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From Draper to Balibar: Daniel Tutt on the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Philosopher Daniel Tutt is with us, offering a unique lens through which to view the crossroads of psychoanalytic theory and Marxism. Ever wondered how intellectuals can navigate a depoliticized public sphere? We promise you'll leave this episode armed with strategies to engage meaningfully on compromised platforms and foster a vibrant counterpublic sphere. Join us as we explore the insightful works of Étienne Balibar and Hal Draper, dissecting their contributions to Marxist discourse amidst the tumult of the late 1960s.
Our conversation maps the historical development and philosophical layers of the dictatorship of the proletariat within Marxist thought. Discover how figures like Lenin, Marx, and Engels shaped this concept and how the Paris Commune played into these revolutionary ideas. We'll guide you through the debates of Lenin and Kautsky, illustrating the intense class dynamics that shaped key revolutionary moments, and explore how revisionist Marxist theories influence our understanding of state power and class struggle.
Intellectuals play a crucial role in Marxist theory, and we delve into their impact on societal structures, from traditional 'master intellectuals' to more organic forms. Shifting academic values and austerity have shaped theoretical struggles; we reflect on these changes while examining the interplay between dictatorship and democracy. Engage with us as we consider the adaptability of Marxist theory, analyzing varied interpretations and the continued quest for intellectual integrity in an ever-evolving world.
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Hello and welcome to VarnBlog and today I'm with friend of the show, daniel Tutt, a philosopher with a focus on psychoanalytic theory and Marxism and author of books how to Read Like a Parasite Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family, how to Read Like a Parasite Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family, and a post of his own, thubstacked, which has come up on the show before, actually, in terms of radical engagements, and we were talking about it off air. Since I now have formal permission to do so from the author, I will probably cover sections, not the whole thing, of his book on Nietzsche and radical engagements as well for the general public. Because I have permission, I don't do books anymore unless I explicitly give him permission by the author. That way no one will sue me.
Daniel Tutt:People can't sue Really A lawsuit.
C. Derick Varn:Is that true? I don't know. I've been told it was possible that I could receive a lawsuit for reading an entire book, even if I added commentary to it, and I was like that feels weird and feels like a violation of fair use. But whatever, I don't get in trouble for articles that are published freely on the Internet.
Daniel Tutt:So, yeah, it is a rough environment to be an author. The public sphere is like a is like a bare knuckle arena, a page match, and that's uh easier for us from uh troubled backgrounds because we're used to bare knuckled engagements. So, but yeah, no, it is, it is, it is a um. It is interesting, though, the the composition of the public sphere. It's it's not only, as mark fisher said, driven by this pernicious privatization model that uh, and and benjamin studebaker is very good in this, on this as well of how marketization actually foments like islands in some ways, right, um, it's. It's all of those things, of course, but um, I don't know.
Daniel Tutt:I suppose my message is still still returned to it, because maybe there's something that could be a source of a strength from that fact, you know, or, or I mean, because for a lot of folks, it's a total depoliticizing reality the fact that the public sphere is so pernicious and it's. It's almost like um, it's a perfect recipe for the democrats, in a certain way, to totally pacify um, a socialist possibility. So we have to fight through it, and I think it's at this point that we have to sort of um, I don't know, almost even like stomach x or some of these platforms that are like fully compromised in some ways, because they still become a rallying point for these kinds of programs, if nothing else to get the word out about them to you know, start conversations, especially in a time in which the academy I don't know if you've noticed this is in such dire straits that in intellectual conversation and activity is not really happening in the academy.
Daniel Tutt:No, I think I think people, I think people that want to claim that it is are living a fantasy right. So so, like it or not, we have created this counterpublic sphere and I say we roll with it. Like I think we should be a little bit more proud of what we're able to do here, because I think that without it it would be a lot worse.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about how you mentioned X, which I think is a compromised and increasingly biased platform. Sometimes I think it's like Truth Mobile or whatever.
Daniel Tutt:It's gotten so bad.
C. Derick Varn:It's so bad I mean, you can now buy uh, one thing I will say uh, okay, I'm paused. Um, so, on that note, we're going to talk about two intellectuals one very much in some ways from the para academy, within the academy, I've recently talked to a few literary scholars on on French theory who tried to explain to me exactly how Lacan and Althusser and all that emerged in a kind of both academic and para academic situation simultaneously in relationship to what classes they were taking in 1967. And on the other hand we have Hal Draper, who is formally trained. I mean, he had a master's degree, he worked in Berkeley's college library but was not, by modern standards, a formal academic. And so these two figures are interesting to me because they were both key figures in 68, although from very different generations and traditions. Balabar comes out of the French quasi-Maoist structural Marxist tradition, of the French quasi-Maoist structural Marxist tradition, and Draper came out of Max Chapman's tendency within the Trotskyist movement and they were both actually very much involved in their various reactions to the late 60s. Draper was very much involved in the free speech movement on berkeley's campus and balabar is very much uh involved in 68. So it's it's interesting to take their their.
C. Derick Varn:Anyway, draper's descendants by and large ended up unlike a lot of the Max Shackmanite trots, his descendants a lot of times ended up anarchist. Wayne Price was an associate of Draper. Ron Tabor was an associative Draper. Ron Tabor was an associative Draper. Lauren Goldner was an associative Draper, didn't really end up an anarchist, more left calm, but still in that same sphere. Balabar as a figure is a little bit harder for me to place on that spectrum. You and I would probably want to separate him from the other let's say bastard children of Althusser, the post-structuralist Sans Derrida, who was not from the Althusserian tradition, but Foucault, was sort of um and definite. There is definitely a intellectual genealogical lineage there and deluse and guitar re get all up in that um and uh. You and I both actually share unpopularly amongst many left academics a profound distrust for Deleuze, guattari, lyotard and a lot of the post-Marxists who came out of socialism or barbarism when that group gave up.
C. Derick Varn:One of the things I found interesting about both these books is that it's not just that Draper tries to be really, really fair to Marx or that Althusser is who Balabar is being loyal to. They're both very loyal, at least in this time period, to Lenin. They both want to vindicate Lenin's view of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They have different ways of doing it and we'll talk about that.
C. Derick Varn:Balabars is sort of philosophical and very rooted in specific instances in the Communist Party of France. Drapers is more analytic, historical and very rooted, and him going through the archives and piecing together what was available prior to Mega 2, research about what we know from Marx's letters and Lenin's letters, what they actually thought and did, and these two books to me kind of are. Whenever someone asks me to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat in modern terms, I tell them to to look at this, although I do think it's interesting, because we, I think Balabar almost endorses what we might consider I don't even know, I don't know how to characterize it, but he almost rejects the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but not quite, whereas surprisingly, given a lot of how Draper's ideological descendants, draper pretty much endorses Lennon's view, almost like verbatim. So I guess that that means we should go into this. Uh, you told me to read the draper book, which I had not. Not the draper book, you told me to read the balabar book. I told you book um
C. Derick Varn:uh, and I have remembering vaguely reading this essay cursorily, like 10, 15 years ago somewhere in there, uh, when I was not in grad school, but before I was really adroit enough to get everything that was going on in this text. So let's start with the balabar book, because I think it's going to be the one that we're going to probably spend the most time on. Um, why did you find this text particularly emblematic of both a defense in relationship to Lenin, but also a tendency of the French to try to move away from that around the emergence of Euro-communism and post-Marxist theory?
Daniel Tutt:Oh yeah, and in a certain way the Balibar intervention in 1976 should be understood not so much in the specific context that Balibar is facing, but as a work of almost what you might call pure political thought or a philosophical analysis of the novelty of Lenin's discovery of the reality of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat is something that and we should say something about its historical foothold, where it comes from. I think that's essential, essential. But what? What I was, what's so striking about this text right, is that it's written after 1961, in the 22nd congress, where what happened there with sino-soviet split was. It was the last congress that china participates in and, as you, as most people know, the dictatorship of the proletariat is put into a philosophical valence or topic for discussion by Mao in the cultural revolution. But China had already split off from the international communist congress and things are already very much adrift. So, in good sort of rigorous althusserian style philosophy. I mean, the french are you gotta hand it to them, they're damn good philosophers in terms of the systematic basis of their theses, they, they. That they write this text is a masterpiece. I think it must be said. It's a masterpiece, um, because it elucidates the sort of the. Well, what he says are the three primary learnings. Right, lenin's always learning politics. Um, after 1917, regarding lenin's position on dictatorship of the proletariat, the most interesting point being is that before 1917, lenin didn't even use the concept. Instead, he used the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry. But after 1917, he reverts back to using it in its old form and its first form. If you read Richard Hunt's the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, where Hunt acknowledges what you said, that Hal Draper's original essay is the most systematic, well, hunt's is probably a little more systematic than Draper's essay is the most systematic. Well, hunt's is probably a little more systematic than Draper's.
Daniel Tutt:He locates the first origin of the term where it actually came from, from 1850, in a Blanquist-Communist organization that Marx and Engels both joined, and in this organization they put forward this concept. But in the Rheinische Zeitung the concept had already been in the air, but for the first time, this organization which was called the Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists, they decided to put it as a mission statement. They decided to put it as a mission statement. Plank number two of their mission statement was we are working for the achievement of the dictatorship of the working class as an explicit to adopt the term. Why? Because as you probably know and as listeners may know, marx and Engels are continuously trying to distinguish themselves from Blanquism. We see this in Marx's debate with Willem Weytling.
Daniel Tutt:Willem Weytling took this figure from 1848. It was a military general. It's not even a Bonapartist, no, he's a dictator. His name's Kavinak, french military figure. Kavinak settles the revolution of 1848 in a pure dictatorial way. Willem Weitling, the Messianic communist, says this is precisely what we must imitatex rejects that.
Daniel Tutt:They reject that and they argue more in line with an old baboofist conception of a kind of constituent, constituent democratic dictatorship where dictatorship would be a temporary move backed up by a constituent assembly. That's essential because this was the vision of Babouf, of the conspiracy of equals from French Revolution. That's the true origin of what would become dictatorship or proletariat. And that's interesting because I've been doing a lot of research on different Marxist views on French Revolution. Right, and Babouf represents the Sainte-Couillat. And the Sainte-Couillat were the most exploited of the workers. In some sense they were the ones who were the least compliant with the sequence of the left flank of the revolution.
Daniel Tutt:Okay, there's been some interesting studies regarding the class composition of the sense culotte and who they found solidarity with, which falls in line with a bit of like revisionist history of the 19th century that I'm interested in, such as Ron CA or even Christopher Lash, where they show, for example, that most of the followers of sans-culottes and conspiracy of equals if you look actually at the membership of the occupations, of the men that joined the conspiracy of equals, they were all petty bourgeois for the most part. In other words, there was a unity between the most exploited workers and downwardly mobile, petty bourgeois. That's just a fact. It's not something that's quite easy for us to metabolize that fact, but it is an interesting one and I think it's almost like a what you might call a truism of revolutionary history that we should pay attention to. But that's a side point, so anyway.
Daniel Tutt:So marx and engels are uneasy about it. They're uneasy about this term. For 20 years it goes dormant. And when does it reappear? It reappears in 1871, in the paris commune, and here, you know, marx will elaborate that positively, glowingly, in favor of it, in part because he's contesting the produnists, the unionists and the anarchists, and this becomes a site of distinction from their tendencies right. And then, of course, engels will later argue, which becomes hugely influential for the Second International in the preface to the Civil War in France. After Marx is dead. That he says, quote if you want a definition of dictatorship of the proletariat, look at the paris commune, literally says that right there, it is right, um, so that's a bit of the historical foothold.
