Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
Eco-Leninism and Degrowth: Reimagining Sustainability with Nicolas D. Villareal
Eco-Leninism, degrowth, and sustainability solutions all come under the spotlight as we welcome the insightful Nicolas D Villareal to Varn Vlog. What if just cutting down on capitalist consumption isn’t enough to save our planet? Nico challenges some common misconceptions about degrowth theories, especially those linking human labor to material throughput. We investigate the intricate dynamics of the service sector and its impact on living standards, questioning whether reducing work hours can truly lead to sustainable economies. Join us as we confront the contentious suggestion that living standards in the developed West need to drop for the sake of the planet.
The episode also navigates through complex terrains of Marxist theory and state intervention in capitalist systems. Can China's state capitalism offer lessons for eco-socialism? We explore this by diving into how capitalists as personifications of capital have evolved since neoliberal times. With historical perspectives from Marx, Mao, and Lenin, we ponder if modern monetary theory can address systemic ecological issues. We also dissect the shifting economic dynamics among the US, China, and Vietnam and their implications for environmental regulations.
Finally, Nico and I brainstorm innovative approaches to socialism focused on environmental sustainability. We scrutinize the role of rationalizing household consumption within socialist frameworks and consider labor tokens and infrastructure investments as potential paths forward. Reflecting on China’s collective experiment, we discuss the need to rethink GDP and material incentives while incorporating diverse historical contexts into our solutions. Expect to leave with a deeper understanding of how modern ideologies can meet both human and ecological challenges head-on. Stay tuned for more of Nico's illuminating insights in upcoming episodes.
The articles referred to can be found here:
The Economics of Feasible Degrowth
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Thank you, you, thank you.
Nicolas D Villareal:Hello and welcome to VarmVlog. And today we're talking with Nico Villarreal about all kinds of stuff, but mostly your recent letter that you did in response to an article called Eco-Leninism, which itself is a response to Climate Leviathan that book from a few years back and you tackle the parts of Ecolinianism that seem to pick up some common degrowth issues. Now I'm on the record as thinking the whole Promethean socialism versus degrowth argument is our bright green versus deep green in some ways is often very misleading because I'm not sure what actually the vectors of growth are, what they're actually trying to achieve. And the last book by Sato, which is the first one that isn't just Marxology, made me go like, oh, that's it, that's all you meant. But these misunderstandings kind of go through a lot of the degrowth and actually also the people responding to them negatively's analysis. So I wanted to have you on to talk about that, since you wrote a letter in response.
Nicolas D Villareal:So you mentioned three issues and I'm going to let you talk about them. So you mentioned three issues and I'm going to let you talk about them. One is the assumption that human labor time is directly correspondent to material throughput, and that's going to take some parsing. Some people don't even know what we mean by that. A decline in all economic activity would lead to a material throughput decline, and there's a sub mistake on that that reducing capitalist consumption will necessarily reduce all economic activity. And three, assuming that the transformation of relations of production is only a matter of political will. Now, that last one's a biggie, so we'll come back to that. So can you explain those and why they're important?
Nicolas D Villareal:Sure, so the first one, of which one was the first one, was it the economic throughput, and yeah, assuming that human labor time is directly correlated to material throughput.
Nicolas D Villareal:So what do we mean by that? So the thing is that a common thing that comes up in every degrowth thing which does have at least some basis in fact, but it's a little bit exaggerated, a lot exaggerated, as I point out, a long exaggerated as I point out is that one way that we can have a sustainable economy and less growth, everyone's better off is just if people work less. And the idea behind that is that if we just work less, we have more free time, which materially improves our lives, but we're decreasing actual economic activity. What they're thinking of is material throughput, using all the energy inputs and whatnot. The problem with that thinking is related to, specifically, the way that productivity canes affect labor time in capitalism. So part of the thinking of that is that capitalists will, like they employ more labor than they need to because that's how they create value. It's also a thing of social domination and status, but it's the main thing is that you need human labor to create value and the the idea is that well, if all that's just unnecessary because it's capital's logic and a capitalist strive for profit, that we can just cut that down and solve all these problems.
Nicolas D Villareal:The issue with that is that almost all of that labor time that is being freed up by productivity increases is going into not creating more stuff. Even though more stuff does get created because of the productivity increases, it goes to the service sector. And because that labor is in the service sector, it's not going to affect the material throughput when you decrease it. So if you decide, well, we're going to decrease labor in the industry sectors. Well, the reason that people are laboring in the service sector is that they have enough value to exchange for the commodities that they consume to reproduce themselves. And that group of commodities that people use is all produced by industry and agriculture. And decreasing those means that you decrease the consumption bundles of everyone in society and that's a real problem. That is a material decline in living standards. It's not just so. If you so, if you decrease just the service sector, it's not affecting material through, but if you actually affect it, you are going to affect people's living standards significantly okay, um, a lot of the grovers would immediately respond to that.
Nicolas D Villareal:But we need to affect people's living standards, particularly those in the developed West. That's the going argument. What's the problem with that line of thinking for you?
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, it's not necessarily false and this will relate to some of the arguments made at the end of the piece or the letter is that, yes, we need to figure out ways to rationalize consumption bundles and that will probably be necessary for humanity's continued existence down the line. But trying to do that in capitalism with the existing systems of production and reproduction that we have will be pretty disastrous and just won't work. If you look at instances where we have seen declines in material throughput and specifically in fossil fuels and stuff. If you look at like Germany right as the Ukraine war was going off, or China around the same time, but for different reasons, it was trying to do what the growth was once specifically cutting down coal production. So they introduced quotas for that and it led to severe shortages that were just not sustainable and they cut down on industrial production first. They didn't just protect the households, but it just wasn't a sustainable situation.
Nicolas D Villareal:And so if you want to control consumption bundles and also, relatedly, get out of the problems of the I forget what it's called exactly when you have greater efficiency, consumption increases it's Wal-Mart's paradox or one of those economists and you need some kind of social system that is able to control the consumption bundles that socially reproduce households or whatever unit of people that you want. Okay, but beyond that, but there's still a level before that, and this is kind of the thing that people are in denial about that the big thing that we need to do is investment in um new systems that are capable of reproducing society, um, without destroying it like it is right now. Right and um this I. So I was reading um a little bit of Saito, uh, or how do you say it, is it?
Nicolas D Villareal:I think it's Saito, I think it's Saito.
Nicolas D Villareal:It was the book the Ecological Socialist, a book that you were reading for Radical Engagements. One of the things that struck me that I realized was that the whole problem with the Promethean socialism versus the degrowth thing is that Sato has it exactly backwards that the Promethean socialism is the only way to do it. For the reason like he goes through this whole argument about how the specific logic of capital requires this extending growth and the constant expansion of the productive forces, and and just is what causing this problem? The issue with that argument is that it's based off of, like, the ideas of reification and the personification of people, like that people personify commodities and commodity relationships.
Nicolas D Villareal:This is a very common argument in like big theory, marxism, but the problem with it is that it's fundamentally just wrong in a scientific sense, in a way that Marx meant it, because the thing that he does give a very specific, concrete example I don't mention this in the letter, but I should probably write it out at some point that the capitalists personify capital, and in this they're not just personified money, capital, it's expansion, growth, they, they embody the means of production and the productive forces, and that self-expansion of the means of production, um, and that embodiment just wasn't true for the entirety of capitalism. It stopped being true in neoliberalism for the simple reason collect collectives. Profit equations show why, that there is a fundamental mutual exclusivity between capitalist consumption and capitalist investment. And once you hit a point where too much investment endangers the reproduction of the capitalist class, then they no longer personify the expansion, self-expansion, of the means of production. I see is that the closest thing we see to state capitalism and that the logic of capital overcoming itself is probably in China right now. Right.
Nicolas D Villareal:And they are the ones that are doing the most investment into those new sectors of solar panels and renewable energy that will be necessary to make this all possible. And in the place where personification has broken down, where the logic of capital has broken down, we actually see the inability in the US, so they're trying to overcome it right now, but generally speaking, they were very unwilling to make these investments. And if it actually cuts into the social reproduction of capitals, I expect that it will be politically defeated or forced to transcend to something new. But the fact that that situation is just not compatible with dealing with the ecological crisis.
Nicolas D Villareal:I suppose this leads me to a couple of questions when I'm thinking about this in a series of throughput and state capital adjustment. I agree with you. For example, and I want people to understand, when we say something like state capitalism in China, we're not just using it as a slur In Chinese communist theory. They think that the period of state capital is necessary to develop the productive forces and to develop the class so that a dictatorship of the proletariat can be transitioned into. And then you go through that and they have a very long de ray view. I mean, mao sometimes talked about it as almost it might be a thousand years before they hit true socialism.
Nicolas D Villareal:And so Lenin talked about state capitalism too. Unfortunately, because of anarchist use of that term, some left communist use of that term. It took on a moral valence as well, as a Trotskyist used it too. It I mean, we also Trotsky issues too, but it's, it was a minority tendency in Trotskyism. It took on a moral valence that it didn't really have in in Lenin, or you know, marx doesn't write that much about it actually, but it it.
Nicolas D Villareal:It is something to think about here, because what the state is doing, the strong state capitalism of china is doing is trying to force capitalist actors to to act responsibly. So, as the committee of the bourgeoisie uh, in china, even though it's not primarily by the bourgeoisie, it's primarily you. You know, the Chinese Communist Party is mostly made up of professionals. They are leaning really hard on certain elements to try to tamp down on, you know, excesses of competition. And in the West that happened basically by monopoly granting in what we might call the historic heroic period, capital that we see from, say, the end of the Long Depression into 1920. You know what Bukharin called monopoly capital, not what Beron and Swekarin called monopoly capital, not what baron and sweezy called monopoly capital. Right, um, now, for those of you who are not marks nerds, you're probably like, what are you guys talking about?
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, the, the issue here is um say it was partly right that capitalist competition for, for resources necessitates what becomes inefficient use of resources. Right, it doesn't start off that way, but it becomes that way. Uh, capitalists themselves realize this and have tried to handle it in various ways. And the chinese communist party try to handles it, tries to handle it in various ways. Like um, we have in the west, and particularly in the united states, to a lesser degree, canada in the anglophone north america have pretty much given up on leaning into that because of the patronage of capitalists, right, I think you and I kind of agree and that's almost inevitable. Um, and people go, well, why you, mmt is true or whatever. And and I'm like, well, even if you assume MMT is true, like the currency only has power because it commands access to production and under capitalism production requires capital list. So if the capitalist did a true capital strike, the currency would collapse even under emmt conditions.
