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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, you know, 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It's been replaced by a view that the contrary is true.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 you know the only way to escape is to

which ourselves retreat into abstraction retreat into kind of you know um the pretense and veneer of

hyper conscientiousness

and you know being smug

and being a know-it-all who's like

looks down

how do you bourgeois moralism

precisely like you know oh I'm a left com

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 calm

revolution in construction of socialism.

Besides Mussolini.

Yeah. That's a good one um you know it's so important

to to talk about the real origins of fascism and why trotsky is is wrong with seeing it as rooted in

the petty bourgeoisie that's not to say that there in the petty bourgeois Z.

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, Demetriol's formulation, it's finance capital's it's finance because that's the most developed capital and uh for those listening if 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 Parenthes, black shirts, and reds.

And there's a few other types, it's indisputable,

that the economic foundation, the class backing,

the fascists,

where 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 that we're here

and if we succeed or when we succeed

the forces of productions

will be unleashed. That's

one of the central guiding

threads of the movement

of history,

of the of the movement of history of the of the of the materialist understanding of the law of development that's operative in different forms of life

Marx makes it his 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 disillusion 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 the sort of Christian asceticism where we all just want to be poor.

That's obviously a McCarthyite manufactured lie that it seems like a suspiciously large number of leftists are accepting today.

That's not the case.

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 is operative

but you

also have

an understanding

that capitalism

stifles

development

capitalism stifles

development

and socialism

doesn't

and that's extremely clear from history. The most

rapid developments in the forces of their 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 nonstop that no one needs. It doesn't mean

like expanding the parts

of capitalism that today function as

a system of waste as a William

Morris, the famous British socialist

called it. So like

if it's shit

like fast fashion, 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 our cities will not be

crumbling. It means that our

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 is some, that's a condition we don't have today.

They can't flourish.

They can't flourish they can't uh actually actualize those rights to life liberty in 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 is 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, an explicitly progressive condition. And I agree totally here with Michael Hudson's analysis. He holds that if the old

Cold War was won explicitly between socialism and communism. Today it's one that's between

industrial productive capitalism and this more parasitical 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 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.

And the Chinese have been extremely successful in doing this to the Russians, even though 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.

And others have, those that are large enough

to not

be as damaged

as other countries, smaller countries

like Cuba and Venezuela are when they're

hit with 900 fucking

sanctions and this hybrid

warfare. So

yeah, I'll stop rampant.

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

So if you're opposing, 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 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 Russian capitalism

and that's what he refers to the the the the petite bourgeoisie among the peasant as an

inscipient bourgeoisie it's not really an established bourgeoisie but it's a kind of it's

aspiring toward 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 that peasant revolution, that democratic revolution, as it's called, wasn't, didn't actually

lead to the creation of a peasant capitalist classed. The Stolyepin 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 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 of 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 an a capitalist interest

and if you look at bricks and the countries that actually are that represent so-called industrial capital

let's call it like i said it 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 finance capital because we're even at a deeper layer of

abstraction now right black rock and the infre you know this massive concentration of the

of wealth the ability to print money, right?

This is held by central banks.

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 yeah that the capital is i mean capital

is a relationship of accumulation and the capitalist the 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 capital?

Even though you could trace all of these investment firms and finance capital back to like the railroad.

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 Engel 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 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 that is still being trapped by the fetters of this

institutional capital, just money for money's own sake sake which increasingly assumes like a ritualistic

you know um 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, you know, and politics and so on. And, you you know 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 production no it's maintained through military force almost

directly now when because the u.s has to kind of act as a world police and you know directly enforce

the rule of capital by military means i don't think these post-owned people or whatever appreciate

they'd rather go well you know actually in china and r 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.

