Fourth Reich Archaeology - #082 - Fourth Reich Political Theology, Part 2 - Side A

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

We are back with another installment of our ongoing series Fourth Reich Political Theology with Marcus from the Return of the Repressed podcast. Recall that in our opening salvo of this series, we laid the foundation for our excavation by exploring how the superstitious religious worldview of the feudal world order was superimposed onto the capitalist world order with “The Market” playing the role of God. The same way that serfs and peasants lived their lives in awe and default belief of a vengeful deity, we today implicitly believe in the mysterious market forces we are told move the earthly cosmos beyond the will of man.This episode picks up right where we left off, expanding outwards on what we covered in part 1 to reach beyond the “earthly philosophers” of bourgeois political economy (Smith, Bentham, et al.), to the German Idealists from Kant to the so-called neo-Kantains, to the early sociologists, to the man of the hour himself, Carl Schmitt. In our journey, we draw heavily on Georg Lukacs “The Destruction of Reason” to trace the thread of irrationalism through all liberal political philosophizing. Lukacs and Schmitt see eye to eye when it comes to the hypocrisy and incoherence of Western bourgeois liberal democracy. After all, rule of by and for the bourgeoisie–and the exploitation and domination of the proletariat that entails–cannot really pursue the objectives of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. That would destroy the special privileges enjoyed by the ruling class. But from the same observation, Schmitt and Lukacs proceed in polar opposite directions. Schmitt would strip back the pretense of institutional norms in favor of the rule of raw power, which he supported in his advocacy for and membership in the Nazi party. Lukacs, good Marxist that he was, would instead expose the exploitive nature of the state and the society and, developing class consciousness through praxis, expropriate the ruling class in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s another incredible conversation with Marcus, and one that has real practical implications for today when we once again find ourselves in what Schmitt called “the state of exception” where the sovereign alone makes the rules…Return of the Repressed Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cw/TheReturnOfTheRepressedFourth Reich Archaeology Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

The following passage is excerpted from George Lukash, The Destruction of Reason. At no stage does the development of irrationalism evinence an imminent character, as though, that is to say, one proposition or answer could give rise to another driven by the inner dialectic of the philosophical train of thought. We mean to show, on the contrary, that the various stages of irrational, came about as reactionary answers to problems to do with the class struggle. Thus, the content, form, method, tone, etc., of its reaction to progress in society are dictated, not by an intrinsic inner dialectic of this kind, but rather by the adversary, by the fighting

conditions imposed on the reactionary bourgeoisie. This must be borne in mind as the basic principle. of the development of irrationalism. That does not mean that irrationalism, within the social framework we have defined, has no ideal unity behind it, just the opposite. It follows from its very nature

that the problems of content and methodology it raises are closely linked and reveal a striking unity and a narrow one. The disparagement of understanding and reason, an uncritical glorification of intuition, an aristocratic epistemology, the rejection of socio-historical progress, the creating of myths, and so on, are motives we can find in virtually any irrationalist. The philosophical reaction by representatives of the remains of feudalism and by the bourgeoisie to social progress may in specific circumstances,

and personally talented individual proponents in this direction receive an ingenious and brilliant form. Here, one very important determining factor of irrationalism becomes clearly evident, for in the eyes of the reactionary bourgeoisie, one of irrationalism's most important tasks is to provide men with a philosophical comfort, the semblance of total force,

freedom, the illusion of personal autonomy, moral and intellectual superiority, while maintaining an attitude that continually links them with the reactionary bourgeoisie in their real dealings and renders them absolutely subservient to it. Or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses,

of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information which showed that there were two wars going on. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small. For example, we're the CIA.

Now, he has a mile. He knows so long as to die. Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes the national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Proz Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers.

