Pierre Bourdieu, Academic Power, And Class Reproduction with Daniel Tutt

In Part 2 of our series on intellectualls, Daniel Tutt returns to talk  Bourdieu. Start with the feeling that “merit” is natural and fair—and then watch it fall apart. We take Pierre Bourdieu’s sharpest tools—habitus, field, cultural capital, symbolic power—and use them to expose how universities, media, and taste quietly reproduce class while insisting it’s all about talent. From Homo Academicus to Distinction to the Algeria studies, we clear up the biggest misconceptions: cultural capital is more than style, symbolic violence is more than rude behavior, and habitus is embodied history adapting to shifting fields.

Our conversation travels through the crisis of the scholarly habitus—leisure packaged as labor, prestige buffered by adjunct exploitation—and the awkward truth that DEI can deepen stratification when it diverts resources and legitimizes existing hierarchies. We connect Bourdieu’s hysteresis to today’s culture wars: fields change fast, bodies adapt slow, and the resulting frustration feeds irrationalism. His study of Heidegger becomes a cautionary tale about stalled elites and seductive anti‑rational philosophies. Meanwhile the working class loses a stable habitus in a gigged‑out economy, making organizing harder and resentment easier to weaponize.

We balance Bourdieu with a Marxist insistence on production and power. The best use of his map is practical: reveal the hidden rules, rebuild class independence, and design para‑academic and organizing projects that out‑perform the academy on rigor and relevance. Expect clear definitions, concrete examples, and straight talk on credentialism, elite infighting dressed as populism, and why making class legible again is the first step toward changing material life. If you’ve ever felt the system deny its own history while sorting your future, this conversation will give you language—and a plan—to push back.

If this resonates, follow the show, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review with the sharpest insight you took away. Where do you see symbolic power at work today?

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

Chapters

• 1:35 Setting The Problem Of Intellectuals
• 2:48 Why Bourdieu Matters More Than We Admit
• 6:13 Cultural Capital, Symbolic Power, And Misreadings
• 9:20 Habitus, Doxa, And Scholarly Life
• 14:16 Algeria, Fanon, And Marxist Tensions
• 19:42 Field And Habitus: Beyond Determinism
• 26:39 Class Taste, Distinction, And Its Limits
• 32:52 Working Class Without A Stable Habitus
• 40:11 Heidegger, Petty Bourgeois Crisis, And Irrationalism
• 47:53 Para‑Academia, Gatekeeping, And Reform
• 55:59 DEI, Symbolic Violence, And Legitimacy
• 1:04:57 Class Politics, Media, And Elite Factions
• 1:13:12 Marxism, Peasantry, And Organization Dilemmas
• 1:20:07 Making Class Legible And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:48

Hello and welcome to Varnblog and Emancipations and Daniel and I returned to talk about the problems of intellectuals. Um the mini problems. And today we're gonna talk about Well, I think we have we we we're we're talking about Pierre Ba uh Bordu, um not to be confused with Elaine Badieu. And um you laugh, but you know how many people do when I mention him? They're like, do you mean the the the Maoist guy? No, I don't. I mean, maybe, but I don't think he actually had that many Maoist associations. Um and I think we are gonna we're gonna start with the paradox that's obvious uh today. I mean, uh you had me uh kind of um review Homo Academicus and Pascalia Meditations and uh a book I've never read before, which is Badu uh Bordu's see I almost did it there. Bordu's book on Heidegger. Um which was a which is a book on Heidegger that even anti-Hag, you know, I'm actually surprised that the anti-Heidegerians uh I say that as if I don't like them, but the anti-Heidegarians like Richard Rowland don't cite this book more. Um I agree with that, yeah. They always cite like Adorno, like not not um not but not Bordue, which I find interesting. Right. But I guess the the the fundamental paradox of Burdue from these readings that you gave me, and just me thinking about all that I've read from, you know, because I'll mention uh Distinction, which is this book on uh the sociology of aesthetics and class, um and an outline of practice is another book that I read. And I'm not a Bardurian, I'm not even trained in sociology, but since I did both philosophy and anthropology, I had and and it and education, he came up over and over and over again. Um, and as you said last time, he's one of the three most cited academics up there with Chomsky and Foucault. And yet, this man, even more than Foucault, really dismantled his own social class or his own social strata, like like two whole books basically about the ways in which academia is in a perilous class position and and everything. And I think you and I will also talk a little bit about all of his specific uh frameworks and concepts, but I think his frameworks are some of the most abused and misstated as to what they mean in academia. Like I was taught what cultural capital, symbolic capital, and symbolic violence was just frankly wrong. Um you know, in a way that made it hard for me to understand Bordeaux's work. I also think um I didn't really get the relationship to habitus and doxa. I mean, there's a bunch of uh Badoyan concepts to to kind of to work through. Um and then when people like analytic Marxist approach him, they will just say that he's basically the just the default liberal stratification theorist for class.

SPEAKER_03: 4:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 4:23

And I also think that's profoundly unfair. So you know what what got you into Bourdeau?

SPEAKER_00: 4:33

Well, yeah, I'm I I study I did study him actually formally, but I didn't study, I mean, I took many sociology courses throughout. I mean, I'm sort of my educational background is a bit unorthodox. Like I went to a very small, yeah, a very small school in Southern Oregon, okay, which was actually extremely productive because it was a school where a lot of very accomplished professors retired to teach at, but the school itself had no like cachet in terms of its prestige, which was fine with me. I mean, uh I learned a hell of a lot, but I really leaned towards history and sociology. And then in my master's, I was largely studying ethics and philosophy, and then I did my PhD in like much more contemporary critical theory, where Bourdieu becomes kind of a necessary interlocutor in contemporary critical theory. What I find interesting about him is this extremely robust critique of the yeah, of like, yeah, the the sort of system of sort of prestige that undergirds uh the educational system in the post-war period. He has a very, very compelling idea regarding what drove the primary social mechanisms that drove the May 68 uprising, which we can talk about. He um has a very interesting set of works with this other figure, Passeron, on um the way that the educational system in France, he's mostly doing these deep empirical sociological studies and case studies of French society. So that immediately gives us um somewhat of a limitation. Although Borjuist scholarship, as you mentioned, he's I you know one of the most widely cited, if not the most widely cited, academics. So there's a lot of people that have applied his work to American context, most notably is the Berkeley professor Luke Wakant, uh done a lot of stuff on inner cities and on the question of poverty that I actually find extremely robust and valuable for understanding the pathologization that liberals do on the poor. So there's been a lot of very productive Borduoist scholarship. I think, you know, what I but that's that's really the it's it's this um confrontation with the narcissism of scholars and what he calls the scholarly habitus, which he always theorizes as tied to. And I get into this on my book on Nietzsche, which I very much appreciate, is really like, you know, we should be unabashed as scholars that our vocation is premised on a subtraction from wage labor and the immersion into leisure. And as a working class scholar myself, you know, or at least from origins working class, that pressure of like, you know, working uh manual manual labor jobs for much of my life, um, but always having that passion for the life of the scholarly habitus, I knew it was always about leisure and the immense difficulty to actually find leisure and the way that that goes disavowed, where the way that that becomes normalized or habituated, right? That's is sort of the idea of what a habitus is. He says that a habitus is sort of the composite set of habitual practices that go unacknowledged. Habitus, therefore, has a kind of unconscious, which is not necessarily repressed in, like, a Freudian idea of the unconscious. But a habitus is itself a very potent concept if you think about it, because what it implies is a denialism of the very ground of practical reality from which we operate. And that immediately is is is alluring to me because it gave me a way to see the kind of hypocrisies and the contradictions of scholarly communities. And, you know, this is also one of the reasons why Bourdieu is extremely critical of faux radicalism, of faux academic radicalism. He's very good on that, you know, and that's why he really felt that um deconstruction and post-structuralism were creating a kind of fake utopian politics. He has, you know, he did his PhD um in Algeria. He did case, you know, casework in Algeria, and you know, during the whole imperialist saga and debacle of Algeria. And, you know, uh a very important um, also former professor at Berkeley, uh uh Michael, uh, what's his last name? Boenaus or something like this. He recently died tragically, but he's one of the foremost Bourdieuist scholars as well. And he wrote a very important set of essays on Marx and Bourdieu. And one of the most striking essays in there was on the early Bourdieu and Algeria and the strong polemic he had with Franz Fanon over Algeria, which fundamentally came down to this debate between the revolutionary agent and Bourdieu is siding with a traditional Marxist view that it must be the working class. Whereas Fanon is, as most folks know, saying, well, no, you have this kind of comprador problem, and the working class will fall into a type of comprador situation whereby the relationship between intellectuals and workers is more efficacious for anti-colonial liberation, according to Fanon, uh when the intellectuals side with the peasantry, with the lump and proletariat. And Bourdieu thought this was an unnecessary recipe for violence. Um so that that I found to be quite uh interesting also because he emerges as a figure who's not afraid to go against a lot of sort of popular scholarly fads or directions. You know, one of the things that if you look at the early Bourdieu as well, he was trained as a philosopher. And I think if you read his work, you'll you'll get that taste that he does have a strong philosophical foothold. And he said that he was always interested as a young scholar to make a bridge between what he saw as an overly objectivist Marxism, combined and combined that with the overly subjectivist existentialist current, which was so predominant in French intellectual life. And uh some commentators have said that his system is an attempt to synthesize. So the Marxism never fully, never fully um goes away. But one of the most, and I think this is something that sparks your iry, Derek, and I think it's for valid reasons, of course, he is going to advocate for the politicization of domains of symbolic life, for cultural life, et cetera, that most Marxists shy away from. And I think that's where the problems actually come into play, right? Because you can already see that I think, in a general sense, a lot of liberals will be happy to politicize domains of culture. I think when they do that, though, perhaps they miss perhaps the the uh the um vital Marxism that actually is at his core, which is something we can kind of get into when we actually dig deep into his thought. Um so he's a he's an extremely interesting and and layered thinker. He also uh is from a working class background as a scholar. He had this sort of very um miraculous, I guess you could say, meritorious rise to the French academy. He was he said in an interview once that he was drawn to thinkers that were outside of the traditional canon on the margins of the university, and that he identified with them precisely because he always saw himself that way. And so it is a certain interesting fact that this scholar um elevates to this height of notoriety within the system. So perhaps that's also one of the things to go back to your original question of like, um, why do academics have this love-hate relationship with him? Perhaps it is a bit of an irony given his backgrounds, uh, his background, and also the fact that after Algeria, he and Passeron did all of these studies, deep, deep studies, which at the tail end Homo academicus comes out of the educational system. And basically the basic conclusion from which is that it is a system for the social reproduction of prestige that conceals the fact that it is based on the kind of destiny of class position. And in essence, in simple terms, it's very much a rigged system that has to have these um uh sort of signposts that help academics dissociate from the fact that everything is kind of based on this notion of pre-selection, right? So, I mean, um his thought goes through these different oscillations. It begins very local, it then moves to the uh educational domain, and then he, once he becomes famous for that work, he then begins to uh focus his studies on cultural domains, on politics, on the state, on history, the history of philosophy. That's where the Heidegger study comes in, and so on. Because in a certain way, he's given the power from the university system to fully go into. I mean, that's one of the very powerful things about French intellectual life, is that you are um its its hierarchy system kind of grants uh senior intellectual figures no no there there needs to be no sort of formal teaching done. You're purely on a kind of research lectureship. I think he was actually gave a series of lectures similar to Foucault, if I'm not mistaken, at the Collage de France. And some of those are incredible lectures. They're they're translated and transcribed, people can read them. So he does enter into the canon of some of the kind of uh leading French intellectual figures in the post-war period, but he's very much an outsider. I mean, in that sense, he's very much like kind of like Michel Clouscard, another working class origins, you know, French intellectual post-war figure that is just so interesting, right? So, I mean, I think these are the reasons why I'm drawn to him.

SPEAKER_01: 15:19

Well, I mean, comparison to Clusecard, it's interesting though, because Clusecard is not nearly as recuperable as Badieu. I mean Bardieu, Bardieu. See, I made a mistake now that I did it. But I mean, like, it's hard to get translations of Clusecard in English.

SPEAKER_00: 15:34

Yeah, true. Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_01: 15:35

Right. I'm drowning in translations of Bardieu in English, right?

SPEAKER_00: 15:40

Um and that actually that but that there's a reason for that, right? And that has well that that has to do with the politics of kind of neo-trotskyist new left review verso politics, which sees Clouscard falsely as succumbed to Stalinism, because Clouscard published with the French Communist Party, and he remained in solidarity with the French Communist Party and was against the 68ers. So much of the translation authority and choices in the West, in the Anglo, not the West, but like the Anglo sphere, has this kind of neotskyist orientation. So they they've kind of put they've marginalized Closecard. I mean, I was I was talking to Verso people, and they thought, you know, that why would we do this? Because he's a Stalinist. And okay, so then, you know, is Cluse? I don't I'm not gonna go down that road. I just did a whole interview debunking this claim, in my opinion. It's not fair to put him in that box, similar to the way that, you know, okay, well, if like Lukash is also put in that box. So that's a whole other debate. But I think Bourdieu, yeah, Bourdieu has never been um a Marxist like that. In fact, I would actually contend that when you look at Bourdieu's praxis of sort of like his prescription for politics, and this is evident in the book that I mentioned uh on Bourdieu and Marx, there's actually a number of issues that come into play, and there's a kind of a lot of paradoxes because he ends up effectively in a kind of quasi-elitist position where he's like, Well, academics are the only one that can save the working class. So he he's he's not easily uh identifiable as a Marxist in political practice. I think his theoretical constructs are very, very Marxist at the same time, which we can kind of you know tease out.

