Jamie Merchant on the Many, Many Current Crises

Jamie Merchant, the author of Endgame, joins us to talk about the current chaos. Start with the spectacle and you miss the structure. We step past the daily outrage to map Trumpism as a regime built by a new insurgent fraction of capital—tech oligarchs, private equity, and venture investors—who are eager to smash norms, rewrite rules, and route public money through tariffs, defense contracts, and boutique industrial policy. Their rise squeezes out the old asset-management establishment, pushes it toward the Democrats, and locks the opposition into a politics of “normality” that cannot mobilize the base or contest power.

We trace the media’s role in this shift: a long slide from public-service reporting to algorithmic engagement that rewards emotional spikes and partisan framing. Biden’s term tried to stabilize the system with CHIPS, infrastructure, and managed globalization, but even light-touch AI regulation, the SVB collapse, and worker pushback inside tech drove Valley elites rightward. Meanwhile, the stock market’s euphoria masks a real economy straining under a profitability crisis. AI’s massive data-center build may juice capex and energy demand, but unless it raises productivity broadly, we’re sitting on a bubble that deepens monopoly dynamics without delivering shared growth.

Zooming out, we argue we’re living through a new state-capitalist era with less capacity: the government takes bigger stakes, centralizes power in the executive, and leans on tariffs as revenue, even as planning expertise and administrative muscle erode. The postwar managerial state—Keynesian levers, technocratic confidence, public legitimacy—is gone. That’s why policy-first left populism keeps hitting a wall. Without a living, rooted class subject, electoral surges can’t endure. We sketch a different route: rebuild working-class civil society—mutual aid, cultural institutions, education, and cross-sector networks that bridge immigrants, service workers, industrial remnants, and professionals. Strategy begins where the regime is weakest: in the social substrate it can’t manage or monetize.

Hear candid takes on the investor realignment behind Trumpism, the AI bubble loop, why Democrats are structurally stuck, and how to make organizing matter when the state can’t—or won’t—govern for the whole. If this resonates, share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review to help others find the show.

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

Chapters

• 1:37 Framing Trumpism Beyond Daily Chaos
• 3:47 Why Analyze Trump As A Regime
• 6:47 Media Algorithms And Emotional Politics
• 11:32 Present As History And Chicago’s Lens
• 14:37 Democrats’ Structural Paralysis
• 18:27 Class Fractions And A Capitalist Insurgency
• 23:57 Tech, Private Equity, And Trump’s Support Base
• 29:07 Who’s Frozen Out: Asset Managers And Banks
• 34:07 Populism Inside Democrats And Its Funders
• 41:07 Liberal Institutions Speaking In Trumpist Terms
• 45:37 Biden Normalizes And Rationalizes Trump Policies
• 50:37 Media As Capitalist Enterprise In Decline
• 56:47 From Objectivity To Open Partisanship
• 1:01:07 Profit Crisis And Algorithmic Outrage
• 1:06:17 Tech’s Drift Right: AI, SVB, And “Woke” Labor
• 1:11:47 Defense Contracts And New Oligarchs
• 1:17:17 State Capacity Shrinks As State Role Grows
• 1:23:17 Tariffs, Slush Funds, And Executive Power
• 1:28:27 Why Left Populism Hits A Wall
• 1:34:27 Keynes, Latour, And A Dying Managerial State
• 1:41:17 China’s Model, Limits, And Misreadings
• 1:48:17 Development Ceilings And Global Legitimacy Crisis
• 1:54:27 Beyond Sanders: Building Class Composition
• 2:01:07 Civil Society, Mutualism, And New Forms

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:50

Hello, and welcome to the Barn Blog. And today we're here with Jimmy Merchant, author of Endgame Economic Nationalism and Global Decline, uh, which was published last year, and author of three different articles: one in The Baffler, one in Heat Wave, and the most recent one, which kind of ties them together in my mind, and Brooklyn Rail, about the Trump administration. I am normally hesitant to do Trump administration stuff, not because I don't think it's important, and not because um I'm afraid of it, but because most people focus on superficial short-term analysis and see Trump as a sugenerous phenomenon. Um, and even if he is or it, because this is a regime, not just a person, is something new. We have to ask ourselves uh a few questions about how it emerges out of the old and not just freak out about what is going on right now. Um and I also think a lot of people get caught up in the what the fuck is he doing today-ness of it all, um, which creates a way in which people will talk about what's going on in your home state one day, um, and then the next day talk about the big golden ballroom, and then the next day talk about whatever's going on with Pam Bandi or whatever, but then not put it together in any long trajectory trends or anything at all, and then something something fascism, which is a pretty useless analysis, even when it's correct. Um, so all that aside, um why did you start writing about this? You know, I don't associate with this this kind of commentary on Trump with your tendency of of of uh communist politics. Um you mean sort of your sort of like why take why go in on Trump and sort of analytically right why use Trump as an analytic locus since it's usually, as we said, a locus of misunderstanding, not understanding.

SPEAKER_01: 2:59

Yeah, yeah. I mean, certainly like the way that it gets the whole phenomenon of Trump the figure and Trumpism the movement gets taken up in the media and online, like for the most part, is is way overdetermined by this this by the um the kind of wild like media ecosystem uh in which we live and the way that you know the technologies that we interact with every day, um and the algorithms that like are programming us now on a daily level are now trying to wind up these like really emotionally intensive responses intentionally on the part of uh users and viewers and so on. And so it gets in the sort of daily discussion of I guess like the regime, right? It it gets caught up in that environment, like really uh chaotically. But it's just it's at the same time, it's just what is on everyone's mind. It just dominates the discussion, you know. No matter where you are in the political spectrum, it's like it like politics has just taken over everything, you know, it has taken over um entertainment and pop culture and um education and like almost every other domain of of life and like civil society that we can that we can name. And it's just that I guess that conviction that it's like it's so front and center in our consciousness uh that it needs to be like I guess demystified in a certain way and taken out and seen and kind of like what you were saying at the start, like placed against that historical, like the canvas of that historical backdrop. And um, you know, so that you can all we can all begin to offer explanations for how did we get here, you know, like the present as history, which is really kind of my thing, is like understanding the present as history. Um to sum up kind of what all my writing is about. And yeah, and just compounded and and made uh more urgent by what's specifically, you know, what's happening in cities across the country, but but you know, being in Chicago right now, it's it's really top of mind. Um trying to figure out what's going on with this with this regime and what the political currents right now. So so that's I guess that's what motivated me to dig into it more analytically, I would say. If that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02: 5:31

That makes total sense. Um I've actually really appreciated your work because I've been looking for a way to start explaining what we see in Trump 2 versus Trump 1 beyond like obvious superficial things like Avanca isn't there, and the mediating forces of society have been fertily atomized, etc. etc. But I started thinking about like, well, how do you explain that the mediating forces of society were fertily atomized when the essential mainstream of economic management and the Democratic Party was in charge for the prior four years and could not restore any of it, apparently? Um, and which which does really put a hamper on a lot of people's political hopes for the immediate future, even if you didn't assume that the the Democrats would just be weak tea. I I think um one thing I have to ask you is uh why aren't people asking, not that the Democrats won't do anything, but why they can't beyond political will? Because this doesn't seem to be on the table for a lot of people. They cannot imagine that this is not just a problem of cynicism, which you know it probably is there too. This is not me to take that away. I don't want to take the blame off the democrats, but like what why can't they even look at that uh at the moment? What do you think that is?

SPEAKER_01: 6:55

Uh, I mean, I think that the the Democrats are, I mean, there's multiple things going on as always, right? But one one dynamic that I've been short tracking in my recent work is how the shifting class fractions of the American ruling class and the investor class uh are uh you know playing out within the within the regime and then within the so-called you know loyal opposition, as it were, uh the Democratic Party, and like what's kind of shifting behind the scenes of the two parties. And uh, I mean, we can definitely get into this in more detail if you want, but Trump, I believe, Trumpism, the current regime, Trump too, represents a kind of insurgency from within the capitalist class on the part of not just Silicon Valley tech billionaires, although they're you know among the most important, but also like private equity capitalists, venture capitalists, um, hedge fund managers, uh owners of controlling stakes and publicly traded companies, like these kind of like petty cap petty private capitalists, right? Who uh who aren't like the old school, like the our kind of older notion of the uh responsible capitalist manager of the of a publicly traded company, like massive corporation. Uh, nor are they like the CEO of like a very widely distributed publicly traded corporation in the kind of classic neoliberal sense of like we're going to spread share ownership right across as wide a base as possible and democratize, so called you know, quote, quote unquote, democratize the economy. But uh are increasingly these like you know like tightly controlling, sometimes very family-oriented uh capitalists who share Trump's outlook on in the world and share his contempt for the norms of the political systems and and like the kind of legality of the economic order as as we've inherited it, and are perfectly happy to support him and his like campaigns to wreck it, you know. And I mean, I'm telling these are people like you know, Mark, obviously Mark Andriessen, Musk, despite their falling out, uh, that share the same a lot of the same goals. Um, Bill Ackman, uh, another figure I've written about, private equity guy, uh, very um on board with with Trump's with Trump's whole agenda and kind of shares a lot of his worldview, I think. And it's kind of figures like these, I think, that are that are powering the insurgency within the Republican side of the ruling class, um, and and really are a lot of the capital support base for for Trump's trust project. Uh, and so that leaves the a lot of the other, like a lot of the other powerful like capitalist interests kind of frozen out. And we can get into more about like who those are, but I think a lot of those interests are the the fig, like the the corporations, the fund managers, and the kind of figures who were really who worked hand in glove with the Democrats, you know, throughout the 2010s. You know, I'm thinking of people like Larry Fink uh of BlackRock, for example, uh, and the the JP, you know, the like the Jamie Diamonds of the world, right? Like the investment bank CEOs, like these are the kind of fractions of finance capital that worked very closely with the Democrats and formed and cultivated very close relationships with that party, but now have been kind of frozen out of the current, the current kind of you know, the favor of the current regime, uh, which is more on the side of the the kind of insurgent private finance that I was describing earlier, or supported by it. Um and uh they you know they hold a lot of assets that like the Bill Achmans of the world want to get their hands on, right? Like 10, you know, billions of billions of dollars of like private retirement funds, pension funds, right, that are still managed by the big asset managers. Um, you know, the private uh the private fund managers want their hands on that, on that uh catch pile. And so um Trump is is part of that part of that project to try to raise that. And so I think the the more that the more that the Trumpist project like radicalizes, the more it's pushing the kind of establishment like status quo anti, like what we used to call neoliberal capitalist interests, uh, more forcefully into the Democratic Party side, and is making kind of appeasing them and and you know, like catering to their desire to want to get back to a more stable, less erratic order of things. Um it's making that that appeal on the part of the Democrats more and more appealing. And I saw as a result, I think that like, you know, it's that desire on the part of that older fraction of the capitalist class for normality, for some kind of return to normality. And the the Democrats like kind of willingness to see that as their ticket back to power is kind of a big factor in what's like leading to the political paralysis of the Democrats, right? Like they don't they they don't see any uh self-interest in taking a more radical stand against Trumpism or in uh building stronger like connections with the base or capitalizing on the rage and the the the hatred, right, uh, for what's happening right now on the part of many liberals, right? Like people we would call normies, who are beside themselves, right, just livid with anger. The Democratic Party is not interested in capitalizing on any of that, really. They're they're not trying to oppose the the regime in any kind of um effective way, I think in large part because they're trying to triangulate with the very powerful business forces, right, that are that that are still kind of in their corner and aren't interested in any kind of like powerful um like response like that. And so, I mean, we could go back to the Biden years, right? And I mean it was, you know, he was cutting with like the CHIPS Act and the Infrastructure Act and uh all of the dynamics. I mean, he was cutting these deals through the asset managers, right? Through the big banks, like they were they were helping the administration like uh manage and organize these deals and the um as kind of like financial engineering um to make them happen. And so we can go back and you know, we can talk more about the background and all this, but like a long story short, that's what I see as like a big factor in what's preventing structurally, right? Yeah, structurally.