It's precisely because the U.S. can't reproduce capitalism or material relations of production at all and has to act as a fetter upon them and obstruction upon their development is why it's reactionary actually. That that's what 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, it's 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 fact, when you look at the interest of the, 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 Black Rock or is it the network of offshore banks and banking cartels

that coordinate, you know, 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 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, 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 capitalist, 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, you know, these value for Marxists, 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

if it's in a totally ethereal you know you know structural uh 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 platonic ideal of capital,

right?

So it's just kind of, I mean, 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-Pron,

if you could just continue

making usuriously money from money uh which is what we've seen

i mentioned a very high percent 95 percent is basically just making money for 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 got into

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 didn't have to show them.

They know it already. how parasitical the

elite is they already know it they just have different worlds used through which they interpret it that

are somewhat spontaneous but um 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,

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, 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, and I just finished

a couple 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

who 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 Carlyle's past and present.

Thomas Carlylew 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 that malthusianism is always present in in a section of the ruling class it's always been there they want to depopulate and it's because at the at the social level, they don't value humanity. They just value their class. They don't value humanity at all. And it's, uh, 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 Harari,

you know, one of the favorite ideologues of the WF,

we have no need for the vast majority of the men. Cool with the dog whistles here, all right?

The anti-Semitic dog whistles.

Oh. I mean mean you just mentioned

I actually don't know if he's Jewish but you did mention a guy

rather than an abstract

capital

oh relation so

oh 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 u.s such a crisis of meaninglessness where people are just you know falling into deep forms of nihilism, of bad consciousness, of, you know, these positions that are, that, you know, 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 for something bigger than themselves when they fight for something that's not just

that the things that are around them when they they're not just fighting for basics or when they're

fighting for humanity which is ultimately what our fight is they fight for life we love life um 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 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 U.S.,

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, now 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, marginally successful, and I was like,

you know what?

I'm going to do this instead. I'm going to

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 do understand that like, you know, committing for a deeper purpose.

And, you know, I'd'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 uh 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 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 this is the kind of reconciliation and it's really similar when it comes to this stuff about Marxism and 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 mention, 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. How could

it be that they are

trying to de-grow 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, like, 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 i mean socialists and

communists marxists across history have never said uh oh you know, 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

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 as it existed and um you know you could say

that okay uh you know why can't something similar happen now well the uh the issue is one you can't divorce the marshal plan from the context of communism as a as a as a as a as a as a as a as a pressure upon the ruling class to actually adopt socialistic and communistic policies. Sorry, communistic is a little loaded. I'd say socialistic policies to compete and, you know, to stop the spread of communism.

But I think that what really we're looking at today in terms of why that's not viable, right?

Some huge craft, I mean, that's what the Great 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.

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 Bricks 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, right is 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, maintain control over the system globally.

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

They think that, no, actually the ruling class

is primarily exercising control

by preventing

Christian symbolism

in the government

by these Jews

that are like, you know know instead of saying merry christmas

the the white house now says happy holidays really i mean i i kind of 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 do 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. 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 super patriotism of the past of my

country's 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 the 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. You know, 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 we'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 were, 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 terrorists 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 plus 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 um 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, it's filled with contradictions.

And if you think contradiction represents as D medities, 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 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, you know, 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 in the project that we have here,

that we have in the Midwest of Parks Institute and in my personal scholarship, I find that 99% 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

and 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 the very, 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. This

it's not just Hague, it's scope,

goes back to Aristotle. So it's

a complete absence of dialectical

thinking and it reflects itself in these uh, 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.

You know, Engels has this quote from a letter that we, I know't know and I cite all the time

what all these gentlemen black

is dialectics. Thank you so much black guys. All they see is

cause here effect there.

Sorry I was just thanking

thanking someone

like I got him to enroll.

Yeah, and I don't know if you want me to talk about it, but the

way that we have formulated this absence

is as the purity fetish.

It's a

you know, it's a, you know,

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. But instead of the purity

fetish, we called it just formalism, right? Muzois formalism. And one would ask why formalism, you know, because isn't being one-sided with regard to content also the same thing just as undilectical?