SPEAKER_01: 17:34

But well, this is interesting. If people go back and listen to our episode one, we have a similar problematic with another renegade sociologist, Alvin Goldner, yeah, who also thinks that the that the new class, you know, is both the problem of and solution to the working class's problems. Um, even though he has a strong critique of them. And I think you have a similar issue with Bordeaux. There seems to be some I'm speculating wildly here, and I'm gonna admit that this is almost irresponsible, but this seems to be something that comes up in sociology in particular, like over and over and over again, where there's an understanding of the sociological construction of academia and adjacent fields to it, like the media. Uh-huh. But it also can't get around that as a solution because somehow, like, they see themselves as being produced by that, making it reflective of the problems of this strata of society, but also because they have that the ability to be self-reflective of it, they see it as a way to create something that either the working class or society in general could jump off of to control the problems that emerge in the strata of society, and also the classical bourgeoisie and structuralized capital. And I I think that's it happens so much in sociology that I do wonder if there's something to the discipline that leads it to that conclusion, like over and over and over again.

SPEAKER_00: 19:07

Well, I mean, uh to cite another example in in the US would be Philip Reef. He does the same, the same thing, right? Where he begins with this very widely read polemic called the Triumph of the Therapeutic, which was probably one of the most radical from the right critiques of the new left as sort of faux professional revolutionaries, but then he ends his career on the response, the dereliction of duty of intellectuals. And it's the same Queg Meyer, which is you've totally misread Freud. Freud gives us the tools to concretize our class project, right? In essence, to do the work of culture, but you have sought to tear down culture as sort of radical leftist intellectuals. And of course, he criticizes D.H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, and Carl Jung as sort of paradigmatic intellectuals that sort of uh led the new left astray. But you're right, I think that there's something to this. I'm not sure if uh I guess I suppose that sociology is that this may be a kind of blemish on the, and maybe that is perhaps for myself why I've strayed away from sociology, because perhaps there is a kind of realism that's a kind of functionalist realism. I mean, we even see this with Weber. I mean, Weber once wrote a letter to Lukash when Lukac became a communist, and he straight out said, because of course Weber was a mentor to Lukac, right? He straight out said, you are forging solidarity outside of your class. Effectively, what are you doing? You have there's no place for you in the Bolshevism. You're you're an aristocrat, you're bourgeois, like act like it. I don't know, maybe there's something to that. I don't know if I have a rigorous theory as to why, but it's it's like a premonition. I think you're onto something, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 21:08

Well, I mean if we think about the origins of sociology, there's three origins, you know, just like the origin of socialism. We always list three things, right? But it's it's sociology a la and sociological positivism, yeah um, then uh functionalism a la Durkheim, and then the German historical school, which we all consider the late German historical school, which we all consider sociologists, but they saw themselves as historical economists. Um and those come together, then you add in the Frankfurt school for you know what it does, and you get some interesting problems. And I mean, Bordu is interesting because he also reminds me of Lash in the sense that he he actually uh like his debate with Fanon reminds me of Lash's debate with the Frankfurt School, that they were um looking for a new subject because they were uncomfortable with the working class for whatever reason. And you know, Lash even you know basically accuses the Frankfurt School of ignoring their own empirical data. Um, the one time they actually did empirical sociology in the authoritarian personality, right? Uh, which uh um Martin J confirms actually that they did that, that they that all the other studies on authoritarianism and working class culture went in the other direction of the authoritarian personality.

SPEAKER_00: 22:45

Um, that's interesting because Bourdieu once said that his scientific method is based on the affirmation that one must, as a scholar, immerse themselves as deeply as possible into the specific localities of the most highly uh granular empirical uh grasp of the reality of the social situation, and it's this has to be historically located. And he identifies um Bachelard as a thinker who assisted him in this precise uh capacity to um locate historical novelty in kind of conjunctures or in instances and and in this kind of um and this is why actually um Bourdieu does not fully uh reject structuralism. He said that he's deeply influenced by Levi-Strauss, even though Levi-Strauss's theory of structuralism has a very non-empirical foothold. So he sort of takes the best of Levi-Strauss but adds this empiricism to it. But then he also wants to account for subjectivity, which he feels is missing at the same time, but is like overly represented in existentialism. And I think that perhaps one you one thing you could say, perhaps, is that um maybe this uh empiricist foothold is part of the embedded realism that prevents Bourdieu from falling into a messianism or a utopianism or a far-leftism. It keeps him very moderated, perhaps. I think that's that's very valid, that's probably very likely. At the same time, a lot of his of his work is still trying to uh escape this, and what you what you could say is that he's trying to create like a dialectic ultimately between habitus and field, which we can kind of define that in a moment, but a dialectic between these two social phenomena that would account for uh uh a theory of subjectivity that would not be fully determinate. And he thinks that Marxism is a full determination, it's too, it's too what he calls objectivist, and therefore it kind of misses the richness, it sort of treats the subject as a contingency, which he doesn't want to do, right? And and and moreover, he thinks that Marxism misses the granularity of power operations across different fields, right? And so, therefore, I think for Bourdieu, Marxism doesn't have a theory of institutions and power and the and the kind of and and then this is not like micro power, it's not a Foucault conception of power, because not all fields are fields of power, by the way. Um, so so that I think is very is very interesting in a certain way. He's trying to add something to Marxism, and I think that he gives Marxists a real a real question. Are we gonna accept this or not? Like that's actually a real question, right? Because, and I'm not sure that there's like a clear answer. And I think that perhaps a lot of Marxists probably would consider Borduo's conceptions of class to maybe at best have descriptive richness, but at worst lead us astray in terms of practice. That might be something we that I'd like to get your take on in a certain way, which I mean, I think first we need to kind of yeah, give a little meat on the bones of actually what we're talking about in terms of field and habitus and stuff like that. But because I think one can certainly get the sense that Bourdieu, uh Bourdieu's theory of class, and you get this a lot in his book on distinction, runs a risk of being kind of um a degraded theory of class that is definable by aesthetic taste, which is not what he's trying to say. I think that goes back to your initial point where there's a bad reading of Bourdieu, because there's a lot of other texts that Bourdieu brings out regarding class and the class experience and the class situation, um, especially his work on educational systems and institutions, that don't fall into this, you know, because his book on distinction, I think, is interesting because what he's really trying to do there is show that um the Kantian theory of aesthetic taste and aesthetic judgment is premised on this idea that has been deeply influential of uh disinterest, that we sort of, as consumers, we have this kind of disinterest. And he tries to concoct an empirical sort of presentation that our aesthetic consumptive patterns are class coded, uh deeply so, structurally so, right? But that is like downstream from I mean, I think it's a very popular book for obvious reasons. Um there's a lot of very surprising revelations in that book. I think that might be why one of the reasons why it's so popular. But I wouldn't say that this is like his primary theory of class or that he aestheticizes culture or something like that.

SPEAKER_01: 28:08

I mean, I think we can get into exactly like how he defines class more rigorously, but I would agree with that, but I I would I would say I think that's also why Burdu gets cited so much, is because you can use him to argue that class habitas is a uh manifested in power relations and relations of distinction, that B show up as a form of identity formation, uh, particularly in response to your disposition and habitas, and thus C make class identical to race and gender as material identities, and not, as most Marxists would argue, a third more important thing about your relationality and relationalities.

SPEAKER_00: 28:56

Yeah, exactly. I think this is this is actually essential, right? Because there is a view that I think Bourdieu wants to avoid, which is the problem of determinism. From his very from the very um first introduction of the concept of habitus, he's trying to avoid this idea that like in a certain way, a habitus has a has a relation. Its relation is to fields in the plural. So there is a theory of relation. I think the interest the and the point that he makes about here is very interesting, which is that he would criticize Marxists for limiting their relational theory only to uh the productive mode uh and you know, and labor. He actually says that straight out that there needs to be a multiplicity of uh of relations. Uh moreover, a habitus you you as subjects, we don't exist in sort of one sole habitus. And even in his work on education and class, a lot of the conclusions of the inheritors text, for example, would have you conclude that really um, and this is very he's very, very close to Basel Bernstein, the class code theorist that we talked about last time. Where uh and they actually, I think, collaborated. Um, because a lot of the conclusions of Bernstein and Bourdieu in terms of studying educational systems was to really show that um micro exclusions uh uh according to and falling kind of in line with class habitus determine the whole system of power distinctions in the academy. And those are kind of untranscendable in some sense, right? And there's like these series of denials and disavowals of them, but they structure the system, right? Right. I mean, that's very valid and true. And you, as a, as a teacher, I'm sure I actually wanted to ask you like what you generally think about that. Like have, you know, just as a side.

SPEAKER_01: 31:05

Oh, I definitely see it. Absolutely. I mean, this is this is this is something that I've thought a lot about with uh Marxism. This is why this is why I had good things to say about the analytic uh Marxist uh sociologist Eric Owen Wright, even though I think his his schema ultimately completely fails. He was trying to to both argue against Bardieu and with Bordeaux simultaneously by saying your recognition of intra-class competition and stratas is absolutely valid. Uh um velv and goods are valid, uh, but this does not explain the function of the economy at large, which is still about these primary these primary aggregate relations, uh, which are tied into the mode of production. Um, but it might explain the experience of class and the formation of relations of production and social reproduction. And one thing that I mean, we can say Bardu tries to do that Marxist hinted at but never did was trying to figure out uh what the part of the relations of production were not super structural according to the base superstructure metaphor, but base and where they come from in the realm of social reproduction. If you look at like Engel's work on the family, this is kind of an attempt at this, yeah. Um and you can definitely see, and you know, that so that like Soviet um uh Marxism really did not address this. I mean, Lukash is trying to address this too, right? Um, and I do see this as a problem with a lot of Marxists, but I also see the function of symbolic and cultural institutions as a way that Burdu can be more recuperated than other radical class theorists. This is like I think part of the paradox here. Because if you have the kind of basic reading of distinction that I think we both would agree is actually wrong, it's not what Badu's trying to do. But if you read it that way, and then you add on stuff from some of his other work like symbolic capital, symbolic violence, cultural capital, um, etc., and read them as uh forms of access that show up in cultural and social reproduction that are like economics but not economics, you can apply that to any identity theory equally, and in some ways undo Badu's fundamental point about class by applying his concepts uh incorrectly because because you'll notice that habitas is something that serious Badurians and like you and I use because I talk about habitas as like uh it is a relationality of class, but I think of I think of it as class in social reproduction terms.

SPEAKER_00: 34:14

So we're yeah, go ahead. Well, he defines the habitas as the forgetting of history that determines the present, right? As a naturalization of this of acquired dispositions at the level of accretion across a subject's social and cultural trajectory, but understood by them as the way things are and the way that I am as a subject. And so again, it's this necessary um misrecognition. So the concept of misrecognition is essential to the inhabitation of any habitus, which which makes the concept extremely rich on the one hand. On the other hand, there is what he affirms as a differentiated habitus. So, for example, the scholarly habitus is a differentiated habitus. It's not as if he can claim that symbolic power is fundamentally detached from, or symbolic capital is somehow fundamentally detached from real capital. Because if that were true, then you would have the vulgarization of a functionalist theory, which would actually be illogical, which would be that, well, working class intellectuals sort of remain in this uh subordinate position when they're inducted into the habitus, which is actually not true because, as we articulated, Bourdieu's own biography disproves that.

SPEAKER_01: 35:42

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 35:43

It disproves that. So he's not making this kind of vulgar, like quasi Mark Fisher vampire castle essay argument. We should not be reading him like that. In fact, what's interesting and almost fatalistic about a habitus is that in the same way that Goldner talked about with the universal class, the habitus of the scholarly habitus uh forces the problem of origins to remove itself from the equation. So it becomes almost like a blind spot, a further blind spot. And that's really like shitty, like in a certain way, like things like you know, that that that's a very uh strong fact or a strong claim, for which I'm not sure that we have an immediate solution to that claim. Absolutely, we don't have an immediate solution to that claim.

SPEAKER_01: 36:34

What to think about habit testing? I I want our more Marxist theory inclined uh listeners who haven't been exposed to Bordeaux, which you know, because you got an undergrad degree and whatever you got it in and it wasn't sociology. Um uh are you you just went the high school and you got it in the theory listen in the podcast. Hell yeah. Uh all these are valid. I'm not I'm not smacking them down, and it actually, in some ways, it gives you a better chance of approaching Bordeaux because you're not gonna have some tertiary source poison him for you, um, like I did. Uh but uh habitas is interesting to me because it gets at the same thing, both interpolation and ideology does for Altusaire, yeah, and ideology and uh collective consciousness do for Lukash. Um, but it is in some ways more empirically provable what he's talking about than those two concepts. So we can uh, you know, unlike interpolation, which you can get into well, how does it actually work other than as a structural function of language? Um you have a hard time answering that. Whereas habitas, we know how it actually works. You are modeled habits that are taught to you as you know, the air you breathe, what another Marxist call ideology, but these are modeled for you in ways that are incentivized and also appropriate to where you are in the hierarchies of production and those social hierarchies within them, yeah. So they make sense because they work in your strata of society, right? Um, and they are reinforced by the denial that there's a history to why they emerge, so they are naturalized. So we have things in Marxism and in you know, both both structuralist and Hegelian to get us to a similar theory, yeah. But we often are stuck with like um uh more abstract notions of reification of the entire society and Lukash are you know um structural language claims and altisaire as to how it works, where isn't whereas in Bordeaux, we actually get something we can sociologically watch, like exactly, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 38:50

