Flowers for Marx Symposium, Part 1: Ben Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, and Ernesto Vargas

What makes a book of Marxist theory so controversial that publishers back out after initially accepting it? The answer takes us deep into the heart of leftist intellectual debates that have shaped revolutionary movements for generations.

"Flowers for Marx" brings together contrasting perspectives on fundamental questions that have divided Marxists since the 19th century. The conversation opens by exploring how platform appearances on shows like Joe Rogan became grounds for publisher rejection, raising crucial questions about whether the left should prioritize ideological purity or audience expansion.

At the core of this discussion lies the tension between humanism and scientific approaches to Marxism. Conrad Hamilton defends Althusser's critique of humanism as potentially undermining revolutionary politics, while pointing to the achievements of actually existing socialist states often overlooked in Western discourse. Ben Burgis pushes back, arguing that core historical materialist insights suggest underdeveloped societies face inherent limitations in building socialism without first developing productive forces.

The global dimension becomes clear when Ernesto Vargas begins examining Mexico's experience, where dependency on international financial institutions undermined development despite significant land redistribution initiatives. These different national contexts reveal how abstract theoretical debates manifest in concrete historical situations, challenging Eurocentric assumptions about revolutionary strategy.

What emerges is a recognition that while these debates recur cyclically, they're not merely academic exercises. They reflect genuine dilemmas revolutionaries face in different contexts, which explains why theories considered settled often resurface with new urgency. Whether discussing the moral dimensions of Marxism or the viability of different development paths, these conversations remain vital precisely because the challenges they address persist.

Tune in to our follow-up panel featuring Matt McManus and Daniel Tutt for additional perspectives on these enduring questions that continue to shape leftist thought and practice worldwide.

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

Chapters

• 1:35 Introduction to Flowers for Marx
• 9:33 Publishing Controversies and Cancel Culture
• 20:54 Humanism vs. Scientific Socialism Debate
• 43:42 Eurocentrism in Marxist Theory
• 1:08:57 Historical Materialism and Development
• 1:22:12 Non-Aligned Movement and Mexican Context
• 1:31:07 The Future of Left Politics

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 0:48

Hello and welcome to VARM Vlog. Today we have a panel the first of two panels on the book Flowers for Marks. We're going to talk about the history of the book a little bit in a second and what it is. It is coming out by Revo Press and I will do full disclosure. Since I am an author for Revo, I'm also part of their collective, although I'm not an editor there. Ironically, I've seen this book before and we were talking about that off air. It has a kind of harried history, and so when I was reading it, when our Revo editor sent it to me, I was like this is familiar. Where have I seen this before? And so there's a history there, and we'll get into that in a second.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47

Today we have Conrad Hamilton, ernesto Vargas and Ben Burgess. Burgess is a returning guest. Ernesto and Conrad had not been on here before. Though I don't know Ernesto, I do know of Conrad. We've actually never spoken directly, except maybe, I think. Maybe we shit posted in one group together once and we are spread out all over the world. So we have people coming from Southern California or Northern Mexico, we have people coming from somewhere else in Mexico and we have someone coming from Shanghai, and I am here in the Mountain West in the United States. So flowers for Marx. This book seems to be weirdly controversial for a book that's about relatively benign controversies in Marxist history and criticism. Why is it controversial and what's the history of getting it published? You know why was it hard to get this book in print.

Conrad Hamilton: 2:46

Should I take a shot at that, I guess? Okay, yeah, I mean, you know, I think that I mean probably what a lot of people are going to know about the book because it was a bit of an episode online was that the book was previously signed to Punkton Books and, you know, we had given them a manuscript and waited, you know, months and months over a year I think and then at some point, we received a message from them indicating that they didn't wish to publish the volume, and there were a few different reasons for that that were cited, which I don't think it's necessarily.

Ben Burgis: 3:27

I think it's important to mention it here, like just as far as what an extreme and odd decision was, mentioned it here, like just as far as what an extreme and odd decision was this was that, um, it had been accepted by them like literally years earlier, um, like a like a few years earlier, because, because there were, because there were like a lot of delays, like it had, you know, I think everybody had turned in. Like you know, everybody had turned everything in by the end of 2022. Right, that was the uh, the original thing, and and so it had been like it was. You know it had been, you know it, and it took a while to get everybody to turn it in. It's you know most of my fault, but like I got, uh, like like given that, right, it is like the whole manuscript had been in, it was edited, right, you know, it was like literally like on the verge of publication, uh, when this happened, but I'd.

Conrad Hamilton: 4:19

So I just wanted to kind of add that in for flavor before you sort of go into what the actual controversy was yeah, yeah, well, the uh, yeah, I mean, I'm not sure of the exact date, I think it may have been the draft manuscript, may have been submitted in 2023. But and it needed to be worked through editorially. But it was there, you know, the chapters were done and then we subsequently they contacted us and they said, after having signed the book, that they didn't want to publish it. Having signed the book, that they didn't want to publish it, and there were different reasons given for that, you know, and I don't think it's necessarily useful to get into all of them.

Conrad Hamilton: 5:05

I think probably the one that was most decisive, in the sense that it couldn't be retroactively changed in editorial, was that they were frustrated with some of the platforms. Apparently Matt and Ben had appeared on, so I think it was what Quillette, compact and Joe Rogan. They were in particular because Ben had appeared in the Joe Rogan experience. I think people watching this may be familiar or not, but yeah, then I know that at that time, ben wrote about this on his sub stack, so he made, I think, a great argument and maybe, ben, you want to add something there.

Ben Burgis: 5:42

Sure, I was going to say earlier. By the way, this is kind of interesting. I think I'm the only person here who's been in the same physical space as all three of the other people on air at different points. You know, varn a couple times, ernesto in Mexico City back in 2019, and Conrad in London just a few months ago. Anyway, but yeah, it's so, yeah, odd little reunion for me me, although I don't know that any of the other people have been around each other, but, um, but yeah, no, so I, I mean it seems like the issue, as you said, there were other issues, but some of the other issues that they cited were about content, uh, and so those presumably could have been fixed right, the, the history couldn't have been fixed. That the, the fact that, uh, you know, matt and I had both published in, uh, in compact and colette uh, in the colette case, much more matt than me, but, you know, I had a little bit and I had, um, and and, yeah, I'd been on the Joe Rogan show, um, in 2022, which I'll just note was, uh, a very, very long time before they decided, uh, that they uh to, to, you know, to unaccept the book, which is what part of what makes it such an odd decision. But they said they couldn't be. You know, they couldn't be associated with that and and it just it's. It seems to me at least, like a really extreme version of guilt by association and just extremely unhelpful, because you know, you think okay, I mean whatever you think of you know what I did when I was in the show or whatever.

Ben Burgis: 7:33

Presumably I would think it's the largest podcast in the world that we want there to be more leftists on there rather than less. I'm also very curious whether they'd apply this consistently. Cornel West, for example, has been on the Joe Rogan experience. It's not totally out of the question. You could imagine him like writing something about Marxism. That would be that they would be consistent in that way. I have a hard time imagining it, but I think the more interesting question is not, would they be consistent about this, but but should they?

Ben Burgis: 8:18

Um, what purpose does that serve? You know is is. Does it, you know, you know, does it punish Joe Rogan in some way? For, you know, for his, his bad political takes? Uh, if, if, small radical presses will, you know, like, not only believe in boycotting him, which I actually find counterproductive enough that you know you'd like you're not going to go and expose his listeners to points of view they don't normally get, but that you're going to do this secondary boycott of anybody who doesn't boycott him. It's just very unclear what that to me at least, what that's supposed to do for anybody.

Conrad Hamilton: 8:55

Yeah, and I think, in terms of your overall question, you know the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser, right, what is the role of kind of normative commitments, you know, within Marxist theory or practice? You have discussions of analytical Marxism, cohen, for example. You know of the non-aligned movement, right, ernesto's piece, you know. So, again, it might be like you know what are the what, why would it be that a text like that is divisive? But you know, I do think, that there are a couple of aspects of it, in terms of the people involved, in terms of the perspectives represented, that could be contentious. So you know one, I think, again, of course, you have Matt and Ben involved, whose work I appreciate, obviously, and you know, I think that they have been very active, you know, in trying to push the message of the left across different mediums in the way that Ben's saying, I think, you know, in spite of being aligned with, you know, both writing for Jacobin, which is, you know, probably fairly mainstream. As far as you know, contemporary Anglo-American left commitments go mainstream. As far as you know, contemporary Anglo-American left commitments go. They've also both been very critical of cancel culture at different moments in certain aspects of contemporary liberal culture. You know, and I think that that has been something that you know has been a provocation for certain people, you know.

