI and that burnished its revolutionary credentials . The house of Bonapart is a pure product of the Revolution in that , of course , napoleon Bonapart , the founder of the dynasty , had been a relatively obscure figure of a relatively obscure family who had risen by merit through within the Revolutionary French army , ultimately to the leadership of those armies and to a counselor position and ultimately to being the emperor in the beginning , in 1805 . Yes , I think he's crowned emperor in 1805 . And in that sense he's a product of modernity itself .
Speaker 1The real rub is that is the ism right is the way in which the rule of Napoleon Bonapart is being is a kind of prototype for the rule of his nephew , and of course Marx has a lot to say about that . First time is tragedy , second time is farce , et cetera . The repetition , really , of the Revolution itself . But the disintegration into imperialism , into the rule of the nephew , seems for Marx to have a different character , right . So really what he's talking about is the difference within the repetition and in particular the way in which the rule of Louis Bonapart what's tragic ?
Speaker 1Well , let me put it that way , what's tragic about Napoleon the Great ? Arguably , and this is the argument that I think , marx accepts the rule of Napoleon Bonapart even though he understands , as a student of the French Revolution and Marx is a student of the whole French Revolution and he understands the politics under Napoleon , and it's quite complicated and I don't want to go into all of that . But basically , the argument would be that the military defense of the Revolution undertaken by Napoleon the Great and the military spread of the Revolution is necessary , that it creates a Europe in the image of bourgeois society , that it creates a Europe that's , as it were , adequate to revolutionary France . And it's tragic that that had to be . And it's tragic , of course , that it collapsed , that it couldn't in a sense complete itself in a stabilization of a sort of professedly bourgeois regime , a regime that claimed its legitimacy from the Revolution rather than the counterrevolution , rather than as counterrevolution . So that's the tragedy .
Speaker 1The farce is that the Revolution of 1848 to 1851 that gives rise eventually to the coup d'etat of Louis Bonaparte is that it can't achieve , it can't clarify its own purpose and it disintegrates . It can't even manage its own counterrevolution . So if you read , like the Class Struggles in France by Karl Marx , it's all about the inability of the Orleonists and Legitimists to in a sense stabilize the counterrevolution . Or at least you know , the Republic itself is unstable and the counterrevolution is unstable and so it takes this form of plebiscitory imperial democracy and that's what you know , spawns Marxist thinking or sparks Marxist thinking around . This I mean , it's already you know it's growing out of the defeat of the Revolution , it's growing out of the failure of the tasks of the Revolution .
Speaker 1You can see these ideas developing over the course of Marx's writing in 1848 , 49 , but they grow more acute when the Revolution is over . At least for Marx it's over in the sense that he's in exile , beginning in 1850 , and soon he turns not , you know , he turns away from the idea that the Revolution will be renewed towards the recognition that the Revolution is over . And he has that , he knows that and he's arguing that to the exile community even before the coup d'etat . So I'm not really getting into the you know details of , like you know , a theory of Bonapartism here , derek , but just laying some very elementary historical background . But hopefully that's good enough to get us started , and I am going to just grab my coffee now .
Speaker 2No problem , go ahead .
Speaker 2So one question I guess that comes to mind is there's a whole lot of part of your introduction to the both volumes , particularly the second volume , that goes through the publication history of a lot of the journalism where this discussion , you know , outside of the Civil War in France and the Brumere , where that is , where it's obvious in the primary thing which those two texts are about , gets kind of bracketed out almost by the way it is presented to the public .
Speaker 2So you mentioned and the In the 20th century and the English-speaking world , we basically have two or three volumes , some of which are relatively recent , of Marx's journalism , and prior to that we had to rely on the translations of the Soviet text , usually from from Progress publishers , which were usually organized around like regions , so like Marx is writing on Ireland or Marx is writing on India , right . What kind of misconceptions do you think organizing the work that way led to ? Because you seem that it seems to be implied at least , and maybe somewhat stated directly in your introduction , that that this actually has led to some theoretical misconceptions , just by the way we receive the text .
Speaker 1Okay , I Mean . So I'll just , if I may , just back back up just a little bit to say you know , you're right to point out that . You know we have these famous texts from , from Marx written in German in , if you will , revolutionary Form , in that you know they are a kind of party literature . They are , they are written by the let's call it Marx Ingalls party in the sense that they're in the . The editorial control is in Marx's hands .
Speaker 1He is the editor of a kind of a journal that is , you know , a kind of periodical journal that he launches in London called the . No , yeah , right , in Shazaitung , my Germans so bad , I'm just gonna say political , economic review , my pronunciation so bad . Politician Review . It's a , it's an air to the new Iran is Shazaitung , which was his revolutionary newspaper , but it's published in the form of a journal and that's the . The venue within which Class struggles in France is published in four parts and the fourth part of which he says the revolution is over . Curiously , or Interestingly , he understands that in terms of economic recovery , or he poise , he poses it in those terms in the fourth part of the class struggles . The 18th Brumair is the only Publication that was to be part of a journal that was going to be published in . In other words , there was only one journal that was published and it contained the 18th Brumair and nothing else . But it was supposed to be a new journal that was going to be published in New York City , which at the time was something like the third largest German city In the world , and and there were new Germans arriving every day from the continent . And Again it's in the .
Speaker 1The person who published that is a figure named Joseph Wettemeyer , who's a very , you know , close member of , if you will , the Marx party , the , the heirs of the Communist League , who have split over the issue of whether the revolution is over , you know , shopper , and in Vilek splitting With with marks and Ingalls and others on on that question . So we have that and we have a Text called the Civil War in France that kind of takes these issues up 20 years later in the context of the commune . But there's a lot of retrospective material In in that where he , where Marx , really goes into the history of the second Empire and in rehearses the arguments about Bonapartism in particular , in great detail , there Again written under the editorial control of the party , if you will , in this case of the International Working Man's Association . And of course Marx used that party publication as a , as it were , an act within party politics , as a , you know is directed against Bakunin . It was , you know , it was a maneuver within . You know he willfully alienated many of his own English supporters , etc . Right , it's , it's a , it's an act within party politics . But broadly speaking , whatever the limitations or the lack of Boldness is one word he uses . He sometimes talks about how he can't speak with his accustomed boldness in the first international , but nevertheless this is his party , he's chosen to participate within it . So these are his terms . You know the that he's operating within .
The material that I published is published by , if you will , a hostile editorial board , not utterly hostile , because obviously they're publishing him , but it's a . It's an American newspaper , it's a Republican newspaper . Its socialism is all together unclear . It has roots in American Fourierism Going back into to communal Experiments of the 1840s . The Brook Farm Commune in Massachusetts is the kind of the seedbed of what becomes the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley and a kind of managing editor , charles Dana , who is Marxist , direct liaison with the newspaper . And Dana is Sound . As a Republican I would say you know he . He and Marx are both Ultimately going to be fired from this newspaper over effectively the same issue , which was the Adoption of revolutionary military methods in the US Civil War . They were both proponents of that and they both got fired from the Tribune for that . And so you know , broadly speaking , dana was a good editor for Marx , you know . But there are all kinds of pressures that Dana is not fully in control of on that editorial board and Some of them Marx was really quite hostile to , for instance , pro-panslavist Impulses on that editorial board .
Speaker 1But Marx is writing in English and what I wanted to be , the point that I wanted to make with with these books , derek , is that you know , of course I , I have a very political understanding of Marx , you know , I , I do agree with you know , ingles is Funeral oration in which he says you know , karl Marx was above all a revolutionary intellectual . He subordinated himself to the demands of the socialist workers movement . I'd say that's really what we call , you know , rather than talking about young Marx , mature Marx , like Marx , as Marx , like you know , when he ceases to kind of be a student and becomes the figure that we know , you know , for instance , lenin puts it that way you know , is really Marx coming to Operate within Socialism . He doesn't really write anything for himself or express his own ideas like we don't know . What you know , like Marx is everything that Marx is right or Marx rights is commissioned by socialism . Even when he doesn't have a party to commission him , he , as it were , allows himself to be commissioned by , you know , the , the party that was and will be , you know , we might say , by world history In his understanding . And that's how he tries to write for the Tribune and he gets himself into a lot of trouble . He has a lot of articles that are refused and that's a real bitch for him , because he doesn't get paid when his articles are rejected and Yet he very clearly isn't bowing to . Yeah , he isn't writing what he thinks will get published , even though he and his family are , you know , on the . You know they're , they're , they're borderline , they're , they're borderline , impoverished for almost the entire time he's writing . You know they're , they're extremely impoverished and they're they're . You know , as he would put it , the wolf is at the door . You can barely pay his bills , you can barely feed his family . Number . You know a number of his children die , probably due to those straightened circumstances and and nevertheless I would argue that he continues to write for a In a radical way , in a way that's that's Marxist .
Speaker 1You know , these materials can't be dismissed as just like trying to get the bills paid , and what I try to show is that the concerns of these famous writings about France in In in the Revolution of 1848 , persist straight down through 11 years of journalism , which amounts to about Seven of the 49 substantive volumes of the Marxingles complete works and you know a very large , you know a very substantial proportion of his published output . And I point out in my editorial introductions that he wanted to include this material when he conceived of writing , publishing his complete works or collecting his works . He did not neglect it . In every time he in a sense provided a kind of bibliography of his writings or Author's bibliography . He oh kind of you know , I'm sorry and authors biography . He discussed this and he was proud of his work on the New York , you know for the New York Tribune . In all of it he is arguing that there is a Significant world historic transformation that has taken place in the world in the wake of the failed socialist revolution .
