Ready to peel back the layers of the complex world of Marxism? Brace yourselves for a spirited exploration of the 'warm' and 'cold' streams of Marxism, as Chris N, Jason N, and I traverse the arcane terrain of political determinism, volunteerism, and the revolutionary ideas that underpin Ernst Bloch's theory. We'll grapple with the works of Alvin Gouldner and Enzo Traversoc as well decoding inherent contradictions, and dissect the nuanced humanist and deterministic tendencies within Marxism.
We'll also dive into the stormy waters of Marxism's relationship with liberalism, and the philosophical and scientific tension that brews within its core. How has Karl Marx's posthumously published work influenced the interpretation of Marxism? We'll tackle this, and delve deeper into the roles of Engels and Bernstein in molding the understanding of this theory. We also dare to explore the current state of the left, its flirtation with liberalism, and dissect the rise of Bernie Sanders against the backdrop of a faltering labor movement.
Finally, we'll confront the thorny issues of socialism's relevance in today's society. Will Marxism's claim to shape the world ever be fully realized? We'll sift through these questions, examining the impact of the 'warming cold' and 'lukewarm morass' on the current state of the world. Join us on this thought-provoking journey through Marxism's myriad interpretations, its challenges, and its potential relevance in a world grappling with the imminent fallout of capitalism's failures.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @skepoet
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Ready to peel back the layers of the complex world of Marxism? Brace yourselves for a spirited exploration of the 'warm' and 'cold' streams of Marxism, as Chris N, Jason N, and I traverse the arcane terrain of political determinism, volunteerism, and the revolutionary ideas that underpin Ernst Bloch's theory. We'll grapple with the works of Alvin Gouldner and Enzo Traversoc as well decoding inherent contradictions, and dissect the nuanced humanist and deterministic tendencies within Marxism.
We'll also dive into the stormy waters of Marxism's relationship with liberalism, and the philosophical and scientific tension that brews within its core. How has Karl Marx's posthumously published work influenced the interpretation of Marxism? We'll tackle this, and delve deeper into the roles of Engels and Bernstein in molding the understanding of this theory. We also dare to explore the current state of the left, its flirtation with liberalism, and dissect the rise of Bernie Sanders against the backdrop of a faltering labor movement.
Finally, we'll confront the thorny issues of socialism's relevance in today's society. Will Marxism's claim to shape the world ever be fully realized? We'll sift through these questions, examining the impact of the 'warming cold' and 'lukewarm morass' on the current state of the world. Join us on this thought-provoking journey through Marxism's myriad interpretations, its challenges, and its potential relevance in a world grappling with the imminent fallout of capitalism's failures.
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Audio Producer: Paul Channel Strip ( @aufhebenkultur )
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @skepoet
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Hello and welcome to. If you're watching VARM blog, if you're listening VARM blog in Regrettable Century, this is not a no-world episode, however.
Speaker 1:This is just another joint episode and we are talking today about warm and cold Marxism, which is a phrase which I think is really the warm and cold streams of Marxism which is a phrase that I got from you guys and I wanted to talk to you about, because I've been wrestling in my head with different conceptions of revolutionism and different conceptions of what Marxism is for about I don't know 15 fucking years at this point and I've been going back and forth about the critique of economism and the critique of political determinism, which to me are the two vices and I say political determinism as opposed to volunteerism, because both have deterministic and volunteeristic threads within them. And when I heard you guys talk about the hot and cold stream, I started to see sort of a way out of this binary, a sublation, if you will, because there's also a different but aligned binary and we talk about Marxism and that is humanistic or Hegelian Marxism, although not all humanistic Marxism is actually Hegelian, which is confusing. And there's also Marxist humanism with a hyphen, which is its own special thing, and scientific Marxism, which is sometimes Hegelian and sometimes structural. But all these things seem to be kind of confused historically when we think about them.
Speaker 1:And the warm and cold stream metaphor for me was useful because it is both fuzzy enough that we can kind of use it to pick apart different elements in all these things in ways these kind of hard binaries don't really allow us to do, but also speaks to two different tendencies, often within these kind of poles of Marxism, and so I wanted to pick you guys' brain on that and how we can use that to understand the current moment.
Speaker 1:And this will be leading into a different episode that we will do probably in a couple months, about how both these streams are headed off of a waterfall into the ocean. But yeah, so I think it's always funny that the white guy Wednesday on TIR was always called the Anglo-Opessimus Power Hour, which was funny because none of us are wasps at all yeah, not even a little bit. Like it's like one Polish dude, a half Bulgarian, half Scotch-Irish Jew and occurred like I don't know. But also they're not as pessimistic, even with me there as we are together. So that could be taken as a warning for those of you who want your revolutionary optimism what I like to call stupidity.
Speaker 3:So, cowardice Calvary, not your blind optimism anyways, yeah.
Speaker 2:Your optimism, just like your pessimism, must be dialectical or not at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right, because both the warm and the cold stream are there, based on some objectively actual foundations. It's just that to pick one or the other is to be either be determinist or volunteerist, and either way is to be hopelessly optimistic, right.
Speaker 1:And one thing I've learned from your discussions of warm and cold that I've seen in myself is like the determinist will be hyper-deterministic until it's convenient for them not to, and then become hyper-voluntarist. And the volunteerist will be hyper-voluntarist until they lose, and then they will be hyper-determinist.
Speaker 3:Right, that's because they're both integrated fully into what Marxism is as a philosophy, so you can't really ever separate it completely.
Speaker 1:I mean, I consider this. I bet you guys have been reading, just for some context, of people. We want to pick up our readings. That's informing this conversation. I've been reading the kind of, I guess, post-marxism. It's hard to figure out what Alvin Gouldner actually ended up, because he dies while he's finishing his last book, which is the Two Marxism, which is a attempt to do meta-Marxism, which is to apply Marxism to itself and figure out and to be theoretically rigorous and figure out where the contradictions are and what they lead to Within Marxism, both as a theoretical practice and as an actually existing political tradition. And so that's in the back of my head. And you guys are reading Enzo Traverso, one of my favorite Marxist scholars, but you're reading a book by him which I haven't read.
Speaker 2:It's really good. Yeah, it keeps getting better. Every chapter that we go over is even better than the last one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would consider the latest chapter that we read to be a critical reading for all leptists of every kind.
Speaker 2:The book is called Revolution and Intellectual History.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which I think I started reading because you guys are reading it. I haven't finished it yet. I've just got through my chapter on trains. That's what I was like after the rules.
Speaker 2:It was a good chapter, but I was like God, I hope it gets better than this. It was fine, but it wasn't like Traverso-Calibur material in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Well, to me it's a sleeper sale to get your materialism, your vulgar materialism, almost in, before we get into stuff like symbolic bodies or whatever. What I'm gathering is that book is written kind of dialectically and the reason why this is actually informing me about this and we'll talk about this material basis here. But I think both these books and I'll throw another book that we've all read here but maybe our audiences haven't read and we haven't talked about it in many years Russell Jacobi's Dialectic of Defeat- Right, excellent book.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all together as kind of context for this conversation, where there are all kinds of contradictions and anomalies that emerge in Marxism, but they actually are based both on historical events that actually really happened and on the theory. And the one thing Gouldner and I don't know have you guys read two Marxisms? I haven't.
Speaker 1:No, actually I haven't, I will get you a copy because it's actually hard to get now. It's that apparent. The one thing Gouldner emphasizes that makes Marxism unique, both compared to other forms of radical politics and to the major politics of it day and he's writing in 1980, is that Marxism really is theoretically focused in practice, even in its actual practice, in a way that liberalism or conservatism or fascism or whatever are not although fascism is a little closer sometimes Whereas liberalism is a cluster, it's like a family relationship of things that all beckons to you and against it and you can't really define it, but you can see how it moves, whereas in American politics, for example, everything is liberal and nothing is liberal. But whereas Marxism really is theoretically quite precise because it's a critique of both actually existing capitalism and the socialism and proto-communism of its development and day, and so it's informed by that, that doesn't actually mean that it ends up being purely theoretically coherent.
Speaker 1:I think. And that's where these warm and cold stream stuff really got to me, because I was like, oh, now we have a way to talk about these two emergent tendencies, because someone, for example I think another thing that happened the same day I was listening to you guys talk about warm and cold stream was. A friend of mine asked me what does Marxist take on free will? And I was like what?
Speaker 3:It depends on what year you're asking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what year are you asking? And also, how are you asking it? Because Marx clearly doesn't believe in counter-causal free will, but he does believe in human agency most of the time, but sometimes it sounds like he doesn't. So that gets you into the problem at hand, and I don't want to. It's not because Marx is a terribly inconsistent thinker. I actually think he's trying to be a consistent thinker, which leads him in radically different and sometimes radically opposed directions, and so to bring that back, it's good to start with Marx, but I also think we have to talk about Marxism as a tradition larger than just Marx or Marxology. Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 3:Well, because, like you were just saying, marx was trying to be a consistent thinker within the communist movement and then, later on, there are people who are trying to make Marxism into a thing and make it consistent, and that's a different project.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely. So, before we go, because I haven't defined warm and cold stream for our listeners, because I didn't use the terminology before you guys, so I'm going to let you do it. What are the warm and cold streams? Where did you get this metaphor from?
Speaker 2:Well, it comes from Ernst Bloch and in the principle of hope I think he really lays down what it is. And for him the warm stream, like we previously mentioned, is the more humanist sort of tending towards basically drawing a lot of inspiration from early Marx and his discussions of alienation and his sort of borderline romanticization of pre-capitalist modes of production.
Speaker 1:What gets later called like humanist Marxism and Marxism and Marxism Right.
Speaker 2:And then cold stream would be the Plakanov, kautsky, stalin. Of course there's a myriad of different offshoots of this, but the very deterministic sort of scientific route that Marxism can take and does, which actually, in our opinion, becomes the main way of thinking about the world by Marxists with the triumph of the Soviet Union, basically. Yeah, well, even before because like. Yeah, probably. Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3:Like Otto Bauer in his seminal work about nationalities and social democracy. He's heavily criticized by Rosa Luxemburg and Kauske and Lennon, and I would say he's criticized by very, very cold stream kind of thinking.
Speaker 1:Yeah Right, Even though Luxemburg is in general a warm stream thinker yeah like one of the things about this, though, one of the reasons why I think this is a good metaphor for what's going on here, as opposed to what's commonly used, which is Western or Eastern Marxism.
Speaker 2:Right, not accurate.
Speaker 1:Which is not accurate at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Who's Ludocharsky? Then? Yeah, lukash, he's not from the.
Speaker 2:West Exactly Well.
Speaker 3:Lukash is both Well yeah, also, lukash is, both Lukash is both.
Speaker 2:Yeah, depending on the year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and Althusser is from the West, but he's definitely most of the time Curl's dream, except when he isn't, which he has to come up with like a bizarre form of physics metaphors to justify.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can turn the tap on or off, depending on Right.
Speaker 1:I mean, and that's why it's a better way to think about it, because in most of these figures of movements like OK, we have scientific socialism and Hungarian socialism, and one of the things that Alvin Goldner brings up is we always treat those as like antithesis. But he points out that Lukash and Althusser actually often say the same thing.
Speaker 2:Right, Well, how?
Speaker 1:they got there was completely different, but their conclusions are similar. Yeah, and that's something to really kind of play out, and I think for me that was an indication that a lot of the super focus on like well, we have the right methodology, this is the science of socialism starts to fall apart when you start looking at like well, how do these groups that have opposed methodologies within the Marxist tradition end up at similar conclusions and, conversely, groups that have the same methodology and also claim to be in the spirit of scientific socialism end up at diametrically opposed conclusions? And this was hinted in our discussion of American Trotskyism. But you see this in general, it comes up over and over again, and it is not just a Western phenomenon either, and I think that's important to talk about. I think we see this in Chinese Marxism too. I mean, and you want to talk about seeing in the same person. Mao is all over the place, if we use this kind of metaphor, sure.