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 profoundly, you know, similar to the kind of critique of Cartesianism and, you know, I really, 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 you're just 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 shade at the Anglos,

but the,

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.

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 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?

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 being...

Both being the fun. Yeah.

Both being the fun. Yeah. It's interesting

you mentioned Hakeful

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

I mean

there has been quite a bit of scholarship

as to how much the Hegel engaged with certain oriental traditions and how much they influenced him in his thought.

That's an interesting field that I haven't done too much research in, but I think you're correct to describe it as a problem of formalism.

And I think that the paradox is

that when there's this over

emphasis 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 four.

Yep.

Is the correct approach, the Higalian 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 guerrilla meme with the Pepe.

And I love this one.

Oh, Pepe the Frog.

Yeah.

The gorilla with the Pepepe.

And it was, that's uh if you

read uh the logic of essence

that second part of the science of logic

that's what 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 you critical thinkers is to pierce through appearance and then get at the

the essence of something that no it's 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

it's like interdependence of both it's like's like the essence doesn't come at the expense of the appearance.

Right.

And it's the same kind of...

Even formalism isn't necessarily the only way...

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

You can... We had the word the Anglo-Saxon metaphysics from the 17th century. We had the word the Anglo box.

It was 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 positing 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's substance. Because I had this view that Spinoza was the one who ruined him 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,

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

You know, I don't know if this has been explored. I know Paul Cockshott, who's a British

Marxist, has explored the relationship between- He's one of our writers at the Institute. He's one of

our researchers. He kind of explores 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 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 but but but but within sorry yeah 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

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 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 ways.

And it's like, okay, you don't need to build cities near uh rivers anymore to have large scale production you know

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

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

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,

and trapped within the mechanism of the steam engine.

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 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 how the homology with

capital is very clear right how you're kind of taking fossil fuels kind of literal concrete

um 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.

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.

Like 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, Coxshot 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, I think it's a very underappreciated one.

And finally, it's like, 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 1970s with the new found 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, 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 Things Abstractor?

And

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.

I want to start touching the table.

The immediate.

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.

Concretus 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.

When 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 it is having these different series of abstractions, these different moments that are integral to the concrete whole.

And so they participate in the, 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 in a concrete system.

It's something that is itself concrete and 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 on the concrete. Just like the concrete itself

can only exist through

the relations that

it contains between

these different forms of real

abstractions.

Don't you think it kind of

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 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 recognize the concrete of abstract labor as a form of analysis.

I think he was hinting that this in reality it was being made concrete

through the arrival of his angles 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.

So I think that's what I would say on that. And I think what I mean by like a concrete store of value is just kind of like immediate. i think that does open another question which is

even though energy turns into kind of abstract energy whose real determinant content cannot be

presumed that's just the case for thought just like like in the case of labor, right? When Marks 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 um is concrete the way in which it's utilized and applied and consumed and so on

that that is concrete it 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 think that's

you mentioned that in reality it is concrete.

I agree, but not in its social reality.

And its social reality, it is an attraction.

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.

We 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 it,

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 on 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...

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, you know, 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, is 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 studies still wasn't

as developed as it would be

when Marxist is writing.

I think, 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 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 yeah yeah I see

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,

that 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

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 19th 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 motive 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 mercantiless 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 abstracted.

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's like, I mean, um,

it still had to mature as a mode of production. It's kind of like,

like if we say,

I can pass concrete judgment on a child.

Like a child is not completely a man yet.

I think the difference.

Yeah.

They become a man.

They obtain the complexity that makes it more concrete.

Because concrete is 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

completely if it's still, it's

like, imagine trying to pass judgment

on the character of a person in their seven.

No, no, no, I get what you're saying, but I think

the contrasting premise I think at's sense. 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, that 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 it, 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

um this is going to sound like pomo nonsense but almost kind of like a virtual object 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 olive Minerva only flies with the falling of dust, 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 it's a rationality. The darkness continues. And so I think this is what we're seeing. I think this is partially what's going on here uh you seem to be describing this process whereby

early capitalism existed in this um in in this form where it still had some light and rationality

to it and i that's that's, that's fair. I agree.