Nicolas D Villareal:So I mean it goes even deeper than that, because if, because in principle, and the collective profit equations show this and you can think about it abstractly, like you can imagine a situation um that when you unhinge capitalist social relations from the logic of capital, in principle it is possible to have a capitalist class um in with any situation of growth, in principle, just like accounting terms um and if it, but, and the problem is that it's, that's not the, the logic of capital is not even the problem here. And this is like I say, though calls. I don't know if it's a subtitle of the book, but he says like an unfinished political economy or political economy or something right right, yeah, what I like to call the uh, most important thing in capital is the stuff in the back of a napkin.
Nicolas D Villareal:But go ahead yeah, but that's the thing is that he's he's focusing on the incomplete part of like the those incomplete parts, and connecting it back to what marx originally said. But there was enough about political economy. But the incomplete part of his critique of political economy, of his project of capital, wasn't just that, it was also the theory of the state right. And part of the problem with Sato is that, by just trapping himself within Marxology, he doesn't think about how these parts of things that Marx didn't really was able to finish were also a part of like this metabolic, like metaphor logic thing in terms terms of control mechanisms and feedback loops.
Nicolas D Villareal:Because even if you just assume the dumb logic of capital, I think Sato is vaguely right these things are totally incompatible, will destroy humanity or whatever. But in reality I think it's entirely possible. We can imagine a situation where capitalism survives the current ecological crisis that we're in and it doesn't immediately destroy humanity in the next thousand years or whatever. But the state is able to do things, uses the creative capabilities of humans, their labor and all kinds of things, and brings them up to do things that are not necessarily just straightforwardly the logic of capital, and it does them in a response to all the same problems that sato's identifying. Um, and certainly, like some things are resolved on themselves, there's new innovations of so sato just talks about oh, there's elasticity of capital. There's also these innovations that sometimes overcome problems right that's not the only thing.
Nicolas D Villareal:That is how capitalism responds to these things.
Nicolas D Villareal:Capitalists impose their own regulations, and so does the state. Yeah, exactly this is why I think, even in what we might call a traditional capitalist society like the United States, it's impossible at this point to separate the state sector out from the market sector in any meaningful sense. At this point, I mean the interplay of commodities and rents alone mean that the state is highly involved, and while that does lead some people to come up with what I think is fundamental misunderstandings of the past and the present, like techno-neo-feudalism, it is true that that means that there's a lot more regulations and rents and the state has grown. And one of the things that you know you and I have talked about it, but I talk about it a lot on this channel is when leftists buy as true what neoliberals said they were doing, which was, you know, deregulating, privatizing, etc. But what they were actually doing was creating public-private partnerships with, from a neoclassical point of view, tons of moral hazard in them. That were forms of rent-seeking in a lot of ways to maintain other kinds of markets. Part of your work and I want to tie some of your prior work into this uh, by breaking up, um, large monopolies to reintroduce competition, uh, through financialization. That's how they did it. And there's the sloppy, you know, jack welsh form of it that you know just, uh, totally destroy everything. But in general, uh, that was happening anyway. So, when you know, I listened to a lot of podcasts and then people go off on how Jack Wells, you know, made capitalism something more, and they're right about that. But without strong state intervention that was going to happen. Somebody was going to do that because the numbers game of at least creating even fictitious profits is mandatory, of at least creating even fictitious profits is mandatory, and, interestingly, the way that is done in our capitalism was a decision of courts. So even here the state intervention is pretty is is pretty apparent.
Nicolas D Villareal:And I do think, um, having to deal with the state is one of the major problems of Marxism, because Marxists believe in a class nature state. They believe the state is fun, is effectively a function of capital. Uh, they posit a transitional state, uh, uh, and it is a state, a dictatorship of the proletariat, which is a temporary state of being. And I think it's interesting. I mean, hal Draper is one of the first people who pointed out that Marxist rhetoric about this actually is a little confused, because we talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat, we mean it in the classical Roman sense of a temporary dictatorship, to move into a new status quo. But when we talk about the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, we mean it the way, kind of like the way most people mean it, which is just like, yeah, they rule everything. And it's confusing to people, um, it's confusing to marxist critics, but it's also confusing the marxist um why this is important when we talk about something like state capital.
Nicolas D Villareal:Lenin's discussion of state capital is he basically ends up kind of agreeing with Plakhanov that we're going to have to do capital development ourselves. We have to, particularly after the German Revolution fails. There's nothing to join up with, so we got to develop our own productive forces. It goes kind of the way Plakhanov says it would go. One of the things about Marxist-Leninism under Stalin is that it was kind of a move fast and break stings, developmental period, kind of a move fast and break things, developmental period, um, but I don't think that. I think that we have to look at that when we talk about getting things under control.
Nicolas D Villareal:And interestingly, um, the book climate leviathan actually does see what you are saying as the most likely statistical outcome. It's not the one they want, but is what they see is the most immediately feasible, which is some kind of capitalist state, uh, leading a coalition of other capitalist states to lay down um regulations in a very authoritarian manner to kind of lead to new development. And it will be ugly, according to them, the way it's going to be done, but that's probably the only likely way to do it. They also talk about climate Maoism as a way which is a little bit more unclear, more unclear and uh, climate x, which is like modeling on um, all kinds of other you know uh ways of of dealing with land and and this and the other. I kind of think we're probably.
Nicolas D Villareal:And they also talk about climate behemoth, which is we don't do anything and it's a war of all against all, um, uh, and I've kind of thought that we're probably going to get all of that actually um, that you know, but that the state capitalism for for and and not in a great way, probably, particularly in the West, um, uh will be uh, how this goes, and it's going to lead to a lot of tensions when you compare it with the general trend of de-democratization that's gone on for the last 40, 50 years that people have and by that I don't mean just you know this Bonapartist tendency to empower executive figures.
Nicolas D Villareal:I actually also mean, like in every place on the planet, the administrative state, both economically and regulationally, has expanded significantly, particularly after the 1950s, and is not democratically accountable. Democracy know it and kind of want it, because they are constantly carving out or professionalizing our whatever all kinds of parts of the government so that it is not publicly accountable, and then they will often sell this to you as democracy because it is, in theory, responsive to the legislature, although, again, not really. So. I particularly think that you're right, which means that the kind of regulations and stuff we'll get here in the West will probably be shitty in a lot of ways, will probably be shitty in a lot of ways and it's going to, as I pointed out, one of the ironies about neoliberalism at this point, and I tend to think that we are in something like post-neoliberalism or we're transitioning to a new way to regulate capital and it's very long and ugly.
Nicolas D Villareal:How to get there, you, how to get there that I can see very strange things coming out to try to help this and one of the things that I saw, even with the progressives, and we're talking about this on the day after Cori Bush lost. But Cori Bush voted against the Infrastructure Act, partly because she felt it was really important to have a carbon tax. But a carbon tax that would probably hit individual consumption, not as much large-scale economic consumption although it might have. But I highly doubt that Democrats would do that. They would be punitive on individuals driving their cars more than on industry.
Nicolas D Villareal:I think, like the, the situation that we have now because of the class relations that we're just talking about, the fact that the the US system as it existed for the past 40 years or so, has basically going on 50 years is to protect the capitalist class and their consumption, and things don't quite work like that in China and some of the other places, like Vietnam and what have you. But the thing that I think really drives home the critique of say that I'm making is that the fact, like there will be, like probably the regulations that you're talking about and probably for like reasons that are totally beyond the us's control, of uh, changes in manufacturing around the world, um, and export share. We've had our disagreements about that, but I think that for many reasons, that there could be a new emiserating tendency in the US, combating climate change and the ecological crisis than very high growth in places like China and Vietnam. They're doing huge scale investment to deal with it and the the thing with the like the state what it's like well what it's like that.
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, my disagreement with you about this on China and Vietnam is I actually think even their low-hanging fruit's gone, but I do think that they're going to have a lot of competitive advantages. On specifically this issues, I don't think the US and Europe are going to be able to keep Chinese EVs out forever.
Nicolas D Villareal:I was just looking at Chinese solar panel exports today and the biggest importer of Chinese solar panels right now is Europe. Even now, after that, it was like Brazil and Pakistan which, by the way, in terms of the share of capacity Pakistan has now, of the share of capacity Pakistan has now, they were importing 25% of that just in the first six months of 2024 in solar panels. Go ahead.
Nicolas D Villareal:The other problem is everybody's having human capital issues. By that I mean there is a decrease in population coming, pretty much, and all the developed world, in which I definitely include china, um, and that's going to have interesting effects. You know, in the long run, you and I, I don't, we don't think, I don't think it's necessarily bad that, but the, the transition is going to be ugly, particularly here, because we're not, I mean uh, the, the shareholder view of, of growth that we've seen in the united states, and this is what makes, like, comparing gdp right now, uh, to like here in china, a little bit distorting you. And I agree that gdp we're not these people who say gdp doesn't tell us anything, but like gdp doesn't make a difference between productive and fictitious capital. So if, if, like facebook is reporting numbers that they can't valorize but it's still going to show up in the gdp records, like, um well it's.
Nicolas D Villareal:I mean, mean GDP is going to be income, right, not wealth. So it's certain things Right, the income is. That's not really.
Nicolas D Villareal:But you get income from wealth valuations, though I mean, that's the thing, that's like, what these, what these companies are often doing.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, but that's always a trade-off with someone else when you're actually pulling money out of wealth, when you're pulling money out of a stock. So if you do a dividend out of a stock, you actually decrease the value of that stock a little bit, and similar things like that. But there are ways to fake GDP that aren't related to wealth.
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, what I was going to say is I don't disagree with you. I think that a lot of these ways that we see this growing right now like US GDP growth, like these investments and shit, like very weak LLM models and machine learning that you and I have talked about it has a lot of potential promise, but we're using it completely wrong and in ways that are energy wasteful in the way we're going to do it Right now. These cause the appearance of GDP growth and maybe they're real for now, but I don't think. The way AI is currently being developed and employed, for example, the output doesn't really help.
Nicolas D Villareal:So this is the way to think about it, right? So when you have, like sectors that are from investments that aren't necessarily profitable, it is real GDP growth in that you can think of it basically as investors consuming like by spending regularly. It's fake in the sense it's unsustainable, but it is like real GDP numbers because it's real economic activity.