Speaker 3:Linden was all over the place too, and also so was Trotsky, and actually one of my favorite examples of the way that there's not like a good side and a bad side necessarily is Stalin and Trotsky are both principle figures of what would be called what I would consider to be Cold Stream Marxism. There's no warm stream between them, and they're diametrically opposed, despite the fact that they probably would have pursued a similar route.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm going to say that their policies for the Soviet Union are largely similar. Actually, their policies towards the party are different, and Trotsky gets more democratic as he gets older.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean when it doesn't matter, Right yeah? Right After he band supported banning factions Right. I mean sorry Trotsky.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's also a whole lot of like center and left opposition who are not Trotskyists, who supported the removal of Trotsky from the party, who ended up getting purged too. So I mean, like all this ends up being pretty tenuous.
Speaker 2:But I think everyone fucked up. I'll say that, yeah, and it goes back to the original sin of Bolshevism. That deletes to Stalinism is the ban on faction.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1:So, and I think we also have to talk about like Stalin is a very cold stream figure. Yeah, stalinism in its formal inclinations is very cold stream in its theory, but Stalinism in practice is fucking hypervoluntarist as fuck. Like Marxist, is it tends to be extremely volunteeristic when it's actually attempting something, because the whole premise is actually in some way spiting Ploekhanov.
Speaker 2:Well, on top of just the German invasion of the Soviet Union comes the activation of, like a dormant Sarelian strand within Stalinism to rally the people with volunteeristic feats of strength and defiance and reincorporating religion and great Russian patriotism into the official ideology of the state.
Speaker 3:So it's like and like extolling the virtues of the holy black soil of Mother Russia. You know like.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's real warm stream stuff, but so warm that most Marxists won't touch it. It's too warm.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's like. It's like the boiling water that you pour on the tea bag, but you just try to drink it.
Speaker 1:Well, because, because that's if there's ever any, and before people get on there, I'm not equating Marxist, leninism to fascism. They're radically different things, absolutely. But if there's ever any Truth to the comparison where you can find weird things that are actually comparative, it's not totalitarianism. What the fuck that means?
Speaker 2:It is this like big? Thing?
Speaker 1:It's an interesting thing because Now I mean we could get into Lukashian totality. I actually did find that. Like people who say that it was invented by anti Marxist like Hannah Arendt, I actually found it being used by Marxist in the 20s.
Speaker 2:Oh really, well I know it's used by Mussolini to use by Victor Serge too.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I must say he described the Italian state which, by any definition of totalitarianism, is not accurate Right.
Speaker 3:Right, that's an aspiration.
Speaker 2:Yeah, aspirational of more than anything else.
Speaker 1:Right, I was actually a Victor Serge is my. Victor Serge is one of the early places I find it, but I find it early. I find it earlier than you're supposed to Like. Right, and in Draper talks about discussions around it in the in the mid 40s.
Speaker 2:Right, but the definition everyone uses.
Speaker 3:Who's the Dutch Marxist who's like a critic of Lenin? I don't remember.
Speaker 1:Panic, I think.
Speaker 3:I think as early as like 1919 or 1920, he's even using something like totalitarianism, right?
Speaker 2:Maybe I don't remember that.
Speaker 1:But I don't think he uses that word.
Speaker 3:but Maybe not.
Speaker 1:But the thing is, though, where I agree with you is our definition of it comes from like 40s and 50s anti, anti communism and the that's the one that I think is fake, right, right. Well, I mean, I kind of think they all don't work actually, because none of it Like. One of the things that I will say when we talk about Stalinism is we attribute too much to Stalin and we don't attribute enough to material conditions.
Speaker 3:And in a way, like thousands of other party members. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And like all these social antagonisms, many of which had nothing to do with socialism whatsoever, or even get unleashed in a revolution, and we should expect that, by the way, like that's something we should, like you, kind of have to control. And it's interesting, one of the critiques that I make of Stalin during the control I mean in the purges, during the US Chiva is he didn't have enough control of elements of the society.
Speaker 2:Oh, absolutely Like it was the. It was basically Pushed by Stalin and then the centrifugal force of it got way out of control and they actually had to crack down on it, because it was the bloodletting was so insane that the party leadership started to become concerned about it.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:And interestingly, here again you want to talk about the turning on the taps. What we see here is very cold stream analysis, Like like Stalin has quotas because he figures there must be just a certain amount of people, and yeah, but it unleashes these forces that he absolutely is not in charge of. And and it's interesting to me because actually some of the best writing on this comes out of the Chinese like there's this weird, you know, there's this weird. Like Stalin is good, but not really. He also fucked up tradition and Marxist Leninism in China. That is actually like not part of. It's a very strange thing, because they also accuse like Khrushchev of historical nihilism. So it's like, but we can't talk too much about how we fucked up.
Speaker 1:Like that's the Chinese.
Speaker 2:That's the 60 40 thing. Yeah, stalin is 60 percent good and 40 percent bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and, like the Sino-Soviet split actually goes back to Stalin, but we can't say that because but anyway to to kind of that's interesting, because some of the better critiques of Stalin's lack of control come out of China, right the. What is interesting about that, though, is, in the cases of the Soviet Union, you see both run amok kind of opportunistically, mm, hmm and that's. And you see this also in defenders, like if, today, if you read someone like Paul Cox shot, or, or when he was alive, domenico Lucerdo, who, like I mean Lucerdo, is definitely a Hegelian, and, again, this makes a whole Hegelian versus structural argument kind of horseshit, because a lot of the Hegelian, and so I think that's the point. And I think that's the point, and I think that you know, and I think that the point of view of the Hegelian versus structural argument kind of horseshit, because a lot of the Hegelian.
Speaker 2:Marxist are also in this cold stream, in the extreme, where God's just both.
Speaker 1:And yeah, I mean, I remember when we were reading Russell Jacobi's dialectic of the feet and, like Jack be, can't figure out what to do with with Lukash.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why Is he a Western Marxist or not?
Speaker 1:Yeah, like he also caused some people wrong too, like, like, like Sartras is a Western Marxist, but like the idea that the Western Marxist he has this idea that the Western Marxist are mostly descendants of the Left Opposition in Germany, and I'm like well, Sartras and Maoist buddy, why so I?
Speaker 3:mean. Sartras is definitely a Maoist by the end and even by the last couple two decades of his life, but he actually starts in the orbit of Trotskyism. For whatever that's worth, it's just to say that like too precise a definition actually makes this impossible to have a discussion about Right.
Speaker 2:He takes the fringe path right. Start off Trotskyist and Maoist. Yeah, that is the fringe path actually.
Speaker 1:Which is interesting, as opposed to start off Maoist end up right winger, which also happens in France, Right.
Speaker 2:And Italy too. Yeah, you know the neo-Nazi Maoists in Italy, right?
Speaker 1:Yes, I do. What the fuck, Just like there's a very tiny group of people in the United States who, like Mao, who will argue that the Confederacy was a national revolution.
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, that's a discussion I would definitely love to never have. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean it's interesting because a Maoist friend of mine once said be careful about national imperialism. It's actually a tendency in Maoism that people don't see because it's not white and it was a non-white Maoist who told me this.
Speaker 2:All I had to do was read about what national Bolshevism was one time and I'm like, oh, like Maoism.
Speaker 1:Sometimes Like Maoism, sometimes, let's be fair.
Speaker 1:Maoism is a highly like of the forms of Marxist-Leninism, and there's a book I have back here who talks about one of the appeals and this is gone now because the Soviet Union doesn't exist but one of the appeals of Maoism is the same, is actually similar to the appeal of Trotskyism is that when, when the taunts pushed, there's this encouragement, first from krushev, but it gets actually worse after krushev. It's, it's, it's worse periods, actually in the Brezhnevian period, during the period of soft neostalinism, which is which is kind of funny but where the, the, the under the guise of the popular front, again also from Stalin. Guys, you can't, you can't pretend that, like, third periodism is the only thing that Stalin ever did. Yeah, pushed a lot of the Communist parties in Latin America and Europe to be to the right of the socialist parties right.
Speaker 2:Yep, they asked each other going in opposite directions right in 30s right.
Speaker 1:So Well, you know, particularly in places where neither we're in control now we're, so where the social democratic parties have power, they tend to just go Keynesian. So but but you see this in, like Latin America, like you look at, like some positions taken by the Communist parties, by the by the common eternal line Communist parties, and Then you see a double response when is the socialist response, which actually often goes to the left of them? And then the other is a malice, our gravaris response. Now, gravarism doesn't really exist outside of Latin America, so so that's not an option for most people. There's not a lot of gravaris in Europe, which I actually find interesting that that never happened. That whole another debate I'd like to Probe is why weren't there gravaris in Europe? But anyway, the people who there's, people who like Che gravar, but there's no faction right.
Speaker 3:I think. I think the distinctions aren't very, we're not very clear. At the time it was just like there's there's a good and a bad marksman. The bad one is the Soviet and the good one is Maoist, and Cuba and Vietnamese and, by extension, certain parts of the USSR as well.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna say it's also like but the the weird thing is, all these people, including including at least half of the Trotsky, is there soviet defenses, right? So like there's this weird, and it's actually the Maoist who are arguably the most Marxist, lenin, the most anti-revisionist Revisionist, depending on which group you're talking about yeah who end up being the we Soviet defenses, like yeah, to a Catastrophically destructive level in some way.
Speaker 2:Well, right cuz it cuz at that point.
Speaker 3:We're not talking about, like philosophy. We're not really talking about like what motivates a person or what should be. We're just talking about like what is necessary to say right now. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But that's the thing with these, this warm and cold thought, warm and cold streams from Ernst Block that that really have you thinking. You know Ernst Block is associated with Western Marxism. I find that interesting because he's also one of the few people associated with. You know. The other, the other couple that are associated with quote Western Marxism that people never mentioned went back to the DDR.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean that the Frankfurt school didn't want to have anything to do with Ernst Block because they thought he was too Stalinist.
Speaker 1:Right the same, similar to why they kicked out a Henry Grossman. And Cuz Grossman decides after 1936, that, while the Stalin is a mixed figure, yeah, yeah, and which I think is interesting, because also that's right before the Villain drop pack which I, right before, which I've always like wondered, like, what did he think about that? But oh, why? I think Ernst blocks, associated with with With the quote Western Marxism is the beginning in another's life. So in the beginning he's definitely in this more humanistic Carl Korsh stream of interpretation. In the end he leaves the DDR over the Prague Spring, so it's, you know. So he does die in Western Germany, but this is a job as a proxmo, I think, gary, and uprising it's one of the two, but he's a supporter of the DDR in between. And so, like again, people like, oh, he's a Western Marxist. Well, he lived under a formerly Marxist-Leninist regime voluntarily.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he believed in the project and he went to go participate in it and it was. It was the Hungarian revolution of the Prague Spring.
Speaker 1:Yes, the Hungarian revolution there. The Hungarian revolution is an interesting one because Revolution whatever? Yeah, well, because the Hungarian, the Hungarian revolution, is also one of mixed characteristics, like there are clearly fascist involved, but there are also tons of Marxist involved.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's heavily, heavily infiltrated and funded by the CIA at the time as well, right, yeah, so it's like it's one of those Situations where having a hard and fast Read on this on it is gonna end up making you wrong.
Speaker 1:But I do think these, the suppression that comes after it, is one of the things that leads a lot of people to who are who are pretty, you know, ardent Communists and at least in the German section, to leave yeah right made that the repression was a disaster.
Speaker 1:It also like you know, it's it. It's one of the reasons why people lost a lot of faith in Lukash, in the West too, is his participation in the aftermath of that Yep. But you know it's a lot of people who are, who are at Marxist Lenin supporters leave over the Prague.
Speaker 2:I mean not that well, they, a lot of them, leave a proxming to a lot of them leave over the Hungarian revolution and then the rest of them leave over the Prague Spring right.