And only now, uh, 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, um, we assume that we're looking at something different from what we're looking at now, but when the

owl of 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 Grondresa, it is the anatomy of the man that gives us the blueprint or something for the anatomy of the baby. We can come to understand the beginning of capitalism.

It's mercantile this stage concretely because we see it what it has degenerated into.

If you wish to describe instead of maturity 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.

Yeah.

Even in terms of

their and this is early in marks and angles not way later in marks his life especially but

at least early on the assumption was the revolution's happening in eng 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 is was also a huge operative issue um for the Russian revolutionaries and the Russian Marxists, right? Because the whole dispute was stagism, right? Okay, by what procession of the 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, you know, 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 in 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 lennon'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 history we can distill the essence of the laws of history

and apply them in the present like here and now right and i i think the significance of that

is is necessarily a different view of the material concrete. It's the whole paradox that gives rise

to Ogromsky, 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 kind of phenomenal formations like like like 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 not only that,

but then ultimately actually

creating the material

foundations of a proletarian dictatorship

almost backwards, right?

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

No, it's the interesting thing, and I like how you qualified it by the early marks,

because we both know that the later marks 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.

It was Nikolai Shurnershefsky

who said that

history gives

to its

to its sons

the bone and 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, with all the hassle that led to it.

Marxist, Marx had a lot of faith in the Russian of Shina, the Russian commune.

And when it came to the debates between the Russian populace and the dogmatic Marxists and Russia,

and we're speaking here of course late 1870s, he sided with the populace who said it's the Upshina,

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 obscen. 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,

socialist, uh, society.

Now, um,

as far as the time thing, I mean,

I, you can, you can blame Marx.

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

Someone that has engaged with, say, the first volumes of the first volume of capital. They can blame

Marx for not

predicting the development of

capitalism of

that industrial capitalist stage

into a monopoly

finance dominated capitalist stage.

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

haigel and marks use it as that uh 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 stage 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, the 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

that if I catch them only when they're 60

you know and in that process

the older that they get the more sense

I'm able to make of the

first year it's just like

if you look at capital as a project, the development of all of the

categories, yes, they start abstractly, but they're abstracted 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.

Yeah.

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

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

If you, 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 there is i'm just

saying that was like if you don't watch parts two and three um 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-urned private that's already been

dissolved by by industrial capitalism

that has been sublated by finance capital.

It's 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 Upshina was passed.

Is that true?

And he wrote that?

I have not found, on the contrary, I think the more he dug into, he learns Russia.

Yeah.

Because I could have sworn 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 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

71 yeah it could be a little later but he engages with it in first

in a letter to Mankovsky.

A Russian

right-wing populist

who is telling the Marxist,

well, 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.

And then there's the

Verasasasolish interaction,

where he was already prepared by that reply

to Mankovsky that he doesn't send

and prepares four

drafts of the Vedasasasasoulis 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 attain the fruits of it in a very Shornashvsky-like manner.

But it was always a hypothesis.

It wasn't like,

I have not found any evidence

and I've looked at some of the

published.

Are you aware of like the claim

that he said that?

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 says

that he ends up towards the end of his

life it's not just Russia

he engages with

as a psychologist

I think sorry

he engages with

Inca societies

and Mayan societies

through the work of

um

what was

Kovalowski

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 proletarian.

Russia eventually has to develop the Soviet Union has to eventually develop the proletary as this china i think one of the

reasons it made a lot of sense to me that he said that was because obviously angles outlived

marks and it doesn't seem like angles is maintaining this view as far as the strategy of the Russian Marxist is concerned and his advice to them and stuff.

