🔴 RED PILL NEWS | PALESTINE WAR 🇵🇸

And then you. I'm not sure. I I I'm not. I I'm I I I'm sorry. I'm not going to be a today. I I'm not trying to make a little bit. Congratulations. I I'm trying to try. I I'm I I'm There's nobody here, just us together.

Keeping it hot, that July forever.

Because we're the masters of our own fate.

We're the captains of our own souls.

There's no way for us to come back.

It's boy we're cold, boy we're cold, and I would say,

Take off, take off, take off all your clothes.

Take off, take off, take off all your clothes.

Take off, take off, take off, take off all of your clothes.

They say only the good idea that just ain saying right.

Because we're having too much fun.

Too much fun tonight.

And I lost for life.

And I lost for life, I'm left for life, and I left for the life,

and I'm left for life, I'm so small, keep the the life, keep so on.

I'm not, you're not for life, and I left for the l'a'uil'a,

I'm left for their name, the t life. And the life's not alive.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

Cause we're the masters of our own faith.

We're the captains of our own faith. We're the captains of our own souls. So there's no need for us to hesitate.

But alone, let's take control and I'm alone.

Dingle, ting off think off all your clothes.

Take off, think off, think off all your clothes.

Take off, take off for their own clothes.

They say only the good night in the world

that just stay right.

Cause we are having too much fun.

Too much for tonight.

Good for life. We dance on the H as a Hollywood sign, though we run out of breath.

Gotta dance until we run out of breath.

Gotta dance till we die. My boyfriend's back. Any schooler than ever. There's no more night. Blue skies forever.

We're left for light in this morning. Keeps to one. Keep the sun's alive.

Keep so much more.

Keep so alive.

Keep so long.

I'm lost for love.

And I left for life,

I'm listening to love.

Keeps tou limice.

Keep so much more. Keep so fun. Keeps us alive.

Keep so fun.

There's nobody here.

Just us together.

Keeping it hot.

A July forever.

Because we're notthe masters of our own fate.

We're the captains of our own souls.

There's no way for us to come by.

Because boy we're cold, boy we're cold, and I'll say,

Take off, take off, take off all your clothes.

Take off, take off, take off, take off all your clothes. Take off, take off, take off, take off all your clothes.

Take off, take off, take off, take off, take up all of your clothes.

They say only the good diet that just say right.

Because we're having too much fun.

Too much fun to mine.

And I lost for life.

And I lost for life.

And I lost for life.

You're not so alive.

You're so much alive.

You're so much alive.

It's just a line.

It's lost for life.

And I lost for life.

I miss the life.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

Because we're the masters of our own fate, we're the captains of our own souls.

So there's no need for us to hesitate.

For all alone, let's take control and those lines

think off

think off all your clothes

take off

think off

take off

Take off

Take off Think your clothes, take off, they go.

Think of all of your clothes.

They say only the end of good night, oh, they're just ain't right.

Cause we're having too much fun.

Too much more tonight.

But I like for you. We dance on the age of the Hollywood sign.

Don't we run out of breath.

We dance on the age of the Hollywood sign.

Don't we run out of breath.

Gotta dance till we die.

My boyfriend's back.

Any schooler than ever.

There's no more night.

Blue skies forever. You'm lost for life.

And I left for life.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

Keeps us alive.

It's lost for life.

And I left for life.

Keeps us alive.

Keepss alive. I I'm gonna be try to

what's gonna

you know

that's

the the I I'm gonna I'm a little bit. I I'm a little bit. I I I'm gonna see you try to get you know

the today. I I'm sorry. I'm trying to... Welcome.

Today we are going to be talking to a guy named Daniel Tut. So to provide a background on him if you're

not familiar, he's a professor. I'm gonna be honest, I forget the university, you're gonna

have to forgive me. It's Washington something.

I just, I don't remember universities at all. George Washington, something like that,

university. But he's a pretty notable figure in the sphere of, you know,

continental philosophers within the United States.

I remember him and his presence before I started streaming so that that'll give you an idea. Anyway he had some

disagreements that he wanted to talk about. First beginning with Maga

Communism he seemed like he was kind of pathologizing the phenomenon by basically saying that

Maga communism is just about you know Haas being a father figure to all of

these people something along those lines.

It's very clear we have diverging views on psychoanalysis, on Lacan, on Maga communism.

He mentioned that he believed that my orientation philosophically was irrationalist because of my

integration of the ideas of Alexander Dugan and Heidegger.

So we want to discuss these things. of the ideas of Alexander Dugan and Heidegger.

So we want to discuss these things, but I want to preface something.

In DMs, we came to an agreement and an understanding that this would not be a fight.

This is not about proving who's smarter or who has better credentials.

It's not a...

SIOP, thank you so much.

It's not about proving whose reputation should be better than the others.

It's not about, you know, I did see some interesting comments by people saying this is about

the final nail in the coffin of Maga communism and I just, I just assume this is, this has nothing

to do with him or his intentions because it's kind of ridiculous.

If you look at what we've been doing behind the scenes and the connections we've been making

on the international level, I don't know if you should be too optimistic.

If you're one of our haters, I don't know how optimistic you should be.

I think you should hold your horses and continue your hate march, so to speak.

It's not over yet, I promise. Anyway, but it's a very rare

opportunity that I get to talk to intellectuals about these topics. I also want to expose my own

audience to a lot of these thinkers and ideas. I want you guys to be more

aware of the significance of Lacan and other thinkers for theory. I want you to

be able to integrate these ideas because ultimately I am a Lacanian and I wear it on my sleeve

that Lacan psychoanalysis has been an important factor in my ability to do what I do and the

ability for me to build infrared and what it is, and

large part comes from that, not necessarily in the sense of a method for manipulating

people, not in that sense, but in the sense of avoiding the pitfalls and shortcomings

in vanities, the foolish errors of the psychopathologies that inevitably befall public

influencers, specifically millennials who are the least self-aware when it comes

to their psychopathologies.

There's a reason infrared isn't like Caleb Maupin.

There is a reason we don't, we are tankies.

Yes, unapologetic Marxist-Leninists,

but we don't seem to exhibit the same level of,

put it this way, we're tankies with a sense of humor.

I think that's kind of rare.

That's been very rare. We have a sense of humor and we have a sense of humor. I think that's kind of rare. That's been very rare. We know,

we have a sense of humor and we have a sense of...

Not completely isolating ourselves from society and so on and so on. But anyway, I don't want to ramble.

Without further ado, we're just going to kind of get into it, and I'm going to invite him now.

So, let's transition over to our Zoom meeting.

Give me a moment. All right, let me do this. Okay. Hi guys, anyway, we're going to create an invite link.

Actually, give me a second.

Uh, how do I do this?

Alright, invite, copy, invite link.

Okay, give me a second.

Alright.

Okay, so he is invited and we're probably just going to get right to it.

I made an appearance, my first appearance on RT yesterday, by the way.

It went pretty well. They released the, they sent me a Google drive of the clip. It was only about two minutes.

And I can't wait to share that with you guys. I'm probably just going to upload it to YouTube.

So we're just going to wait patiently.

Hopefully, there's no complications on the technical side of things.

Uh, okay.

Let me make sure he's not waiting. Uh, okay.

Let me make sure he's not waiting to be let in or something. All right, we're good. Lionel, what's up man? Thank you. I I think all live streams belong here, to be honest, on Kik.

People wonder why I'm on such a trashy website.

Well, it's the nature of the industry.

Lionel, thank you so much, appreciate you.

Because I'm, I have a, I believe in the Promethean gesture of,

Hipsco, thank you so much, appreciate you.

Of enlightening the most stupid people on the internet.

I did not read his book, I didn't have time to but I read his article

Which he wrote for cosmonaut on Nietzsche

I guess we're gonna be discussing Nietzsche, but I'm not I'm not a Nietzsche and myself and I have a very

I'm not very impressed by Nietzsche in general.

Thank you so much, Kras and what I mean by that is I don't consider him as important

as people may come out to be. Yeah. Red saffron, what's up?

Thank you so much.

Numinus, appreciate you.

Appreciate you.

Thank you, Numinus.thank you, Numinus.

Okay, so he's in. Okay, hold on. Let me, uh, let me let him in. Hello?

Hey, what's up?

Good, how are you? Is the audio okay?

Yeah, it's good.

Okay. So, if you want to introduce yourself, you mentioned you

wanted to give an introduction, so... I observing the Holy Month, thank you for having

me.

I'm actually looking forward to this exchange.

I think it's important that I give a sense of an explanation as to this exchange. I think it's important that I give a sense of an

explanation as to why I'm here, given that there's been several people on the

left that have called for me to be canceled because I'm here. They find your

movement to be fascist and to be red-brownist for them.

They have an issue of not platforming reactionaries.

And based on my study of your movement on your work, people have been sharing a lot of information with me about you and infrared,

what I noticed is that everything you do seems to be out in the open, unlike for example the

conservative but quasi-socialist magazine compact.

Infrared seems to be an evolving platform with new ideas and

strategies constantly being adopted. So, after researching all of that and consulting with

comrades and people I trust, I've decided to engage you because I think you are communists and I am doing so on the basis

that we do have serious theoretical disagreements.

Now, I will admit that I think a lot of what you propose is problematic in terms of

your theoretical understanding of Marxist politics.

Specifically, I'm concerned with a combination of Dugan's right-wing, sort of mystical Heidegarian nationalism with Marxism.

This is not convincing to me, and I find it to be dangerous, but I also find that Heidegger's thought more generally is problematic for Marx.

And for Marx and Angles, I don't see that linkage.

This is something we can explore tonight.

But why am I here?

This started because I shared a tweet from your interview with Dugan and Russia, and I noticed a few things about your followers that struck me.

You have become a sort of what we might call in psychoanalytic theory a father of the horde

to a bunch of disaffected young people. And of course, I think, Haas, you bring this upon yourself by calling yourself a warlord.

And this is interesting to me, I think, because based on my research, you probably were inspired

by French theory and DeLos andatteres' notion of the war machine.

But perhaps we can talk about that.

But what really worried me in my interaction with the mega-communists online was that many

of them showed signs of some pretty regressive behavior.

Many of them peddled in some very retrograde culture war nonsense, and this involved

even inciting violence to LGBTQ people.

So I'm here because I think our differences are real and noticeable.

We are both Marxists. I typically will not accept

an invitation to engage anti-trans people that hide behind dark money like Compact, but

I'm here because I understand that on the left in America we're in a total mess. The fact

you have created a platform based on the unity of

opposites, mega and communism is not lost on me. But when infrared followers adopt anti-LGBTQ

politics, you've essentially adopted what I consider to be a hyper antipolitics.

What is antipolitics?

Antipolitics is the acceleration of bourgeois culture war polemics to the total abandonment

of substantive proletarian politics.

When anyone aggressively persecutes LGBTQ, leftists, you all look like Republicans to me.

Not necessarily fascists, no, you look like standard bourgeois Republican culture warriors.

Communists do not fan the flames of a pernicious and opportunistic culture war that can lead

to dangerous outcomes.

To do so is unrefined.

It is not only bigoted, it is worse than that.

It is anathema to Marxism completely.

Let me share a personal story to highlight what I mean.

Right after I agreed to come onto your stream, a comrade of mine discovered a meme

that one of the mega-communists put out during Pride Month.

It was a meme that advocated that Gays be exterminated,

and it referenced Maxine Gorky, the great Marxist literary figure.

My comrade called me in tears, saying that this made him fear for his life.

He also happens to be gay.

His partner and him live in the rural South, and they both cried about this. So, this shit has real consequences outside

of the simulated online world. What if your brother happened to be gay? Do you think the

working class is somehow not affected by LGBTQ expression? No, this comrade works, a working

class job, but even if he didn't, it wouldn't

matter. We have no space or time or patience for regressive behavior. Haas, I think you're

too young to know, but for me, I grew up in the 90s when homophobic slurs were normalized,

and I can tell you it was actually really dumb and stupid,

and there's no need to go back to that. Nothing about communism should be about degrading

people at this level, that is bourgeois liberalism. Communism is about dignity, freedom,

self-expression, fostering individual, independent thought

and mass excellence.

Never forget what the bourgeois parties can do when extermination is sanctioned.

Well we're witnessing right now, are we not in Gaza? Unfortunately, there

are many sources for extermination and exterminationist ideologies in our traditions. But they have

no place in Marxism. None. We can talk about how exterminationist ideologies have functioned

in the Old Testament, in religious traditions, all the way up to modern eugenics, and even

in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Right? We, on the other hand, have a tradition to uphold,

and I want everyone listening to think very carefully, especially as we go into the election cycle there are powerful state

entities that want you to fan the flames of a fake culture war and everyone

needs to be cautious do not give into it how would you feel if it led to violence what if your brother happened to be cautious. Do not give into it. How would you feel if it led to violence?

What if your brother happened to be gay or trans? Would you want them to be hurt?

We have a very sensitive situation on our hands and we need to act with

dignity and respect. Okay, so this is where I'm coming from on that issue.

Let me say something briefly about myself so you don't think that I'm a soy Marxist

professor. I'm from a working class background. I entered the workforce right after 2008

economic crash with very little job prospects.

In fact, that was stuck working construction and landscaping back in Oregon.

But with all my heart and soul, I wanted to be a scholar, not necessarily an academic.

I make a strong distinction, actually, between the two, in fact.

And I was only able to go to

grad school by living in the patronage of a wealthy real estate guy that I

worked for who I met off Craigslist. In this process I became a Marxist. For me I

want you all to know that socialism and class politics are highly personal.

This is not a joke, this is not a game.

I have family on welfare.

I have family that have died from deaths of despair and drug overdoses.

I understand the social decay that's happening in this country very well.

I have seen the effects that poverty can have this country very well. I've seen the

effects that poverty can have on people. Many of my family do not understand

socialism. My father and my brother are mega. They're pro-Trump. They're

conservative, but politically I know they're completely lost. We need to be more dignified and

respectful if we ever want to convince Americans of socialism. As a

scholar of Marxism, it's imperative that we be very critical of the

university, specifically of its politics, which are dismal and non-existent.

As Marxists, we should pursue scholarship and knowledge as much as possible.

The main problem with the university today is its exclusion.

It is only for middle and upper middle class people, and this is a big reason why the university

is no longer a political source at all.

Let me finally say I am critical of the DSA and have never been a member due to their professional complicity with the Democratic Party.

I have served on the executive committee of a group that I encourage all of you to learn about called class unity, an organization that aims to further Marxist analysis. Class unity is totally independent of and critical of the essay.

They offer free courses on Marxism and Socialism, which are amazing.

While I am critical of DSA, I'm also a close member of Marxist Unity Group, and many of

the comrades there encouraged me that this conversation is worth it.

That's my intro.

Sorry, that was long. Yeah, no problem. Thank you so much for coming on. We do appreciate your willingness to engage in dialogue. And I believe that the perspective you're coming from is a reasonable one. Specifically when it

comes to the concerns you've raised about comments that were made and

potential concerns about fanning the flames of the culture war. I appreciate

your comments on the need for communists to exude a level of excellency. I think

that's a really great way of putting it. When I think of communists in China,

when I think of communists like Jizhienping, even communist in Russia, that's what they also strive for,

is a level of professionalism and excellency, which,

to do a degree of self-criticism for the early years of infrared,

we were lacking.

