Understanding the Modern Relevance of Oswald Spengler with Ben Lewis

Ben Lewis is the author of "Oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline" and the primary translator at Marxism Translated ).  We discuss his recent book on Spengler and Spengler's complicated legacy. 

Are you ready to unlock the enigmatic mind of Oswald Spengler and his intriguing theories that have influenced modern discourse? Our esteemed guest, Ben Lewis of Marxism Translated, guides us through the intellectual labyrinth of Spengler's ideas, his surprising relevance in the 21st century, and his seismic impact on the conservative revolutionary movement. We peel back the layers of Spengler's admiration for August Babel, his complex relationship with National Socialism, and his critique of Marxism as well as his unique theories of utility and the marginist theory.

Delving deeper into the perplexing world of Spengler, we take a magnifying glass to his controversial views on democracy and civilization and his idiosyncratic take on the relationship between Prussian socialism and his own work. Relying on Lewis's expert analysis, the twists and turns of Spingler's reception in Europe and the U.S are unraveled along with the ideological factors behind the works of Kautsky and Bernstein. Get ready for a deep dive into the ways in which Spingler's thought has influenced the likes of Nietzsche, Hegel, and others.

To conclude this intriguing exploration, we'll shine a light on the challenges of interpreting historical figures, the ripple effect of Spengler's theories on American socialism, and the significance of accurate translations of German works. Delve into the fascinating role of hindsight in understanding history, and the multi-layered complexities of the SPD's relationship to Marxism. Whether you're a seasoned scholar or a curious newcomer, this conversation offers fresh insights into the life and work of a lesser-known but influential figure in contemporary discourse. Get ready for an intellectual voyage that's bound to ignite thought and stir curiosity.

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

Chapters

• 0:00 Spingler's Relevance in Contemporary Discourse
• 12:57 Controversies Surrounding Oswald Spengler's Views
• 21:11 Goethe, Spengler, and Cultural Development
• 27:40 Revolution and Caesarism in Historical Spengler
• 40:49 Caesarism and Bonapartism in Marxist Theory
• 48:19 Overview of Spengler and Prussian Socialism
• 54:15 Spengler and Nietzsche's Influences and Perspectives
• 1:10:21 Spengler, National Socialism, and Relationship
• 1:24:11 Complexities of Spengler, Strasser, and Hitler
• 1:32:18 Reflection on Marxism and Babel's Book
• 1:38:18 Revisionism and Historiography in Marxism
• 1:49:31 Challenges of Interpreting Historical Figures
• 2:02:39 Exploring American Socialists and Translations

Transcript

C. DericK Varn: 0:47

Hello, welcome to Varm Vlog. And today we're recording, in the wee hours of the morning and as the dawn approaches and the darkness fades, here with Ben Lewis of Marxism Translated, and we were talking about his book, not about Marxism, but about Oswald Spengler, oswald Spengler and the Politics of Decline. And I have to say, ben, I was I've always thought Spingler was interesting from these figures who are kind of associated with the conservative revolutionary movement. But I now think he's more interesting and weirder. So, yeah, imagine how I feel. Yeah, and so your book rocks us through his life. You do a reception history and then you talk about the key periods of ideas, and one of the things that you really hit on is don't judge Spingler just by the decline of the West. Yeah, what do you think Spingler is such an interesting figure?

Ben Lewis: 2:02

now, no, that's a huge question, but I think he's a thinker of crisis right In the darkness of the 21st century as it opens up in the open your blog and I think that in times of crisis people, for whatever reason, will search for answers or have to search for answers in the sense beyond the kind of cosy establishment, consensus, right, and you see that takes all sorts of forms and irrationalities, et cetera, et cetera. But I think one of the things he hits on quite nicely is that in his albeit reactionary critique of democracy he makes the point that in times of crisis people do not look to the existing parties, they look elsewhere. And he has all this thing about tradition and blood and all this rest of it. So he kind of makes a good case, I think, for his own relevance or renewed relevance today, in the sense that when the kind of bonds of society he obviously sees that in a very metaphysical way but when the social bonds holding a society together start to disintegrate, people are much more open or prone to these ideas of blood and soil and particularism and nationalism, et cetera, et cetera. So I think his reception is a complicated one.

Ben Lewis: 3:18

I don't know much about his reception in the US at the moment, but certainly in Europe. He's big in kind of Spain and Italy as well at the moment Again Italy. You would see the connection there immediately. So yeah, I think that's probably why he is back to a certain extent in more popular discourse. I think in scholarship it's still pretty marginal. To be honest with you. I mean, maybe you've got a different impression than me, but my impression would be that in German and in English I can't speak for Spanish, italian et cetera. In German and English literature. It's still not a big field of studies really yet, but maybe it will be. I don't know.

C. DericK Varn: 4:00

Yeah, I was actually surprised when I was studying Spingler myself, like coming out of a very actionary phase of my own life and how there's a bunch of weirdos, pseudo scholarship about him, but there's not a whole lot of like sound stuff.

Ben Lewis: 4:22

To be honest, even the sound stuff like Fisher and people like that. They were kind of these very kind of well-heeled Harvard or Yale type people in the Cold War and really read it and it's partly of its time, right. Fisher and people talk about manly pessimism and the black question and the whole. The Americas fall in the past. So there was this kind of it's scholarly not bad, although again I think it's questionable lots of the scholarly approaches that they take, but it's politically very dubious, even in the context of, say, 70s America. It's always slightly odd.

Ben Lewis: 5:02

So, yeah, you do get these kind of Spengler fanboys, I suppose, online and some of the stuff. You can find certain websites in German and English and it's not bad actually, but, as you say, it's not really institutional or peer reviewed or anything like that. But you can find some interesting things. But yes, there's this tendency either to dismiss Spengler completely, which is probably less of the case these days, but or just to lionize him and turn him into this profit, et cetera, et cetera. So that's, you will find a lot of stuff on the internet.

C. DericK Varn: 5:35

I mean, there's a fair amount of stuff that's trying to like. Do the. We swear he's not a Nazi so we can like him. Thing that's right. Which, and the only academic work I found you're like, I found that what and you mentioned one of them, fish, or the other one you mentioned in your book is excuse yeah and just back actually I thought that it was questionable Cold War, like James Burnham-esque you know, flirting like, almost adopting early Spengler-spenglerian ideas.

C. DericK Varn: 6:20

But also I didn't learn that much from that about stuff that I discovered later. So like when I was reading Prussianism and Socialism and I was like this man really likes August Babel, yeah yeah. Like that is surprising yeah.

Ben Lewis: 6:41

I was surprised as well. But then you think about it, you take a step back and again it's one of these things, one of the tricky things in studying history. Right, because Babel, you know work as leader, you know hero of our own movement, obviously you know Lenin writes wonderful things when he dies, when Babel dies. But then you think about it and actually Babel was probably the most famous politician in Germany, maybe even beyond. You know, he was known for his speeches in the parliament, et cetera. So Spengler, actually, as a student, when he was just kind of wandering around Germany looking for something to study, he used to just go and watch Babel speak because he was a brilliant speaker and I think that probably so when you again, I was also surprised when you take a step back and think about it there was a whole kind of aura around Babel as an incredibly talented parliamentarian. Regardless of where you stood on his politics. He was respected as a real kind of hitman politically. But yeah, so he really loves Babel.

Ben Lewis: 7:40

He obviously has his own particular interpretation of Babel's legacy as some kind of Prussian socialist, implicitly authoritarian socialist, which is just a wonderful thing because you know it kind of Spengler's critique is similar to that of the left in a sense. You know, the SPD didn't go far enough, it didn't radically do anything, it made a pact with the army, et cetera. And Spengler just says, well, yeah, babel was still around, you know, heads would have rolled, he would have imposed his iron hand on Germany, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a very interesting kind of almost volunteeristic appreciation of Babel's legacy, which I think is actually more problematic. I think maybe it could have been the case that Babel ended up doing what the SPD didn't go, didn't go along with it. But who knows, that's speculation.

C. DericK Varn: 8:29

I think that's a fair point. One of the things I tried to figure out when I was reading Prussianism and Socialism a couple of years ago in English I mean, I can't read the German, but it's hard it reminded me of of like German historical school socialism you know, like Smoller and later Werner Sombart.

Ben Lewis: 9:04

Yeah, but Michelle, to a certain extent right.

C. DericK Varn: 9:06

Right, yeah and yeah you bring it up like anyone sympathetic to the Italian elite school also would fit in here. And I do think there's been a slight increase in Spingo scholarship in America recently because there's interest in the conservative revolutionary movement right now in scholarship. There's not a lot there either. I mean there's like three books and Spinkler's not a huge part of those books. So far. Most of the scholarship in English that I've read is really about Ernst Younger.

Ben Lewis: 9:51

And there's lots on Schmidt as well, right, yeah, oh my God. Yeah, yeah, yeah, probably Schmidt.

C. DericK Varn: 9:56

You can draw yourself in.

Ben Lewis: 9:57

Schmidt scholarship. Which is odd, right, because again you might think, okay, spengler's proximity to sympathies with sympathies for Hitlerism, right, we can maybe talk about that later on and how it's actually quite complicated. You know, maybe because of that whole episode he was marginalized but Schmidt wasn't out and out ardent, I'm seeing he's like incredibly popular in scholarship when Spengler is, yeah, hasn't been dealt anywhere near, as you say, on the level of, say, even like Van de Broek, willa van de Broek, younger Schmidt and the others. So that was a strange one. I still haven't quite got my head around that. I think.

Ben Lewis: 10:39

Maybe what I try and show in the book at least, is that Spengler is a thinker of the conservative revolution. But that term is so broad and encompasses so many different and often contradictory ideas that it's very difficult to, even if we take the term conservative revolution as an unproblematic thing, it's very difficult even for Spengler to kind of tickle the criteria and fit into that thing, right? But yeah, you're right, I mean the stuff is, which were the books you mentioned you said in American scholarship? It's exciting to throw that on you if you've looked at them. But I'm not aware of stuff on, although I haven't really worked on this because I said, the book was published last year and it was finished two years ago.

C. DericK Varn: 11:22

So the German conservative revolution scholarship, I think actually it's mostly English translations of German works. The biggest one would be people reading Mölle.

Ben Lewis: 11:37

Yeah, that's the kind of standard work, and that's in English now, is it?

C. DericK Varn: 11:39

Yes, it's been.

Ben Lewis: 11:40

Okay, I didn't know that. I didn't know that recently. Okay, yeah, because I read that in German. I mean, I didn't read the whole thing, but I kind of went through it because it is the kind of standard study on the conservative revolution and he's been criticized for his use of that term et cetera. That's in it. So there's a big kind of sub-level of scholarship on that as well. But I didn't know that was English. That's interesting.

C. DericK Varn: 12:02

Yeah, it was translated around 2018.

Ben Lewis: 12:06

Okay so, yeah, that's when I was in the last final throws of my own decline on my PhD thesis.

C. DericK Varn: 12:17

And younger is interesting because there's just a lot of literary interest in him. So you can. And then I have my trilogy of famous Nazis, that, and they are as follows Heidegger, smith and Werner Sombart. And Sombart's another one where I'm like why, like, two of his books are well read in English, but scholarship, I think, kind of stops in the 70s and I'm always interested in that. I'm like he's the guy who coined the word capitalism and I realize he died at Nazi. But we do kind of have to talk about it.

