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actually on our side.

The winds of history are actually on our side.

If it's not taken into the extreme of economism, which Lenin obviously critiqued, which says that this renders politics obsolete entirely, which is obviously false.

But overall, the notion that material reality is on our side, I think, has been lost in Western Marxism.

It's been replaced by a view that the contrary is true.

Material reality is this kind of demiurge keeping us in the prison of capital, and that the only way to escape is to ourselves retreat into abstraction, retreat into kind of, you know.

The pretense and veneer of hyper-conscientiousness and you know, being smug and being a know-it-all who's like looks like bourgeois moralism.

Precisely, like, you know, oh, I'm a left comm.

I'm not like a vulgar, stupid Stalinist who's actually like in the dirty muck of reality.

I'm in the know about true Marxism, right?

So it's like, that's really the kind of.

Nonsense we're dealing with, I guess.

Well, previous generations of communists have had to deal with that.

And thankfully, for us, history is not on their side.

I've yet to see a successful left-com revolution in construction of socialism.

Besides Muslim, yeah.

That's a good one.

You know, it's so important to talk about the real origins of fascism and why Trotsky is wrong with seeing it as rooted in the petty bourgeoisie.

That's not to say that there wasn't petty bourgeois elements within it, but it's abundantly clear if you look at the evidence that the Nazis and the fascists in Italy and in Spain could not have came to power without the most developed parts of big business.

And specifically Dimitrio's formulation, it's finance capital.

It's finance capital.

That's the most developed capital.

And for those listening, if you want to look more into this, there's a great book by Jack Powell called Hitler and Big Business that points out the ties of Hitler and big business.

There's, of course, the classic in our tradition, Michael Perenzi's Black Shirts and Reds.

And there's a few other tits, indisputable, that the economic foundation, the class backing, the fascists were the most developed sectors of finance capital.

I like how, I mean, of course, you're completely correct to say that given in Marxism has been the fact that we're here, and if we succeed or when we succeed, the forces of production will be unleashed.

That's one of the central guiding threads of the movement of history, of the materialist understanding of the law of development that's operative in different forms of life.

Marx makes it his mission to show how it has been the fetters that the feudal mode of production, the corporate guilds presented to the development of the forces of production that were one of the central components in the development of the bourgeoisie.

And that's not done for no reason.

That's done for the sake of showing, well, there's this historical tendency that as soon as specific forms of intercourse, specific class relations prohibit the development of the forces of production, along with the specific classes that embody those contradictions, you will have a condition where you either have the dissolution of all classes in society or you have a revolution.

And he points this out in various different societies, and then he elaborates that very much as to how it exists in capitalist society.

And this is telling for a few reasons.

Every year I have to teach Marx in my history of Western philosophy class.

And there's many assumptions that people operate with about Marxism.

One of which is Marxism is just a sort of Christian asceticism where we all just want to be poor.

Uh, that's obviously a McCarthy manufactured lie that it seems like a suspiciously large number of leftists are accepting today.

Um, that's not the case.

Uh, but one of the central reasons why Marx had the confidence that socialism will succeed is not only the capacity of the proletariat that sort of embodies in its individual will the will of history or this cunning of reason as operative, but you also have an understanding that capitalism stifles development.

Capitalism stifles development, and socialism doesn't.

And that's that's extremely clear from history.

The most rapid developments in the forces of production were under collectivization with Stalin, then with China.

And the societies that have grown the quickest have been communist societies, societies led by a communist party where society serves society itself.

And that doesn't mean that unleashing the forces of production.

People hear this and they just think about like a factory cranking out shirts non-stop that no one needs.

It doesn't mean like expanding the parts of capitalism that today function as a system of waste, as William Horace, the famous British socialist, called it.

So like if shit like fast faction, fast fashion, I mean, it doesn't mean just making more shit like that that just ends up in a landfill.

It means producing more efficient.

It means that our cities will not be crumbling.

It means that we don't have to wait two years to get potholes fixed.

It means that we can develop and create the sort of abundance, not that's just

Ridiculously wasteful, but the sort of abundance that allows for each human being to have the conditions necessary to flourish as much as possible as individuals.

And that's something that capitalism prohibits for the vast majority of people.

And when you phrase it in those terms, for the American people, at least, it becomes almost self-evident that that's a condition we don't have today.

They can't flourish.

They can't actually actualize those rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And that communism, when you actually explain it to them, is a system that is foundationally rooted in giving you those actual, concrete, real freedoms that are experienced as freedoms.

Not this bullshit bourgeois freedom that's a freedom for them to accumulate capital.

And for the vast majority of people, it's experienced as a form of unfreedom, just like their democracy.

It's experienced by the vast majority of people as a highly undemocratic society.

But as things intensify, I agree with you that productive capital, industrial capital, takes more and more an explicitly progressive

Uh, an explicitly progressive condition, and I agree totally here with Michael Hudson's analysis.

He holds that if the old uh cold war was one explicitly between socialism and communism, today it's one that's between industrial productive capitalism and this more parasitical uh financial capitalism.

And I don't know if capital is still the right word to refer to it.

I still refer to it as capital, but um, it's not capital and how it functions within capitalism, where it's elevated to this position of supremacy over and above any other common interest of society.

It's capital being used for the sake of society.

Uh, and the Chinese have been extremely successful in doing this.

The Russians, even though they're they're not led by a communist party, they have the communist legacy, but they've been extremely successful in doing this, and other countries have as well.

Iran has been successful in doing this, um, and others have, those that are large enough to to um to not be as damaged as as other countries, smaller countries like Cuba and Venezuela are when they're you know hit with 900 fucking uh sanctions and this hybrid warfare.

Uh, so yeah, but I'll stop uh rambling.

No, I mean um yeah, I I think one of the reasons it's also because people also kind of are operating with this distinction like, okay, well, industrial capital's from the past.

So if you're opposing if you're so if you're championing these outmoded classes and interests and not getting in with the times, you're basically a reactionary, and that's

Kind of where it seems like the logic is coming from.

But I think what peop what they don't appreciate is that when we talk about industrial capital, first of all, we're talking about an incipient interest.

So it's mainly an aspirational interest of society.

You know, I'm I'm an entrepreneur and I have this vision to produce this and do this and I can't do it because there's so many gatekeepers and institutions stopping me.

And you read Lenin's analysis of the um Russian capitalism.

And that's what he refers to, the petite bourgeoisie among the peasant as an incipient bourgeoisie.

It's not really an established bourgeoisie, but it's a kind of it's aspiring towards something like this, but it's being blocked by the forces of feudalism and monopoly capital, right?

And their democratic aspiration is to get rid of the gatekeepers and open the way to have the opportunity, specifically by resolving the land question.

Now, obviously, we saw

That peasant revolution, that democratic revolution, as it's called, wasn't didn't actually lead to the creation of a peasant capitalist class.

The Stolypin reforms are a separate historical phenomenon, I would argue, which were reversed very quickly.

It was a return to the actual, or you know, more or less organic communal form of production that the peasants were participating in for a long time, actually, right?

And when that was modernized through collectivization,

It was even that aspiration, let's call it, incipient bourgeois aspiration, actually turned out to be not bourgeois at all in content, but rather a type of concrete content of socialism itself.

You know, in economic problems with the USSR, Stalin said, you know, socialism isn't just state property.

Socialism is also this new thing called the collective farm, which isn't state property.

It's a form of people's property, right?

And so I think the lesson you should draw from that is that the incipient, let's call it, interest of industrial capital isn't necessarily a capitalist interest.

And if you look at BRICS and the countries that actually are, that represent so-called industrial capital, let's call it.

Like I said, it's kind of, and like you mentioned, it's kind of difficult to precisely say this is capital still, right?

It's the only way the aspirations of the incipient industrial element can be satisfied is through socialism.

Because the extent of socialization represented by, let's call it like derivative finance capital, because we're even at a deeper layer of abstraction now, right?

uh Black Rock and the infr you know, just massive concentration of the uh of wealth, uh the ability to print money, right, that's just held by central banks, uh

That the requirement for the centralization of the means of issuing credit, let's say, and allocating resources, which is ultimately tied to like actual natural resources, like oil, right?

Behind the bank is you go so abstract, and then behind the bank, you pull the curtain and it's oil under the ground, right?

And that's even true, if just real quick, that's even true with the turn that happens in the 70s towards financialization.

It doesn't come out of thin air, right?

It's because of the explicitly, you know, and very clearly observable long-term trend of the rate of profits falling that the capitalists, I mean, capital.

Is a relationship of accumulation.

And the capitalists, the personification of capital, has to accumulate somehow.

So they're forced with this question: well, what do I do with this productive capital?

Do I ship it abroad and pay workers less so that the rate of profit is improved there?

Or do I just turn to this more parasitic form of capitalism?

Even though you could trace all of these investment firms and finance capital back to like the railroads and yeah, I mean, in the beginning, they started somewhere, but it's the law of capitalism.

They ascended to the status of abstraction, and the capital form, let's say, increasingly became institutionalized and distanced directly from production itself.

But I think that nonetheless, though, the extent of socialization represented by black rock, let's say, right, I agree is irreversible.

That is irreversible, right?

But the reason why, let's say, industrial capital is progressive versus finance capital is because the aspiration of industrial capital can only be satisfied when there's a red rock, when the function, the institutional function taken on by the oligarchical capitalists is assumed, as Engels said, by the state itself directly and made to serve the common public interest.

So, for example, we don't want to abolish banks entirely.

We want the bank to be owned by the state, by a proletarian dictatorship, right?

So, the extent of abstraction and centralization is not.

The problem.

The problem is how um

That is still being trapped by the fetters of this institutional capital, just money for money's own sake, which increasingly assumes like a ritualistic, you know, purely ideological and institutional form.

You know, they have to go to Bohemian Grove every year to burn the owl or something.

I mean, it's like a metaphor.

Like, capital is not.

Directly a result of the material reality of the productive relations.

It's something increasingly tied up with the superstructural realm of the propagation of ideas and information and politics and so on.

And you look at the United States today, which obviously, as the global hegemon, is.

the center of the puzzle the central piece of what we call global capitalism.

How is this institutional capital maintained?

Is it maintained through production?

No, it's maintained through military force almost directly now.

Because the U.S.

has to kind of act as a world police and directly enforce the rule of capital by military means.

I don't think these post own people or whatever appreciate.

They'd rather go, well, you know, actually, in China and Russia and Iran, that's still reproducing capitalist relations.

And it's like, okay, but read Marx and Engels.

If you actually succeed in reproducing capitalist relations, what you're actually doing is developing socialism.

Actually, materially reproducing a given thing, it's participating in the process into which it develops into its contrary, right?

It's precisely because the U.S.

can't reproduce capitalism or the material relations of production at all and has to act as a fetter upon them, an obstruction upon their development.

Is is why it's reactionary, actually.

That's what defines the nexus between reactionary and progressive.

And then finally, you know, I also think that um

When we when we consider

The overall tendency and trajectory of capital, like you mentioned, and how it's nonetheless a derivative form of capital, which is not based on profit directly, but based on profits from profits from profits, right?

It's like derivative by many layers of abstraction.

When you look at the interest of the ultimate form of capital that exists today, which I don't, I'm not confident I could say I could describe directly.

Is that BlackRock or is it the network of offshore banks and banking cartels that coordinate monetary policy on a global?

I don't know.

Like, I don't know.

They all own each other.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So to discern the exact circuit of capital that is at the top, I'm not going to confidently say I can do that with certainty right now.

But I could say that.

When we consider how it makes profit from printing money, for example, pumping in in credit and just kind of signals which are no longer directly tied to the production of material wealth.

The degrowth stuff is actually real because when you think about it,

Given this structure of capital accumulation, actually real industrial production becomes increasingly factored in purely as a cost rather than a source.

It's like the derivative form of capital isn't saying, oh, no, no, we need this industrial capital to make a profit.

It's saying this is actually an investment cost, it's an operating cost, and if we can eliminate it,

you know, we could increase profits.

It's almost exactly like how the capitalists the industrial capitalists used to regard the proletariat.

You're just a pure cost.

Even though that's the source of the surplus value, the logic of capital is such

That it wants to kind of attack like an autoimmune disorder, attack its own material premises.

So you have the exact same thing going on now, except with the real material and industrial premises of the production of wealth, out of which capital itself is valorized.

Because these value forms, I don't know if they appreciate it, but.

Capital

The valorization of capital is actually derived from a material process of the production of material wealth.