Daniel Tutt:There's probably some more things we could say about that, um, but the point is is in regards to a question of state power that's different than bonapartism. That's the first point I wanted to make. That is also one of a recognition that, in the face of revolution, the communist movement engages in what you might call a kind of mimetic rivalry with bourgeoisie, wherein, wherein the working class must assume a power which was formerly foreclosed or unavailable to it for a sequence of time right, triggered by revolutionary uh, moments. Paris commune, 1917 are the most essential, the most catalytic and of course you know this is, this is the origin of lenin's huge debate with kautsky. I mean, the renegade kautsky is about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Because what's kautsky's position on dictatorship of the proletariat? It's that. Yeah, lenin mentioned it once in a letter, but it doesn't mean much. That's kautsky's. Yeah, he didn't, he didn't like it at all. Like he's, like this is. But how?
Daniel Tutt:Draper shows that while Kautsky is saying that and while Bernstein is saying that, you have Soviets forming, you have insurrections forming all around them. So it becomes thrown into the cauldron of orthodoxy, revisionism. Right, it gets thrown into that cauldron in a very important way, very important way, um, a very important way and um, and balibar's position is basically, I think that marxism is that, that it is the nucleus of marxism, like it or not. Yeah, that's what I walk away with reading balibar it's the nucleus of Marxism. So after 1961, when it is formally abandoned by Khrushchev, it's formally abandoned. It was the second death knell, the second death knell from 1936, when Stalin had abandoned it. Stalin abandons it first. So it's two tragedies, right?
C. Derick Varn:so, uh, it doesn't mean that mark is dead, but you know it's.
Daniel Tutt:It has big consequences well this is.
C. Derick Varn:This is actually of pretty big import. I think it's one important to acknowledge um the shift in in linen uh, which I got from Draper, from the dictatorship of the president and proletariat to the dictatorship of the proletariat. One of the things that confuses that and you hinted at it about the Sino-Soviet split is that while Mao was really pushing the dictatorship of the proletariat, he was also pushing new democracy and the concept of the four classes. Initially he was only doing this for China and other very, very underdeveloped states, but it is eventually, particularly in the West, but even by some Chinese, taken up as a universal standard. Like we need to um have a coalition of the oppressed and uh social patriotic classes.
C. Derick Varn:Um and early lenin very much uh and I think practically uh oriented, because we we can say anything about Lenin that he was both theoretically rigorous but infinitely practical is that he knew that the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia would be a minoritarian dictatorship and that's part of why the inclusion of the peasants was so important.
C. Derick Varn:But it's also part of a problem, and it's a problem that works itself out rather bloodily in Soviet history and Lenin's trying to oscillate in the various popular demands, in the red terror and specific in the anti-cool organization, which, you know, even Stalin sort of admits, is a internal war, amounting to a civil war during the Yusuf china I I've started using the term yusuf china because it feels better than the purges, for those of you who don't know what I mean um, although I do think it's also used as a way to get stalin off the hook for some of that um, I think that it's important to note you're correct that stalin formally abandons the dictatorship of the proletariat, which also hurts later because we, when we talk about anti-revisionism, there's two anti-revisionisms there's the first anti-revisionism that leads to the third, international, and then there's the second anti-revisionism against khrushchev, uh, which is often taken up by people who use stalin, uh and and I'm going to use a term of art interesting ways there's also anti-anti-revisionism, which I very much love, in the Second International.
Daniel Tutt:We don't want to go down that rabbit hole.
C. Derick Varn:It's a fun thing to think about, but I think it's important to to parse this out. Maybe a little bit of political context. For, about the interim period, draper seems to think that Kosky and Bernstein's abandonment of it, but Plakhanov's misunderstanding of it back to what is essentially a Blanquist position, play a dual role in why the term is so misunderstood and even demonized at different times. Yeah, I haven't read all of Hunt so I can't say what's in that book. I just added that to my reading list. So I can't say what's in that book, I just added that to my reading list. But it is interesting to think about that, about the idea.
C. Derick Varn:I do know that Hunt does call this totalitarian democracy, but it is because and this is one of the good points by Zizek, an unpopular name to invoke these days for a variety of reasons, but a good point by Zizek that liberalism, whether it admits it or not, is also a totalitarian ideology. Like it affects all aspects of life. It, just because it has the semi-real, semi-illusionary notion of free choice, it can escape the fact that it actually does do that. Um, but let's get in. I mean, I guess this is a good pretext for balabar what you know, you, you. You say on this text that, that, that, while the context in France is worth noting, that it may not be as important as in many of the other things we read from this time period. Why do you say that?
Daniel Tutt:no-transcript. And even more recently, balibar will actually practically, in practice, move away from lenin. It is at this point, though, however, that he is, I think, making a certain um intervention. That's, you could understand, similar to how a lot of these french, all theusarians, were were doing almost almost, as a kind of philosophical return to the origins of Marx. Alain Badiou does this in his text Can Politics Be Thought. Derrida does this to some extent in Specters of Marx. I'm not embracing or endorsing that book, although Badiou's book is very interesting, balibar is more interested. I mean also, daniel Ben Said, a great French philosopher, finishes his dissertation on Lenin around the same time, maybe a little earlier. So this was in the air. This was in the air to make a true appraisal of the novelty of Lenin, but I think that, like a lot of things in French theory, it is disconnected from praxis. So that's fine. We can still benefit from it, perhaps as a theoretical intervention.
Daniel Tutt:A couple points. One is one of the things that Balibar argues right. Is that to the point that you just made? What is it about bourgeois society that allows us to not see the fact that it contains a dictatorship? Is it fetishism? Is it commodity fetishism? Balibar says no, it's bourgeois legal ideology. Bourgeois legal ideology explains that the opposition between democracy and dictatorship is an absolute difference. But here's the caveat that Lenin will introduce to political thought, not only to Marxism, but you could say to political thought, in the same way that Machiavelli would introduce a truth to political thought, right, which is that it's only through the active experimentation of a dictatorship of the proletariat that the dictatorship of bourgeoisie can be known or can be revealed. That's why Balibar continuously wants to suggest that Lenin presents an actuality of thought and that is the heart of Lenin's dialectics as well which is that Leninism, therefore, is a realization of a new form of social consciousness. In the process of experimenting with the form itself, then the question becomes strategic, right, how is the procedure to go? And here the watchword is to understand the logic as the logic of a class, not of a party. That distinction is essential. That distinction is where Plekhanov and most Marxists completely went awry, but it is one that Lenin insisted upon and the the idea, therefore, it reaches into the heart of what actually is state power for marxism.
Daniel Tutt:How does one um conceive of state power for for marxism? Anyways, this is the heart of balibar's intervention is to reveal all of these things. We can I mean, I can do a whole elucidation of it. I don't want to like review it verbatim, I'm happy to flag some key points. But this is, this is the novelty of balibar's text, I think, derrick, it's that. It's that it's actually trying to show that here's what lenin discovers for political thought. In that sense, it kind of transcends just old-fashioned marxism, if that makes sense.
Daniel Tutt:Bad jew is also a contemporary of bali bar, and that's a lot of what you will also do, right, where you're extracting philosophical truths from practice. Um, so you know, I find that quite compelling, um, I don't know how you find it, uh, but I mean we should probably dig into some of the of the roots of of all of this, because I think, um, one of the points here is um, state power is always the political power of a single class. This is like a maxim that Balibar locates from Lenin, and that this power is held in an absolute way by a single class. Therefore, for Lenin and this is different, by the way, than Polansis, this is crucial the realization of the Marxist theory of the state is that you do not have a compartmentalization of power and that the state should never, therefore be understood as neutral from from one aim, and the bourgeoisie has one ultimate aim which coalesces. There may be competing interests, there may be competition, but what unites that class, what unites the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, is the reproduction of the perpetuation of exploitation, primarily of wage labor. That's the central centrifugal point that coheres the logic of state power for marxist leninism.
Daniel Tutt:Polansis will argue later, after the 1970s on, through the 80s. You know he's one of these greek marxists that's hugely influential on, like, say, syriza, on euro communism. He's a very interesting thinker, but one of his arguments is basically that and ellen macekins woods will criticize him accordingly is that basically, um, it's to, this state is a heterogeneous assemblage and that the concentration of that one aim that I just articulated, which is ultimately reducible to an economic aim of the reproduction of capital, is that there are competing interests within the state that can be negotiated with and so on to offset that that. And that he makes a distinction between political and economic power. And so he wants to argue that there was a flaw in the original conception of dictatorship of the proletariat, basically because it was only it conflated politics and economy. That's polansis's argument, but lenin's argument, as I understand it from balibar is more singular, that the state has this singular function to perpetuate exploitation of wage labor.
Daniel Tutt:The other thing that's super central is that the only way in which the proletariat can train itself to transition to democracy is through the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Daniel Tutt:This is a big insight of Lenin that Balibar finds very correct and very sound, and that Lenin struggles with, struggles with in his polemics, both internal to Bolshevik comrades, but also with other communists at the time, luxem kautsky in particular.
Daniel Tutt:And one of the things that lenin will say and this is something we've talked about before in the series on revolutions that you and I did is that it comes down to culture, that culture becomes the site where the process of uh development needs to take place simultaneous to the maintenance of political power, and that in some ways and Lenin has a lot of things to say about even, you could say, aesthetics, but also equality and the kind of superstructure as well so that also needs to be undergoing a process of mutation, of growth, of transformation, uh concurrent to this uh period of time.
Daniel Tutt:And then the final thing I'll say is that without dictatorship of the proletariat, balibar says, according to london, you would have no true, true distinction between socialism and communism and therefore, it's only through this sort of procedure of the working class taking power and sustaining that power until it can enter into a stage of communism in which the state withers. Without that, what you will basically have is a theory of the state which is non-marxist, which no longer insists on smashing the state, and that, unfortunately, is exactly where polansis is polemic lance eventually. Well, therefore, the go ahead. Yeah, that that I was just going to end with that, um no, therefore well.
Daniel Tutt:Therefore, the whole concept in marx, which we saw from paris commune in his debates with bakunin on the notion of withering of the state, is basically abandoned. Okay, so I know I've said a lot, but those are the sort of key insights of of Lenin's realization of the of the process post 1917 um, of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It helps us realize that distinction between socialism and communism to achieve the smashing of the state, um and that and that in that process and this is something that isabel garo, the great trotskyist philosopher currently living in her book communism, um and strategy is also big on which is that time plays a huge role here as well, because time for rest, recuperation, post-revolution, for the working class to regenerate itself, that's what I meant when I said a moment ago about Lenin and culture. You need a theory of time, of subtraction from wage labor in order for the proletariat to mature its consciousness.