Engels's research was not necessarily in that area. He was focusing even in the

origins of the family private property

in the state. He's building

a lot from Marx's notes. Engels

his area was in the harder

sciences and towards the end of his

life and the study of Christianity

and in continued political activities.

But 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 stated explicitly and it was published in a Russian

periodical as its own thing separated from the Communist Manifesto but if you have any

sources there I'd love to yeah I I'm I'd probably have to look

and see

because I either it was a

Marxist themselves making

that argument rather than actually

quoting Marx or

it was that but um now okay the trouble is not over yet because i have one

more um these aren't troubles this is no no i know i know yeah yeah yeah if that is, I change my, I don't change my opinion on it, but I studied.

I look at it.

No, no, I'm wrong.

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

I'm just referring to it in jest.

I think what I would, what I would say, what I would say could have Volk.

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

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

Um, shelve that for a second. Is there something else I wanted to say? I think it is important to point out, though, that Marx didn't finish capital, and he wasn't

able to arrive at the more concrete.

And he planned volumes on, I forgot the order of it the world market the state

yeah i think the world market was the last one right i don't remember he does like two or three

plans there's a only one from the rinsa there's a very very ambitious yeah

i don't know i i i i get what you're saying i what you're basically saying is that because i think

the most convincing argument against my like 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 like capitalism in its totality had not fully developed by that time and that's all the

lenin has put the the question of social they yeah that's why it's the last

imperialism it's like but i but i think stage of socialist revolution i think i think though

i think i would also make the argument though that

lenin's break with the established marxist tradition was so abrupt and so severe um i mean 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 marks and Marxism right then 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 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

marks himself you know i think marks himself 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 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 highest 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 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 it gets into...

True, but I think I think... it gets into a form of speculation if not in the Higalians, but in a more quotidian sense, if you say, um, uh, that, that Marx didn't see that marks 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 one

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, 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 with them alive to say that marx and angles

were alive at this time and like totally were impervious to it. But it's obvious

imperialism, as Lenin describes it at least, was there in the 70s, yeah. But, you know, 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 super structural 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, you know, the need to wait

for development of capitalism anymore.

We're not talking about, you know, 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 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.

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 state. This is a sort of libertarian idea that some Marxists

hold that you can have capitalism here and then there's just, you know, 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. 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 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, yeah.

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 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 they're 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 it's abstract i we're

using the words incorrectly but you 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 yeah yeah yeah but it's also like, 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 this sounds horrible. It sounds horrific

to say this, especially from a propaganda perspective.

But isn't materialism 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, 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 there was a problem and he was like naive like he was trying to fix this problem but i

just don't think he he lived long enough to do it right or he got there i agree lenin is

definitely the heir of marks no doubt about that i, not like trying, you know, George's Sorrell 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, we can go and like have our fascist orgy and be free of like we can we can be like de anunzio and just like run around and frolic in the woods naked or something i don't think that's true at all i think lennon is still in continuity with something fundamental in Marx and built by Marx.

But I guess my view is that 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 PewDie Pye

or something like Marx failed to take into account

PewDie Pye 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 could, he, he, he, he did not even think to entertain it you know what's it's not just

lenin it's angles angles 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 heretical thesis, look, it depends on how we're understanding socials. 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 way that I think that, you know, the people like Schenke-Yugar or something.

No, no, yeah.

You love socialism because you love the post office or something.

Is that where your line of argument is?

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

I think rather getting to like the definition of socialism, I'm going to like, I'm going to like, I'm going to like, I'm going to walk on.

I'm going to walk on a mind and like blow up or something. But to kind of avoid doing that directly, I would say, I think 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

uh necessity right i don't know that's the transition from exchange value to use value but not

use value in the immediate sense but use value in the immediate sense, but use value in the sense of

like necessary to

attend to the necessities of

society, of the

commons. But every

form of life has had

its degree of socially

established necessity.

I mean, without it, it did not survive.

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.

Yeah.

