Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
The Death Left?: From Millennial Waves to Modern Challenges in Politics
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation with Chris Catron as we dissect the evolving dynamics of leftist movements, from the millennial wave to the emerging Zoomer left. We're making the bold statement that the recent Leninist turn intertwined with neo-Kautskyism is reshaping contemporary leftist politics. Exploring the rise of neo-Stalinist and Trotskyist tendencies, we also tackle the challenges faced by groups like the Democratic Socialists of America in integrating Trotskyist organizations.
Our dialogue with Chris ventures into the heart of leftist ideological shifts, scrutinizing the friction between radical liberalism and Marxist-Leninism, especially in the wake of MAGA-Communism. There's an intriguing spotlight on historical figures such as Earl Browder and William Z. Foster, juxtaposed with modern platforms like the PSL and Monthly Review. The discussion critically examines the left's response to mainstream political figures, including the complexities of Bernie Sanders' and Jeremy Corbyn's influence on progressive politics.
Finally, we unravel the layers of U.S.-Israel relations since the 1980s and the intricacies of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Chris offers insights into the paradoxes within leftist politics, from protest voting frustrations to the psychological barriers of breaking away from the Democratic Party. We also reflect on Marxist critiques, the frustrations with critical theory, and the cycles of generational shifts in political sentiment. This episode promises an enlightening exploration of historical memory, political norms, and the enduring challenges of building solidarity within leftist movements.
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Hello and welcome to VarmBlog, and today I'm here with one of the most often requested guests on the show and a guy that I owe a right of response, Chris Catron. He is the author of, and I'm just going to go through them and I have them for those of you who are watching. You can see them the Death of the Millennial Left Interventions 2006-2022, marxism and Politics Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006 to 2024. The Off Forgotten and I don't think you're the and edited by you also has a lot of your work in it Marxism in the Age of Trump, which is a nice brief volume about the first round of Trump politics, and you are a contributor, although not editor, of the platypus review readers, which I'm holding up uh one and two, which are big, massive tomes that I throw at people when I get mad at them um great uh.
Speaker 1:You're also a regular guest, uh, on sublation media and I you know, with your own semi-regular show over there, the Katron Zone. What else are you doing these days, chris?
Speaker 2:I did a course on the introduction to Marxism for Theory Underground.
Speaker 1:You are one of the gang of three that founded Platyypus affiliated society all those years ago, in 2006. So, um, and you are, uh, one of my anxieties of influence, I think, as everyone knows here. Um, it's funny because people think I hate you and I'm like, why would I buy five books by a person I hate? But, anyway, we're here to talk about the millennial and or zoomer left. We are now in the changing of the guard, and the last conversation that we had together on this channel with Spencer Leonard, we were talking about how, in many ways, today's left seems to have taken a turn that looks a lot like the new communist movement's last days in the late 70s, early 80s, when I was not but four or five and you were a teenager. Um, but, uh, I wanted you to build up on that. What do you make of this seemingly leninist turn that also seems to have some relationship to neokotskyism, um, although that relationship seems a little bit obscure. How have you seen that going?
Speaker 2:Well, there were a few phases of this right in our time, in the time that I've been drawn back to the left, during the millennial era. So I think that there was like a kind of left unity idea, kind of neo-Kautsky and left unity idea, based on the Unified Socialist Party of the Second International as a model and helped by the fact that Lars Lee did historiography and scholarship on the Kautsky and basis of the Bolsheviks and therefore of the Russian Revolution More recently. So all of that happened before and also after Occupy. So it sort of was there as an influence before and after Occupy in maybe some different ways. You know, the idea of left unity and then the idea of maybe party building. More recently we have the kind of neo-Stalinist turn and also a kind of rebranding of the IMT, the Trotskyist tendency as the communists, and then we have mega-communists All and then we have mega communists. So we have a lot going on.
Speaker 1:The IMT is interesting in that for some strange reason, they seem to be the well. What are they now? The RCI, rca right, revolutionary Communist RCP, rca, revolutionary Communist Party and Revolutionary Communist Organization, but they seem to be the last trot standing. I mean not that there aren't still trotskiest around, but the other tendencies seem to have liquidated into the DSA and become less and less relevant even there. What do you make of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a big difference between the millennial left era and the current time is. Early on with the millennial left, the ISO was a outsized presence, or the Cliffites more generally. So the SWP in the UK, the ISO in the United States, and so in that way there was a kind of default Trotskyism Also, you know, I should say, like historical materialism journal and even Verso to a certain extent. They were certainly seen by other Marxist tendencies as Trotskyist, even though they weren't quite Trotskyist, they were still perceived that way and that seems to have really faded. Um, there were, you know, a couple of organizations liquidated into the DSA. Solidarity did Um, and then, uh, the ISO sort of did by default, even though they didn't intend to, but when they, uh, you know, closed shop, salt, the socialist alternative, has retained its independence but has also sort of gravitated around that DSA orbit. So I think that a lot of the wind in the sails of Trotskyism was taken by the DSA.
Speaker 1:Why do you think so many Trotskyist organizations liquidated themselves into the DSA? And, as an addendum to that question, why have they not been important in the DSA? Because they seem to be less and less represented in the National Political Committee and in key committees in the organization national political committee and key committees in the organization.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I think that they jumped on the democratic socialists bandwagon, meaning not social democracy but democratic socialism, and so that seemed to be amenable to the Trotskyist kind of mindset. Now, you know, not capital D democratic socialists, but small D democratic socialists, so non-authoritarian or non-undemocratic socialists, so not Stalinists, right. So I think that that facilitated it. And you know, we should also mention, you know, people that were acquainted with Cosmonaut and Marxist Unity Group as sort of post-Trotskyist, not Trotskyist, you know, influenced by the Communist Party of Great Britain, one of whose major writers and thinkers, mike McNair his book Revolutionary Strategy was influential with the neo-Kautskyian orientation of the millennial left is an ex-Trotskyist, so that's sort of like ex-Trotskyist, non-trotskyist, anti-Trotskyist or post-Trotskyist, something like that. Now, so they were all more or less compatible with the DSA in their own ways. I guess of all those tendencies the Marxist unity group might have the most influence within the DSA, some limited influence, but still more of a felt influence.
Speaker 2:I think that the other Trotskyists who got involved with the DSA were really participating as like individuals and then, you know, had a kind of a theoretical or journalistic kind of influence. So Robert Brenner, who was in Solidarity. He was for a brief time a co-editor of the journal that associated with Jacobin, catalyst, and Charlie Post wrote for Jacobin and for Catalyst and had some debates. I think he debated Vivek Chhibber about like socialist strategy, and so he was a member of Solidarity as well. But yeah, have they really vied for leadership? Maybe not so much. Maybe they've just been happy to exert influence or serve some kind of a pedagogical role right.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, I think about the iso. Has you know, once it liquidated it has like three different tendencies that split up between, like, some of them are members of uh there's a bread and roses some of them run Spectre magazine, some of them run Tempest magazine which are all kind of adjacent to various factions in the DSA, but they don't seem to be particularly powerful. I do think it's interesting and maybe this is a way to pivot back to the neo-Stalinist question in that there was a debate between Charlie Post and and bashkar sankara about the popular front in 20. Uh must have been 2019 and post kind of predicted a little bit too late in my opinion, but but before, a lot of other people did that this attempt to make the popular front would not make social democrats or, excuse me, democratic socialists.
Speaker 1:I'll call them what they want to be called more popular, um, that it would actually make marxist leninism uh isms plural, uh. Come back and, and and. While I'm not sure the Popular Front is the only reason for it, it does seem like we have something like a resurgent Marxist-Leninism, with the caveat that the parties that represent it I guess primarily the Party for Socialism and Liberation are themselves splits from Trotskyist parties and are not actually historical Marxist-Leninist organizations, which will probably make people uncomfortable. But what happened from your perspective?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, there are a couple of things to look at there. I think that the Bernie campaign and the way that it went, and also Trump's election in 2016, brought back, also out of the second term of Obama, kind of rad lib leftism. So Black Lives Matter and Me Too, me Too, right. So I think that the attraction of a kind of neo-Stalinism over the old sort of legacy Trotskyist influence over the millennial left was that the neo-Stalinists had a more straightforward approach to anti-oppression and anti-imperialism, whereas the DSA and the Trotskyists that liquidated into the DSA had a difficult time dealing with those things, and so they were always sort of stuck on the race versus class or gender versus class or, you know, anti-imperialist, yes, but not authoritarian socialism, you know. So I think that the neo-Stalinists just have a way of cutting through that. You know, going back to the 1930s, to the popular front idea that you know, marxists and Marxist-Leninists and Leninists, leninists and Leninists more generally should not be just about a kind of working class economistic struggle against exploitation, but should be anti-oppression, and of course that includes national oppression, which includes colonial oppression and imperialist oppression. All right, so they just have a very straightforward way of dealing with that in a way that I think has really flummoxed the DSA. The DSA has really struggled over these issues and so, in light of things like BLM and Me Too, but then more recently like Israel-Palestine, I don't think the DSA is able to navigate it as easily.
Speaker 2:I think that the Stalinists are much more ready to take up the red lib causes. I also think that with the DSA, because they are in the Democratic Party and they have the rank and file strategy, they have an orientation towards organized labor, so they have a stake in the coalition within the democratic party. That lines them up with organized labor as opposed to with the kind of ngo industrial complex. Uh, you know, social group identity politics, elements of the coalition, right, so they're they're kind of like, by being in the democratic party in a way, like the psl or other neo-stalinists are not. They're kind of um, you know, stuck in a certain place in terms of the internal politics of the democratic party and therefore the definition of definition of what being a socialist is. You're concerned with economic issues, so they kind of pigeonhole themselves that way.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the interesting ironies about this new resurgent Marxist-Leninism slash Neo-Stalinism is fascinating to me in that they both have their popular front and their periodism at the same time, which is an interesting development Because historically speaking and this is still true for the CPUSA they are also broadly an inside-outside part of the Democratic Coalition. The PSL still true for the CPUSA, right they are also broadly part an inside outside part of the democratic coalition. And the PSL runs candidates I think we're. They just recently claimed to have the most, have the communist candidate with the most votes in history, but of course we're not counting anybody who went under the name socialist and we're ignoring the fact that the communist party of America never ran candidates ever, right. So you know how meaningful of a claim is that. But and I think they got like maybe about 1% of the vote or less PSL did yeah, psl did yeah. I mean, you know if they were comparing it to say, like Debs, you're dealing with something like 5% to 7% of the vote. You know which is a much bigger proposition.
Speaker 1:I've been thinking about this incoherence because, you're right, there is a certain like alliance with radical liberalism. I mean Gerald Horn, somewhat infinitiously, was on the 1619 Project Board Right. Yet there is also a more clear rejection of radical liberalism amongst a subset of these Marxist-Leninists, which I guess led to the creation of Maga-Communism. Would you like to talk about that a little bit, right?
Speaker 2:Obviously they're anti-liberal, the neo-Stalinists, right, but that's because you could say that they're competing in that milieu and so they have to be sort of anti-liberal. You know, one thing about the Maga-Communists is that they're very Browderite, right, they're very much followers of the earl browder line but they claim to be followers of william z foster and of course those two figures represent the different figures who led the communist party in the 30s and went through the twists and turns back then between what you were talking about, the kind of third period, versus the popular front, right. So you know, it's a kind of a curious thing. So they always say William Z Foster, but I feel like they always mean Earl Browder, actually kind of unclear about that. Now, you know, and Earl Browder was purged ultimately, you know, from the cp usa when they changed lines yet in after world war ii, um, so it's uh, you know again, I kind of feel like what, what is the concern?
Speaker 2:Because when I'm looking at, like PSL, or looking at also monthly review, right, so as opposed to historical materialism and new left review, you know, verso books there's also a monthly review and they're the old kind of anti-revisionist Stalinists, they're the sort of old left, you know, the sort of anti-Khrushchevite communists from back in the day. That's how Monthly Review got started and they've been pretty consistent. You know they keep chugging along there and so that's always there for the left to take up, as opposed to this more. You know democratic socialist, but really social democratic leftism that that the millennials ended up in, so we're also in the. You know, when we're talking about mega communism and maybe even like a kind of yeah, like uh, gabriel rockhill, who who's his audience? I guess it is more of a Zoomer left at this point. Certainly, the MAGA communists are young.
Speaker 1:I mean, well, this is something that we can see with Rockhill and with A Month Review. I agree with you, a Month Review has mostly been an anti-revisionist journal. There are some times where it's had Trotskyists on staff. They're also, weirdly, the people who keep Hal Draper in print, which I find very bizarre actually, particularly given where they've gone lately. But one of the things we saw from them is they kind of stayed relevant by getting on the degrowth eco-socialism debates, uh, and then, as uh, john Bellamy Foster not John uh Bellamy Foster, yeah, john Bellamy Foster um moved away from uh Cohe Sato, sato and and company. We've seen them get on the Dominica Lacerdo train, uh, particularly strongly, and I frankly don't. Well, I'm not saying all those books are without any merit.