SPEAKER_02: 14:22

I I want to talk about three things that aren't in your analysis that I think are not there, not because you're missing them, but because they're misguided. One one, um private equity is still a form of finance capital. So despite what people thought, this is not finance capital versus uh traditional manufacturing. I don't think it ever has been, actually, but it definitely can't even wear that facade very well right now. Um, despite the the quote Margo accord notion of manufacturing and the tariff stuff. Uh if you look at what they're doing, it's decreased manufacturing. Any idiot would have figured out that it would because it makes manufacturing conditions unstable, and input export, uh, input-output costs are gonna mean that no one's going to invest in manufacturing in traditional manufacturing that way. Um, Phil Neal's work also makes it very clear that it just wouldn't do what they're saying it would do anyway, and they must know that. Like the the the you know, I'm gonna use some really annoyingly uh technical Marxist jargon, but the organic composition of of fixed capital is so high that that uh that socially necessary to labor time is really low. And even if I build mass factories, it's not gonna build, it's not gonna create a lot of jobs. And we see this in the developing world, even people taking you know Chinese development in Africa are not getting the jobs payoff that you would have gotten even 20 years ago, uh, which has also led to a misconception of people seeing China as like this, you know, traditionalist manufacturing hub, of which it is and isn't simultaneously because it's it has the same organic composition issues that everyone else does, thus, it has high youth unemployment in a supposedly communist country. Um so that that's something that's also kind of missing. So this is a this is an internal to if you think finance capital is is the big problem, this is a this is actually a competition between different kinds of finance capital. So that's one thing to point out. Another thing to point out, and I do want to maybe this is something that I do think is missing, but I do want to talk to you a little bit about it, is there does seem to be a real populist insurgency, and I put that in question in quotation marks, uh, in a faction of the Democrats that does seem to have massive amounts of consulting money now. Um, if you look at the stuff around Bernie Sanders, there's money there, there's real money there. Millions of dollars are flowing through consulting firms that came out of our revolution. Um, but it also seems to not be able to do much to counter signal here because I mean, for example, uh Sanders is going on conservative shows and talking about Trump's immigrant, uh, you know, closed borders and border stuff in a way that like sounds like a 12-year-old, honestly. And and yes, he's always believed in relative immigration controls and all that, but talking about Trump versus Biden as if Biden didn't have really strong immigration controls is really fucking funny, yeah, and he knows better. Um uh so why do you not why do you think um this kind of opposition that a whole lot of people who speak for the left, and that's also in scare quotes for people listening, uh, are buying into, even defending you know, weird former mercenaries in Maine. Um uh why is that like still whose interest is that in? Because I do think there has to be some interest within the party that sees this as a way to get some of that progressive uh function back in without doing much, and I think because the prior example of a candidates like this that were supported by Sanders were people like John Fatterman, who are are you know not supported by Sanders, but in prior about a decade prior, people like Kristen Cinema, which then actually reinforces weirdly um the standard uh mainstream Democrat view, even to these progressives who are very pissed off that they aren't doing anything, that the insurgents are actually just right-wingers in disguise, anyway. Like, what do you think the basis for that is? Because I do think we have to figure that out because that's the only place where there even is the illusion of dynamicism in the Democratic Party right now. But a lot of people that I respect seem to be fooled by it? Question mark.

SPEAKER_01: 18:57

Like, yeah, kind of like why why why people are either being fooled by it or in any case showing support for like a an agenda like Sanders, like and coming out and saying something like we need to be serious about border security, and Trump is doing it well, but still taking a kind of left populist view of things. Is that kind of what you're describing?

SPEAKER_02: 19:23

Yeah, I mean, yeah, and and and the same people that kick people out of the movement like Angela and Eagle uh you know a few years back for for this for saying basically the same thing. Now they're like, oh, but Bernie's always said this, and we stand behind them. But I I I'm not so interested in like the left logic of that. It's dumb, but that's not my point. I I'm more interested in why would the party, why would there be enough, why would there be millions of dollars being funneled for ad campaigns and and whatnot into this within the party if there wasn't some faction of capital thinking that was necessary? I'm not saying they believe in its agenda. Like uh well, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 20:05

I mean, I think it's I do think there's probably a large there is a large constituency behind like in the money backing up the the like behind the Democratic Party right now that I think is just they they they've maybe concluded that they've they're they've read the tea leaves or seen the what the writing on the wall or pick your metaphor, but uh the like the world of globalization is is gone, is is increasingly I mean the the global economy is still obviously integrated globally, like economically, like that's not that's not over, but like the the the former ideology, right, that like linked a lot of the corporate world together and the political class on both sides of the spectrum as a as a narrative that made sense about the world, that is the classic globalization narrative of yesteryear, uh they it's it no longer is meaningful. Um and or they're not buying it. And I think that like in a lot probably the the factions of capital who are behind the Democratic Party um have increasingly just come to kind of accept that accept that reality and are just like, okay, we're in a world now that is going to be increasingly uh nationalistic and border crazed, and we're going to have to make compromises, you know, because a large part of that big business coalition, um, it was always divided on immigration stuff, for example, right? Like there was always like a pretty, for a very long time, there was always like a pretty strong corporate uh lobby for immigration reform, meaning like not a current, like not uh an extremely harsh uh border security policy. And because they obviously they need undocumented labor to um to survive and to remain profitable in a lot of sectors. Um but I think they're increasingly recognizing that like the winds are shifting and and Trumpism is like driving this, right? Like as a project, um that's like the weird, like the the weird sense in which Trumpism is both like backward looking and nostalgic, but also really generative and like um fusure-oriented in the way that it's just it's it's barreling the country, indeed the world forward in this increasingly um atavistic direction, um, but reshifting and reforming all these different uh class and political alliances that we that you know our generation grew up kind of taking for granted. So so I think that there's yeah, so I think that there's been kind of an acceptance of that this this new world where this new darker and more violent and um you know border, border-accessed world that we're moving into, even by factions of the the otherwise like more cosmopolitan or international-minded uh ruling class. Um and that includes part of the the Democrat the Democratic um base as well, a democratic financial base as well. And yeah, I mean that's one that's one way I think of making a cut and and sort of getting it a question. Um but that that gets beyond like, you know, kind of like I guess we could start talking, we could get into ideological discussions about uh what is what is changing, you know, within like the the media institutions and how they are taking uh they're also following in this trend and and just framing everything in a much more like straightforwardly uh Trumpist way, even though even the so-called liberal media, like this, you know, CNNs and MSNBCs of the world, not that I mean that many people watch it anymore, but they increasingly just take Trump's rhetoric and his framing at face value when they're talking about stuff, right? And that's that's that's a difference between now and Trump one that I think is pretty important. Um yeah, just the liberal institutions in general, man, are like they're increasingly just sort of speaking in Trumpist-like terms. Right. Um, yeah, so I think that's I think that's part of it.

SPEAKER_02: 24:28

Um my my take on the Biden administration, uh, and and we'll contain to this into the media in a second, but that it did function to normalize and make large sectors of uh more traditional capitalists by traditional, actually, I only mean back into the 1980s. We're not talking about Fordism or anything. Um traditional capitalist functionaries happy by rationalizing and humanizing prior Trumpist policies from this from these various insurgencies. One thing I do want to get into though that I find interesting here, because I don't think this is about the um Trump won the popular election, so we all just have to back down narrative because I'm like yes, he barely won it, everybody's barely won it since like Obama won um uh since 2008, and even then that wasn't as overwhelming as you would have thought it would have been, given how unpopular Bush uh was in 2007. Um I mean, you were talking about a president who left office with like a 20 25 approval rate or something like terrible, um uh but who was popular for most of his presidency, kind of. Um the the Obama you know shift was a was a was a clearer win um than Trump's, but both are relatively narrow for historical norms in the United States. Um so I don't really think that's what did it. I know a lot of people do. Uh I'm not saying it's not a factor. What I think is, you know, and this comes up in your book on Endgame about economic nationalism. I mean, we are seeing a return of economic nationalism that was driven by stuff far before Trump. I mean, like Trump as a figure, if we think about this kind of figure, actually comes rather late. The US resisted this for longer than parts of Europe and parts of the periphery in Asia. And while I don't really think you can crossify Russia and China as the same phenomenon, um, they are tied into similar market phenomenons. And I think Mike Davis is like, you know, deathbed call of doom. Um like, I mean, I was just I I I have read uh that Thanos piece at Sidecar like multiple times, and I'm like, man, he called it. And oh my god, it's really good, yeah. Yeah, and I don't think people realize how dark it was. I was just like, like, I mean, it's not like you've lost, but it's pretty close to that, and there are no good guys on the horizon, but a lot of you are gonna think there are.

SPEAKER_01: 27:13

Yeah, it's it's bleak, it's bleak.