Nicolas D Villareal:I don't think they're just. What I mean by fictitious here is technical. I don't think it's valorizable because of the problems that are going to inherently become from having an unproductive product. And right now all those LLMs are doing is efficiency gains. They're not really creating. Like you have to check them so much that you still have to use about the same amount of human labor as you would without it.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, I mean efficiency gains were very small niches of the market and they've really hit the limit of that and they're not going to get much out of that. I wanted to comment, though, on something you were talking with Hubber and the guy Lee Phillips from the.
Nicolas D Villareal:Walmart book. There's all these problems we have have today. The system obviously isn't working, but I and like they're all of the critiques on them is that they don't go far enough, which is, and I think the truth of that is that um like the way they're thinking about systems and what like what their plan is is fundamentally state capitalism, right.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah.
Nicolas D Villareal:Agreed, and it's like when they say, oh, yeah, well, even nationally, nationalizing everything would be such a big boon, it was such a big change and stuff which, yes, it would be. But where does that get you? That leaves you at the NEP right. It doesn't even get you to the high communism stage of what the Soviet Union was. Right.
Nicolas D Villareal:And there'd be no reason to go to that form of high communism either, barring a war. The incentives wouldn't be there, because we've already done a lot of that development. So go ahead.
Nicolas D Villareal:So this brings me back to where I ended. The letter to cosmonaut. Is that, um, like the, the state, capitalism is probably necessary to get us out of this crisis. It's probably, and it's a lot more effective. The critique by a lot of de-growthers, um, that because you, you're not controlling the consumption, um, you're not actually creating a permanently sustainable situation to the extent humans can um and I think that is what characterizes um a situation of like higher communism, socialism, um is this ability to rationalize household consumption, uh, in some way?
Nicolas D Villareal:um that it that like, like, even in like cockshots kind of model. I mean, there's like people can put in demand in the market, but there's ways to, because money is, doesn't exist anymore. You can, and there's still central planners you can very effectively cut into that. You can. You can deliberately choose what technology or production techniques you want and which ones you don't, in a conscious way. That's one of the big things that's missing from them, I think.
Nicolas D Villareal:When we talk about household consumption, you and I agree that consumption does have to change. There's a lot of unnecessary consumption, and a lot of what people the anti-consumers will focus on is actually not the important stuff. Like you, having my favorite stupid collection books in your house isn't really a major contributor to the problems of society, but energy uses is, and energy efficiency could be changed by changing what's on. You know, a consumption market. I mean, we're you and I are assuming something probably like labor tokens, not currency, but we aren't assuming total rationing either, and that's one of the things that's different from some forms of degrowth. And again, when I hear people talk about the growth, it's all over the place what they actually think.
Nicolas D Villareal:The answer is Sato's was actually or cyto or whatever. Um was actually much more moderate than I thought it was going to be. Um, you know it was. It was kind of underwhelming actually, um, and I don't think it would work. Uh, so you do have to develop a ton of of capacity, I think. What people rightly would say, though, but isn't marxism about freedom? And? And you and I would say yeah, but you know we're not. We're not arguing about. When we talk about rationalization, we are not talking about total control of everything in the household, but it would be like there are very inefficient houses right now.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, so going back to, I remember what it was called, it's Jevons Paradox, when the efficiency increases in efficiency don't lead to decreases in throughput because people just use it more because it's cheaper, and that problem goes away in any kind of planned economy with socialism, because investment is a social thing that is socially controlled.
Nicolas D Villareal:So right now we have there is no social control over investment at all.
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, I mean marginal cases, but that's one thing that's out of our control right now. I think that one thing that like an easy way to rationalize household consumption in a socialist society is to say well, we're like, we see that um, like the like market clearing prices are, would still be a thing in that kind of society, but investment is still something socially determined Um. So if you think that a, if increasing production of this person using the certain production technique is not a socially good thing, you can control that um and that isn't something that can go out whichever way people want um, but at the same time, so I I like the, the idea of like, of a different corporate structure, of voluntary associations, that now we just have households basically, but in like, in towards new socialism they also talk about, we'll have communes as well, and I'm sure that there's all kinds of ways that you could rationalize consumption in a commune that would make it more efficient and all kinds of things like that, and this would just be a different corporate form of voluntary association.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah Well, you and I have talked about this a little bit. I mean, like I actually believe that, like all kinds of nested, one of the problems that I have is, I think centralized efficiency is good but, to remind people, there's a reason why we have two lungs, because biologically castiate failure is disastrous. But things like nested communes, nested Soviet structures, levels of planning, those particularly with modern communication facilitation, are kind of easy to do. And while I'm not delusional and think we're going to ever get rid of all status consumption, if you're coming to those things in a communal way, the social pressures within that commune are going to limit status consumptions and that's one of the. You know that's a big individual waster.
Nicolas D Villareal:And then other things, like when we think about social planning and we like, okay, we're going to have to like deal with a lot of old houses, you know, modernize them in some way. We would have to deal with apartment blocks, we have to better use land. I mean, one of the good ideas I got from Bordiga way back then is like we really do have to deal with the town and country problem and urbanization. The urbanization technologies are good but not in the way they're currently used. They're currently used that way, specifically for capital. If we're not, if we don't have capital concerns like that and we can diffuse out production in a lot of, in a lot of ways, um, from a central, from a centralized, centralized plan, you can do stuff, like you know, multi, big, multi, multi-person apartment blocks with free access, land all around it, like, and I've you know, and I've even seen that in capitalist societies, and these are things that communes would be incentivized to do, in capitalism, there's no incentive to do them.
Nicolas D Villareal:So there's two things there. One is that the well one with what you were talking about before, about having redundancy and that we don't want things to be too centralized. I wrote a blog recently just because I was thinking about how we should think about enterprises in a socialist system and entrepreneurship and competition and those kinds of things, because in Cockshott's model of important new socialism he just kind of says that people get assigned wherever the planner tells them to. There is no actual enterprises as independent things in that kind of socialist society. But I think that's really not a good idea for the problems with centralism you were just talking about, for the problems with centralism you were just talking about. I proposed this based off of what I know about government contracting, since I've worked in small government contractors since I left college and what they do or what the idea was, is that even though enterprises shouldn't own their own capital in order so that that can all be socially organized, we should still think about how like of enterprises, institutions, and that there is like institutional knowledge and capabilities that you lose if you're just randomly putting people together and having basically managers being able to prove themselves by bidding on contracts with people that they're voluntary associating with and building institutions out of that that basically come into being so long as they have contracts and basically disappear when they don't have contracts. I thought that would be a pretty clever way of dealing with that um.
Nicolas D Villareal:Another thing I wanted to say was about the um, the like, the communal investment, and this relates to the other two points I was making in my letter, which is that the economic stuff and the capitalist consumption aren't necessarily related to the economic throughput and the capitalist consumption aren't necessarily related to growth, because economic throughput is unrealistic, and that capital consumption aren't necessarily related to growth, because when we get rid of capitalist consumption and some of it still has to assuming that the physical people are still around, they still need to have some income to reproduce themselves, even if it's not whatever they were getting before. But just as importantly, now that we've freed up that income, is the responsible thing to do just to idle that economic capacity? Or is it better, if there's this enormous task in front of us of preventing ecological catastrophe, should we be organizing labor and making investments in infrastructure to try to avoid that somehow? And it seems obvious to me that you would need to do those things, and those things are economic activity. They potentially create growth and, particularly with thinking about like a commune, is that they will have to be making like a for investments in like the, the community or whatever. That this is probably the like.
Nicolas D Villareal:This is something I've thought about from, I've learning about it from the Chinese collective period the principle of self taxation, which I think is probably going to be very important going forward because of various reasons, but the like you need to have some like. That organization of like the part of that rationalization of household consumption is also making getting people together to work to make the infrastructure that requires less material throughput, and that it's not just investment, it also means maintenance and because investments depreciate over time, they physically wear down and that maintenance is also economic activity. It's a whole cost category of GDP right now and that's also something you have to think about.
Nicolas D Villareal:So this brings us to some of the others. I mean, I do think we have to talk about the state a little bit more and I agree with you that basically what the People's Republic and fairly democratic planning, those kind of things, a lot of their models are still, by and large, effectively state capitalists, more responsible, co-op driven, etc. But they are still about generating surplus and they allow for the accumulation of wealth. And, um, and I know this is a basic point, but when I talk about like yeah, eventually Mike Marks played with labor tokens, uh, cockshot uses labor tokens plus cybernetic theory, um, but you know, labor tokens does repeat some of the things of um, of markets, in that there's choices of what you get with your, with your labor time, effectively, right, uh, from a collective pool, you can get, you know, things that you want, um, with a labor token.
Nicolas D Villareal:What you can't do is use it as a, as a store of value beyond that, and use it and leverage it over time and you can't transfer it in a way to leverage additional goods in most labor token schemes.
Nicolas D Villareal:So, people can know what we're talking about.
Nicolas D Villareal:What I'm talking about isn't necessarily just even the token or exchange part, although they've used like a point system in the communes in china yeah they did.
Nicolas D Villareal:I'm more, I'm almost thinking of of self-taxation in, because it, in terms of corvée labor, um, which is just commanding labor to do something for you, um, and but because the point system, because they weren't exchanged, they weren't related to the external exchange of the commune. You could make infrastructure investments by getting a bunch of people to dig a ditch and that wasn't really related. It's not really the same thing of the problems of not, of it not quite being communism or whatever, but I do think that there is, like, what you're talking about with Sato and what he's proposing, like the communal thinking or like the local thing. So I have not read his solutions exactly, but, or like the local thing. So I I've not read his solutions exactly, um, but it sounds like to me that the closest thing to it that exists, what he's talking about, is probably Rojava, uh, in in Syria. Yeah.
Nicolas D Villareal:Which also has like a strong ecological ideology through book chin Um. That got picked up by the Kurds there and the PK came Um but yeah, that got picked up by the Kurds there and the PKK.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, weird Marxist-Leninist book chants.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, it's really funny in retrospect that that happened, but at the same time, it is so typical of, I think, the problems with degrowth ideology, because they are I mean, they don't care about growth per se, but they are reliant on oil production in the areas they control. It's one of the main things, the only economic activities that they have to export. There's actually been some battles today between the Syrian forces and the Kurds there, but it like it.