Conrad Hamilton: 10:27

And then, at the same time, if you think of the book you also have in my debate with Matt, you know, you have the situation in which, yes, we're discussing, you know, marxist humanism versus Marxist science, but it also takes the form of a political debate, right, and that's kind of the main axis of the book, you know, and Matt is defending the essentiality of humanism and, in some sense, moralism to Marxism essentiality of humanism and, in some sense, moralism to Marxism and he ends up also defending a kind of democratic socialist agenda. As the debate progresses, you know, and while not dismissing the need for normative commitments, in some sense, in my essay I reprise Althusser's critique of humanism, and then that segues into a larger critique of kind of the post 2020 situation with respect to democratic socialism in the United States. So you know, it's an interesting thing, right, because I think that when it comes to more liberal minded presses, I think that you know, defending socialist states or having those kinds of discussions can be provocative.

Conrad Hamilton: 11:27

But then let us note also that if you look at the people we have representing, defending socialist states or having those kind of discussions can be, um, provocative. But then let us note also that if you look at the people we have representing, you know um, not that Ben's engaged in those polemics so much, but if you look at the authors we have who represent, um, you know a more mainstream, uh set of commitments, like I said, jacob and so forth, um, they're also not completely undivisible, right, because of the positions they've taken. So you know, I think the book could be challenging in a number of levels, in that sense.

C. Derick Varn: 11:57

So there are. The book is interesting because it's kind of it's a series of, let's say, essay debates around maybe two key questions. One is the question of humanism and science, slashlash-historical materialism, and the other is the question of analytic Marxism and, let's say, the non-aligned movement or critique of bourgeois socialism. There's a lot of things we can pull from an SOS essay and I do think those are interesting political debates that would be controversial, even though they're also Marxological. But I mean, I think every even liberal-friendly Marxist press has published something I mean like I can think of.

C. Derick Varn: 12:53

Since the 70s we've been having the structuralism versus humanism, versus analytic Marxism debates. You know, I was reading Gouldner and I was like, oh, we were doing this back in the mid-s too, so it's, it's not a new debate. Um, I do think it's political valiance has changed and I wanted to, you know, uh, have conrad talk a little bit about that, about the humanism and science debate, because I do think that's basically a debate we've been having for 150 years, but the valences of that debate are a little different. And for those of you who are wondering Matt, we'll have a chance to respond. He's coming on in another panel. So why do you think this is coming back up again. It seems to come up about every say generation or generation and a half.

Conrad Hamilton: 13:51

Yeah, I mean, I think, think, I think definitely there are um different reasons for that. So you know, I think that, um, you know, again, I mentioned before you had the. I can point to a couple reasons, but I mentioned before you had the uh. In 2020, 2019, you had the collapse of the, the corbin and the sanders campaigns. Um and I, that you know, and Althusser is quite clear about this right, if you look at Althusser's work, when he criticizes Marxist humanism right Now, he doesn't say in his writings that humanism wouldn't necessarily have an instrumental application, right, he also doesn't deny the need for moral commitments on the left that can't be reduced to science, as it were. So he talks about exploitation as being a morally suggestive term, you know, that would also be useful. But he's critical of the use of humanism in the context of the 1960s, in the context of his conjuncture, because he feels that it's connected to and I think, even if he doesn't say this explicitly, it's also implicit at times he feels that it's connected to the Soviet politics of detente right in Europe, you know, and the kind of de-radicalization or demobilization within the Cold War, and that it's also connected to, you know, the decision of various Western European communist parties to adopt a kind of broadly reformist position. Right, and we know that, though Althusser wasn't so explicit about his political preferences because he was in the French Communist Party, we know that. You know he had a certain level of sympathy for the Cultural Revolution. That, on the whole, um, you know there was a more radical impulse that he kind of supported um, you know, and I think you know another thing it's important to understand also why, um, you know, the politics of detente were occurring right, and ultimately a big risk at the time was nuclear war, right, um, and you know, if you look at um mao in this time, right, he was comparatively casual. You know, I think at one point he says well, you know, if you look at Mao in this time, right, he was comparatively casual. You know, I think at one point he says well, you know, world War, I gave us the Russian Revolution. World War II gave us the Chinese Revolution. You know, if the bourgeoisie want World War III, bring it on. So you know, pretty hand on the horn kind of attitude, you know, to which the Soviet response might be. You know, if humankind is exterminated, well, then there's no class struggle. Right, so it's a little bit um.

Conrad Hamilton: 16:21

So you know, I think, if you look at the last few years, on one hand I think you have um, you know, I mean, if you look at jacobin, for example, they've been, I think, fairly explicit about the way that they connect humanism, um to the um, you know, kind of coalition that they're trying to seek, you know, with, say, left liberals. You know, in order to, you know, broaden their sort of or achieve hegemony, as it were, within the Democratic Party and, to be fair, I should mention, with the goal of achieving an ultimate rupture right that would not be in any way limited to the Democratic Party, that would bring about a genuine socialist movement in the United States. You know, and I also think that you know, if you think of the, because the way I would see humanism, you know, is, you know again, regardless of the strategic utility of it, it's always a kind of extra class concept. So I think that if we're really looking at, like, what is the crisis in our time? Maybe analogous to nuclear war, and we still have the risk of nuclear war, but what is the crisis in our time?

Conrad Hamilton: 17:16

And I think that you know, in a way, the environmental threat, right, in addition to the politics of, you know I said DSA, jacobin, blah blah, other left populist organizations that have attempted to, you know, integrate themselves or achieve success within the parliamentary milieu. I think you also have this overhanging threat of environmental crisis that has, in its own way, helped furnish the occasion for renewal of humanist ideology. And then, I think, whenever you have that you also are going to, as a response to the political and theoretical dimensions, you're also going to have salient crit, salient critiques of it, which emerge right on the grounds that you know we're going to soft, we're going to parliamentarian, right, this is potentially a rapprochement with capitalism ultimately. Or, you know, we're too freely immersing ourselves in kind of extra class debates, right, we're making our praxis too much about the threat of nuclear war, too much about, you know, the ecological dimension, and not immersed enough in the sort of agonistic class one. So maybe that helps, and I don't know if anyone has anything to add to that.

C. Derick Varn: 18:23

Anyone else like to respond on that? I mean, like Ben and Ernesto are ostensibly in a separate debate, but it is related to this. Analytical Marxism has a complicated relationship to Marxist humanism, although I would say that most of the current generation of analytical Marxists, which I associate with Vivek Chibber and elements of Catalyst, which is the theoretical journal for Jacobin, are fairly sympathetic to Marxist humanism, even if you know, like Romer and other classical analytical Marxists were a little bit more skeptical. And you know, I would like to, you know, I would like to, to probably hear Ernesto's view of the unaligned movement's relationship to, you know, scientific socialism or scientificized Marxism. So you know, I find that one of you would like to comment on that before we talk about the second debate.

Ben Burgis: 19:31

Oh, ben, you're on mute, just you know sorry, yeah, I was just gonna say, uh, in a way it kind of connects to me with what you're saying earlier, varne about how, um, the it. You know it feels like all of these debates are are on some sort of like vast, infinite time loop, uh that you know, battlestar Galactica and all this has happened before and it'll all happen again. I've been reading like just happened to have been reading this week Ellen Myskinwood's book, the Retreat from Class, a New True Socialism, which was written in the 1980s and is, and I think, some of what I mean. I think there's an interesting question, like I'd have to think more about it, but, as Conrad was describing sort of what he gets out of his reading of Althusser and what he thinks some of the underlying concerns were and what he thinks some of the underlying concerns were, even though Wood talks about Elthar's error there and I think, anyway, like, like I don't know that they, you know, I don't know that her assessment of him is the same, but whatever, like, putting that aside, right, I think there is some echo there to what Wood is concerned about in that book which you know, what Wood is concerned about in that book which you know, which is the sort of the development of some Marxist intellectuals towards this kind of fuzzy post-Marxism, that that you know like sort of substitutes, this general like doesn't really think in terms of class struggle anymore. It's just this sort of uh, you know this, this kind of movement for, like, radical democracy being, you know, being waged by nobody in particular. That you know it's uh, you know it's sort of, um, you know all like the, the contours of that struggle are you, you know, understood much more in terms of discourse and ideology than material interests.

Ben Burgis: 21:36

And I think you know, like, thinking about that, that critique, and I mean I'm pretty, you know, I mean how it maps onto some of the things that you know that that that Ernesto, sorry, that Conrad, just you know was, was just talking about you think some of that's a little bit complicated and messy. But I think I'm broadly sympathetic to the idea that there are people who have gone on this kind of trajectory and that's not good, right, that there's something there that's, you know, that's worrying. And of course we can, you know, we can argue about how, you know, jacobin, or other things you know, fit or don't fit into all of that you know, and obviously I have views about that. But because the question was about analytical Marxism, I'll just stick with that Right.