SPEAKER_02: 27:16

Um, but uh that aside, I mean, like let's try to contextualize this first by talking about this ideological shift, and then I want to go international because I I do think there's a tendency right now to be entirely state focused because we are there is a tendency on all sides to double down on nationalism at a time when state capacity seems way weaker than it's ever been, um, or not ever been, but at least the last 150 years. Um so let's talk about this and uh what you're seeing. Uh like why are why are liberals diagonal this narrative? Like, like I I listen to I try to listen to liberal stuff all the time and get into their progressive outrage, and I I follow the scandals of who's funding who and blah blah blah. And I'll even listen to the abundance and um and chorus people and all that because I need to know what liberals think, right? Um, and I've noticed that like increasingly uh if you listen to MS Now, aka M S N B C, um you still have Rachel Madow, but Rachel Maddow is no longer doing the conspiracy shit that she was doing. Um there isn't the focus on identity politics at all, even though even though there are plenty of people who are pretending that this is still somehow a major issue on the liberal left. Um uh it is in universities, but universities are archaic institutions that take decades to change.

SPEAKER_01: 28:53

So, like um and they're also trying to stamp it out.

SPEAKER_02: 28:58

Yeah, oh no, yeah, right. Uh I was about to say, with the help of government, I like like we have so many English and sociology departments that are basically in receivership right now in my state at public schools, and people are very focused on Harvard or whatever, so they're not noticing this happening. Um and and the states have been able to justify it because enrollment's down. Um, too. I mean, because people don't see it as a valid, uh a very good risk on investment. I don't know if that's entirely true yet, but I get where they're coming from. Um I guess my uh to get back to this, you know, um, what do we mean by the media now? But uh, because I I think people don't think of social media companies as media companies, and I really think they should. And two, what do we what have you seen as like like I've listed, like I mentioned with the MSNBC, they have a bunch of old neocons on who will even like play as Mandani sometimes, but are more or less still, you know, they still have a national conservative um outlook. They're just opposed to the people who call themselves national conservatives, like like, and that's that's becoming the main of the of the Democratic Party resistance. So so what does that mean and why is that happening?

SPEAKER_01: 30:21

Well, uh I think the the legacy media, right? Like the CNNs and the MSNBCs of the world, even the fox, the foxes of the world, although just keeping it uh confining ourselves just the kind of the liberal uh outlets. Like they uh it's it's you know, the media, uh the information system, the public information system has always been a privately Enterprise, um, subject to capitalist imperatives. And I mean, we can go right back, we can go all the way back to like the beginnings of the commercial newspapers in this country. And the way that those were the really like the first commercially uh viable mass media and like that began around kind of like the 1830s, 1840s, like antebello era. And uh were able to break away from the more kind of like government controlled like newspapers and pamphlets of the time, which were the dominant, the dominant media of the time, through the you know, through the capitalist model, through a profit-driven uh model of expansion. And uh in in the US context, right, that took on like as the news media, as the as the capitalist news media grew into one of the main pillars of liberal society and government, they developed this kind of in-house ideology, right? That was kind of like empiricist and positivist. But uh it was, it was, it was, let's put it this way, it was like a it was like an empiricist version of impartiality, right? Like we're just gonna report the facts, we're not gonna be partisan, we're not going to be um ideological, although of course empiricism is and positivism is deeply ideological, but that's not they weren't operating on that level. Um, and that became the kind of house ideology of of journalism, of news, of of those, of the news institutions in this country, right? And uh that that whole I mean I mean that paradigm sort of held you know through the uh late 19th century, up through the 20th century, you know, in the era through the era of the great newspapers, through the era of the television, you know, the coming of TV. Um and then even in the early years of the internet, uh, that sort of that professional, the professionalized sense of journalism and of news as a public service, right? That even though it's capitalist, even though it's a business, it has a public obligation, you know, to to get something right about the world, uh, was very was still was still very strong. But over the last you know, 20 or so years, under the pressures of profit crises and corporate consolidation, and you know, the need to find a new business model, and then the coming, of course, of social media, um, which is a whole other kind of like a whole other level of private owner, of like monopolized private ownership, um, that now is increasingly driven by right-wing fanaticism, right? Especially in the case of like something like Twitter, which has been transformed into just basically like a Nazi chat forum. I mean, that's barely an exaggeration. Uh, and so the I mean, just the the information environment under the pressures of this rapid technological change and crises of profitability and business viability uh has just been degraded so dramatically that um now the and taken over by you know the the algorithm or the technology that they call the algorithm, uh which, like I was saying earlier, kind of trades in histrionic, um queuing up historianic responses in in the way that is most likely to gin up more more clicks and more ad revenue. And um it's kind of yeah, it's kind of like this unholy like marriage of these different economic, technological, and and cultural factors coming together that has just totally degraded and destroyed the the information environment. I mean, to the point that like the news institutions, they don't really, you know, they don't really care about uh that old ideal of impartiality, of objectivity and reporting, of keeping things not ideological. They're openly partisan, right? And so like I think that's happening, uh that's that's that's happening on both sides of the spectrum, so to speak. And um, I think it's contributing to a broader breakdown of liberal liberalism as a as a coherent philosophy and intellectual outlook in the world, basically. I mean, they have no more, they don't they they don't really have a a strong intellectual basis uh to criticize um Trumpism anymore. That's part of why they don't have any sort of strong intellectual or or or basis and conviction to criticize Trumpism anymore, because um, you know, central institutions like the news and media have essentially just collapsed as functional, you know, informate information providers and recyclers of information for the public. Um and so as the public is is degraded, right, like intellectually and ideologically, the institutions begin to reflect that and begin to just give back to them this this more like raw and unprocessed and um yeah, emotionally charged kind of messaging um in place of the old model. And so um that went further back into sort of history than I originally intended, but that's like that's part of how I understand the the long breakdown of the of the information of the public you know information uh environment in this country and how it's feeding uh the it's it's like it's it's such a huge part of what is making Trumpism so effective as a political movement, you know, is is the the this this transformation in the form of how people consume information, I'll put it that way.

SPEAKER_02: 36:43

Yeah, I I think this is uh yeah, liberals talk about this about like the conservative takeover of like TikTok and and Instagram and Twitter being obvious. Uh, but I also think Blue Sky is interesting too because it caters to people who like to pretend we're somehow in the eternal spring of 2016. Um I I think you you're dead on here. And I and I I've actually thought a lot about this. Um, one of the things I've noticed is that uh the turn towards sort of uh for lack of a better term, I'm gonna not be particularly Marxist in my phrasing here, but highly emotivist forms of social justice with vague identity categories, uh that we often call woke, uh, which dealt with, and I want to also be clear, some very real concerns. I am not saying this was all manufactured, but drove a lot of the response to uh the partisanization of conservative media, which was driven large by by certain kinds of business interests that used to be more like the Koch brothers and Sunbelt development, um, which you saw a little bit more in the first Trump coalition than you do now. Um uh and I find I found that people didn't contextualize that with any materialist analysis, that they just, you know, the wokism was a problem that emerged from the universities, right? But no, there was no real explaining why did the New York Times ever fuck with that shit in the first place, and why did it become so dominant? And one, I I don't know how much stock you put into this, but I am a believer in the overproduction of elites, and it's not something that's that is uh strictly speaking from Marxism. But but I do think that's part of it. But the other part is they needed a way to capture certain audiences and build in um what we might call um collective action problems for for audiences to leave. Because if if you made it like you were signaling a social allegiance change, it made changing your reading habits uh a seemingly political act. And this goes back to something you said earlier. Politics is everywhere right now, first and foremost, on every on every part of society, and yet I'm just gonna say it, we have less effect over politics than we ever fucking had. I mean, not ever, but like since liberal democracy probably developed and had full enfranchisement, like um, yeah, and I find that like like fascinating because people are confronted with politics all the time and and think they're involved in it, but can't really actually do much because they can't materially contribute that much, or if they do, they do so and such aggregate like with the Obama or the Bernie Sanders campaign, where you might help people raise millions of dollars, but you have no savor where that goes or how it's used, or if it's even used to fucking elect the candidates you want elected. Um, you know, and no, people are like, oh, well, it's not making AOC or Bernie Sanders or Kamal Harris or who would fuck ever rich. And I'm like, no, but it's going into a massive concert uh consulting infrastructure that is making people rich, just probably not the candidates. Um I say this because all this to me seems tied together in a general you know crisis uh of these forms of capital. Because honestly, it doesn't make that much sense that media ownership was ever profitable. Um, like as a commodity, it's easily reproduced, um, particularly now as a physical commodity, it's uh it was actually studying the media that got me to believe that there was something to labor theory of value, which I think people will find surprising because many Marxists in quotations scholars will do this and they become like Jodie Dean and talk about how labor theory of value is just not operable and whatever, and then they go off on some tangent and end up talking about how we're in feudalism or what um but uh I I looked at it and I was like, Oh, look, no, the labor costs for for uh newspapers and other forms of media, magazines, etc. books have gone down as those labor costs have gone down. There's been intensification of organic capital, socially necessary necessary labor time drops, and I hate to tell you, but without rents, they're not profitable. Just flat out. I mean, you I am contracted to write a book, you write a book, uh, you've written a book. I used to work for zero books, so I know the publishing model. Do you have any idea how little money fucking publishing companies make? It's pathetic.