Nicolas D Villareal:I think it's still typical of what the kind of problems you'd run into in trying to implement the degrowth situation. Because the when you, when you're not trying to make big investments that would probably cause growth, when you're focused on just decreasing economic activity, you're leaving in place the very inefficient, and the things that are left are those inefficient and sometimes fossil fuel producing activities. There was a study that got cited in that original eco-leninism article, um, saying like oh, we could live on like five percent of the energy that we do now. Um, so it shouldn't be a problem that we don't even need to make investments like big, like really big investments. Um, I looked at that study and it said we are assuming that everything gets switched to state-of-the-art technology that is the most efficient.
Nicolas D Villareal:How do you do that if you're not using a lot of energy to produce the state-of-the-art technology that's the most efficient?
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, exactly, it doesn't work. You need to have a bunch of investment in economic activity to get to that situation versus driving an old car.
Nicolas D Villareal:Old car has a lot of environmental damage to it. But the new EV, if you're treating it, if you're trading them in all the time, does more damage. But under socialism there's no incentive for us to do that. There would be an incentive like, yeah, sure, there might be personal electric vehicles where you can borrow for some things. But like, and I'm not against them being nice and cool or whatever, under socialist society I'm not, I'm not, you know, a hair shirt socialist, um, but. But I do sort of think like, yeah, but the most efficient way would just be having better electric public transit. I don't like um, I I don't really know um, you know, except in low population areas, what and when we talk about the long of socialism we are talking about, you know, balancing out populations on the planet and stuff. Like people I don't think pick up how big some of the stuff we were talking about is to enable the kind of freedom that we want to enable.
Nicolas D Villareal:I mean like so I mean like right now, it's definitely better to have an electric car than just be driving around the gas car all the time. Even though it's not like there's still gas emissions and material associated with the electric car, it's not like it, it's. It's still quite a bit better because of just how much you're using with the car, um, but it's at the same time, it's not like an ideal solution, um, because it's not like it's compared to having like several thousand cars, to having a good public transportation system. It's a or. It's clear that the transportation system just uses less stuff.
Nicolas D Villareal:Overall, it's more rational, um yeah, it's rationalized, it makes population movements easier and again, I'm not saying there wouldn't be any personal vehicles and yes, I do think ultimately, if you can switch to an EV or a hybrid, you should switch an EV to a hybrid. But I also do think that if you are trading in a car prematurely to get an EV, you are actually still causing ecological damage. There are studies on this that back that up, and if you trade those EVs in regularly, you are contributing to the cost and unfortunately, consumer habits aren't great. Now some of that's being fixed today, unfortunately by the market, but in shitty ways. I mean, one of the ways it's being fixed today is people can't afford new cars, so they're not buying them the way they used to, and when they do buy them, they tend to try to offset their cost of the high-priced new cars by buying a hybrid or an EV usually a hybrid. I mean, one of the things about EVs that are also suboptimal in the current conditions is you need to own a house in most places in the United States for them to be easily powerable, unless you're lucky in a major city and have access to things pretty consistently. It's just not easy for renters who aren't renters and you know a single house units to, unless they put them in to charge EVs, and that has not yet happened. So there's all kinds of infrastructure problems because we're letting the market fix it, but we didn't build the infrastructure that we have, even for the capitalist society, by market forces. The market forces didn't set up the US highway system, even though they're dependent on it, and that's that's something that we have to deal with, even under capital. That, like expecting the market to do all that, is nutty.
Nicolas D Villareal:But as I as I talk to Huber, one of the things that one of the points I think he made that solid is you're right, we're going to have to do a lot of upfront investment and it's going to lead to a lot of economic activity in the near run to be able to do the kind of reductions that people want. We can't just assume that having. I'm going to talk about this in terms of water usage. One of the problems in a city like um atlanta is the cost of fixing the water system, even though they're running out of water. Um, what's the cost? Well, you have old ass pipes that are not particularly efficient and we would have to spend the energy to dig them up and use the resources to dig them up, and that's amazing. That's a massive expenditure. It's easier to do it if you're doing like big projects and doing them all at once and trying to piecemeal that, and so there's no way for the economic activity not to be disruptive. But it would be something we could do, plan out and mitigate that.
Nicolas D Villareal:Under current market conditions we really can't. And how do we? How do we plan on the market conditions? You know, bourgeois state imposed regulations which are not so much. They're just stopping you from doing the worst things, they're not necessarily helping you do the best things. I mean you can subsidize stuff. That's the other thing we do. But that's about it.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, I mean it's like, and right now we kind of need to do the opposite of subsidized things because the whole fossil fuel infrastructure needs to be rapidly depreciated and that's not something that has ever been, that's not a policy tool that the USA has ever had, has ever been a policy tool that the US state has ever had. It's funny because this whole thing of like depreciation investment is a big part of it's kind of ignored a lot of times, like when you talk about like the car being turned over. I had never really thought about like oh, how many people buying a bunch of electric cars every year or something, because I bought my first electric car this year and before that I've been driving a 2007 truck. I expect I'll have this electric car for another at least 10 years or something and it's strange to me to think that people will be buying cars regularly. But I guess that's another thing that you have to think about in a social society is what should be the proper depreciation, turnover rates, maintenance rates for things.
Nicolas D Villareal:Right, I mean yeah.
Nicolas D Villareal:It should be rationalized to a certain extent that we should be able to. I think in a perfect world we should be able to make all of the durable goods for a society one at a time, like one year we're just making tables and the next year we're making refrigerators or something like that, because we know exactly how much society should need over that period or something.
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, it's one of the things I think about. A lot of the time, even in early capitalism, before it had really taken off, industrial production was that stuff was made to last a long time. Today, for a variety of reasons, one of which is a kind of backdoor form of inflation, where you make the same shit but you make it with cheaper materials, uh, and not necessarily more durable materials. And then you know, sometimes cheaper materials are good, maybe they're better, but um, not. In most cases today, mdf is not better than wood, and I think about that because in a socialist society, why the hell would we make anything that would be made not to last Like like we? You know, go ahead.
Nicolas D Villareal:This is one of the real problems with GDP is that is no good way of knowing what the depreciation rate is for common household goods.
Nicolas D Villareal:And those things have probably been like growth in terms of real, like in terms of the things that people like. It's probably way lower than the official stats say, because the value of a desk that lasts 40 years is way higher Like the real value than a desk that lasts five years. But that all of it like that's not something that somebody figuring out CPI is going to know and that's just not reflected in the real gdp numbers absolutely, um okay, so this brings us to the to go ahead.
Nicolas D Villareal:I just I mentioned that in the letter. Actually, specifically is that if we really got into doing this, like making things really durable, that would actually increase real GDP by rapid deflation, because things would be worth a lot more if it was actually accounted for correctly.
Nicolas D Villareal:Right and we don't, because we only calculate for nominal values.
Nicolas D Villareal:We try real values, but we're not good at it.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, we're terrible at it, At least with household goods. You can kind of do it for fixed capital and production. But there's better ways to do it. You can do it for houses, yeah, but my desk being a ship versus a desk I inherited that was built in the 30s and had until I don't know when I lost it. But those things are very different things. They're just completely different sets of you know, but the function that they have and economically they're pretty much identical. Like no one's going to say like, oh, this old desk is more valuable than the new desk, even if it's providing use for way longer and thus I don't have to replace it. And this is something we talk about. I mean, this is known a lot and like junk. You know like I always hold up the iPhone for a lot of these things that have held up for you before. But I bring this up because the iPhone's actually a fairly good product.
Nicolas D Villareal:A lot of these smartphones are good products and they brick themselves deliberately so that people will buy them because you know, yeah, the camera's better between an iPhone 15 and an iPhone 7, but there's not a lot of marked innovation. An iphone 7, but uh, there's not a lot of marked innovation, like, um, and in fact, one of the weird things about contemporary capitalism in the west is we're not big on doing hardware and physical commodities at all anymore, even if we produce a lot of them, I mean, but like that's not where that's not sexy capital right now. Um, uh, you know that. I guess the exception to that would be NVIDIA chips.
Nicolas D Villareal:Most of those aren't made in the US either.
Nicolas D Villareal:We're not going to talk about how Vietnam's taking advantage of US decoupling with China. There is a point, though, that we haven't gotten to this in your letter that I think is actually really important, and this is my problem with a bunch of leftist thinkers, from David Graeber to all kinds of even certain Marxist-Leninists, certain Marxist-Leninists who perceive of the problems of relations of production as just a matter of thoughts and not that there are material incentives that statistically make certain relations more likely and material incentives that make other relations less likely. Like, um, and weirdly, david graber, of all people, is one of the people who both notices and then deliberately ignores this. Like he talks about like well, mountain peoples, you know, tend to like not be very controllable by the state, and I'm like, well duh, they're in a fucking mountain, it's really hard to control them. Like it seems like the physical Structures in the environment, literally, are part of why that is happening.
Nicolas D Villareal:Similarly, he was talking about that with coastal people. They can just bug off to the water for a while, and I'm like, yeah, they can Because they're near water. That's not, I guess, the political where there's being near water, but I can't replicate that everywhere, right? So I wanted to ask you what kinds of things do you think, like a lot of these eco socialists both bright green and and degrowth miss about incentive structures and transformations of relation of production?
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, so I mean in the example in the article I was responding to, saying like oh, stalin, because he didn't focus on the relations of production, didn't fix this problem, I'm like sure, but like, even in very radical situations of I mean like that, I genuinely think in collective period, china, they tried to change the relations of production no, I I do too.
Nicolas D Villareal:Uh, I've actually said that ironically um, uh, 60 like 65 to 78. China, uh, it didn't have the. I will agree, actually, with the chinese themselves. They didn't have the material forces to do it right yet, but they really are the only people who truly have tried to do labor tokens, to do local collective decision making, to rebalance out skills. I mean, one of the things people miss about the rustification of the intellectuals wasn't that it was always about punishing the intellectuals, it was also about putting them out in the countryside to skill people who do not have access to city levels of accumulated knowledge. And there's no way to do that without redefining the population Go ahead.
Nicolas D Villareal:I mean there's so many things that happen in that moment, Like bringing people in to the countryside, the academics and stuff Like higher level education basically broke down in China during that period, but the primary level education only.
Nicolas D Villareal:It was excellent.
Nicolas D Villareal:The fact that it exists at all in rural China is because of that period.
Nicolas D Villareal:And it was slightly undone during the early Deng period too.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, If you look at other countries, if you look at India, totally non-educated rural areas compared to China, a lot of other countries in the area there's also increased social trust because of that period.