Ben Burgis: 22:27

So so I think and you know, of course, that's what I'm writing about for the book, so it's most relevant to this discussion it seems to me that some of the analytical Marxist figures did go down something like that path to one extent or another. I think that. You know, I don't know, I mean, romer is a little bit of an unclear case to me, because oftentimes I feel like he's engaged with these sort of very technical debates about neoclassical economics that it's just like I can't really find an entry point into. So it's like I just don't know what to make of any of that. But certainly, you know, if you think about the two people that I've spent the most time thinking about, uh, from the original generation of analytical marxism jay cohen and eric all- right you know, I think, to one extent or another, I think you can find things to criticize about both of their later work that are somewhat along these lines.

Ben Burgis: 23:40

I mean, in fact, the last part of my essay in this book is a criticism of Cohen that is in a certain way along these lines. Obviously, I'm a huge GA Cohen fan. I find many, many things to like in his work, but there's a strand of some of his later stuff that I don't love. That you know that I'm talking about in that essay and with Eric Goldwright, you know you think about some of what he was doing at the end of his life with the Envisioning Real Utopias project, like some of that is pitched in a way that's like very much like what Wood is complaining about and like some of what Conrad, channeling what he got out of Althusser, is gestured out in a certain way. So I think there's some truth to that.

Ben Burgis: 24:27

People who have various kinds of ideological axes to grind love to do this thing where they say, oh aha, you have these figures in the current, who are making certain sorts of mistakes. Therefore, they must have been doing this because of their original sin of disagreeing with me about some larger ideological or methodological question. And I'm always pretty skeptical about those narratives, and obviously even more so now because I think that those guys were right about things that a lot of the people with those narratives would fault them for. Well is the is the sort of original sin of analytical marxism. It's analyticness and that leads to, like certain you know, kinds of political or ideological mistakes that might be made by coen or right later in life.

Ben Burgis: 25:18

I think the test has got to be okay. Well, we've got to contrast it to what's going on at the same time and very continental kinds of marxism, right, and? And then it seems to me that once we've done that, it's like man, I don't know, cohen and wright look like pretty orthodox marxists at the end of their lives compared to fucking mclellan, lou, for you know, whatever, right, like you know, like you know examples, multiply right, the, uh, you know, I mean, like you know, compared to the yard.

Ben Burgis: 25:43

Yeah right, you know exactly right. So a lot of people come out of franklin school etc. Like you know so. So it seems to me like that's probably not the issue right. There's probably, in fact, much larger historical forces going on that are having some degree of gravitational pull on a lot of these figures from a lot of different intellectual traditions that last point is a very scientific point to make about humanism.

C. Derick Varn: 26:12

I'm just going to slyly point that out there, Ernesto. What is your response? I mean, how is the humanism scientificity debate relevant to your work on the non-aligned?

Ernesto Vargas: 26:24

movement, look past a lot of. So in Mexico we had a tendency for humanism, spearheaded not Marxist humanism, but spearheaded by José Vázquez Poncellos, and he had this conception of the cosmic race which was like kind of a radical deconstruction of racism that would lead you to a sort of universal humanism so on and so forth.

Ernesto Vargas: 26:57

But eventually a lot of frustrations with the reality of Mexican politics led José Vasconcelos to swerve right and he started a brown shirt movement. Led Jose Vasconcelos to swerve right and he started a brown shirt movement. So I mean, I'm not trying to make some sort of argument of Hitlerium or whatever. What I'm saying is that I certainly appreciate the hope that the humanist movement brings to the movement, but without a structural analysis and a historical analysis you get stuck in dreams.

C. Derick Varn: 27:51

I lived in Mexico for a while and I became obsessed with the La Cosmica Raza idea and where it went politically and how it seemed to start out as a deconstruction of European racial theories and ended up fascist, adjacent if not actually fascist, and how that even plays into American and Chicano movements and the focus on that and ideas about Aslan and stuff like that. So I do find that interesting and the humanism is also. I mean, when we talk about humanism it's also tied in with our relationship to Hegelian idealism, which is interestingly something that Althusserians and analytic Marxists both critique against someone like the political Marxists like Wood are, let's say, very, very orthodox Trotskyist or orthodox Marxist Leninist from the 20s who they had different Hegel that they liked. And you know I like Hegel too to some degree. I'm a big fan of the science, of logic and a kind of a fan of the phenomenology of spirit, if I don't read all the God stuff in it as being literal, but it does seem like that's another problematic that you kind of have to deal with.

C. Derick Varn: 29:15

It doesn't entirely go away and one of the reasons why I think it doesn't entirely go away is, uh, it does seem relevant to like a hopeful idea coming out of, uh, bourgeois, of bourgeois progressive movements around 1848 in Europe. That doesn't feel so hopeful by the beginning of the 20th century. And I wanted to tie that in a little bit about one of the things that I found when I was reading this book that isn't super explicit. I mean, it is kind of explicit in an essay but it's not super explicit in general is that the humanism debates and to some degree the analytic Marxist debates are also kind of debates about Eurocentrism. Am I wrong in picking that up? I would like to hear all your takes on that.

Conrad Hamilton: 30:17

Well, I mean, you know, I think that you know it has to do with the kind of symbolic codifications right through which the text works right.

Conrad Hamilton: 30:24

So I wouldn't say that it's about Eurocentrism per se, but I think that's an implication of the debate. You know, in the exchange between Matt and I you can see a sort of division whereby Matt makes very clear that the societies that he thinks that the left should emulate right are those of you know Norway, sweden, so forth, like sort of social democratic mixed market societies, though Matt does add, of course, that you know Norway, sweden, so forth, like sort of social democratic mixed market societies, though Matt does add, of course, that you know, like if you look at something like the Meidner plan, right, which is an attempt to have unions buy their own companies, that that needs to be pursued to a further degree, right, you know, and you know in my essay, you know and it's not that I don't have appreciation for the successes achieved by those kind of movements, but I also point out that, with respect to the general position of democratic socialism and you can find it in Matt's work I also discuss Bhaskar Sankara's book what's the socialist? What's the name of that book?

Conrad Hamilton: 31:29

ben sorry, I can't hear you on mute. What is it?

Conrad Hamilton: 31:32

oh yeah, the socialist manifesto yeah, yeah, I, I discussed some passages in that, um, you know, and I think that, um, when it comes to this issue, um, you know, uh, it wouldn't be about valorizing, um, you know, or saying that, oh, like, what was realized in the Soviet Union and China were perfect, right, or anything like that, right, it would be about, in a more Marxist vein, you know, assessing the relative scale of their achievements, right, okay, exactly Okay. So you know, we know, that in the book, you know, the defense of humanism made by Matt is also connected to the sorts of societies that he feels that socialists should emulate, like Sweden, norway. As with the Meidner plan in the 70s in Sweden that called for unions to buy out the corporations they were within, matt also wishes to pursue a more radical agenda within that context. In my essay, the defense of Marxist science, if you will, you know, is linked to a greater appreciation for the legacy of actually existing socialist states. And that's not so much about saying, you know, oh well, you know, what was achieved in Soviet Union or in China was, in absolute terms, perfect. It's about, in a rather more materialist way, you know, gauging sort of where they came from and where they got. So you know, we know that in the Soviet Union there were 200 million people raised out of poverty. We know that in China, you know, dispute the metrics a little bit, but 800 million people have been, you know, and that has very wide implications, obviously in terms of, you know, health care and education. You know infrastructure and all this you know.

Conrad Hamilton: 33:30

So I make a few points about this. You know infrastructure and all this you know, so I make a few points about this. You know, and I think that you know, one of them is that you know, if you look at the actions with respect to foreign policy, right, you know there's all kinds of you know Swedish firms right, we're going to talk about it you know that are not just exploiting labor in some generic capitalist sense, but are connected to a larger kind of matrix related to the expansion of imperialism, and this affects its military commitments as well. Right, we know that. You know Norway, for example, was very involved in the campaign in Libya. Right, with NATO, you know NATO is sort of like the scourge of God right in the global south, and you can see that history in terms of foreign commitments, I mean like, even if you look at the engagements in Africa, right.

Conrad Hamilton: 34:19

So much support, right was furnished by, you know, the USSR and China for anti-apartheid movements. You know, with the West that turn occurred relatively late, right, you know. And even when it did, right, you know the kind of anti-apartheid positions that were being taken. They weren't so much about directly arming people, right, you know, in Scandinavia you had a certain level of political support that was given in small dispersals of funds but they were never so active in that way. You know, and I, you know, I also think that you know there's a kind of and you know, I also think that you know there's a kind of teleology at work in a sense in this discussion, because, you know, I feel you can see Matt leaning on it at other times.