Speaker 1:I mean it's, it's, it's. It's one of those things like when you study the history of the CP USA. There's a couple of big exoduses and then the high point period. The first one is the Molotov-Ribbentrop pack, which causes a shit ton of people to leave, and then a lot of them come back and night when the popular front is initiated, and then they start leaving again, and I think it is the Hungarian uprising which causes a huge exodus, and then you know the Red Scare to do so between the two.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean it's, it's the between the Khrushchev secret speech or whatever that's. You know the term that uses secret speech and the. But yeah, it's definitely that period. That's when probably the single biggest exodus happens. Between it's all 56, though, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean. So you have this, what you start seeing it down to, like the height of. The height of I Think it's 48 is the height of the CPU as USA, but it might be earlier than that, but it's it's. You know, that's when it's like at like 80,000 people or something like that, as full members. So you know there's lots of fellow travelers and stuff to you.
Speaker 3:So probably, yes, there's like 80,000 full members in 48, but there's like a million and a half former members who are still part of like front groups or right affiliated in some way, like the Communist Party in the in the late 40s and early 50s was extremely powerful. I know they didn't use it, but they they could have and who knows what they would have done and they decline precipitously.
Speaker 1:In the oh yeah by like tens of thousands, like a month right, and then and then they they do not have any advantages from the new, from the return of the new left, like they don't see. They're one of the few communist groups that don't see a Tickup of membership during that time period, partably from from a series of of internal splits. I know I got pushed back for saying that, like the, the RCP was a split from the Communist Party because there's two organizations between them, but David's a split from the Communist Party, bob a vacuumed enters late guys, but most people who are in the RCP start their story with Chairman Bob, so they don't really consider a lot of the stuff before that, that series. So I think that's that's an interesting problem.
Speaker 1:Now let's look at the warm stream and cold stream and try to figure out this out like. So what do we see here? Like, what do we see? We look at like where the, the ideology of the US Communist Party I'm the Communist Party of the of the United States is during this time period. It's all over the place. Why it's all over the place? But I think it's colder than it is.
Speaker 3:At least it's consciously colder. It might not necessarily always be colder, but I don't think there's like any deliberate attempt to write the ship any particular way. So what if it goes back and forth? It's a, it's incoherent in terms of its self-conception and in terms of the the outside assessment as well. And I think it's interesting because I think in the 1920s and 30s.
Speaker 1:I think we'd actually call it warm because during during both During both the initial lead-up and During third periodism, and during the early phases of the United Front. From below and the popular front, it's very volunteeristic, it's very by your bootstraps, it's very like it's led by people like William Z Foster who are like Marxist, leninist, syndicalist. Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think it matters like a that they, they, they revive the American revolutionary tradition and all of their like points of reference are like Civil war, lincoln, reconstruction, that's all like it's intended to be a. That's all like it's intending to sort of appeal to Kind of romantic sort of feelings that are laden in at least a big part of the population.
Speaker 1:There is a, there is a way in which you know this is part of this tradition. Now we could talk about a very cold stream form of Marxism, vietnamese Marxism but Vietnamese Marxism also does this. They still. They're one of the few Marxist Leninist parties on the planet that still actually explicitly talks about the importance of American thought, and they fought them right so why Well, I mean, like Ho Chi Minh includes the part of the Declaration of Independence and his Declaration of Independence from the French Empire?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and always did respect and admire the American Revolution Right anti-colonial struggle.
Speaker 1:One of the things that is interesting about this. Okay, so where do we in this two streams, where do we put something like Cuba? Because Cuba's, in one hand, is explicitly Marxist, leninist state. On the other hand, the the actual ideology coming out of both Castro and of like Gravara is Not really of the same kind of Determine, like hyper economic developmentalism and determinism coming out of the Soviet Union at the same time right.
Speaker 3:Um, yeah, I mean Cuba's never really a developmentalist regime like at any point, no it's not and never.
Speaker 1:It never tries to be, which which is also interesting. That makes it kind of the odd man out of the national like of the small state. National revolution Marxist, leninist, aligned groups.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, it's like singular, it's like alone even. Yeah, it's odd man out for sure.
Speaker 1:Like you know the other, because the other non developmentalist Marxist, leninist regime is probably the DPRK, which is about as far away from what what's going on in Cuba as you can get as far as intellectual justifications, where it's actually aligned, what it actually does.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean like.
Speaker 2:The thing that pops into my head immediately on mentioning Guevara as a warm stream figure, is his quote about the Revolutionary being driven by feelings of love.
Speaker 3:Right yeah, just all of the romanticism, the sort of Voluntarist emphasis put on resisting American imperialism well, and also it like even afterward, like it's the duty of everybody to like find some time to just go become, just to go work in the sugarcane fields for a little bit, just because you have to dedicate a part of you and who you are just to the general cause of Building up socialism right stuff like that. It's like not to be found in a kind of a Economic determinist kind of schema and telos of history.
Speaker 1:So you have someone who's like Basically like be the cultural revolution, but in yourself before the revolution even happens, and in In China. So I mean this is in it and it's interesting because also that I mean Russia has its cultural revolution to, and it's eclipsed Because I think, partly when it happens. That happens right after the first red terror and you know the first word, tear is something that Marxist don't like to talk about because you can't blame it on Stalin, and linen At first really encourages it. But he also is the person like saying like hey, like you can't kill people just because they were, just because there's a children of bourgeoisie, like yes, let's say, linans role is very similar to that Robespierre.
Speaker 3:It's just like taking control of something that's happening organically. You know. It's like, well, the population wants the terror. So like, if we don't manage his hair, it's gonna get out of control.
Speaker 1:But it also is Bolshevik figures who are pushing the, the sort of like most Exterminationist elements of the terror, to like, if you like, yeah, like the. The red terror paper is published by the Bolsheviks and it's actually criticized by linen, but once he sees people actually doing what it says.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean like linen. The big misconception about linen is that he wasn't a completely hegemonic figure. No, he was often outvoted.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like, even like, threatened to resign a couple of times. He was like, if I have to, I will just quit and I'll just join the rank and file and I'll agitate against the whole leadership. You know, just because of how much the leadership was not Bending to his will. Right, right, I mean to be fair also.
Speaker 1:And you know, marxist linenist of the Stalinist variety will bring this out to you. Stalin did that a couple of times as well, I mean, although he tended to get you back.
Speaker 3:Right, like that difference matters a lot actually. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Linen did not tend to get you back. I mean, you know, and when you read linens, like last testament, which I know some people think is not real, I think, I think most historians actually do think it's authentic.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I like, I, puriferally study Soviet history as well, just because I have a good Soviet historian to learn from in my program and yeah they it? There are no historians that don't that don't think it's real. Yeah, by the way, no, but like none that I've come across, grover first not historian, he's a, he's a professor literature and I don't Correct me if I'm wrong, but he doesn't read.
Speaker 1:Russian. I don't know. I don't think so, though I think I'm not sure. I think I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:Correct me if I'm wrong, but he doesn't read Russian.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I don't think so, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I read that somewhere. It might not be true, though, so I might like this is like for public consumption, so you know allegedly that's what I've heard.
Speaker 1:I find it interesting that most of the people who like take the most vogue or Stalin defenses are almost never historians, not even Russian ones like it's right. It's, uh, it's like okay, so you found a literature professor and a philosophy professor. Okay, um.
Speaker 3:Right, those things don't delegitimize a person like outright. But if, uh, all the historians are on one side and none of the historians on the other side, that that at least says A little bit about what, where the legitimacy can be found.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean being a historian isn't just reading books that other people wrote and then compiling pieces of it together. There's actually a method and it's actually rigorous, you know, yeah right, I am not a historian, I am a.
Speaker 1:I am a history popularizer because I actually don't use that method.
Speaker 2:Which is fine, but we need a popularizer popularizers.
Speaker 1:But you know what's funny about that is, even I am more rigorous than some of the stuff I've seen, where I'm like I'm at least checking my fucking references.
Speaker 2:You guys didn't even look, yeah, that matters too, so it really does, and like the references to like, and even historians will do this too, though, like. I read recently a book that quoted Susan Buck Morris about Hegel, saying that Hegel didn't pay any attention to the Haitian Revolution. But if you go look at Susan Buck Morris, what she said about that was that Hegel did pay attention to the Cuban Revolution. The Haitian Revolution, no, sorry, the Haitian Revolution, I think Cuban yeah.
Speaker 1:Haitian Revolution.
Speaker 2:But it's interesting because, like she took the quote, that this author took the quote out of context, based on a general overview of the book that she wrote about the Haitian Revolution, that the western philosophy, western radicals, didn't pay enough attention to the Haitian Revolution. So he quoted the gist of the book against Hegel when in reality, hegel actually did say something about the Haitian Revolution.
Speaker 3:I mean, in reality, hegel actually took a lot of inspiration from and actually tailored a lot of his philosophy to the world that the Haitian Revolution represented.
Speaker 2:The master slave dialectic comes from the Haitian. Revolution his observation of the Haitian Revolution.
Speaker 1:It actually turns out to be critical to his thought but he backs away from it. That's Buck Morris he does, and I think actually that's accurate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Buck Morris actually makes that point too, like in he talks about Africans as being non-historic peoples.
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh man, that is one thing we got from Hegel that I wish we had not gotten with this, fucking idiot. Historical, not historic peoples, because if you ever want to find Marx and Engels sounding like idiots in history, it's usually there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, yeah, especially Engels, and especially in the 1850s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when he refers to the Czechs as non-historic peoples.
Speaker 3:Engels can eat a dick, alright, yeah the other thing is like Although, depending on how you would interpret that, it's kind of true, it just depends on what you do with it afterwards.
Speaker 2:I'm just being a knee-jerk reactionary. My other one is Czech chauvinist.
Speaker 1:Marx, who takes the right side in the Civil War and takes the right side on abolition, but still says stuff like the Irish have it worse than black slaves, so like like that's a very unfortunate turn of phrase.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Marx has some unfortunate initial assessments of colonialism as well, that he eventually recants and makes up for.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, at one point I think it's in the New York Tribune he writes an essay praising British colonization of India and he's like, oh, I think it's going to build up the textile industry and then later they can buy capital. He's like, oh, actually, you know, it's the exact opposite.
Speaker 2:He does several articles reporting when he's living in London on the situation in India, where he recants every nice thing they ever said about British imperialism, because he didn't understand the full extent of what was going on.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wonder what we would have gotten from him on the Taiping rebellion, because he writes about it, but he writes about it very generally and he kind of both sides it.
Speaker 2:Like the. Yeah, I guess that's the sort of proto-communist movement. Yeah, yeah, and he's insane, he's very wild.
Speaker 3:Millions of people died and also like it kind of sucks. But also if it didn't happen, everything after would have been worse, kind of like the English Civil War, like the Puritans and the roundheads would. I'm very glad that I was not alive to witness and interact with them, and then I mean I'm also very, very glad that they existed.
Speaker 1:I would have been a Jacobite if I was fine.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, I mean I would have been on the side of the Catholicism and it wishes to say, on the happier side of life, the high church, anglicans. Yeah, which is to say that, just based on what I know of myself right now, if I could just transplant myself back to like 1549, I would have been on the wrong side. So luckily that's just not a thing that we have to do.
Speaker 1:I mean, well, this is where we think about. We have to think about these things, though, from a very interesting standpoint. So, for example, in the context of Scottish national liberation, being a Jacobite is actually progressive. From the context of the movement of the bourgeois revolution, it's not. And Lennon to give Lennon credit was pretty clear that, like on many of these things in history, like they're of a dual nature and you can't really clearly define them. We were talking about this earlier, but I was thinking about this in his writings about Serbia, where he's like look, if it wasn't in context of World War, yes, serbian national liberation would be something every socialist should support. However, in the context of the World War, you can't support any of these sides.
Speaker 3:Right. So it's almost as if there's like a tension between two different opposing forces and they like drive history forward in some way.
Speaker 2:Dude. Okay, so people say that dialectics doesn't mean anything, it's because they don't fucking understand it.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's to say that dialectics is systems theory and, as a person integrated in the systems theory? No, it's not, but it is related. Sure, it's also not folk Taoism, which is the other thing. People tend to do with it, which is just like well, there's always the core and the other thing, and then it emerges from contradiction.