However, we are striving to go in that direction.

More recently, especially because of a more

international orientation we're taking for the moment.

Without wanting to ramble, I want to address the question, hopefully we don't have to

get too hung up on it, on LGBT politics and where we stand officially on it.

Firstly, I would like to preface this by saying, I absolutely do not condone the abuse, the attacking, the denigration of gay people or trans people or any other kind of sexual minority,

let alone endorse the idea of exterminating them.

I think the response to that specific phenomenon, while I have reservations about its causes,

in the form of punishing the individuals and scolding them and attacking them is probably

even more symptomatic of any kind of decay, social decay and pathology

than the phenomena itself could possibly be.

And I've made my position clear on that.

Our hostility and our inflammatory comments toward leftist members of that community,

to be honest, stems from a very concrete experience we've had with them.

We've had very ugly interactions with them.

These people have tried to docks. they've tried to malign and

slander us to the utmost degree. We didn't even begin in any way critical of LGBT politics.

Originally, Infrared had members of the LGBT community in it and there was no problem

But just by virtue of just minimally exuding a sense of

heteronormitivity I guess

Suddenly we got labeled transphobic and fascist and so on and so on and they made

this the primary contradiction, some of them at least. So it escalated to the

point where there was an extreme overcorrection. We noticed, and this is

primarily the criticism, that the critique of heteronormitivity, specifically

that is at the heart of Western leftism, is what makes it antisocial and bourgeois in nature,

for even worse, potentially fascist in our eyes.

My view on the LGBT politics is very simple.

I believe that heteronormitivity will always be the fundamental characteristic of any given society.

That doesn't mean that exceptions to the norm need to be exterminated or abused or attacked.

There are always going to be exceptions to the norm.

My problem is raising those exceptions to the status of the norm,

mounting a general critique against the norms of society in general. And the problem that

left us have with norms in general, I think, is where most of our problems are coming from.

It's interesting that this critique of norms has become the dominant quality of leftism

in the West when if you read Lenin's State and Revolution and he talks about a post, a society after the dissolution or the withering away of the state,

how basic, how the basic dignity of human beings is enforced and respected is through norms.

He gives the example of when a woman is attacked on the street and a crowd just spontaneously and intuitively responds to that

That's how order will be enforced after the end of the state

So for him, there's a clear

Clearly something very fundamental about norms, norms that are not

prescriptively arbitrated by a political consciousness or some kind of ideological consciousness,

but reflect a accumulated experience of living, of people living and coexisting with each other.

I will admit there's an extent of an overcorrection on our part when it comes to our fights with the LGBT leftists, but as

long as it can be respected, as long as the heteronormitivity of the working

class can be respected, and that is not raised to the level of, oh, this is the basis of fascism, we need to

queer society and impose the exceptions to the level of the norm. We don't want to hunt

down minorities and exceptions. We just want a clear understanding and appreciation of the dominant norm, basically.

Mm-hmm.

Well, I mean, I think one of the things in looking at your work is that I'd like to see more of,

is a deeper understanding and deeper appreciation of how these phenomena

are reflective of capitalist alienation. And often, Haas, when you talk about the experience

of leftists.

Sometimes you essentialize them in an idealist way by saying, like for example, certain

pathologies are unique to leftists by virtue of what?

Is it by the virtue of their class position?

Is it by virtue of their ideological choice? Is it by virtue of their ideological choice?

Because to me that would be idealist.

And it would also be missing the fact that generationally there is certain forms of social

alienation for which these phenomena are an expression.

And as Marxists, we should have the solidarity to recognize that because as I said in my

opening remarks, never forget.

And mega people know this in rural America and all the post-industrial places in rural

America that, you know, how hard it is to be a gay person,

how hard it is, and people have to form local networks of solidarity because the truth is,

and Angles himself knew this as well, the 1917 brought the truth is and Angles himself knew this as well.

In 1917 brought the most egalitarian upsurge,

which then led to China for the rights of women and for the rights of sexual minorities.

Unprecedented.

Read Goron Thurborn's book on the history of the family, the biggest

egalitarian expansion of the rights of women you could ever imagine, not

premised on the forcing of a rigid patriarchal. No, that came later as a reaction, right? So communism has to be about sexual

and individual liberation at this level, right? If we lose side of that, we lose sight of

what alienation is and how it's affecting all of us. So what I'm worried about is the question

of solidarity when we think this and also the rerouting away from materialist analysis,

the risk of that, the risk of that, and getting caught and mired, the bourgeois parties would

love for us to be caught and mired in this debate for eternity.

Would they not?

Would you agree to that?

I suppose, but I think the issue is that when discussing the topic of alienation and the

class origins of this position, I agree it does stem from a violent alienation from communal

norms and family norms which is which has

material and class causes but I think the minimally orthodox Marxist

perspective would locate the proliferation of sexual abnormality in general to the lump-inization of the

proletarian class.

It seems like if we gleam the basic history of how communists have appraised the significance of the family for the working class.

It's not the nuclear family of the bourgeoisie, which is isolated and egotistical and based only on the transmission of property.

It's more like the extended family, which actually seems to be the norm for most of human history actually.

But nonetheless, the proletariat is heteronormative.

Well, I mean, the Frankfurt school came up with an interesting idea in this regard, which

I work with in my researching and in my writing, which is a paradoxical insight, which is

that the bourgeois family produced a subjectivity that the working class had a dialectical

relationship with, which at times was envious because if you are working class person

We know from studies today that work working class people want to reproduce a family

The problem is the material realities that's preventing them from doing that. That's the same dynamic that Marx and Engels talked about in Communist Manifesto 1848.

The emissuration of proletarianization was blocking the promises of bourgeois property ownership and family, right?

As such, part of the question that

Frankfurt School recognized, like a dorn or an horkheimer, which I don't like them

often, but I think this inside is correct, that over time what happened was the subjectivity that a stable family could produce could

actually give you a subject that could more rationally exist in the world and

contest authority. So the problem with the neoliberal period, the world we live in now, is that we have lost

the stability of the family, and in the loss of that stability, I think we agree on this

point, we have a stunted, well, in a fancy sense, a stunted Ediple situation.

We can define what the hell that word means in a moment.

So it's from that cause that I think we can then analyze back these phenomena, these situations.

I wouldn't call them abnormalities,

because, I mean, what the hell does that mean?

What's the norm there?

That's a problematic concept for me.

But nonetheless, it's a problem over when the market dominates social life and the family

and erodes all stability like it is today, Adorno and Horkimer basically say subjects

can no longer adequately contest authority. That's the big insight that they have.

And so therefore it's not good for revolutionary politics to have this unstable family.

So I mean, I think the question is not so much should the family be a certain transcidental patriarchal way.

It's a material question.

Should people have the freedom, the radical freedom, to experiment in communal living,

to experiment in the form of a bourgeois family in some sense.

It's a question. This is always a question and I don't

think Marxism has a clear answer on this. It's left to us to figure out. But what

we know is that the masses want families. We know that. That it remains

extremely popular and that family abolition is a bit of a very difficult demand

to put onto the proletariat, right?

I recognize that.

Although I would be curious what your position on family abolition is from the standpoint

of proletarian demands. Have you thought about that?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I don't understand how this has become a more or less dominant view for the left

wing in the West.

The fundamental context of proletarian politics in Russia, in China, even in most

of Europe probably, in history at least, has been the communal and familial context in

which the working class lives.

When we talk about working class mass

movements, we're not talking about individuals fully abstracted from any

familial context and just existing as isolated individualistic atoms with no commitments or obligations whatsoever to their kin,

we're talking about networks of people related by blood, related by family, related by community.

And that's always been the context of socialist mass politics. It's

the premise and the presupposition of it. The notion of family abolition, I think, you mentioned

in not after 1917 in Russia, that the return of patriarchy, I believe you are referring

to the Stalin period, represented a reaction to that.

I don't think it represented a reaction.

It's just an adjustment to the actual reality of the majority of people living in the former Russian Empire.

Sure, in the urban context, you had various intellectual and petty bourgeois forms of experimentation,

but those couldn't be replicated in the context of the countryside.

The adoption of the extremely

egalitarian divorce laws, for example, when applied to the context of the

Russian countryside, actually really harmed materially the status of women,

because men took advantage of it and left them hanging high and dry

and it just wasn't feasible or tenable whatsoever within that context. So I don't think the return

of quote-unquote patriarchy was a reaction to any kind of egalitarian ideology.

I think it was actually just giving way to the material reality that existed then.

Well I mean I think we should understand what patriarchy is, right?

And one of the things that psychoanalysis, and like, I know that you read and study

Jacques Lacan, the French Freud, who's notoriously difficult and for whom Jijjeek has introduced a whole generation to his thought.

Lecon has a lot to say about patriarchy, right? And one of the things he says is that really

patriarchy starts to erode with industrial capitalism as early as the 1830s. And he even cites

like popular novelists like Balzac who showed that the petrofamilius authority

was like the the father within the bourgeois household is always a humiliated father, right?

And that capitalism itself erodes patriarchy. So there's this

dialectic of a kind of reaction response to the constant, everything that is

solid melts into air, right? This affects the family, this affects the... So I think as communists we need to be aware of

that fragility and the cause of the fragility that that stokes. And moreover, I think psychoanalysis

actually could help us in understanding the problem with trying to force a certain

version of paternal authority, fatherly authority, that would actually fan the flames in a certain sense because it

for for psychoanalysis sort of have to understand what the meaning of a father

is you know what I'm saying

the meaning of a father is not

is inextricable in Freudian understanding and inextricable from the relationship that the child has to the mother.

It's a triangle, right?

And so the purpose of the father, really, is to allow for the child to

healthily escape from the womb care of the mother so they can be an independent

and rational child on their own.

When that becomes stunted, you have developed psychotic or perverse phenomenon,

or you can also have neurotic phenomenon.

In each three instances, there is a relationship

of a stunted relationship to the father.

So what I'm trying to say is that one of the things

that Lacan understood,

he read this very

important playwright named Paul Cladell, who was like an expert on paternal

authorities, great Catholic reactionary writer, and he really understood the

status of the father, the struggle of the father.

And I think one of the dangers is if you have a society like ours, which is fundamentally

dealing with this fragmented family, with absent father phenomenon, which is we're not

allowed to talk about on the left, but I think that we should, right? We can talk

about that as socialists, as communists, not as necessarily religious

traditionalists, right? In that context, people want surrogate father replacements, right?

They want to have fathers of the real, fathers of the horde, fathers that kind of can offer some strict transitantial assurance.

But one of the things that I think Lacon would say in that regard is that actually what

you're doing when you do that, you create a community that actually doesn't allow for

those individuals to fully transcend the father problem.

Because one of the things that look on understood, you only

transcend the father when you have a sense of equality with the father. There's never

a transcendence of the father where the father's like some constant source of authority. Now

you have to overcome the father in some sense. And I, so anyways, that's a side point,

but only I know it's gets complicated, Haas, but I'm only saying it because this was the source of a big debate that I had with your

people online. Maybe we can talk about this because I know you've given a video and a talk about this whole name of the father and

Lacon and stuff like that. I don't know what you think about it.

Sure. So regarding the first significance of the father within industrial modernity or industrial capitalism

because we should remember there's also an industrial modernity for Russia and China,

which was a non-capitalist form.

But it's true that at the outset, industrial modernity violently abstracts people from the agrarian context in which patriarchy was given meaning.

But I think specifically in the experience of socialism, rather than the nihilism of the complete because just I would like

to clarify some things the name of the father is ultimately what attaches a

given subject to a real source of meaning, I believe. And in the late Lacan, there's this question of whether one can say, one can regard there to be a symptom in the real, sorry, a meaning in the real, because the symptom is what

comes from the real. So does that point to some kind of meaning that is there,

that is not merely just an after-effect of some kind.

And Lacon says, not only would this necessate

the need for a god to exist, but specifically the God of Abraham,

the God of the Abrahamic tradition, the God of Noah,

the God of the prophets, and so on and so on.

And it's very clear what relationship the name of the... I mean this is even, Freud directly

draws from Moses, he directly draws from the Jewish tradition when he talks about the origins of the name of the father.

So it's not just an arbitrary relationship of

familial or household arrangement. It's about what attaches you to a fundamental horizon

of meaning.

One that is, and this is important, ulterior to just some kind of conceit of thought or logic

of some kind, something that really does descend from the real.

Now to that extent, I don't think you can artificially force a patriarchy upon reality.

I think we are rather burdened with the debt or the guilt of a

patriarchal obligation or responsibility, much in the same way as Hamlet, as we

see in the play Hamlet by it with Shakespeare. The name of the father, the

ghost of the father, is an enduring sense of guilt for us.

And as far as the return of patriarchy is concerned, the point is not to resolve...

I think you misread how this works within infrared.

Because the idea that I'm a father, I think is a little bit misleading.

I think the...

That's not my claim. No, no, yeah, I understand.

The idea that I am serving as a kind of substitute for the absent father, I don't think is correct.

I think the constant theme of people messaging me and telling me how what I have said has impacted them in their lives is that they were in fact estranged from their

families as most leftists are and that I inspired them to forgive their fathers, to make up

with their fathers, to actually pursue healthy relationships with them.

And now the fact that I have this role of being able to do

that and return people to their families and to their fathers, maybe that does

have some significance. But I don't think that stems from me, my image being a replacement for the absent father. The name of the father

that is invoked by infrared isn't me, it's not Haas. It's the tradition of

communism, which I think it's intuitively clear how that's a patriarchal tradition.

It's the religion of the heads of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Specifically in the American context, we do have this patriarchal tradition which we have not successfully inherited or fulfilled.

How would William Z. Foster look at us now and see us now and the state of communism

in America?

It would make us feel ashamed and guilty and for good reason.

And that is a patriarchal relationship of some kind.

Avenging the name of the father, which is the communist tradition in general, I think is an

ever-present reality that imposes itself upon us, whether or not we want to

acknowledge it or not, if we remain minimally committed to the tradition.

So now I think we're getting at some points of some disagreement here because I think you've hit upon a

Several points I wish to respond to the first is this idea of placing Mao Lenin

Marks angles in the position of a kind of transcendental name of the father that

communism must adhere to. I think, first of all, I don't think that those figures

desired for future communists to place them in that. That's far too religious.

Think about that structure. That is a messianic

structure, right? On the one hand, it's a messianic structure, the problem for which is related

back to the other points you made, which is if you, Haas, as warlord, place yourself as a not, this is the key point,

a non-lacking, non-castrated father, which is outside of the symbolic, because that's the

funny thing is when I was engaging with your people.

They were treating me as if I was the father of the symbolic.

And the problem with that was that they were presenting you as the only one that could

kill me, the only one that could fight me, right?

So the problem then with a horde father, according to Lecon, is

that the horde father maintains aggressivity of its subjects. The aggression remains.

When the whole notion of the name of the father is about the transcendence of

aggression and the development of rational independent thought. Problem that I

have with hoard structures, their authority doesn't facilitate rational

independent thought and I think that this is a

great motivation for infrared to continue to pursue theoretical inquiry. I

mean, if we if we place angles and marks as transitant fathers, how can we take a concept like

dictatorship of proletariat, for example, and actually work with it to face our realities?