Nicolas D Villareal:And I do worry a little bit in China when they lose anyone with any memory of the collective period about that social trust, because Michael Sandel has written about this about young people in China not having the same social trust. Because, um, michael sandell has written about this about young people in china not having the same, uh, social trust and actually kind of believing western meritocratic notices. He was writing about that 10 years ago. I'm not sure that it's still true, but I I do think like, well, um, the collective period really did put people in proximity to each other who had never been in proximity to each other before.
Nicolas D Villareal:It is. I have some lines in an unpublished article right now that will hopefully come out eventually about how China is weirdly prescient in history of like preceding social forms, because bureaucracy was invented in china and that and then it took off in europe like a thousand years later, um but probably through the sicilians taking it to the normans.
Nicolas D Villareal:But uh, from the islamic world.
Nicolas D Villareal:But yes, yeah, agreed yeah, I mean some people think it wasn't related, but it definitely seems related to me that they took it directly.
Nicolas D Villareal:I don't have good sources for that. But what happened there in the collective period? Those ideas of self-taxation and the ideas of a non-professional state like modern state, those things I feel will come back eventually at one point or another, because that is like it solves so many problems with the proper material base for it to make it actually work. If you had that, I think it would be much more efficient and effective than the administrative apparatuses that we've developed now.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, I actually, you know, I mean, I've talked about the paradox of China in that period because in one set, in one hand, it was actually really really truly taking doing socialism immediately seriously, and on the other hand hand, what it was doing internationally was a disaster for the socialist movement. Um, uh, you know, like I, I hesitate to to categorize someone's foreign policy as mean girl bullshit. But like some of what, uh, they were doing in, say, africa, or siding with the united States just to spite the Soviet Union, or like when, you know, being nice to Pinochet and that was just to spite the Soviet Union, it's like that's kind of that's disastrously petty. It did enable them to set up good relations with the west to get the overhead capital they needed that they couldn't get otherwise eventually, but that was actually more dung than the mouth. Um and uh, you know, I, I, I think people should study the collective period more and I don't think they should study it the way that it gets like lionized in the new left or in mouse bond x or any of that. Uh, not that all that's bad, but I mean, I really go in and look at what they were doing, because when people like, oh, the cultural revolution was so awful and I'm like, yeah, but then how was like? How was, uh, life expectancy increasing pretty dramatically during that time in particular? Like it's hard for me to square that with oh, every like it was a, you know, a bloody mess. I do think there were bloody messes happening that were unnecessary, absolutely, but I don't think that actually defines most of what was going on.
Nicolas D Villareal:And I think the other problem that you had and this was a problem I realized but that he was setting up a system that was going to come flat into party bureaucracy, but he both wanted to control but needed that party bureaucracy. That's something, however, that we can deal with more now with communication technologies, we don't we can systematize things that we probably had with more. Now with communication technologies, we don't we can systematize things that we probably had to bureaucratize. Not that I'm going to think we're going to be without any bureaucracy. Like I know that there's going to be bureaucracy, although I would hope that it is not. That that's another thing that's collectivized. It's basically like the bureaucrats are sortitioned and that we've systematized their knowledge and, like you go train to be a bureaucrat for a while, you serve for five years and you get out like um or something like you know, um. I do think we have to think about that.
Nicolas D Villareal:But yeah, it's very important that it be deprofessionalized. It's so funny because this isn't just a left thing actually of ignorance about the collective period, Even people who specialize in the whole field of comparative economics and thinking about institutions economics. When I took a class by a guy who even taught it back in the Cold War about comparative economics, we learned all about the Soviet system and material balancing and everything and then he said, oh, China is just the Soviet Union, but worse, they're just more incompetent.
Nicolas D Villareal:And it's like absolutely not.
Nicolas D Villareal:There's so much more that was going on there, though. There's so many huge experiments that happen that are will probably be world historically consequential in retrospect. Um, but uh, well, to relate this back to what you were asking about the relations of production and thinking that's just a matter of will, um, it's, it's so obviously not, because even when you try, even when you have the will, there are, like, having the material capabilities to do things matters the most, because if you can do it or you can't and this is a this is a problem both for the de-growthers and for, I think, some of the like the the, the, what, the Bright Greeners, yeah, and also the Lee Phillips people, even, yeah yeah.
Nicolas D Villareal:They're like there's not. Either you think For these people, either you think, oh, we can just make this happen, or they all think that we can just Use the technology and things that we have now in various ways either by just not using them or by using them more basically, but really planning and doing things like being able to control consumption bundles in a rational way. That will require whole new social technologies and systems, a whole new kind of knowledge.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, this is one thing that I've tried to talk to people about a little bit. Yes, in a new social system you approximate both physical and social technologies of the old. Marx talks about usury and banking and feudalism versus what it does in capitalism, right, and the difference of relations there. And Andy also talks about, like how the rentier becomes a capitalist by bundling rents into commodities, etc. Etc. Etc. I mean he has that's like a big thing for him and I think we will see some similar things. But there are things that I do think, like no, you can't just turn Walmart's logistic system into a co-op because there are teleological hangups in it based on capitalist production models that you're going to have to redo, like yes, you could do it, but it wouldn't like be a magic bullet to anything.
Nicolas D Villareal:It would just be Walmart Right, Some redistributed profits.
Nicolas D Villareal:This is why what you say state capitalism is the teleologies of these technologies, both social and material, pretty much are assumed to just be democratized. And I'm like, well, once you democratize it truly, things start changing in a big way. Um, and it would require us to rethink a lot of the stuff through. And there's there's also times where I'm like, hey, you want to do this massive industrial development project, how are you going to train the people for it? Now, like and with what people like? Whenever we talk about reshoring in america, and I'm like, yeah, you know the technology, the automation technologies are way more efficient. So, uh, phil neal's really good on this, and that has all kinds of implications.
Nicolas D Villareal:If we try to do forwardism the way we did in the 50s with today's technology, it wouldn't work because, frankly, the technology, the automate is too efficient for it. But to think about this in a broader way, these social technologies are things that we build on, but we don't just democratize them in and of themselves. We do have to change how they're being used in some fundamental ways, and I do think the collective period in China is sort of like a proof that you can do that on some kind of mass scale. They fucked up in a lot of ways. I mean, some of the stuff with agricultural productivity in particular was a problem, with agricultural productivity in particular was a problem. But they, you know, they have those social technologies, and my fear about socialists right now, as we talk about, like you know, the echo stuff is, I do sometimes think that they kind of think we just need one one major planner like that you know big guy in the sky model, which is when people complain about, like, say, stalinism, um, and you know, everyone's unhappy with me when I talk about stalin because I'm not, I'm not a stalin fan, but I'm also not the person who, like quakes in my boots, that I think that stalin was super hitler.
Nicolas D Villareal:Um, uh, the part of the problems with stalinism, as cockshot points out but also kind of weirdly defends, is that, um, stalin really did, you know, let out democratic social forces, been an uncontrolled way, and that's really what the purges ended up. That's why they ended up being so bad, that's why the Yishal Sheena ended up being so bad, as you, you, you unmask social forces, and part of the reason for that, I really do believe from the work of Jay Althageddes, is that the, the, the having to industrialize that fast had such social consequences. And I'm going to give china credit. They didn't do that in any of their phases. They didn't do that.
Nicolas D Villareal:Um, you know, yeah, some of the some of the late dong, early who jim jimin period stuff was brutal, but it wasn't like the 30s in um in China and you might go well, the cultural revolution was like that. I'm like the cultural revolution, uh, it's death toll was nothing like the ease off Gina. Now we can talk about other death tolls in China and like the great, the great leap forward. I do tend to think some of the China uh, chinese apologists in a great leap forward are underplaying how many people died, as opposed to the capitalist who are overplaying how many people died.
Nicolas D Villareal:But as opposed to the capitalists who are overplaying how many people died.
Nicolas D Villareal:There is an interesting thing that there was a great truth to what my teacher was talking about, in the sense that the big starvations in China didn't happen because they destroyed this quasi-Pedibor's peasant. They basically went to war with their peasantry. Like that didn't happen in China. What happened was it was actually incompetence and fundamental flaws of the way they had their system, which is they just did not have information and bureaucratic control over the agricultural sector and to do contradictory things um and the um, whereas in the ussr they really went to war with the peasantry. Stalin called world war ii like, oh yeah, this is just like my war with the peasantry. Um and the the, the thing um like.
Nicolas D Villareal:But this is another thing I was thinking about when I was writing my blog about socialist entrepreneurship and competition.
Nicolas D Villareal:Is that, like in the USSR, that was all like, partly because of the way their enterprises worked and like you had like the bureaucracy and you had enterprises that were just bureaucracy and those kind of uh kulaks were deliberately suppressed because they had these values that were totally opposed to what was going on and interests opposed to it.
Nicolas D Villareal:Um, and then you had in, like the in china, the, the cultivation of entrepreneurs in their new state capitalist development period. But you really have to think about a way to have socialist entrepreneurship, because you need dynamic institutions. And if you look at all the enterprises in the USSR and how they stagnated and how, like, they became totally useless and not capable of innovating, like the lack of competition and the lack of entrepreneurship are basically two sides of the same coin there, and and I think it is so necessary to be able to articulate a way that those forces can be used for good in a social society, because otherwise this whole problem that we have right now with a militant, reactionary, petty bourgeoisie are essentially unsolvable. They are problems that like lead directly back into the problems of so Soviet collectivization essentially, except in a more politicized dimensions, and that's one reason I wrote that it's a bit of a tangent to the degrowth situation.
Nicolas D Villareal:I see, I think that I think that's actually kind of important to think about, though. When we think about, like, how we would, how we deal with incentives and structures, and how we deal with, like even environmental structures beyond just obvious things like climate change, I mean, there's there's there's a lot to do with the environment that you have to deal with, and and there's a lot that you're going to have to deal with, particularly when you're trying to end uneven development with the developing quote developing world and because one thing yeah, go ahead.