Speaker 2:I would say they're without any merit. I'll stake that claim myself uh, they are.
Speaker 1:They are very highly. They're almost conspiratorial in that they've accused basically the entirety of the of the western left western yeah, western left and western marxism although who lacerdo considers a marxist is bizarre. Um, you know, when I was like looking through the western marxism book, I'm like, well, okay, so you got foucault and people who aren't marxist or even leftist foucault's not a leftist either, and then you have yeah and then you have block.
Speaker 1:but all you quote from block is before he's a Marxist and then after 56, there's nothing like from his entire middle period, when he was in fairly orthodox Marxist. Yeah, why do you think this has so much purchase, particularly since some of the evidence of CIA collaboration is so very thin, like it's barely there?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's sort of it's. It's it's guilt by association. You know it's a, it's very lame. I mean, look, obviously there's a reaction against the DSA. It's a Biden era phenomenon. So, you know, bernie in 2020 was very different from in 2016. Bernie got a seat at the table with the Biden administration coming in. You know, biden, our time that was the title of the issue of Jacobin that greeted the Biden administration. You know, bhaskar Sankara said the Biden administration was the most progressive in his lifetime. He said, also parenthetically that's not saying much, but nonetheless a vouch for the progressive bona fides of the Biden administration.
Speaker 2:So there's been a reaction against all this and especially around, I think, israel-palestine is a kind of a turning point. I mean, gabriel Rockhill has been beating his drum for a number of years, you know, for several years now, really, since the Trump era. But you know, I think that that's when he made his turn, when he, you know, fell off his horse on the road to Damascus and figured out that all the stuff that he had studied he had studied the French fries, that they were all bad, right, and then it's really elaborated from there. So he starts off by repudiating the French and then it ends up engulfing the Frankfurt School as well. So there's a reaction though Frankfurt School as well.
Speaker 2:So there's a reaction, though I think that the reaction to the disappointment of Bernieism, especially in light of the Biden administration and you know, really underscored, although not starting with the Gaza war in the last year, I think that that was like the final straw. You know, the way that I like to approach these things is that major events always split the left, and a lot of splits also happen around the election cycles, however obscurely, you can still date them pretty regularly to the election cycles, and the last few election cycles have been particularly fraught because they are, as I put it, the crisis of neoliberalism. You know Bernie and Trump as twin phenomena and really maybe Trump couldn't have been elected in 2016 without Bernie, because there were a lot of.
Speaker 2:Bernie supporters who switched to Trump, and there's still a large cohort of, you know, former Bernie bros and disaffected Democrats who are Trumpists and you could say sort of broadly speaking. I mean, you know, just this afternoon Tulsi Gabbard was nominated by Trump to be director of national intelligence, which puts her in a very practical position in terms of policy.
Speaker 2:It's not a figurehead position at all. It's a very hands-on position and you know, bringing in these war on terror veterans JD Vance, pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. You know the people who got burned by the war on terror who are going to make sure that there's no going back right to the old bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, a crisis on the left right Not resolved by the Bernie turn by any means and indeed exacerbated by the Bernie turn. I think the Bernie turn created new problems and new fractiousness and new disappointments and frustrations on the left.
Speaker 1:There's a lot there and I want to flag some of it to come back to you. But what do you think the Bernie turn actually represented? Because I've been mulling about it. I was drug kicking and screaming to Bernie land in 2020, actually by our mutual friend, doug Lane and his audience, because I was super, super, super skeptical that it made any sense after 2016 to try it again. Um, and I have seen today well, not today so, but in the last week, uh, you know stalwarts like Nathan Robinson talking about how Bernie would have won, just like they've talked about how Corbin would have won. And it's strange to me because that would be to me and I'm not the only person who made this analogy, but to me I it would be like if I was talking in 1992 about how Jesse Jackson would have won there were.
Speaker 2:there were a lot of people. I was there there were a lot of people who were doing that when I was there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I ate crow. Because I said no one is still mourning the Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson campaign and then like five people on X found me. I was like I'm still mourning the Rainbow Coalition.
Speaker 2:They are, and anyway, I think I wrote about this in my article on the Sandinistas and the death of the millennial left. Anyway, I think I wrote about this in my article on the Sandinistas and the death of the millennial left. The Bernie campaign of 2016 was exactly a resurrection of the Jesse Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988. Now, ok, so what does it mean? So, with Corbyn, I mean, corbyn did lose. He lost against Boris Johnson, correct so, and it was like a wipeout. You know Now, you know that's when the Tories got the north of England. The traditional labor constituencies Won them against Corbyn.
Speaker 2:Now, so what Corbyn and Bernie had in common was that they're kind of old new leftists who have a connection to the old socialist and communist left and were therefore concerned with the working class socioeconomic issues. But because they really came up politically in the 80s, that's when they're elected. They're elected in the thatcher reagan era, not only against neoliberalism, but also against the second cold war, and so they they satisfy the left in terms of being anti-imperialist. Now, as it turns out, bernie's not enough of an anti-imperialist, especially, you know, I don't know, he's been very condemnatory of Israel and the Gaza war, but nonetheless, not enough for people right. It's a little bit like Black Lives Matter, meaning it's a situation in which one can never be enough. It's a little bit of a setup that way. So, like Me Too, black Lives Matter, palestine, solidarity the nature of these issues is such that you can never be enough, right. So it's a little bit of a trap because, you know, if Corbyn and Bernie aren't anti-imperialist enough, I don't know who is Right. So I think that 2020, you know, before and after Trump, I mean, look, of course, bernie could be elected president, absolutely, and he could serve as president. He could be an effective capitalist governing president, no problem. Same thing with Jeremy Corbyn, even though people were saying, oh, jeremy Corbyn, we're gonna to have to do a military coup if he gets elected. No, not at all. These people can totally serve. You know, prime minister, president, they can do it. You know, especially with the Labour Party and the Democratic Party, they could definitely be, you know, governing leaders, leaders. Now, corbyn got the leadership of Labour by a fluke because of a quirky internal election process that allowed young people to have an outsized say than they would normally have had.
Speaker 2:Bernie didn't get the nomination because, even though he could be president, he can't be the nominee of the Democratic Party. So the Democratic Party can't allow that. So the sort Party, so the Democratic Party, can't allow that. So the sort of what if he's a protest candidate? I mean, you know again, with Jesse Jackson, jesse Jackson was never going to be the nominee. He was never going to be the nominee.
Speaker 2:He was a message candidate. He was a pressure tactic. He was telling the party look, you need to speak to the people that I represent in order to get elected. You have to reach the people that I'm reaching in the primaries Right. So they're not. Neither Jesse Jackson nor Bernie Sanders ever wanted to actually be the nominee. That's something that people need to understand. They were not trying to be the nominee. Bernie was not trying to be the nominee. I mean, there's no reason why he couldn't be, except for the fact that the Democratic Party is the way that it is, meaning he was unacceptable to other elements of the coalition and he was reaching outside the electorate in ways that made the Democratic Party uncomfortable, in the same way that Trump reached outside the traditional Republican electorate in a way that made the party uncomfortable, because they don't want to depend on unreliable voters. They don't want the party to become dependent on a mercurial working class or even small, you know petty bourgeoisie, small capitalist swing vote base that can't be relied on.
Speaker 2:So you know in terms of, like Nathan Robinson I mean, I've said this since 2016, millennials and even people, my generation and maybe some younger people they're going to be mourning the Bernie campaign. They're going to be looking back with nostalgia for the rest of their lives. So that's just that, like that's just the case. They're going to be the same way. The mcgovern generation nostalgic, like bill clinton supposedly represented the overturning of mcgovernism. No, it was the fulfillment of mcgovernism. They were bill and hillary were mcgovernites to the core. They picked their battles, they played the game and they ultimately brought it to power. That's what it represents. There was a documentary called One Bright Shining Moment, released not that very long ago, about the McGovern campaign, looking back with a great deal of sentimentality and nostalgia. So we're going to be dealing with this forever, back with it with a great deal of sentimentality and nostalgia. So we're going to be dealing with this forever. Everyone's going to more or less look back with nostalgia and regret the lost opportunity of Bernie. That's just the case.
Speaker 2:Now, 2020, bernie represented something a little bit different because, again, in a way, that was not the case in 2016, hillary did not take Bernie on board in any way when she ran against Trump, but Biden did take Bernie on board, and that has to do. Also, I think the illusion was well, the right got what it wanted with Trump, so now we progressives should get what we want with Biden. Now it's our turn to push the Overton window hard left, in the way that Trump supposedly pushed it hard right. Of course, that's a misinterpretation of Trump, but whatever that was the perception, the Republicans went hog wild on their agenda, so we should do the same with ours. Went hog wild on their agenda, so we should do the same with ours.
Speaker 2:Bernie went along with that, which meant that he gave up in 2020, he really gave up his dissent from the Democratic Party. He really gave up his loyal internal oppositional stance. In other words, he just represented progressivism the squad. So the squad were elected in 2018. And you know it's all women of color and you know they. They are Bernie crats, but they're not. They're members of the DSA, but they're not socialists. They might call themselves socialists, but really they represent the traditional Democratic Party identity politics base.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean Ilhan Omar, who considered themselves socialist and who considered themselves MMTers when I was working for Zero Books, that we should be looking for an AOC candidacy in 2028, which at the time I thought was ridiculous. And I also reminded people about the career of Nancy Pelosi, not just, you know, evil villain Nancy Pelosi to the left of the teens, but how she began in the 80s as a relatively progressive Democrat from California and even considering the status of Italians in the party at the time, almost a similar kind of racial status within the party as well, which has all been kind of erased by history. Mario Cuomo yeah, it's another one, mario.
Speaker 2:Cuomo Again my time.
Speaker 1:And I also remembered all these people who were far more left than the squad ever even pretended to be in the 60s, who, through the McGovern campaign and into the eighties and nineties, like Gene Kwan, former mayor of Oakland, okay, yeah, okay who was a radical Maoist at one point in her life, and even someone like Robert Reich who I believe had connections to the, to the Avaki and I RCP there's too many RCPs to keep up with.
Speaker 1:So the history there for me and I don't remember it, this is just what I've learned. If you studied it, you could see it rhyming and similar with the Harrington strategy that was revitalized by Bosh, Carson, cara, because I was like I was doing research from Christopher Lush and then I ended up reading a whole lot of Michael Harrington gearing up for the McGovern campaign and quote left populism and from 68 to um to 72, and feeling like this was almost identical to what the strategy was being achieved now, even though the DSA was claiming to be beyond Harringtonism under Sankara's unofficial tutelage. I mean because you know Bhaskar hadn't been in the official leadership in a long time and he also incorporated elements of Neokotskyism into it.
Speaker 1:I mean I, somebody was telling me that yeah, he didn't really pay attention to what mcnerr was saying, but, um, he was having people read revolutionary strategy and the jack had been reading groups after occupy. So I was right, which the the mcnerr book, which I was surprised by. And one thing I think, and and you've said this as well, that we have to admire bashkar for being an effective um organizer as far as it goes and probably one of the better ones of his generation. And yet the only thing I can see that he really did ultimately was revitalize. It made the DSA the clearinghouse of the sex, yeah, and because the sex didn't really go away, the parties died but they all just liquidated into the DSA. And now there's even, you know, maoist groups in the DSA which I do not understand.
Speaker 1:Right, I think both Red Star Caucus and the Communist Caucus have professed relationships to historical Maoism, although different periods of Maoism. Right, so you know, at the end of the day, it seems like you just have a lot of capitulation. Now I am going to pivot to something We'll get to the Frankfurt School of Politics, but I do have to ask you about it because it comes up all the time. You have accused me of misrepresenting your position on Palestine. How has Palestine played into this in particular? Because it does seem to have been the flashpoint that really separated a lot of people off from the Democrats, kind of, but not totally.
Speaker 2:For me the Israel-Palestine issue is a very vintage 1980s issue, you know, from the time of Yasser Arafat, from the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. And then they were sort of bogged down in Lebanon for many years. They occupied South Lebanon, fighting against Hezbollah, so they went in fighting against the PLO, they left fighting Hezbollah, so they went in fighting against the PLO, they left fighting Hezbollah. And so for me, you know, of course, what came between then and now were the various attempts at a settlement with Oslo and Camp David Now. So for me it's just the sort of replay of the same. Now, back then, of course, Jesse Jackson, you know and Bernie, but Jesse Jackson in particular, very much expressing solidarity with Yasser Arafat and comparing Yasser Arafat to Nelson Mandela Right. So people will talk about that. They'll talk about like Israeli apartheid, They'll talk about the absence of a Nelson Mandela style figure among the Palestinians. People will bemoan that, but they forget Yasser Arafat actually was floated as such a figure at one point. So I think that you know the issue has remained. For me it's a repetition, but it's also gotten worse over time.