C. Derick Varn:Right, it's interesting to me, daniel, because, believe it or not, I've gotten to a lot of these internal debates around Lenin through a completely different research path that I've been doing concurrently to this, which is around Bordiga, because Bordiga and Gramsci's divisions are around a lot of these points. What is the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat? Bordiga thinks it's the organic rule of the party. However, what Bordiga means by the organic rule of the dictatorship of the proletariat, bordiga thinks it's the organic rule of the party. However, what Bordiga means by the organic rule of the party is actually quite vague, because he opposes disciplinary attempts to bring about internal homogeneity beyond class homogeneity as as coming down from Moscow, moscow, particularly after 1927, um. But he's also very critical of gramsci's attempt to deal with this in culture as a means for building the basis of the party. But gramsci is pulling from linen too, and that's that's, uh, part of the the structure of their internal debates. Um, it's one of the structure of their internal debates. It's one of the interesting things about them is like, despite the fact that later Borgas will like denounce Gramsci and Togliatti will turn him into like a martyr, who was the first founder of the Communist Party and he was the first general secretary. He was not the founder, that was actually Bordiga. Of course they wanted to get rid of him. One of the things that you discover is that their ideological children hate each other, but that Bordiga and Gramsci were still in contact with each other while they were both on the same prison island in 1930. And so the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the debate also about the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is the debate also about the nature of the relationship of the party to the proletariat, um, and as well as who, how? What does that mean? Uh, gramsci takes the view that, um, that democracy, uh is, would be manifested by the dictatorship of the proletariat eventually, whereas Bordiga throws the entire concept of democracy out for something also vaguer, which is this organic, invariant unity. And again I have come. You know I've been in the past been pretty hard on Gramsci for the decisions he made between 1925 and 1929, many of whom, many of which he seemed to regret before he was in prison. But it's actually a quite interesting pickup on the same tension that is explored in Balabar and in a lesser way in Draper, barr, and in a lesser way in Draper. It keeps on emerging within the communist movement about our relationship to both the party and to proletarian culture and what we should do about that.
C. Derick Varn:Because the other thing that lands I mean situating Marx is always useful because figuring out. People know about the Marx and Bakunin debates but they often don't know about the Marx and Blanqui and Blanquist debates because they are much more. When you read Marx they're much less explicitly referenced than they are than the Bakunin or the Proudhon, the debates with the anarchists, etc. But they do seem just as passionate. But they do seem just as passionate they're just because blankiest are within the first international and marx wants to keep them there. Uh, they are often in veiled language, um, which is rare for marx to do. I mean um, uh, the.
C. Derick Varn:The other thing I think that we have to to look at, to flip forward to balabar is about um is, we do see this, this alt-syrian systemization?
C. Derick Varn:I mean the one thing we have to admit that both balibar and palancis are alt-syrians, um, and I think, superficially, palancis does have a point about the, the, the heterogeneous nature of the state, but I say that you know, my take on that is yes, the state is divided against itself, but it's actually. That doesn't contradict the linen point. Um, the linen point that the state is essentially still for singular class rule and is this unitary still applies. And I think that's where palancis goes, goes off. And, to be fair, lenin at earlier times floated that idea. He floated that idea that internal class conflicts led to relative independence of the state. People can cite early Lenin for that, but that is pre-1917 to the best of my knowledge. So I think what is interesting about that is the contestion in Hogeneous state actually reflects the contestation and heter competition is more about bourgeois internal divisions than it is about class divisions. And to mistake that is to make a big mistake yeah, it's, it's interesting.
Daniel Tutt:I mean, draper has a nice illustration of bernstein giving a speech at the height of the German revolution where he could quite easily come out, at least rhetorically, on the side of an you might say like an advocacy of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But of course, not only does he not do that, but he sort of pretends that the revolution isn't happening right. So there's this very interesting dynamic that takes place even in the united states. Uh, morris hilquit is a communist thinker, philosopher, who also develops a marxist theory of the state. And in my work on american communism you know draper's, is it brother theodore, uh, wrote another interesting book on the history of american communism and I I try to show that um hilquit was actually one of the american writer, marxist writers, early 20th century that wrote the most on dictatorship of the proletariat. But he makes a certain non-leninist, revisionist reading of it that I locate as influential, eventually on harringtonism. Because that's the through line ultimately right. Because the through line is if you have a neutral theory of the state, that actually influences a lot of things, right. It influences your theory of power, it influences your theory of class big time and it influences your conception of power. What I fear is that it ultimately results in a type of populism unbeknownst to yourself, because if you hold that view that there's a non-unitary, heterogeneous theory of the state which is not governed in an absolute way, you are abandoning the centrality of the liberation of all classes, which I think is sort of why philosophy matters in a certain way for marxism, because then what are we doing? Right, we enter almost like a horizon, you might say, of a political nihilism in some sense. Right, where are we going? Teleology, right? I mean, it becomes a question. Yeah, that's why this matters. You know what I'm saying. It becomes a crisis of the vacuum of power as well, in a certain way, of the capitulation to bourgeois power and to bourgeois ideology.
Daniel Tutt:I think the concept matters. Why? It matters as a process of political learning, of political knowledge as well. Right, because it ignites something inside of the proletarian movement. I mean, lenin would also use the term proletarian democracy, coming after the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which he's juxtaposing that to bourgeois democracy. Both forms have a dictatorship, but only one of those dictatorships is a temporary one, in which something better will come, and I feel that that becomes a political wager. Right, it becomes an ethical wager as well, I would argue. You would need an ethics at that point, right, why else would one embark upon such a? I mean, you know what I'm saying? Because with some of these neutered revisionist theories of state power and Marxism, I feel like we get caught in the kind of eternal return of bourgeois society. We're not capable of seeing the construction of something new and we're not capable of ending class exploitation. Ultimately, that's the rub, that's the leninist insight. You know, that's the, that's what we're doing.
C. Derick Varn:You know that's what we, what we're aiming for, in some sense I think it's important to, I think, what balabar does as a service to and and this I do have to thank um, all two stairs, otherwise obnoxious distinction about ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatuses, because this is actually clarifying in this book. In fact, this book may be the first book to convince me that it might be a useful distinction to maintain We'll go into that in a second but I think it's important to look at here. Um, uh, but I was also thinking about the problem that causes this, because, uh, we, we can always talk about Marxism as a great unfinished project because Mark's barely finished anything he set out to finish. Uh, and I I don't say that just to be snarky, it's just kind of a fact the amount of formerly published and endorsed Marx works are like a paltry to all the Marx that we have and have to construct with. And Lenin was actually quite innovative and using letters and notes from Ingalls and things that were not generally used in the Second International to inform his own decisions about where Marx and Marxism were. I mean, this really shows up when you read State and Revolution.
C. Derick Varn:And one thing I will say about that problem is that I think you're completely right that, even if I agree that the state has an outwardly heterogeneous nature. If you see it as neutral and I think today it is more or less viewed by most marxist as neutral um, then you are engaging on either populism or, worse, liberal reformism. And this is an interesting overlap between balabar and draper draper, again, coming from the trotskyist tradition and Balabar coming from, I would say like, maoist or post-Maoist structural Marxism in France. Yeah, post-maoist, where Marxist-Leninism under Stalin ends up, actually ends up looking a lot like where the Second International ended up, and it's the question of the nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat that leads there.
C. Derick Varn:In 36, the specific shift was to the people state or a state for the whole people, um, which, while very I mean that would always strike people as popular with the masses, uh, it is class collaborationist and undeniably, and they would, I mean, I know what stalin would probably have said if I had talked to him and not uh, ended up on purge list um, he would have probably said that this was necessary because of the level of development in russia and because of the failure of the german revolution.
C. Derick Varn:Thus, you know, we need to do this to develop bourgeois-like capacities under proletarian control and thus this kind of populist orientation is justifiable, and I don't say this to condemn or defend Stalin here, but it's completely decontextualized from what Stalin would have meant, but it is a logical conclusion from applying that logic to all situations. So there is a way in which Palancis leads directly to Laclau, which leads directly to Occupy Wall Street, and then that leads directly to the DSA, occupy wall street, and and then that leads directly to the dsa. I mean, I do think there's a way in which, like even through seemingly radical or even ultra-left tendencies, you actually end up at the right of the social democrats as manifest state, manifested by harrington post, the dissolution of the cpa, the communist socialist party of america.
Daniel Tutt:So no, I think that's. I think that's right. I mean, I think 1936 stalin's declares the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat right. What's essential about that is that stalin does not have a dialectical theory of the revolution, but he has a stagist theory of the revolution. So it's kind of like in philosophical terms, it's like a dumb teleology. In some sense it's like a kind of right. It's like a dullard, it's like a dullard theory of the human, ultimately of humanity.
C. Derick Varn:Right, we have our political revolution we've gone through our economic reformation revolution, we've had our cultural revolution, and that's the late 20s, 30s, and now we're just done because we did those steps right. We've done the steps, that's what we um. But then the state for the whole people seems premature, because it seems to me that what is implied in both state and revolution, and even by Marx, that if there are still different social classes, you have not achieved and gone through the dictatorship of the proletariat. And we can agree or disagree about whether or not Marx means that early socialism or before it. I'm not like. I actually don't think that's an easy question to answer. But right.
Daniel Tutt:Well, I mean, I suppose the question that is interesting right is if Lenin's premonition is that ultimately the structure of bourgeois state, state power is unitary and while competing interests may exist and while some heterogeneity amongst them may exist, ultimately they share a common interest for the exploitation of class exploitation. The only way to reveal that to the proletariat is through a sequence that would suspend bourgeois legal, the legal form, the legal form of the state apparatus in particular, so as to make that otherwise fetishized reality apparent. How do you do that in a non-corrusive way? That's the question, I think. And then you know, you look at certain socialist revolutions, say the hungarian revolution, or even, I don't know, portugal in the 70s. You know, you can, you can sort of um, look at that, because of course, one of the things we haven't mentioned is mentioned is the function and the role of the military Yep and its essential status. I was just reflecting on the fact that hasn't been talked about much at all here is that we had a military coup d'etat that appointed a neoliberal figure, yunus, in Bangladesh just a couple weeks ago.
Daniel Tutt:Right Now, of course, to the extent that liberal ideology will portray that, they will de-emphasize the fact of its coordination with class interests, right a uh process whereby the horrors of the bourgeois state apparatus are undergo a revelation or undergo a procedure of um some making visible. Let's say something like this and, um, of course, our political imaginary is nihilist and you can think even a popular television, think of, like the, the batman with bane, right the post-occupy portrayal of this right. Um, there we. This is why aesthetics and culture matters, not like some empty film criticism, but it's actually why, um, politics that is concerned with power must also reshape this domain of aesthetics and culture so that collective imagination can prepare itself for inventing a society that will be beyond exploitation. Of course, that then introduces another philosophical debate, internal to Marxism, about the value form and the eradication of the value form and all of that. That's something we can discuss.
Daniel Tutt:I think what's interesting to me is the ending of exploitation, the ending of class domination, as a priority of what politics is aiming towards. Not making that exploitation a little bit better, it's not swapping in a new bureaucracy, it's not any populist conception, I think after 1961, you could say Derek, and I think this is one merit of LoCerto. By the way, if you read his book on class struggles, I know you have troubled relationship to LoCertodo, you'll notice that he basically diagnoses the post-1961 world as inevitably caught within a cycle of populist conceptions of class. Right and I think that's what you get from polantis, I think that's what you get from french theory ultimately, which is an abandonment of the marxist understanding of class as a political operator. Right and then dictatorship.
C. Derick Varn:Proletariat is like the heart of that, whether we like it or not I mean, I would say, um which book are you referring to by listerdo, his book on?
Daniel Tutt:class struggles, so it's an interesting one. It's uh, I called it like. Last night we did a study group on his western marism book. I called it his encyclopedia, in some ways of of, because he defines his conception of emancipation, he defines his conception of, of class struggle, and then he sort of does a very elaborate criticism of sort of intellectual genealogies that distort class struggle. It's, it's worth looking at. I don't know if you've read it I have not.
C. Derick Varn:I uh, I have stayed to the to the most popular uh lucerto books with the, which I think are of mixed quality. Uh, the western marxism book is probably the book I'm the harshest on, uh, for reasons that I've discussed uh on the patreon side of my channel. Um, I am very mixed on the stalin book, although I don't think it has no merit, unlike some people um, and I don't think it also it nor does it completely vindicate Stalin on, like a lot of his supporters think. Uh, I don't think Lacerda would have completely claimed that. Um and uh, I've read uh, the liberalism book, which I think is quite good actually, uh, and the Nietzsche book, which I would um, I would pull a Mao and say 80% good, 20% would, um, I would pull a mao and say 80 good, 20 bad, um, and so, uh, I you know um, but one thing I think, that's that, uh, I haven't read I've actually had them I the book on class struggle, I believe, and the book on bona partizan or democracy, which I'm actually quite looking forward to seeing what he posits there.
