🔴 RED PILL NEWS | PALESTINE WAR 🇵🇸

I have a special guest coming on.

I don't want to take too much with his intro because he's been waiting for a while, and honestly, I'm late.

Uh for good reason though.

But anyway, we're not going to talk about that.

We are going to talk about

Easter, for one brief moment.

I just want to say happy Easter for all of you who observe it on this day.

I know not all Christians observe Easter today.

But a lot of them do, so if you do, happy Easter.

And that's pretty much it.

Now, if you guys bear with me, I'm gonna get the zoom set up.

I'm gonna just bring them right in, and that's how we're gonna do it.

So.

I'm gonna I've appeared to you just to make a brief

appearance and then I'm gonna disappear.

Alright.

So you guys can watch my headquarters.

This is actually what my room looks like as I get this together.

Red Saffron, what's going on?

Let me go ahead and get this set up.

Uh okay all right all right so we got this

Okay, I'm gonna do this.

All right.

Okay, so this should work.

Hold on, actually wait, give me a second.

Got that link.

That's what we needed.

This should work.

Alright guys, hello.

I'm here through the Zoom right now, we're going to be inviting our guest.

And I don't know who that is, but thank you so much.

I gotta do something really quick.

Johnny 2x4, thank you so much.

Just one thing really quick, actually.

One quick thing.

Just gonna copy this, bring it back over here.

Alright, there we go.

Now I will be able to see.

Um

Okay, let's

Invite him.

Uh let me see something.

Alright.

Wait.

It's crazy how that didn't work.

It's actually crazy.

Give me a sec.

Give me a sec.

We're gonna we're gonna fight.

Okay, telling me it's been copied.

Alright, got it.

'Kay.

It's all good now.

Alright guys, I'm sure you know Carlos.

Carlos is from the Midwestern Marx Institute.

I'll introduce him more when he gets here and let him introduce himself.

But basically he's like the philosopher

for Midwestern Marks and um some have even compared him to me actually in terms of our role, in terms of the role we fulfill.

But in any case, this has been a long time coming.

It's going to be a great discussion.

Let me.

Make sure he got the invite.

And you know

Okay.

Alright.

Hey, what's up man?

Hey, what's up, brother?

How you doing?

Good.

Is my audio okay?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is mine?

Yep, yep, works fine.

Yeah.

'Cause on Zoom the little attachment mic doesn't fucking work for some reason.

Yeah.

Uh so I'm pretty sure most of my audience knows who you are, but if you want to introduce yourself, feel free.

Oh, we're live already?

Yeah, yeah, my bad.

I didn't.

Oh shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was going to ask if I can curse because I I yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

Go ahead.

Um

I am one of the directors and founders of the Midwestern Marks Institute.

I'm a philosopher.

I teach philosophy at Southern Illinois University.

I'm a Cuban American and I spend most of my time writing or doing various forms of popular education, whether it's the classes that we do through the Institute or the other forms of more public writing that

That the Academy kind of shuns, but that I think is essential for anyone who considers himself a Marxist and a scholar.

So, uh, before anything, I just wanna I wanna say I s I was actually pretty shocked by something I saw today just from Midwestern Marks.

And I can't believe it, but I I didn't know I didn't understand it because

You know, why do you guys just hate Jews so much?

No, in all seriousness, I saw a tweet from you guys.

And what does it actually say?

The tweet reads, I'm going to paraphrase it, something along l the lines of the Jewish working class is not your enemy, finance capital is.

Pretty straightforward.

Okay, but somehow a swarm of and I usually don't talk about leftists, but

I kind of see how you guys are c under attack now in a lot of ways that we were in the beginning of when infrared was launching.

And I just.

It's incredible because all these left comms, I mean, all pan-leftists, what I like to call them, because they're from across the board, right?

They all have this unanimous agreement that that tweet was somehow anti-Semitic, which kind of seems like they're telling on themselves.

Or what, I mean, what how does that work?

If you say finance capital and they say, oh, you must mean Jews, what is going on?

You know?