Speaker 1There's a lot in your question that it didn't get to , but hopefully that's a kind of beginning To why I did these , put these works together In the way that I did . So what I do to get to the substance of your question is I show that for Marx there isn't like an American question or an Indian question , right , what there is is a is a question of the growing consolidation of the world state and , in relation to it , the reorganization , the persistence and reorganization of proletarian revolution . So for Marx , the imperial state is , is not national , it is international , just as the bourgeois state before it was , and it Is an international counterrevolution that's unfolding throughout the period that I , you know , throughout the period of these writings , that that , that that begins to turn in the very late 1850s , and that turning is itself International . It you know what's ? I just read , for instance , august NIMS on the American Revolution . And you know , apart from recognizing that there are people who Marx knew there are , like socialists from Europe , right , his analysis of the American Civil War is Did I say American Revolution ? I meant the Civil War , the second American Revolution . His analysis of the Civil War is in purely American terms . Right , it's the slavery question that you know just is some kind of original sin . It's a very typical , you know , american kind of blankered perspective , and you know I don't I'm not writing books here , I'm editing books here , but I do provide a good deal of editorial guidance and and show , both through the editorial apparatus and in the material that I select , that remarks . The same process that , for instance , is Leading to the rebirth of the Revolution of 1848 in the form of Italian republicanism , is giving rise to the American Civil War .
Speaker 1And while what's occasioning the Civil War is the counter-revolution that counter-revolution is itself conditioned by European developments is an expression of European developments . The Confederacy is what Louis Bonaparte and his British counterpart , lord Palmerston , it's what they look like in the New World , and it is a Project that could never have been conceived without European support . It was a project that was undertaken in concert with European military initiatives and it was a project whose only possible success depended upon European involvement . In a fundamental way , the , the US Civil War was its greatest Victory , or what it's it . The precondition of its victory is that it keeps the Europeans out Right , which then results in us thinking the Europeans had nothing to do with it , but it was in fact a great Union victory , that the Europeans were Intimidated to stay out of the war . And they were intimidated to stay out of the war , you know , yes , by the Union for sure , secretary of State Seward's threats to the European Diplomats were very explicit , you know he , he said I'll wrap this world in flames , all right if you attempt to intervene . But the working classes of Europe also were , you know , organized themselves and do in and very self-awarely rekindled the spirit of 1848 in In response to their government's attempts to intervene in the US Civil War .
Speaker 1So that's an example of how , you know , just saying Marx and Ingalls on the US Civil War Like misses everything right , because what you're ? You're just acting like . You know , america is like this parallel and independent history . It has its own road to socialism . So you know , I just dismiss it . You know , in a way that I think is pretty straightforward , that you know it depends on a kind of Very degraded Stalinist notion of national roads to socialism . I could talk about this with her . The other most famous body of this journalism would have been the writings on India , and and I could talk about that too you know that Basically Marx is being dragged into you .
Speaker 1To take Marx on India and to put it that way is , you know , was basically to set up a question of Marx's relation . You know , did Marx favor or oppose imperialism , which really is not the question at all For Karl Marx in the 1850s ? Why is it not the question ? Because it's not the question in the world . It's not the question . You know there is a and I talk about it and I supply the writings .
Speaker 1You know there is something called the Indian revolt of 1857 58 , but this isn't really anti imperialist In any in any meaningful sense . It's a dying gasp of , of an , of of an Indian aristocracy that's being displaced . The new and most vital forces within , within Indian society that are going to give rise to , you know , the future of India , are Resolutely opposed to the Indian revolt . You know that the , the urban forces of Indian society , which doesn't mean that they're on the , you know that they're in favor of imperialism . But if you , if you look at the dynamics of that revolt , you know it isn't , it doesn't have the the basis for reorganizing the Indian state really . And so you know Marx is all for . You know the success of , of the Indian revolt . He's , he's in favor of the military defeat of the English East India Company , but there's really no sense in which Anybody who could speak the language of modern politics in India or in Europe , you know , would have been like speaking for the revolt . They could have said whatever they wanted to say , but they would have had no organizational relationship to that revolt , whose own vocabulary and organizational forms were were really , you know , as I say , you know , not recognizable in modern political terms . And so For Marx , you know , writing on India Is really writing about the Bonaparte estate within Britain and the way that it , the form that it takes , given the fact that Britain has a massive overseas empire and as a truly massive overseas empire , and you know , in the time that he's writing , and in in a way that like there's no rival to it , right , there's no , there's nothing comparable
to it .
Speaker 1And in India , of course , you know , crystallizes that the , the emergence of like European imperialism , with France having an empire and the Dutch having an empire and even the United States having an empire to a degree , really lies in the future . This isn't the very heart of Of , if you will , you know , the global Pax Britannica where the British Navy Rules . This rules the world at the level of like overseas dominion and trade and in India is the , of course , anchor for that in Asia . So he talks about India in the context of influence and Persia , projecting influence into Persia . He talks about India in the context of going back in the Crimean war and the rivalry with Russia . He talks about India in the context of projecting power into China In the second opium war and In that context , you know , the French are being basically brought in as junior partners . Palmerston and Louis Bonaparte are operating in concert , just as they will with respect to America . So you know , these are just the way in which these books were .
Speaker 1So , ultimately , what happened with Marx and Ingalls on India ? Leftists in the 20th century read Marx and Ingalls on India and they realized this isn't anti imperialism and they decided well , marx is a pro imperialist , since the only way , you know , the only framework that they that , that the very publication suggests , I would argue , the very publication of a book of Marx and Ingalls on India really suggests the question . You know , what do Marx and Ingalls have to say about the national destiny of India ? Right , which is just not their preoccupation . Their preoccupation is world socialism , which you know , of course would include the territories of South Asia , but isn't about one way or the other , national self determination In the 19th century . That's just not the issue .
Speaker 2Right . I always think about the fact that , like , the national question in Marx and Ingalls is never , from what I can tell , generally expressed as like a principal , consistent stance on the national question and more like what's going to value socialist and this or that specific instance . And Right , it seems to me to be a kind of at least post 1930s and maybe even post 1950s conception to go back and reread this in the light of that and interpret it in the light of that . One of the things I liked about your introductions to this is it made it pretty clear that that trying to do that like , say , maybe Kevin Anderson or Perry Anderson , either one of the Anderson's actually in this case will , because they're trying to answer questions just as not at play , like , for example , marx's Eurocentrism , leads you into all kinds of cul-de-sacs that just you're over interpreting something Right , like when I mean this stuff is just .
Speaker 1it's just anti-Marxism , is all that . It is right , I mean , it comes out of anti-Marxism and it just should be recognized for that right . But yes to your point , derek , and as always I appreciate how closely you read . So what is the national self-determination that Marx is dealing with ? Right , he's dealing with the national self-determination movements of 1848 . He was directly involved in them . Right , he was a German revolutionary and after all , the German revolution attempted to unify Germany and there were national unification movements in Italy and Hungary . In fact , at the time those were like the things that everybody knew about . Right , in Britain or in America , if you asked your average person on the street , like , who were the famous revolutionaries , they would have mentioned Cossuth of Hungary and Mazzini of Italy . They probably had heard of prominent French and German revolutionaries as well , but Mazzini and Cossuth were international celebrities Marx is talking about , even with respect to those movements which were clearly developed and expressed in 1848 , I opened the book by talking about how he thinks that Cossuth has completely gone over to Bonaparte and that Hungarian independence has just become a Bonaparte business project .
Speaker 1And of course , I think there's an echo .
Speaker 1Marx and Ingalls will say the testamentary executors of the revolution of 1848 are Louis Bonaparte and later Bismarck , and Bismarck himself will say that the tasks of 1848 , it turns out , aren't to be settled by pamphlets and debate but by blood and iron right .
Speaker 1And they are recognizing that the organization of Europe is going to be undertaken by the major imperial powers , by the major capitalist states , and of course German unification is undertaken by the capitalist state . And really the whole question of national self-determination is not , is not obviously revolutionary . The thing that Marx really despises is all the little petty nationalisms in the Balkans , which he sees as just projects of the Tsarist's cabinet in St Petersburg , that these things are just being cooked up . So he sees national self-determination as becoming kind of astroturf projects , if you will , which isn't to say that he's opposed to them . He gets into the greatest detail about them , if you will , revolutionary potential in talking about Italian unification , where there really is a struggle between a kind of monarchical , lullabownist project Victor Emanuel , who was aligned with Louis Bonaparte , and a project of Matsini and Garibaldi , which seems to carry with it a kind of if naive , nevertheless Republican spirit rooted in 1948 .
Speaker 2Marx follows that very closely and of course the national self-determination project that he despises most is that of the Confederacy which people do not like to consider a national determination project because it kind of messes up some of their conceptions that it's always good .
Speaker 1But those are exactly the terms in which it was sold to liberals in both Britain and France .
Speaker 2And it's actually probably still a large part of its historiography today , in which and that , by me saying that it was never a national liberation project , it was about slavery , and in which case , yeah , it's about slavery and the national and state sovereignty to impose it , which is a national framework .
Speaker 1To say that about slavery is just to . The problem is is that people don't understand what they're saying when they say that For Marx what it's about is it's about the entire destiny of the New World . If you're talking about slavery , for him , the Confederacy necessarily , that the success of the Confederacy will necessarily dictate the overthrow of the American Revolution , that , whatever you mean by the North , it won't be the legatee of 1776 . Right , probably it'll be overthrown , right , right , probably . Lincoln is just right that a house divided against itself cannot stand . It must be either wholly one thing or the other , entirely slave , or entirely slave or entirely free . And that's what Marx thinks will happen .