Are we just going to replicate what the transitant fathers did exactly?

We can't do that. That wouldn't work. That wouldn't make any sense. So it's also a problem

of independent interpretation. This is a worry that I have. Mao made mistakes. Did he not? Did Mao make mistakes? Of course. Did Marx make

mistakes? I don't know, of course, right? This to me, this to me is a question. Now I think

you're right that we must have a profound reverence, but that reverence should

remain intellectual, right?

It should not enter into a theological domain for me.

Now, I notice that your Dugan and Heidegarian stuff has this mystical messianism and it's um I find it quite interesting

Because you know why it's interesting you're a big critic of Western Marxism, but Western Marxism is also Mesaanic and I think that you have a messianic structure which I'm not necessarily opposed well I

We're we're dialogue in here. I think you know just an anecdote

I was in Moscow recently and I had the privilege of visiting

Lenin's mausoleum

I don't see how you can escape the messianism that is inherent to

communism. I mean, it's objectively there, whether we like it or not. And I think this is

a point of disagreement I'd like to raise with you regarding whether

or not we can only appraise the significance of these figures from an intellectual perspective.

The reason I disagree with that isn't because I think those individuals are without faults.

That is, you're right, that's completely opposed to the spirit of all of

those thinkers. Mao himself said that he thinks it would be a good deal, that

after he died, if it was a praise that he made 50% correct decisions and then 50% mistakes.

He thought that would be fair.

He also is famous for regarding Stalin as having been 70% correct and 30% wrong.

While Stalin probably wouldn't admit it openly, he probably didn't entirely

agree with Lenin on the national question and it's enduring significance and specifically

giving the Soviet republics the right to secede. Lenin of course deviated from the, uh, well it's actually,

it's actually questionable whether Lenin deviates from Marx and Engels actually,

but they at least deviated from the tradition that laid claim to their inheritance, which was the second international.

So I understand what you're saying from that perspective.

But I think the difference between Western Marxism and Eastern Marxism is that

the reverence of these figures isn't to make them into kind of gods or infallible

superhuman individuals, but rather a matter of historical memory.

Their names are attached to specific concrete historical experiences, which did materially transform

reality in practice, not just as a matter of the intellect, but literally affected the very

texture of civilization itself irreversibly. The legacy of Lenin in the Soviet

Union is not just an intellectual, but someone who fundamentally laid the

foundation of an entirely different path of modern industrial development in

civilization. The same is true for development and civilization.

The same is true for Stalin and Mao as well.

So these thinkers, the reason they have a patriarchal significance

isn't because of a superstition where we're just elevating them

to some kind of transcendent level outside the scrutiny of rational thought.

Rather, we're acknowledging that their legacy and that the memory of these figures

stands for something far beyond them as detached intellect or just even as individuals in general.

They represent the leaders, the thought leaders, so to speak, of different eras of history,

which of course includes the innumerable contributions of the people.

Stalin was regarded as the father of the Soviet people.

Without the people, what is Stalin? Nothing.

So I think it's important to understand that patriarchy is not necessarily

in reality, I mean, I'm not talking about an ideal context, in actual reality doesn't

function as a way of absolving individuals of the responsibility of taking an independent position.

But I think the impossibility of acquiring equality with the father lies in the antecedents

of the father.

The father is what precedes us.

It's the totality of a history that comes before us that's being succeeded.

We of course can't be equal to that because behind us is a wealth of experiences of millions and millions of people we could not

possibly ourselves replicate individually and the names of the father just

refer to those in different concrete senses. Now I want to just briefly touch upon something you said about the father

of the horde because I also disagree with this analysis of how the community functions.

I understand that there's members of the community not as educated as me who when confronting someone like you

will refer and defer to me basically. I mean I don't think there's a need to

psychoanalyze it when for example people say okay Haas is the only one that can

defeat you I think it's just concretely

in a common sense way. It's just because they themselves may not have the confidence in the

level of knowledge to be able to disprove what you're saying, but they're confident that I can't.

I don't necessarily think that's an inherently pathological assumption that they're making.

And finally, I don't think the father of the horde that you're talking about is ever

something that Lacan or Freud acknowledges to even exist.

The father of the horde is just a kind of a kind of presence in the form of guilt,

which is because, as we know from the story,

there is a conspiracy of men which kill the primal father of the horde,

and their guilt is what is fundamentally repressed in the founding of any given community.

The actual father of the

horde is just a kind of mythical construction. It doesn't actually exist.

Yeah, no it's true and the part of it is that the guilt from the killing of the

father is what permeates the social contract and also

makes possible the enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and so on.

But civilization is founded off of that. But even before that, all of why was the father killed? The

father of the horde was killed because he's, we saw his enjoyment, he kept all

for himself. He did not share it with the other boys, you see.

So when they killed him it was about a fair distribution. And in that sense

when you have in a situation such as our own society, like Elaine Bad Jew and my mentors talks about

this in some of his work, where fathers cannot be overcome, where there's a stunted Edipol

process, okay, where people are in permanent adolescence, okay, where they, where we don't

know what it means to be a man, okay? He says that gangs and outlaw groups form in which

the rivalry of the primal father returns in an imaginary form, in a fantastical

form. It's not real, you're right, it's not real, but it is enacted, it is simulated.

I'm not accusing you of doing that, that'd be quite vulgar. I'm not going to go down that line.

I think that

I've seen and people send me videos. Thank you for all the DMs of videos of you saying these

things. And I think for all of the people that want to, I mean, one of the things that you seem

to do is evolve your platform and you think differently, which is good,

and I want you to keep doing that, of course.

But I think that the, this amazing Argentinian Marxist, he was a Che Guevarez named Leon Rosichner and he wrote this book where

he argues that the father of the Horde is actually in capitalism like that the mode of production.

And he makes this argument that like a revolutionary group, the mode of production and he he makes this argument that like a revolutionary group the leader of a revolutionary group their task is

The organization of the disaffection of the proletariat

Towards the end of what he calls the invention of a new rationality so that each member of that group

Functions as a leader themselves. That's the key point

That's the goal of a revolutionary group the goal of revolutionary group is not the reaffirmation of a transit.

Individual at the top.

It's actually, and I don't mean to be anarchistic here, it's more of a horizontal form of

expansion in an ideal sense.

Because what you're doing as a revolutionary is you're creating what he calls a new obstacle than what bourgeois society creates as the obstacle between desire and satisfaction.

Because Freud teaches us that in modern civilization we have a fundamental unbahagen.

There's a kind of discontent at the heart of civilization.

The revolutionary group brings that discontent out, creates a new solution to it, and then

allows people to follow that and become independent individual leaders themselves. Over time that's what socialism can do, right?

This is why psychoanalysis matters. I think I think the issue of the relationship

between the subject of psychoanalysis and the subject, for example,

of Marxism and the class analysis has never really been properly bridged. And I think it would

take a little too long if I, we can get into it, but just, the comment I'd like to make now regarding the

the primal father of the horde is I think that there's a distinctly

Western significance of Freud's description rather than it one that's for universal humanity.

I think that if you look at Michael Hudson and how he makes the distinction between this kind of two trajectories of historical development,

one is the Western one, exclusive probably to Europe, which he calls the

oligarchical form, which is based on usury and debt and so on and so on. And

there you actually have concrete instances of a history that is based, actually

yes upon there being a kind of a king or a patriarch of some kind

and a conspiracy of oligarchs overthrowing this is the case of the Roman

Republic of the city states of antiquity and so on and so on and this is what gives rise to the

Western notions of liberty and ultimately the enlightenment and so on and so

forth but then you also have a completely opposite trajectory that's occurring

in the non-western world which does seem to be the kind of

history of the of a kind of obscene Freudian patriarch of the primal horde. What

else is the sultan of the Ottoman state than that or the Persian state or Genghis

Khan and so on and so on the Tsar of Muscovy and so on.

So it stands to question whether or not the assumption that freedom

for the individual or

uh... human dignity for the individual and so on and so on

comes at the expense of this reality of uh... patriarchy

is it true that the patriarch of the primal horde

possesses this full and unmitigated Juiissance?

Or is this just the biased perspective of the Western subject for whom this is the underlying

psychopathology behind which this kinds of oligarchical political power ultimately formed.

That's interesting question. I haven't read, although I like his work a lot.

He's the guy also wrote super imperialism, right?

Yeah.

Interesting cat.

An important figure on the American left that people should listen to, in my opinion.

Freud had this point that he made in 1900 interpretation of dreams called a revolutionary dream.

Every Marxist should read this passage of his book where Freud is in a context where there's actually like a revolutionary sequence

and there is an existing aristocracy in Vienna, okay, and he dreams

that he's on a train and he encounters this aristocrat who who is

threatened with being overthrown if the socialist uprising is successful and

Freud actually has an anxiety about that

happening. And this is actually why Freud is actually a liberal reactionary,

because Freud didn't want the revolution to happen. Freud actually wants

stability, one status quo, right? Just like Nietzsche, but Nietzsche is much worse.

But you see the point.

So it's interesting to me because patriarchy is bound up with any contestation of the social order.

Look at what happened in the French Revolution, right?

And analyze the patriarchal dynamics there. You'll see the same phenomenon. So there's

this question, I think, of the difference between aristocratic patriarchy and bourgeois patriarchy.

It's two different things.

In Freud's time, Freud wanted to retain an element of aristocratic patriarchy.

That's a fact, I think.

And Kojin Karatani, the great Japanese Marxist in his book on Freud and Kant really elaborates

that quite convincingly and I've written about this.

So I don't know about this distinction you're drawing.

I'd have to think about this further,

but I will say that the abolition of forms of patriarchal authority are inescapable in

the post-French revolutionary sequence.

And in now, in today's time, I think things have obviously changed. I

think we are in a type of post-patriarchal scenario, right? There are elements

of patriarchal authority, no doubt. I mean every working- family knows the abuse that can happen within the

family. Every middle class person knows that to some extent. But nonetheless it's a fragmented

patriarchal situation that we have today, no doubt. But I can't really comment on that distinction Hots,

because I don't know Hudson's work well enough.

And I'm not convinced of that East-West distinction.

Well, I think, for example, if we look at the forces right now

challenging Western hegemony, they're characterized by countries

that, I don't know how else you would put it, that are more or less led by some kind of

patriarchy or patriarchal tradition, right? You have, in North Korea, it's actually a dynasty, like directly, almost, right?

In Russia, you have Putin, you have Jijin Pi-Ping, you have Jimping, you have Jaminai in Iran.

I think this phenomena of strong men, kind of Cesarian patriarch patriarchs versus this kind of more horizontal post-patriarchical

neoliberal societies is a real distinction in the world today.

This brings us back to the question of the bourgeois family as that which we are to transcend.

But see, in your thinking, what I'm almost hearing you say, and this is perhaps reflective

of some of your work, is that your vision of revolution would not be a sublation

of the bourgeois family and structure and so on, but perhaps in a sense would be a displacement

of it, would be a return to something completely other than it.

It would not be building on its foundation and transcending it or sublating it as such.

And I think that that's a difference but that we share that we have with each other.

Because I think that the bourgeois, the dissolution and the chaos of the bourgeois

social structure is all around us. We live in that in that wake.

These other forms of authority and patriarchal authority in a communist sequence in the West say in America, I could never envision them being incorporated back in.

I could never see how that would happen. I could never see how that would be forced to happen.

But is that kind of what you're suggesting?

I don't think it can be forced at all. I think for example, if I were to travel in the Maui, we were of China and say,

hey guys, you know, Mao is a patriarch and they would probably, it'd be ridiculous, right?

It would make no sense at all. So I think there's a degree of abstraction we have to presuppose

when we're even engaging with

reality in this way and kind of, I don't want to use the cliche term, but kind of deconstructing

it at a psychoanalytic level and trying to locate these various different parts at the level

of familial or psychosexual pathologies.

But I think that, for example, it's clear to me that the era of the bourgeoisie represents a fundamental negation of humanity.

I think Marx, to extent agrees with this that the negation of negation is in a way a return to the positive being of man,

but it's very ambiguous when Marx kind of seems to use this language of man regaining himself, regaining his positive being.

On the one hand, he doesn't advocate for returning to the past,

regarding to the pre-industrial or pre-modern agrarian relations.

He fully presupposes the irreversibility of modernity in general, but at the same time

there is a recurring theme that communism represents a negation of the negation, which

is therefore a return of some kind of positive being, a return to

these communal, not to the return in particular, but in general, a return to these communal

relationships and familial bonds, which have characterized the majority of mankind's history, but according to Marx,

were obscured to him, were never fully clarified to him,

and now finally, because of their complete and total negation by capitalism,

we can finally acquire a kind of science and insight into the essence of man

and these communal relationships and that is for him what communism is. Now the way I

interpret that to answer your question directly is that I believe that if we look at the concrete experience of communism historically,

we do see an acknowledgment of the irreversibility of modernity, but simultaneously and somehow

this is able to be integrated within a more or less a continuity of civilization.

We see in the case of Russia under Stalin, the integration of industrial modernity into the long history of the Russian civilization.

And it's reflected and acknowledged as such.

The same is true for China.

I mean, many people miss the context

that Mao was an expert of the Chinese classics,

that many people think he's illiterate or vulgar

when it comes to Marxism,

but that might just be because, I mean,

the overall majority of his knowledge was steeped into the rich literature of China and China's

own history. So here, we don't necessarily have an illusory return to the past where you can

avoid this fundamental

abruption and break represented by modernity, but it contextualizes that

abruption, it contextualizes the break represented by modernity within a deeper reconciliation, which yes, in a sense is a

return to the past, but a return that couldn't be anticipated from a perspective that precedes

the negation.

So to me, the negation of the negation is a reconciliation that makes the present commensurate

with history. Yeah, I mean I think in a certain way what you're hinting at to me represents a danger of a certain event a certain form of evental politics that would think

Revolutionary sequence in perhaps an unmediated fashion. Like for me I'm always attentive

to what Marx and Engels learned from the Paris Commune, which in a certain sense

if you think about it was a very like humbling lesson because it was a total failure. It was actually a disaster.

Actually speak about genocide, it was actually like a genocide what happened and

it was all led by anarchists and like a total like we have failures today on

the left obviously but the Paris commun Paris commune was a very instructive one,

but there was one area where its negation was instructive and enlightening, which was

that it allowed for the working class to have an exemption from labor for a time being and

to experiment with power. And that process

itself is essential. So I would simply caution a thinking of revolution in a kind of

evental insurrectionary mode, then we can actually then think about that vis-a-vis

Dugan and some of this mystical event stuff, which I find can be dangerous in

the sense that it's not patient enough for me because it's not building the

resolve of the working-class independent organization which Marx and

Engels put at the at the very center. So the whole process of the negation of the

negation would have to be detethered from some kind of conception

of the immediacy of it, of the immediacy of revolt as producing something which would return

man to something profound.