It's.

And and the saddest part, Haas, is that these are people that you click on their profile and they have a hammer and sip.

Yeah.

And they can't they can't uh recognize that this is a basic term in

Marxists in the Marxist tradition, and not even in the Marxist tradition, just in general political economy.

Everyone knows what is referred to by finance capital.

So it's pretty absurd, especially because, I mean, the whole purpose of the tweet is to combat this rising anti-Semitism that I don't for the slightest bit think is spontaneous.

It just so happens that right at the time when it's undeniable how badly the Zionist Nazi entities losing the information war, perhaps the most important war, besides the one that they're losing on the ground to the forces of resistance, right at that time, when it becomes a conscious process of reflection in the leaders of the West that they're losing the information war, there's a sudden spike in the most politicized social media platform in anti-Semitism.

Of course, it serves the purpose of legitimizing the claims of Israel that anti-Zionist anti-Zionist discourse is actually anti-Semitic, which, I mean, it's pretty absurd for a few reasons.

First, the Palestinians are Semites.

So that's kind of strange.

Secondly, some of the leading voices in opposing Zionism have been Jewish people.

That's something that we've seen with massive protests in the U.S.

A lot of them have been led by primarily Jewish organizations.

Another thing, Zionists is a bastard child of imperialism.

It has nothing to do with Jewish self-determination.

It's precisely the connection that it has with British and American imperialism that allows it to even survive.

And what's being criticized is the culmination of a 75-year ethnic cleansing that has led to an intensification of the genocide when in October 7th, the Palestinians bravely attempted to escape the prison that they've been contained in for decades, known as Gaza, a place where 75% of the people ended up at.

They were displaced from other parts of Palestine.

So criticizing that horrendous condition that depicts, I think, the bankruptcy of the capitalist imperialist project at a morabilized stage is definitely not anti-Jewish.

It's definitely not anti-Semitic, but it's explicit why they do this.

And the leftists just feed into it.

They feed into it.

And the way that these algorithms work is that it creates these positive feedback loops that end up influencing people who somehow, six months plus in, might be neutral on this issue.

And they see the leftists say one thing, then they see the, I'm pretty sure, not very spontaneous rightist jump on and say, well, who are the real finance capitalists?

And it just feeds into this anti-Semitism that just divides us.

This is something that Marx writing on the Irish question and on the question of American slavery.

These are just like tools that the ruling class uses to divide working people.

And Marx has refers to it as the secret, the secret through which the ruling class sustains its power.

So it serves to divide and to recuperate this increasing elevation of consciousness that's surrounded by the fact that people are seeing a genocide unfold on their phones, and they're beginning to draw other connections besides the Israel-Palestine affair.

They're beginning to question the system as a whole.

And in times of crisis, capitalism has always turned to Nazism and fascism.

So that's what we're seeing before our eyes.

And at a time when groups like ours and like the infrared collective are trying to combat this, for these leftists to come after us, just shows that, as Stalin once said, they are objectively the left wing of fascism.

Yes, because it's curious, they've contributed nothing to the effort to curtail the rise of this new form of anti-communism, which, you know, as you mentioned, I don't know actually if you mentioned this directly, but it's a swipe against us.

Why anti-communism at this moment in the form of anti-Semitism?

Why now?

Why communism?

Why are they mentioning communism?

You know, it's not like there's a communist movement.

It's because of us gaining traction, us gaining steam, and many people recognize it, some positively, and others are very terrified of it, actually.

They're very dis distraught.

Now, i I do find it interesting because when you probe into the leftists' arguments, more or less it seems like they are

Saying something along the lines of, well, why are you privileging or focusing on finance capital when industrial capital is just as much what upholds capitalism and is a part of capitalism?

And then I see it's funny because you guys are just linking Lenin's imperialism.

And I think I don't know if it's like lost in translation or something, but

Do people not know that monopoly capital is finance capital?

That they're one and the same thing?