Speaker 1Because he goes into some of this in great detail in some of the articles that I include , where he's kind of explaining some of the journalism that I publish is not from the Tribune , it's from other publications . One of them is called Depressa and it's published in Central Europe . There you see Marx explaining Marx , the cosmopolitan Londoner , and he's like yeah , I know these people , I've been there , I've been to Central Europe , I know these people don't know anything . He kind of explains America to them , including the geography of the place , and he says look , there's no way that the Midwest , that the entire Tennessee , ohio River Basins are going to be in one country and the Mississippi , into which those rivers drain , therefore all transportation of agricultural goods will pass , will be in another country . That's just not going to happen . So what are you talking about ? You're talking about that the South will necessarily take over Kentucky , indiana , illinois , ohio , et cetera . And if you say that , what you're saying is that really even New England is going to fall , because that's going to be completely unviable , and so for him it's a question of slavery , in the sense that the whole of even the freedom that resulted from 1776 , the kind of beachhead of freedom in the New World that flowed out of the initial revolution , namely the Free North , will be rolled back , and it will also mean the reintroduction , it'll mean the collapse of the Monroe Doctrine and the reintroduction of European colonialism .
Speaker 1So the exact nature of the alliance between the Confederacy and the regimes in Europe Louis Bonaparte and Palmerston , those discussions don't advance beyond a certain point , but it's very clear . And of course the French overthrow the government of Mexico in the course of the war and install the Emperor Maximilian . So it's very clear , in the Spanish recapturing territory in the Caribbean , they're sort of minor bit players . The Confederacy has anticipated this . I don't know if your listeners know this , I'm sure you do , derek , but the forces that give rise to the Confederacy were already trying to overthrow governments in Honduras and Cuba , etc . They're called filibusters , where you would have these like mercenaries who would take troops out of people , veterans from the Mexican-American war . And there's a movie made about the most famous episode , a guy named Walker in Honduras . That's just called Walker . That's a pretty good movie . And so all of those impulses that were tied to the expansionism of slavery and a kind of imperialist impulse emanating from Europe are all being defeated on the battlefields in North America , and Marx is super clear about that .
Speaker 2Right , I mean he basically , and I think correctly realizes like the Southern Planner class is the Neurostocratic class and that it would be highly regressive for them to win by any standard . You know , I mean that's interesting to me in so much that that gets .
Speaker 1You know , I quote . I'm just going to say this because I have to dig in Derek , I quote there's a Do you haveif you watch the Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone ?
Speaker 2Oh God no .
Speaker 1Well , there's a . The bonus disc has a conversation between Oliver Stone and Tarika Lee and in it Tarika Lee says you know , it probably would have been better if the North had lost the Civil War . What ? Okay , you wouldn't have been saddled with American imperialism . It's pretty nuts , right . I mean , the left is all over the place . You know , and evenyou know you'll hear this a lot . I mean , like Claude McKay and oh , who am I thinking of ?
Speaker 1John Reed , in their reports toI think it's the second Congress of the common turn , you know , they described the Civil War as just a matter of like , you know , northern Industrial Capital's aggression . I mean , it's understandable why they would say that , but it's rotten . Ultimately it is rotten and it fails to grasp . You know what I emphasize in the book , which is that solidarity with the Union is the reason . It's not the Polish uprising of 1863 . Solidarity with the Union is the galvanizing reason for the formation of the First International , full stop . The First International has to be viewed in the context of the unfolding of the American Civil War as an international revolution . And of course there are many implications to that . The struggle , you know . The working classes , you know contest with Parliament over the Second Great Reform Bill , including the Great Hyde Park demonstration of 1866 , the so-called Glorious Revolution in Spain . Ultimately the commune itself .
Speaker 1I mean a lot of the initial agitation against Louis Bonaparte's regime is about discontent with the regime's stifling of the expressions of French support for the Union .
Speaker 1There's a wonderful book called the Cause of All Nations , written by , you know academic historian named Dan Doyle , where he really gets into details about the agitation amongst the French . For , you know , at one point , you know , like where they just won't have it , like the students of France just will not have it anymore , is when Lincoln dies and Louis Bonaparte tries to . You know , he brings out his military into the streets and the students basically like riot through the streets of Paris until they can fight their way through to the House of the American Ambassador because they demand the right to present their condolences to the American people on the death of Lincoln , right . So Lincoln and the Union cause is really a expression of a anti-Bonapartist unfolding revolution , right . Or , if you will , and better , a counter-Bonapartist revolution , right , which is really the way that we should begin to think about what socialism would be . That's a kind of critical Bonapartism , because Bonapartism is the negative image of the dictatorship of the proletariat , just to sort of okay , large that thought right .
Speaker 2So one of the things that one of the parts of your second book that I was kind of most interested in and kind of found the most complicated was Marks and Engels' writing on the Taiping and in China , because that doesn't fit like the pro-imperialist model or the anti-imperialist model at all Right and his stance is kind of complicated . But would you like to go into like what Marks and Engels actually said about the Taiping rebellion and development in China ?
Speaker 1I mean the Taiping rebellion . You know , the Taiping rebellion , of course , is one of these very murky events , you know the character of which is , and I don't know the vicissitudes of it . I'd be interested to know the vicissitudes of , you know , of CCP historiography on it . I don't know if you know much about it .
Speaker 2It's contested actually . I don't know so much about their current status on it , but I do know like they went back and forth from whether or not it was a model and some of the early pre-mal figures even took names from the Taiping rebellion . But that's dropped later on
. It's kind of a mess .
Speaker 1Right . So it's a crisis in the state for sure , and the state loses control of vast swaths of southern China in a kind of parallel state as erected from Nanjing , and the upheaval that it involves in the displace you know , in basically the disruption to society that it involves in terms of transportation networks and the like results in massive amounts of death , like staggering amounts of death .
Speaker 2Something like seven , eight times the people who died in the American Civil War died in that rebellion .
Speaker 1yeah , yeah , and so you know for Marx and Engels , you know for them , they're looking for signs of the . They will look at even the defeat , and I think Engels just says it like , and I quote it like in the case of the Anglo-Persian War , they see that the what's happening in Asia is that there's this deep churning of Asian society , right , and it gets laid out , I think , in most detail because , after all , there is the most detail with respect to India in the 1850s . So the two bodies of writings on India , there's writings on the Anglo-Persian War of 1857 , and there's writing on the Taiping rebellion and there's writings on the Second Opium War in these volumes , and so , if I could just kind of take a broad view of some of that before I get into the details about China , they see the coming , the effects of capitalism there , and that's already anticipated in the Communist Manifesto right , where Marx describes , you know , british imports into China as like a heavy artillery right that's breaking down all Chinese walls , right , that language in the Manifesto , that the inundation of the imports from the Industrial Revolution in Europe and that sense of vast disruption and to a large degree , reversal of world historic trade patterns of , you know , like Europe selling textiles to Asia ? Right , is a world historic reversal . Zills and cottons had been purchased from Asia for millennia , going back to the Roman Empire , and so these things are kind of dissolving or disintegrating . You know , they're acting as a kind of solvent to dissolve the preexisting social relations in Asia . Whatever you want to call those , if you want to call them feudal or some kind of patrimonial , whatever you want to call them they're being dissolved .
Speaker 1And Marx describes it with respect to India . He says you know , the melancholy of the Hindu is that an old world is being destroyed and no new world is being put in its place , right ? So this is a similar problem that you see . You know , even in Germany , right , that the old world is being destroyed in Europe . But the bourgeois revolution in the form of like republicanism and liberal rights and the subordination of the state to society , you know , basically , the bourgeois revolutions that had been experienced in America , britain . You know the Netherlands , britain , america , france isn't extending into Germany , it isn't extending into Italy , right , bourgeois relations aren't expanding . There isn't an integration of the world into this . You know mutually beneficial cooperative . You know global humanity that the Enlightenment envisioned , that , say , adam Smith envisioned . Instead , there's some kind of disintegration and upheaval that is extremely destructive , that's gripping Asian society .
Speaker 1And those are the terms that Marx and Engels see the Taiping rebellion in right . They see it as a very directionless kind of groping , lurching , shurning of society . And you know Engels , for instance , will talk about the salutary effects of defeat , right that you know . Maybe the Persians being defeated in war will help to kind of crystallize a political response to the European challenge , or that the defeat of the Indian revolt will help to crystallize a politics in India , or that the you know , just simply the process , which is largely an internal Chinese process , of the Taiping rebellion will result not in something that was planned or intended , but nevertheless in a kind of Hegelian behind the backs of actors way , will open a road for greater political you know , more fruitful political developments in Asia . You know , essentially for the emergence of something like modern politics . And of course that is happening With respect to the Arrow War or the Second Opium War . You know I lay a lot of emphasis on that in the second volume that you're referring to , derek , because it is a moment where Mark sees the .
Speaker 1You know his real focus is on the politics in the UK and what he sees is a consolidation of a kind of , you know what I call parliamentary bonapartism .
Speaker 1You know , mark's analysis is that the pluralistic party competitive system in the UK that , of course , is centered around Parliament , does not preclude the erection of a bonapartist state there .
