Hello and welcome to VarmVlog . And today I'm here with a Moog , a who PhD candidate . Where again at Columbia , at Columbia . Yeah , so you're a dirty PMC . Oh , and Cod , yeah , it's so much that category makes any sense , which it doesn't . But let's we're gonna talk today about . We're gonna start off with a kind of it . We're gonna start off actually today a little differently and that , instead of talking general about trends on the left that you and I have kind of done for Off and on for now Fucking Christ , it's literally a decade , dude .
Speaker 2Oh yeah .
Speaker 1Um , grown up with it . Yeah , yeah , you have . It's all it's always . It's always interesting because I always , me young leftist gravitate to me and I'm like , can I talk you out of this ? Like this is not a life than any one should choose from themselves , like what someone tells me . They want to become a teacher , like me , and I'm like , no , don't do that if you my child , that would disown you for saying that , and People do this to you .
Speaker 1Yeah , it really does happen . It's like I want to be a teacher and I'm like , no , do something useful with your life . Yeah , yeah , no , I do think teaching is useful . I just don't know if it's if it is so in current condition and similarly with being a leftist . But let's ask ourselves a couple of of like interesting questions about Lukash , because , okay , I have Soffoned on to on two communist thinkers that when we met 10 years ago I thought were enemies number one . One is George Lukash and the other is Antonio Gramsci , and it's not that I've become a Gramscian or Lukashian , and I do think there's a whole one of the apparatus of Marxism in its philosophical context that is pretty much invented whole cough by Lukash . That leads to places that Lukash does not see . We talked about standpoint epistemology , but I was . I was actually . I re-read the reification essays recently in history , in class consciousness , and I started reading the crisis of reason .
Speaker 2I say destruction of reason destruction of reason .
Speaker 1Essays yeah .
Speaker 2Yeah , excuse me , not the , the anti , the anti-alt right book .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , it's empty a lot of things it's also anti tendencies that weren't even completely visible yet when it was written , which is like Nietzsche and Marxism , which you can tell he's aiming that I don't own a horchimer , really , you know people will try to discount it as purely Stalinist . I I do think there's an effect of the Stalinization of of Communism on that book , but I don't actually think that's all that's going on with it . But we'll get to that . But I was reading . I was reading the , the reification essays , and actually then reading the essay that I hate , which is the one at the one that ends history in class consciousness About Marxist methodology , which makes it entirely circular . First in terms of what you know , how do we know what the , what the science of Marxism is ? It's a methodology . What is the methodology ? Well , it's worth the working class does when it organizes itself as a Soviet , and then later on , what the working class does when the Vanguard Party acts for it , when he revises that thesis to get away from tailism .
Speaker 2I can say something about why that's not a . I don't think that's a that bigger problem , but let me know go ahead like I mean , I don't know .
Speaker 2I guess I want to moderate that slightly . I think I really the point of the theory is it supposed to be like , to repeat the phrase , the intellectual expression of a revolutionary movement ? So it's like the thought really is that , like the theory makes sense when the conditions to apply it are right , and so it's kind of like it's kind of designed to be circular , like in the sense that , like Lukash wouldn't necessarily think it's a problem that it's circular . You would think that either it applies or it doesn't apply , you know . But it's like it doesn't really predict , like it definitely doesn't work the way like People brought up in Anglo-American circles or even outside that would think like scientific theory theories work . It doesn't predict anything straightforwardly . It doesn't , you know , by itself help any any old person , do anything or manipulate the world or whatever . It doesn't even give it a you , doesn't even actually give you a career ground for critique in that essay in principle Career ground for critique in that essay in particular .
Speaker 1That's for sure , for sure .
Speaker 2It's , it's sort of it's assuming in a certain way that you kind of you start from it's kind of yeah , just start from the right kind of working-class perspective and you unfold it onto the , onto the creation of a communist society .
Speaker 1Yeah , but the common miss reading that that gives you is like well , we can understand society from the standpoint of of any oppressed , marginalized and or exploited category , right , because we can understand it through their action , which is actually a misreading of the text . I agree with you , yeah , but it was the most common misreading , both in his critics and then in the , at the end of the new left period in the 70s , of his fans . Yeah , and created the intellectual justification for standpoint epistemology yeah and standpoint epistemology .
Speaker 1You don't want to get into it . The standpoint epistemology , very simply for those of you haven't heard this term is that the standpoint has unique knowledge into the system at which it , which it is enforced , particularly if it is oppressed . Therefore , we have to take , like a lot of intersectional claims like well , you have to acknowledge my true , for whatever is actually based on deducing from like this in a systems theory and going well , my truth must be true , right , because of my standpoint I have , in my experience , is different than yours . So this kind of phenomenological claim is that that Lukash does not make is actually overlaid by people like Sandra Harding down a haraway , etc . But they use Lukash as a justification .
Speaker 2Yeah , that's fine .
Speaker 1And before I let you like kind of deal with the problems with that , because I agree with you , that's not quite really what Lukash was doing with that circular stuff . But also , even from the kind of More Anglo-brained version of this that you're dealing with , there's a confusion of systemic structure versus Quality of being in a system , and For you so like no I , it is kind of true that I don't know the experience of someone In a system of oppression if I'm not being oppressed at that same time are exploited , etc . You can do this with any of those categories , but that doesn't mean you actually have any object , non qualitative understanding of the structure , or when I say qualitative even , probably I didn't even go further than that you don't have any non qualitative , experiential Understanding of the structure . So it might even qualities , their quality system structure that you probably can't just understand from being oppressed by it . Like that's not , that's not a A deduction that you can validly make under any system of logic , be it analytic , higelian , dialectic , whatever , and it's commonly made . It influences the liberal left .
Speaker 1But you know , my original point on this 10 years ago was like hey , let's quit blaming this on liberalism , because this was a tendency in Marxism itself , which was often critiqued as workerism , and that are or tailism , like those are the two forms of it . I no longer use workerism because workerism also means like five different other things in Marxism . So let's talk about that like a little bit before I get to
what . What it's really bothering me when I was reading history and class consciousness because I agree with you at circular , but I Think it's that does so much damage to even what like Weissen schaft means in German , that , because when people go , oh , weissen schaft is not what we mean by science and I go , yeah , it's not , but it's close , like the , the closer , like the closest , um , I Think the closest trick translation of that would be something like logic of our , our Systemic logic of like .
Speaker 2It's somewhere in between math and science .
Speaker 1Yeah , it like Like logos in the classical Greek sense matches up to Weissen schaft if you've removed the theology from it , unless you're Hegel , of course , and in there . So , and While I think , like clearly Lukash understands this , he has a pretty good understanding of German yeah , it does seem that that even that that kind of circular like well , we know the science , revolution , when the revolution happens by what it does , this is a method of Marxism , blah , blah , blah . Yeah , like it's even hard to square Weissen schaft with that Reading of what Lukash is doing there . So it's not to say that I disagree with you , it's just like that to me . That really is close to it , the closest analogous thing . You could say that that's , that's logical . I can't . There's no way to prove or disprove it is circular , but that doesn't mean it's Tautologic , like it's a tautology in a , in a non-definitional sense , like the only way to prove it would be to experience it and there's no way to ensure that you could experience it .
Speaker 2Yeah , um , well , unless I mean , I think , unless you're in that like , part of the point is it's a kind of invitation For you to think that you're in like a special situation . Right , it's like it's a . I mean it's , lukash is powerful because people keep trying to be like , people keep Replicating and we'll talk about the late replicating the circular structure of the theory in like online fights in . You know , even people would never read Lukash , right ? So people will be like you know , well , why am I right about this ? You know , why am I right about Syria , right ? Well , because my , the people I support represent the right perspective . You know and like . Why is that the right perspective ? Well , you know , I can't defend this from outside my view of the world . You , I'm sure you've had arguments like this all the time .
Speaker 1Yeah , well and a lot of times it's really interesting because it actually is formally and like . This one's a . Bring me to a reification essay . But I'm gonna use reification in its in its Anglo meaning here , that it's litter , or maybe even I should actually use a theological term that I often use , hypostatization , and what I mean by that is like you're giving causal agency to a Aggregate abstraction . That's impossible . So , for example , we can't say that an aggregate extraction is causal . In fact , honestly , capital , yeah , like capital , capital , like what happens in capital cannot be caused by capital . Like we can say these are the way , these are the things that the totality of capital Inclocate because of its ruling value structures in most cases , and we think an aggregate , that this is predictable . That's a meaningful statement , but it to to say that , like Capitalism causes X right Is confused .
Speaker 2Now yeah , or it's like shorthand . You're right playing that in more precise terms yeah right now .
Speaker 1We can flip that , we can flip this with anything like cuz . I could actually argue that you can't even say that about a human being , because there's something like , and then all of a sudden like causal , like you know , like if you get really strict with this , you could just argue well , talking about causes just doesn't make sense , yeah , which will blow up everyone's mind . But that actually is where some analytic philosophers in the early 20th century went , because they're like , well , no , we can't say what the the cause is , because , at any level , the , the complications outside of physics which we're always trying to make other things seem like , but that the reason why we wanted to see my physics is because , well , physics , we actually can kind of Sometimes Talk about causation in a clear way .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean , this was my thing about you saying that . Well , the problem with blue Couch's view is that you know you reach this point when you like can't really look outside it and you know to Get anything from it you have to , like you have experience the thing that blue couch wants you to experience . But once you do that you've already kind of like all his conclusions are baked into that starting point . So , like a lot of people I mean , if you're talking about who , I think you're like a bunch of people Thought , thought in analytic philosophy that this was true of pretty much like all types of reasoning when you zoom out , like Zoom out far enough , right .
Speaker 2So I , I think I mean , listen , I don't disagree with you . Luke Hatch's theory is weird and it can't be proved or disproved in like in In any straightforward way , can't even really be criticized and like I , I think , and this means it's like pretty much Unusable and like hard to take it and you shouldn't really take it at face value . The only place I disagree with you is I don't think that means it's like nonsense or whatever .
Speaker 1I mean no thing that .
Speaker 2Yeah , it's like because you see , when you say Tortological , it can give that , it can give that kind of .
Speaker 1I just mean it , I actually mean it strictly now that it's nonsense that like , like , let's talk about three kinds of tautologies , because this , this word is abused in debate . So people will say , oh , with us tautological , and they mean that in a polemic sense , like you're , you're being circular . We have to throw it out . Well , all definitions of tautological . For one thing , like if you try , like I always go , I always got an ancient philosophy for this . But like , the reason why like there ends up being like concepts like the Pernimate forums is like , just answer what a fucking pen is . Yeah , like without , without stuff . Reference Ultimately , I can play the Buddhist logic game in the Militant Pada , which I realized when I was like 12 . I'm like no , I can't actually come up with any essential thing . That's true in all cases . That is not self referential as a definition .
Speaker 1Yeah right , because other things than a pen writes , other things than a pen have ink , other things than a pen , you know , and there's both the like , rigorous Buddhist logic form of this and the Militant Pada , as I talked about in the past , but there's also just diogenes , plex , or chicken , and throws it at you , right ? Well , it's , it's uh , you know many ways to see how this falls apart , right ? Um , so it's
one of these things . I was actually reading a lester McIntyre , one of one of the people you and I used to deal with a lot . Still alive , just don't . Yeah , the motherfuckers . Immortal . He's like almost a hundred years old , yeah .
Speaker 2I was .
Speaker 1I was reading his Marxist work and I'm like , oh , that's young McIntyre . And then I realized , even though this is written in the 60s , he was already middle-aged . His major like Catholic ethical work , like comes , like in his 50s .
Speaker 2Yeah , because it's after that too , which is like the break I mean it's his break happened earlier , but like it's like he doesn't really write that in much Marxist stuff after that .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , here's the thing . Interestingly , oh Recently , he has oh my god .
Speaker 1So I have not read this book in totality , but I was just talking to my friend , jules assailé , and we were talking about Um , his last book , the ethics of the epic . The ethics and something encounters a modernity , and he's writing about clr James , so , so and , and so I'm like do we have this weird Catholic Marxist hybrid stuff coming back ? But I was reading his essay when when this is , when he's still a Marxist , when he was writing him for EP Thompson , where he actually Says like look , the two , like two things that you see employed in Academia today , vincenstinianism and Freudianism are basically used for their opposites , and what vic-constitianism is trying to do is just like go , look , it's okay that we can't define a pen , because common language is fine .