Conrad Hamilton: 35:14

But this kind of idea according to which, well, the proper socialism would be the socialism that is accomplished within a highly economically developed society, probably Western, a highly economically developed society, right, probably Western right, and then in some way, you know, the Soviet Union or China, would be kind of abortions because they occurred too early within this more productivist conception. I don't want to completely dismiss that argument because I'm not, you know, some ardent anti-productivist who just believes you can create anything at any time. But I do think that you know it's important to appreciate like there's a kind of weird paradoxicality within this logic, because part of what Lenin was recognizing and it explains in a sense his turn to anti-imperialism you know, the conference at Baku in 1920 and all of this part of the shift towards anti-imperialism within the socialist left was motivated by the increasing awareness that, you know, within the context of the imperialist world system and the way it had been structured, that there was no way the countries were going to be able to achieve substantial industrial development, that they were being obstructed in that way and turned into essentially resource extraction sites. And we can find some interesting exceptions to that, like the Japanese in Manchuria, when we're active in industrializing, even as they basically use slave labor. But the norm throughout imperialism right was to sort of intentionally keep countries in this highly subordinated economic position.

Conrad Hamilton: 36:43

So you know, one of the paradoxes, I think, is that you know, even if you you know, even if you were to maintain that kind of productivist hypothesis, I don't necessarily think that it negates those achievements, because I think that what it would also attest to is the fact that you needed this kind of process of political rupture, even if it was premature, to actually shepherd the conditions into existence through which a more affluent or robust form of socialism would be created. So I'm always a little bit skeptical about those kinds of arguments. But yeah, I mean obviously. Just to conclude. I mean, if you look at Althusser's position in the 1960s right, he was critical of, you know, reformist positions within the USSR, particularly after the denunciation of Stalin.

Conrad Hamilton: 37:35

He was critical of the culture of reformism that had emerged within certain Western European communist parties, you know, and he was tendentially aligning himself with more radical movements that were emanating out of poorer parts of the world, like China right. So there was a sort of, you know, martial character to his engagements on that subject, in spite of which he didn't write about imperialism per se a lot, which is interesting as well. But anyway, that's my answer.

Ben Burgis: 38:00

Yeah, Ben, and then we'll go to Ernesto, that what's often dismissed as teleology, productivism, technological determinism, is another thing that's very popular is just historical materialism. In fact, I think one of the core insights that differentiates Marxism from earlier and later forms of socialist thought is precisely the understanding that capitalism wasn't an avoidable moral mistake but a necessary phase of historical development that, you know, indispensably creates the foundations for a flourishing socialism. Right, I mean that. This is why, I mean, in a sense, you have Plekhanov, you know, predicting more or less what was going to happen in the Soviet Union in the 30s. You know, with his line about income development, right, that, you know, if you tried to force socialism within a severely underdeveloped state, you know, you'd end up, uh, you'd end up essentially, uh, regressing to this very direct form of extraction, which, which is pretty much exactly what happened for a while there. Uh, and you know, before the, the soviet union ended up, um, you know, plateauing in a lot of ways and, uh, you know, and, and it stopped being, you know, it stopped being anything like as sort of nightmarishly repressive on a workplace level as it had been in the 30s. You know, when there were all these like laws against absenteeism, right, you know, you could literally be arrested for, for not showing up at work when they had an internal passport system to uh, you know to to stop you from moving around from. You know, from place. You know place to stop you from moving around from. You know, from place to place within the Soviet Union without official permission, et cetera. Right, so it stopped being nearly as repressive in those ways, but it also stopped making big strides in development. Right that you know both of those things happened and in fact you know it was very dependent of it. You know more and more on Western aid and loans.

Ben Burgis: 40:12

And you know, in the, you know you can make similar points to a certain degree about the early history of People's Republic of China. You know that the sort of successes, you know that the really, the really impressive, you know, lifting people out of poverty successes were after in fact becoming, right, a mixed market economy in some ways, in some ways even more so than the Nordics. That by some metrics, the you know, in Norway, for example, the state, the state, controls about twice as much wealth as the Chinese state does. And you know, again, I think, that the you know, the larger. You know that the larger point, here I mean the sort of basic materialist insight is that you're only going to get well, one, you're only going to get a working class that's sort of capable of acting on, that has the capacity as an interest to create a social society, is capable of acting on its own terms, as an agent of its own emancipation, rather than just to sort of ground troops for some other part of the population in highly developed conditions. And two, that you know if you're going to have, if you're going to sort of you know if you're going to have, if you're going to sort of you know, attempt to create a more egalitarian kind of society, and in conditions, in very underdeveloped conditions, then you know at best that's going to lead to this, this, this rationing out right of of crumbs that you know, which is precisely the circumstance under which Marx famously says all the old crap, right, is going to return again right.

Ben Burgis: 41:51

So I'm very suspicious of this kind of voluntaristic idea that you know that you can pole vault over stages of historical development like that, again, like stageism is another one of those words a lot of Marxists use as a pejorative. But I mean, I just think it's like well, what you're describing as stageism is just basic Marxism and you know it shouldn't be a pejorative right. And I think that you know, and it's worth noting right that Lenin, right, and I'd mentioned Trotsky, but I suspect that you know, I suspect that I'm better off rhetorically emphasizing Lenin here, right, like, like Lenin at the time when he was leading the Russian Revolution, was very much committed to this basic historical materialist thesis that it would be impossible to skip to socialism in conditions of czarist Russia. I mean, that's why very explicitly, he says this over and over and over again right in some speeches the whole game plan was to have sort of seize an initial outpost in Russia and then the revolution could spread to the West, crucially Germany, and sort of take its industrialized base, which is also the sort of speculation that Marx had started in the last years of his life, most famously in the letter to Vera Zasulich and then more explicitly in the introduction to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, right, that this like, yeah, maybe you could skim ahead if this acted as a signal to proletarian revolution in the West, right. So the sort of key core historical materialist insight is basically there. And I have to say, is basically there.

Ben Burgis: 43:34

And I have to say it seems to me that the actual history, very much you know, bears this out right, because you know, even putting aside, you know the foreign policy questions, and you know we can compare, you know how much. You know the sort of anti-apartheid efforts you know, I mean like a very long I think this is might not like be true as far as the information that finally came out, but a very long standing speculation is that you know Swedish prime minister Wolf Palma was assassinated because of his, his, the strong stand you know he'd taken on on apartheid in South Africa. You know we can talk about things like you know. I mean, my God, if we're going to do compare foreign policy records right, you know Mao embracing Nixon. You know at the, you know as, as the United States has committed genocide in Vietnam, and you know and and and having you know, and sort of trotting out this bizarre three worlds theory to rationalize what he was doing.

Ben Burgis: 44:47

But I think that the sort of larger point right, I mean that this kind of anti-productivist idea that it is possible to achieve socialism under these circumstances, or at least the sort of qualified defense of the actually existing socialisms that originated under those circumstances, you know what it ends up being is essentially this defense in terms of you know, developmental successes, which is, you know, fair them right. I mean there are plenty of, you know, there are plenty of countries everybody would agree are capitalist, that you know, in the sort of period from World War II to present, made something like the same leap from you know thatched huts to skyscrapers, you know, I mean the one that Derek and I used to live in. You know South Korea is like a is a sort of pretty obvious case in point. So there are certainly unambiguously capitalist examples of this. But if you want to say, okay, certainly, like Dengis, china made particularly rapid advances in this regard and there are real things that can be learned from just how quickly, just how quickly and just how impressively and just what a large scale they did this. I'd say you know fair enough on all of that.

Ben Burgis: 46:18

But I would just point out that in classical Marxist terms, this is very much not right. What the historical mission of socialism was supposed to be right, that this is what the historical mission of capitalism was supposed to be right, that this is what the historical mission of capitalism was supposed to be, is developmentalism right. The historical mission of socialism was supposed to be, you know, taking hold of the productive machinery that had been created by, you know by capitalism, and you know using that to create something more democratic and egalitarian going forward. So I think it is. I would just say, of course one could say Marx is wrong. God knows, he got stuff wrong. But I think I guess on my end I'm often frustrated that there isn't more grappling with what a sort of fundamental rethinking of the classic materialist picture this would be can I?

Conrad Hamilton: 47:15

can I jump back on that quick before you go?

Conrad Hamilton: 47:16

ahead yeah, yeah, um. So I think actually it's funny, right, because ben ben sort of stresses here the um, you know, critiques of his critique of the opposition to productivism, um, which in his account, you know, would be akin to throwing out the basic categories of Marxism. And I think, you know, I agree with him about a lot of that. You know, and this probably tells you a lot about why we have a good baseline for debate within the book because, in spite of certain disagreements, I think we maybe share this kind of norm, core Marxist impulse I don't know how to classify that think we maybe share this kind of norm, core Marxist impulse. I don't know how to classify that, you know. But again, like you know, even I mean I think that I would just stress a few things you know which might be more like accents on this discussion. Yes, we can talk about other states that have been successful, but, you know, I think that there's a sense in which the exception proves the rule.