Ben Lewis: 12:57

He's also interested and I don't know if you've been reading the stuff that I've been doing recently on Kautzky and Bernstein because actually Sombart and these people they take as good coin or they bounce off or they riff off Bernstein's critique of Marxism, which is Kautzky kind of shows it's like doesn't know it's ass from its elbow, it's all over the place. It's a really kind of contradictory thing. He's trying to reconcile the marginist theory of utility with the Marxist one and combine them both, all these different things right. So it's amazing sometimes in the history of ideas how these kind of absurd beginnings lead to these avalanche effects of, because basically anyone now who's taught Marxism is a load of nonsense will prefer to Sombart, bernstein, et cetera, et cetera, and I think that's interesting. But yeah, sombart, the only thing I've really read in detail is Sombart is the American Worker essay which Kautzky critiqued. Do you remember that? That's it.

C. DericK Varn: 13:55

Yeah, why American Sanne-Abré Socialism, which was republished in America in 1973. And it's interesting, I mean that's also from his phase where he was half in the German historical school, half of Marxist technically Like yeah.

C. DericK Varn: 14:15

Or he would call himself a Marxian, and it's an interesting book. What I don't love about it is it's kind of the origin of every American worker is an embarrassed millionaire, but it's also way more substantive than that. Actually, not saying I agree with the book, but I also think it was published specifically in 1973 because the new left was trying to explain itself to itself. So it's and that's really the end of Spiegler scholarship. It's like broad, yeah, people still write on him, but it's not as big of a thing. And I think even more than say, like Max Weber, I get the feeling that Sombart is hard for them to explain. But then, like you said, why is there so much Smith and Heidegger scholarship that like it's like we can ignore that they were Nazis?

Ben Lewis: 15:25

So it's just weird. I mean, I've got no problem with studying Nazi thought and Nazi thinkers rigorously seriously, taking it seriously, but it's just it's this weird one that Spiegler seems to have been consigned to a footnote almost in history for a long time because of this Nazi association, which is actually very complicated. Right, because obviously, as I show in the book, he is sympathetic to the project of national socialism in a variety of ways, but in a sense the Nazis are too left wing for him. They're too interested in the mass right and political parties, all of these things that he, in his kind of aristocratic critique of modernity and modern political parties, is against. So it's really a complicated relationship that he has with the Hitlerites and he met Hitler once and was kind of impressed by him. He votes Nazi, but he was very careful to dissociate himself from that regime. He didn't want to be publicly associated with the early Hitler regime, and so I think that's also worth mentioning. Right Is that? And obviously he dies before he has to perhaps make slightly more complicated or difficult choices, but he turns down a professorship at the same place where Heidegger is actually in where is it Fibog? So he turns down a professorship there, and so it's a strange one, but it's just weird that he seems to be. He's got him partly because of that. But the relationship, I think, is more complicated.

Ben Lewis: 17:00

So what I try and show, I suppose, is that it's kind of balancing between two things On the one hand, this idea that Spengler was just a Nazi and out and out a national, social reactionary, but on the other hand, coming into or critiquing or taking on some of the more modern scholarship that says, yeah, well, of course he wasn't a nationalist because he believes in cultures, right. Or you know, he couldn't have been a German nationalist because his whole idea of historical development is not based on nations but on cultures, right, the eight great cultures that apparently form the history of the world. So I'm working against that as well. As she said, no, he was an ardent German nationalist. He'd shared a lot of the nationalist aspirations of the national socialists, et cetera. So I suppose it's kind of complicating it slightly between this lionization and demonization.

C. DericK Varn: 17:49

Yeah, when I was reading your book he reminded me of another figure. He reminded me of Julius Avola, who's even weirder but who had a similar critique of the Nazis that their racial, and of the fascists that their racialism was too biological, that they were too into the masses, that they weren't aristocratic enough. And I was like, oh, I was struck in your last chapter about how similar that was.

C. DericK Varn: 18:17

I was like oh, so this has happened with the reactionaries simultaneously convergently. No, it makes sense. It's also interesting because the client of the rest actually is fairly well read. One of the most interesting bits of trivia that I know of is CLR Jains. Before it became a Marxist was apparently obsessed with that book. So I've always joked that, like Speigler, tends to be Marxist's favorite reactionary, because the way he talks about history isn't totally foreign to us.

Ben Lewis: 18:53

No, that's true, and there were people in the SPD. For example, he had a complicated relationship with the SPD. They threatened to take him to court once because of something he said, that he had met the leaders of the SPD cavorting with prostitutes or something like that in Berlin, or something like that. So there was a big like Huha in the press and everything. But some people in the SPD simply made the claim OK, well, all you need to do really is substitute class with culture or culture with class the other way around, and you've basically got Marxism, which I think is a very simplified version of it. But they did see, what was obviously appealing to certain people on the left is this idea of development, right, heraclitus and big influence on Speigler. So, yeah, some people, even on the left, would say, ok, well, yeah, this is kind of what we're saying too right.

C. DericK Varn: 19:49

Broadly speaking, it reminds me of like the 70s left feelings about Nietzsche, actually in a very similar way.

Ben Lewis: 19:56

Obviously Nietzsche a massive influence on Spengler.

C. DericK Varn: 19:58

Oh yeah, what are the influences on Spengler that you point out that I had actually never really noticed before? Is the influence of Goethe? Yeah, so would you like to talk about that a little bit Like how did Goethe influence the Spengler's thought?

Ben Lewis: 20:10

It's really interesting. I think most people today Goethe studies is obviously a huge thing, but very few people I think today would say Goethe's scientific studies are really of merit and value and fascinating and should be taken seriously by the scientific committee. He wrote on the theory of colors against Newton and also he was convinced in a kind of anti it sounds like it's an evolutionary approach but actually it's kind of anti-evolutionary that basically everything can be traced back to one archetype or Urform, or Urgestalt in the German, there an original. You know the term. People listening to your podcast will know the term, also from Marx and Engels because they use the term Ur-Komminismus, which is often translated as primitive communism. But that's actually misleading because it's more like this original, private, primeval form of communism. It's not, because obviously the term primitive implies oh yeah, it all went to shit because they didn't have enough to eat or that. So you said a minute, it's actually wrong to translate it in those terms.

Ben Lewis: 21:12

And so Goethe, in terms of plant life, in terms of animals, you can basically trace back all forms of life to one archetypal form, right? So when it comes to the, he goes away and studies plants. He had this huge Hibarium, as it was a Luxembourg, by the way, very much influenced by Goethe in that sense Goes away and studies all these leaves and plants, forms, and basically argues that all plant life could be traced back to one archetypal plant or leaf. He's looking at leaves, leaves in particular, and so what that allows him to do is make a number of claims. Then. So, when it comes to the, there's the Oz intermaxillary I should look this up before, because I can't remember what it is. It's the intermaxillary bone somewhere here. And so Goethe would also look at skeletons and skeletons of other life forms and say, okay, because this particular bone existed in this animal at a particular time, we can then extrapolate from that that there must have been a similar bone in human beings at an earlier stage, let's not say evolution, but at earlier stage of development. Does that make sense? So you can postulate stuff for which we do not have evidence, but because we're seeing that evolution out of an archetypal form, we can kind of fill in the gaps. Right.

Ben Lewis: 22:28

And this, nicholas Boyle, one of his biographies, you know this was the subject of much scorn and derision in the scientific community of the time, and again, it's not particularly what Goethe is known for, but for Spengler, this idea of morphology, so the study of forms and how forms shift over time, was truly kind of revolutionary, not just in terms of the animal world or the natural world, if you like, natural sciences, but in terms of societies, right. So he would make a similar point. If, for example, we say that there are all of these forms, to which everything can be traced back to one original form, we can do that for societies, for cultures, right. So when it comes to this bone somewhere here, come over, and it was the inter-maxillary bone, it's similar. So, for example, if in ancient Chinese culture we do not have evidence of something existing, are you written evidence? And one of Spengler's lines is does history only exist when books are written upon it, which is quite a nice little line against Von Rancor and stuff.

Ben Lewis: 23:30

But we can say, okay, we don't have evidence, so to speak, of this phenomenon in ancient China, but because we know that each and every culture goes through a particular life cycle and they're all equal in that sense, we know, for example, that there would have been a quote-unquote reformation at some point, at the particular point in the evolution of Chinese culture, even though we don't have evidence for it.

Ben Lewis: 23:54

Right, because all cultures, they're born, they blossom, they mature, they decay and they die. And so if you take the reformation or the enlightenment, so-called these things that are kind of seen as exclusively modern European or Western European phenomena, actually, so Spengler, that's just Eurocentrism, that's just viewing the world through the prism of our own experience, whereas in fact these things can be found in earlier cultures and societies too, right, even, as he say, in China. We don't have evidence of it, but we know it must have taken place at around this particular time, and that's why Goethe really is significant for Spengler and it allows him to develop a theory of history that does share certain tropes with other forms of historiography of the time, but it is quite unique in that sense, right, because he's using Goethe in a way that usually positively using Goethe, in a way that Goethe isn't usually used. Yeah.

C. DericK Varn: 24:57

When I was reading your book it actually made certain Spenglerian assumptions like even in the decline of the West a little bit more clear to me, because I was like, okay, this is how we can both be a fervent nationalist and actually, for the time, fairly egalitarian on cultures like it's, because he does see them as like well, we go through developments like yes, of course I favor mine and we have to push ours because otherwise we'll decline.

Ben Lewis: 25:21

But yeah, no, that's the paradox. He is actually quite a radical thinker for the time right, in the sense that he's saying all cultures, fundamentally, are equal, they're all organisms that will go through the same thing. There's nothing particularly different about Western culture, although the kicker is, as you say, that now, because our sense of our guiding idea is the infinite, for the first time in human history, we can now grasp this theory of cultural development. So that makes sense. There is a paradox, there is something unique and new about modern, faustian Western culture, as he calls it, because otherwise, if it wasn't, he wouldn't be able to postulate his theory of history. All right, and this is a paradox that Tideger brings out as well. As reading some stuff of Tideger on Spengler actually makes similar points to me. Actually, that that's the real kicker in Spengler, because if all cultures are fundamentally equal, what is it that's so different about the West that allows us to make that claim in the first place? But that's a bit more abstract, I suppose.

C. DericK Varn: 26:30

It struck me when I was reading your book and I went back and thought about the decline of the West and we'll get to his other works too but that there was a way in which his historical claim kind of rhymes with other Hegelian thinkers, except that he doesn't think Western cultures particularly unique. But I was thinking about Marx, who similarly doesn't think Western cultures particularly unique but does think that capitalism actually does give us enough material development that we could actually understand ourselves and start to control it in a way that we couldn't in the past. And I was like that sounds similar to I do see how Marxists could have approached this guy. I'm like well, it's not totally different. If we flip some conceptions and make it more materialist and less weirdly spiritual, then maybe we have something to work with here?

Ben Lewis: 27:22

No, exactly, and not just in terms of the material, because, you're absolutely right, it's actually a trope of many German thinkers of the time, because they're all trying to lay out their stallers Now. Okay, here's the problem, here's the solution, which is posed uniquely by my ideas, which are a unique product of this particular time. So you know Kant's Copernican Revolution, right? Spengler makes a similar claim. I'm ushering in a Copernican revolution in history. You mentioned Hegel. Hegel makes a similar point. Right that Hegel's far more, I think, explicitly or obviously Eurocentric in terms of his schema. There's something new about bourgeois society that provides the key to understanding and changing things and marks. Similarly, but also in terms of historical understanding, I think you could make a case for historical consciousness, insight into necessity, all of these different things that come from that and I think that's absolutely right is that there's always this kind of that. The problem is laid out, and that's why the answer is the organized proletariat. That's why the answer is reason, that's why the answer is bourgeois society and democracy, blah, blah, blah, exactly.