I don't think that revolts, and we know from alter globalization to

Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, revolts do not shift the ontological

substratum of us. Exactly. I would prefer to think about revolts and negations

of the system, okay? Vis-a-vis consciousness. Okay? This is getting us to my

hesitation, my fear with Heidegger as such in this ontological form of

thinking politics, which we can maybe talk about. So I don't know if that touches

exactly on what you're saying, but I'm thinking that you're talking about the

reconciliation of humanity and communism and revolution.

Well, very briefly, oh sorry, I didn't answer them.

No, no, no, go ahead.

I was asking clarification, but go.

Yeah, I think that's the key point of what I'm trying to say is precisely the need for the modern mediation.

The Leninist Party form, in my view, is the ultimate form of modern organization.

The Leninist Party form affords no mercy upon the parochial existence of party members.

It's an elite and exclusive party, at least in its incipients.

It's not open to everyone.

It's only open to those who are the most educated, the most dedicated, in this sense, yes, the most abstracted from

the immediacy of their personal desires and interests and wants and so on in parochial

context.

But I just think that through this mediation, we end up, we end up arriving precisely at the negation of the negation.

And it stands upon the shoulders of revolutionaries whether they want to acknowledge this new negation of a negation either as a complete failure or as the vindication

of their original revolutionary impulse, very concretely, socialism in one

country, the failure of the revolution to spread after the October

Revolution.

On the one hand, Lenin was a little bit beset by this and wondering whether this meant a

total failure, but there was a worm of doubt in his head, which he writes directly toward

the end of his life, maybe we can pursue

a path different.

Maybe we can pursue the premises of civilization in a way different from that pursued by Europe.

Maybe that's possible.

He wasn't certain about it, but it was this worm of doubt in his head about all of this

kind of dogmatism of the old Marxism, which Stalin seizes upon and remains faithful to

realizing.

So Stalin sees the so-called failure, not as a failure, but

precisely as the moment of the negation of the negation. Precisely because we

went through this totally negative revolution and created this highly advanced

form of modern organization.

Now finally we have a clear insight into the real laws of history

as they concretely actually exist in the current state and status

of the Russian nation and the Russian people.

Now it's finally clear for Ostrowski on the Russian nation and the Russian people. Now it's finally clear for

Ostrotsky on the other hand, well hold on, hold on a second, because you see

part of this notion of Vanguard Party and the consciousness that they would

impute to the most radical elements of the working

class movement is only possible when you have trade union consciousness developed.

And trade union consciousness is only possible when you have a bona fide working class

culture and a series of apparatus and parties.

Well, that's, that's, well, that's why I agree with Baju.

Winnie says that our task is not a task right before 1917.

That would be a bit historically anachronistic.

No, our task is more, analog for communism would be pre-1848,

which is we have a kind of nascent, non-existent

class consciousness on the one hand, and a nascent non-existent

institutions for the working class.

Neither exist. When those exist we can talk about negation of negation at another level,

but without them you talk about negation of negation, you're talking about mystical,

anarchism, and insurrection.

That's what I worry about. That's what I worry about.

I think what you're talking about, to translate this to the best of my ability,

is that there needs to be a material context for the application of this kind of Leninist politics. There

needs to already be a form of the existence of the working class constituting

itself as such to even give meaning to that form of organization in the first

place. Exactly because the working class needs to have an adversarial opposition.

Right. Not only to the ruling class and to bourgeoisie, that's established, but to management as such.

Instead, today we have like kind of, you know, these sort of fly by your seat of your

pants, sort of non-organized forms of agitation, and we have a form of alienation which we

talked about earlier

which is not tethered to the problem of labor. I think as Marxists what would be

very useful and this actually connects us back to the sexual expression

question we had before is like all of these forms of alienation are tied back to

the class struggle. We just need to enlarge our understanding of it, you know what

I'm saying, as Marxists. I, I, and we need to build the resolve of the working

class at the level of parties, organizations, institutions, so that these, so that the force

and the education can come from that.

But I think it's also curious, because it should be mentioned, again, the concrete history.

When the Russian Social Democratic Party formed, there was no working-class movement at all to speak of.

There were no trade union, there was no trade union consciousness.

And yet this organization was able to form, which would eventually become the Bolshevik party.

We see something similar in China.

I mean, Mao didn't have much of an industrial working class to work with to begin with,

and to the extent there was an industrial working class in China, that was not really

the main base of his party or his movement.

So I think we should ask the question of not necessarily whether this means the adventurism

of the Blanquist and others is vindicated. I don't think that's what it means. But I think that the ability to have insight into the material context that gives operational context to your organization.

That does give you the context of what is my organization going to set out to do?

What consciousness is it articulating? What sight-guist is it seizing upon?

Should probably not be seen in a stagest manner where, okay, first we have to wait for the trade unions to develop,

but more in discerning a more essential or fundamental logic from that, where we can be like Lenin and say

actually I can appraise the current concrete situation. There's an

incipient petty bourgeoisie in the countryside which also is potentially

becoming proletarianized. There's this class struggle among the peasantry,

which, despite being an internal class struggle, all of them seem to be united against the urban

bourgeoisie and the urban kind of hegemony, an institutional hegemony in general, a war

between an incipient process among the people and the institutions, which is what urbanity

is, it's the way people become institutionalized in the first place.

I think Mao is dealing with that on an even more direct and overt level, right?

So, yeah. I guess that's a good context to begin with maybe some of our disagreements about Heidegger,

or more importantly, Maga communism, because for us, rather than waiting for trade unions,

we precisely see MAGA as probably the equivalent of the trade union consciousness of the past. It's not necessarily

revolutionary. It's not necessarily even progressive, but it is a kind of for us fundamental context

in which communist ideas would give articulation to and which would be applied to.

So, but I'm more than, I mean, we can go in any direction you'd like.

Talking about Heidegger, I think, might be important because, or dogan and stuff.

So yeah, I mean, I can lay out my concerns here.

First of all, I just think that everyone, every Marxist, and I know that, you know, your

pinned tweet, which I've read every

single one of them, the tweets on your Marxism is not woke, right?

That thread, where you accused Lukac of being the godfather of woke, which I'll be honest, has that offended me?

Because Lukac is very dear, and I think that you were misinterpreting him.

You called him a Neocantian, when he's obviously a Marxist-Tigalian, and he's trying to not reaffirm the subject-objectualism

but to overcome it.

And I think that part of the reason you probably think that Lukac is the origin of woke

is because standpoint theory in academia has been overtaken by identity politics.

And Lukac is kind of the godfather of that, but that is not his fault.

Okay? Because you can still adhere to the theory of the standpoint of the proletariat and be a good materialist,

I insist. So that's a fundamental point for me. And moreover, I want to suggest to you

and everyone watching and listening that Lukac's critique of Heidegar and the destruction of reason

is essential because one of the and the destruction of reason is essential.

Because one of the things he shows there is that like Nietzsche,

Heidegger was trying to engage with Marxism in his being in time itself.

By creating a conception of humanity which avoided fundamentally the question of the class struggle.

Heidegger's whole distinction is between authentic and inauthentic being, right?

And Lukot shows that this is a total mystification of capitalist reality.

Adorno even, even Adorno liked Heidegger more than Lukac obviously says that

fateful throwness is exactly the origins of a certain fascist idea of subjectivity.

So of course I'm not going to suggest that, oh, he flirted with Nazism, he was a Nazi,

let's ignore him.

I'm not saying that.

I'm rather saying, if you read the birth of fascist ideology by Sternhel, for example,

you'll see that, like, this mystical idea of a kind of reconciliation of humanity

at the level of their ontology, the level of their being, which for Heidegger is always in a

in a space of enclosure and we're never quite able to capture it and the forgetfulness of being and

all of that stuff.

It's mysticism, right?

And I just want us to think very hard about Marx's critique of religion and what Marx would

think about flirting with mystical theology?

Think about the communist manifesto in the critique of the true social...

What did Mark say about Moses Hess?

What did Mark say about William Waitling?

Both religious communists. He was opposed to them. William Waitling basically said that

revolution is messianism and it will redeem all of humanity. It's the same thing as a Baptist preacher.

Marx was opposed to it. This is what I worry about in this regard. The other

thing I worry about in this regard is the fact that the nationalism question

is goes unaddressed and I want to see how you answer that. Because for Dugan, yeah,

he's going to say that a national entity will have its own enclosure of being and realization of its destiny.

Shit like that.

That's crazy shit.

In a certain sense, it's like, do we want to transcend the nation state or do we want to reinforce it?

I want to hear what you say about that. I'm giving you my general impressions here. And we can talk about mega-communism.

Yeah, yeah. There's a few things I wanted to toucest on. Firstly, with regard to Lukacs,

the reason I accuse him of being a neocontian, is it because I think

that's a position he himself avows, but it's because that's the position firstly where he's coming from.

So it's providing the very way in which he negates his older neocontian position, I think there's a lot of neocontian baggage

that he simply presupposes even in the process of doing that, and that he never really makes

the process, he never makes the real transition to actually becoming a Hegelian.

He becomes what I call a kind of contionized Hegelian.

It's a very actually common genre.

And I think even Jijjeek talks about this.

For Hegel, his philosophy was really a kind of holistic one. It was, it was

ontological. It was about the whole of reality. It was including nature and so on and so on. It

had huge metaphysical commitments, so to speak. It wasn't just a kind of,

it wasn't just confining itself to some kind of transcendental horizon of thinking. For Hegel,

the radical identity of thinking and being, which is at the origin of Western

philosophy, is in a way more fundamentally and profoundly affirmed than any previous thinker,

I would argue. And for the Marxist response to Hegel, the at stake in the kind of thing, as far as the thinking consciousness is concerned, is still including nature. Engels is dialectics of nature, that the same forces that give

rise to the development of history are the same forces in nature itself, is fundamental

to Marxism. And what Lukacs seems to do is kind of bracket the

dialectics of nature, right, and kind of just say that this trend, that the social

reality is the transcendental horizon of the way in which our relationship

to nature is mediated and that we cannot actually say anything about the actual reality

of this and like the metaphysical stakes of it, so to speak, but we're just speaking within the confines of some kind of

sanitized social vacuum.

Let me say something here because well, it's more modest. We don't have to discard the dialectics of nature. It's more about overcoming class society.

It's self-abolition of the proletariat is our goal, right? The transcendence of this mode of production,

the overcoming of this relation of oppression

and exploitation that we experience, concretely, does the proletariat produce knowledge

by virtue of that experience of emisseration and exploitation.

Lukac's answer is the affirmative, yes, they do.

The question then is how is that knowledge dialectically

incorporated into the overcoming of the system?

So in that sense, he's working at at a level of consciousness, for sure.

He doesn't need to incorporate all these extra elements of mystical religion and so on.

And to me, it's more realistic for thinking irrational, because what do we need to do is develop the basis of collective

interests of the working class. I don't think that we need these supplementary

philosophies to do that. So his is a little more clean cut. Maybe it's a little

more simplistic. I will give you that. I'm more drawn to it in my old age. I just

think that Lukak, oh sorry, yeah. I'm just more drawn to this, just more more

hesitant also of the incorporation of these irrationalist philosophies.

Because Lukac has a concept, what he calls aristocratic epistemology.

Really important concept, everybody should study.

And Heidegger has a kind of aristocratic epistemology baggage,

which is that there is, and there does emerge for Heidegger has a kind of aristocratic epistemology baggage, which is that there is, and

there does emerge for Heidegger, a sense in which only a few, only a select, have access

to the truths of being with like a capital B, right?

And then you can see how that gets connected to the Vanguard. So is the Vanguard, right? And then you can see how that gets connected to the Vanguard.

So is the Vanguard, right, is our, is our cadre, is the Vanguard Leninist Party of our time?

Do they need to possess that knowledge of the truths of being. To me this is not necessary. To me this is not necessary.

I actually think it would be silly if well I don't know if you agree or not.

Well I would like to make some clarifying remarks on the idea. don't, I just, I don't agree with this idea that proletarian consciousness is something

that needs to be constructed.

To me, proletarian consciousness is rooted in the actually existing material interests of the proletariat, which yes, are objective.

It seems like Lukacs' notion of objectivity doesn't actually include the real itself,

but rather a point of reference of a subject's relationship toward themselves. The self-relation of the

subject for Lukacs is all that is objective for purposes of, at least as far as communism

and class struggle is concerned. Maybe natural science has a different object that's actually in the real, but

him making that distinction in the first place is why I accuse him of being a neocontian.

Now I'll get to the significance of Heidegger, of course, but I think what Lukacs has stripped away from Marxism

is the notion of the material objectivity of communism, that capitalism is not

something we have to overcome, it is overcoming itself objectively. What we are

burden with the responsibility of doing is

making sense of that and giving meaning or not giving meaning but discovering

the meaning of that and giving form to it at the level of consciousness and

organization and so on but it is something objectively

happening there and you see the clear distinction in Western and Eastern

Marxism as far as that perspective. Stalin and Mao are accused of being like

vulgar fatalists who believe that the reality of their regimes is rooted in some kind of objective insight into

the material laws of history. But I think they're right actually in the Western

Marxists who cynically kind of derived this as a reification of just one idea

over others are wrong. Now, as far as the

significance of Heidegger is concerned, I want to put on the table why I

think Heidegger is crucial for Marxism. Please. I don't agree with the

accusation that people like Heidegger and Dugin are irrationalists.

I think maybe for Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, it's possible to make that argument. Why?

Because to me, these are romantic figures in the bad sense of the word, who just kind

of meander and dwell in the failure of bourgeois rationalism and affirm that as a kind of

reality in and of itself.

So it's just this kind of result of the self-consuming madness of bourgeois rationalism.

Which, so I agree with that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer can be categorized as that.

But when it comes to Heidegger, I don't think that reason can be reduced ultimately to the relationship

of concepts to themselves.

I don't believe the relationship of concepts or conceits of the mind is the ultimate horizon

of what rational being or existence amounts to or is.

To me, rationality is what we ultimately refer to as a specific ontological unity of opposites

where the thinking consciousness is really united with its material premises.

And this is where I think Heidegger points us in a correct direction.

Premises which themselves cannot be arbitrated by any given conceit or concept of thought.

For Heidegger, the way he responds to this problem is obviously wrong because

how he responds to it is that because of this inability for our the conceits of

the thinking presence, beginning with the logos, to fully ground its own premises,

we are just kind of faced with confronting this kind of oblivion of being itself,

where because we cannot find an adequate means of giving expression to it, which actually is it,

this is a kind of fundamental crisis.

But to me, Heidegger stumbles upon a realization of something which I think has productive and positive

consequences, namely the fact that there is no specific horizon of the disclosure

of being in the form of thought and more specifically conceptual thinking, which can itself, which can itself

define its own material premises on conceptual terms itself.

And I think that's exactly why I disagree with

Luke Cox's so-called rationalism, if we want to call it that. If he's

critiquing irrationalism, my critique of his rationalism is that it's idealistic.

It's this vain attempt to insert the premise of thinking, to insert into the premise of

thinking creatures of thought themselves.