Conrad Hamilton: 48:12

Within the non-Western world, the only states that have accomplished, you know, poverty alleviation and infrastructure construction at that scale, you know, in population level, were the USSR and China. I think, when you tend to look at other examples, what you're going to find is that they're usually conditions which are somewhat exceptional or extraneous that inform them. So we could talk about, you know, the privileged access to petrol right in the Gulf states as well as the subsequent cartelization that was pursued. That did a lot to enrich those nations as well as generate recession in the United States, which is a good index of how important it was to the US economy to have access to cheap resources.

Conrad Hamilton: 48:51

You know, if you look at a place like Korea actually if you read Chuang, you know we talk about, you know, from kind of an ultra left standpoint. They talk about the history of China. One point they make is like how totally contrived, in a sense, the South Korean economy was because they received not only massive amounts of free technology transfer from the United States that China or the USSR were not receiving maybe the USSR briefly during World War II, but in general but they also they had also huge wheat shipments started for the last few decades the Soviet Union's existence and massive Western bank loads for the for the last couple decades its existence, you know so yeah, well, they did, they did get some things, but in terms of, like you know, in terms of technology transfer, um, you know this was it was there was massive uh transfers to south korea as well as japan, which partly explains the electronics economy that emerged there.

Conrad Hamilton: 49:47

um, as well as the fact that, um, you know, if, if you look at a place like South Korea, right, they didn't have like the same historical industrial base which in many ways, encouraged the shift towards an electronics-driven economy, but also, like you know, the level of, you know, the contracts that were given to companies, you know, based in Korea were incredible, you know, and the money that was pumped into it.

Conrad Hamilton: 50:09

So, if you look at the Vietnam War, incredible, you know, and the money that was pumped into it.

Conrad Hamilton: 50:14

So, if you look at the Vietnam War, you know, my understanding is that I have to double check the citation, but my understanding is that Korean soldiers, some of them, came to join the Americans and they were paid basically the same scale as American soldiers, which is something like 20 or 30 times the average salary in Korea at that time, and, in addition, korean companies were getting a lot of the most extensive and valuable contracts to do works associated with the war. So this was just one example. But I mean, there's a huge amount of Western support and this is like what I kind of you know. So I want to go a little bit further than the way Ben's putting it, because I don't think it's just something where it's like you know, well, you know, different countries developed. These ones did an okay job. Okay, I think it's that if you look at the world system as a whole and you set aside things which you know would be clear exceptions for one reason or another, what you're going to find is so.

Ben Burgis: 50:59

Similarly, for example, we're going to set aside Cuba because it got was propped up by so much Soviet aid. You know for, for, like most of the time, you know, for the first few decades after the revolution.

Conrad Hamilton: 51:08

Well, I'm not, by the way, I'm not talking about, you know, autonomy as some kind of heuristic principle here, right, no, no?

Ben Burgis: 51:16

but I'm just sort of, I guess I'm just asking for consistent standards, right, because it's like it's true, true enough, right, that in any case, if you zoom in enough about the details of the case, you'll find like exceptional or particular local conditions that are going to play an exception. You know they're going to play some kind of role and I'm not objecting to sort of zooming in on those details in these cases, but I just want to do it in every case, right, that they have it's not like you know. So if you say, okay, well, you know South Korea and Japan didn't have, you know, built up you know, previous industrial bases, so that helps explain why the electronics revolution took hold here, et cetera, it's like okay, but like, at that point I think, when you start looking at, you know it's China, right, it's like what? There's like nothing about local Chinese conditions that plays any sort of role in explaining like any of its successes. It was all just sort of you know, it all just popped out of like essential features of the system. Yeah, Now.

Conrad Hamilton: 52:16

Conrad is frozen.

Ben Burgis: 52:18

Oh no.

Conrad Hamilton: 52:19

You got me. Yeah, the issue is not about expecting that every country is going to develop in some kind of you know, a target, gratamized way. Rather, my point in making this is just to say that you know, within what we would term like the general or kind of, you know, imperialist world system, there was a failure to generalize, you know even the conditions of, you know, basic infrastructure, education, etc. Etc. And that was not the case within the socialist bloc. So the point is to say that when we talk about that world system right, if we talk about a place like South Korea that experienced a high level of prosperity, if we talk about, I mean, japan has its own history, we could give different examples or the Gulf states, that these function as exceptions within it, whereas within the socialist bloc, what we saw is that, you know, a certain level of material provision became more the norm.

Conrad Hamilton: 53:10

But but I want to, we could, we could, we could hash that out back and forth, but what I want to you know, continue and just say is that I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying. I think you go a little bit far when you say you know it's interesting when you say socialism is about, you know, collectively owning the means of production and pursuing democratic changes. Because of course, you know, even in the less developed context of Russia or China, we could point to a lot of things which you know seem to fit that mandate, right you know, whether it's exhaustive overhauls of the legal system. To you know, legalize abortion, orive overhauls of the legal system to you know, legalize abortion, or make divorce legal, or create widespread child care, just to talk about the gender issue right. Or reforms, to you know, ethnic and religious policies, blah blah. So there was a control of the means of production and there was a democratizing dimension.

Ben Burgis: 53:56

But again, even Although those are interesting examples because, like a couple of the ones that you just mentioned, were actually reversed in the Stalin period- the abortion one you're talking about.

Conrad Hamilton: 54:05

yeah, yeah yeah.

Ben Burgis: 54:07

And you know, in general there's gender-related stuff that got much more reactionary there, like homosexuality, for example.

Conrad Hamilton: 54:15

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, and that's like you know. Know, I mean, that's um, but it is important to remember, right, that you know, particularly prior to you know, because we have sometimes that this image of socialist states is being very retrograde in this respect. Um, you know, and on one hand, uh, that would not have had any much purchase in like a pre-1960s, 1970s, you know, kind of liberal capitalist or modern liberal capitalist kind of framework. But also, you know, sometimes we ignore certain aspects of the equation. We discussed this.

Conrad Hamilton: 54:48

So I think the highest rate of women's workplace participation in the entire world today is not Sweden or America, it's actually Albania, right, and this has so much to do with the fact that in the socialist period, like if you're a woman and you got good grades and you were like, no, I want to be a psychologist or I want to be a teacher, they'd be like, no, you're going to be an engineer. And then, within a couple of generations, women wanted to do that more. So there are aspects of that that aren't discussed enough, but all I meant is that, you know, accepting the limitations that Benz puts forth, there was a horizon and a limitation.

Ben Burgis: 55:22

Sure, the claim is that it's impossible for collective ownership of the means of production to exist in the absence of a high-level development right. I mean nobody, I mean even Marx in the 19th century, isn't claiming that right. If you look at the sort of debates that he's having with, like, carl Heinzen, and you know the 1840s and 50s, and you know he, like he'll say things like well, if the proletariat were to be victorious under these conditions, it wouldn't last, right? I mean, that's his claim, right? So it's not that? You know, collective ownership is impossible at a low level of development. Instead, the historical materialist prediction is that collective ownership isn't going to lead to a flourish in socialism and thus is not going to edge out.

Ben Burgis: 56:09

Capitalism is ultimately going to collapse into something worse, which know which? Which? Which is, seems to me, is is, you know, I mean in different ways and to different degrees, in different contexts. But I mean like, if you want to look, view from 10 000 feet, I mean like, like, what's the story of actually existing socialism in the 21st century, the 20th century, right? I mean that's's the story, right.

Ben Burgis: 56:35

And within a single human lifetime, right From from from 1917 to 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, all the people's democracies in Eastern Europe collapsed that was previously noted at the expense of uh, of of becoming, you know, of, of sort of reintroducing many capitalist features to uh, to, to to its economy. And you know by by some metrics, and then you know for um, you know, by some conventional ways of thinking about this actually being less socialist, right, you know, than than some of the most advanced uh social democracies etc. Right? So it's like it seems like the overall, the overall trajectory of all of this is that, you know, is that the, this the sort of experiment and in implementing collective ownership without the material conditions being there, you know, by and large, I mean like the story of the 20th century is is not a happy one.

Conrad Hamilton: 57:37

I mean, capitalism won one big so, so, my, my only thing is that, without denying what you're saying, the thing is that failure would have two different criteria we could apply to it right, and one would be did it realize this kind of, you know, um, uh, did it achieve kind of the socialism of the 23rd century, you know? Did it bring about, uh, or just the continued existence of?

