WW3| High IQ Interview

So if you don't know recently

Florida man with the 20.

What's up, Florida man?

Vaquero with the one.

What's up, bro?

Abe, what's going on, Abe, with the five?

What the hell, man?

Gerald with the one.

What's up, bro?

Uh so a lot of y'all must be wondering what did y'all do to earn oh shit.

It's just like it's always happening.

A lot of y'all might be wondering: what did we do to earn?

Such a beautiful timing for our stream.

Why am I dressed this way?

Many questions.

First of all, I have to be doing an interview with Tony One Dime, who's going to have me on his show.

Autistic, what's up, bro?

So that's the main reason.

And the second thing, ch hey, what's up, Chavenista, what's up bro?

The main thing

Is that uh

Yeah, well we scheduled the interview to be six, so that's why we're here.

But also, it's because you guys reached the goal.

I didn't have to stream this.

I'm streaming it this early because you guys reached the fucking goal.

Keep doing that.

We'll keep having these fucking streams earlier than usual, right?

Lennon Dubois, what's up, bro?

Now, you might be asking, why am I dressed this way?

Because it looks based.

Yo, human.

What's because I look like a white Nation of Islam member?

That's why.

Because.

Or maybe not a white one, a brown one.

Um.

Also because, you know.

It just looks based.

I don't want to say cosmic woods.

I needed to wear a hat today and I didn't want to look like a propagandist because this is going to be a high IQ, big brain interview.

This guy's pretty smart.

And you know we're going to have some more intellectual, philosophical type of conversations.

So you know it is what it is.

But uh

Yeah, you know, I mean, I got the shirt tucked in.

Kami, what's up with the five?

What's up?

And uh, I don't know, I feel like I'm looking pretty based, I'm looking pretty wide.

You know, a lot of people don't appreciate how wide I am.

That's why sometimes when people have AI make AI versions of me, I'm not shaped the way I'm shaped.

I don't, you don't have that upside-down triangle that I am, you know, because the AI usually doesn't, because the way I wear my shirts, whatever.

So I just felt like you know.

I need to do justice for myself because these AI versions of me are not inaccurate represents.

They make me look like a kebab stand owner.

I'm not a kebab stand owner.

I'm a warrior.

You understand?

And I'm a part of the new white nation of Islam.

Just kidding, it's a joke.

Anyway, guys, we are.

Where do I get these clothes?

It's just you can wear any.

I have these.

I've always had these.

I had these clothes for years.

But the way I design my fashion, setting new fashion trends, you see, I look pretty based.

You know what I mean?

I look like.

What the fuck am I doing?

Let's get right into the interview.

Why am I stalling for this shit?

You know what I mean?

Type of stupid ass shit that I'm doing.

Anyway, guys, let's get right into the interview 'cause he's waiting and I've been stalling doing dumb shit like this.

All right.

So

Let's first of all set this up correctly.

Hold on.

Alright, one second.

All right.

Yeah, to do this.

Alright.

Wonderful.

Are we doing Crown Saldine?

What's up, bro?

How you doing?

Yeah.

So I I gave you some fair warning about the the hat situation.

It makes it more entertaining, I like that.

Yeah.

Any particular reason?

No, I I I no, I just today I didn't have time to really get ready and I needed to wear a hat and I only really have two.

And uh by the way, I'm live right now, if that's okay.

Just want to give you a heads up.

So you're live on infrared?

No, no, on kick.

Just on kick.

'Cause uh Thursdays is usually I do Tuesday, Thursday and Wednes uh Tuesday, Thursday.

And Sunday.

So I'm on cape right now.

That's fair.

Um, I'm gonna ask you, though, for when we do the back room.

Probably best not to be on live.

Is that after the interview?

Yeah, well, that's the exclusive part of the pod.

Yeah, yeah, I understand.

Understood.

Yeah, you know how it works.

People have to pay to get access.

No, no, yeah, totally understood.

Yeah, just let me know when that begins and I'll.

I'll cut things on my stream.

Will do, will do.

All right.

Well, we don't really need to waste more time.

We can just get into it.

For sure.

For sure.

Let me just check this message.

Give me a sec.

We're not gonna w wait, so d are you gonna engage with your chatters while you're not okay good really not.

Uh

Banger.

Alright, let's get it.

Can you hear me fine?

Uh yep.

Yep.

Welcome to One Dime Radio.

Today I'm here with a very, very controversial guest who was inevitably going to come on One Dime Radio.

It was just a matter of time.

You know, we've been talking for a little bit and there's been reply guys on every episode of One Dime Radio who've been saying, have Hazaldin on, have Hazaldin on.

And there's people who are probably also freaking out.

listening to this that I even had you on.

And, you know, my views on things and where I probably disagree with you, it's probably not going to be too hard to guess if people are familiar with my sub stack, which is where I publish my views.

But I notice the reasons I disagree with you probably are very different from the reasons a lot of the left disagrees with you.

But what I think is useful is whenever there's someone as controversial as yourself or the institution, the party you represent, the ACP, the American Communist Party, I think what's useful is to actually understand what they believe from their own words, you know, rather than just hearing things.

So I'll just start off.

You know, who are you and why are you so hated?

Because truly it is.

Uh it is fascinating to me how much people on Twitter go fucking nuts over you and uh your crew.

So, I think, first of all, Hazal Deen.

I'm the chairman of the American Communist Party and the host of the Infrared Show and the main streamer of the Infrared Movement, basically.

And I guess Twitter's changed a lot recently because, you know, X is different now.

But there's a strong energy and intensity with the infrared movement.

Like, right off the bat before the ACP, right?

And the infrared movement was kind of coming in, guns blazing, basically denouncing the entirety of the American left as fraudulent.

With some very heterodox ideas and takes about Marxism and about socialism and history.

People try to categorize us in all sorts of different ways.

You know, they they try to put us in a specific box, so to speak.

Whether that's the Nasbull one, which is the most recognizable one for most people, there's other interesting ones people make up, like the the LaRouche thing.

And, you know, I attended a conference with some of those people once, so that didn't help as far as.

That specific idea.

There's others who claim we're outright Nazis, just pretending to be communists.

Others claim we're feds directly, you know, working under Tulsi Gabbard.

And it all comes from the common denominator that we do not come from them, so to speak.

I mean, most of the people from the movement do come from left-wing backgrounds, but I did not consult the gatekeepers of the American left in order to, you know, develop a worldview.

And so, you know, they're just trying to like, where do these people come from?

What, where does this come from?

And the truth is, is that it came from a very honest reflection on the failures of the U.S.

left over the past few decades and for the entirety of my adult life, you know, where majority of my life I've been a leftist myself, right?

And, you know, I broke the mold, I guess, of the conventional established U.S.

left and decided that these were not really all that authoritative people that we have to just bow down to just because what?

I mean, what achievements do they have on their belt, so to speak, you know, that justifies that.

So, and then, you know, because there was a huge intensity of that movement, there's just a lot of energy.

I'm not saying it was huge, but there was just a lot of energy there, you know, intense energy.

You have disgruntled ex-members of the movement who take all that energy and use it to dedicate their lives to hating us forever, which is very typical of these sorts of things.

And if you, most of the

The animosity toward the ACP and myself and infrared, most of that actually comes from ex-members of the movement who were disgruntled, they had a disagreement, something, and they just dedicated their whole lives to trying to gatekeep us from the discourse.

So that's just kind of, I feel like that's why there's such an intensity, to be honest.

It's that, you know, we, it has a lot to do with the fact that gatekeepers feel insecure in our presence.

I mean, CPUSA, we wanted to revitalize the CPUSA years ago, and there were gatekeepers in the CPUSA who were worried about that.

You know, they were just calling us Nazbulls.

They didn't, there's a lot of things about the established left that we just kind of discarded and said, this is just kind of dumb.

You know, obviously the extreme woke stuff, which is now dead apparently, but uh it's living still somewhere in

I don't know, somewhere in uh N New York or Massachusetts or something, but

Mostly people have moved on from it.

But back then, it it was quite extreme, and we kind of laughed at it a lot.

And it was just their we we kind of jammed their radar as far as their ability to just map us on to something.

Like, are you are you are you even on the left?

Are you guys truly leftist?

Or are you some far-right Nazbull thing?

Are you feds or something?

Just this way we discombobulated the political mapping people use to just categorize who's who and who's on whose team.

So.

The controversy, yeah, I mean I can't blame anyone but myself for the controversy, if I'm being com completely honest, because infrared just launched as a declaration of war on all the established conventions of the US left.

Just like without any politicking, without any diplomacy, without any just like straight shot, just saying everybody's full of shit and just

Asserting a completely different path and line.

And you know, that it's not just like the typical pro NATO liberals, it's like uh in the ML gatekeeping sphere.

They were very b uh bothered by that as well.

They spent decades, you know, doing this LARP, and here we come completely avoiding any dip diplomacy and and you know, I don't know, we didn't pay tribute to them and uh just right off the bat, we were a force of disruption, which is why I think it's a lot it's easy for people to fedjacket us too, because they're like they're disrupting our whole operation, which is you know, very close.

I mean

Most 99% of people quit right before the revolution's about to happen, right before they're about to seize power.

And we disrupted them right before they were about to turn the USA into the chazz, but on a national scale.

They were just on the cusp of that.

And then Infrared launched and the feds, they sent us in, you know, like they saw BreadTube, they saw Vosh and they saw ContraPoints and they're like, send them in, ruin everything.

And that's why no one has healthcare or something.

Well, that's that's what I've noticed is you seem to get the most hate from other Communists.

Uh c I would probably guess because you're just competing on similar turf and because of the constituency for this sort of thing is rather small.

Uh which is another reason why I'm not too uh

I'm not I'd never been quite convinced of of the you know Marxist-Leninist communist path but

I think because of how fringe it is, the people who are most vicious with you guys are like other Marxist-Leninists or Trotskyite kind of groups who see you as like a threat to their success.

They would have recruited 12 more students if you guys weren't about.

And because I've noticed the reception that you guys have when you talk to people on the right, for instance, versus on the left, it's very different.

Because that is probably another reason you're controversial is you're willing to talk to people on the right.

I've actually heard some of your conversations with some pretty big figures, Sneeko, some other guy who's quite controversial, Shields.

I forget.