The way he does that is in the so-called notion of proletarian consciousness, that philosophical

thought being unable to fashion its own

premises on terms within its control, kind of uses class struggle as a

as a vehicle with which to do this and realize this. So realizing proletarian

consciousness really then amounts this kind of mastery of consciousness over

its material premises. And I find that to be a fundamentally, not only idealist,

but yes, neocontian orientation. Why? because the neocontians from the

same social democratic context Lukacs is coming from more or less do affirm the

same thing but in a different way through institutions through the creation of

these kinds of civil society institutions which which represent the self-consciousness of society,

society can be fashioned according to the conceits of reason and thought.

I think the problem with this line of Heidegarian thinking is that it doesn't have a theory of fetishism.

Because the reason that rationality matters is because rationality is different than commodity fetishism,

which is the condition that knowledge is subordinated to in capitalism.

Or you could use the fancy word of reification if you

want to use that.

It's again, it's a more modest proposal that Lukach offers, which is, one, the experience

of emissoration and exploitation by the proletariat produces a revolutionary knowledge.

The task is the coordination of that towards ends of emancipation of the working class more broadly.

That does require, and Lenin knew this as well, solidarity with different classes,

and the construction of, I mean, why did Engels and Kowtsky

treat the Lumpin proletariat? Sometimes, you know what they would do is say, buy them off.

Buy them off.

Why if you're doing a rent strike, will you buy off a landlord to help you for a moment?

Because it's strategic.

Class struggle is strategic.

It has to be.

Lennon knew that better than anything.

The problem of the peasantry, always strategic.

What I worry about in this Heidegarian conception is that there's not an understanding of

the fluidity of capitalist class relations, especially now, and the necessity for us to recognize

and honor that. Otherwise, we do run a risk of thinking about the class formation in a static way.

I'm not saying you're necessarily doing that, but I think it's a risk.

And the other risk that I have here when we go back to the mega question is how can we ideologically convince, in a Gramscian

sense have a war of ideological hegemony with the mega cohort, to convince them to renounce

and redirect their resentments towards the elites, towards more productive class

struggle enemies. How are you going to make that pivot? It's a big, fucking pivot to make.

You could say, well, let's follow that and just do a revolution that's anti-elitist.

But again, that's exactly what happened with Mussolini.

So Mussolini was trying to do this and he didn't, he wasn't able to do revolution at the

mode of production, so he says let's overthrow the bureaucrats.

And we know what happened after that.

But sorry, it's a capitalist.

But Mussolini didn't overthrow the bureaucrats. He, I think they were in

large part a huge base of support for him specifically. Were they not?

Well I'm saying the target. What I'm saying is that fascism emerged, you could understand it from a higher perch,

as a capitulation of fucking like we cannot revolutionize

the mode of production at the site of the factories.

I- This is where the idea of the general strike came from.

And Sorrell, this is why Sorrell is so important

in understanding the origin of fascism,

because Sorrell himself gave up on rational class politics.

And that's a problem when you do that.

But maybe I could form it in a question,

Hoss, which is, how is your hegemony struggle with Maga

going to shift their target of enemy

as they currently understand it,

towards a Marxist conception.

I think I would begin to answer that question by kind of going back just a little bit to the question of the specific kind of knowledge generated by the existence of the proletariat.

Yeah, please.

Because I think I disagree with the view that the suffering in and of itself

produces any kind of knowledge.

The lump and also suffer. I mean, plenty of people suffer.

I think in order for that suffering to have a class content, it needs to be contextualized within a specific horizon of meaning,

social meaning, collective meaning, historical meaning, according to which it is in a way the vindication

or the moment within the process of realizing some kind of outcome, material outcome, social outcome, if you will,

that in a sense, already the proletariat has a sense of in the positive sense.

Now, I'm kind of jibbering, so I'll be more concrete about what I'm talking about.

I always like to say in the context of the Russian Revolution, every single

propertyless proletarian was also an aspirational peasant who wanted to own land.

And I don't think that's a bourgeois instinct on their part because they didn't want to own land

as the Stoliepin kind of petty, petty proprietor who wants to sell their

surpluses as an independent producer as much as have a sense of positive being,

have an attachment to the land, own it in the sense of have

this way of life commensurate with their existence, rather than this pure point of kind of

proletarian negativity of being stripped of everything, which I think is in a way fetishized

by a lot of pre-Stalinist, Marxist thinkers as the hype, I mean, in a sense, Lukacs, I think,

also is guilty of this.

This point of absolute negativity of the proletariat is

The staging ground of the ultimate liberation of mankind because only now because it's freed of any kind of

relationship to positive being any kind of grounding in a positive existence. It's free to experiment with the total freedom to positive being, any kind of grounding in a positive existence, it's free

to experiment with the total freedom to explore and so on.

But aren't you saying at the same time that MAGA constitutes or represents a unique form

of proletarianization that must be contested and dealt with.

I think we live in an interesting period of transition, I think.

Lenin wrote imperialism the highest stage over a hundred years ago. So a lot has changed since that. I don't

think we're still in the highest stage. I think we're in a period of

transition probably, at least, early transition at least. And I think what's going on

with MAGA isn't so much, I think what's going on with Maga isn't so much I think

because of proletarianization happening. I think rather the historical

proletariat as it the classical proletariat is what Maga is, what remains of them.

And that proletariat looks a lot differently,

different sociologically maybe to us than it did in the 19th century.

For example, it's not living in cities, crowded cities and crowded slums

anymore. It has, you know, small plots of maybe land that their houses live on. It has trucks.

It has cars. And this has led a lot of people say, well, this is the middle class, this is a petty bourgeoisie,

but no, really, it is people who work at factories and who work blue-collar jobs,

who more or less are able to afford this decent, form of living.

But I think we should really interrogate the question.

Isn't it true that in the post-war period,

the white picket fence house, single family with a car and whatever the American dream

Wasn't that a kind of

Concession to the dreams and aspirations of the proletariat and if we think this is exclusive only to capitalism

Also in the Russian context of the Soviet Union, the worker

also had their own dachas in the countryside, vacation homes. They did have a

more or less, it wasn't one for one the same obviously, in terms of urban planning and the widespread

usage of cars, but the sense of dignity and independence of the American worker had a

counterpart in the Soviet worker.

That doesn't mean they were petty bourgeois.

It just means that to at least in a limited extent the aspirations of proletarian politics

were fulfilled in the American context as exacting a concession from the ruling class.

The Soviet context, a complete takeover of the state as a proletarian

dictatorship, but nonetheless I think sociologically it's a similar phenomena. Even the pattern

of de-industrialization, the post-Soviet de-industrialization, it's very similar to the neoliberal

de-industrialization that happened to the proletariat here. So to me, I see sociologically,

MAGA isn't really that different from like the communists in Russia today who look upon the

20th century Soviet experience as the kind of high point of the golden age of the proletar, literally for them it was the proletarian dictatorship.

Maga looks upon this golden age of more or less blue collar, they see it as a blue collar dictatorship.

It wasn't that, but they see it that way because of the concessions

they were able to exact from the state at that time. So, to me, when it comes

to MAGA it's not necessarily about completely transforming their consciousness, but rather articulating and making sense of

their existing consciousness, which I think is more meta than just something that can fit

within the confines of conceptual thinking.

It's to make sense of the concepts that are suspended in their consciousness.

Not to introduce new concepts necessarily, but to organize the concepts that are already

suspended in a way that is consistent.

They are right about the existence of a deep state. They are right about the significance of

Bill Gates and these various agents. A lot of their conspiracy theories have truth,

but to consistently make sense of this consciousness without betraying

it, without kind of falling into the errors that it leads to, I don't want to mean to

ramble, but you know, Maga's intellectual leaders are precisely the ones who betray Maga because they draw

conclusions from this spontaneous consciousness of Maga in ways that betray their fundamental

premises.

Because they are confused at the theoretical and philosophical level,

they don't know how to make sense of them.

So you have the white nationalists,

completely divorced from the Maga base, totally.

They were never close to them to the begin with,

but there's them.

You have the kind of right-wing influencers like Dave Ruben all these kinds of people.

Again, totally divorced from the Maga base. And I think the task of Marxist is just to

consistently maintain fidelity and be faithful to the spontaneous on organic instincts

the Mago Proletariat already has. I will I will give you this. I mean one of

the problems we've had on the left is we have not seen emerge a lead a form of leadership

Which is capable of doing what I mentioned earlier which is to organize the discontent of the masses

And that's that's a reflection of the class character of leftist leadership and

That's a problem, right? If I

were you I would abandon the project of trying to, I would rather think of a way

to take the working-class elements out of MAGA completely because I think

that if you look just at the percentage

of working class people that revolted on Jan 6th, what was it, 9% what I read, maybe 13?

It's not a working class movement. And like you just said, it may be majority working class,

but they're actually ideologically alienated.

So why remain within the framework of MAGA

if they're so ideologically alienated? How do you shift them? How do you shift them out?

This is the construction piece. No, no, I think it's a fair, it's a fair point.

But I think I would say that the goal isn't actually to remain within the MAGA period.

Like again, the analogy is that MAGA is like a trade union consciousness.

We do want to go beyond MAGA, but the reason we affirm MAGA communism is because

it's necessary to integrate this particular experience by the American working class of MAGA, of this incipient,

I think the first form of partisan politics in the US and the recent in the era of neoliberalism at least and

Build off of that foundation which has already been laid now the the the historical era of

Maga for American politics. It's irreversible. It's fundamentally divided the country in a way I don't think can be bridged or resolved.

That chapter of the history of the American working class needs to be acknowledged and needs to be recognized,

not in order to meander within it, but to integrate it within a post-Maga

working-class politics political future. Now, the reason I just think it's important

to acknowledge and recognize MAGA is a specific understanding of history,

where the totality of history is history of the people, right?

Not even just the working class, but the whole people.

This is fundamental to Marxism, Leninism, needs to be integrated

in such a way that culminates and gives rise to the revolutionary consciousness of

the present, to liquidate Maga and say, okay, this was just one big, complete mistake, would be a form of historical nihilism in my view.

It would basically say, listen, this whole experience of the polarization and of the struggle between ordinary working class people against the hegemony, however flawed and however confused, that was just

totally meaningless. It was just totally meaningless. It was one big mistake and

your only ability to find satisfaction in terms of the pursuit of rendering your

life meaningful and sensible is just to listen to me the intellectual.

Not only do I think that's wrong, I don't think it works. I don't think people buy it.

I think you have to acknowledge and level with where people are at now in terms of their consciousness and what they've just

experienced.

And in a way, yes, vindicate their history, succeed it.

Vindicate MAGA.

MAGA is beset by a lot of the things you're talking about, confusion and alienation and mistakes,

I totally agree. But the goal of Marxists should be, in good faith, vindicate the correct

and underlying essential feelings and instincts of the working class, which was

there is a rational kernel to MAGA, the recognition of which is precisely what's going

to allow the working class to move beyond the confines of MAGO.

If you just keep telling people, sorry, one last thing, if you just keep telling people,

you know, oh yeah, MAGA was a total nothingness, it was just one big meaningless mistake.

They're never going to listen to anything you say.

You have to acknowledge and give the devil his credit.

You have to acknowledge this fundamental shift in their consciousness

which took place, which is irreversible and which is

what's happened at an objective level.

So if you say that, I'm curious as to why you do, why I've listened to things you've also

said where you felt that Bernie Sanders did not represent that.

See when I think that he did, I think that he did. I think he did too, yeah.

Okay, see, that's important, because that goes back to this notion of the consciousness of the unity of collective interests,

which I do think is important. And now, unfortunately, we're in this world of sloganeering, the transitental

slogan of MAGA means something, Trump means something. What is MAGA after Trump, after that signifier

is gone, it's very likely because of its leadership as a petty bourgeois structure that it could

crumble and fragment. Very quick.

I think that's likely. I think Mago will probably at this stage crumble. I just kind of think...

If he loses, it's over.

Not, not, no, no, I think even if he wins, it's over.

That's something else I'd like to also clarify what I think is.

If Trump wins in 2024, he's either winning in a way

where it's gonna be a civil war because he's declaring war against the hegemony or he's become so

consolidated and captured by the hegemony that

the grassroots movement of Mago will just disappear and

the subject of the politics of the state will just kind of be a totally siopped population who don't have

your autonomy of a movement existing. So I'm not optimistic about the current direction of MAGA right now.

I just think if you want to be a communist in America right now, as MAGA is on its way out dying,

you need to redeem it, you need to redeem history to continue

moving forward. And that's why you mentioned Bernie Sanders, the problem with

Bernie Sanders is that he's still a politician, he's still around, so that's why

we don't praise Bernie Sanders. But ask me about the Bernie movement in 2015, 2016, and I

was there, I understood the significance of that. We are building off of that

as well. That was a moment, but at the same time we should also recognize the

Bernie movement wasn't ever able to succeed. And I think one of the Bernie movement wasn't ever able to succeed.

And I think one of the reasons I think Maga Communism became appealing is because there

were a lot of disaffected Bernie Bros.

Quote-unquote, who saw how the Bernie movement couldn't even take off from the ground

because it was just captured by these meaningless squabbles by deeply nihilistic anti-social

elements who felt like if their personal grievances were not immediately

satisfied overnight that any mass political movement whatsoever would be

somehow a betrayal of you know and they came and wrecked it. They wrecked the whole

thing.

I hear you.

I mean, I think, to sort of connect this back, I know we've been talking for a bit,

and I mean, this has been a very interesting conversation for me.

One of the things I've sort of studied and thought about, and I want you

take on this, kind of connects to Heidegger too, because capitalism is

structured in this, capitalism as you said and I agree, Marx elucidates in

capital is its own self-eating it eats

its own tail all that is solid melts into air and so on in that scenario a

politics of nostalgia right is destined to self-defe Now, one of the things I worry about with

mega-communism as you've construed it is that I cannot not think of it that

way. It seems like it is caught in a politics of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a natural thing. I'm not going to be like an idiot and say that people shouldn't be, no, of course they are.

I'm just saying strategically capitalism doesn't allow you to have success when you formulate a politics on nostalgia.

This goes back to our question on modernity and stuff like that.

And again, it connects to Heidegger because Heidegger has this mystical conception of realization of history and shit like that.

And so that's what I worry about, is that you're concocting a sense of a kind of nationalist,

and you haven't answered my question about

how you're going to get out of nationalism. Yeah, yeah, I'll get to that definitely. But um

that needs to be answered. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Um, I want to say on nostalgia and I'll get right into the

question of nationalism. Please. Uh, the thing nostalgia and then I'll get right into the question of nationalism.

Please.

The thing is, I think we're in a unique, and this is also, I made a video once where I

said I'm a conservative communist.

Communism is conservative and a lot of people were very upset by it and kind of confused because communism is

revolutionary how could it be conservative am I just one for one affirming the

conservative revolution movement in Germany most of whose figureheads did become

Nazi sympathizers?

No, I have a lot of criticisms.

I don't necessarily think they were completely coming from,

I just think they totally fumbled the bag, so to speak.

They had this kind of ambiguous, correct insight, which they developed in a totally wrong way, I think.

But that's not even necessarily the context for it.

To me, I think modernity happened.

Industrial modernity happened.

And now here, we are in a unique so-called

post-modern historical moment where we are called to reflect upon that. We're called

to contemplate what happened in the 20th century specifically because the 20th

century isn't the same as the 19th century. The French Revolution was the

fundamental context of the 19th century. The fundamental context of our era is the

October Revolution.