Why you think our country's so innocent? This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Don. Dick is currently on location at... We're so glad to have you with us for what promises to be another stimulating installment of our ongoing series, Fourth Reich Political Theology, featuring our good friend Marcus from the return of the repressed podcast. On the free feed, we'll be releasing this second volume of Fourth Reich political theology in installments. However, if you would like access to the full, unadulterated, unabridged, four-hour-plus, epic

conversation, head on over to patreon.com slash forthrightic archaeology, or indeed, go ahead and subscribe to Marcus's Patreon where he will also be posting the full kit and caboodle. Before we get right into it, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for liking, subscribing to, commenting on, and spreading the word about this podcast. We depend on you to manipulate the algorithm in our favor by engaging with the content on your podcast app of choice. Helps us to reach a wider audience, but what really does that is, of course, your word of mouth. And you need not only talk about the podcast with strangers or with your friends or your loved ones or your enemies for that matter. You could talk about it with your grateful and faithful

co-hosts. We're reachable by email at forthrighteckpod at gmail.com. We are also on Twitter and Instagram at Fourth Reich Pod. And we sure do enjoy hearing from all of you. And I want to give a special shout out to all of our listeners who've reached out to us from the frozen streets of Minneapolis, St. Paul, Twin Cities area, as they struggle in real life against the ice invaders in their city and are really the vanguard of anything resembling a revolutionary movement right now. So, you know, history is occurring before our very eyes, and we count ourselves lucky that anyone participating in the action sees fit to tune in here, we do believe that there's something to what we're offering

here. And indeed, the theoretical framework that really pours through this episode, you know, this is not an academic abstract exercise when we're talking about theory and about philosophy and about the development of the ideological basis for the forces that rule the world against which we're all engaged in some kind of struggle here. To put a very fine point on it, Carl Schmidt's system of thinking of political theology was a blueprint for a massive sciop that was deployed by the Nazi party in the third, Reich to enlist into that fascist, repressive, and extremely anti-worker project that, you know, was ultimately carried out on behalf of monopoly capital.

And Schmidt essentially instructed the fascist state on how to pull that off without a revolution, with sufficient consent of the masses in order to keep the whole scam running. And that blueprint has kept the scam running well past the demise of the Third Reich and has continued to this day into the Fourth Reich. And way back in Schmidt's time, the world was lucky to have an incisive thinker like Georges Lukash to actually call out and really pick apart at every level, you know, not only Schmidt, but all the other thinkers, all the other irrationalist thinkers who have constructed this false dichotomy between the state of normalization, right, the bourgeois institutional status quo

technocracy that is essentially involves putting a bureaucratic facade in between the ruling class on whose behalf the entire bureaucracy operates and the masses who are exploited by that ruling class in order to prop up this spectacle of fairness and democratic legitimacy. So that's one side of, of the irrationalist divide. And what Lukash tells us is that is not a sustainable way to organize society because at bottom, you cannot have the principle of equality when the functioning of the society, the entire structure of the society is based on inequality, is based on subordination of one class by another.

The other side of the divide in the irrationalist fork in the road that Lukash tells us about is, of course, the stronger vitalist, very self-aware irrationalism of your Nietzscheans, of your Aryan race mythologists, of your genocidal crusaders, of all stripes. And what Carl Schmidt really brings to the table is the observation that both of these roads lead to the same destination, namely to Auschwitz. Why is that? It's because all of the bureaucratic, liberal edifice at the end of the day is defined by what happens. when the norms break down? What happens when the society reverts to the law of might makes right? And to Schmidt, that reversion is inevitable because, at bottom, the underlying system, the underlying reason for the existence of the bureaucracy, of the the state in a liberal democracy is to enforce the same fundamental repression, suppression,

and exploitation that the dictatorship achieves through brute force. And to Schmidt, that's a good thing. He was a fucking Nazi and it just so happens that all of the people in charge of our country today happened to be enamored of the guy and his ideas. And here we are with this series with not only the objective of having a good time talking about some very interesting concepts, which is a positive externality of the whole affair, to be sure. But the real goal here is to engage in dialectics, you know, both as between Marcus and myself and with you, the listener, and we really do hope that you'll get something concrete, something useful out of this experience because we don't want to grab your ear for four and a half odd hours just for the fuck of it.