Ben Burgis: 57:58

collective ownership of the socialism of the 23rd century, you know, did it bring about, uh? Or just the continued existence of collective ownership of the means of production? Right, Like, like, like. Continued existence within already achieved forgets, 23rd century.

Conrad Hamilton: 58:08

Right, uh, like. So, this, this is, this is one angle we could see it through, you know. Another angle is, you know, did it succeed to a far greater degree, you know, um, or were those people better off than it would have been, you know, it, had that not happened? Right, um, you know, and I think that you know, if we're really talking about the terrain of political reality, right, you know, that is the most pertinent discussion we could have, right, you know, uh, and if we look at that, um, you know, I think there's absolutely no doubt, um, you know, when we look at the developmental gains. So the question really is, would it make more sense to say, okay, let's just participate in this?

Conrad Hamilton: 58:41

You know, imperialist world system that, you know, isn't doing much at all for us, right, is relentlessly exploiting us, or should we, you know, take the chance, right, adopting a system that may be premature, right, or that cannot be realized in this exact moment, right, but that in which we're nevertheless beginning to furnish the conditions, right, through which a possible break could be made in the future in which we are? There are elements of this control of the means of production, implementing democratic changes and so forth, you know, and even if you look at China. It's interesting in this way, right, because you know, of course we can talk about the success of the Deng era. People don't often as much mention that the rates of growth seen in Mao's China were the highest in history, right Prior to when they went even higher before you know, or that you know if you look at the market changes, the shift to service and light industry that India did in the 1980s, it wasn't so different than what China did, which raises the question of why did they succeed? And a lot of it has to do.

Conrad Hamilton: 59:43

I think the major factor is that there were preconditions single general, unified language, right, much better infrastructure, education and so forth that allowed that to succeed. But the point is that you know, whatever regressions we can talk about, it's still something that has a tremendous but we positive effect. You know, of course, it's still something that has a tremendously positive effect. Of course China is like half publicly owned the economy, but it's still something that has a tremendous positive effect, not just at the level of public ownership of certain resources which are then made accessible to people you can look at transit here, all kinds of things but also in terms of forms. You know, forms of protectionism that continue to be necessary for China to ascend within a global context.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:00:24

Right, so you know we could discuss, like you know, the moral dimensions of, like, the firewall in China, but what's also very clear about it is that part of the goal of setting it up was to avoid a situation where you had Western firms coming in and basically monopolizing the online space. You know, profiting from that right and not creating the capacity for Chinese firms to develop, but also doing things like taking all the data right, which would turn out to be very important from Chinese users, gaining the capacity to tamper in China's political system, and so forth. Right, so you know, there's a really powerful legacy in terms of the political structure, which was great. So I don't I don't fundamentally disagree with Ben's hypothesis, I just think it's a question of accent, and I think these are, you know, whatever the failures, I think these are also remarkable achievements that are at the root of any success that people have been experiencing in these regions.

Ben Burgis: 1:01:17

I certainly wouldn't deny the existence of successes and or or even in some cases, unique successes, like, like I said, I think that, especially with the speed and scale of Chinese development, I I would question like, actually, maybe this is like sort of clearest to phrase as an actual question, right For you? Right, I mean an actual question for you. When you say that there's sort of no doubt about material improvements, I think that is true in some of these countries. I think that's plausible in some of the national cases. I think that's plausible in some of the national cases. But does it give you pause in making that assessment that by the end of these systems, in so many of these countries, so clearly, there was just very little significant social base for keeping them, that the they have a that like the that the populations had soured on them so completely and and you know, and, and in many, you know, and in many national cases I mean really so like so manifestly celebrated their fall, or you know, we're and and that that even now, right, In a lot of these countries, I mean you know not all, I mean we can't generalize too much, but I mean like even now, right that there's so little constituency, right for going back to the kind of planned economy that they had in any sort of certainly any short-term timescale.

Ben Burgis: 1:03:09

And, like a lot of these places, it does seem like, if we're just going to look at popular attitudes and maybe that's not the same question that you're raising, right, if we're just going to look at popular attitudes and maybe that's not the same question that you're you're raising right, maybe maybe, like you know, maybe popular attitudes don't reflect objective improvements, but like that, at least in some of these countries, I mean, the very idea of socialism has has been discredited, probably for several generations at minimum, right, you know, because of these experiences. I mean, does that give you any pause in making this assessment?

Conrad Hamilton: 1:03:40

Well, I mean, it gets you know when it comes, like in China, it it's never collapsed. And you know, if you look at, I think Harvard did a study right and they found that, you know, it was like 88% of people express, you know, uh, strong satisfaction or general satisfaction, um, you know, with the character of government. Now we could, we could dig into the details. So that was a vetted study. We could dig into the details surrounding that right. Like you know, greater control of media obviously is going to change what people see, um, and so on, so forth.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:04:13

But you know, if we're trying to assess this in a broader way, I mean, it's like you know, there was always a certain difficulty surrounding the legitimacy of socialism in Central Europe because of the way that it kind of been implemented by fiat, with the movement of the Red Army there. If we look at other territories though not all of them, I mean my understanding is that even in East Germany there was a pretty strong public support, but the problem, because of successful reforms that have been implemented in the 80s, but the problem was that, you know, it just became quickly impossible, also because parts of the border were opening up, and you know. But you know, if you look at, you know the Soviet Union itself.

Ben Burgis: 1:04:50

You know I mean, although just real quick. I mean, I just looked this up when they did the referendum on German unification in 1990, it looks like it was well over three to one in East Germany.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:05:07

Everybody understood. Nothing else was possible. By that point. There wasn't any other serious pathway.

Ben Burgis: 1:05:11

Okay, but the fact that nothing else was possible is not unrelated to the fact that the over-reported the population. What happened?

Conrad Hamilton: 1:05:20

My point was just that I said even in Germany there was a problem of legitimacy. I said that it appeared that at different points the East German government did have a high degree of organic support.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:05:29

It might be worth noting in that respect. But if you look at the more organic, you know, or the territories of the USSR, what we find is that you know, you know that the referendums over, over maintaining it, you're getting things like, you know, 70% of people saying yes, we do want to keep it. And that's actually really interesting as well, because a lot of the territories that they're serving, you know, were had their history with Russia right, began with, you know, sort of their colonization by Russia before they were folded into the USSR, right, and that's extremely stark when we take into consider, like when we add that dimension to it. So if you look at somewhere like you know, algeria, where I think 99% of Algerians voted to leave France immediately, right in the 1960s, and then you look at a situation where you have, you know, some republic in the caucuses that you know has a not totally disanalogous history, saying, well, 70% want to remain within the USSR, it speaks to the drastic discrepancy in that.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:06:26

But you know I mean I know in Albania they had they, they socialism fell and then they had the first election and the Albanian Communist Party won and international observers were like, yeah, it's a legitimate'm not sure.

Ben Burgis: 1:06:38

I'm not sure which which country in the caucus you're thinking of? I know in like georgia, for example. Uh, the independence referendum was approved by 99.5 percent of voters. Right voted for independence for the soviet union, uh 1991, one second, let me pull it up here.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:06:55

Do we have? Uh? One second, let me pull it up here. Do we have? So wait, 73%.

Ben Burgis: 1:07:06

In what country?

Conrad Hamilton: 1:07:09

This is the question Do you consider necessary the preservation of USSR? 73% in Russia. We'll see here Ukraine, 71%, belarus, 83% Azerbaijan, 94% Kazakhstan.

Ben Burgis: 1:07:27

This is a poll that's taken at some point like several years before the fall of the Soviet Union.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:07:31

It was a 1991 referendum. Do you consider necessary the preservation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a renewed federation of equal sovereign republics in which the rights and freedoms of an individual of any ethnicity will be fully guaranteed? Uh, yeah, so.

Ben Burgis: 1:07:46

And then we have here, we have 94 all of those places very quickly after it voted overwhelmingly for independence referendums did they vote for independence?

Conrad Hamilton: 1:07:55

reference 94 percent. Nazaraijan. Generally, if you actually, if you talk to people in this region, the collapse of the USSR is not considered a democratic phenomenon, right, it's considered a political phenomenon that was thrust on people Like new states are being created without a high level of democratic consultation, but I don't think there's any doubt, right, when it comes to the places we're talking about, right, you know, uzbekistan, turkmenia. So Azerbaijan 95% in Kazakhstan right. You know, uzbekistan, turkmenia, so, so so Azerbaijan 95% in Kazakhstan right.

Ben Burgis: 1:08:20

Yeah, azerbaijan, which you just mentioned, in December 1991, approved independence for the Soviet Union by a referendum of 99.8% Azerbaijan.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:08:35

Yeah, I mean we have to, we have to. I don't think we have the time here to run through like a comparative study of polls.