Nicolas D Villareal:You're definitely right, because the thing with the resistance to any kind of socialist, ecological socialism right now, if you look at the reaction to it society, that they really want that they associate fossil fuels with some kind of independence and ability to create and control and be like great in like a Nietzschean sense or whatever, and that is a big problem that we'll have to confront, not just as like, like, there's a sense of like, there's a explicit reactionary enunciation of that, but there's also like a kind of folk ideology version of that. It is kind of dispersed everywhere, especially in the developing world, especially in America, that you need to find a way around. I think that there was that the rhetorical ways that people talk about, like with the Green New Deal and stuff, I think just mostly failed because they, partly because of things that we've talked about before, that it is still so focused on the bourgeois state and creating a dependence on it, more or less. I think that that crisis of imagination is really dangerous in this situation.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, I would agree with you. Um, I mean, I I think we're gonna have to really like, think through a lot of this in very big ways and, uh, I also think we have to be both more ambitious and less ambitious simultaneously. I do think sometimes we need everything now. That's not going to happen. But I also think, like one of the things that you talk about, innovation. I've thought a lot about this in another context. I've thought a lot about this in another context.
Nicolas D Villareal:The Soviet Union controlled this bureaucracy during the period of both high Stalinism quote-unquote or high communism and war communism, basically through violence, and that's socially exhausting. Nobody can maintain that forever and also it's just a bad fucking idea in general. A I'm not a person who's a pacifist. I don't think we're gonna get any of this without some violence, but, like you do not want to maximize violence and have that be your primary way to induce innovation and or control your apparatchiks, etc. Um. So the question comes how we're're going to think about this Like, and I did think, like your stuff, about you know, returning something like socialist entrepreneurship. I don't like the term, but this idea of, like social competition and social antagonism, but for good, productive ends, is going to be important. It's going to be important for innovation, it's going to be important for, I mean, it's even important for, you know, controlling the bureaucrats, um, you know, uh, keeping them from re-professionalizing. Um, you know, cause that's one thing you don't want, uh, keeping professional, uh political cast from developing. Like, uh, one thing we do know from, one thing we do know from from relatively egalitarian social hunter gatherer societies, is they hostile to each other if they need to be, like it's not, it's not all you know, kumbaya around the campfire. I mean, there's some of that, there's a lot of that, but there's also, like, no, I'm going to mock the people who are trying to break the rules, and if they, if they don't take the mocking, then eventually it's going to get slightly violent.
Nicolas D Villareal:I think we have to think about that when we build these systems, particularly when we think the stake of, like, not just human survival, but like most life maybe not all of it, but most life on the planet could be really fucked by our current decisions. Yeah, you know, and I'm not one of these people who's just like, oh, like you know, you know, I realize species go extinct and shit, but mass extinctions are bad why? Yeah, you know you don't, life is good bad. Yeah, you know you don't, life is good. Right, exactly, you know, and I do think that's something we have to think about as we go forward, and I think that's going to mean incorporating all kinds of different ways that humans have thought and all different kinds of times into what we're doing now and that can't and I agree with you of different ways that humans have thought, in all different kinds of times, into what we're doing now and that can't and I agree with you, that can't be done just by saying, hey, we should do it because we think it would be a good idea, or X didn't address it.
Nicolas D Villareal:It's a failure in their ideology. It may be a failure in their ideology but, as I've said to some of the things, my problem with a lot of Marxist-Leninism about Stalin, it's not that they're often wrong, that there was a whole lot of choices in some of these situations. Some of the errors are on board, but not all of them. My problem isn't that we acknowledge that. My problem is that we didn't try to make that a goodde-sac.
Nicolas D Villareal:If we can get over, if we can get over you know the fact that we're always trying to defend ourselves against capitalist lying or misunderstanding or decontextualizing if we can get beyond that and actually look at like, okay, why did this happen? Why did why did so many people died in the great leap forward, like even assuming lower numbers? I remember I was talking to uh, oh, I forget his name right now um, the chinese scholar who wrote a defense of the cultural revolution, but he also had a defense of the great leap forward in it and some of the stuff was like well, you know, just all people were dying a little younger and I'm like I mean, you know, that happens when you fuck up.
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, yeah, it's so funny. It's writing that and then COVID happens and China has its lockdowns in response to it. That also people don't die a little younger.
Nicolas D Villareal:Right, I mean you know, and they were really. I mean I think we sometimes give China a little bit too much credit for its early handling of the COVID pandemic, but by three months in they were. They did way better than a whole lot of other people um, like most of the west um, and I think, you know, even assuming that maybe there is some misinformation and misreporting, uh, even from the chinese government itself, I'm still assuming that we did notice. If, like I don't know, 50 million old people died in China, yeah, I mean you had to bury them.
Nicolas D Villareal:So like I remember having a conversation with someone who was like a big skeptic and like, oh, like it's not really happening, like in india or whatever it was. Like you know, we have like satellite photos of the cemeteries and stuff, right, that we can see the people who are dying, it's yeah, not just satellites, but yeah um, but you.
Nicolas D Villareal:It's related to that thing of being able to learn from past mistakes. I certainly feel that from the reaction from my recent article on materialism, that the intellectual culture on the left has not progressed far in the past 100 years.
Nicolas D Villareal:We really like our 19th century. We really like our 19th century. We really do the Marxist left in particular. We have arguments about physics based off of Aristotelian assumptions. It's sometimes real fun.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, I mean that's half of what Sato's doing too in doing Marxology for all of these arguments and stuff. Right?
Nicolas D Villareal:archives and I'm like okay, yeah, but what you actually publish is like the Sashuas letters and all the normal shit that I know that people use to, like you know, get out of jail free cards for marks, like. So if there's something really you know, other than some more stuff about Liebig really illuminating in there, please share it. Um, because, uh, what you know, your, your current argument, don't you know, outside of the first book, don't really base off that and I don't know why we need to make a Marxological argument you know about. You know, uh, even before. Um, uh, you know, you and I are going to do an episode on the paradoxes of Bordiga because I'm writing on them.
Nicolas D Villareal:I will say Bordiga's reading on Marxist ecology in the 50s is way ahead of everybody else. I don't agree with all of it. Some people take it into weird directions. They use it to go into rerouting. But if you read Humans of the Crust of the Earth, he picks up on things that paul burkett pick up on, you know, way later. Um, but uh, that aside, um, the it's not that funny because he there's a section in Humans and the Crush of the Earth that he talks about Liebig and Marx's use of Liebig. So I was even like oh even that's not new. Apparently, we've known about that since the 50s, like as Bortiga's referencing it. It's not, it couldn't have been that hard to find, because he didn't have access to the Marx Ingalls archives.
Nicolas D Villareal:So it's something to think about entitlement of authority, basically without having to do all the other scientific, materialist work of actually learning a bunch of different topics that are often disjointed. There's no guidebook of how to look at all these things where it's like you want to know marxism, just here's the big list. You know, this is how you do it, um, and whereas like actually developing um coherent thoughts about what's actually going on in the world, there is no guidebook for that Right, you have to think for yourself.
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, it's like when people tell me the development of capitalism and they quote to me Das Kapital and I love Das Kapital, don't get me wrong but I'm like that's not a material accounting of all of capitalism and its history. It's not, and it doesn't even pretend to be. Yes, it's. Yes, he's got real history in there about the enclosures and all that stuff. Yes, he's doing real empirical research and but he's also taking the arguments of Adam Smith at face value and working them out. And I want to say, like Smith was trying to do science for this day. I don't think he was making shit up, I don't think he was trying to mislead people. I you know his knowledge limitations are what they are.
Nicolas D Villareal:And I've always taken the Stephen Gould talk about when he compares Marxism to evolutionary theory and it's like, well, we'll know when Marxism to evolutionary theory, and it's like, well, we'll know when Marxism actually starts to progress again. Because we won't be worried about Marxology, because we don't worry about Darwinology. Like no one's telling you hey, go back and read the Origin of Species. We don't have Origin of Species reading groups. Maybe we should. I mean to be frank and as a person who, on the Marxology stuff, I often think a lot of the Marxology is still bad hermeneutics because it's like okay, so you're favoring the interpretation of some footnote over published texts that were signed off by the author.
Nicolas D Villareal:If someone took all my notes and tried to make them into coherent like philosophy, holy shit yeah, it'd be insane, it, and I think it's just there's all a deep desire there, I think, for the esoteric, um, that is, everybody wants access to secret knowledge. When I think that usually the the best knowledge is the exoteric that you can like go back to it's, like, yeah, this is what that means, this is, and you can actually interpret it properly. Because, like, going back to the beginning of our discussion, um, and like the thing with, like the personification, reification, bearers of commodities, all that stuff, real subsumption even.
Nicolas D Villareal:Oh my God. Real subsumption is a oh God.
Nicolas D Villareal:But it's like all that stuff is used to like justify this. It is a deep theory reading of Marx that everyone comes up to basically, and it's also scientifically, in the scientific sense, that Marx mentioned, because they never mention the empirical side of that. They never talk about specifically how it's connected to what Marx is saying, with the means of production and how that's supposed to develop. Because if they did it would be obviously wrong.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, I was about to say, particularly with something like real subsumption or total reification, like it is like, like, if you grasp basic reification, it's really important, like you understand, like how money works, of any variety. But there are ways where, like I'm reading, I'm like you're trying to explain the totality of social interactions by a theoretical construct, and reification was a big one in the 20, in the early 20th century. I feel like real subsumption, which is another thing that's like barely spoken about in published marks and is only a few fragments, and on published marks, um, it gets used to make all coming from negri forward, to make all kinds of weird uh, uh claims about what is and is not possible, um, so much so that I often don't know what people even mean by it. And I've read the real subsumption text like I'm always like, okay, what, what do you mean? Like, like, uh, I got in an argument about slavery and capitalism and blah, blah, blah. Real subsumption means that that, uh, that slavery is not semi-capitalist. I'm like look, okay, I get that. Our typology is capitalism. It's not a word. Marx even uses that much. He usually uses bourgeois society for that shit. But even setting that aside, it's a prior social form being reappropriated in a new social form and, yes, eventually it would be fully reappropriated.
Nicolas D Villareal:I guess the problem is with slavery in particular is that it treats humans as fixed capital and in doing so, renders getting productivity gains from them without direct cost a lot harder to do. A kind of impossible, like people have noted, like how much like physical, you know physical intimidation and and overseeing over costs and stuff that you need to do that. And when we talk about, like, the wealth of, say, the planter class and why they were so wealthy, well, that's because the slaves counted as assets and that was part of the valuation. Um, so it's, it's something that I think about when people talk about that, it doesn't really. If you want to call it fully capitalist, that's fine, I don't actually really care. Uh, when I say like semi-feudal versus, uh, capitalist, whatever, uh, although it misses the, the reason why I worry about it is it misses.