C. Derick Varn:Uh, I will admit, the book that I hate by him the most that I've read is actually his book on Hegel.
Daniel Tutt:But and we need. We need his book on Kant. It's in Italian and he has a huge book on Gramsci, which is supposed to supposedly amazing. But his book on Kant is incredible. It could change Kant's scholarship. It's called Self-Compromise and Censorship in Kant's Political Thought and it basically is an analysis of the early Kant and the development of his ethics as an implicit political solidarity with Robespierre, but then a subsequent retraction by the pressure of the German intelligentsia as Kant becomes Kant.
C. Derick Varn:That's interesting because my instinctive reading of Robespierre was that he was a proto-Red well Red kind of Red in the bourgeois sense Kantian, and that is both his benefit and his downfall. Point about the Kotsky reading of Robespierre as a figure of the larger end of the petite bourgeoisie I don't think Kotsky is completely wrong about that.
Daniel Tutt:And that's also CLR. James had the same reading.
C. Derick Varn:CLR James often, weirdly, through a mixture of hyper Hegelian Marxism and Spengler, often actually comes to second international points without realizing that that's what he's done.
Daniel Tutt:But that's what he's, I think. I think that's right. I would say after I think I think a lot of CLR James's theory of the historiography of class and revolution is gets non-dialectical in a certain way, because it becomes these sort of static class actors that that repeat from the English revolution up to the present and you know, they're sort of like characters in a play, that sort of reappear. It's a sort of there is that Spanglerian repetition, that thing, it's a very you're right, I think he, the ghost of Spangler, never left him in some sense perhaps.
C. Derick Varn:Well, this is a core that I think lacerdo is not wrong on. I just don't think he's right that it's just a western problem. That there is a tendency towards typology that tends to flatten out movements of class and development in history, that intellectuals, be they marxist or not, tend to pick up going all the way back to Plato, as if you know every state's turn, because they have similar rhyming turns in history, or actually just a form that's going to go repeat exactly the same over and over and over again. And they only do, at the most abstract, remove right Like so. They only do that if I pull back so far that I can't see the distinctions between them, um and the.
C. Derick Varn:The marxist worldview I would defend, because it attempts to be dialectical in the proper historical sense, tries to do both. We're trying to be in that morass and in the fine grain detail of everyday life and its critique, and also over it to see its structures and that's, you know, that's a big ask, that's a huge ask, um, I guess this, though that's part of the point, I mean, the dictatorship of the proletariat emerges out of this in some ways. I mean, we ask ourselves what's marxist theory of the state? Um, you know another draper throws off in his six, six, five volume work on marxist theory of revolution, that the early notes at the time that he was writing and again we have more letters now we haven't done much with them, but we have them um indicate that marx was going to sit down and write atreuses on the theory of the state but got bogged down in the economic question.
C. Derick Varn:That gave us capitals, volume one through three, and theories of surplus value, volume one through three, all of which are incomplete, except for volume one of of capital. Um, and it does never really got to it. Um, right, and uh, we only have hints of it that we can deduce from the letters. Uh, and it gets very, quite interesting to, to, to parse out, because you have his hostility to total abstentionism. Allah Bakunin, uh, in the, in, in the in the working men's association and the first international.
C. Derick Varn:But then, uh, you have all these letters he wrote to uh Wilhelm Liebknecht and to uh, uh, uh, a young Kotsky, and Lafarbe and Babel, and they're very angry when the particularly the SPD tries to treat the state as neutral, tries to treat the state as neutral like they can be in a coalitionary government with uh, even progressive bourgeois parties. Marx has the harshest things to say, even harsher than what he says in the critique of the goethe program about that in particular, indicating that he's like no, if you empower that state to rule, you are empowering the bourgeoisie. There's no way around that. You can participate in electoralism, uh, but your role is mostly I mean, for lack of a better modern analogy like the tea party or something.
Daniel Tutt:It's just to tear shit down and obstruct like, yeah, that's, that's a good point, because I feel like social democracy, during the second international, used the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat in a disingenuous way, often right, and that actually, that actually tells you something, right, which which it tells you something, I think, about the level of agitation amongst workers for revolution. See, one of lenin's points regarding the necessity of dictatorship of the proletariat is a theory that and this is something we haven't talked about but which we should it's basically an imminent theory of immisceration, which you could almost chalk up to partially a empirical claim as well, which is that every worker will know of the absolute status, because, again, we talk about this fetishism of bourgeois life, concealing the fact that it perpetuates the tyranny of capital and perpetuates this condition of immiseration. Lenin will say and Balibar points this out that every worker has a sense of this, but they cannot place it. The intervallic period of dictatorship of the proletariat is a, is a point to achieve what mark said in the civil war in france, which is that the proletariat cannot he says, quote um take the state machinery in their hands immediately, something like that. It's a paraphrase and that's, I think, a beautiful way to think about it. It's this, it's this period, it's this, it's this period of time of, um, of not reproducing, of being very careful not to reproduce the bourgeois state. Right, it presupposes that the proletariat has seized the state. It does presuppose that. That's why the paris commune angle says this is it, this is the beginning. We know how the paris commune went.
Daniel Tutt:I was just reading kristin ross I think it is the verso author. I mentioned this on another program, but she was saying that it was basically a genocide, as we would define genocide today. Right, um, so, uh, so, yeah, I mean. That to me is the question, and I think a thinker like Isabel Garo helps me a lot in thinking about this, because, again, what she alerts me to is this sense in which, yeah, this intervallic period is one of a complete, it's the beginning of the re-transformation of human collective existence, of what it could be in some sense, right, it's. And therefore she argues, by the way, that dictatorship, because we didn't mention this.
Daniel Tutt:But dictatorship is like an old Roman term which doesn't mean rule by one man. It means no, it does not. This is very important. I've, this is super important. It means a benign form of emergency rule for the preservation of life. It's like that, that's like. It's like that's what it meant in its roman construct. Later, uh, it will be taken over as rule by one man. That's not actually its initial form. That's why it's always a constituent dictatorship from babu. Constituent democracy is a part of that, but a democracy of the dominated class first. Yeah, so that the expropriation of the expropriators can also occur simultaneously. Yeah, so those are important caveats when discussing that. But again, of course, the word in hindsight after 20th century is yeah, I mean, it's a mess. It's a difficult, loaded word from the standpoint of rhetoric and marketing and discourse. It's a tough one, for sure. Marketing and discourse uh, it's a tough one for sure. Um, but nonetheless it it hits at something that's so, so, so essential.
C. Derick Varn:When most people imagine dictatorship, they imagine, um, they imagine what we would call bonapartism or caism, and I mean, I think, part of the the longue durée historical reason why and bourgeois legal forms were able to seize on this so well, and their particular mythologies about the Roman Empire, is that it was one of the one of the dictatorships which led to a civil war which put Augustus in power, in power, and then we retrofit that back onto julius, who's dead, um, and then assume that julius's main goal was no, solely, and it may well have been. It's impossible for me to know honestly. Um, you know we're talking about figuring out the mental state of a 2 000 year old dead man, but, um, it is still that that is constructed around the bourgeois boo, uh, what a state is, and then that is kind of like the ir western myth of how bourgeois, uh, societies function. Um, I mean, yeah, ball bar goes into this in the book.
Daniel Tutt:No, no. It's the site at which bourgeois legal ideology creates an otherness to itself.
C. Derick Varn:It's the site at which democracy becomes the only tonic through that reality Like dictatorship or democracy democracy, which is also to, which is also a bourgeois legal fiction to obscure both its bonapartism and that. The bourgeois often experimented, as marx pointed out, in backing, uh, absolutism, which of course is part of why the party of order ends up backing bonaparte. But like this, that isn't even new to liberalism. I mean, if you want to talk about some of Lacerdo's good on Lacerdo's very good at documenting this tendency and early liberal thinking, despite all the democratic rhetoric.
Daniel Tutt:No, you're right. And Lacerdo to his credit. In his book which is called democracy or Bonapartism, you know, he argues that the origins of Bonapartism, as we know it from the post-1848 period in particular, which you know a thinker like Kojin Karatani will say is the origin of modern capitalism. That's why we always talk about 1848. Capital, nation and state form a trinity.
C. Derick Varn:Trinity that has basically remained intact to the present.
Daniel Tutt:Well, one of the things that the bourgeois class initially instituted Bonapartism to enforce was to combat universal male suffrage. To combat universal male suffrage on the basis of what? On the basis of the preservation of private property, because the achievement of universal male suffrage, initially that was the one stumbling block in which bourgeoisie would accept the Bonapartist rule, because they would preserve that. It's the property. Nexus that they're preserving right, that's the repetition, it's always goes. Nexus that they're preserving right, that's the repetition, it always goes back to that.
Daniel Tutt:But at the level of their legal ideology they must conceal that right, that complicity right With capital and with its perpetuation. So that's actually why, by the way, I find Karatani very useful, because he shows that the capital nation state nexus after 1848 is centered on a logic of the perpetuation of exploitation, of wage labor, but you could also say of the reign of capital itself. I'm getting this from his book Transcrit critique, which isn't talked about that much. But and also, by the way, he wrote an incredible book on Bonapartism I think actually is better than Los Sertos, because it's because it deals with the philosophical concept of historical repetition, because Lucerto is not great on philosophy, right, it's a side point I'm making, but anyways, yeah, kind of an ironic side point considering what his job was, although I guess he was a professor of the history of philosophy, not of philosophy itself.
Daniel Tutt:Um well, yeah, we were talking about this last night. Lucerto calls himself a realist in philosophy and um, and he he thinks that like lucerto's hegel. It's interesting that you dislike his book on Hegel In a certain way, what Loserdos Hegel is all about is a sort of highly I wouldn't say Stalinist reading of Hegel, but certainly not a post-structural, a Hegel that would still insist on the negation of the negation, would still insist on taking seriously the logical categories of Hegel, a certain way, whereby what hegel represents in thought, in political thought, is the um. In the same way as for lukacs, right is the is the end of philosophy. That's the key point of lukacs and angles right, which is that hegel ended german philosophy. Marx brought it into the streets and made philosophy finally a praxis right. But ultimately all of the core issues and problems of philosophy were solved by Hegel. Lusoto's a bit like that. So his Hegel is not fancy, it's not this like Lacanian or Zizekian thing, it's a very straightforward Hegel.
C. Derick Varn:It's kind of refreshing Maybe. Yeah, my critique of that book is actually. I think it eventually leads to him seemingly using Hegel to argue that there is no need for a withering away of nation and state, and that, frankly, I would see as tantamount to betrayal. And I also think liking the book that Marx was harshest on Is a little bit suspect. But that's just me, which what?
Daniel Tutt:are you referring to there?
C. Derick Varn:The philosophy of right Hegel Is that. You know, that's where you get the Like yeah, you get the critique of Hegel's philosophy In general, but it's kind of tossed off the. So yeah, you get the critique of Hegel's philosophy in general, but it's kind of tossed off Um, the, the, the yeah. So, um, you know, we this is not we debate Listerto hours, um, but uh, one thing I will say is I get frustrated when people respond to me about any of these people. Oh, they're Stalinists, you shouldn't read them.
