Why Capitalism’s “Mute Compulsion” Isn’t The Whole Story with Nicolas D. Villarreal

Start with a simple question: if investment drives productivity and growth, what happens to a society that keeps choosing consumption over capacity? We trace a straight line from Marx’s core mechanics to Kalecki’s equations, then use that line to cut through fashionable theory detours—value-form shortcuts, communization fantasies, and techno-feudal hot takes. The result is a clearer picture of why profits can soar while real investment sags, why the dollar’s “miracle” masks fragility, and why printing more money can’t manufacture machine tools, skills, or energy.

We lay out four regimes that help decode the past 70 years: Fordist reinvestment that pushed productivity up, extractive reinvestment that scaled capacity through coercion, subsistence stagnation where neither investment nor exploitation rises, and neoliberalism’s defining mix—low investment, high exploitation, and asset hoarding. From there, we unpack how U.S. trade deficits and financial inflows fed capitalist consumption while weakening the incentive to build. Debt and soft budgets smoothed the ride, but they didn’t fix profitability on new capital or reverse the long slide in productivity growth. The numbers point to a coming snap-back to trend, not a new golden age.

China’s path raises the stakes. Sustained high investment, tighter discipline on capitalist consumption, and strategic upgrading are pushing the global cost curve down and forcing others to respond. That doesn’t make China post-capitalist; it does show how targeted capacity-building can escape the stagnation trap. The practical lesson isn’t romantic—it’s logistical. Real constraints matter: inputs, machine tools, power, training, and time. Risk management beats magical thinking; autarky is a myth, but resilience is a plan. We argue for redirecting surplus toward compounding productivity, treating statistics as instruments not idols, and rebuilding the industrial backbone that reduces market domination over everyday life.

If you’re tired of theories that skip the engine room, this conversation connects the dials: profits, investment, productivity, debt, trade, and class incentives. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves charts more than slogans, and tell us: what’s the first capacity you’d rebuild?

Links referenced: 
https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/contra-capital-as-abstract-domination?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/an-economic-theory-of-maximalist?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

https://open.substack.com/pub/nicolasdvillarreal/p/a-sketch-of-a-revision-to-orthodoxy?r=2m9aw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Chapters

• 1:35 Setting The Stakes And The Three Texts
• 4:26 Orthodoxy, Forces Of Production, And Misread Marx
• 12:53 Kalecki’s Equations And Class Dynamics
• 21:43 Neoliberalism, Consumption, And The U.S. Profitability Problem
• 32:17 Debt, Trade Deficits, And The Dollar’s Mirage
• 42:42 Investment Slump, Fordism’s End, And Soft Budgets
• 52:32 Why MMT And Social Democracy Fall Short
• 1:01:06 China’s High Investment Model And Global Pressure
• 1:11:32 Techno‑Feudal Claims, Accelerationism, And Value
• 1:21:01 Risk Management, Autarky Limits, And Trade Realities
• 1:30:27 Left Epistemics, Analytic Marxism, And Facts
• 1:38:39 Where The Left Looks Next And Closing

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:48

Hello, welcome to Barbog. I'm here with Nicolas de Vivreal. D Vivrial. I don't know why I turned your name German all of a sudden. Um, and uh we are talking about three articles that are related, but we'll get to the thread that runs between them. Uh a sketch of a revision to orthodoxy, which is about incorporating the Kalikki profit equation uh into Marxism. Um an economic theory of maximalist risk management, which is about uh basically the end. I would I would say the book that you are referring to is about the end of Fordism. Um but yeah, basically uh and then uh the the elephant in the room, which was uh contra capitalism as abstract dominion, a review of mute compulsion by Soran Mao. And I have to tell you, um, you know, I'm not as sympathetic to my old friend of me Douglas Lane as I used to be, as I don't think his Marxism has any marks in it either these days. But he used to say that the history of Marxist theory post-1950 was basically how to not be a Marxist and say you are. Um and I really do feel that lately when I see what becomes like hot in the Marxist theory world, you know, uh for usually in two years of a time. And I actually appreciate the end of people because they don't actually really say they're Marxists, but the the lot of the value form people uh uh uh kind of aren't either, and we'll we'll get into that. But I remember like Kohei Seito and Solar Mao were like the biggest name names in Marxism for a while in the theoretical front, and I do think we've been kind of uh benefited by uh some other things who that are more historical, like like libels, citizen marks and stuff becoming more of a focus. But um, I I before we get into the specifics of your economic critiques here, why do you think there's so much Marxology that doesn't have a whole lot to do with Marxism? Or if it does, it's actually ignoring some like basic, obvious things that are in key text.

SPEAKER_00: 3:28

Yeah, I I definitely think that this has been like a trend for decades now, I guess, probably since the 50s, definitely the 60s.

SPEAKER_02: 3:38

Yeah, it's pre-new left for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 3:40

It's you know yeah, I always come back to Mark Hughes because that's what I read in college. I was like, this is like the most idealist thing, it does nothing to do with what Marx was talking about. Um, like maybe has some insights, but it's not this is not what it was about, right? And um this is similar to like what uh is going on in mute compulsion, which I mean has some takes some things from Marx, obviously. Um like the like the part that it gets correct is like the domination that the proletariat feels from market forces, which is pretty basic. Um, you know, how people need to eat and they need to buy stuff on the market in order to eat, so they need to sell their labor in order to buy that stuff. Um and they were deprived of means of self-reliance uh because of primitive accumulation. Uh so they have to, they have no alternative. Um but the the what happens is that like the what like the main thing he dismisses is like productive forces determinism associated with orthodox Marxism, um, which is like I kind of painted as a straw man in certain ways, because he kind of portrays it as just being about like the technology as opposed to like how that was integrated with the tendency for the rare profit to fall.

SPEAKER_02: 5:16

Um I want to I want to comment on that because a lot of the critiques of productive forces determinism are based on ignoring two things. One, the tendency of the Red Prophet the Fall being what part of what informs it, two, the organic composition of capital being a driver in and of itself, which can look like an accumulation of technology, but it isn't just an accumulation of technology, and three, which also takes care of some of the other critiques. Um the modes of production emergen of relations of production, which is where the superstructure dips into like if you think about it, the metaphor, it is almost like a yin-yang, um very bad, where there's like this little spot of things we associate with the superstructure and what defines the relations of production in the modes of production, and these people just sort of ignore that like entirely, like um, and I'm always confused as to like what they're responding to. It feels to me like they're responding more to GA Cohen than to Marx, or the people that thought that is exactly what you're saying, that modes of production were just Whiggish technological developments. That's that's GA Cohen. That's Marx Cohen.

SPEAKER_00: 6:32

Well, and also Stalin's line, but yes.

SPEAKER_02: 6:35

Well, GA Cohen, weirdly, even though he was an anti-Stalinist, accepted the the Marxist-Leninist Soviet version of modes of production like without any critique. It was weird, actually. Um so yeah, I just yeah, I want to let you finish. I find this interesting because a lot of times I'm like, you're critiquing something that's wrong, but this is not what we historically believed either.

SPEAKER_00: 7:02

Well, I mean, he does cite some uh Konsky and Hilfriding also, um, and dismisses them in like the same vein. Um like the like the problem that that he has with it, uh I think it like part of it is because he has drawing on these traditions of value form theory and uh communist communization adjacent stuff. Um, because he doesn't like want to admit that there are these progressive tendencies um in capitalism, like what there's no examination, for example, of what like okay, there's these economic uh forces of domination, um, and there's the how it applies to proletariats, and there's how it applies to everyone else, is how he puts it. And there's no like specific examination of how it affects capitalists. Because if there were, like the the fact that market discipline forces capitalists to actually economize production and use the most efficient production techniques available, like he tries to like weasel his way around that a bit with saying that, like, oh well, you know, uh because like the the the water wheel was more intermittent even though it was lower cost, it got replaced by um uh coal and uh fossil fuels. Um so that disproves the notion that like capitalists will always choose the most efficient method of production, which I yeah, they're going to there's going to be some like divergences there. There's also just the fact that having like the energy source be less intermittent is going to be more efficient from a time perspective. Um but it's like the by ignoring all of that and trying to sidestep it, he doesn't want to like he he's basically burying Marx's main thesis in like uh in capital and also the manifesto and basically in everything after like 1848. Um because it it like the 10 everything like that he wants to emphasize is like that whole um it's pure relations of production, which the relations of production are very important, but he doesn't want to like deal with the forces of production as something that might be progressive in any way, um, because that has is kind of like opposed to the politics, I think, of his broader theoretical milieu. Um at least that's the way I perceive it.

SPEAKER_02: 9:41

Well, I mean, we have to think about his I mean, let's say what is Mal's milieu, which is the new Marx lecture. Uh I'm just gonna say it in English because trying to get that new uh Marx lecture uh right is kind of a pain in the ass. Um, which is mega two scholars. I mean, that includes all kinds of people like people I like, like Tarcel Carver and Marcel Musto Musto, people I'm kind of neutral on, like um Kohe Saito. Well, I'm not really neutral on Saito. I was I like Saito's earlier work, and the more he got into Ingalls as the problem and uh and uh uh his definition of degrowth, which when I actually read what he was suggesting wasn't even as radical as I thought it originally was. Um I'm sort of skeptical of um I'm skeptical of the map of the monopoly capital school uh Barana Sweezy to some degree as well, although I think it has a little bit more validity to it. Um, and these people come out of that world. Um, and then adjacent to that as well, you have value form you have value form theory, which is tied into the New Marx lecture from from Heinrich, um, which is uh I would say a particular reading of II Rubens, the more I've actually read Rubens, the more I'm like, I don't think modern value form theory actually is what Rubens was exactly talking about, but I can't quite put my finger on the difference. Except that somehow a lot of the confusion the conclusions of value form theory either end up being whatever communization is talking about, or Keynesian style social democracy tote court based on something like a Marxist version of modern monetary theory, like uh, which is to say it either becomes managerial or or total rupture, right? Um, so I mean this is interesting because you do take other things into account. For example, you talk about how Kalecki, who I don't was Kalecki a Marxist? I'm actually okay.

SPEAKER_00: 11:54

It was and he was greatly inspired by Capital Volume 2 when he came up with the equations. Like they basically distill like the those insights from Marx, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_02: 12:06

I mean, I think I think it's interesting. We talk a lot more about Grossmann, who I also like, Al Def and Grossmann. Uh that's that's um Henrik Grossmann, um the Polish German uh Frankfurt school member who got kicked out. And yeah, yeah. Um basically was the the a person who tried to figure out the theory of the rate of profits to fall in a much more worked out way. He has some critiques of marks. I know people like uh Andrew Kleiman don't like it, but uh I think Kalecki is more interesting to me because Kalecki actually kind of figures out a business cycle equation that also explains class conflict. Um so uh we can get into that uh in a second, but it it does seem to me that like Kalecki's an answers to those people who like the the post-Keynesians who say, well, Marxism just doesn't try to work this out empirically, it's all imminent critique or um total abstraction that doesn't have any you know non-class war predictions about how the uh economy works. And I just didn't think that's true.