The way society produces its material wealth, like now I'm not talking about symbolic relationships or structural relationships or any Pomo nonsense.

I'm actually talking about how people feed themselves, where your food comes from.

That is how Marx and Engels understood what a mode of production is.

They didn't say, oh no, it's just like totally, it's a totally ethereal, you know, structural pattern of capital.

And it's like, no, this is based in actually a form and of production.

Like, words have lost meaning.

Production is no longer about actual production, it's about reproducing a specific form of ideas.

You know, the the platonic ideal of capital, right?

So it's just kind of rid I mean, they've they've really just ventured into idealism and accused materialism of being fascist, basically.

Well, if the thing is, and you put it brilliantly, if you can go consistently from M to M prime, if you could just continue making usuriously money from money, which is what we've seen, I mentioned a very high percentage, 95% is basically just making money from money.

Productive capital, even if it reaps profit, is seen as a burdensome investment because you still have to put down the cost of production that create the conditions for the surplus that then is reaped as profit.

Why do all that?

Especially when the rates of profits that were coming in through that form of capital made it not worth it, specifically after the crisis of the 70s.

So it's gotten to the point where capitalism that operates with these systems of real abstractions, those real abstractions have themselves abstracted to deeper levels to the point where everything is just so disconnected from the meat and potatoes of just engaging in the sort of activity that allows one to survive.

And I think for us communists, what this does is make it easier to show the people, and in many ways, we don't even have to show them.

They know it already, how parasitical the elite is.

They already know it.

They just have different worldviews through which they interpret it that are somewhat spontaneous.

But that instinct, and I see this every year in my classroom because most of my kids are, they come from poverty, from working class families.

Everyone hates the status quo.

Everyone hates the establishment.

And it's very clear.

They just cannot survive and obtain any form of security.

And they're seeing their parents live in constant precarity, and they can't even imagine getting to the level of stability that their parents' parents had.

So this is, it's creating a very dangerous condition for the elite.

And it's not disconnected with the rise in this sort of, I've called it environmental neo-Malthusianism, where it's just promoting this, you will own nothing and be happy.

You have no idea how many people, every time I talk about how in class, I just finished a couple of weeks on Marx.

Every time I bring up how it is that capitalism fetters the development of the forces of production, you have no idea how many people just come back to that slogan: you will have nothing and be happy.

And that's the reality of the contemporary bourgeoisie, and it's not new.

Engels mentioned in a review of Thomas Carlisle's past and present.

Thomas Carlisle was one of these reactionary conservative socialists of sorts.

And the past and present text is actually very interesting.

I think that there's some homologies with some of the ways that Tucker Carlson talks today.

But that's besides the point.

He says in the review that Malthusianism is always present in a section of the early class, it's always been there.

They want to depopulate.

And it's because at the social level, they don't value humanity.

They just value their class.

They don't value humanity at all.

And it becomes burdensome.

And if it wasn't for the fact that we make profits for these people, they have no need for us.

As the Harare, you know, one of the favorite ideologues of the WF, we have no need for the vast majority of people.

With the dog whistles here, all right?

The anti-Semitic dog whistles.

Oh, I mean, you just mentioned, I actually don't know if he's Jewish, but you did mention a guy rather than an abstract capital relation.

So.

No, but they're literally saying it.

We have no need for the vast majority of humanity.

And it's scary.

And that's why we have to affirm as communists: you know, our fight is for humanity.

It's not just for the working class, it's for humanity itself.

These people are evil.

I don't hesitate to invoke that category.

They're against life.

They're a cancer that just devours all forms of life.

And it's a very righteous cause that the one that we have.

And when you have in the West and specifically in the US, such a crisis of meaninglessness, where people are just.

You know, falling into deep forms of nihilism, of bad consciousness, of these positions that are that they attack the very essence of what it means to be human, having a purpose in life, being able to exert yourself creatively and endeavor to achieve that purpose.

When you have this crisis of meaninglessness,

And you have a group of people that are saying, that are allowing you to make sense of why it is that your life is so distraught, that are showing you the systematic roots of your individual ills, and that show you how to move forward.

Those people are very scary because not only do they say, here's how your condition gets better, but they also afford the vast majority of people a purpose unlike any other, which is the purpose that one obtains when they fight for something bigger than themselves, when they fight for something that's not just the things that are around them, when they're not just fighting for basic survival, when they're fighting for humanity, which is ultimately what our fight is, a fight for life.

We love life.

That gives everyone a tremendous sense of purpose who actually takes it up seriously and doesn't treat it in this monastic fashion of I'm just going to sit around and excuse my obscene reference, circle jerk with the five people that fucking agree with me.

When you treat it serious, it's a tremendous source of purpose and it makes it very easy to sacrifice the things we have to sacrifice.

I live in poverty.

I have the degrees, I have everything, but I live in poverty.

And I'll continue living in the way that I am if it means advancing the struggle.

And that sense of purposefulness is something that I think the vast majority of the people, especially in the US, that are dealing with this crisis, meaning the rise in depression, the rise in anxiety, is something we can afford them at the more subjective level.

That's not just we're going to improve your conditions, but we're also going to give you a project in life that's meaningful and as meaningful as any other.

Yeah, I mean, I can somewhat relate a little bit.

Thank you, Eddie.

Appreciate you.

Kind of hurting my case right now.

The poverty thing with the subscription.

But no, I can somewhat relate because I wasn't, I did get a scholarship to law school and I was in law school, right?

And then, like, I got some marginal success streaming.

I wasn't making money at the time, but I was like, get marginally successful.

And I was like, you know what?

I'm gonna do this instead.

I'm gonna be like a full-time

Preacher of Marxism, I guess.

And so I like I left, didn't fully leave, it's still kind of a leave of absence, although I don't know if I haven't checked back in a long time.

But I'm I do understand that, like, you know, committing for a deeper purpose, and you know, I'd I'd be way, way more wealthy if I went down the other path, but it's just like I don't even care, it's not even worth that, you know.

But you know, I think one of the things I wanted to say, though, is that.

I think this is a good example of.

I don't know exactly what I would call it philosophically or theoretically, but it's like a very Hegelian.

move where you're in this kind of unhappy consciousness and you think that the contradiction is just between your consciousness and the world.

And then the Hegelian move is a kind of displacement where you recognize actually the contradiction is external and it's imminent.

It's out there actually.

And this is the kind of reconciliation.

And it's really similar when it comes to this stuff about Marxism and the the the pan-leftist twist on Marxism, according to which you know capital is this somehow rational force that's reproducing itself materially, you know, not just institutionally, but materially reproducing its existence at the expense of history.

It's like transcendental.

Because you mentioned, for example, something that is paradoxical.

If MM prime is pursued

And the actual material premises of capital's valorization are cut off.

How does the derivative capital continue indefinitely?

And then they would reproach us and say, no, you see, they depend on the industrial capital, so it's an absurdity.

You know, how could it be that they are trying to degrow?

And how could it be that they're trying to kind of attack their own premises?

That's an absurdity.

And I think they're missing the point.

Because that's our point.

Yes, it's a paradox.

Yes, it's a contradiction.

That's exactly why capitalism is destined to be supplanted by another mode of production.

Because it actually doesn't succeed in reproducing itself.

The triumph of capitalism is actually the triumph of socialism.

Because the triumph of capitalism is the same thing as the destruction of capitalism.

It's literally the same thing.

Yes, the logic tends into a direction that ultimately leads to the dissolution of capital itself.

But they find this so difficult to believe.

How could that be?

How could it be that something tends in the direction of its own dissolution?

Because capital is clearly something that exists.

And if it exists, it must somehow omnisciently attend to the conditions of its reproduction, which it clearly cannot do.

And that I think maybe is the only real limit of conspiracism is like actually the capitalist elite can't preserve it will lead to c I mean socialists and communists

Marxists across history have never said, uh-oh, you know, if we're not successful,

You know, capitalism will win.

It was like: if we're not successful, there's going to be a huge crisis, there's going to be irrationality, madness, and insanity, and people are going to start eating each other or something, right?

Because they're not going to know how to cope with this contradiction.

So, people need to appreciate that.

You know, capital is not a boogeyman.

Capital is something latent with its own dissolution, up to the present stage where that it should be like abundantly clear by now exactly how that is.

Now, I understand there's a sense of.

There is a sense of craftiness of the actual ruling class in terms of preserving this kind of system.

I mean, a good example of that was the American system of the Bretton Woods.

After Paul, it was a brilliant way of saving the ruling class, you know, by kind of

Developing Germany and Japan after the war, after the destruction, and shock absorbers of capitalist crisis, this was actually a way to extend the lifespan of capital.

Is it still capital?

I don't know.

But clearly, the institution of capital at least, right?

As it existed.

And, um,

You know, you could say that, okay, you know, why can't something similar happen now?

Well,

The uh the issue is, one, you can't divorce the Marshall Plan from the context of communism as a as a as a

Is a kind of pressure uh upon the ruling class to actually adopt socialistic and communistic policies.

Sorry, communistic is a little loaded.

I'd say socialistic policies to uh compete and, you know, to to s stop the spread of communism.

But um I think that what what really we're looking at today in terms of why that's not viable, right, and some huge craft I mean, that's what the great reset is supposed to be actually, right?

It's supposed to be that.

But the reason I don't actually think it's possible

is because um

I think that when you

When you look at the nature of monopoly capital today and the extent of the overhaul, literally a great reset that would be necessary to meticulously fashion the economy in such a specific way that allows for the reproduction of these institutions, right?

That is not politically viable.

You can't do it because there's a lot of political hurdles, specifically the phenomena of populism and actual resistance by the population, right?

Furthermore,

You also have to understand that

Of course capital or the capitalist institution of capitalism, capitalist civilization, does lead to fascism, it does lead to madness, it does lead to war.

And that's exactly how they plan on bailing themselves out of this crisis.

Because China, Russia and BRICS are accelerating the productive forces so rapidly, too rapidly for the institutions of capital to react.

They actually need war.

It's like actually necessary.

It's a life and death struggle, and it's going to be articulated that way, right?

So.

You know, if people are like, well, you know, capital might be able to reproduce itself if the ruling class is crafty.

And I'm like, yeah, that craftiness is already on display.

It's the craftiness of the war agenda.

You know, it's the craftiness of destruction of our constitutional freedoms and democratic rights and the total mobilization of the economy for war and implementing that agenda.

All of their intelligence is being poured into that.

It's, you know, it's so funny, rightists, I argue with them.

And I'm trying to explain the ruling class, literally has like one agenda, and it's imperialism.

Like all of their intelligence goes into that.

How do we.

You know, um, maintain control over the system globally.

But they somehow think that's not the primary way the ruling class is exercising control and and its craftiness.

They think that no, actually the ruling class is primarily exercising control

by by preventing Christian symbolism in the government, by like by by these Jews that are like, you know, instead of saying Merry Christmas, the the White House now says happy holidays.

Really?

I kinda think they're getting it reversed.

I think the actual thing that's they care about is imperialism and all that other stuff is like

Very downstream, you know.

But what are we doing?

I think for regular working people, yes.

For the ideologues, I think there's a purpose behind that sort of distraction to move us away from looking at imperialism.

And I mean, you're absolutely right.

And this is something that has been acknowledged for a while.

There's nothing better for a period of crisis than a good war.

The war economy comes in as indispensable in moments of crisis.

Which is also conjoined with the rise of fascism, fascism on questions of war and peace.

It's very clear where it stands.

I don't think it will have the same success that it's had in the past, simply because the material incentive in the population is just not there.

It's not there.

We don't have the absurd superpatriotism of the past of my country is always right even when it's wrong.

I think in many ways the sectors that would have had that have become a lot more critical of the foreign policy of their country.

We also don't have this sort of fracturing that existed very in a very real way in the working class in the pre-Civil Rights Revolution era, where it was very easy to divide working class people and get some to buy into imperialism and others not to on the basis of race.

I think that the civil rights revolution creates the conditions for the possibility of making the class struggle more acute.

That's just a basic position in Leninism.

Democratic struggles, once they're one, they make the class struggle against capital more acute.

It's easier to fight a multiracial working class struggle if you're not literally divided by apartheid as we were.

And then you also have a condition that I think is irreversible within the context of capitalism, which is that we're literally the first generation.

To live lives that are guaranteed to be worse than their parents.

Like at least you had in the first and second world war period the prospects, the idea, the potential at hand for a better life than those that the sort of life that was lived by the people that raised you.

That potential, the vast majority of Americans recognize is not there.