Because so-called industrial capital was the type of capital that Marx was primarily describing in Capital Volume 1, which is the traditional form of industrial kind of commodity production and reaping a profit based on the sale of commodities directly and accumulating capital on the basis of surpluses reaped thereof.

That form of capital does not exist anymore.

It's been completely subsumed by monopoly capital.

So I would even go so far as to say, because people are saying, well, you just side with industrial capital rather than finance capital.

And I'm like, okay, show me the industrial capital.

There isn't.

Every single

Independent, let's say, entrepreneurial or industrial interest is dependent through debt on finance capital.

And if they're not in debt directly, the only way they can ascend in terms of the expansion of their business operations is by having funds allocated to them by finance capital, right?

So the notion that there's even such a thing as industrial capitalism anymore is an absurdity.

Where are the industrial capitalists?

They've all been subsumed in a hierarchy, the top of which is

Monopoly finance capital.

I mean, even Lenin observed that to be true for his time.

Keep that in mind.

It's especially true.

in today's era where it's even gone further in the degree of abstraction from real production.

And you know, w w well will you know, most of this nonsense comes from a guy named I don't know if you know him, familiar with him, his name is Moishi Postone and he's a kind of darling of the leftcom crowd, so-called leftcom crowd, you know, the the non-Stalinist left.

And Postone kind of came up with the brilliant idea that basically.

You can be anti-Semitic without mentioning Jews.

He called it structural anti-Semitism.

So, when you personify capital in any kind of way, when you associate capital with a specific concrete interest of any kind, rather than a pure abstract structural relationship, that's actually a form of structural anti-Semitism.

So, for example, thank you so much, Shrelstani.

So, for example, if we say that, you know, okay, there is a monopolist ruling class, it's actually an actual concrete class with a concrete class interest, and it's like controlling the government and it's starting all these wars and it's ruling society as a ruling class, it's in the name.

Polstone would say, well, you're not mentioning Jews, but the similarities with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are so stark and they parallel each other so strongly that you're actually a structural anti-Semite.

So that's where this idea comes from.

And it's interesting because the vogue.

High IQ Marxism of the left comms because keep in mind these people have this idea that it's kind of funny.

They're like, oh, you guys are MLs.

That must mean you're like idiots.

We're actually the guys who like think.

There's even this like meme that like, oh, left comms read a lot of books.

No, they don't, right?

But anyway, the vogue idea interpretation of Marxism is that classes are just pure structural relationships and patterns which have nothing to do with concrete interests.

It's actually just a kind of specific form, right, of society, which is totally impersonal, which totally is abstracted from any kind of like real flesh and blood interests.

And that, you know, they identify this roughly and it's all bundled up in what they call the value form.

It's kind of German value form theory, right?

And this is where this kind of notion of capital as this transcendent force comes from.

Oh, capital has subsumed everything.

Oh, capital is doing this.

Capital is doing that.

How can we escape capital?

It's just so inescapable.

And it's like Marx and Engels are writing, yeah, the process of capital accumulation inevitably is laying the foundation for its own dissolution.

Like the acceleration of capitalism is laying the foundation for a transition into a new mode of production.

And these guys are saying, no, no, actually.

The fact that the origins of socialism are from capitalism means that it is forever tainted by it, that everything we call socialism in history is actually just capitalism because it bears the birthmarks of this prior mode of production, and capital is this transcendent, inescapable force, which is totally impersonal, has nothing to do with concrete class interests or collective interests or groups of people.

And that if you departure from this, let's call it abstract Marxism, you are no different from a fascist or an anti-Semite because their mistake is personifying capital and attributing to it concrete interests.

So that's really where they're coming from.

That's the basis upon which they associate your tweet with anti-Semitism.

Right.

And thank you.

Thank you for sharing that.

I hadn't heard of these figures.

But what they're doing is the same thing that has been central to bourgeois political economy forever, which is treating capitalism as this trans-historic force that's just suppressed in different forms of life.

And then somehow at some point, because of these great revolutions, it's allowed to flourish.

And you can get deeper into this by talking about how they speak about human nature, etc.

But it's completely baseless.