And we'll get right into it in just a moment, but first, if you've not yet listened to Fourth Reich Political Theology Volume 1, please stop this episode right now. Before you go any further, go click on that episode 1 and listen to it all the way through side A and side B if you're on the free feed because this builds upon that episode. And you will recall, if you have listened to that episode, that we really were setting the stage. We're leading up in a narrative arc from the emergence from the feudal system, from the religious, superstitious worldview that accompanied feudalism.

into the equally superstitious, equally supernaturally inclined ideological system of market capitalism under the leadership of the bourgeoisie. Recall that all those qualities that had been previously reserved for the godhead, the deity, at the top of the hierarchy of power, beneath which were the kings, the lords, and on and on, well, the top of the hierarchy was replaced by an abstraction, namely the free market, and in order for the bourgeoisie to maintain its hold over the organs of society, well, it instilled the fear not of God, but of the market. which could be equally deadly if you get on the wrong side of those market forces anywhere in the world.

And of course, the victims of European colonialism were very much on the wrong side of the God of the market and have been suffering its punishments for the greater part of, oh, 400-odd years, give or take 100 or 2. In this episode, I want to give a little orientation, given the length of the discussion ahead. We style the beginning of our discussion as a further recap of what we went over in part one. However, that's not exactly accurate. Beyond a recap, it's really an expansion, an outward expansion, to include a much broader cross-section of the intellectual. intellectual milieu that defined that transition into the modern capitalist world that we still inhabit today, unfortunately. And after taking stock of where things stand at the close of the 19th century,

we then turn our sights to the man of the hour, to Carl Schmidt, and we describe not only his biographical origin story and do a little bit of Freudian psychoanalysis on the man as our subjective analysis. Well, we also discuss in-depth Schmitz works, his philosophy, his thought, his ideology, and his contributions to that ideological groundwork underneath Nazism and the Third Reich. And of course, if you dig deep enough beneath our own society, you will find that that foundation laid by Schmidt is still very much in place. And throughout the episode, we will turn again and again to Lukash to help us interpret the impact that Schmidt had on the Nazi project, on the eternal

Reich of capital, and will also reflect on what openings that leaves for the discerning critic armed with the tools of the immortal science of historical materialism. Now, without any further ado, let's get digging. If the rule you followed, Bridget it is. Of what use? What's the rule? Hey, it Frizi, Fagazi, it's a wazia, it's a wuzzy, it's a feroast.

It doesn't exist. It's never landed. It is no matter. It's not on the elemental chart. It's not going to read it. Right? We don't create shit. Welcome back, Marcus.

We are doing this now for the second time. had a little bit of the technological gnomes fucking up my wires here on my end and screwing up about five minutes of chit-chat to commence the session here but we'll do it again no problem yeah it's like the gremlins in you know gremlins too when they blame the japanese for like cars malfunctioning maybe it's gremlins one actually that guy he's like goes on like a really anti-Japanese rant. Like, you know, cars don't work anymore because there are Japanese gremlins in all machines.

So, yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's what's happened. Exactly. Although I think this time it's going to be American gremlins or just maybe, just maybe, Israeli gremlins, the worst kind. Exactly. Exactly.

In the hierarchy of, uh, of goblins and gremlins. Yeah. You got to watch out from our foreigners because they plant gremlins in their machinery. That's the same gremlin's brought down our planes and the big one. That's right. World War II. Good old WWII. But thank you so much, Marcus, for joining us again on Fourth Reich Archaeology for round two of Fourth Reich political theology.

Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be back here, of course, because the first installation was, yeah, great success. I had a really good time, and I have been thinking a lot since last time. Like I told you last time, when I listened to that episode, the first time I was in Indonesia,

walking on a beach with a nice beer in my hand and the full moon in the night. sky just peak enjoyment of life and now I'm back in my cold house here in the mountains with the snow outside and I can't afford to properly heat this municipally designated dwelling that I that I have but that doesn't matter I think we're gonna have a we're gonna have a good time anyway yes and I'm yeah happy to be but back. Absolutely. I hope you got at least a nice sweater, something good to wrap around to get cozy, because we're going to tuck in now for another lengthy convo here. We've got much to discuss,