So the material conditions, the objective conditions have changed such that the incentive that was present in other eras that allowed for the war economy to be a successful way out, I don't see that there anymore.

As for the other point that you were making before that, it's interesting because I mentioned that a lot of these value theory people.

They start people like Michael Heinrich by explicitly rejecting the theory of surplus value in contradictory value production.

And that relationship, which you just mentioned, that they cannot get their head around, where on the one hand, you have this drive, this force moving one way that requires this other force, but that in moving that way, it's moving against this other force.

That is a reflection at a more advanced and abstracted level of the basic contradiction in commodity production, of the split, the contradiction between exchange and use value, an exchange value that has to, in order to perpetuate itself, almost forget what it is based on, and the split between the buying and the selling of the commodity that is the foundational contradiction for all the other ones.

And that's all a crisis is.

If you look at the theories of surplus value of Marxism, the place where he most explicitly deals with the theory of crisis, it's all it is, is that foundational contradiction exploding to a certain extent that all the other ones do as well.

And this tension that you correctly point at these people not seeing, it's a reflection of the fact that they can't see it when it occurs at the foundation that leads it to occur in this other more abstract macro level.

At the core of it, it's just an absence of dialectical thinking.

We can't accurately reproduce the concrete concretely because the concrete is filled with contradictions.

And if you think contradiction represents, as Armenides, the way of opinion, you're going to be lost.

You're not going to understand the world.

And I think that there's been this tendency in Marxist, quote-unquote, Marxist economics in the West to reject that contradictory value production.

That when it comes to issues of geopolitics, issues of empire, issues of these contradictions manifesting themselves in more macro and developed forms, they're never going to understand them because they have foregone the apparatus that would allow them to understand the foundation of those contradictions, which is the ability to think through them as a real unity of opposites operative in the world.

Not as this syllogistic mental, it's a real unity of opposites in the world.

And if you cannot grasp that, you're not going to understand it.

You're going to be groping in the dark every time you try to explain the world.

You're not going to be able to make sense of it.

And this is, I mean, in the project that we have here, that we have in the Midwestern Parks Institute and in my personal scholarship, I find that.

Ninety nine percent of the time, the failures that I encounter in the left are rooted in the fact that people do not think dialectically.

They're unable to see contradictions.

They're unable to see things in the processes in which they exist.

And they're unable to see things in how they're located in various forms of social holes and social totalities.

They're unable to see how things turn into their opposites, how stuff is preserved even when it changes.

You can't have the understanding of change if you don't have the understanding of some identity that's sustained in that process of change.

It's not just Hegel, it goes back to Aristotle.

So it's a complete absence of dialectical thinking, and it reflects itself in these political judgments that are founded in a deep misinterpretation of how the world is, and therefore an incorrect assessment of what the fuck is going on every time a new political event enters the sphere of discourse.

So it's an absence of dialectics.

Engels has this quote from a letter that we, I know, Noah and I cite all the time.

What all these gentlemen black is dialectics.

Thank you so much, Black.

All they see is cause here, effect there.

Sorry, I was just thinking uh thanking someone like Pegg.

I didn't mean to interrupt.

Yeah, and um I don't know if you want me to talk about it, but the the way that we have formulated this absence is as the purity fetch.

It's a term that captures in a positive form the absence of dialectical thinking.

Because when you don't think through contradictions, you don't think through movement, you don't think through totalities or heterogeneous totalities, what you're operating with is the notion that that which can be supported, that which can be accepted, is only that which measures up to some abstract, disconnected, pure idea that exists only in my head.

And not to interrupt, but you know, we arrived at a pretty identical conclusion in parallel, obviously separately.

We but instead of the purity fretish, we called it just formalism, right?

Bourgeois formalism.

And, you know, one would ask, why formalism?

You know, because isn't being one-sided with regard to content also the same thing, just as undialectual.

And I say, yes, but when you're one-sided with regard to content, you are faced with form.

So you turn content into form and form into content.

And ultimately, the real content is beyond your purview, then.

All you have is the form.

Because the content actually is always and perpetually in contradiction with anything we ossify and we take as a kind of static object.

So it's the formalism, right?

And

That is uh profoundly, you know, similar to the kind of critique of Cartesianism and w you know, um

I I I really um

I guess racialized it in the beginning of streaming because it was like the Anglo stuff.

You know, it's this is Anglo-Saxon metaphysics.

I was debating SDL and I was like, fucking Anglo-Saxon metaphysics from the 17th century talking about because he was trying to like bring up some data stuff of like support for gun ownership.

And I was like, nobody gives a fuck about your Anglo-Saxon metaphysics.

No, no, no shade at the Anglos, but it is these traditions that, at least in the academy, have been the most fierce opponents of dialectics.

Of course, yeah.

I mean, even among Marxists who I like personally, I'm not going to name them because I like them a lot and I don't want to put them on blast, but the British do have a problem with dialectics.

Even the ones I like who are Marxists, who are theorists.

And then, you know, I'm not even letting the Germans get off the hook, by the way, because.

I don't think they understand dialectics either.

And I always think to myself, I'm like, why was Hegel German?

Kant is the German.

Hegel is like Russian or something.

I don't know how that guy was German, right?

It makes sense that Kant was German, but not Hegel, right?

And what I mean by that is that also German Marxists tend to do the opposite of the British ones, where instead of focusing on the empiricism, they focus on the kind of transcendentalism of Kant and so on.

Both both being

Both being the fun.

Yeah, it's interesting you mentioned Hegel being Russian, because Mark says in one of his letters towards the end of his life that the people that have understood his worldview the clearest have been the Russians.

So, and I mean, there has been quite a bit of scholarship as to how much Hegel engaged with certain Oriental traditions and how much they influenced him in his thought.

Um that that's uh an interesting field that that I haven't done too much uh research in.

But I think uh I think you're correct to describe it as a as a as a problem of formalism.

And I think that the paradox is that when there's this overemphasis on form, not only do you not get to understand what's going on at the level of content, but you also don't understand what's going on at the level of form.

Yep.

Because the correct approach, the Hegelian dialectical approach to it is not just even like in the traditional philosophy, you have this.

Well, you have appearance, and the point is to pierce through appearance and get to the real essence, get to the real content.

And that's also wrong.

It's a more developed stage than just I'm going to focus on appearance and form, but it's also wrong.

Because the correct position is inquiring why it is that the content required taking such a specific form.

How is it that the content, in order for it to be as content, needed to take the form that it took?

And this is, you know, I saw the meme the other day, the gorilla meme with the Pepe.

And I loved it.

Oh, yeah.

The gorilla with the Pepe.

If you read the logic of essence, that second part of the science of logic, that's what you get.

You can't come out of it thinking, you know, really the goal of philosophy and critical thinkers is to pierce through appearance and then get at the essence of something behind.

No, it's understanding that relationship.

What is it that requires the essence to shine forth and to reflect itself in the way that it does?

It's basically the interdependence of both.

It's like the essence doesn't come at the expense of the appearance.

And it's the same kind of, even formalism isn't necessarily the only way.

I say Anglo-Saxon metaphysics from the 17th century.

We had the word the Anglo box.

It was like big in the community.

It's like formalism.

But all of them kind of, either it's the pure formalism or there's a kind of positioning of this ultimate essence behind all appearance.

We'll never get there.

We'll never actually make it something concrete.

But it's like a pure bluff, right?

That's a necessary point of reference of bourgeois thinking.

And yes, you're right.

The real knowledge, let's say, lies in precisely understanding.

Precisely how it is form arises out of the content, and also importantly, how the content is the reconciliation of the contradiction itself.

That's what the content is.

Content is not a form behind a form.

Actually, it's substantialism, is the word from Spinoza substance.

Because I had this view that Spinoza was the one who ruined materialism in Marxism.

Because to me, substance precisely was a kind of essence, which was simultaneously also a kind of form, and which was behind all of the forms, right?

And for me, the truth of the matter is that.

The essence is actually what reconciles.

The form, and it's not behind the form because content is not itself a form.

Content is the dialectical and the concrete unity of the dialectical relationship that form is suspended within the process of, right?

Of the development.

So, but you know, to kind of

Uh, you can also kind of add more comments, but to slightly shift gears, because I did want to talk about this a little.

Um.

You know, uh I don't know if

This has been explored.

I know Paul Cockshot, who's a British Marxist, has explored the relationship between capitalism and thermodynamics, right?

The direct basis of capitalist production that Marx was writing about in actual energy, which I find a fascinating topic because when we talk about this.

This tendency of kind of abstraction that cuts itself off from its premises one-sidedly, and it's like the purity fetish, actually, right?

Like what you're talking about.

It's cutting yourself from your premises and just seeking to kind of arrive at a pure or fetishizing a false ideal of your premises.

And it's the same thing, right?

It's exactly the same.

It's abstract thinking.

Yeah.

But within physics, though, you think about industrial capitalism specifically.

And it's it begins with the steam engine, right?

And what is the steam engine?

What does that actually do?

Because that's the center of, I would argue, of industrial capitalism as a whole, right?

There's no way to talk about a mode of production without referring to actual like concrete means of production, right?

Right, and you know, the central paradigm of 19th-century industrial capitalism is based on the steam engine, and it's like, what does that do?

And it's kind of fascinating because you

Because for the whole history of mankind's civilizations

Civilization or production was powered not just by human labor, but also by some external, almost autonomous force.

And that had always been water, right?

It had always been water power, and then marginally wind power in some cases, but mainly water power from rivers in particular, right?

And ports and so on.

And what the steam engine does is it kind of abstracts economics from geography in a w in ways, and it's like, okay, uh you don't need to build cities near

Rivers anymore to have large-scale production, you know?

And how that mechanism works, like physically, kind of does seem to parallel what capital is and how capital works.

You begin with some kind of concrete store of energy, like in coal or in firewood.

This is almost kind of comparable with use value, if you want, right?

As far as capital is concerned.

And then what the machine does is it kind of

Frees the energy from it to turn it into an abstract energy, an energy whose concrete application.

Is not defined at the outset, right?

It's kind of like general labor versus concrete labor, you know?

And the steam engine in particular

Begins this as a kind of autonomous form of generating energy through, but entrapped within the mechanism of the steam engine.

It's not, it's not abstract energy quite yet, right?

But

It is a form of the abstraction of energy because of its ability to kind of um.

Abstract itself from like concrete ways of the transfer of energy through relationships with rivers and like nature and stuff, right?

Then it's electricity and kind of like how work is measured abstractly and in general that you really kind of see that how the homology with capital is very clear, right?

How you're kind of taking old fossil fuels, kind of literal concrete concretion of this latent forms of energy in the cosmos, right?

And emptying that from its concrete context into something abstract and then applying it to reality and the outcome is unknown.

Um, I think it's fascinating how much that kind of topic of energy in general has been overlooked.

I think I sound like an idiot because I'm not that.

I'm not that well read on Marxist political economy thinkers, the history of Marxist political economy.

I know about Marxist capital and stuff, but this history of the scholarship on it and so on, I don't know if enough attention has been paid to, again, a more concrete view of political.

I mean, Cockshot takes us to a huge extreme, because he also rejects dialectics in general, and he kind of rejects.

this notion of social relations as irreducible to natural relations.

But I do find it to be an interesting direction because I don't think it's a very underappreciated one.

And finally, it's like.

It it it is important to ask the question of like how is it

Capitalism outlives its concrete instantiation.

in a specific paradigm of production.

Like, is it a coincidence that the era of imperialism was also the era of the combustion engine and electricity and a kind of shift to a totally new way of

Harnessing and dealing with energy, and you know, continuing up to the nineteen seventies.

With the newfound significance of oil for the world economy and the information age, I'm kind of rambling, but what do you?

What do you think about that or?

I uh I haven't engaged with

Any work akin to an analysis of the homologies between the development of capitalism as a social totality and the thermal dynamics that's connected to it.

I would say this: that there's a paradox at play because capitalism is itself as a totality, as a form of social totality, a very concrete one, and in many ways, the most concrete form of life that humanity had experienced up until the point of its development.

And I have this thing I do with my students because one of the texts I always sign is Hegel's short little popular article, something he doesn't do very often, which is called Who Thinks Abstractly.

And

I one of the things that I tell them when I'm trying to break down the concrete abstract is I ask them, what is concrete?

And then all of them just want to start touching stuff.

They want to start touching the table, notebooks.

Right, right.

And what is the abstract?

And like the image that comes about of the abstract is like, you know, Plato's depiction of the philosopher as a stargazer.

the wrongful depiction that other people make of the philosopher.