C. DericK Varn: 28:35

Yeah, one of the things I was thinking just in general about German thought at the end of the 19th century versus, say, english thought. And I was like Germans really, really, really, really really think history is important and the English only kind of do. And particularly when you look at philosophy, analytic philosophy is designed in some ways to not deal with history at all. And when I started researching the German historical school I was like, oh, these ideas are all over the place. I mean, you see them in Nietzsche, you see them in Hegel, you see them in Spengler, obviously, and they have effects on English thought and American thought, but not actually probably more American thought. American transcendentalism and Romanicism was really into German.

C. DericK Varn: 29:40

But it is interesting how much of this gets reduced down Because the kind of similarities on historical thinking in German thought look so similar that we can miss really important differences. And then civilization, which is you have a whole chapter on it. That's a pretty big concept and it's in Spengler in a way that if you were to say Drury the client of the West in English and that classic translation, you might not catch all he's doing with that. It's not like our class of civilization stuff in the United States.

Ben Lewis: 30:32

So yeah, yeah, that's right, there's also translation problems because generally what we've referred as cultures in German, there isn't really a culture civilization distinction in English.

Ben Lewis: 30:47

So Huntington's, which again we can talk about, the influence of Spengler or the use of Spengler, huntington's clearly somebody who seeks to, again not in a particularly convincing way and not in a way that I think is kind of fair to Spengler actually, but he obviously draws on this idea of irreconcilable hostile cultures that cannot understand each other.

Ben Lewis: 31:09

But his book is the clash of civilizations, but in German you have to translate that as der Kampf der Kultur, because again, the civilization just doesn't add up. So there's that issue and again, because I haven't read the decline of the West in English, I missed that point. There may be, yeah, maybe there's something lost in his whole outline, but it is fundamental. The whole idea of the Farisian conception of the infinite is so fundamental to all of the. It's basically the stone on which everything is built up upon, in terms of his claims, not just of the past and not just of his kind of diagnosis of what we could call West and modern Western societies, but also his kind of prognosis then for what's going to happen and how it's all going to go down basically in both senses of the term. Yeah.

C. DericK Varn: 32:04

The decline of the rest. In English, as Lisa has translated by Hughes, does not really emphasize the difference between culture and civilization in the same way that you kind of need to know in the German. And I have an undergraduate in nine months in Germany, understanding of German. You can hear it in my Batch pronunciations and I knew when I was reading that that there was a difference. But even I was not particularly clear on how important that would be Interesting.

Ben Lewis: 32:42

It's good that I brought that out then, actually, because to me it was just kind of self-evident and I don't want to make that sound like a bragg or anything because there is a lot that is incredibly complicated, particularly on the metaphysical side of Spengler's critique or understanding of the modern Western world. And I remember my PhD supervisor and I we sat down, I think it took us pretty much two academic terms, but we would read about 150 pages a week or something and we just plowed through the two volumes and but yeah, that's interesting to me because I said that that's something that didn't, because I read the German side, I wasn't quite sure that that hasn't been brought out so clearly. So I'm pleased that I did that whole. It's basically a chapter, isn't it? On the culture of civilization.

C. DericK Varn: 33:30

Oh yeah, you have a whole chapter on it and the other thing that comes out in that chapter is and this is, I think, a little bit clearer in the English translation but the Caesarism conception. Do we talk about Spengler's conception of Caesarism, because you think it's important to his later political work?

Ben Lewis: 33:50

Yes, I think it's absolutely essential, fundamental to his later work, to his other political writings. However, I caution against the idea that the understanding or the description of Caesarism the looming Caesarism, if you will right in Western civilization, then finds direct, immediate, unmediated reflection in his political writings, if that makes sense. So we can't just say here Spengler, in the decline of the West, has a particular understanding of Caesarism which we can talk about in a second, and then that finds reflection in Prussianism, socialism, rebuilding of the German Reich, the hour of decision or years of decision, etc. And that is a tendency. I think that's kind of let down scholarship on Spengler, particularly in English, right, that people just say, okay, they see his political writings, his political career as simply as the manifestation or the words made flesh of the decline of the West, and I think that's problematic. But yes, in terms of his understanding of Caesarism I kind of touched on it a little bit before is that politics is increasingly dominated by money. Right, divas, poccus went pocket wins in terms of elections, the best democracy that money can buy. And through that process, through the press, through political parties, through money influencing politics, what happens is that power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. So you get the plutocrats of Rome and basically it's within the hands. The future of these polities, of these societies increasingly finds itself in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and whether the people with money, the politicians, the army generals, the people who control the press, etc. And that is kind of how Spengler sees not just the ancient world or the classical world in terms of Rome, but also in terms of all of his cultures, there will always be a Caesarist point at some point in its development because all cultures go through the same life cycle.

Ben Lewis: 36:04

So the way he describes it, I forget exactly the dates. But if you look at the dates for Faustian civilization, so our world today, roughly he says, comes into being about 1,000 AD and will roughly last until about the year 2000. But if you look at his predictions for Caesarism, he says roughly between 2000 and 2200, I think that's what he sees as the period of Caesarism. As we talked at the start, there is a case to be made that there's a certain truth in what he says. At the moment I can see where the world is going, particularly the US, but not just the US, but you can see already that's kind of quite vague as a prediction. That's 200 years, which is a fit of a life cycle of a culture of.

Ben Lewis: 36:52

Spengler sees it the average life cycle and he calls it the D'Herral Spildung des Caesarism.

Ben Lewis: 36:58

So the kind of formation of Caesarism is quite vague about how it's going to play out, and again, that's kind of understandable because he's trying to predict the future. But I would also and this is the claim I'm making the book is that actually even in his time, so 1920s, 1930s he's already kind of looking across the political scene internationally to find these Caesar figures and indeed thinks that he's found them in people like Cecil Rhodes, mussolini, et cetera, et cetera. And one of the famous things he says in one of his writings is that we Germans will never make another Goethe, but we might just make a Caesar. So it's not. It's this idea, then, that Caesarism is not something that's just simply preordained, it's something that one has to fight for, has to see comes about in the right way. Because again, he would also look at someone like Lenin. His understanding of Lenin in the 20s would be Lenin is a kind of Caesar figure, but it's obviously not the kind of Caesar figure that Spangler aspired to in Germany.

C. DericK Varn: 38:00

Well, yeah, I think this is interesting in that the Caesarist idea is I've, you know, I've read about it comes up in places you don't expect it, like in American ecology. Joseph Tainter talks about complexity problems and his predictions it's like, yeah, when societies you can complex, they tend to throw themselves behind an authoritarian figure. A lot of bone-apartism, and actually he says, it tends to destroy the society. But like, so he doesn't take the same kind of positive view of it as Spingler does. But then, obviously that we mentioned it offhand, there's Rebekah Michels, the iron law of Aligarchy, and his answer to that was like, basically, like, well, if you want a democratic answer to the iron law of Aligarchy, the only real one is an authoritarian leader. That's what you got.

Ben Lewis: 39:01

That's right. But also, it's not just that, it's also that in a sense, that is preordained in the political as far as I understand as critique of democracy and the SPD is that, you know, fundamentally, there's something in the nature of political decision making that lend itself to, you know, to the concentration of power in fewer hands.

C. DericK Varn: 39:18

I think that's right right, that's basically his point about the critique of the SPD Right, and he actually, but his, his, his, his. He thinks that's preordained, that there's no way out of it, which I don't think there's no way out of it. But but I will admit that that answering the iron law of Aligarchy is actually something I would sleep over at night. The the interesting thing to me is like his argument, which is Proceasorist, is like well, the only way to defeat, you know, this Aligarchical tendency is with like a, a massively supported Caesarist figure.

C. DericK Varn: 40:02

It doesn't I don't think he uses that word, but it is like you know, yeah, I mean like basically, like it's almost a Hobbesian answer Like you break up the Aligarchs by putting the power in even less hands. But like, but that you know that that one person may be accountable to the public in some way and may lead them, and you know. So that's how an anarchist talks himself into being well, in his case, a fascist. The but what? What? I was interested in too when I was reading your book and I was like in what ways does this rhyme with the Marxist theory of Bonapartism? Like, how is it?

Ben Lewis: 40:42

different.

C. DericK Varn: 40:42

How is it the like?

Ben Lewis: 40:44

That's. That's a really good question. Something I haven't particularly thought about either. I do know that once, actually during my, my PhD examination, one of the examiners made the point that actually Caesarism and I didn't know this is a big concept in Gramsci. So Gramsci, you know again, I'm not by no means an expert on Gramsci and you know the idea of Caesar is something that's in his, in his writings on the state, etc.

Ben Lewis: 41:16

And with the concept of Bonapartism, bonapartism traditionally in Marxism is essentially the way I understand it at least is when you have a situation in society where no class can really dominate society, at least in the old or traditional way, right, so that this is kind of like equilibrium of class if they aren't able to rule and therefore the tendency is for somebody to step in, be that from the military, be that from, and it's kind of it's closely linked to a theory of crisis in a sense right. And again, I found references to Caesarism even in Karatsky, talks of Caesarism not just historically but in terms of, you know, the rule of the Kaiser. So the Kaiser, the Kaiser's personal regime, if things come to a standstill, it could be the case and the Kaiser Wilhelm certainly wanted that that he would stand above the society as a kind of Caesar figure. So there's obviously a difference in the sense that for Spengler this is something preordained and cyclical and repeats itself. That's obviously not you know what Marxism would say on that question. But the idea and I think also what a difference is that for Spengler, caesarism is basically a product of plutocracy and democracy in adverted commerce.

Ben Lewis: 42:40

Right, because again he's got to. He develops this critique of democracy as basically amounting to the rule of money and it's from that that the Bonapartist or the Caesar figure emerges. It's actually from that situation where somebody realizes okay, democracy is a sham, it's basically the rule of money, it's based on the mass deception of the people through the press and all the rest of it. Political parties in that sense are a sham. Let me take power, and I think in terms of the Marxist assessment of Bonapartism, ie in its original form, is you know, that the revolution reaches a point where no class can really continue and therefore it takes. But again, that might be simplistic in terms of my understanding of Bonapartism. I don't know if that's that rings any bells or you think that's.

C. DericK Varn: 43:29

Yeah, it rings any bell, it rings many bells. To me, the book I was thinking about, that is most about this actually is about Gramsci, is Caesarism and Bonapartism and Gramsci because it seems and that's by Francesca Antonioni and it's. I have not read all of that book, I've read parts of it, yeah, and one of the things that I gathered from it is part of Gramsci's projects is to figure out what about Bonapartism is unique to Capital and what about this is like a form that pops up over and over again, and trying to disentangle that. But of course, with anything, with Gramsci, a lot of the scholarship is in encoded notebooks, yeah.

Ben Lewis: 44:22

So good luck. Do you mean recurring phenomena in terms of recurring historical phenomena?

C. DericK Varn: 44:27

Yeah, that's interesting.

Ben Lewis: 44:31

I think somebody would need. I'm kind of done with Spengler in a sense, but I think somebody again my examiner made the point is that there is more scope here to look at Spengler's understanding of Caesarism and Marxist critiques, marxist understanding of Caesar, and particularly in Gramsci. It sounds like that will be interesting. For sure I should get that book. You have to submit a link.