I remember back in the day, I still remember the Keith Woods debate.

I think you talked to Fuentes too, right?

Like before he was popping off.

Yeah, I didn't even, I really didn't know who he was all that much.

I just heard some things and I was invited to, I guess, I don't know, have a discussion with him.

I said, yeah, sure, why not?

And so if you watch it, actually, it's really interesting how he presented himself in that specific discussion.

You know, he was like, yeah, I'm basically, you know, we should have, you know, healthcare.

We should have these things.

You know, we do need to unite across racial lines.

I don't know.

It's just really interesting.

I recommend people go and watch that interview or whatever.

Yeah, I saw him say the opposite now, where he's like he's shitting on Tucker Carlson for night and you I've really you gotta go watch it.

It's like you would not believe it's even the same person.

Yeah, so I think that and I noticed the people who on the other side of the aisle, they they the thing that they're usually uh they have questions for you is like okay communism, communism, that's scary.

Whereas the people on the Marxist kind of I would say like the woke side of the left, they always they they always mention the nationalism.

They mention conservatism or or ways in which they might sensationalize those very words.

Like they might say, just say fascist or they might say as a kind of synonym for nationalism or patriotism, because I don't even think you guys even use the word nationalism.

You just said patriotism.

I'm not even really opposed to the word nationalism.

I wrote a thing called nationalist internationalism.

I think it depends on the content.

But anyways.

Conservatism, you know, you're often uh accused of being like super conservative.

Now I'll just say off the bat, uh before I let you like clarify what these things really mean to you, like what in what what sense is the word mega communism really relevant?

And what is patriotism?

What does conservatism mean to you?

But I'll just first say that

With um

Like these particular things, I mean, even if all that all those accusations were true, the funny thing to me is like none of this would really be at odds with actually existing Marxism-Leninism.

In some sense, it's more consistent with it.

Like, actually existing Marxism-Leninism is like, you know, nationalistic, it is conservative.

I don't it's some I don't I'm not saying that as that's a bad thing.

Uh in some ways maybe it is, in some ways it's not actually.

Uh but I think it is not like inconsistent.

If you someone would say that you're misrepresenting the views of I don't know the Chinese Communist Party.

I'd be like, uh, well, I don't know, it's kinda more consistent than the people who are saying like, you know, kids should transition just 'cause they think that they're born the wrong body.

You know?

So yeah, but feel free to clarify what these labels mean to you.

So the thing is, is that they don't mean much, to be honest.

I mean, the thing about infrared, before I talk about ACP, you know, because infrared comes earlier, we kind of launched on the basis of just a just a blatant, like, outright disrespect for the prevailing political sensibilities and labels within society.

Like, we were so fanatically Marxist-Leninist in a way.

We're just kind of like, why should we bow to this?

Oh, do we fall in liberal?

Do we fall in conservatives?

Like, these labels don't mean anything to us.

Marxists or communists historically just have their own takes on things, which upsets liberals, upsets conservatives.

But the important thing is that it's our own.

You know, the whole idea behind the CPUSA revivalism is like, we kind of have our own thing, and we don't have to pay tribute to these established.

Um, you know, political labels and stuff because those are just controlled.

Those are just completely controlled by the hegemony.

You know, they're just completely a fake synthetic form of discourse and politics.

So, you know, when it, when people, what I see it is like everyone's trying to categorize us: are you conservative?

Are you nationalist?

Are you this and they're that?

They're employing the discourse that is within liberal democratic society in order to make sense of a tradition which is fundamentally incognizable within the parameters of liberal democratic society.

It's something that is like beyond the threshold of anything that can be comprehended if we're operating within the coordinates of liberal democracy.

I think the idea behind our view of Marxism-Leninism is that this is genuinely a novel, if you will.

even in some sense, a post-historical form of

A kind of post-historical form of politics and modernity.

And we draw a lot from Alexander Kojev and his kind of very unique understanding and appraisal of of communism and the communist experience in the twentieth century.

So, like, from our standpoint, we are in a way proponents of the end of history, but we just think the end is not Fukuyama's liberal democracy, but something more like the CPC under Xi Jinping.

And so, we have this attitude of almost ridicule and mockery toward conventionally established U.S.

politics and ideology because we consider it in some sense to already be dead.

Its conclusion has already somehow been realized.

We can see where it's going, so to speak.

And so, we do love to troll and make fun of this in many different ways.

You know, I'm very liberal when it comes to my employment of.

uh labels, libertarian Stalinism or I don't know, Ron Paul Maoism or something like that.

But that's coming from a disposition that is ultimately not taken very seriously as an ultimate horizon of

Politics, the things that are established conventionally uh in the discourse of liberal democratic societies.

I don't know if that makes a whole lot of sense, but it is.

It's more like the thing that's important isn't so much: are you liberal?

Are you conservative?

Are you nationalist?

Are you internationalist?

The important thing is.

Is the disposition with which you make political sense of reality?

Is that something that where does that come from?

Is that something you're just deriving from an existing discourse under a liberal democracy?

Or have you joined the

You know, the the the the villainous

counter hegemony, you know, the League of Base Gentlemen in the World, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, Khamenai, Ansaro La, like all the villains of the world who are somehow outside of this

you know, liberal democratic discourse and have somehow discovered their own way of making sense of modernity that just does not fit within what we have.

You know?

And infrared very much says, yes, we're with them.

We're outside of this discourse and we we we look upon it with a sense of

Ridicule and mockery, and kind of one can say that's arrogant, but on the other hand.

I think the Trump presidency has given us this audacity, probably, because Trump is a living form of the kind of ridicule of Western liberal democracy.

And Biden wasn't much better.

He was senile, right?

But I think everyone can at this point agree there's this serious dysfunction within Western liberal societies, which the terms of Western liberal ideology and discourse really struggles to make sense of and resolve in some kind of way.

Our provocation is that it is resolved already by Xi Jinping, who is occupying the point of the end of history, basically.

The Chinese have gone through all of this, they have already figured it out, and we're just kind of playing catch-up.

Like, we had woke, they had 10 years of the Cultural Revolution.

You know, they've been there and they've done that, so to speak.

You know, they had during the reform and opening up, they had all the kind of liberal discourse you can think of.

They thoroughly debated and discussed all of these ideas that we consider sacrosanct, and they made the judgment that this is kind of stupid and that they have something more advanced and superior.

And I think whatever one thinks of China, I think it's true, probably on a very self-evident level, that China has something more advanced than the U.S.

does as far as its internal system.

And so that's a provocation.

It's not to say, okay, so we should just become China.

It's more like.

Well, square one should be China, probably.

Like, instead of square one being this blue versus red fake liberal democracy, the square one we should begin from is: okay, we're living, we see China as like a post-apocalyptic reality.

They've went, they had, they occupy something that comes after the breakdown of our society.

Like, they've survived it and they've weathered it in some sense.

And so, China doesn't necessarily have it all figured out, but if we want to address current world history, we have to do so from the vantage point of.

What has thus far been achieved and accomplished, which I think is the Chinese perspective in some sense?

I don't think within, and maybe it's going to have to go outside of the Chinese perspective.

Actually, it probably will be, 100%.

But it will not come from within the terms and conditions of liberal democracy.

Zoran Mamdani is not going to provide the solution to the contradictions of Western liberal societies.

Abdul Al-Said is not going to do that.

AOC is not going to do that.

There's nobody within the Republican or Democratic Party who's going to do it.

The resolution of society's contradictions today can only be comprehended from the perspective that already takes for granted the fact that it has already collapsed.

Like the current system is already gone.

It's collapsed.

I don't know if that's if that makes any sense.

Or at

But it just to clarify, so you do think basically the solution is like a a one party one party dictatorship that basically is akin to like the Chinese Communist Party.

Uh, for sure, dictatorship.

And yes, I think I really believe that party dictatorship is a qualitative step in advance of modern liberal democracy for sure.

Um

And if there's something beyond the party form, I'm open to discovering and exploring that.

But I definitely reject liberal democratic political pluralism.

And I think that it is a way of

Ignoring or pretending like there is no definite contradiction within society, which must find resolution in some way.

I mean, we have.

A tendency within liberal democratic societies of polarization, not a multitude of, okay, ten or twelve different competing viewpoints all vying for a chance on the public square.

We just simply have black and white polarization is the tendency.

And Marxists would say that's a consequence of class struggle.

You know, the haves and the haves-nots, so to speak, coming to a head.

Okay, so I wanna there's a lot I wanna get through.

I have my analysis of China in a YouTube video called Uh How China Works, um, that looks at actually, I would say,

Some of the things I think they do very well.

But also, you know, some of the other things that I think would probably disappoint some socialists who expect it to be something else.

But nonetheless, I think everyone would agree China for its standard, for its point of progress, is objectively a success for where it has evolved.

Now, whether that model can work in the West or is desirable in the West is a different question, just because I think dictatorships, individual or party,

Are rare in terms of ones that are good.

Like it's pretty much at the behest of the party and who controls the party leadership.

So it's a dice roll, I think.

There are real good ones.

I think even people across the spectrum would really admit that.

Like there's people who are not socialists who like to say Lee Kuan Yew is their favorite dictator, right?

But they would admit that, you know, that's pretty rare.

Most of the time, it's not what you're going to get.

If you look at the majority of the communist states, I mean, I view the vast majority of the communist states as failures, frankly.

And the reason China and Vietnam, and probably just China and Vietnam, honestly, are kind of the, or maybe Laos, if you count Laos is very small, obviously, but as sort of exceptions to that rule and that they were able to catch up with the West, with the liberal democracy through their reforms and their flexibility and all that.

But even then, I view that as kind of in the conditions of their culture.

Like, I think a lot, people forget how much of the characteristics of the Chinese system is just as much influenced by Chinese traditions as it is by communism, by Marxism, Leninism, in terms of their meritocracy ethic, right?

The fact that their system isn't actually as centralized as people think it is, as decentralized components, provincial competition.

You know, so I think like any system, don't you think, for any society needs to be tailored to those conditions.

And that's actually what took me, made me sympathetic to part of the idea of MAGA communism.

Yeah, I know you don't really go with that term anymore, but that's what you guys are very known for is this patriotic socialism.

But the principle of it, right, that you need something adapted to the conditions you're in.