Speaker 1And we've talked about this before in terms of , like , the role of , you know , the expansion of the bureaucracy , the development of metropolitan police forces , the growing independence of the bureaucracy , including the diplomatic corps , and then this highly recalcitrant to , if you will , democratic pressure , military , which is overseas in the case of the UK . And it's a theme that he really ad-embrates with respect to the Crimean War , which is that the policy towards Russia doesn't change no matter who's in power , right , and that even the Whigs are completely in bed with the Tsar , right , and it takes a massive like assertion of British civil society to even launch the Crimean War . It's against every impulse of the cabinet , right , and that would be the kind of the formal political expression of this parliamentary bonapartism is the growing independence of the cabinet from Parliament , from parliamentary pressures , right , and the continuities that you see in cabinet government . Just , you know , despite pluralistic , you know , despite the circulation of elites in those offices that is mediated through party politics .
As a temporary side note , I'd just like to note that this is popular . This is popularly defended amongst quote progressives today as the consistency and independence of the administrative state apparatus Like . It seems interesting to me that that is oh , it's the tenderness from Trump right .
Speaker 1It's anti-fascist .
Speaker 2Right , it's .
Speaker 1I find that argument People might be pro-Putin , but thankfully the state is on the side of Ukrainian democracy and all the rest , right , yeah , yeah . What are you going to say ? Sorry , don't let me .
Speaker 2No , no , it's just it's . That's one of the things where , like when you actually read Marxist journalism , you just you immediately realize that , like , our conceptions of state and what parts of the state may even be useful are fundamentally different than what they did . Because the idea of like these independent cabinet positions that are consistent and that have no check by the popular will that Marx opposed that explicitly is , is like almost off the table for discussion . I mean , admittedly , progressives don't claim to be Marxist , but a lot of Marxist you know are in line with progressives and yet totally ignore this element of Marxist thought .
Speaker 1Well , they ignore this element of Marxism . I mean , let's just be plain right , they , they , they ignore the whole fucking history of Marxism . Because you know , this is what the revisionist dispute is about . Right , like Miliron , taking a cabinet position in France was a , you know , was directly at , you know , at issue in the second international it was really the international dimension of the second of the revisionist dispute and was discussed by both Kowski and Rosalux and Bergen , indeed , in all the international sort of corollaries or analogs of the more famous debates in Germany , of course , in France itself . So you know , it may not have risen to a certain level of clarity in Britain because Britain didn't exactly have socialism , I mean , you know . But in in America and France and Germany and places that really did , you know , had socialist parties , it was understood that you don't take executive positions and that a cabinet position is an executive position . Right , like , that's . The difference is , you know , you can be a member of parliament , you can be a member of the House of Commons , in this , you know , as it were . But you know to , to accept a cabinet position is to , is to administer capitalism , and yeah , so Marx is pretty clear about all that . And you know , you know from the beginning and you know , but , but the , the lying , the deceit , the manifest manipulation of the press , which is a big subtext of these books that I could , you know , which you really just have to read , I think , to get the full subtlety of Marx's treatment of the press and it's , you know , what it means for this , for the press to come to express state interests . But , very apropos to our time , all of it is leading up to a parliamentary showdown over .
Speaker 1You know , basically what happened is that Lord Palmerston , the Prime Minister of Great Britain , who's a product of the yeah , he's a foreign minister almost his whole life . He is the impresario of British foreign policy , going all the way . You know , he basically does his understudy work , you know , in 1815 , you know , in the negotiations around Vienna . He is a pure product of and an architect , a major architect of the European counter-revolutionary peace that emerges out of the Napoleonic Wars and embodies the kind of the contradictions of the British role in that piece , in that , you know , obviously Britain is more liberal than its allies . You know Prussia , austria and Russia . You know the other architects of that piece , and so he can appear more liberal in relation to them but is really their master and the master of a conservative state order In .
Speaker 1He is in a sense conditioned to the secrecy of the foreign department . In taking it up after 1848 as prime minister , he's elevated to prime minister and brings all of the kind of bureaucratic and secret impulses of his entire career to bear in undertaking a foreign policy without reference to Parliament , including making peace and war without reference to Parliament , and this really becomes an issue . And the East India Company is important to that , because he can use the East India Company to make war in Asia and claim that it's sort of the Indian government's deal . It's the company . The company's doing it right , because it's a separate army , it's a separate military structure and has its own finances . So he can get around Parliamentary power , the Parliamentary power to declare war and to fund war in Asia in particular by using the East India Company . That's part of the issue of what the East India Company becomes after it ceases to be a trading enterprise . Why does it still exist , right ? This is one of its great benefits from the point of view of the ruling class , certainly from Paul Marston's point of view .
Speaker 1And he has directed also , he has directed the consul in China and Canton to spark a war . And of course it can't be proved right , because there's a lot of secrecy involved . But basically it becomes very clear that a war is being sparked in China with you know . That is a kind of you know , through false flags and all sorts of skull duggery , to gin up a war . And he loses a lot of support from liberals who generally support him , including Gladstone sort of one attempt to oppose him . Eventually Gladstone will form the liberal party with Paul Marston . But in the crisis around the Chinese war , all the ironies and the since are coming out , because the old Tory gentry are , like , speaking for peace and commerce . And the consul in China that Paul Marston's operating through is the editor of Jeremy Bentham's papers , right . So he's like the you know , a true born heir to radical English liberalism , right , and Marx is just delining in the ironies of it . But he's also showing the full blown political crisis that's emerging around this war . And basically , paul Marston dissolves parliament . They censor , you know , they censure him not censor . Censure him for essentially evading parliamentary scrutiny , refusing to provide documents to parliament , refusing to answer parliamentary questions , stuff that we're just completely used to now . Right , that the government cannot be , you know the government bureaucrats won't answer questions . In this case their chief is helping to shield them .
Speaker 1And the election in the election , the liberals say Cobden and Bright , the famous liberals of the day . In parliament . They say explicitly we've got a bone apart here . Except he's a lot stronger than Louis Bonaparte , because our democracy is a lot more deeply rooted than the democracy that he's . You know that the plebiscites in France , you know , without parties , can , can claim , and so he's going to . You know he's more powerful and more dangerous .
Speaker 1John Bright gives a speech to this effect in the free trade hall in Manchester . So it really is the last gasp of liberalism , even as it's showing the full contradictions of liberalism . Right , because this guy Bowring , john Bowring , who's the consul in China , he was friends with all of these people , cobden and Bright . He was a card-carrying member of their circles and in the election basically , that is you know when so , so , so , palmerston is censured and he just says fuck you , I'm dissolving parliament . He dissolves parliament , he , he goes to the people for an election and he wins reelection . And this , for Marx , is the point where you have something that's truly parallel to the events in France , where you have the people voting democratically against liberalism right , unmistakably right , that they are voting for
that .
Speaker 1The democratic basis of Bonapartism is clearly expressed around what , of course , in this case , was a jingoistic appeal to , to British patriotism in the face of , you know , the insults given it by the Chinese . You know , in the I'm not going to go into the details of the incidents that provoked this , these hostilities in Canton , but basically the claim was our flag was insulted by the Chinese and , like I said it , the whole thing was was was cooked up to to create those hostilities . I think it's pretty factual , you know , historically sound to say that and that's what Marx assumes . You know Marx is like in the course , the liberal press is saying it at the time , and so the issue for you know , around the the Second Opium War is for Marx , you know he goes into the greatest detail about how this is playing out domestically and how you know , for Britain , right in anywhere , derek , bonapartism is a domestic issue , right , imperialism is a domestic issue for Marxists , like most fundamentally right .
Speaker 1What is imperialism ? It's not America in Iraq or in Syria or Ukraine , it's the fact that there are tens of thousands of police who have New York City under armed occupation and Chicago under armed occupation , and that that's necessary , right , I'm not saying that the police , I'm not saying that police should be gotten rid of under capitalism , but the necessity of that force , of those bodies of armed men , is the heart of imperialism . It's why Norway is an imperial state , denmark is an imperial state , the capital estate is an imperial state . That's all that Marx means by it . But in the British context , where it has these territories all over the place , right , of course that's significant for the domestic politics and it's a training ground for those bodies of armed men . It's where bodies of armed men go to learn their craft of of controlling the population , etc .
Speaker 1It's very nice to have India and all of these places for the ruling class to go and get paid , of course , lots of money to learn how to non-democratically lord it over the people , and those are habits that they can bring home very conveniently . And so Palmerston's rule of course looks very different than Louis Bonaparte's , but it's really because Louis Bonaparte is ultimately a local expression of a world state that is ultimately , of course , headquartered in Britain , right , and that's Marx's analysis in this era , right . And even when the world state is at war with itself , that's an expression of its cohesion right . So that my third volume is I'm still working on it which will be about the Crimean War , where Marx is basically arguing that the way that the British and the French express their alliance with the Tsars by going to war with them , because the war strengthens the state internationally and it never is addressing anything fundamental , it's never threatening any , as it were , party to the war . It's a fake war , as Marx puts it .
Speaker 2Oh , I guess the last question , which may be a doozy in and of itself , is how do you think all this got so obscured ?
Speaker 1It's a really good question . You know I've been in , you know , of course , you know I'm a member of Platypus and I've been reading . You know we've been running a reading group this summer on politics and you know , I think it really gets to the obscuration of the question of democracy , that it's really unclear , I think , to the left how its project is anything other than democratic or anything more than democratic .