SPEAKER_00: 13:20

Um okay, go ahead. Well, it's funny because I mean the post-Candians will often draw on Kalecki, um, but they draw on the parts that I don't really emphasize. Like Kalecki he wrote down like these accounting um uh uh accounting identities. Um and uh but he also had some equations like oh it like what will probably describe these causal dynamics, and it's the causal dynamics part that mostly they're focused on, but they take away from Kalecki. Because they'll look at like, oh, like uh as profits rise, it means more capitalist consumption, like less capitalist savings. Um and uh there's some other things like that. That also like uh there was a book recently that was like die uh uh making of a ruin or something about the fall of the USSR, which was like that they needed to be like signing Kalecki for why they needed to pivot to more consumption in the Soviet Union, um, like consumption-led growth. There's also like a way you can interpret um like the the equations. Um but it's like that what like this, what all of this ignores specifically, is that, and this is the graph I've been coming back to a lot the past few weeks, is that what's like like the relationship between capital intensity and labor productivity, um, which is something that Marx talked about directly as one of the tendencies of uh capital accumulation. Um, that as you had an expansion of the means of production, that you had rising labor productivity, both as a cause and a consequence of that. Um and uh this is like very central to everything that uh Marx describes about the logic of capital and capitalist development. Because this is going back to the manifesto, um, it's like all about the revolutionizing of means of production, the mode of production, um, like the the this tendency towards growth and the development of the productive forces. Um, and all of that dynamism comes from this tendency for increasing capital intensity, um, which is the same thing as the organic cap capital composition um or organic capital composition.

SPEAKER_02: 15:48

Right. Um I'm gonna pull up this chart from this article and I'm gonna describe it for listeners because I know never watches the show, a lot of people listen. But and you you came up with this based off of Kalecki, and I have like some technical points I I might not even differ, what you just might point out, but um if you use these equations, you have high investment, low exploitation rate, social democracy, USSR. I would say US Fordism also is that um which is which tends to come after a period of class struggle, um, but also in a prosperous period. Like uh um then you have high investment rate, high exploitation. Now, this is interesting to me because a lot of people will go, okay, but these are not all capitalists, and I would say, yeah, they're not. Some of these dynamics are larger than capitalist dynamics.

SPEAKER_03: 16:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 16:47

Um, um uh so you have a high investment rate, high exploitation rate, and the kind of exploitation that we're talking about in terms of the early Roman Empire is extraction or uh um I mean we that the thing that's an area where you could technically get iffy about whether or not you would consider the Roman Empire highly exploitative or highly um expropriative or extractive, um, and we could make hay about that. But the same basic logic according to Kalecki models would still apply. You have a lot of use of labor surplus, but it's being reinvested at very high weights, it's not being hoarded in individual profits. Um you have low investment rate, low exploitation slash uh expropriation rates. I'm gonna just add the expropriation rate. Hope you don't have problems.

SPEAKER_03: 17:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_02: 17:40

Um uh, which is subsistence farming, hunter-gatherers, capitalist policies that completely fail, you know, like South Sudan or something. Um uh and then you have the reason why people confuse neoliberalism with feudalism, uh, which they're not the same thing, but but this is what they share low investment rate and high exploitation rate. So low growth, um lots of lots of hoarding of value, whatever the value is in that society. Now, uh, you know, we could go into why that's still not neo-feudalism because feudalism is a different mode of production, but the the trends of investment are the same. You have low investment into infrastructure. I mean, that's obvious everywhere. Uh and high exploitation, so you want relatively high profit rates, relatively high prices, relatively high capture, but it's not going into anything, it's just being hoarded. Um uh and uh one thing I would point out is you know, according to your theory and according to this chart, which those of you who are listening, I just took down. Um feudalism and neoliberalism are sides of transitional, of transitional uh uh I wouldn't say modes, they're not transitioning to different modes, well, feudalism was, but they're transitions that don't really go anywhere. Uh like, you know, like okay, so that what I mean by like uh neoliberalism. Neoliberalism returns profitability to the markets uh and expands the finance sector dramatically, as well as some other things we've talked about in the past, like uh petite bourgeois of elements of business that were not, um uh creating uh more and more futures and and whatnot, which are basically commodities based off of rent. Um these kind of things you see uh in neoliberalism. Um but as a way to fix the profitability on investment, it doesn't fix it, right?

SPEAKER_00: 20:05

Like and I think they can fix good what they can fix, and this is very important, is capitalist consumption, right? Um so the the the full like clinic equations like uh for capitalist consumption, um so you take gross profits, you take out investment, you take out um trade surpluses, um uh surpluses for government um uh like the opposite of deficits, and you take out um uh the I think that's those are the main things. Um I might be forgetting one or two. Oh, you take out worker savings, but that that's harder to measure. Um and basically if you if you do this, like if you look at like the US uh political economy in under neoliberalism, like we have had rising deficits, which takes uh away from capitalist consumption because the capitalists have to buy bonds. Some of that has like comes from overseas and whatnot. And that's actually the other important thing, is that the current account uh deficit, this like the trade deficit that we have, that is increasing capitalist consumption. Because the capitalists, what they don't, whatever they uh send overseas, whatever they export, they can't consume at home, even though it adds to profits. But what they import, they can consume. Um and uh basically what the um like the US like political economy has done is that like it's done that, it's it's had like the rising uh trade deficits basically cancel out the rising uh government deficits. Um, but it's also basically seen a decline in investment rates, uh, which has allowed for greater capitalist consumption. Um there's also like you can break this down further with like what what about like specifically uh profits to industry. So you take out rents and interest rates, and if you look at it that way, it looked really bad in the mid um like like the 1970s and 80s, uh, because there was like pretty much no it was negative um for that for those people. Uh there was so much of like the the share of income that was going to interest um that it was basically this is why the economy was basically collapsing and the bulkers shock. Um but like because like the like the US in order to deal with all of that, the US economy basically just shut down investment. And this I saw these comments from both uh uh Paul or what what's the New York Times um economist guy? Sorry? Krugman? Yeah, Krugman and uh Milton Friedman, I think was the other quote, both talking about how the US has so much um like money coming in from like foreign direct investment, like the the balance of payments, like uh money coming in, um that it must be because there are so many good investment opportunities in the US, uh, and that this is like why we shouldn't be worried about that as an increasing like um source of growth for the US economy. Um but it's really it was not it's it's not a sustainable growth model. Um and the US, if you look at like where the US has been in the big like chart of I can link it to you if you want, um, of like the relationship between capital intensity and labor productivity. Like the US is a major outlier in that relationship, um, in that it has a much higher apparent labor productivity, which is real GDP to hours worked, um, compared to the capital intensity that we have. And this is a big reason why is that our we have the large trade deficits and the um like uh the the money, the like the foreign direct investment, people buying US bonds, other assets, um how this has been sustainable. The the US government, like the US is uh if you look at the economies that have uh trade deficits and which have and rank them by their debt to GDP. The first one is Greece, and then the next two are the US and UK. Other countries that are major reserve currencies, like um Germany and uh uh I'm sorry, the European Union and um you can just call it Germany, it really kind of is. But anyway, yeah, that's why I said it too. It's just a bit of a brain slip. Um but the the the euro and the Japanese yen, um, like they are they have, I mean, there's lots of debt there, but they have trade surpluses, so they don't have the same pressures. Like the reason people get their like the get the euro and the yen is because there's lots of trade with Japan and the Eurozone. Um that like the the fact that like the US buys more from the rest of the world than it puts out should mean that people hold less of its currency. But the fact the role that we play in the global financial system, um and the the the basically the history of like the the Volker shock and the what Thatcher did in the UK have meant that there's lots like this kind of mystique and um and like value uh preserving role of the dollar and pound in the global economy. Um which like the the UK has already snapped back of in in terms of that relationship between labor productivity and capital intensity. The past decade, um or ever ever since 2008 basically, they've had stalled um real GDP per capita growth, stalled labor productivity growth, um because it's they snapped back to the to the mean basically. Um and that I anticipate that something similar is gonna happen to the US, that the the UK is a window into our future.

SPEAKER_02: 26:34

Yeah, well, I mean as the UK goes to Argentina, so do we. Um and I think this is an interesting point because it does two things that are often that uh are often hard for Marxists to deal with, and the Kalecki. Uh the reason why I asked you about the Kalecki is I know Kalecki being referenced by post-Keynesians way more than Marxists. Marxists kind of ignore him. Um that's why I was that's why I was like, well, like I thought he was a Marxist, but I'm not a hundred percent sure because Marxists don't talk about him very much. Um but what is this interesting is it describes the conditions of modern monetary theory, but also makes it very clear like why most versions of it, like Giannis Verifacus's, are utterly wrong. Like, um, and but people might go, well, well, what do you mean by that? I'm like, well, it's not domestic consumption uh that keeps all this afloat. If it was a closed system, it actually wouldn't work. Um, and that's also true for Japan and Germany, although they'll talk about the EU's fiscal constraints on Germany, but um it's why I think, for example, uh people get very confused about the United States. Because one of the points that you you make that's interesting is that um we have a profitability problem, we are still a major world producer, we are still the second uh uh our second or third major world producer. But the thing is a whole lot of our production is internal. Like we are we are a massive consumer of goods, and increasingly 10% of us are a massive consumer of goods. Um so that means you have literal wealth boarding. I mean, that's what that means. And people have conf, I think a lot of people on the left have confused that wealth warding with what Marxists mean by profits. They think that, oh, we have billionaires and you know, approaching trillionaires. That clearly means things are profitable. And I'm like, look at the line item on investments. What do you get on average per item sold uh on a physical commodity or a commodity that isn't tied into the state through rents, and you'll just start seeing those those margins have dropped precipitously, not just in old school physical commodities or directly extracted commodities like oil, although it's very true there as well, until you hit a very low um supply. The the other thing that you see is this is also true for things like services and other things that you would consider that oh, well, there's a lot of variable capital and services, you'd think they'd be um very profitable. They follow this trend too.

SPEAKER_00: 29:31

Um there's been some relief under neoliberalism, but there hasn't been like I mean, that there's been a basically a stall of the trend for profits to fall, they still haven't improved very much. Um that but like the um but this is also isn't sustainable. If you look at like um the uh the the amount of public and private debt globally that has like what it looked like as a percentage GDP, uh I saw a study going all the way back to like the 19th century, and it's very stable until you get to like 1980, and then it just goes up linearly. Um and that I think has really softened a lot of budgets for enterprises in major capitalist countries like the US, uh, and is why like the investment has fallen off. But yeah, like the um there has been like the uh like all the measures I was talking about earlier to uh increase capitalist consumption. So I made a graph of like um looking at how much money it

SPEAKER_02: 30:47

would take to get like the uh median um or the the average income uh of today in like today's dollars um and it that number grew precipitously from like the um 1929 to 1980 it went straight up to like from like 200 000 to like 1.2 million um and then it fell uh and and then it it it never recovered it like unlike the rate of profit which is like stalled out that amount of what it takes to actually make it as a capitalist fell considerably um because the capitalist consumption rate as we mentioned is several other things involved there um and basically this is we we've been propping up this capitalist class uh by mortgaging our our growth basically um and basically just hoping that the rest of the world props us up with the um with the money they send us which is getting harder and harder for that to happen for a variety of reasons like yes people like Michael Hudson who've been critiquing they've been uh predicting the imminent and immediate collapse of the dollar have been wrong but no that doesn't mean the Valiber is going to stay strong forever nor could have Biden's policies ran infinitum done so part of the problem that you have with like liberal and heterodox left thinkers and I mean this as a deep deep critique is uh they think in terms of election cycles not in terms of even decades um and I think it's even deeper than that because and this even goes back to Mao's book um because I think that there's a deep inability to face up to like reality in much the same way that like um like the USSR and the Eastern Bloc was able to just keep financing things to keep going.