C. Derick Varn:And I'm like why, like, why, like I mean like for real, why I mean like, like, uh, like at a certain point even quote most of the unquote western marxists were technically marxist leninists.
Daniel Tutt:So I don't know, like why we have this weird barrier so I don't really, I don't really support the notion that there is a kind of, um, abstract stalinist ideology that still very much permeates the left. I think that's just anachronistic and I think that it, um, it performs something that you would never want done to yourself. It sort of forces a reductive reading of a given thinker's interpretation or their interpretive model or whatever, and sort of forces them into some kind of box over, and sort of uh, forces them into into some kind of box. But also I think that, um, okay, fine, maybe you could add neo-stalinist, maybe that's a little bit more accurate. I think there certainly is neo-stalinists out there. But what I? I would be more careful to accuse people who themselves say they are not Stalinist, but then you still say, oh no, well, you still really are. And here I'm going to show you I'm not. I'm opposed to that.
C. Derick Varn:No, that's a statistic. Good it's uncharitable?
Daniel Tutt:Yeah, it's. It's also like Inviting a dialogue based on deception in some sense, in a certain way, right. We should take people at their word, and we have enough people on the left today who actually forthrightly claim that they are Stalinists, to go off accusing people like Lo Certo, who's simply more complex than Stalinist. Oserto, who's simply more complex than Stalin is. His production of his theory far exceeds Stalinism by far, by miles. When you reduce somebody to Stalin, you're making an association which signals something, especially in the academy. It's very pernicious. We already know what they did to Lukács in this false portrayal of Stalinism. It took us literally a lot of time and effort to disprove those accusations in the case of Lukács, Okay, and it was important to do so, because then the whole text brought out who knew it was important to do so, because then whole texts or, in the case of Althusser etc.
Daniel Tutt:Yeah, exactly, stalinism, as in ism, is a sort of an operator that is not so consistent, I think. I think its appearance is highly inconsistent and it also becomes this conspiratorial label and I've just seen the pernicious effect that that labeling process has within the bourgeois academy. I know what it signals and I don't want anything to do with that.
C. Derick Varn:I agree, I think, to do with that right, um, yeah, I, I wouldn't, I agree, I think I think what what we see is uh with that is you have people who are treated as thought taboos that you cannot even acknowledge when they have a point. Um, lucerto's been one of them, altis air, sometimes it's the same, um, you know, and there's plenty of critiques to be made about Althusser, both theoretically, oh my God, in his personal life. But you still have to deal with the truth and falsity of what he said. Beyond that, and I mean that's even true for Stalin himself. I mean, I agree with you, I find reading Stalin to be often very vulgar, but I do not necessarily think, unlike a lot of our Trotskyist comrades, that even the problems of the Soviet Union under his tenure are necessarily even the results of his thought.
C. Derick Varn:They seem to be both larger and smaller than that simultaneously. And you have to deal with the situation of the, of, where the soviet union was between 19, let's say 21, uh, when it's clear that the european revolutions aren't happening anytime, real soon, and thus we capitulate to the Brest-Lovitz treaty and to say 1952. I mean, there's a huge shift. And even when I talk about okay, you want to talk about Stalinism, which time period are you even talking about? Because Stalin from 1927 to 1936 is very different from Stalin from 36 to 42 and 42 to 50 to 51. It's also very different. And I'm not saying those are hard ruptures. There's not like a epistemic break in Stalin, but there is. There's major shifts, both tactically and where his thoughts, concerns are going, and I've read enough between Eric Von Rea and another book that I've been reading that goes into what Stalin literally read Like what is he? What's going into, you know, to his thinking I'm familiar with this book.
Daniel Tutt:Well, first of all you should, we should note how much erudition stalin actually did have, like he read a ton, like they were saying, the number of his books in his libraries, uh, and and he, he was famous for making notations in the side margins. And um, this, this author that you mentioned, went out and collected, like because st Stalin had a library where he lent his books out. So all of his books were like out amongst the people and comrades and anyways, his secretary would always sign them in a particular way. So this guy made an inventory of all of his books and apparently Stalin organized his books in a very, very interesting way, organized his books in a very, very interesting way and spent what does he estimate is the hours that Stalin spent reading per day. It was significant. Basically, after theology school, stalin just became a hermit reader in some sense. I mean so much so that this author says that he's shocked that Stalin was so productive. Bureaucratically, that's all he was doing was reading.
C. Derick Varn:Right. I mean that's the amazing thing. All the Bolshevik leaders seem to have been like that. I mean, like Trotsky's library is impressive, kamenev and my least favorite Bolshevik Zinoviev are also fairly impressive and I would love I don't know if anyone's ever would even know how I'd love to know all that Lenin was reading. I mean, the man seemed to have access to like every single note any communist was making in Western Europe, for example, like in specific detail before any of that shit is archived like right.
Daniel Tutt:I mean, that's actually one of the interesting things about the debate about dictatorship of the proletariat between Kautsky and Lenin. There's only 17 mentions of the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat in marx and angles's work. And one of the things after 1917 that lenin will do is he will go back and scrupulously look for and chotsky does the same thing of all of these mentions to make his case for the NEP but for other certain actions that the Bolsheviks are doing for which Kotsky is highly critical. And, of course, one of the things we didn't mention, of course, which is mentioned by a lot of people, is that one of the citations is, of course, marx's letter to the Civil War, generaloseph weidemar. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Uh, it's. It's worth mentioning. A lot of people know about this, but if you don't, let's just say it.
Daniel Tutt:Weidemar is a german um military figure. Uh, fought in the uS Civil War, was a newspaper man with Reiner Shaitan. He was independently wealthy, he was a communist. His son followed Engels'. Advice and settled in St Louis, and then you know this new book called the St Louis Commune. His son was the leader of that after Weidemeier died, but anyway, his famous letter. Weidemeier died. But anyways, famous letter Weidemeier asks Marx what is your most important concept? And lo and behold, marx says it is the dictatorship of the proletariat, precisely because he says bourgeois economists had already discovered class struggle. I didn't have much to add to that. So it's very interesting though, because marx is saying that my political truth is well, my most important concept, therefore, is a political truth right. Why? In distinction to what? In distinction to the socialist movement itself? Very interesting choice on on Marx's behalf.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, Chris Couture makes a lot out of that point.
Daniel Tutt:So does Alain Badiou. Alain Badiou is huge on this In his book on the communist hypothesis almost I would say the communist hypothesis book, which came out a few years ago by Badiou. People may not know this, but let's put it this way it is bad Jews. It's not to be understood in this like abstract, invariant theory of, like historicism. It's actually like bad Jewsou's modification of this insight that we just talked about, of Marx saying this to Weidemeier.
Daniel Tutt:Mm-hmm it's Marx's most novel insight regarding how communism is to be enacted and achieved and actualized. Because, again, without it, the distinction between socialism and communism doesn't work. You don't have communism until it is initiated. So, anyways, it's very interesting shit.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, I think that's I mean. For all that, I will criticize people who abandon the economics of Marxism and there are plenty of Marxists who do I do think it is a fundamental, important truth that we have to hold on to that marxism is not just marxian economics, it is not just a critique of capital, um, it is a both theory of history and a theory of politics, and you can you can have issues with all parts of it. But for, for example, one of the reasons why I am so obsessive about understanding what we mean by class is partly because it requires us we need it to understand what we mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat, a concept that, hopefully, this show illustrates. Despite what people might think of me and I've even been accused recently of having anarchist sympathies because I'm critical of certain things like the incorporation of lasallian concepts, like, uh, democratic centralism not that centralism is not a marx, it absolutely is, but that phrase and that history, history goes back to lasallian, switzer um, that people will accuse me of being an anarchist, uh, and I'm just like no, I I'd be like the fact that I believe that you can't abolish a state in one sweep and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary and good. It just isn't for me, and I think for Lenin and for Marx, a dictatorship of the party or the dictatorship of an individual.
C. Derick Varn:For the proletariat, it literally means the proletariat has complete social control. For the proletariat, it literally means the proletariat has complete social control. And the way I read it is they have it until everyone is proletarianized. Um, and we've expropriated the expropriators. And by that I do not mean, in this vulgar revenge fantasy that people often have, that we just kill them all. I mean that, like no, there's no more bourgeois conditions to be had beyond certain bourgeois technologies which are no longer in their control, uh, from literal tech to, like time accounting, um, but you know, but, and the other thing is, I don't think you can dismantle the state in one go, uh, even though you have to smash it, you can't get rid of all of its functions because human path dependencies are what they are, and it would be undialectical to think that I could just flip a switch and change the way we have related to collectivity, social, uh, social collectivity and the social imagination in one failed swoop. I just don't think that's possible.
Daniel Tutt:So yeah, yeah. What I like about the concept is that it invites us to think revolution without a technocratic imaginary. The sense that if marx's claim that the proletariat cannot just take over the machinery ready at hand of the state apparatus, but that there needs to be a subtraction from the state apparatus, I see that as an invitation to an experimental form of social existence. To invent a new form of social existence is the task, which would mean that, say, in Occupy, we're Occupy generation people. Right when Zizek kept on saying oh, the problem with Occupy is that nobody has a plan for what's going to happen after. No, that's not the problem at all. According to this logic, according to Marxist logic, because already, if you take that technocratic mindset, you have already reproduced the bourgeois machinery itself. You've just brought in uh, maybe you know a different striving class. You still retained the ideology of meritocracy and so you still retained things. So the question, I think, is this is this one, which is your imagination should be beyond what you currently can think. That's what it's inviting us to do. In that sense it's a true yes, I'm sorry, but in that sense it becomes a philosophical wager. Revolution does, yeah, yeah, that touches culture, that touches touches aesthetics and so on, um and again touches the meaning of the theft of time, the theft of wage labor.
Daniel Tutt:What is possible in the, in the world of human experience? When that is restored, we don don't know. A lot is possible. More than we could dream is possible. See my point. It's almost like an imaginary that is inert. We only get glimpses of it. It's very blocky. It's very blocky in the sense of utopia. This is what block means by utopia is the igniting of of that, the igniting of proletarian imagination. Right, that's what this is about. I think lennon's point was you don't know how long that period must go, for it could go for a long time. You know it probably will take a long time because, yeah, there is, there is going to be a restitution with the past, there is going to be resentment, there is going to be a lot of shit that comes out.
C. Derick Varn:If nothing else, there's the generational project of undoing, lumpenization of large parts of the working class, which cannot be and I know, I think everybody that I listen to gets mad when I say this but cannot be done in one fell swoop. It is not just about like uh either the social democratic uh, probably if we give people nice things, this stuff will go away. You and I both know uh, generational, uh, generational pathologies that are tied to lumpenization and poverty do not go away overnight, even when you give people money like we know that for a fact like I think that's a I can, I can appeal to lived experience on this one, but like, um, but I mean, yeah, I, I, I'm, I people have a hard time reading me when I talk about mal, because I I consider Mao one of the best and one of the worst communists who ever lived simultaneously and not for reasons liberals do. But one of the things that I respected about Mao was his attempt to pro-internize the quote non-hostile classes, lumpen, um, uh, intermediate, large peasantry, uh, sex workers, um, people who recanted, working in the warlords, that sort of thing, and, and I think that's a real project that we have to, you know, embark on and and we talk about.
C. Derick Varn:You know, yeah, I, I talk to people about stuff like police abolition, because that's what everyone's talking about and I'm like, okay, you want to do that, like you want to do that. You know what you can't do? Just throw money at a bunch of social workers who work for the same state, right, money at a bunch of social workers who work for the same state, right, um, and ask also are also just not deal with the what we could call the lumpen bourgeoisie even of organized criminal gangs who aren't doing it just because they're impoverished, even though that may be how they got started, and um, there needs to be, there needs to be a little bit of Russo in the picture is what I'm hearing you say, if you read me in so far as well, yeah, it's a different relationship dependence.