Because I in a way, the habitus as this what he calls belief-forming system that doesn't see itself as a belief system, because in a belief system there is some you know tacit affirmation, there's some verticality, but in this there's an unconscious investment, and that is why he calls it symbolic power, which is his version of ideology. So symbolic power is his conception of ideology, and I think you know, intuitively we know how this works, in the sense that when we see uh a form of agency transpire, which exceeds an individualist, I don't know, choice or affirmation or rational choice theory. But when action or behavior coheres to a habitus, you sort of know it when you see it. And one of the things that he studied, for example, was the habitus of like Catholic priests over the long duration, where they are actually from the Vichy occupation of the Nazis of France up to when they became red. So it's like when they were influenced by fascism to when they became communist. And one of the things he shows is that the habitus is this uh domain of habitual practice that has consistency over time, but it was the cultural field which undergoes change. The habitus remains more static. So that's the dialectic that I was referring to between field and habitus that I find very rich. And I think that actually teaches us quite a lot regarding the stickiness of this of this form of ideology. So it's a very rich theory, right? And I think that um you can then you can then apply that. I mean, I'm thinking here of the practice of of Mormonism in Utah, which you're very intimately familiar with, and I'm somewhat familiar with, or even any, any kind of micro, you know, religious community. And I think that you do see this um very profound uh power of continuity, of the kind of overarching mechanisms that keep this consistency intact. And that then that is sort of field of that is a sort of form of power, but it's a form of power that doesn't um have any conscious recon recognition of its own basis in power. So there is this, there is this almost it's not psychoanalytic, but it's like unconscious, it's an unconscious. And that's why I think the his concept of field is all seems to me where more dynamic activity is thought. And that's actually where probably, you know, a more materialist uh uh uh dimension can be incorporated here. Whereas I I theorize habitus as sort of you know, like this more sunk, you know, more constant, more consistent. Um and this notion of hexus is interesting. You I think you mentioned this concept. It's uh I guess you could say it's like Bourdieu's theory of of the body, which is the um, I guess it's sort of like the ground of our individuality um and the way that habitus sort of marks us. One other thing I wanted to mention here when we think about the working class, a lot of working class Borduists or working class studies scholars that study Bordu, rather, you know, one of the big themes that they point out is that the working class in today's time is absent of a habitus. And that's very interesting to me. Where you almost have to incorporate a kind of theory of liminality, and I think this is very, very empirically sound, where a lot of working class experience is actually dejected from immersion into habitus, and perhaps that becomes a fecund. And this is something I'm working on in my in my next book with Revol Press on the working class, that I'm really trying to work through. Because I think that it gives us perhaps, and I want your thoughts on this, maybe like a new way to think about what alienation is today. Right? Because there is like, you know, I think that liberals love to tell us that class is educational merit and access and you know the class divide in income between those who have done four-year degrees and those who haven't is sizable. It is real, it is significant.

SPEAKER_01: 43:26

Although they will do stuff like lists of people in the same job position as working class and not working class because some are credential and some not, which leads you to to a weird division where you have even people making the same income from from uh being labeled as different class positions because of a perceived access difference because of credentialing, and um uh they like Bourdue for this uh quite a bit, actually, but it's also very confusing, and it doesn't help that a lot of Jacob and excuse me, shouldn't say Jacob and I because it sounds like Jacobite, but a lot of uh let's say social democratic or democratic socialist Marxist will jump between Marxist definitions and these definitions so that they can pull from government and bureau of labor statistics surveys, um uh and make big claims, but without pointing out that their definitions of class actually shift between one between one instance and the other. Um, I do find it fascinating. I mean, I do think there's real I I think cartelling and credentialing is important, and I I don't want to downplay that. And I know Marx didn't talk about it much. I also think that this observation that the working class has no habitus, my theory about it is that uh or has less of one today, less of one, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 44:48

Yeah, um destabilized, destabilized, a destabilized habitat.

SPEAKER_01: 44:53

My theory of that is that uh for variety of material conditions, um, you have seen the lumpinization of large portions of the working class because this was always true for lumpin', being that they do not have one class origin. You know, I agree with Clyde Burrow that we should probably refer to lumpen as a social category, not as a class, or because you can come from any class and end up there, yeah. Um, and the incentive structures we've seen dip into the working class as uh as things have shifted. One problem that that that has for Marxists, though, historically speaking, um, is that we are assuming that working class identity as what it existed as from about 1890 and only England and the United States and parts of Europe to about 1990, which is that was regular former workforce paid by uh by wages on a formalized model and not either by script or piecemeal, um, which is more like irregular labor, which reflects both the gig economy and a lot of the working class of the developing world. And the the reason why that's an issue for Marxist is that when Marx was writing about the working class, those conditions were in place then too, not the conditions of the second international to the to the post-war consistent consensus. So, in some ways, the return of lumpanization in a weird way actually is a return to the norm of piecemeal work when you take away the socialization of the factory floor. That's that's a lot there. Bordeaux, I think, does give you a way to understand that so does Marx, but a lot of contemporary Marxist theorists come up with weird new categories that actually make it harder to understand, like like the one I mentioned, the precariat. Well, what's the precurate? Blah blah blah blah. But you're like, okay, so it you just mean unstable. Well, this uh yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 47:06

In in his book, in his book on Heidegger, you may remember a very interesting point where he he, and I'll relate it to what you're saying. I think it's uh directly relatable, in fact, and it may actually point to Bourdieu's conservatism regarding the scholars, regarding the professional class in some sense. The social conditions that led to Heidegger's rise were was premised on a material breakdown of the credentialing system within Germany and this weird dynamic of young scholars having no proper ascension through the scholarly ladder, but they were basically stagnant but given leisure. So they were productive, but not gaining prestige as expected. So it's a decline in expectations of prestige, but an assurance of leisure for scholarly work. And this produces kind of what Bourdieu calls a petty bourgeois habitus, and a petty bourgeois habitus leaned towards irrationalism, philosophy, because it's trying to sort of resolve this crisis of of the of the fact that they have no social place, right? So they sort of they're they're in a a differentiated habitus, and there's a sort of alienation going on here. And I felt that this is um sort of related to the point that you're making about lumpenization, even though that's not exactly qualifies as lumpenization, insofar as um, you know, perhaps if we think about it, perhaps, you know, the symbolic power that comes from being inducted into a stable habitus uh brings with it a whole conundrum of what you might effectively call kind of brainwashing. And I think we see this anecdotally with a lot of comrades that go to elite universities and then become radical, become politicized, become Marxists, they have to decondition everything that they were habituated into. And I would I would claim that yes, you have the problem of de-skilling happening in the working class and the abandonment of education for the working class, which is a true material problem. But would we could we also contend that there may be a sort of uh not a power in that exclusion, insofar as a you're not indoctrinated into something, but b, you have a strength of having to coexist across a multiplicity of habitus for which you're never fully a part of any anecdotally. I will say I have felt this way myself. I have felt that I've never really had a home. I've touched, I've touched these, these I've never been accepted by them. Not really. Not really, you know what I mean? And I think that's the fate of many of us. And I think that perhaps that um fluid uh sort of touching of the multiplicity of different forms of habitus, maybe that gives us a certain vantage on the world, right? Or maybe what I'm saying is wishful thinking. It's I'm being very speculative right now, so I could be wrong. I'm just throwing something out there.

SPEAKER_01: 50:37

So, yes, that makes sense to me. And I think two ways we could tie it into but Badoo a little bit more in a second, but just I'm gonna mention the most basic of educational sociologists who does pull from the Badoo and tradition, but I mean she's super basic. You give her to elementary school teachers, and that is Ruby Payne. All right, and one thing Ruben King got me thinking about, because she went in and she like just described the class habits and education of each social class and where they were at, and one and it was very much liberal, it was stratification. This part of the middle class does this, this part of the class does this, this part of the lower middle class does this, etc. etc. Over time, if you looked at her descriptions, the the underclass traits eked up, and the upper class traits eked down. Now, that's a just an interesting observation, it's very empiricist, it's not much theoretically rich about that. But when I read Clyde Burrow's book, which you put me on to, I like Clyde Burrow's work a lot. Uh, both you and Nicholas Kearney uh have really had me uh interface with him, um was that there's a problem of the intermediary classes, but interestingly enough, if you look at both the experience of the working class and their lack of habitus and the experience of the intellectual and their denial of their own habitus, um there's a way in which they're both de-class A and that they're D-Class A models and consciousness and habitus habit uh are actually signs of unstable identities in in a strata that is getting harder and harder to figure out where the roles in production are because the socialization of the factory floor has fundamentally changed. Now, to bring that as to where you and I would fit into this, you and I share two traits that are very interesting. We are both I come from a from a working class and even quasi lump in background, just straight up. My father was a con man. Um, so I mean he had jobs, he had blue-collar jobs, he ended up in he ended up in sales by the end of his life, which is a good place for a con man to be. But nonetheless, my my stepfather, who was actually raised by, was a mechanic, and my mom was a waitress turned nurse in her 40s, and also nurse jackied herself very quickly.

SPEAKER_00: 53:17

So even I remember you saying that transition your mother had. I remember you saying that that was significant.

SPEAKER_01: 53:25

Oh, huge. Yeah, it changed her personality, changed her relationship to substance abuse, did a whole lot of stuff for her, both good and bad.

SPEAKER_00: 53:33

Like that's the thing is that my my mother and father, neither of them underwent inclusion into a professional or scholarly habitus. They didn't undergo that. Um, my mother basically did odd jobs, no formal training other than um beauty school for maybe a year, never finished, and then my father's like a potter, so he's just a you know, um sort of artisan, working class artisan. But that was very interesting for me because college fundamentally shaped it gave me, it gave me a habitus in this technical sense, but it gave me one that was still quite precarious in an interesting way because of the economic dynamics that were coming in my future, which I didn't couldn't foretell, mainly 2008, which I think changed and rocked. That's the other thing we share in common, which is that you both came of age at that time. And it was it was significant. I mean, there's no way around it.

SPEAKER_01: 54:43

I know that a lot of people kind of get uneasy when you people always mention 2008, but you know, it was a fucking significant event, and um it completely changed the left and the left talking points, even on the ultra-left, like completely overnight almost. Like, no one gave a shit about I mean, like, people forget this now, but no one really gave a shit about Marx outside of humanities, academics, and maybe people in China and the Naxalites in the in the late 90s and aughts. Like, really, it it was a gaping chasm of information.

SPEAKER_00: 55:22

Um that's why my first introduction to Mark was Marx was through like William S. Burroughs's relationship to Wilhelm Reich and then like uh Foucault and then Marx.

SPEAKER_01: 55:35

Actually, very similar here, too.

SPEAKER_00: 55:37

Actually, yeah, like it started with like avant-garde literature and then a few stepping stones into okay, this is this figure that is so central. What is what is he about?

SPEAKER_01: 55:49

For for me, it was punk zines into art into art into stuff like Burroughs, but also like the stuff Gro Marcus was writing about on lipstick traces into the situationist in the ultra-left in France as an art movement, not as a political movement, yeah. Then realizing they were politics and then struggling with that and thinking they were frankly thinking a lot of it was stupid, and then finding Marx at the bottom, and then as I saw 2008 coming around 2005, I actually was pretty perceptive about that part of the economy because I sort of started thinking about who we were giving loans to and why, and like how all that worked and who was making profits about that. And it to me, it's like, well, you if you're taking that much risk, you must have low profitability for investment, and then and you know, and then the crisis happens, and I'm like, Well, no one had a good explanation to this, but the Marxists. The the other explanations don't really make a whole lot of sense to me. Um, and that's how I kind of ended up a Marxist. Um, and I find I think you know, the recounting these stories, uh, one of the things that I find hopeful but also depressing about the current situation. When you were talking about the the leisure time elements of the period for Heidegger, but not the prestige. We lived through that kind of in in the in the odd teens. I mean, there was a class of people who some of them became pretty successful academics later, but Mark Fisher was among them who were basically educated, fairly prestigious academics who had no real work, weren't making a ton of money, but made enough money to survive, but still had plenty of time to blog, and then wrote books off of blogs. And and I would say one of the things that you saw at the time was a turn towards more and more irrationalist modes of thinking. Um uh and I mean this even from people I like, like uh Fisher's politics of joy towards the end of his life, I actually view as like was irrationally optimistic um uh about not just what not just the the chance of the social democratic project working, even though his earlier work had said it couldn't, but also that if it did work, it would do things like get rid of his depression. Like and so to me, the fact that then we saw weirder and weirder shit. I mean, we see it today, you know. I I'm now watching Marxist at Salvage Magazine, for example, become substance dualists because they have a 19th century conception of materialism, and they're answering it with a like a second-century conception of idealism, um uh because they don't because they don't seem to have thought through all the implications. And it seems rational, but I'll tell you that like it kind of isn't. Um uh now uh I I see this because um in the Badurian logic, it makes sense your point about alienation comes back in here from the Bedourian logic, it makes sense the habitas is breaking down because the socializations of the factory floor have moved into the socializations of the service industry, which is highly fractured, the petite bourgeois craft, which have been proletarianized. All right, the crap, the crafts and trades are now mostly wage labor, so they've been proletarianized, but they still largely function on a petite bourgeois model of individual success, are very small group success. There's no like mass socialization in that. Um, the academic, we're super alienated in some senses because the academic's thing is total social war hidden behind a veneer of objectivity, and if people will argue with me with that, I'd say you haven't been to grad school. Like, because at no time except in grad school had I ever had to think about how much I was signaling and what kind of theory of mind the person I was doing uh had, because if I picked the wrong thesis advisor, I could never get a job.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:34