SPEAKER_00: 32:56

Like that they were unable to deal with their soft budgets as a political problem so that eventually it became a problem at the largest scale abstraction which was international markets and the dependency between like the like the global economy. And the same thing is basically happening now with the US and UK economies um in particular because the like we are um not we're not as dependent on energy anymore but we're still dependent on the rest of the world for all sorts of things um the cheap like cheap final consumption goods but also machinery electronics uh that are important for businesses uh basically even though we're resource rich we haven't been doing the investment and the machinery to run this stuff we've been relying on other countries to do it because uh because it's cheaper for labor and we can hide our own profitability problems am I wrong about what you're implying there I think you're right I think that's right and uh but the the way this relates to Mao and the left is that um sorry and Mao and the left is that uh people have like just think that this can continue forever that like he there's no facing up to the fact that at some point you have to deal with hard budgets and hard choices and trade-offs. Um like mute compulsion as an idea is kind of presupposed on the idea that uh this is a sort of domination that we are trying to abolish in a certain sense. He doesn't go that far he goes he he's careful not to actually say that we're just trying to abolish economic domination. But he like the there's no facing up to the way that like like the in the post-Kynesians and the the MMT people are like this especially is that like yeah well like at some point we'll hit the hard limits of the economy like no we already hit the hard limits of the economy in like 2023 of what like the government spending can do there is no like easy fix to these things.

SPEAKER_02: 35:04

You have to start thinking about like w uh more concretely and more hard-nosed about how to to like improve the situation which is also why the abandonment of productive forces is such a problem because then this the US is not exempt from like the the dynamics of uh economic development um all the conversations that happened and this is my problem also with like the uh the Jacobin crowd when they were talking about the um in in the book Flowers for Marx um because like the the way that they talk about the Jacobin people talk about social democracy that they can just um will this into be with like a political power class conflict in the traditional way trade unions and so on um like it doesn't one it doesn't face up to like the fall tendency for the rate of profit to fall like they avoid it in in that way it doesn't fade up to the fragmentation and petite visualization of the labor market it doesn't actually like I I might even be harsher than you I actually have talked to people uh about the Jacobinites and I and I've said you know for all they're critiquing people like me as being ultra leftist and book group readers and whatever I think they are the most utopian of any of us because they really do not look at anything but immediate trends and they really seem to think we could will ourselves back to a 1950s economy and that's not possible to do no it's not um and you like you have to deconfront that the the expropriation of the capitalist class and using that their surplus more towards investment isn't just um like a nice thing like they like I honestly think that most a lot of people when they talk about this they're just thinking we're gonna move shift this to consumption like no you can't do that this isn't just um like the the the the way that like everyone is thinking that they can just have everything and no one is thinking about economic constraints uh on the left um or if they are it's only in terms of raw throughput and like like sociological like uh environmental degradation it's not in terms of other structural limits like um but like for example i've told people like okay so let's i i I accept that the mmt description of of money is more or less correct and we're not dealing with commodity money like capital volume one is based off of although I'm gonna argue that capital volume two actually does start to deal with this problem and this marks never finishes working it out but um but but I'm gonna accept that that doesn't change the fact that even even with all the liquidity in the market the profit margins per item have not increased GDP which while I admit is an imperfect statistic does not ever go past five percent in a developed economy and if you bracket out things that are transfers of wealth and not creations of value by commodity exchange like the GDP would be even lower.

SPEAKER_00: 38:38

Like with that labor productivity thing like if the US um like GDP reflected the cap like the labor productivity implied by its current level of capital intensity our GDP per capita would be about 30% lower. That's bad. Yeah now if in a crisis we probably wouldn't see a decline of 30% GDP we'll probably like see uh a whatever decline caused by the immediate crisis and then like a stall as like we eventually catch up to where it should be um which is how it went with the UK of course you never know it could like it could just be totally mismanaged by uh US authorities um but it's like this is not like the the path that the US is on isn't sustainable um and everything all the policy debates we're having is like people are like on the left thinking how can we just like make things nicer for people which yes we need to think about how to make things nicer people we also need to think about like the the reason we need to expropriate now is very necessary reasons to continue basic economic development um to catch up to the where the Chinese are going um like that and also just in like and we can and there are ways to to relax the pressure of economic domination because you don't want the market to just decide everything. The way you do that is through having like actually understanding what it takes to be to live in a self-reliant way and that the that understanding that knowledge doesn't exist in capitalism because it can exist. The whole premise of capitalism is everyone being interdependent on the market through the market. And this is what I was writing in that economic theory of maximal uh risk management.

SPEAKER_02: 40:35

Yeah I was gonna bring that to you because it seems like you know even the way we're talking about it we haven't systemically laid out why these three articles are related but they very clearly in me are and it's almost like here's the problem look at Kalecki um these are some ways that people have tried to deal with the solution let's do a tale of two books here's the most popular one of the most popular theory books from 2023 um and then here's a book that like nobody read but but you um I'm sure more people read it than I read it was the the triumph of broken promises was because it got recommended by the the odd lots guy Joe Weisenthal. Right well I mean this is what's crazy I have better reading lists for Marxists coming from the fucking uh not even post-Keynesians from twos than I do from Marxists right now. Because I also listen to odd lots and I'm like business people listen to this like you know like and I I I think that's uh the Bartel book is interesting um because it does lay out a problem basically that socialist states because they hadn't fully achieved socialism um got into the same rut as capitalist states at the end of the of the of the cold war and that prompted a a uh a failure of legitimacy um but our failure of legitimacy was actually somewhat delayed because the because it should have maintained after the 70s but the end of the Cold War made it look like we were still viable and that is also because as I've told other people the US didn't so much win the Cold War as Russia or the USSR just lost it. Yeah like your opponent can lose a thing and you not actually have done anything or one on any value of your own and still may be heading for massive catastrophic consequences from not dealing with that. And I do think there's been a hubris in the West after the 1990s that has led us not to deal with failures that were obvious in the 1970s and we have not dealt with them since then other than some neoliberal return to capitalist upper class consumption and uh hoping that high levels of debt can keep it can keep enough liquidity in the working classes that everything doesn't completely fucking fall apart. And we really are on the bounds that maybe we are about to see some stuff really break. Now you know I admit that you and I are both skeptical of the Marxist who are always like the tendency to the rate of profit the fall means it's finally over it's happening. You know like I'm not sure that that's where we're at um but I do think that this is a major problem. I just want to hear you like talk more about what you think about that. Because I I I went through this and I was like oh I get why these are paired right why you paired this with the Mao when we wanted to talk about this because you when you wrote these you didn't necessarily write them as linked pieces but they clearly kind of are to me.

SPEAKER_00: 43:58

Well I'm actually thinking of putting everything together in like a pamphlet of some sort for my political economy research. It's a work in progress. But like with the book of your second book yes oh I just I I did the first one I was like you know this is a lot of fun uh so I think I'll do another one because there's nobody like there's no like um pressure from like an editor to like straighten this up so I just get to put it out there. But uh like with the the Triumph of Broken Promises book um the funny thing about that is that like they don't seem to get like maybe I missed it somewhere um but like they mentioned like in the situation with Poland that Poland sacrificed investment in order to make its like international payment obligations. And like there's not I I don't think they quite understood that the US has also sacrificed investment not quite in such a stark way um but by increasing its reliance on um international finance and like taking on the role that we did and allowing this like big increase in access to debt and credit um that the US has also really allowed its investment rates to slump um and has allowed its economy to like sacrifice its long-term growth thing. And the current growth is a bit of a mirage. Now the like in terms of what that means for like a crisis um I have no idea if if when that could happen I mean maybe if uh Trump lets the Chinese like flood deals with investment the problem is solved right um like there's always a chance that they could do something like that. But at the other end like Trump could end uh federal like the Fed independence um in in a few weeks or something and we would have the crisis immediately um because then our role in the global financial system would be over.

SPEAKER_02: 46:07

Yeah they'll say when we're no longer a consumer where it's safe to put to put bond investments why the fuck would you need the dollar? Yeah like you know uh unless we you know unless we do gunboat diplomacy but we're not really been that good at that lately either so like um I I do think this is uh this is kind of a a a key this is a a a a key like cold water to the face to a lot of the uh left schemas we have right now because they just don't really deal with this stuff.

SPEAKER_00: 46:51

I mean honestly I will I will be honest with you I kind of think you know for all my critiques that I've had today about like the the the post Keynesians and the MMTers that they are almost more honest about it than the Jacobin crew is um because what the Jacobin people use MMT for is like everyone gets a pony yeah I mean and uh or are you know we could have our we could just we could just uh if we just print enough money would generate enough domestic consumption that we'd re-industrialize internally it's actually pretty close to Trump's theory to be complete I know they don't like that when you say that's what they want but uh I mean like like the difference is like Trump wants to gut the social safety nest because he's got some misguided notion that that would make people more likely to to contribute as opposed to I don't know just become so desperate they tear everything to the ground but um uh um but um we're not we we're not there yet we're not having bread riots yet so well you know the Jacobin crowd they just like will actively deny reality a bit I think because like the the whole thing with Seth Ackerman never owned up to that error in like the rate of profit critique um they just totally got his math wrong of uh because he misread the paper he was citing um for what depreciation rates oh I remember that can you can you go over that I mean there's many things like also Seth Afferman totally botched the understanding of what low income was and why it was affected by inflation because he kept on talking about high debt levels of the of the very poor and I'm like the very poor can't get debt yeah like like you're talking about the lower middle class brohe and you're not talking about the very poor like but go ahead um what Seth Ackerman did is like he put out a big paper that was like a shot against uh Brenner right uh or put uh put a up uh jack bon article rather and uh Brenner Riley thesis right yeah yeah I think so which that that that also has a ton of problems but yep but but Ackerman's complaint was not one of them no no he Ackerman said that because uh he found this paper saying that depreciation rates were higher than uh people thought that there actually wasn't a tendency for the depreciation or the tendency for the rate of profit to fall um and he misread it because the the line that like what he was saying was basically assuming that there was a big increase in depreciation rates which is not what the paper said he basically like took where like these stable depreciation rates that economists have been assuming and then made it fall to that level where really he should have assumed that there were these lower or higher depreciation rates the whole time which would have created the same shape of rate of profit curve. And because he he did that it showed a big increase in profitability that basically nobody was suggesting happened. And certainly not the people he was citing. And there was I was there was originally going to be mentioned in like one of um like Brenner's people's response in Jacobin but the editors took it out that because I I pointed this out to them and so they were going to put it in but then the editor said no.

SPEAKER_02: 50:38

Yeah because because they just I mean honestly because if you publish that in that then you have to be like here's why this is a basic like undergraduate level mistake uh from one of the key thinkers of Jacobin magazine.