C. DericK Varn: 44:53

So the other thing it reminded me of when we were talking about the Caesarism is actually just normal, not Socrates, plato and Proclus, which is the whole democracy, corrosion, oligarchy, which will corrode into tyranny. That is Proclus' correction of Socrates, because Socrates has that reverted. Yeah, it's interesting to me because I'm like well, is this an idea that's floating in Germany at the time, or is Spengler picking it up from classical studies? Because you could get it either way.

Ben Lewis: 45:34

Yeah, I think clearly that the main strength, the real strength in Spengler's book is his understanding or is engagement with the literature on the so-called classical world when you get to actually the other. So it basically it revolves around a quite strong comparison and contrast between modern Faustian culture and Apollonian classical world of Greece and I think that basically the way he so you can see that very, and again you see it in Marx and Engels there's a big reference point is the classical world, because that's what really people know about at the time. When it comes to, say, india, china, when it comes to Magian culture, so Arab culture, broadly speaking, spengler's a lot weaker. So I think that that is clearly in terms of the intellectual climate of the time. The intellectual reference points, apart from maybe the Renaissance or maybe through the Renaissance, is Greece and Rome and I think that's where that idea comes from. Clearly you've got Bonapartism as well and the idea.

Ben Lewis: 46:54

So I've even found references in Kowalski to the danger of modern day caesarism, which is sometimes called the rule of the saber, so the rule of the sword as well. That's kind of synonym for it, so it's floating around in society and also that after the kind of the West you start to see people like Mussolini emerge on the stage, these kind of strong men of history to whom Spengler always looks, not just in terms of his will but in history as well. He'd always look at these so-called great men of history, and I think so. It's definitely in the air, both in political sense but more broadly, I think, intellectually, german intellectual culture, historicism, which Spengler clearly has a relationship to, albeit a critical one. That's where it's at, as it were, if that makes sense, I think it is floating around extensively.

C. DericK Varn: 47:44

Yeah, but that part of Spengler reminds me of, like the only thing I can really think of in English. That's quite that's kind of like. That is like Thomas Carlisle, but it's it's. It was just interesting to me because I was like well, a lot of people thought this, and I mean going all the way back to. But there's also like, even though he's claiming to talk about these other cultures, he's basically deducing it all from like well, we're going to base it on Greece and Rome and like German culture, because we don't know enough, and pretty much.

Ben Lewis: 48:18

I mean. So, you know, and there are people, there are Spenglerians today who say, look, spengler got a lot of things wrong when it came to the Arab world or to China, but now we have the, we have much more evidence that we can fill in the gaps more phonologically, and you know, that's a fair point, I suppose, but in terms. But I think it also speaks to the limitations not only of the study but actually of the method, that the, because you know, if you've got eight cultures, broadly speaking, and really it's, it's about the two key ones. That's problematic not just in terms of the evidence but also in terms of the method. Right, that the two can't be separated, and that's that's an issue.

Ben Lewis: 48:58

But clearly, yes, the, you know the idea is the fall of Rome, you know the, the, the, the classical world, and you know, and some of the way he describes some of the, the, the examples he uses to describe what he sees as this fundamentally different world will be a way of literally seeing the world, are quite interesting. You know the, the, some of the points he makes in terms of, you know, ancient Greek art and sculpture and plays and all the rest of it, it's not without, without merit. It's always kind of stimulating and interesting.

C. DericK Varn: 49:31

So I guess that leads us to the next period of a Spingularian thought, which is the Prussian socialism. We mentioned this in the beginning, but I was trying to tease out where exactly Prussian socialism was, because I got. I got my Martian socialism and my friend's socialism. I got my quote armchair socialist, aka German historical school, gustav Smoller, neo-cantian national socialist. But they're not Nazis, want to make that clear. We got, I know, I know what they are. I know about, I know about the gray area in between the Marxist and and the historical schoolist, which are sometimes the right wing of the right wing of the s-payday sometimes People who are not in the s-payday but are vaguely around it.

C. DericK Varn: 50:25

Yeah, weirdly, neo-cantians show up in this. Yeah, prussian socialism it's actually really hard for me to put on the spectrum, exactly like it does remind me of the German historical school socialist, but it doesn't seem the same. And yet I don't think I know enough as to say why.

Ben Lewis: 50:48

Yeah, I mean to be fair to you, provided a pretty good overview of the competing. I mean sure there's probably a few more as well. But you know you've good of the kind of views of different socialism. You know I always think back to the, the communist manifesto. You know, when you have this, the critique of the various types of socialism that are bound at the time right, but in terms of in Spengler's time, the way I would explain it is that it's not that Weird, in a sense, because you know why pressure right, why why Prussian socialism. This also comes back to debates and controversies, even with the within the radical Workers movement, the radical wing of the workers movement, because you have this, you know what's the. It's slightly more complicated than this, but the way the history of the German workers movement is portrayed is as a clash between the Eisenach Marxist in Saxony right and the Prussian lasallians, sponge fights or etc. Etc. So it's even, it even takes the form sometimes of this struggle there. But I would argue that basically Prussian socialism that's why it's linked to this lasallians was initially a question related to German national unity, you know, and one's relationship to, to the, to the Junker class in Prussia in particular, the dominant political class and that, and therefore what, what is known in the 1880s not as Catedral's autism, as academic socialism, socialism the chair, but the starts until is most and starts with your, is a mistake.

Ben Lewis: 52:14

Socialism really becomes a thing around the time of Bismarck. So I've got a book there. We can see just by my ear, here is a book on Bismarck. He really it is a conscious attempt to undermine the socialist project by saying look, we want, we don't want, democracy, we don't want working-class rule, we don't want all this kind of stuff, but we do want a strong state. That kind of keeps the book was, was he in check and Introduces social reform, health insurance, all of these kind of things. So I think that's probably the tradition in which Spengler stands, albeit 30 odd years later. Right, that's, that's the kind of reference point. And yeah, like I said, they were, there, were. There were advocates of that kind of socialism within the left too. So you know, von Schweitzer, lasal, lasal, famously.

C. DericK Varn: 53:06

You know his letters to Bismarck that were headed to laughter.

Ben Lewis: 53:10

State-funded cooperatives, etc.

C. DericK Varn: 53:13

Etc. So the question I'm gonna left now to you, but anyway.

Ben Lewis: 53:17

I was just gonna make that point exactly. It's got a certain appeal today amongst the left besides. So I think in that sense, you know, there's always this sense of these books about Spengler that I find Unhelpful in German because they're very kind of Homogenizing. So they saw, spengler is just Vika or Spengler is just LaSalle, all the but. But there is a sense in which the Sal and the Sally influence Prussian socialists. In that sense right Did influence Spengler's outlook on on life and his political project. For sure.

C. DericK Varn: 53:48

So you know, some of this comes up and you know the, the way he his historical project, like his knights and Vikings, tying into pressure socialism and and that does feel kind of uniquely Spengelen and part of his civilizational project. Yeah, because you know I'm just like well cool, I guess. One of the things, though, that seems to tie this up and and it's something I think a lot about, you know, you mentioned Plunga and some Bart. We've already talked to him but, and oh.

Ben Lewis: 54:33

Plunga Zombat and Troch Troch.

C. DericK Varn: 54:35

Yes, thank you, I was like I was like the name, I had trouble saying. It's a difficult name as as kind of analogous, but Not entirely. I mean like, yeah, so that that's interesting. What I think about that trilogy, though, is is they're really writing, you know, after the Reich's really falling apart, and how? How do you think the decline of the Reich really that changes Changes me, because the you know, the other book is literally about the decline of the Reich, and that's the one that I never see referenced in English.

Ben Lewis: 55:25

Yeah, I Think I think so. So Plunga, troch and others. I think that you know there there is a sense in which Spengler always claims originality and prophecy etc. But I do think you know that there are Antesitants and I do think there are also influences At the time. So you know, clearly there is this another German words hard to say Deutsch trunst mit der Fusik. You know this, this, this metaphysical German us, which is kind of a product of the first world war, although it has probably a longer history than that.

Ben Lewis: 55:58

That I don't go into, particularly in the first world war, this attempt to show, you know, the Germans as as kind of the, the chosen people, right, and this rejection of kind of Civilizing and all the rest of it, and Springer clearly fits into that, the whole idea of the English being this, this nation of traders, of money, of Moneyed interest with the Germans. Yet nightly discipline, collectivity. You know, each risk, each man for himself. That is English, everyone for everybody else. That's Prussian. That's basically the summary of it. What's interesting this is actually how I ended up doing the Spengler's book in the first place is that there was a, there was a right-wing Pro-war faction in the SPT called the Glocker, around Parvus and Lynch, who Lynch was previously on the anti-war left who basically go in for Germany must win the war Type politics, right, they support the German war effort more, much more explicitly than even the SPD leadership does, which is always a bit like as a tent. Okay, we go along with it, but you know, this isn't good, right, this isn't right, etc. They go along with it because on the basis of similar arguments and Spengler actually references, I think, in Prussianism and social, and he references Lynch, which is called Lynch's book, again, from memory, is called 3R Reveille, revolution, so three years of world revolution. And what? What that means is not the Russian Revolution in 1917 but the revolution of 1940, right so, and for Lentian people, what they say is they say similar things with a slightly Marxist on twist. They say, look, because England dominates the world, because in England or in Britain you don't have a Marxist type organization, you just have that you know the labor, labor parties, organizations and trade unions, etc. Because you don't have that, german England must be smashed, which will then pave the way for Continental Marxist organization.

Ben Lewis: 58:01

And what's interesting, the Spengler kind of takes a lot of that stuff For granted and quotes it as well, references, it say ah, this is really interesting, and because Britain is a, is a country that you know is surrounded by seas, it's a trading, merchant navy Type power that dominates others, and that's why Germany was winning. So there is this, there's a whole lot going on at this time of trying to formulate or Provide a reason for why Germany must win this war at all costs. And obviously you talk about then the Klein of the Reich. I mean Spengler is convinced that Germany will win the First World War, right up and you know to towards the end, really, even though the the first war itself is filled with also to personal tragedy for him. I would check, go into a little bit as well but he's convinced they're gonna win, and actually the the first I think it's the first edition of the Klein of the West in 1918 is Said something like may this big, may this book live up to the military achievements of the German army, or something. I come up exactly the kind of fought, the acknowledgments page, so.

Ben Lewis: 59:04

But for him it's obviously a huge shock then when that falls apart and he calls it the greatest betrayal in the history of humanity, or something, something about that. Right, and so, yes, it's. All of these people then are trying to deal with what's gone on and what's gonna come next, and I think for a lot of people that encourages despair. But for Spengler, even though he's disgusted by the sailors mutinies, the workers councils, the soldiers council etc. Does in his correspondence he makes various points as to say, well, look, we've got to get through this. This is actually a kind of opportunity if we buy that time. So I think he's in it. You know, okay, that's very conservative, revolution etc. But I think he's quite interesting for that as well, for that point.

C. DericK Varn: 59:49

Well, I mean, it's interesting because one of the things your book actually kind of made clear to me is if you read him as pessimistic, which is kind of a misreading.

Ben Lewis: 59:58

Yeah.

C. DericK Varn: 1:00:00

It's less true during this time. It is interesting and that, like he's, he really does seem to almost Temporarily go against the temperament of the dumb and culture. Because you know, I've read a lot of German from the night, a lot of German stuff from the from like the 1910s, and it's generally, you know, even people like Max Weber get despairing. I mean, it's, it's just, it's usually a kind of a like oh well, this is gonna be depressing, and and I don't get that so much from this period of Spengler- I think that's also, by the way, the reason he got pissed off about it, but that's also the reason why his books sold.