and I too have been thinking a lot since our last discussion. You know, I think the old Lennon phrase. It's on everybody's lips recently that there are decades when nothing happens and then weeks when decades happen is not just applicable to events on the ground, but also to the life of the mind. I feel like our collaboration has inspired me to advance my thinking, to deepen my thinking on a lot of these issues, certainly digested. more theoretical writings, I think, in the last month or two than I had done for well over a decade prior. So thank you for that also. You know, it is, it's just great to be working together with somebody who, you know, we really get along well and I think have a lot to talk about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, and I would say, like reading Lukach, I've stated it many times on my own show, especially the book history and class consciousness, which is not the one we've focused the most on today, or like in the last couple of weeks, it's probably the most important book in the Marxist canon from my perspective. And it really is one of those books that like, to make the analogy of like, yeah, the cold weather over here again like it's just starts the engine miraculously even should it be like minus 20 outside or you know you just read that book and all of a sudden you're going to feel like a philosopher you're going to start thinking and yes and i think uh the other book uh which is the one we focused the most

on um the destruction of reason um it's got a nicer title in swedish uh i think in swedish it's the what's the professional mandate of somebody who executes someone? Like with the hood with the black hood Oh yeah like the executioner.

Yeah, is that what do you call it? You don't have a cooler medieval name for those people with the axe or the one who like pulls the ladle of the gallows. Okay, well then yeah, then it's not so cool even in translation.

But like yeah, the executioners of like pure reason or something is the Swedish title. Nice. I like the Spanish word for that, which is Berthugo. Yeah, sounds similar. Barnamen, Berdugo, at least is B.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But destruction of reason is a pretty cool title as well, to be honest. I'm not going to shit on that title. It's a cool translation. Most definitely. Yeah. And just because you quoted Lenin,

so I have to quote Lenin as well, like this is an opportune moment then if we are indeed within this kind of like Weimar period now, which it does feel like we are where you know we're going to see years taking place in weeks

we must remember as Deden said to have a heart on fire and a brain on ice. Yes. And that's why we engage with theory because we do not want to get too caught up in the moment because that is the fascist

bribe of violence, right? The brawl of just going fucking amok. That's right. I mean, reaction is not only an ideological construct, it is also a subjective behavior

to be reactive, to react to the events in a knee-jerk and inconsiderate way is as dangerous as adapting in reactionary ideology. Yeah.

Yeah, I think a lot of like the words we're going to use today might on the first account seem like we're being hyperbolic and that we are like sort of, you know, making fun of our opposition. But we're going to start to see that like their claims to truth are very different from ours. Like the word irrationalism is something that they take on themselves, as a kind of like you know as a kind of a higher royal road

to truth you know like it's all about that feeling you know about this intuition and this like experience you know the Leibens philosophy the life philosophy of like being in that fucking moment and just being an alpha you know like of like just feeling the energy that comes

with like being destructive like even Nietzsche has, you know, many famous quotes throughout this work about like how, you know, this is what it is about. Like you shouldn't like the greatest, you know, bane that Nietzsche, you know, loves to hate. Like he even, he even says that. I love to hate them. I hate the socialists. There's nobody I hate as much as the socialist because they elevate the proletary arts to a level of class consciousness where they are capable of being rational.

he wants them to be a mob of anger and destruction that he can channel with his theories about world domination of course he never lived to see that moment the imperialist period of Germany but like as I've said before that's why he was able to dream about it even

stronger so we should not forget that they have they lay different claims to truth than we do. And it's like, yeah, what's an insult for us is admiration for them.

Yes. Yeah, he's like a Nazi Moses, right? He leads the path to the promised land and expires, you know, right on the precipice of arrival. Yeah, exactly.

He guides the blonde beast to its rightful place. It's promised land. Yes, and we're going to track a lot of that in today's episode. Before we do that, we did want to recap a little bit of what we covered in part one. Of course, listener, if you've not already done so, please do listen to Part 1 of Fourth Reich Political Theology to get yourself situated because obviously the next session that we're about to record builds up on the foundation

that we laid back in that recording. And to that end, you know, to the listener who has already digested it, it is rather a dense meal to digest. We hope it didn't give you any ideological indigestion. And we are going to do just a very brief recap to get ourselves on track in this episode. So to begin, you know, we started out last time talking about this shift from feudalism and the feudal economic system where the dominant ideology was, of course, this highly superstitious religious sentiment that imposed on the serfs a very hierarchical worldview, which served the interest of the feudal lord. who held their rightful place above the serfs as almost closer to God. And of course, the monarch in that system was even closer to God

to the point of taking on quasi-deistic or quasi-divine qualities in the eyes of the masses. You know, you think about cathedral construction. You go to these medieval European cities. you see the ways in which the architecture of life confronted the everyday normal people, and it was imposing to a degree that would really leave you in awe if you're used to spending most of your time, you know, digging in dirt. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not for nothing that Lewis the 16th's grandfather is called the son king, right?