Speaker 1Yeah like we get as long as there's a game where we can communicate the fact that we can't delineate a precise definition or even like a hard delineation line , that's fine . This is actually kind of important when we get to Lukash , because it's like well , what's the issue with you , lukash's use of visonshaft or science ? And it's like well , because none of us actually recognize that game .
Speaker 2That's that , that's right . So , so that's a useful distinction , because the problem can't just be like Circularity or whatever , because , as you as you , I think showed , like this is everyone's problem , if you like , look back far enough . Right , the problem is actually that , in a sense , the circle isn't wide enough to like speak to us , given our language , games and you know whatever .
Speaker 1Right , yeah , right , exactly . So . So you can't really . You can't really critique Lukash from an analytics standpoint . You can kind of kid critique him and the way Martin Jay does Then Lukash in Tartality for like Sneaking in fictin and other kind and like Neo Kantian concepts . Maybe I'm not actually sure he does that the more I've read both Jay and Lukash , but it seems like that's at least one viable explanation For some of what's going on in there or at least that's what Lukash looks like to Crypto liberals , or ? Right to Martin Jay right .
Speaker 2It's like anything that isn't atomized individuals is like oh , you're bringing spirit of , you know , because they'll say that to a bunch of people like , yeah , yeah , it's actually interesting .
Speaker 1I was reading John Levy Martin , who is like a , a Pragmatist who has some relationship to analytic Marxism , but he does this . But then , like , when I really think about this Methodological individualism , like , on one hand , I see what you're doing and I also also want to avoid ascribing causal power to Aggregate extractions , like because I don't think that makes any sense , right ? On the other hand , some of what you're doing is arbitrary , right , like Okay , why are we speaking in terms of individuals only in these things , but we can't , we can't speak in terms of , like , aggregate probable causes , because somebody could and the individual case , you know not do this . Well , yeah , but that's not . That doesn't disprove the like the , the aggregate trend , does it like so ?
Speaker 2I don't know . I think the upshot here is like I don't know , sure , the problem really is with like aggregates , but with ontology in . When we talk about like , the problem arises whether we're talking about social beings or individual beings . It's like it's much easier to talk about relations and structures and causal patterns than like things or , you know , objects .
Speaker 1Right . Well , here's the thing that relations are easier to talk about . Causal patterns are actually very hard to talk about , right , right , right like . For me to say that this causes this is a different thing for me to say in Aggregate . When this happens , this thing also happens , and this is why I get really mad at the Althusserian use of overdetermined , because we actually do need to talk about over determination . A lot Like we can't conclude that the singular thing X is actually causing why and this is endemic to Liberalism , is also endemic to , like , heterodox economics , where we like well , this is causing this . I'm like we don't know that actually .
Speaker 2I'm Marxism , by the way . Yeah , chiba , like if you heard of Chiba's recent book . The came out a year ago . The class matrix .
Speaker 1Oh , my fucking God , like if this is where analytic Marxist ends up .
Speaker 2Drown me in a sink , yeah no , I kind of it says absolutely nothing about book . I mean , it's like he has this whole thing where he like , shows you that , like , materialism is true , right , and he , you know he's like , how does he show you that materialism is true ? Well , assume that there are certain class roles that people in a society have to occupy Because they have to work in order to eat . No , you can't just assume that's a historical fact , you know . If you , yes , fine , assume market dependence of a Brennerite kind I mean , that's where he's getting this , I imagine , right , so you're getting right , right , okay , fine . If you assume that , like , the conditions for market dependence hold , then fine , class , class , class positions determine society , but that that isn't something that like dropped down from the logos , that's like a historical fact right .
Speaker 1Well , this is another thing , like Brenner and political Marxism . Recently I realized this by going through Eugenie Morozov's Cretin yeah , where he but he actually points out that , like all these assumptions actually do two things . They assume that Accumulation ends at a certain points . That may be a Marx , that may not be , we're not gonna argue about that but they assume it . And to that that , while it was false in the initial instantiation because he admits , like Ellen Mac and was it missed ? Yeah , but there was a political project to build capital . It didn't just happen from nowhere , it didn't organically develop from commodity trade . But after that happens , it's assumed that the illusion of the separation of the political from the social , from the economic is real . Yeah , right , you can't just assume that , and particularly when you talk about something like what is the commodity and what is the rent . Now I think rent a capitalism is a real thing and it's a shift . However , why do rent a firms develop ?
Speaker 1invest so much in research and development Doesn't make any sense unless you also realize , honey yeah yeah , that under English common law that you can sell Patents and Create rents and sell them as commodities . And once you realize that , you realize , oh , this whole distinction that is so crucial to orderly capital , it's not legally true in the capitalist core and it's in and kind of hasn't been for a long time , right like , and it's not new that it hasn't been . And you have to pull .
Speaker 2You have to pull fake moves and say well , these are like secondary , fictitious markets that aren't really , you know .
Speaker 1I'm wild , like I do sort of believe in stuff like fictitious capital . What is fictitious capital ? Well , that's money that disappears the moment where something changes and it was never Valorizable , meaning you couldn't . If you tried to spend it all it would not have . We could not have sustained the spending , right , right , that's fictitious capital , right , but you can't . The funny thing about fictitious capital is you can't know what capital is fictitious or not till it disappears . Right , like what people go with it all that wealth go in the after a cove , it where all those you know Tech giants lost it and I'm like wait , just , it didn't go anywhere .
Speaker 2Well , it wasn't anywhere in the first right .
Speaker 1There was no , there was no , they couldn't spend it into what value it was . It was speculative assets and and Since it was unspendable and then went away Through the revaluation , it was never real . But that does lead you . That's not how we normally think of reality . We don't normally think of reality is something that we can only know After . Something isn't real . Right , like , like , and that's that , even like as a philosophical , ontological , epistemological conception , all those things that's just starts breaking people's brains . Like , like , what do you mean that we can all ? Yet we can only know if capitalist , fictitious when it disappears ? Right , like , because until then you think you can spend it and as long as , and as long as and until you try and fail , or it's arts are , your revaluation makes it disappear . It's real .
Speaker 2Yeah , the same . The same kind of thing happens with the labor theory value Right . I think that's why people are so happy to think about it in this like in the dumb way of like no , there's actually this like Energon substance that , like the worker puts into it and like finance , doesn't create any like value juice , and so that's why it's bad , right , right and it's parasitic .
Speaker 1On , on on on industrial capital . This is a Hudson view right now . I'm always like right like this is a view by Michael Hudson , for this you know yeah . This has also become common again . This was common in the late 19th century too . It was also common with the American founding fathers . This is not a new idea .
Speaker 2It's not even particularly much .
Speaker 1It's not Marxist at all , actually right , because my thing is like from the Marxist standpoint , the argument would be that the profit rates , because of heavy competition and increasing difficulty of getting new counter rents into the system , etc . It's harder and harder to make traditional productive commodities profitable , and my proof of that is commodities that you can't patent , they are not profitable like , so there's no way to Do this rent commodity thing right that we're talking about . So then , then what does that mean ? Well , we don't . I like I say this and I'm like I'm not entirely sure that I know what it means , for one thing , but one thing I can say does look fairly obvious Is that it leads to lower and lower investment in these fields , but that's , and that leads to more and more financialization , but that's not a parasite coming from outside of industrial capital , right , it's not even a political product imposition , a political product imposed in industrial capital as in , like the , the Harvey neoliberalism theory , and With someone that we were talking about , lukash .
Speaker 1I Actually find this interesting because , other than the reification of money , I Don't really see how Lukash speaks to this at all .
Speaker 2Yeah , like what does he ? I mean , this is a big problem with reification . Just what does he think is reified ? Right , like the whole , the whole stick is like . Oh well , you know , reification , is this like structural contradiction where , in the dumbest way to explain it , right , it's like something that doesn't look like a thing , or res Becomes depicted as a thing by this , you know , but like what's the original thing , right , is it ? You know ? Is it like the human essence or species being , or whatever the fuck Lukash himself is like never really clear about ?
Speaker 1this and like . No , in fact , it is when 1967 , when he criticizes himself right .
Speaker 1He says that he confuses Objectification , externalization and alienation right right into one , into one concept of reification right um , and and on one hand , sure , like , because when I , when I one of the things I got from reading the Reification Essay and I was like I'm like Lukash , the Frankfurt school , are actually more consistent when you , when they , if they take this Reification stuff to a logical conclusion like Reification and Totality , like there's no way out . If you take this completely seriously , yeah , because all it's not just like the relations are reified in the currency , through through , like we , you know the classic , the classic materialist Tagalian reading , like which is different from the Hegel Hegel reading , by the way , people even know that . But it's like , okay , we have a social relationship of power . We have to hide it . We hide it through an idea . We express the idea through a fetish , you know , and money's the most obvious one .
Speaker 1But any kind of fetish , the crown , et cetera , like that , that object gets imbued with both , hiding the relationship of domination , right or exploitation in the case of capital . It hides the relationship that you're depending on someone else for something and someone else is using your labor to get something . But it's also a thing and we increasingly invest this thing with its own power . It doesn't matter if it's gold , paper or whatever , like that's part of the point Mark's like and capital , it seems it has to be gold because it's relatively stable and that there's historical reason for it . But even there he's talking about the money form versus money , for a reason and people you know , like MM Tears Likoh , he believes in commodity money . I mean , he does sometimes , but , like MM Tears , commodity money did exist sometimes too . It wasn't always state money . So , and in fact you know , our earliest evidence of money barter at all is between religious organizations like temple taxes trading with each other in electrum .
Speaker 2Like and you can call them states , but then we're just abusing the word .
Speaker 1Yeah , they're not states , like they are compulsory systems , but they're not states Right .
Speaker 2Just to say the point you're making is really important is like , yeah , absolutely , what Lukacs would say is like , what's being hidden is like the cooperative , like egalitarian human relations or whatever , but like , as he knows very well , that's just an abstraction . Calling it like that , right , like you know that we depend on each other , right ? Like putting it that way , is just an abstraction . And the question for him is like , well , what makes it not an abstraction ? The communist movement , it's like the real representative of the hidden relation in the actual world , right , but then we get few history , right .
Speaker 1Right . So this is the problem . This is the problem with Lukacs . Is that what he thinks he's answering with that last essay after his reification essay is the history in class consciousness ? He's actually problematizing both assumptions , right ? What do you mean by that ? Well , like you're right , q , history doesn't happen what you predicted . But also and he gets more , you know , he actually does address this later in other , in later writings , but people don't read those . But also , like , I think there's a fundamental contradiction of what he's saying about reification and then this real movement which happens because of praxis and we haven't talked about the praxis category , but it's really important for him .
When communists throw out praxis all the time , they're not getting that from Marx or even Ingalls , they are getting it from parties , usually Marxist-Leninist parties , who pulled it from Lukacs , right , like that distinction , yes , goes all the way back to the praxis theory . What's the other philosophy ?
Speaker 2break down an Aristotle Poetry one . What is it ? The ?
Speaker 1poesis praxis . Yeah , it's poesis , which is making theory area , which is reflection , as opposed to philosophy , which is wisdom whatever , and praxia , which is like , reflected in form , action . So communists drop poesis out altogether . They don't talk about that , interestingly enough .
Speaker 2I think that's funny , but they pull about that's what Markuzzi does , but that's another thing . Yeah .
Speaker 1Yeah , but we're not talking about Markuzzi right now . But Lukacs pulled back in praxis , and particularly political praxis , to kind of bridge the gap . But it doesn't make sense If I take Lukacs's reification essays at their word . Praxis is reified by capital too Right , which is why I think that's why Lukacs's fans get all up in hotel grand abyss and eventually kind of maybe , maybe not abandoned Marxism the who you ask , but they at least make Marxism like you do have a dorno basically accusing Marx of being a positivist by the end of his life , like so there you go and you know something like Martin Jay , again liberal , has his own problems but says that like well , this is the problem of totality .