Daniel Tutt:I mean, one of the things that Clyde Barrow is very good on in his book on the lumpen is that, yeah, the lumpen, in policy form, are libertarians. Um, because, uh, ultimately, uh, they undermine their own self-interest.
Daniel Tutt:What they, what they, what they want is not labor demands. Therefore, there's an internal split between the proletarian working class and the lumpen at the level of their social existence. What you're pointing to is the internal conflicts that appear within communities and families based on that relationship to labor and exploitation, which some people have to weather and other people don't. People don't. The difference between getting welfare and not getting it creates conflicts that are regressive and enough to drive you crazy if you've ever seen them or dealt with them. Right, it's insane shit.
Daniel Tutt:Right, that is what comes to an end, right, right, but in so doing I think this is important to state our imagination of productivity will change, because there must therefore also be a new social contract about collective social existence that is different than the current one. Yeah, right, that will then motivate and our, our desires will, could change. They will change. You know, it's not just some kind of vegetative now we all get whatever ps5s and, you know, recuperate, maybe there's a bit of that, but there's also the possibility of maximizing certain impulses based on this new arrangement of reality. So, anyways, but I hear you on the resentment piece. It hits home for me, it's one of the reasons why I am a Marxist. To see that contradiction in real, to see that appear. To see that appear, it's almost an appearance of social conflict that you need marxism to really to not allow.
C. Derick Varn:Marxism helps you metabolize that without falling into psychosis or just anger I think we definitely see that on a lot of the left today, regardless of their orientation, I mean what do you mean?
C. Derick Varn:Well, I think the inability to deal with one that you know. I agree with you that there's an ethic emerges out of this eventually. But I agree with you that there's an ethic emerges out of this eventually, but that our critiques of capital aren't just ethical, they're not Not anti ethical. I guess I would disagree if people take that reading, but they're personal.
Daniel Tutt:I would say this they're personal right. Say this they're personal right for some of us, and without marxism. Marxism helps me depersonalize, right, which is good, because if I personalized it I would probably die a lot younger. You know, I'd be very unhappy person psychically, right uh?
C. Derick Varn:yeah, and and I think I, I also think, um, clive burrow is right in documenting something that marx uh documents himself, but in a vaguer and more inchoate way, um, because he only really talks about it in the remare.
C. Derick Varn:But the, the natural allegiance of this, libertarians drink in the lumpen, who are also basically making allegiances with people, uh, the middle strata, the lower middle strata, the petite bourgeoisie, um, because they, because uh, the lower middle strata of the country has a harder time um dealing with regulations and uh and taxation, but uh often does want subsidies.
C. Derick Varn:So this is at least this incoherent libertarianism that you can see in something like Trumpism, where we're giving subsidies but we're talking about a libertarian market which is, you know, even by a libertarian logic, patently absurd, but is where this comes from need the dictatorship of the proletariat. It's to suspend that shit and to, like, help those people who, if they don't try to overthrow us and kill us, uh, uh, to integrate themselves into the proletariat and then everyone out of it collectively, um, because basically, if we're all, if we're all participating in social labor and have equal power in that social labor schema, then there really isn't class anymore, and so that is to the benefit of a lot of these people but at current they would never recognize that in any aggregate form Individuals might recognize that in any aggregate form individuals might. I mean we should always be careful not to generalize down from the aggregate class interest to the individual consciousness. That's a dangerous thing to do. But um, as a group, yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Daniel Tutt:No, you're totally right, you could think about it almost like the logic of like a social bond, right? So why the lumpen proletariat from the time of 1848 up to jan 6th? Why, in both instances, is there a unity between the lumpen and the finance aristocracy? It's precisely because both class positions are parasitic on productive labor. So a hypothetical dictatorship of the proletariat would have to recorrect that parasitism. Right, that's going to be painful and it would be violent, no doubt, but it has to be a sort of period of a transition which would and here, of course, the elephant in the room in some sense is is maoism and the so-called re-education camps, yeah, which we haven't talked about. I don't know, I don't know. To me, uh, to me, uh, maoism whole is a whole can of worms. But I want to say, back to my point on anti-technocratic thinking of this process, it also has to be very anti-bureaucratic, which would fulfill, by the way, the question of freedom, which I do want to retain right.
C. Derick Varn:That's my question.
Daniel Tutt:This process is non-coercive its aims. Its aim is towards freedom. Its aim also is towards a redefinition of equality. Lennon talked about that. By the way, lennon talked about priming the proletariat, or a relationship to equality as what he called actual uh raju das in his book on class theory and marx is very good on this. Lennon's not anti-equality exactly he's anti-bourgeois equality.
Daniel Tutt:He's not anti-equality. In some sense that goes back to the social contract as well. The new vision of what social, social existence can be yeah, that's so, I don't know. Like this opens a whole precipice of things. That is just so. Uh, it's a good conversation, man. This is the exact pulsing heart of what I find is most vital in Marxism. To be honest, it really is. It really is.
C. Derick Varn:Marxism is about class abolition and I know people have to internalize that. We've been critiqued by anarchists for not taking it seriously enough, but because we've allowed things like apparatchiks and bureaucracy and things like that as concessions to reality. We can go back and forth from whether or not that's necessary and and quite, and I'll be quite frank, I don't know um, but what I will say is that the goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat is not pure, naked, nichian social control, the way it is often read as even by a social class, because if we were to do that we would be replicating class society. We might not be replicating capitalism, but we would be replicating class society, which is the larger goal. I mean, marxists are not, you know, we're not mere anti-capitalists, we are anti-class society. To court with the realization that these things cannot happen overnight or all at once and that is the distinction between us and anarchism is the framework of time and the framework of the necessity of time in the rebuilding and the necessity of time and of rebuilding.
C. Derick Varn:And there's a few other things about authority. Frankly, I think Engel's writings on authority is quite confused and when we come to mystifications, I was responding to someone's idea that fascism is the dictatorship of finance capital. I don't think that's totally true, but it's also not totally false, although fascists think they're opposing finance capital. Uh, I don't think that's totally true, but it's also not totally false, although fascists think they're opposing finance capital. That's. One of the ironies of that position is that, um, it is about like maintaining national dividends, which is a very finance capital thing to do, but it is also it also projects that out elsewhere and basically favors domestic finance capital over international finance capital um I, I think that's true.
Daniel Tutt:I'll say one caveat, though, is that you know, um daniel burnfin has alerted me to alfred son ratel's um theory of the rise of of fascism, because, you know, sun Raitel, the German philosopher, was actually, by trade, an economist when the Nazis came to power, and his analysis of fascism as a war economy I found really precise, because I still felt that, when we have this notion of fascism as finance capital, the problem that I have with that and you see this a lot with, like the Midwestern Marx people today the problem that I have with that, ultimately, is that they end up personalizing class as a populist, elitist thing. You know Right, or I just saw, like I just saw thinking about it's not, they're not thinking.
Daniel Tutt:Class is a relation. By the way, balibar name makes a nice point, which is that this intervallic period after the seizure of power by the proletariat allows for class as a relation to be seen and therefore as depersonalized. You could almost say that in bourgeois society, the bourgeois ideology almost reinforces, through logics of fetishism, this precise personalization of class. That itself performs a certain violence. You know what I mean. This goes back to my point about like subjective violence and how marxism has helped me move beyond that, because I think without that, um, class would be a very like a haven of just pure resentment. Yeah, you know, I think that marxism are beyond class resentment. They have a vision of doing politics that can transcend class resentment. That goes to abolition, but abolition comes later. It's sequenced, right, yeah.
C. Derick Varn:You can't just get there tomorrow. I mean, one of the things I think we see and this might seem slightly off off topic and we can tie it back into balibar in a minute I do want to go to balibar's points about the uh repressive and ideological apparatuses and their disorder in the late 20th century. That'll probably be the last point we talk about to tie it all back up. But I have been thinking about people who seemingly alternate dramatically between, uh, what you know some people might call ultra-left positions. I wouldn't even say and I say ultra-left here not in just like a slur for left communists, because I don't think these people were ever left communists and I'm thinking an example of this would be Mark Fisher or David Graeber, and they're very different. I'm not saying they're the same, but what you see, this oscillation between, like, um, you know, uh, read Fisher's early work in capitalist realism and he sees social democracy is basically a form of capitalism and I think somewhat accurately at least the social democracy that he's talking about. And then read him post the vampire castle and the politics of joy. And then read him post the vampire castle and the politics of joy and frankly, he wanted to do to Corbin what we see normal liberals trying to do to Harris and make it a figure of personal instantiation and immediate gratification, which also meant that it was not that radical of a critique. In fact, in the Vampire Castle and that essay is honored in people ignoring the parts of it they don't want to look at. But he critiques people who critique social democracy as being part of the Vampire Castle castle too, not just the identitarians, um, because they foreclose the, the vision of reform, um, but he does not even seriously deal with why they do that or why he himself did that priorly. Because he did, if one reads uh, capitalist realism closely, um, now I I say that, yeah, similarly in graber graber, you have this radical substitutionism. We can get away from the state. And yet when you talk to anarchists, a lot of anarchists love graber if they're younger, but the older ones, the ones more familiar with the tradition, hate his guts often, or they might couch it more nicely than that. But because there's this oscillation in him towards like oh, we can use state policy, like MMT you know, to build a culture of whatever, or we can just retreat from the state and let it go on just fine and just purely live this out in the space of the cultural, which is his answer to occupy, just purely live this out in the space of the cultural, which is his answer to occupy. But that, in a weird way, is this oscillation between an ultra position, the immediate prefigurative liberation, and total concession to the status quo. And you see this in the period of a lot of Gen X leftists. And we have to be careful with this because, I agree with you, generational categories are are a bourgeois, but we have to deal with time where this is a common pattern of people oscillating back and forth between ultra-left positions and really right, right, deviationist, almost liberal ones, um, in ways that are totally disorienting to people approaching them.
C. Derick Varn:Today. I mean, and you see this even in something like Jacobin Magazine, jacobin Magazine published a positive piece on Bordiga. Why on earth would they do that? Bordiga would have hated every one of their stupid guts, like from his perspective not calling them all stupid, by the way, way, but I mean that's how he would have felt. You know why are they praising him? Because he's some dissonant figure they can recuperate without really contextualizing him at all, like David Broder does, but and I've seen his larger work when he touches on Borga, but in that piece he, the editorial ship, does not let him really go into it. It's more just like almost a celebratory, mild anti-Stalinist thing, without realizing that in some ways Bortiga is more authoritarian in his view of the party than even Stalin is. And party and even stalin is um and um. This. This, to me, is because of this confusion about the goal. Um, and the two goals here are are one of the things to bring this back up to.
C. Derick Varn:Something you mentioned earlier was an undialectical view of class. You know, you and I think class origins are important. I want to, I want to say that, but we don't think, at least I don't think you think, and I know, I don't think that class origins solely determine your class positionality, that that is something that develops through your relations of production throughout the course of your life and does shift for many people, even though your class positionality at birth is reflected in your habitats and your class culture, and so, um, this doesn't happen much anymore. There was a time in which it did, where a bourgeois person from the working class does still at some case have a memory and taste of working class values. Now it might actually manifest in a way that makes them even more reactionary, like you know that's there's actually sociological research to back that up but they have that memory taste feel that matters. That's something we have to take seriously as marxist. But we cannot reduce class to that at all and nor do I think we can totally reduce it to just um, oh, you're taking a wage today or oh, you do productive labor. It's actually a much more dialectically fraught field and we know this from the fact that when marx gets to the fucking definition and capital, volume three, he doesn't define it, he stops and we never get the answer.