I think it is obvious.

Like, I think every society is very different in terms of its cultural traditions, its people, the language, what is possible at the level of development.

You can't really be a materialist and plant the same kind of system in every place, right?

But my view is probably patriotic socialism in America would look very different and should look very different than China.

But curious, what do you think?

Uh yeah, so I know what you mean by the term, but the it's funny because the term patriotic socialism was invented by our enemies to make it seem like we were soft-launching national socialism.

Like we were just trying to like, you know, shift the overton window to make, you know, Nazism more acceptable.

But of course, socialist patriotism is part of the canon, just part of the boring old Marxism-Leninism.

But the thing about socialisms, too, like people, I think people who aren't familiar with the Arab world can think something as stupid as like only nationalism and socialism can be combined.

Oh, that only must mean Nazism.

It's like, are we going to forget that Baathism was a thing, Nazarism was a thing?

No, left-wing nationalism is very real.

You look at Ireland and elsewhere.

But I would say that, yes, I mean, this idea of socialism with American characteristics.

But this is where things get interesting in terms of interesting paradoxes.

When we say socialism with American characteristics, we're just adopting Mao Zedong thought to America.

It was Mao who particularized Marxism and kind of gave it that.

Like dynamism to say that this universal doctrine or this, I don't know, this universal method and truth should be applied very strongly and concretely to local conditions, even in ways that violate the dogmas established in Moscow.

So, when we say, yes, we want to do that for America, are we actually doing something American or are we just importing the Chinese model to America?

Because the Chinese model doesn't contain the content of China as a nation per se.

The Chinese model just says adapt it to the local conditions of your nation and your country.

That's just Mao Zedong thought, right?

If Mao was living in America or if he visited America, he wouldn't tell socialists to be Chinese.

He would say, adapt it to the American characteristics.

So we're still within the Chinese framework, in my view.

Even when we propose this.

And

It's interesting because

I think there are limitations with that framework actually, um, which presuppose its achievement and its successes, but the limitation is the following.

China has a five thousand year history and is a rich, densely

Um, you know, saturated civilization with so much concrete concreteness and particularity and stuff.

But the American project is 300 years old.

What is America?

I mean, what actually defines the concrete substance of American civilization?

I mean, you ask, you get a room of five different Americans, you get five different interpretations of what that is.

And some people think they've gotten it figured out.

And it's that there's so much.

The reason I distance the patriotism stuff now is because there's so much dumb LARP that was created where people thought that sports ball and barbecue and beer, this is the substance of America.

I mean, okay, look, you want to do what Mao did for America.

Mao was reading the classics of Chinese literature, which he was more well versed in than Marxist, the Marxist canon.

Okay, for us to say that American culture and civilization, like that our version of that is just this goislop, whatever we're going to call it, like that's just an insult to the very notion of what a civilization is.

So it's very clear that America is in the early stages of becoming something like a civilization or becoming something like it's in its decline.

No, no, no.

I think America has an identity as a thing that makes it unique.

And in some ways, America is unique in the sense that it's not really the American Revolution I don't view as a national revolution.

The independence movement is separate from the American Revolution, which is just a broader revolution that happened to take place in America, which is the bourgeois, second wave of the bourgeois revolutions.

And it's catalysts that ultimately made French Revolution possible, Haitian Revolution possible, national independence movements possible.

It's why Fidel, Ho Chi Minh all invoked the revolution, right?

So American Revolution was like the launch of the defines America.

The American Revolution was like the launch of a Bitcoin or a cryptocurrency.

And the currency is called the United States.

And it was a speculative gambit from the beginning.

We can build a united republic on this land completely distinct from what we've seen so far in Europe, which had a more balkanizing, fragmentary, feudalistic tendency.

We're going to build this unified republic on this land.

We haven't done that yet.

We don't exactly know what it's going to look like, but e pluribus unum, out of the many will arise one, right?

And through the course of American history, we see genuine potentially progress in that development.

But the decline you're talking about, I think, is that now things have come to a head.

There's this fundamental internal confrontation, which is a struggle to comprehend and understand what actually is America.

If you want to render it in more abstract or contemplative terms, I'm not saying that is the driving force behind the contradictions, but if you want to render it in contemplative terms, we're at a crossroads right now as far as.

What is America?

Like, what kind of.

I mean, Trump obviously represents.

A specific understanding of that.

But even that understanding is schizophrenic.

Trump wants to be China, but he also wants the global American empire, which is the very thing that made it necessary for America to deindustrialize and to you know to for America to become less American and for America to become more saturated with the influence and obligations to its foreign allies, South Korea, Japan, Europe, NATO.

Trump claims all these people who make the American Empire possible are ripping America off.

But he wants very jealously to cling to the power that comes with the American Empire, but he simultaneously wants to go into a direction that

Is more kind of emulating China somehow, right?

So it's a it's a type of schizophrenia.

And of course, the Democrats have nothing to offer besides A, continuity, which is impossible, and B, which is very interrelated, being opposed to Trump and this idea that the continuity of the American empire was disrupted by Trump.

And as long as we get rid of Trump, we can go back to how things were under Obama, which

was an illusion of continuity itself, right?

So this is kind of

This is kind of where we're at, and um

You know, I would say that um

MAGA communism had a genuinely serious component to it.

It wasn't just a complete meme.

Like, it was very serious.

We we did genuinely believe that the basis of a future form of politics in this country will come from the MAGA movement.

Uh communist politics, you know, a politics like we were observing the clear fact that MAGA if you go back I know you don't agree with it, but it's just for the purposes of understanding the world view behind it.

If you go, if you have this idea that Xi Jinping is the end of history so far, right?

then the idea is that America is bending and twisting around, it's oscillating around this end of history in all sorts of distorted, malformed, confused and obscure ways.

But that's still the center of gravity that is responsible for why there's all of these strange ironies going on in the development of US history, civilization and politics.

which reflect it's almost like we are being colonized by

The by the end of history, which is China, not because China is doing it intentionally, but because it's like we are an inferior system and an inferior mode of production that is struggling to maintain its superstructure amidst being dragged along into a future and into a conclusion that only China so far has made sense of, you know, with Xi Jinping and Xi Jinping thought and so on and so on.

So MAGA has this odd way of appearing like.

A mass socialist movement, even one with a strong workers' character, workerist character.

Definitely, everyone knows it's populist.

The MAGA tendency, everyone compares it to fascism, but the relationship of cybernetic popular sovereignty Trump has with, or he had, I should say, with the MAGA masses, well, that is just a very barren kind of farcical shadow of the one-party dictatorship.

paradigm that comes from Marxism-Leninism or comes from communist countries and it's devoid of the ideological content in a clear way, but the form somehow there's a strange resonance and you have Trump's cult of personality people make all sorts of comparisons between that cult of personality and the cult of personalities you see in socialist or communist states historically.

That's not because Trump is a communist or a socialist.

But liberal democracy, as it turns on itself, is bending and twisting

Under this kind of gravitational pressure that is coming from a future that is already communist, you know, that's kind of the interpretation.

So, MAGA communism is basically an understanding that all the liberal critiques of MAGA are barren, reactionary, and devoid of.

I mean, MAGA is an acceptance that liberal democracy is dead, and our square one has to accept that, right?

And so, the MAGA masses, this was, you know, before.

Trump's second term, mostly, you know?

But there was an understanding among them that they're positioning themselves in a way where they recognize the liberal democratic hegemony is completely corrupt and bankrupt.

All the democratic institutions, all the federal agencies are totally devoid of any legitimacy and credibility.

The mainstream media as well.

And um

The

The cult of personality of Donald Trump became this kind of empty signifier with which they could project all sorts of different kinds of vague populistic aspirations and notions of an alternative.

But the important thing is that you have a structural shift from trust in these kinds of democratic institutions and the open society of democracy into a view that there is a concrete conclusion.

We can understand this as America.

You know, America as a country.

And no, that's not open.

That's not an open society.

America has to do what's best for America.

We have to build our country up.

There's a like there's just this kind of sense of determination there where it's filling something that used to be kept open and empty before, right?

Now, what that looks like in the specifics was always very vague and always kept open in a lot of ways.

Yes, there were dominant voices and controlling interests and tendencies, the Edelsons, all these kinds of people, but there was a genuine.

opening of possibility we noticed, which I think has been vindicated by the fact that a lot of MAGA has become Candice Owens, Tucker Carlson, Major Taylor Greene and so on and so on.

And they have disaligned with Trump

But they have kept this

Enmity toward the status quo.

And simultaneously this um

They're they're in now in the stage of kind of searching.

I mean, uh Tucker Carlson recently endorsed Abdul Al Sayyid, so some of them think that the DSA thing might be

Sneeko has also taken interest in this phenomena as well, by the way, this new left-wing, I don't know what you call it, progressive push.

On the Democratic Party, but it's definitely lo it's it's lost, but it's looking for something now, right?

But in any case, what I'm trying to say, I guess, is that MAGA communism was.

An understanding that we cannot begin the square one of our politics within the terms and conditions of liberal democracy anymore.

Like MAGA is this self-mockery of liberal democracy that has now taken the form of a completely different way of talking about politics.

Instead of talking about, you know, um, you know, instead of talking about mere politi people you have a political disagreement with, you have the deep state, you have the enemy of the people, you have, you know, the uh

Whoever the ruling cabal is, the ruling class, you have an understanding of the concrete interests of the collective as a nation versus.

This, you know, more liberal, globalistic obligation, this pretense to this moral universalism that we're going to be the world police, and so on and so on.

So that's a completely new discourse.

And it may be funny how devoid of intellectual content is in there.

And it may be funny the irony that this is.

Inadvertently giving way and vindicating Xi Jinping and Chinese socialism, in a sense.

But we

We uh made peace with the irony and we just went with it, so to speak.

I don't know if that makes any sense at all.

It does make sense.

There's even liberals who might even agree with you, but in a way that they think is a bad thing.

Like John Keene, he has the new despotisms, which he sees like the rise of Xi Jinping and popular, what he calls the benevolent despots, Putin too, as symptomatic of potentially an alternative that could challenge liberal democracy, and we should be scared of that.

And also, it's why we need to improve things to deal with Trump or whatever.

Fukuyama even says similar things along these lines too.