Like, no, it uh uh it's weird because in the Heidegger example, there's a what he calls a kind of zeitgeist that was forging a Kind of Weltenschang, which was a new form of militant conservative philosophy that had at its core an all-out assault on rationalism, an all-out assault on Marxism, on the despiritualization that Marxism brought about. He really centers Oswald Spangler and the decline of the West as paradigmatic and as extremely influential for the development of this of this zeitgeist that made Heideggerianism really possible. Because Spangler, more so than Heidegger, gave intellectuals this kind of currency of concepts that was extremely pre-fascistic, extremely um on this on this um obscure Nietzschean vitalist irrational affirmation of a pessimism. This is another thing, is that the um radicalism of despair becomes very, very I mean, Bourdieu's book on Heidegger is very close to Lukatch's chapter on Heidegger in The Destruction of Reason. And the both of them should be read closely together. I think Lukatch's critique of Heidegger's conception of design and what he does to Husserl and to phenomenology is more rigorous philosophically than Bordieu's is. But Bordjou's is better at giving the social cultural context that made Heidegger possible. And the way that all of Heidegger's um esotericism conceals its implicit solidarity with Nazism. And Heidegger's book is uh one of the early texts, like uh what's this guy? Emmanuel Todd, I think it is, the French theoretician that wrote a very important book on Heidegger's relationship to Nazism, which is one of the first. Richard Rolin's latest one came out only two years ago. It's just funny that the Americans took that long to finally have their moment of Heidegger's complicit complicity with Nazism. Nietzsche does not fare well in Bourdieu's book on Heidegger, by the way. But I think what's interesting is this idea of a fragmented habitas that converts itself into this wider cultural uh worldview. And this is something that I'm seeing today with this um really sort of ambivalent embrace of Nick Land on the left, again, again. And there's a fundamental confusion here. I mean, Fisher, to his credit, was a lot more clear as to why Nick Land is an enemy than a lot of contemporary leftists that are very infatuated and mesmerized with Nick Land. I worry that the that the land identification today is functioning almost like a fetish that's ultimately very obscure, right? In the sense that there's this sort of fascination with Land because he seems to be a court philosopher of the Trump moment, or one of them next to Yarvin. And there's that seduction of power. I can never for the life of me explain why so many of the anarchists de los and guatterie younger kids are so infatuated with land. Like I know that uh his early work has some philosophical merit. Like his piece, for example, in Fang Numena on Kant, slavery, and incest is a very, very compelling and it's quasi-Marxist, right? But once Land moves into what is effectively post-blood and soil nationalism, and he theorizes the cathedral and outsideness and all of this deeply racist and reactionary mumbo jumbo, I see a lot of apologetics, a lot of apologetics and a seduction that's at work here. That's my own take. And I don't um, you know, I'm doing an event on this with a comrade who's and obviously I love Mikey Downs, and but I love Mikey because I know that Mikey is trying to do a Marxist critique of land, and maybe Mikey has a bit of seduction. If Mikey's listening to our conversation right now, I'm not trying to isolate Mikey just as a side point. But I think there's a lot of uncritical, seductive relationality going on with land as an example. And I also just think that in final point I'd say is that um the social breakdown of the capitalist system gives rise to an output of intellectual irrationality when the university discards when the university falls into a crisis of prestige, downward mobility, and the fragmentation of its own coherence as a habitus, it no longer becomes a site where productive intellectual work can actually transpire, in my view. And I think you can attest to this as well, because you fall into this kind of strange relativism there. So counter-public academic educational efforts become really necessary, quite frankly. And you know, but but not like I once had a correspondence with Luke Wakant, this bourgeois at Berkeley, and I learned something very interesting. He's very opposed to para-academic activity. He does not like the para-academic activity. Like I teach at a para-academic institution called the Global Center for Advanced Studies. We invited him to give a course, and he's like, there's no way I'm giving a course there. Right. I think it goes back to this bourgeoist idea that we talked about before, which is there is a sort of conservativism at work, which is that the reform has to happen of the university system itself. Right. So he doesn't, he he doesn't, he seems to have an allergy to proletarian education, let's call it, right? Which for me, it's not that I it's not that I have an allergy to proletarian education, it's that I don't have a choice but to do proletarian education. Like that's not that's just like my reality. I'm facing it, I'm having to do it. It's not necessarily like, you know what I mean? Like if you're if you're rejected, if you're dejected from the system, A, don't have shame about that rejection, but also don't give up. Like, don't you know, you know what I mean? Don't like capitulate. That's one thing I would say. It's like, you know, there's no need to capitulate to this the crite, the academic system's in a crisis. Learn outside of it, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:46

Well, uh, this leads to an interesting point. Uh uh, I I am gonna be interviewing Ada Palmer, um, the fiction writer and historian on the Renaissance, uh, and how it was actually a crisis of education and a crisis of legitimacy, um, and was not really a high point of European liberal uh civilization from either sides from either historical epoch of before and after perspective. It's sort of a retroactive construction, but it is interesting how both fruitful and dangerous these time periods of these breakdowns of habitas are, and and that puts the intellectual right now in a particular place because as we're gonna get to in the last part of the series, when we talk about public intellectuals outside of academia, um um there is a sense in which uh your virtue is also your vice when it comes to this de classe lack of habitus problem, and and I'll get to that in in in a second. Because we've we've we've edemonided the right the vice of irrationalism, but we've also identified a skepticism towards to use a very nebulous term, the status quo. Um and this manifests in both rational and irrational way amongst the working class in particular. I mean, people will tell me that like non-college educated working class people um are particularly given towards conspiracy theories. And I've always been like, well, this is because they recognize a fundamental problem, but have no non-personal narratives for which they can understand to explain it. So a botched personal narrative, which may even sometimes be true, I mean, but it's not true in the aggregate, uh, is a way that most of these people explain their experience, which is the which is a real recognition of a serious problem that is then led into different things that are easily abusable. Um and this puts both the intellectual and the the organic intellectual and the academic intellectual in a particular bind because uh the academic intellectual would have to then admit that their claims to objectivity, even in the sciences, is situated by incentives and not just by the ure logic of science, scientific objectivity themselves. And a lot of people don't want to do that, I mean, because it it demystifies their own position, and it also means it looks like it's actually giving headway to the irrationalism by admitting that there are problems with scientific thinking. Um on the other side, um the the paraacademic recognizes a problem that is given into more and more and more hard issues of dealing with uh what do you do when you are trying to interact with, I don't know, a thousand Joe Rogans who are seeing real problems but positing no solutions because everything is personalized or ad hoc or super presentist or whatever, right? Because there's also no social way through habitas to in to instantiate anything because right while we talk about habitas is bad and it is mostly uh an ideological function, it does socialize, right? Yeah, and that's good.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:26

So no, it's very interesting because I would say that without any touch to the scholarly habitus, one effect of that lack of familiarity with it often will lead people to presume that there is no distinction internal to it, which of course there is, as we are articulating. And that creates a kind of blemish on the organic intellectual who must by necessity have a prerequisite training in those institutions. There's no such thing as a pure autodidacticism. I would never fully trust somebody that's a pure autodidact. I mean, I don't know about trust, but you know, I would be skeptical of somebody, and even like Guy Debor, had this what he calls ontological hatred of the university system. You know, a very famous uh autodidact, uh, French philosopher Mehdi Balhash Cassem, who's been on my program. I mean, there's these exceptions, these kind of exceptions, but I think it's not advisable to advocate a pure autodidactic pedagogy or a form of education. I think that um what I'm trying to say is that we have to A, formulate and help people formulate modes of distinction within the scholarly habitus on the one hand. On the other hand, we also have to have a kind of clear sense of the antagonism that is born from the crisis of experts, which is understood in a manipulated way. It's often manipulated. Um, you know, it's at the it's at the um core of Bannon's discourse, it's the core of elements of Trumpism, it's at the core of Pat Buchanan. I mean, this has been with us for a long time. It's even in the core of um the general Burnhamite view, which is to, and even, I would say, at the core of even Yarvin, right? Which is that they wanted, in a Machiavellian sense, they the right benefits by castigating, and and this is a strategy that Lukac identified in the Nazis. One of the Nazis' core propaganda techniques was to falsely align liberals with communists in for the masses. It's an ingenious strategy because it sort of shuts down what is otherwise a fundamentally antagonistic uh horizon between them. But when you conflate them, it gives you all kinds of maneuverability around them, right? And so I feel that um I feel that these distinctions actually have a lot of purchase, a lot of importance, in part because maybe one formula we could derive in a Borduous sense is that the deeper you are embedded in the scholarly habitus, credential-wise, security-wise, etc., there will have a kind of correlating effect on your capacity for communication to subjectivities outside of it, right? That you will necessarily struggle, that chasm will be a material barrier for a form of communication. So I think in that uh context, um, yeah, that that that is clear to me. That is clear to me. On the other side, I think a lot of working class people probably, and this is something I see a lot in Lash, which we talked about in our first episode, they do want a renormalization of the stable intellectual to play a very particular social function that is predictable and that, like, you know, let intellectuals be intellectuals, that kind of idea. And I'm a little bit for that, but I'm also a little bit for seizing the instability that we're facing in a way which um can galvanize class consciousness, right? Through an intellectual project. And therefore, I'm for para-academic work. But I think para-academic work can only be successful if it is sets itself the task of being more rigorous than actual academic work, which is very hard to do. It can be done, but I think that's the only way that it could actually succeed. So the onus is on the labor of the para-academic. They have to, and they can never be fully detached from the university. I think that's naive.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:10

Um, but I think I mean I see both of us still have some relationship to the university.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:15

I teach I teach it, I teach uh periodically at university, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:18

I'm I'm I yeah, I'm I'm technically a community college instructor too. So not quite a university, but in that system.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:25

So I uh I absolutely no, of course, and I I I interview academics all the time. I have profound respect for a lot of academics, but I will say that I think it behooves us to sharpen our critique of the frivolous basis of so much academic faux radicalism and like falsely political constructs. A lot of that is improving, I will add. I think that in our lifetime we've seen waves of very, very um pathetic scholarly trends that have produced uh a lot of like very, I mean, I would even I would even blame a lot of cultural studies, a lot of post-structuralism, a lot of decolonial thought. Not all of it, but a lot of it uh was forged in a context that was formed of a habitus that told itself that what it was producing was way more political than it really was. I'm not sure that um the acute crisis of the contemporary academy can afford that kind of stuff. Uh Bourdieu has a great essay on this where he he he thought that post-structuralism, very similar to Catherine Liu's critique of post-structuralism, was basically giving a completely unrealistic conception of liberation. Same same thing that he critiqued in Fanon. I think he's a little bit unfair to Fanon, if you if you ask me, um, but he was embedded in Algeria, so I suppose that he had perhaps more valid reasons. But you know, I think this is the value of his work in a certain way, but I still I still can't wrap my head around his fatalistic realism of saying at the end of the day only academics can save us, which is kind of how he concludes a lot of a lot of his stuff. Um by the way, this whole condition of the of the 68, which I didn't I mentioned but didn't articulate, he develops this concept of what he calls hysteresis, which is kind of like a play on the psychoanalytic idea of hysteria. And in the psychoanalytic conception of hysteria, as you as you probably know, it's a very um ambivalent relationship to authority, in which you protest authority, but you secretly wish for it to remain in place, right? And hysteresis is a sort of um frustration which is incapable of fully overcoming that system which oppresses you. So it's kind of like a bad rivalry or a bad paternalism, and that sort of explains this idea of the petty bourgeois and the precise context of the Heidegger uh uh situation I articulated. Because that's what he really thinks that 68 was about. He thinks that 68, and he analyzes it empirically, he thinks that '68 was really driven by um downward mobility of the French educational system in a tailspin, where basically the middle strata was not given the uh uh ascension that they were promised, which is part of the reason why the French ruling class largely saw much of the 68 protesters as the new as the new ruling class, but in a frustrated state, which kind of in a very crude way is what happened. So he was he's definitely not like a pro 68 figure at all. Uh Bourdieu is not. Um and a lot's been written about this idea of hysteresis, which I think is certainly a kind of recurring because I think you have to sort of ask yourself, like, okay, well, then what is the educational system to be? Um, because in a way, I I'm not sure that we have the means to restore the type of stability that they opine for. So then what is what are we to make of it? And I would say that you know, in our next episode, when we turn to Gramsci, Russell Jacoby, and this question of organic intellectual, maybe we can kind of put some meat on the on that bone. But it's very hard for academics to and I guess part of that is the is the uh psychological dimension of what the scholarly life gives you in a certain way. I think that um alienated leisure.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:24

I mean, I I actually I actually point I I do think we do have to admit that it's not leisure in the Marxist sense, it is still alienated because ultimately it is for something other than your own edification, but in all other ways it's effectively leisure. Um and you know, I don't think that's true of all white collar work, I think that's specifically academia. This is one of the things that one of my one of my issues with the with some of like Kathleen Lou's talking about the PMC that I'm like, you're really talking about if I even accepted your category of PMC from Aaron Reich and whatnot, you're really talking about part of it, not all of it. Yeah, um yeah, yeah. And that part of it is the part you know very well because you're a professor, but um uh it is a it is an interesting problem. Now I want to complicate uh I I want to complicate the the narrative around 68 though, and and I think it's the same complication we hit with student protest and dowerly mobile protest uh today because I do think if you looked at like the demographics of the people who are in Jacobin, a lot of them will be a lot of them from a Marxist perspective, we would consider um wage earners and thus working class. We might not consider them productive workers, though, and we would probably see them as proletarianized professionals who used to be petit bourgeois. And I want to interject some changes that still just that may be illuminating for us today. Um I am skeptical of some of the cranes of Peter Turchin, but I think if you read Berdue and Peter Turchin together, you do see a lot of the radical um elements of academia leading these charges um for more inclusion for for talking about. I mean, a lot of them do talk about the working class. There then, as in now, at least now as until about five years ago, I actually think it's a the academic trajectory is completely different now because blue-collar people are no longer sending their kids to college, but they were trying to. We are both products of that, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:50

Like, um well, I think I think the thing the thing I just want to say very quickly on leisure, just very quickly. Okay, so if you add the question of sort of prestige or symbolic prestige, and you add in this theory of his own conception of uh inheritance, symbolic inheritance, one of the things that he would try to show is that the mere affirmation of an academic who says, yes, I am desiring tenure so that I can have a life of greater social ease. Think about that that demand for a moment, and you'll immediately recognize that if you sp if you break that down from class background, you do you do not have the capacity and the habitual formation of your subjectivity, if you're from a working class background, to formulate that demand. That's true. Your parents are not gonna bestow upon you through repetitive rituals and other initiation rights, that normalization of that. That doesn't that will not be a reasonable demand that you would make on institutions for your for yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:05

No, in fact, I've always thought tenure was bullshit for that reason. And I was weirded out when my other radical colleagues would defend it, and I would be like, I mean, even if we assume the academic, the the academic is actually a proletarian in some wage-earning sense, although that's very complicated in a variety of ways. But even if we assume that, uh tenured academics are one of the most laborist aristocratic categories I've ever heard of in my life. They are protected from almost all other labor discipline. They are granted the leisure to pursue pretty much whatever they want off of some academic justification, and particularly after the 1980s, they exist by the exploitation of mass amounts of adjunct uh and graduate student labor.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:58

I mean, mass amounts, and that and that fact, you see, this is Bordeaux's theory of symbolic power of ideology. That reality cannot be affirmed within the institutional matrices of the system itself, and that I would claim goes to your point about the aggressivity of contemporary academia. It's a fucking brutal, backbiting zone of pettiness and weird, rivalrous, almost like mental health dynamics that are sort of in full force and full effect, full of people combined with the class dynamic of their own expectations. Because again, that class origin point is important here because your expectations and the pressures imposed upon you are non-existent. So, yeah, sure, you want social ease, but you've not you have not been formulated as an individual to demand it from institutions. There's no right, like so there's a certain power imbalance that again goes unacknowledged. So that's a very significant dynamic, and I think it's interesting that the tenure system is so I mean, I remember when I first did an interview with you, you said something very striking. You may remember you said that modern academia is still quasi-feudal. Right. Yeah, and it is. I was thinking about it. I'm like, actually, he's right. They're not gonna acknowledge that, but it fucking is, right? Which is why so many senior academics have terrible practices in the Biden period when we had public sector unionization happening. You had all of these countless cases of senior tenured academics turning against the adjunct unionization efforts, which was really dark. Even Marxist academics turning against adjunct union unionization. That's really, really bad. But it happened actually more than you would think.