The concept of property that existed in the feudal era was not the Jew Subtendie,

I don't remember the robe.

You probably do more as a lawyer.

You're supposed to,

you know,

but it's,

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

How it emerges is different.

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

ability because that's where the right begins in 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, whatever, that's when you have a

kind of notion of like, okay 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 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 in that.

Well, Marx would disagree with the dogments that develop after that just try to equate in many ways.

The Asiatic mode of production is just a form of feudalism.

Yeah, yeah.

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

Yeah, yeah.

But which I disagree with.

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, whether that's acknowledged or not.

I mean, even in capitalism, you can't do whatever you want with it, even in the 19th 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 going to say, you know, you, you could make the argument and I've said this before in half in jest. Half in jest, but there is a

Syrian's dimension to which I do view the Asiatic mode of production as socialism. Like,

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,

give it credit for

that the trajectory of Western

European history

which remember Marx

angles begin

drawing from Hegel more or less

regard as history proper

Marx basically says Asia falls asleep 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 Mark 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 Motor Production doesn't have a developed notion of private property.

Whereas in Europe, the institution of private property increasingly

becomes developed and actually the epochs of history, the forms of life or modes of production,

are defined by the development of private property, which 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 pro-

Which were far superior, which'm far superior

which were far superior

to the west

Chinese cartography

they mapped the whole world

eight centuries

before the printing

press

that's a million

different things yeah

and I think that's

I say that the the not just the Asiatic, but even the Ameri Indian.

I agree.

Yeah.

Civilization of the...

It throws marks for a quandary.

That's why he tells...

And this is specifically 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 was in some of these

a very Indian civilizations

the larger ones, the ones that

come close to being sorts of

empires, a form of socialism,

a form of Indian

socialism.

Whether that could be applied to the Chinese form of life?

I don't know.

I think the Chinese...

There's Chinese scholars who definitely argue that.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I have seen. Yeah. Yeah.

I have seen some research. Roland Bore cites it

of various scholars

in 20th century China

that look back... Even today.

...how some of the earliest...

Yeah. How some of the...

What? Building on some of the 20th century was, how some of the early Confucians talked about the purpose of society.

And it's basically socialist.

And there's this 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 Mark's meeting in heaven.

It's like a narrative fictional story.

And Confucius

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

Marx is like, oh, that's social or that's communism.

So there is, 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 emphasize that that is already there as the norm 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, like, 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 i'm the reason i didn't mention non-western you know who

agrees with you yeah very thoroughly w b dubois 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 socialists.

But I think, and 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...

Well, they had feudalism, which makes it a little bit different.

I understand, but the Romanops...

China, you would say China was futile?

No, no, no, I'm saying Russia had some...

That's what I was going to mention, because it would be predicated on the view that with the Romanov's comes the introduction of already a kind of early capitalist modernity.

A feudalized capital. Yeah, yeah yeah that's how it would qualify

but um but um so how do we understand that distinction i think the key to understanding

is that what modern the modern element of socialism is actually strangely American, actually.

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 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

can i say some requires requires a negation that they that was simply impossible for them and which required europe's intervention right what's interesting about that is um they weren't not that i know of i'm not a researcher in this area uh 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 presuppose 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 interest between the elite,

that common

sort of sitlish kind,

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 a

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 For the monuments? The monuments.

Being able to build the monuments.

If I have in my university, the person that has carried forth this study and that has kind of revolutionized the area of ancient philosophy

robert hahn he's someone who i've worked with that was his t a year and um that's his thesis

some of the principal philosophers of Miletus,

Aristophanes, not Aristotle, Jesus, Thailies, and the other two with the A, I forget,

an axiander, not an axiomender.

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

sitlish kite that was being destroyed, that they're forced to defend. 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.

It's Robert Hahn.

Robert Hahn. And there's also send me or text me or yeah on discord anything because um but but you know um

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 us all this form.