But I would say he's got Trump derangement syndrome, in fact, actually a bit of a different take on that.

I think they're partially right about the death of liberal.

So when we're talking about liberal democracy, I think the death of the liberal part of liberal democracy is very true.

But that's because liberal democracy, as we understand it, like this idea of the open society, this globalism, that's a really new thing.

Like even what we call democracy, you know, first off, it wasn't even called democracy for that long.

Like the founders called it a republic, right?

They didn't even call this shit democracy.

It's a democratic republic.

It got called democracy gradually as you got suffrage.

I mean, this is kind of what my bigger book is out.

So I have the one with post-left theory, but then I have the more bigger one I've been working on for like four years, the freedom to change nothing.

That one talks about that a lot, which is the spectrum of managed democracy.

I think what we've always had is like managed democracy, not like actual democracy.

And that system is very flexible, way more flexible than people realize, because, I mean, it used to not be all that liberal.

Like, I mean, if you look at the Immigration Restriction Acts that the U.S.

used to impose, it was far from like this liberal open society we see today.

I mean, you know, or just like look on free speech, like even that's something kind of taken for granted.

We look at like Woodrow Wilson and stuff he did.

I mean, totally, you know, suspended free speech in Canada.

They do that too.

Like, there's been illiberal periods.

But liberalism as a philosophy, as liberals imagine it, right?

Like liberals versus liberal, the things we associate with liberalism, like constitutionalism, you know, separation of powers, checks on power, free speech, shit like that, right?

Parliaments.

That's all way older than the philosophy of liberalism.

And I think that still has a place and a use.

And in fact, allows for a system to be quite adaptable.

I think the US system is a little bit particular because it's actually so divided.

The separation of powers is so intense that it's really hard to get anything done, which is why they have to create a deep state to do anything for foreign policy.

Whereas a system like Canada and Britain, I mean, if you get a majority government, the prime minister is basically like a democratic dictator.

So they're quite flexible in terms of what they can do if they wanted to, if they wanted to.

Now, one thing I think that you're spot on in your analysis is the idea that like MAGA, at least in its 2016 form, I wouldn't say 2020, but 2016, MAGA and Bernie were part of the same broader phenomenon.

I've heard you say that before.

And I totally agree in the sense of like, it's the populist moment, and it is the first time we actually start thinking of alternatives to this kind of neoliberal status quo, right?

Um, I think things changed a little bit in 2020.

With 2020, Bernie, I've used this fundamentally different kind of um campaign.

I'm not sure if you'd agree, but I've pretty Bernie is he kind of capitulated to the woke stuff and the PMC, and his base changed, right, in terms of even who he, which states he won.

And same with Trump, like Trump kind of increasingly shifted to like older voters, to boomer voters, and to like, uh, you know, insofar as he got young people, he got mainly like younger men, whereas I feel like there was more of like a petite bourgeois proletarian base in 2016 in his in his movement.

So, like, you know, the idea that you should try to, the people on the left should try to win over Trump supporters.

To me, it seemed like kind of like obviously, why is that bad?

It's tailism, it's tailism, right?

But no, I don't, I think there's something fine about that.

If people in your audience might say, oh, you know, one time used to be a hater of the ACP.

I mean, I wouldn't say I was a hater, but insofar as I critiqued the ACP, which I did, it was mainly that I don't think the attempt at patriotic socialism was done very well.

I'm not against doing it.

There's people who think that doing it was fascistic or something.

For me, it's just I thought that the iconography, and I know there's a memetic component to it at the time, but the iconography of like hammer and sickle with like Marx, Lenin, Lincoln, and fucking Xi Jinping or whatever the fuck you put.

Like, I like to me, that was just like a corny way to do it.

But like, I can totally see like socialism with American characteristics.

Like, yeah, okay, you believe in liberty, liberty in the economy.

How about that?

You know, like you can easily build something like that that's compatible with the American ethos because collectivism I don't think is ever going to really work.

Like extreme collectivism, like you know what I mean, status collectivism rather is not going to really work in the United States.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

For some other countries, I think it very well could, you know, like I actually don't think it's really a coincidence that like China, Russia were more eager to embrace communism insofar as they were.

Like, I mean, their civilizations were already kind of collectivistic.

And I mean, even anthropologists like Emmanuel Todd, they've looked at the family structures kind of in many ways fit into communistic arrangements.

So there's a lot there.

But like I said, with America, you know, patriotic socialism, I don't know about communism.

I don't think communism, not big on that, but like patriotic socialism, I'm not inherently against that.

And, you know, I know I think we should just stop trying to also like capitulate to the, like, I know, not say capitulate, but like trying to appease the woke people who are scared of like being proud of your country.

Like, my position is like every any people should have the right to be proud of where they're from.

Like, I think it's like, like, some people like to pick and choose where it's right to be proud, or the Imperial Corps.

You can't.

You don't have to be proud of the Empire.

If anything, Empire is kind of bad.

You know, and you can make a case empire is bad for the Americans, too, in the sense that it's kind of like a waste, big waste of what they could be doing.

They could be, you know, take the isolationist stance.

Anyway, point is.

There's a lot there I I've I've thrown at you with regard to patriotic socialism.

I don't know what you make of that, as well as the Bernie Trump convergence.

We have been immersed in this discourse for like five years now, you know?

And I'll I'm so I'm speaking to you from the perspective of the conclusion I've drawn from these discussions and debates and how much I've thought about it.

I don't think respectable American patriotism exists anymore.

I don't see any fresh talking about a fresh, a new life of the kind of civic patriotism that comes from the New Deal era, liberty, you know, the pursuit of all these things that are sacrosanct when we think of what are American values.

I don't think anyone

believes in them in a way that is

Like distinctly from the era we live in.

So there's a lot of older people who probably cling to that for sure.

But I look at the younger generation.

Does the younger generation cherish these values and concepts?

And I say no.

I think that they're going in extremes and very much they're going in the direction of collectivism.

Whether that's on the right, whether that's on the left wing, I think the room for

The America the classical American patriotic sensibilities, I see them as dead.

I see them as from the 20th century and today in the social.

I agree.

They are dead.

It's not a question of whether, like, oh, defending, like, I'm not advocating a conservative stance, which is like, oh, defend the American.

Like, no, these things are dead.

Like, I don't blame people at all for not being patriotic.

What's there to be proud of right now?

Like, I'm thinking of what America could be in terms of its lost potential and realizing that.

Because I think realizing something that is based in a tradition is how you make radical movements succeed.

Like, I mean, if you think about it, even in the Russian Revolution, right?

Underpress in large part as a betrayal, right?

The Tsar was betraying.

No, absolutely.

You have to always make it seem compatible to the world.

Like Mao, right?

He talks about dialectics and Taoism being compatible, whether that's true or not.

But like, you know, that I think, or even he also embraced Sun Yat-sen, right?

So do the KMT.

So he has to do it in that way.

So you have to be what I'm saying.

You have to have some kind of super historical narrative about what your country is, what it has achieved so far, where you fit within that tradition, and where it's going now.

And if you don't do that, and if you're speaking from the standpoint of some ridiculous, abstract, you know, like substanceless moral pretension of, well, this is just the right thing because it is.

And it's like, well, what ground do you stand upon?

What's the context, right?

There's no concrete context behind your politics.

It doesn't even exist.

I guess the reason why.

I choose a more provocative path today.

On the topic is that I I I look at how

I think what we call America is imminently in a state of insanity with respect to what it itself is.

If we want to salvage an American

National historical lineage and build off of it, I think it will look like something that is unrecognizable from the standpoint of classical American sensibilities.

I like to have this provocative idea that America is Tartaria.

Do you know about the Tartaria conspiracy that's in folklore on Facebook and stuff?

No.

Well, American many Americans on Facebook believe that all of the architecture from the Art Deco period and the Chicago World's Fair is actually evidence of a lost civilization called Tartaria.

And that it's been erased from the maps and that there were these mud floods that destroyed all evidence from it.

And they had free energy that was discovered by Nikola Tesla.

Now, it's a very it's popular folklore on Facebook and on among many it's like a folk conspiracy theory, right?

So I like to say that the truth of what America actually is is something as strange and alien

I mean, I'm not saying the conspiracy is true.

I'm not a crazy person.

But what I'm trying to say is that

we are alienated from what we are, and that if we were to kind of come to terms with what we were as a nation, it would not be something familiar to us, is what I'm trying to say, right?

And I think that there's so much truth of that, and I'll I'll basically draw from two examples.

The first one would be the pre

Formation of America as a country, right?

So we talk about American individualism, but the foundations of American civil society, even before the revolution, was a type of fanatical, extreme collectivism, right?

From the first settlers, you know, the first ones that came here, all these various different communities, the Quakers, the Shakers, the

All these way the companies and colonies were set up originally, plus the various utopian experiences that would come later, that would accompany the, I think it was the Second Great Awakening or the first one, in the early part of the 19th century.

The utopian socialists in Europe were actually drawing from existing communities that existed in America at the time.

And then, of course, we have the post-Civil War period.

Which my friend Logo calls the Second American Republic.

Which, even in its artistic style and its sensibilities that prevail, it was a completely different country than what we can reckon.

I mean, it's not a coincidence that the Tartaria conspiracy theory is centered around the period that we would call the Second American Republic.

So this is Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, probably all the way up to the World War One.

you have a very radically different country almost, right?

I think a lot of what we have as far as American our our sense of the classical American values, you know, the Amer the true American way,

I would say this is an artificial construct of the New Deal.

The New Deal created an artificial form of civil society where civil society was no longer spontaneous, it was no longer organic.

It was something more akin to the civil society that existed in the totalitarian countries, meaning it was something fashioned institutionally to be in alignment with.

the state, right?

And the New Deal did the same thing, I think.

It promoted a notion of civic virtue and civic values that were very comprehensive, but very much not spontaneous civil society, right?

And I'm not saying it's a good or bad thing.

I'm just saying this is what the New Deal did.

And then during the Cold War, this is where we get most of our understanding of the true American values.

And there was a concentrated effort, I think, during that period, actually, to distinguish America in terms of what its values are and what America is as a nation from anything that could remotely resemble socialism or communism.

The first American socialists and even communists were very seamlessly American.

I mean, whether we're talking about Eugene Deb.

Well, Marx.

Marx wanted to move to Texas.