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:02

I mean, particularly, I find it particularly funny because in so much that there are pressures in academia, they are so they are intra-social amongst your peers and they're nasty. I mean, they really are nasty, and and or they are from administration. So I'm just like, even though most of these tenured academics see administration as demand of their existence, when push comes to shove, they will protect administration over people who ostensibly do similar work to them, which tells you they're labor aristocratically alienated from their own strata. And and I find this interesting, but I also to go back to the 68 problem because I think you see this again now. This is another thing where where 68 rhymes but almost in inverse, because 68 you had this downwardly mobile elite. I completely agree with you, but you it was mixing with an influx of former proletarian's children, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:01

That's the big difference, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yep, you nailed it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:05

And today, um the former proletarian's children are people like us, but we are rarer and rarer in academia, despite despite the fact that the percentage of the population is who interfaces with the universities has doubled from the late 60s. Uh and I find that quite interesting in that uh I would say today uh there isn't there is an intermixture of people like me who I consider myself like one of the lucky people rising out of the blue-collar working class whose whose relationship to it is complicated, but has done manual labor jobs, right? You know, has done all kinds of kind of sketchy employment before. Yeah, I was a prison guard, I I worked loading docks, I uh I've done all kinds of stuff. And I was a I was a pizza cook, you know, like um the but I have been in education in some capacity now for almost 20 years. Um I I find this weird. Uh my my own consciousness, I I feel like, you know, to be again to be used something from Fanon, but because of this lack of clear habitats, I feel like I have a double or even triple consciousness. And you can see this in my own response to my background. If I if I did not like Uh lump and ice working class people uh when when I got straight out of education, I saw them as unable to function in a meritocracy, to lift themselves up, um, and to be fundamentally damaged. Then later on, I felt like I romanticized the working class in response to myself, right? To my own realization that I was a bullshit habitas, that I was being profoundly unfair to my own background. This was even a form of self-hatred because I was internalizing the hostility to me in these uh class codes. I mean, this is one of the things with like I remember reading JG Vance's Hillbilly elegie and actually sympathizing with parts of it, even though some of it was the most obvious bullshit ever. Like, yeah, even I know how the order of the forks go. Um, and also in my life, I've actually never encountered that social chest. Um, so like no one's actually cared. Um, but uh uh I do remember all these ways in which, in tiny ways, I betrayed my class origins because of my concerns, because of my assumptions, because of kinds of self-lies I wouldn't accept, right? Um, and one of the ways to deal with that in habitas, and uh often with a lot of people, this sticks is you internalize that hostility back onto your class origins, and you hate where you come from. I mean, and JD Vance's is abundantly clear the way he talks about uh poor white trash.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32:28

Like well, the problem with him is he hasn't moved to the second level that you moved into, or I guess actually the third. Actually, you were gonna articulate the third level.

SPEAKER_01: 1:32:38

Well, the third level is you start realizing there are social function, social destruction in the working class, but it is it cannot be decontextualized as being solely from the class itself, and that we have to deal with that in a profound way. You know, one of the things that I realized, for example, uh I'll be like, why are not why are all these working class people getting married at 19 and getting divorced at 24? Right? And it didn't occur to me until my 30s to start looking at a stable marriage as a classed good that is foreclosed for a lot of working class men and women. Um, and if you don't believe me, uh you can read Hannah Rosen 10 years ago, and more than 10 years ago, I think now, uh, about the effects of women in the dating pool, particularly amongst the working class. And this is you know highly liberal, not a radical at all. Um, or you can read uh Christopher Reeves and Ryan Zagraff on working class men today, and correspondingly the stats on working class women and their ability to hold down a family and being sending mothers. This idea that you often see amongst leftists that it's the upper middle class because of their bohemianism destroying the family values, it's just not true. They get their bohemianism and they get married too. And right, well, that's just seen as a phase.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:05

That's actually that's actually interesting because one of the things I was re realizing when I was reading Musa Al-Ghareeb's We Have Never Been Woke.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:14

A book I kind of like, actually.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:15

Yeah, I like it too. He's a Borduist.

SPEAKER_01: 1:34:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:34:19

And actually, you can see the limits of Bordu. And I wrote a review of it and I showed, I tried to show the limits of his of his work. Because you get into what I what I would consider this problem, you know, we talked before about belief and the disavowal of belief. I think we get into a real problem. Like, say, say, like Lenin. Like Lenin affirmed that something like a professional revolutionary is unnecessary for Marxist socialist work. And therefore, there has to be a kind of trueness of the ideological commitment of the vanguard intellectual. A lot of Borduists fundamentally castigate radicals as never capable of transcending the habitus of their own, you know, of the own confines of it. And therefore, they they think that the appeal to revolution, say in he analyzes the new left. Nowhere in his analysis of the new left, he takes a very Orwell critique of the new left as middle class socialism. And for me, this is a real question, right? Because I would contend, and one thing I do like about his book is he starts off and he talks about his own class consciousness as a working class kid from I think the Midwest going to Colombia and seeing that polarity, which is like true bourgeois, true bourgeois um habitus, really sets you off in the kind of recognition of something like class difference and power. And I always felt like um that actually is an affirmation as to a the importance for working class people to come into touch with classes other than their own because of its intrinsic political politicizing power. But then maybe one of the conclusions of Gareeb is that only people from working class that can mix with this habitus have a touch to like authentic politics. So I was kind of critical of that because I don't really think that perhaps politics should be understood vis-a-vis this authenticity problem. Very like influenced by Adorno's criticism of authenticity. I don't think authenticity, I think that um there needs to be a degree of social trust and this idea, and I even see this with Catherine Liu a lot. There's no social trust in the appeal to social change on behalf of certain classes. So I uh perhaps that's answerable through organization, through party, where all of that stuff is subordinated to the higher mission of the party, and in that sense, it kind of gets swept into that, and it doesn't fucking matter as to whether I trust you or not in terms of this. I don't know the answer exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 1:37:19

But my my issue with that is though we have two case studies, and they end up in either the purges of the cultural revolution, and I actually defend the cultural revolution as avoiding this a civil war in China between uh uh a declining aristocratic class, uh declining aristocratic intellectual class, which is a class category we don't even really have outside of priest, like you know, in the western tradition. It's hard for me to like point out the the the weird, like um, if you look at the DPR case flag, there's the the sign for the aristoc for the quasi-aristocratic intellectual class in the clock in the three classes on the flag. And people are like, Well, what's that a big deal? And I'm like, Well, they're trying to incorporate a non-bourgeois, only semi-aristocratic class, but a class that we had in our society only in religious contexts, and which have been subordinated actually largely by the reformation and counter-reformation, right? Um, and I bring this up because I mean, you know, I'm not a fan of Nick Land, I'm really not. But the what the one thing he said that I was like, well, you do have to deal with it, is there is a way in which academia is analogous but cannot be the same as this quasi-aristocratic uh class in Asia, uh, which which Lan, of course, equates to the priest class in the in the West and calls it the cathedral. Um now I think that's very vulgar class analysis, but it shows us the problem that academics uh forgo, particularly if you don't have this relation of production model, because um the the intellectual in even in Russia they had very clear social reproduction purposes in regards to the state of an absolutist early modern semi-feudal system, um, uh and in China we could say a tributary system because feudalism is not really a the best analogy for what's going on there, um but that academia today doesn't really function that way, but but but if we look at like the function of academia from an ideological standpoint, some of Burdu's stuff still still I think stands in a way that's hard to deal with because there are two ways in which academics justify their lack of habitats. We talk about their lack of class coding or the fact that they try to they try to deal with the problem of inequality to make meritocracy work by in language and in cultural habitus erasing your ability to explain to express your difference in anything other than identity categories, it even the identity categories there are not to be seen as relational, but to are seen as socially essential, huh?

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:26

I would say quasi-ontological, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:28

Yeah, quasi-ontological, right? Where you say, Oh, they're socially constructed, but you can never do anything about that. Um, so so they're not they're not biologically essential, but they also aren't not essential. And you know, you know, some of this in the in the kind of faux radicalism of the post-structuralists where they talk about strategic essentialism and non-essentialism and this, that, and the other, right, which really makes you feel like this is a bad faith move. But but I think when you when you think when you realize that it's part of this habitus denial that you're talking about for academics, because academics serve two contradictory functions, which is why they have been allowed to exist in a non-competitive market state, and they might not be allowed to in the future, by the way. I mean, this is just something there. I think their bourgeois is now beginning to happen. Um, uh, in the sense that uh on one hand, uh they sort, and this is true even for like European super generous Nordic model, you don't pay for university, they sort social access and cultural and social capital also corresponds, although cannot be said to be the same as actual capital. Like it is a way for class mobility to happen. But what is interesting about that is even in the cases where there is free college and the Nordic models and the German model and parts of East Asia, who primarily benefits from free college is still even in those cases, the children of the bourgeoisie and downwardly mobile aristocrats, that's still who benefits, even when you make college free and remove the market access problem because it is about the legitimization and skilling of that particular social strata, but it can only justify to itself by saying that it is enabling class mobility, which in theory increases this kind of access of people to elites, which then of course uh enables them to say that they're actually equalizing society through education. But those are two fundamentally opposed functions. I'm gonna say that colleges do kind of do both, but the latter is almost by lottery, right? Like it is not it is not meritocratic, it's who's lucky enough to get in or have met somebody to get them in, or to have made the right choice when they went to undergraduate, or whatever, you know, to bring up JD Vance again. Something I happen to know about J.D. Vance when he talks about his military experience and how he earned all this is he doesn't mention that he was a um non-infantry, non-officer, which means that he worked um with officers all the time, which gave him access to things like Ohio State Senators, which is how he got the access to things like Ivy League universities. Um, and I just happen to know this about his biography, and that's left out of Hildeology. So there is a way in which there is a lottery function that even the people who go through this from the blue-collar working class have an incentive both implicitly and explicitly to not mention, right? Right. Um, and this is a function of a habitat, it's also a function of symbolic violence, right?

SPEAKER_00: 1:44:26

I mean, I would actually say in these egalitarian societies that even Passeron and uh Pourdue analyze in their, I think, trilogy of works on the French educational system during the welfare state, showing this same fluidity of social reproduction happening, I would actually say the symbolic violence is technically higher or more pronounced, paradoxically, in those situations. Whereas in the United States, there is a sense in which there's more of a naturalization of inequality from the get-go, which then kind of um punctures the brute social reproductive underbelly of the system, right? Because you have to have a system which is already normalized inequality from the beginning. And so, in that sense, I feel as if you know the symbolic violence, quote unquote, is in a way blunted in the US system because we have this Protestant cultural dynamic at work already, a predestination, and there's like a whole the conservatism of the of the centrist worldview. There's a whole range of dynamics that kind of blunt that in a certain way. Uh, and I think that you're right, but what did you mean when you said that the cast of academics now are becoming fully bourgeoisified? I was very curious about it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:45:55

I mean, I mean the academia is becoming bourgeoisified, and it's gonna have a it's going to have to have more and more of a profit motivation to survive. Um, that even though we have seen how bad for-profit universities failed, because that's actually one that's actually one of the interesting things that that goes on here.

SPEAKER_00: 1:46:13

Speaking of symbolic violence, you and I are unique, not only because we did college and it was maybe unexpected for us to do that based on where we came from. We also chose uh you chose poetry, I chose philosophy. Like, what's that? There's no there's no profit utility in those degrees. No, we had some illusion of a minimal social stability that would allow us to do that, which was then revealed to be a sham, and we had to live in the wake of that, right? Absolutely, right? And and now the problem, and I don't know how this is gonna play out. Um, that sham is now revealed as a sham, it's known as a sham, and there's a descendant. What was the statistic? I don't know if you recently saw it, that's something like 40% of young people don't think college is really worth the sacrifice, right?

SPEAKER_01: 1:47:15

Yeah, I almost got an argument with Doug Henwit over this because he was like the instupefication of the America, and I just commented maybe the institutions themselves played a role here, like maybe it's not like because even leftists will still do shit like pretend that the average American is stupid, like at a fundamental level, not just because they're incentivized to make bad choices and thus live an uninformed life, but because they're fundamentally dumber than their European counterparts or something.