Ben Lewis: 1:00:50

Well, right, because the the onto gang stim on, you think you've got the word under gang, which is such as this lovely it's almost impossible to translate just the the sheer force of the word under gang. Right, you have that on the title of a book. People are gonna read it because, yeah, this is what's happening, this is how. This is our downfall, this is our going under, this is our decline, right.

C. DericK Varn: 1:01:11

Absolutely. Um, I think you know the one thing that we haven't brought up, that I mean, in some ways it's obvious, like you get Spengler and you're like, of course he's influenced by Nietzsche and yeah, he has he has correspondences with Elizabeth Foster Nietzsche, but Can you speak to the ways in which he's influenced by Nietzsche and which ways this may evolve or change during the course of his his career in life?

Ben Lewis: 1:01:39

Yeah, so he famously says that I, I Get my, my method from Goethe, which we discussed, right, and they said that the questions that I pursue I get from Nietzsche. And I think that so that there's the whole question of morality or, in a broader sense, you know, what is it that's in our heads and why is it in our heads? Where does it come from? Right, how do we explain it? And I think, with the, what he sees in Nietzsche. He says that Nietzsche just had this profound ability to understand Kind of the human, the human condition, and what's brilliant about Nietzsche, in his view, is that he did so at a time when, culturally, his world is in decline, whereas for Goethe, goethe is kind of the embodiment, because, again, it's this kind of thing of determinism, right, if you are living through the spring of a culture and it's blossoming into summer, then it's likely the case and Spengler makes it, with all these tables at the front that you've lead, it leads this explosion of thought, right, that.

Ben Lewis: 1:02:40

And Goethe, in that sense, is the embodiment of, for Spengler, the embodiment of the high period of Western culture, right, whereas for Goethe, he lives in the, in the winter period, at a time when Thinking is dominated, or should be dominated in Spengler scheme, by money, by materialism. So you know, one of the things he says is that, you know, the understanding of trying to understand the meaning of life becomes a matter of campaign slogans for Bread or for more money or wages or whatever. That's kind of house. And that's what I think Spengler finds so unique in Nietzsche is that ability to live in a time and be completely Not of its time, not of his time, in that sense, right to ask more profound questions about truth, about morality, and also power and politics, etc. It's, that's just. I think that's what he he gets from Nietzsche in terms of, then, his questions and what he's trying to to pursue it.

C. DericK Varn: 1:03:40

I Will say as a person. So my scholarly interest before becoming a Marxist was Nietzsche. You know both one of those and I've read everything Nietzsche. This has been written in English impressive. Well, bad for your brain.

C. DericK Varn: 1:04:01

I Love Nietzsche and I think Nietzsche's, nietzsche's, like Nietzsche, is the enemy that every Marxist really needs to have because, like you have to be on your toes and you have to realize you have to learn from your enemies with him. But I Do, you feel like there's a certain kind of mania that if you read a whole lot of Nietzsche at once, that you might get, even if you know, even if you're in a good scholarly apparatus, like when I got into the end of his life notes, and I'm like I feel like maybe I'm going crazy too, the but it is. So it is interesting to me and Because that's why I see Nietzsche as, like the, the quote reactionary that we need to deal with, because, yeah, he sees a lot of the same problems, this Marxist, simultaneously, but from a completely different perspective. And and Spingler is refreshing, and I'll get to why I bring this up. Because after reading so much 70s French scholarship on Nietzsche, which is our Walter Kaufman, you know, and the American scholarship on Nietzsche, where he just made into like a basic essentialist Reading.

C. DericK Varn: 1:05:23

Spingler's Interpretations are like oh well, this is, this is better than Heidegger, who's trying to read his own philosophy into Nietzsche. But it is also Refreshing. And that I'm not some, no one's trying to convince me that Nietzsche believe something that the plain reading of the text doesn't support, that I'm supposed to believe that Nietzsche some like you know, anarchistic, you know Foucaultian type, and that's it's refresh and in a way it's refreshing. That didn't, no, no, but didn't.

Ben Lewis: 1:06:09

Well, I just make the point that I think maybe it's my, I'm not so as steeped in Nietzsche, certainly as you, but one of the things that I Found. So he makes these. Basically he gets at his grave. He has thus books out of to sure, and he has Goethe's Faust, right, those are the two books. Again, it's very ceremonial and these are the you know.

Ben Lewis: 1:06:31

He always says like, are you just copying this guy or you just copy in this guy's it? No, there's only two people influence me Nietzsche and Goethe. But I do think it again, maybe it's my just less, being slightly less aware of Nietzsche. I do think that the when you read the client of the West, the Nietzschean aspects aren't as immediately obvious to me as the Goethe and ones. Hmm, that's all I would say. So, and again, maybe you've seen things in in the text that I don't run, because you know we all will. Again, a text like the client of the West, we read in certain ways, but Goethe, it's obvious to me, any Clear that that's what he's doing with Goethe.

Ben Lewis: 1:07:12

But when it comes to Nietzsche, the only time that it kind of half made sense to me was that Nietzsche was not Seidge-Maisa, which is weird because one of his, one of his titles, right, he wasn't, he wasn't part of his times. He was actually living a life that could see, through that, what was around him. And he said, you know, he's got this passage right, nietzsche. I think it's a speech he gives Some kind of occasion, maybe when he wins the Nietzsche prize, or I can't remember. But he says, like you know, can you imagine how Nietzsche must have felt what walking down the shabby streets of you know, of Modernity and the hollowness of life and the meaning and less of shops and things that he says you know? So that that that started to put something in my head.

Ben Lewis: 1:07:56

And okay, that's how he sees Nietzsche. But in terms of the method or the questions he pursues, I mean, it's not immediately obvious to me, apart from, yeah, he's looking at morality, he's looking at truth, what, what is truth? So that was maybe Less apparent. When it comes to the politics, the aristocratic element, clearly, that's. You know he does say as well in his, in his unpublished memoirs and I was an aristocrat before I read anything by Nietzsche, that's what he says right.

Ben Lewis: 1:08:25

But. But apart from that, I mean, I don't know if anything stuck out to you, but it wasn't I I wouldn't put them on equal footings. In that sense I was to go to his far more significant to the historical scheme, at least in my reading, than the nature is.

C. DericK Varn: 1:08:39

But maybe I'm wrong so what I would say is, having read a lot of genealogy of morals and having read a lot of dust books as doothra, is that Nietzsche is not systemic like that, but he is actually interested in apocle change and the whole Deaf of God returned to the heuristic. We need to Basically go all the way back to a pre-socratic culture Because we need great men, because we okay, like that does feel.

C. DericK Varn: 1:09:18

Yeah, yeah, and and the other thing is that is similar is that Nietzsche does actually have cultural archetypes and patterns and in fact he thinks they come up Eternally, because everything for Nietzsche comes.

Ben Lewis: 1:09:35

Yeah, it's a little bit of cool, yeah, yeah right so so maybe I do see it. Yeah, maybe there's more to it than I give credit for, but say but good, to me it's obvious, because I would say the way that the whole historical morphology comparative method is is is so explicit and easy to follow, whereas with Nietzsche, but yeah, I'm not trying to, just not easy to follow.

Ben Lewis: 1:09:59

It's friends, not systemic either in that sense. Right, he's got this whole System to be built up, but it's not like you know, it's not. It's not kind of you follow through Each of the things. It's one of the weird things about reading the kind of the West, because sometimes you just get so lost in what the hell is going on here but then you get to bits of that. This is really well written. This is. This is convincing. This is interesting. But no, I think what you say is is crazy. It is probably my being less steeped in Nietzsche, that's more to account, rather than Spengler, so we can give them that one.

C. DericK Varn: 1:10:32

I think, well, I also think it's good that you picked up the nugget of, because If anything that you know they're kind of we were talking about, you know Political weirdos. You pick up Spengler. If anything that they're gonna bring out, they're gonna talk about Spengler Nietzsche. They're not gonna talk about Spengler and Gert.

Ben Lewis: 1:10:52

That's. That is that is correct.

C. DericK Varn: 1:10:55

Because Gert is not generally seen as a as a reactionary. He's not part of the conservative revolutionary movement. I mean, the only person I think it might even put him there would be like Isaiah Berlin or somebody like it's yeah, that kind of, yeah, that tendency to basically dismiss German thought is kind of on a trajectory towards something right, it's all counter-enlightenment yeah it's all romantic candle enlightenment, which I'm like, come on.

Ben Lewis: 1:11:25

Yeah, yeah. There is generally a lot less on on Goethe, although Goethe studies is just a whole field for it. I mean, it's you know, it's a world of its own right.

C. DericK Varn: 1:11:37

Oh yeah, so just just my, my, my love of German came from Nietzsche and Goethe Actually, and it was reading.

C. DericK Varn: 1:11:48

It was reading Faust and my first year of college and going like I want to study this language because this book is fascinating, and I know I'm not getting it In English, like there's, like there's too many damn footnotes, and and then I got into Hegel, which is usually the downfall of everybody.

C. DericK Varn: 1:12:10

But I think that's interesting because, you know, it's one of these cases where, like, the influences of the German, of the German conservative revolutionaries, are actually probably way more red than they are in English. And that does kind of bring me to the last bit of your book, which is the really complicated Relationship of Spengler to, to national socialism and the Hitlerism in particular, and the way in which you, you, you thread a delicate needle between the people who want to go. He wasn't a nationalist, or even if he was a nationalist, he was not, he wasn't a Nazi, and you're like it's not easy to say one way or the other actually. So what let's get into to that like. So, in the run-up to national socialism, like what exactly is you know how? Is Spengler a fellow traveler but not a full embracer, perhaps?

Ben Lewis: 1:13:24

Yes, maybe, maybe a good place to start is Munich in 23, 1923. So you know, there is. That's why these terms conservative revolution. They're helpful in the sense that we can locate certain trends. But we also have to realize that the German right and I'm not just talking about, you know, do your traditional conservancy, and I'm talking about the far right, the people that want to get rid of the biomass system at all costs right, they're so Divided and there's so many different tendencies and, and you know, you've got again. You've got this kind of German thing between the national approach and the particulars approach. So you have the Bavarian nationalists right, who wants to split off and form their own, their own entity. Spengler's massively opposed to that. Obviously, being a Prussian socialist, he wants to the Entirely Germany to stick together. But so this whole array of forces, organizations, influential people like Hugenberg, the right wing press magnate right, who Spengler kind of kind of Plays putsy with and tries to work with and does work with on some level, and Hugenberg never really trusts him, though. You've got and got kind of the, the old army guard, some of some of whom are still in power, some of them are still generals, others who are running an overseeing paramilitary organizations, right. But if we go back to Munich in 23 and the Hitler-Ludendorf putsch Spengler is there Actually at the, at the events of that night, because it was a, it was a speech by Gustav von Kahr, who's one of Spengler's good friends, right, when conservative, and he's giving a speech that's then interrupted and then the whole theater goes ahead with the, the, the, the attempted push, and I think, if not before, if it hadn't already happened before, this was the moment at which Spengler really was truly disappointed by the Nazis, because obviously that whole thing is just a farce, right, because they have to convince people that they hold them at gunpoint to say, right, we need to call the national revolution now, will you do it? And they say yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they let them go and then they inform the police the next day and there's a march and they're just all arrested and hit the ghost of jail and everything. So I thought Spengler, I think that really influenced Spengler's kind of concrete political, tactical, political judgment of the Nazis and Hitler in particular.