Yeah, absolutely.

For the same magazine as some of the people who founded the Spoiler Party.

There was no existential confrontation of ideologies.

It was so seamless for a socialist or a communist to just be like, yeah, I'm an American.

Like, I'm just an American.

This is the American way.

These are the true American values.

This is actually the faithful.

This is what is in faithful continuity to the American Revolution and to Lincoln and the Civil War.

Most of the radical socialist union songs, the melody was from the Civil War.

These are Civil War melodies most of the time, right?

And so it wasn't.

Marxism did come from Europe, but socialism and communism in this country was very.

There are a lot of being patriotic and being socialist was not.

Something that was like radically different from each other.

It was like very seamlessly almost it carried a connotation of actually patriotism did carry the connotation of socialism in a lot of ways.

World War One kind of changed that because it then it meant allegiance to the you know the policy of war and stuff.

But even that could not eliminate the fact that the way that class struggle was articulated was mainly in the form of patriotism.

Like, okay, you know, like these capitalists are not loyal to us as a country and our people and our nation.

They serve money, they don't serve the people in the country.

Anyway, I want to get in a tangent.

During the Cold War, using the artificial civil society kind of engineering that was created during the New Deal, a concentrated effort began to very harshly distinguish what they termed American values from the values of Communism and and so-called totalitarianism.

I would argue the methods were no less totalitarian, so to speak, but they were just more disguised.

There is no society on earth that developed the most sophisticated form of controlling its population psychologically, culturally, just engineering it with such meticulous precision.

Nothing comes close to the United States, if you ask me.

During the Cold War, the military-industrial complex, how it adopted the systems theory and cybernetic understanding.

of how institutions should work, how society has to be governed, how everything has to be planned.

We see such a level of deep coordination between corporations, between all the sectors

Of American society that are like responsible for controlling and governing the behavior of people with a kind of the unified policy of the state.

And so

I O S gets in invented after the Cheka and then CIA gets invented when the OSS is insufficient and gets pranked by the Chin the North Koreans.

And then they develop the CIA with the help of Wall Street, of course, so that they can get their interests packaged in there.

But yeah, I know I I

America d certainly adapted in ways that are very negative in response to the Soviet Union.

But I wouldn't say um that came out of nowhere, but I wouldn't justify it.

Yeah, I mean, um I think that well, I wouldn't only blame the Soviet Union, I would say during the nineteen twenty nine Great Depression, the crash of the stock market, that actually was the end of liberal classical liberal capitalism as we know it, right?

And so the why or how what we call capitalism survives this is largely because

Um, states acquiesced to a paradigm which liberals of the previous century would not have accepted as a form of free trade capitalism.

So we have the New Deal in the U.S., we have the Labor Party and its influence in Britain, especially after the post-war period.

And then, of course, we have fascism, right?

But in all these cases, social democracy, corporatism, very in Scandinavia, we have social democracy and so on and so on.

And, you know, just I would say this is just the civilization changing.

And it's almost, it's like what's going on today.

If I would explain it in the same way, it's like I say Xi Jinping is at the helm of the end of history for the same reason that there was a New Deal instead of the old liberal form of capitalism.

It's just the way I think that we typically have this idea from Fukuyama.

That illiberal

uh societies are more backward and parochial and that the open and dynamic and advanced thing is this thing that we called liberal democracy, which mainly is a charade of the neoliberal era.

It's a kind of Disney Disneyfication of politics to create the facade of this comprehensive

ideological value system, which in many ways is a kind of theme park and not reality.

It's just a kind of way to make us feel like we're in a open and dynamic and liberal society.

But behind the scenes we know

We have an unprecedented extent of control going on like never before.

But in any case, Fukuyama had this idea that Western societies had it figured out, more or less, right?

And that everything else was backward and parochial.

And the Soviet example was very used very strongly, right?

Soviets were just freezing in the ice somewhere and they were in villages and they didn't have blue jeans and McDonald's.

In any case, the point I would make is that no, actually, everything was reversed.

Uh actually

Communism was always something more advanced.

The problem is that the end of the USSR was not because Western liberal democracy or Western liberal capitalism was a superior or more advanced paradigm.

If that was true, we would not have Putin, right?

The collapse of communism was due to more internal reasons, you know, an inability to actually have the right type of communism, so to speak.

Well, it couldn't adapt.

Maybe would you agree that?

But it could, yes, absolutely.

Vietnam adapted.

Absolutely.

But there's something missing.

Or adapted too fast, like Gorbachev.

Well, the adaptation, it's not about adaptation.

It's the very terms and conditions of how to adapt are only sensible within a kind of Marxist or communist paradigm.

Because if adaptation just means acquiescence to the American-led world order,

then clearly that was not a solution as far as resolving the problems under Soviet led communism.

But if adaptation means being able to actually

Um, adapt Marxism or Marxism-Leninism or communism to a new era, more generally, that that is a revolution happening within communism or within Marxism.

It's not a concession to liberalism, it is a new, it's like the same way that Lenin is adapting Marx, right?

Or Mao is doing it, right?

And uh

Deng Xiaoping should be I mean, retrospectively, I think it's very clear, should be placed within that continuity because his reform and opening up did not

Lay the foundations for China to become a liberal democracy.

we have today Xi Jinping, who's the West immediately clocked and was able to understand that, okay, now definitely, if we if we thought China was going in the direction eventually of liberalization, now we for sure know this is not

This is not where things are going, right?

And if things are not going in the way that was anticipated, we should ask the basic question.

Um, what way were they going from the very beginning?

When all these Western observers thought that Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up is, you know, I feel the wind in the air.

What's that song they made about the Berlin Wall?

You know what I'm talking about?

Changes in the air.

I don't know.

Something they made.

They thought that that was happening in China, but now that we see that wasn't the case, we can go back to the beginning and say, wait a second, what they were doing was not acquiescing to us.

They were.

They were evolving on terms that could only be made sense of from the perspective that presupposes Marxism, I think.

See, I noticed this from some of the Marxist-Leninists who have the position of the defense of actually existing socialism is they'll kind of say that Marxism-Leninism just is adaptable, so like it's in continuity.

Whereas I actually view China and Vietnam as the exception to that rule, as opposed to the rule of Marxism-Leninism.

I actually think Marxism-Leninism is usually incredibly rigid, actually, and not because of its ideology, but really due to the dynamics of one-party state.

A one-party state's hard to adapt due to the internal dialogue.

It's really hard to actually genuinely criticize the party in a very serious way.

One, due to incentives with party bureaucrats trying to move up, right?

A lot of the dialogue is transparent.

You don't really even know what political factions are, even though there's always political factions that are very opaque within the one-party states.

So sometimes it's actually quite hard for these systems to self-correct.

But China has developed the mechanisms to do that, partially because of its decentralization and its different systems at the level of different provinces.

It's kind of local democracy in which it's able to kind of understand what people are thinking, which the Soviet and Yugoslav systems kind of failed to do in terms of like understand what the local public really felt, right, so that they could predict.

Then again, you know, there's no guarantee that that will continue or not.

The thing about the liberal democracy, right, is it has to adapt.

It has to adapt due to the fact that there's different parties.

Now, it also has its weaknesses, its inability to act decisively.

I think that's the most obvious advantage China has in terms of its strength over liberal democracies.

But one thing it has is self-correction.

And the thing about liberal democracy, and this is where I would say managed democracy is a system, if we think of it that way, as opposed to liberal, I think it's here to stay.

And I wouldn't say, I would hope that there's a better system.

I would hope we can find a better system, but I'm not convinced that we have.

In some sense, I think Fukuyama was right in the sense of the institution of managed democracy, but he was wrong about the liberalism.

Because I think managed democracy will adapt in ways that outlive liberalism.

Like we're going to enter, I already think we're entering in a conservative age.

Like we're fundamentally entering like a very conservative epoch in which the kind of liberal, like, you know, relativist, sort of individualist worldview has expired.

It's, I mean, it's unable to reproduce civilization if you look at like in terms of literal like birth rates and stuff, but also just inability to structure families.

Even Fukuyama kind of admits this a little bit in the end of history, where he says like for liberal democracy to work, it relies on like pre-liberal conservative ideas, right?

And he talks about like how Japan, it's like concerted traditions are very important to it, but even how in America Christianity was important.

And to some extent, you need like pre-liberal ideas on like family, because like, let's be honest, like super liberal parents, right?

Are they the best kind of parents?

It's like, no, you know.

But I will say, like, you know, you mentioned Kojev.

You're highly inspired by Kojev.

And I just want to say, like, Fukuyama's Hegel is Kojev's Hegel.

Of course.

So like Fukuyama's end of history, I always encourage people to read it because it's not as ridiculous as it seems.

I think Fukuyama is actually largely like since Trump got elected, he's gotten Trump derangement syndrome.

And so I don't really listen to anything he says anymore.

But that book is interesting in terms of what it poses, because people think when he says the end of history that he means, you know, liberal democracy, like in this neoliberal form, is its end of history.

I mean, he says like, no, I mean, he means, he says, well, he thinks social democracy, right?

Like, he's like, okay, he didn't believe in that at the time.

Now he's kind of in support of it because he recognizes capitalism sucks a little to some extent now.

But back then, he was kind of like more of a neocon adjacent figure where he thought like, okay, well, you could do what Denmark does, but that's still like liberal democracy.

It's still in the same kind of paradigm.

Or you could do what like Japan does, which is more like right-leaning version of liberal democracy, but it's still in this parameter.

So he thought of the end of history being quite flexible.

I would say, I would just expand that to say it's even more flexible in the sense that it doesn't even need to be liberal.

Like you could have like democratically elected dictators, basically.

I mean, in terms of what the prime minister can do, it's quite flexible.

And in some cases, the biggest changes in like even just American history.

I mean, there are presidents who basically were temporary dictators.

Like, FDR was like a temporary dictator.

Lincoln literally was a temporary dictator in terms of habeas corpus.

But that's the thing, right?

Temporary.

They were open to being challenged.

They didn't have to restructure the entire regime.

And I think the system can adapt itself.

And that's kind of what they're trying to do.

Whether the system will fail if it can't adapt itself.

But nonetheless, I think.

You know, I wouldn't like this is why I'm I'm skeptical of the people who think like, you know, US is just gonna decline.