I mean , you know , the left is obviously in favor of democracy and yet democracy is the adequate basis for capitalism , right , it's the most adequate basis for the Bonaparte state . And it's this problem of democracy , this question of it's not a battle for democracy , it's a battle of democracy as Marx puts it in the manifesto . And of course that problem gets deepened as a result of the lesson , you know , the lesson of 1848 is just how deep that problem runs , given that the counter-revolution takes the form of universal suffrage democracy in France . And so I think that when we're talking about , you know , the trajectory of Marxism , right , it's really the critical current within socialism that brings those lessons of 1848 to bear , that says look , we have to capture state power and institute a . We can't institute socialism , we have to institute a dictatorship of the proletariat . Why , to begin to address the basis of democracy ? Right , the basis of democracy is capitalism . Right , the reason why we have democracy is capitalism .
Speaker 1Democracy isn't just a kind of an undifferentiated or timeless or a historic political form . It's a form of politics that's conditioned by the proletarianization of society . You know , so like very basically , you know , when people don't have any guaranteed place in society , right , when we're all replaceable , we're all fungible , we can all be dismissed . And increasingly , you know , and that creates all sorts of pressures that we internalize we don't even think about . Right , like pressures to conform , pressures to not speak out of turn right , pressures not to call attention to ourselves . Right , all of the ways in which capitalism , as a society that's not just got cracks in it but is driven by contradiction , that our , in a sense , last claim , that is , that we can fall back on , is as citizens that we can vote . Right , and , of course , capitalism . You know , in a sense , the primal image that people should have of capitalism isn't of , you know , bankers or Wall Street or really even factory production , but of the isolated individual presented with , you know , prefabricated choices in a voting booth . Right , that is the essence of capitalism . Right , the atomized individual who is , you know , can side with and , you know , can in a sense liquidate himself into a collectivity that can serve as the basis for the perpetuation of capitalist society .
Speaker 1Politically so , the dictatorship of the proletariat is intended to , of course , take state power to . What does that mean ? It means to you know , historically , what it who knows what it means today , or if it means anything at all today ? But what it meant historically is , that is , that the working class would supply the staff of the state right To the extent that the state had to persist . To the extent that it did persist , it would do so because of the ongoing contradictions of a society founded in bourgeois right or bourgeois social relations that there would still need to be . There would be questions adjudicated by force , but that adjudication of questions by force would be undertaken by the class that is , as it were , at , you know , the most closely experiencing the contradictions that are giving rise to the necessity of force . You know , so you might have to break a strike right , but you would have , you know , but the working class would have to break that strike right , you know , in the name of society as a whole , let's say under the dictatorship of the proletariat . So there's a question of socialist politics operating in civil society and , like we were talking about before , not seeking to administer capitalism but only to only , as it were , to administer capitalism on the terms in which it can begin to implement its program . Right , and what we mean by taking state power , and an essential aspect of that program would be that at least the commencing of the withering away of the state which would be , which would commence with the restaffing of the state , and so I think that that whole horizon has been been lost and and I think that you know that , in that sense , the anarchist core of our aspiration to socialism has been completely lost . Right , that what we seek is a world not in which the people rule , but in which no one rules .
Speaker 1Right that that that socialism is about , you know , the self regulation of of a society of freely associated people whose decision making you know processes you know would have , would take lots of forms . You know it's . You know I don't want to have a voice in , like how , like you know , some pandemic gets dealt with . I just don't want the people who are making those decisions to be subject to the pressures that they're subject to under capitalism . Right , like I'd be very happy with certain kinds of rules of experts and certain , you know and and and , and you know the professional associations . You know I want the doctors to figure out what the protocols are for when you stop trying to revive a patient , right ? I ? Just I'm just concerned that those that that doctors and professional associations , are under all sorts of pressures and distorted out of all recognition in this society .
Speaker 1Right , and I also want to be liberated , you know I , in other words , another , another way of putting it is that you know the left too often acts like socialism is going to be like one long , like DSA meeting or something you know , and that we're all going to wake up and vote on like a hundred plebiscites every morning . Right , we , we want to be liberated from politics , it , you know , as much as we want to realize the potential of democracy . We also want to be able to live in society and , and I think that those aspirations and socialism are gone , like what it would , you know , in other words , like what's the alternative to democracy ? What does it mean to have a critique of democracy ? What is the self-regulation of society , or what I'm calling anarchism , which is really a liberal impulse ? Right that's coming out of the enlightenment . You know the whole enlightenment is anarchist in an important way that people just do not understand . Right In the , the , the kind of return of the state in conjunction with democracy , that whole problem is is obscured .
Speaker 1You know like . Why is it obscured ? Like , why did socialism , like the whole imagination of socialism , collapse ? You know it's a long story but it has to do with , I mean , I think it became , I think people became overwhelmed by the task . You know , I think that revolutions seem to promise war . You know the , the , the self mastery of the task of socialism , of like working through political parties that then manifest the contradictions of capitalism within themselves and that contradiction has to be prosecuted politically in . You know the splits and regroupments that are involved . You know the , the dialectical , or you know the Marxist sense , the negative , dialectical prosecution of democratic politics through socialist party forms . You know it became unmanageable .
Speaker 1You can call that Stalinism , you can call that , you know , retreat . You know it's a . It's a very deep question that I don't , you know I'm hesitant to say just Stalinism and to kind of rehearse a certain , you know , trotskyist narrative . You know that is the narrative that ultimately I , you know I'm trained through , that , I think through , but I'm not . You know , I don't know what you think , but I'm not sure that that means anything to young people .
Speaker 1Now , you know , like , if you , if you try to tell them about , like , you know the zigzagging character of Stalinism and you know Stalinism is like the , you know the gracing of the accomplished fact and the history is so obscure to them . You know , what I would say is that the struggle for socialism is a great big gamble . Right , it risks , you know , a lot of upheaval . It did result in like massive upheaval and war , and I think that that overall experience in the first half of the 20th century generated a massive recoil and retreat and and the kind of you know , I don't know , you know , see no evil , hear no evil , kind of you know self-stupification . And now we're , you know , you know we're left with like , I don't know what you know , like the , the very impulse to politics itself I think people are terrified by . You know , I don't know what you think , but something along those lines , right , that there's a real forgetting . That's kind of so that you're a teacher , right , you know , one of the things I would say is that you know , just to come back around one last time , if I could , to Marxist journalism .
Speaker 1You know , one of the things that impresses you so much , you know impressed me so much , is the level at which it's written . Right , this was stuff that was written the English language stuff for the New York Tribune , was written for the largest circulating newspaper in the world . You know this stuff . You know Abraham Lincoln would have read this stuff out in Illinois , you know it was . It was put together in like a weekly edition that was sent around the country and that's why it was the biggest circulating paper in the world .
Speaker 1And you know , you just can't imagine . You know , because Marx writes he's just quoting Latin and Greek and Italian and whatever , right , left and right , and just his language and his thoughts are on a very high level and you know rates of literacy were high . Right , the people who read this material , you know they were not like all super literate and undoubtedly in the 19th century , literate people read it out loud to illiterate people and in a in , like , a profound way , like the illiterates of the 19th century , are more literate than like professors . I know today , right and like , how do you like ? You know , like the world itself , right in the age of the rise of socialism , educated people right .
Speaker 1The way that they self-organized , the way they organized their own lives , was to be able to confront their own circumstances with sober senses , as Marx puts it right , that that was that . That was something that , like people did , like you know , in their church life , in their civil , associational life , on the whole . And you know we're living in a time where , you know , there are so many tasks and it requires a division of labor that I would , you know , I just can do my part , you know , in trying to educate people at a high level , you know , a small group of people at a sophisticated what I hope is is a sophisticated level , and produce some books that maybe a couple hundred people will read , you know , and maybe some future generation might pick up . You know it's a it's a daunting question , you know that gets down into , like psychology and everything else .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah it's . It is a daunting question and , as I've confronted with my brief four-way into socialism , which is now 20-something years , I think that brief .
Speaker 1I'm sure you're beginning to realize these are the best years of your life .
Speaker 2Yeah , what I've , what I've seen , is an increasing feeling like we're on repetition , compulsion with the enormity of the task and that each round is more degenerated in how it's presenting itself than the last . And that's like this revival of certain things we saw in the 80s is weaker than it was in the 80s , which is itself weaker than it was in the 60s , which was itself weaker than it was in the 30s .
Speaker 1And but wouldn't you reflect upon your position within that , derek or others ? I hear what you're saying , but I also , you know . I wonder because I feel like you know , you , and to a degree I and others , we're sort of the ones writing the history . You know . I feel like they're not really telling their own history . You know what I mean .
Speaker 2Oh no , they're not . I mean , they're avoiding their own history .
I've been reading recently like books get thrown out on the quote left to the left of the DSA or whatever it was coming out of , like something like Medwax or Marx , and it's an erasure even of Marx's Leninist history , to use their terminology . Like talking about the left in the 1970s without mentioning once , not a single time , the Sino-Soviet split . How do you even talk about that without mentioning that ? And you kind of realize that .
Speaker 1Oh , you mean they want to be Maoists and believe that Chairman Mao was the scourge of the bourgeoisie Right and you just completely obscure the fact that he was the one who shook Nixon's hand and brought the violence of the Soviet bloc or the Right the bloc .
Speaker 2And there was proxy wars where he sided with the US . Like just all this stuff is just bracketed out , or the debates within , even within China itself , is bracketed out , like it's .
Speaker 1They bracketed it out in India and in Bangladesh , even though it created a refugee crisis of tens of millions . The Chinese support for the Pakistani military , of course , the US support and Naxalism flourishes in those very regions right Of Bengal .