Ben Lewis: 1:15:53

But also there are different levels to it. Also on an ideological level, we talked about the Spengler's kind of being two right wing for the Nazis, which is a bizarre thing to say but it's true, because he thought that whatever the political or ideological orientation, once a political party is a political party it's already of the left, it's a left wing phenomenon. It doesn't matter if it's Hitler, it doesn't matter if it's the SPD. Parties are left wing democratic. That's nothing that the national movement needs. Some of the national movement doesn't need, and so the ideological level.

Ben Lewis: 1:16:27

Then you've got the whole question of racism and there's some lovely quotes actually in the decline of the West and in other books where Spengler says you know, those people who look at old skulls to understand the societies of the time will understand nothing about skulls or societies basically. So there's these jibes constantly, this kind of biological racism which Spengler finds ridiculous. So there's a whole number of levels in which he's critical of the National Socialist Project. The so-called Jewish question is tricky because, again, even though he would reject the Jews as kind of biologically different or biologically distinct and therefore you know other, he does have this I mentioned it briefly this concept of Meaghan culture, according to which and somebody in a review, somebody point out that Spengler, meaghan culture is entirely an invention of Spengler's that I think nobody else really uses. So it's always need to explain. It's kind of Arab culture between zero AD and one thousand AD.

Ben Lewis: 1:17:44

And he argues that the Jews, or the symbols. Our Faustian culture is guided by the infinite and notions of the infinite. Right Apeleonian classical culture is guided by notions of the static, the corporeal, the approximate, the close, the tangible. We think about space and numbers and algebra and all these things. For Meaghan culture, according to Spengler, the symbol is a cave. So he argues that the Jews in modern Western Europe are a kind of outdated form of life that have stuck to the cave in the form of ghettos, he argues. And not really, they're not really part in that sense of modern Faustian culture, right? So there's already a distinction. And they say the Jews belong to a culture that is basically like a dead tree. Essentially it's somehow dead, but it's still there, flaking away, just about still standing. So you've got this and obviously you can't then draw a clear line between oh, that's cultural racism and that's biological racism, because the two that they do, it's still racism, right? They're different approaches.

C. DericK Varn: 1:19:02

You could make a similar Lukewarm defense of Heidegger is not that his racialism towards the Jews is not as clear as Hitler's, but he may even be. Sometimes he's pretty anti-Semitic, so it's that's right and Spengler isn't.

Ben Lewis: 1:19:19

But again, it's these tropes that are in Heidegger as well, you know modernity, finance, money, cosmopolitanism, rootlessness, all of these things. And it doesn't, it just takes one step to the Jews right Finance and socialism, basically. And so I think that there's again Spengler is not a biological racist, he's not an anti-Semite in that in the classic Hitler sense. But there are claims, given that he, you know, his theory of history, his theory of culture is essentialist in that sense. Right, it cannot be otherwise. That he would, you know, he would view the view, the Jews, as other. And when it comes to the practical politics of the time, he says well, you know, either the Jews will, will assimilate or they'll go elsewhere. Right, and I think that's the. He also makes a point as well about leaders. He says that Bonaparte was Italian. Who else do you talk about? Makes another leader, I can't remember whose name it is. And then he says, and and Israeli was a Jew, right, benjamin, israeli was a Jew, ie, not a Brit in that sense. So there are these kind of tropes and ideas that they can certainly feed into that kind of anti-Semitic perspective, and I would argue that maybe it's just a sign of the times later on.

Ben Lewis: 1:20:47

But if you look at his final text, the Hour of Decision, which is bizarrely seen as this critique of national socialism, the kind of the ideas about blood and race you know become more prominent in in Spengler. But again he always says you know, race for him is is how he describes it, is not the race that you that you are, it's the race that you have. So race is more this idea of the way you hold yourself, you know, the way you behave. To have race is to be a, you know, a decent, upstanding, rounded, aristocratic citizen. So it's very confusing and it's hard to do justice to, you know, in this kind of format. I say I go into enormous detail in the in the book and I also then trace it across his career. But this clearly is clearly an issue there that you know. He is in some senses an anti-Semite but he certainly didn't support the, the policies of, of the right regime towards the Jews.

C. DericK Varn: 1:21:53

No, definitely. There's no hint of extermination in anything he says.

Ben Lewis: 1:22:00

And of course it's still. He dies in 36. So you start, you start to see, it's clearly, signs by 36 is all sorts of signs that the Jews have got. You know, there's something's going to happen to the Jews. The Jews are being rounded up, they're being pressurized, they're being demonized, etc. So he doesn't, he doesn't really make a stand against that per se, you know, and he always says 33, the national revolution he's infused by, he calls it the national revolution of January 1933. Right, so he's not like sticking his neck out and saying, well, what about the Jews? No, but, but I say that the whole biological anti racism thing, so the biological racism thing, you know that's not him, but, and there's a big but, that in a big caveat that we need to add.

C. DericK Varn: 1:22:45

In many ways that actually hit. There's a certain strain of, or of, modern Orthodox Russian anti-Semitism. That's finger Not quite echoes, because there's no religious overturns to it at all and he's not particularly hostile to the Jews, but that that that it does rhyme with. One of the things that that that I find interesting about Spingler is his relationship to Strasse's Strasse brothers. Can you go into that a little bit like?

Ben Lewis: 1:23:25

Yes, so he really I think it must. Maybe not on the on a political level, because again, they have this correspondence, right, gregor Strasse and Spengler, and Spengler one set of Strasse said Strasse, alongside Hugo Stiness, the industrialist, is the most, is the cleverest person I've ever met in my life. And they have this, they have this big exchange of letters and Strasse really is probably, in terms of his national socialist and his particular take on national Socialism is probably closest to Spengler politically, ideologically, or let me add a caveat there Spengler of Prussianism and Socialism, the Spengler impressionism. Social, because Spengler's political views evolved as I go into in the book. It's not. It's a bit more complicated to say he's close to Spengler. He's close to Spengler, the Spengler of Prussianism and Socialism, and indeed says that in the correspondence that we've actually we still have Spengler burnt his papers after the purges for good Reasons, right, so with there's only a few letters, but he had this extensive letter correspondence with Gregor Strasse.

Ben Lewis: 1:24:32

And Strasse is interesting because he's he's seen as all of this disputes in the scholarship. He's generally viewed as kind of on the left of the Nazi Party, of the NSDAP, and what happens I can't remember exactly when it is, but he, but his followers put forward a motion that basically argues a bit more along the lines of Spengler's Prussianism and Socialism and says we need national socialism, we need to, we need to overcome capitalism, we need to remove the power of business in the society, etc. Etc. Which is maybe where he differs from Spengler, by the way, you know, it's said to be kind of much more radical in their approach, still racist, still biologically racist, still, you know, militaristic and all the rest of it. But they wanted this. There's a very strong kind of anti capitalist quote unquote tendency within it. But then Spengler, hitler and his supporters sorry, defeat their motion and then see to it that no other motions of that kind can ever be put to a Congress again. So that was again Hitler trying to prepare himself to to, in a sense to moderate or to moderate is the wrong word but to kind of present himself as acceptable to the captains of industry, to the people running the German press, etc. Does that make sense? Is this kind of run up to him as this kind of statesman? And they sign language drasa.

Ben Lewis: 1:25:55

But then obviously you have the purges in the, in the so-called night of the long knives, which is interesting in two scores or three scores Actually. One is that strasser is killed right and which is a big shock to Spengler, burns all these correspondents, etc. Two is that for Gustav von Kahr, who I mentioned, the Bavarian politician he's, he's killed and also one of Spengler's best friends really, schmidt is murdered as a result of an administrative cock up. So Schmidt doesn't have a T on the end of his name, it's about the SCHM ID, but and they were meant to kill a guy with. It was called Schmidt but with a T, but they killed this guy instead right in 34. And I think for that that was a kind of watershed moment for Spengler as well. This is a, you know, he cried, he went to the funeral and gave a speech etc and kind of veiled references to the kind of terrorism of the, of the Nazis, and that's kind of the tragedy, I suppose, in his life, because he spent his whole political career agitating for the abolition of political parties. But when there's only one left he realizes actually this is maybe not how I foresaw it. I'm playing, so that's you know. So that's where strasser fits in. Is that the strasser was much more of this wing of. We need a Prussian national socialism, right? We need radical economic transformation as well, which didn't sit well with the people that were saying, ok, hitler's becoming a force now on the on the scene, the German elite. Well, how do we respond? The other thing I wanted to mention about the, the night of the Long Knives as well.

Ben Lewis: 1:27:28

There is one meeting between Hitler and Spengler that lasted for about an hour at the Bayreuth Spiele, the Wagner Festival, and long story short, as they get together and they discuss, I think, various political questions of the day, and Spengler says, yeah, I agree with Hitler on this, and that they also talk about the burning of the Reichstag, and Hitler's trying to convince the Spengler that they were that close to a communist revolution in Germany, which obviously wasn't the case. And it's reputed that Spengler says to him which would make sense given his whole critique of of national socialism he says watch your Praetorian Guard, I watch your essay, watch what you know what, watch the, the, the armed people. You've got behind you. And that's exactly what Hitler does when he, when he purges again people then who are actually quite close to Spengler politically. So there's this ambiguity as well there.

Ben Lewis: 1:28:26

This, you know, it's incredibly complex, complex thing. And then you have this whole situation there where Goebbels is trying to get Spengler to speak publicly on the radio, etc. Such a way. He refuses to and it all gets a bit complicated. But the year that it's enormously complex. And one thing that I stress is, while it's also contingent, it's an open ended thing. It could have gone a different way, maybe if Schmidt wasn't killed. Maybe if this happened, maybe this, you know things could have turned out differently, I think. And then obviously he dies in 36, which maybe was the blessing of an early death, as I put it in the book, right.

C. DericK Varn: 1:29:06

Yeah, I mean clearly it's. There's a few people who have studied from Germany as like. Well, that's a question that their death means we don't have to ask. So it's one of the things I find interesting. I was thinking about this in terms of younger, where I think younger's opposition to the Nazis is. It's clearer, but also in a similar way slightly overstated, that that Spengler kind of runs with. But we don't know. We know the answer. Like he lives long enough I mean younger but long enough to become an old man who's who experiments with drugs in his 60s and 70s. I mean like he's very strange man.

C. DericK Varn: 1:30:08

Whereas Bingla's death really does resolve the question and it's interesting to me to think about when we think about so many of these German figures that we kind of have to deal with who, for a variety of reasons not just the war or the Spanish flu or any of that you just lose so many of these thinkers in the 20s and 30s in particular. I guess the question now I mean you came to Spingler through the SPA Day and your current independent research project is getting us all to understand the relevance of the Second International and bringing all these texts back. That I don't. I'm still I've told you this many times and I'm still like why has so few of this been translated?

C. DericK Varn: 1:31:12

I know why we have so much of the Russian stuff translated, that's from the Cold War, but you think that we would, even from the criminologist Cold War perspective, that we would have been more interested in the Second International as the precursor to this than apparently we were. It's odd, isn't it? It is odd, I mean it's odd to me when I was in my mid-20s and approaching Marxism, how few of these Second International texts were available. Even the ones that have been translated were not readily available anywhere. I mean Kowski's Road to Power is more available now than when I was in my 20s, but it's like and I'm, you know, women in socialism. Similarly, these were books that were more read than the manifesto, actually.