SPEAKER_01: 41:35

Like that's no assumption, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 41:38

Right, like like um, and it's basically kept uh kept afloat because of academic and our social control reasons, if I'm completely honest. Like it's a form of social reproduction management, effectively. Um, and it's not really that expensive to do anymore, so why not? But it's not a profitable business uh at scale. Um anything but like, you know, even people who who talk about things like I don't know, the the role-playing book industry or something that's completely frivolous but might be profitable, and that's not about social control. You're still dealing with people who run shops that are way tinier and way more petite bourgeois, actually, than most people realize, because you just don't need to run big things anymore. Um, but broadcast media is even weirder because, like, I don't I I've always been like that's only been ever profitable because of monopolization. That's like that's the only way that was ever profitable. It's a rent-seeking thing, it's always been a rent seeking thing since day one. That's actually part of why things like the F uh the FCC exist and are able to influence it because it requires government involvement to be rent-seeking in a way that the traditional, and by this I do mean like 19th century, uh early modern publishing industry were actually profitable. Uh that never was going to be pace for broadcast media. And this brings us to the social media. And I guess this brings me to a big crush, and then we'll switch to the international outlook. Um, when you talked about the the people aligned with with Trump and the Democrats, we the elephant in the room is the tech giants were very much at the end of Trump won on the side of traditional capital and the Democrats, of traditional finance capital and the Democrats. That was clear, you know. Even Musk, uh, and they were always ideological weirdos people, but that you know, that's not the point. They thought it was in their interest to play with the Democratic Party versus whatever old coalition that Trump was putting together and Trump won. That clearly isn't true now, and they are acting more like uh private equity venture capital firms. Um uh and I guess I at first I interpreted it as they wanted to kick the ladder down of competition, which I still think is partly true. Um, that since if you know anything about these companies, like Elon Musk would not be the world's richest person if SpaceX had not gotten a contract from the Obama administration, it's just a flat out proof. Like Tesla didn't do it. Um Peter Teal would not be as important as he is if he wasn't uh pedaling a surveillance stuff to states, and and there is a way that in which these like seemingly um you know, talk about we I guess we talk about the contradictions of neoliberalism because it because seemingly anti-neoliberal and that they're anti-globalization, but pro-neoliberal and that they're pro-propriate partnerships like crazy while pretending that they're mostly laissez-faire or whatever. Um uh is an indication of some major shift, but uh I'll I'll I'll uh telegraph where where I'm going with this and give you a little bit from both in-game and in reading the work of uh a professor Alami in the Netherlands about state capitalism, uh, which I started getting into when I was reading Brennan Riley's by uh Biden uh Bidenism uh DCs, which most of which are wrong, except for one thing, um, that that we lived in an area of low profitability, and that low profitability was leading to um political decisions actually mattering for economic decisions and a straight up rents and patronage record uh network, uh, despite the fact that you were hearing everyone say that we were having record profits, and this is why I brought that up in the beginning. So, how is that related to why the tech giants, even ones that have I said some of them still have vaguely liberal inclinations in the small L sense? Um, why did they all line up and kiss the ring? I mean, you're like musk and teal that makes sense both materially and otherwise. But people like Bezos and Zuckerberg are harder to explain.

SPEAKER_01: 45:58

Yeah, uh, or like Mark Andreessen. Yeah, right. Um, yeah, who who definitely I think is in this who is certainly in this camp. I think I think that the Biden administration experience for them was a kind of crucible in in some in certain ways. Uh I think that the um so it's the end of the pandemic, right? There's a restoration of what seems like you know normality at the time. People are breathing a sigh of relief or whatever, and the um a lot of the capitalist class was sort of you know happy to you know, January January 6th happened, you know, whatever we're putting all that behind us. Um just water under the bridge, right? Let's move forward with sleepy Joe. But I think the so it's you know, Silicon Valley has had a series, like a recent history of uh of failed next big things, right? Um in the early 2010s, it was like the big data revolution, and then it was like a web 3.0 or whatever, and then it's and then it's virtual reality, and then it's the metaverse, and then it's crypto, and then it's NFTs. And all of these big things that were supposed to be the next like the next iPhone, right? Uh, and just deliver untold expansionary growth that like remakes economic life and social life, right? And creates whole new um domains for for revenue generation, uh, just did not materialize, right? It was just one failure after another. And uh of course, we had the big crypto you know bust with Sandbankman uh freed uh going to jail in under Biden's term. And it was also right around then that of course the LLMs entered the public discussion and uh they decided to make this into the big AI revolution, right? That was going to really be the next big thing uh for the valley uh for the oligarchs. And so uh that happened and also the Silicon Valley Bank breakdown or collapse, I should say, uh happened. That was huge, right? No one even remembers that now, but that was like an enormous collapse that had most of Silicon Valley wondering how they were gonna continue to operate, like after it broke down, because it was so central to the venture capital model uh that drives the valley's like ideology and economy. And so they were scared shit. Let's buy it. Um, and so AI is you know is in the mix and it's being seen as the next big thing. That big bank collapse happens. Uh and also at the same time, though, you have the Biden administration beginning to talk very mildly about like regulating you know these new AI technologies and you know making them safe to use or whatever. He's still like full speed ahead. We're gonna build all the data centers, like we're gonna, you know, um be the world leader in this technology. But he's they're just you know, the administration is just making these little tiny little gestures towards regulation, and that's enough to um totally like freak out right the uh the the venture capital and investor class from the valley, um, who increasingly were wanting to put all their chips in this, right, as like as as their as their big break. And so they were really freaking out about this during the Biden years, and going back to what you were bringing up about the you know the the place of so-called woke um thinking in all of this, like they and Dressen himself has that interview in the New York Times where he's narrating like this really traumatic experience where they were talking about AI and his his stupid uh venture capital firm. And like one of his workers got up and was like, I don't think it's okay how much of how much damage this has on the environment, right? Like I we shouldn't be pursuing this. Like, you know, this is this is bad for the for the planet and for our society. And uh and and it was like he had, you know, there were across across um these tech corporations, right? There was like people like workers that were organizing and were speaking out and were, you know, these are mostly college-educated, like um professional, uh like software engineers, programmers, and so on in the tech industry, but they're increasingly becoming sort of class conscious and speaking up about things and confronting right these little petty tyrants of you know uh private tech capital. And this was really traumatizing for them, uh, apparently. And um, I think that is a big, a big factor in what pushed them to the right is was this turbulence among their workers. Um and again, they're on the record talking about this. And so I think it was a combination, I think it was sort of a combination of those things that that pushed them into the Trump camp. Um, in addition to the prospect of also, of course, um the like you know, the the new defense startups like Anderil, Palantir, etc., uh kind of really salivating at the prospect of getting plugged directly into the defense budget, right? And Trump's people, oh yeah, like 100%. Massively. Like, yeah, they're they they again, it was about like uh, you know, brush Trump is gonna let them brush aside the monopoly incumbents, right? Like for them to break in, they had to get like the Lockheeds and the you know the Northrop, the the Northrop Grummons uh and the Boeings like kind of to the side so that they could start distributing the contracts to the new to the to the newcomers, and that's exactly what they've been doing. And so um, and so we could get into you know how the whole crisis of you know temp capitals itself a symptom of the declining health and vigor of the the capitalist system more broadly, which it is. But like speaking locally, that's kind of how I read the binary.

SPEAKER_02: 52:45

So um I do want to get into that because uh I've been baffled by this idea that they're gonna bring back high rates of profitability without massive without a massive state, which they are set simultaneously gutting. Um uh because um uh weirding Alami's work, uh it seems very clear we're in a period of state capital development, one that we haven't seen since since the the early 20th century. And at the same time, we do not have the state capacity of the early 20th century, despite all the surveillance stuff and and everything like that. One of the things that I have I've told people about like their fears about Trump is I'm like Trump can might destroy the republic, and liberalism is probably dead anyway, even if he doesn't. Um, but uh guys, he can't occupy half the country with with with just ice or even with the military, like they don't have that capacity, they could do it with drones, but then you start getting into like you do that and you start provoking count. I mean, you're talking about some of the richest states in the country and some of the and thus some of the richest areas in the world, just allowing that to happen. I doubt it. Um, so and also I've read some stuff out of Congress that indicates that they know that. Um, so it it I've tried to figure out what this is about in a more you know, as much as I hate populism, and that's a different debate, but because I think it's also a technology of of control right now, but um uh just taking a more populist, like, okay, what other functions does this actually serve? Because the whole liberal fear and maybe even Trump statement that they're gonna deploy the National Guard of all 50 states, and if they do it, and it most likely would lead to a civil war, which would be very bad for all forms of capital, no matter what. Even even the venture capitalist firms would have a hard time profiting off of that, um uh because it would basically destroy the dollar. Uh so I I am at a I have been really trying to figure that that part of this out, and uh what I've figured is this. Um, this does create instability, which allows for more and more of these insurgents to insert themselves and get more and more control of a of a balkanized internally federal government, uh, even if it's it it risks it does risk the thing that I just said. And the reason why that's important is if you factor out the internal loop of NVIDIA chips and server farming, uh, you have this paradox where the most valued company in the world, open AI, is openly unprofitable. Um, but its only way to become profitable is to somehow, and now this is also to me a vindication of Marxism and actually concerns some of my doubts about Marxism in the past, believe it or not. Um uh somehow get bring profitability to the older forms of the economy, that's their promise, that's their eventual payout. Otherwise, they're just sucking, otherwise, just a massive wealth transfer that eventually will have to stop. And if you take out the NVIDIA server farm builds and the power energy usage related to that making energy companies more profitable, what you see is you are in no or negative growth in most of the economy, and you have been since about 2003, and definitely in the last year.

SPEAKER_00: 56:44

Um absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 56:46

Um, and even even the purveyors of the bubble are saying it's a bubble. Only people like Derek Thomas over at the abundance area of the Democrats are trying to like spin this in a way that it isn't. Um, I mean, Sam's got to admit it's a bubble.

SPEAKER_01: 57:03

Like, I know I was gonna say they just have they have fewer, yeah, yeah, they have fewer and fewer like defenders these days, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 57:11