And as you mentioned, there are tendencies that consider themselves to be within Marxism.

I don't know if I would consider them to be so, but who do think in these ways.

And an interesting critique of that way of transhistoricizing capitalism emerges in Ellen Mikens Wood's book, The Origins of Capitalism, where she goes over the different forms that that's taken specifically in different so-called Marxist spaces.

And what's interesting also about these value form people, and I've read some of them, specifically because in some of my research, I try to see the homologies of the Ascension to the Concrete of Marxist Capital in the three volumes and Hegel's Science of Logic.

And some of these people work within that area, people like Christopher Arthur and Tony Smith and others.

And what's interesting is that the sort of groups, the cliques that they're working with, which include people like Michael Heinrich, who just wrote Karl Marx and The Birth of Modern Society, as a historian, he's okay.

But as a theorist of political economy, they're rejecting the foundation of Marxist political economy by rejecting the reality of contradictory value production.

So just from there on, you realize that this is a way of thinking that cannot grapple with contradictions, objective contradictions.

And if you can't do that, there's no semblance of Marxism in your outlook.

What's interesting about this reaction, which is very unexpected, because I think we had made a similar tweet a few days back and it just went viral as normal and there was no reaction.

It was this one person that started commenting and then people saw that person commenting and then started getting into it.

And then somehow the folks from the right get into it in the other side.

And it just creates this cycle of idiots talking to each other.

And I think it's a good depiction of how, in many ways, what you have is a mirroring of these positions: a left that sustains its identity by just being anti-right, and a right that sustains its identity by just being anti-left.

And their positions end up just being a mirror of each other.

Whatever the other is, it's just an immediate opposition.

And it's ridiculous because, as Lenin had already pointed out more than 100 years ago, finance capital is the dominant form of capitalism in the stage of imperialism.

It consists of a merger between banking and industrial capital.

So it's not like when you say finance capital, you're keeping industrial capital out of the conversation.

You're just bringing up a specific type of relationship that this industrial capital now has to a form of banking, finance capital.

And if you look at some of the profits of the Fortune 500 companies, the vast majority, I think Michael Hudson's pointed to like 95% of it comes from interest, stock buybacks, and rents.

So basically finance capital.

So it's become the principal form of accumulation.

It's developed distinctive forms of contradictions in society.

I think the contradiction between the contradiction that's present in debt is one that's intensified more and more, specifically within what we've called at the Institute, the reproletariat, this portion of the American working class that elevated itself to this position of middle class.

It, you know, to use Engels' term, it bourgeoisified itself and has now landed once again in precarity, in a position where there's no economic security and where the minimal capacity to accumulate that embodied the fact that they were able to own a house and car and all that stuff is gone.

And this is the positive way of formulating, I think, what's been accepted as the death of the middle classes.

And a lot of the central contradictions that these people exist in with capital is not necessarily through a process of extracting surplus value because they're not the proletariat.

They're part of the larger toiling masses, the working masses, but they're not the proletariat.

They're not the class that's producing surplus value.

In many ways, as we know, Marx points to in volumes two and three of Capital.

It is on the basis of the extraction of surplus value from this other class that the salaries and wages of these agents of circulation arise.

But the central contradiction that they find themselves in with capital.

Is debt.

A lot of them are in tremendous debt just for trying to get buy-in.

Marx, prophetic as he is, did notice that this was going to be an increasing trend in capitalism, the indebting of the working class.

And in the third volume, he calls it the secondary form of exploitation, the one that occurs after the direct moment of production.

I think that's one of the primary forms of exploitation that we have today.

And to have people who consider themselves Marxists, who identify as Marxists, go out and say that we can't speak about finance capital when it is the form of capital that is at the center of some of the most principled contradictions that we have in our era, it's just ludicrous.

It's insanity.

But it shows that for these people, communism is just a label.

I call them in my book, The Purity Fetish, the identity socialist.

It's just an identity.

There's no actual incorporation into any movements that attempt to build power for the working class, by the working class.

And it's just a social clique.

That's all it is.