C. DericK Varn: 1:32:07

Yeah, certainly women in socialism Right, I mean women in socialism was probably the best book ever.

Ben Lewis: 1:32:17

Yeah, like 36 editions or something. During Babel's life. He joked that you know basically his retirement. He didn't have much of a retirement, he actually died. But he was like you know, that book will basically fund my retirement. Yeah, yeah, no, but it is odd, as you say, and it's obviously a product of, you know, regression in Marxism. It's a product of the defeat of the work. You know it's the defeat of the workers movement in the 20th century. You know they take much more obvious forms than you know, the lack of access to materials from the Second International. But it's also a symptom of that. I think it's a reflection of that. Right is that these things are kind of our. They're not more common sense in that sense and you know I've written about it before there's all sorts of ideological factors behind that.

C. DericK Varn: 1:33:09

But yeah, yeah it's my current obsession is pointing out, like when people come at you know the red a gig as paid a and I'm like well, you know you can say that, but in some ways you're correct, but your actual politics are less alien.

Ben Lewis: 1:33:31

Like but you know, people having to, having to go up the Einstein or whatever you know, basically held up for a lot more principles than most of the leftist today. It's also partly because they just don't know this history right. But I said that the fun thing for me doing the bandstein-cautsky thing is, like you know, I have read the bandstein book, albeit, you know, here and there, not studied it. But when you see the context in which it's set and you see the points that cows he's making kind of live in response to it, it's just striking just how bad that book is.

Ben Lewis: 1:34:04

You know the bandstein one, and we don't get that impression often because again, the text that we know and like Luxembourg's, which is a great critique of like the program stuff and the political stuff and the means and ends and all that kind of stuff, but it just in terms of the stuff on theory, the theory of value, dialectics, method, it's just so poor. You know that it's just bizarre that this becomes. Then this book that you know is apparently the kind of the last word on Marxism. I know that's slightly exaggerated, but you know that's what people will say right, yeah yeah.

C. DericK Varn: 1:34:40

Absolutely One of the things I think is actually quite interesting. This is from Marxism After Marx, and I was talking to James of Procolt films, another fellow of Britt and he was. He was somewhat sympathetic to Kowski and was like, yeah, the books are great, but Kowski was actually making a hey of things to try to reconcile theory with what the espadet was actually doing, and doing so made a horrible mess. Whereas, in response to, that no, no, no, no excuse me it's a problem.

C. DericK Varn: 1:35:23

Einstein was actually trying to reconcile things, so what they were actually doing Kowski was trying was actually the better explicator. But but, in being an explicator, actually does not deal with the fact that the espadet's practice wasn't really in line with Marxist orthodoxy and that's. I don't know that. I believe that entirely. I think it's a little bit too simple, yeah.

Ben Lewis: 1:35:50

I think so, because again, you have to I mean, make you know. Hindsight's a wonderful thing, right? Because you know, I say, oh, yeah, because, because this happened in 1914, kowski did this in 1918, 14, whatever Obviously this was, the seeds of this were here. But again, that's not kind of how things, that's not our history unfolds, right, these things are contingent, they're open-ended, they're contradictory, they're complex. All I would say is that you know, for some of the people that I respect highly of the time, that this was not saying, oh, kowski is just defending, you know, a practice that is basically non-existent anymore because it has become the party of Bernstein.

Ben Lewis: 1:36:29

The fact is that, you know, repeatedly the party distanced itself, even when it's, you know, it is moving to the right and it is showing signs of bureaucratisation. It repeatedly distanced itself from Bernstein. And why? Bernstein's different, as opposed to people like Auer? Ignat Auer was basically the view that you were a visionist, but you don't revise the program because that will cause too much of a stink. And so Bernstein was like no, I'm going to take on the program, right, yeah, but the program was there to keep a lot of these people in check as well. It actually kept them going. Do you see what I mean? It was something that a lot of the right found a hindrance. So it's not as if, at any point really, the party said, okay, yeah, this is right, we're basically a party of reform, now let's get rid of these planks of the program. That said do you see what I mean? There was never that break, and so I think it is kind of simplistic. So you're just defending a party that's already changed beyond recognition.

Ben Lewis: 1:37:31

Yeah, well but again, you can argue these things. Okay, so by what criteria do you make that claim? But okay, this criteria as opposed to that criteria, tick, tick here, cross, cross there. To me it misses the point of why it's worth looking at these things, right? Do you see what I mean?

C. DericK Varn: 1:37:47

Yeah, yeah. Well, how's my question about that? My point of view in the SPA day is it's such a I mean, we talk about this with the Bolsheviks. In the SPA day, this is even more true. There are so many different things going on in this party and in the society in which this party is coming out of that any attempt to just like this is why this happened is going to almost necessarily be false.

Ben Lewis: 1:38:15

Absolutely. It's interesting to see as well. I made the point in the poster made the other day. I don't know how many times I've heard that the idea of second international Marxism or Karatsky as fatalist, right. I'd be a rich man if I had a penny every time. Somebody said that. But Bernstein is kind of one of the first to do it, bizarrely. So people, they claim that they have this kind of insightful, revolutionary critique of the second international or whatever, which is fine.

Ben Lewis: 1:38:45

But actually in terms of the, if you look at the people that first lumped this accusation against the dominant trends, it actually comes from the right and then it's picked up by other people outside of the SPA day we talked about some of these people then it's kind of instrumentalised as a kind of left-wing syndicalist critique.

Ben Lewis: 1:39:02

But there comes a right-wing critique because you know Sombart sorry Michelle and you know it's so yeah, for me, actually, the value is not oh, should we go back to the SPD in 1900 or 1912, or maybe not 1912, because in 1911, x happened?

Ben Lewis: 1:39:23

That's not. But the value is trying to understand the history and development of some of the things that we take for granted, that we've learned and acquired, just because that's the way ideas have passed down. So if you actually look at the context in which these things unfold and understand them better and see, oh, that actually really was an issue or that wasn't all, yeah, so this is a great thing that the point Karatsky makes as well is that this whole theory of the collapse or the theory of the breakdown to Sambart's tale basically that Bernstein elaborates his entire theory on the basis of one sentence in a resolution to the London Congress of the International that was mistranslated, not voted on and never accepted it's just weird how these things that, to me, is. In that sense I'm more of a classic text historian than anything else. You always have to go back to the context and to see how these things unfold right, yeah, this is often my critique of Newmark's lecture.

C. DericK Varn: 1:40:30

In German. It's like well, that's a very interesting and cool bit of information that you found and it is helpful and thank you.

C. DericK Varn: 1:40:41

But, I'm not revitalizing, I'm not completely revising a 200-year-old tradition off of something Mark's wrote in the back of a napkin. So it's like we should prioritize the I admit it with Mark's as hard because Even with a lot of these figures, as hard because you're dealing with somebody who didn't publish a lot of their most important words during their lifetime but you should prioritize importance by what we know they want to publish, then what we know that their friends saw to publish and then maybe the most interesting parts of their notes. But you should hierarchize, priority given based off that. That's also how I read the Second International One of the things about this and then we'll turn this thing over and finish off.

C. DericK Varn: 1:41:34

But that I find so interesting is I know good scholars actually who will repeat falsehoods about the Second International that they're getting from interpretations of linen text and they will repeat it without a question. I've gone through many of my Haymarket historical material books and been like that claim is wrong. I know where you got it from, but that claim is wrong. You're normally a pretty serious scholar but you're repeating this thing about Kalski. I've read multiple times Kalski voting for the work read. I'm like that did not happen.

Ben Lewis: 1:42:15

He did not have a vote for one.

C. DericK Varn: 1:42:18

He didn't vote Like, but we can deduce from the rest of his career that if he had voted, he would have voted with the piece graph.

Ben Lewis: 1:42:34

It's like I say the day before the big vote. He says we should abstain, like Babel Leetnish did in 1870, 1871. So you know, no, it's all. But again, that's kind of there's two levels. I suppose that is again as a kind of big text-based, source-based historian. That is unfortunately partly just because of life and the way things work that generally ideas and conclusions tend to filter through the secondary literature.

Ben Lewis: 1:43:06

The secondary literature unfortunately, for the most part, especially in English, of this period is not very good, and there's good reasons why it's not very good usually because it's anti-Marxist for the first place, so it's either completely dismissive of Marxism or doesn't understand it. That's the or both. Right, there can be both too. Or you have the soviet block stuff which has its particular axe to grind, and actually this is where I think of. I read a lot of East German stuff which is really really good, really detailed. They're proper historians, but go away, and again you've got to read between the lines there because they're paid servants of a particular state with a particular ideological imperative. But I would say that compared to If you read I don't know the history, the official history of the German workers movement, in German, in the GDR, as opposed to stuff you'll read in English. You'll get a lot more detail in the German stuff. It's just a lot better.

Ben Lewis: 1:44:06

But unfortunately and this is something that people don't realise these ideas are passed down largely through the secondary literature, which largely is poor, and they end up then making claims that Actually Trotsky's government says exactly the same thing. They don't know it because they haven't read the stuff, but they say exactly the same thing as the GDR, as the GDR historian did right. There's exactly the same conclusion, and this is all sorts of examples about the Airfoot Programme, about democratic central, whatever it happens to be. So I think that's. It is unfortunately, or maybe it's in the nature of things, that ideas pass through the secondary literature and on one level that's fine, but it's got to be. I suppose one of the things I see as my job is to go okay, how does this square with the original literature, with the primary literature? Does it work and does it not? And, as you say, there's a lot of stuff that's just lost in this noise.

C. DericK Varn: 1:45:01

Absolutely. I mean, I will be honest, I mainly stick with Mark's direct scholarship or Mark's single scholarship, because you can spend your whole lifetime on that and I don't work in it academically. It is my political calling, it is not my academic calling.

Ben Lewis: 1:45:26

And so that's the other thing. Right, sorry to interrupt again. Try to be a Marxist in academia. Like, try to be an academic in academia. At the moment, who would say like, that's the other side, is that?

C. DericK Varn: 1:45:38

A humanist at all. By that I don't mean an ideological humanist, it's just like someone who works in history and the humanities. So, yeah, I'd be there, absolutely. So you know, I have just learned to revise things and one of the things that I've had issue with, for example, I got from a secondary source that, like Max Weber, was in the S-Pay Day temporarily. I actually can't confirm that. I've, like, really looked, yeah.

Ben Lewis: 1:46:12

It's possible. All I know is that I mean politically he was much more closer to the social they're called the National Social Party, right, so non-run and people like that. But it is possible that he flirted, he could have had membership. I'm sure that's possible to find out somehow and somewhere. I'm not. There's a guy I know, brazilian scholar I know, who works on Weber, wrote a book on Weber and Social Democracy which I haven't read but I want to, and he made the point to me we were talking not too long ago that Mariana Weber, so Weber's wife, had written a review or a critique of Bebel's woman and socialism. So there was this kind of intellectual milieu that was around the SPD and you did get people that would join the SPD and then get expelled because they were just basically hangers on that didn't want to do anything in the movement etc. They were more interested intellectually in it. But it is possible. I wouldn't rule it out necessarily. But I don't know.