We still haven't fully, we still haven't fully drawn out its full significance, even though

it continues to affect how the world is being shaped now, especially with the rise of China. And I think that nostalgia today has a

different significance than it did in the 19th century because in contrast to

the 19th century where nostalgia was associated with the kind of bourgeois

romanticism and into a further extent

a kind of reactionary veneration of the pre-modern mythological past, which in many ways was constructed in a completely artificial way, ironically.

I think there's an authenticity to the nostalgia of the present,

which doesn't necessarily make it reactionary, but which on the contrary, is a specific form of partisanship about the

past.

And this kind of, which lends itself to a type of retrofuturism whose exemplary case

is Jijin thin thin thouin thought in China. Jijin thing thought in China.

Jijin-Pin thought in China is precisely characterized by a type of nostalgia for the Mao era.

But it's a nostalgia which is recontextualizing the past within the context of this

horizon of the future, right?

Which in no way is possessed by the illusion that it's returning to the Mao era,

but it's allowing this fundamental context of the experience of industrial modernity and the way society recovered

from it as the kind of context for how for the spiritual development of the future and and you see in China this kind of combination of Mao-era nostalgia with this like hyper-futurism

characteristic of the fourth industrial revolution.

And I don't necessarily think that's reactionary.

I think in the Russian context, that's the kind of so-called Stalinist nostalgia.

In the American context, there's a limited extent to which that's associated with the post-war

period here.

I mean, I mean, a very limited extent. I'm not trying to idealize or say that post-war America is just as kind of, is somehow socialistic in the way that Mao's China or the Soviet Union was, but as far as the meaning of proletarian consciousness

today, we need to reckon with the following fact.

The proletariat as a class realized its sociological and to a limit extent

political significance in the 20th century. That's why today so many post-modern

thinkers or whatever are kind of dwelling on this question of the

post proletarian subject is it this kind of multitude is it what heart and

Negri are talking about is it the lump in proletariat and so on it the classical

industrial worker is no longer the front and center, but the problem is we still

have the classical industrial worker. We sociologically here identify it with the blue-collar working class.

And while they're not necessarily a majority of society, they've never been a majority.

And they're old, and yes, their content does take a kind of nostalgic form.

So the question is, moving forward today, after modernity, so to speak, is it not the case that socialism, because it already has this rich history, working-class politics, because it already does have a history.

In contrast to Marx and Engels' time, we're not just living in a time period where all we had was the Paris Commune.

On a sociological, political, and historical level, the proletarian class irreversibly and fundamentally

changed the nature of our reality.

I mean, in the United States, FDR's New Deal and the post-war era, pop culture, consumerism,

all of this was defined by some kind of working class

culture, that's taking root as the foundation of the development of society.

I, okay, I think that the experience sociologically of the introduction of what they call de-industrialization

and the blight that has affected the former industrial belt has resulted in trauma at a collective scale. I mentioned that in my

opening remarks. I've seen it myself and this goes back to a curious point that

you made which is you don't really think that emissaration produces a special

knowledge which I didn't say suffering Which I didn't say suffering.

It didn't say suffering. Really it's commodification. What is proletarianization but the consciousness

that one needs to develop of the dependent relationship on wage labor for existence,

which is unique for the proletarian working class.

So it's a unique form of emissaration that Marx wanted to ameliorate, that only Marx

really pinpoints, yeah, and which still exists.

So for me, it's about a prioritization.

I don't want to start with a sunk sociological class and build from there.

I want to start with the set of principles of a party that would then draw elements out.

But I don't know if I trust working within this sunk.

I see your logic and I'm on your program, I'm not going to offend you

because you've been very respectful

to me.

But I am worried about it.

I'm not worried about it in the same way left liberals are worried about it, that they're

like, because these are my people, my parents, you know, I know Omega people, it's not

like that for me, you know.

And I also know, Haas, how fucking capitalistic they are.

That's something we haven't talked about in the sense that a lot of these cats, you remember

the John Birch Society, remember anti-communism, you think that happens just on the left? It happens on the right too.

And sometimes all those people have guns, man. So I mean out of curiosity, have you guys faced hostility at that level

where people are like, you're a communist and they're like, you know, getting ready to kill you?

No, it's ironic because the higher up you go in terms of so-called professionalism and how

petty bourgeois they are, so if you're an intellectual, right, and you're not actually

the rank and file at the root level, but you're kind of a derivative maga commentator, absolutely

we get the hostility.

But it's this reflexive, it's a hostility based in the reflexivity of

contemplation and ideology. It's like, oh well you're a communist, well you know

Ben Shapir, and it's like it's not an authentic response as far as ordinary

people are concerned.

The type of person you're talking about that has guns and is like a nut job and crazy

person, my experience and the experience of everyone I've talked to is that those people

are the most receptive to our ideas, the most open-minded.

Is that right?

Yes, and I understand the role of the John Birch Society and the kind of reactionary

populisms of the post-war era.

It should be remembered that a lot of those,

objectively were reactionary, were directed against the nescent

kind of progressive, you know, CIA state

military industrial complex that was forming and the accusation was that

you know communists have taken root of in the government and that you know

everything's being hijacked and it was of course it was reactionary and of course

it was selectively weaponized by that same CIA and that same

deep state for purposes of anti-communist adventurers abroad especially.

I totally agree with that.

But I think that the legacy of John Birch and reactionary anti-communist populism

is this kind of vestigial shovel I have out in the back of my shed, which is the only way

I maintain a cognitive mapping of reality, not me, but

for these people that are indulging in them.

Their anti-communism isn't really targeting any real communist.

There's no actual communist movement in the U.S. right now to give context to that sentiment.

When they're talking about the communists, they're talking ambiguously about the government, about the federal government, about the FBI, and so on.

So I think it's just a matter of giving concrete content to what communism means.

Well, it's actually the John Birch Society, and Lukot shows this as well, adopted that from the Nazis,

because the Nazis were the first to make a homology

conflation between liberals and Marxists. They really started to do that. And it's an

ingenious ploy or tactic if you think about it, because it demonizes the ruling class, it kind of paralyzes both.

It shuts down the contestation between liberalism and communism, which is obviously, it's

the same thing that James Lindsay does.

Yeah, yeah.

But I, you know, I also think it should be remembered because a lot of people really undervalue this.

Nazism was not really a grassroots vulgar reactionary populist movement. Those have had existed within Europe for a very long time. They were identified as, you know,

anti-Semitism. Engels was writing about it. They were identified in the form of reactionary

socialism, reactionary trade union consciousness. People should really appreciate that fascism came

from the top down. It was an elite ruling, not even petty bourgeois because a

lot of the Trotskyite view that the root of fascism is the petty bourgeoisie. A view

not shared by the common turn has somehow taken root as the main currency among leftists, or even better this notion that it's a productivist, the productive capitalist versus the finance capitalist.

If you follow the money trail, the root of

fascism class-wise was literally the financial capitalist, the most abstract

financial capitalist ruling class you can think of. Roosevelt in the 1930s was fighting

against these finance capitalists in a limited way on behalf of the interests

of the light industry

incipient capitalists the light industry capitalists were not the basis of

fascism

uh... jay p morgan

and wall street

and even even the industrial cartels that existed in Germany which supported the Nazis were venture

capitalist startups that were created by Wall Street using the debts created by the

Treaty of Versailles and putting them to work in a, in the form of venture capital, IG Farbin, all these industrial

cartels, they were literally created by Wall Street financial capitalist speculators.

So, I mean, I definitely, I mean, I definitely agree in the sense that,

I'm not going to comment specifically on that point, but what I am going to say is link it to another debate we just had a moment ago, which is other class formations other than the working class.

And in angles wrote about this more than Marx, okay? Really, like, take

the lump in proletariat. A lot of people may not realize it, but Angles didn't think that

they were purely a reactionary group. He definitely didn't think that they're like, like the Panthers

thought, that they're a revolutionary group. But he didn't think that they're like the like the Panthers thought that they're

a revolutionary group. But he made a distinction between honest lumpins and what's an honest,

lumpin which is not necessarily a moral category, but an honest lumpin for Ingalls is a a proletariat who has a partial reliance on wage labor,

a partial relation to motor production, but not full, like kind of like gig workers,

or you could think of like men that have a felony and can't work at Walmart.

They're lumpanized, right?

But their honest determines the basis of their solidarity with the proletariat.

If they're dishonest, there's solidarity with finance aristocracy.

That's Bonapartism in some sense, right? So you see my point, like, but even

Petty Buzo can also have an alliance with the working class. This to me goes

back to this question about class politics in its heterogeneity, not its

static formation.

Right?

Like, if we're going to really build working class parties, you've got to think about people's

interests and manipulate and use and strategize in that regard.

And even the lump in are, like, there's no,

goes back to our exterminationist points, you know,

I'm not saying you're advocating it,

but like we have to be careful when we assign a sense

of classes one particular way. The classes are heterogeneous and they act sometimes in their self-interest, sometimes

not.

You have to convince them to act out of their self-interest sometimes.

I actually fully agree and one of the reasons I have this ambivalent relationship to what I would call,

I guess, Western rationalism, maybe not rationalism in general,

because there are non-Western forms of rationalism, is because I reject the view of class analysis

according to which a class is the aggregate

sum of different individuals.

I think that's wrong.

Class is a social relationship which interpolates individuals in a way that's non-reducible

to the tangible and sensuous experience or set of experiences

any given individual has. So for example when it comes to the lump in individually

lumpin are not necessarily prone to reaction. It's very possible that

contextually lumpin masses exist within the context Fanon pointed this out of an anti-colon

struggle. Lumpen represent all these peasants who

were stripped of their land and hoarded into cities with no way to make a living except

through criminal means and who aspire towards some kind of liberation of their country from the

Comparador bourgeois and they can have this revolutionary significance. But

the problem is when lump-in-class interests enter the fray. The distinction is important to draw between the interests of a class

and the interests of individuals who are part of a class. So Lumpin as individuals who are part of a class are definitely capable of aligning with the

proletariat but the interest of the lump in as a class is not about what's in

the interest of those individuals but about the interest of what is necessary

to reproduce that class and exactly and it's not based on labor. It's not based on labor.

That's the problem. And moreover it's the problem. It's specifically based on raising the negation

corresponding to the immiseration to the status of the supreme horizon of politics, which what does that amount to?

A destructive and antisocial element.

Because they represent the destruction of society, they become antisocial elements that

get used to terrorize the working class, to literally be the face of terror of the fears

of the working class, of the working class is on this kind of existential brink of totally

losing their humanity and losing any semblance of humanity and the lump

and kind of are there to kind of demoralize them when they're used by the

bourgeoisie I mean and kind of crush their ability to articulate a meaningful

a meaningful sensibility

about their class position where their poetry can say,

no, I'm not just characterized by a negation.

I am part of this kind of project

of realizing some kind of positive being, some kind of positive human

existence. The lumpin is not disposed of that sentiment as a class. It dwells within the

declassing and that's a very important word is declassing that's been used by Marxist

because really the lump and represent the negation not even specifically of old pre-modern

classes because that's also the proletariat but but specifically of the bourgeoisie, when the

buzwazi and the petty buzwazi fall into complete bankruptcy and immiseration, they

become declassed and in a sense lose a particular class character.

I mean, the lump in the United States, I'm not talking about,

a lot of the, there's always racial undertone or people, when they're talking about lump

in the US, they're trying to like just say, oh, this is black people, right? And the Panthers

may be contributed to that view a little bit to themselves, but I'm talking

about specifically after 2008, the white, primarily white, young, former middle class people

who got declassed, went to the cities and kind of became these bohemian hipster

types and stuff.

And then later became anarchists, and then these are anarchists who later are the types

that went and to go to Ukraine and fight for alongside Ukraine.

Also in Ukraine itself, the neo-Nazis there, come from the same background.

You're talking about like, you're talking about like lump in bohemian PMC.

Yeah.

I really think that's probably the main, the main context of this part of this we haven't touched on is connected to French theory because French theory which we haven't touched on I know we were planning to.

French theory did like like leotard and even

Doulouse and Guaturi

I mean they did they did make a strategic point to break with Marxism completely in their conception of Marxist class analysis and I

I used to be like an ardent French theory guy, and I really became troubled when I understood

Marxist class theory.

And I understood what they were advocating in this regard, because that becomes quite irrationalist

from the standpoint of changing capitalism. It becomes, um,

it's a different problem than the mystical problem of Heidegger. It's a

different problem. And, well, it creates a counterculture leftism, where

counterculture becomes the end.

It's not really transcendence of capitalism.

This is why my concern with Nietzscheanism.

Nietzsche, who I know you don't like, called the intellectuals that Nietzsche produces,

parasitin proletariates, which is a type of proletarian intellectual

that imitates a lumpin position and they become parasitical. So I mean, I agree in certain extent,

and I think that we have to be careful at the same time

because the Bolsheviks had counterculture,

and we should too, as Marxists.

So I'm not fully, I'm not fully saying that we should not have a form of bohemianism.

Like there's a great book by Max Eastman who was like an American Bolshevik.

He was pretty important.

He tried to bring Bolshevik bohemianism into New York

in the Greenwich Village. There's an interesting history there if you've ever

seen Reds by Warren Beatty. I don't know if I would characterize the avant-garde

forms of cultural experimentation by the Bolsheviks as bohemian.

I think what we're rather faced in that context is a widespread sentiment that this is like a completely clean slate,

and it's true, they were articulating modernity for the

first time in the Russian context a total kind of complete negation of the

past where now we are we are impressed with the responsibility of the

construction of a new man a new future future. But I don't think

that was a kind of petty bourgeois bohemian libertinism. I think it was more

kind of a responsibility in the face of a completely, I think it was an ontological kind of gesture

of completely embracing the way modernity has fundamentally transformed what it means

to be human.

And I think they came upon the limits of that experimentation

when they realized that modernity didn't actually completely negate

the past and the wealth of traditions of the past,

that actually this specific moment is participating within a wider reconciliation.

I think that's the Stalin moment, which as Boris Groys points out, didn't actually negate

the avant-garde, but actually in a positive sense fulfilled its mission by rendering it superfluous ultimately within

He's specifically talking about within the realm of art with socialist realism, but I think it holds true

Well, I mean, I think I think that's valid. I think that the task of avant-garde is the creation of political myths.

And like if you study the political myths of Bolsheviks, is worth studying, like Luncharski,

and they used like Rousseauist festivals and they created all kinds of artistic symbols

to represent the transition of the new society. That requires from a class standpoint a group of people

that are exempted from wage labor and

are capable of doing cultural and artistic production. It's a fact. And

there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. As long as it's coordinated by a

party interest and it's not just free-floating capitalist entrepreneurs.

I think that's the problem that we have today.

And I think that with the Stalinist culture, I think what you started to see was rendering

culture more accessible to the working masses who didn't have time to indulge in these pursuits. I mean, one of Lenin's big criticisms

of these avant-gardes was that they're, you know, they're saying, well, you should be focusing

on making the classics of bourgeois literature even accessible to proletarians, because you

take those for granted and they can't.