Speaker 2:It was a central issue in American politics only starting in the 1980s. Israel-palestine. Something that people don't really understand is that Israel-Palestine would not have been a clear political issue in the United States before then. So it has to do with the Second Cold War. It has to do with the Reagan coalition in particular. It has to do with the neocons in particular, which is a change, because historically the Republican Party was more oriented towards the Arab states and the Democratic Party was oriented towards Israel. So you have not so much a switch, but you have the Republicans being more positively aligned with Israel starting in the 80s and the Democrats increasingly incorporating a criticism of Israel starting in the 1980s.
Speaker 2:Starting with Jesse Jackson and up through Carter's book and the aughts. But really the Israeli invasion of Lebanon was a big, big deal in that respect. And the US you know this is going to seem like a quirky interpretation, but it's actually literally the case the US intervened in Lebanon like why the Marines were there and got bombed by what became Hezbollah? So they were there because they were actually trying to help evacuate the PLO from Lebanon so that Israel wouldn't completely destroy them. Help evacuate the PLO from Lebanon so that Israel wouldn't completely destroy them. So the US was intervening in the Lebanese civil war precisely to prevent the wipe out of the PLO. So PLO were evacuated to Tunisia. Now of course that's the PLO. There were still Palestinians left there who fell victim to the phalange at Sabra and Shatila. You know, under the benign excuse me, malign neglect of the Israeli forces, it really becomes an issue in a different way. And so you know it doesn't go back to 48 or even to 67 or 73.
Speaker 1:It's really 82. To back up your point and also to put a finer point on this in regards to the historical stances of Marxist-Leninism Truman famously came out for Israel, but against the wishes of the pentagon. Uh, they did. They didn't want us to touch it, um, which also put him closer to stalin yep, who was a very strong supporter of israel, which occasionally today I will get what I see as a historical retcon that it was all 30-dimensional chess and he didn't really mean it. But there's no evidence for that.
Speaker 2:But Stalin didn't mean it. No, they provided material aid in a way that the United States did not, meaning they provided weapons and the Israelis were. So they were first armed by the Soviet bloc, then they were for many years armed by the French, not the Americans, and so starting in the 70s, but really ramping up in the 80s, is when the US became the main arms supplier of Israel, and of course Israel has not ceased to also be armed by Europe. So it's not an exclusive American by any means. They also get arms and subsidization support from Germany and from France. Obviously the UK as well, although the UK is actually a little bit more hands off than France and Germany have been.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I actually recently pointed out that 60 percent of the arms come from the United States, but about 40 comes from Germany and France and the broader EU and they get some financial support from Britain. But I was actually surprised how little direct arms support no they don't Right?
Speaker 2:Not from Britain, right, because the British look at the way that I put it very succinctly. That's why in my article this year that I wrote on Israel-Palestine you know I hinted in this direction and didn't really get into it I analogize the partition of India-Pakistan to Israel-Palestine, and in both those cases the old British colonial army was on the side of the Pakistanis and on the side of the Arabs against Israel. In other words, if you want to look at the Arab militaries against Israel in 1948, that was the British colonial military. That's what it was, in the same way that the Pakistan side in the partition was the old British colonial military. So you know, but do people have patience for this history? No, right.
Speaker 2:And the point of bringing these things up is not to be like aha gotcha, it's just to alert people to the turns that history has taken and can yet take again. Right, it's denaturalized things. And understand that there aren't just like two sides. Even in the cold war it wasn't as simple as two sides. Um, the maoists could be made uncomfortable by this. Now, after the rapprochement with the united, of course, is no longer on the side of the Soviet Union in the Middle East. What does that mean it means that they kind of on the QT more supportive of Israel? And that could still happen.
Speaker 1:Rhetorically they have. I've been watching Chinese media reports and while they encourage anti-Israeli sentiment domestically, they've also been putting out stuff about how we need to respect national sovereignty and and uh and basically they haven't stopped their trade deals with Israel today. They're still a their trade deals with Israel today. They're still a major trade partner with Israel. They still run a port in Hafez somewhere out there. Yeah, that's right, and I find this very weird. They're also very anti-Islamist. Yes, well, I mean, you know for obvious reasons.
Speaker 1:I find this very weird that this is just ignored by a lot of the people who are taking there's silliness.
Speaker 2:I wrote an article on Kamala right before the election. There's a lot of silliness and there's a lot of stupidity and there's a lot of willful blindness and a kind of I don't know suspension of disbelief would be a charitable way of putting it. You know, um, you know people see what they want to see and you know we are dealing with, uh, with younger people. You know, obviously I'm a college professor, so, uh, you know I've been at ground zero with the Palestine solidarity protests and you know the young people don't really know very much. They don't, and you know it's not their fault, but they're also not being taught anything. And I can also say the mood is such that if you bring these things up, it just enrages them. Yeah, it makes them extremely angry because you're messing with their black and white thinking and their straightforward white settler, colonialist, anti-imperialist narrative.
Speaker 1:I've been sort of baffled by that in light of the election and we will go back to Rock Hill and the Frankfurt School. But I have mentioned several accounts on X and talking to people who told me actively not to vote for Kamala Harris, which is not hard for me. I wasn't going to anyway.
Speaker 2:Where'd you?
Speaker 1:vote Nah.
Speaker 2:I did not.
Speaker 1:I voted PSL as the protest vote, and I don't even like them.
Speaker 2:Are you in a?
Speaker 1:swing state or not a swing state?
Speaker 2:I'm not in a swing state but I would have done it anyway.
Speaker 1:Right. One of the things that I have been fascinated with in regards to some of these movements around, these new Marxist-Leninist, is that the settler, colonial discourse is pretty strong and they've also been encouraging us to not vote for Kamala Harris in reprisal, for you know, the Democrats did in Palestine by sending so many bombs over there. But the same accounts and I'm very serious about this the day that Trump won, immediately took it as a sign of white supremacy and I was like okay, are you asking us to vote? Like, if we do what you wanted us to do, what did you think was going to happen? Did you think the PSL was going to win? Are the Greens? I actually was pointing out to people that even if the greens got the entirety of the Muslim vote, it doesn't get them to 5%, right, right.
Speaker 2:You know, Muslims are less than 3% of the U S population.
Speaker 1:Right. So it's just like it's like. You know. So if every single Muslim voted and voted green, it still wouldn't get you what you needed, and I don't even think they hit their 2000 numbers of like 2.7% or whatever it was.
Speaker 2:So it's symbolic, it's psychological, it's protest vote, it's registering your dissent. It's like the uncommitted thing. What was that meant to accomplish? It's a pressure tactic on the Democrats. It's not really opposed to the Democrats. It doesn't really want the Democrats to lose.
Speaker 1:No, this is something I've come to accept. The strategies that these people propose are often not thought through because they do not want the obvious results of them like strategy.
Speaker 2:I'd say it's a rhetoric and, like I said, it's a kind of a to use an old fashioned word and affectation. Or, to use an Adolph Reed posing posing as politics. You know, and I think that you know, we're in for more of that because, again, what you mentioned earlier the idea that if the Democrats had only handled things differently, they wouldn't have left themselves open to being defeated by Trump Right now, with the topic that we're talking about, it's a little bit unclear, because Bernie angered people by saying well, of course Hamas does have to be defeated, right, so it's wrong what the Israelis are doing, but nonetheless, hamas does have to be defeated. Right, so it's wrong what the Israelis are doing, but nonetheless Hamas does have to be defeated. I think with AOC it was a little bit more strained that they had people following her around saying can you say the word genocide, even though she had said it? Still, they wanted her to say it. I don't know they wanted a viral like a TikTok. I don't know what they wanted from her exactly, you know.
Speaker 2:So I think that again, it's one of these bottomless, impossible to satisfy issues that stands in for something right. It's a kind of a symbol of like okay, we're stuck with the Democrats, but we hate that and we hate the Democrats even though we're on their side by default. So they're not going to. You know, I mean a few people. I think that a few people you know, like people that we know, like Jean Bajelon posted to Facebook that it's at least possible, if not likely, that Trump does end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine in a way that the Democrats couldn't. You know, and you know other people that I know also were warming up to the idea that they should welcome a Trump victory Right, but generally, that's not. That's a minority of people, right, don't? You know? Very few people allow themselves to feel that, in other words, that amount of disaffection with the Democrats. That amounts to a kind of a break or some kind of a disaffiliation, at least psychologically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's as a person who has been saying we need to advocate for working class independence.
Speaker 1:Blah, blah, blah, blah blah. We're supposed to believe. Who does actually believe it? That's the question. I have been kind of shocked by the response that I get about some of these issues, and not just from progressive Democrats, who I expect the pushback from, of course Right, I mean, if they they were dumb to think I was on their side in the first place but from a lot of my own audience that I that I've been like. You realize that what I'm saying is you have to risk a Trump candidacy If you believe in holding electeds accountable, as I heard. You know, as friend of the show, donald Parkinson has said over and over and over again that that means you do have to be serious about the fact that you would at least temporarily empower Republicans and that would have real results. And so you either mean it or you don't.
Speaker 2:And the other thing that I've said is that you have to treat both parties as essentially hostile powers. I think breaking with the Democrats is extremely difficult. I mean I've certainly had this experience in Platypus over the years, that despite all the ostensible Marxism and et cetera in platypus, that psychologically it's a barrier and it's almost impossible to traverse that barrier. Meaning you know you get angry, you get disappointed, you get frustrated, you feel betrayed by the Democrats. And you know my attitude is I don't feel frustrated, angry or betrayed by the Democrats because I expect nothing of them At all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't feel betrayed by the Democrats. I get annoyed by leftists who whine about it. But you know, and I do feel gaslit by all these sides and this will be our way to get back to Rock on the Frankfurt School. But I mean, there's obvious things like Blue Anon now, which reflects QAnon. But I actually want to talk about the more subtle things because I'm like everyone focuses on the dissent and conspiracism on the right, which is real but not particularly new, just real. But there's a long derayed dissent into conspiracism on both the liberals and the left. It's just that their versions of it, when it's not obvious shit like Blue Anon, is a lot more subtle, maybe more pernicious. That way, right. I mean, like all the muller report, comey report, steel dossier I mean still dossier was an out and out conspiracy by the dims. Um, that that were believed for four years and people will make fun of russiagate. But I'm like, has has that affected the way you view all this stuff? And then it was no surprise to me that the people that I thought were above this.
Speaker 1:I did think, okay, the thing about leftists is, when we're out of power, we can at least be honest. That's supposed to be one of the advantages that we have. Right, we don't have a stake in power. Power, so we have no reason to lie, and I guess maybe china, but for the most part we have no states to be directly tied up with either. Like, no one's giving us money still there. Cuba's still there, cuba's still there. I'm yeah fair, um uh, but I mean cuba's not giving a lot of americans money, I don't think.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:But I get it. But I've been surprised at the way in which we also reflect that the first thing was Truanon and the revitalization of left-wing 9-11 conspiracies, Although that didn't really catch on, and then, since then, it's been the CIA as an omnipowerful thing that does everything but also incompetent and can't do anything, and I'm like I don't know how you believe both those things at the same time. So they produced a ton of Marxist scholars and, yes, the CIA did give money to things like the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Obviously and anyone who's ever got a Fulbright has had some indirect relationship to intelligence agencies via funding.
Speaker 1:But the idea that there was a entire tradition not just in the United States either, In fact mostly not concocted by the CIA that led everybody off the true path. Of what exactly? Because, also, we're not going to acknowledge that, even though we're going to denounce Khrushchev as revisionist, we're not going to actually acknowledge the content of the Sino Soviet split. And you know, going to actually acknowledge the content of the Sino-Soviet split and Mao doing things like being nice to Pinochet to pitch off the Soviets or supporting the Khmer Rouge with the US to fight the Vietnamese. We're just not going to acknowledge that that happened, and this was really all a CIA plot ran by intellectuals, which I think is appealing to nerds like us.
Speaker 2:I mean, if I could simplify it right, because it gets back to what we were talking about in terms of like the PSL, like the PSL. So if we simplify things by looking at the PSL, so the left like I have a background on the sectarian Marxist left they all have this inherent kind of character and dynamic which is that they're interested in boosting their own sect, not in terms of, like, public profile or influence, but in terms of membership.
Speaker 2:They or influence, but in terms of membership. They're very much aware of the fact that they have a revolving door of membership, they have a turnover, and that they have to maintain a certain level of membership to keep the dues paid and keep their organization functioning. So they, you know, don't need to be coherent beyond a certain point. They just need to get through the next activist phase with enough recruits, enough influx of fresh blood. And so you know, they know who their audience is, they know how they're trying to appeal to their audience and they know with what purpose they're doing it.
Speaker 2:um, and of course, they have a more long-term vision in mind, but it's put beyond any kind of I mean so, like rock hill, I'll just say about rock hill that the most obvious thing is okay, all western intellectuals on the left are the compatible left and they're part of institutions that they cannot materially break from because it's their bread and butter. Right that if you are an academic, if you're an employed academic, which he is, he's tenured faculty. That's when he got his tenure and then he was free to do what he's done, which is renounce all of his scholarship and do this very crude stuff because he has tenure. Now, that idea, you know it plays on the guilt of the intellectual.