And it couldn't be more upside down.

Like if you trace the etymological understanding of these words, abstractus literally means that which is disconnected.

Concretis means that which is complex, that which contains within it many different determinations, that which is composite, which has

The most concrete would therefore be the whole.

And what you have in capitalism as a concrete mode of life is one that is constantly, not constantly, one that is integral to it is having these different series of abstractions, these different moments that are integral to the concrete whole.

And so they participate in the concreteness of the social totality of the form of life, but they participate in a way that is through abstraction.

And if you look at something like labor, I mean, Marx uses, of course, concrete labor to describe the specific type of labor that's going on.

In abstract labor, this sort of general socially necessary labor time.

It's quantified, and therefore, the specific type of activities are just completely homogenized all to the same type of thing.

The differentiation is a quantitative one.

But that abstract labor, which is a real abstraction, just like the abstract commodity that it produces, it's a component in a concrete system.

It's something that is itself concrete and it obtains its meaning through the concrete.

It can exist as an abstraction only because of its dependency on the concrete.

Just like the concrete itself can only exist through the relations that it contains between these different forms of real abstractions.

Um don't you think it kind of um I th I think it is a paradox within Marx because Marx begins Capital trying to begin level with the reader, I would argue, right, in Capital Volume one.

Like, okay, concrete labor is like labor as an immediate use value, but we know as Hegelians that's not exactly a correct description of what the concrete is, right?

But I think I I would argue actually that I think Marx was trying to make the case

That rather than capitalism being concrete, the concrete of capitalism was actually socialism, right?

The only way we could appraise the concrete content of abstract labor is if we recognize how it's being assailed by this larger historical tendency through the increased socialization of labor, through this increased divergence between the material.

Necessities of production and labor in general versus the form it's taking in the form of capital.

It seems like.

It's not just our job to recognise the concrete of abstract labor.

As a form of like analysis, I think he was hinting that this in reality it was being made concrete through the arrival of, as Engels would put it, socialism from the future, victorious socialism from the future.

And I think in general, when we look at capitalism as a concrete totality,

We're already describing socialism, actually, and maybe society is not aware of it.

But this is one of the things that is so interesting about the nature of capital itself.

Because capital wasn't just a pure analysis of capitalism, it was also a kind of gospel of socialism, I would argue, right?

Because it's really saying once we have appreciated capitalism as a concrete totality, we have actually proven that this thing is on its way out and it's turning into something completely contrary to it, right?

Um

So I think that's what I would say on that.

And I I think what I mean by like a concrete store of value is just kind of like immediate.

But I think that does open another question, which is even though energy turns into kind of abstract energy whose real determinate content cannot be presumed,

That's just the case for thought.

Just like in the case of labor, right?

When Marx talks about abstract labor, is it actually abstract labor?

Or are we just not able to presume the determinate content?

Of that labor, right?

And of course, it's the latter that's true.

It's a limitation only of the mind, actually.

In reality, it is concrete, you know, in reality.

Energy is concrete, the way in which it's utilized and applied and consumed and so on, that is concrete.

That does obey a concrete and determinate kind of pattern that reconciles all of its the many different determinations.

Like the concrete is the concentration of the many, right?

And it's the same thing with capitalism.

I I I think that's uh

You mentioned that in reality it is concrete.

I agree.

But not in its social reality.

In its social reality, it is an abstraction.

In the form of reality that it takes under capitalist forms of intercourse, it is an abstraction because it divorces itself from the concrete reality of the complex, specific type of labor that performs it that requires a wide array of different things, certain types of materials, skills, types of specific, qualitatively different types of work.

And it just makes all of this into a number.

It's just a quantity.

That's why it's abstract.

You also bring up something very interesting.

You say that.

And please let me know if I'm paraphrasing wrong: that the concrete of capitalism is socialism.

Yeah.

I think that the way that I would understand that is that capitalism is itself a concrete social totality that is a movement.

It's pregnant with certain contradictions.

And amongst those contradictions, one of the things that you find when you study this concrete totality concretely, it means when you ascend to it as a concrete, is that on the basis of these contradictions, a new form of life is already taking shape.

that if we think about socialism

Modern socialism, it cannot be done without what capitalism develops upon feudalism.

That centralization of the forces of production.

Is fundamental for socialism to achieve its ends.

And in that sense, socialism does exist as a

Socialism exists as an abs, it exists abstractly within capitalism, but it is an abstraction that, through the understanding of the concrete totality that it exists in, gives us insights into how it will itself be a concrete totality one day.

So it exists implicitly.

So that's why, like, even after revolutions, like the socialism we describe today, it's still a socialism that is unfolding, that is concretizing, that it's becoming itself as this radically new form of life.

And so, like, any that's why I hesitate, like, any attempt to, you can't provide a concrete political economy of socialism yet.

Why?

Because the totality that we would be analyzing is one that is still in a process of maturing, it's still in a process of concretizing, just like the flaws of classical political economists, which Marx respected very much, are rooted in the fact that the object of study still wasn't as developed as it would be when Marxist writing.

I think you know, you know, Hegel's famous saying about like the owl of Minerva, right?

And this kind of issue of like always being too late when it comes to the sphere of consciousness.

And I suspect something similar with capitalism, actually, because you know, capitalism was around for hundreds of years before Marx.

I don't know if you'd agree, right?

I mean, after the Black Death, and but that was not seen as like capitalism in its purest form because it was still attached to the fetters of feudalism.

But you know, actually, I would argue that capitalism in the days of early modernity and mercantilism is actually when you might have been able to describe capitalism as a concrete mode of production, right?

A mode of production which is the riddle, the hitherto riddle of the history of feudalism solved.

All of the various

determinations of the feudal mode of production were entering into contradiction with each other.

So what is the positive reconciliation of that

you know, for which all of these different and contrasting determinations are part of are concentrated into one thing, right?

And it's clear that that thing was capitalism.

So I think there's an irony of I don't know if I would call it an irony, but I think

Before capitalism assumes its purest form, so to speak, that's when it's at its most concrete as a unique mode of production.

But I think when Marx was describing capitalism, the industrial capitalism of nineteenth century England, as it began there, I guess, I think the thesis more or less was that

This is capitalism on its way out.

Capitalism is exhausting itself now as a mode of production, and the only reconciliation of

Now because it's freed from the fetters of feudalism, so to speak, its real contradictions are now laid bare.

And these contradictions represent different determinations of the same mode of production, right?

But

How are those contradictions reconciled into one mode of production, right?

And I think that obviously when taken in the positive sense, that mode of production is socialism.

It's socialism that renders these contradictions superfluous and is therefore worthy of being the concrete of industrial capitalism.

I I wouldn't put it in that way.

Um

You mentioned that capitalism as a concrete existed in its most concrete form, in its mercantilist stage.

I think the notion of concrete that we're dealing with when we do that is one that's a lot more akin to a sense of immediacy.

It's a lot more concrete precisely because it's still operating with self-earned private property and it's not as abstract.

I don't mean in that sense.

I just mean like because of the proximity with the prior the vestiges of the prior mode of production.

It's precisely because of that proximity that it is not concrete yet, that it's still abstract.

It's like, I mean, um

It still had to mature as a mode of production.

It's kind of like if we say, I can pass concrete judgment on a child.

Like a child is not concretely a man yet.

I think the difference is they become a man.

They obtain the complexity that makes it more concrete.

Because concrete, just having this complexity within it, they achieve that as they develop.

And as they develop, we, alongside with that object of analysis, develop the capacity to describe it concretely.

We can't describe it concretely if it's still.

It's like, imagine trying to pass judgment on the character of a person if they're sex.

No, no, no, I get what you're saying, but I think the contrasting premise I think at work here is that I guess what I'm trying to say is I think there is an inevitable delay where, yes, I don't think that was necessarily capitalism in its immature stage.

It's just that the superstructure, so to speak, or consciousness could not have possibly caught up by that time to the fact that capitalism was in its mature stage.

And now that when capitalism seems to have matured fully in industrial England, it's precisely because it appears to be an adult that it's actually already dead to us.

So there is this, I don't know what I would call it, even tragical relationship, like the owl of Minerva, I guess, the delay, this time lag, where precisely when something appears to us fully, it's already gone.

It's already taken flight and become something else.

And I think that should change maybe our understanding of what the material concrete actually is.

Is it really just the sum total of these various phenomenal appearances?

Or could it even be regarded as a kind of materially concrete?

This is going to sound like Pomo nonsense, but almost kind of like.

a a a virtual object, uh the the concrete thing to which the whole logic and the whole existence of the present society is actually tending towards and actually referring to.

Can I say because it's a very interesting quote: The Out of Minerva only flies with the falling of dusk, right?

But when dusk falls, the day is not over.

You still have the night, which is the other component of so the light of the day, the rational part of the day is gone, but its irrationality, the darkness continues.

And so I think this is what we're seeing.

I think this is partially what's going on here: that you seem to be describing this process whereby early capitalism existed in this.

In this form where it still had some light and rationality to it.

And that's fair.

I agree.

And only now, when it has developed to a certain stage, can we look back at it?

But in looking back at it, because there's this delay, we assume that we're looking at something different from what we're looking at now.

But when the Olive Minerva flies, we're still in the same day.

You get what I'm saying?

You still have the night going on after the daylight ends.

And I think that's what Marx is picking out.

Like, capitalism has matured.

And in the same way that he says in the Grand Risa, it is the anatomy of the man that gives us the blueprint or something for the anatomy of the age.

We could come to understand the beginning of capitalism, its mercantilist stage concretely, because we see it, what it has degenerated into.

If you wish to describe instead of maturing what it has degenerated into.

What I'm more saying is it's like.

When something appears to us fully and fully fleshed out, like this is it in its pure form,

It has already become something contrary to that.

I think that's more kind of what I'm getting.

And I think that it's not necessarily.

Like

To be fair, it's like

Marx and Engels did kind of jump the gun, even themselves, when they thought that industrial capitalist England was like the final conclusion toward which all world history was going to tend towards.

And they were clearly wrong about that, right?

They were clearly wrong, even in terms of their and this is early in Marx and Engels, not way later in Marx's life especially.

But at least early on, the assumption was the revolution's happening in England, and then it's going to and then everyone has to catch up to England.

And kind of this issue of time.

You know, was also a huge operative issue for the Russian revolutionaries and the Russian Marxists, right?

Because the whole dispute was stagism, right?

Okay, w by what procession of the f time is Russia, which is some kind of backward feudal society in their eyes, right?

Going to turn into socialism.

So the economists were like, okay, leave the politics out.

Capitalism will just take us there.

And we shouldn't intervene in politics at all.

And the Menshevik faction of the Social Democrats and others were saying something along the lines of, we do need to intervene into politics to aid the bourgeoisie to overthrow the autocracy.

And then we're going to, then will be our time for socialism, right?

And then the only one who

Was a time traveler, I guess, in many regards, actually, because Lenin's development of capitalism in Russia, you could say that's a work of time travel, right?

But also, in terms of his revolutionary strategy, actually.

We don't need to collaborate with the big bourgeoisie.

We don't need to wait for a liberal.

We don't need to redo European history.

We can distill the essence of the laws of history and apply them in the present, like here and now, right?

And I think the significance of that.

Is necessarily a different view of the material concrete.

It's the whole paradox that gives rise to what Gromsky, I think, describes as the relative autonomy of the superstructure with regard to the base, which is like, how do we even implement socialism or how do we justify socialist consciousness when there's a huge delay going on in reality?

The premises and material foundation of socialism isn't even here, so we need to actually create it to catch up with us.

And I think the only rational explanation would be that.

Because the view of the material concrete

Is probably more like something like a virtuality toward which reality is bent or tending, rather than like the sum total of.

the instantiation of specific ki kind of phenomenal formations, like like like s the the existence physically of factories here and proletarians here.

How is it that, for example, in China, you have Mao leading a proletarian revolution, like without a proletariat, right?

But it but not only that, but then ultimately actually creating the material foundations of a proletarian dictatorship almost backwards, right?

I know if what I'm saying is confusing, cut me off.

No, it's the interesting thing, and I like how you qualified it by the early Marx, because we both know that the later Marx wasn't thinking like that.

He wasn't thinking like that precisely thanks to the influence of a little Russian thinker, whom Lenin will base the title of one of his early 20th century books, What is to be?

It was Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who said that history gives to its sons the bone and to its grandchildren the marrow.

So these societies did not have to go through all of these stages because they already went through them in another place.