Speaker 1The thing is I actually do like talking about capitalism as a totality and then talking about systems within capitalism as systems , because it's clearer . Because if I talk about like capitalism as a system but we have these subsystems , it makes it seem like it's interchangeable . So I do like that clarity . But if you mix that reification and you see , because he thinks reification's in the arts , and my friend Daniel Tutt , for example , is like really , I'm like we have to bring back socialist realism and whatnot and I'm like , yeah , I don't think you can . Actually I don't think you can do with reification what Lukas tries to do and apply it to all areas of life as a kind of communist thinking , deductibly as a way to raise class consciousness , particularly in light of his prior essay and of the fact that even he thinks he got his categories confused in the reification essay and bundled too many of them together .
Speaker 2Yes , I think you bring up that's really important about Lukas . It isn't just that he thinks he kind of like banks everything on the communist movement or whatever it's that . He has a very his theory , has a very specific concept of what the communist movement is which is kind of very philosophically related . Right , it's like it's not just the collection of people who happen to join the communist party or whatever .
Speaker 2No , no , no it is the real movement that manages to solve the problem of reification by kind of containing within themselves the seed of like a self-conscious , rational society . Right , that's like . That's the idea and like the thought is , this isn't something that people learn , it's kind of something that's like there in the movement from the get go like , you know , in the blood or something like that . I mean that's not fair , but you know so it's not even as straightforward as like he was optimistic about this thing that misfires . It's like no , no , no , like the theory is circular . He , you know , you can't even understand what he means by the real movement without describing it in terms of his own theory .
Speaker 1Yeah , I think you're absolutely correct , and that is that's a problem for him , but it's also a problem for us , because we have adopted all like , for example , I have to remind people that praxis does not just mean action . This is what Adorno would call actionism , and I actually get the frustration with actionism because people just do and shit to do it . That leads to irrationalism , emotive moralism and look , I always have to caveat this when I talk about picking up Alistair McIntyre's categories of emotivism . Mcintyre isn't saying that , like ethics is reasonable and removed from emotion . He's saying that , like a lot of attempts to make these things function by rules like this actually lead to them not having any parameters at all , and you're just going off of your gut feelings and not being honest about it .
Speaker 1Like , and in the case here , with praxis , it's a different problem , because Lukash is not trying to come up with a singular rule , but you're right that his theory of reification should be predictive , but his theory of what Marx's methodology and revolution is isn't predictive , can't be predictive and cannot be criticized if not for being predictive , which is why Popper would be like well , this is a problem with Marxism . It's totally circular , blah , blah , blah , blah , blah . It's actually real fun , though , like I was telling you earlier , I'm reading early McIntyre , where he actually takes direct aim at Karl Popper using Wittgenstein like well , marxism actually has an idea of what human nature could be and is modified by , and you don't . And because you don't , you have this nebulous open society where everything's an individual , and I think it's a good take down of Popper , but it doesn't speak to the problems of Lukash at all .
Speaker 2Yeah , I think this is the navigate Popper , like , listen , if you're trying to create a theory of the world in a way which is intended to change it and which brings you the actor , the agent or your political movement into the theory , you're gonna brush up against the kind of secularity Lukash is dealing with . Like . The only way you don't do that is if you just try to predict stuff which leads to this .
Speaker 1I think another tendency in Marxism that you and I both hate is the tendency to pretend that since Marx is aiming to combine the normative and the descriptive , that like and basically commit the naturalistic frivolcy like . But he's just . You know he's making this argument and there's been attempts to detangle that analytic Marxism does that Like . Well , no , it's really a moral argument . So what Lukash does is actually even harder to deal with from this standpoint because it's not just like let me rephrase that what Lukash does makes , it justifies a move that doesn't actually follow Lukash or Slavik at all . But you can use the categories to do Well , I don't have a moral critique of capitalism . I have a descriptive of the client-reader profits , of fall , which will trigger revolution because it will force consciousness on the people , et cetera , which you go . And there's an interesting move there which I wanna actually say Lukash doesn't do in his defense . There's a move that says well , we can predict how people are gonna respond to immiseration and then we can use that to assert control .
Speaker 1The problem is with history here is no , you can't predict that . It hasn't historically borne out . It didn't even historically borne out in Marxist's lifetime and he dealt with that like it's in his letters , which means that you have a whole problem here . But what you're trying to do is get out of this like early Marx , lukashian , like materialist , hegelian problem of like . Well , you're trying to say , since you don't wanna argue it from moral grounds because of the sphere of emotivism , you're trying to argue it from objective grounds .
Speaker 1What Lukash will say to you and again , I don't think he's completely wrong here is there's no way to do that either . There is no way to remove the value judgment from the categories in which you are parsing society , and because of that , and there's no way to remove your for lack of a better term standpoint here . And because of that , the whole question of whether or not something is normative or descriptive is actually not . It's impossible . Impossible not because it's completely meaningless , but because any category itself already contains a judgment . And when you add to that Lukash's theory of reification , those judgments are set upon you by the structure of your political , economic life . Yeah , like .
Speaker 2In other words , you might say Lukash is trying to combine the theory of history , like practical politics , and ethics in one go .
Speaker 1Yeah , and trying to say like this is what proletarian reason would look like and it would be necessarily communist Right right , and a bunch of people who rag on him , like analytical Marxist might , aren't trying to do that .
Speaker 2They basically grant that you can't do that . And then they rag on Lukash for not being predictive . Right , but he's not trying to do social science like that thing you said about not being able to predict . I mean , he says things , he makes social scientific claims , and there are things he says about society , whatever , but like the thing you said about the rate of profit not being able to predict it , that deterministic view is what history and class consciousness is reacting against Right .
Speaker 1this is what he's calling economism .
Speaker 2Yeah , exactly it's like that debate revolutionists like Kautsky says revolution will happen necessarily . I mean he doesn't really say that , but he's read us saying this like revolution will happen necessarily because of deterministic tendencies . Then Bernstein comes up and says this isn't actually happening . There's like new middle class or whatever , whatever , right . And then Lukash . And then people get worried wait , is Marxism falsified ? And that's when Lukash comes in , right , he says like this debate is happening under a false pretense , like people are assuming that Marxism is like reducible to a particular series of predictive claims . No , it's actually this like research program . That's both ethics , politics and social science at the same time .
Speaker 1Right , and what Lukash would say about the analytics if he had seen them and this is what I often say about them is that the analytical Marxist often import things to scientifically fix Marxism that are just as out of their ass is what they're removing ? So we'll replace labor theory about value with marginalism . We'll replace class consciousness , which had been . That's not another thing we're gonna have to come to . That's not a category , it is something Marx says . Right , but that's not .
Speaker 1If you read Marx and try to categorize what he means by class consciousness , he does not have a systemic theory of class consciousness . Right , Class consciousness , yes , it's when the class acts for itself , not just exist in itself , and that is the way Marx thinks about it . But , like post-Lukash , there's a lot of people who'd be like well , you know , we're not talking about the sociological category of the working class , we're talking about the class working for itself , and by that we mean , basically , communism is what we want it to be , and anytime the working class doesn't do it , they're not really being the working class , they have some other form of consciousness , et cetera . That's an out that Lukash creates . I don't think he intends to create that . The more I've read him , I don't think he can win in with that kind of bad faith reading .
Speaker 2Yeah , but it is the proletarian perspective is not one out of many perspectives . It's like special it's supposed to be . I mean he waffles on this and you're right , he leaves room for this , that ideally . He seems to want to say that we can verify that the proletarian perspective is the right one by doing science . I mean , he doesn't quite you can't actually say that . But he's definitely has that kind of rationalist thing where it's like no , no , no , yes , you can't ever get out of the proletarian perspective . But also you're not just pulling stuff out of your emotions . You're like there is some bringing like the circle there is a circle , but it's a big circle , right , it's like this is the way I put it . Yeah , that .
But and you've studied Lukash more than me , but we both studied him a lot at this point and I find this fascinating , because I do think this creates a problem . It does lead for this kind of bad faith , circularity . It's like well , basically it's false consciousness when people aren't doing what I want them to do , even if they're in the right class category , because that's just the class in itself , and it's real consciousness when it's becoming communism . But I have but , as we've already said , his theory of revolution actually brackets out having any preformative idea of what that means . Intentionally , yeah , on purpose , like he's actually and this is him actually following a Hegelian Marxist reading . Like Marx , you know , we can't do the cook traps of the future . In many ways Lukash takes that more seriously than Marx does . But that means that , like people can just assert at a hawk like , well , when , when the class does x thing , that I like it is moving closer to this , because we we know when it does x thing , it is acting for itself and that doesn't even have to come for the class , it can come from the party and it could be any party , and it's just like you think this is a game . Once you've done that to Lukash that that that really is just a confirmation bias mechanism and that's not what I think he was trying to do .
Speaker 1I do think that's the result of how his thoughts used and I think that's part of why he himself you know , not just because you know Stalin Stalinized Marx and Lenin's Communist Party's where it's back . That's also part of it . But I do think that's part of what he starts seeing his work being used to do too and he's trying to figure out a way out of that , which is why he starts talking about reason so much , right , and this gets us into the second phase of his career . But I do find that kind of interesting because you know , you and I , when we talked about this many years ago , I said I think Kowski is the father of political Marxism as a More than Ingalls , as although Kowski has there's like a apostolic succession through Ingalls , whatever you want to make your crystal metaphor for .
Speaker 1But the Kowski-Bernstein debate set up what quote Orthodox Marxism is politically and that Lukash sets up later what Orthodox Marxism is Philosophically and ideologically and the way in which Marxist talk . However , I'm actually pretty convinced now , through your work and through my own , that Volger-Lucasianism is not actually what Lukash was trying to do , but in some ways we still , which is why I've softened on him . But on some ways we still have to hold them accountable for it , because he has and he introduced these kinds of forms that are so easily given to Abuse , agreed .
Speaker 2I mean , it's like one way of showing the difference between vulgar Lukasianism and Lukash , or even the early look at we can talk the later guy . I don't think ends up it's not really we can talk about him . I don't know how productive it is . I think it ends up just correcting a bunch of his earlier stuff and like becoming slightly Vega . But like the vulgar Lukasianism , just to take your example , it's like when the guy says the person , sorry says like oh , you know , the proletariat is doing this thing that I like and thus they are the subject object of history . You're only entitled to make that move if your consciousness represents the subject object of history . All right , because unless , unless you're doing that , then you're just expressing your point of view like the whole . You know , the whole point of the proletarian point of view is not that it's just like a bunch of things that are morally good or whatever , it's that like there are . This , it's like a quote .
Speaker 1Some invariant program that like is always true at all times , which is another we're reading , but yeah , it's like it's got to be .
Speaker 2It's got to be a real force , that's like capable of transforming the world , and not just Capable of transforming the world , capable of transforming it so as to bring about , like quote , a self-conscious , rational society and I say self-conscious is a weird Hegel thing right of like , a Society which doesn't hide its , its the mutual interdependent character from itself . Like this is the . I mean it's . Why is that good , is the ? That should be the natural question .
Speaker 1But like there's a complication like this is how post Hegel people talk that like you know well , one of the things I think we do have to deal with those is even an early Lucras . So if you look at like his 1912 philosophy or art book , he does kind of muck up the categories . I mean at first , you know , he later Luccas is like trying to get like like , for example , george Simmel's work is an influence on Luke and early Luccas but it's influenced by Nietzsche and like Luccas Just got a purchase that later and he like that's many essays and the destruction of reason are about that , about you know , about getting the Nietzschean irrationalism . But one thing he does do and I don't think he drops , is he continually takes up neo-cantian terminology and tries to make it more and more radical over time and that is Neo-cantianism is a huge influence on like German historical thought and it shows up everywhere , from like the German historical schools to Friedrich Knapp Friedrich Knapp and the founder of Charitlism , to Werner Sombart , marxist and German historical school term , nazi Analyzing philosophy , the development of early sociology , max vapor , etc .
Speaker 1It's all over all of these things . If you're a German rationalist , for the most part with some really notable and quite weird exceptions you are a neo-cantian right and and You're either in it or you're reacting to it right .
Speaker 1And so Luccas , kind of kid , kind of the way that like , interestingly , like logical positivism slash logical what is positivism , morph into logical positive and become something else later on . But whatever the Vienna school is doing , which interestingly was also Marxist but had no- yeah , I don't know they would be mark .