SPEAKER_00: 50:57

It's very slippery with the facts sometimes I mean there was a whole thing I had like problem I had with uh Vivek Chiber's class matrix book which is like conceptually well he makes all the same mistakes about social democracy as Jacobin people do in general um but he also wrote and analytic Marxists do as a whole too because the other thing is we should just admit that the that uh Hamilton and co are right uh in the in the Flowers from Arts book the analytic Marxism is the unofficial unstated party line of uh um Jacobin of Jacobin but since analytic Marxism fell out of favor academically in the 1990s for reasons of his own internal contradictions I'm not talking about because it's not Marxist enough I literally I have a book by uh I believe Tom Mayer that sets out the criterion which analytic Marxists set for themselves and he just systemically points out they don't meet their own criterion um and you don't see a lot more of it for a while and then Chiber uh Chibber uh and Eric Owen Wright and Co kind of become the the grand domes of the Jacobin crew uh at least their theoretical basis um and then like uh you know Matt McManus who who isn't so much uh analytic Marxist uh I I don't know that I would call him McManus a Marxist at all um and I mean I like Matt I really do but I don't think he's a Marxist I don't even know that he would say he's a Marxist I'm actually would be interested in knowing that um big things like liberal socialism right um right and he sees Marx as part of that tradition but yeah uh whereas Ben Burgess is a Kohenite a specifically GA Koen I um analytic Marxist with some caveats like he won't say that there's no such thing as uh labor theory of value or even an imminent critique of Ricardian labor theory of value and Marx he will just kind of say I don't know and um I've always been frustrated with that go ahead yeah but but then like in in my review of Flowers for Marx I was I was looking at the stuff he was citing like this one terrible article um to say that like it that was published in Jacobin by I think an editor um that like Marx was basically a proto-marginalist um and that all his critiques of uh supply and demand are um like not are being misinterpreted um and despite that like it it is totally a wrong reading of what Marx was talking about. Marx hated all of the proto-marginalists he even the ones who drew like the Marshellian like cross graph like he knew one of them from Germany and hated that guy Engel said specifically hated that guy um and this made any person who is familiar with the history of political economic thought um could have told you that that article was bogus um but uh it was cited by um uh in in the book and oh yeah yeah by Burgess yeah by Burgess and um and then he also like like this really like galling argument by um Steve Paxton um which I look I downloaded the book and looked it up to just see what he said about like how the experience of the Soviet Union collapse actually vindicated Marx because it it started in like basically feudalism and therefore wasn't developed capitalism and never was bound to fail. And it's just analyzes what the conditions were to start a Soviet Union to say that yeah this is why it failed like 70 80 years later um 90 years later it just makes like the the the sheer changes in the economic system in Russia the changes in the productive forces you cannot it is not a credible argument to say that the the specific conditions of feudal Russia um like in the forces of production led to the collapse of the USSR that's not credible no I mean the USSR was keeping pace with Europe and the United States in industrial production within 20 years. But that's not because it was feudal um also I mean to me it's like well then how do you explain what happened in England either yeah like is there just some kind of magic to to uh to Protestant I mean like Protestantism that causes uh you know uh a a change in and exploitation type in rates um I think Brenner explained you know for all my problem I have a lot of problems with Brenner these days um but Brenner does explain England fairly well or at least uh I would say Adam Milkins would interpretation of Brenner experience England fairly well um I you know uh to put back to let's get what were you saying about Vivek Shiver what did he mess up with that he the he makes the whole book as this um like defense of a structuralist theory of class but he never goes into what structuralism is or what structures are and therefore what the the the structuralist class is um he just like basically uses all of like the um like like uh analytic Marxists and uh like more sociological stuff um to argue like about like from incentives like a neoliberal economist would right um and it it's just very frustrating because like why why couldn't you have just connect looked at this a tradition that does the thing that you're looking for and have had some sort of dialogue with it um which would have been like the the more academically rigorous thing to do.

SPEAKER_02: 57:35

Right I mean what's interesting is like I can't even think of who they could go to for that uh which is uh Richard Wolf when he was writing with what's his face um not now Richard yeah Rid Resnick because there was very clearly a dialogue between autisterian structuralism and analytic Marxism and and and Wolf and Resnick's 80s and 90s work. Not so much anymore. I don't really know what Wolf was on now but like um I I do think you you know it got it existed even um uh the you know I I this is neither here nor there I I am fascinated with the fact that like there's a problem in the 1970s there are four schools of Marxist historiography that emerge out of it basically that we that are not tied to the Soviet Union and also weirdly don't get tarred in the Western Marxism debates today because I don't think people understand that this would be more important than complaining about Marcusa um but uh you have the Monopoly capital school uh you have the political Marxist school um which is Brennan Woods which has some ties to the analytic Marxist school and then there's the world systems school um and I guess you could also throw uh altisarian structuralism in there although I don't because it's a little bit before that um and people it's not that many of us anymore um no but but the existence the the tension between the Lakashians and the altisarians are actually why those four schools of historiography exist.

SPEAKER_00: 59:29

Do you know that meme about like that that boomer comic of this guy standing in line for coffee and he's oh yeah black coffee is a do you want espresso whatever all this bullshit it's just I just want black coffee I just want orthodox Marxism thank you um well I mean I find this I find this very interesting to me because um you have a good people have a hard time for example can can conceptualizing uh the problems that have emerged with the Democratic Party and the Republican Party uh today and I I theorize it as the following um the democrats are in denial that their managerial system can continuously maintain high profit rates without inflation andor even further accelerating the drift of of uh income up and they cannot deal with the fact that they're so dependent on that um upper capitalist spending uh not just for obvious things like their own campaign

SPEAKER_02: 1:00:47

campaigns but to maintain the economy that they can't stop the way that it is siphoning stuff upwards and then they just have to say it's a good economy based off that um whereas the Republicans actually realize that's non-viable but their solution is worse um which is basically deny organic capital uh turn I mean I remember my argument against 20 uh project 2025 which I now think is naive not for the reasons people think I always said of course they won't try that that's incoherent capital won't let them like and then I realized no they're throwing spaghetti against the wall and capitalists know it they're they're terrified because they know that the only thing holding their stock market up is uh um is the physical production around AI and do not mean AI software that's not profitable I mean capital investment I mean capital investment in chips and in data centers that's it yeah and so it's actually not even all the magnificent seven it's like you and I were talking about this privately it's like three or four of the companies in the Magnificent Seven and then that's beginning to wane and there's nothing else behind it uh and they've also gutted all the social safety nets for reasons that make that I hate to tell people do make sense. I don't want to like I don't want to say it's good and I don't think it has to be this way uh but um the bond market's gonna weak gonna weaken and and if it does you'll see a massive deceleration of the uh of the hoarding of dollars and then it'll be quite like what the UK did to itself and we'll have a massive inflation problem and a massive impoverishment relatively quickly and a state that's floundering to respond to it I mean you know how however ridiculous you know Trump's America is I hate to tell you structurally Britain right now is more fucked yeah but they don't they don't have a real economy they just have London they just have their like version of New York right um which I'm like the reason why I always compare it to Argentina is I'm like you know what places are like that uh stalled out uh low middle income countries in the developing world like Guatemala yeah it's it's funny because you can look at like the what the capital intensity is for Argentina and it was a leading country like 200 years 150 years ago or something right and then it it never grew its capital intensity it just never put that money towards investment and it got stuck there forever.

SPEAKER_00: 1:03:48

And still kind of is actually like I mean the big problem is is that like you you do actually need to depreciate like depreciate the currency you do need like to restore hard budgets to the economy. But the problem is that like uh the only like the the Melee what just wants to do that just like he doesn't care what happens to people if you do that. Like a socialist government would figure out how to do this how to actually plan the economy to restore self-reliance um that would be the proper socialist program there. But of course Melee's not going to do that. The main like if he's he's actually regressing back to the old Argentinian playbook which is like profit of the government by slowing the the rate of like the decline to the dollar and just having like the actual inflation be higher than the the exchange rate fall. But if he was serious about like actually just letting it free float um then like he could stabilize situation at the expense of virtually everyone in the country.

SPEAKER_02: 1:04:55

And then he would be ripped apart like literally like you know um but yes I mean uh it would I mean this is one thing that you and I you know when you I talk this way and uh I move a lot in MMT circles I actually will like I agree with MTers about certain things it is true the government can't run out of money you know what though money is not value and you don't seem to understand that like and they'll be like well value some vague abstract saying and then I'll be like okay but liquidity is not abstract power the other answer is not abstract and so power isn't abstract like what are you on like uh like oh value isn't real and I'm like I don't know man I can statistically model it um I'm sure I mean that the in theory no that doesn't prove it exists I can statistically model a lot of things but that's what you're doing with your alternate analysis like power and whatnot except it's not as explanatory um and so you know trying to get people to understand that like you know one of the things that that you get into we haven't talked about yet but one of the crises for American capitalist is is something forced valuation right if we actually had something that forced capitalists to valorize their their uh their wealth like sell stuff on the market instead of hold stocks forever through investment it would become very clear I think that every one of the major capitalists both as individuals and companies are overvalued um and thus are guilt uh thus have fictitious capital propping a lot of their uh valuations up right it do you do you agree with me on that I mean like that's my um I mean like the like the existing valuation is based off of um like the prop like the mass of profit in the economy basically it's not totally unhinged from that no it's not nothing yeah but it but it is like the but the mass of profit that we have now is basically based off of unsustainable circumstances uh and and the growth models is how I would say it okay so like I I would say that I'm not saying that the valuation is based off of just subjective whatever I'm saying that if we were forced to have a reckoning through valuization we would see that the that we are projecting to the future things that are not projectable into the future and those valuations would fall almost instantly and um that's basically by definition true because every every like if you ask these investors what they're doing they're they're making a a um underwriting um like uh they're doing underwriting for these investments where they're laying out well how much what's the value of uh the future cash flow going like uh 10, 15 what a hundred years even um and some of the that may be more realistic than others um but if you forced everyone to sell right then you basically are just left with well what's valuable right now um and sometimes that happens sometimes there's like a crisis where you I don't know like 1928 like I'm just I just thinking like the Great Depression is an example the long depression's another one actually like uh in fact I would say one of the ways we've dealt with risk management this will get us back to one of the articles um is by making sure we don't ever call the cards on valuations at one time like like we have structurally set of the economy so that that is less likely to happen which is why you've had less things like an obvious Great Depression. Today I'm fascinated by the problem though because you and I you and I haven't talked about this but I'm like the traditional ways in which we measure a recession we are definitely approaching but what people aren't factoring in is those traditional ways are based off of a couple of key assumptions that are no longer true one of which is just growing population rates like I'm like well if the population is shrinking both from lack of immigration and from lack of births like you could have a decrease in jobs and not have an increase in unemployment like and actually I think we see that um and then there you know there's the shrinkflation of employment which is like people who are uh contractors in gig work don't count even if they even if they're making sub-poverty wages yeah you know um so uh this ties us back in though uh the book the Bartell book talks about risk management as one of the things that led to these failures in both the um the the socialist world and the uh um it didn't talk about that so much as it that that's what I took away from it all right so it's implied by it yeah because one of the things I I've always found fascinating right I'm not a big dung fan you know this about me but um I do think that China also had the failure to deliver on promises era uh that the USSR had but managed it way better by getting around um the problem of productive forces by getting but by encouraging western investment as opposed to western direct export uh extra um uh extraction so by encouraging western uh western parties to invest in chinese production firms uh opening up the market that way uh but it did lead to a collapse of the Chinese social safety net in the 1980s like that's actually true yeah um and they were able to write the ship basically between Hu Jintao and X and G's you know G came X policy came last but even there uh they have had to do that at slowing their own economic growth they because this is one thing that like we just have to deal with like like the the middle classes in China are still subject to the same pressures that the middle classes like in Europe are if not America too. And I I I'm saying that to me because it does indicate that like they found a way to to deal with this temporarily but they're gonna need to find another way long term to finish this transition.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:50

Well I mean it I think that they've actually they'll get there because for this simple reason that China has an extremely high investment rate um and because their investment rate is so much higher than the rest of like most normal uh capitalist economies um that that's basically why everything's happening right now the way it is that everybody feels the pressure from China and it's not going away in quite the same way that it did when um Germany and Japan caught up um because they're not like I mean they have a ways to go before they reach similar labor productivity levels as um like modern developed economies and I I I don't anticipate them slowing down um that that sort of investment. Matter of fact a lot of economists say that like they've been expecting that uh China's investment rates are going to fall and um basically I expect the opposite I expect that China by pushing this like like force onto global um markets is basically gonna force the rest of the world to increase their investment rates um that have been stalled since neoliberalism basically so privately you and I talked about this as an interesting conundrum because I said well this is why this is why I view China as the most responsible capitalist country and you more or less agreed with me although you said yeah it's a state it's a way of state capital management that actually can discipline some of the worst excesses of the uh of the bourgeoisie um and not through the way that like you know people on twitter imagine like they're just shooting uh yeah you know uh billionaires all the time which they're not they're just not that's not like I think Jack Ma's still alive like he's still alive and still like he'd even made a public appearance recently that seemed that he was back in favor a bit but the fact that he disappeared after he made like comments critical of the government basically on behalf of typical capitalist interests um it like it shows that they can't exist as like a like the capitalist class can't exist as a political actor really in China in the way that they um are supposed to in every other like in bourgeois states around the world.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:28