SPEAKER_00: 1:47:51

It's the elitism of liberalism, it's the same elitism that would not that is not capable for however many you know in-depth conversations and sociological data you can throw at them regarding what the rational kernel of voting for Donald Trump was on behalf of working class people, like that's a reality, and a lot of it comes down to like, all right, well uh what's resentment for you? Like, how does social resentment function for you in a certain way? Because I would contend that there is a certain middle strata that has a fundamental allergy to the mere fact that working class people possess resentment. And so one of Nietzsche's great uh uh ingenuities, in my in my view, which is that actually Nietzsche, I read, it's my reading, he's he's he's he's about his his his interest in Rosantimand is about the possibility of its eradication from the lower classes, right? It's not about a tacit recognition of its reality, which is I think what we should see it as, right? No, it's and seeing the rational kernel in that reality. It's not about that for him.

SPEAKER_01: 1:49:06

Literally, it's almafati, love your fate. He states it explicitly, like oh yeah, um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:49:15

And that's the thing, is is like, you know, uh, I was I was I've I've been on this whole deep dive trying to you know study the the current far right, and so I was listening to Candace Owens' interview, Nick Fuentes, and she goes, So wait a second, you're from a good family, you went to Boston College, that's a good school, and Fox News denied you on the basis of you being anti-Semitic. How dare they? Like, in other words, you were prepped to be the next Rush Limbaugh. How could the establishment deny you? It's like, oh my god. But it's just so funny. If it not only does she not only does she care nothing about class, power, etc., etc. It's not even it. Her whole worldview is based on the denial, the rejection, not denial, rejection of it. It's like that's conservativism, that's what that is. That is that is, and that's why it's repressive.

SPEAKER_01: 1:50:11

I mean, it it shows me they are that most of these conservatives know nothing of their own history, too, because I'm like, well, they were also denied to Joe Sobrin, almost denied to Pat Buchanan, uh, they were denied to uh Sam Francis, they were denied to all the precursors uh of uh the American traditionalist movement, which became the alt-right, which is where the grapers are like the internet meme form of. Um right. And what what is fundamental about that is it also like as much as they hate liberal credentialing, I mean, they'll talk about all these elites, they all want to be that or are that. I mean, this is the other thing about uh about this liberal elitism and the way in which conservatism can use the things that Bordeaux and Al-Muza are talking about, but dishonestly, like as if it's from Harvard. You know, you can talk about all these Ivy League Aheads doing DEI, but they're from that same so they're from that same social class, they're from that same social strata, even if they were pushed out into the media version of it and not the elite policy version of it, and they're pissed about it. This is an inter-elite fight, which can recast itself as a populist one. And one of the darker things that Badu is implicating in his writings about 68 is that the left does this too. That these insurgents are basically inter-elite fights that speak the language of proletarianization, but have no actual interest in it because if they actually did dismantle the society, what they want would not be available for them. The the interesting thing about the right is the right might accidentally dismantle the society and the left always chickens out. So um, um, I mean, I find that funny. It's also terrifying, but like it is something to think about, and I guess I wonder if that's also part of what the what Bordeaux and Gouldner and Almuza, while they all kind of freak out about that implication a little bit, even if they're like, you know, we should look at the rational reasons why working class people may have chose either not to vote or vote for Trump, right? Like, um, did and then you know, liberals will just call that will call them racist. And I'm just like, even if that was true, it's not actually all that explanatory. Like, why are they racist? You know, like like, you know, what's what's the insimpant logic here other than bad stall does bad things?

SPEAKER_00: 1:52:46

Like, or the or the or the presumption that this these institutions possess this is part of the problem that I have with DEI, is that DEI has a self-congratulatory presumption that the current like there's a presupposition that DEI comes from a benevolent institutional source, which itself is not riddled with inequality and fragmented and totally illegitimate, but it can only function presuming that it's not. That goes back to this disavowal thing and the fact that symbolic power is a very powerful notion of adherence to institutional mores and norms, even in the face of their decadence, their crisis, and their illegitimacy. You still every window I've seen this, I've seen this as being part of it. What I think is interesting though is that when you are a part of these institutions, but not fully a part of them, you're kind of partially a part of them. You you do have the power of visibility, like you're not as succumbed to the disavowal of things because you don't there's no incentive for you to fully defend it, right? And that that I think perhaps is something that's useful for socialist education, and maybe again what what working class people can kind of use to their advantage. And I would even say that the more just as a general advice to comrades, like the more you can enter into these institutions from the inside, the better. I'm not I'm not trying to make a claim that people should fall into some asceticism. No, I think these are even try to reform them from the inside, it's just knowing how they work, it's knowing exactly, it's knowing how they work, it's not falling succumb to some naive kind of conformity to them, right? Always, always never conform to them. But you know, I think Fred Moton has this beautiful idea of treat them uh like a fugitive, be a fugitive inside of them, you know, use them, abuse them, like they are they're unjust, they are they are riddled with they are they are contradictory and and so on.

SPEAKER_01: 1:55:05

So like they're unjust by their own aims. I mean, this is the thing. I'll give you an example with DEI. Since the implementation of DEI from other forms of civil rights uh stuff in um in higher ed, you know, it didn't work like affirmative action. Affirmative action did allow mostly white women, but then also um foreign academics largely, and then also some of the upper class of color to enter into what was predominantly white institutions on a relatively equal footing. Um but with DEI came in, we actually saw, and you have to be inside the university and actually paying attention to administrative, not just academic talking points. This is another thing. I really the ideological function of act of academic literal of liberalism really is super pernicious. Um, and I don't even mean that in a conspiracy way, just to flat out like we are denying what we're doing, we are helping students of color. How are we helping them by increasingly diverting resources that used to go into black communities and the working class to Nigerian international students who we also hyper-exploit, but who will go back to their countries and are also richer than most of the right students here?

SPEAKER_00: 1:56:23

That's a and then that's a common factual thing, and this is this is so problematic to me because then when the race irrationalism gets kicked up, either by the right or by the left or anyone in between, no one's culpable for that precise causal point that you just indicated, which has in injected into the system something which is contradictory and um yeah, like absolutely self-effacing to its own purported aims and goals, and has been premised on a conception of race which is super essentialist, like extremely so, more so than even the academics would feel comfortable with, I assume, right? Unless they're like weird, vulgar, like I don't know, social Darwinist race reductionists, afro-pessimist, maybe. Because that's why this other thing, it's like, and I don't even know if this Fuentes guy is like who the I don't even trust him at all. I was listening to this interview with him, and he's like, Oh yeah, I'm an identitarian because after BLM, the left made me an identitarian, and I just took them at their word. And now that's the way that's the way I see the world.

SPEAKER_01: 1:57:37

See, that's an old script, though. I mean, this is the thing. This is like like Greg Johnson of counter of uh counter counterpoints, but okay, that's confusing because there's about 50 things called that. Not counterpoints. One of the no no, not counterpoints, counterpoints. Um which was a white nationalist organization uh adjacent to Richard Spencer that no one paid attention to. But uh do you know where I mean uh I'm not gonna get into people I know personally who've done this, but do you know where most of these people come from? They're spurned academics themselves who then feel like um they their class prerogative or their meritocratic prerogative was usurped by racial ideologies within these institutions. Greg Johnson said the same thing. Greg Johnson was one of these ra one of these racialist guys about 15, 15, 16 years ago, and he was like, I was all into it until I got denied this and I became an identitarian white nationalist because I saw that there was nothing I could do to be meritocratic in the system. Right. So it's a it's a long very much so uh tradition. I actually thought it went back to the 50s, but I found it like going all the way back to the French fucking revolution. So like it's it's a long time.

SPEAKER_00: 1:59:07

It's a tricky one too, uh for obvious reasons. And I think that um like there needs to be some affirmation, I think, on behalf of socialism, because I I when I see this stuff, my first thought is only socialism can solve this irrationalism. You know what I mean? Only like a kind of old-fashioned socialist commitment to universalism can solve this conundrum. Because on the one hand, you get into a trap whereby uh one side is basically gaslighting the other in an internal return, and no one can take any responsibility, at which point the reason I say socialism is because it becomes a kind of it becomes a bourgeois racialism, for which you just have to reject the whole, the whole, the whole construct in some sense. Of course, of course, they're both disavowing responsibility for it. And of course there is something like the woke right going on, but even that category is very odd. I hate that category. I don't even want to, I shouldn't even have said it, but there has to be some affirmation that this racialist uh nonsense needs to be needs to be rejected. I think everyone during the the Trump period felt the effects of racialization in a hyper way. And I think you're right that historically that that's that's the exact point is that this is a long standing canard of liberalism as a kind of means of the pacification of the masses, and even I would say of the class struggle in a certain way. That's not to say that race is a non element, it's to say that liberalism has this playbook of the The instrumentalization of race. And when push comes to shove, only a Marxist analysis on race can fully reveal the true materiality of it as bound up with the class system. We can't trust liberals on this at all, I would say, you know? And um, and so it's it creates a breakdown in trust. It's another interesting thing that I think you and I both may share, which is once you get introduced to radicalism as somebody that is themselves like touched by class consciousness or sort of feeling um radicalized, it goes back to the same thing with Musa Al-Garbi and We Have Never Been Woke. It becomes a question, I think, in a certain institutional valence. And I experienced this with uh communization and the California communists, whereby uh they I at certain points I loved their prescriptions and the militancy involved with their whole vision. But at the same time, I was wondering why they were not more critical of liberal academic institutions. In other words, there seemed to be the academic institutions seem to have almost like this field of like disinterest as almost like it didn't have any power. It was just like this sort of like thing, it's like neutral, it's neutral. Yeah, and I came to I came to realize it's not neutral, it's like not it's not neutral.

SPEAKER_01: 2:02:14

And I was actually like reading their their stuff about the the client of working class uh you know um identification and their claim that basically there never has been a working class politics, which is a claim that innose makes in the history of separation in notes volume four before people come at me and say they don't do that. Um, you know, a lot of them have moved away from it now. But this focus on the riot in a of liberal institutional categories as that means I had seen that before in Marxist humanism when they started saying that the advanced forms of the proletariat was just the racialized forms of the proletariat. Uh um that this move had been made before, and that led to some weird conclusions even even in the 60s, like Ronia de the Skya supported Zionism. Now, admittedly, she wasn't the only, I mean, Sartre, the USSR until the mid until the until the late 50s. Um, you know, uh, there's all kinds of people who supported Zionism, but the um the the issue that you see here is that there is a there is a realization that racialization is one of the most extreme forms of alienation amongst the working class, and there's also a fundamental hardship that every everyone who studies this looks at that using paternalism about race has been a way to build scabs and thus also increase the perception that the racists are opposed, which has people not focusing on class structures. Now, I don't think that's always conscious for the bourgeoisie. I'm not that conspiratorial, and a lot of people are. Um, and I also think we have to admit that racialized divisions amongst the class also sometimes have class strata characteristics which cannot be easily avoided.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04:10

Um, you know, but there's also there's also the fact that bourgeoisie and middle strata subjects are it's very difficult for them, maybe in some cases through interpersonal relationships, to know the extremity of the fragmentation that working class life is undergoing in today's time. In part because the working class has an interest to conceal that reality for their own dignity, which I don't blame, I don't blame them for doing that, of course. Like everyone knows that you don't share the secrets of many things that happen.

SPEAKER_01: 2:04:53

Ashanda for the bourgeois.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04:56

I don't know, I don't want to call that bourgeois, I just think that's just like common dignity. That's just common, that's just common dignity. But you know, when you have a society of working class people dying 10 to 15 years younger than their middle class counterparts, and the in and all of that social uh chaos is largely concealed, I'm sorry, but there becomes uh a chasm that that develops there that's quite pronounced and pernicious. And that's why for me, I think your your three-part realization is very important. And it's frankly something of age. Like it's something like, you know, yeah, you have that stage where you feel sentimental about it, you have that stage where you fetishize it. But then I would argue that you have a stage where you you you just don't have the time, you're too exhausted to really fetishize or to even harbor some ambivalent affect about it. In part, especially I I would say even more more precisely, once you have two or three family members that have died prematurely, I would contend that you enter into a new form of consciousness. Similar, even like you know, there's been a lot of theories about the biography of John Brown, whereby John Brown uh reached a point after he had six, I think six children die, right? Where he had kind of reached a point of transcendence from so you see, it's actually, I would say, for we have to think about that condition in a in a way that is for politics. It's not necessarily a depoliticize, these things are not purely tragic. There can actually be a pro-social learning from dealing with and confronting these realities while maintaining a kind of dignity of of those realities, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 2:06:50

Um but this makes I don't know if that makes sense what I'm saying. But this makes the academic radicalism all the more problematic. But I I'll say this in this sense. Now, I am not a prude you you at all, like not at all, and I I'm not a teetotaler either. But I will tell you that the way substance abuse is often romanticized in radical circles, and the fallout of that substance abuse has a higher cost on working class people because they do not have the medical and therapeutic access for how to deal with it, and we know this. Like if we look at drug use amongst the classes, it's not even, but it's not as unbalanced as you might think from the way it is presented in popular culture. Um but if you look at drug-related deaths among the classes, completely different. Um and and and thus the radicalization and like you know, certain strata, uh, you know, yeah, some of them will die at 65. But I mean, just to put it, I'm gonna put it in the men of my family because I think you're absolutely correct. I'm just gonna be blunt about this, and I'll use my own biography here. Um, my uncle died as a as a long-haul trucker from undiagnosed diabetes and and uh and untreated alcoholism at 55 years old from a heart attack on the road. My other uncle died from um skin cancer at 59 because he not because it would have been necessarily terminal, it's fairly easy to treat, but but because he was so afraid of going to the doctor because of his costs that he only went to the doctor when it was already systemic and he was in so much pain he could barely move and there was nothing to be done. Um, the number of people in my life I've lost under the age of 40 to alcoholism, you know, good old-fashioned alcoholism is more than a hand, right? Um, whereas, yes, my my college educated friends have the same problems with alcohol and drugs, they aren't dead by that time period. And I really think you know, when people talk about the conservatism of particularly the white working class, but even when people talk about the social conservatism of the black working class, etc. etc. etc. I'm like, but what do they fucking see? Like, like they see this semi-lumpetization, and we can talk about this in the modes of freedom, but it also comes with alcoholism, premature death, no access to health care, bad food sources. This is actually stuff that Burdu documented in the 1950s, right? Um uh Werner Sunbart, who we don't talk about anymore because he ended up a Nazi, but Werner Zumbart actually talks about this in relation to land seizure and social democracy in the United States. And he talks about how the how the Central European proletariat drunk itself to death while the proletariat in America invested because the proletariat in America stand a reasonable chance of getting land, and the uh European one did not. And if you look at today and the social conditions of the day and the social welfare now today, flip those odds about where they're at. But if you were to tell you know most liberals that that was the case in the beginning of the 20th century, they would look at you like, but Europe's always been the more intellectual, and you just want to like smack them around because it's so historically illiterate. Um and or even if you do have a historical literacy, you have no notion of European European class culture and why it is the way it is. Um and while like it's so tied to drinking, and maybe it's a lot healthier about it today than American drinking habits are, but again, even today, we are seeing that shift again just because working class people are acknowledging the fact that alcohol is killing them, like it's kind of an internal uh antibody, but you know, maybe social media and video games will kill them instead. I don't know. Like, um, so it it is it is this uh this this super big problem, which you know, I think what I liked about our Musa is he gave my suspicions to the stats, he gave me the hard stats to point this out to people and the obvious contradictions. Like, liberals live in a world that is actually way wider than the world that a lot of the people they call racists live in, and not only do they live in that, but the people who they celebrate all their time are their servants, and they don't even acknowledge that fact. Like, and by servants we mean gig workers, but still.