like we are in pyramid building days of the collapsing feudal order. We're arriving here at some kind of, yeah, like you say, like a transition, what Gramsci would, I guess, call an interregnum, the time when the old has not yet died and the new cannot yet be born. And perhaps, at least for our purposes, we thought that like starting with Kant, was a great idea because Kant is sort of like a critic of the old and he's also a critic of the new that develops and he sort of puts out a lot of like these big questions that like to be honest philosophy has not been able to supersede you know like I mean they are in a way questions that

shouldn't be superseded I think if you think that you can supersede them you often you know you might think that that's how you become a materialist by by superiors by superiors. preceding the metaphysics of Kant, but that's when you end up with like, you know, some kind of vulgar materialism, which is of course the dominant hegemonic ideology of our days, because especially Anglo-Saxons don't read Kant. And they like to think that they have some special, true relationship to reality. But I don't know, like with the disintegration of the old reality. We also have a disintegration of like law, right? And I think Kant is the first one where he doesn't solve it, but like he's got some kind of a solution to this. Like, like, first of all,

like reality is no longer philosophically like out there to be discovered, right, by us. It's sort of like, to use a Kantian term, like it's transcendently constituted. And again, this is why we have been thinking a lot I guess like the last couple the last four or five weeks because yeah these aren't questions to be superseded

you know and I'm referring here immediately to yeah the transident transnational constitution of reality you know what does that mean like it's a big one and one shouldn't have a quick answer I think

but it's yeah, it's like in this kind of Cartesian tradition, I guess, like of a great doubt. And of course, out of it, we see the development of like the Gena Romantics in Germany. So Kant is during the Enlightenment period, right? Like when what we know as science really like begins to take a hold. It started already like in the century before and maybe the century before that as well with a lot of like new inventions like the telescope and the microscope and you know like all these material means with which you can

observe the natural universe has of course produced new thought within the superstructure you know this is the very basics of Marxist historiography what we call material

history right but there is a reaction right like and and to a certain degree they are not you know stupid either like the people of the general romantics who are going to become the the

and idealists who are in a way, you know, the teachers of Marx. They, but they do take count to another level, you know. During the romantic period, we see, we see a reaction. Like in the early 1800s, we see a reaction to the Enlightenment process or the project, you know, like the revolution of 1789, right, and the storming of the Bastille in Paris. You know, they don't like, some of them like what's been happening. but they want to take it in, you know, in some other maybe direction. And in that sense, there is a sort of like progressive bourgeoisie and there's a reactionary

bourgeoisie. And so out of like maybe the progressive, there's like thoughts of nation building and so on. Yeah, please go on. Yeah. And I think all of them, you know, to tie it back to emerging out of the old order, they all share a general belief that what their. building towards what they are resolving in leaving behind the superstitions of the past and entering this new age of scientific discovery is to bring about a more rational order that whatever

the bourgeoisie is building whatever society the bourgeoisie is constructing for itself to preside over as the ruling class, they imbue it with these principles, these enlightenment principles of rationality, efficiency, organization, elements that they viewed were missing from the feudal order, were missing from the superstitious worldview of the feudal period. And I think what they really whether by perhaps unconsciously or perhaps consciously, you know, they eventually need to rely on some form of uncritical belief among the masses that they are seeking to subject to their form of rule. And so in that regard, they channel the same. irrational theological sentiments that had predominated in the feudal age into a new god of their

own invention, namely the god of the free market, the god of capital, right? Yes, yes. I wouldn't say that they are all hell-bent on rationality being. I mean, overall, of course, the bourgeois class, the bourgeoisie, is of course a class that derives its strength from a rational look, a worldview, like a Veltan Chau. And it is perhaps mainly the aristocrats who are the true, maybe representatives of the romantic reaction, but also the bourgeoisie is a little bit afraid of what rationality has done