They can just obtain the fruits of that development and attempt, and here is where the superstructural dimension comes to it, if they're successful in this political battle, obtain the fruit without the hassle that led to it.

And Marx had a lot of faith in the Russian Obshina, the Russian commune.

And when it came to the debates between the Russian populace and the dogmatic Marxists in Russia, and we're speaking here, of course, late 1870s, he sided with the populace who said it's the Obshina, it's the commune.

That if we're able to develop the forces of production here that have already developed there, and we can, we can build communism on the basis of the Ubshina.

We don't need to wait to develop a proletariat.

And you made a comment earlier about collectivization.

Collectivization was in part the realization of that prophecy: that it is on the basis of that communal form of life that was present in Russian civilization that you build once it acquires the technological developments of capitalism, you have the potential to build a communist or socialist society.

Now, as far as the time thing, I mean, you can blame Marx.

I'm not saying you, I'm using the general you.

Someone that has engaged with, say, the first volumes, the first volume of capital, they can blame Marx for not predicting the development of capitalism in that industrial capitalist age into a monopoly, finance-dominated capitalist age.

The interesting thing is, you know, as we both know, he does get to that later on because people don't read through capital as a project as a whole.

But I still think that.

If we think about the concrete in that sense, the sense that Hegel and Marx use it as that which contains the many, and the most concrete would be that which is the whole, it is very clear that insofar as we can even speak about an imperialist age of capitalism, what we're speaking about is a capitalism that is still developing.

Now, we can also understand that that development, just like in life, is a development towards that form of peeing towards death, a direct engagement, a process of life turning into death.

But you're still, I'm better able to describe someone's character if they live up to 70 and I'm able to see it than if I catch them only when they're 60.

And in that process, the older that they get, the more sense I'm able to make of the first years.

Just like if you look at capital as a project, the development of all of the categories, yes, they start abstractly, but they're abstract precisely because those are the building blocks so that you can get to the more concrete categories after.

And it's not the case, and people do this, they just read the first part of capital and they're like, okay, now I understand the early part.

I understand the first category.

No, to understand those first categories and to understand them comprehensively, you have to see what they unfold into.

So that just like you couldn't understand what they unfold into without seeing the first ones, it's a reciprocal relationship.

And the example that I use in some of my texts is The Godfather.

If you only watch part one, you can't speak comprehensively about the Godfather.

You got to watch part two and three because watching part two and three are going to help you understand what part one, there isn't a part three.

No, no, there is.

I'm just saying that was like, if you don't watch parts two and three, you can't have a comprehensive understanding of part one.

To understand part one, you have to watch part two and three.

And that's what happens with these forms of life as a whole.

We can see, and this is what the libertarians do.

The libertarians look back at this pure idea of capitalism that you had this self-earned private.

That's already been dissolved by industrial capitalism that has been basically like what you would call classical capitalism, right?

It's almost like libertarianism is like capitalist neoclassicism, like just like how they tried to go back to the ideal ages of Greece and Rome.

It's like similar.

But, you know, to be a little difficult, I could be wrong about this, but I do remember reading Marx writing eventually that the window of opportunity for the Obshina was passed.

Is that true or that he wrote that?

I have not found, on the contrary, I think the more he dug into he learns Russia, which is because I could have sworn I read that that was that he said, like, okay.

Um, originally, like, yeah, this is a window of opportunity, but then later on in his life, he was like, But the window now passed, and it's it's basically the window of opportunity comment was already later on.

I think these letters, if I'm not mistaken, are from um 71.

Yeah, uh, it could be a little later, but he engages with it in first in a letter to Mankowski, a Russian right-wing populist, who is telling the Marxists, well, if you if you really want to be a Marxist, just sit around and wait with your hands in your pockets for capitalism to develop.

And Marx writes a long response, he never sends it.

Um, and then there's the Vera Sasulish interaction, where he was already prepared by that reply to Mankowski that he doesn't send and prepares four drafts of the Vera Sasulish one, and he ends up sending the last one.

And the conclusion is basically: you know, these stages where my analysis of Western Europe, the more I've studied Russia, I think that this could be a potential for socialism and that you don't have to go through this stage.

You can just obtain the fruits of it in a very Chernyshevsky-like manner.

But it was always a hypothesis.

It wasn't like there, I have not found any evidence.

And I've looked at some of the.

Are you aware of the claim that he said that?

Uh, that he said that there was potential, or that there wasn't that the window of opportunity passed that comment.

I have not encountered any claim where he where he says that he ends up towards the end of his life.

It's not just Russia, he engages anthropologists.

I think, sorry.

He engages with Inca societies and Mayan societies through the work of.

Kovalevsky, Maxim Kovalevsky, one of the Russian anthropologists, he called him his scientist friend.

And he comes to the same conclusion.

There's different forms of communal life in these areas that could leap to socialism if you have the capacity to incorporate the developments of the forces of production.

You don't need to wait to develop a proletariat.

Now, we can say that he was wrong in that change towards the end of his life.

And I think there's something to be said about the fact that constructing socialism and incorporating those forces of production is very hard or nearly impossible without developing the proletariat.

Russia eventually has to develop the Soviet Union has to eventually develop the proletariat, as does China.

I think one of the reasons.

It made a lot of sense to me that he said that was because obviously Engels outlived Marx, and it doesn't seem like Engels is maintaining this view as far as the strategy of

The Russian Marxist is concerned.

And his advice to them and stuff.

Engels' research was not necessarily in that area.

He was focusing even in the the origins of the family, private property in the state.

He's building a lot from Marx's notes.

Engels' area was in the harder sciences and towards the end of his life in the study of Christianity and in continued political activities.

But I haven't seen I mean I haven't seen any evidence that Engels earns on that position.

And I think the last Russian preface to the manifesto that was done when they were alive is the only area where that hypothesis that has been constructed on the basis of unpublished manuscripts, where the hypothesis is is stated explicitly and it was published in a Russian periodical as its own thing separated from the the Communist Manifesto.

But if you have any sources there, I I'd love to still I'd probably have to look and see, 'cause I either it was a Marxist themselves making that argument rather than actually quoting Marx or it was that.

But, um

Now, okay, uh the trouble's not over yet because I have one more um

Problems.

These aren't troubles.

This is the case.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If that is the case, I don't change my opinion on it, but I I study it, I look at it.

No, no, no, I'm not.

I'm just this is an area that I've it was my project even when I was an undergraduate.

I'm just referring to it in jest.

I think.

What I would what I would say, um

What I would say, yeah, Volk.

Okay, Engels wrote about Russia in the 1890s, the Eastern.

Okay, we can shelve that for a second because there's something else I wanted to say.

Um.

I think it it is important to point out though that Marx didn't finish Capital and he he wasn't able to arrive at the the more concrete you know he planned volumes on I forgot the order of it the world market the states yeah I think the world market was the last one right and it I don't remember he does like two or three plans there's the only one from he was very very ambitious yeah

I don't know.

I get what you're saying.

What you're basically saying is that because I think the most convincing argument against my time travel stuff is that, well, capitalism would eventually transition not to socialism, but imperialism, right?

So the fact that Marx didn't foresee imperialism proves that capitalism in its totality had not fully developed by that time.

And that's how the Leninists put the question of social.

Yeah, that's why it's the last time it's socialism.

That's the stage of socialist revolution.

I think, though.

I think I would also make the argument, though, that Lennon's break with

the established Marxist tradition, was so abrupt and so severe

Um

I mean, uh we talked about this before, but like it was like it's it was especially so severe in terms of the effect that it had, in terms of like.

what it meant at the time.

It was a completely, almost completely different take on Marx and Marxism, right?

Than than the one that was conventionally established, which we would both agree was a betrayal of Marx, obviously.

But revisionism became the dominant view and a distortion of Marx into dogmatism became a dominant view.

But I think the the the point I would disagree with is that

You know, when Lenin said of this, Marx and Engels have said nothing, right?

I think there is a grain of truth to view.

Lenin's imperialism, his specific strategy, his specific understanding of how the world had developed,

As filling a vacuum not just in terms of the blind spot and the failure of the of social democracy, but perhaps even Marx himself.

You know, I think.

Marx himself is

Did not fully understand the concrete of capitalism, not just because he didn't live long enough to see how it would develop.

But because perhaps there were errors in the fundamental premises of the project of capital, which perhaps might also be related to why he couldn't finish it.

I imagine if Marx finished capital, it would have been clear how imperialism would have been directly anticipated.

And all the things Lenin talks about that and you know, when you read Imperialism the High Stage, it's a polemic.

And the polemic is look at these lousy Marxists ignoring these basic developments of reality.

And meanwhile, look at this liberal guy.

What was his name again?

It was like.

What was his name?

Robert forgot his name.

But look at this liberal English theorist who's appreciating and understanding all this stuff, and then like where the Marxists are nowhere to be found, right?

Like that the whole rage animating Lenin's

But you even you're even in the way that you're describing it, you're describing it as a development.

And I, it's, it, it gets into true, but I, I think, I think it gets into a form of speculation if, if not in the Hegelian, but in a more quotidian sense, if you say that that Marx didn't see that Marx wouldn't have seen it even if it, if he was part of seeing the development, I think that there is something to be said because he's not just the Capital is not just unfinished in terms of volume two and three.

Throughout his whole life, he was working at the end on a third version of the German edition of Volume 1.

So he felt like volume one itself, though published, was unfinished.

Yeah.

Right.

So there is something to that.

And it's also the fact, I mean, the volume gets published in 67.

All of these manuscripts are coming out through the 70s.

And what's happening in the 70s is, I mean, Lenin traces the development of imperialism to the 1890s.

I think it starts in the 70s.

I agree.

I think Du Bois is right to say, and here's where Du Bois is right.

Du Bois sees the development of modern imperialism in the counter-revolution of 1870s.

But to briefly interrupt you, you know why Lenin has to say it's the 90s, right?

Because I think at least, because it would have been problematic from a theoretical point of view with them alive to say that Marx and Engels were alive at this time and totally were impervious to it.

But it's obvious imperialism, as Lenin describes it at least, was there in the 70s.

Yeah.

But I think the reason I'm saying this, and I guess.

I think imperialism as a development

Already

Is when capitalism, as we know it, starts to directly take a political and superstructural form.

And I think that is what's defining the new strategy Lenin is calling for in the era of imperialism, which is the anti-monopoly strategy and the democratic struggle and so on.

And the reason it shifts to that is because we're not talking about the need to wait for development of capitalism anymore.

We're not talking about some kind of like actual pure process of production being the source of class struggle.

We're talking about a struggle between increasingly undemocratic dictatorships and the democratic aspirations of the masses, and how the dictatorship is like the sole, the last refuge of capital itself, not economics anymore, right?

The pure relations of production, as they're being reproduced at the purely economic level, that is no longer reproducing capitalism.

Like Lenin's already observing that, right?

Oh, it's the state.

It's the state.

It's the state, exactly.

But it becomes, and I think we agree on this.

You mentioned earlier that you see capitalism being something that starts far back, you know, well before industrial capitalism.

And

Capitalism gets to a stage when it conquers, when the capitalist class conquers political power, where very quickly it becomes clear that in order to avoid crises, it needs to stay.

This sort of libertarian idea that some Marxists hold that you can have capitalism here and then there's a capitalist mode of life.

That's why I use the term Marx, the traditional dogma is mode of production.

The term I always use is form of life, because you cannot separate it from the state and from all of the different state institutions that not only allow you to simply reproduce the economic base of society, but that save the economic base of society as soon as it comes into contradictions.

I I think also though that the state is playing this role of

This is especially evident after 1929, right?

Of propping up capitalism itself economically.

Yeah, like it's not even just like how it used to, because we all know that even in the days of mercantilism, the state was playing a role in capitalism, right?

But I think that the qualitative difference in this case is that relations of production are not being reproduced purely at the level of the form of life.

They're being reproduced by force politically.

The significance of the democratic struggle had always been we have these relations of production that are just pure vestiges of the past.

If we have formal equality, if we have democracy, the vestiges of feudalism are done, right?

Feudalism is not coming from like actual material relations of production economically.

It's just like these vestiges of the superstructure.

And by the time imperialism starts to develop, I think the same can be said of capitalism too, right?

Capitalism also is superstructural.

And if we win the battle of democracy, that's the cynical.

Goal of the Popular Front, like McCarthy, is like, these people are civil rights activists and they're fighting for democracy, but it's really communism.

And it's like, well, the grain of truth in that is if we do

Gain basic democratic rights and fight against the dictatorship of monopoly capital, socialism is the logical conclusion.