So you know what we saw in Stalinism was that, you know, ballet and kind of classical music

and all these kinds of things previously reserved for the bourgeois elite became accessible to the whole people,

to the whole masses, even farmers living in the most remote of villages. So I think that's

also an important kind of context when we're talking about...

Yeah, it was, it was true. I mean, Victor Serge was an interesting biographer of Bolshevism, right?

Not, he's kind of like, not on the inside, but he knew everybody very well.

He said Bolshevism can be understood as a group of leaders that attained the highest ideals

of artistic and cultural knowledge of bourgeois culture and life, and then fully transcended it.

But that was only possible because bourgeois culture in life was at its fullest decadent

point.

It was able to be walked over, and they did.

Which is why I think we do agree on the 1917 as a historical moment, but we haven't talked about French theory

And I realize that it is getting a bit late

Is there anything you wanted to say regarding French theory or any questions?

Sure, I think I mean, I guess we talked about Lacan. Yeah, I don't think we've fully kind of gotten over the Heidegger problem because I don't

agree with the view that this is mysticism.

I don't, could you maybe qualify what you mean by the mysticism?

Because I think that would be a context for going into the French theory maybe.

Well, I mean, yeah, I just invite anybody to listen to the interview you did with Dugan on

the whole d'azine.

I mean, da zine is not in man's experience and comprehension, and it's this

Arregnus, you know, the theory of the event of Heidegger is

When you combine that with Marxism is what I worry about of this of this

It's it's actually now. No, no, I want to say one thing. I want to say one thing. One thing we didn't talk about here, which I would encourage you to do

if you haven't. I know you're pretty well read here. There's this thing called left-wing Heidegarianism, okay, where they say the most important concept

of Heidegger is the midsign, not being, so they therefore move away from the right wing

foundation. And it's not about the restoration of the of the ontological with you know

It's rather about the being with that's the midsign the being with and the

Fraternal and the solidarity and the care and you know, this is actually where like a lot of

A lot of like Marxist Heidegarians mostly go in that direction, okay in academia

But I don't really so what I'm saying is right-wing Heidegarianism I see as generally mystical.

Left-wing Heidegarianism, I see as a bad praxis.

I agree about the left-wing Heidegarians. I definitely don't associate with that tradition, nor the right-wing ones actually.

I think... I don't... I't not try to do but

Dugan but let's talk about do yeah yeah exactly let's talk let's say something

here Millerman the famous English interpreter of Dugan tries to and he been criticized, tries to say that at the core,

Dugan is kind of a political or populist. And I feel like that's not really true. I

think actually Dugan, his guy has some sort of intimidating politics to

me because they are mysterious. He is a dark magician. He has like the dark arts.

I don't, I don't don't I don't know him yeah I don't this is

my feeling I've only read the fourth political theory I'm not a do good I think

there's a general kind of impression he's like a Rasputin kind of I mean he himself has addressed this kind of impression he's like a Rasputin kind of. I mean he himself has addressed this kind

of aura he says he goes, you know, I'm not an evil peasant, you know, I have a deep appreciation

for Western thinking and and and and and

Western philosophy and he's he's talking about modern Western philosophy even the French French stuff so

I think that

We I can talk about Dugan's political commitments and and the significance of that in a second, but I think it should be important that when it comes to Dugan, he really should be

taken at his word when we say that the Western conceptual framing of politics in terms of, you know, is he a fascist, is

he ultimately a fascist, or is he a liberal, it doesn't apply to the Russian context

in the first place.

Forget about Dugin. The paradigm of Western politics is totally

inapplicable to Russia. It's also inapplicable to China, because things that are considered

right-wing here are considered left-wing there. The position of communists in Russia, it's

totally different than the position of leftist here.

So they have a completely different mapping of the political in Russia and in China and other countries when compared to.

So I think the basic premise of this kind of universalism of

Western politics should be challenged. And I think it's always actually been an

operative distinction. I think that American communists, as in the 1920s, didn't understand what was going on in Russia.

I think there's always been a translation era.

Maoists in America didn't understand.

I mean, when Maoists in the West met actual Chinese communists living in China, it was always a disaster.

It was always just like a confusion on the part of the Chinese.

Like what are you talking about?

I will.

I will.

I will say this.

Yeah.

I will say this.

I will say this. Yeah.

I will say this, two things.

And this is gonna be funny, I think.

I know that we both dislike the politics of Slavoie Jijijek,

but I also know that when at some point he influenced us.

We have a lot of differences, obviously, as this conversation is shown.

I did an interview with him once where I asked Jijek,

what is your opinion on Dugan?

Do you think he's a serious philosopher?

And this was right as the Russian Ukraine

thing was going on. And of course I didn't like Zijjeck's position there. However, I sort of

did, I mean I can send you the link or people can find it on my YouTube. I sort of did agree

with his general position, which is that, I mean,

there is a sort of hodgepodge of somewhat incoherent things going on. One case in point, tell

me this business of chaos. What is this business of chaos? I don't, I mean I kind of understand it.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, actually, it's a good question. Please. Tell me. I, I, I, what is this about?

So my take, he's written a lot about it, but I'm going to just refer to what he wrote in political

Platonism, which is one of my favorite books by him.

So Dugan was coming from a background of young dissidents in the late Soviet period, and many of whom were in fact indulging in

mysticism, but purely as a subversive countercultural phenomena, a response to the general

kind of nihilism and cynicism and stagnation of the late Soviet period.

Um, definitely an immature context. I mean, he himself would acknowledge that.

The, his dissidents wasn't coming from a pro-Western anti-communism as much as it was a response

to the barren state of spirituality, even in the communist sense.

I mean China had the communist sense. I mean, China had the Cultural Revolution.

Huge enthusiasm and mass fervor in belief in the ideas of communism.

That was not the late Soviet period for most Soviet citizens. There was a total loss of any connection to any kind of higher ideals or cause or belief.

So that was responded to in many different ways by these kinds of young, countercultural people, right?

And I think through that, Dugan got introduced to

the entire canon of all schools of thought in the West. People think like, oh he's a fact, like no, it was everything.

He was reading, he was reading Lacan, he was reading the French theory guys, he was reading

Lukas and you know, he was reading all these kinds. Literally everyone and the totality of that is what kind of leads him to the later

theories he has on Russia's missing logos in general where like searching throughout the

entire canon of Western thinking, nothing

quite fits right for Russia, right?

And that's a recurring theme later, but chaos specifically.

So I don't know how that entered originally Dugan's thinking through Aylister Crowley or something.

I don't know, but I can tell you what it actually means for his thinking as far as I know it

now, right?

So Dugan is drawing upon Heidegger in his

acknowledgement and his recognition of Logos as the revealed form of Dacine in

the West. Now Dacine seems like a mystical concept in general, but when you simplify it,

Dacine is just a being for whom the question of what it is, which is at odds with the question of what it is,

right? Now, why that's idealistic within the frame of Heidegger exclusively is because it already

is inframed as a question for the thinking consciousness.

And that's an important point I want to stick on a note here because it's relevant for

what I consider significant about French theory and why I think French theory was a progressive

development from Heidegger.

But for Dugin, the Logos, the Western Logos, represents the articulation of the whole

of being and of all of reality as an exclusive whole.

So it's an exclusionary form of thinking according to which, for example, the spoken word and

the relationship between words and concepts and so on and so on, becomes the fundamental

horizon of all of reality to the exclusion of its premises.

All identity becomes reducible to the identity of difference.

Because from Heraclitus, what do we learn? All that exists is change.

All that exists is difference, right? That's the

incipients of Logos as the seminal kind of principle of the West, the revealed

docien, the being which is at odds with the question of what it is. Well, why that's

even framed in the way that Heidegger puts it is because in a way it presupposes the

logos as the revealed form of being, being in the form of a relationship based on difference, purely difference, right,

to the exclusion of positive reality and positive being.

So Dugan contrast logos with a kind of supplementary or opposing concept, which he identifies with

chaos.

Rather than the exclusive hole, which is Logos, Dugan identifies chaos as an inclusive hole, for which Logos is just one of its many

infinite possibilities.

He says that the Logos, what's the word, kind of, swims like a fish in the womb of the chaos.

The chaos is not incompatible with the existence of Logos.

It's just not reducible to it.

Okay, so Dugan's chaos has an actual exact correlate within French thinking, right?

It's just Lacan's non-all. It's the same exact thing as Lacan's non-all, right?

It's the all, yes, but it's a non-all.'s an inclusive whole which is not reducible to any

instantiation of what it is to the it's not the whole as the sum of all these

different parts it's a non-all right you know you're familiar with this

concept I'm familiar with it in the fact the woman as the non-all, right? You know you're familiar with this concept. I'm familiar with it.

Like the woman as the non-all, for example, right? So, Dugan identifies chaos with this kind of

feminine principle rather than the masculine principle of Logos. So for him, chaos is just...

That's why I, in my threat, I, I, um,

say that Dugan can, can be interpreted as a kind of non-dilectical materialist.

You know, he would very much disapprove of that characterization.

But when you think about it, all chaos is, is just a kind of vague point of reference of

just material reality as such, just material being, right?

Not material being as it enters a positive determination of some kind,

which you only get through a dialectical materialism,

but just like the pure antecedence of material being, right?

And I think it's a kind of post-phenomological,

non-dilectical materialism, basically.

Well, I think the problem that I have with it is the possible mystification around violence.

I mean, one of the things that concerns me with Dugan is a certain theory of the event of the Heidegarian Ereichness, vis-à-vis the self-realization

and the destiny of realization of certain forms of cultural formations that come into

existence vis-a-vis violent catastrophe, which is why, like recently he's talking

about how Russian society must prepare men and women for upcoming militarization, for example.

So is that an example of that?

That concerns me, especially because if we then apply that to the composition of the mega-base,

well, we know that the mega-base, because of their emissuration from from post-industrial life could give a shit

about imperialism. Trump is the least imperialistic there. Why is he least

imperialistic? In part because this class is done with these wars in some sense, which

is a positive development.

But you see, I'm worried that Dugan's, um, Dugan is giving us so much that I'm concerned.

I have a lot of concerns about this, to be honest with you.

And I don't know know I'm also getting a

little bit tire because I'm a dad with two kids and yeah no problem it's it's

getting late for me but I mean we can go on and on about these things I mean I

think it would be interesting to see what you think about what Zijek says about

Dugan on a side point.

One of the thing I want to say about the not all.

Okay.

So, you have this theory of patriarchy where you basically, you know, as you articulated earlier,

and you also say that you have a fidelity to Lacon, but one thing I want to say about that,

is Lacon has this notion, this is why he's kind of critical at patriarchy at the metaphysical core of the non-repoor of the sexual relation

which means that the

There is no harmony of men and woman, right at the core now if core. Now, if you are a Jungian, if you are a mystical thinker, you

would submit that there is some kind of unity or harmony. Lacon is not on the side of a harmony

there, of the sexes. And I wanted to ask you if you are on the side of harmony,

because I think that most patriarchal thinking is on that side.

Is that your view? Do you divert to Lacan?

I agree with Lacan that there's no sexual relationship, but it needs to be qualified.

There is no sexual relationship but it needs to be qualified. There is no sexual relationship from the standpoint of the subject involved or engaged in the sexual relationship.

So at the level of their desire, at the level of their fantasy,

at the level just of the kinds of subject entangled in the sexual relationship,

there is no sexual relationship, right?

And I think my affinity with the mysticism you're talking about doesn't come from the view

that there's this kind of alt, there's this deeper harmony of the sexual relationship within the

relationship. My view is that the harmony comes from without their relationship, from outside of it.

So at the level of, for example, the type of civilization and society, the sexual relationship

inadvertently produces and inadvertently is part of, and which is inadvertently the context of the sexual relationship.

Once you escape the inframing of the desiring subject and you go to the level of the material being and existence of families and type patterns of reproduction,

I think the impossibility of the sexual relationship becomes superfluous. Because really really by that definition of

Lacan all this fulfillment of the sexual relationship is is a kind of the

full fulfillment of the kind of desire of the male or the woman of their fantasy of their acquisition of a kind of desire of the male or the woman, of their fantasy, of their acquisition of a

kind of full juissance.

But when you no longer cease to hold harmony to that standard and you recognize that the inability to accomplish that is rendered superfluous in the

way that it participates in a wider social existence or wider civilizational existence, I think that in a sense we

can say there is a sexual relationship, just not one that can confine itself,

that is confined within the relationship itself. It's the wider context

that enables the relationship to meaningfully exist and most I mean even

naively through having kids in a, the impossibility of the relationship

is reconciled in some kind of positive reality, some kind of positive being, but that's kind

of my take on it.

Like, to me, it's not enough to just say this is impossible or this is lacking and

this is where I go beyond Lacan. I'm interested in the positive being which renders these kinds of

negative and abstract characterizations superfluous,

right? It's not enough to say it's impossible. In what way is that impossibility

a specific determination, a positive determination? Yeah. Well, that's right.

I mean, I think psychoanalysis teaches that enjoyment has,

it's a problem of mutuality.

Like, enjoyment singularizes the subject in a certain way,

which means that enjoyment is kind of like an asocial, has an asocial function.

And that's a truth, the psychoanalysis, it gives to social life and to political life.

And it also is a humbling truth. I mean, we don't have the time to fully elaborate

this, but hopefully this conversation has inspired some of your followers to kind of pursue

these lines of inquiry. Because one of the other things I noticed when I interacted

with your followers was they were quite hostile to this as gibberish or academic stuff.

I mean I hope that we were able to speak in a way which was more accessible tonight and

I hope that people read more about the kind of authors and ideas that we talked about.

Because it does matter to Marxism. These things do matter to Marxism.

Whether you think, however you've pieced together psychoanalysis, you should read it.

Right? You should read it. You should read Freud. You should read LeCon.

They're world historical thinkers.

And I hope that's conversation has contributed to that, and I do thank you for bringing a comradely and respectful tone,

despite our disagreements, and that surprised me.

No, thank you.

I appreciate you coming on in good faith and having this discussion.

I want to leave on a final note because I wanted to bring this up but I wasn't able to about

going from Heidegger to French

theory because I discussed this with Dugan himself off camera. All right. So very

briefly I just want to say, you know my problem why I think Heidegger is

idealist is because for him the question of, or the problem where being is at odds with

what it is, right?

The assumption that that is automatically framed as a question for the thinking consciousness

stems from the fact that Heidegger

subscribes to the premise of Western philosophy according to which thinking

and being are the same which is from I believe the Parmenides that's how you

pronounce it from Plato.

Parmenities yeah. Yeah.

And the problem I have for that is that while

Heidegger is bringing up the right problem, he's not, the way he is articulating

it is an idealist in wrong way, but the correct take from it is that,

yes, it is a being that is at odds with what it is,

but this is not reducible to the form of a question.

It's really an actual ontological status of this being. It's actually its real status. It actually

is at odds with what it is, not just in the form of a question, but at an existential

and ontological way. And that is precisely where the significance of the Freudian subject

intervenes. This kind of subject at odds with what it is actually, not just as a

question, but as a desire, as a kind of fulfillment of the fantasy. From there,

Batai and Lacan kind of reinterpret Heidegar's

docien in a materialistic way in the form of the Freudian death drive, right? The Toy Distribe

or whatever, which is this kind of being which

is really at odds with what it is, but in a way that can be understood productively,

like it's at odds with what it is in the specific sense of constantly overcoming any specific

instantiation of itself.