Speaker 2They would call this all Marxist .
Speaker 1Right , it's like a new year after it , for sure .
Speaker 2Nor have cool .
Speaker 1Oh , interesting , okay , I was you actually should read about the Vienna school . Two of the himple and your F Were Marxist . Carnap was also a Marxist , but he considered it completely separate from his project right .
Speaker 2None of this shows up in the philosophy . In the philosophy .
Speaker 1Absolutely there's no . This is a weird thing and this is why a lot of people , when they discover revvn and all the logical positive is for Marxist they're , they're like a lot of people my friend as re well , my former friend , as re xb , would often point to this is like well , this is really the origins of analytic Marxism , like , except that they didn't actually Dude . There's also a professor in in England I forget his name who is a logical positivism , stan and also a communist , but but , and I think I mean I think that's defensible , but you actually do have to modulate the two ways of thinking . You can't hold on to those categories and Try to deal with the Segelian stuff . I think the only other person who really tries is Lakotos , and I don't want to get into that today and I think Lakotos is the most successful , but he's also the most still Hegelian , like .
Speaker 2Ultimately . I mean , it sounds like you have to choose where you can't have both of you know if you're going to be fully consistent . You can't have both right so .
Speaker 1So I think this is really really interesting . Well , what you'd have to say is , like your , your commitment to communism is purely ethical . Yes , it is not . It is not because the norms into descriptions emerge together and Because , from the logical positivist standpoint now , as a side note , logical positivism often gets like will positivism was disproven , blah , blah , blah . But my logical positivist should get more credit , because they're actually the people who disgroup themselves . They're the people who did the proofs against their own forms of verificationism , fossificationism , etc .
Speaker 2They disprove that , not an outsider and also scientific movements and just generally movements are not the sort of things that get disproved . This is like no this is like the weird Hegelian thing of like everything is like a movement of thought , that like is all talking about the same thing and gets refuted like right .
Speaker 1So so we mentioned that the history and class consciousness book is part of where this Stampoint stuff comes from right , but it's also from Lukash's as I just said , increasingly radicalized neocantianism right .
Speaker 1Because he talks about , you know , the imminent utopia of experience , which is expressed best by Socialist realism as a unity of form and material , actually , because it both Is a constitutive standpoint that shows a subject object to itself is actually objectively better , blah , blah , blah , blah , right , like that's his , that's his aesthetic , and and you know . Thus , you know , socialist art becomes a concrete totality , which , which enables something to through self-recognition , etc .
Speaker 2And it's these categories come into play to explain , like concepts , like reification , and subject object of history , like . So what's wrong with capitalism ? Well , it causes a gap between form and matter . You know what's wrong with capitalism ? It uses it , it Creates it , mechanically dominates the organic character of life . All this language is all over that first essay , like he takes a binary Opposite in , like 19th century German thought and uses it as a description of capitalism right , just kept on doing it .
Speaker 1Now , I Think that's interesting . I also . It's also like Not something that I totally think is Wrong entirely . I I do think his belief that , like the totality is expressed in certain kinds of arts , like early bourgeois totality is expressed in the novel and , like you know , early antique Mentality is expressed in the epic poem , the subject idealist illusion is dissolved through Don Quixote or Tristan shanty or you know , those kinds of Proto modern , nay , proto postmodern .
Speaker 1In many ways , novels , which , which is always like , yeah , that can , like the conventions of modernism , are actually somewhat specific guys , that wasn't how it been wrote forever and he talks about , he talks about this and it's like well , one of the things about capitalism is like Is that Modernity in and of itself hides totality , it fractures the appearance of totality , but actually it was also more totalizing , ironically , then prior forms . But we can't go back to prior forms because those are specific material instances and and so we the only way is forward , but the way we're going to do it is to go back to the prior forms Forward . But the way forward in this still ends up in his insistence on stuff like you know , socialist realism , etc . Yeah , that he's really hung up from and the trouble with socialist realism .
Speaker 2There is like what count ? His reality Principle was also completely inside his like dialectical theory of the world . Right , it's like what counts is because . So what do people think socialist realism is ? Well , just paint , exploitation or whatever . But it's like no , oh , any new cartoon description of socialist realism is also points back to other things in his right .
Speaker 1So so does that . There's also the fact that if you read history in class consciousness , he's rather vague , and whether or not he thinks like Luxembourg and Luxemburg area in proletarian spontaneity our party vanguard is , is actually the way that we see the subject , object of history . He's . He is absolutely , I think , inconsistent on that , agreed , and I think he's actually it gets this on for political reasons , but you know , that's here or there .
I Think , though , you know we talked about this problem with , with , with standpoint theory , that that emerges out of Lukash and Reification , but as read mostly through Marxist , feminist works , and then the Marxist part of the feminists is dropped by the 80s and it becomes something , and then it gets incorporated ad hoc , I might add , it is not essential to intersectionality , intersectionality at all , like there is nothing in Margaret Kimberley that indicates standpoint theory initially , there's nothing and privilege theory that necessarily indicates it either , and , however , it is highly convivial to both once you move every other part of it .
Speaker 1So , like privilege focuses on systemic problems but your own unique experience of it , so it can individualize and even somewhat moralize the , the privilege , etc . And that's from your standpoint , and of course , all other standpoints are supposedly invisible to you , etc . That is an insanely simplistic reduction of what Lukash was aiming at right , and I'll also say that's even a simplistic reduction of what Harding and Donahar way we're aiming at . It's just that as that theory has developed , there's kind of a have your cake and eat it too , on whether or not you mean the strong form or the weak form of that or the objective form or the subject , object form of it , as in Lukash , are just like Quality , a theory , the way we were talking about earlier .
Speaker 2Right . I mean the point about the quality of reading is that it ignores how circular Lukash's theory is . Like the quality of people . Assume that you can take the subjective bit out and like base all the theory on that Right right , the quality I don't know . This is the product . This is both what's good about Lukash and the problem with him that , like no even this product , you can only understand what the Proletarian standpoint is by looking at the other parts of Lukash's theory Reification , the capitalist structure that his conception of class conflict is , understanding of culture . Like the standpoint comes with the structural analysis . They're like linked together . You know you can't get the structural analysis without the standpoint , but you can't get the standpoint without the structural analysis either , you know .
Speaker 1Yeah , so this leads to history , class consciousness kind of weird position , both in the intellectual history of like Western Marxism and Western radicalism . And I put those in quotation marks because I think that category by Perry Anderson is not particularly helpful .
Speaker 2Oh it's not a thing . I mentioned it randomly in this email I sent Paul Matic Jr . He was like a long three-power drops of like you academic .
Speaker 1Like my friend Stephen Ham will , also hates the concept of rest or Marxism , is like that's just kind of arbitrarily drawing like Marxism outside of the . It's interesting because initially those people used it as a compliment , like , oh , you're not the degenerate Soviet , but now it's actually used as an insult oh , you're the degenerate Westerners who don't understand real Marxism . I'm like , okay , well , what is real Marxism ? What the CP , the PRC , is doing and also what Stalin did in 1932 , except that I'm not gonna deal with the fact that those are not even remotely the same thing and don't even have remotely the same theoretical justification . And in fact Stalin killed the guy which Dean , I Think , misunderstood but used for a justification of his super NEP which we are still going through in China .
Speaker 1Because dung is one of the people who actually explicitly picks up Bucca and ism and socialism in one country . So you could have socials when Chinese characteristics etc , removing the other parts of Bucca and out , which is like Not his theory of imperialism exactly , but like his theory of , like the radicalization of the party , the need to eventually get rid of the standing army , but nonetheless . So you have people who hate the car and but also defend Dung ism because it , which is an expression of the NEP , which is an expression of , like the former Bucca knight version of Marxist Leninism . It makes no sense Based on eastern Marxism .
Speaker 2Whenever these people say you know they're real core of Marxism , these what you mean ?
Speaker 1like a bunch of books which take a set of political tactics in one context and like try to build a world philosophy out right and Then later people in Latin America trying to take those books and and take the fact that even Mao said this was only for China . This was Mao Zedong thought , and then make them as trans historical rules for revolution .
Speaker 2Yeah . Yeah , now is that was actually about gentrification in Brooklyn , oh right .
Speaker 1It's just , it's just like it's fucking hilarious to me because you , I go , I actually I studied , I recently studied the development of , like the development of Mao Zedong thought into Marxist , leninism , maoism , into Marxist internationalism , malism , into Marxist third-worldism , because Marxist Leninism , maoism , trust , think Mao Zedong thought , but throws out three worlds theory because it doesn't want to permanently justify the Sinos Thoviets , but MIM picks it back . Mim picks it back up three worlds theory but doesn't pick it up in its original context . Adds on this labor aristocracy theory that sees it that kind of uses like a Weird mixture of world systems theory and whatever to say stuff like well , you know the real proletarian activities in developing world . I Want to ask you a month Are the proletarians are organizing as proletarians in India ? I ?
Speaker 2Was recently there , actually , but I wouldn't . I'm not an India expert . Nationality is not a standpoint . I don't claim my standpoint as far , no , and this is a real problem .
Speaker 1I just , I just , I just ask you , not because you're an India expert and not because you're a standpoint , but you do come from that area of the world that can speak from , from just offhand observation , and my , my senses well listen , the problem with India was always , unlike people , marxists have been talking about this from God knows when , like we , didn't industrialize in the right kind of way , right , so we don't have a big proletariat .
Speaker 2We have , like this weird kind of high-tech service sector that we export stuff to and we have , like you know , agricultural , this like large agricultural sector that's tied up with all kinds of feudal things right , and like Now the and there's always been a gap where there's , like the industrial proletariat . We unlike . China . We weren't able , we didn't like because of the way our state grew up , we weren't able to get that absolutely .
Speaker 1But here's the question that I have , the people who say this well , well , you're talking about whether there's more proletarian activism , but there's less proletarians in the developing world than the past , right , in fact . In fact , what we see in most of these areas , it didn't industrialize at a particular time because people who've industrialized later , aka Bangladesh , have not been able to benefit from this either . Right , what do we see ? What we see ? The shrinking of agricultural labor and the shrinking of proletarian labor At the same time . That's a real statistical fact . Yes , but China actually does have a . Well , if no , yes , no , okay , so right now , there is high unemployment amongst you from China . It's up about 20% from China's own records .
Speaker 1This is not me like using Western propaganda . That's unheard of . Also , china does have a business cycle . I'm not gonna get into that that when people are like China , socialist , socialist countries don't have business cycles . Nonetheless , all that aside , I Don't like . I'm I'm actually a mild China defenseist . I think we , like there are actual socialists in the government there , so , and I think they're sincere . It doesn't matter if if they're sincere or not , but I do think they're sincere . So you know , and I also think of the powers that act . In the capitalist world , china's probably one of the most Responsible , etc . And and really have bring on a ton of people out of poverty . I hate to say it , though the United States for a while also brought a ton of people out of poverty . So you know , I know that's gonna be unpopular , but it's also an objective fact .
Speaker 2Yeah , the and all the Empire stuff like is true , but it's all with the all kinds of collaboration for domestic elites that people don't like to talk about .
Speaker 1Right , exactly . So I mean , you know my mouse will talk about them when they bring in comp or door stuff . But then I point out that like , yeah , you can do that and that's actually explanatory for some things , but I hate to tell you , comper door has nothing to do in Marxism . That category , actually , is very specific to Portuguese rule , right . So yeah , to bring all this up , though to bring this in Back to Lukash , where we're complaining about this , because Lukash gets picked up , all these tendencies that we're talking about . They pick up Lukash ad hoc , right , but at the time there's a problem who likes Lukash ? People that the people who often , like you , will caution in Crominology , hate . Carl Kors , ernst Block , you know , marxist humanist ? No , no , hyphen , because Marx is humanist hyphen . Specific Marxist humanist ? No , hyphen is not .
Speaker 1Marxist humanists who don't have an initiative right or aren't part of an in , aren't part of an international Marxist hyphen humanist movement have no relationship to the root of Dona Skye , a general . So what happens to Lukash ? Well , I think people pick up that , like his , he's inconsistent on the party and he's definitely skeptical of bureaucracy . So like they come after him a little bit , in Germany and Hungary party intellectuals really kind of call the book idealist . Gregory Zinovia condemns and and , like in his opening address to the third into the common turn in 1924 , basically accuses of tailism and Also kind of accuses it of idealism and ultra leftism .