Ben Burgis: 1:08:40

Well, no, but I'm talking about the actual official independence vote.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:08:46

Well, this was an official referendum, right.

Ben Burgis: 1:08:49

Sure. So there was this referendum before statehood. I mean my understanding, if you read, like Vladimir Zuboff's book Collapse. It's a really thorough book about this that came out a year or two ago. I recommend it to everybody. My understanding.

Ben Burgis: 1:09:12

What I can remember from that book is, I think what you're talking about is, before there were any serious moves at independence in any of these places, right, there was, you know, as a result of, you know, perestroika and all that, right, the internal reform process. There was this like move towards okay, we're going to have a new Soviet constitution that's going to be much more liberal. And there was this, you know, plebiscite on supporting that. Right, it's like, oh, do you want the Soviet Union to continue to exist and we'll have this nice, new, much more liberalized constitution that's with much more national autonomy? And when those were understood as the options, sure, that won overwhelmingly everywhere, right, but then the political situation changed rapidly and, yeah, I think all of these places as far as I know maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think all the former Soviet republics had independence votes when they declared independence.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:10:10

Yeah, so the Azerbaijani independence referendum you're talking about, it actually was held three days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I mean so you know, if it's a little bit loaded to say, you know, okay, well, we're going to improve things from here on out. It's also potentially, you know, loaded to ask people if they want to leave, as a whole system is dramatically imploding in front of them.

Ben Burgis: 1:10:29

Sure, I, mean it happened quickly enough that, like I think some of the votes were before, you know, the Soviet Union had dissolved itself and then eventually just kind of imploded. And you know, I mean I take your point right that it's like sure, at that point, what are you going to do? But like I also think that if you know, if you get like 99.5 or 99.8% of the population in these places and I've never heard anybody claim that these were fixed, maybe they were Like I said's, that's not a claim I've ever heard anybody made before but like you know, if you have these like crushingly overwhelming numbers saying yeah, like that seems to me hard to square with the idea that there was a significant percentage of the population of these places that were like no, no, no, what are we doing?

Conrad Hamilton: 1:11:17

we want the soviet union back yeah, we see, we see crushingly overwhelming numbers on the other side. I mean 95 percent.

Ben Burgis: 1:11:24

Keep kazakhstan 95. When you're saying keep, what you mean is this vote that like, at that point, nobody, you know there was no, there was no like movement toward. You know they're like there was no, uh, like independence wasn't anything anybody thought was on the table. It was like the real issue was about this liberalizing constitution and saying, okay, do you want to keep the Soviet Union going and have this? And sure, of course that was. You know, yes, that was overwhelmingly, but I think it was even more overwhelming when it was starting to break up.

Ben Burgis: 1:11:54

You had all the like, all these, I mean, granted, you can say a lot of that is less about, you know, less reflective one way or the other of how people feel about the economic system than it is about the sort of patriotic fervor of like nationalism in these emerging, you know, states. But, um, but you know it's, it's not. I I don't really think that how people vote in the sort of gorbachev referendum, you know, should you know, should you know? Should we keep this going with the greatly liberalized constitution that we're working on, like I don't think that's like counter evidence for how people voted.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:12:29

We could also look at polls they've done since, where you ask people, like you know, and this is interesting they'll ask people do you want socialism back? And you have a lot of these countries where it's like 70% of people saying this, you know, and it's cross-generational to some extent. I mean, I think even in Poland it was like 50% saying this, a country we really associate, you know, with you know a fervid anti kind of Soviet reaction.

Ben Burgis: 1:12:51

Yeah, I mean certainly the left parties in Poland do terribly right. I mean like, like, like it's. The political spectrum, I mean, like you know, it goes from like the neoliberal center to the hard right, right, so it's like the it's. I guess I'm politely skeptical of what the constituency is for neo-Stalinism in Poland.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:13:16

Yeah, it's kind of funny that people would not vote for left-wing parties but then say we won. But anyway, maybe we should keep the discussion moving because I don't want to get stalled on this for too long.

C. Derick Varn: 1:13:26

Yeah, ernesto, we. You speak a lot about Samir Amin and the Non-Aligned Movement and Samir Amin's kind of world systems version of I'm going to put it in quotation marks here third worldism, because one of the things I find frustrating about talking about third worldism is there's like 10 different forms of it that have radically different claims for how it works and what is going on and who we should side with. Um. So, for example, um amin was famously skeptical of the of the brotherhood in egypt. Um and and in 2011, um, a lot of other third worldists were not Um and uh. I mean would find um, the idea that there's no exploitation of the uh first world proletariat to be a ridiculous claim. I mean, he would just throw that out categorically. Um, particularly when it talks about general polarization. Uh and uh the the end of the 20th, beginning of the 21st century. Why did Amin play as such a key figure as an answer to the kind of socialism you were critiquing in Mexico?

Ernesto Vargas: 1:15:16

Well, the prime culprit, I guess I would say, of the collapse of any sort of Mexican, I want to say Marxism, because Marxism in Mexico's history has always been on the margins. I mean, I can't really say that without taking into account the fact that a lot of the most famous public buildings in Mexico have socialist murals, right, like that's, culturally at least, it's been deeply embedded. But there's a lot of characteristics of Mexico that kind of make it an interesting case study for this question. And the fact is that Mexico's government, the government that we have to deal with conceptually, I guess, is a government built on a popular revolution, and well, there's a lot to say about that. But I don't want to get too into the weeds about Mexican history in particular. But the fact of the matter is that any kind of actual Marxist, radical anarchist, whatever you want to say, radical anarchist, whatever you want to say uh, movement in uh, okay, perfect, uh, movement in mexico was uh quickly shut down by overwhelming force from not just the state, because so the state pretty much dissolved, right, porfirio diaz, uh, was chased out of the country, and you had a period of civil war, and some guy gets elected, president Francisco Ignacio Madero, and he gets murdered and so on and so forth. Right, it's very similar to the American Revolutionary period back in the day, but the thing is that there is a latent Marxist thought across the movement and it comes to a head with Cárdenas, right, and Cárdenas starts this land redistribution policy. Land redistribution policy. So today 42% of Mexican territory is communally owned right, so 42% of the country belongs to about 3 million people and they own it with their families. They live as peasants for a vote, and this sector of the population has been, I guess, key in a lot of the political developments of the country.

Ernesto Vargas: 1:17:51

But to summarize, the big thing is financial capital. That's the big thing we have to look at in terms of Mexico, because Mexico had its particularities that allowed it to develop its productive capacities, it had its national economy, so on and so forth. But what really changed is that the banks, international banking, started to meddle with the Mexican financial institutions and Mexico. Well, because it didn't have a solid protectionist state like actual, because it was a protectionist state but that withered right and a lot of public-owned businesses were sold out. And again, the important thing is the money, the banks, because the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, they come to Mexico and they loan us money.

Ernesto Vargas: 1:19:01

And well, germany had this great incident right of the loan forgiveness and in fact Mexico actually had a loan forgave back in the 40s I think, after it stabilized its government. After it stabilized its government, we actually got a massive 97% or 96% of a loan forgiven. Mexican national development, without realizing how much of it, was conditioned by the fact that it just had to pay off debt. It paid off so much debt and in the middle of that you had the massive capital flight, so other countries with better prospects for revenue were absorbing all of the money. And the little fact that Mexico is just another country in a whole monetary system that moves from place to place and we have to be cracking that. Not what a specific country legislated legislated.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:20:40

And can I just jump in, Ernesto? You link up the failure of the ultimate dependency on debt with the failure of the decline of the import substitution policies of the Cardenas period right, and the failure to generate organic working costs. Is that correct?

Ernesto Vargas: 1:20:54

Well, yeah, because Mexico. The wages stagnated in Mexico big time for like 15 years, which happened again, by the way. I don't really go into that in my essay. Maybe I should have, but the modern period is, to quote Ben it's just a repetition of the past. This whole entry of AMLO and the continuity to the Shanebaum has been a retreading of those steps. Thankfully we've taken a slightly different position, but you can see that that if the if the people don't organize around unions and they don't organize across borders, we're just going to get sidelined by international capital again and again and to be clear too, because I I helped out a little bit with this part because I have, yeah, contributions uh to the essay.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:21:52

But to be clear, um, I think the framing with respect to amin uh has to do with the fact that, um, you know, uh, if you look at sort of the division that he makes between um core and and periphery, I a lot of what was going on in the debate between Matt and I. The implicit models that were being juxtaposed right were sort of social democracy in the West versus you know what we call actually existing socialism of the type that Ben and I were also debating. But you have all kinds of states that didn't fall into that binary, right, you know, and of course Amin was very active in these. But you know, talking about the non-aligned movement in particular, which mexico never technically part of right, um, so it did maintain a close relationship with those countries, which I think that's part of the joke we make early on uh in ernesto's essay, uh, mexico's I mean, in a certain sense I mean moreno is like one of the.