Well I mean well that makes China an interesting thing though because it it it is still subject to national market to international market dynamics. It still operates within everything that we consider a capitalist economy um but it does have a way of of uh limiting its it its capitalist class or at least subordinating it in a class collaborationist way that other states have not managed to do including ones with high government investment i mean like the Nordic countries um I do think that's an interesting problem I mean uh in that it actually could be it if done well enough and if the US fails as a countermeasure it actually would give China the ability to put pressure on the global market uh in a way that could change things in a massive way the way the US did in the 1970s honestly uh but I don't mean that and they would do the same thing they would definitely not um but I mean in like US uh fiscal decisions started really affecting everywhere uh at that point even though the US productive economy was actually weakening um you know actually uh this reminds me of a FT podcast I was listening to a while ago um where like this was only this is already true in certain ways that the Chinese investment decisions are basically already impacting American um like savings and investment display decisions um that like the reason that it's so difficult um to like do manufacturing here is part of Chinese competition um like if if like if you force this much investment and just to build the absolute amount of industry um there's less room in like the the global economy for everyone else um but if you want to compete um you have to uh invest and also put discipline to ensure that you're moving down the global cost curve and that requires a lot more than what most countries are able are willing to do right now um especially the US especially the UK I was gonna say I I think in a lot in the cases of of a lot of developing countries that's not uh that's not a a willingness that's an able but in case of us yeah that's a will like that's a willingness issue like we could have done something about this um even from a as I've said before is like even from a capitalist perspective these people are bad at managing their own economies now I have a theory for that that actually isn't all that tied into Marxism but you know you and I both are not necessarily opposed to supplementing Marxism with other theories um but I do think it's because our elites are uh are over specialized and under um and under challenged and real and relatively isolated and oddly enough despite the way China's always depicted as an autocracy and despite some problems with China that I do agree with like I don't think I don't think China's always as good to labor as a lot of like mls would want you to believe um but uh there is a sense that they are at least trying to build up social surplus for something other than the massive accumulation of wealth um they seem to be willing to tolerate some of that to get the production up yeah um the point with China is specifically economic development which is going to put them at odds with capitalist consumption and in the US and the UK and and places like it the point is capitalist consumption as far as it has been in need under neoliberalism.

SPEAKER_00: 1:18:25

I I am reminded though as as you mentioned like the the situation with elites um there's this conservative commentator Tanner Greer who's like an acquaintance of mine um who is like a China specialist basically um because he he I think he lived there for a bit as a a missionary um but his he was talking up recently about like how stupid the recent stuff with the military has been and um he was saying how in China Xi Jinping tells the cadres you have to have a catastrophe mindset that if you don't do it right there will be catastrophic consequences for the country and that simply doesn't exist in the US um everything is totally performative here and intentionally so um by Trump and his administration um and that's probably not going to end well but I do think there is a deeper structural thing here also of capitalist consumption that they just cannot en masse like raise investment rates without causing a real political crisis. That like the the all of Trump's bases are like these petty Borge like militant political types and if there's no longer an economic base for them and I've mentioned this to you before it would be a really serious issue um and the I'm not exactly sure what would happen.

SPEAKER_02: 1:19:58

Well I mean we have this problem both parties though because the the the base of the Democratic party is investment capital plus uh proletarianized and I use that advisedly I do not mean poor people be oh proletarianized you mean poor I'm like no I mean people who used to be in a petty bourgeois relation who are now in a wage relation but they are in a wage relation dependent on government subsidies not on the market so we already like if you understand I mean I don't mean to sound like Michael Lind right uh but he's not wrong about this if you understand this as a petite bourgeois versus professionals and Marxists have a real fucking hard time not realizing that the professionals are no longer petite bourgeois and this is bigger than a cultural issue and it's not like the PMC exactly the way that is it's not just about like your educational attainment and credentialing um this is about your structural relationship in the economy doctor more doctors and stuff are now wage earners than they were in the past but all that stuff is based off government largesse largely in post-industrial areas and that's why stuff like these these uh the big beautiful bill is so disastrous to the American economy because you have all this professional stuff that's also supporting all these post-industrial areas almost entirely which also if they collapse the rural areas that are dependent on the petit bourgeois development and on like large scale wealthy farmers and whatnot that also collapses too like so you have two people who are economically at odds but if either one of them win they both fall yeah it's a prisoner dilemma it's a prisoner's dilemma of extreme proportions yeah um I don't think maybe yet you have come close to that I don't I've been amazed that like it's been fucking people like Michael Lind and not Marxists who've looked at this Marxists like PMC they're really running everything guys that have the last year just has it disabused you of them actually really running everything because if it hasn't you need to get with the fucking program like um no I I've honestly been thinking about like Trump as a bit of like the the American version of the cultural revolution um that like this is all like the Chinese had thousands of years to appreciate what like the social and cultural role of educated professionals were and it is basically like in China it was a literal aristocracy basically like yeah but say it was basically a kind of aristocracy we did not have in Europe except maybe in very wealthy clergy that would be the except that these people weren't really clergy they were their own social class like I mean you have to remember one that like the Americans who were looking at the higher education system in Germany and brought it over literally talked about an aristocracy of excellence and the Germans themselves were using higher education as a means to perpetuate their um domestic aristocracy in like as a trying to preserve it in modern capitalism. Yeah I mean it was basically a way to like transition and uh uh while while fully capitalist modernizing and not getting in some of the traps that the English got into that was what it was about and I I don't think people understand that I was like no that's why Erno Maher was right it actually took World War II to get rid of a lot of those fuckers but in the US they're not like an economic aristocracy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:37

They are like they are proletarianized as you're talking about they exist basically as um this ideologically coherent group or not co not ideologically coherent as in they all have this one political ideology but in that they have all have this ideological training as like the ideology of professionalism.

SPEAKER_02: 1:23:56

Right yeah I mean this is one thing that you I think maybe maybe um I'm gonna give Altissair a little bit of credit for is if you understand them not as a as a coherent class that is a clear new class like James Burnham tried to do with the managerial class my thing is like these new class theories are interesting and I do think professionals are a problem but the problem that you have with them is when you look at them profoundly you're like yeah but what you see is justifying this class is constantly changing it was not originally uh Burnham didn't give a shit about college degrees like that's an Aaron Reich innovation and Aaron Reich meant something Aaron Reich thought that they were going to be a vanguard class aligned with the proletariat because it emerged from it and she was wrong and then uh we use it as a theodicy to explain why Bernie lost and not that you know he didn't have any leverage in the Democratic party and also his platform doesn't actually make sense um but um I'm just I'm just saying like uh I I I know the jackaman heads get mad at me when I say this but I've always been like you didn't even have a coherent theory of political economy undergirding all this um like Bernie is half MMT half Keynesianism I guess that that's out of halves but like a little bit of classical Marxism like but very little um it's not it I don't know you know like it's like uh hearing Corbin tell me about how an island off the coast of Europe is somehow gonna return to an industrial policy of when it was an empire uh because without you know with with what material inputs again I'm just always fascinated by the lack of thinking this shit through um and I know I sound like I'm ranting sorry to get but it does seem to me that the like that China is interesting as a model because when it comes to this risk management of the societies we're talking about it's been the only one that's been able to kind of I'm not even saying it's done it all there's a lot of promises to the workers hasn't fulfilled but that's kind of been able to restore a social contract that people have faith in none of the other BRICS countries have the West countries haven't been able to do that um post-communist Russia definitely hasn't been able to do it um so you know that does not bold well for a lot of these schemes and I think one of the things that we can get out get back into a little bit uh to get us back into Mao um and by Mao I mean um is uh it does seem like most of these theories uh don't deal with the Kalecki thing and they also treat capitalist polities as autarchies even though they say they don't like um like I mean you know there's the obvious things that like Benjamin Studebaker brings up like capital flight but there's bigger stuff than even that yeah like um or like oh you know like Warren Moser just when I would talk about like uh what if other countries won't trade in your currency and he just like but they do though and I'm like but what if they don't though and he's like but they do though well you know go ahead I mean there's a funny example here in Cuba um that has been going through a very severe economic crisis lately um which is mainly the result of like um the they the tourist sector basically shut down during COVID and because of that they lost access to foreign currency that they needed to buy things like fuel.

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:07

And because they didn't have fuel that means that they couldn't use it on tractors and um all all sorts of machinery and equipment that was used to actually run the industries that were export industries to get more foreign currency like particularly the sugar industry. And that led to a downward spiral where they couldn't produce more to get more foreign currency so they kept getting less and less and less and less production and now they're in this situation that basically now the Chinese are trying to bail them out so that they get solar panels and reduce their reliance on foreign energy imports. But the the takeaway from that is is basically that um economies need trade both ways in order to uh usually need trade both ways in order to get the inputs that they need for their economy to work. Even China has lots of energy imports has lots of imports for agriculture things like that. The US has a lot of natural resources exports but we need those higher end machineries, electronics things like that. Which if we didn't have those our economy would like uh contract considerably um now the like this interdependence is really important um because it's like like like I said earlier people like capitalism requires interdependence structurally because if you like um it it's what forces people to engage in markets.

SPEAKER_02: 1:29:45

Right. I mean that's why capitalism is a socializing factor which I don't think people understand they think it's only an atomizing factor and I'm like no it's both it is atomizing to other forces of civil society but since it forces us into market engagement and market related production which forces us out of subsistence individual which is still not truly individual but like out of small family microeconom micro microeconomies um into a macroeconomy in the market it is a socializing factor like and that's like it's dialect to sound like a bad Hegelian which I know but that is its dialectical tension is that it's both atomizing and socializing simultaneously um so anyway I think that um like this this part of like uh risk management like it it's a part of like trying like the main thing uh

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:49

Socialism to me is like figuring out like is people actually understanding how production works and how what the alternatives are in a specific situation for a society. Um and so like this sort of alternative planning, like today it only really happens as like military contingency plans, um, and on a very small scale. Uh, I'm sure the Chinese planners have like, well, if we lose access to the US in a war over Taiwan, well, we're gonna do this and this and and so on. Um, like it's what what is the bare minimum that you can do is like this certain like rationing. Um, if you wanted like if in order to spurn the market, you actually whether it's like especially on this like international level, you have to understand what it takes to be uh to do our talk production. Um that's the point I was making.

SPEAKER_02: 1:31:42

Um I would agree with you. I I I I think it's a we that's also a paradox, is like um for all my critiques of methodological nationalism, I do think honestly you have to look at national planning to even get a sense of the scale you need to operate at. Um, but then you are then you almost immediately have to then go, okay, but what are my ex what are my non-national external limitations? Um and I have to deal with that. Um and and the global market, the global market does do whether we like it or not, and whether we think it's efficient or not, or why it why it does it for what, does outsource a lot of that thinking about the competition between polities, um, and states. Uh, so I mean, you would agree with me that that's one of the functions that it does.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:37

Yeah. Um, it's all good, it all goes into like uh insurance and derivative markets, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:32:43

Right. Um so I mean, I guess this at this brings us back though. You had a critique of Sora Mao that I think is interesting. Um, because if you look at this from a from a risk management standpoint, it becomes very clear that what's compelling um capitalists is a very different set of concerns and motivations than what's compelling like the professionals and petit bourgeoisie, and definitely what's compelling the average working class person. But in Mao, that's not really differentiated. Am I wrong? I mean, I when I read the book, I felt the same way.