Speaker 2Right , sorry , yeah , no , that , no , I'm with you . The ironies are abundant , and not just For those of you who think this is just a Western Marxist problem or just an American problem . I assure you from my experience worldwide , it is not . So yeah .
Speaker 1I mean , do you think that people your age , you think the millennials are beginning to write their own history ?
Speaker 2No , I do not , not so far . I think they're afraid of their own history .
Speaker 1Frankly , like I think , I think confronting there aren't even memoirs of like organizing for Sanders or like even from the major people Right . No , I Never mind . Like occupy kind of . It's amazing like the paucity of material that's and it does . I think it does combine with this like seemingly intensified resolve to tick every box in the repetition compulsion . You know like we're going to do every single thing that the New Left did and it's very distressing .
Speaker 2It is very distressing . You know , I've been writing a book on Christopher Lash every For like two years and every time I go back and read his I didn't know that .
Speaker 2Every time I go back and read his late 60s 70s material up into his early 80s material , I am struck by , like , how unbelievably similar it is , including stuff like the resting on your laurels after the fight against Nixon is over and turning into like this depoliticized , very self-focused , very therapeutic-focused way of understanding self and politics . It's also interesting because it's being you have the critique of Fordism morphing into this , you know , narcissistic person , but it's also the same people have to defend Fordism , right ? I mean , chris Cutron talks about this too , and with us there's almost like a you know , neoliberalism . As I understand it has probably been dying since probably about 2010, . Maybe I don't know , and what is going to turn into is unclear to me . It seems to be unclear to a lot of people .
Speaker 2But there is a way in which , even though the left can't frankly shut up about neoliberalism and call things neoliberal that it even aren't , it also is defending it because it refuses to like deal with the fact that it is its primary . It is wedded to the party that , even more than Reagan in the 1990s , up and through Obama , solidified that regime . I mean , and in the fact that you know there were so many , there are so many Marxists who were even critical of the Obama administration , who then celebrated the Biden administration . I think of Dylan Reiby and Robert Blinner's , like seven theses is that I was . Yes , there was some mild criticism of Biden in there , but it's been .
Speaker 1Even the resistance that was minor to that form of the Democratic Party has been liquidated and it really does feel like post-neoliberalism in the sense that it doesn't take on any distinctive shape of its own , or it doesn't feel like a project even of the right has been crystallized in any way .
Speaker 1Trump certainly wasn't allowed to , or couldn't fail to , in any way chart a course forward . You would have thought that he represented that kind of post-neoliberal project in the absence of the left , but it really hasn't amounted to much . And , yeah , the only thing that the left and , seemingly , capitalism , most CEOs can imagine is some kind of endless project of the civil rights movement or whatever they imagine the 60s to be , some sort of project of perpetuating the new social movements that came out of it , and under the explicit patronage of the Democratic Party . That's the thing that's really changed , I guess , is that the Democrats are sort of unmistakably the vehicle of it , in a way that no new leftist would have thought of , right , that they would have seen the distance between , because obviously they would have seen the distance . Their foundational experience was hostility to the Democratic Party in the civil rights movement and they knew that the Democrats were kicking and screaming as the governing party of this country , kicking out their own Dixie Cratt leg , but it didn't completely do until 2000, .
Speaker 2honestly , it's one of the things , even as one of these older millennial , younger Gen Xer people that I'm in and that gap cohort I remember when the South was run by Democrats in my lifetime , like Zell Miller is like one of the primary governors of Georgia . I remember .
Speaker 1Well , the whole idea . I mean , obviously it's a really foundational myth that the Republicans became the racist party Right . Like if you don't have that , the whole house of cards falls apart , derek . I mean , if you can't fucking convince yourself that you know the white supremacists are organizing through the Republican Party and it all . You know , yes , the Democrats used to be the white supremacists but now the Republicans are . You know , and I always knew that that was a lie . You know , politicians had support and when they got kicked out of the Democrats , some of them joined the Republican Party after a great deal of reluctance . But it hasn't really reproduced itself .
Speaker 1And yeah , I had two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor growing up in the state of Tennessee and I remember Sam Nunn and you know , like Democrats , like Charlie Wilson , you know kind of , you know Warhawk , you know Sam Nunn was also this way , you know , I guess , soft on the welfare state , but no more or less than most Republicans were . Certainly the Rockefeller Republicans were . Yeah , it's like people have to convince themselves of quite a bit . And now of course they're getting black politicians in the Republican Party in the south and they just scream Uncle Tom , it's just , I don't know .
Speaker 1I mean I find my Democratic friends to be more openly , I don't know , more insufferable in a sense , like I feel that they're dangerous , like the level of their delusions today . I don't like the curiosity just about the . You know basic things . You know we've all experienced this , like the simple , the obvious symptoms . You know from imprisoning Julian Assange over Podesta's emails through Twitter files . You know it's getting more and more crazy how much they're willing to throw out in the name of . You know the progressivism of Biden .
Speaker 2Well , it's interesting to me because it it's interesting to me in the sense that it becomes very clear how little it means in so much that , like Biden's , progressivism in most ways represents an administrative continuity with Trump , with the exception of it is not as disruptive to the administrative state itself .
Speaker 2But almost every policy is the same , including the stuff that really supposedly mattered , such as the immigration regime and stuff like that .
Speaker 2And at the same token , the states that have , you know , conservative governors in the South have gotten much more audacious in what they're willing to do and yet , like the fight against that has been totally dropped are as just used as a wedge in the national debate , but it is not seen as anything that needs to be confronted at the local level and actually the other .
Speaker 2The other response we see is a return to the 80s 90s , sort of like anemic inside the Democrat track of , like you know , robert F Kennedy Jr . Whatever you think of him , it does resemble in many ways Dennis Kucinage and Cornell West is seemingly kind of like a parody of Ralph Nader and and that is a reversal to norm of the prior two decades like , like in so much that Sanders is like is like a McGovern light . This is like the two decades after that light too , and it's and it worries me also in so much that , like , even the kind of technocratic apparatus of the Democrats is clearly cracking in , so much they literally cannot imagine anyone running other than an 84 year old man or 80 , whatever year old man .
Speaker 1There's no back bench at all and that there's nothing parallel to the accomplishments of neoliberalism in the offing . I mean , right , neoliberalism obviously was . You know I guess it's not obvious , but it's pretty obvious to me that it was . You know the way that a form of patriarchy was smashed and and and and all you know what we could call racism , in the sense that the expansion of labor was smashed . You know also there was an immense accession of women and of course , the racial minorities into the American labor force and and into broader , you know , strata of the American labor force and ever before . So that has international corollaries in there was a expansion of wealth or prosperity , at least at the level of the elimination of extreme poverty on an international scale .
Speaker 1You know you can grant all these things to the neoliberals . You know I don't . I know you're not supposed to , because neoliberalism is supposedly capitalism itself or something , or the harshest form of capital . It's not right , it's just the form that it took . It's the form that the collapse of the new left took , but the , the present just feels like it . It . You know today is going to be the best day of all days to come .
Speaker 1That nothing , you know that nothing is better in the on the immediate horizon and in the Democrats don't really claim that it is . You know , however hollow you know it's morning in America , or whatever Reagan's bullshit was , you know it was semi convincing , and certainly Clinton's bullshit was semi convincing . I mean , I was there , I was 20 years old in 21 years old , in 1992 , and there was a lot more opportunity for young people in 1992 than there seems to be today and there's not . It doesn't seem like anybody wants to address that , like like the basic question of how you do , you know , like , I guess , like people being able to get jobs and , like you know , minimal prosperity , I don't know . It seems to me like there isn't a political project that is mobilizing even the aspiration towards , like bourgeois , you know , prosperity .
Speaker 1And I don't know if anything else but , yes , anything else right , and obviously there's like a hatred of the other words . The millennials have been moaning about what a miserable capitalism they've been living in their whole lives and how it's so futureless and how the Gen X and other preceding generations had it better off and that , you know , their future was sold down the river . But you know , I feel like they never confronted their aspiration to capitalism . Even the lameness of their leftism is tied to the fact that they could never like squarely confront what they really you know what the middle class ambient phenomena on campus and generationally was was a demand for a more prosperous capitalism . Right , and at some level that was generative in the sense that , you know , for my generation , just people were conservative , right , they just a lot more conservative generate .
Speaker 1You know people that didn't bother with Marx and socialism , but the way that millennials dealt with Marx and Marxism and socialism seemed like such a . It comes to seem now like such an abuse , and that's why I'm interested to talk to you , because I think of you as somebody who really like managed and I know that you're older , you know , but you managed to to experience your time in a way that gave you some real leverage on this history and that's why I keep asking are they gonna ? Who's gonna write their history and who's gonna confront the fact that , like we were , we read Marx and we read socialism and it was like it ripped a generation , and I don't think the Jackabin crowds going to do it , you know .
Speaker 2I'm gonna fade off into that good night , because the political project is also kind of become an institution that even itself does not , cannot generate . Like , when's the last time you've really heard about anything going on in the DSA , even even within socialist circles , within Twitter , you know , or something like that , where you know the discourse is and I don't hear it anymore ? Really , it's kind of .
Speaker 1You know that's so much better than I do , derek .