Speaker 2That's really funny . The idealist activation is really funny because , like in retrospect , the big thing about new catches like , oh , the whole , the way people read it is like all this philosophy is just like an apologia for like whatever the party wants , right , it's like raising what the but it's like no , no , no , he was read in the exact opposite way that this is some crazy Follower .
Speaker 1Yeah , this is like . Oh , this is a way to turn to give the . The ultra is an actual methodology right .
Speaker 1Which I find it funny when , when my friend Daniel says I was like using Lukash to fight with the , the quote ultra is it ? I'm like , yeah , but like Lukash , his entire life is trying to fit himself from being an ultra . I do think the the accusation that's made that he was just a Stalinist is Not true . Like I don't , I don't . I don't think he's completely removed from Marx's liminism and he , he , I think his entire wife , he just gets a vaguer and vaguer , so you can't call him one way or the other , and he has to because he's in the case like political Situation right .
Speaker 1I mean , he's kind of an impossible political situation because he's read in the West and he's still read in the , the , the , the , the Soviet block too , so like he's got somehow appealed to both . And you know , hungary is a communist state .
Speaker 2And he puts his mix in 56 and like the thing is like , whenever he has like the littlest chance to break from Stalinism , he takes it with open eyes Right .
Speaker 1Although his . That does kind of get us to his battle against irrationalism and books like the Young Hegel and the Ontology of Social being and I don't want to get super into that because you know that stuff is , as you said , vaguer but also makes like arguments about Hegel that I think he just kind of made up , like like like Hegel was super duper influenced by Stuart and Adam Smith and like we have . We do know that Hegel was aware about a Smith . It kind of shows up in like the philosophy of right , but in so much that Hegel was doing that . That's what Marx is critiquing and he doesn't seem to have been particularly advanced in his understanding of Adam Smith , for example , at all . And that comes up , I think , is that in the , in the Ontology of Social being or the Young Hegel , I can't remember , but he assisted it twice , I think .
Speaker 2I mean I wouldn't be surprised if he says it both times , but I think it's probably in the Young Hegel
. The Ontology of Social being is like I find it . I mean it's readable , but it's like one of the more unreadable books of Lukacs's version .
Speaker 1Well , it also seems to be like in like , even though he doesn't like want to sign on to the Frankfurt School at all , he's also got some of the same concerns as the Frankfurt School , because the destruction of reason is , like , clearly aimed at like Nietzsche and Heidegger , and while Adorno likes Nietzsche and doesn't like Lukacs' dismissal of shelling Kierkegaard and Nietzsche he totally agrees with with Lukacs on Heidegger and and some people actually will point that out One of the things , that one of the things .
Speaker 1However , that you know , a whole lot of people who are normally Lukacs fans really hate the destruction of reason book , and that's where he I mean he says some stupid stuff and like that Wittgenstein is just a subjectivist and that helped facilitate the rise of fascism . That's , that's a , that's a real argument he makes , and I'm going to bring it up to Daniel Thud eventually because I think that's ridiculous . I am more convinced , however , over time that some of his accusations against Nietzsche and you know the aristocratic , epistemological position , is actually true , Like and I don't just think that's out of intellectual laziness , I think he's actually slightly onto something there , Right .
Speaker 2Where else he wants to tell right is like he wants to line up make a good guy's , bad guy's distinction in intellectual history between , like the people who like the German idea of reason as , like you know , logos , real realizing itself in the world , the world having like this underlying systematic order like that we can understand .
Speaker 1Basically Hegel good , all non-Hegelians , including analytics , bad . Bertrand Russell's secrets what else does he say ? He says Bertrand Russell's secretly religious . He , he def . He does defend the Soviet Union and Eston in that book , but like I will say this , it's really weekly . Yeah , like that's not a strong . He doesn't do it strongly and , as you say , as soon as he gets a chance to break he does .
Speaker 2And he thinks the point is that , like he wants to line up this commitment to Hegelian reason with good politics . So basically , everyone who has good politics was Hegelian to some extent and everyone who has bad politics was not Hegelian .
Speaker 1I mean Lukasz , is where we get this idea of a Hegelian Marxism even more than like Marxist humanism , et cetera .
Speaker 2And more than the Frankfurt School even .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , it's just unclear that all the Frankfurt schools are Marxist Right , and I think that Marcusa is a Marxist . Adorno is probably a Marxist . I don't know that . I think Heide Horkheimer really is by the end of his life . He is not . No , I know , I know that pisses off my former colleagues in the Platypus affiliated society , but I I am pretty sure that I feel like no , he's not a Marxist at that point . And I'm not sure Adorno is either , because he's really vague about whether or not he thinks Marx is a positivist or not . Yeah , and Marcusa . I think Marcusa is probably the smartest heir of Lukasz , but he's also kind of a Heidegarian , which is fucking weird . Yeah .
Speaker 2And I don't know how much he stays in that all his life , but like definitely it's like yeah .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , I mean what look ? I mean , one of the interesting things about Marcusa is , you do see this tendency , the Marcusa everyone likes . The one dimensional man is very much like a Marxian reading of Heidegarian you know being , and I've surprised how many people hate Lukasz but how many people love that book . That's really weird to me , because if you want to accuse something of being idealist , well , I think one dimensional man is pretty close . Yeah .
Speaker 2Who's read Marcusa is more like someone I mean , funnily enough closer to someone like lash , which is like you know , someone who's a really in for the sea right males like American sociology , like my Marcusa . I mean , this is part of the reason people think he's like lame right . It's like , ah , the fucking , the guy who like up sticks to San Diego while the donors doing the real theoretical work .
Speaker 1Right . Um , well , it's also interesting because a lot of people who like to pull out , like the Frankfurt School , work for the CIA stuff off of very thin ground , often don't mention that , like they're often attacking Adorno and Horkheimer , mike , but the ones that you tend to actually defend were the ones that actually work for the OSS . Um , and I mean they did it for like under I do point this out like they did it for understandable reasons and when literally the Soviet Union and the US were allies . So , like this is not to defend working for the OSS . I don't think they should have . Well , I don't know if I think they should have done it , but like it is compromising Absolutely . Um , but it's not as crazy as it seems post 1965 , when you're thinking about it in 1945 .
Speaker 2Like he's not killing Lumumba or whatever . Like he's , he's . He's like writing about Nazism .
Speaker 1Yeah he was working on Nazi stuff . All the three Frankfurt School members and the other two , who are they ? It's Markuza and two others , but it's not Horkheimer and Adorno that we ever have any evidence that they were on the . Uh , despite what Gabriel Rock here implies , we don't have strong evidence that they were ever on the OSS payroll .
Speaker 2Is it like Neumann and Pollock ? Yes , and I don't know about .
Speaker 1Pollock , it's Neumann , it's . It's Neumann for sure . Yeah , I don't think Pollock is either . Um , it's like that would be a nice state .
Speaker 2Capitalism is a CIA .
Speaker 1Um , so I guess this this brings us to some interesting
things . You work with Axel Hanif . He's my second least favorite surviving post-Frankfort school person . Um , my first least favorite is Habermas . Oh , still alive , so's uh Kissinger , but anyway .
Speaker 2Um . Are you drawing the parallel ?
Speaker 1No , I'm not , actually I don't think Habermas is that bad , um , but , uh , and my favorite is Raymond Gois , also still alive . So , uh , I really like Raymond Gois a lot . Um , axel Hanif is harder for me to figure out , because it's just harder for me to figure out where he sits on the on the whole spectrum of Marxism and , uh , the two books I've tried to read by him are boring . Yeah , and I'm not going to ask you to like talk crap about your thesis advisor . So our dissertation advisor , so um former dissertation , that's a former , that's a whole .
Speaker 2yeah , and I think we should . I'll leave that we're not going to talk about that .
Speaker 1Um traffic change . Traffic change Absolutely .
Speaker 2Um , I was going to ask you that intellectually I can , I can say I mean I think in some ways he's not really in this discussion that we're talking about , in a sense that like he's a bit more like roles , he's like in the same conversation with like and I mean I wouldn't say with like analytical Marxists , but with different kinds of analytical people , that like he's right .
Speaker 1Yeah , yeah .
Speaker 2He's . He seems to have good . He's not doing this like social science , ethics , politics , all in one thing he's absolutely not .
Speaker 1No , when I read him I felt like he kind of like Habermas , like okay , we're talking about community capitalism , we're talking about like operative fairness and justice and words that I don't care about .
Speaker 2Um , like , uh it's kind of it makes it , it makes his project like a lot of people think it's like the way I used to read it when I was like quite young . Um was like , well , we younger than I am now anyway . It was like , oh , uh , he's here . Oh , you know , this is just like shilling for the Democratic party or the SPD or that was like . But like in a way , reading him and this , the reading him and this behavior and Habermas and this like less Luccian way , makes it makes the politics of those of both of them like less less bad . Because you're , when you're reading , like people say this for how much all the time , right , like they say , oh , you know , it's like shilling for the UN or shilling for , you know , the EU , but like that's implying he's more like Lucci than he is , like only in Lucci can you draw these like rigid mechanical connections from , like the social theory to the politics , like some people are just like not that ambitious .
Speaker 1Right , yeah , I mean like we . Just because a whole lot of people who got trained on Foucault work for the UN does not mean that was Foucault's point .
Speaker 2Yeah , I can't .
Speaker 1Actually , I've actually never understood that tendency . Frankly , all the people who like read Foucault and become like institutionalists and I'm like , how , like , what on earth in Foucault made you think that like it's like it's like you read his description of Bentham and thought it was a good idea . But I mean .
Speaker 2Marx this is . But , by the way , this is something we get from Lukash this tendency to draw like direct lines from extremely abstract theory to like political .
Speaker 1Particularly late , lukash and I . I do think that's a bad tendency , like , for example , like literally trying to bring Wittgenstein for fascism is insane .
Speaker 2Like sorry , I just can't believe that was . I mean , hey , he's not like a , he's not like a liberal . I mean like shit , but like that's .
Speaker 1Wittgenstein was actually kind of we have evidence towards that he was actually increasingly Marxified . Now it's former Marxism , not a former Marxism , I like it seems to have been mostly chaffer anism , for that's . That's the work of the Italian economist Chaffer , who was kind of a Marxist Keynesian hybrid , with some physiocrats , stuff there and in there and very weird , but what's ? It's always , I mean yeah , it's weird .
Speaker 1It's weirdly contested amongst also like Marxist . If you're in a very particular school of Marxism that is obsessed with it , which is anyone around Andrew Kline and everyone else like barely notices that that even existed . But that Wittgenstein was . If he was a socialist and we have some indication he had socialist inclinations , it was through Chaffer so and we know his big socialist inclinations as part of why he hated Carpapa , one of many reasons why he hated Carpapa .
Speaker 2So you can't . This is the thing . It's like only you can only make these moves for someone like Lukacs . You're like really consciously is trying to like put these things together . You know , some people just have work that's not supposed to have immediate political implications .
Speaker 1Yeah , I mean , I think the , the , I think I want to defend elements like when he's on to something and the destruction of reason he's really on to it , like the kind of irrationalism of the like neo aristocratic movement . I don't think like , ironically , someone like Isaiah Berlin , who Lukacs might also call crypto fascist , actually believes the same thing Like that that . You know that irrationalism of values is deliberately irrational to assert power as its own goal and not even along utilitarian are are , like you know , instrumental reason lines , right . So the other thing that makes Lukacs different from , like the Frankfurt School is there's no vapor in him . But there's no , there's none of this later German historical school stuff , except for a little bit of neo-cantianism , which we mentioned , but that mostly shows up in the aesthetic writings , whereas there's a lot of that in categories .
Speaker 1But like the difference between types of reason , that's vapor , that's Werner Sombart , that's German historical school , that's not Marxism , but that's all up in Adorno and Horkheimer . Now , how you know Adorno and Horkheimer are more Marxist is that they are Hegelians , right , like hyper Hegelian even , and they're materialist Hegelians to some degree right , and they take they take Lukacs as reification stuff very seriously , like negative dialectic , seems to in some ways to me to be partly a response to developing this idea of reification out to such a degree that , like Lukacs isn't wrong , they're kind of on hotel grand abyss because there's no way out for their like . Like the totality is total . Like you know , everyone's a fascist now .