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:27

So yeah, no, this is this is one of the key points because if he did differentiate it, if he understood what the different like tendencies and like incentives were on capitalists in particular, he would have to go back a bit more to the forces of production and how that determines things. Um because the the capitalists, like they have um their like it's it's a classic MCM. Their income is the difference between M prime and M. Um, and it because of that, they're always uh they're trying to minimize the their costs, but in doing so, um like in order to expand their profits, they're always doing things like investing in new technologies and so on. Um and this creates the falling rate of profit dynamics and the the development of the productive forces more generally. Um and this is very different from what like the the the workers experience. Um and it's uh uh a problem like for Mao because he like it like I said before, like it would require recognizing that there are progressive elements to um the mute compulsion of economic domination, right? Um, and it would complexify a lot of his uh thesis, I think, um, of what what that role is exactly. Um like it like we can't imagine a world without this sort of force, which is the same force as just that the general economic dependency we were talking about before. Um like there's always going to be some of that, and when that's like the problem of capitalism is that it structurally creates that, and you don't want that to be the case. Um you you want people to be able to uh spurn the mark like this interdependence um if they want to live relatively as they choose. Um but to the extent that it's a real thing, you have to respect it. Um and the uh and this is another thing here, uh somewhat like um well doesn't do this so much, but I mean we can get into this later. It's uh like the relationship between like um like M prime and M. Like it that is not actually like the the growth mechanism of capitalism, like national.

SPEAKER_02: 1:36:04

Yeah, sorry, Deleuze and Guitari.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:07

Yeah, no, this is a very important um to like Deleuze and Guitari and Nick Land, who takes from them.

SPEAKER_02: 1:36:13

Yeah, the accelerationist in general, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:16

Yeah, that they think that um because a growth in um like the growth in M is the growth. No, the growth is but the real growth comes from like the C, it comes from like expanding labor productivity and all that stuff. Um like the the growth in M is literally just central banks deciding we're gonna print more money. Um the and it also it it doesn't like you can have profits without growth. This is a fundamental of the Kalaki equations because the fact that MCM is like you think if you think about it as only one firm, you're not gonna realize that um like the profit in an economy is equivalent to capitalist consumption plus investment. Um, because those are like uh the spending that the capitalist does as at the same time that they're buying uh the means of production and the labor power to produce things. This is a big misunderstanding um caused by the loose and land and people like that. Um that the capitalism is not gonna expand infinitely um necessarily because of profits. Um at some point we're gonna hit limits of like one, the monetary thing is totally arbitrary. Two, like eventually, like the um there's gonna be structure limits to how much you can invest, and that'll be that. Um that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02: 1:37:46

No, it makes perfect sense. I mean, this this has been the problem of both left and right accelerationism. Right accelerationism is just it expands infinitely and it becomes infinite progress, and even if it destroys humanity, blah blah blah, and trying to stop it, as Peter Thiel says now is the antichrist. I don't I will admit our capitalist overlords have done a lot of meth, allegedly. Um allegedly.

SPEAKER_00: 1:38:15

Um so I mean, this is like the two like deviations of understanding the logic of capital, in my opinion. You have Mao who thinks it's all just like domination and control. Um, there is no of these like tendencies for the productive forces to develop, basically. Um, that's just like a myth, even though it's much more strongly confirmed than the other thing he talks about, which is like the surplus population increasing. Um and then there's this other deviation of well, actually, the logic of capital means everything's gonna blow up, like the productive forces are gonna keep blowing up forever. Um, and we're gonna explode, and uh AI is gonna take control of everything.

SPEAKER_02: 1:39:01

Yeah, I mean, and ironically is basically that's let that's almost left. Well, no, it's not. Uh left accelerationism is that it'll explode and then socialism will happen, which is still very close to communization theory, honestly. Yeah, it's a horseshoe there. Yeah. Um, and then there's right accelerationism is an explode, and our robot overlord Cthulhu beast that emerged from all the meth we've allegedly done in China, um, will uh dominate the undermention of the market and just lead us to a post-human future.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:39

Um, I mean, their argument's not that stupid, but it's not that much smarter.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:53

Um I mean, one, I mean, the problem is one that it's wrong.

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:58

Two, even that it's like it isn't wrong, even if it isn't wrong, why would you want that?

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:03

Like, yeah. Why would why are you telling me this?

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:09

Like, I think I keep that part quiet, my dude. Um no, I thought that too. I'm just like, wait, wait, your vis like your vision is literally just a dude, my friend, this is like a Superman villain's plan.

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:32

Yeah. Um I mean, certainly I think some of them want to be like seen as supervillains. Feel especially, but uh I think that's a common trope in like Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:51

Yeah, I guess if they can't be heroes, they have to be viewed as because at least they're they're world historically important. Um I I am uh you know, I mouth the mouth domination thing is interesting to me because domination is part of capital, right? But it's just like I this occasionally happens with world systems theorists too, where they what they'll just start arguing that there literally is nothing um liberatory uh are socializing and about the development of capitalism, and then I'm like, you know, they'll start talking about how the feudal work day was was less and this, that, and the other. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I mean, some of that's true, but some when did people die in the in uh early medieval Europe? I just want to put that to you before you get all like happy about uh these kind of societies. Like what did knights do? You know, it's it's you know, like uh who did they terrorize? Because you guys seem to be forgetting a whole lot about the prior forms of social formation also sucking.

SPEAKER_00: 1:42:11

Um yeah, there's this common like error, I think, that's made with uh world system like various like interpretations um that go either two ways. That one, like that because like profit rates equalize, this means that like there must be unequal exchange between the global north and south in order for the like these big um like divergences and like trade flows to make sense, which one they don't equalize. There's capital, there's like barriers of mobility for physical capital um to be installed in lots of these developed cut or developing countries. Um and the other thing is that I was having um like you could also take it the other way that because there's um like not this these equalizing profit rates or something fishing going on, but I mean it's the same issue. Uh I just like I don't find the economics very convincing on a lot of that stuff. Um that like you do have to admit that at least in most sectors, there's some pretty big productivity differences um and what's possible. And there's also these same dynamics with like capitalist consumption also apply to the developing world. That if especially if you have like a cabal of like really wealthy people in your country that control everything, which is true for like lots of African countries, lots of Latin American countries, um like that they're not gonna want to invest more, they already get all the money. Why would they want to put some of it towards investment? They're not gonna get they're not gonna be able to eat it, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:57

Yeah, I I I think this is just uh a hard problem. And the I think you know, Mao is one thing, but I think you and I both have uh you know a critique of communization theory. I do, I will admit that I think Innotes contribution to the debates and in notes volumes one through well, really volumes two, three, and four. The first one's not all that helpful. I hate it. Um I hate it so hard. I know you do. I know you do. You don't like either side of that debate. Um I used to I used to be more conven one, I always thought DeVay won that debate against against Theory Communist, and two, uh, that DeVay's answer still isn't very good. Um I thought the opposite.

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:46

I thought DeVay's you agree with end notes that Theory Communist won that debate, but well, I think that they were slightly better, they were still bad, but Daw was just so bad that he I couldn't hand him anything.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:01

Um but I I will give you this. Um I I guess my my concerns here are uh um the communization theory seems to me to be uh structurally similar to um a couple of theories. Um immiseration theory, uh actually accelerationism too, because accelerationism is left accelerationism is a catastrophic form of the amisoration thesis. Um and then the you know, well, the working class didn't do what we wanted it to, um, cuz reasons. And I I do in the history of separation think the cause reasons is basically their answer. Um people could listen to my long discussion with Ezri on that because uh they basically deny that there was ever a politicized labor movement in the first place. Um just like I was like, okay. Um uh but I do think there are questions that EndNotes tries to deal with that basically have not been tried have not been dealt with particularly honestly. I just think all their solutions are terrible. So for so like uh the they they do deal with the theory, like at least Banyev, and I don't know if he's still a communization theorist, actually, now that he works for the new left review these days, but um he uh he he doesn't he accepts uh theory rate of profit the fall and the increasing need of organic capital and development of machines and them being related. Phil Neal does too, and when they're talking about that part of the economy, their writing's actually quite good. But then you would like try to figure out what they think the answer to it is, and it's just like riots, yeah, and then the riots will force intersocialization. And I'm like, why in what ways do riots force socialization? Um uh riots will force socialization, something, something we abolish everything, communism, and like no transition whatsoever. Um no bourgeois intermediary things like time accounting, even much less, you know, markets.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47:33

Uh and someone just like uh uh make like one of those there's an old meme about like in capitalism, you have uh one cow and you sell the milk, and then in in communism, someone steals your cow. Someone needs to do that for like social democracy where everybody gets a like gets a cow on paper and um and the the communization we abolish cows. Yeah, I mean it does feel that way.

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:01

I mean, but it is interesting because I kind of I kind of view one uh my most edgelord opinion is like uh a lot of Marxist Leninism, not all of it, but a lot of Marxist Leninism ends up being social democracy just with more guns and maybe some anti-imperialism. Um the social the social democratic people of pretty much all stripes think we can have the early 20th century economy back uh as the basis for what we're operating on, and that's nuts. Uh they also seem to deny not just the theory of rates of profits the fault, they there's other there's other things that like the Jacobin crew in particular just doesn't want to deal with um that inflation hurts the very poor, that uh social goods is not the same as building um uh class power. Um that uh what's another one? Um oh yeah, co-ops in a world of markets still operate under capitalist logic or they don't stay open. Um like you know, uh on and on and on. Um, and I guess if I encountered those things as the primary forms of socialism, may you know, which I did, and when I did, you know what? Communization seemed pretty pretty uh um, I mean, I was like, at least the guys acknowledge that bullshit can go on forever. Um but you know, I think we're in a weird cul-de-sac right now. I was gonna ask you, um what in what ways do you think uh the our current economic stagnation in the United States and in the West in general, but particularly in the United States, um has led to a like how has that affected the consciousness of the Marxian and post-Marxian left in America? Because that seems to be part of what you're hinting at.

SPEAKER_00: 1:50:27

Yeah. I think that there's I think that there's almost like there's a lot of wishful thinking, right? There's like um almost like oh how back in the day there was all these thoughts that oh, like communism will unleash the productive forces and usher most like incredible new growth, um, except for like social democracy. Like if we just had the same Keynesian policies, we'll have the same growth as the uh post-war period, uh, ignoring all the contradictions of how that played out.

SPEAKER_02: 1:51:00

Yeah, and that it didn't it hasn't happened in have people looked at the gross wakes of the Nordic countries, it's not like they're markedly higher than the rest of the West.

SPEAKER_00: 1:51:10

No, like it's but like the there's this there's that the and the same thing applies to like MMT, which is just an extension of it's the it's the post-Kantian stuff. Um, and that but then there's also like um the sort of pessimism, I think well, this it's a weird positionality because um I can't quite tell if it's defeatism or not. Um of like well, that this like the post-industrial condition of the US is now the universal condition, and it is like people thought that the Fordist system had solved the contradictions of capitalism. I think that there's like with endnotes a bit, um, there's people who think that neoliberalism solved the contradictions of capitalism, and now by becoming feudalism. Yes, it's just this forever.

SPEAKER_02: 1:52:06

I don't think that's just endnotes. I mean, that's like so ubiquitous right now. Like Giannis Farfakis is talking about that. Yeah, every liberal on TikTok, Nico, just start screaming nick uh techno-feudalism the moment you mention Elon Musk.