Right, including themselves. I mean it's just been like this has been openly like I mean when you have Sam Altman saying that we're gonna focus on on deep fate porn and and other things as our means to profitability. I'm like, so you're an addiction mechanism, and that's all you got. Now, I don't mean to tell you that that despite what people think about illicit drug use, it's not actually in the broad schedule super a super profitable industry. That's why it hasn't been legalized. Uh and its profitability is actually based on it being illegal, but whatever. Um, uh, because constant demand doesn't actually mean what you think it means. Um, and so I the reason why I say this vindicates me is because from a Marxist perspective, investments in fixed capital like this will only ever lead to temporary profitability booms, but then they'll lower the profit bar lower and lower and lower over time as market competition kicks back in. And the only way to offset that is monotony power, right? Which people uh which I think is what people are mistaking for futilism. Um like yeah, um, but that involves massive state investment investment, and basically we have you know the oil export war model that you see in parts of the sim uh what we might call the the semi-developed world. I hate these terms, but uh you know, Russia, Mexico, uh Mexico's not on a war model, but it's doing the same thing. Um uh export economies, particularly in Ron process resources. Um, Mexico is transitioning to a process resources model when it has been for the last 20 years, and uh, but and which may explain some of its own kind of lefty middle century internal dynamics, actually, uh, which would make our left populist friends a little bit uncomfortable because that's gonna imply that's gonna end eventually. Um uh but um then you have the China model, which uh which is um intense and state involvement, uh authoritarian, but with some significant social safety net and payoff, uh but you know, not not as generous as even mid-century social democracy in a Nordic country, but it you know it it does have that, um uh to deal with its lower growth rate, which you know, the elephant in the room is I just see people promising less and less on the Chinese growth rate and then calling it like super high. And I'm like, yeah, five percent is good, you know, but we were at that two years ago. Um, and uh, but they still have a very high loof youth unemployment weight, there's still a decreasing um uh manufacturing problem, and that's not even dealing with the massive demographic decline they're about to hit because they like most of the developed world have a demographic bomb that's going off now, right? Right, um, and so while I do see them as the most responsible state capitalist or capitalist power, and I mean that positively, and I do think they're a real socialist in China. That's not my point. Um, I don't see that as a viable exportable model to the world, and they don't seem to either, actually, which I've pointed out. Um they're not making that a condition of like joining BRICS or Like um the BRICS is not the fifth international people, like it's just not. Um, so so if China has problems, they're just way less terminal than ours, um, and yours problems actually seem more terminal than ours, uh, which is something that um their power dependency. I mean, to me, whenever I'm like, oh, the US is turning into Argentina, sorry, Argentina, I shouldn't insult you like that, but but uh then I look at Britain, I'm like, well, Britain's doing that even faster than we are. Um, and that's despite uh, you know, return of liberal uh return of labor, excuse me, government liberal, um, doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Um uh Corbynism doesn't matter, none of that's had any effect. Um, the the popular rhetoric around left populism increasing worldwide has had almost no zero, no policy effects anywhere. Um you could argue, oh, it has in Brazil, kind of, but it's mostly doing developmental management, and in uh Mexico, it's doing responsible developmental management, fine, sure, and true. Um, but I don't know how long that's gonna phase shift into you know mid-century social democracy or anything. So taking this internationally, this profitability crisis seems real, and it's hard to forget people to swear because they are taking stock profits, which are not really profits, um, in and of themselves. I mean, they can be, but the but stock profits as somehow indicative of a productive economy that is producing massive profits and it's just corporate greed. And that just doesn't seem true if you actually look at the bottom line, um, except in this weird loop around NVIDIA chips and server forms and and and the AI thing, which does seem like it's about to blow up, and it will be massive when it does. Um but what do you think there?

SPEAKER_01: 1:03:00

It's gonna be just it's gonna be really ugly when it does. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh, I mean, I think that like because the the you know asset appreciation, stock profits, like you know, capital gains, like the appreciation, in other words, the appreciation of right, the price of assets, like from the time you buy them to the time you sell them, it has become so central to just the way that everyone thinks about um you know business vigor and wealth and profitability in general. Because the because the stock market had it plays such an outsized role in like the political imagination in this country, and even among right, certainly Trump, it's always like the one of the main things he's thinking about, right? Is the health of the market. And so I think it's it's kind of yeah, it's it's kind of natural for people to kind of see that and just conclude that, well, look, it's going, you know, it's going bananas. Like, you know, profits have literally never been higher. Like the SP has to be a record every two weeks or something, um, without distinguishing between right, well, capital gains are one thing, and um profits that allow for the broader expansion of the uh international productive economy, right, uh, are another. And then we can, of course, you know, if we want to take the Marxian point of view, we can point out that, and in fact, the production of surplus value is something different for both of those, right? And it is like a deeper level of abstraction. Um that yeah, you know, in my book and in my work, I I try to make the point uh I try to show it's like analytical power, right? Um, but but yeah, I mean it's it it's very hard. And I also agree Alami is a fantastic contemporary, you know, Marxian theorist. I love his work on state capitalism. He and his co-authors, by the way, there's a few of them over there who are working in like Europe, who are working on state capitalism right now, uh, who are doing who are doing really great work. And yeah, it's it's uh it's very it's very clear that we're dealing with this transnational or in that international shift into a stage of capitalism in which you know states, national states are not only taking a more hands-on interventionist managed directly managerial like um approach to their national, like formerly private economies. They're also increasingly taking larger government stakes in their economy, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:05:46

Um, the rise of sovereign wealth funds, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:05:49

Yeah, yeah, sovereign wealth funds or the treasury, the Department of Defense here, right? Taking taking shares in like the railroads company um and in Intel, right? Uh I think it was the Treasury that took a took a share in Intel, a big share in Intel a few weeks ago. And uh, I mean, so even right Trumpism again, like as this generative historical force, just like, you know, we're gonna throw the neoliberal playbook out the window to start just start buying companies with the government um for their national strategic objectives, whatever, blah blah, however they rationalize it. But uh the point being is that they feel like they have nothing left to lose, right? Like that like Intel is a term is a massive failure, right? Like they've completely been left behind in the international semiconductor and like sort of like manufacturing and AI and like chip design race, like they just have totally failed. And so uh the you know, the government is increasingly just like whatever, we just we have we have to try to do something, right, to stay competitive in this space. Uh, because like you were saying, like with the profitability, I mean, because it is increasingly difficult for uh these for these national governments to secure the like the like the a vigorous expansion of the private capitalist economy in a way that you know would allow for to kind of broad, widely shared growth uh that would stabilize the country, right? That's always first first and foremost on their minds, sort of like balancing the needs of accumulation versus the needs to stabilize the country. Uh they're increasingly just throwing the rule back rule book out the window. Um, but also they're they're like that's kind of like a classical framing, right? The way that like state like sort of state theorists and and Marxists thought about it in the 70s was like there was, you know, the capitalist state faces a trade-off between you know fostering the accumulation of capital, removing the barriers to private investment and expansion, and maintaining their domestic legitimacy, right? Their political legitimacy as liberal democratic uh states. And it's increasingly evident with Trumpism, with not just Trumpism, but that is maybe the most visible example that they're willing to just throw out the window the whole legitimacy part of that, right? Right by securing, like in some sort of liberal democratic sense of like we are, you know, we're we're an administration that governs for the whole country, right? Um, in the way that Bush or Reagan or Ernie would have talked about it, they just that that has been completely discarded, and it's now, you know, they now are explicitly presenting themselves as a partisan occupying force, you know, to the public. Right. Um to their to to their well to their to their audience, but also you know, to the the audience of the people they hate on the liberal side. Right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:08:52

And the people they just run over, which I do think uh leads people to like this is why people assume this is gonna be like an uh authoritarian hyper Trump Reich, which I'm like there are many, many problems, but I'm I'm actually not really super worried about uh the brumare of an 80-year-old. Um uh because the one thing I will say is even with amongst this uh petty proprietor uh slash well, even calling them petty proprietors a little bit confusing. Private equity slash uh some petty proprietors you know, whatever we see now, because it um uh it seems clear to me that like once this Trumpist coalition is not maintained by Trump, these policies will probably be expanded by someone else, but the political coalition will immediately go to war with itself, like um because this moment of exception cannot be maintained forever. That's always true for moments of exceptions. That's why they're moments of exception. Um, and that's also, I mean, maybe we're beginning to see that on the left in quotation marks, uh, too, because um it's very clear that the donor class is realizing that it can't, even though it's incentivized everyone to do nothing, it actually can't maintain that for very long and have any pretense of public legitimacy. Um, now you've made this critique uh someone with very different politics from yours, but someone whose work on the politics is I like Benjamin Studebaker has talked about there is a worldwide general crisis of public legitimacy in any democracy on the planet. Um, like it is not just here. Um, part of that he blames capital flight and a few other things that he doesn't think you can easily fix. Um, which is by the way, why I think most of the left populism slash left populism is also usually left nationalism, as Bernie Sanders has made very clear. Um, I think that's doomed. I think even if it won, it would not work. Um, and I and I I wanted to get your take on that because yeah, I mean, things like a Green New Deal and universal health care would be good. That's not that's not something that I would even oppose if it happened. I don't think there's the actual capital basis are wealth for that, um, and the way that they do, like they seem to have been confused on this, and then I actually want to use this to pivot on the like in your most recent article for the political row, you talk about um theoretical regressions, because I do think we've seen a ton of them, and I want to go into some of them on the actual left. Um but uh what do you make of that? I mean, would a left populist vision like that even be possible? It seems like they can't really do it in social democratic Europe, but what do you think?

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:58

I mean, this country like can't even you know fix like it can't even fix its roads and and and bridges and this public infrastructure. We can't get a functioning train system in our major cities, like you know, we can't run uh a functional like air traffic controllers that like the planes and helicopters are like crashing, you know, falling out of the sky.

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:22

And that was before Trump, by the way. It was getting before Trump.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:26

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. These are long-standing issues. We can't fund our, you know, like or at least we don't fund like our our education system at all. Yeah. Nearly what it needs to be. Yeah, I mean, um it's it it's hard, it's hard to envision uh how this would just be a matter of like a voluntary change, yeah, just a just a switch of will. Like, okay, we haven't been funding these things, now we will. Um in part because, I mean, there's a number of there's a number of aspects to this we could get into. I think like the the suicide state piece kind of gets into it a little bit, but um you know, there was another old debate that used to be on the Marxist left uh around state theory in the 60s and 70s, which was around like how you know transportation and education and like public goods are an overhead cost ultimately for private capital. Right. But they but they are one that the capitalists uh had historically been led to support because it led to better circulation of values, circulation of capital, the reproduction of labor power more effectively, right? Like more productive workforce. Um it led to a more overall just a more productive and efficient economy to have like these functional, like um this functional infrastructure, right, for um for society, even if it was, even if it was an overhead cost at the end of the day. And uh over the last you know, 50 years, it's just been a progressive dislike shipping away and dismantling of that whole that whole network and that whole sense of like um of of public of funding public infrastructure for the good of private accumulation. Um, that yeah, I think it's not it's not really a matter anymore of being like, yes, it's like the Green New Deal. Obviously, that is like we need, of course, that's what we need, right? Like we need some kind of like massive overhaul of the the whole energy and and urban and transportation infrastructure in a post-carbon economy. Um but uh it it hits, it just clashes with this hard reality that like um the ruling class, right, the capitalist class is no longer willing to fit the bill. I'm sorry, to uh foot the bill for these kinds of for these kinds of social and environmental infrastructure costs. And we had this idea in the 2010s that you know, okay, if we elect Sanders and we elect AFC, you know, we develop like a critical mass of elected representatives who share this point of view in Congress and with a sympathetic president, like, okay, yeah, maybe we could policy our way into this, right? Um, but I think that the the I I mean that put it in other interviews, like policy is sort of over, um, in the sense of like in that sense, right? Like we're gonna be able to write some kind of you know, encompass like like really ambitious, like Congress, right? And it's like and its lawyers and its its lobbyists and the NGOs are going to be able to collaborate on some kind of massive legislation, uh legislative overhaul like that. Um, I just think the state, like you mentioned earlier, you know, it's being actively dismantled. Um congressional and executive leadership is just there's the vision is not there. Um they they can't see past you know tomorrow, much less next quarter or like you know, 10 years down the road. Um that kind of long-term strategic vision has been completely demolished. And the ruling class just isn't interested in it, fundamentally, you know. And um, I think it would bankrupt them to uh to undertake this kind of massive um investment. And they so it's kind of like we're in this you can call it chicken and egg or a circular um problematic, but it's like you know, if we talk about something like implementing the Green New Deal, it's like we're sort of already presupposing like a major rebalance of class power from yeah, away from the capitalist class and towards you know the mass of laborers and workers and the working class. Um and that presupposes very like a coherent, like you know, recomposed working class, a class conscious working class, like one capable of acting in and for itself. And um so yeah, I think it's like it just it it brings up all of these questions around um around politics and strategy that I feel like is we were kind of overlooking in the 2010s for the the nice kind of like policy, clean policy idea of it, right? And I don't want to say that like you know, the people who wrote about that, um who are writing about the Green New Deal and those kinds of ideas had a kind of like Pollyanna-ish sense of what it was gonna be. Uh, but I do think that that that model of like like intervening and entering Congress and the executive in order to carry it out, like I think that ship has failed. And yeah, um, it's it's it's I think that part of the the idea is launch a thousand fetterments.