Speaker 2Like yeah , I mean in some ways they like they , they , they kind of agree with Lukacs that if , like , one way of seeing it is like the both Lukacs and the late Adorno kind of agree that like , if communism is going to happen , it's going to have this form of this like self conscious subject , object of history , and then you just disagree about whether that assumption is true or not .
Speaker 1Right . So I guess you know one of the mixed legacies of Lukacs is a lot of people hate him for the wrong reasons . I love that people complain about him being a Stalinist and then also people complain about him still to this day , like , well , he's a humanist and we need like real science , like altissarianism , and I'm like , oh , so you mean like barring a bunch of vocabulary from psychoanalysts and particle physics later , but not in the early part and structural linguistics and just calling it science , like , is that what you mean ? Like , because I don't . You know , one of the things I've pointed out , one of my , one of the better thinkers I know on the left is my friend Niko Villarreal , but he's an altissarian and every time he brings up structural and state apparatus is I'm like you could actually make this easier without those categories , like you don't need those categories to make the arguments you're making .
Speaker 2But you see , Derek , we need fuzzy categories , because that's what distinguishes science from ideology .
Speaker 1Vocabulary .
Speaker 2Yeah , they literally think this right . It's like that's the whole point of Marxism he invented new concepts , or whatever . I think that's literally the definition of science .
Speaker 1Like yeah , like we have more scientific concepts which are just well , that is kind of Trotsky's definition .
Speaker 2It was not right .
Speaker 1I mean like when , when Trotsky talks about dialectics versus like analytic philosophy I was reading I'm like you don't even understand what either of these things are Trotsky like , like even from the Marxist perspective , you don't like , like if I was going to hold you accountable , it's like you read anti-doring and made it even dumber and more totalizing , which is hard to do .
Speaker 1And to defend Lukas , some of that , some of this early stuff where he's like doing this German and Tithi stuff , like that's stuff that's done , and Ingles too . And unless you can't totally remove it , you know accusations that Marx does that because I think trying to cut to like oh well , marx is really Jesus but Ingles is really Paul and Marxism invented by Ingles . I don't think that's true . Yeah , but Marx doesn't have the same conceptions as Ingles , like , or let me rephrase that Marx probably does have the same concessions as Eagles , but he's not as ambitious to try to apply it to everything . He's not trying to apply it to anything but like the development of ideas and political economy , and I guess he is trying to come up with a theory of history , right ? Yeah ?
Speaker 2Not even the theory of history . I mean the theory of history maybe eventually , but often he's just like doing good case studies , right . So you know it's like here is the Civil War in France , here is , you know , the Brumet .
Speaker 1Here is like yeah , this is where I think there's critics of Marx who are leftists who I think have some points Like if you read what he writes in capital and read the theoretical text , then you read what he writes in , like his case , that he thinks they often aren't the same , like , like , and so one of my things with the Althusserians is like oh , you think there's an epistemological break and all of a sudden Marx got scientific and I think Marx is a thinker who was throwing stuff against the wall and we're drawing conclusions from texts he obviously didn't publish in his lifetime .
Speaker 1A lot of the time Like , like , and there's so much of Marx we have to deduce from letters , from whatever , because we don't have his official version of anything .
Speaker 1And we have Ingalls's cleaned up , you know , notes on stuff that I think , and I think we have evidence from people like Fred Mosley's work and a lot of magnitude people that Ingalls didn't do that much doctoring at all , like there is some doctoring but there's not much . Yeah , that Ingalls was fairly faithful but that we still just don't really know , like this whole cohesito stuff on whether Marx thinks infinite progress is possible , like infinite technical progress is possible . I read that information in the clips that we have , and I actually I think maybe Cito's over concluding in one way , but like there is some evidence that , like Marx , understands this stuff from soil research and is arguing with these other people , but also doesn't want to ever agree with Malthus on any of these things , so then does these other things but sometimes may actually partially agree . It's really kind of strange , yeah , and also like I'm not sure the person to go to on this stuff is Marx .
Speaker 2You know what I mean .
Speaker 1No , although Marx really was , it's interesting because Marx really was trying to tie in . He was trying to figure out stuff about , like productivity and agriculture , oh okay , and it was affecting sections of the capital . And there you know and this is not the epistemological break that , like someone like Altecerre points out but there doesn't be a very different view of history and non-western development in late Marx and early Marx , like early and middle Marx , like talks about how , like the Irish have it worse than black chattel slaves and stuff like Like it's like , it's like so wrong , but it also comes from like no knowledge of that . Whereas , like during the civil war , he takes very different positions , during late in life , the one time he actually leaves Europe , which he doesn't go very far , he takes even more different positions . There's these hybrid positions that he tries to take .
Speaker 2This is Marx's Angela Nagel phase .
Speaker 1Yeah , don't say that , cause Angela Nagel thinks she has a Marx phase with her readings of Marx's letters and late in life where he talks about like the competition between the Irish and the British , but like he actually argues , he actually argues against what she uses in an argue for explicitly .
Speaker 2This is interesting . Has anyone written on this ? Like Marx and the Irish through his life .
Speaker 1Like yeah , well , okay , here's the thing . I don't think anyone's written on it , but there used to be collections put out by progress press when the Soviet Union was around , that would collect like all the writings of Marx in one country .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1So there was one on Ireland , one on Britain , there was one on Marx in the Americas and that I think that's been redone .
We can stake Spencer Leonard of the Platinum of the Affiliated Society for one for two things . He's got two books that I actually think are good , which he collects all of Marx's writings on , but Mara Marx's journalism and the ones that mentioned Bonaparteism and all the ones that mentioned imperialism . And actually he does make a case that a fairly strong case , that like when Marx says imperialism he's not meaning anything like what linen and and Bacchan and stuff mean by it at all , like , and he means different things . But I think from reading the things he means different things by it by different times . But he often means like imperialism is like the form of government , of like of a Bonaparteist leader . But you know there's a crypto implication in Spencer Leonard's writing . I think that maybe , like early Marxist stance on colonialism was correct .
Speaker 2So Ah , this is the general plot , the bourgeois revolution kind of position .
Speaker 1Yeah , there is only one revolution , the revolution , and it's the bourgeois one , and communism will be the fulfillment of the bourgeois revolution . Right , like that's the plot .
Speaker 2Read Crucially everything that the bourgeois revolution did was good .
Speaker 1Except when it's regressive , and then it's bad . Yeah , Although , why it's regressive ? I haven't like . Here's the thing . I've actually been one over that . Maybe regression is a useful way to think about this stuff in some degree .
Speaker 2Not to be a year or something it is teleological .
Speaker 1But I'm okay with saying like , let's talk about what the aims of X movement were a hundred years ago and then look at what they are now and see how they've changed and like , from the standpoint of X , what have they done ? They've regressed . So I'm not holding people to a trans-historical teleological development standard . I'm saying my reading of this , which I don't think is theirs , okay . It's like we can say like okay , communists in 1920 believe this , this is what you believe now .
Speaker 2Right .
Speaker 1Regression From these initial standpoints . What have you achieved and what do you believe ? Oh , you've achieved less and you've changed your theory to justify that achievement . That's , for me , regressive , because there was a stated goal . Do I think it's regressive from some ur notion of progress ? No , I do not , like that doesn't make any sense to me . But I do think , like people who argue with there's no progress . I mean , if you mean like generic moral progress towards some nebulous better world than no .
Speaker 2No .
Speaker 1Right , but if you mean like developments on prior stuff where there were clear goals or whatever research conditions , depending on what we're doing , yeah , like yes , there is progress , obviously yeah .
Speaker 1It's domain specific though , but political movements have aims and domains , so we can judge them off that right Now , I don't have like a general regression theory for capitalism , because I don't know that capitalism has regressed from its goal of whatever whether or not , if you think , it's value creation or abstract domination , depending on which version you're particularly attracted to . It hasn't regressed from either one of them .
Speaker 2So I mean it has a . This is the thing . I'm not even sure we know what the aim is . Like people it has a dynamic , like we know what pushes it forward , but I don't know if that means we know what it , like quote , wants to do .
Speaker 1I'm going to quote Well , this is another thing that even gets more complicated when you like , do stuff like . The one thing I've noticed that platypus people do now that I didn't hear as much when I was actually in it is they try to distinguish between the bourgeois culture and bourgeois revolution and capitalism . They don't see them as the same thing , Right ?
Speaker 2Which it's supposed to be like contentious right , Whether the bourgeois , like people supposed to disagree about whether the bourgeois revolution like no , I don't think they would think that , though . Oh , they are reading of that .
Speaker 1Like they probably would argue that like the proletariat can only be , like they're not postonites in this strict sense either . Like the proletariat could is the only people who can bring about the bourgeois on subject position by universalizing it . But to do that we have to complete the bourgeois revolution , whatever that means . And that's where things get vague and weird and like Invader arc elect Trump all that kind of stuff .
Speaker 1Yeah , like , elect Trump or don't care about Trump , and the formal statements is don't care , but I have definitely seen platypus members so , and I know and actually not Catron or Spencer Leonard or those people you know take pro Trump stances , but not in the like mega communist , vulgar way . The whole thing , though . One of the things that I have realized I guess maybe this is our jump and up point to talk about what we normally talk about is like let's critique the left , but I've actually , though , moved away from just critiquing the left , because a lot of people who critique the left drive themselves insane by it .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1Like , because , one , what are they critiquing it from ? A lot of them don't have a positive program or anything , and they're not even critiquing it from this kind of Lukashian standpoint . So it's well , what are you critiquing it ? Well , it's PMC or it's liberal or whatever , and I'm like , but you're not defining those terms in a way that is coherent .
Speaker 2Yeah , like , and even what we do , which I think is valuable , is often just like it's done , or it's irrational , it's incoherent , which ? Is fine , I mean I think it's valuable , but like it's also , we don't have like other ?
Speaker 1No , it's not like I don't think an individual can come up with a viable political program .
Speaker 2Yeah , it's not . Yeah , yeah , I don't think Even two individuals .
Speaker 1I don't think that is a process that works that way . Even in the cases of actually existing party where , like people actually like have platforms and whatnot , those platforms run into reality real fast and find out what's viable and what's not , even within their own political sector , and a lot of it's not , yeah , like . So good luck imposing an ideal platform on anything like this . Yeah , and while I am kind of a degree of programism and that I think like political programs are good , I don't think they can emerge meaningfully in a way that is responsive to the class from like sectarians drawing it up and abstract .
Speaker 2Agreed yeah .
Speaker 1Like yeah , yeah , matt's policy we have with Donald . Like I was talking to Donald when I I don't know if I should say he's mentioned . I'm gonna park this in the guy head . Yeah , because I've had a similar bait with him .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah , yeah , Whereas he was his big thing in DSA . Right , it's like we have to come up with a program and we have to unite people around it , whatever , whatever . And like obviously the people arguing with him were like ah , you know , it's not realistic , Like you can't actually go organize nurses or organize tenant unions , and then like imagining Donald lecturing about the program .
Speaker 1Yeah , and part of his program is to overthrow the US Constitution , by the way , so there you go , it's like and then .
Speaker 2And then he said and he was right about this , it's like well , if you , well , then if you don't want to do that , what's your alternative ? It just sounds like a bunch of liberal stuff . And he's not wrong , he's not wrong about that .
Speaker 1Yeah , he's absolutely right . My pushback on him is like but why is your program valid ? Yeah , like , because it's based off of and I know what programs he bases . It's off of Interesting the one he doesn't . So if you go through Marx's community group , it's like the Irford program , the 1907 SBA program , I think , the 1912 Bolshevik program and then the 1918 SBA program . Notice that my favorite program , the Bolshevik program I actually like the 1918 program and the one that actually started the communist movement , is not in there .
Speaker 2Why ? That's just surprising . Why do you think ?
Speaker 1Because the 21 conditions attached to that program which are , if you read , the ABCs of Communism , the 21 conditions actually make the unity that someone might near once impossible , so we skip that one . Also , there's parts of it that are too , that they would find to be almost over leftist , which is funny because it's a official program of like but like . There's stuff you can't . It's hard to their .