SPEAKER_00: 1:52:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:52:23

I mean, it's just like it's like so. I get why it's like a popular phraseology. I even get why people would think that. I flirted with it myself when I started thinking about how much of the economy had become rent because that distorts the ability to measure the value relationship. But what I've learned from looking at the kind of the work you do and a few other people do is that it distorts it, but it doesn't, it doesn't fundamentally undo it. These things still act like you still trade rents like commodities, and they still act like commodities when you do so. Like, so you know, also the labor markets like we don't have surfs. You producing content for Facebook does not make you a surf because I'm not sure how much value is actually generated by that content. Uh-huh. Um, and I don't mean that in an abstract, like valuable. I mean like literally, I don't know how many profits are made by it at all.

SPEAKER_00: 1:53:19

I'm pretty sure it's just redistributing surplus around. Uh right. Uh it it's I I feel like like the the one thing everyone forgets is that like there are in fact still like tendencies of things going on. That there is like um the economic development still matters, even if it's doesn't feel like like it feels like where like the US is defying gravity, but people don't realize it's defying gravity because it's when they've been here the whole time and it's just like the water they breathe.

SPEAKER_02: 1:53:54

Um I refer to us as having the like a two decades-long wily coyote moment.

SPEAKER_00: 1:54:01

Yeah. Which it's about how long it was for the the USSR, too.

unknown: 1:54:06

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:54:07

You know, and I'm like, we might you're like the United States might survive this, but not as it is right now. That's over. Um, and uh yeah, I mean, I don't know, man. It's it's dark. Uh I guess to pivot a little bit, where do you think we should be looking? I mean, clearly, like you and I have you and I have constantly had a slight difference of view on China, although it's I think it's not a difference in kind, it's a difference in amount. Um, but I do think China gives me some limited hope, which is why I'm a China defensist, even though I don't think it's solved some of these fundamental problems yet. Um, and I'm not sure it will. You seem to be more optimistic that it's at least creating a path where it could, and I think that's fair. Um, but where else should we be looking right now? Because it does feel like um, like for example, uh, you are associated with a neocotskyist tendency, kind of loosely. Um, and my critique of them is like I really like them and they're often right, and they're right about the problems of economism, but sometimes their fear of economism leads them to not take economics seriously enough, like, period. Um you might disagree with me because they're your comrades, but you know, I just don't see a lot of writing about economics in that sense and a lot of their work.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55:38

Um I mean, it's certain it's definitely a more of a political focus because it's about like the struggle for democracy is the primary thing. Um and like that I I think that's good. Um, I mean it's hard to figure out how exactly you translate like this economic problem into like a real like a political thing for a time when the socialists are still so marginal that it doesn't like nothing we can do is gonna affect government policy, really. I mean, even if like Zoran wins or whatever, it's not gonna really affect the investment rates of New York. Um, like the it it's a bit of a conundrum. And I know I've said in the past that like if the left had just known in the 60s that this was gonna come to bite them in the ass, that there were still contradictions of capitalism that could have done something. But I mean it's kind of difficult to say exactly uh how you I mean the the the thing with Chinese I don't know what they could have done.

SPEAKER_02: 1:56:40

That that's the thing is like I do agree with you, but I'm always like, but what would they do would have done though? Because so by the 70s, some of them did realize it, and what they tried to do also failed. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:56:53

Um I mean, I I think that all you can really do politically is just say what you believe and hope that like other people agree. Um, but it it's like with China, like the the it's not just what China is doing domestically. The fact that China is exerting this pressure on international markets is means that um like eventually the rest of the world will have to respond.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:18

Right, it will have to be but to me that also means we need to really start paying attention to China in a much more serious way than China good or China bad, because it's gonna matter how they negotiate the next 20, 30 years.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57:30

Well, it's not just what happens in China, it's like who is the first to evolve and adapt? And that's really well probably won't be us.

SPEAKER_02: 1:57:39

No, yeah, probably won't. I mean, to be fair, historically, why would we assume it be us? The former hegemon, it like in the in their Thucydides trap moment, and that's you know, uh, rarely ever is the person who realizes the situation first, you know, like um you know, Britain peaked in 1890. I don't think it realized it peaked in 1890 until like 1970.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:58:07

Um, so like you know, um some people still don't realize it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:58:20

Um you know, I think we peaked in 19 in the 1960s, or maybe even the 1950s, which also means the Pox Americana was like 15 fucking years. Like um, and it wasn't peaceful either. No, the Korean War and stuff, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:58:39

On an industrial scale, like World War II. Uh right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:58:43

I mean, it's I just I I always think about that. I'm like, yeah, you know, this is where I do where you and I, I don't know how you feel about generational logic, but I actually do talk about the baby boomers as the only real generation, in the sense that like the material infrastructure of capitalism as we know it was built around them, and they were such a big population that that we actually have forgotten how everything worked before them. And people I mean, I'm watching the New York Times do we made a mistake to assume that the post-war consensus was the norm. And I was like, motherfucker, it was obvious that the post-war consensus wasn't the norm by 1972. Like, but the way this generational logic and this investment terminology and all this has gone, we've been able to not look at that for a long time. I mean, even when we talk about neoliberalism, people say neoliberalism's over. And I've been like, it's ending, right? But it can end for a long time. Um, but also like you keep on just thinking that new all that neoliberalism was was uh just global markets. My boy, there were global markets like before there was capitalism. I don't know what you're on. Um the the the what's ending uh is that the the availability of that profitability of uh capitalist consumption for the for the bourgeois class to have any trickle-down effect pretty much ended in the odds.

SPEAKER_01: 2:00:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 2:00:18

If it existed in the first place, it only existed a little bit between the 1980 and 2000 and say six. And it's been over since then, and we've been kind of flailing in different kinds of policies to not deal with that for a long time. I mean, you had QE, um, you had uh the low interest rate years, but eventually even when you had the high interest rates, because

SPEAKER_00: 2:00:47

Of the way the system changed, they wrote a blog about this, remember a few years ago? About how, like, because of the way they changed the Federal Reserve System and the interest rate setting, they ended up still having like this positive uh like offsetting impact when they were tightening the rates of just sending lots and lots of money to banks.

SPEAKER_02: 2:01:09

Well, that will that will fix things for you, I suppose. Um I mean, you know, and I think I do think the uh um, I do think the situation with um I'm trying to articulate this in a clear way. Um I do think it's hard for us to get all the stats together and look at all the things in real time. Um, because it is increasingly more complicated. But there's a lot of people who are just in response to that, just pretending that the stats don't matter.

SPEAKER_00: 2:02:23

Um I think kind of problem, I think, is that on the one hand, like people don't understand the stats, they don't understand the counting. On the other hand, the people who do, like the really like economist people on the left, overcompli overcomplicate it. Um, because they're specialists and they're focused on this one, like uh these tests in much more complicated empirical tests of specific theories and stuff. They're not trying to zoom out and look at what's the big picture right now.

SPEAKER_02: 2:02:59

Yeah, and that that's worrying to me, particularly from the left, because we're supposed to be like, look, as I've said many times, if you don't have power, why aren't you at least honest with yourself? Like, I get why people who are trying to maintain illusions lie to themselves. I don't get why people who don't have those, like well, we're not part of the state ideological apparatus in any meaningful sense. Like, we might be an epiphenomenon of it. I'll I'll I'll I will grant that totally, but like, why can't we be honest about this? Because it does seem like there's a block on it. I'm not saying that Soran Mao and people are being dishonest, but I'm saying, like, I do think the Jacobin people are actually kind of willfully ignorant on purpose.

SPEAKER_00: 2:03:51

Yeah, there is definitely both an ignorance and like this like atmosphere of arrogance in a lot of these uh at more academic left circles, um and I that they don't like care to check, like just do the most basic fact checking of these claims. Like what what are what are the overall statistics tell us? What are the what are the basic historical trends of capitalism? And they they're afraid of it because of like people I don't know, maybe like Steve Pinker pulling out all these stats about how great capitalism is. You can look at it and like you you can verify things for yourself empirically, and you don't have to rely on like the uh various charlatans or mediators. Um more people need to be validating these things themselves, um, which is the only way like it's we're just in a bad epistemic environment. And my problem with like um like Burgess is he'll like talk so much about like logic and stuff like that. Logic isn't the only part of reasoning, you also need facts and you need the context, and um, if you just lay out like this very like academic argument, but miss like the things that are right in front of you, um, that's a problem. Like this being rigorous implies going out and checking things.

SPEAKER_02: 2:05:20

Well, yeah, I you know, I'm always iffy on this, but what I think there's a difference to be the one is I think logic is often not where the the issues are at. Um and I actually don't think it's a very Marxist way to argue that it's that like I would think that yes, if you make an illogical argument as a Marxist, that is a problem, right? Absolutely. Um, but two, as I pointed out to Ben, I'm like, there's not even just one form of logic, like it's not even just one form of valid logic. Like, like you know, if you get into like philosophy, it's not just you have dialectical reasoning, and there are logics that had different constraints, there's first and second order logics, and we don't ever get to any of that stuff, and then more importantly, if our logic's sound, but our axioms are wrong because our facts are wrong, or because our axioms don't make sense. Uh, you know, you and I might disagree on many things, but I can tell you what we both uh uh agree on that the experience of qualia uh doesn't actually matter all that much. Probably not um for uh uh for the problems of class consciousness, thank you, China Mia Bill. Um uh you know, because I mean even the question is kind of a category area is like, why does Marxism, which is not does which is not offer explanation to every single phenomenon in human existence, not offer an explanation for this phenomena that I am obsessed with? Uh something, something, something, epso facto materialism is wrong. And I'm like, uh no. Like, like, like um just because I can't prove that uh like signs um are the inputs that cause qualia, uh the fact that I can posit it and it is coherent means that it is a possible proof, meaning that it doesn't count for it, yeah. Meaning that no, it does not disprove materialism, like um and this kind of weird shit. Like, like, why is that what we're focused on? I'm really baffled actually that we're focusing on stuff like that at this moment in particular. Like, like, I'm like, uh, how many chickens are coming home to roost both economically and socially and politically?

SPEAKER_00: 2:08:08

You know, my problem, like there's that's there's actually a commonality here between the Melville thing and the analytic Marxism thing, in that both are kind of like showing this deference to these like um mainstream academic philosophy or other like social science stuff, um, which is my big problem with analytic philosophy, which is as like a um philosophy of science, as like in a general approach, um, I I think that it it disregards the idea that Marxists should be doing science as their own thing, and they they genuine they generally believe that these experts in academia, whether philosophers or social sciences, are where this stuff is supposed to happen, and that this is the proper role, and this is where like the the actual there's a division of labor in like who should be doing these things, and analytic Marxism is just taking what the economists, uh the the proper philosophers tell them, and just cross-referencing Marxist claims with that, and that's not what it was about, that's not what Marxism is about. There is a specific you have to work as a scientist to assess these claims all the way down. You can't just take like you especially can't take the bourgeois like academics at their word. Um, you have that's the part you have to double check and engage with.

SPEAKER_02: 2:09:48

Yeah, I think about this uh in like Romer and the Analytic Marxist, where he's just like, Well, we we can't figure out value theory if de facto marginalism is true, yeah. And I just I bring up non-Marxist critiques of marginalist assumptions. I'm just like, look at this Keynesian showing how this doesn't actually make sense, but you're just accepting it because it's David Gore in a in a neighboring social science, or um game theory is something I actually do use, but I don't use it for like class warfare uh because the the conditions are different. Um it's this stuff baffles me, and I'm like, so you have problems with the Hegelianism of Marxism, and your answer to it is random academic shit that you take at face value that in some ways seems more problematic than the than the Hegelian stuff you're replacing.