I think it's g i insofar as it's in decline, which it is, it's like it's Roman Empire decline.

It's like very slow.

Yeah.

And uh there'll be attempts to revitalize it and I wouldn't

And I'm not even opposed to revitalizing it.

It just depends on how that's done, right?

Is it gonna be some sham?

It's is it gonna be some fucking bullshit to pacify people?

Or is it gonna actually be like a transformation uh involving um you know some of the major reforms which I I saw on the ACP platform that strike me to be honest is kind of like radical social democracy stuff I would support.

Um not even the stuff about A AI uh planning and transition into a post monetary economy.

What do you mean that I didn't catch that about the post monetary economy?

Yeah, it's the idea that we will transition into kind of like uh basically not just socialism, but even maybe something like the lower phase of communism is possible, you know?

That uh through

Artificial intelligence, you know, economies of scale can be planned and forms the the we can basically go beyond money, you know.

Post-monetary economic planning.

Is this a new addition to the no I believe it's in our platform?

But is it new?

Because I remember the older version, which No, the first ACP platform.

Let me try to find it exactly.

Economic planning.

I mean, I'm not opposed to planning.

I think planning is necessary for the United States.

I think people because I hear you talk about our program being.

Uh, I just remember seeing it, and it didn't look like communism.

Um, and that's why probably were communists.

We're like, you're not really communist.

But I was also in my list of questions, which is like, why, why are you really communist, huh?

Are they Supi really communist?

Because, yeah, so it's why even why it's a little more vague, but it's under the accelerate force industrial revolution where we say a system that operates according to socially governed principles rather than profit.

Um sure.

So we definitely that's socialist, I wouldn't say it's communist.

Well, I guess the intention behind it is definitely post-capitalist economics.

Sure.

Yeah.

But uh no I just wanted to check 'cause I uh forgot the exact wording.

But uh going beyond money would be in the communist territory.

Going beyond the state, getting rid of all classes, that would be in the communist territory.

I mean, like that's why they did all these purges of classes and uh wanted to abolish private property.

That's like communism.

But in terms of the system that works for the common good, I mean that's that's like in the domain of socialism.

There's many kind of non-communist socialisms.

Well, I I kind of disagree with this understanding because um communism in terms of you know that classes are not the reason there's a continuation of proletarian dictatorship is you can't abolish classes by fiat, you know, you can just suppress the emergence of uh class power that are contrary to those of the proletariat.

But you cannot abolish classes as an act of will.

Uh that that's only possible through the development of the productive forces.

But I wanted to talk about some of the things

You mentioned before

Uh regarding Marxism-Leninism, I think most of the time what Marxism-Leninism means for most people

Is the Soviet Union and its geopolitical power and its influence?

So that is the first thing, like, the first.

Uh that's why Marxism has any relevance, obviously.

The October Revolution, Stalin, and the aftermath.

But I think that people underestimate the significance of the Sinno-Soviet split.

You know, that was not a local conflict.

China had a revolution and an experience with Marxism that is just as comprehensive and just as historical as the October Revolution.

You know, the Long March, the story of how Mao undermined the Soviet-backed

Um leaders within the CPC and created a form of leadership and and principle that very much deviated from the dogmas of

Moscow, you know, and also I see a pattern in the history of Marxism because Lenin did the same thing with social democracy.

You know, Kotsky was the Pope of Marxism.

And so I see this pattern across the history of Marxism, which makes sense, there's a logic to it.

But go back to the Soviet Union and its allies.

When we say it's a failure, we have to qualify what we mean.

If failure is defined strictly in the sense of being able to catch up with the West, then yes, even if you want to say failure in the sense of being able to create an alternative global system, yes, it was a failure.

The Soviet Union didn't create a global system that was separate from the United States.

It created a global bulwark of military and political resistance.

And it did so very effectively, by the way.

I mean, the Soviet military very much did rival that of the United States, for sure.

I mean, they really did give them a run for their money, quite literally.

And they were very successful in helping and facilitating the overthrow and creation of various different states.

And the limitation, of course, you can talk I can talk uh in a million different ways for why that ended up not being sustainable and why the Chinese path was ultimately more successful.

But to qualify the question of whether Marxism-Leninism became discredited, with the exception of China for treating it as an exception, after the end of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact and its allies, I would cite current President of Belarus, Lukashenko, when he said Marxism-Leninism had a lot of problems and it wasn't perfect, but it's the only thing that's worked so far.

Like so far that's the only thing that ha that has proven it can work.

Maybe something else can work, but everything in the post Soviet space that has been built by way of infrastructure, industry, the foundations of civilization, this comes from a combination of two sources.

One is from the communist period.

And the other one is if i they're in the eastern europe, it comes from the the handouts that come from the EU, right?

Where they're just pumping credit and money into it.

Now, Russia, of course, is is um building and it's becoming more advanced and stuff thanks to its partnerships with China, mainly, I would argue.

But I think the world is in a place where, okay, look, yes,

Poland and uh Poland is a welfare recipient of EU.

We can't pretend Poland's one of the fastest growing economies in Europe.

Sure, but look at the balance of payments.

Look at how much they take from the EU budget versus how much they give back.

And it's not but like in terms of dependency, I mean, there's countries that got a lot of handouts and they didn't do very well.

I mean, like Italy, Spain, and Greece, you know, notoriously got a lot and they got a lot of people.

I think for geopolitical reasons, there was a concentrated effort to stabilize and build up Poland because of the geopolitics of where it's actually located.

Regarding Greece and Italy and so on and so on, these became debt colonies of the German banks, you know, who had no intention at all of developing Greece, for example.

I mean, they didn't want to see Greece actually develop and become a prosperous economy.

They wanted to maintain their kind of Ponzi scheme.

No, I'm not a defensist of the EU.

No, no, I understand.

I think you overlook the strength of Polish institutions.

Like, Poland was democratic well before a lot of countries were.

Most of the countries that became communist under communist rule weren't democratic before they had communist rule.

So it's not like it was a big shift for them, a regression.

Whereas Poland, that was very different.

Poland was democratic and it slid into kind of like temporary dictatorship kind of during the threat of both the Russians and Germans trying to go.

Well, Poland had the dictator, what's his name?

Izlutski?

How do I say his name?

Yes, yes, yes.

That was right before, that was right in between the Russian and the German threat.

Forget like the socialists.

So only for a few years we could invade.

There was some.

No, no, but before that they did.

But that's like, you know, a lot of countries didn't.

I thought, to my understanding, Poland, when did Poland actually become independent from the Russian Empire?

I think it was.

It was like uh I think World War No, it was like um like World War World War uh one.

Right, after World War One.

So they had the dictator Pizlutski who ruled Poland.

That's after that.

There's a bit after.

So there's like there's the Russian invasion and there's um like which puts Poland in the middle of the past.

I think he be he came to power in the twenties, no?

The late 20s, if I recall correctly.

But in any case, Poland, I mean, Poland was one of the only countries to overthrow communism democratically.

They had their free elections and the communists won a couple seats.

It was like the labor unions that pretty much pulled it down.

I mean, I think Poland's one of the cases where it's so undeniable that the Poles rejected communism.

You can make arguments about Russia, and I think that's a real where I would say Russia communism was overthrown completely from the top down.

Like a complete coup d'état.

Well, do we agree though that's not that?

That was very much like a mass rejection.

Is it fair to say that Solidarnos was a 100% organic movement of Polish civil society?

I just kind of don't buy this idea of color revolution in every space.

You can't mobilize that.

But it literally was a color revolution.

I'm not saying it was an unsuccessful one.

It was clearly.

What I've always finded interesting to me is when people say, you know, Marxist-Leninist, like, oh, the, the, you know, Reagan together with the Pope John Paul, you know, no, look, there were clearly not complex.

But like, Poles are Catholic, dude.

There were clearly.

You know, like, no, look, there were clearly serious dysfunctions within.

I've never met Poles who are sympathetic to communism.

No, look, there, there was.

Some are sympathetic to socialism, but like, what I mean is you can't deny that there is like a release.

But there, I, I meet many Romanians who are I meet a lot of Romanians who are, and Slovakians, and other people who are not the beneficiaries.

Romanians, sure, high nostalgia is very high in Romania.

But the reason mainly is because.

Poland was propped up artificially through welfare.

It's not an organic case of a thriving society pulling itself up through capitalism and democracy or something.

It's a case of a concentrated effort.

It's like the Marshall Plan.

They did a Marshall Plan for Poland.

And then, yes, Poland.

These kind of arguments, though, they really become kind of very questionable when you apply them to Marxist-Leninist states.

Because what would you call Cuba in terms of Cuba was absolutely dependent on the Soviet Union?

Absolutely.

There was a huge degree of dependence on the Soviet Union and it's the way it it would subsidize the price of sugar, for example.

But, you know, but yeah, there's successes.

So like yeah, it entered into a crisis for sure.

But simultaneously, you know, I wouldn't say Cuba in isolation that we can say in isolation Cuba's model of socialism it comprehensively works, you know, in isolation.

I mean, I would never say that.

I wouldn't also but I would say, for example, that

Uh it it would be a hard sell to say that the Cuban Revolution and the Color Revolution in Poland had equal degrees of foreign influence in terms of making them possible.

I just know that.

I think Cuba really did have its own revolution, you know, which was a I don't think that the overthrow of Polish communism was something that was just completely top-down.

I just don't I don't know of course nothing nothing is ever 100% top-down.

I don't think that it was the case of the Czechoslovak revolts, the one that was in 1968.

Yeah.

No, I don't think that either.

No, I look look anyway.

We don't need to dance around these.

No, no, look.

What I'm trying to say, though, is that for the majority of the

The former, I mean, should the Czech Republic and Poland and some of these countries that were welcomed with open arms into the EU, like Croatia and so on and so on.

We can't say this is representative, so to speak, of those who had to deal with the post-Soviet legacy because you have a whole other kinds of states, both within Europe and outside of Europe, which have not discovered a paradigm of building institutions or governance or administration.

How to build a military, how do you build a security apparatus, how do you have some semblance of development and running your country?

A lot of countries are still forced to build or take for granted the foundation of, in some way or other, whether it's they're directly communist states or they just happen to be trained and educated in Moscow.

This is Soviet hardware, right?