All they're really interested in is having a small group of people whom they can guarantee that whatever ideas arise in their head, those people agree with them purely.

It's a commitment to these abstract, pure ideals that are not necessarily realizable in the world anytime soon.

And if you don't share them, you're getting condemned.

So it's just cliques that surround themselves around these weird, pure, abstract ideals.

And it ends up being almost like a monastery feel.

Like if you buy into the ideals, you're there, you're pure enough.

And communism becomes not a project of incorporating the working classes into a consciousness of how they are the agent of history that can radically change the world.

It becomes a social clique that has to be very hostile towards the entry of anyone that thinks in the slightest way different to them.

And that's no communism at all.

That's, you know, you can basically trace all of that to the creation of the fake left and the compatible left, as we call it in the Institute.

And it's a product of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the State Department.

And it was explicitly done for the sake of challenging the only force that the imperialists have always been scared of, which is real communists.

And real communists are back.

Historical necessity has brought us back.

And they're going to throw everything at us, the fascists and the left as well.

Yeah, I think that some of these arguments stem from this notion, you hear it repeated often, that you know, part and parcel of fascism is a demonization of big capital and a championing of small capital.

And that was Trotsky's appraisement of the class origins of fascism, actually.

He said the problem was the petite bourgeoisie, the small middle class.

Now, Trotsky obviously had these views because he was an elitist and he detested any kind of populism.

But the facts actually contrast from this view of history.

Well, for purposes of demagoguery, they did engage in this kind of rhetoric here or there.

The facts are fascism was not a phenomenon of small capital.

It was a phenomenon of big capital.

Fascism was rooted, I mean, this was the analysis of the common turn in monopoly capital, right?

And that's not small capital, that's not the petite bourgeoisie, that's actually the advanced, whatever progressive big capitalist actually.

So this kind of Trotskyism has become commonplace.

Additionally, the notion basically where, like, okay, this opposition between the concrete reality of production to the abstract reality of like institutions and financial abstraction and so on and derivatives, this is actually a kind of fascistic distinction.

And actually, you know, to understand capitalism, you need to kind of de-essentialize oppositions like that.

So, for example, when Michael Hudson makes an opposition between the productive kind of

Aspects of society versus the rent-seeking parasitic one, you know, that is kind of a fascistic trap.

And it's just, first of all, it's ironic.

that they're speaking from a pretense of Marxism, because the first gesture of Marx was what?

I mean, the first thing he did to distinguish himself was from Hegel, was to reject the kind of pure

Abstraction of idealism and descend into the depths of the concrete.

Which is the proletariat, right?

Marx's privileging of the proletariat as the revolutionary class, the laboring class, over the civil servant or, I don't know, some other kind of subject based on contemplation and reflexivity, was itself, I mean, that's materialism, it's the essence of materialism, right?

And obviously, it's a given, it's a truism within Marxism that socialism amounts to the unleashing of the productive forces from the fetters of an increasingly outmoded, increasingly superstructural, and increasingly abstract.

Relationship of capital and the valorization of capital ceases to be organically based and reproduced just from the concrete content of production, but increasingly takes a political, abstract, and superstructural form.

That's imperialism, right?

So when we oppose the parasitic rent-seeking elements.

From

The kind of and what are the productive elements in society?

It's actually BRICS, it's Russia and China.

I mean, is that outside of capitalism entirely?

I mean, people can debate about that, but the fact is that they are positioned against monopoly capital.

Yes, because that distinction between the productive versus the parasitic is operative in that case, right?

And which one is on the side of socialism?

I think it's plainly self-evident, you know?

And it's like, you know, this view that.

That, well, actually, you know, you're talking about productive capital, but what we're calling what we call productive capital in China and Russia and BRICS and so on.

I don't really think you can reduce that to capital anymore.

I think the extent to which the necessity of the productive forces in those countries to have to be socialized, you know, the the extent to which they have to obey long term planning, the extent to which they're inexorably entwined with an overall view of production based on use value more or less.

I don't think you can say these are simply