Speaker 1Socialist republicanism is not really compatible with the 1980 program , I would argue yeah , so , so it's not there . Yeah , but I'm always like , well , but we have a completely different class formation . Even if you think those are valid , that's not produced by the class . Now , which is actually interesting , a critique that Marx and Ingalls made of anarchist and utopian socialists they were . They were imposing their visions on the larger group , kind of ex-Nilo Like that . Now people point out that Marx and Ingalls are kind of inconsistent on that themselves . But like , that's the problem . So I'm always like , well , you should be building ways for us to build a program and then the party should come from that . But you should know , you know what people actually think would lead to communism once they're convinced that the orientation is a good one in the first place , yeah , and that is so . I view communism as like an orientation and the programs got emerged from the people who would make it . That would arguably be the working class . The merger thesis would imply like that .
Speaker 1The other critique that's often leveled at Marxist Union people is their talks about economism I think are fair and you know . But I'm also like yeah , but you seem to think you can politically create the workers movement . And they do . And I'm platypus . People have done this too Well . But we need the working class for itself , not the working class in itself , and that doesn't even have to come from the working class in itself . And I'm like that doesn't make sense , yeah , like that ladder of assumption that somehow you know what consciousness would be . That doesn't make sense and that's not what Lukash and those people meant either , which they would never say that they're using Lukashian categories , but they are Like , because these are not categories from Marx and Ingalls , they're categories from , like , lukash and Lenin .
Speaker 2I mean the problem here is that like no one knows where class , like real class struggle in class formation is happening , like it's kind of this like weird whack-a-mole game where it's like , well , you try to , you try to win elections , no class struggle there , and so you fuck up . You try to organize in the workplace , that's just economism . You get stuck in trade union bureaucracies . You fuck up . You try to , you know , you try to do the end notes thing of like you know organizing and they don't even believe in the class formation anymore .
Speaker 1They think that's failed or was never real , right ?
Speaker 2I mean like 2010 and notes , I guess , right , yeah , you know it's like , oh , but wait , class for me , class for me , is it really there either ? So it's like this is the point about a program Like you have to , you have to like give it to somebody and like somehow can never find a place where like I mean , don't give it , Like it has to have some , like real address Not to merely be sectarian assertions .
Speaker 1It has to come out of an actual political group that has a mass membership and mass participation .
Speaker 2Yeah , and you know , it's like this is the thing about all that anti-politics stuff . It's like it's kind of they observe correctly that like the explicit political sphere is like not where you have mass membership , political action , you're not likely to get that in elections or wherever Right .
Speaker 1It's like the point is you can't oppose to that this thing called the social right , like you know , it's like what's just somehow completely separate , or like civil society is completely separate from the state , and I'm like no , it's not and it's never been like I mean there's like that's just a bunch of you know workplaces where you can make real gains , but specific gains over time , and then you get caught in the trade union or our media stuff like , oh , we need to do the civil society because that's the , the marketplace of ideas .
Speaker 1This is literally believed , like . I mean , honestly , doug Lane believes it . I'll just say who and I think that's like that's , I'm like that . To me that's like that's garden variety liberalism and it's particularly naive , like because liberal strategy , the liberal road to communism .
Speaker 1Yeah , but it's not just a liberal strategy , because , because , like the communists would probably say , if they're being consistent with this critique , that the illusion of the separation of the civil and the state , and both from the economic , was always an illusion , that none of these things are actually separated , yeah , that , even when you try to say , well , well , this is civil society is part of , I guess , the superstructure , but it's a part of the superstructure from you can , you can do something about , as opposed to the state , right , and then you're like but no , it's not , because both of both , both the state through law and civil society through participation , set up the relations of production which are part of the base of production . Meaning your whole fucking thing is breaking down . Like , like , these divisions don't actually work by the categories which you gave them , right , and that's a big deal , but people cannot deal with it . So , like , when people like , well , you know , the state hates civil society and leftist hate civil society , I'm like what's civil society Like ? What do you mean is ?
Speaker 2culture . That's really what they mean . Like this is yeah .
Speaker 1But leftist want to control culture . I'm like if you wanted to make it more meaningful , critique of left liberalism , you would have to say that it is developed in habit of using regulation and thus rules for everything and things that can imply that for two speech . But that's not really a division of the civil and the state . In fact , if you look at how that actually works , it emerges from the civil sphere , affects the state sphere and the state fear reimposes it on the civil sphere . But they're not . It's like those fears aren't actually all that separate .
Speaker 2Yeah , like I mean , it doesn't mean like , this is the thing . It's like it's good to be worried about the left being a subculture or whatever .
Speaker 1Like obviously that's a problem if you're one of your alienated people believe weirder and where they're shit because they're more removed from actual communal life and or actual power .
Speaker 2But that doesn't mean you theorized like by making that observation people think they've theorized this communal life and power . No you still don't know what that is . You've you've observed the problem , but that doesn't mean you've , like , properly understood where that problem comes .
Speaker 1Yeah , for example , people explaining to me on one hand , this is a proof of something Marxist that a lot of people bring it up don't deal with . On the other hand , that also breaks down a whole lot of categories that Marxist weren't insist upon . So I'll give you an example .
When did secularization really hit the United States ? Around 2007 . Churches were better organizing almost every part of American social life in a real dual power way until about 2007 , 2008 . Why did that stop ? Well , they had a lot less money , but there were . But can you say that's why we secularized ? No , because there were other trends prior to that that were also happening , like it's a hyper complex phenomenon . So there was the reaction against religion of 9 11 . There is the existence of new atheism , which I think I think is epiphenomenal not phenomenal , but it's something you have to take into the feedback loop .
Speaker 1You had a more multi confessional polity where everybody was breaking away from their home confessions because it's removed from any organic context . You have the political overstatement of one particular form of Christianity , even at the expense of others , but one that doesn't even seem to be able to generate its own intellectuals , aka evangelical . Who are the fucking evangelical intellectuals now ? They don't seem to be any . Most of the people who lead , like the Christian conservative , like thinking and legal movement , are Catholics , like . So you see all these trends right . So I can't say that any one of those cause secularization . I can observe secularization , but I don't have a theory as to cause . But I can also point out that , like , what really broke it was money , money , like what makes all those trends come to the fore . But did it cause it ? No , there have been financial crisis is all like for the last 150 years . They didn't cause secularization .
Speaker 1So my point about this is , like everybody right now has a tendency to deal with complex phenomena with , like , positing a simple solution , a reductivist solution , one that , when you actually look at it , almost definitionally , can't be true . Right , that's not unique to leftist , but what is unique to leftist is to insist that they can kind of deal with this through was increasingly belief systems and identities that have no relationship to power or community . Yeah , and it's actually kind of hostile to it , like what did the DSA do when it started becoming mass ? Did it try to instantiate itself in some kind of real social world ? For a lot of people that just know , it became a party branch for a Pacific ring of the progressive part of the Democratic Party in New York and California and couldn't even unify in a way to do that in a formal sense yeah , but in an informal sense it did that .
Speaker 1It created all these organizers . These are professional organizers who are also removed from the workplace and often hated by actual union members , but that's who the DSA represents , and that became called the rank and file strategy , which in and of itself is insane . Like how is creating a whole bunch of union bureaucrats a wiken file strategy just because they are nominally socialist ? I mean , it's like a match through the institutions thing .
Speaker 1Right , it's just different institutions , right , yeah . And it's led to this appearance of people calling for , like oh , we've seen the rebirth of organized labor . No , you haven't . Like , actually not at all . What we've seen is organized labor decline . Like , interestingly , there was a real uptick in organized labor from 2010 to 2013 . I mean , from the period from the Sanders movement forward . That actually stops . Right , that's objective . Like so we had new unions . There does seem to be real labor militancy out there , but it's not translating into anything .
Speaker 2You mean in terms of like a politically powerful union movement , like it can't win anything .
Speaker 1It's not even growing . So we had a ton of new unions approved last year , right , but the actual percentage of the workforce that was unionized declined from 2020 to 2022 . Declined even though you had double the number of people asking for unions . And then what do you see ? Well , you started seeing people like Eric Blanc talking about , like you know , the Red State rebellion and the formation of new unions , then plurising the Biden national labor relations . That was like the teachers right yeah .
Speaker 1But as , like the same field that was that these teacher unions were fighting on , are now just liquidating and they're not talking about it . And then they start focusing on the national labor relations board . Right , what does it have to do with Lukash ? Not a lot , but what can we say ? And I'll kind of bronze the thesis . We can't really do much about this because people are using these kinds of intellectual abstracts , formations to claim the opposite of what is true . A lot of the case , and it's actually kind of like when we were talking about , with fictitious capital , something that's hard to even say until after it's already happened .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean the thing that Lukash wanted to do . The unity of theory and practice is now actively impossible . It's and it's being made harder by every social . If society has a T loss , it feels like it's to put whatever obstacles it can towards making the unity , of making it harder and harder for people within it to understand it and change it intentionally .
Speaker 1Right , the kind of standard Marxist answer is alienation , which I think is fair enough , except the alienation is just naming it . Yeah , I think the alienation is real . In fact , you know part of my whole push back on , like on David Graver's bullshit job thesis , I'm like while those jobs were bullshit until they went away and then all of a sudden realized they were kind of important . But people are alienated from their work . The fact that they feel like it's not important is a sign of their alienated labor . It is not a sign of their job actually not being important . Yeah , even if it's not super productive in the strict sense . And like Graver doesn't like that , like because he doesn't want , because Graver is that war of Marxist categories . Graver has a has a long historical tradition to just try to make categories he doesn't like disappear , but he does have a kind of , he does have a wee bit of a of a counterpoint . Well then , what's causing the alienation ?
Speaker 2Why is it getting worse ?
Speaker 1Yeah , like and keep saying capital , but like yeah , that's just renaming it like and that points fair . I just would like to point out , however , that , like , the alienation does seem to describe what is going on better , but we also don't know the cause . But it's not because the jobs are bullshit .
Speaker 1Yeah , whatever people . You know the Marxist answer , you know the old Marxist answers people are alienated from the product of their work . They literally don't see what their work is for and it doesn't give them fulfillment . Yeah , but that's the part of Marxism that the most Marxists want to get rid of .
Speaker 2Yeah , exactly .
Speaker 1Which is like I'm like , but that's one of the few things that explains something .
Speaker 2No , absolutely , and it's the thing Graver likes , even though he won't say it Right ? Yeah , I mean , it's a . It might have said it but anyway , it's like . I think the thing about this kind of graver stuff is that , like I , there is something right about the idea that , like in society nowadays , power is exercised through like these weird impersonal bureaucracies and like yeah , through utopia of rules book is actually much better than his bullshit jobs book . Yeah , I mean , this is , this is weird . Impersonal bureaucracies , social media communication , the tech tech media .
Speaker 1Hidden mediation is now in a lot more places . Is just money ? Yeah , exactly .
Speaker 2I mean this is the thing . Doug Lane is not completely wrong that media and communication is like structurally interesting . I mean I don't . But the idea that it's like a lever that you could push the way we used to think you could . It's like this is not the right way to think about it , but like there's definitely something right about the idea that , like we're looking in the wrong places , you know he thinks that .
Speaker 1He thinks that , like all that communicative capitalism stuff is dumb , but that , like now , he's on the whole like well , everything is really just a literalization of the Patriot Act and like it's just a state directly controlling thing . The state controls the spectacle he then cites . He cites the boars late theoretical apparatus as evidence , which is insane because it's literally just a . It's a metaphorical theoretical apparatus that he doesn't understand , can't be evidence for anything .
Speaker 2Yeah , but it's like new cuts is evidence of reunification . That's like what , yeah ?
Speaker 1it's , and he does it with Horkheimer too and and I have said this , probably I'm going to say it publicly I think that's . I think that's intellectually vapid , but he does have a point that there's increasing entanglement between state actors . What he'll say , though , is it's like the DHS is just expanding this , and this is really the Democrats , and it's the Democrats dirty games , and I'm like . The DHS was the , even under the person appointed by Obama was the most friendly to Donald Trump . I don't know what you're on . All the state agencies making that . The one that secretly the , the , the , the handler of the Democrats through social media mediation is literally absurd . Yeah , like , but maybe you're onto something about how the state has changed , but you also can't prove entanglement , because what he's trying to disprove is like the Chomsky business .