For a lot of the third world and for a lot of Europe, even today, they have not really discovered something that could actually completely replace the old hardware, you know?

And I I guess that's what I'm trying to say.

That's true, absolutely true of Ukraine.

I mean, a lot of these even Syria before even probably Syria today still, because they're not really doing so well.

But even Syria under Assad, I mean the whole Syrian state was where did they get their education and training in terms of how to run a country from, you know, I mean you know, and their military and everything.

So Soviet Union.

Right, exactly.

So it's.

I mean, you could even Egypt and stuff.

It's like there's so many countries not ideologically communist or Marxist, but.

Com what we call this alternative civilization that was led by the Soviets, which wasn't a comprehensive system, but it was a very successful paradigm of building

uh centralized states and a minimal form of development from scratch.

Because most people, you know, you have to remember they're they're coming from nothing.

They're operating from nothing.

You know, so it's like a boot kit to get somewhere, right?

And while that was happening in the post-war period, we had the Bretton Woods system.

So the U.S.

was creating a global system.

Um and the Soviets were resisting the global system, saying this is an ultimate form of imperialism described by Lenin.

So we're just gonna resist this and do as much as we can to just, you know, not get absorbed into it.

Then after the seventies, what ended up happening

Was that huge portion?

I just wrote this for the Beijing Review.

Huge portions of the socialist bloc were taking on exorbitant credit and debts from Western creditors because they could no longer fund their own development autonomously.

So the Soviet Union was taking on a lot of debt from Western creditors, especially in the 80s.

Romania is a famous case.

Poland as well.

I mean, every single communist state in the war have you.

Especially Yugoslavia.

They were all indebted to Western financial institutions.

So they came kicking and screaming into the US-led global economic system.

Why did they do that?

They had to do it because they didn't create a system of their own.

All they did was because they couldn't produce goods.

So that's why they could.

All these debt was so that they could buy a lot of the kind of foreign goods people wanted.

It was also mainly to finance the continued development of industry themselves to get the capital they need to build more factories.

That's what I'm talking about.

So I'm talking about soft industry, like consumerism, consumerism, largely.

Because that's where really the system failed in terms of industrialization was somewhat successful.

Like in terms of the consumer goods industry was completely unable to develop an independent form of that in the communist bloc.

It was completely impossible for them.

Because that presupposed something like an information economy of some kind, right?

And that's why we have the rise of cybernetics and information theory and computers all happening basically at the same time as the rise of what we call consumerism in America.

But the Soviets, their understanding, they were a very the whole paradigm of rogue states, whether we're talking about Saddam's Iraq or Assad's Syria or Gaddafi's Libya, which we have come to know in the 21st century mainly, right?

Originally, this is the Soviet Union in the post-war period, where it says we will not be part of Bretton Woods, we're not going to be part of this system, because it's a form of.

Imperialism.

What the Soviets didn't anticipate is what Michael Hudson calls superimperialism.

So this is a qualitative change from the type of imperialism described by Lenin.

into the kind of American-led global system of dollar recycling which was not anticipated by Soviet Marxism-Leninism.

Um

And so, like, when I say they had to come kicking or screaming one way or another, what I mean to say is they did succeed in building military and political resistance to the United States.

I mean, Vietnam kicked the US's ass, right?

So they did it.

The problem is, that's not enough.

That doesn't actually account for what about all of the pressures induced by this global system, whether it's cultural soft power, whether it's economic.

And so on and so on, that basically, you know, exert this tremendous pressure internally.

That's coming from civil society, morally, spiritually, and so on and so on.

And so, you know.

What I mean to say is like I understand it was a failure in some very important qualified sense, but

I don't think it was a failure on the terms of liberal democracy.

I think it was a failure on the terms of a standard that could only be articulated within that very same tradition, so to speak.

Well, yeah, there's a reason why they call it the second world, right?

The three worlds theory, because they hop from third world to second world.

They never could quite get first world.

That's, I guess, uh, the limitation, I think, really, was of the market economy, because ultimately China still has a market economy.

Yeah, as obviously, that doesn't mean you can't do some planning.

I mean, even the liberal democracies did some planning in the World War II and a bit after, even.

I mean, they still do some planning now.

I mean, a lot of people talked about with the entrepreneurial state and whatnot.

State is always playing a role.

So I don't believe in the free mark, like the free market bullshit.

I actually think the market economy, though, in terms of light industry, in terms of consumers.

But that's the fascinating thing.

I think that markets are not actually in command of production since probably 29.

What we have instead is not the market, but the information about the information that comes from the market.

So not just the information that the market feeds into planners as inputs, but even the information about that information is the driving force behind the current global economic system we have.

And markets are not about trade between equal, you know, reciprocal subjects.

You know, I'm going to give you this.

You're going to give that to me.

That's trade.

I mean, that's what's relevant for a market.

Markets are about collecting data about what people want and what they don't want.

So for example,

I'll tell you what's so fast.

I was thinking about this recently.

I don't want to go on a ramble, but I think it's an interesting topic, especially with AI and stuff on the rise.

When the Soviets or some socialist country in the socialist bloc had a grocery store, okay, or something.

And they would say, you know, bread.

There's a sign on a shelf.

It says, this is bread.

And then under the sign, there's nothing.

They had the sign, but they didn't have the bread.

I mean, this is an exaggeration.

They had bread, of course.

But so far as the stereotype goes, you have the sign, but you don't have the thing.

Which means you have the aspiration to plan for and realize this good, which people clearly want, but you don't actually have the thing itself, right?

And what markets create is an ability for.

The for the for the system to actually be punished when it's unable to deliver on terms that are outside of the system.

So, for when a corporation puts, okay, here's my sign that says there's going to be bread, because you're not buying their bread, they go bankrupt.

So, that's an that's a form of punishment that is not managerial.

It's not I'm going to fire you because you didn't deliver the bread.

It was, well, you failed to actually generate enough money or feedback that justifies your existence.

So, that's obvious to most people.

That's why market capitalism is superior to socialism or Soviet socialism in most people's eyes.

But here's the profound irony.

Actually,

Actually, today, from the development of neoliberalism all the way up to how artificial intelligence works and the kind of civilization and society we're becoming now, actually, the Soviets were correct.

When you have a sign that says bread, that is bread, not the actual thing itself.

And if there's a thing that's called bread under the sign of bread, that is only a kind of uh

Detail of the system.

The thing itself doesn't justify the sign.

And this sounds fucking crazy.

So, what am I talking about?

All right.

What I'm trying to say is that, um

Today, the way that most new industries work is that they're actually operating on a loss.

They're not operating on a profit.

They're operating on a loss.

And they are speculative vehicles for financial capital.

which continue to promise that they're eventually going to justify the initial capital put into it.

But this speculative gambit actually is the thing chugging the entire economic system along.

And we have gotten a taste of how systemic promises and the content of those promises, even at the level of like the private market, have actually disaligned.

Since COVID and the disruptions in the supply chains, a lot of people did start to see shelves with the sign of maybe it's not bread anymore, maybe it says PS5 or something.

And there's none.

Okay, that's not a big deal.

But then it has started to actually impact the price of groceries.

I remember, remember when toilet paper was in a shortage, right?

And then if you go to the gas pump today, you see that they're all out of diesel.

So there's the sign of diesel, it's just the thing itself isn't there.

Now, I'm not saying you gave a taste as to like a few days of what people had in the Soviet Union.

No, I'm not saying they can't have the price of their favorite pizza go up by like $2 or else.

Well, I'm not saying that socialist governments should probably not want to fuck up the economy.

They're in charge.

What I'm trying to say is Americans.

Yeah, but I'm not saying that we're at the point of the Soviet Union in the 80s where that was literally the widespread reality.

I know.

I'm not saying people are suffering at that level.

But I'm saying is we have developed a type of economic system that is not fundamentally punished by inputs that come from consumer choices and the market.

Increasingly,

The choices of consumers are being defined by

These comprehensive like systems of planning I don't know what else to call them.

That promise to deliver things, whether that's to the shareholders or even to the public, you know, a lot of things.

Have taken on the form of Kickstarter economies, for example, right?

Where we're going to promise to deliver this in the future, but we don't have it already.

And, you know, being able to order a Tesla used to be really hard, actually, right?

And there was even a joke that Tesla was just like the Soviet Union because of this incongruity.

Now, you can get over the incongruity and you can eventually fix it so that it's not an eternal shortage, but that there is an incongruity in the first place means the sign is not actually directly justified by the thing.

The production of the thing just represents a sophistication of a system that is not itself fundamentally justified by market relationships.

I don't know if that makes any sense at all, what I'm trying to say.

It's like I'm not saying we have gotten to the point of Soviet shortages, but I'm just saying People's Republic, a Walmart type of argument.

More or less, yeah.

I mean, more or less, we have gotten to a point.

Where, and this is the same thing is true for China.

If yes, we can deliver goods and we can deliver things on the shelves and stuff for sure, but

the intention or the ability for corporations to to deliver those things to us and the intention to deliver those things to us is no longer justified or grounded in

The fact that we choose them.

I don't know if that makes any sense whatsoever.

I'm not sure.

It's like the thing that's there is very much.

I think it's look.

I've seen Paul Cockshot.

I've read his stuff about how we think because computers are advanced enough.

He already thought that in the 90s, quantum computer, like that computers made it, not quantum computer, but like computers made it already possible to plan an economy.

And I'm a skeptical of that.

I'm for planning of inelastic, goods with inelastic demand because goods with inelastic demand, which is stuff that people need regardless of, like there's demand for regardless, which can make them very vulnerable to price gouging, in which the market is not necessarily sufficient for things like that.

That's where we're going to have.

Yeah, I think the state and planning can be really good for that.

For stuff that is inelastic demand, I think there's elastic demand.

The market's always a bit better.

And it's easy to think of information technologies as somehow making it possible to plan, but it seems like that.

But it's really allowing markets to just be a little bit more efficient.

It's easy to look at Amazon, for instance, as something that's like, it operates more like the Soviet Union.

But I don't think we have market, but it actually is just a market.

It's like we have markets at all anymore.

I think that's the point.

And in the classical sense.

But it is, though, in terms of it's responding to price.

Like it is price that is ultimately different.

But I think if there's a thing.

It's more responsive because of the technology.