Speaker 2:So you know, my response is well, what are leftists in the West supposed to do? We're not really supposed to do anything except express our feelings about our government doing bad things via imperialism. But you know, in the grand historical narrative I mean it goes back to Marcyism, the PSL, their break from the Workers' World Party, it goes back to Sam Marcy and his split from Trotskyism in the 1950s World War III they believe in. You know it's going to come to pass that the, you know, the imperialist primary contradiction is going to play out in terms of the socialist states versus imperialism. I mean that's it.
Speaker 1:You know they're a sitting here and we're supposed to you know, denounce the imperialists and we're supposed to recruit students on that basis. There's no socialism in the United States in their view. There's no socialism in the United States. No, I have had many a conversation with people who, when I asked what you know, if you want us to take an anti-imperialist position, fine, I'm not opposed to that in theory, but what do you want the Western left to do? And I get told nothing. And then I'm like, ok, sometimes I'll get well opposed to genocide. And I'm like OK, but just being against genocide is not a positive position. Oh well, you could just rephrase it Liberation of genocide. And I'm like that's still not a positive position. It doesn't tell me how we organize society after you win this one specific thing once.
Speaker 2:And you know, domestically they do have another orientation, I should say, which again goes back to the Marciites. They support the national self-determination struggles of minorities in the United States, so they support, you know, what used to be called Chicano, but Hispanic, latino nationalism. They support black nationalism, nationalism right, so they do. That's, that's a positive orientation. Is that, um, you side with the communities of color in the united states who are fighting against their national oppression?
Speaker 1:I find that. I find that interesting, though, because going all the way back to the black belt thesis and and those attempts in the 30s and 40s was never popular in those actual communities. The 30s and 40s was never popular in those actual communities. No, it's not, never has been. Never has been, like maybe in the indigenous. But even then I point out how like do you know how most of the reservations vote? They almost almost unilaterally, with the exception of the dna vote, republican yeah, trump won the native american vote.
Speaker 2:um, yeah, yeah, uh, at large, like I'm not sure how it broke down, those on the reservation, those off the reservation, but he did win the Native American vote.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Um, uh, which he? He lost the DNA of the Navajo, in specific in 2020, but that's the only time I really know recently what's happened and that's never discussed. I mean, I just because I often feel like a lot of these groups are projected upon, they're not really engaged with.
Speaker 2:Right? Well, there's that. There's that problem. That's the white left, though, as my old mentor, adolf Reed, said, unfortunately there is such a thing as the white left, and it really is a problem.
Speaker 1:One thing that this leads me to. You know I've watched Rock Hill. I'm actually friends with some of one of his students and I've seen Rock Hill try to moderate his positions recently as they're being increasingly picked up by, uh, Bellamy Foster in the month of review and a friend of the show, daniel Tuts, very sympathetic to him in ways that I don't understand.
Speaker 2:But, um the the uh Western Marxism was published by monthly review press, wasn't it? Yeah, I believe so Right.
Speaker 1:The the Stalin book was published by Iskara Press but Western Marxism was published by the Review Press and I think Sebastian Budgen probably opened up a can of worms that he didn't intend to by publishing all those other books. Lacerdo yep, so, and Lacerdo's own politics, because I've tried to get, I've tried to understand why he has such an appeal and I get it like. I read the liberalism uh, a counter history and I was vaguely initially like attracted to it, until I read a lot more about liberalism. I went through the jonathan israel books and and all that and like, okay, so he's just flattening out a tradition that's a lot more varied than than it actually seems. And yeah, if all you know is the heroic steven pinker narrative of liberalism, then this would be shocking to you. But if you actually know anything about its historical development and contradictions, it probably wouldn't. And it's not as deep as it's being portrayed.
Speaker 2:But what I began, myself said that john lock was the originator of materialism in a socialist sense. Right, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you and I have argued about this before, and I had to give you that Marx liked Locke more than I did. Nonetheless, there's a reason for it.
Speaker 2:It's not about us liking it or differing from Marx. We have to understand why Marx would have thought that we don't have to necessarily agree with it, but we need to understand how it fit into his way of thinking.
Speaker 1:Why does it fit into his way of thinking, Chris?
Speaker 2:Well, it has to do with his criticisms of socialism and the different strands and where they originate, you know. And Chartism versus French socialism, the Jacobin tradition versus German true socialism, young Hegelianism. You know, marx has his scores to settle, you know. But he does think that there's something coherent. He does think that England was out ahead, you know, he does think that there's something coherent. He does think that England was out ahead. You know, he does like Adam Smith more than he likes Ricardo, you know, he likes the Lockean tradition, you know. And you know politically and and philosophically, because he ties these together in a way that is difficult for us to reconstruct, you know. In other words, marx is very sophisticated about these things, in a way that we tend to be more flat footed, we tend to be more simply partisan, you know. So you know it's. You know, marx is a sophisticated critic of socialism. You know.
Speaker 2:I think that I was actually watching something with I think it was Daniel Todd and Rock Hill, I think it was their recent podcast, and Rock Hill said well, western Marxism is all about critique. So of course, what I just said fits right into that, you know, whereas Eastern Marxism is more about the positive content of socialism and it's like well, that would be nice if it were true, meaning if we're to say that the Soviet Union and communist China and etc. Have actually shown us the positive content of socialism Right, In a way that the Western Marxists are stuck, basically in a pre-1917 world, you know, in which they're only critical and they're not at all positive, whereas you know, the Eastern Marxists had to embark upon socialist construction and discover it's going to take a lot longer than Marx or Lenin thought and that Trotsky and the Frankfurt School held on to this naive understanding about socialism, but meanwhile Stalin and Mao progressed beyond that.
Speaker 1:My question to them has always been the following, having read a ton of this historical material about the in onecountry debates and the various positions that were taken, even within the Soviet Union. One, these people don't often cite these thinkers. They might give me a report by Dung, but that's about it. And two, what I was a bit to with Lacerdo there's also internal debates to Euro-communism and his own regret about being involved with that. That is never brought up in his attempt to reframe tagliati and the uh and the second french of that french, second italian communist party, um uh, that I think are just completely omitted when these people talk about lucerto because they don't want to look and hit into lucerto's context. Luc was contextless, of course, and that's weird to me.
Speaker 2:Or they might just like the way he resolved it ultimately. In other words, the twists and turns of his early career may not matter. What matters is the conclusion he came to.
Speaker 1:Well, I have been trying to point out to them that they are not completely upfront about all the conclusions that he came to and how radically they differ from Lennon and Marx, because in the Hegel book by Lacerdo he outright says we don't need to worry about the abolition of the state ever. That's right, um, that's right, and, and it's mostly about a positive reading of you know, hegel's philosophy of right, uh, which I, which I just find weird because I'm like, okay, you can make all kinds of arguments about Marx and Hegel, but the one text you know that Marx had little patience for because we have the notes is the philosophy of right and that's the one you want to revive.
Speaker 2:I mean it is, it's there's, look, there's honest Stalinism. I mean, I guess my my point about being of my generation is that I've lived long enough that I know where all this comes from, meaning I know that, even though they're kind of opposed, like Badu and Lusordo, I understand how they came to where they arrived and, at the end of the day, they do have to differ from Marx. They do, they have to, and I appreciate the honesty, you know. I think we published, you know you lifted earlier, the first volume of the Platypus Review Reader. We published Grover Furr, his article about Trotskyism, and he said yeah, you know, the Russian revolution, you know, first of all may not have succeeded, and that might be a problem for us to consider, but it might have, you know, it might also just basically challenge Marxism and maybe we don't need to be Marxists, you know. And they all kind of arrive there.
Speaker 2:Badiou arrived there, lusordo, in his own way, arrives there. So Marxism is just turned into this vague historical materialism, not the journal but the philosophy, and there's an active liquidation of Marxism. There is, and I think we have to pay attention to that. I think that what happens is that people want to use the term Marxism very vaguely and they want to trade on its intellectual respectability, that it still attracts young people. You know, young people might be agnostic about Lenin or Trotsky or Mao or this or that, but everyone can agree Marx is important. I appreciate the fact that the new left generation wrestled with the history of Marxism and had to conclude in the end that the problem is actually Marx, because they all did arrive there.
Speaker 1:For me. What bothers me about this today is I actually told some of this I missed when Maoist and other Marxist-Leninists when I was in my 20s would just be honest with you and say, oh, we have a new synthesis that corrects Marx, because today they don't say that, they don't just out and out say it, they're like, no, we're continuing the historical tradition of Marx and, yeah, marx is problematic because he said a few racist things once or twice, blah, blah, blah. But you know, we're actually the true Marxists in the formal sense. And then they'll do the same, frankly, tricks that you saw the new left do, even the non-new communist left you around abusing the various asulich letters. I used to do it. I used to do it too. I I get it um, claiming that there's stuff in the in the mega that they've never like kevin anderson kevin anderson and peter hugh just do this.
Speaker 2:They do this like late late marx. Um that that revised his view, became less Eurocentric. It's in keeping with the Varus Zasulich letter, the idea that there might be a different path to socialism for Russia.
Speaker 1:Which, again, you have to ignore. Yeah, he does say that, although he edited that way down yeah, conditional upon european revolution right exactly you know, my attitude is this.
Speaker 2:You know, we're living through a time of like. I mean, you know there are all these characters. It's conrad hamilton, you know, sublation socialists is very much a sort of dong jio ping is to the gist. And I just Hamilton, you know, sublation socialist is very much a sort of Dong Xiaoping-ist and a Xi-ist, and I just feel like, you know, we're probably living into a time when things are going to change pretty radically and what's not going to change is the United States. The United States is still going to be what is it that Yanis Varoufakis calls it? The global minotaur? It's still going to be like the economy that all the other economies are hitched to, more or less like, which the millennials recognized, like.
Speaker 2:I think that this Rock Hill stuff and the neo-Stalinism stuff is really about reacting against that promise, because there was a promise of a return to the struggle for socialism in the United States with the millennial left and it does feel betrayed. There's a bitter disappointment with that. And you know, the us doesn't matter, only china matters. I mean, rock hell has interviewed this guy, is it roland de?
Speaker 1:boer yeah, roland, we're on board. Yeah, I used to write on religion and marxism and then moved to china from australia and then became a total China Stan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and you know, and I think that that really is Rock Hill's position, right, and I think that that trajectory of that guy, you know, christian theologian, to some kind of Christian Marxism, to Chinese Communist Party, it actually makes perfect sense, you know, in the sense of you know, a frustrated, petty bourgeois radicalism that you know has a very kind of what Marx and Engels would call sentimental socialism. And you know, I think that it's plausible at a certain level. In other words, the scales fall from your eyes. You feel like you've been lied to your whole life. You recognize the utter kind of depravity of, you know, capitalism. And then you're like, okay, okay, and who's struggling against this? Is anybody struggling against this? Oh, it turns out there are people struggling against it.
Speaker 1:They're right, they're in the right against this monstrous, horrible civilization yeah, I remember I had a friend who was an ultra leftist, who actually edited with me at North Star for a little while, and he did the same turn. He's like I first went to philosophy to find the truth and then I went to Marxism, but I must believe communism is possible unless it already exists, which I was like, oh wait, that's a leap. And therefore I have to defend and he was doing this before, this was popular, this was around 2014, 2015, I have to defend socialist China. And my response was, as you see, china develop a business cycle and doesn't even have the social good services which I also will say is not the demarcator of socialism I want people to know that demarcator of socialism, I want people to know that but doesn't even have the social good services that you'd associate with a capitalist European economy and has abandoned its collective period.
Speaker 1:And then I went through. I read Carlos Garrido's book on Western Marxism, which is crib notes, largely from Lacerdo's. There was so much of a have your cake and eat it too Ism in it. But communism is possible, but we have to develop the productive forces. And then I was like but how are you not actually going back and, without realizing it agreeing with Plakhanov. When you do that, oh that the Russian revolution made no sense.
Speaker 2:Right Right, right, because what?
Speaker 1:you're saying is we had the revolution prematurely so that we have to now join up with the West to get the productive forces, but just controlled by communists, even though that also means that communists are implicated in running and participated in global capitalism and they're also thus disciplined by it. And for people who don't get that and you know, I've been recently reading a lot of Samir Amin and I was like so you've been advocating decoupling, but why is it that it's never the societies you're telling to decouple who choose to do it? Why is it always imposed on them? They're not choosing it.
Speaker 2:Right, they're not going to choose it. No, I mean, it's a curious thing. I mean, I think, you know, I think that China now is promising to arrive at lower stage communism in 2050. Right, and so that's a year after the centenary of the Chinese Revolution, and I think that they have to say that in order to have any plausibility as a ruling party, because otherwise, I think that you know, to recruit young people to it as a ruling party rather than lose it to the brain drain to the West, you know, which is a serious matter. You know, a lot of Chinese students are looking to get out. You know, who get education in the West want to stay in the West. You know, I think that, like the Soviet Union, it's going to arrive at a point where everyone, all the communists, are like yeah, we're not really communists, you know, and they just try to cash in their positions, you know, in terms of becoming a new capitalist class.