SPEAKER_02: 1:18:05

Um it is very much is right. Uh the the I mean there's a couple parts this I want to I want to zoom in on, and then we'll pivot to the idea to the left theory ideology problem, right? But one of them is like not only do I think it would bankrupt them in terms they don't have the profitability and actual profits to do it, two the left also doesn't recognize, and I hear this all the time. I'm like, oh you know, with the amount we're spending on X, um say the military, we would uh we could have universal healthcare in a week. And I'm like, for about a week, and also you are not factoring the downstream cost other than just the nominal monetary bill because you don't fucking know what money really is. Um uh and you know uh what I create, I critique your tariff piece. I agreed with 90% of it, but I said that you know what I think we have to be careful of is assuming you know, even though we measure this in and monetary values, we aren't dealing with commodity backed money or even simple credit money that Marx was writing about, and that's just a fact. Um, but that has led people to believe uh that we could just print our way into re I mean if you if you were to look at like the most vulgar forms of modern monetary theory as a policy prescription, not as a description of the way fiat currency works. Um, the idea is we could print our way to a jobs guarantee, and and it the ruling class would be okay with it because they're not getting taxed. And I was like, what do you think taxation is about? Who like this is about power, and like even you know that. Like, so why would they ever do that? That would be giving up their power over the over the class. But in addition to that confusing the expression for the thing, um, because even modern monetary theorists realize that what's actually at stake is production. If you actually really push on them, they know that. Um, they know it's what you said, they know it's production, but but they sort of think that liquidity is the only thing at hand for for increasing production. But then I'm like, but for your stuff to work, it isn't just a way that'll be captured by investment capital. You're gonna have to have state capacity planners on the well, which we didn't even see at Gauss plan to make sure you invest this correctly. Um and sorry, the Soviets couldn't do it, and they are better they were objectively better at this than you. Um uh, so I don't know what you know how that was going to go because I'm like, okay, so you want you want us to to targetedly intervene through um I want to say on on healthcare. One uh the people will bring up the Nordic and the British, actually, the British system is probably the most socialized in the world. Um and it's is internally falling apart. Um uh the the issues in Canada, which is still way more generous than the United States, but it always looks better because the United because you know if the United States didn't exist, they'd have to invent it so that their own problems wouldn't be visible. Um but like provisional uh pro provincial, not provisional, provincial funding of um of National Health Service in Canada is becoming a crisis because they can't provincially um keep it up with costs. I mean, that's that's a true thing. It's way more generous than what we're doing by leaps and bounds, but it's it is uh a truth, uh, a real thing. And I hate to tell people, I've been to countries in Latin America that do have socialized medicine that you would not want. Mexico has socialized medicine, you have to bring your own needles, right? Like, um, and I'm not joking, and I don't say this to disparage Mexico. I love the country, it's just true, and most Americans don't know that they just have so they hear we could spend this amount of money and get this thing, and then the other thing they don't think about uh and Gabriel Wynant's work actually is helpful for this, is that the jobs complex that's gonna be kind of keeping the cities alive, is a privatized health industry that keeps the spouses of former um blue-collar production workers employed, which basically holds the entire city together. There's a reason why Chicago and Detroit and these areas have more these massive healthcare systems that are also not particularly integrated. Um, and places in the in the mountain west either don't have them or they have more integrated ones like we have here in Utah, um, because it's not it's it wasn't the same kind of works project to to fill up a post uh a deindustrial base, right? And I guess the the last thing to look at before we get into this is like, and your work actually does touch on this. The idea that we're not productive is false. We're the second largest producer of uh manufactured goods on the planet. We sometimes get overtaken by the EU, aka Germany, but um not recently, and yet that has not led to anything because of these, you know, uh organic composition problems that you've talked about, Phil Neil's talked about, um, uh, that have just made this developmental path not as possible.

unknown: 1:23:42

Right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:23:43

But there are so many people after Occupy who are path dependent on this 2010s thinking, um, who I kind of think are being used, frankly, um uh that don't want to deal with that. I guess maybe one more thing before we pivot is is uh your point about about the the Sanders Workers project. It's similar. I've actually made the point, it's perfectly circular. Support us to create national policies that would bring the workers' movement into being, but we need the workers' movement to exist so that you can bring us into office to do that, right? Like, that's it's what they're actually like just put it in very simple terms that's what they're doing, that's what they've been advocating for for 15 years. And I've I've had to argue with people in the people in the right of the DSA and in the center of the DSA about this. Where I'm like, okay, so if you guys are are are doing so well, you've created a bunch of union staffers, I know many of them personally, but uh the unions are still declining because okay, you want to make a big deal about the the the UAW. That's in one of the most devastated economic fields in the United States. It's not like the auto industry has done very well since 2001, actually. I mean, like maybe since the 70s, right? Like, so you're banking on a a renewed workerism in a field that's dying that had that and the UAW's been having to go like organized TAs to grow, and they haven't tried to do what you would think makes sense uh to go down into like the other things related to the auto industry, like the ununionized uh service sector, the ununionized uh auto parts distributor sector, etc. etc. etc. And the reason why is those are franchised and can't easily be unionized in any significant sense. They're not in an industrial model, so you can't really do it. Um, public services are closer to an industrial model, although not really, but at least they involve massive amounts of people and and singular institutions, so that's where you go, even though like that doesn't actually make sense from the purview of the UAW's jurisdiction or needs, or like how are you going to represent the interest of TAs and auto manufacturer uh workers? Um uh that that doesn't make sense, and and these just are not looked at because I think it it really hurts any idea of what left populism could be. Um but I wanted to get your take on that and what you think, how you that might relate to this theoretical regression.

SPEAKER_01: 1:26:30

Yeah, it's it's really shock. It's well, it it shouldn't be shocking, but I still feel surprised every time I see the Jacobin article arguing that like uh yeah, like workerist Sanders style populism is still the way to go. We just gotta get all the woke stuff out of it, right? Uh non-DEI. And it's just like, guys, like, you know, we tried this twice and it didn't work both times, and you know, it might be time to move on. And um there, I mean, all the contradictions you know you were describing and like the would-be base for this project is is totally right on. Like it's you know, I UAW in particular, I know, has been having like a lot of I mean when you're when you're organizing what remains of the industrial worker base and and TAs and RAs and like lawyers, like all in the same, you know, all in the same union. Um yeah, it's it's like it it it's it's very difficult to to form that into a coherent political subject. And um you don't you yeah, you don't see you just you just don't see them very often reckoning or grappling with that. I mean, I think it's weird because there's this like doubling down on this vision in these parts of the left right now, even as as we've been talking about throughout the conversation, the actual capacities of the state to like organize and man to not even to to envision something like this, never mind organize and manage it effectively in like a you know technic technocratic way is just being sapped away by the day, you know?

SPEAKER_02: 1:28:17

And I mean we don't even have the skills for it anymore. I mean, I mean that literally, like we don't know how to do it now. Yeah, right, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:25

We wouldn't know where to start. We wouldn't know where to start, you know, and uh I mean we have at the same time this concentrating concentration of power around the executive office, right? And I think the you know, the build-out of uh ICE and Border Patrol, which is now like the sixth or seventh largest army in the world or will be in a few years, um, by personnel and funding, and the tariffs, right, which are meant, at least in the way that they frame them, um are meant to kind of replace in part the you know the income that would be brought in from income taxes, particularly from corporate income taxes and the very wealthy. Um and indeed, like the tariffs have been bringing in like pretty significant revenue that is gonna be difficult for the next regime, you know, the next government, whoever it is, if there is another election, uh, to just say, okay, we're not doing that anymore, right? Um like this big slush fund from the tariff revenues is is we're just gonna give that away and stop doing it. So it's it feels like these like these massive institutional transfer, you know, changes are being baked in, almost putting us on this trajectory for more personalistic, like executive, like powerful executive, extremely weak Congress, extremely weak legislative branch. Um and that these trends are going to be continuing, you know, regardless of what the administration is, the next administration is that comes in. And that is being um that that's happening while we're seeing this, yeah, this like this stronger, reinforced call for the essentially just the 2010, you know, standards, standard style vision for nationalized everything. Um uh, but without woke. And so yeah, it's like it's a weird paradox, and um, I think it's related to what I talk about in the Suicide State essay, uh which a lot of which is concerned with um sort of exactly this problem, right? Like the in that essay, I sort of get at it through, you know, with like Adam Two's and Latour, you know, these two figures, which I'm happy to chop it up about about them if you like.