Speaker 3:No, I think the only way to begin to appreciate dialectics is to like actually study dialectics and not find some other thing that's kind of like that's simpler to understand, because it's not like those things.
Speaker 1:Complexity theory and system theory is more complicated to understand. But I mean, let's talk about this, because I think the Warren stream and the Coles stream actually comes out of a dialectical approach to this, because what you're actually saying with this is like these are both tendencies and Marxist thought. They're both real and you should not favor like You're going to always favor one of them over the over the other, and yet also you should realize that by doing that you're failing Right Like, and I don't know how to explain that exactly, because it seems like I'm asking you to hold two contradictory things at the same time.
Speaker 3:But actually, that's going to happen anyways.
Speaker 1:Right, but only in moments of success, when you actually sublate and you get. Unfortunately, the metaphor turns into lukewarm water.
Speaker 2:Which God will spew out of his mouth, if you know your old testament.
Speaker 3:But fortunately for us, the owl of Minerva will only spread its wings with the falling of dusk, so it's only in retrospect that we'll actually know whether we're favoring one or the other Right.
Speaker 2:It's like a zinco in almost right. You have to hold both in your mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like to talk about this one fictitious capital, believe it or not, because I'm economically minded, but I'm like you. Only know if capital is fictitious when you try to valorize it and you can't, right, and what does that mean? When you can't actually spend it, when you go to, when your appraisal actually falls apart. That's what very practically means. So you have this appraisal, you're worth this much. Then all of a sudden, you try to spend it and you get or try to sell the assets, and then you and you realize, no, you're only worth this much, that other stuff that was fictitious, but you can't know it until you've done it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so Every, every attempt to just like be dialectical and to like enforce a dialectical way of things unfolding is always, it's always going to end in failure.
Speaker 1:Well, and we should talk about the history, like I've talked about this before, but let's like, let's talk about and we'll get. Bring this back into this metaphor, because I think this will get us into, like our kind of dialectical pessimism. Alright, which is but dialectics itself. One isn't even just Western. It emerges concurrently in several different cultural traditions. You see it developing the dharmic tradition in Chinese, in Chinese Dallas and Confucian thought, and in both Christian and pre-Christian metaphysics. And the reason why it develops is because it's how you fucking figure out definitions.
Speaker 1:If you can't agree on axioms, how do you do it? You do it through dialogue and debate. Right, so both both. Dialogic is when you kind of agree and can build from agreement. Dialectic is when you have to argue it out but you're not arguing. It's not just like an analytic argument where your argument, where you're arguing over the logic, you're literally arguing over the terms. How do you get to the terms at hand? Right Now, dialectic, post German idealism says okay, you may not be too honest because you are a Worldcat, but from the good things that one may have learned to halve and I guess those.
Speaker 1:But we need to make this less about just debates between interlocutors and more about the world itself. So how do we see these debates playing out in history and where do we see them emerging and creating things that you don't expect? So there are contradictory notions. If anyone ever tries to really sit down like I know that I'm not against, like bourgeois rights, but if you try to figure out any bourgeois right consistently and every now and then liberals that kind of have to do this and you realize that they're almost on to something, but then they can't try fully take it through, like, for example, that freedom of association is inherently contradictory. Why? Because some people might want to associate with me and might not want to let them, and that's where discrimination comes from.
Speaker 2:And after discrimination laws Right.
Speaker 1:It's inherently contradictory. Freedom of speech is actually inherently contradictory.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for the same reason.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and because all of these things have both positive and negative elements to them, and the way that liberals traditionally have gotten out of this contradiction is to just focus on the negative parts of it, like, and that's where things start really falling apart. So, from a dialectical perspective, we should always expect there to be, as long as there's divisions in the population, as long as there's classes and even other social divisions, really for there to be tensions in these rights that cannot easily be overcome by the rights themselves.
Speaker 3:Well, and even we have to embrace the fact that contradiction is going to be a fact of life, for our lifetimes at least, and maybe for forever.
Speaker 1:Now. I like to talk about this in a very specific way, because people who are trained in analytic philosophy do not know what we're talking about Because they're like but you don't mean contradiction the way we mean it. No, we do not mean contradiction in Hegelian philosophy is not a syntax contradiction, it is not an absolute. A equals, not A Like. That's not what's going on there, although what is actually going on there is. History is fuzzy enough that A does equal, not A, depending on how you're defining A in its emergence in the world.
Speaker 3:Right and also depending, even from one moment to the next, even sometimes.
Speaker 1:Right, so that you know and I get where there's this kind of liberal critique that this leads to like well, you can make everything mean anything this way and vocally you kind of can Like if you're really just trying to do amplogia, it's really easy to do with dialectics and that is a problem.
Speaker 3:Well, right, but I think that's why we have to, like you know, like there's a reason why Hegel, just to take one example, he had political positions and he stuck to them and, yeah, he was navigating contradictions and so on and he, like, he made judgments about whatever was happening and what might happen.
Speaker 1:Right, but he's also. He's also very clear from his own philosophy that he can't know if his political positions are right. And, by the way, exactly From the philosophy of right, he's wrong, and some of them.
Speaker 3:Well, some stuff, but yeah, yeah, he's certainly wrong about at least a few things that are like so important that we have to be critical to the question State's going to be the end of history, like that's pretty big.
Speaker 3:Well, even the way that we would determine the end of history, like for our purposes, I would say, yeah, definitely that's, that's wrong. But there's another way of looking at it where, like, the end of history is the is the period of human development in which individual human beings can all concentrate together at a social level and influence things like a, or, to put it another way, an era of democracy. And so we are still living in the end of history, which began in 1789. And so, depending on even how you interpret that exact phrase, hegel is either wrong or right.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:I mean well, and to be fair.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is where people get kind of people push back on me on this. I've been recently pushed back on this, and let's talk about this. This is where this is where the cold and warm streams actually don't always help you, because I can't use dialectics to predict things. I can only use dialectics to understand things in the past and what is likely to emerge. And attempts to use dialectics to predict things and Marx did, by the way usually amounts to eating a shit lot of crow, right, right. That's the thing that I think we that there are two. They're in the broadest sense. I think there's two things to Marxism. One is it's a way of understanding history and of understanding the likely movement of history, and two, it's a way to predict the future and the coming of socialism and its realization and being.
Speaker 1:We're really good at the first part. We've been accurate on the first part for the most part. Yeah, we are shitty world historically shitty at the second part, and the problem that you have is that liberalism, conservatism, et cetera don't have the second part. They don't really have the first part either. They're basically like liberalism began as a historic project. We clear the limitations, but at this point. It's an orientation. It's like it is a set of related emotions and temperaments. That's not how it starts. That is what it is now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but they benefit a lot from having no pretense of having that second part Correct.
Speaker 1:So you can't hold them accountable for failure, whereas Marxists have a problem because, on one hand, of the revolutionary traditions, after the liberal one, we're the ones that succeeded, on the other hand, we're also the only ones that failed, because we actually had a chance to do something. And it's very interesting reading. I bring back Goldner's book and the readings that I was talking about in the beginning, these three books that are in my mind. Goldner is writing from the perspective of the late 70s and he talks about the crisis of Marxism. But at that point that crisis seems paradoxical Because on one hand, you have Marxist-inspired national revolutions all over the globe that are finishing up at the time period that he's writing this book, but on the other hand, the Marxist world very much seems in malaise, as does the capitalist world. I mean, the 70s is kind of like a point of general malaise. But there's all these national revolutions going on that start in the 50s, that really continue up until the 1980s, and Marxism is seen as part of that.
Speaker 1:But from just 12 years after that book is published, that crisis no longer seems like a malaise. It seems like a collapse, because Cuba's backed into a corner, the DPRK is backed into a corner, vietnam and China have to open up to the West. Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. Most of the Warsaw Pact doesn't exist anymore. Even in the social democratic countries of the Scandinavian countries the social democrats are actually politically losing. It seems like a completely different world.
Speaker 1:And yet that malaise, that intellectual deadness, is interesting because it was an indicator of a coming real historical shift. That malaise came 20 to 30 years before and that's interesting. So how do we deal with that? From the cold and warm stream? This is an interesting sort of problem Because we talked about when you realize the cold and warm stream is in these big eventful changes or when something actually happens. Now, I'm sorry, the 1970s to the 1990s is a cold shower for socialism and a whole lot of current politics in my mind is basically just trying to deny that that happened. It is like a trauma response where it's like suppression.
Speaker 3:I mean, yeah, like all politics Well, at least not all politics, any politics which has a claim to being interesting.
Speaker 2:Including the very, very, very bad ones.
Speaker 1:I mean I guess that it's true that right now, like non-centrist politics is both emergent and interesting and all over the place, and yet also somehow can't seem to win, even when it wins, and I don't just mean in the left-wing sense, also I mean all kinds of new forms of rightism that have emerged in the last two decades that are reminiscent of early 20th century forms of rightism, and yet they also, when they win, they just normalize, like it's not, like it's like if Mussolini had joined with Britain and decided to oversee a post-war Keynesian transition without the war in the first place.
Speaker 3:Which is to say if Mussolini had gotten what he wanted.
Speaker 1:Yes, actually, because he did not want to side with Hitler, but are like, yeah, because you have, like what is it? For example, spain, for example, as fascist as it is, it set out World War II.
Speaker 2:Just set it out.
Speaker 1:We're just not involved.
Speaker 2:And as soon as the axis started losing World War II, they started de-fascistizing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they normalized to the point of their own whimper, collapse, like it's like. Well, I don't know, maybe the king will restore democracy, which is what happens as soon as.
Speaker 2:Franco was gone, democracy was restored.
Speaker 1:It's just like well, we had this blip and I guess you guys got rid of the communist so we can let democracy happen again, which actually interestingly also happens in Latin America all the time. Like you have these cadellos. They're hugely traumatic and they're very, very violent, but they all just kind of end Like they don't even get revolutionarily overthrown. In most cases they just sort of like we've exhausted society. We can't kill everybody, let's just stop.
Speaker 3:Right, but that's all only because of the war, because if not for the war, then all that development would happen in a different way and maybe there would have been revolutions that had to overthrow them. So it's just again. It's like in retrospect we can see how something played out, but nothing is guaranteed. Not at any point in history is the outcome ever like the one that is possible.
Speaker 1:All right, and I think what's interesting about bloc is bloc's post-embezzlement. Is Tennessee on Marxist? And also it comes up in critiques of Marx, and I think one of the things about it is when people make it. I can't deny it because it is in there when Marx sounds like socialism is inevitable and it's absolutely inevitable. And then also you have points like socialism or barbarism, which is not a direct quote from Marx but actually comes out of Marxism phrasing.
Speaker 2:Which indicates a common ruin of the contending classes. Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Which indicates he does not actually think it's inevitable, and I was just reading Hal Draper bend over backwards to try to not make that a contradictory statement.
Speaker 3:And the problem there lies in the fact that Marx is both trying to do political economy and also political agitation, and they require an entirely different emphasis on things which are only merged in retrospect. But on the surface it's like you turn off one faucet and turn the other one on.
Speaker 1:However, the problem that you have is outside of capital. Marxist writings actually aren't that clearly delineated Like. Is the Brumere a polemical text or is it an analytical text? In my mind, it's got to be both, yeah.
Speaker 3:In certain works, like the Brumere, I think he is trying to do both.
Speaker 1:But yes, like the manifesto versus capital. I mean, I think Grimesh is one of the first people who sees that there's a tension there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, unlike Kowski who's just like oh, the manifesto is OK, I guess. But the real question is the economic doctrines of Karl Marx, which is a phrase that no one should ever have been able to say. The doctrines of Marx, even though he has at least two positions on everything.
Speaker 1:But this is actually interesting because the people who try to turn it into a methodology Lukash, for example end up making the methodology substance-less. Like Lukash is answered to what a proletarian revolution is is tautological. It's not even like what the proletarians do. It is what the proletarians do when manifested by a politically conscious proletarian movement, in itself and for itself simultaneously, which you can only know once it happens. But somehow that's scientific, which I mean. It may be true, but it's useless Like, and I say that because if that's your methodology, then it's not a methodology, there's no method to that.