Ben Burgis: 1:22:57

I mean, you know, whatever you, however, you want to classify it politically, right, you know it's like a sort of mild social democracy or whatever you want to call it right, like uh, democracy or whatever you want to call it right. Like uh, let's just say left reformist right, like they have a like mexico today and some in certain respects is one of the most like moreno, is like one of the most successful left reformist parties in the world today like I mean that, like like last year, all of the people doing cope for, for kamala losing, you know, losing, we're like, oh see, incumbents, you know, have have just been swept away everywhere in the world.

Ben Burgis: 1:23:30

It's this global thing. There's nothing you can do about it.

Ernesto Vargas: 1:23:33

And it's like well.

Ben Burgis: 1:23:34

Except right across the border, exactly.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:23:41

I think it speaks to the way that in a certain sense it's interesting because in Latin America we've seen the failure of socialism to congeal. In a certain sense it's interesting because in Latin America we've seen, you know, the failure of socialism to congeal. You know, in a kind of broad, territorial way, akin to what we saw in, you know, russia or China, I mean, all kinds of regimes have been destroyed or collapsed through, in some cases, their own mismanagement policies, their own mismanagement policies. But I do think it's really interesting if you look at the way that you know, with the kind of new pink tide, if you will, you know, if you look at the way that populism has been manifesting within Latin America, because it very often takes on a kind of left reformist form. And I think that that tells you a lot about the way that you know, because, like, who is? Like, the most iconic, you know, visage in all of Latin America is Che Guevara, right, probably Right.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:24:34

So I think what is instructive with respect to is that you know, even amidst those failures, you know there was a kind of cultural integrality acquired by socialism, you know, that is allowing it to function as a form of populism, um, in a more effective way, uh, than certain territories in the West. I mean, you see, for obvious reasons, reasons that are, I think, even much more obvious Um, you see this in China, where you know the form of populism right, um always takes the form of um, you know, perhaps some kind of confused, but nevertheless returned to the original ethos of Mao. So I think it's the way really interesting, the way that populism, you know the kind of mythical histories that it evokes, right, or the kind of cultural imaginaries that appeal and how that can influence the progression of politics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:23

We've been going for about an hour and a half and actually I have like four major things I want to open up, but we have another panel coming up for this. I actually I'm just gonna tell you guys I'm becoming contacting you all in smaller batches to further develop some of the comments that came up today. Uh, not that I was intending to turn this into a long series, but I actually think there's no way not to um, so, um, uh, because I want to get into specifics on all this. So I'll be reaching out to you guys individually to talk more about this, and maybe we might even set up a debate between Conrad and Ben, actually, so you guys can hash it out and prepare. Yeah, you did, but you didn't finish. So, in fact, you wrote a book about it.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:26:06

We never finish. It's a never-ending debate. Hopefully we'll be. Hopefully we'll be like in our respective retirement homes.

Ben Burgis: 1:26:12

Yeah, Although I guess sorry, I guess this is off topic, but I've really been. I also feel like I'm at a disadvantage here because I am, because the Conrad right now is giving me severe nicotine pangs. I really want to.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:28

This was a strategy, you know, I knew, because the Conrad right now is giving me severe nicotine pangs. I really want to see this was a strategy you know, I knew.

Ben Burgis: 1:26:39

But yeah, because I do think, going into the situation in Mexico will actually take a while.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:43

And we haven't even really got to the contention between Ben and Ernesto, although I will admit that contention is more subtle than the contention between Conrad and Matt when I was actually reading the essays, you know Conrad and Matt are going directly for each other Well, mostly Conrad going directly for what he sees as Matt's humanistic, over claims and support for democratic socialism, whereas the debate around analytic socialism versus the critique of bourgeois socialism in Mexico is a much more subtle debate in a lot of ways and it's indirect in its examples. But I hope this gets people interested in the book because I find these debates to be both eternal, as we've commented on a lot, but also evolving. They do change and you know, another thing we could have easily done is I could get four kinds of Maoists in the room and ask them about how they feel about 1982 and see how that goes, and I am sure that that would be an interested in as spirited as anything between Ben and Conrad.

Ben Burgis: 1:28:12

I should also say that that this you know this ended up being on the more contentious side, but if you go back, the real heads will do right. If you go back and look at the complete history of Ben Conrad interactions on this topic, that that also had discussions about China framed differently, where we have agreed about some of the sort of positive lessons that you can learn from what has worked there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:28:45

Yeah, yeah, from what has worked there?

Conrad Hamilton: 1:28:49

Yeah, I want to add that they're very I mean in the Bobby's skeptical the continuance of the politics of what I term the Jacobin line, which is maybe a little bit misleading because the DSA itself is quite fraught in terms of its internal elections and everything. But you know, I'm a little bit. I'm a bit skeptical about that. And I'm skeptical about it not because of some a priori aversion to coalition or working with the Democratic Party, but because I feel that, you know, there's been a consistent unwillingness to make real compromises, uh, with socialists. Uh, that would warrant, you know, um, providing continual support, especially when we look at things like what, uh, the democrat position toward, uh, israel was uh and so forth, uh. But you know, and I suppose I'm I'm more, I'm also skeptical in general of the idea that you could have really have some kind of parliamentarist framework through which socialism could come to power and maintain it without, you know, functioning in a more martial way. You know, we can look at the example of something like Allende in Chile, you know, in terms of not taking control of the military and how that ended up. And I think you'd probably see a very similar thing in the United States if you didn't, you know, have more aggressive processes in that way. But one thing I will say about it is that I think that you know, I'm very aware, when you look at history, it's not it's not to reject this entire historical sequence. I'm very aware, when you look at history, you know and we could talk about Russia, and you know the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, or we could talk about, you know, the Chinese communists coming out of the Chinese nationalists that you know, even if you want to incubate a more radical movement, you know, in a way, it's necessary to build a movement that might not be as extreme, you know, and that radical movement only gained credibility once that first effort kind of fails.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:30:53

So I think that Frederick Jameson says this at some point. He says that you know we need to support social democracy, you know, if for no other reason than because its failure is the essential condition for the creation of any, you know, kind of more truly revolutionary politics. Right, and that's something we talk about it and we can say, well, this isn't going to work. But I think it's something that people have to go through and experience, and I think that there's been some steps to having that experience in the United States. And you know, even if people haven't conquered political power. I think there's been a lot more media visibility, there's been a lot more discourse. I think we can see that there's a generation of left-wing intellectuals who've emerged out of that. So I don't necessarily see though we do have different positions I don't necessarily see them as completely antithetical in that aspect, and I think this is true more generally. You know, like we were talking about China, I think actually there's a lot that we agree on, which is why we're able to discuss these things ultimately, yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:31:49

The most contentious but most meaningful debates are between people who you agree with about 80% of the way. So you know, I would love to go into all these in more detail, and we will actually. I think this is actually great fruit for that, so we will. You will be seeing these faces again, you guys. Fruit for that, um, so we will. Uh, you will be seeing these faces again.

C. Derick Varn: 1:32:12

You guys already know Ben. He's been on here twice before. Um and I'm on. I'm talking to him at TIR, like usually about twice a month sometimes, um, but, uh, ernesto and Conrad, I will see you guys again. If you were interested, I'll be in contact about that, and we will also shortly be airing the Matt and Daniel Tutts discussions on this contributed an introduction and Matt, of course, was in debate with Conrad Um, so if you come back to this channel, you will see more about the book and Matt can make his case and Daniel can talk about what it was like to write an introduction and adjudicate between you uh, contentious lot, um and uh, then we will probably be talking to you guys individually. So thank you so much for coming on. Check out the book from Ebel Press. You can find a link in the show notes and I mean Ben is everywhere kind of infamously, and I mean that may have been why this book got in trouble. And Conrad and Ernesto, where can people find your work if they're interested?

Ernesto Vargas: 1:33:36

I'm streaming on Twitch lately if people want to catch me there. The channel is called Marksicans TV.

Conrad Hamilton: 1:33:46

Okay, yeah, I mean you can just Google me. I think if you Google me, like my CV will come up, which is on academiaedu and that's like a you know probably unnecessarily comprehensive list of you know just about everything I've ever written within the left context. So, for those who wish to dedicate a scholarly project, for those non-existent persons that wish to pursue a scholarly project, for those non-existent persons that wish to pursue a scholarly project, that would be the way to do it thank you guys so much.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:15

Check out the book and hopefully this debate will continue and earn us in a good faith. Take care, thank you bye.