Speaker 1:So I think that that is more likely to happen than China leading the world to socialism? Well, I don't even know how to expect China to do it when there's not. I haven't seen China, for example, make any move at revitalizing a common turn. You could try to argue that bricks is that, but like half, the governments in bricks are explicitly right ring, so I don't even know what that's about well, they're not trying to do that.
Speaker 2:They're not trying to do it that way. I guess they're trying to do it economically only, not politically. I mean, look, this doesn't mean that I'm like hostile to China, right, it's not about like, oh, defending China versus hostility to China or something. You know, I don't wish any bad things to happen to China at all. Unfortunately, I think that bad things will happen to China. That doesn't make me happy in any way whatsoever. At the same time, I also know that if we've got a socialist movement going in the United States, it would inspire people in China and the Chinese government would have to repress those people.
Speaker 1:One thing that I find interesting about this time period is a lot of these socialists have made actionable predictions. Marxist-leninist slash proto-MMT-er Michael Hudson, which I also find interesting because his relationship to Marxism is nominal at best, but I have been noticing that he has faced no real criticism for four years of predicting the imminent collapse of the dollar and it not happening, and also predicting that China would very quickly return to pre-COVID levels of GDP and it not happening. There's been no acknowledgement of that, and what I normally get is, like, well, china's doing better than the West, and I'm like, well, india is doing better than the west, and I'm like, well, india is doing better than china, but I don't see you like arguing that we should all adopt the, the indian the way of government and organizing their society either.
Speaker 1:So what is that about?
Speaker 2:yeah, I mean, I think that what you said earlier about believing that socialism is possible, and the only way that you can believe that it's possible is to show it in reality. I mean, look, my perspective is well, a kind of twofold, I would say. One is that I'm not sure that socialism is possible. However, I think we must strive for it. And then the question is how? So you know, I think that you know, there's going to be. We're living through a political crisis. We're living through a social crisis, that's been true for a while, but we're living through a political crisis. We're living through a social crisis, that's been true for a while, but we're living through a political crisis in particular. And so it's clear that there are opportunities, there are political opportunities, and the question is what will come out of the political crisis? And so you know again, we were talking about earlier hitching one star to the or hitching one's wagon to the star of the Democrats. You know, more or less one way or another is. You know, we've, we've kind of tried everything since the 1930s. We've tried everything on the left, and you know, I think, that all options have been taken. They have not worked out.
Speaker 2:Now, the older Marxist movement also didn't work out, but it came close and it also raised interesting questions and and and also, you know, the other side of it is that people do return to it in their imagination, meaning they do reach for this history, they do wonder about this as a possibility. So maybe the millennials had a better imagination than younger people. I mean, you were saying, you know, a fellow millennial was like I need to believe in China because it exists, you know. But I do think that, um, the idea that you know it's far-fetched to reach all the way back into older socialist history in the United States and elsewhere, you know it's far-fetched to reach all the way back into older socialist history in the United States and elsewhere. You know, like the Neokautskyism, the second internationalism, lenin you know the original Lenin, not Marxist Leninism that seems like quite a leap, quite a reach.
Speaker 2:It's different than the way people reach back to Marx. It is different. It's different than the way people reach back to Marx. It is different, but at the same time, it happened, it does happen. People do think about these things and we have to. I believe that there's therefore some material basis in social reality for that imagination and I do think that that's a clearer leap than, I don't know, an atavistic right-wing leap back into, I don't know, medieval Christianity or something like that, you know, which also is not what it them to take, given the fact that people claim an interest in socialism and communism and Marxism. You know, as Mike McNair would say, there's no shortcut, there's no shortcut. And so if there is anything for us to do except do protest, demo, make noise or just virtue signaling on social media, then we do have to get serious about starting at square one.
Speaker 2:Very basic, you know, and also with an open mind, meaning you know again, everything's been tried, All bets are off. You know we're back to square one, we're back to step zero, really. And you know Marxism can give us some indications about the nature of the problem we face and the aspiration like the goal. But apart from that, there's no script to follow.
Speaker 1:Is that part of what you take from the Frankfurt School? One of the things that's up in the air is the turn on the Frankfurt School, and that's been happening for a while, I remember. So we've seen for a while a turn against the Frankfurt School and, to be fair, some of it's the fault of Habermas and Aksuhanov. But beyond that, I think the ambivalences of Horkheimer and his Vietnam War gets brought up. A lot People will try to go after everybody because of the three who served in the OSS, although ignoring the fact that at the time the Americans were aligned with the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2:And communists in the United States also served in the government that way.
Speaker 1:Right, it wasn't, you know.
Speaker 2:They were with the rest of the left, Right, Not all of them there were. There were people who were very deeply opposed to world war two, but they were. They were alongside the Stalinists in that.
Speaker 1:So I uh which, yeah, that part of it I find very funny because of when I see that resurrected I'm like, well, what was the CPUSA doing at that time? I do believe it was the popular front with the Democratic Party government, but whatever. Also.
Speaker 2:McCarthy had to purge the communists after World War II for a reason Because they were there. They were in the government. They were, in fact, in the government, the communists. They were in the State Department, the Army, the OSS, oss.
Speaker 1:They were there um, well, I mean, this is one of the things that where neither contemporary communist nor most liberals want to look at it, because it actually does make some of the stuff that the birchers say, most of which is crazy, to be fair. But they didn't make it all up Like there really were communists in the government and that wasn't just a right-wing conspiracy, it was a fact.
Speaker 2:Right, the difference being they didn't control the government. They were used by the government Right, which is the Rock Hill accusation. The Rock. Hill accusation is that these people were used by the US government in the Cold War and it's like well, there's a long history of communists subordinating themselves to capitalist governments and being used by them.
Speaker 1:All the popular fronts, all of them them. Yeah, all the popular fronts, all of them. We could talk about France, we could talk about Italy, we could talk about Indonesia. It hardly ever goes well in the long run.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they use and dispose of them Capitalist governments.
Speaker 1:It just seems weird capitalist government right it just seems weird to me to pretend that that isn't. I mean, even like I, I point out that, like you know, castro got ca money at one time, like it's just like everybody got money, um. But I've been sort of taken aback at this. Like, fine, you want to critique these people for taking, say, money? And look, I, I've been on about the congress for cultural freedom for a long time. I, I got it, I learned about it from reading chris for lash before it's even declassified, right. But, um, I've never thought that everyone who participated in it even had any idea what they were participating in, um, so that that to me seems like a weird critique. And, like I said, I could easily do the same thing with everybody who's ever gotten a fulbright, which a lot of the people making this criticism have. So it's just like this is a weird argument, it's not a serious argument.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's just it's meant to put some empirical data on the general claim that this is the compatible left that by default supports imperialism because it's materially dependent on imperialism, that it's the left that expresses the leftism of the labor aristocracy and the imperialist core Right. So even if you point to the fact that the Frankfurt School was interested in the labor movement, then it would be like yeah, but only the imperialist labor movement of the labor aristocracy.
Speaker 1:What other labor movement would there have been before the national liberation movements in countries that didn't even have developed capitalist production modes yet. I'm just confused by this. Conversely, for today, when I think about people who try to revive Maoism, I'm always like where's our peasantry, even in the developing world? Where's our peasantry that you're going to form an allegiance with? I don't see it existing. There's still peasants out there in some developing world, but, like, not in any mass number, not to form a mass line with Like where is this at exactly?
Speaker 2:And are there landlords, right? So that's the I mean. In other words, there might still be peasants, but they're not dealing with the traditional landlords anymore. They're dealing with debt, they're dealing with banks, they're dealing with states. They're not dealing with landlords in the traditional sense.
Speaker 1:Why do you think people have turned on the Frankfurt School so thoroughly? I mean more than the rest of a lot of the critical theory? Left Like, left criticism, like use of the Frankfurt School was to basically try to remove their Marxism from them, like which again, that's why I said Axel Hannes and Habermas didn't really help. But there was this whole period in the 80s and 90s and early aughts when I was coming up with like the Marx, like honestly, the first people I talked about really that I met who talked about the Marxism of the Frankfurt school was you guys.
Speaker 1:When I learned when I learned about Adorno, I had heard about cultural Marxism, but it wasn't really Marxism and blah, blah, blah, blah blah, Like from the right.
Speaker 2:It's a basic point. I mean again what we were talking about earlier, about a certain kind of point. I mean again what we were talking about earlier, about a certain kind of ignorance. I mean I don't like relying on that kind of an argument, but I think it's more plausible than a politically tendentious argument, you know, like describing motives politically. I think that what people want on the left, they want a descriptive theory and they want a normative theory. They don't want a critical theory. So the Frankfurt School is going to frustrate them at the level of is this a plausible descriptive theory? Like it can be in some ways, but actually usually you can find more compelling, more exciting descriptive theories and then it is absent a normative theory.
Speaker 2:And then people go looking for the missing normative theory and they're like, oh, it turns out they're theologians, not Marxists, that they're really followers not of Hegel and Marx but of Schelling. You know, this is what, like, martin J has concluded. You know, and it's like but wait, there isn't a normative theory, because there doesn't need to be, meaning. Marxism doesn't have a normative theory, it goes with the existing norms in bourgeois society. It doesn't, like, offer some other norms and it looks at the self-contradictory character of those norms. And so there's just, there's really a fundamental frustration with critical theory and an impatience with it you know, to use Adorno's language and impatience with critical theory, that you know the idea that the possibility of change and the necessity of change is expressed by contradiction, and that contradiction is not about one side or the other side. So I think that people think, oh, contradiction means there are two sides, and it's the workers and the capitalists. And so you resolve that contradiction by taking the side of the workers. I mean, really, this is what people think it is, and it's like no, actually the concern is that the workers, in struggling for socialism, embody the contradiction and are trying to work through that contradiction. And you know this, that I think that that just strikes people as bizarre, perverse, like what are you trying to do? Are you demoralizing people from struggling? And so they turn it also into like, uh, when the frankfurt school just says it looks like the class struggle has ended, they think that that's a simple descriptive statement, which it's not. It's a weird irony of history. But also they turn it into a normative statement, meaning that the class struggle ended because it must necessarily have to have ended. And so I think that there's a lot of proceeding on false premises. There are a lot of category errors. I mean, we could use all sorts of logical, you know, descriptors for this, but there really are. And um, you know, and people are going to discover that that's true of Marx too, but again he gets a pass as some kind of like prophetic figure who speaks in riddles, you know. But when you get down to like the Marxists, then you want them to tell you what's what and what should be like, what is and what should be. You just want a descriptive and a normative boom, you know. And Stalinism provides that, democratic socialism provides that, the Swedish model provides that. Whatever you know, there are these things out there that satisfy in a way that I think the Frankfurt School puts a fine point and underscores what is inherently frustrating about Marxism. About Marx, really, but about Marxism. You know, it's true of Lenin and Luxembourg and the rest. You're going to find the same problem ultimately. So they want, you know, an inspiring story, they want a narrative, they want a program, they want to know how to feel, they want a moral orientation. They want a moral orientation.
Speaker 2:I don't know who the good guys and the bad guys are. I mean, it's so degraded from the Maoism of the 70s. Yes, who could understand? Oh, the Soviet Union went from being Anti-imperialist To being imperialist Right. It went from being anti-fascist To being social fascist Right, and it didn't cause them to bat an eyelash. You know, it was just like oh, that's just the way it goes. You know, soviet Union succumbed to its contradictions, you know. And then, the way that I always like to say it is, you know, after the death of Mao and the purge of the gang of four, for real Maoists, that means that communist China is a fascist country. Like the actual Maoists, like the real Maoists, yeah, think that.
Speaker 2:China today is a social imperialist and social fascist country.
Speaker 1:I think about, even as late as me, when I was coming up and found you guys and I was also tempted for a teeny little bit to get involved in the Kusama group. And they were still maintaining that. And I was actually joking when I was like I miss it, when I wasn't listening to Maoist make apologetics for everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in other words, that was them trying to keep their critical edge Absolutely.
Speaker 1:You know, but those Maoists are gone. So it's. No, it's a generational turnover.
Speaker 2:It's. It's a really horrible thing. You know, people like to, you know, skewer me for calling myself the last Marxist. I mean that in a very kind of pathos laden way, meaning like it might end up that I'm the last Marxist and that might be a tragedy, you know, like it's like you know what I mean. It's not like I'm making any great claims for myself. It's like, um, you know, you know, and um, I mean obviously you know it's a complex proposition about Marxism and historical continuity and discontinuity and all that, and it is meant to make people think, but just at a very basic level it's like, you know, actually the 60s generation wrestled with this stuff.
Speaker 1:Right, whereas today we seem to have a farce of it. My last question, to talk a little bit about this, because this is an issue where you and I have actually argued. Um, uh, I have. We have gone back and forth about the origins of capitalism. I dated a little bit earlier in you, but like that's not what I want to bring up here. What I wanted to talk about is what bourgeois society is, and marxism, because it's relevant to what we're talking about.