SPEAKER_00: 2:11:46

And liberals uncritically embrace culture war frameworks of social antagonisms of the working class, which the working class also embraces. But here I would interject the duty of liberal or left-wing intellectuals to abandon that form of accounting for these antagonisms, because the task of the intellectual would be to create a better framework for people to express the reality of social death and decay that they're experiencing. Rather than these, other than these eternal cycles of of nonsense, pseudo-racial, pseudo-racial, non-materialist racialization, right? Racialization is valid in a materialist form. I'm not trying to negate that. I'm just saying that like this obsession with and again, it goes back to this fundamental need to have a healthy distance from these institutions. You need more distrust in them, you need much more distrust in them, right? And I think that that's Bourdieu's power, is that he can, even though he sees them fatalistically as necessary, I think we can kind of glean from his insights that there's a way to uh work on their margins, maybe, maybe is the only way to truly hold them accountable, but also to benefit from them, not and not get sucked into their orbit, right? Because I think in Algarby's We Have Never Been Woke, you know, he has this uh whole series of historical examples of this the schism that emerges when upper middle class, primarily upper middle class, try to forge a cultural or social revolution, and they immediately have they become at loggerheads with a working class subjectivity which they other ize. And he tries to give this kind of from really 1848 up to the present, it's a bit crude, and I criticize him for it. Because he cites that that um that book that I shared with you, which which I then after reading his footnote on it, I went and I read it, the um The Yankee International. So, you know, he thinks, but that's the problem. He thinks that Marxism can never escape its middle class capture. Yeah, I want to actually get to know him a little better because maybe I could help him like say, you know what, like maybe you know, proletarian socialism is real, like we can do it, you know, because I think he's a valuable thinker. I I actually like I like a lot of his work. Have you had him on the Varn vlog? I have not. I have covered his I've covered several of his essays because on radical engagements, uh, radical engagements, but I haven't had him on.

SPEAKER_01: 2:14:31

I'm thinking I've been thinking about asking him on what was funny about him is frankly, I was led to believe he was a conservative when I was first presented him, right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:14:40

And right, because he publishes it compact in an uncritical way, right? Yeah, that whole thing, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:14:46

But but what I actually read, I'm like see this guy's a Bedurian, you know, soft leftist. He's not got a good read of marks. I really don't think he does.

SPEAKER_00: 2:14:54

Well, that's the thing, Derek, is we have a whole generation of young thinkers that have gone in a way different than you and I have. Like we had a formation in the left in a real way, right? Various institutions, some sectarian, political organizing, a whole range of things. It's kind of concerning to me that the crisis of the left has produced all of these thinkers that have had no touch with the left as an institutional force at all. And therefore, they they don't and they don't trust.

SPEAKER_01: 2:15:23

Well, even the new left institutions are gone. I mean, that's the thing. Like, you know, and uh I'm gonna be honest with you. If if if I was an outsider and I was looking at Sanders and Corbin and the people who replaced Occupy and the anarchist and the anarchistic left of the 90s and early aughts, uh with this with those, I would be like, I don't want the truck with that. I would yeah, and I to be fair, I also didn't want anything to do with him. I fought that tooth and nail. Um, because I thought it was based off of a fundamental denial of where the working class is now, off of pretty much romantic notions from people at the end of Fordism, yeah. Um, who have just survived, like have had the luck and uh and money, uh, even if I'm not saying Bernie wasn't rich until he was a senator, but like who had the luck and money to not, you know, um uh die young. Um and you know, when we talk about, for example, when people talk about the hyper-conservatism of the baby boomers, which is actually overstated even with the older baby boomers, uh, you know, it can be compared to Gen X. But the the one thing I that you that yeah, there's one like dirty crucial reality. Uh the left and the work, the left and the working class members of those groups die younger. They just do. This is it's an actuarial, unfortunate fact. And because of that, they're underrepresented by the time that that generational amassed capital has been built up.

SPEAKER_00: 2:17:01

Um, and that's actually that's actually one of the funny things about the the Bourdieu connection to Heidegger, because one of the ideas of Heidegger, of course, is being towards death, and one of the ideas that's also of Heidegger is the need to create a philosophy of practice that has fully transcended Marxist class analysis. So that's why Lukac calls Heidegger's conception of being towards death bourgeois philosophy par excellence. Right, right? It's literally that's what it is, which is extremely pernicious. It's like it's fascism, but it's like foundational fascism, right? You know, it's like it's like philosophy as fascistic, right? Yeah. And even in the recent interview with uh Nick Land and Dugan, Dugan was saying I was appeal uh Heidegger appealed to me because he transcended Marxist class analysis. Right. Yeah. You know, so it's like you know these things about class analysis are tricky. I'm glad we talk about it so much because you can't you can't abandon it, but you have to kind of you know do it right. But you you certainly the consequences of abandoning it are life and death.

SPEAKER_01: 2:18:23

Absolutely. I mean, this this is one thing I think that's also lost on a lot of people because uh um I think, for example, there's a lot of evocations of class in the left right now, particularly like the Jacobin left and errors or that, but they're evocations, they're not class analysis. Their class analysis is often frankly pathetic. It's you know, I was I think about Seth Ackerman talking about how inflation doesn't affect the poor because it reduces the value, uh it reduces the value of interest on debt. And I was like, the poor don't have medium interest debt, they have no debt or they have payday loans, in which case that amount of inflation would break the fucking planet. So it's irrelevant to them. You are talking about the middle class as if it is the poor, and what and you are talking about it because frankly, your norm for what middle class prosperity is is the 15-year period from 1948 to 19. Well, it's a little bit more than 15 years, 17-year period, from 1948 to 1965. Like that and only in America, like you know, like it's just not the norm historically, even in Britain, the height of empire, it wasn't a norm. Like, like it's just it's a miscast analysis. Um and when you make those kinds of fundamental errors, you're not useful to the proletariat, and thus, why should they listen to you even when you are advocating for them? Because at some level they know you're not gonna deliver because you're the way you describe their experience isn't recognizable to them. Like, like, yes, they want their dignity and they're glad you're giving them their dignity, but you're also making them sound like victims, and you're also denying their reality of how hard it is in some ways, right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:20:32

Like, yeah, that's why I got in this big debate with Dave from um Theory Underground, where I was like, Why are you defending Andre Gortz's farewell to the working class?

SPEAKER_01: 2:20:45

Ugh, uh, right. Okay, I did a reading of that book once on a show, and oh my god, it made me mad.

SPEAKER_00: 2:20:51

Like, it's a very terrible, it's a very terrible book because I was actually going to say that I'm not sure the Jacobin sees itself as a great defender of the proletariat. I'm not sure that that's even how they would self-conceive or self-define their politics, frankly. But maybe I'm wrong about that. A lot of weird stuff came out of that uh post-60 age milieu, like Gortz, where the proletariat can have this like very opportunistic re-recasting. So I think that a lot of Jacobin may be falling perhaps in line with that. But I also see your point that there's a kind of projection of middle class downward mobility, which then results in formulations of class analysis that effectively have a complete denialism or rejection of the working class. And um, perhaps that's unintentional. But the yeah, that's I can see that's it's on.

SPEAKER_01: 2:21:49

I mean, I do think it's I don't think these people are like actively setting out to build a false consciousness. I just think um they are removed, they are assuming that because they're downwardly mobile that they speak for even if again, even if you assume that these that these people are in some ways from a wage-earning and thus working class background, right? Um the way that they it deny that even their strata position within that is fascinating, and it creates this interesting illusion that you see in um centrist and conservative thinkers like Michael Lind, all right, over uh American Affairs, where they see the battle um of American politics as a battle between the petite bourgeoisie and the professionals, and then if you get a little bit more complicated and a little bit smarter, you get like Christian Parenti, not a guy whose analysis I always agree with, who says, like, oh, you have to admit that the PMC is proletarianized, which is why they're dependent on government subsidies, um, and thus why they're at odds with a different petite bourgeois, you know, intermediary class, the the the true petite bourgeois, who are hurt by tax rates because their profit margins are really low, right? And this leads to the overclass in Michael and aka the capitalist, he doesn't ever want to say that, but that's what it is, picking sides between these two battling factions, and that's where the the illusion of our politics comes from. But the problem with his analysis and all the and Michael and uh Peter Turchin and a lot of these people's analysis is they see the working class as a completely inert force, yep. Like it just doesn't matter. Um and you know, you can appeal to them to read to to appeal to one side of this this elite that becomes a counter-elite next election cycle, or the other, but they're not, you know, they're not political actors in any way.

SPEAKER_00: 2:24:01

Exactly. Yeah, the formulation from this creates a kind of like an interminable like bonapartist politics as the only horizon of politics on the one hand, on the other hand, there's no possibility of class independence in such a vision, precisely because class independence would only be some narcissistic projection of one of these warring strata, and I think that at a certain level of discourse, they may be right about that.

SPEAKER_01: 2:24:31

I mean, if you're if you're reading magazines, they're all right, but like if you like if you're reading the the national review versus um versus uh uh you know m plus one, you know, I was you know, I today said that like M plus one uh you know pays its editors too low, it's a low salary, and some like no, it isn't. And then I looked it up, I'm like, well, technically, no, it isn't, but it is too low to socially reproduce, which actually should indicate a major crisis on the working class. Because if the government stops subsidizing social reproduction amongst the working class, you're gonna have some real problems. Um, because if the slightly above median income cannot actually even afford to rent in an area, uh it means that like most of that area is functionally shut off from the effective economy, which is also why the economy seems to be so decoupled from everything right now.

SPEAKER_00: 2:25:30

Well, I think you need you need to add a little Bourdieu into the mix because Bourdue would show that the only basis by which the salary can be kept low is a preventative for uh uh people from certain class backgrounds that would not be able to afford it. The only in other words, the only reason that it's so low is because it's a position which is guaranteed by familial networks of patronage that would be that would be supplementing the income, right? Right? So that's that's obvious.

SPEAKER_01: 2:26:03

I mean, maybe this is true for more and more sections of society.

SPEAKER_00: 2:26:06

Like I I I'll let me let me be clear. I'm not I'm not it's true for more and more it's it's obvious to me. Well, it's obvious, it's obvious, but but like I'm not I think one conclusion from that being obvious would be, oh, well, let's politicize that. And I'm not necessarily advocating that we politicize that because I think that there's a tendency for class politics to be politicized in this kind of like micro way, and I think that that may be like one of the errors of certain 20th century forms of Marxism, and I'm not necessarily wanting to advocate that, nor am I wanting to advocate some Manichean left populism of like 1% versus the 99%, but there does need to be a formulation which which cuts the demographic question in a more coherent way, and that's what like research and uh work needs to be put into is that precise that that's what needs to be made legible for us, and and I think that these analyses of like Lind and the Jacob and things are not helping us make class legible. Do you know what I'm saying? They're not, it's not, it's like a disservice to the legibility of class because those types of like why was Marx a journalist? Like, do you know what I mean? Like, this is the journalism piece matters a great deal, I would claim. Not not journalism as we know it, but this kind of engaged proletarian journalism, super essential.

SPEAKER_01: 2:27:32

Yeah, it was a big deal. I mean, and the other thing is like one of the things that that I think uh Amuza misses about one of the functions of the merger thesis, which is which opened Marxists up to middle class capture, but also was based on this this assumption that proletarianization meant that people could choose, both people would be forced into the proletariat by the economic conditions, but they could choose to be in it because they realized what the future was. And that's this is a paradox for Marxism. I and I I I think it's a true contradiction in the sense that it both enables us to bring in people who have the skills to skill the proletariat and things that he do not have, and we desperately need that, but also it does create a capture point for for uh intellectual elites and new classes to develop within the marks within the Marxists.

SPEAKER_00: 2:28:24

Oh, yeah, and all of and all of the ridiculous ideologies that come from that, but let me ask me let me pose it a different way. I would actually contend that because the institutions of class independence will not come from the capitalist class, things like rustification become kind of well, let's say they have to be rethought. Because how else would you introduce skilling other than through mechanisms like that? Right because it's not like oligarchs are gonna be, you know, contributing to the the development of proletarian institutions. That's not gonna happen.