towards the end of the Enlightenment, you know, like, okay, like, I mean, this is all good and stuff, but like, if it also necessarily then results in people revolting, you know, like maybe we should subdue this rationality a little bit, you know, and of course, that is, I think, where you're actually, like, very correct in this reintroduction of the, yeah, let's say, yeah, superstition or ambivalence or ambugibigibigil. ambiguity ambiguity of of capital as some kind of master signifier and I think especially we see this

like so like insofar that like yeah the romantics maybe dealt with things that rationality will never be able to talk about properly you know things of beauty you know feeling true feelings living a real life and so on then of course you know we We've all probably enjoyed some novels from the 1800s. And, you know, we have some affinity with like this kind of romantic notion. You know, it's a nice thing to be a romantic in your everyday life. You know, don't think about love, rational, you know, in a rational way, right?

Like, that's probably going to ruin every relationship you ever engage in. If you think about it as a true liberal and as a contract or whatever, you know, an economic sexual contract. It's very damaging, I think. But, you know, of course, these aren't the only things that they think about. They have, like, a political agenda. And maybe the positivists here are the ones we introduced, which kind of rejects maybe even Kant, as I suggested before. And they start this new trend then, or for this new movement of, like, naive realism,

where they really do think that they know what's going on, you know, like, oh, oh, yeah, yeah, your critique of pure reason, blah, blah, blah, notions about absolute knowledge. absolute subjectivity, you know, all these problems that arises out of like the fall of feudalism, they don't really apply to us, you know. We actually have, you know, a positivist, true understanding of reality. We have discovered the royal road to science. And, you know, like we're not so bothered by these German idealists, you know, Fichter, Schelling, Hegel, etc.

You know, and we are not worried by them. And the ones who are not worried by this are, you know, the ones we introduced before, John Stuart Mill, Ben Tam, the French, you know, August Comte, who is perhaps the true founder

of positivism and sociology, which is where we're going with this recap. But they all have one problem in common, like you said, right? they cannot understand why the proletariat is revolting. Yeah. You know, and we have another revolt in 1848, which brings their worldview to complete destruction.

And then we have the famous Paris commune of 1871, right? And, you know, it seems like no matter how rational they are and like, you know, how well they understand the world, the stupid masses don't seem to appreciate like these beautiful factories that they've been building for them. and they want to keep on making a fuss, right? Yeah, they want to keep on making a fuss. And at the same time, you know, it's always a question, at least in my mind, whether they're approaching the issues of their day from the perspective of kind of scientific objectivity, as their writings would suggest, or whether kind of as Marx pointed out,

they're actually just putting into writing their own theoretical justifications for domination of the proletariat and the working classes. And especially, you know, we discussed in the last episode about how John Stuart Mill, you know, at the same time, he's coming out with these definitions of liberty. And I think that, you know, you put your finger on it when you said, like, they have to resolve these excesses of the revolutionary masses in some way to avoid getting their heads chopped off that when the French revolution came with liberté, egalite, fraternity, the liberty, you know, if you take that to its logical extreme, it kind of precludes any sort of social subordination. at the class level to the bourgeoisie that they really wanted to achieve.

And so you could think of a work like John Stuart Mills on Liberty, where what he's really doing is trying to come up with the cheat codes to suppress the desire for freedom, for liberation, and recode it as sort of an algorithm that is built on this fake notion of utilitarianism, the greatest good for the greatest number. And that itself, although appears objective, it really imports a number of very arbitrary assumptions that ultimately enumer to the benefit of the class that he represents. And we discussed how John Stuart Mill and his father James Mill were

British imperialists were profiteers of British colonialism and imperialism through massive holdings in the East India Company and that, you know, when you're talking about the greatest number, you are delimiting the number of people whose pleasure counts towards your calculation to the whites, to the middle class, the educated that you consider to be your peers. and subordinating the well-being of the masses that are underneath your thumb. And one thing that jumped out to me from Lukash, just not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but he discusses what Marx once said about the cynical doctrines of classical economics,

that doctrines did not come out of books into reality, but entered books from reality. Right. So I think that really flips on its head what we were discussing, like, the way that philosophy is taught even today in schools as just idealistic trajectory of, oh, this really super smart guy came up with this idea and wrote it down. And thankfully, we can look at it and evaluate it on its merits. And it's like, bullshit.