Like, directly, it is right, because the institution of private property and its abstract, we're using the words incorrectly, but you get what I'm saying.

And it's like advanced form as this as the institution of finance capital won't be able to be maintained without the dictatorial force of the state.

I think abstract there would be correct because the finance capital is so disconnected from any productive activity that's not abstract.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I get what you're saying.

But no, I mean, like, and I think my heretical, potentially heretical thesis from this, though, which I'm not certain about, I just think it should at least maybe be entertained or thought about is like.

Is it possible that

Imperial this sounds horrible, it sounds horrific to say this, especially from a propaganda perspective.

But isn't material isn't imperialism the material victory of the socialist mode of production to the point where capitalism has to retreat to the superstructure because socialism already won materially?

And I think even Lenin will say that socialism in Russia has to be built off of German state capitalism.

And he uses the model of the German post office actually as a paradigm of socialism.

And I think it's possible.

That Marxists may have, and Marx himself.

I mean, you mentioned his attempts to revise that.

He understood the problem, definitely.

Like, I'm not saying he didn't think there was a problem, and he was like naive.

Like, he was trying to fix this problem, but I just don't think he lived long enough to do it, right?

Or he got there.

I agree Lenin is definitely the heir of Marx.

No doubt about that.

I'm not like trying you know, Georgius Sorel and these kind of like proto-fascists try to make the argument like, no, Lenin breaks with Marxism.

Finally, we can go and like have our fascist orgy and be free of like we can we can be like Di Annunzio and just like run around and frolic in the woods naked or something.

I don't think that's true at all.

I think Mar Lenin is still in continuity with something fundamental in Marx and and built by Marx.

But

I guess my view is that

Uh, there was, you know, the meme like Marx couldn't account for this.

You ever see that meme on Twitter?

Like, it'll be like some like human nature or some shit.

Yeah, yeah, or like it'll get to ridiculous levels, or it'll be like PewDiePie or something, like, Marx failed to take into account PewDiePie or something.

And it's like, I do think it's maybe possible that Lenin was giving.

Recognition to something that Marx may have not taken into account, but which he actually could have, but who didn't, not because he was dogmatic or he was wrong or deficient in character, but just because

He couldn't, he did not even think to entertain it, you know.

But it's not just Lenin, it's Engels.

Engels is very clear in his early 1890s letters that not that they fucked up, but that they had to focus all their energy on political economy to flesh that out.

And then the idea would be to get to these other aspects of the form of life that they weren't able to give the attention that they gave to political economy.

They gave very little attention to those.

And Lenin is the person that I think explicitly gives a lot more attention to those.

Now, about the.

About the heretical thesis.

Look, it depends on how we're understanding socialism.

If you're understanding socialism as state intervention,

For the sake of ameliorating the contradictions created by capitalism.

I don't even know if I'd put it that way, to be honest.

Well, that's the that what that's the way that I think that you know the people like Shen Uger or something love socialism because you love the the post office or something.

Is is that where your line of argument is?

No, I just mentioned the post office 'cause it's an example Lenin uses.

Lenin uses I think rather.

Getting to like the definition of socialism, we're I'm gonna like we're gonna like I'm gonna uh walk I'm gonna walk on a mine and like blow up or something, but uh

To kind of avoid doing that directly, I would say I think uh when I mean socialism in the material sense, I mean a mode of production that is based on some kind of um

Some kind of socially established content and some kind of socially established.

Necessity, right?

I I don't know, the the transition from exchange value to use value, but not use value in the immediate sense, but use value in the sense of like uh necessary to attend to the necessities of of society, of the commons.

But but every every form of life has had

Its degree of socially established necessity.

I mean, without it, not necessarily an explicit notion of the common good, according to which attending directly to the needs of your population and to the needs of reproducing it.

Is actually the preeminent function of the relations of production themselves.

Although you could maybe make an argument that this is true for well, even in the concept of property, the concept of property that existed in the feudal era was not the Jusubtendi Abutendi.

I don't remember the Roman, you probably do more as a lawyer.

You're supposed to, you know, but it's not the right to use and abuse, which is the Roman one that's captured by capitalism.

It's the right to almost like shepherd over the right to care for.

So the notion of property in the feudal era was like you have a duty, very similar today to the Chinese capitalist class.

Like they have a the more capital, the more responsibility, the bigger duty they have to society and to the common good.

I think that was the notion of property was one that was centered on caring for that property.

No, no, that's true, but.

I I think that's not how the property emerges though, right?

How it emerges is is different.

It emerges as a as a kind of private property where lords can be they can be um benevolent and they can be malevolent, right?

And they have that right, they have that ability because that's where the right begins and ends.

But when feudalism stabilizes into kind of political order, which is, I think, the exception within feudalism, to be honest, a larger political order of like, you know, France or the Holy Roman Empire or whatever, that's when you have a kind of notion of like, okay, what actually is the right of property from the perspective of the monarchy, you know, from the perspective of the empire and so on?

How does it recognize it?

But the premises are entirely different.

This is why feudalism, I think, was distinct from Asiatic modes of production.

I know it's not a view held in Marxism-Leninism, usually.

The view is that the Asiatic mode of production thesis is wrong and that

Well, Marx would disagree with the uh the the dogmas that develop after that just try to equate many ways the Asiatic mode of production as just a form of feudalism.

Yeah, yeah.

But that becomes the that becomes a kind of orthodoxy in the or Marxist-Leninist countries.

But uh which I disagree with.

I I think there's a significance to private property, perhaps beginning with ancient Greece, you know, and through Rome and through feudalism, according to which like there is this right of the individual to own this and pretty much

do whatever they want with it, whether that's acknowledged or not.

I mean, even in capitalism you can't do whatever you want with it, even in the nineteenth century laissez-faire era, right?

But more or less, the rights of the property owner are where the state ends, more or less, right?

Whereas in the Asiatic mode of production, it's this isn't the case.

You have a far more highly integrated society where

Property owners, quote unquote, do actually function as like administrators tending to a flock, like actually on behalf of the state almost.

And I think but but and I was gonna say, you know, you you could make the argument, and I've said this before in half in jest, half in jest, but there's a there is a serious dimension to which.

I do view the Asiatic mode of production as socialism.

Like that they were so they were formed, they weren't modern socialist societies, but socialism is.

actually more of the default state of what civilization has always been than we get it c give it credit for, that the trajectory of Western Europe of Western European history, which remember Marx, Engels, begin uh drawing from Hegel more or less,

Regard as history proper.

Marx basically says, Asia falls asleep, right?

Real history is in Western Europe.

Is he saying that because he's a white supremacist?

No, he's saying that for a specific reason, because the materialist conception of history is about changes in the mode of production based on relations of production.

Well, the changes in the relations of production can only be measured in terms of the development of private property.

And Marx says the key difference between the Asiatic mode of production and the trajectory taken on by Western Europe is that the latter, sorry, the former Asiatic mode of production doesn't have a developed notion of private property.

Whereas in Europe, the institution of private property increasingly becomes developed and

Actually the the epochs of history, the forms of life or modes of production

are defined by the the development of private property, which never simply doesn't happen.

But the problem with this view, of course, is that notwithstanding the lack of the development of the institution of private property, Asiatic modes of production underwent forms of development in terms of culture, politics and technology, still, right?

So when I'm one of the US Chinese cartography, they mapped the whole world eight centuries before.

Yeah.

The printing press, a million different things.

Yeah.

And I think that's.

Well, I think that the the the not just the Asiatic, but but even the the Ameri-Indian civilization it throws Marx for a quandary.

That's why he tells, and this is specifically in his engagements with Koalewski.

He says, stop using the categories I employed in Europe to classify these.

Because if I'm reading your research correctly, we cannot apply those.

Now, I don't know, I wouldn't call it socialism.

I'd call it perhaps something different, a more communal civilization.

It's definitely more communal.

I mean, there have been arguments that there there was in some of these Ameri-Indian civilizations, the larger ones, the ones that come close to being sorts of empires, a form of socialism, a form of Indian socialism, right?

Um whether that could be applied to the Chinese form of life.

I don't know.

I think that Chinese scholars who definitely argue that.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have seen some research.

Roland Bohr cites it of various scholars in twentieth century China that look back at how some of the earliest yeah, how some of the what building on some of the twentieth century ones how some of the early Confucians talked about the purpose of society.

And it's basically socialism.

And there's a story that's told by one of them.

I hate, I don't have the, I've written about this, but I don't have it in front of me.

There's a story that's told by one of them about Confucius and Marx meeting in heaven.

It's like a narrative fictional story.

And Confucius describes that form of society that they considered to be, that he considered to be ideal.

And Marx is like, oh, that's socialism or that's communism.

So there is a, I think there is something to that.

And there has been some Chinese scholarship in the area.

I think a lot of it is still in Chinese.

I think I would understand the hesitancy to call it socialism because there is a key distinction here, right?

But I think the reason I call it socialism is because usually when we use that word, we're also implying a substantive basis of like, you know, concrete social relationships which are recognized as such and which are regarded as the primary ends of production and society and life, right?

And the reproduction of those relationships, those communal relationships.

And I would stress to emphasise that that is already there for the nor as the norm of the civilizations of mankind, that the reproduction of societies and communities and forms of coexistence between people and relations between people, which are not predicated actually

Purely outside of the West, right?

Outside of the West, exactly.

Right.

Which are not actually predicated on the view that some people are human and others are subhuman, but are that are predicated on the view that there is a common reality we share, and that is the object of all production.

And all of the land is actually owned in common.

It's just man, the differences come in terms of how it's managed and so on, with bureaucracy and whatever.

And I think that that is really the norm for non-Western.

And the reason I didn't mention non-Western.

You know, who agrees with you?

Yeah.

Very thoroughly?

W.B.

Du Bois.

Yeah.

His last area of research, and some of it hasn't been published, was on Russia, China, and some of the Asian civilizations and explaining how socialism is just, it's natural to them because there's something within their civilization that is just the relations, the forms of intercourse that have dominated their civilizational development naturally tends towards the modern conception of socialism.

But I think when we look at that, it's the norm for the majority of mankind in its history.

We look at that and then, you know, we say, okay, but these are concrete forms of sociality, right?

These are specific forms of sociality.

This is not socialism in the abstract.

This is not socialism, in other words, in its modern form.

So the real distinction is not between socialism and class society, I don't think.

I think the real operative distinction for most of mankind's history is socialism and modern socialism.

And I may go so as far to say is that capitalism is just a detour between the two.

Capitalism is for China and Russia, all capitalism was a detour between socialism and modern socialism.

In Russia's case, that would hinge on the argument that the Romanovs were already implementing.

I understand, but the Romanovs.

You would say China was feudal?

No, no, no, no.

I'm saying Russia had some that's what I was gonna mention because it would be predicated on the view that with the Romanovs comes the introduction of a already a kind of early early capitalist modernity.

A feudalized capitalist.

Yeah, yeah.

That's how I would qual that was what I was gonna qualify.

But um but um so how do we understand that distinction?

I think the key to understanding it is that what modern the the modern element of socialism

Is actually strangely American, actually, because, and I'll qualify that, because all it is is a kind of.

It's a kind of disclaimer, let's say, which says we cannot make absolutely certain, um.

Assumptions about the concrete content of the sociality before the fact that it's before the fact of it being expressed in reality.

In other words, modern socialism differs from pre-modern socialism, and that in the case of pre-modern socialism, there is a kind of taking for granted of the concrete content of social relationships to the point where calling it socialism is bizarre because the notion of like sociality in the abstract divorced from its actual concrete instantiation requires a negation that they that was simply impossible for them and which required Europe's intervention.

Right.

What's interesting about that is.

They weren't, not that I know of, I'm not a researcher in this area.

But it doesn't seem like they were asking themselves the question: what sort of form of life are we?

Exactly, precisely.

That's exactly it, right?

And it's the same thing, like the conditions that lead to that question, Freezopose.

A fall, a break.

Precisely.

Precisely, exactly.

And that's what happens.

I think it's a fall that leads to the emergence of Western philosophy.

If you look at the conditions in Miletus, it was a war of all against all.

You have an explicit clash of interests between the elite, that common sort of

Sitlichkeipe, this ethical life that individuals were naturally connected to, it begins to break down.

The common bonds begin to break down.

And you have a ruling class that, in order to salvage those in Miletus, they begin to develop these great monuments for the gods because they assume that if they're able to bring back a form of belief in these gods, the order will restabilize.

What ended up happening was that, in the process of developing those big monuments, you have an incredible leap in technological devices that were developed for the sake of being able to accomplish those tasks.