Speaker 1:If Marxism sees what it's trying to do is work through the contradictions of bourgeois society to something necessarily new, yep, where are those contradictions actually located? And why is it that the liberal tradition or the progressive tradition today and those are not really the same thing, but we're going to have to like, deal with them as the bastard children of historical liberalism or whatever um are, of overly bourgeois liberalism? That's probably the clearest way to think about it Um, why is it that they don't recognize this either? Like what, what? What are the values that seem to be gone? And why is it that even the people who are directly descended from those values in an ideological and material way also cannot recognize them at all?
Speaker 2:I mean, they do and they don't. So you know, one of the things that we deal with in the United States that, I think, is something that the left bemoans and regrets but is actually advantageous, you know, and really a real opportunity for us, is that we have really just conservative liberalism and progressive liberalism. We don't have like traditional conservatism. Like traditional conservatism in the United States is just a mask for conservative liberalism. Conservatism in the United States is just a mask for conservative liberalism. You know and um, so who came to mind for me was Saurabh Amari. Now, of course, he's an ex-Trotskyist, but I think his, his time with the Trotskyists was pretty limited, so I don't think it left a deep imprint. And you know he's a convert to Catholicism. You know, um, you know as an Iranian American, as you know like, uh, you know he's a convert to Catholicism. You know, you know as an Iranian American, as you know, like you know formerly of a Muslim, you know cultural background, but you know he knows that the big change in American history is the Industrial Revolution.
Speaker 2:You know, he knows that that's when the working class, in a new and different way, emerges and is shafted, you know. So you know he can recognize that. And you know again a lot of these things are self-evident in the 19th century that something major had changed. It wasn't just socialists and communists and Marxists, it wasn't just Marx and Engels Everyone liberals, christians, traditional conservatives they all saw something new happening in their time in the 19th century, and they wondered about the fate of civilization. Nietzsche even has his own way of thinking about these things. So you know, it's registering for everyone and in a way that we've naturalized it now. Now we're living in the crisis end of neoliberalism and the emergence of a kind of post-neoliberalism, mm-hmm. And what that means is that liberalism has a bad name and not just progressive neoliberalism, you know, but conservative neoliberalism has a bad name, you know, everyone is turning against free marketism, whatever neoliberalism thought of as liberalism right.
Speaker 2:Whatever neoliberalism thought of as liberalism, right. So there's a kind of a deep disenchantment right now like that we're living through right now. Disenchantment with the American constitution that's also part of it Disenchantment with liberalism, and so the kind of defense of, like, american constitutional republicanism and you know the American tradition of democratic republicanism, you know these sort of bourgeois values it seems quaint now. You know, I think that even libertarians are sort of on life support. You know they're like way at the tail end of something you know like vivek ramaswamy, right as some kind of avatar of a libertarian strand in the trumpist coalition.
Speaker 2:Not much, not much liberalism, not much libertarianism there. Actually, you know, it's not what it used to be, you know, just a short couple of decades ago, you know. So I think that that's a problem, because I think it obscures a great deal and then it makes people reach for other explanations. So it's Christian nationalism, it's white supremacy, it's, you know, cisgendered patriarchy, it's all these things where really it's just conservative liberalism, it's a sort of a distressed liberalism. Now the progressives, I mean one thing that we could pay attention to is how actually illiberal the Democratic Party has become. So they've given up a lot of their old liberalism. You know, like I don't know defensive free speech, things like that. Now, also their impatience with there being an oppositional party. They are impatient with there being an oppositional party. They are impatient with there being an oppositional party. They have been since the FDR era, but I think they're very impatient with the existence of an oppositional party now, which also is contrary to their older liberalism. So I think that that's part of the like. We have to sort of go through this phase of like, you know, like post-liberal democracy. Isn't that what the idea is. The idea is like right-wing populism, but maybe even left-wing populism is some post-liberal democracy, and it's cropping up all around the world, you know, with the collapse of neoliberalism.
Speaker 2:So I think that it's a strange thing for me, because I think that, trying to teach people Marxism and about the old socialist history, one thing I've encountered is that what grabs people's imagination is the older bourgeois thought. In other words, what really is the sort of epiphany that people have is like reading, like Adam Smith or something. They're like, oh, cause they haven't read it. For the most part, right, they haven't. So then they read it and they're like, oh, this is not what I expected, and so that feels more compelling. You know, we've had Implodopus members who got very enamored of Hegel. So it's kind of like, well, of course Marx is correct, but they have a real love for Hegel, you know, and I just think, okay, so what's that about? And so I do think that, even though liberalism has a bad name right now, I still think that a lot of what people are reaching for in terms of socialism and Marxism, what they're really reaching for is liberalism.
Speaker 2:So that's one thing that I'd say. You know that it's a sort of transposition of socialism and liberalism. You know, like, even like I don't know, like the democratic socialists that we were talking about, like Ben Burgess will say. Well, of course the point is like freedom Right, freedom from poverty, freedom from deprivation, freedom from you know, or what Sarabhamari called tyranny, incorporated that you want the working class to enjoy freedom by having greater material benefits and working less. So it's even interpreted that way. So I think that that's one part of it. But again, liberalism now is a dirty word because it's associated with everything. It's associated with the Republican Party, it's associated with the disappointments with the Democratic Party, disappointments with the Democratic Party it's associated with America.
Speaker 2:America as, unlike any other country, except a little bit, the UK, america stands for liberalism. If you remember Zizek would talk about this that during the war on terror, even to a certain extent, derrida and Habermas their statement against the war on terror, you know that they were like, yeah, you know this. Like liberal, democratic, like market based society capitalism. It's really just the UK and the United States and Europe has a different identity, a different tradition and so it should be like Europe should be independent of the United States. Like, yeah, we understand the UK is going to go with the United States, but we stand for something else. This has been kicking around for a little while. You know, in other words, what people mean by liberalism and their discontents with it. I mean neo-Stalinists again, do us the favor of just being anti-liberal authoritarians? Right, they just straight up, we'll go there. So I mean that's for me, you know, looking at like the last 16 to 18 years, that's how I've seen it unfolding. I've seen it unfolding at the level of how neoliberalism raised questions about liberalism but also probably was going to drag liberalism down with it. You know. So you know pushing back against that.
Speaker 2:You know Lenin's liberalism, you know Marxism's liberalism like to say, okay, the original bourgeois revolutionary tradition. Whether you call that liberalism or not, that would be disputed. It would be called smaller republicanism rather than liberalism. And yet those things are related. They are related like constitutional republicanism. Is liberalism basically? Um, that that gets turned into that's just apologetics for capitalism, that there's no contradiction there. You know that people don't see that capitalism contradicts liberalism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which, to be fair, even someone like Chomsky, not usually the most astute of readers of these sorts of things, does realize.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, he's in touch with an older tradition. Actually, the anarchists can be good on this. Certain anarchists Definitely the Chomskyan anarchists, the Bookchinites to a certain degree too that they would always say we don't like liberalism, we like classical liberalism. They would say that right.
Speaker 1:but again, I think that now, like, the move towards classical liberalism is associated with the republican right and so people really hate that, you know yeah, I've thought a lot about it because, uh, back in my even before I had anything to do with you guys, back in my 20s, I used to argue that the libertarians and the republicans are misrepresenting classical liberalism, not because they are not part of it they actually are but because we kind of all were, we all develop out of it, even if we consider ourselves like I might consider myself post-liberal. I might consider myself post-liberal, but the thing is I do acknowledge that being post-liberal means we come out of liberal assumptions and that there's a tradition there that goes all the way back to Hobbes and Locke. I find that fascinating and I also find it interesting that, if you don't get attached to already existing States, I think about the other traditions we've seen that come out of this, like communization theory and stuff like that which I've flirted with. I'm not going to, I'm not going to pretend like I haven't, but they often devolve into eschatology to get yourself out of liberalism.
Speaker 1:Like we move from immiserationism, fixing the problem to climate change, fixing the problem to some giant catastrophe. It's just going to remove the complexity of society from us and we don't have to think about it anymore. And I find this to be such a fucking cop-out that I can't see straight around it. It's just like okay. So basically the universe thinks like you do, and I will admit I see some of this in Marx. Marx flirts with this kind of stuff, but he doesn't seem to stick on it in any sort of way, the way these people do away, the way these people do.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in his time. The way that I like to put it is that you know, marx had this illusion, but we should understand maybe how and why he had the illusion that the Industrial Revolution led straight into communism.
Speaker 2:Right, you know that basically the Industrial Revolution was the transition from bourgeois society to communism. And you know that basically the Industrial Revolution was the transition from bourgeois society to communism. And you know, did he ever give up that idea? Not really Meaning, he just thought OK, actually the workers are going to have to do it, you know, and they're going to have to act more independently than we might have originally thought, and you know, but basically they never really gave up that idea, meaning up through, like Lenin. The idea was well, the Industrial Revolution does lead directly to communism, but first the working class has to be organized sufficiently to make it happen. And it turns out that takes a little time. And it turns out that takes a little time, you know.
Speaker 2:But you know that now looks like again, like when you think of communization theory, eschatology, it's like it really wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be much more concrete, empirically observable, material history unfolding. You know, communism, the real movement of history, not in some abstract sense, but in a very real sense. You know, like Marx and Engels and Luxembourg and Lenin and even Trotsky, they thought that they were seeing it happen right in front of them, that it was happening in their time. We obviously don't. We can't see it that way.
Speaker 2:And so what do we do with that? You know, do we say, oh, it's the peasants. You know, oh, it's um. You know, uh, what is it if you're, if you're socialism, what was the phrase? If your socialism? It started out if your socialism isn't feminist, it's bullshit. Right, yeah. But then it became if your socialism isn't trans, it's bullshit. You know. And I just thought, okay, like I kind of know what you mean, but there's a leap there, and it is this eschatological move that's what it is, you know into like communism, as just like the negation of everything we don't like in this society.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting how much I see about debates in communism right now.
Speaker 1:If you look at the debates around mega communism versus, uh like progressive communism or whatever, um, how I just see, uh, an extension of one area of the culture war into an it's indefinite maximal position into the future, um, and I find I quite frankly find either one of those visions particularly compelling, and that's beyond any like particular opinions on the specificity of the issues.
Speaker 1:And you know like I'm all about bodily autonomy and so I tend to support trans issues. I do recognize that this has been framed in a way that tends to aim to negate anyone's sense of conscience or be very weird and selective about who gets the right to have freedom of association and stuff like that. Freedom of association, um, and stuff like that. And I just what I see is like people are hitting I mean I'm going to be very like old school hegelian here they're hitting on a contradiction that leads to unhappy consciousness, but instead of trying to work through that, they just fall back on one side or the other and then let an aporia just emerge. We're just eternally debating the same shit and we're not trying to integrate people in the civil society or anything like that. In fact, we're trying to figure out who should be excluded.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's a kind of human tendency, but it's also I don't know if- it is so much I don't know if it is all that much I think that at my darker moments, but also seeing some light on the horizon, I think, oh, you know, there are these boom generations and they, they go through a nihilist phase. You know, I was a kid in the seventies.
Speaker 1:I remember, I remember you came up in a nihilist phase.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I remember the 60s generation hit its nihilism phase and one of the ways that it got over it was the weird 80s yuppie turn. That's going to happen, in other words, after they sort themselves out after everyone who's going to kill. You know, in other words, after they sort themselves out after everyone who's going to kill themselves on drugs do, then those who remain are going to flourish in this capitalist world and they're going to be super cynical. They're going to translate their nihilism into cynicism. You know, and I see that coming, the millennials will become conservative. They'll leave the Zoomers as their bastard stepchildren, whatever. Like my generation, my generation was like whatever happened to the end of the world. The end of the world becomes and and then you've got to make money Just so it turns on a dime at a certain point and then those in the wake of that are like what?
Speaker 1:That's where the Zoomers are going to end up it's funny that you bring up that specific thing, because I, when my 20s, I wrote about whatever happened to the end of the world. Uh, because even after 9-11, there was still all this apocalypticism going on and we went through this whole period. I mean, people, I, I think people really forget the weird apocalyptic undercurrent and both liberal and conservative parts of society that went through in the 70s and 80s. Um, like I, I feel like everybody thought the world was about to end tomorrow and yet it didn't um at all. And then you know, uh I see that with millennials and, weirdly, I think I already see it with zoomers Like there's a whole lot of like.
Speaker 2:We were promised stuff, uh, in 2020, none of it's happened, and uh, when the youth vote in the end kinda yeah, I think so, or at least not at least a part of it.
Speaker 1:The voted um and the. The resentment politics. Right now, I normally associate resentment politics with the right, but lately I have not, because I was just trolling. By that I mean trolling as in going through.
Speaker 2:Not actually provoking.
Speaker 1:Not provoking people. I was just going through comments on these various Trump, I saw a video labeled Trumpist get their comeuppance after 2024 election and it's about people getting kicked out of their families and I'm like I don't know why you think this is good if you want to win people over. No, they don't know why you think this is good if you want to win people over?
Speaker 1:No, they don't, they don't. But then I read the comments and it was just this internal witch hunt, self-hatred stuff that really was a parody of what I've heard conservatives do from these other stuff. Now, of course, I've lived with conservatives all my life, so I kind of have a good idea what they do.