Speaker 2Indirect censorship , yeah , and I'm like , but that also happens too , and you're trying to deny that that happens too , because that complicates your assertion that this is just the state , right , yeah , but I guess the point I mean he's , but I don't think he may be wrong in all these specifics , but I don't think he's wrong in thinking that like this weird behind the scenes social media technology state nexus is like maybe not where all the action is , but definitely where more of the action is than like the workplace .
Speaker 1Yeah , but he would not say that .
Speaker 2No , I know he wouldn't say that , but like , even though that's how he acts .
Speaker 1He would never admit that . That's what his theory is actually implying .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean I'm not and obviously this is not to say that like work relations aren't ultimately important to capitalism , but like , just just just hear us for the last 40 minutes , like what are we been saying ? How is that ? How is that ? How you know ? Decades of like , let's go back into the workplace . How's that worked after us ?
Speaker 1The thing is like . This is why I don't want to abandon the some of the stuff about talking about totalities , even if they're like totalities that are very hard to clarify . Yeah , while I don't want to give capital causal anything , it does seem true that , like well , more of our society is directly commodified and that does seem to lead people to have more brand identities and stuff like that and make , but it also makes work life seem less important . This is actually a lash point , but like , one of the biggest shifts in capitalism , at the end of fortism in particular , was to get people to stop seeing themselves as a worker and start seeing themselves as consumers .
Speaker 1Yeah , and I think that's fine , I mean things . I think there's truth to that , like absolutely . But I think we also have to admit that also means a whole lot of social control and even social valorization is not in the workplace at all . It's in these places that are like kind of commodified and kind of not , and that also leads to places for all kinds of interventions , and I think the problem with Doug Lane is he's only focused on one kind of them . No , exactly , I think why ?
Speaker 2obviously , like I don't . I don't want to say the work workplace is irrelevant , or like workplace struggles are irrelevant or whatever . But the point is it's clearly just one lever among many now in terms of like I don't know , and if you use it on its own , it just gets you into union hierarchies you know and like , which themselves often have problems of , of ILRs , of like oligarchy developing etc .
Speaker 1Which does mean to combat that . We need better views of how you actually deal with power equalization . And one of the things I will take from Graeber I think Graeber way downplays external inputs like environments etc , modes of production and what makes an egalitarian society . But I think people just want to run it down to the ladder . Take out that , like even from the evidence of people who do believe in that there are like external limits on what societies can be egalitarian and what can't , and that it is probably more likely to be egalitarian in most cases than not if people were left to organize themselves Like you had the . You know , there's a lot of evidence that , like to build agriculture wasn't because people decided it was more efficient , it's because people made them and enslaved other people to do it . Yes , right , like just to put that out there . Yeah , but sorry Marxist , I have some Atticus friends who do go . Sorry Marxist on that .
Speaker 2No but there's , it's the naive German ideology story right , which is like progress . Each , each mode of production is more productive than the last one , and that's why right .
Speaker 1Yeah , well , to me that's not even that , that's not a classical Marx concern , but that is an analytic Marxist concern . Like that is something that , like G A Cohen , believes right , and that's
a . We get a lot of people who are not really aware of Marxist history and I think one of my big internal debates about you know how Marxist am I if I think Marx actually has a unilaterally rigorous view of history , then I'm not really a Marxist .
Speaker 2I'm just going to go ahead and say that because I'm like I don't see any evidence for that . Yeah , this is . I mean also . How is it supposed like , how are people like , how is the causal story actually supposed to work ? Like people care about efficiency and so when in more efficient mode of production comes up idealist bullshit like .
Speaker 1Come up like you can't , yeah , yeah , yeah , it's just there's no evidence . There's also no evidence for it . There's also like , at least in terms of efficiency , for what , like , like , because I'm , like you know , under early agriculture , most people's lives involved in it , except for the king's , got shittier that . You see it in bone density , you see it in height . You see it like like . You see it in projected average lifespan from the , from the anthropological evidence . Right , like , sorry , like , how is that more efficient ? It can support a larger population at a much shittier standard of living . Until we got really good at it . But I'm we're talking like thousands of years , really , not until the Industrial Revolution do we get really good at agriculture , right , yeah , so you know and I say that because basically Malthus is right until the Industrial Revolution .
Speaker 1Malthus observation about populations is correct until the Industrial Revolution . It's not correct for hunter , gatherer societies . It's not correct after the Industrial Revolution . It is correct for , like feudalism , anti-cigarian societies , any kind of society is based off of socials , farming , etc . Like he's . Actually , malthus is not wrong about that Now , when he's , when he's trying to use it for and argue for is horrible . But we can't . We , through reinvestment , we do deal with population issues and this is why the people who want to go like , well , capitalism is not a useful category , and I'm like , I don't know . You're gonna have a hard time explaining to me why , all of a sudden , we actually got good at reinvestment schemes , which we were not good at between all of forever and the 17th century , like .
Speaker 2Yeah , I mean they call that like industrialization or whatever . Right , but that doesn't make sense , Because in industry is actually came up much later than that .
Speaker 1Right , it does seem to have to do with incentivizing reinvestment . Now , if you don't want to call that capitalism , fine , but like to me , it's like . Well , mysteriously , the thing we call capitalism happens to happen around the time . That happens so like , and that's also when industrialization happens , etc . But I will say this .
Speaker 1This sounds like I'm gone back on my things are too complicated to answer that way , but I think they are , because there's all other factors to like , when you know my great search for like the moment where I could say this is capitalism . This is where it began . I keep pushing it further and further back .
Speaker 2Yeah .
Speaker 1And basically I'm like I know in capitalism fully instantiated , the way we understand it . It's like the 19th century , yeah , and I know it begins earlier than that , but it can be . It can be begin somewhere between the 12th century , the 17th century , like . It's just like or it's a 100 year transition period .
Speaker 2Yeah , exactly , exactly . I mean at that point you should stop using the word transition .
Speaker 1It's like it's also like I was talking about feudalism , like I think feudalism might be a meaningful category , but we can use better terms , if you'd rather feudalism . Feudalism is , feudalism is a transition period from tribal not tribal society from antique society , which is not trouble .
Speaker 2But that's amazing . Like feudalism as a transitional form .
Speaker 1And when I actually started looking at it , I'm like it's not one thing . But there are things that characterize this time period , that that that you will find over and over again , but they're like not one system of law , there's not one system of land ownership , etc . Yeah , I still think it's meaningful to talk about it but , like , the transition from antique society to the , to the high middle ages , aka feudalism as we think of it , is also fucking like 600 years , yeah , and it involves losses of technology that , like , it's hard to explain . Like I always point this out , you know , the Egyptians forgot how to make pillars , literally , and the Anglo-Saxons apparently lost the ability to make saws . Yeah , there are no saws made in England . Between making this up , between Like the fifth century .
Speaker 1Everything so like saws existed too , because they were still around .
Speaker 2Right . So it's not even a question of like knowledge having been lost , like physically or whatever .
Speaker 1Right now it's literally like that that no one knew how to retro engineer it and the like it was not and it wasn't . We don't even have evidence like people have massively worse lives during this time picture . Look at the bone Evidence . It's not , like you see , like an evidence decline of life , but you do see an evidence of like they just quit all this technology , quit being relevant to them , right , and so they didn't invent it again . You know , it's like when you read about stuff from like the high middle ages , when , like people are going to get water From the well and passing under the aqueducts because they don't know what they're for .
Speaker 2Yeah , no , I mean it's . It's , I mean the thing that really comes back to . It comes back to , comes back to home tests and this is like this is why the biggest history . Yeah , exactly , it's crazy to believe in Wiggish history . That's straightforward sense . Like you know , people forget stuff . It's coming back to home . Test is like you know , things really changed really .
Speaker 2I mean , like I don't want to , I don't know if I believe in like state capitalism necessarily in the beginning of the 20th century , which like starts off , which are Luke Hutch is responding to right , it's like state bureaucracies , large-scale techno , like large-scale industrial conglomerate , large-scale industrial corporations , joint stock , company , which kind of part of the old trend , mass democracy is not really a thing before the training , training century , you know , because the boat doesn't get extended right now . You know , on all these things you know kind of change the game a little bit they don't change the game in terms of exploitation , alienation , all the basic stuff .
Speaker 2But like you know , politics doesn't work the same and like blue catches , partly responding to all of that . And you know I this gets back to your stuff on lash as well , because lash is theorizing in like this kind of post 19th century world as well . Then you know , we still haven't kind of thought through like all these changes , the , the regrettable century , right , that's still , you know . Yeah , so that's that . I think I mean in some ways that is like the deeper legacy of Luke Hutch , because it's all all these things that get theorized deeper later on . There's like there's a theory in practice , stuff we've been talking about , but like you know , his attempt to like combine Vavos theory of bureaucracy , the state law , with Marx , it's like that is been really influential , just , and whatever you think about his dialectics , you know , instead of sociological level is like really , but how ?
Speaker 1to big effect on yeah , well , it's one of things . People who hate the Frankfurt school , like say , eric Owen Wright , still do the Weber plus plus Marx thing . Yeah , and let's also remind ourselves , weber himself was doing German historical school plus Marx thing . Yeah , I said he was in the S P Day . I've heard he was in the S P Day . I guess I actually need to write the S P Day for this Storing because of her .
Speaker 1Other people say that there's no evidence . He was in the S P Day and I'm like , well , damn it , which is true , because it was definitely loosely associated with it till he , until he ran as a liberal in , like right before the term , like during the late , during the late Prussian period . Because he he dies like at the beginning of the Weimar period . So we don't have any . He wasn't , we don't have any indication for him . Like for a lot of the , a lot of the Marxian , like the late , the Latest form of the German historical school . They were highly influenced by Marxist , but a lot of them become Nazis . Right , they were , doesn't ? Vabour is not associated with any movement that's tied to that , but he also dies really early . So like yeah .
Speaker 2I mean Vabour is like famously , his historical Reputation is as a limb , is like a canonical , like Against the extremes kind of live .
Speaker 1Yeah , he is , but he's not . He's actually not a liberal in the In the kind of Anglo-British American way .
Speaker 2Right , he's not like , like the Thomas Mann right like he comes to you know he's like weird like .
Speaker 1Kind of Thomas Mann is a member of the of the conservative revolutionary movement and then abandons it .
Speaker 2Yes .
Speaker 1Yes , and and Vabour is never , never part of the . But you , vabour and Mann end up kind of close to each other , but from opposite directions , it seems like , because Vabour clearly is , even if he was a liberal , he's more coming out of this this like quasi socialist tradition , if not the espadet , then definitely the , the , the younger German historical school , which were the armchair socialist that Marx was complaining about , the kind of National socialists , not Nazis , but like they were neo-cantians , they thought that national development was super important . Fridrick , carl , fridrick nap is one of them , right .
Speaker 1Yeah although in MMT is like Charterism and MMT should be separated
. And then I Also think we have to admit that there's two different theories of M&E . There's legal theory of money and then their state theory of money , and they're actually not the same thing Because they're more than states can issue law right . So we don't think of it that way . No no , but like Premodern societies , there are multiple , like there's different laws you are beheld into and like , like , like you know , canton law versus state law versus , cannon law versus .
Speaker 1You know , yeah church laws cannon law .
Speaker 2Yeah , yeah .
Speaker 1And there's even different courts for it . So , and sometimes you might be tried and Like . Double jeopardy actually made sense to me when I realized , like , oh , it's not just that you're getting tried twice , it's also you might be tried for it with actual punishments and church court . Maybe get out of that and then get tried for it in criminal court , like , and then maybe again in civil court , I don't know . Although double jeopardy is not applied to criminal civil cases , so you can get like if you lose on a murder case , you can still get hit by a wrongful death case , see OJ Simpson .
Speaker 2So and on that note yeah we should end .
Speaker 1Yeah , because we , we , we did good . We stayed on topic for the first hour and a half .
Speaker 2All right , yeah , yeah , this is for us , this kind of a record . Actually , to be honest with you , yes , oh .