How would you trace that ? I would trace what's happened is it's been ? It's been a return to the old norm where the DSA is kind of a New York political machine , which is what it was in the 80s , and actually more successfully so than now . They got mayors back then and , but now it does so by , like , taking dues from other parts of the country and basically routing them into the Democratic Party apparatus of New York and LA and and people you know they don't want to confront that . They don't want to say like , oh , I was in an organization that , even though it's national , basically , has only had success in these two areas and it has a national focus and 80% of my dues go to that . They don't want to say that because it would mean that the the shimmer of whatever left unity they thought was a shimmer , that was basically a center , a center of the Democratic Party Party , like control opposition project , which which , honestly , some of the best senators of our generation went into .
Speaker 2And the other thing that they don't want to look at is , for all the labor militancy and labor unrest that there is right now , the formal labor union movement has never been a smaller percentage of the US workforce and it is after their supposed revival and including in areas where we saw like real grassroots hesitation , like , say , red state labor , teachers unions and whatnot , where now people just give it . And this isn't spoken about , really , but people have obviously just given up on that because they're just leaving the profession altogether , which you know , and there's enough shitty employment out there that that's not going to show up in massive unemployment numbers because we also have a declining population . But it does mean that , like , a whole lot of people are even willing to just walk out on what was traditionally means of like getting out of the like blue collar working class into the quote professional managerial class or whatever you want to call it , whatever new category you want to paste that with . What it has me , for me personally , is to feel like I've seen people who have used radical rhetoric their entire lives and kind of walked away from it and even stuff like , like the diversity , equity and inclusion stuff , like the corporate version of this that also is beginning to just not have the kind of pool that it used to , because it obviously doesn't change anything .
Speaker 2The biggest loss of black wealth that we saw in this country was in 2007 . No , not the biggest loss . Yeah , the biggest loss of black wealth was 2007 and it's never been recovered . Why do you say 2007 ?
Speaker 1because that's when this .
Speaker 2That's the housing crisis . That was a loss of everybody's wealth , but it disproportionately affected the black community , like that's 2008 .
Speaker 1I mean 2008 .
Speaker 2Yeah , well , I mean really , really , it's a period from 2007 2011 , but it's I like to I like , and we should be honest with that , because it gets really bad in the beginning of Obama's tenure , which made which has made the irony of like liberal representative profound , because I've looked at the numbers that hasn't recovered at all in this time period of the most focus on , like , like EMPEST style racial diversity which tells you from an objective level , even from what you say you want , what you are doing doesn't work . If it does anything , it does diversify . Things like the board of Harvard which , yes , now has a lot of people of color , although not a lot of black people want it , but it does have like a one or two , but that does not change anything for the many ass majority of even black people , much less people in general . Right , it is not , but you know it .
Speaker 1I mean , I guess you know I'm interested what you think about , like the fate of the intellectuals of your generation , because when intellectuals of my generation no . I mean , yeah , it was very clear from you know , like I guess it became clear to me . You know , on the one hand , like you know , even producing these books right .
Speaker 1I , you know , even though I'm not like exactly trained to do this , you know I got to go to graduate school , right and like a big way , and so did you know a lot of my sort of core cohort of Platypus around the University of Chicago James Vaughn , sunit , chris , right , we were all there and we had a lot of patience . And yet , you know , we experienced , like very clearly , like this left academic thing , like it can't go on , like we're not going to get these jobs , like it's , this thing is like ossifying in a certain way . But you know , your generation like didn't , like , I think , in a salutary way , like experience right up front , like we have to develop , like a new way to be intellectuals , like the academic left is not going to be available to us , like I see that , like the people who've tried to do that of your generation , they're pretty unimpressive . Like they're like activist scholars .
Speaker 1Which has been a mitigated disaster for both activism and scholarship , and which Right Like I mean , you're going to be a scholar , you got to be a scholar Like you're going to . You know , obviously , like I write books like that , right , I don't .
Speaker 2There's a division of labor for the other right , yeah , there is , and you know .
Speaker 1Wissenschaft is Wissenschaft , right , and you know . But of course , professors haven't produced the most important books in the history of the left , right , no , obviously , you know , being a failed professor has you know . Or out , being outside , going to journalism right , getting a PhD , but not getting a job like Karl Marx or Gare Glukoch or whomever . All right , there's a long history of left intellectualism , right , that I feel like your generation looked at , like even your , you know , interest in the lash , you know expresses that . And yet , you know , I don't see like the like , just in terms of like . Okay , what are you going to teach a succeeding generation Like , what are you going to make of your experience to like to be in intelligentsia ? It's a real crisis , you know , and you're so much you're closer to those you know , to that dynamic , than I am Well .
Speaker 2what I see with the Gen Z young people is that there's a general rejection of all narratives , but actually it leads them to be easy prey for very easy narratives .
Speaker 1Obviously all this really degraded Marxist slatedism .
Speaker 2Yeah , it's lately . I've been like you guys are insulting your own tradition here , like which is hard for me to say but like you're not even being self-honest with that . It's just usually verbiage from late . I mean literally it's like Lucerdo , it's like Michael Parenty , who wasn't even formerly a Marxist , leninist . Honestly , that's another irony of all this . It's and it's like pretend Well , lucerdo is just a pox on humanity .
Speaker 1I can't believe that people read this garbage . I guess you're saying he's like the best of what they read it , or- .
Speaker 2Yeah , he is actually . That's the thing . He's the one who's actually kind of a scholar . And then what you get from the rest of it is like these people can't even understand that . Like , for example , defending 1938 USSR and 1987 CPC under Dung , you're in self-contradiction . Or like arguing that you need to hold to the Stalinist text of 1952 , while also arguing that you need to maintain third periodism . I'm like you can't . You actually can't do that . You don't understand your own position . And the context for those positions is degenerated , as I find a lot of them are lost . On them it's just completely lost . And there's this want , I guess because they feel cheated by bad education and like vulgar anti-communism or whatever to just invert those narratives , to just flip them .
Speaker 1And where is the vulgar anti-communism ?
Speaker 2I mean , I don't know , that's not anymore , I guess , it's like the Tea Party calling the . Democrats , communist in 10 years ago . That's these people's primary trauma , which I find kind of funny .
Speaker 1But because this is not a generation that rebels . No , it's not like you're telling your parents to fuck off by saying I'm a communist .
Speaker 2No , actually , that's something that I even have trouble understanding while we're talking about this generational shift I mean we're really off topic now but I'll like the amount of continuity between generations , even though there is a real experiential gap between , like , boomer and Gen X and Younger Millennial and Zoomer kids . Like there's a massive gap between Zoomer kids , like there's a massive technological gap , but there's not really a social gap at all , which to me and people say , oh , yes , there is . I'm like , really do you ? I don't see it . And a lot of the values .
Speaker 2Rebellion seems to be at the level of identity , but not in a way that actually changes how you communally organize yourself or have a community or any of that . And you know that's a very controversial thing to say , but it is like , no , these kids are alienated . They don't even really date much Like , and these are sociological facts that when you present like , when you present like , look , these are the sociological facts that you were presenting of yourselves , like this is not . People aren't assuming this about you . These are the surveys , answers that you give in private and you don't like them . But you also like you wanna overthrow everything and nothing and that's , you know it's . There is a kind of- .
Speaker 1I agree with you that you know in a very broad way , the world is the same Right For every living . Every generation that's alive today has lived the same life that you know we basically are . Another way of putting that is that we are in the world of the new left . Our problem is that the socialist tradition to come back to a little more square leftist conversation that the socialist tradition , however we understand it in terms of Stalinism or a generalized crisis of Marxism , that many good members of Communist parties resisted , et cetera , nevertheless it lay in ruins in the post-war period , with the possible exception of the United States and Britain , that there were many , many , many , many , many , many , many , many , many , many states in Britain , that there was this decimation of socialism in Europe . There was this strange thing , of course , the Soviet Union , but there was a project that especially the American New Left faced , that was inherited from that situation . If we're going to reorganize capitalism from here right , if the UN and the World Bank are going to be in New York and Washington , then we need to reorganize the global socialist movement from here right . That there was a task that , of course , faced the whole world but that , you know , perhaps the American left was crucially placed to address and , to a degree , did right , rose to that occasion in an important sense , in the civil rights movement , which I will always argue , is the core event of the new left globally and is the most inspiring event and is the most destabilizing event for the world state , because it attacked the key pillar of the world state , the Democratic Party , and I think that you , we and this gets to your question of like repetition it has its roots in the 30s . It has its roots in a deeper history , for sure .
Where did that decimation of the left come from ? Well , it came from the failure of the left . But we have to face this . We don't have like the problem of Stalinism exactly , and I think in an important way , stalinism had to be given like a shot in the arm by the new left because it was dying on the vine , like they weren't looking at a world that was full of already organized communists . Really right , those parties were very weak , even though they were mass parties around the world , and I think that the this is why I said you know it's important that at least you and I are in our different ways , you know , with our many differences , you know here to address this history and to highlight this question of repetition , because it is . It does circle back to how do you address the ruin of socialism , if only to move past it , you know , if only to move past it , like I just feel like we haven't moved past it .
Speaker 2I feel like we haven't acknowledged it , like which is , which is the ? In some ways , I feel like we were more honest about this 20 years ago , about the socialist . You know , the 20th century was a disaster for socialism and now there's more of a . Well , we'll find wherever we can find the cracks and like no , that really wasn't a disaster . Look at this , this , this and this , and I'm like well , every time you do that , you're having to .