So the market used to be a kind of sum total of interactions between private agents.

When that thing that we're calling the market is itself a defined system, I don't think we're talking about a market anymore.

I think we're talking about something that transcends markets, which, yes, there's room for people to make choices within it, and the system can be responsive to those choices as data, but it's no longer a market proper.

I mean, that could be semantical, but

When markets are this emergent thing that we refer to, when there's various different sovereign economic actors interacting in terms of like exchanging goods and so on and so on.

I think what we're we're redeal we're dealing with are various different competing planned systems which somehow are able to account for

The decisions people make regarding what they want to consume with a greater degree of efficiency and

Precision.

So the problem with the Soviet shelf that said bread and there was no bread, the problem with that was that the system was insufficiently.

fleshed out, so to speak.

The problem was not the system that says there's bread even when there's no bread.

The problem is that the system that the only way to make bread today, so to speak, is to somehow do so as a consequence of being within this very complex

System of planning

Um, so to speak.

I mean, and it's even kind of true.

Like, I don't know, I don't actually mean you could technically grow your own bread, and there's all sorts of ways to make it and stuff.

But even for the most ordinary things, you're talking about supply chains that are so complex and so much grounded within systems, like genuinely defined systems.

And even the tendency of today is consolidation, obviously.

If there is any semblance of a global free flow of goods that we then call a supply chain, I don't even think that's necessarily true to say that.

The tendency of today is for those to be consolidated and controlled in ways that are aligned with the needs of industry.

So yeah, I don't think all that's at odds with markets.

Like I thought I think when a lot of people are critiquing markets, they are critiquing like libertarian arguments, which has like a utopia naive faith in like this idea of free market of like permanent competition, which I think is false in terms of markets, of course, have tendencies to concentrate.

Like, you know, that's why I don't see myself as a capitalist ideologically in terms of what I believe.

Like the market, of course, predates capitalism by a lot, as you know.

And I think it'll exist under socialism.

I actually agree quite heavily with Vivek Chibber in terms of his analysis of markets because he's drawing from a similar source.

There's this really good book called The Socialist System by Yanos Kornai.

And it, I think, is the deepest analysis of why that system, the limited systems didn't work.

And because it's not really just like, it's not just the planning and the data and the shortages.

It's also the incentives.

Because you might see like consolidation, right?

And natural consolidation.

And the impulse would be, okay, why don't we just like nationalize it, right?

Problem is if you nationalize some industries, certain industries that are nationalized often will have the incentive to like kind of do quite poorly because they know that they're going to get funding from the state no matter what.

They're going to get bailed out no matter what.

And then, you know, to some extent, that's kind of like a problem already with the corporate system.

It's kind of how the private sector works today already.

Well, like banks.

I was going to say banks already work like this.

And the big automotives, the big four, and also AI companies now want the same thing.

And that's what they're pushing the regulation push.

Corporate communism.

But that's our reality.

What I'm trying to say is the Soviet bureaucracy was vindicated.

The self-systems are bad.

Maybe, but that is the direction of history.

Self-relating systems that care more about being internally consistent than they do somehow achieving direct parity with the content of what they're supposed to be doing.

That is definitely, I mean, that's even how AI works.

If you ask AI, hey, generate me bread, and it, I don't know, it generates a Twinkie or something.

It's not quite what you were aiming for.

It says, hey, generate me a glass of water and generates you a grizzly bear or something.

Within the system, like that is, it is not able to actually understand the difference.

All it could do is be more receptive to inputs that somehow align the output with the input more accurately according to our, you know, according to some external sensibility.

But the thing that's making it possible in the first place, like fundamentally does not care.

This is kind of what I'm talking about.

Like it's a sign of bread.

It doesn't matter if there's actually bread.

And increasingly, the thing that makes possible the real thing.

Just like the desired output of an AI generation prompt or something, is a logic internal to the system itself rather than having anything to do with the content of what people want or choose.

I have a question though, just so we like, because I could grant your idea of a market, but I want to know kind of how we're defining it.

And it isn't, I'm not one of these like, you know, semantics analytic people, but it's like, let's say we have a YouTube.

Um YouTube, like and and there's no money.

So let's just like ignore the factor of money and ad revenue and all that kind of stuff.

Just different videos that are competing for views and channels that are competing for subscribers, right?

Would you say that kind of setting is a market, even if there's no money involved?

Yes, because it's uh responding to the viewers.

Like in YouTube's own policy seems to YouTube's own policy seems to uh

Show that because, like, you know, there's a period where I try to interfere due to political pressure, you know, when it was trying to like crack down on like so for you, a market is like YouTube.

One thing that if what's happened is that it's started to be way more lenient with regard to monetization because I realized that it's actually better for it to just like allow for ads to play on as many videos as possible and let based on what people click on and watch to decide like what it gets pumped up.

So, it literally pumps up what is watched and what is like clicked on.

So, it is responding to demand and supply.

So, it is like a market in that regard.

Yeah, just the technology makes it very responsive.

Now, I wouldn't say that that is like this is the thing, like markets do what they're supposed to do, but I don't think that's good in all cases because I actually think sometimes giving people what they want is not what they need.

Like, I think the market's really good at giving people what they want.

Like, in terms of consumerism, it's not good at giving people what they need.

So, like, you know, if you read the Christian Critique of Capitalism, which is an essay I have, which is actually like, I think Milton Friedman is kind of partially right in terms of his analysis of capitalism, but I think that's the rule of Satan.

That's the rule of Mammoth, you know, like which is literally all about like this freedom of choice.

Yeah, just giving people what they want.

Look, okay, so if that's your definition of a market, which is basically, I mean, if we had to kind of define it off the top of my head, it'd be a system that can be receptive to people's choices and wants in ways that you know.

Uh in a in a diversity of distinct ways, you know.

then I would agree that markets will always exist, you know, including under, you know, what Mo Marxism hypothesizes as a a communist mode of production.

But uh yeah, no, it's it's interesting you say that regarding this distinction between what people want versus what they need.

And I also think that's going to become more relevant in the AI age as well, though, because AI is something that can give people directly what they want without even mediation by way of labor, right?

So people can just it's like a magic thing that gives people what they want, and it's it's not only going to be confined to LLMs or something because.

robotics is is accelerating at an extremely advanced pace at this point.

So the the que I think also the question of why we want the things that we want in the first place is also going to become more decisive and relevant.

Like what do we need

And where do our wants fit within that kind of underlying need?

Because the interesting thing with AI is that I think it has the power to generate desires that people would not otherwise have, but only have because they're being hooked into some kind of system of feedback.

Like the fruit AI videos.

Is there anything within human nature intrinsically that desires to consume fruit AI?

And it's almost like, I think no.

I think that AI footage of fruits.

You don't know about fruit AI?

No.

Oh, you're very offline.

You don't Doom Scroll enough on TikTok.

I mean, I use AI in terms of like, I try to become knowledgeable about AI, but I've never heard of this.

No.

I don't doom scroll a lot.

That's think of Brain Rot.

Do you do this thing called Brick to break my phone?

Just think of BrainRot, for example.

You know, it's like these things are not intrinsically responding to human nature.

What these things are doing is that they're not just giving people what they want, they're creating systems of desire that people get hooked into.

And it's almost like you want to continue consuming it.

Uh for reasons that are cr caused by the thing itself, not by anything within you.

And that's a profoundly

Curious quality of human beings, actually, is that you can actually want things not because there's anything within you that wants it, but because the want is caused by the thing itself according to its own internal logic and so on and so on.

This is actually how most desire works, if you ask me, you know.

And if you come from a more psychoanalytic perspective, like Lacan or something, they they would agree, you know.

But that's gonna get into that a bit, which is ideological influences.

Yeah.

So systems have that's what systems are when you think about it, from even from cybernetics and systems theory.

Systems are self kind of self-replicating, self-sustaining, self-reproducing.

Uh

Which

You know, it's it's cybernetics is about control.

It's like a you know, cyber, it's like this the science of steering and control or whatever, right, according to the founder of cybernetics.

But actually, we don't control anything.

It actually defines us as the subject.

It interpolates us directly.

So we're not, you know, at the captain of a ship controlling things based on what we want.

We're also defining what we are in the first place.

So

Okay, so I wanted the second half basically to get into ideological influences.

And one of the things was going to be about religion.

I think that was interesting.

I listened to your talk on Marxism and Islam and I had some thoughts on that.

But I would like to segue this in the back room, actually.

Oh, yeah, sure.

So I'll do this prelude maybe for your audience.

I'll do the outro.

I want to say something, which I do want in the public right before I go to the back room.

So I just want to give a shout out, first of all, who kind of made me want to do this conversation.

So like some, maybe like almost a year ago, it was maybe like February, I did a live show with David McCarricker of Theory Underground, who I know you know.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And yeah, we did a live show in Vancouver.

And interestingly, who attended, there's some people who attended that live show who are part of the ACP chapter in Canada.

I didn't know that there was ACP chapters in Canada.

Really surprising.

And they were really nice people.

Like we hung out after we even got dinner.

They're really nice people.

And what I noticed kind of drove them.

They weren't like ideological cult followers.

Like, and you always hear this, like, oh, ACP is a cult, right?

They weren't at all like that.

They were like, you know, individual thinkers who just thought creatively about things.

What kind of brought them to watch people like myself, like Dave, and like you, was really just kind of disenchantment with the left from what it seemed.

And that seems to be a common theme.

So they kind of, you know, they're actually part of what part of what convinced me to make this happen.

And, you know, another made me also aware of a shared background.

So you come from a Lebanese Shia background, which is interesting because I do as well.

Yeah, I found that out when I first spoke with you, I think.

And yeah, small world.

That's right.

Yeah.

I'm Christian.

I'm Catholic, but that's from my mother's side, which is Spanish.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

But the father's side, the Lebanese side is Shia.

So there's a lot to talk about there on religion.

I have a respect for Islam, even though I'm a Christian.

So we're going to talk about stuff like that, the Islam, Christianity, socialism in the back room.

All right.

Yep.

I'll just join.

I'll give a closing.

So, guys, the stream's gonna end now.

I might go live after this.

I don't know.

Depends on how long.

But yeah.

So, if you want more streams that are earlier, you know, remember doing his outro.

I would just say you could actually.