Speaker 3:The method is just to have been correct.
Speaker 1:But when you argue that Marxism is a science and Lukash does, and we were talking about this warm and cold stream trying to combine in the same person, and that's what's trying to happen there, but it ends up being meaningless, like it's just tautological In the bad sense, not in the definitional sense, which, of course, yes, a chair is a chair, because it's a fucking chair, shut up.
Speaker 3:Well, right, I mean. One thing that would help us out a lot is if we all had the same meaning of science in mind. Since before Marx and certainly now, but even in Marx's own time, both conceptions of science I mean at least more than one conception of science is used, and the lack of recognition of that contradiction leads to like what you just said with Lukash at a certain point it just becomes unintelligible nonsense.
Speaker 1:Well, the new left response to this was to focus in on the fact that Weizner-Schopf doesn't quite mean science. It doesn't mean natural science, but even that's kind of a cop out because it does also sometimes mean that Like presaging. It would be like me criticizing someone for saying well, when we say science, we don't mean biology, but sometimes we do, and you're right. One of the things that haunts Marxist claims of science is that there has still been, really despite the practical success of science. Ask any motherfucker to tell you what it actually is in a way that is both coherent to practice and to non-contradictory definitions, and they can't. There's no answer to the demarcation problem to this day, like, which makes vulgar skeptics online really uncomfortable because they're like but what about pseudoscience? And I'm like well, we only know pseudoscience in the retrospect.
Speaker 3:Frankly, I mean, there's a really. I think again, partly. It's just not very well known anymore, but I think it's early. It's like 1807. Hegel was talking about the need to elevate philosophy to the level of science, to make philosophy scientific, which is to say that science is the thing, philosophy is the thing, and to the extent that we can merge them, we're onto something. And it's not clear whether or not we even have an idea of what that would look like now.
Speaker 1:I think that is complicated and hard yeah.
Speaker 1:It's complicated and hard because it ties stuff in. The other problem is, like Hegel wants to raise philosophy up to the level of science and sign us up to the level of philosophy. That's why it's the science of logic, right. But then Marx actually even ups the gambit from there because he's like well, the point isn't just to understand the world, get the science and philosophy together and rigorous enough, it is also to be able to use it in ways that change the course of human history, which is an even bigger demand. But Marx says that and yet he also says simultaneously and concurrently that this is inevitable. And one of the things I want to push back on is yes, I think there's a difference between the polemic and the analytic claim. The problem is that he doesn't ever actually explicitly contradict himself. In the analytic he argues against himself, but he doesn't say OK, socialism is, socialism's not inevitable.
Speaker 3:I don't think that Marx really was. I don't exactly know how to put this. I don't think that Marx ever really thought about what we would have done 100 years from his lifetime, because I think he just thought this is going to work itself out at some point. Somebody is going to come along and do this better. At least everybody is going to know what I mean whenever I say what I say, and of course, none of that's true, so he just doesn't account for it and our accounting for it is well, that's an ongoing project and we fail that most of the time.
Speaker 2:Sort of like Paul's letters. He didn't think anyone was going to turn him into books of the Bible, but here we are trying to figure out what the fuck Paul is talking about. Well, yeah, exactly the theology out of it, yeah.
Speaker 3:Of course that doesn't help us. We still have to do that, but it's just that Marx's work, or Paul's work for that matter, is barely going to help us in making sense of how to make sense of Marx's work. It's what's called a conundrum.
Speaker 1:And I think that's something that to talk about these streams again, because this seems to have somewhat lost the kind of titles back in, because the conundrum of these streams, the conundrum of the stream.
Speaker 1:Well, I do it too, but the conundrum of the streams actually comes from this tension, right Right, right Like and it's a tension I actually, would point out Isn't entirely just in Marxism, because most liberals today also are stuck in this cul-de-sac and in their worldview it's even more blatantly self-contradictory.
Speaker 1:So we always talk about systemic oppression, but we focus on individual responses to it almost solely, even so much as, in fact, we talk about systemic racism, but then we want to collapse it into bias. And you have someone like Abraham X Kendi who, while I think it's a lot of bad rap from people for what he's accused of saying, I will point out that his want to collapse racism back into one coherent category by pretending that implicit bias, bigotry and structural racism are all the same thing, because they're all related, is a move that is only clarifying, if you think that having something easy to talk about makes it clearer. And so in this too, you see this tendency towards like volunteerism, where you have to check your privilege. But you didn't give yourself your privilege. Like privilege is not something you gave yourself. Now I think these discourses are highly distorting and highly removed from class. But the thing is the tensions that we see in Marxism are in those tensions too, like it's already there. The conservative doesn't have those tensions because they have no pretense to consistency.
Speaker 3:They don't, that's true.
Speaker 1:Like. They sometimes have pretense to principles, but their principles, even when they have them, are modular and, let's be honest, most of the time they don't even have that. That's why it's not a, the reason why it is not a bug, but a feature that conservative values can pivot around a dime. It's not just hypocrisy and it's not just cultishness, although that is part of it. It is also because they're defending the status quo and the status quo has always been there Whereas we're trying to both promote a positive program which is changing the world and battle against the status quo, and also not be weird-ass gurus who make predictions that aren't true, which is a very hard. That's not just a two thing to keep together, that's three things to keep together Our conditions of victory. It's like playing a game where your condition is you have to completely change the game board and the other guy's condition is you just have to survive. Why One of those is way easier than the other, which is why I think conservatism is often easier to have a positive vision, even compared to liberalism.
Speaker 1:Even though liberalism has this inclusivity and justice, the current time period the inclusivity and justice is actually not inclusive at all. As Marxist, that shouldn't surprise us. That is a particular historical development, that shit-lives are shit-lives. Sometimes I guess I push back on you guys on this because I'm like well, but shit-lives are shit-lives because they're also in the same world we are. In some ways we have to hold them accountable for being that way, but in other ways we also have to admit that we're not that different from them and they're in this weird cul-de-sac too and they're also failing at whatever their conditions are. It's just that their way of achieving victory is to deny they ever had the conditions that they said they had in the first place.
Speaker 2:When viewing the most disgusting shit-library available, one must always think there but for the grace of God, go I and God against us.
Speaker 3:Very well said.
Speaker 2:But yeah, like you said, the cul-de-sac that the Liberals are in that makes the just insane and revolting behavior of the Liberals as bad as it is. This is the same one that we're stuck in. The worst part about it is that the left is being drawn towards the Liberals as a pull of attraction. There's no independent Marxist pull of attraction anymore. There's no labor movement to rally around to speak of. There's some stuff going on. Obviously I don't want to downplay that there is some stuff going on, but as far as a strong leftist, anti-capitalist, worker-centered pull of attraction, there isn't one. That doesn't exist. What we have instead is the left being drawn to liberal causes, causes that are. I mean, inclusivity is good, lgbt rights are good, following trans people who exist is good, but it's not working-class politics.
Speaker 3:Without that. That's the anchor.
Speaker 1:I also want to put out that it's also not not. I know this sounds like a. This is a thing that I need to clarify, because a lot of people think you can't walk into bubblegum at the same time.
Speaker 2:Right, right, I mean but, no. I should say Point well taken, I agree.
Speaker 3:It's just that if you don't put the bubblegum in your mouth first, you'll walk away from it, and then you cannot walk.
Speaker 1:Right, I agree.
Speaker 3:I'm not saying that like. What I mean by that is just like it certainly should be and can be working-class organizing. But if you're not first organized in the class as a class, then it's just not.
Speaker 1:This is actually one of the this is a crucial tension that I think we should point out and this whole roll arm, cold string discussion, because race and gender are ones where this actually becomes pretty clear.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:On one hand we think, as we are Marxist, that the predominant division amongst human beings is in the way they organize their labor force.
Speaker 1:Now this gets muddled with women, because we also think that the first division of labor is gendered under agriculture and, frankly, while Ingalls works under a lot of bad anthropological assumptions, that seems to be one that is mostly true. There are gendered hunter gatherer societies, we don't know how like we can't really project them all the way back into antiquity, but there also seems to be less gender hierarchy and less division of labor and hunter gatherer societies. And, what is also interesting, sometimes there is less division of labor in agrarian societies than there is, although there is some. But the idea of the nuclear family division of labor to bourgeois division of labor where the woman is a manager of the household, that is not unique to bourgeois society. That's part of Greek aristocratic society, in Athenian democracy, for example. But in general it is not a historic norm, because if you're running a farm and even if one person is running the household, everyone's got to fucking work. Labor is part of that.
Speaker 3:Well right, like if we think of history as just a line that just goes forward enough, then you're going to miss out on all kinds of stuff, because that is a way of doing things at one point and then it becomes later, it becomes again the way of doing things on a higher level or whatever. But it's not like it's just, it wasn't and then capitalists came along and now it is. It's just, it is again and more. And that is both liberating and also increasing exploitation at the same time.
Speaker 1:So one of my I come out of the platypus society, people know this, but I'm not one of them, and one of my critiques of them is like they have the revolution, and the Bush Revolution begins it, and communism will be the fulfillment of that Right, and and I tend to completely push back on that because I think that's not a great reading of Marx, for one thing, but I also think it's just not historically true, because they have to constantly talk about regression, but it's like just the failure to voluntarily live up to the liberal revolution. For them, right, whereas for me it's like no, these ideals were always contradictory. Yeah, like, and that's what dialectics means. And they're contradictory because they're also materially contradictory, and it's not just about fucking freedom, like like. One of the things, one of the things that you have to to deal with as a Marxist, is to say, well, most people's conception of freedom is actually only freedom for a certain amount of people, and that's absolutely true.
Speaker 1:But the reason why I bring this up, though, is because I think we are the result of these contradictions in liberalism. Like that's why we exist. Yeah, like, we are not liberals, but we are not cleanly anti liberals either, and I think that needs to be understood, because these warm stream, cold stream problems you want to see where it shows up in a vulgar form, not just in Marxism. It shows up in a much more vulgar form in your average resist liberal Because, on one hand, they're constantly talking about history as linear progress, of which they are on the right side of Right Whatever the fuck that means, which no one really knows. But you see this tendency there, like we're on the right side of history. History is always more inclusive. History is always better.
Speaker 3:It's like it's bending towards justice, and even if it's long, it's eventually going to get to the right place, and so the being on the right side is just always to be on our side.
Speaker 1:On the other hand, these same liberals tend to be catastrophists in a heartbeat Right yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's always. We are always teetering on the verge of fascism.
Speaker 1:Right. Every election is the most important election ever. Fascism is always around the corner, and it's been that way since Reagan at least, even though the policy I mean. One of the things that I have not heard liberals really address is that while the tenor of the policies between the Biden administration and the Trump administration are different, but a whole lot of the changes Trump made to American fallen policy have been maintained and extended, just given a human face, by Joe Biden and his administration.
Speaker 2:But even foreign policy only. There's also domestic policy as well, including immigration.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as I say, immigration policy is actually probably more restrictive now. It's definitely more successfully restricted because it's not resisted by anybody. And there you wouldn't get some of my liberal and left liberal friends to admit this, and yet they don't really know how to do anything about it and they just sort of accept it. You saw this in anti-war activism in prior times, like the Democrats were anti-war from 2004 to 2009.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, eight. Well, whenever Obama decided he wanted to drone strike people, all of a sudden they weren't anti-war anymore. But yeah, 2009, I guess.
Speaker 1:Which is funny. Just like it took Clinton to fully neoliberalize and weaken the welfare state, it took Obama to the finish and fully neoliberalize the army. One of the things when people talk about the poverty draft and they don't understand that the poverty draft used to be real. It's not anymore. But when people go, it's never been real. It was real until about 2005. And particularly if you look at it in not just in an individual perspective, but you look at the regions in which the army is recruiting the most from, because they're always the poorer parts of the country and the reason why is even is, like you guys are from Texas, outside of the major metropolitan areas, what was keeping a lot of small town Texas alive?