Speaker 1:Right but like, but what I heard that they do and I was sort of kind of like, okay, I mean, there's the obvious stuff that you see on X or whatever, where people like, oh, I called my, I called eyes on my neighbors, what, uh, what you know, cause the Latin vote, which I don't imagine, there's a lot of that actually going on, but uh, but people are at least stating it, um, or we're not gonna. You know, uh, key black leaders in Michigan are like we're not going to patronize their businesses anymore. Um, but just in general, looking at the resentment politics, and I was just like I was pretty much taken aback because I'm like everything I know about politics and building solidarity and trying to win something would tell you this is the wrong thing to do. But that's not what this is about. This is not about winning anything. I'm not sure what it actually is about. This is not about winning anything. No, I'm not sure what it actually is about.
Speaker 2:This is an anger election.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And there's sort of, you know again, kind of bottled up, frustrated, confused anger. And then there was, like directed anger, and Trump was the directed anger. You know, the Democrats is the bottled up, confused anger. You know, the Democrats is the bottled up, confused anger. You know, I think, I do think you know it was the second COVID referendum, yeah, but I also think, you know, maybe to cut to the chase, you know why, resentment politics on the left. Well, of course there is no left, derek. The left is dead, and the Democrats are certainly not the left. They're the right, they're just a different flavor of the right, and so the fact that the two parties are both trading on resentment politics shouldn't surprise us.
Speaker 1:I mean. Well, the thing, I think, the thing that is interesting to me and this would be my last statement, slash question is it did seem like after 2008 that there was a possibility for an actual rebirth of an actual, real fucking left in the world.
Speaker 2:I don't mean to say in the West, but just in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, today I have a more relative notion of left and right than you, but I also feel the same way. I feel like if the left existed at all in the past 15 years, it has chosen to liquidate itself into right-wing politics, and whether it liquidated itself into Republicans or the Democrats doesn't matter. They were both right-wing politics.
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter, because you know the left is optimistic. You know the loss of optimism that is the conservative turn, you know, and it happened with Obama. Really, we have to be honest, obama killed the optimism. Bernie sort of offered it again, but really Obama damaged it. I mean again, that's why I referred to, like Me Too, and BLM. There was a pessimistic turn that happened especially with the second term of Obama.
Speaker 1:You know. So you know, the disappointment with Obama is really what gave birth to Bernie and Trump. I don't disagree about that. I remember in 2015,. I said you know, this weird hangover from Obama mania is going to lead to. You know, I forgot exactly what I said, but it was. It was just like was. It was like the possibility of Trump winning is much more real than I'm being told and I can see that.
Speaker 2:And even Bernie like didn't really represent hope. It represented like a more embittered like okay, bernie's going to give us what Obama promised, and that's different from like real hope. You know it was because I think that the idea there, I mean we'd have to differentiate two different things One is the socialist impulse, the other is a progressive impulse, like a progressive capitalist impulse. And so it was like Obama promised these things that are not pie in the sky. What Obama promised was not pie in the sky, right, but it represented hope, bernie. It was kind of like these are our minimum demands and the wars give us social safety net, give us healthcare and some possibility of free education, at least for some, at some level, and that this is our bare minimum, right. So it wasn't like, ok, hope, and maybe you know we can go up and up from there, obama. It was more like this is going to be our bare minimum, we're not going to compromise on this. We want what was promised. At least give us that. So you know, which does say that Bernie wasn't inspiring, but it was like basically, it was perceived that there was a window of opportunity for progressive reforms, that there was a window of opportunity for progressive reforms. And Bernie represented like, okay, the window is closing, let's do it right.
Speaker 2:And then the window closed and it didn't just close with Trump, you know, biden again very confusing because on the one hand very progressive, On the other hand not what we were aspiring for, even with the Bernie, you know. I mean, I don't know. I think that there is a narrative that the anti-war movement was vague, that it took people a while to formulate a kind of aspiration for socialism out of the Great Recession. So there was this idea that maybe bernie represented progress over obama. But I think that there was already a diminishment of horizons between the earlier moment, you know, pre pre-obama, and the bernie moment. I, I think the Bernie moment was a lowered horizon.
Speaker 1:I think it was already.
Speaker 2:but, like I said, it wasn't like okay, we build on this, it was more like we should at least have this, you know yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it does seem like we are going to one of the things I've agreed with you profoundly on, whether I've wanted to or not. Well, I mean, it does seem like we are going to. One of the things I've agreed with you profoundly on whether I've wanted to or not, but I've had to admit to myself that I do is that whatever the right is right now and I think the right's been contentious and divided for a long time, having come out of that world myself that it it did, however, see a way out of the neoliberal melange in a way that a lot of the, particularly the democratic socialists, left. I remember reading sam gindin's uh, like socialist and surrealist and being like the right you think you're fighting in 2018 sounds like a right from 20, like from like 2002, not from 2016. I don't know who you think you're dealing with.
Speaker 2:It was just total misrecognition of oh, the trump representative changed from bush right, yeah, right, exactly.
Speaker 1:But well, yeah, what was weird is, instead of admitting that, what they did is tried to read like was leftist and liberals, both like going back into the bush legacy and trying to make it better than it was, which for me, is horrifying, like for me hearing people say and I've heard this this week that bush you know at least represent, uh, recognize and uh represented liberal norms and law, and I was like what the fuck are you talking about?
Speaker 2:yeah, like, come on, I mean it's so.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, oh no, it's chilling, it's chilling it's just like I don't you know, for all that trump, trump has done venial and petty shit, he has not gotten us into a war that killed millions of people. Um, he might not have ended wars, but he didn't get us into one off of what was clearly an illegal move, and I don't know how that you can't like. You can set. Just tell me that like, oh, his, petty, basically 19th century bullshit, shenanigans. Because I'm like, yeah, because I'm like the other thing. The other thing I'm often surprised by is people talk about long-standing norms and when I look them up I'm like this was from the 80s.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's no exactly it like when did these norms, you know, when were they established, right? And it's basically like yeah, reagan, like it's Reagan tip O'Neill.
Speaker 1:Right, it's just like. Okay, so Chevron deference, it's like a conservative court in the 80s trying to rein some shit in. I don't know Like. That's not like some longstanding US legal doctrine that we should be defending Historical memory short. It's not like some longstanding us legal doctor and that you, that we're we, should be defending and Historical memory short. It's incredibly short.
Speaker 2:Especially for young people, you know to be.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, to be fair, they didn't live through it. But but even old people like, yeah, Then how many baby boomer leftists do you know who are now in their 70s and 80s, who have are even just regular liberals who told you they haven't lived through? You know that I guess things being very polarized in the 60s and 70s and into the 80s.
Speaker 2:The Cold War, I think, gave people a false sense of understanding what it was about. It was a lot crazier. I mean, again, we were talking about Maoism earlier. You know the cross currents in the Cold War. You know it was a lot crazier than people remember it.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:We don't have that framework today. I mean, the mega-communists want to, you know, make it simple. You know the gabriel rock hills. You know dominico lucerto, like you're talking about. He went through his struggles in italian communism but he came out with, like you know what. There are just two sides, and it's as simple as that. Which side are you on, comrade?
Speaker 1:it seems like people wanting to larp the cold war and make a cold war that doesn't actually completely exist, exist and that never really existed and that never really existed.
Speaker 2:I mean, look, the cold war was what? 1947 to 1956, like the classic cold war, yeah.
Speaker 1:and the second one is like what? Like the 80s, yeah. Late 70s you know, Carter and into the 80s.
Speaker 2:But you know, but the classic, like you know, the idea of there just being an East Block and a West Block. That ended with Khrushchev, no, because immediately the East Block divided, yeah, so you know, and then it got very confusing, very paranoid. So I think that's the other thing that we've gotten back in touch with is the paranoia of the late 60s and 70s. I think it's back returned now.
Speaker 1:I think is back returned now, hmm, um well, yeah, yeah, this is uh not the most hopeful conversation, but, uh, I will say that, uh, I agree with you that there is a conservatism that comes with with with hopelessness, and it's something that I find symptomatic in myself, that I'm always struggling with about like trying to maintain realistic hope but also being completely realistic about where we are, cause I like I read Benjamin Studebaker's book and I like agree with like 99% of what he says. So I'm just like, well, okay, so where do we find hope now? And what? So I'm just like, well, okay, so where do we find hope now?
Speaker 1:And, admittedly, when you take the critical perspective and just start pointing things out and I'm not even talking about this deep Frankfurt School- criticism just pointing out Frank's on the ground, like this country is not doing this thing that you were saying it should be doing and yet you're not acknowledging that. Like that sort of basic shit, I get called shrill, I get you know, it is just like okay. So what you're mad at is that I am not enabling your delusions of positivity at a moment where off of something that is just not real. It's just not real Like you have imagined. This it's not. You know, this is a projection that you're putting on a place far away. And when it comes to certain types of third worldism, I'm not saying there aren't people who are principled about it. Maybe you would, but I wouldn't go that far. But I would say it does seem to me very suspect that it seems to emerge when a left fails in the West and people just go fuck it. It must be everyone else's fault, but mine.
Speaker 2:That's right. No, that's right. I would say that I mean, I'm not, it's not like I'm wholly unsympathetic, I'm not. I'm not ascribing cynical motives, exactly, um, but you know the left is stuck in a rut and that therefore, it has to rationalize. You know so what I mentioned earlier about, like PSL, and you know they have to recruit young people, they have to keep the dues flowing, they have to keep their tendency alive. That can sound like, oh, you know, they have to recruit young people, they have to keep the dues flowing, they have to keep their tendency alive. That can sound like, oh, you know, very cynical motive, but it's more objectively the case. Like, how do you keep an organization like that going? That's what you have to do. You know it's not, it's not like their fault, it's not like a moral failing. You know it's not like their fault, it's not like a moral failing. You know it's not unprincipled behavior. It seems like the only rational thing to do.
Speaker 2:You know, again, I grew up in the high era of sectarian Marxism. You know the devolution of the left into sects, and they were all more or less the same. You know they were all more or less structured the same. You know, and why? Because they lived under the same conditions. That's why they were the way they were. So it's just, you know. So it's not about, like you know, uh, attacking people's character or something, and it's not like you know. I just think that we need to be doing something wholly different, you know. I mean you were mentioning the neo-stalinists in the dsa.
Speaker 1:Well, the original dsa was a merger of old socialist party people and new left Maoists yeah the people who broke with Kamehameha when he formed the Green Party right, joining up with the old Herentonite social democrats even, I think right.
Speaker 2:And what I would say also is that you know, the illusion of transcending Harringtonism, you know, I think the way I put it in what I wrote about this, which is it's actually below Harrington, but also Harrington's awareness of what he was doing, like awareness of the compromises he was making, as opposed to avoiding that problem, not acknowledging it, and so it's sub Harringtonian, both in its practice and in its self understanding. And again, that's, you know, it's going to be easy for people to say, well, Michael Harrington was some kind of cold war social Democrat, and that's why you know it's going to be easy for people to say, well, michael Harrington was some kind of Cold War social Democrat, and that's why you know some kind of Western Marxism and that's why, well, no, you know, you know it's, it's it beset them all. The Maoists beset them all. So it it, it does is convenient for people to forget. So it does.
Speaker 2:It is convenient for people to forget and again, to do what we were just talking about in terms of waking up and deciding. Actually, it's simple and we can forget all the messiness of this history. That wasn't that long ago. We can wake up today and decide. It's simple. Which side are we on. I think beneath that is a deeper despair actually.
Speaker 1:You know, because they can't bear to deal with the full scope of the problem. Yeah, I definitely feel that today. I mean, it's just interesting to me and this really is my last statement, I'll let you go and I'll let you talk a bit about this, but, like when you talk about what independence would mean, and our mutual friend Gene Bajelon used to say, because we would talk privately about it and I'd roll my eyes at the beginning of the Dungus and the end of the FDR rights and, uh, you know the, the people listening to Harvey K and all that stuff, uh, and the you know the emergence of, of analytic Marxism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It seems to me like all these people have actually given up and they're just finding some like figure yeah, that's either historical or far away to project as an exit ramp. And when that doesn't happen, they're going to do like most of the people did in the seventies and eighties that very few people talk about, and just ultimately depoliticize, yes, and just become annoying normie democrats and republicans, depending on where they live in the country and, um, and this will be some weird period in their life that they, like, are kind of embarrassed about.
Speaker 1:Um, and what is interesting today is that both seems to be happening but also can't entirely happen. Like it doesn't seem to be as easy for people to go back to that world, maybe because it's not clear Like what? Like I was thinking about why we're not writing culture. Everyone's like oh, culture of narcissism is still relevant today. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, have you actually read the book today? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, tick, tock, tick. And I'm like, have you actually read the book? Because, like, um lash is pretty specific that he's talking about the end of fordism and the end the minimal self is kind of about the beginnings, what we now call neoliberalism. But but they aren't describing our society at all.