Speaker 2You know , like you said , grace , necessity , like by by saying well , this had to be the way it was , but fundamentally , structurally , I just want you to realize that's a conservative argument . I could easily make that about any society anywhere ever Like . So what's the significant difference of what you're offering ? And ? And the answer is not a lot . Furthermore , the societies that you're celebrating have all had to make concessions and integrate to the best of their own ability into , you know , the capitalist world system . The user use that kind of phrasology or the capitalist totality , to use the kind of probably older and more accurate for his already , and because of that , you don't really have anything other than what you're projecting onto other struggles and and and whatever you know elsewhere Everything is always elsewhere actually .
Speaker 1I feel like it's a question of like okay , maybe it was all necessary . Like , I feel like , well , that's a task , like let's make the whole 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century necessary by making it a long period of figuring out the project of world socialism . Right , maybe it took all of this , like , maybe it took all of these generations , but only if we're addressing that the manifest task like this gets to the issue , like we're not past socialism . Right , it's necessary because it's we're clearly evading the necessity , right , that that's driving a kind , you know , it's the evasion of that necessity that's driving the forgetting . You know the self-stupification . It's not that young people are dumb or not good enough or whatever . It's that this , the , the evasion of the task , requires you to forget , requires you to distort , requires society to regress .
Speaker 1Right , and that's where I feel like you know , let's make this kind of slow , you know , like , I feel like we , like we're all facing , like the disintegration of capitalism , right , right , and I'm like , god damn it , let's prosecute it . Like you know , if capitalism is , is a crisis-ridden system , if it's got tendencies to break down , then let's fucking prosecute that breakdown . Like , the breakdown of capitalism is a utopian potential . Right , if we could realize the , the politics that that could make that happen , right , that could actually make the disintegration of capitalism lead to something else other than more capitalism . Right , I hear it's like these people talking about political economy and like the big you know the big crisis , and I'm like it's just more capitalism , like that's , you know the . The reason it's a crisis is not because they're this , you know this statistic , or that statistic , this unemployment , you know whatever . It's a crisis because we don't have anything to answer it . Right , yeah .
Speaker 2Well , I think that challenge where where we should leave today . But yes , I think you're correct .
Speaker 1Anyway , I I appreciate you having me on , derek , and I hope that . I hope that I can get some paperbacks of these books out so that listeners who doubtless can't afford them can sometime In the meantime , make sure that you know everyone should make sure your library gets these books right , even if you won't read them you know some some poor 18 year old , might you know ?
Speaker 1and more generally , I would say , you know that I'm trying , you know , I , I think you and having me on the question of your , the question of the self-education of those who were touched by the left of the last two decades , you young people are not , so , not so young people .
Speaker 1Now you have to realize that it's it's on you , Right , it really is , in the sense that you can't rely on Jacobin , or even you know , you , derek , or me or anyone else , right , that it is time for people to actually you know shit or get off the pot in the sense that you know , okay , fine , you don't want to be an intellectual , you know , but don't turn it into like a . I feel like people are turning these things into like an endless conundrum , right , I hope they listen to you , you know , let them listen to you every day . That's great , but let people study , you know , let them bring something to listening to you and and listening to others , listening to me , you know , I think that it's very distressing to imagine that , that the whole library is just going to fall to dust .
Speaker 2Yeah . You know , absolutely , but my challenge is is always like do something with this . Just listening to this as a passive form of entertainment is not useful , even to you . It's you know , the listener .
Speaker 1Right , I hear you struggle with your , with your own listeners in that way .
Speaker 2Yeah , I do , because I see this as a pedagogical kind of like . You know , a little bit like what you guys are doing , but on a smaller scale , as a pedagogical intervention , because I'm not foolish enough to believe that this kind of media could ever be a proper political intervention in and of itself Could help one , if one existed . But I'm like , oh , it does exist Really , really , you know , like , are you going to tell me the squad is really your vision of any of this or anything like that ? No , it doesn't exist yet . So , so you know that's where we're at . But if you don't do anything with it , then you , you help me pass a couple of hours a day , but this is not my primary job , so it doesn't even matter for that purpose .
Speaker 1One of the things that I try to do with sublation I was so disappointed about is trying to get , you know , the , the detritus that is the left to talk to itself and to debate . And you know , maybe that was , maybe maybe that was chimerical . I really don't know . I can never . You know , I'm still puzzled . I don't know what you think , but I can't , I can't determine whether I just attempted that project with the wrong people or if it was doomed .
Speaker 1You know that there's no way for people to you know , because what we're talking about in terms of , like , drawing lessons or trying to crystallize a historical conception of the present which really requires us to , to confront the millennial left , I think it's got to be contentious , right ? I mean , how could it be otherwise ? You know , as in I , I tried to , to to you know , in my own humble way , to , to , to steer a publication project in the direction of controversy and debate . You know which I I feel like Platypus prepared me for in a certain way , because it prepared me for a sense of , like the breadth of the left and all the discrepancy on the left , but I didn't think was like a paraplatopous thing or like a crypto platopous thing . I thought it had its own logic , you know , as a kind of whatever more political direct strategy debate , et cetera , kind of question . That depressed me too , you know , and I in the podcasting space it feels like debate or disagreement is maybe harder to have . I don't know what you think .
Speaker 2It is because people will .
Speaker 2I guess you and Doug are like a notorious yeah , we have debates , but in general it's harder to have because the audience says they want it , but they don't , they don't reward it and a lot of people have to follow their audience Like there's there's a , there is an incentive structure here to give your audience what they want , and by that they usually mean confirmation bias , which is a very and I mean this in the negative sense of the word , because I don't have , like I don't use liberal as a swear word anymore . I don't think that's wise or fair or accurate . I think it that misses the kind of good part of the dialectic within liberalism . But there is a sort of liberal as in like self , as in like sovereign individual self flattery element to the way that political media , all political media , but particularly marginal political media , which all the left is there's right wing counterpoints to it , but all the left is because it has no relationship to a power can be given towards , yeah , can be giving towards self flattery . And if you make your living off that , it's very , very hard to do . And yet , conversely , it's very hard to devote enough time to it to do it well if you don't make your living off of it . And and that is not to excuse it . I mean , I think there's no excuse for the lack of debate and lack of contention and lack of standing up to people , including your own audience , and also there's also no reason not to talk to people who you might disagree with because of some fear of contamination , unless you really just think they're stupid like that . There's nothing to be learned from the , from the discussion and that is seemingly where a lot of people are at right now is after , particularly after Trump the .
Speaker 2The call for ideological consensus because of fascism and quotation marks has has never been more pronounced . And yet you know a lot of these people were who were claiming three years ago that we were going to overthrow borders and and you know police and whatever are are now very silent on that , and also because the , the kind of faith in what they wanted to do was also this very state-centric thing , while also calling for the abolition of just selective parts of of the state , which would never be viable , like it's not possible to maintain parts of this state and not other parts of the state in the way that you want to do it , and I mean you even had politicians in office pretending that it could be , and they knew they were pretending and that that kind of like self-flattery is disastrous towards any movement . I mean , it's it's been disastrous on the on the political right in the past too .
Speaker 2But the left tasks itself with something different than the right is always told people Like , you're not the right . The right's task is is either to go back to the past or maintain the current order . Your task is a taller charge and when you fail they win , even if they don't seem to win Like , because in some ways they're invested in in the status quo . And the thing that I've come to realize is a lot of the left is also some way invested in just parts of the status quo and it thinks it can pick that selectively Right , like and Well , I just tell my , you know , of course , I just tell my students , all the right is is discarded projects of the left .
Speaker 1Yeah , there really isn't such a thing as the rights project . You know , it's very confusing for people , obviously , but you know , I thought that you had to have , like you had to have , writing , you know . You know that , that that the debates had to be informed by like a vital world of publishing and , of course , like periodical publishing and and that , in a sense , one of the things that I was trying to explain to Doug Lane and that I was kind of pushing with Doug is that , like , look , our only success would be to get the most out of the decline in this , in this moment . Right , that , like we can't , you know , like the kind of hits and the kind of viewership and whatever existed in the past , right , those days are gone . You know , I guess I'm thinking about this because I'm about , you know , the first anniversary of starting that crazy project , you know , and that we have to . I worry that , you know . Basically , what I worry is that we aren't making the most of this depressing moment .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1Like to me . I guess it's because of my age , maybe , you know , I I'm not exactly sure that I ever thought that the wave wouldn't crest and receive , receive right . I thought like because I was the child of the 80s and 90s , you know . I thought , well , there's so much like inertia here that , like , the millennial left is not going to overcome it . But the question is whether it could create a context or a kind of , you know , points of leverage handholds to begin to move it .
Speaker 1And I'm I've tried to keep faith with this entire trajectory in terms of what I could do on the left , to , obviously , for me , a lot of that meant platypus , but now I feel like there is like a kind of a final phase . You know , like there there are like tasks now and of course , I think for platypus and I argue this , argue this point within platypus that we have to . You know , there's a task that still exists for us as an organization . It's debatable , but I still there and that's why I'm interested in this question of like writing the history , having the last , you know like what is going to be the last word on this trajectory , like what in ?
Speaker 1And it gets to this Zoomer question , right , who is going to orient this generation that's emerging , that's going to be dealing with all of these aging Gen Xers and millennials running the world , that's going to tell them , like here's a coherent story for understanding how we've gotten here and what the task is
Right . Yeah , and I feel like one of the most disappointing things is to come back to the beginning of like who's writing the history of your generation ? One of the great abdication of the millennials , to me , is not only like the way they conducted themselves , but like the refusal to reflect upon it in the end .
Speaker 2Yeah , no , absolutely . Well , I guess that's a call for reflection and I'm not now . We will wrap up . Thank you so much . Thank you for having me , derek . Let's go all the best . You too .