Speaker 2:Well, our town was military base and oil yeah, I was about to say, you have oil but if you don't have oil, it's a military base nearby, is it not?
Speaker 1:And it's not just almost always In the military, it's also all the things serving the military. When the military bases contracted under Bush and then really accelerated contracted under Obama into the drone warfare we have today, whole parts of the red states, the people, that's when the red states died. People don't seem to put that together. Like all the economic collapse of the red states, they finally neoliberalized the military. Military Keynesianism ended Right. Okay, what does this have to do with red stream, with war and stream red stream, blue stream, with war and stream cold stream? Well, there's a cold stream to that and there's a warm stream to that, but we don't look at either at the same time. We can't hold both of them in our heads. So what's the warm stream to that? The warm stream to that was like the volunteeristic efficiency of the Bush administration. The cold stream to that was the humanization for us, not for anybody else of warfare under the Obama administration as a natural resource of technological development.
Speaker 1:Right as a natural outcome and resource of technological development. And it also continues to this weird thing in the United States, where the military is a beloved institution. Although conservatives love it less than they used to, actually Liberals now like it more than they used to. That's weird.
Speaker 2:It's really weird. It's the same with, like, the CIA. Yeah, very much so. The liberals love the CIA now and now. The conservatives hate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the FBI, it's fucking what.
Speaker 3:Well, it's just kind of like the early Cold War again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really is. But you know, as far as.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we have to. We look at that Now. Cold War and Stream stuff, one of the big things that we have to deal with that I haven't heard you guys talk about since you pulled this from block. How do we? You know, it's clear, when we talk about revolutions like the volunteeristic revolutions, that's Werbera, that's Castro, that's Mao, that's linen, I mean to a real sense, even though linen's writings are very cold stream, what he actually does is not that at all.
Speaker 2:Well, he flips the switch right, like he opposes insurrection, and then, when he realizes he can't oppose it anymore, he flips the switch and then champions insurrection Right.
Speaker 3:And his definitions of socialism become increasingly colder as building socialism gets harder and harder.
Speaker 1:Right- Right, so state capitalism becomes a necessary phrase, et cetera. Yeah, because they didn't join up. So what's interesting is in many ways linen without I don't even think he realized he was doing this because very early on he was not exposed to like the Vera Zurich letters and whatnot but like he ends up doing what Marx says you should do in the Vera Zurich letters, which is try to like piggyback off the like. Their strategy actually is kind of a backdoor way of what Marx implies in the unsent Vera Zurich letters, which is like if you join up to a post-capitalist society that went through capitalism, you might not have to, and then that doesn't happen. And then we get to the very volunteeristic we're going to do this developmentalism internally, which is really hard to do. And what is ironic about that is it does make Ploekanov look good, because for all Ploekanov shenanigans as leader of the social democrats of Russia, et cetera and there's a lot of shenanigans including like suppressing shit and stuff like like- Well, it includes, just like, outright opposing the 1905 revolution.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, the workers should not have taken to arms. Yeah, which is absurd. Well, but Lin's response is perfect for that, because he says, nevertheless, they did.
Speaker 1:And because they did we?
Speaker 3:as Marxists, we are obligated to join them.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 1:So, although that worker, like that worker, that aligning yourself when workers do that becomes something harder and harder to do too with as we go on. Well, yeah, sure, but it's, you're right, he becomes, you move to this. There's this weird oscillation that in the warm cold where people switch on a dime, where, like one of the things with current China defense is a lot of Dungist, are hyper volunteeristic on revolution and then hyper cold stream on developmentalism, but also they kind of ignore that it would require, like it requires people to join, like the like. There's still an implication that, like, for most of the world to do this, you either have to join up to China or the West and you would really be better and a lot less deaf. It's the weft in China where, somehow on the same side, because they were both socialist, like although that last part's not talked about like because it is implicit but it's not talked about.
Speaker 1:It's not a popped about because it's like that would be too warm, but then also, if you don't believe that, then none of their fucking politics makes any sense. Like, why would you even like if it really is? It's just you have to have China win, then why are you even involved in politics Other than, like a fifth qualifier war? That's not happening.
Speaker 2:Like, I just also wanted to point out to we talked about this previously. I don't remember if it was with you, but the various letters where Marx puts out the the idea that you could skip over the bourgeois revolution in Russia possibly also shows up in preface to the Communist Manifesto written by Ingalls.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Ingalls publishes in post facto, but then, but then Pekanov suppresses that apparently. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's better. We were talking about this and I think that we I think we got it wrong. We said it only showed up in those unpublished letters, but then I later on found, found it. I mean, I remembered this in the back of my mind somewhere, like it was in the preface to like the Communist Manifesto that Ingalls wrote in like 1870 something.
Speaker 3:Right yeah, 88 actually, I think 88.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's after. It's after Marx is dead.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff that we think of crucial that's released by Ingalls.
Speaker 1:I mean, one of the most weird things is the current battles over critique of the Gartha program, where there's where one, there's the people who think it's absolutely crucial because the abolishers of already formed to their Stalinist who like it, because it's the only time where you can see Marx talk about like well, I mean there's that and a section of the Grindessa where you can talk about, well, you have to have parts of the prior forms of society in the current forms, but they're different.
Speaker 1:They're actually completely different in a new form of society because, like, like, he talks about like usury capital working differently under under capitalist conditions than it does under feudal conditions, although it's exist in both, and the only time you see the feudal version of it is when, like, capitalist are fucking up. That's actually in the Grindessa, it's so. So there's all this use of the critique of the Gartha program and then there's this current like from the Lars Lee slash social Republic school who were like, you guys are too mean to the Gartha Congress Because the Congress didn't actually adopt all the language that was critiqued.
Speaker 1:So you're slandering. Yeah, this is the new line that Lars Lee's took in platypus. It's being also promoted by like the neocoskius and Marxist unity group in the cosmonaut.
Speaker 2:I was not aware.
Speaker 1:I need to look into that because it's a critique of the draft program, of the Gartha program.
Speaker 1:It's not adopted. But then they have to ignore how much importance linen puts on it, because, like, whole chapters of state and revolution are based off of the critique of the Gartha program, and linen thought it, I mean, and Engels thought it was important too because he publishes it when he publishes his critique of the airford program, and so it's hard for me to like. So people like, oh, it was not a big thing, he only sent it to 20 members, and there's a reason why I suppressed you know, I'm like I don't know, I think it's actually still pretty important. The point, though, is like even the reception history of Marx is really difficult, because it's like you limit yourself to stuff Marx actually signed off on and published formally in his life. You got, was it? You have the German ideology? No, I don't think that was well no.
Speaker 2:German ideology was posted. It was posted and 1881 when published after his death right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's probably Engels late because it could not, because they didn't. He did sign off on it, though they wanted to have it published. He just couldn't get it published. But what is it?
Speaker 3:Umbrella resonates with the more excellent types of desperation today that Britain and I've got stuff that you would not count, right, yeah, but stuff is all published posthumously.
Speaker 1:The thesis on Faribach is not public. Like that's posthumous, Like, like.
Speaker 3:I mean easily the vast majority of what constitutes Marxism proper did not yet didn't exist for a while.
Speaker 1:It's the journalism they would, if you were eliminating yourself to stuff Marx signed up on. It's the journalism Capital Volume One and the manifesto.
Speaker 2:The manifesto yeah.
Speaker 1:There's one of the early books that is published early. Oh, the poverty of philosophy. The poverty of philosophy, yeah Right.
Speaker 2:Dude critique of the German ideology didn't come out until 1932.
Speaker 1:Wow, ok, so it's even later than I thought, right, so it's like it's post Ingalls even. But I published it by the Soviet. Union One of the things I will say, though, is that isn't. That isn't because Marx didn't want to publish. They did try to get it published.
Speaker 2:No one will publish it. I just looked it up and that's like the first sentences that they could never find a publisher.
Speaker 1:But like the political and economics manuscripts, all the versions of them, including 1844 and Grunesa, etc. Those were all those weren't even published but like those were, basically they are effectively notes. Yeah, so much of the stuff we have to pull from letters, because the letters clarify what said. And then there's all the economics manuscripts and everything but Capital Volume One, which are all like, like, really like, if you only have Capital Volume One, even though it's got stuff in it, that's late, because you know the last revision of Capital Volume One is actually after he's stopped writing Capital Volume Three. But you don't have most Marxism at all, right, and in fact it's like I do start having more sympathy towards the second international when I'm like, oh shit, they had so little like oh yeah, I mean I think the number of Marxists they've even a clue about Volume Three is all posts like after the second international Most, I mean whatever.
Speaker 1:I mean Ingalls is putting them together in the beginnings of the second international right, like yeah. Right yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, but I think that when Kowski writes the economic doctrines to Karl Marx, I don't think he'd even read Volume Three yet. Right, I think? I think I'm not, I'm not entirely sure.
Speaker 1:Who puts who's like. Like Bernstein's actually a specialist in Volume Two and three because he works with Ingalls on it, right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and Bernstein is a very you know. To mention Bernstein at all is already problematic.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, but well, you want to talk about the bad symptoms of warm and cold, right? Yeah, oh yeah, like it's, he's both, but in the wrong ways.
Speaker 3:Both. He's both, but in the way that is really only helpful in getting the liberals moving again Right, because he even like, even says he sees it as the same project Organizing liberals. If we just did that then we'd be OK.
Speaker 1:I mean basically one of the interesting things I remember all these socialists to get into Schupenter and forget that while Schupenter worked with Marxist in his period and flirted with the German historical school, ultimately he hated socialists. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:That, like that. People like well, I remember when I was in the 90s a lot of people were reading his book on democracy and capitalism and how democracy was going to end capitalism and lead to socialism, because capitalism was to had too much freedom, had too much creative destruction. Ie was too prone to crisis from the Marxist standpoint. Like he's agreeing with Marxist basically as an Austrian, but like he's upset about it. He's like well, ok, maybe you guys are right, you're going to get socialism through democratic means. But what was interesting about that is like people don't realize. Like he's critiquing democracy, fools like and he, he, he actually ends up at the same position as Bernstein. And so when people try to revise Bernsteinism, and in the aftermath of the new left which was a pretty common thing, like you see, schupenter and Werner Sombart, everyone's favorite former Marxist turned Nazi be revived, be revived to like argue for this evolutionist concession, to like love, populism.
Speaker 1:Basically, it's like the first, the first terms to what Harringtonism becomes is at this time period, and it uses these texts to do it Like, but they don't you. What's interesting is they don't use Bernstein himself, because that would that's too controversial.
Speaker 3:Well, because that would be an admission.
Speaker 1:Yeah right, like. So we're going to use Sombart. Oh, we're going to use Sombart and ignore that he died a Nazi, and we're going to use. Which doesn't mean it doesn't mean that his book on America is wrong. Actually, what's interesting is he's basically the first person he doesn't use this language, but he's the first person to promote the Settler-Crowano thesis.
Speaker 3:It's all right, really yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean he's got. Yeah, he does write quite a bit before his right word turn.
Speaker 1:That I think it's completely doesn't use that language. I want to be clear on that. Like he's not a, but he is his explanation for why there is no. Why there's no revolution in America is that the American work in the apple pies, yeah, aren't well kind of. But the reason why he says that is because they're exploiting all this extra land and doing it under industrial conditions, which means that there is a way in which the workers are little bourgeois people, which is which is kind of the. The interesting thing is like Jasekai, for example, and settlers will take that but also argue that basically both blacks and indigenous Americans are fully fledged nations in the Stalin sense before, before any bourgeois revolution, which I think is doesn't like that doesn't make any sense. But but that's kind of how you get to settlers and it's actually in Verna Sombart and but that's what that.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is that text gets brought about. It's that text is translated in English in 1973. Right, why is that? Well, we're going to do Bernsteinism again, but we're not going to call it that, because that's not going to work, because we just got to say like well, americans will never be socialists, so if we're going to get to socialism, it's got to be through like liberalism and shit. So we got to play with the Democrats again. Yeah, and again it's also a justification of actually existing policies because, well, the CPU SA actually still did that. Even after the fucking Red Scare, even after Truman, they still maintain the popular front. Like, when did the CPU SA ever drop the popular front, even though they've done it now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, they were severed from Moscow and just never changed their line.