I mean, it's even, 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. How do we return to that, right? That's why there's in fascism. And this might not

be popular to say, but I don't care. It's a form of utopian socialism.

Absolutely, yeah.

It's a form of reactionary, utopian social.

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 a hundred percent 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'm actually my qualification would be that

I mean Marx is clear that

you either have

a revolution

in a new form of life emerged

or the dissolution of all classes

and I think you know yeah the quote Luxembrose or the dissolution of all classes.

And I think, you know,

to quote Luxembourg,

it's,

in our context,

it would be socialism or barbarism.

I wouldn't consider the barbers.

If there's not a scientific understanding of the transition, you will, it will materially impose itself upon us, but how we react to it could quite literally lead to

our extinction, annihilation of civilization itself. But, you know, 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, not to bring, we're not going to discuss

Dugan right now because it's too late, but he does mention something in political platonism, I find

compelling, but Lenin also said the same thing, so I guess we don't have to mention Dugin. 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 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 don't know what we would call them,

organic social relationships, organic communal bonds.

And I mentioned to you always, because it's a recurring theme in my outlook and my writings and stuff, is just like, when Heraclitus talks about the dreamer, right, who awaken 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 going to get into it too much, but it's like... It isn't inevitable that Rome turns culminates in neoclassical Britain, you know, in the 17th century.

That's not inevitable.

Rome also became the Ottoman Empire.

Same thing with Greece. Greece 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 like the European as a unified organic history. It's it's a specific trajectory defined by a specific kind of relationship toward concrete civilization, let's say, right?

Different type of sociality.

Exactly.

But I think...

The essence of a civilization, civilization 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

understand like

we can also understand it as a

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 we're trying to

ameliorate it we're trying to like go back to know we don't want to go to 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

right 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 else. I think there's signs that it was, it 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, 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 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, 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 give what I'm saying like this is part of the

dialectic of universal world history and it's like to this extent it's 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?

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, 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 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 people's way of life, you know?

Or does that make sense or no?

What I'm saying?

Parts of it.

Yeah.

Like, in suspending these

like ontological assumptions about reality, corresponding to the alienation of 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 reapplied to reality.

And then you get the business.

My question would be if in Asia, and not just the far east, right, if in the near and middle east, then we would call them the Middle East, then we would call them the Middle east uh 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, 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 conjoint with the rapid development

that we find in the last. 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?

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.

And then, you know, 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 like empires and civilizations.

And 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.

Were it not for, 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?

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

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 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 continuity of progress.

So I think

Well, it's

it's it's

capitalist modernity

that does that retrospective

Yes, exactly.

And it intensifies how it does

because even

even at the beginning of modernity capitalist

modernity 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 first few Greek

philosophers they took a lot of their ideas from Africa they usually stole everything from

what I know yeah basically every 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 philosophies.

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 bed.

I have a family to get to.

But to ask you bluntly, and I don't actually presume to know this, it's something,

it's a question I've always struggled with, actually, and I've never come to a satisfactory conclusion.

Was European modernity necessary like is there a timeline 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've seen 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 discomfort.

What produced, what woke up the enlightenment was the Arab War.

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 60, 40 on this.

60 I do lean, yes, but there is a huge 40% in me where I'm like maybe it wasn't necessary maybe this is like in

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 de bliss basically and i don't 40% of me thinks it is but 60% says no that 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 eblis like, let's

say, ontological crime

committed by Europe

and modernity against

the traditional, 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 asked 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 this, I don't know if I'd call it an ideal, but this kind of, the Mongol Empire, more or less he's trying to revive it

this notion that this is

and he's obviously combining it with religion

but

I haven't studied

Mongol civilization enough to

speak about it

but all I can say is this

without Avicenna, without Avicenna, without Averos

without the left Aristotelians

of the Arab world

there could not have been

your

don't know

yeah I totally agree

with that

the thinkers

that are the conditions

for the possibility

of the different forms

of the indictment

that Europe goes through

yeah I think

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, which didn't fully recognize itself

right didn't fully recognize its

own latent reality

and the conclusion from it and

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 do think

modernity is is unavoidable and i agree that the enlightenment is all but I also agree with and I have the full qualification of like what Dominique Lesudra says like every great thing about the enlightenment was also an equally horrific horrible thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the same time.