C. DericK Varn: 1:47:18

Yeah, I mean, and just to touch your difficulty, I often have, so I have German listeners. I'm often like, can you tell me if there's a document in German that I can try to work through that could confirm this or not? Because apparently in a hundred years of scholarship someone made this claim. It's been repeated in a couple of places, but I can only find the one thing and I can't find anything that actually I can't find a primary source or even a German secondary source that really backs it up and that's not the. I mean, that's one example, you know it's. There's a lot of that. I've just remembered like being super frustrated 15 years ago when I first learned about Clara Zegken and I was like, okay, so I need to learn about the women in the SPA day and the women in the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, and just hitting a wall and I was like, oh, we have Luxembourg scholarship, we have a little bit of Zegken scholarship, we have a little bit of like we're British socialists, like Nezbeth scholarship, which that's strange.

Ben Lewis: 1:48:42

Some polythias all you've got yeah.

C. DericK Varn: 1:48:46

And then you have a lot of Marxist feminists but stuff in the 70s. It's making claims about these people but off of like scraps of stuff translated that are really like I would almost say tertiary services, almost yeah.

Ben Lewis: 1:49:03

Again, I'm just finishing a little pamphlet that will be out, hopefully for Zegken's birthday in July. And yeah, it's becoming clear to me that that kind of 70s, almost like second wave feminist literature, when you match some of the claims to what actually happened and what Zegken was writing, it is incredibly problematic Just on the basic level of re. Again, I don't want to make this into a big thing because we're talking about spending, but just reworking completely, using completely different categories to describe past events. So things like, oh, these activities of Zegken and others appear feminist to us because for us feminism means any efforts to further the cause of women in society. But again, that's an arbitrary definition thrown back onto a time when the word feminism in German doesn't exist at that time either. So it's very. Again, it's this tendency to project backwards onto something and not understand it in its own terms. And again I go into that in there.

Ben Lewis: 1:50:16

I've just been finishing that, actually the introduction to that pamphlet, because it's, yeah, I'd never really sat down and gone through the stuff on Zegken because and again, it's a strange one for feminist writers to approach, because Zegken was clearly like, opposed to feminism in the sense of a cross-class project for humanity.

Ben Lewis: 1:50:36

So she makes that clear. But on the other hand, she was a staunch champion of women's rights in all spheres of society. So it's a complicated legacy to approach and some see her as kind of okay, maybe along the wrong path, but she had the right intention, whereas other people say no, she split the women's movement on long-class lines and therefore she ruined everything pretty much right, or she held back the cause of women's liberation for being this dogmatic communist. So yeah, that's another story that maybe we can do again. But I think it relates to the point you're making about secondary literature relying on very little recycling ideas that were either dominant at the time or whatever. And again, it feeds in all of this stuff that the feminist literature from the 70s it all is informed by the standard Cold War critiques of the SPD as well. The underlying point, right.

C. DericK Varn: 1:51:29

Oh, yeah, totally.

C. DericK Varn: 1:51:30

And I think but when they're not, I mean. So, for example, I think about this is not so much what Zach can, I think about the socialist feminist movement in the 70s which basically takes Lukash and uses him to invent standpoint and epistemology, and my reading of Lukash was corrupted by that for years, because I hit the secondary literature just by accident. It wasn't like by accident. First I have that conception, and when I hit the translation, that's what I'm reading those words as right. And only when you start really breaking stuff down and being careful and I do speak enough languages now that I kind of know to do this but it becomes a real problem, and I mean Marxism. This is endemic in general. I mean, like you mentioned, ur-communism, which we always translate as primitive communism, our primitive communism, so-called. There's also the fact that in English there's all these headings like that are like you know, it's an English writing in Antedurum, where they play historic materialism. I'm like that's not in the text. I've read this completely differently for years until I actually looked up that you put the heading there. It's not in the original and stuff like that it really matters.

C. DericK Varn: 1:53:04

So to end off, though I do think just to tie back into Spingler, I think Marxists do need to try to be somewhat objective when they're quoting these figures of we might call reaction or whatever, and try to understand them better, because the one thing I will say and I even have this in this he sometimes myself to go well, you know well, nietzsche is a reactionary and like, yes, but also and that's maybe important to understand whatever you define reactionary as he definitely an aristocratic, anti-modern. At the same time. It's not particularly useful for understanding these things. And I do think understanding someone like Speegler is really important because, like you said in the beginning, we're kind of in a time period that's looking to rhyme Our 1920s are. I'm hoping they don't rhyme with the actual 1920s, that'd be really bad Because now we have nuclear weapons, that'd be disaster, but it does have a whiff of it, no sure.

C. DericK Varn: 1:54:23

And I think we've seen these ideas come back, like when I was in college nobody would have been talking about Speegler, even in weirdo white ring circles and that's. And towards the towards, about the middle of the odds, that started to change. And so I think you know we have to take this stuff seriously, we have to do the scholarship, because if we don't do the scholarship, the only people who are gonna be speaking on this are people who are using it for a political project of one way or another. I agree.

Ben Lewis: 1:55:00

Yeah, let's say it started, let's say, through the SPD and it was an academic project. It's not hopefully it's not my magnum of first, it's a PhD thesis. There's a book and then I'm very pleased with it. I think, you know I'm looking I kind of it was traumatic experience, right, and about Speegler for a PhD. But I look back on the book and you know I'm pleased with it. It's, you know, I think it's well put together and I'm happy.

Ben Lewis: 1:55:24

But I think, yeah, the point about these ideas, one of the things I want to do, I suppose, is to historicize Speegler and portray him as the you know, or show him as this guy that you know, was not this all seeing profit? Because, again, that there is a tendency among the right at the moment to latch on certain figures. You know whether it's the kind of more intellectual people you know Jordan Peterson, who, by the way, was also a winner of the Oswald Speegler Society Prize recently, just FYI, you know or even down to these. You know these new. You know even like things like Andrew Tate and things like you know, the emergence of this kind of all seeing profit that is there to.

Ben Lewis: 1:56:08

Obviously, it takes a different form today in terms of YouTube shorts or whatever, but this idea that there's this strong guy that can see through things and explain the whole world to you just like that by appealing to some pretty base instincts. Often that was probably you know. That's what I think is a contribution, and it takes away the scholarship on Speegler from either the right or, as we talked about in the context. It's like 70s America right wing Ivy League type Cold War professors, right. I think that's also important.

Ben Lewis: 1:56:44

Yeah, we should not let questionable Cold War professors define our understanding of anything from Jordan Also just on the other important side as well is that you know we have to understand that reactionary critiques of our existing society, as unwelcome and wholesome as they often are, they often reflect something that is true about or something that builds on a truth or an issue or a problem or a fundamental dislocation with the society in which we live. Right, speegler and Heidegger, you know they do it in this reactionary, back to nature, sometimes kind of way, but they highlight something real that people feel every day in their lives when they go to work or whatever. They've highlighted something real and a human response to the alienation of the world in which we find ourselves. I think right, and that's not to say, you know, hydering, spender are great people and they have the answer, far from it. But they tap into something that we all feel and many of us, or most of us, cannot rationalize or explain, or, you know, reference to other projects, and so there is an appeal and I think you have to deal with that and you have to deal with that politically and, you know, ideologically as well.

Ben Lewis: 1:58:06

As there's something you know, because I think, as society begins to resolve, as we see some of the horrible things we're seeing at the moment, the dissatisfaction is going to only increase and thereby increases the probability or the possibility that people can fall for this kind of politics, right, these politics of decline, because it makes a certain sense in that limited sense of the term, does that make sense? So it kind of speaks to you Absolutely, especially in the context of, you know, ben Schwenger's right and there's the SPD, the KPD, you know they're a larger, there's an organized working class movement, but you know, in the I'm not saying in the absence of a working class movement, but in the absence of those kind of organizations, the danger is even more that the right benefits from this, from these crises. You know, and it kind of challenges this idea that you know the left, we just wait for a crisis and everything will go away. You know which?

Ben Lewis: 1:59:06

is a part of much of them, unfortunately. You know like.

C. DericK Varn: 1:59:09

Yeah, that is the what is we call in the states accelerationism, which are one of the versions of accelerationism. It's also the Volger-Miserationist thesis. It comes up again and again negative economic as opposed to like evolutionary economism, all these things. You know, I am a purveyor of the Zinzi, of the Rights of Prophets, of Prophets, of Fall, I think it's. I think it's one of the few things in Marx that I can objectively like I got evidence but but I don't think it means anything politically, which I think is something that that that people like don't know what to do with because I'm like that doesn't mean we win. In fact, it means when, if we screw up, like the consequences are usually well, the right, like some of the scary elements of the right are going to be able to take advantage of this, are also, historically, a good number of us are going to merge with them, which I would prefer to avoid.

C. DericK Varn: 2:00:16

So, if for no other reasons, that's why you study this stuff, not because we're looking for for wild prophets are because you know, when I said the smells of the 1920s, I don't think it's 1920s.

Ben Lewis: 2:00:30

I think maybe, if anything, it's more like the 1900s actually Right, yeah, actually.

C. DericK Varn: 2:00:35

I've been talking about for about 15 years how everything feels more and more great gamey than it used to.

Ben Lewis: 2:00:45

Yeah, which has, you know, which has material basis in the, in the world right, the Americas, the Klein China, you know these things play out. So I think, yeah, it's a bit more 1890s, 1900s-ish, but again with all those massive caveats and problems.

C. DericK Varn: 2:01:01

1890s didn't have nuclear bombs.

Ben Lewis: 2:01:05

Exactly, and no international.

C. DericK Varn: 2:01:08

Yeah, so thank you so much for coming on.

Ben Lewis: 2:01:12

Thank you for the invite. It was a pleasure.

C. DericK Varn: 2:01:14

One of the things that I have to do and it's one of the weirdest things as a Marxist podcast or I have to do I? Let me be a petty proprietor right now. Do you have?

Ben Lewis: 2:01:25

anything to plug, no, just just my, just my, my Patreon, marx and Translator. We talked about that and I say I will have a pamphlet on setkin coming out. It's about 110 pages. It's a translation of the first book she ever published, in 1889. And yeah, long introduction by me, a longish introduction by me about Tekken, tekken's life and legacy and things. It's just kind of part of something I'm building up towards and for this book I'm doing on Tekken's project newspaper, the Gleichheit. But yeah, that's that's it and you can get follow me on the usual channels and the rest of it. And yeah, thanks, Thanks again for having me. It's been a lot of fun.

C. DericK Varn: 2:02:04

Thanks, Thanks for coming on. I'll link here Marxism translated. I will just say I find that invaluable Because it's so far. I'm like I didn't know that, I didn't know that.

Ben Lewis: 2:02:15

Yeah, it's same for me the emiseration theory as well, how that that was actually the product of Claims-Karatsky. That's not in Marx, it's actually Marx's opponents. Anyway, I don't want to hold up all these different things that you take for granted and then you see their etymology, you see their evolution is yeah, it's fun. So no, I'm really enjoying the doing it and it's great that people read it and discuss it and hopefully it does something.

C. DericK Varn: 2:02:40

It's also made me interested in going back and reading American socialists from the same time period, like Victor Berger and Eugene Debs, like actually reading them and not just reading our shorthand of them, and that I think we can do that. And for those of you who don't read German, it's in your language, so we don't read that either.

Ben Lewis: 2:03:02

So, yeah, there's a guy, a patron of mine, bill, who works on this stuff and he's actually he's fanned quite a lot of translations of stuff back in the day in the American press. So again the American-German connection kind of makes sense right, and obviously they're looking to Germany. Yes, we're finding different things. So it's worth looking at the Social Party press and things like that, because it does often contain stuff that is worth looking at and you probably wouldn't have seen before, heard of before, and again, you don't need me to translate it or it's there in the library somewhere.

C. DericK Varn: 2:03:37

Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. I see you. Good morning to you.