SPEAKER_02: 1:30:40

But I would like I would like that because Latour LaCour is not a figure that most people actually that much. Attention to anymore. I was forced to read them 20 years ago. But I actually do think he uh really profoundly affects a lot of left or quasi-left pundits. And twos, I'm gonna say, is one of the best of that of that cohort. But the more I look at it, what he's advocating for, more I'm deeply confused by how he can still advocate for it, even when he's right about so many other things. Yeah. Um, and I think in a in a more, you know, I think when I was talking about with MMT, I've seen this there too in dumber ways, where you know, um uh and I've you know some at some of the MNTers have gotten into Claire Matthias' book, but not really grok that that meant that the basis of their own work was tied into the same capital stabilization project early, early 20th century. Um and that it's actually damning for them in a lot of big ways. Um uh because my friends, Keynes was the uh was was proffered as the answer to fascism as a way to manage this sector actually of the economy that's coming back in full force, and fascism was an attempt to manage that too. Um, and I hate to say it so a social democracy, and probably so was a lot of Marxist Leninism in the developing world, like um, and I don't think anyone I I think that I think because I think people don't like that because you're basically like I'm for closing your options, but let's get into twos in specific, and then we can jump from there. So, so how did Latour and this kind of post-Marxist milieu of the 1970s to 1990s and actor network theory and all that? So it's if you're in deep humanities academia, actually still is a pretty big paradigm. Um, how how was that you know uh uh a cover for this? I also think about uh Baudrillard was too, by the way. We'll get to that as well, maybe.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:43

Oh, yeah. Although I have a soft spot in my heart for Baudrillard.

SPEAKER_02: 1:32:46

No, no, I do too, because he's reacting to stupid leftists in France.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:49

So I think he's fun to read in the contemporary context of like, you know, all meaning breaking down and like nothing like that anymore. Um but but yeah, definitely he's a main figure there. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like uh so I think Tues is an interesting figure because he I mean he's an interesting figure in a lot of ways, but he is both a very strident Keynesian, right, and a very uh he's heavily influenced by Latour. And those two things typically are at odds with each other, yeah, right? Like because the Keynesian is the classic macro social scientist envisioning the social whole, envisioning the economy as this you know hydraulic like mechanism where you you're pulling certain levers to affect certain variables and you're modeling it out and you're looking at the whole thing, right? Like and you're modeling, you're predicting behavior and the way that it's going to work out in the future in order to optimize growth. And Latour, right, his whole project in a lot of ways is to cast doubt on that whole epistemological enterprise, right? Is this saying that look, as soon as you start modeling the the like as soon as you you you claim to offer a model of the social whole that encompasses everything, um, or even the economy, right, you are and you are essentially like writing out or or um sort of violently effacing um the the networks and the the local interactions where meaning is made and where people understand how how people understand themselves to be acting and how they understand the context in which they're acting. And that can never be captured in like the the macro social scientist model, right? That's kind of like part of what Latour is is about. And um, you see that coming out in in twos, right? Because he's always thinking like a Keynesian, like, okay, you know, like how are the policy elites fucking up? Like, what could they do better? Like, what could, you know, how could they you know manage the system more competently and effectively? What could the Democrats do to be more effective as the you know governing political class and so on? But he's also always thinking about the sort of messy imbrications of um institutions and and agents within the institutions and how they're like imbricated with each other in these really hybrid messy ways, and how that always kind of like eludes that larger macro perspective in some way. And so that's the Latour moment, right? And you always sort of see those two things in oscillating in what twos is saying, or usually very often you do. Um, but the funny thing is, right, like they both like both Keynes and Twos, they take the 20th century like managerial uh state as their as either the standpoint from which they speak, which is what it was for Keynes and for Keynesians. Um they're speaking as basically state technocrats attempting to manage the capitalist economy competently, um, or the object of critique, right? That's that's how Latour thinks about it. Um you know, the that whole perspective of the you know seem like a state, as James Scott famously put it, um, is is uh mistaken and misleading for all these ways, all these books. But they both take the that that formation of the of the 20th century, the state that was built up across the course of the 20th century, the progressive managerial state, as their point of departure, right, as either object or standpoint. And as the kind of subtext, uh not necessarily subtext, the theme, but really I feel like of our whole conversation today has been like how that managerial state is dissolving in maybe in all these ways, and how the technocratic expertise that it relies on is dissolving, how the institutions that make it up is dissolving, how the political class is becoming stupider, right, like by the day and less and less capable of managing it effectively by the day. And all of it is uh rooted, right, like I argue in my work, right, in this declining vitality of not just the US economy, but the international capitalist economy to you know right to generate the surplus value that allows the whole system to all the countries and all the corporations to rise together. Um it's increasingly it's decreasingly able to fulfill that function. And so that's why uh international politics and economic policy is breaking down into this like international knife fight, right, between with tariff policy and trade sanctions and increasingly militarized relationships. And so uh and so that's why I think that's partly how to explain like Tuze's confusion, right? Like he's like, there's nothing more here. And so he's more and more interested in like China, right? Over the last, you probably noticed over the last like year or something, he's become really fascinated with China and with everything you know that country is doing, especially on post-carbon energy build out. And um he's he's he's he's really transfixed by it.

SPEAKER_02: 1:38:07

Although ignoring how much that China has failed to complete that, but go ahead.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:11

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 1:38:14

Um but he looks like like like I mean the the number of times China has tried to get off coal and go back as I think we have like uh is yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:38:23

Yeah, they're saying now that they're they're aiming to be um they have milestone in like I think maybe 2030 or something, they're aiming for it to be like you know, a very small portion of their energy production, but we'll see, you know, that'd be sets back and forth. Um but you know, people like zoos, they just look at the graphs, right? And they see the the build out in the graphs, the lines going up, and they're like, holy shit. And um and I think it's yeah, I I think that that kind of like um that uns that's that palpable sense of of uncertainty and confusion and just like um loss that's that you get in in 2's writing now is because those two theoretical poles of his outlook, right? Like Tues and Keynes, I'm sorry, Keynes and Latour, um, are rooted in this a state formation that is now on the way out. You know, um the state like they're they have neither the capacity nor the will to um administer national capitalism in the kind of um classic, like uh in the as it was in like the sort of Keynesian, you know, heroic era of the post-war, the post-war period, um, when that was seen as like the main license for legitimacy, not just for the governing class, but also for the capitalist economy. They're no longer interested in in that whole problematic, and um it's increasingly just turning into this uh you know familial and nepotistic um war for spoils in this in this country at least.

SPEAKER_02: 1:40:00

Um but yeah, and we have seen this before, but people don't like what it ends in. So uh yeah, yeah, that's that's true. And and the last time we saw it, there was a massive workers' movement, and there was uh uh uh counter forces in other parts of the world. I mean, China is a counterforce in the sense that, like if I was to say it was state capitalist uh attempting to transition to socialism, if I just take them at their word, um uh I I and by the word I mean G's word, not what their constitution says. Um uh I have to conclude that um they are the more responsible state capitalists, but people who are looking at their throughput are ignoring some pretty significant uh issues that they've been having. That frankly, if Trump wasn't doing the wrecking ball that he was doing here, would have come up as major problems even sooner. So uh deflationary economy, um private investment still being largely tied into private real estate, um, real estate valuations despite land reforms that gave people the right to own their homes uh and whatnot, still leading to massive amounts of speculation that has been unstable. They are still having to slowly roll those bank that that bank down. It's unclear if they're gonna actually totally succeed in that. High levels of youth unemployment in a socialist managed economy, um, increasing numbers of billionaires with internal political influence, and also rising internal Han nationalism, which G has tried to navigate both by incorporating and suppressing depending on the time, um, just like he did with other forms of neo-Maoism, although the Han nationalism isn't neo-maoist. People I'm not implying that it is. Um, but that's how we did that's how we handle neo-maoism too, is like deal with Boshi Lai, but like also incorporate parts of the project. Um and uh I think this is largely because people don't really know that much about China, um, frankly. Uh, but you they're also like, oh, it has massive legitimacy, and I'm like, well, it it would like you know, uh, she has done things like finally reverse the underdevelopment of the Chinese countryside, which was terminal from Dung to who to Hu Jintao. He's done he's done a lot of things, like yeah, yeah. Um uh similarly, when we talk about Steinbaum in Mexico, I mean Amlow's led a pretty successful developmentalist policy that was that's gonna hit hurdles though, because it was based on integration with the United States, yeah. Um, and being kind of the the kind of trade point local, you know, middle production manager uh between us and East Asia and Latin America, and uh that's collapsing. Um, they're still being pretty profitable off of the internal economy because there's plenty of stuff to develop in Mexico, but once they hit that, you're gonna have the same kind of problem that you had in Chile and Argentina. So it's there's a ceiling there, there's a ceiling there, and no one likes to hear about the ceilings. And I'm like, you could overcome these ceilings if you had an international socialist project, but you don't.

SPEAKER_01: 1:43:37

So or if the rate of you know if the organic composition of capital was not as high as it is, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:43:42

Right. Uh if you had a I guess a butler and jihad, but good luck on there. So, like, I mean, because I mean, seriously, because I've had to tell people like, if you want this smokestack socialism to work, you literally have to stop productivity technology, and no one's gonna want to do that, including socialist states. And if you ever want to get out of a workerist paradigm, which I would assume socialists and communists want to, although that may be a bad assumption, although that you know historically is why we exist. Um, well, you know, those people didn't read the text anyway. Um depends on who you ask. If you ask Marx, the read the the abolition of the class is part of the point. Yeah, of course, of course. Um there are contradictions in there, even in Marx, but like uh my my point about that is just like um I don't see you know I don't see how you do that forever, which is also why I've seen you know on the far left, far left, uh you've seen stuff like Dominica Lacerdo come up, which basically say that communism is just national developmentalism forever. Um like if you read his Hegel book, uh he's like, we shouldn't get rid of the state, and I'm like, Well, the that was a mistaken thing, it's empirically wrong. And I'm like, Well, then you are saying that the actual from the standpoint of classical Marxism that class abolition is impossible, and even Lenin and even Stalin would have thought that was going too far.

SPEAKER_01: 1:45:23

Is he like a is he like a philosophy of right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:26

Yes, he he he he that's his favorite Hegel text.

SPEAKER_01: 1:45:29

Yeah, okay, makes sense, you know.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:31

And I'm just like so the the Marxist it's based off the Hegel that Marx explicitly hated the most, right? Right, yeah, and also basically sees the Prussian economy as the eternal answer to everything.