For the monuments, the monuments, being able to build the monuments.

If I have in my university, the person that has.

Uh, carried forth this study, um, and that has kind of revolutionized the area of ancient philosophy.

Robert Hahn, he's someone who I've worked with, that was his TA for a year.

And that's his thesis.

Some of the principal philosophers of Miletus, Aristophanes, not Aristophanes, Thales, and the other two with the A, I forget, Anaximander, not Anaximander.

The names are slipping.

It's late in the night.

But they were also.

Architects.

And it was on the basis of these projects that were commissioned by the elite in order to recapture the faith, the ethical life, the sitlishkeit that was being destroyed, that they're forced to and it promotes one, you have this fall that leads to this origins of philosophy, but you also have at the level of the productive forces these technological developments, these revolutions in the forces of production.

Can you, by the way, send me that book that describes that?

Because I have really been struggling to find good sources on Greek technology and how that emerges.

And it's Robert Hahn.

Robert Hahn.

And there's also send me or text me or see on Discord anything.

But I think what we're also talking about with this pattern of the fall is also this is the most important thing: recognition of a fall.

It's really always a recognition of a fall that plagues Western thinking.

We used to be pure.

We used to have a golden age.

We've somehow descended from that.

So how do we return to it?

Right?

The epitome is Christianity.

You know, this sin that connects to Christianity.

I mean, it's even the context of the Roman Empire forming was the corruption of the Republic, right?

And the cycle of kind of degradation and then searching for the kind of golden past to redeem ourselves from that degradation.

You can even say to an extent, like fascism in a lot of ways is kind of interpreting history in this way, right?

It's like very overt and explicit there.

Like there's an ideal point in the past we've departed from, and how do we return to that, right?

That's why there's in fascism.

And this might not be popular to say it, but I don't care.

It's a form of utopian socialism.

Absolutely, yeah.

It's a form of reactionary utopianism.

And I think when you say that, people need to understand that just proves the stakes of the transition between capitalism and socialism.

Actually, people are like, whoa, are you saying it's inevitable for Marx?

No, it actually can go wrong, and we can be consumed by madness and have a dysfunctional civilization that kills itself.

That is 100% possible.

Like the inevitability of socialism isn't necessarily going to be a good thing, right?

It can be utopian, the utopian kind, right?

So I'm actually.

My qualification would be that, I mean, Marx is clear that.

You either have a revolution and a new form of life emerge, or the dissolution of all classes.

And I I think uh, you know, to quote Luxembourg, it's it's in our context it would be socialism or barbarism.

I wouldn't consider the people who are not afraid of the.

If there's not a scientific understanding of the transition.

You will materi th it will immaterially impose itself upon us, but how we react to it could quite literally lead to our extinction, uh annihilation of civiliza itself.

But, you know, uh, going back to the kind of origins of alienation.

that you're talking about and mentioning

It's obviously also there with Heraclitus, you know.

I I I not to bring we're not going to discuss Dugan right now because it's too late, but he does mention something in political platinism I find compelling, but Lenin also said the same thing, so I guess we don't have to mention Dugan.

But when Heraclitus his famous phrase all is one, what does he actually mean by that?

Does he mean a return to the kind of concreteness and organic unity of the pre fall?

And it's actually the opposite.

When Heraclitus says all is one, he actually means the all as a pure multiplicity of differences, the lap the pure laceration of being into infinitely kind of divisible different components

That is one.

That is actually the truth of being.

That is one.

That is what the whole is.

The whole of reality is actually its division into multiple parts, to paraphrase Lenin.

Right?

Heraclitus is describing exactly what you're talking about in the philosophical form.

He's describing this kind of.

Loss and this fall from I I don't know what we would call them organic social relationships, organic communal bonds.

And

I mentioned you always because it's a recurring theme in my outlook and my writings and stuff.

It's just like when Heraclitus talks about the dreamer, right, who awakened from their dream and cannot recall the dream and is searching to remember and recall the dream.

It's like searching to recover from the fall is the same thing.

There's a discontinuity between the premise and the conclusion, which I think Western civilization quote unquote, because

We're not gonna get into it too much, but it's like

It isn't inevitable that Rome turns culminates in neoclassical Britain, you know, in the seventeenth century.

That's not inevitable.

Rome also became the Ottoman Empire.

Same thing with Greece.

Greece also became

Something that wouldn't necessarily have culminated into Rome.

It's just that there was this trajectory we can more or less identify as a consistent trajectory defined by these increasing relations based on alienation and abstraction and so on.

The trajectory, the connection is not geographical.

Exactly.

That's what I mean to say.

It's not actually because of a European as a unified organic history.

It's a specific trajectory defined by a specific kind of.

Relationship toward concrete civilization, let's say, right?

Different type of sociality.

Exactly.

The essence of a civilization.

A civilization is not just as biological.

Right, exactly.

And then, but I think of intercourse.

I think, though, what I would say is that.

When we uh understand like

We can also understand it as a recognition of the discontinuity and then an obsession with once we recognize this discontinuity, holy shit, we can't forget about it.

We're burdened with it and we're trying to ameliorate it.

We're trying to like go back.

We don't want to go in this direction.

We're burdened with this discontinuity between the dream and now that I'm awake and I have to recall it.

Let me just go back into the wholesomeness of where I came from.

And it's precisely the attempt to do that, which digs the deeper hole even further.

So I think in this limited extent,

Because a lot of people say like, Oh, I'm anti-white and I'm anti-European.

And I hate Europeans.

And I think, actually, I think this is a part of the dialectic of humanity.

And were it not in Europe that this process took place, it would have happened elsewhere.

I think there's signs that it was, it could have, Japan could have been a trajectory for this as well.

If you study how Japan is responding to mainland China and Korea and what's going on in Asia, Japan is also kind of having a, it seems like a Greek moment of some kind, maybe, right?

So there, and there's other locations, I'm sure, where it's similar.

But it is a n it is like a devil's advocate that isn't isn't easy to respond to.

Like it's it's not necessarily true that Europe

is like a Yucubian ape who like basically fucked up everyone else was getting it right and like Europe were just assholes and they got it wrong.

I think no, there there this there is something there that

was not being addressed by others, not because others were deficient or incapable, but it's like a division of labor of world history.

Europe was attending to this specific issue, this specific quandary.

The others were attending to

Other kinds of issues and quandaries, right?

Or which weren't actually issues, but you get what I'm saying?

Like this is part of the dialectic of universal world history, and it's like.

To this extent, it's true that

I don't know if without the Greek moment there would have been the leap in technology there was.

That led to the uh that that that corresponded to the Hellenistic era, right?

Ditto for Rome and then ditto for industrial capitalism.

I agree that Asia, in terms of the development of technology, lapped Europe for the most part for world history, but

the rapidity of the advance of their productive forces in such a short window of time

attested to a different paradigm of technology that's happening in Europe.

What do you mean by who's the day that you're referring to in that last part?

Uh Asia or Europe?

Europe's rapidity of the development of the productive forces.

Attested to a different paradigm of technology, according to which technology was just this kind of

I don't know if I get into it.

Like, I i it's something in abstraction from the concrete it's presumed to be at least in abstraction from the concrete reality of production and social relations and so on.

And it's highly experimental and it's highly kind of um

almost individualistic in its conception, right?

And the paradigm of technological development in Asia seems to be less less that and more kind of in harmony with

The deeper premises of production and the general kind of ontological outlook underpinning.

Um

people's

people's uh way of life, you know?

Or does that make sense or no?

What I'm saying?

Parts of it, yeah.

I

Like in suspending these like ontological assumptions about reality corresponding to the alienation of the trajectory of Europe, if we call it Europe, right, beginning with ancient Greece,

That opens a window of like accelerated technological development.

Which then, of course, has to be re-applied applied to reality, and then you get the business of the.

But my question would be: if

If in Asia and not just the

Uh, you know, the far east, right?

If in the near and middle east, in what we would call the middle east, West Asia, if you had technological developments and developments in intellectual life that were far exceeding those in the west.

Because if I'm maybe I'm mistaking what you're saying, but it seems like there's something in the fall that is directly connected to seeking some sort of response to it that is conjoined with the rapid development that we find in the fall.

I think it's more kind of like these more

I don't know if I'm using this word correctly, these more concrete civilizations.

or Asiatic civilizations, let's say.

Are where the majority of mankind's progress is happening.

But they also, you know, these civilizations rise and fall, they ebb and flow.

And what we call,

The history of Western Civilization

Are a series of points in between these ebbs and flows.

For example, ancient Greece emerges where?

After the Bronze Age collapse, right?

Um I'm sure you can make a similar argument about Rome with regard to the

either rivaling Hellenistic powers, or maybe Carthage, something of that nature.

Um and then, you know, it's it's clear that

industrial Europe, early modern Europe, really intervenes

At the lower point of some of the Asian civilizations, like the Ottoman Empire, for example, right?

And that was a window of opportunity.

And all that specific trajectory of history is stitched together by or united by is like being this kind of

Point of historical exceptionality that inserts itself at the decline of these different empires and civilizations.

And so, so I think basically what I'm trying to say is that the reason for the rapid accelerated development of the productive forces isn't because of the superiority of one civilization or the other, because the only thing that unites Western civilization on a larger historical level.

Put it this way, it were it not for

There is no it is not necessarily true that Greece had to be part of the trajectory of Western civilization.

Greece could have just been a footnote in Persia's history.

Right.

Right?

Yeah.

Rome could have just been a footnote in like the development of the Ottoman Empire, right?

the the the the empire that's based in Anatolia, right, in the Levant.

These could have all just been exceptional footnotes within these wider civilizations.

Because those civilizations themselves have footnotes.

Those footnotes just weren't.

um brought into the historical continuity of what we call Western civilization.

But they also had these exceptional footnotes of like moments of abstraction and doubt and kind of like

Similar to the Greek moment, I guess.

But the history of Western civilization stitches together all of these different moments into one continuity, right?

One con continuity of progress.

uh so i think um well it's it's it's um it's capitalist modernity that does that retrospectively yes exactly the purpose is and it intensifies how it does because even even at the beginning of modernity capitalist modernity um certain narratives i mean you look at the the basic philosophy textbooks it was understood that philosophy developed in africa and then uh that the main the the the first few greek philosophers they took a lot of their ideas from africa they usually stole everything from what i know yeah like literally everything that the thesis that eliminates any connection to africa

uh is is one that develops frankly at the

End of the 18th century.

And it doesn't get popularized to the middle of the 19th century.

So, even within modernity itself, capitalist modernity, there was a period of time that it took for it to disconnect itself from these Eastern civilizations, and in the case of Africa, southern civilizations, in the realm of philosophy.

Because it was seen as a common project.

I guess I would ask you bluntly, and also I want to let you know we probably should wrap up soon because I got to go to family tale.

But to ask you bluntly, and I don't actually presume to know this, it's a question I've always struggled with, actually, and I've never come to a satisfactory conclusion.

Was

European modernity

Necessary.

Like c is there a time line in which this that never happened?

We just have China's dynastic existence, we just have, you know, Russia, we just have these Middle Eastern empires, the gunpowder empires,

Take Europe out of the equation, like would they have just developed normally?

Because I see arguments on both sides, surprisingly.

I have seen convincing arguments that no, they would have continued developing technologically and probably wouldn't have.

Dealt with as many calamitous problems.

But then I've also seen the argument that actually, no, Europe did awaken these civilizations to something fundamental which they didn't have before.

The Enlightenment is real, actually.

There is a reality of Enlightenment.

It's pure discourse.

What produced, what woke up the Enlightenment was the Arab world.

No, no, I agree, but I think the pressing question is: I understand the premises of Europe.

Are not just Europe.

It's mainly coming from.

But

Once we've established that, like, was Europe itself something necessary for world history?

And I do lean, although I would say I'm like sixty forty on this.

Sixty I do lean yes.

But there is a huge forty percent in me where I'm like, maybe it wasn't necessary.

Maybe this is like in Is Islam, you know, the story of Iblis, right?

Where like the devil basically fucked up and like he didn't actually have to fuck up, but he did anyway and like that's what we're faced with now to overcome.

So is Europe just Iblis basically?

And I don't forty percent of me thinks it is, but sixty percent says no, th this is actually something fundamentally necessary for world history and exceptional.

Which, if it didn't happen in Europe, yeah, maybe it would have happened elsewhere, but it would have been the same thing.