SPEAKER_00: 2:10:55

Yeah, um I mean it's just an epistemic deference to bourgeois authority, is the way I would put it, um, that has led a large part of the left down a dark like tunnel. And uh we we just need to be able to in the like create a culture of people doing the sort of intellectual like investigation themselves as opposed to relying on these people.

SPEAKER_02: 2:11:24

Yeah, um I I completely agree, and I mean I will admit that's a tall demand, yeah, because it it means that we basically have to be like willing to go and review stats and stuff and learn all kinds of fields that we don't know, and it's gonna lead to very acrimonious stuff internally because we have like in some ways we are sort of like I know we don't like to reinvent the will, but sometimes you actually have to, um, you know, or you have to do stuff like you and I were talking about GDP, and we're talking about I think GDP is a flawed statistic. I think the people who throw it out are basically like economics is dumb, and I'm like, okay, because the categories are bad or whatever, and they're just like, nah, because economics is dumb, it's just a mechanism of power. And I'm like, sure, but that doesn't mean that this doesn't tell you anything, right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:12:19

Like there was uh like a recent article from Palladium where someone was trying to say like the the the headline was something like GDP is like bunk or something to that effect, and the um the actual argument was that well, you know, the the value add numbers don't really add up correctly. Um, but that's not really what people think about when they think about GDP. If you think of like in terms of conceptually what GDP is, you have like the total amount of transactions in an economy, which is nominal GDP, and you're just deflating that by an inflation index, and that's your top line real GDP number. And you can sanity check inflation indexes of like um by just looking at what prices in like a catalog used to be um years ago. Uh there's like you can sanity check that. Um, those top line numbers can be off, but they can't be off by that much um in the grand scheme of things. And they're also double in the nominal numbers are also double-checked several ways. Um, so the the composition can get messy, especially with value add. But I I don't think that GDP numbers as a whole are that like totally wrong about what they're saying they are.

SPEAKER_02: 2:13:35

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, like, I I do think there are problems that you have to adjust for, like we mentioned, like value add is a problem. Um, dealing with stuff that is just a wealth transfer that will show up on GDP, but is not actually generating anything new is a problem. Um, but I mean we can kind of approximate that, and I try to when I talk about it, like um uh uh the idea that it tells you nothing is kind of weird.

SPEAKER_01: 2:14:07

I mean, it's just like it's like okay, we talk about gold.

SPEAKER_02: 2:14:12

Right. Um uh when we talk about class statistics, I realize that like liberals and stuff don't define class in the way I do, but I can still look at those statistics and approximate things based off of what I know from other statistics. So I'm like, okay, so I know that uh when when liberals report working class, what they mean is doesn't have a college degree, but I also know that this many people are working in this sector, and I can adjust that by however much percent based off of where people are currently employed, and know that we should boost that or subtract that by this much. Um uh and a lot of people just don't seem to be willing to do that, like um, they they just want to throw the baby out with a basket, like with the with the bath water, actually, and the basket and everything else. Um, you know, we're just throwing we're we're even throwing the tub out, like uh, because it doesn't make any sense to me when we're when we're talking about this, and they're like, oh, I can't know anything about this because the stats are different or because it has a liberal definition of X. And I'm like, Yeah, but I can adjust for that, and there are other stats that I can triangulate and approximate it. It was never gonna be a perfect knowledge. You don't get perfect knowledge with with with stats unless you have complete knowledge, which we don't have. So, you know, it's it's frustrating. Um well, thank you, Nico, for coming on. Um, hopefully this pushes back against the anti-scientific turn uh in Marxism. Yeah, because uh um that's uh that's been one of the things I've been really worried about is like is like um people either redefining science to the point that it has nothing to do with science and it's just rhetoric, or people who do not have a scientific conception of what we should be doing and think this is all about the imposition of norms. Because I'm always like norms have to have a material basis to be maintained, otherwise they fall apart. Like you can believe what the fuck ever. It doesn't matter if you can't reproduce it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16:28

Fingers crossed, but uh some people take it seriously.

SPEAKER_02: 2:16:32

Yep. All right, uh, you'll be back on the show relatively soon because we're gonna be talking about semiotics, and I actually have like five of your articles in my queue for RE, but most of which are good. I I do I did come down really hard. I'm just gonna go ahead and out people. I did come down really hard on your qualia article, and then I read what you were responding to and then became way more sympathetic. Um, because I uh was just like, oh, this is why you're making the argument this way. Um uh because I was just coming at it from my I spent five years studying this shit and I'm really mad about it. Um like but the problem of consciousness, uh effectively I have this like when I was arguing with you about it. I've actually effectively have the same position that you do. It's just like it's it's interesting, but I don't think it actually indicates a goddamn thing.

SPEAKER_00: 2:17:25

Yeah, I mean the reason why in the all the essays I wrote about AI and semiotics and stuff, I didn't talk about that at all because I didn't think it mattered.

SPEAKER_02: 2:17:34

It's just like it's like because I just you know, I don't want to get into uh I don't want to get into the whole debates about like pea zombies and shit because I just don't care what I admit that it I I do think it the the question for me that is interesting is does the existence of qualia either internal to our to our consciousness and external or external to our consciousness, like whether or not it exists in our heads or outside of our heads. To me, I don't know that there's a lot of metaphysical questions that come from that.

SPEAKER_00: 2:18:22

I like I mean honestly it comes down to like what what are the the definition these people are willing to accept is if they if you could accept that there's a pattern to thought that you can identify in other things, then the problem is solved. It's like it exists out in the world. We can identify things that can do that. Um then there's no this why are we debating this? It's stupid.

SPEAKER_02: 2:18:46

Well, I mean, here's the thing that I was like that was basically kind of the is Chinamy Avil a crypto plaintist and doesn't even know it.

unknown: 2:18:54

I I don't know.

SPEAKER_02: 2:18:55

Like I'm like serious, because I was like, I was like, it's a problem of qualia that you think that there has to be an external form beyond the the the fact that we are constructing a sense impression from from formal structures that we see in the material world is is the is the fact that those formal structures are recognizable and you have to posit a third thing like an eternal form uh that is not material for that to make sense to you because uh no, you don't.

SPEAKER_00: 2:19:28

It's funny like how many people do this because there's also he mentions Richard Seymour, who's also like embraced dualism because he was dissatisfied with materialism. Um, and it's like, why are you doing this? This is I mean, I g I I guess it's just because those are the philosophy that people read.

SPEAKER_02: 2:19:47

Um we've been kind of been slagging on Marxist-Leninist. Uh, what happened to Trotskyist and the like did they all get hit in the head with a rock?

SPEAKER_00: 2:19:55

Like sometimes it seems like that. It's the most likely explanation.

SPEAKER_02: 2:20:02

Because I'm just like, wait, like your answer to the problems of consciousness is dualism. I mean, I like I get that like like monism versus imperial criticism by Lenin is probably the least like convincing Lenin Lenin text ever.

SPEAKER_01: 2:20:21

Um but my dudes, we had dealt with this for a while. It's not like um it just feels like uh I don't know.

SPEAKER_02: 2:20:40

I are are we just still with Gen Xers who are facing death? Like you know that's a seat.

SPEAKER_00: 2:20:45

That's a possibility, and they are they're all Gen Xers for some reason.

SPEAKER_02: 2:20:50

Um I mean they're all about 10 years older than me. So I'm just like so.

SPEAKER_00: 2:20:56

I guess what I am into dualism as like a midlife crisis thing or something, then hit me the head with a rock.

SPEAKER_01: 2:21:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 2:21:04

Well, I mean, I I guess my thing is like if I ever start feeling this way, I should just become a monk and not say anything. Like just be like, like I'm going to go contemplate the mountains now. Um, I'm not gonna fuck up Marx's theory.

SPEAKER_01: 2:21:27

Um quietly walk away.

SPEAKER_02: 2:21:30

Like uh, because I mean I wanted to cover it on RE, but I went through the first paragraph and I was just counting the number of equivocations, and then finding later on when he'd admit they were equivocations, and then be like, but they're not though, but they are, but they're not though, and I know that sounds like incredibly uncharitable, but to talk about Marxists really care about consciousness as if we care about qualia, or that the consciousness of an aggregate becoming a collective with a gentle power is the same thing as worrying about why experience the color orange is uh weird. And they're like, Oh, there's gotta be a line because of like psychoanalysis or some shit. And I'm like, look, I realize there's a problem in the Marxist theory of mind because it was come up in the 19th century, but like what your your answer to it seems to be like the fifth century, yeah. Like, um, so I mean it actually made me appreciate Sora Mao because I yeah, like at least I'm still a Marxist, but but I will say that the that all this seems to be like did anyone even understand what they were saying they believed in the first place? I guess that's my question, and yeah, and we can't answer it today, it's not gonna be answered on this interview. This like last hit 15 minutes of both of us is kind of ranting.

SPEAKER_01: 2:22:59

Go ahead, okay.

SPEAKER_02: 2:23:02

Like, because I just feel like like, man, I've spent 20 years struggling with shit, and you guys, I mean, Richard Seymour is one of the people who got me you know thinking about Marxism when he was blogging in like 2005, you know, and and uh seeing him you know seeing him do this is like this feels like Let's Kulakowski all over again. Like, and people who don't know who I'm talking about, but like like I just are we just experiencing the 80s fallout of the 70s and 60s left again? Is that where we're at? Like, like it's just kind of a bummer, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 2:23:49

Um I mean, you know, I at least I got a blog out of it.

SPEAKER_02: 2:23:54

Yeah, you did. Um uh uh the the amount of people who who share that article as if it was profound, and I'm like I was like, one, if it wasn't Marxism, we wouldn't even be talking about this because this has been a debate in cognitive philosophy since like the 90s, and I've got a post like this on less wrong every other month, yes, and you know, those weird rationalists who become fashion Christians, it's just like it's like okay, man. Um uh anyway. Um, I'm I would cut this out, but I'm gonna keep it in because I don't know why do we need friends? I can make more enemies just talking about how fucked up everything. Um enemies, all right, and on that note, well, you will be coming back to the show. We'll be talking about semiotics with your friend Leaf, and I'm sure it'll be an interesting debate because I think there our differences are. I don't know. I'm actually still trying to figure out how different our differences are. I think there's just a lot of times where I'm like, where my answer is like, I think that is a viable answer, but you can't prove it.

SPEAKER_01: 2:25:04

And and and you're just like, Yeah, I'm like, okay, um uh so we'll see.

SPEAKER_02: 2:25:16

Um uh and I I think it will give us some time to clarify more even in more depth what you mean by uh structures. There is a friend of the show, Eli uh Sinesh, who is also wants to come in and talk to me about some of your structural analysis uh from the standpoint of information theory. Uh so I'll send that to you in Leif um or Leaf or Leif. How do I say his name?

SPEAKER_00: 2:25:41

I don't know. Leaf, I think.

SPEAKER_02: 2:25:43

Leaf, okay. Uh I tend to make everything more complicated and then making things sound foreign for no fucking reason. But but then you know, if I don't do that, I'm wrong too. So uh uh so anyway, on that note, uh thank you for your time. People should really I will say this. Um, your substack, whether I agree with it or not, is actually one of the few Marxist substacks that I learn something from, uh, as opposed to I just yell at. Um, because there's a lot of substacks that are Marxist that I'm just like, oh yeah, you discovered tailism again. Great, fucking awesome. Let's just try this for the 85th millionth time.

SPEAKER_01: 2:26:34

Um, like or uh, you know, oh you learned that there's a business cycle. Woo!

SPEAKER_02: 2:26:44

Uh uh anyway, just take care, take care, Nico. All right, take care, Tip. All right.