Speaker 3:What's tragic about that is that, like the popular front in the 30s and 40s, was a meaningful thing that, like you, could critique, but at least it's. It's, it is a, a position that has actual weight. And then today, to not have dropped it is to is to have dropped it because essentially, what it means is to be dragged behind and play a role entirely supportive of, and not a partnership with the liberals Right.
Speaker 2:It's tailism, yeah, ml tailism instead of truck tailism, right.
Speaker 3:I mean because pop frontism would be awesome compared to whatever is called pop frontism. Now, At least pop frontism we could criticize.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean it's also like well you know, united Frontism, which has been ruined by its association with Trotsky, is using it as an excuse to do pop frontism, but not.
Speaker 2:I know I always say I always said that when I was in the ISO I said wait, how is this not pop frontism?
Speaker 1:I mean it wasn't. I will be fair. To be fair, Trotsky is listeners. That's not true of all Trotsky is forms of the United Frontism, but it is true of the largest. Trotsky is forms United Trust of Frontism in the United States, in Britain.
Speaker 3:So yeah, and a big part of that is because the workers formations, I mean they don't exist, like the United Front between communists and other workers formations. That's the political, it's political calculation that requires the other workers formations to exist, and so otherwise you can do is pop frontism.
Speaker 2:But, and pop frontism requires you to participate in coalition from a position of strength, where you are needed, instead of just tailing. Right.
Speaker 3:In every case, we're really just talking about tailing. Yes, Whether it's, it's only as at protest or else at the ballot box is just tailism.
Speaker 1:And even if you're not tailing by being, I don't know, the DSA and technically in the Democratic Party, probably you're tailing by the fact all you can do, like if you look at some Marxist, leninist and Trotsky troops who don't do that, they still end up what they do is try to tail movementism from the Democratic Party still.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or organic things adjacent to it, but are easily capitulated to the Democratic Party because no one has any independent imagination. That isn't like the Green Party, which is a farce anyway. And so it's interesting because when I talk about cold and I want to use this cold and warm metaphor from Earth's block to get it to the American is because in the beginning I said, well, when they come together they're lukewarm water. But actually I think it's true, actually in America, that they've come together into lukewarm water.
Speaker 2:Mm, hmm.
Speaker 1:What is Bernie ism? Is Bernie ism warm or cold? Yes, exactly yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think I think in either case, whether we're talking about cold stream or warm stream, we have to first talk about Marxism, and Marxism is doesn't barely barely exists. So, like, I'm not really sure, but I also I'm kind of indifferent as to whether or not what we're doing, what the DSA types are doing right now, is cold or warm stream.
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's interesting because it's a nature To me like we're looking at this postmortem and we have the hour of maneuver now. It can now take off. I think we can fairly say that Bernie was a response to the failure of the labor movement after Occupy, which there was a real this is one of the weirdest things about the 20 teens there was a real labor movement, militancy and expansion.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:From 2012 to 2015.
Speaker 2:I mean starting probably in 2008,. I think right yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, it didn't really, you don't? You see it? You see an end of decline around 2008.
Speaker 2:And actually take that back.
Speaker 1:You see a precipitous decline at the beginning of 2008 because the auto workers unions are liquidated, so like they're crushed. But after that, once that's over, you see, because there's a big drop after, like the UAW scandals and all that. But once that's over, you see a stop into the client unionization.
Speaker 1:Like yeah, around 2012 you see a pickup in unionization, like it actually increases All right, both in raw numbers and in percentage of working people around 2000 and about 2018. It's been steady from, like I think, from the beginning of Trump administration about 2018. 2019 is still steady. You see a slight uptick because there's hints that we're going to start seeing a recession.
Speaker 1:Actually, yeah 2020 happens, covid happens, everything goes haywire, but at the end of that, when we come back, a ton of union jobs have been to unionized. Yeah, green develop in the United States is not unionized by the most part. I think people don't know that, like the green union, stuff is not union for the most part.
Speaker 2:So it's not much of a new deal then, is it?
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it might like they might have tried to make it union, if they ever actually did it but there's nothing, unlike the inflation reduction act, which is the minimum program of the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1:So if we look at that, in this World Historic Movement, bernie happened in the context of this. What's interesting is Occupy happens. That's really a response to the failure of the Obama administration to live up to any sort of change and it's a very anarchistic movement because that's the form that's before. It looks like Occupy looks like the alter globalization movement with more Marxist in it, but it still looks effectively the same. And at the time I remember saying, and I remember listening to David Graber and I said this you can go back and find it in print, so you can't accuse me for making this up in hindsight you guys wouldn't, but listeners, you can find it from 2012, where I was like this is not the beginning of a politics, the end of one Like and I don't know what's coming after.
Speaker 1:Then we get the DSA. The DSA interestingly, it was not obvious at the time, because even I was like we need a clearinghouse of all these left-wing sects, because there's actually left-wing movement. It's all tied up in these stupid sectarian organizations and we need a clearinghouse for them. I hope it's the IWW, because it's a union, not a party and not attached to the Democrats, and I didn't get what I want because part of that is Bosch-Architon's car is fault and that is why I always call him Bosch-Caroline, but anyway, I mean, but part of that is because of an organizing strategy, and the IWW just didn't have one.
Speaker 1:No, it did not, and in fact it's shortly after this, when I tried to join the IWW and couldn't, because it couldn't get a shit together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, didn't you say you couldn't get anyone to get back in touch with you To take local?
Speaker 1:dues, so I paid the national dues. I did it twice. I paid the national dues and they couldn't get me in touch with a local person. Pay local dues and finish joining Like for real yeah.
Speaker 3:It's kind of a.
Speaker 1:I mean whatever it's just yeah, I mean, you know so, so, so, but anyway, that was my hope. I didn't get my hope, I'll have been there or whatever, but I always felt like, okay, bernie, felt like real movement and real dissatisfaction, but it also and, conversely, in retrospect, was a massive way to not do what you needed to do. And in fact, in retrospect, it's pretty clear that we were allowing ourselves actively to be played at the time. Well, right.
Speaker 3:Because the idea was like if Bernie is the president, then the organizing which we are hoping for and which we already have witnessed will continue and pick up, and if not, then it's all sunk. And that means in practice that it was all sunk.
Speaker 1:Right, and the entire time I even pointed out that that was a circular logic, because you needed that working class movement to exist to get Bernie into president safely, yeah, to hold the party accountable, or you had needed to completely have already taken over the Democratic Party. And and I was like, oh, all the stuff, and I said this until 2018, I'm like all the stuff you're doing around, this is kind of co Like. This is not to say that Barnard's always right, barnard's often wrong, but the the what is interesting about that is that seems in retrospect like a very cold movement, like we were just moving along with the, with the movement of history, but at the time it seemed like completely worn Like. It seemed totally like we have an electoral chance. We can seize this, we can make the workers movement happen by political force. Why?
Speaker 2:is Bonaparte's volunteerism right.
Speaker 3:Which, yeah, the problem is that the volunteerism was not directed at the labor movement, while it was actually receptive to it.
Speaker 1:Yes, and and when it? When the DSA actually shifted to the labor movement, which is post facto, it shifted mostly to a, to a quote. Why can file strategy, which by that what we actually mean is everybody becomes staffers?
Speaker 3:Right, Right, why. And then we could justify our our historic betrayal of labor by having our spokesperson point out the fact that the unions asked us to vote against the strike. Yeah, Even though the the actual workers in the unions, that's down the contract, yeah. The union bosses you know the ones that we, we love so much then we have no criticism of at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because that's the unions, yeah, and that's where we are Right. So so, in this moment, the warming cold combined together into a lukewarm morass of which God should spit out.
Speaker 3:Right, because the warming cold should be thought of as like a hot springs versus the ocean, like you have to jump back and forth between the two because one is too cold for too long and then the other is too warm. But if you actually blend them together, who wants to sit in that water?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're on fire with your metaphors today, jason. This is very, not, very, not characteristic of you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, usually I'm sundowning by this point, I'm just talking about usually with metaphors.
Speaker 2:You're the ridiculous.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, I am, I am a story awful at metaphors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're really on fire today with this, but but I think that's great. It's suspect to the tensions and Marxism itself. We've talked about this in Marx. It's really there in Marx. That it's not. It's not just that Marx is contradicting himself, is not really nearly, but that if you're trying to deal with things as you see them and develop a theory that approaches reality, you're going to be wrong. I think even sciences kind of know this. You're going to be wrong and have to correct, and then you're going to probably be wrong in other ways and have to correct that, and that's how this works.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and at one point that was it was accepted as science like to develop means to move past, because of mistakes which were made in honest attempts to approximate the truth, right.
Speaker 1:The difference with Marxism being that it's a political, is that we're also trying to change everything while we do this, now science ends up doing that anyway. I mean, that's one of the things about science that does that. It's not it's not necessarily trying to do that, but it does do that, like so that's you know, apparently that's kind of how we think about all of this and the difference between one of the things that makes this really hard and really hard to communicate, even from, like, an academic standpoint right, and you know, everyone complains about academic Marxist and yes, they all suck. But also, like you don't have Marxism without motherfuckers, I'm sorry, like let's be real here, and the people, the crypto blankiest in our midst who don't even know, they're blankiest because they don't know their own history. And why would they? Because they're blankiest, so of course they don't know what they are would be like well, of course, Marxism.
Speaker 1:Marxism is the is the last passion of the bourgeoisie to miss quotes. A problematic book because because it always came from academics and academics are bruised as well. No, they're actually not. But then anyway, I, whatever, we're not gonna get into that debate, let's get into this other debate. No one in socialism thought the socialism necessarily had to be thought up by the workers preemptively, because that's not how it's. Not like the. The the merchants aren't the people who thought liberalism either.
Speaker 3:Like well, right, and also like the class struggle wasn't established fact, it just was happening. So, based on the fact that that there's a thing that is happening, the socialists were just a variant of, of an outlook for how it could conclude. That's it. So I guess this gets. Our problem is that we are we are left with only the conclusions but not actually the process right now.
Speaker 1:Well, this is, this is an actually interesting process.
Speaker 1:This is why so many socialists have to like focus on states and not workers movements, because they don't have a way to focus on workers moments like, right, yeah, they basically have to go like, well, the apotheosis of all socialism is China, and maybe Cuba, and maybe the Vietnam and maybe the DPRK.
Speaker 1:Because they're, because they can't find a movement to attach to, and then they blame you know, western Marxist or whatever for the lack of that movement existing, because they're not really doing it as a new peer. But what they're also doing is a similar kind of thought reification, right, it's not dealing with the fact that, like no, these are consequences of failure, which means that, like, we live in the barbarism of which we predicted. It doesn't mean we have to stay there and it doesn't mean that I don't think the next, I think the next battle still within the realm of the working class, but I don't know that it will stay that way because of history moving and whatnot. You know, even though we all you know we have this whole series where we rejected the neo feudal thesis. There, there is a way in which the neo feudalism thesis is too optimistic about, like the failure of capitalism.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 1:It's like you know, if this is, if this is, neo feudalism is actually not so bad.
Speaker 3:Well, it's at least not different. It's not so different as to be noticeable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it was not even mass death yet, yeah, so you?
Speaker 3:know if C level is going to rise a few inches first, yeah, actually, on that, the crisis of capitalism seems to be a lot like the crisis. Feudalism seems almost identical. Yeah, it's happening and it's imperceptible and, like I don't know, I think at this point maybe something else will happen.