That was a product. It was a product of its time. time and place. Definitely. I think like, you know, Marx has that really. I don't know where he says it. It might even be in the manifesto, but like, you know, he has this, you know, little nice Maxime where he's saying the same way that you mentioned it.

He says, quote, egality, fraternity, libertier, and Bentham, right? Like that there is, like it like you, for the bourgeoisie, you can only have all of these things if you're also like an egoist you know like if you also just believe in yourself like that if you just do what's good for you that's somehow going to make all these other things blossom and I think like to really like on a philosophical level to you know try to make that work of course they do what you're just you know talking about this kind of like twist of like are these you know are these social notions or social law that we have derived from the natural law, like, you know, what we can observe in nature,

or is it rather the other way around, you know, and this is the old debate about Darwin as well, you know, like, or rather maybe Spencer and the vulgarization of Darwin, which, where it's clear that, like, no, like these laws aren't natural laws, like you've just imposed them from, like, how your everyday bourgeois life unfolds, you know, like of competition, of like, you know, the survival of the strongest. and these things like you know and that's also in Marx's critique of Maltes right like this kind of bourgeois trick

of trying to make something look natural when it's actually these are actually social problems of their own class like you know that they can't get along you know like what is the greater good if you're all competing with each other like of course you don't have a common objective rational and goal here

like you know it's something that is constantly reformed by you trying to cut the throat of one another. And that's not natural. It's a social situation that you've painted yourself into, like a cornered yourself into. And I think maybe like positivism or like irrationalism arises here as a kind of, like I think they hope that it's going to solve some of these problems. which aren't just intra-class, but they are inter-class as well, right?

Like, you know, they have to try to understand the issue of the proletary art, which is only growing bigger and bigger throughout the 1800. And I think in the sort of like towards the end of the 1800, you know, the imperialist ecstasy is like, you know, again, like it's an emphasis, it's a laid emphasis on these things that they initially, when like positivism was formulated in the 1850s by these gentlemen you know like they said that they rejected

a worldview based on intuition introspection and fate right like in this kind of yeah fate in what but but now it returns in the irrationalist project you know like like don't isn't that

isn't that like how any good capitalist shows his true color today, you know, like, oh, he's taking risks. Isn't that like the coolest thing you can do as a capitalist, you know? Oh, like they have, you know, like they have intuition that makes it possible for them to navigate, you know, the seemingly strange behavior of like, you know, the stock market, for example. Like, you know, they are endowed with this very undefinable quality, which is some kind

of vitalist quality, which they think runs throughout. the entire like, you know, materially existing universe. That like, you know, it's like psychological evolution, it's religious evolution, it's modernism, it's like technological development. Like everything seems to be, you know, having this teleological trajectory and they think that they've tapped into it. But now they are starting to talk about it in a way that is, yeah, specifically irrational. Even psychedelic.

Yeah, exactly. That's the highest levels, right? Like when, you know, and that's where we're going to get. Like, we're going to see like that these people then, you know, when you get to the psychedelic point, it's like, I don't know, like Mishima, right? Like the favorite Japanese right winger. I think in one of his books, he says that like the difference between European fascism, though he did, I think he did suggest that Germany was a little bit more inclined to this than the rest.

And Japanese fascism was that like Japanese fascism was that like Japanese fascism. was aesthetical, you know. So if you just rape and brutalize in a beautiful way, you know, or you kill yourself in like, you know, a ritualistic sepuku ceremony, then it's, you know, more true, you know, because of its beauty. Yeah. And of course, that's the psychedelic part, right? Like, you know, when you're so far deep into this trip, like, what is psychedelia?

Yeah, yeah, it's just that, like, you're guided by your sensation of beauty alone, right? And like that is I think like, yeah, the imperialist ecstasy slowly, gradually developing here towards the end of the 1800, you know, reaching this point that Nietzsche talked about of like world domination. Yeah. And I think we can I think we can delve a little bit deeper into that in a minute. But just to finish recapping what we already talked about in part one, you know, we went from the Adam Smith, the synthesis between his theory. of moral sentiments and then his theory of capitalism set forth in the wealth of nations where he kind of mixes a assumption about human moral behavior guided by an innate intuitive sense of sympathy for the other and extrapolated from that that self-interest for the economic actor would governed by the, when you say the invisible hand, you know, really he conceived of the invisible hand as a mere puppet controlled by the heartstrings, right? The heartstrings of sympathy.