SPEAKER_01: 1:45:43

Um we just need that executive, we just need that um mixed monarchy constitutional monarchy, yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02: 1:45:50

So so we need we need bonapartism, but bonapartism, but controlled by, I guess for him, it's bonapartism, but controlled by party apparatus, right? You know, to which he would never say because he's a critic of bonapartism too, but he has to deal with the fact that that's implied by his Hegel theory. Um he's dead now, so I can do whatever. But his popularity actually indicates to me that a lot of the left, uh a lot of the far left also is in a theoretical regression mode. That, like, oh, all we can do is make dungism over again. I'm like, but okay, so what are you hoping for? That the developed parts of the world become so undeveloped you can rerun a developmentalist economy, right? Like, right, that doesn't make sense. That's also circular, and it's weird and kind of accelerationist, even though you're not saying that. Like, um, uh to be fair to Lacerdo, he just doesn't think the developed world is worth seeing, and we're gonna do this in the developing world, except you know, we're gonna pretend that China isn't part of the developed world now. Uh, you know, if you like, which is which is crazy to me. Um so I guess I guess you know, you talked about also in your your suicide state piece, um, which uh which I would tell people we didn't actually even talk about that much the heat wave piece on tariffs and the oligarchical piece and the baffler, but they're kind of implied in your suicide state piece anyway. Um uh that I mean Trump Trump is Trumpism is an in is an incontroverted contradictory movement that will have a limit. But the idea that you're going back to uh 20th century neoliberalism uh via abundance or uh 20 2010 progressivism, which itself was nostalgia for the 60s. Um uh I think all those ways are closed, and I mean they're heart closed, like like it's not about political will anymore. It's also like, how are you gonna build the technical capacity? You don't have time to do that. Why would you do that when you have all this technology? Like, what is even the purpose of that? You're actually trying to retrograde technological development, which as a socialist, it's kind of weird to advocate for. Um, uh, you know, maybe you think, and I kind of do some of these technologies are just so world damaging, we're not going to be able to utilize them fully, or maybe not utilize them at all, but like like it's still that's that's that's a pretty big departure from historical socialism. Um uh I mean, I guess what do you think comes out of this? I mean, I know that Phil Nil has been trying to work through the kind of communizer vision of that. Um, I don't I think I think it is necessarily both too specific and too vague. I always love Phil's work when he's doing analytics, but when he actually talks about the answer, I'm like, I just I don't see how we get there yet, man. Like, like I just don't. Um what what is your thinking right now?

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:55

Like politically, basically, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:48:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:48:59

Yeah. I mean, I think that the I I I think that the the whole project, yeah, of the 2010s that we've been talking about, the the the sander, the project of sanders just social democracy, whatever we want to describe it as, is is yeah, the way is closed. Um I I think that now we have to get more get more creative, I think, in the way that we're thinking about what a workers' movement is. Like because if we talk, you know, if we if we talk to uh you know your average like Jacobin reader or uh Sanders enjoyer or whatever, like who who's on board with the the old like less populist ideas, like they'll they'll also be like, of course, we support that's what we're all after, right? It's like a workers' movement. But like uh it's again, it's now we're we're down now to a question of like I think strategy and strategic decisions that have to be made about what kind of movement we want and how we build it. And I'm kind of, I mean, my analysis or my take on part of the failure of the 2010s moment, uh, well that you know that came out of like built up out of the the wreckage of the 2008 meltdown, and then to Occupy, and then you know the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore, and then all of that kind of culminating in that energy in the electoral campaigns of 2016 and 2020. I think that those attempts, like those campaigns and that kind of activism was uh essentially, it was kind of like uh it was like tree branches without roots. Um it was, you know, it was mainly electoral. It was uh it was plugged into, it was very run and dominated by the NGO, kind of like, you know, party, like Democrat, Nexus, right? And the a lot of the um the the the leadership of at least the the unions that were progressive enough to want to get on board with with that project, which of course wasn't even most of them. Um and that just turned out to not right to not hold the the political sway um in the way that we thought it might. And you know, I'm speaking as someone who supported those efforts, uh despite having the despite despite being all kind of like the radical left since the early 20s, I don't know, late late 2000s at least. Um and so I think we have to talk about what it means to build the foundation of that of that or of that workers' movement. Um right now, I I the work I'm doing and the way I'm thinking about it is focusing on working class culture and civil society, right? I think there is a class composition problem that we have to figure out before we could talk meaningfully about a working class movement, right? Like the fact that that Sanders tried that twice nationally and lost twice meant that it wasn't truly a working class movement, you know, like it didn't have the support of the vast majority of the class. And so what would it do? What would a genuine, you know, class conscious movement look like? I think that there is a prior problem of class composition that we have to figure out um what it looks like at the level of um local networks, everyday life, cultural activities, stuff like mutual aid, mutual like service, you know, service mutualism, um educational resources, like building out the the kind of civil society fabric, uh, if you like, of um the soil of of what could be a uh conscious class, right? That like sort of cultivates our identity and our self-understanding as workers, right? Um regardless of if we work in the uh the the some part of the service economy or some you know like highly automated um uh factory like auto, you know, like auto assembly factory in like South Carolina, or you know, or we're in the communities that are being devastated by by ice right now, right? Like it's like how do we build the bridges across these constituencies of the class, these fractions of the class that still are very divided and separated from each other, but are like the the unity has to be essential if there's going to be anything like class consciousness, you know, and I think that right now, in my own assessment, that's pointing towards civil society organizing that then make points towards some kind of organizational question in the distance, like what what is the form of organization that we're looking for? Is it party? Is it commune? Is it um you know, is it some kind of dual power thing? Like it's I think all these questions are kind of in flux right now. And uh like we on the kind of you know radical left uh who are pushing for a like powerful working class like project um should be thinking creatively about the kinds of organization that it would take or that would be adequate to to this moment. Because yeah, I you know I tend to agree with you, like most of the not all of it, but a lot of the um ideological and organ like ideological baggage and organizational like methods we've inherited from the 20th century uh may no longer apply, you know, in the present. And so um it's time for something new. And that's what I'm committed to trying to figure out right now.

SPEAKER_02: 1:54:56

For me, um, I'm on a similar page where I think that the ironically, civil society is dying. Um, and so weirdly that's what we need to focus on. But the focus on civil society will actually put us in a direct conflict with the state, just straight up. Like, like, even though it doesn't seem like it would, because we're you know, we're like the people not advocating for electoral work and not advocating for this, that, and the other. But I think if you start actually rebuilding consciousness, you start reskilling people. The reason why it would be a direct uh uh conflict with the state is it would be a direct conflict with those who fund the state now. Um, and I mean as we're talking about this, I mean, quite literally, the government shut down, and you have you have billionaires donating money to Pacific parts of the government despite the fact that it's in blatant violation of both statute and federal law. Um, I mean, this is the end of Roman Republic shit. Um but you know, uh I also think we're not gonna be the end, like to make it just about the repo about the American Republic is to miss the point. I mean, like it's it's a much larger problem. And um uh and I think you're right because we need that people keep asking me, uh, you know, you I'm a I I'm a union rep, I'm literally a union rep. I'm elected, like, but I basically tell people like uh most of these unions are not even in the capacity to represent their their membership well, even if they want to, uh much less le currently lead a political movement as they are declining, bereft of funds and being attacked legislatively, not just in the United States. Like, this is where a lot of people are like, Oh, there's uh you know, there's a big thing in America for people to go, oh, well, there's you know, the it's just the America doesn't have a left. And I'm like, well, our stuff is more decayed, sure, but like these trends are everywhere, yeah. Like, um, you know, and in fact, the fact that we were the hegemon for so long and are now uh quickly not becoming that uh anymore. Um, maybe that's why you're seeing it more terminal here. But if you look around, even the countries that you're using as models, you you see this over and over again. Um or you see market liberalization. I mean, uh, you know, one of the things people don't talk about is like Cuba was forced to market liberalize by China recently, and that's what a lot of those seemingly anti-communist protests were actually about in Cuba after COVID. It wasn't like uh and stuff like that. Like, people just don't know that, and yeah, uh for good reasons. Um I I think I think I guess one last quick question about an interesting point of fracture, uh, is it seems very clearly that not just the US but the entire world wants to start renationalizing its media apparatus. Uh, you see this particularly in the UK, which is basically trying to like shut off, you know, trying to like do its own version of a pathetic, sad version of the great firewall in China. Um, but as a person in you people in China, the Great Firewall actually doesn't really work, like it doesn't actually keep everybody off of the entirely, right? Yeah, right. No, um, elites get into the Western internet all the time. Um uh and I started thinking about this, and I'm like, you know, to me, this is part of the same end game with this economic nationalism. It's like, okay, so they want media nationalism, and I think even a lot of the left kind of wants this. Um, you've seen it in Canada too, um, and in continental Europe. Um, but it's not really possible to do without breaking the the trade networks that these states still need. And I think that's going to be a major problem going forward. And I'm I'm wondering if that's like where a lot of our internationalism might emerge, because uh it's clear that that we've gotten used to having access to like you know. I might I'm a teacher, I complain about how neoliberalism and and whatever the fuck this is, which is not so much neoliberalism, makes my students stupider and stupider, but they do have more access to world knowledge than I did in high school in the 20th century, of course, absolutely, and they know it's going away, they are aware it's going away, and I I wonder what that means if like that and the and the and like trying to serve the functions that were served by other institutions in civil society is where our points of leverage are, which admittedly, I I I will admit, I'm gonna just say this is a Hail Mary pass, like it kind of really is. Um I feel like it's a spaghetti against the wall time period, but I'm increasingly finding that like left populists and stuff are actually in my way for doing this, like they're they're actively kind of a problem now. Um and these are people that I considered allies for you know a long time. Um so anyway, uh where can people find more of your work, Jamie?

SPEAKER_01: 2:00:27

You can find me on uh the good old blue sky. Uh I'm not on I'm not on X, formerly done as Twitter, uh watch anymore these days. But yeah, you can find me on Blue Sky. Um check out my book, Endgame, Economic Nationalism, Global Decline. And yeah, that's uh that's where you can use it I write a light for I. write a lot for the Brooklyn Rail. You can find a lot of my stuff on there as well.

SPEAKER_02: 2:00:51

All right. Um yeah, I I'll I I'll put a plug on the Brooklyn Rail. Uh it's one of the it's one of the magazines that I find myself reading more and more like it, negations, um, uh Strange Matters, Heat Wave, Cosmonaut to some degree, and uh actually the new left review has gotten weirdly interesting again, which is which is they have their stiples that new left review.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01:17

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 2:01:19

I mean even when I think they're wrong right now, I'm like, well they're wrong in a way that actually indicates something major.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01:24

Like I'll supposed to be writing something uh for them actually um as as we speak but things have been a little distracting here lately so I haven't yeah I wonder what could possibly be going on in Chicago. Well anyway so keep an eye out for that maybe sometime earliest next year hopefully yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 2:01:41

All right. Well thank you so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 2:01:44

Really good talking to you man.

SPEAKER_02: 2:01:45

Good talk