Speaker 1:No, no no, and and like, what you're recognizing is a crisis that gets manifested in the self, somehow in an attempt to depoliticize, but what you're missing is we can't do it the same way. And you know my theory about like all this. You know, action is I'm like we got to go out to the demos and this and the other is I I'm like, well, this is actually already depoliticized. Yeah, like, like, because there is no like. When you ask people like what are you actually going to do about this? Um, like, through protesting, our, our, uh, our ballot initiatives or whatever, and sometimes I'll listen to them like I, I gave, I wanted to give the, the, the, the protest vote people or palestine chance, but I've been sort of like, but what do you want exactly?
Speaker 1:Like you don't seem to really want the opposition to win. You haven't figured out a way to have any influence on foreign policy and you don't have any clear international group that has any states in it to join up with. You don't have rich people on your side. Really, what do you got? It's not really like with apartheid in South Africa in about 50 different ways, from where the Palestinians are in relationship to labor, to denuclearization, all that stuff. None of that's in the cards and I keep on hearing about the axis of resistance and yet, frankly, I just see them throwing symbolic missiles at each other and blowing up military targets that don't seem to change much, and then actual stuff going on in palestine and lebanon. So I'm not seeing what you're seeing like, and you guys were just telling me six months ago that hamas was going to win, and I, you know, and I still see that projected on the left into the future and I just like, do you understand your rhetoric? I don't understand how you can believe your rhetoric.
Speaker 2:On one hand, you haven't taught it's happening right before our eyes On the other hand. Israel's going down.
Speaker 1:Yeah, on the other hand, israel's going down. You can't believe both things, you can't. I mean you can, but like you can't believe both things, you can't. Um, I mean you can, but like you can't. They can't both be true.
Speaker 2:Let me rephrase that I guess it could be true. I mean, nazi germany committed the holocaust right before it went down but who's gonna take out israel? Right and that it's magical thinking, though. Right like it's like divine intervention, meaning you know, um, it's like divine intervention, meaning you know it's like right. Well, I guess the good people of the earth somehow are going to do it.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, this is. This is one of the things that I'm very confused on, because they also talk about how public opinion doesn't matter. But, like the Israel is everything on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but Israel soured the world's public opinion. I'm like, yeah, clearly Israel soured the world's public opinion. I agree with you, and I want this to be over for everyone's sake, but particularly for the Palestinians. However, just to put it on the table honestly for a second, what you're telling me is that somehow this is going to just resolve itself because of popular opinion, the worldwide, that popular opinion has no manifestation on the governments that these people live in in any serious way, or at least not anything more than rhetorically. You know we can talk about. What it actually seems to be doing is all these institutions that you have defended, and I don't know why you want to defend the UN, but you know, whatever you've been defending now have been shown to have absolutely completely no teeth.
Speaker 1:Um, and so you just further accelerating the order that you seem to be ambivalent about in the first place. Um, and so I just, you know, I don't know what to do with that, and I know, you know, we're talking about this relatively honestly, and as a person who has clearly been on the Palatinian sympathetic side of this, I have also been kind of shocked by what people just won't look at here.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'll tell you something that I said to, like, nicholas Kearsey had me down at the University of Texas, rio Grande Valley, to give a book talk, and you know I just said, look, believe it or not, I guess, believe it or not or not, you know, I see things from the Palestinian side. In other words, I don't identify with the Israelis at all. You know, I look at it as what if I were living in Gaza or living in the West Bank? And how would I feel about Hamas? How would I feel about these things? You know, how would I feel about the Palestinian Authority? And you know, that's my starting point and that's my orientation in terms of how to look at things.
Speaker 2:And I mean, look, hamas, it might all work out in the end. You know, they took this gamble, they took this step, step. You know, I think that they want Barghouti as the president of the Palestinian Authority, who's not Hamas but who's a critic of the Palestinian Authority leadership now. And so you know, the gamble might pay off. I don't think that it will, but you know, I guess. In other words, I see the Hamas as rational actors and I see them as having a strategy, agreed. And the question is. What does that strategy depend on? You know, what are the considerations.
Speaker 2:You know, and I disagree with what they want to achieve. Also, I disagree with how they're trying to achieve it, right. So there are a few different things, like, even if I were trying to achieve what they wanted to achieve, I would disagree with the means by which they're trying to do it, because it probably won't work, but it might work in some perverse way. You know. It may not advance like a kind of a caliphate, but it might advance Palestinian nationalism, or it might bring about some bizarre one-state solution that people will be struggling over.
Speaker 2:You know, maybe Trump will allow the Israelis to annex the West Bank and Gaza. I don't think so, but maybe that will happen and then the struggle will take a different form. You know, and so you know again, I think that the problem is how people understand the problem. You know, and so I think that you know, we don't know what the outcome is. You know, I think it's unrealistic to think that Israel is going to be found guilty of genocide and somehow suffer some massive geopolitical consequence that will affect the nature of the state.
Speaker 1:I just, as I've pointed out to even other people, even after the disillusion of the German government, germany still exists. I don't really know, um, what like, even, like, okay, even if you get a one-state solution, you don't get the annexation, and you get like I'm like who's gonna back putting you in peacekeepers, in in israel forever and spending the money for that as a neutral party, cause you'd have to do that. I just, I just don't, I don't. I really, when I ask people about this, I don't get really straight answers and I'm just like okay, so I want to, so I want to cease fire. And I'm at the point where I don't really care how I get a cease fire, because I'd rather people stop being killed. That's where I'm at and I don't know that people are really willing to deal with or hear that. But I'm glad you clarified that because a lot of my audience thinks you're a monster on that issue. I'm going to be quite frank.
Speaker 2:No, that was terrible, I mean. So I was watching John Mearsheimer and he was saying that Israel is trying to drag the US into a war with Iran, because it's only under such circumstances that you could cover by military exigent rationale the expulsion of the Palestinians. And I thought, well, so he thinks that's what Israel is trying to do, he thinks that it's likely to accomplish it, and I just think, well, it's not likely to accomplish it. So that's's likely to accomplish it. Um, and I just think, well, he's, it's not likely to accomplish it, so that's not going to happen. Right, there's not going to be a massive regional war that will allow the israelis to push all the palestinians out of the west bank and gaza, so that's not going to happen. But when meersheimer says that he's being a realist, and I kind of feel like, actually, it's like he wants that to happen, meaning that that would make sense, right, and that would sort of confirm his worldview about how the us is, you know, making geopolitical mistakes and allowing itself to be manipulated by israel, etc.
Speaker 2:And it's like you know, but meanwhile he's talking to the children and they're listening to this and they're like, oh shit, that's what's going to happen. And I'm like, what if that doesn't happen, where is that going to leave you?
Speaker 1:It's not like Munchheimer has been horribly wrong in the last two years or anything Right, right and, trust me, I believed him on the russia question and uh, but it hasn't been that simple. It hasn't been that simple at all. Um, and you know, one of one of the things that confounds my audience, uh, is I don't have a simple answer to the Russia question. I don't believe in flying Russia or equating flags. I think treating wars as sports is ghoulish, but also that the question of right or wrong here is real complicated. The more I learn about this, the more I'm like, well, everybody did stuff that led to this and they've all broke norms in international law. I don't really. And yes, this is a proxy war between two great powers, kind of, but then again not really, I can throw only one little interpretation with Mirshai Morin.
Speaker 2:I think that he has a Cold War mentality and I think that he wants to go back to a Cold War scenario. And I think that he wants to go back to a Cold War scenario. So he complains about how Ukraine and Israel-Palestine will result in a frozen conflict that will be destabilizing in a long term sense. And I thought well, but the Cold War was a frozen conflict that was destabilizing until suddenly it wasn't anymore Right, and it's like he sort of forgets that part of it, you know, and instead it just becomes well, the U? S should have handled the end of the cold war differently, but it was inevitable that the U? S was going to have a conflict with Russia in one way or another. And it's like, well, which is it Right? So it's almost as if he can't admit. So he can basically admit well, israel-palestine might be resolved in some way, but it will be a frozen conflict because these are irreconcilable enemies. It's like not so sure about that, actually Not so sure about that, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, about that, actually not so sure about that, you know. Yeah, um, we've been going for two and a half hours. I've done way longer, but I don't want to eat up all your time.
Speaker 1:Um, so great, um, uh, I think this has been a productive dialogue. It's actually clarified some of my confusion about your positions. I'm not gonna lie. Um, so I do want, uh, you to like plug anything you want to plug. I am getting a lot and I'm not. I'm getting a lot out of these two books, even though I read a lot of them. I was thinking about how many of them I've read, because I've read the platypus review on and off for, like I guess now for 15 years. Um, but, uh, seeing them together and actually watching a train of thought develop is actually quite interesting to do.
Speaker 2:Um, and I've tried to curate it so that it's like readable, you know, so that it sort of becomes a kind of overarching argument, which it is, and, um, you know, so it's, you know, I'll just say, in terms of plugging it, it's really one book in two volumes Death of the Millennial Left and Marxism and Politics. So it's 100 articles, 1000 pages, and you know it is, you know, pretty comprehensive, but it's also a little bit retrospective at this point, meaning, you know pretty comprehensive, but it's also a little bit retrospective at this point, meaning, you know it's arguments about both contemporary leftist politics and capitalist politics, but also about the history of Marxism, but really motivated by the moment, by that millennial left moment which you know, I think we can put a bookend on it now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, whatever you think about the millennial left and I know the DSA may somehow start recruiting again, because it always seems to recruit Well, it didn't really so much during the Bush years, but every other time there's been a right wing president they've grown, um, even back into the 80s. 80s, uh, yeah, I mean, that's how they got to their 5 000. They were at for forever. Was was the 80s, but um, uh, I do think the internal contradictions of the dsa are like playing for everyone to see, and while a lot of people try to use that as a recruitment drive, I'm like why do I want to be in an organization that is literally at war with itself and whose leadership are issuing statements that are in direct contradiction to one another from week to week?
Speaker 2:It's a struggle session, Derek. It's part of the neo-Stalinism. Join the DSA in order to have a struggle session.
Speaker 1:So we can have ruthless critique and I'm all about ruthless critique but I don't need to join an organization to do that.
Speaker 2:Maybe we do, maybe we do. We need that kind of coherence.
Speaker 1:It's just not clear that the DSA can be that.
Speaker 2:I would say that it can't, but that's just my perspective.
Speaker 1:Right and I. You know the mega communists are going to be interesting to watch. They're already seemingly having breakdowns and we're only a week into the Trump administration about, like Trump, not doing whatever fantasy projection they put on them.
Speaker 2:If they even believed it in the first place, I don't know in a productive capital against finance capital, and I don't think that that distinction holds ever, and so there's no reason for it to hold now. How would you separate those things? And then you're going to come into some arbitrary juxtapositions. Silicon Valley is it finance capital or is it productive capital?
Speaker 1:Right, I mean, and when they're not doing it, it's yannis verifacus doing it and coming up with new theories about feudalism. And then I'm like, well, who's growing fucking food then for all dealing with, like it's not robots? Um and uh, we're also in the period of the of the millennial left losers tour where, like, everybody who lost somehow gets revitalized and gets about 50 book deals out of it, and we talk about how great they are and how they really would want if they ran today. Um, and I also find that super annoying. Luckily, most of these people are actually new leftist and they're probably not going to live long enough for be that much.
Speaker 1:And I don't mean I don't wish any of these people ill, right, but but like there is sort of like, well, I'm not, I'm only going to have to listen to this for like 10 more years, because then these people are just going to age out of life. But, um, then we'll miss them in another way. Yeah, well, I I already am missing some of them. I I will say like now that like I mean, and I'm like I have my issues with mike davis, but like I'm like I would love to have him talking about right now what we do have, but yeah, anyway, thank you, chris. People should even if you don't like what we've said today and a lot of you won't, and I don't agree with everything in this book, but Chris doesn't expect me to you should read these two books. I think they're really important, and I will also say that I owe you an apology about some predictions you made about the political left, you were right and I was wrong and I will admit that on air.
Speaker 1:One of them was I thought they were going to be smarter about breaking with the Democrats, and I will admit that on air. One of them was I thought they were going to be smarter about breaking with the Democrats and I was real wrong about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I thought that's what Occupy meant. It was like oh okay, so we're finally going to get rid of nineties neo-anarchism and we're going to break with the Democrats and we one of those two things happened yeah.
Speaker 2:I was going to say you can't really have both of those.
Speaker 2:That would be too much. That would be too much. No, I appreciate it and I would just say, also in terms of, like you know, my writing is meant to make people think. The Marxism in Politics volume in particular, you know it's a reader's guide. It's meant to highlight issues and problems, doesn't really resolve them. You know I've got my footnotes there. You know things to read that I think are worthwhile. So you know, at the very least you know I'm trying to motivate, like a kind of general framework, for if you're interested in Marxism and its history, at least consider this neglected, subterranean, esoteric stuff, because it's there, Whether we see it clearly or not, it's there.
Speaker 1:Yes, I agree with that. Well, thank you so much. Have a great evening.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Derek.
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