Nicolas D Villareal:You know what is going on in free labor? Um, and free labor there is in somewhat quotation marks, but it is not, it is not compelled in the way slavery is. It's not Corvée labor, it is not surf labor, it is not slave, it is not chattel slavery. And to you know there's a double edged sword when you talk about wage slavery. Marx clearly doesn't think wage slavery is the same as slavery. Some people seem to try to make him be claiming that, but he does sometimes, rhetorically, not look at the difference that he himself is spelling out, because once you treat human beings as fixed capital, you will do horrible things to them. Um, anyway, uh, that's a long digression, uh, but my point is like marxology is kind of important if you're talking about what Marx thought and I'm into Marxology but it doesn't, I agree with you, it doesn't settle any of the questions. Like I'm not going to base that how we organize our society around ecology based off of Marx's footnote on Libby. Like I can't base that off of empirical evidence.
Nicolas D Villareal:Like I think it's useful sometimes to look at, well, what's the actual context of what he was writing in of like what?
Nicolas D Villareal:because a lot of times he's responding to like, uh, not even ricardo, but ricardo's critics, right, nobody remembers who those were, just on their own yeah, or like william petty, are like, uh, because I've had to recently in conversations with colin drum, but in general I had to go back and read some of that be like, okay, what was actually being talked about here? But, um, also, uh, recently I'm gonna use this because it came up on fucking twitter somebody was was using Ingalls as writing about the communes in America in 1844 as proof that Marx thought communism has already been achieved and realized in America. And that you don't achieve communism.
Nicolas D Villareal:And I'm like A that's Ingalls. B that's like a year after Marx and Ingalls started working together. C those communes failed. And he's clearly talking about the Owenites and the 48ites. And he's talking about the fact that the material conditions do exist right now, with a little bit more development. But he's not saying that the communes are communism as a social totality. Those guys just ignore it. But that's a Marxology reading. It's a weird one. It's a completely decontextualized one, but it is textually there, particularly if you're not reading it in German and you're not reading very closely. It was so funny.
Nicolas D Villareal:One of the reactions to my materialism essay was the one that had the most likes and attention on Twitter was someone basically demanding a citation for why I said materialism was the crown jewel of Marx's philosophy.
Nicolas D Villareal:What I got? A bunch of likes that you needed a citation for that. Yeah, they kept.
Nicolas D Villareal:I asked them like what do you mean? And they kept saying give me a citation.
Nicolas D Villareal:That's like when people ask me all the time when I'm like doing analysis and synthesizing things, and people are like, well, what, what book can I read? And I'm like, no, you have to actually go and study the working papers and the douche, fuck, I don't know. Like read everything, god damn it. Like read everything that's ever existed on this topic. Just fucking go away. No, and you know, I'm not against, I'm an educator, I'm not against putting together a reading list, but sometimes I'm like you cannot get all of this from one book. Like stop it.
Nicolas D Villareal:Like there are some times where you know, even bookish, I am the king of the bookish people All right, you know this about me and I am the king of like ironically, we're both bitch about Marxology. I have devoted a fuck ton of my life to Marxology. But I find it wild that people think we can settle an argument about ecology on a textual reading or settle an argument about communism on a textual reading, or settle an argument about um, uh, communism on a textual reading. Because one of those things that I point out that like well, communism is supposed to be the abolition of class period and honestly, we haven't achieved that anywhere, you know, for counter-gatherer societies in a very primitive sense.
Nicolas D Villareal:Perhaps for Cambodia.
Nicolas D Villareal:In the worst way, In the sense that death is equalized. Death is classless. I'm just waiting for the Thanos full communism to be like. We have total equality through death.
Nicolas D Villareal:I'm like I'm not that far away.
Nicolas D Villareal:Somebody's going to do it. It's going to emerge on Twitter as a fucking meme and someone's going to actually make it real Go ahead.
Nicolas D Villareal:I did do some. I didn't do Marxology because I said specifically I'm not doing Marxology, but I did do a little bit of Leninology in it, because this whole thing started with the debates, like this reaction to an article defending Lenin's materialism and imperial criticism.
Nicolas D Villareal:Which is my least favorite Lenin book. I'm just going to go ahead and say that right out. I didn't particularly care for it.
Nicolas D Villareal:but I thought it was fine. It was respectable and part of the reason why I learned, when I was researching, more of the context around it was that the like all particularly russian positivism was full of quacks yeah, yeah, I got that from your article and I looked it up and it's true, and I was like, oh, I didn't really know because I didn't why would glennon call these people solopists, as in they don't believe in anything outside their own mind, which is a really extreme thing to say.
Nicolas D Villareal:The philosophy, um like it. This is why because they were insane and thought that, like, literally, everything was like controlled by spirits, and epistemology was psychology and things like that, and epistemology, with psychology and things like that.
Nicolas D Villareal:That's like one of the things that came up in your article that I've always thought about was like, yeah, radical empiricism can go two ways. It can go the Hume way. I'm not sure that that's great or not, I don't totally know that. I agree with the reading of the Hume race just reactionary, but I can see how it kind of is. Or it can go the the Bishop Berkeley way, which is like well, our sense, that is all we got to know. So, and I don't know anything really from that, so I'm just going to assume that God is everything.
Nicolas D Villareal:And and I remember a frenemy of the show Doug Lane and I are one of our first debates ever. There was two. There was one on automation and labor theory of value and Doug was doing his normal labor theory of value thing and I was like, well, automation seems to be doing something that could really damage work. I don't know that it could replace work, but it could cause mass unemployment, et cetera for a little while and then it would adjust and we were going back and forth on this and I hadn't put together until actually answering the challenges of Stephen King, king, keen, keen, keen, keen, not King, but the challenges of Stephen King Keen, that Marxism doesn't account for the value added by machines. It has a magical view of labor and I'm like no, machines are fixed capital and fixed capital it does. It reduces socially necessary labor time, so that would increase worker productivity. So marx has accounted for it. It's just not. Over time they will quit adding value, like um, or it will quit enabling more value. Not it's it could enabling more value to be extracted, as actually probably the more technically correct way to say that um and uh. Productivity gains will slow down um and also price pressures will drop the price, so you'll get less profit for per transaction, and that's perfectly already explained and marks. It's not actually even that hard. But I but, to be fair, I didn't figure that out until trying to answer the criticism right, like like, oh, we do account for this. Um, in fact, it's kind of important how we account for it, um, so you know, you're just kind of misstating what we believe, um, but often we often don't, like a lot of marxists don't actually understand their categories, so it's uh, I mean you don't have to even deal into the dregs of twitter to get that on your stuff.
Nicolas D Villareal:On materialism, what I liked about your materialism article we'll talk about a little bit. Uh, this will come out way after I do a reading of it. I have some some criticisms of it on whether or not we know, for example, that cognition is actually sign-based, because some of the reconstructions that you use. The same authors wrote another paper where they question some of the conclusions that they come up with. I cited it in the thing, but they don't discard it. So I just had a little like mediating thing there and I got a little mediating thing there and I got a little bit snippy with Drosserianism.
Nicolas D Villareal:But in general, though, one thing I think you're dead on about is one of the problems with Hegelian explanations of Marxism that aren't wrong. The Hegelian explanation isn't wrong. It's just not explaining to you actually how it works. Is Marxist Hegelianism doesn't have ideals existing which you become aware of.
Nicolas D Villareal:Marxist Hegelianism, because it is materialist, has this idea of emergent ideas based off of the modes of production and also on the environment. I think people forget that and if you add semiotics in there, that starts to make sense. It makes sense that it's non-arbitrary, it's that these emergences do matter and there's relations between them and those relations are mappable. And that mappable is something like a structural theory of knowledge. And I think it's important to look at structures. I point this out all the time that people who don't look at structures often do very basic, even reasoning mistakes, where they like, make a structural argument for something that's actually structurally identical to an argument for something else, without realizing the consequences of that.
Nicolas D Villareal:But also, in this deeper sense, like you have to look at the structures of society to try to change them, like you can't like, like, because if you don't look at the relations, you don't see the unintended knock-on effects. And this is to bring it back to the political will discussion in tied into materialism. We do still think there will be unattended effects of material decisions. Right, like like I know I do. Like we don't know what all the planning decisions are actually going to do, although hopefully under a socialist regime we'd be better able to map out what they are and adjust to them. Like cause, clearly the market's not doing it, right, fucking now, like like I don't know people who tell me about market mechanisms for knowledge. I'm like, do you see how everything works today? Does it seem like it's working to you?
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, it's like the sign of a price is not like. It intentionally cuts off a lot of connections of what otherwise would be the knowledge of a commodity. Right, that's part of the whole thing of commodity fetishism. And why, like? We need input, output, planning and knowledge. It the and like with the relation.
Nicolas D Villareal:The thing with relations of production is similar to that. The relations of production is what Althusser creates this whole theory of ideology for, because the relations of production are created by the way people organize themselves, are created by the way people organize themselves and they organize themselves based off of this knowledge that they create and these relationships between different signs that they have and that they identify in the world and how they relate to them. And that's the whole thing. And the thing with creating new relations of production. The thing with creating new relations of production, it's not just a matter of like. Creating a new set of relationships requires creating a new system. That, because it's not just thinking that, although you do have to think that, it's creating something that makes that make sense, right, the way it actually works makes sense, so that people internalize it and keep doing it. Without that, it falls apart, like it did in the collective period in China, where even Mao was like yeah, that didn't work out.
Nicolas D Villareal:Right. I mean, or as it did in the various periods of the USSR, from the Red Terror of the USSR, from from the red terror to the NEP to to high communism, the war communism, to whatever the fuck Khrushchev was doing. I don't know what we're going to call that. You know, and I do want to like point out, you're right, it's not just about getting your ideology right, because there's an, about getting your ideology right because there's an interplay between ideology and material forces. You know what we call people who have ideologies that are completely disconnected from any material forces. We call them insane.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, the things that exist also have meaning to us. They are signs that we recognize them and they like. If you don't recognize those objective relations to them, then you're acting crazy.