To me, yeah, yeah.

The problem...

For me, with that, I would just say if listeners want to know a lot more about the death drive, go to Freud's

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and I did a video on my YouTube on Emancipations podcast.

You just go there, watch the three-part videos where we just go through line by line.

And honestly, it's lucid

there's no jargon it's very clear you'll understand you'll walk away

understanding what the hell the death drive is because I think the problem I

have a French theory right is they're building the foundation of like five different schools of thought

like neo-Higalianism, Neo-Hidegarianism, Marxism, you know, Freudianism, many isms.

And that's what French theory is.

It's like this like assemblage of a million isms, right?

And then they give it called, they call it structuralism,

and then like, oh, well, we've got to go to post-structuralism.

And that becomes maddening for a lot of people. and I get it, and I would just say, go back to the basics.

You know, go back to the basics. Read, Reid Freud.

He's the most lucid thinker, the lucid rider that there is.

I just wanted to say that for listeners that may be frustrated with all of this shit, you know.

I mean, and Gijek's good because he's clear, but also he's talking about stuff that he knows, but is also like

convoluted and like you need to go back to the sources in my opinion.

I agree.

Totally.

Yeah.

So, but yeah, that's interesting you say that thing and I'm sure your experience with Dugan

must have been interesting and I think we will always disagree on

his role for Marxism in the West. Yeah we didn't really weren't really able to

get into it this time but it's all right because we did cover a lot of...

Yeah, other ground. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on.

I appreciate it.

Again, my goal was to basically educate audiences in general.

I think, you know, one of the reasons I started infrared and one of the reasons I do have done a lot of ridiculous

things to get attention is ultimately because I think the nature of what is required to educate

people on a mass scale and a mass level is just and I think you would agree with this, it's just outside of the

comprehension and scope of what academics can do, right?

You know, one of the things that put me on to this, like I saw Jordan Peterson,

like that guy has contributed nothing to the Western canon,

to the history of thought.

Literally nothing.

He's made no novel contribution.

But why do people, why do so many people listen to him?

Because clearly he knows how to communicate what he's saying, you know, in a way that like,

it's not based on the rigor, the conceptual rigor of what he's saying.

And that's, there's a truth to that.

I mean, why ideas become relevant and enter people's

consciousness doesn't really have a lot to do with their conceptual rigor. So what is it based on?

And I think an active application of a lot of these kinds of ideas from the French school and so on and so on

has to do with actually applying the question of like what do people care

about like how do you actually discover that and I don't think that can be solved in an academic context.

Yeah.

I agree.

I mean, more and more as I age, I'm now over 40.

I have two children, and I've studied philosophy for a while.

I do, I am more, like I just wrote a popular book for a popular audience on Nietzsche, and I'm just more convinced that like, academics should just change entirely the way that they write.

They should stop writing for academic journals that nobody reads. Like, they should do all their stuff online it

should be open you know Patreon fine but just you know you bring it out because

like I said in my very first opening like university is a luxury good now man

I'm sorry to tell you it's's not, you know, that's a major problem.

And so, you know, being able to have access is also good. And you also need good

teachers. So, you know, find good teachers.

But people can check out my stuff. We have some excellent people that I bring on

that are very, very knowledgeable in these theoretical matters.

Yeah, but like I said, thank you so much for coming on and, you know, it's been productive and, you know, hopefully we can open a new channel of dialogue, not only between us, but between our communities. I know you had a bad run in with a lot of my followers, but there's a great deal of my followers

are what I would call scholars.

They're very much interested in learning and building upon.

What I really wanted to do was de-flame to do was deflame this, you see we're in the election season, like I said, and the bourgeois parties are going to try to manipulate the situation and we just cannot let them do that.

I don't want this protracted fight over these things like this, you know.

It's not healthy for anybody.

I agree.

I mean, we need to be pursuing an alternative that's outside of the dominant political discourse and I'm very

glad that you know despite our disagreements you're willing to you have an

open mind about you know how can we do that I don't know it fully you probably

you don't know you don't know you know, we're just kind of here

trying to build off of these ideas and have a dialogue about them to see if

something could come to fruition out of them that, you know, I mean, I have a vague sense of how to

organize and the strategy right now, but I don't have

the conceit that, you know, we can just close off dialogue and, yeah, we should cultivate

an environment of exploring novel ways of thinking and ways of thinking about the situation and how to

relate to the thinkers of the 20th century.

And I can confidently say after talking to you, I think you could have a productive contribution

to that.

So I appreciate your...

Yeah, this was a surprising

conversation and I hope that people walk away with a better understanding that

this kind of sensorial cancel culture thing is not in our best interests.

Oz and I have strong disagreements of a theoretical nature.

I don't think that you are a fascist.

I think, I do think that this red-brown thing has some truth.

You're explicit about it.

You're also opening to change about it. That's positive.

But you're not like funded by like dark money and you don't you don't hide your views.

That's where I have a problem, you know, where it's kind of like we don't really know what's going on, you know, where it's kind of like, we don't really know what's going on, you know.

So you guys are a bit more out in the open and everything you do is streamed.

So everybody that follows you that I know is like sending me videos of things that is

said, including things that you say which are pro-LGBTQ.

People will send me things you say over time that are pro-LGBTQ, right?

So I know it's an evolving platform, is what I'm trying to say.

And that's... Yeah, like I what I'm trying to say.

And that's...

Yeah, like I said, our intention is not to offend and denigrate people or attack people's

dignity because whatever we think about the phenomena, it's ultimately based in the perspective

of being pro-humanity, being in favor of what's

best for the happiness and welfare of the people.

And if this LGBT stuff is becoming widespread, even if I disagree with it or consider it a negative phenomenon,

that doesn't mean I have the right or want to attack the people who are, who are who are being a part of this phenomenon.

That's that's obviously also you also have the duty as a leader of all of these people that look up to you to

to never allow them to do it as well.

I totally agree and I discourage, I want to say, I discourage my followers.

I mean we get into scuffles, I mean one of the reasons we're able to maintain this platform

is because we have a strong sense of defending our integrity, self-defense, because even Jizek, you know, I mean, if anything, he should have gotten canceled over his pro-imperialist positions, like on Yugoslavia and others, but that's not what he got canceled over.

He got canceled over a very mild criticism of gender theory,

where it wasn't even like, he wasn't even transphobic at all.

It was just a kind of vague disagreement

and suddenly he's a fascist.

And, you know, it's a big problem

I how could a community any community get cultivated now without becoming

cannibalized and victimized by this ridiculous like leftist psychopathology so I mean you may disagree with our approach and I

agree it can get harsh sometimes but ultimately you know if someone is just a

sexual minority of some kind that doesn't that's not a check. I want to tell this to my

followers to reiterate, it's not a blank check to start abusing and attacking

people or even be rude or disrespectful to them. You should ultimately put the

dignity and respect of human beings first before anything in good faith.

If we ultimately believe that a communist movement or a communist society is ultimately going to make society more heterosexual,

right? Then it won't happen by hunting down sexual minorities. It will happen organically by people being less. If we're

right, it will be proven. There's no need to attack these minorities. So, um, and, you

know, I don't think anyone should take it personally because I ultimately don't have any hatred at all for sexual minorities at all.

I don't have any... for trans people, I have no hatred for them whatsoever.

It's just that I think the main thing for me is that that should not

be the focus. The critique of heteronormitivity should not be considered

fundamental to what communism is because for successful

communist projects it just wasn't but I think that's what I was included on.

Yeah well on that my friend thank you

and thank you.

Yep, thank you so much.

To be continued.

All the best, everyone, thanks for listening.

Thank you.

Good night.

Take care. All right, um, wow, anonymous, thank you so much.

I grew up in the 90s too.

This guy's critique is substenseless.

Oregon politics is always polluted by left com hippies.

Stalin burial gulag, thank you so much for the 20. Appreciate you so much.

So guys, I understand, um... He was kind of hostile to Maga communism and stuff at first, but I think, let this be

an example.

If you give people a chance, maybe, you know, the right people, and he's definitely an example of the right people to give a chance.

There's not always, it doesn't always necessarily have to be an antagonistic disagreement.

Thank you so much Magas-Dolitanist. You could still be civilized, you know. For us we've had red lines, people who cheered on the murder of Daria Dugina.

That's a red line, you know.

People who spread lies and defamation and slander about us, that's a red line.

This guy was just an honest person who had disagreements with us, so that's not any

grounds to consider them an enemy.

I also think, I also hope that people kind of are going to take away from this something that will enrich their

knowledge generally and get them thinking and contemplating. We're going to

definitely make this into a YouTube video very soon.

I yeah I also want to say that we should be going in this direction to be honest because dark

thank you so much I appreciate you because like I said

guys we tried to figure out what's going on with this kind of right-wing

communities and stuff and to be honest there's nothing for us there. When I say right-wing

communities, thank you so much Australia standing, I'm talking about the far-right,

I'm not talking about MAGA. The far-right, those are not our allies, okay?

They're never gonna be our allies. And why? Because they can't even maintain alliances amongst themselves, first of all.

But second of all, because those people just worship whoever's in power who's willing

to give them a chance.

Thank you so much anonymous.

I appreciate you so much.

The far right in the West, there's absolutely, that's not going to be our allies, all right?

Those are not, those are people you just saw in Haiti recently, with Haiti recently, supporting

the deep state agenda in Haiti just because

they hate black people, all right?

And also we don't want to be antisocial freaks who just like hate all of society and are

just basically anarchists, the equivalent of anarch, and we're just here to offend.

It's not our goal. Bygone, thank you so much. I really appreciated something he said,

where he said communists should be exuding excellency. And you know, like, I'm starting to wear a suit and stuff now and I

like totally agree with that sentiment a lot at all. I know we all miss the

early and chaotic frantic days of infrared but that was a different media

environment. When I was on Twitch wearing a beater, just like not carrying it all, right?

Being as charismatic and funny as I was, we're not in the same media environment for that

anymore. We're not in the same stage of development as that

anymore. I know it was fun. I know it was we had a lot of laughs. I know, um, you

know, it was a source of not just entertainment for you guys, but humanity too. A a Sunday I appreciate you so much but

we're entering a pretty critical stage in US history right now also in terms of

media environments Jews on thank you so much good talk this will make for some

good content like on Twitch back in those days, it was very

light-hearted because it was a light-hearted media environment. Nobody was, nobody was calling for

people's murder just because they disagree with each other and stuff. It was just very light-hearted.

It's gotten serious, you know. It's gotten pretty serious. It's gotten pretty ugly and it's like

that demands a new level of excellency so we can rise above it. I mean, before Twitch was just like this niche new thing

and we were all making fun of it,

in a way, me just wearing beaters, dancing and stuff.

It was our way of mocking this new medium,

but the time of mockery is over

because it's consolidated itself

as a serious source of influence

over young people and people in general in this country.

And it's kind of snobbish how we used to act and it's the time for that is over, you know.

Yeah, it's like we're at war in a way, you know.

And I also want to say that, you know, there's a reason why we reached out as much as we did to the Midwestern Marx people.

Because we need to the Midwestern Marx people.

Because we need to understand that we're against leftists, we're against leftism, right?

But now is the time for the context of a new left-wing politics and a lot of people, including the Midwestern Marx people, but also others, those are people who were with us during

the Bernie moment.

You know, those are people who are in the same boat as us literally those are our allies

Our allies are not these

psychotic freak right-wingers

who um wingers who, you know, it's like, I don't mean to be inflammatory.

I'm not attacking LGBT people.

I'm just saying like, these right wingers are not normal.

They're not normal, even at a psychosexual level.

They're not nor...

Something deeply wrong and antisocial and disturbing about them.

Like, they're furries who love torture porn or something. I don't we don't want anything to do with that. Okay?

Something is really dark and disturbing about it and

We they're like lumpin, you know, they're literally the same as these like anarchists,

literally the same as anarchists.

We don't want anything to do with those people.

Being a left-wing dissident is a lot more normal.

And guess what? I agree that Maga right-wing

dissidents of older generations more generally, those are definitely solid

people. Yeah, there's a lot of, I've met that, I have relatives, I've met them in person. There's a lot of like

young guys who go to the gym who like Andrew Tate who have right-wing views. Those

are also normal people too, okay? But these like neo-Nazis, white nationalists, they're not normal.

Straight up.

You know?

I think this is a war between normal people and antisocial elements that are trying to terrorize normal people

and corral them into this abnormal agenda, you know?

That's what fascism really is.

It's just like these killer clown freaks at war with decent normal people and all of

society. You know, in a way we do, we don't want to get caught up in culture wars.

I mean, we're not going to just a clip, we're not going to write someone off just because they

have colored hair.

And, you know, I don't care what your personal sexuality is I just

want there to be an acknowledgement that the norm of society is not the same as

your own personal idiosyncrasy I think that just should be a respect for society's norms.

I think that's really just my position. That's very clear when I went to Moscow and Russia,

it's very clear there's a norm. There's a respect for the norm. If you are different or you're an exception,

you're not trying to declare war with the norm on behalf of your own exceptionality. You're just going to keep to yourself and not bother people about it.

Going around hating people for their race, not normal. It's not normal at all. Okay?

So yeah.

Also, we weren't able to touch on. I kind of, the thing that was missing here is we

weren't able to talk about Dugan or nationalism. But I think what I wanted to say is that

Dugan is not a nationalist. Thank you Anonymous, appreciate you so much. He

subscribes to the same view actually in a way of Professor Zhang Wei Wei from China, which is this notion

of civilization states, which transcend the nation state.

These are determinate forms of universality, which are based on the recognition of differences and premised on specific forms of mutual recognition

between different peoples, the totality of which constitutes a distinct and unique civilization.

And the new type of state, which is the post-Buzwa state, the post-liberal state, which communism

in the 20th century gave birth to, is the kind of civilization state, which goes beyond the nation state in the sense that it transcends

any kind of homogenous cultural or ethnic existence.

It's characterized by such a degree of abstraction that it can mediate and arbitrate cultural differences between people,

ethnic differences between people.

And Dugan's notion of Logos and the multiplicity of different docines and different Logos

isn't a return to some narrow parochial nationalism, but rather an insistence upon a multiplicity

of different universalisms.

That's what they are.

They're different universalisms.

Determinate universalism is a very hegelian notion,

right? Specific civilizations and their histories as receptacles of a universal spirit.

But only from the particular do you arrive at the universal and not the reverse.

So that's the view on that matter.

Anyway, guys, it's been a great stream.

I will be streaming Sunday, and we're going to be returning to our regular schedule

of guaranteed streams Sunday and Thursday.

In between then, we also may have streams Tuesday.

We also may have streams in between all those days as I see fit,

but I'm still going to be focusing on the book.

And I also have an upcoming trip to China planned. I was invited there. That may be next month or the month after that.

So that's also on the horizon. But in any case, I will see you guys next time.

Goodbye.

Don't play hell divers.

It's an evil game.

Naifo the game.

Anyway guys, bye bye.