C. Derick Varn:And to go a little further on this and maybe tie it back to what I wanted to point about the state, is that I think this confusion and I think the Polanski view, a lot of people see the turn towards left populism. In LaClauow I actually maybe even date it to two people palancis and this is going to be unpopular but baron and sweezy um and uh, because I see it and people who weren't influenced by palancis. One of the one of the critiques I might make of christopher lash is that, um, he more or less accepts beyond, when the business cycle kicks back in the Barron and Sweezy monopoly capital hypothesis and that seems to limit his ability to think about class as a dialectical thing and he makes weird comments like that sharecroppers and Mormon townships in upstate New York are working class and I'm like, by no marxist definition would that have been the case. They're an interesting like sharecropper. Sharecroppers is actually an interesting problem for marxism because they have some characteristics of the peasantry and some characteristics of free labor. But, um, we wouldn't say, you know, we wouldn't say that they were working class in any meaningful sense, but we also would admit they were laborers. You know, um, they're they, but they weren't dependent on a wage and so the socialization of labor is very different for them.
C. Derick Varn:Um, and I find it interesting because there's hints in early Lash, for example, that he understands this.
C. Derick Varn:He never talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat, but he does critique populism pretty hard until after 1987, he seems to lose hope and then embrace it as his final move. And I think you know I don't know enough about balabar. Personally I'm too removed from european uh, academia to say anything like this, but I would suspect that maybe the 80s and 90s is a point of despair where all of a sudden, palancis can make sense as a point of resignation. But once you've done that, I think you're on the road to la clow. You know, and and I hate that, I hate the fact and I've talked about this uh elsewhere I read a critique of state and revolution. I thought was only okay. Uh, recently, um, mostly bad, but there are some good points raised in it, uh, but it pointed out that, other than Polanski, and like the German, a couple of German debates in the 30s, that outside of state and revolution, like it more than the Miliband position, which I think is worse than either.
Daniel Tutt:But the Miliband position is basically Harringtonism in Britain and that's why I think Jacobin has cozied to it. Palancis himself, by the way, in his book on classes may surprise you. This may actually surprise you a lot.
Daniel Tutt:Polansis does not believe that service labor qualifies as the working class and he actually thinks that it is not sort of instrumental or vital to the generation of surplus value, and he therefore has a fairly narrow conception of what qualifies in a Marxist sense as the working class from a strategic point of view as a relation to generation of surplus value and so on, value and so on, and um, uh, some people would suggest that he's a poor reader of the second volume of capital, especially in the uh sections on circulation, which would allow us to enlarge a sense of the working class that would be inclusive of service labor. That was an interesting point. Somewhat contradicts his neutral theory of the state in a certain way.
C. Derick Varn:Um, as a side point, but go ahead, yeah no, I mean it's interesting that these debates have come back up, because they were, they were, they happened in the 70s that with the nature of productivity, of labor, what productivity I mean? I read theories of social value and I can almost tell you that when mark starts about productivity, he's talking about productivity to capital surplus and that's it. But um, nonetheless, uh, yeah, the capitalist surplus, it doesn't enable investment and material production. Um, so, as long as you're in capitalism, it's still important. And there is a way that finance capital, particularly after the 1970s, there's a good argument to be made that finance capital did play some productive role in the financing and leveraging of time in the interwar period and in the post-war period, but that both pre uh World War I and after the the stagflation crisis of 1970, uh, finance is almost purely parasitic, which, um, looking at the numbers, I think it's probably true. I I feel a little bit weird, um, you know, uh, talking about it cleanly, but I do think I got.
Daniel Tutt:Well, I think you're right. I think one can see the cards lined up for the vulgar moralistic reading of the working class, even in the context of dictatorship, of the proletariat you know such as well. These parasitic class positions need to undergo a reformation regarding the reality of their participation in exploitation, of their participation in exploitation, and so you can have a kind of almost like crusader, militaristic conception of the working class that would see the working class as almost like a kind of angelic agency or something like this.
Daniel Tutt:And I think that that's an anti-Marxist way of of construing the working class. Why? Because, again, one of the things we realize from Lenin's experiments after 1917 is that the achievement of communism, through this intervallic period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, allows for a certain realization of what we otherwise only know as a theoretical reality, which is class as a relation and therefore as a defetishized achievement. Yeah, that's an achievement that is through a struggle, that is through a process, that's through a practice of doing politics and seizing power. And I think that that is the heart of what makes Marxism sound right and what also means that Marxism will have a highly confused appendage to it of you know, it takes different forms. It takes the patriotic socialist forms, it takes ultra leftist forms to it. Of you know, and you know it takes different forms. It takes the patriotic socialist forms, it takes ultra leftist forms, it takes those who cannot escape bourgeois ideology, because I also think that then this kind of goes to the rsa question. You know the, because I mean, I think you wanted to talk about that that ideological state apparatus. What does Althusser's theory of interpolation mean regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat? How is repression to be handled? This actually has a role of psychoanalysis as an institution, because psychoanalysis is science, it's capable of locating repression and overcoming it, treating it, working through it. Bourgeois society is a repressive society. It inducts us into apparatuses, right, according to Althusser, which begin with repression, what Freud called the artificial groups the church, the army, the corporation and so on. It's not a voluntary entry right, it's an ideological operation of interpolation.
Daniel Tutt:I think the question that Judith Butler and others have raised, after Althusser say in her book, theories of Subjection, very interesting kind of critique of all this. There is that in a certain sense and you see this in a lot of Lacanian thought too the new form of interpolation is almost structured on a different model of repression, such that it's more repressive, it's not post-repressive, it's repression that's not seen or it's repression that goes invisible. In some sense it's like a complicity with systems of power, willingly. This is why Frederic Lordon, the wonderful Spinoza scholar, has a book which will tell you a million words just in the title, called Willing Slaves of Capital. That's the post-officerian nexus, right. It ups the ante on liberation, if such a prospect is true, in fact, that the systems of domination have reached this level of sophistication over us. Right, you're right. That calls for a more thorough investigation into liberation, deliberation, etc. Etc. So those are some points I would make.
Daniel Tutt:In other words, my question for Althusser would be is the ISA still conditioned in the same way by repression? No, no, no, like it or not, you need a little Freud to answer that question, you do. That's why Freud matters. Right, althusser is working with Lacan, right, but there's still and this is one merit of the Slovene school like Dolar, zupanček and Žižek, you know, the big thing with them, by the way, is that they kind of are like reversing Althusser, like they actually have. They're trying to like turn all through ser's logic on its head. That's actually why, like, a lot of zizek is so maddening you know what I'm saying. Like his subliminal ideology is already sees itself as surpassing all through ser, as saying, yeah, all through ser is of an old mode. We're in a new configuration now, right, right. So we have to acknowledge that, yeah, zizek is flawed politically, sure, but at this level, at a subjective level. Insights there. Anyways, I'll stop there, sorry.
C. Derick Varn:Well, no, that's quite good.
C. Derick Varn:I think to talk about the ideological state apparatuses and the repressive state apparatuses seems to be part of Balabar's analysis of how some of this has got so obscured, because these, contemporaneously to 1970, seem very I would not, you know disjointed Let me use that word and I feel like we've, like you and I, have lived our entire life in a time where those things feel disjointed.
C. Derick Varn:You have state repression, but it seems kind of actually arbitrary and gets caught up in its own internal, uh, concessions and just the, the bourgeois state doesn't even seem to be able to tell the bourgeois state what to do, um, in that regard. And then at the ideological apparatus, I, I would say, seems, seems to be in some ways more fragmented but but not any less dangerous for that fragmentation. Actually, in some ways that fragmentation gives people low. I feel that they aren't affected by it. So you know that they think they're around it or beyond it, even though they kind of can't be, and I it, even though they kind of can't be. And that does seem to really obscure what we're getting at with the dictatorship of the proletariat and what was at stake there and why so many people at the time thought it needed to be abandoned. What do you make of that thesis from Balabar and do you think I am like summarizing it correctly?
Daniel Tutt:I think I'll be, honest, I think we can get lost in this. This here's what I think.
Daniel Tutt:I think the main problem of the althusserian school has been the reduction of class struggle to a theory of discourse and that it overly complexifies ideological struggles and it saturates them to the detriment of the actual site of struggle itself, so that one is lost in the maze of forms of bourgeois fetishism that we attempt in thought, in critique. This is the theory, one way to think about the theory industry to overcome, for which it's an infinite Sisyphean task to overcome. This is why, as Belgaro says, the legacy of Althusser has been to create a new intellectual, a new Marxist intellectual that is overly theoretical, right, too much theory. So my position is not necessarily too much theory, no, my position is why I returned to Lukács, why I'm interested in Lacerdo, it's why I'm moving away from this French nexus. It's too theoreticist, too theoreticist and I. It doesn't have a touchstone in the actual, it doesn't have a touchstone in the real Doesn't mean to say that these thinkers can't help us do that.
Daniel Tutt:Because, you see, the irony of a lot of philosophers is that and you see this even with Feuerbach if it wasn't for Marx and Engels, feuerbach would have been the greatest German philosopher of the time, and he was One year before the thesis on Feuerbach. What did Engels say? That you are the philosopher of socialism, without question. He's saying that to Feuerbach. Now we think of Feuerbach as, like I don't know a clown or something.
C. Derick Varn:No right?
Daniel Tutt:No, no, no. But you see, you see the point. It may be in the sweep of history that one singular figure from this morass of Marxist philosophy becomes the point at which we can pivot to something new, right? Um, so we don't want to underestimate them, you don't want to reject them, but you do want to see the collective limitations of their philosophy in practice. That's evident. That's why ellen macekin's woods prophetic article on the abandonment of class took on Althusser. That's what she took on, and Polensis was a great Althusserian. That doesn't mean that she's a class reductionist or anything like that. It just means that the outcome of Althusserianism has been the abandonment of all of these Marxist categories, class being one of them, okay, but also dictatorship or proletariat and so on. So that's what I would say is that we've reached a certain stalemate, but we've been in a stalemate for a while, right, and I think that Half a century from my reckoning.
Daniel Tutt:Yeah, that's the question. How long has the crisis been? It's a matter of debate. I would say that most of what we're dealing with is the precipice of the end of the Soviet regime. The end of really existing socialism has brought us to a new precipice as it pertains to the activation of Marxism. So look, I mean, yeah, read all through, sarah, read all of it. Be wary of its, you know, pay attention to how it materializes More and more. That's how I look at philosophy. I mean, you know, in my book on Nietzsche, I'm less interested in Nietzsche than I am in the effect of Nietzscheanism in some sense, partially because I find the Nietzschean discourse academy arbitrarily obsessed with Nietzsche in a way which is like minute and silly at times.
Daniel Tutt:You know like that's a whole other thing. You know what I mean. Yeah, I once asked a Nietzsche scholar who's like a real scholar this is a true story A question about the late Nietzsche. You know what she said to me? I'm a specialist on the early Nietzsche. I can't answer that.
C. Derick Varn:Damn, that's fucking crazy, that's too much, yeah, yeah, if someone told me they were a specialist on the early marks, okay, fine, good, we need specialists for certain things, uh, at least right now. But uh, if they told me they couldn't answer a question or had no opinion about the latest marks, I'd be like get out of the fucking room, like, like, like, how do you, how do you even conceptualize the, the early marks, without reference to the late marks? I don't even understand how this works.