Nicolas D Villareal:Right, you have no relationship to what is actually going on around you you know um and uh, I mean those probably have deep structures too, frankly. But but still, you, you're right, like, like, we call people uh, and if one of those people who seem crazy material, the material situation benefits them, later we will call them a visionary. But but you know, it's kind of an accident of history. Most people who who, uh, who project like that aren't and this is like I. I have this phrase that I used to throw at people uh, one of them and I call marx theonosticism, which was the idea that if you just understood some element of marx, like how to get uh, you know, for doug lane, it was how to get over the value form problem for a lot, uh, of people, it's what is Marxist typologies of history and how do we develop to that? And I'm not saying these questions aren't important, but I've always said they're important. But just knowing them or dealing with them does not produce a viable politics. Material questions have to eventually be answered materially and that will change what you come up with like um and I. I don't think people sit with that enough in in a very serious sense. And when it comes to ecology, that has real effects. And you know, I've told people, people, people like oh, you know you're too eclectic because I incorporate Joseph tainter into my understandings of Marxism, cause I do think a lack of knowledge of complexity theory is a real limit. And you know, and we get, what we get is like genealogical critiques. You know we were talking about like also Sarah, and you know, and we get, what we get is like genealogical critiques. You know we're talking about like Alcicero, and Chris Cotron was arguing with you and his argument, which I don't even think is entirely false, actually, that some of Alcicero's notions of materialism or Hellenistic, or pre-Socratic or whatever, and that's somewhat true in that philosophically he was dealing with those traditions, it wasn't all he was dealing with and like, so what I could also say Marxist materialism is Hellenistic because his, his initial focus on what materialism was, which was a kind of formal materialism, not just the idea, it wasn't just material monism. I mean, it was that, but it wasn't just that. Right, it's based off of Epicurus and working through Epicurus in a Hegelian way and then kind of doing what he does when he starts, adding more and more scientific elements into it, but at base, what got Marx started on that journey was a Hegelian reading of Epicurus.
Nicolas D Villareal:I don't understand those kinds of critiques. I don't get them. I also think that we have to deal with the knowledge inherited of all human history, and I don't think we're going to deal with the knowledge inherited of all of human history, and and I don't think we're going to settle this by a marxology debate and I also don't think we can settle it by pure political will. That's my problem with graverism is graverism is like basically, if you think another word impossible, it is. And I'm like only if you build the stuff to make it possible, like and you know, maybe I can't build something that creates infinite widgets with no energy inputs. I don't know, but here's the thing is that it's not like.
Nicolas D Villareal:Even the um, the thinking of it is like problematic in a very real sense is in this framework and we're talking about, like relations of production that involve people thinking a certain way. And this is alfacere's whole thing of ideology is that people can't think a certain way because they're basically programmed not to. They are shaped by society and various institutions and apparatuses in it to think a certain way, and there's outliers in that. But people, that is generally controlled. Um, and there's this I was talking.
Nicolas D Villareal:I was reading one of alfacer's. It was a write-up of one of his lectures on psychoanalysis and he mentions um, this pre-lacanian school in france that had this phrase not all those are mad who want to be. And that really got me thinking that, like it's true that there are people who would like to, just not like to do things, they're basically mad and society doesn't let them because it doesn't want, it needs them to do its own things. It normalizes it, it puts them into the, it socializes them into being normal. And when ideological reproduction, social reproduction, breaks down, people act more mad because they want to be, including in violent ways. Right, right.
Nicolas D Villareal:Oh yeah, I mean, I talk about social contagion. I think it's an overused idea because I'm like, oh, people copying people memetically as contagion, because we always do that. Um, uh, what you're implying is there's a norm that's somehow being violated by copying. I hate to tell you but, uh, there kind of isn't. And if there is, it's socially, ideologically necessitated. It is not inherent.
Nicolas D Villareal:I just wanted an excuse to say memetic, but yes.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah.
Nicolas D Villareal:Which is itself a memetic contagion.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, memetic is a memetic contagion. Good old mimesis. But I should do an explainer video about mimesis and memes and memetics um, my favorite pseudoscience. It was almost a real science for 30 seconds and the people realized, oh wait, this is a metaphor. It really did seem like like I remember just hearing about memology in the aughts and in the 90s and I was like isn't that a metaphor? That I mean mimesis is a real thing but like aren't memes as a phoneme for james? That isn't that like just an analogy? Yeah, I mean like it really like.
Nicolas D Villareal:Once it became like evo, psycho, evolutionary psychology, then it was dead it, because that's not how it works, it's stupid, but you can think of it. I think there is still a science to be made of semimes and a harder version of semiotics that's possible out there, but it's not still a work in progress, which I partly blame Derrida, for he ruined everything with his stupid essays and critiques of Levi Strauss and not oh, yeah, yeah, I mean, oh man, the beginning of post-structuralism.
Nicolas D Villareal:Well, people will listen to me. I say a lot of post-modernism actually occurred because of socialist failure. Uh see, you know, socialism, or barbara, barbara leaving to leotard, and we need to contextualize that. Derrida is separate from that. Derrida is something else and uh, derrida is what happens when you huff a little bit too much Heidegger and you realize that you can terrorize people by obtuseness. Which is not to say that every Derrida book is bad. It's just I find that the Derrida books that are interesting are the ones that aren't read.
Nicolas D Villareal:I honestly feel that the rise of Derrida and his kind of post-structuralism was an evolutionary attempt by academia, as like a bourgeois state apparatus, to suppress real social science. So that is my conspiracy theory, because every time real social science emerges this includes marketing and economics they shut that shit down, they do not let that pass, they make sure that does not because it has implications, for eventually it'll come back to the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois relations of production and they can't have that.
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, managers can read Das Kapital, but we can't have other people reading it.
Nicolas D Villareal:And you can read it as a literary text, not as an economic one.
Nicolas D Villareal:Oh, we're not going to go off of that. I actually like Frederick Jameson a lot, but I don't forgive that Reading Marx as a literary text Fuck you.
C. Derick Varn:Like sure, I can also read Adam Smith as a literary text.
Nicolas D Villareal:Fuck you Like, I mean like, like sure, I can also read Adam Smith as a literary text, but no one does. Like I can write a whole thing about the metaphors and Adam Smith, but and and the, the literary significance of his theory of moral sentiments or whatever, but and I'm not saying no one does, but it is nowhere nearly as pervasive as people doing that to Marx. And then I'm always like, but you know, the reactionaries are still going to be mad at you for teaching Marx at all, even if you're teaching it wrongly. So it's just, it is funny. I will say this Marxist was taught to me in college was a totally bastardized Marx. And Althusser, as Althusser was taught to me in college, to also frank and even Bordeaux and people who are not necessarily Marxist were totally baldrized. And and literary criticism, you know I told you my first encounter with Althusser is being told to teach him in a literary theory context. And I I read it and I'm like, what the fuck does he have to do with literary theory at all?
Nicolas D Villareal:Like I mean like ideological state apparatuses, like okay, I guess you could do something with interpolation, but it's like you would have to really work honestly to bring that there's. Well, there was that one book I read that was um the poetic supremative accumulation. That did like um a like. It was a meta kind of thing because it was talking about, because it did like a materialist analysis of the grammar schools in England and how that affected like the literature and stuff which was kind of interesting.
Nicolas D Villareal:But yeah, there was some. Yeah, no, there was some. Yeah, no, there was some. Good. One of the things I hate about post-modernism as far as, like, new historicism not a paradigm I actually endorse, uh, but that is at least based on actual history and it's not just totally pulling out your butt, um, like uh yeah, it's so funny that that and evo psych happened at the same time.
Nicolas D Villareal:Like the, the maximum ass pull era of academia oh god, were you?
Nicolas D Villareal:were you reading? Uh, I know you're younger than me, but like there's this time period in the end of the aughts, around 2009 to like 2013, where there's this period like people trying to bring back vulgar materialism and literary criticism to get some of that science edge. You know, even from edge magazine I remember this like the, the one of the.
Nicolas D Villareal:I don't even know what that is the ebstein brokers.
Nicolas D Villareal:So there's all these people combining evo psych capitalist economics and literary theory, and Psych Capitalist Economics and Literary Theory and Narratology.
Nicolas D Villareal:What why?
Nicolas D Villareal:To argue that narratives operate like genes.
Nicolas D Villareal:Oh right, so this is what became of the memetics, right?
Nicolas D Villareal:Yeah, this is after memetics died, but when people were still trying to make this work, I didn't know that.
Nicolas D Villareal:That's really funny, even after like I.
Nicolas D Villareal:I went to a narratology uh conference which is, by the way, which is tells you I was a professor at the time because why the fuck else would you go to that um and uh, and it was fine, I mean it was but I went to this whole section on like scientific narratology and it was all that. And then also like evolution and the market and literature and the stories that last are all operating on the same evolutionary principles and I was like if, if capitalism operates off evolutionary principles, 99.9% of everything should die, like it's just. I don't think you realize what you mean.
Nicolas D Villareal:Are they talking about like actual biological evolution, or is it like a metaphor?
Nicolas D Villareal:I think they meant it literally, but it was one of those times where it's kind of vague, like with the development of memetics itself. Do they mean this literally? It was one of those times where it's kind of vague, where like would like with the development of memetics itself. Do they mean this literally or is it an analogy? As an analogy I think it's still bad, but like as uh, but at least it's defensible as a literal claim. I mean what that does? It brackets out all the social sciences, not just the humanities.
Nicolas D Villareal:It brackets out all the social sciences too and subordinates the humanities to, like you know, whatever hard physics or evolutionary theory you want to subordinate them to you know, what I think is a better metaphor for um, like memetic spread, especially with regard to like innovations and statecraft and like the evolution of the state, is crystalline structures, because what happens sometime, and the stability of crystalline structures, because if you have create a new version of a crystal and its structure that is more stable than like the old version, suddenly that when you put like a little seed crystal of that somewhere, it takes over and you can't get the other one anymore because it's it just contaminated with the new version and the only places that are free from that are places that weren't contaminated.
Nicolas D Villareal:And it's not quite biological reproduction. But it's not quite biological reproduction, but I think it's the closest thing in the natural world to how that works basically.
Nicolas D Villareal:That makes sense. Well, on that note, I would wrap us up today. Where can people find your work, Nico?
Nicolas D Villareal:So they can find my blog on Substack, the Prehistory of Encounter, and I also publish sometimes on Cosmonaut and sometimes on Palladium, and I have Twitter Blueski with my name, so that's how you can find me.
Nicolas D Villareal:All right, thank you so much and we will see you again because we have like three other shows planned and I'll spread you out over the next few months. But yes, so you can also find Nico here, probably about every two months. All right Take care.