It would have been the same Iblis-like, let's say, ontological crime committed by Europe and modernity against the traditional civil, you know, the human existence.

I think posing it in an either-or is perhaps not correct, right?

Because we could say that it was an embryo, that it was a latent potential throughout these different civilizations, but that doesn't make it that doesn't make its emergence something that's necessary.

You get what I'm saying?

So, it could very well have occurred, it could have not occurred, but the fact that it was necessary or not is-I mean, that's just not a question I ask myself.

I think there's positive fruits that are brought about by modernity.

I think that the Enlightenment is good.

The valuing of historical progress, the notion of a universal humanity that we all share in.

I don't think it's new, I don't think it's exclusive to the Enlightenment.

I agree, and I have this thesis.

I think I told you about it, maybe, or you've heard it, or maybe you read it on Twitter, that like that was the subjective articulation of what was objectively created by the Mongols.

Like, European Enlightenment is a failed attempt at the completion of the Mongol revolution, actually.

Like, the one that leads to, and I really do insist upon this concept for me of Mongol modernity, that there is a lost origin of modernity with, because, you know, civilization had always been based on a nomadic sedentary dialectic.

And the Mongols actually represented the enclosure of this dialectic, the final kind of nomadic enclosure of space, right?

Of geographic space, which kind of eliminates the outsider-insider distinction finally.

Um, and puts an end to that dialectic, and it's it's it's fascinating, and then Tamerlane is like the one who's trying to rest, he's like the Don Quixote of the Mongols, he's trying to return.

Uh this I this, I don't know if I'd call it an ideal, but this kind of

the Mongol Empire more or less is trying to revive it, you know, this notion that this is

and he's obviously combining with religion.

But

I I I haven't studied Mongol civilization enough to to speak about it.

Uh but

All I can say is this: without Avicenna, without Averroes, without the left Aristotelians of the Arab world.

There could not have been Giordano Bruno the thinkers that are the conditions for the possibility of the different forms of enlightenment that Europe goes through.

Yeah, I think um but no, I if you want to see that as like what they're doing at the realm of thought is trying to realize the civilization that um trying to realize the ends of the civilization out of which didn't fully recognize itself, right?

Didn't fully recognize its own latent reality and the conclusion from it.

And I I actually agree, you know, people kind of think I'm like this reactionary who hates modernity, but I don't think modernity is avoidable.

The Europe thing is another the specific way it happened in Europe, that's what I think is an open question.

But no, I I do think modernity is e is um

Unavoidable, and I agree that the Enlightenment is all, but I also agree with, and I have the full qualification of like what Dominique Lesudro says: like every great thing about the Enlightenment was also an equally horrific, horrible thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, at the same time, paradoxical twin births, exactly.

And I don't think you can appreciate the Enlightenment without that.

I feel like, you know, the whole Steven Pinker, like, oh, it's just like a line going up.

We got enlightened.

It's really stupid.

It's stupid, right?

Like, he's been doing the debates with Mirschmeier.

I don't know if you've seen those, but.

No, no, I didn't see the debate, but I understand the contrasting.

It's so stupid.

But it's like, I think that's why when I think of Marxism, I see it as the realization of the rational kernel in that tradition while leaving out the agree, but I feel like I take it a step farther.

And I think this is what gets me in trouble.

And we can maybe.

Maybe leave on this note with a few more if you want to have your own conclusion.

I think that

It's not just that Marxism recognizes something in the Enlightenment that wasn't fully fulfilled, that the Enlightenment failed to live up to, and Marxism is going to realize it finally and fully.

I think the logic is correct, but I think the truth is the Enlightenment failed because it didn't appreciate its premises, which were outside of the Enlightenment and which were in, let's say, Genghis Khan, like metaphorically.

So because the Enlightenment didn't pay tribute to Genghis Khan, that's why it forgot itself.

That's why it forgot.

It was a spark of brilliance which was forgotten.

And that Marxism will redeem the European Enlightenment only by returning it to the cradle, the Mongol cradle from which it really did descend.

And that Marxism actually is what allows us to appreciate this historical discontinuity between

a conclusion that has forgotten its premise.

Right as the beginning with Heraclitus,

Understood.

And that the dialectical, a materialist dialectical outlook, or the dialectical materialist outlook, right, is precisely what completes this.

And that's why when I say it is the most advanced outlook of mankind, it sounds like a meme, sounds cartoonish, sounds like I'm like a fanatic, but I actually mean it.

This is actually the most advanced outlook achieved by mankind.

But

That shouldn't sound preposterous to anyone within the Marxist tradition.

Yeah, but I don't think we thought there was a better outlook.

But I think most self-proclaimed Marxists don't agree with that.

I think they say, oh, no, actually, Marx, you know, he made some contributions to academia, but really, dialectical materialism is like this.

Well, they hesitate to even call it a worldview.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And you see this in Michael, again, a value form guy, Michael Heinrich and others.

Like they, part of their criticism of the Soviets is that supposedly it made Marxism into a worldview, which is just ridiculous.

In my anthology on texts from the classics of Marxism speaking about dialectical materialism, I have a whole section in the introduction defending why we should be speaking of Marxism as a worldview.

I don't know if I can follow you to the conclusion.

I see the premises and they're not as wacky as a sense of immediacy with the conclusion would lead some people to think.

There is something in the Marxist understanding of history.

There is a sort of glorious return to a past that was much more rosy, but at a higher stage.

And that's something that I absolutely do agree with.

Socialism is in many ways the overcoming of this fall that I think as well was necessary, this civilizational fall.

And that's why it almost like restarts history at a higher level.

That's why Marx is very clear that what we're experiencing is a form of prehistory.

We're not experiencing history.

History starts with once this fall is overcome.

And that's almost like now is just an era of an accidental existence, not a rational existence.

If you put it in human terms, in individual human terms.

You can really speak about yourself and how you are after you have a major fuck-up.

Once you have a major fuck-up and you're knocked down on your feet and you're forced to figure out how to climb up, after that, that's when you can really say, Okay, I'm this type of human being.

Um, and I think at the macro level, that's really what's what's going on.

It's after that fall, and this is this is just straight Hegel, it's only after that process of mediation of something becoming an other, first appearing as uh an other that comes out of nowhere and oppositional other.

And then, once you see it, uh, in retrospect, in light of its development, you realize that that other was you all along and was a necessary moment in your development into a higher into a higher stage.

So, um, you know, and I, yeah, as a final note, um, I think we'll both agree with is that you know, in America, America's perceived fall, its greatest alien other is communism, according to American consciousness.

And as American communists, people think, How, what are you talking about?

America is the most anti-we know, even as someone who calls myself a MAGA communist using that slogan.

I don't know if you partake, it doesn't matter.

I'm aware, but it's like we are committing to a specific dialectic, which, according to this deeper outlook of the materialism and dialectics, is like.

Fundamental to our ontological outlook.

Like that specific contradiction, the form of that contradiction that we're pursuing.

is actually allows us to be in proximity with what we consider to be, excuse my French, a kind of metaphysical absolute of reality.

This process precisely as you describe of the beginning, the fall, and then

The reconciliation.

And what's interesting is that in the beginning, like there's even the connection between the beginning looking like a less developed form of the end, because modern socialism

Modern utopian socialism, but at the embryonic stage of modern it's born in America.

Yep.

It's a utopian community.

They're here.

I live like an hour away from some of them.

Even before the utopian, even before then, the first religious communities that came here literally were setting up communes and explicitly, just like the Anabaptists in Germany with Munzer, they were here too and they were saying, Yeah, we're gonna just have everything produced in common.

I mean, America is a very good idea.

That's why it's called New Harmony.

It's called New Harmony because there was harmony before that.

And it was one of these Christian utopian projects.

But I think that's actually a great note.

It's also an ominous note.

It's very we're not going to reveal anything, but it's a very foreshadowing note, guys.

Tell you that.

But, Carlos, I'm not just saying this.

I think this was probably one of the most fruitful discussions, the most enlightening ones I've ever had.

If you're watching this, you congratulations, and really you should feel honored.

If you're watching this, you should feel glad.

You're so much.

content for tonight's stream like

Even if you're an idiot, you walked away from this with something, a hundred percent.

Like if you have no knowledge about anything, but um

No, it was really a pleasure talking to you, and I even like how we disagree.

It's actually productive.

Like how we're actually arriving at productive conclusions and thinking about things in new ways.

And, you know, I think people shouldn't be sleeping on you.

You're a great philosopher.

You're a great thinker.

You're extremely knowledgeable.

And uh

It's very refreshing, you know, I think yeah, I I wasn't planning on streaming this long, by the way.

I was planning on ending it at like ten thirty, so

Yeah.

But no, thank you so much for coming on and really appreciate it.

No, thank you for having me on.

It's been a pleasure.

And thank you for the kind words.

I reciprocate them.

Yeah, it's been a tremendously enjoyable conversation.

I have a few things to look up when I'm done.

And I think we'll stay in contact, exchanging information.

I think you'll enjoy the Han sources.

If I'm familiar at all with some of the stuff you've been developing, you'll enjoy those.

But yeah, thank you for having me on, brother.

And hopefully the first of many more similar conversations.

Definitely.

I mean, I didn't know how the conversation would go.

I don't know if it would be boring or whatever, but it's clear to me this is actually educational stuff.

This is actually exposing people to.

A lot of I don't even have the words to describe it.

A lot of ways of thinking they probably didn't have before and thinking about things they weren't thinking about before and like.

I think as we both continue to research and like re work on our respective projects, we'll ev we'll have even more to discuss and talk about.

But

Yeah.

Um, I do gotta go get to bed, but, uh

Yeah, again, great talking and yeah, we'll definitely do this again.

Of course, brother.

Thank you.

See ya.

Bye.

Alright Let's go back to our headquarters.

We're gonna do a brief outro

Uh okay, guys.

Alright, what did you guys think?

I thought it was great.

Ah.

I thought it was incredible, like, you know.

So refreshing.

Um

And I really feel like we touched upon like a lot of the fundamentals of like really what are the main contradictions within Marxism and like how to think through them and I don't know yeah Chris thank you so much Wow guys if I haven't thanked you Blackpack thank you so much too man it's cause I didn't want to interrupt but thank you so much for the subscriptions and stuff

See, here's what I could say, Carlos.

is very much thank you so much

Arom is D's, thank you so much.

You know, the great thing about Carlos is that, and we didn't really touch upon this too much, H D G V, thank you so much.

He really is committed.

Thank you so much, Joe.

Wow.

Thank you so much.

He really is committed to the integrity of Marxism-Leninism as an outlook.

And I really appreciate even when I do disagree with him and I do deviate from his view,

I can still appreciate how he's trying to preserve the integrity.

of the Marxist Leninist outlook in the most consistent possible way.

Without being dogmatic and actually trying to creatively think through some of the challenges thrown in its way.

And you don't know how fucking real that is, guys, because you know how easy it is for like Marxist intellectuals to like just you know veer off in some other direction and dismiss Marxism, dismiss Stalinism or whatever.

Like to be able to reconcile, thank you so much, Archie.

I appreciate you.

To be able to reconcile the intellect.

With the truth of Marxism, Leninism takes a lot of integrity, takes a lot of courage and a lot of commitment, you know, uniting thought with the real world and respecting the political praxis of the past and the political traditions of the past, while not underselling, you know, the the the extent to which

They are profound from the perspective of the intellect, right?

So, you know, even when we disagree, I actually think that it's like he has a point, you know.

Even when it comes to our disagreement, I can't say, like, oh, he's an idiot for not agreeing with me.

Like, no, he's totally off the mark.

I'm like, no, you know, it is nice to kind of have.

His input for me to continue thinking about my views on these things because I ultimately just think it's productive and it's really refreshing that like he actually is committed consistently to maintaining the integrity of Marxism-Leninism.

You know, me, I'm kind of known for like veering off and experimenting in different directions.

And I think his skepticism of some of that is warranted because, again,

And the reason I agree with it is because when I am experimenting in these other directions, I'm taking for granted and I'm assuming the integrity of Marxism-Leninism.

I am committed to it.

I understand it is the case.

I'm not trying to negate that.

But it's important that that integrity is reaffirmed and we continue to return to it and understand why it is the way it is.

And I think that he aids in that process.

Um.

In a very important way, you know.

Now, in any case, guys, we are gonna go ahead and terminate the stream.

And I'll see you guys Tuesday where we're gonna have on Malumbo from Jubilee.

Malumbo's gonna be here, guys.

Anyway, guys.

I'm literally going directly to bed.

Bye-bye.

Good night.