Speaker 1:I guess the Marxist unique claim is we. This is our unique claim to politics. We claim that, okay, every other time pass, this stuff emerges, but it emerges kind of post hoc right. We claim that because of capitalism's productive capacity and the collective knowledge of humanity prior that, we'd be able to like seize on this as it happens, and actually direct it. That was our promise. Yeah, as of yet we have not done that in enough of the world. If you even think and that's if you include China as a socialist country, which is, you know, a debate I don't want to get into today, so we're just gonna assume it we have not done that in enough of the world In any kind of fast enough time to actually take care of the situation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not even close and when people talk about oh, we needed more productive forces to do that, I want I always quote people because they'll quote this line and won't quote the line before it. Ingalls predicted that we had enough of productive forces for socialism in 1881 and he says it. He talks about the need for productive forces in in and Socials, metopian and scientific. But he says in that book, when it was published, that we were already there right, yeah.
Speaker 3:We we suffer from an excess, we suffer from a hey, I can't think of the word right now. Is it a decadence? Yeah, it's a decadence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's exactly right. Is it a great rotting? Yes? We've been rotting on the vine for a Century and you know what will happen if you say that, even to To left us indefinitely liberals, they will call us conservatives for talking about decadence at all, because they don't understand what we mean. Well, they need more of that, guns.
Speaker 3:Well, right it in the sense of what we're actually saying. It's I guess it's fine to be conservative. I don't mind being like that's a conservative thing, but I but that it is not a conservative position. No it's just a it's. It is a conservative outlook to the economic development because only I mean I Don't want to say only lunatics would have positive views about economic development, because some of the people who do are, you know, on our side, whatever, but uh, I do not share their positive outlook. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I just don't see what, why we? I don't see what productive forces you could possibly need more of, unless you like I think of a lot.
Speaker 2:We need less of.
Speaker 1:Again, like again to be to be conservative?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, we need less well, here's the thing.
Speaker 1:I this is, this is my, this is my. Gap me back and forth between cold and warm stream a bit, um, I Think. For example, when we talk about growth and degrowth, socialism I wish we just fucking stopped talking about it, because I like Like growth when you're not concerned with GDP and you're not concerned with, like, having to get rid of dead labor Looks radically different. Then not like when I'm not trying to like keep the keep economic exchange going every second of every day. Then growth can look radically different than what we mean by it, and so can non growth look radically different. It doesn't like. Right your limit. That whole discussion Is a discussion of current conditions, extrap in current conditions, abstractified, really not even Concerns, which is actually this currently constituents on a balance sheet, extract extrapolated into the future forever right cuz Just like a conversation about like what's better Apple pie or Metallica.
Speaker 3:It's like what depends on what the fuck you were trying to do.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's just like sometimes we. Some comparisons are.
Speaker 1:Are well fair.
Speaker 3:It depends on what year Metallica and depends on who made the apple pie and also depends on whether or not You're trying to talk about music or you're talking about dessert. So like with the whole growth versus degrowth thing it's.
Speaker 2:It's a false dichotomy, really like obviously some degrowth. That's what I was trying to say obviously some degrowth needs to happen in certain areas, like if we made, let's say, let's say we don't even get rid of smartphones if we just made them less.
Speaker 1:If we just just decommodified them, there we go. I don't really change how they work.
Speaker 2:Well, hey can modify them and then make them so that they last, so that you only need one for you know, 10, 15, 20 years, which, by the way, Apple already did for us.
Speaker 1:It just makes sure that it doesn't like right. Like we know for a fact, did they design software to make their prior bricks bricked? Because, because they make good products and they would last a long fucking time.
Speaker 2:I know I still got an iPhone 8. Man, that's what I'm using right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like like I like I bought a. I think it's 2002. I bought a sovtech guitar amp was made 1967 at the same tubes that were manufactured outside like St Petersburg, and it sounded great. And then I bought new tubes by a, the modern Russian company that makes this, you know, uses the same equipment and within one year I had to replace those tubes with the old sovtech tubes again. So like D-growth doesn't mean there shouldn't be factories, it just means we should stop making stuff to not last.
Speaker 1:Right, because we know how to make stuff to last. Like I have a Yamaha piano from 1971, that's actually like yes we have to replace the felt on it and, like, occasionally you have to replace the wood, but, but there is a sense like an early bourgeois culture before they realized that overproduction was a problem. Yeah, you actually have these really interesting artifacts that still fucking work. Why Work as good as any modern equivalent?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I mean like just just look at Cars right, right the way that they were made in the 1950s and 60s and 70s and 80s, or even the 90s really, and then now, well, man, I think about like a have a Chris knows this person to whatever.
Speaker 3:We have this mutual friend, and one time I was helping him move and and it was really, really tough to carry his bookcase because his bookcase was manufactured in 1791 in Paris. Oh yeah, I remember that one, yeah, yeah. Now, of course, any bookcase I like if I was gonna go buy a bookcase like right now, even if it's made of wood, yeah, it would maybe last a couple years.
Speaker 3:Yeah, only if it, only if it didn't move. But the bookcase I was talking about before that was made in 1791 in Paris, so not only did move, it moved across the ocean and lots of, lots and lots and lots of times. So like, yeah, that's how much we, that's how well we could construct things Based on knowledge that's like very, very old, based on techniques, that which are like outdated, and those are cats yep, for those of you watching, we have a cat, we have a great cat interference because cats are anarchist and they they make things more complicated.
Speaker 2:No um, so I love cats.
Speaker 3:I'm you're muted.
Speaker 2:You're muted, sorry, I had to throw out the cats because they like to pee in here. That feels the only, the only place they go outside of the litter boxes in my fucking office.
Speaker 1:You just cronstatted the cats.
Speaker 2:Yep, until we figure out how to get them to stop being in here. They're not allowed. They're kittens, they'll grow out of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well some of them, but anyway, um the I Guess this is a good way to pivot to our next episode. It's gonna be a joint episode. It's not a no-roh award episode. For those of you who want to know what we're doing on no rope rope, we're going back into feudal class relations. Hell yeah, rodney Hill, am I correct, rodney Hill?
Speaker 2:Yeah, feudalism proper, yeah, yep. We're talking about the transition from feudalism to capitalism this time instead of last time. What we?
Speaker 1:when we talked about feudalism proper, we were talking about the transition from the ancient mode of production to feudalism yeah, the ancient mode of production To the feudalistic mode of production, which is actually like be pretty clear, there's more than one.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and also that transition was like a centuries-long process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but centuries, it's like six, I think. It's like all the dark ages, basically, which wasn't, which weren't actually that dark. I will also add, just to make all my modern scholars happier it's enlightenment propaganda man.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it is, but also.
Speaker 1:But it's also dark in the sense that we don't have a lot of Text. Well, we have a lot of text, they're just not that useful.
Speaker 2:They're all like religious text and then one of the things that I'm figuring out about Hilton. Oh, you know what? I'll save this for next time, sorry, yeah but Hilton will be what we're doing next.
Speaker 1:And no, no, no, but we have a. We have a sequel to the warm and cold streams called let's finally talk about decadence. Yes, yeah, yeah why are both these streams heading into the, the Mariana strange?
Speaker 2:The streams have combined and stopped the jet stream from circulating.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that makes for a stagnant pool that, like mosquitoes, hatch in and yeah, and it makes climate change worse oxygen, so there's a mass die-off of organisms in the area. And that's the reason why we have to talk about decadence.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have to talk about decadence because Because I think I think in both the broad sense and the micro sense, there's a tendency amongst like old leftist go well, you're just complaining about the death of bourgeois radicalism. I'm like you know, it's easy to accuse the DSA of being bourgeois radicalism, right, but I don't think that's true. I think I actually do think it was a sincere attempt to form some kind of workers politics. That Couldn't. And one of the ironies about right now and I've pointed this back at people I'm like you guys talk about how the workers movements more dead than ever before, and you're right. But you have to square that with the fact that the condition of work is it's actually more universalized than it's ever been right and that that actually is the hardest thing. I mean, that's like that. You want to talk about these Anomalies and Marxism. That's something no one saw. No one saw that. No one predicted that the near universalization, at least part of proletarian status would actually reduce class conflict or at least make it one way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, and thus class consciousness and the, and thus you know right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think the only way we can explain that In any, in anything like anything, even attempts to still be Marxian, is A kind of decadence theory that tries to be fair to Marx but also honest with the current conditions. And I also think that means we're gonna have to say some things. That's gonna make some people uncomfortable, because it is not clear to me that we can Voluntaristically bring back the workers movement the way that, like many social Democrats or even ML, think they're able to do.
Speaker 3:I mean. I'll go as far as to say again I'm gonna just prefiguring what we're gonna talk about when we do. That is a. I don't think we can I.
Speaker 1:Think, for even in terms of unionization, when I keep on pointing out to people yes, there's new unions in the service sector and it's great, and service sector employees need to be unionized. It's fundamentally different from industrial unions. Yeah right, it's entire relation like look, if I hate to tell you, but if Starbucks copy you went away tomorrow and there was, and even all its competitors went away tomorrow, capitalism doesn't stop.
Speaker 2:Right, still make coffee at home.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah.
Speaker 3:Rather than respond to that, I'm just. I'm also gonna save that thought, because I just right. Trying to not open up more conversations, but yeah, but we're already at like two hours on this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a barn stream, which is actually the.
Speaker 1:This is the average length of a barn podcast.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, oh this usually how long we record, but I think that whenever I put out episodes they're like an hour and a half yeah we usually cut them down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't see. Barn does not, does not believe in editing anything more than obvious flutes, so so I think we should end up. I think this has kind of been a wider range. I think we can look at the warm and cold stream and look at political and economic. Political here's how I want to set this up.
Speaker 1:We can't say the warm and cold stream is either scientific or a romantic Marxism exactly. We also can't say this political determinism of volunteerism and economism either. There are warm and cold elements to both, and what we mean by that is that there are some elements that see this stuff as something you can bring about, and I guess the I guess Warm stream is more Voluntary, I will say that and cold stream is more deterministic. But In the final instance of both these things, if we were to look at a Tennessee and say this is mostly volunteeristic, as we said in the beginning, they tend to flip on themselves in a moment of defeat and become deterministic right, which is a pretty good cope as far as the coast but also like we're real good at cope as Marxists, right, I mean.
Speaker 3:I think Otto Bauer gave us a pretty good language for exactly what kind of socialists we should be. Yeah, it relates to the dichotomy between revolutionary reformist, but in this case I think it also relates to the dichotomy between warm and cold streams, and that's to be integrated or, to use linens languages, to Be as radical as reality itself.
Speaker 1:And I think that's a good note to end on, even though I think that also means we haven't answered the question as to what that is.
Speaker 2:But not, not, not yet yeah we're gonna go with a literary criticism approach to this and it's up to your interpretation.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna go with the our manoeuvres thing. We'll know what. It will know what it is when, when you have a socialist society that lasts more than 100 years and Actually spreads without you know, killing off large portions of its population.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, I think, I think I'm comfortable with that too. It's like Alba never. That's my yeah, that's my response.
Speaker 1:It just, I mean, if it never happens, it never happens. I mean, I think the one thing I do have to tell Marxist and this will be my final thought, and maybe this will be another part of the Deccanus theory we do have to actually try to maintain the null hypothesis. And a null hypothesis is that, well, there's a bunch of them, there's actually more than one about this but but at the basic level, socialist lost, yeah, yes, and, and there's an optimistic socialist loss. Well, we have China still, and maybe that'll save us that. That is, that's. That's a socialist loss. Narrative, guys, I don't think people realize that, but it is. And then the, the. The other one is like well, the, the time horizon for for socialism is long past, like which I don't believe, but I do think we have to entertain it like we have to see it can't be something that we will not even ask right.
Speaker 1:I Don't think it's historical nihilism to ask it either, because it's one of these things like well, are we wasting our time? I think no, but we have to be able to really look at it, because If I look at contemporary evidence, we look like a weird subculture. Yeah, that's what we look like.
Speaker 3:We look like really there's in the well, well, well, we are a weird subculture, yes, the question is only do we have to remain one? And so far, it seems as the answer is yes. But also but also maybe no and on and on.
Speaker 1:That we show Played them. Credits you.