Paradoxical twin birth. Exactly. And I don't think you can appreciate the enlightenment without

that. I feel like, you know, the whole Stephen Pinker, like, oh, it's just like a line going up. We got enlightened.

It's really stupid, right? Like, you know. He's been doing the debates with, um, with Merchmeyer.

I don't know if you've seen those, but no, no, I didn't see the debate, but I, I understand the contrasting.

It's so stupid. But it's like, but I think that's why 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...

I kind of 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 uh maybe leave on this note with a few more

if you want to have your own conclusion. But 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 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 it's also...

That should sound preposterous to anyone within the Marxist tradition.

Yeah, but I don't think...

I mean, 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, value form guy.

Michael Heinrich and others.

Part of their criticism of the Soviets is that

supposedly it made Marxism into a world view,

which is just ridiculous. In my

anthology, text from the classics of Marxism,

speaking about dialectical materialism,

have a whole section in the introduction,

defending why we should be speaking about 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

as wacky as, you know,

a sense of immediacy with

a conclusion would lead some people to

think. There is something

in the Marxist's understanding

of history. There is a sort of

glorious return to a

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 what 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.

Yep.

Yeah.

History starts with once this fall is overcome.

And that's almost like...

Now is just the era of an accidental existence, not a rational existence.

If you put it in like human terms, in like 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.

And I think at the macro level, that's really what's going on. It's after that fall.

And this is a straight Hagle. It's only after that process of mediation of something becoming

an other first something becoming an other

first appearing as

an other that comes out of nowhere

in oppositional other and then once you see it

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 you know 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 commune 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 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

kind of metaphysical absolute

reality. This process

precisely as you describe

of the beginning, the fall

and then

the reconciliation.

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 the embryonic stage of modern,

it's born in America.

Yep.

It's the utopian community.

Exactly.

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 going to just have everything produced in common.

That's why it's called New Harmony. It's called it. we're going to just have everything produced in common. I mean, American cults.

That's why it's called New Harmony.

It's called New Harmony because it was Harmony before that.

And it was one of these Christian Utopia.

Exactly.

Yeah.

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.

I'll 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 honor.

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, 100%.

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

and thinking about things in new ways.

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... you're extremely knowledgeable and it's very refreshing

you know I think

yeah I wasn't planning

on streaming this long by the way I was planning

on ending it at like 1030

so

yeah but no thank you so much for coming the way, I was planning on ending it at like 1030. 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.

Yeah, 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.

Like, 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 like I think as we both

continue to research and like

work on our respective projects we'll

have even more to discuss and

talk about but

yeah

I do got to go get to bed

but yeah again great, great talking.

And, yeah, we'll definitely do this again.

Of course, brother.

Thank you.

See you.

Bye.

All right.

Let's go back to our headquarters.

We're going to do a brief outro.

Okay, guys.

All right. What did you guys think? I thought it was great. 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 because 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 these

thank you so much

you know the great thing about Carlos

is that and we didn't really touch

upon this too much

HDGV thank you so much he really is committed thank you so much joe wow thank you so much

he really is committed to um 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.

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,

and dismiss Stalinism, or Stalinism, 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 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, 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 he actually

is committed

consistently to maintaining the integrity

of Marxism-Leninism.

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, because when I am experimenting in these other directions, I'm taken for granted and I'm assuming the integrity of Marxism and 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 going to go ahead and terminate the stream and i'll see you guys

tuesday where we're going to have on malumbo from jubilee malumbo is going to be here guys

anyway guys i'm literally going directly to bed.

Bye-bye.

Good night.