Daniel Tutt:Uh, in the case of Nietzsche, there's a whole ideological operation of his so-called decentered status, right, the strength being that Nietzsche's uninterpretable, he's undecipherable. That's his strength. Yada, yada, yada. I have a different view of him. That, I think's more Like more. We can activate Nietzsche better when we actually have, when we assign him a center. That's a whole other debate. But no, look, it's been a great conversation. Yeah, I feel like. I feel like we've hit pretty much everything I wanted to hit.
C. Derick Varn:I don't know if there's anything no, this is pretty much what I wanted to cover. I would tell people, pick up these two books. I was actually surprised. I don't know if there's anything. No, this is pretty much what I wanted to cover. I would tell people, pick up these two books. I was actually surprised for me, you know, just throwing out random books in the dictatorship of the proletariat, more or less how much the Draper and Balabar books actually seem to almost interact with each other and contextualize each other. I was actually quite surprised by that.
Daniel Tutt:That was not something I was expecting. Um uh, and the hunt book is good. The hunt book is good because what's really nice about it is that it's this careful study of the step-by-step evolution of marx and Engels as political thought, as they face events, and so you see all of their hesitations to do certain things and you start to get to know them better.
C. Derick Varn:You start to get to know their political instincts better which I think is very important for us.
Daniel Tutt:The more we have a sense of that, the better.
C. Derick Varn:I'll leave on an endorsement of something that you wrote recently on your sub stack, which I read, which was which was for all of our talk about. You know larger than individual forces, which is important. For Marxists, I think it's absolutely vital. There is a you made a defense that convinced me that the contextualization of biography and understanding of political life is actually still crucial. You know, even if we're talking about larger forces and larger movements of history and long-duray stuff, that we still have to contextualize these thoughts and where they come from. And, unfortunately, when we don't do that, we tend to leave that up to liberals, who do it perniciously. So, um, I would tell people to go check your subject out on the defense of using intellectual biographies and understanding you know, larger political movements and whatnot. Um, is there anything else you'd like to plug, daniel?
Daniel Tutt:uh, not. Um, folks can check out the emancipations podcast. I'm doing um two study groups right now. I'm doing one on lucerto's western marxism. We had a massive turnout with pro-lucerto people, with platypus people, with everyone in between, with non-Marxists. It was fascinating. You know I've been doing a lot of work on Lukács. I'm working on a couple books, one on Lukács, one on class theory, which I'd love to chat with you about in the future. Those are my main things I'm working on in the world of thought and in politics. Lash, as we mentioned, I have an ongoing interest in resurrecting Lash, a Marxist reading of Lash, we could call it. Those are my main things. You know, appreciate the time, appreciate your show, appreciate you and your efforts.
C. Derick Varn:As always, it's always an honor to be here, as always, yeah, always an honor to be here and so it's an honor to have you on and people should check out your podcast.
C. Derick Varn:I quite enjoy. It's one of the few left podcasts I listen to. People might be surprised I don't listen to that. Many believe it or not. Um, uh, and it's not even because they're bad, uh, it's because their audience is not me. Their audience is usually people who don't know as much as I know and I actually find yours intellectually engaging, whereas you know, I can listen to the dig and I might learn something sometimes, and I don't say that as an insult to the dig, but people can get what I'm talking about and any like Marxism one-on-one thing. I mean like by God, god, at this point, if I still needed that, it would be deeply embarrassing, but I think I do enjoy what you do and thank you for coming on and we'll definitely have you back.
C. Derick Varn:I'd love to talk to you about class and class theory. Maybe sometimes we should have a when I've read a. Sometimes we should have a when I've read a little bit more. Have a discussion about the trials and tribulations of Lacerdo, because I think I like you, even though I'm not quite as sanguine on him as you. I don't think I don't. I also don't. I think there's a lot of dismissals of Lacerdo. That has ended up being really lazy.
C. Derick Varn:I was laughing I was reading david broder's uh critique of the western marxism book that he wrote when he came out in 2017 back when he was responding to the italian edition and I was laughing about how much I know some platypus people hate lacerto. Uh, and then being like but like, you agree with parts of this. In fact, like some of my problems with you are where you agree with Lacerdo and don't even seem to know that you do so. So it's it's. It's funny how this all works out. And I'm just like, if you have a standard of like, oh, I can't read anything Stalinist, whatever the fuck that means.
C. Derick Varn:I don't know Right, stalinist, whatever the fuck that means I don't know.
Daniel Tutt:My position on this is like look, I think the neo-Stalinist turn needs to be engaged. I think that it's not. I think that within it there's some actors that can be pushed in certain ways. There's others that can't, and there are limits and there are actors that I think are nefarious. And, you know, it becomes a question, I would say, of a kind of of a careful analysis of our conjuncture and the kind of that's. That's why, you know, we have to be very careful at this moment.
Daniel Tutt:But, I mean, I'm not afraid to debate those people. I think this liberalized relationship to them, to reject them as fascists, doesn't do any service to Marxism in my view. So we may or may not differ on that basis. I think you probably would debate them. I'm assuming you would. On the Lo Cerdo thing, I'll just say you know, read my Nietzsche book, see what you think. I'm ready for your critical appraisal of it. Keep in mind, this is a book that changed Nietzsche's place on the left in Italy and in france. We've only had it since 2020, in the process of making that transformation. It's his most important book. Um, part of the thing that's happened is that the left nichians have not been able to wage a critique of it.
Daniel Tutt:They can't that's a problem for them. I, I'm sorry, but they just can't. It's because of its comprehensiveness, right? So, anyways, you know, think about it from that point of view, because I try to go way beyond him. By the way, I try to go way beyond him. He just sort of gives me a few ideas, and Lukács is more my interlocutor than him. By the way, I try to go way beyond him. He just sort of gives me a few ideas and Lukacs is more my interlocutor than him.
C. Derick Varn:To be honest, in terms of philosophy lately, You've got me to reread the Destruction of Reason, even though it's fucking massive, and there are things that it says that I've just I roll my eyes at, but I do think ultimately it's the defense of the book. And when people I I actually said this to uh on a critique of chris katron's piece on my buddy lukash, where he just throws out late lukash and I'm just like, but like, okay, even if you say it's stalinist, uh is highly debatable. If that's true, lukács had critiques of the USSR pretty late. It seems to me that you'd have to talk about specifically why that's bad and where it shows up, not just say that's Stalinist. Therefore I don't need to engage it.
Daniel Tutt:Oh yeah, that's the platypus position is to say the latter right. And you know, it just takes a lot of work to prove, because it's not just the platypus people that say that, it's the silent consensus of the liberal publishing apparatus that also says that. But they, they don't say it, they just assume it. And so it's been important to defend this book. I have a forthcoming long interview in historical materialism with John Bellamy Foster on this, where we defend it further because it's a way to look at the history of philosophy through a completely different Marxist lens. I mean, we've been talking a lot about philosophy tonight, right as this kind of actualized praxis. Lukács helps us pinpoint this like the dignity of what a Marxist philosophy could be, you know yeah.
C. Derick Varn:And, honestly, a Marxist aesthetic, even if I sometimes disagree with how he particularly like what particular art he thought was the most valorizable. But I do think his, his call for the need for specifically Marxist aesthetics because it's crucial to social reproduction and part of this larger, and that's crucial to stuff like we talked about today, like how you get to the dictatorship of the proletariat and why that's important. Because we're not just talking about economic, uh, production and economic reproduction, we're talking about the, so the reproduction of society, which has implications for everything and and I think people have to take a radical view of that lukash is a way to do that. Um, I will tell you that, uh, that, uh, if anything I might have, I might actually like middle and late Lukasz more than I like history, class consciousness, which, um, because, uh, the the on method part of that of that book, like every time I read it, I get, because the on method part of that book, like every time I read it, I get mad.
C. Derick Varn:But I do think that there's a lot there. I would also say that people who want to throw Lukasz out a lot of Altasarians would love to are fundamentally mistaken, and I think it's rather interesting where you and I have ended up where two years ago, I was like Daniel, I'm calling you on the carpet, you're going to defend Team France because I hate them. And now it's just like well, maybe the French aren't so bad.
C. Derick Varn:Well, no, I'm moving away from France.
Daniel Tutt:No, mean I, I think, I think that's one thing I wanted to leave folks with, which is theoretical struggle. In marxist practice, let's say um should be inclusive of everything and we should not scapegoat thinkers, because that's idealism.
Daniel Tutt:It is, I mean, you know oh, a lame, bad Jew is responsible for the failure of proletarian consciousness, or something. People imply those kind of arguments, right, what you're doing is you're inflating the importance of intellectuals, and we've all know Russell Jacoby's book on intellectuals. Intellectuals are not what they used to be. There may have been a time in which you could make such a claim. No, if anything, our era is one in which we need organic intellectuals to be more empowered, not less. We need more power for intellectuals, not less. We have a crisis of master intellectuals.
Daniel Tutt:The part of the irony of French theory is that French theory is dead because within academia, its currency, its function, doesn't work like that. No more, there's no more master French thinker that can walk around the halls of academia and everybody bows down to them. That's done, that's over. And of course, the causes of that are austerity and so on. Right, we know the causes. But okay, cool, that's an opportunity, though the fact that's over is an opportunity. See what I'm saying. We're different type of intellectual to be born. Well, maybe, maybe the master intellectual was the problem. This is why Ronon sierre is good, ron sierre, ron sierre is good on this.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, he has anti-marxist proclivities, but he's fucking good on this redefines gramsci's organic intellectual right yeah, um, oh, maybe, maybe another project for us to do, way in the future of the show. I don't know, and this is I'm gonna really end this interview, but um is to do something on theories of public intellectuals, from like senate to jacobi, to gramsci, to linen, because they all do have Roncier, all those guys, because it's really important to do, because I do think right now we're assaulted with twin obscurantism, and one of them is the academy, like I feel like academia right now has taken a weirdly anti-intellectual turn Totally, and the other one is a response to that that misrecognizes the anti-intellectualism of academia as intellectualism and of course, that pisses everyone off. So it's Right.
Daniel Tutt:It's kind of a bad moment. So it's right, it's a bad moment. The trend for what you might call the conditions for intellectuals are conditioned by non-antagonistic intellectual production. If you have an intellectual that is permitted by the consensus, there's an immediate depoliticization. That must occur, right? So therefore, the the question of of the distinction between an organic intellectual and a bourgeois public intellectual in some sense couldn't be more stark today. I think the question would be how do we make that? How do we make that difference?
Daniel Tutt:uh, truly antagonistic because actually that that is a there's a certain potency with that, uh, because famously, as you always say with michael brooks it's like, yeah, anybody that wants to become famous therefore ideologically must compromise themselves. And I think the question is, um, how does one not do that while also commanding some kind of audience? You know, it's a real interesting question, because bourgeois ideology still does insist on the neutering of intellectuals as the precondition of their exposure that's a fact how that operation works.
Daniel Tutt:We can show how it works. People might call it a conspiracy, but I believe it to be true. Right, I believe it's true. That actually feeds into your thesis about the incoherent ideology of like jacobin, where they want to be a receptacle for ultra leftism and harringtonism. So actually it's like a de-principled thing when it's just like oh, we're celebrating ideas For the sake of ideas, but they're De-tethered from practice.
C. Derick Varn:Yeah, that's very common.
Daniel Tutt:You're right about that, and it's weird and it's A problem, I suppose.
C. Derick Varn:Anyways, we should wrap up, alright. Thank you so much, daniel, and here we are going to roll the Credits.
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