SPEAKER_01: 2:29:05

I sincerely believe that even the class collaborationist parts of China's policy are only possible because of the experience of the great proletarian coalition revolution, regardless of its excesses and mistakes. Um and that that did not happen in Russia was also why the nomenklatura can only be controlled by pure violence, as opposed to um, you know, uh uh the the unfortunate you know having to live as a peasant for a while as intellectuals.

SPEAKER_00: 2:29:43

Um that's an that's an incredible argument. Have you developed that before?

SPEAKER_01: 2:29:47

Or uh it's not it's not even totally mine. Uh Dung Ping Han, the Chinese scholar, actually also argues it, but it's something I've thought a lot about because uh Michael Sandel, uh the the the kind of liberal communitarian, I guess he's not liberal, but the communitarian philosopher um talks about this and talks about he's worried about China in the future because once Xi's generation is gone, um you do not have a generation that has that kind of um rustification. You have a re you have a re-establishment of expertise um that actually does mirror the late Fordas period in the United States.

SPEAKER_00: 2:30:27

And the problem with the problem with rustification now in neoliberal austerity is that there's not the the distribution of possible incentivization to engage in it is so hit or miss and so um far flung. Even for that Jacob and Middle strata, even they would because they see themselves as proletarianized, and to some extent they are, and that is true, and that is valid. So the degree of proletarianization is so vast that I don't see I mean, that's kind of the ingenious trick of this system, right? Well, first day, you know, you could see it happen, right? So that's a real question, maybe we can talk about in future sessions. Because I do agree with you, I do agree with you.

SPEAKER_01: 2:31:15

It's a brilliant work when the new communist movement tried to do it voluntarily in the 1970s, sincerely, because because we were already beginning to see neoliberalization, so their ability to survive that choice, you know, it just wasn't smart for them, and they were still seen as outsiders, and because there was nothing binding anyone together in that, um, you know, by obligation, either side could work out when it got hard and distrust with each other for legitimate reasons. Um, and so it fell apart, right? Like, you know, um, and I think this is something we really have to think about. In some ways, I've been hopeful about the deinstitutionalization of intellectuals, but the the shadow side of it, which is this misrecognition of the ability of the Candace Owenses of the world, I you know, and because they make the liberal appeal to elite guardianship look good. I see Richard Hanaya just talking about we need to bring the gatekeepers back. And I'm like, well, one, the gatekeepers still exist, but but two, like, like, who do you think's funding these podcasts should give shit? Um, but two, um uh people forget exactly how control the media narrative of the United States was, you know, even during the period of the fairness doctrine or whatever, like it because even in the fairness doctrine, you're defining two simple sides which are legitimate. Like so it's just not um, it's not a very effective way to go about this problem. But I do think, you know, you I do think the one thing I take from Bordeaux that you can criticize Marxists for is particularly after the humanist structuralist debates, right, in academia, and then even more so after the Maoist feticization of the peasantry, which in and of itself made sense at the time when you looked at what was happening in national revolutions, but today, if you're arguing that there you need a protracted people's war mostly led by the peasantry, even in the developing world, where the fuck is your peasantry? Like it's not a big enough position of uh portion of the population anymore. So it's you you have a problem of a total failure to deal with the fact that one social class really has been largely liquidated by bourgeois relations, um peasants, uh, and to some degree aristocrats, although not as thoroughly. Um, and yes, peasants still exist, depending on what the you what you mean by that term, it's also a nebulous term. Uh, like we're sharecroppers in America peasants, and some definitions they are, and some definitions they aren't. Um but the other thing that you have a problem with with this with this notion is that the idea of repeating these uh developing world revolution models, even if you think they're legitimate, in post establishment of capitalist nation states worlds, becomes a hard problem for where it goes in the future. Um, and I say this because I think we should take anti-imperialism very seriously. Um, I'm not one of those people who think we should just throw that away. Um but by taking it seriously, we have to look at the fact that there's a reason why I do believe most intellectuals actually tend to favor the peasantry and the lump and over the working class. And um that reason is actually one of kinds of socialization, and the peasantry has a more individualized socialization necessarily, or they're communally socialized, but they're not mass socialized.

SPEAKER_00: 2:35:31

And you you you you probably remember this is Goldner's point that the only class that socialist intellectuals have been able to revolutionize have been the peasantry, correct. And I think he's right about that. I think he's right. I think he's right. It's fucking crazy. But that now you know why Marxists don't like this money, misguided. So so he's right about that. And okay, so what actually does this does this indicate? I I suppose it it indicates uh the greater degree of a chasm in socialization. I suppose I suppose this is like the Marxist insight par excellence from the 18th of Brumaire as well, but I'm I'm I'm I'm the harder the harder labor is the organization of the working class, without question. And I think that Marx and Engels up the ante on the socialist movement, even forms of LaSallem were kind of trying to do the same thing, they're trying to make the easy way out. Marx and it's never it's never the easy path to to forge the solidarity with working class, precisely because the habitus of the working class is so heterogeneous and already like fractured with your own. Like it, you know what I'm saying? That that it would make sense that the antagonisms are more resolute at that site, yes, which goes to Garby's point as well. So perhaps uh this brings us full circle back to Bourdieu's own kind of warning to Marxism uh in a certain way. I don't know that he necessarily gives us a solution about that, and I would actually say that that would be an interesting question for a Bourdieuist to actually interrogate this problem. But a lot of people are that's the other thing with working inside of the academy. I don't know if I told you this, but if you take Berkeley, you are not allowed to write a dissertation purely on Karl Marx's thought. That's not allowed in in certain disciplines. I actually posted this once on Twitter, and it was one of I always have these tweets that just go like I just get like reamed by the professional elite, and they were just like killing me. They're like, I went to Berkeley and I wrote about Marx, I went to Berkeley and I wrote about, but then I had like another stratum of Berkeley, people that are like, no, he's right, right? So it's based on department. Um so, but I you know that's the thing. It's like a lot of these projects are so hamstrung by these fads and this kind of what's hip, what's in, what's permitted, what's not, and that really constrains, I think, the academic uh possibility.

SPEAKER_01: 2:38:19

But you finished a dissertation, I haven't. I finished a thesis uh for an MFA, which is a different this is a book, but it's a completely different scenario. Um, and uh I can tell you um, though, from watching people finish dissertations, that there's such a focus, then it's not just Marx, like there's such a focus on using these paradigms from Mark, from Burdu, etc. But in the the limited purview of your field to the to the to the point that they often do that many departments do not want you looking at the primary sources, so you cannot check that your field is using these paradigms correctly, right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:39:04

Of course.

SPEAKER_01: 2:39:05

Um oh yeah, and yeah, yeah, and so you have this weird like academic telephone game where there are things being asserted by tenured academics that are factually wrong about primary sources.

SPEAKER_00: 2:39:21

Um, yeah, I mean that that I mean that's very evident in like a lot of contemporary philosophy. If you take Derrida, I mean, he's a case in point where Derrida writes a book about Saint Augustine, that then becomes canonized in the contemporary philosophical deconstruction movement. But because of the taboos placed on identification with him as a master intellectual who cannot be challenged, no Deridian is going to write a critical analysis of Derrida's sourcing of Augustine. That's not gonna happen, or maybe like seldomly, and if it does, it will be denied to the whole canon. Right. I think actually one of the things that's happened a little bit is we've seen a bit of a move away from that because the decline. I've talked a lot about this on my program, like the decline of like I just had this great interview with Michael Barent on the decline of French master intellectuals. They were only really permitted by a by the Keynesian Social Compact, you know, and that the disintegration of this Keynesian Social Compact has the same reason we had rock stars. Yeah, we don't really have rock stars anymore, and that's actually, like I said, a blessing. It is a blessing, peep because it frees us from this trance like identification with intellectual master figures, which I think is not advisable at all, right? So it frees us up a bit, uh, frankly. But um yeah, well, God, we've been going for almost I don't know.

SPEAKER_01: 2:41:02

I was not expecting that Burdu was gonna let us was gonna let us riff on two texts uh for about not even all the texts that we initially plan on talking about either. We basically talked about four paragraphs that we didn't even cite um for about three hours. But I I think this is I I think what this is a good place to wrap this up. I think people can see the problematic here, uh, just to recap why it's problematic. I think habitas is a way to understand the way class ideologies are actually inculcated in a better way than a lot of Marxist theory does, even though they're often less philosophically rigorous. Um uh I think that's there's other essential things into that, it's not just habitas, it's field, which we didn't probably go into enough. It's also hexus, it's the various forms of symbolic violence and capitals, um, plural. Um, but uh there's also a limitation to it, and the fact that I think when you talk about the realism, is that it it like I actually see this with Chris for Lash too to some degree. There is a want to push the working class into their own political actors, but they can't really imagine the working class being anything else than what it is sociologically right now, exactly, and that's kind of a problem.

SPEAKER_00: 2:42:21

Oh my god, yes, and that's I think that that's not true to Marxist conception of class, and I think that's there's something there's something both highly, highly minimalist about the Marxist conception of class, which uh shelters it from overculturalization and which also um is capable of seeing its dynamism so that it doesn't fall sway to reification, uh you know, it doesn't fall sway to like this kind of like in a sense, the the logic of the class has a is conditioned by the whims of capital. And the so the prioritization would fall on on the analysis of capital on the one hand. I think on the other hand, yeah, you do have a rich tradition of the Engelsian uh, you know, really, I mean, the condition of the working class sold more copies than capital. And I mean, obviously, in in capital, it's there's some of the best sections of capital are that kind of worker kind of workers' inquiry, but like a kind of philosophical anthropology of the working class. So you do have that in Marxism, but you you know, I think I think Bourdieu gives us a lot. I think you articulated it pretty nicely. I I I I feel like we defined we define things pretty well. Um, maybe next time we can go further into it, but I feel like it's a good um fluency that people can now have, and obviously people should be reading. I guess if you ask the question, what should you read from Bourdieu? My personal choice. I really like the inheritors. This uh text that he did on um the French educational system and the social reproduction of it is very interesting. I really think these essays I mentioned on um Bourdieu's relationship to Marxism is very nice. I can put that in the show notes. And then um Pascalian Meditations, if you really want a text on the notion of scholarly habitus, it's super interesting. And the kind of power of like on the theme of the intellectuals, it's his best there. And then finally, the book on Heidegger. The book on Heidegger, which we've mentioned here and there, is supremely interesting to understand the origin of irrationalism. This is also a great text to understand the like rise of fascism. It's really just it's a very good cultural context to the rise of how fascism came about. So, I mean no, there's others, but um, and there's a lot of people that have written great things about Bordu. Again, Luke Wakant is quite good.

SPEAKER_01: 2:45:07

Well, I will in this year, I would tell people that we have a part three and a part four, and who knows? We maybe do a part five, but we for sure have two more. The next one is going to be on the problems of the proletarian intellectual. Um, before we get to the public intellectuals, which may seem like they're related and they may or may not be. Um so, and we'll be talking about Gramsci, we'll be talking about Roncier. Uh, who else are we talking about on the proletarian intellectual?

SPEAKER_00: 2:45:38

Um, yeah, we're talking about that very interesting Michaels, uh Robert Mikols, uh, who who is not a Marxist but makes a strong argument for the inclusion of proletarian intellectuals in socialist institutions. Uh he's the what is he's the thinker of oligarchy, right?

SPEAKER_01: 2:46:00

He he's one of these was on was his his his political trajectory is fascinating because it goes from anarchist to social democrat. To kind of a fascist question mark, maybe uh yeah, yeah. Um uh because he basically sees the the only answer to the problems of uh of of oligarchical tendencies in institutions to be Bonapartism. I mean, like that's kind of his conclusion ultimately, right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:46:32

But I feel like the the the the theory of classes he develops in the text that we're gonna read is not at the fascistic stage of his thoughts. So there's actually something quite quite sound in what he's developing here. We'll we'll analyze it, but I think I think it's quite good. And then we're also gonna talk about Jacques Rancier, who I think probably has some of the more compelling, not only like historical studies of worker intellectuals, but actual like he derives philosophical concepts out of these studies about emancipation, aesthetics. Um, because what he does is he he does a rereading of 19th century unknown proletarian poets and philosophers and treats them as if they are like Plato. It's a very interesting methodology. I interviewed him about it actually, and uh people can look at that. It's some good stuff, like I said, Roncier is a very interesting figure. I mean, he broke from Marxism, but not really, in my opinion. And he's this gadfly on Marxism, yeah. You know, he's he's he's one of the good ones of the 68 generation, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_01: 2:47:46

I consider him one of the most useful eminent critiques of structuralist Marxism because he both both valorizes it and critiques it pretty hard. Um, and I uh I like his work too. Uh he's one of the few people of the post-60 68 generation that was a fad to read around Occupy that I do not think did damage to anyone's brain, unlike a Gombin, uh Gombin and yeah, he's a whole other story, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 2:48:16

Oh well, no, I mean well, Jacques Rancier as a man, as a person, is a gentle, kind, just beautiful individual. Um, and you know, I mean, you know, what what he produces is is his scholarship is pretty fucking excellent, actually.

SPEAKER_01: 2:48:35

Uh yeah, I was about to say of Althusser's descendants, I tend to like him and Balabar the most.

SPEAKER_00: 2:48:40

I mean, his book on Althusser, Althusser's lesson, for anybody that just wants to like understand Althuserianism, he wrote the best book on it, in my in my view. Um, yeah, and and he wrote a damn interesting essay in the Reading Capital series when he was an Althuserian on the early marks.

SPEAKER_01: 2:48:58

Oh, yeah, no, his part like it was good. It was no if you're gonna read Reading Capital, get the big version with all of them in it, not just the altisair sections, because they're interesting, it's not just altis air that's interesting. Um, for sure.

SPEAKER_00: 2:49:14

Bali Bar had a very important one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 2:49:18

Uh um, but anyway, thank you, Daniel. We'll see you again in a couple weeks, and uh, this will go out probably on both channels. Um uh and uh take care.

SPEAKER_00: 2:49:29

Thanks, comrades. Thank you, Derek. Thank you.