Right, right, right. It was a real organ, you said, right? Yes, exactly, a sense organ. He thought it was a sixth sense, something that existed physiologically and anatomically that governed human behavior which of course doesn't really exist that's just you have feelings obviously

you know you have a conscience you have intuition but mixing it with a belief that you know economic wealth maximization is for the greater good when you put it into that

dialogue with these capitalists. And remember, Adam Smith was a very pure academician. He wasn't himself a capitalist in the same way that contemporaries like Mill were. And it just creates this really disastrous mistake at the fundamental core of capitalist political economy as it developed. I mean, it really it betrays, I think the Anglo-Saxon relationship here to this dichotomy between the natural and the

social, you know, like, because they refuse to romantics, you know, like, I mean, for the romantics, it's easy for us to, I think, imagine that there is such a heart which feels empathy for others, but, you know, we wouldn't take the Schmittian step of saying that it's a truly

existing anatomical organ that, like, knows how to be a good capitalist. or you know like but but that's sort of like yeah again like that betrays how willing they are to make this work to show that like I mean oh you can call me immoral or whatever but like you know this is just natural like it's the way we're meant to be you haven't considered natural you know the human nature my friend yeah yeah exactly it's all pure projection and we eventually got ourselves around to the beginning of the 20th century.

And, you know, we started to talk a little bit about the birth of sociology in the person of Max Weber, who kind of synthesized again these contradictions that he saw between the spiritual or irrational heart of political economy and the, objective goals of political economy and came up with this mythological origin story of capitalism through the Protestant ethic, which at the end of the day, as we kind of concluded through our discussion, right, as a descriptive matter, it's pretty arbitrary, but as a prescriptive matter, or proscriptive matter, it kind of imbues, again, a certain morality into capitalism that reifies to use another concept from Lukash, the norms that are pre-existing in all these

revolutionary eras that remember Weber was coming out. of, you know, he was the author, the principal author of the Weimar Constitution, right, after the Treaty of Versailles. So a guy who's really right there in the center of the crisis of the bourgeoisie to bring stability out of the utter chaos and destruction of the First World War. And the way that he does that is to say, no, no, no, there's this Protestant ethic here at play. that has pushed these forces into motion. And if we can only, you know, create a balancing structure to keep everything in line and, you know, plan through objective analysis,

the structure of the government, we can get it back on track. Right, right, right. I think I liked what you said there. I don't know if I will be quoting you correctly now with the, you said prescriptive and proscriptive. which is like, yeah, the lie, if you like, of sociology, right? Like that, you know, they want to be this kind of liberal neutrality, you know, like,

oh, we are just observing how society functions. And of course, we have no ambitions like the dirty Marxists to understand history, you know, for the sake of changing history. You know, like we are not, you know, by saying and telling you how society works, we are not in any way trying to also control how society works, by kind of instituting via science a normative judicial order that underlies what's right and wrong. Of course, that's not what we are about.

We are liberal neutral observers, right? But we know already that sociology began as a science to refuse like, you know, Marxism and like, you know, historical materialism because it wanted to avoid events

like, you know, the first the revolutions of 1848, right? Like that's when Compt first, August Comte again, the father of positivism, when he invents sociology, right? Like, and he's got another word for it in the beginning. I can't remember what it is. But it's clear that, you know,

they are, it is a science to solve the biggest, problems of the bourgeoisie. You know, like, how do we preserve the status quo if people are revolting? That's the purpose of sociology, you know, like, we don't want another 1871 Paris commune. And then Max Weber and Ferdinandiniis and Alfred Weber too, right, his brother. Yes, yes, yes, his brother comes later. But, like, there's a third one of the founding of like the German sociology group.

You know, Germany is a little bit later this. Like France and England has already begun developing it. You know, Comte is French, right? And that's already... Yeah, Durkheim. Yeah, exactly. Durkheim's going to come too. Like, he's kind of contemporary, right, with Weber,

but he's working with a longer tradition. And this is simply because, you know, like Germany is later to create a nation state, you know. So like it doesn't have the same ambition to create a science that defends. the nation state or like you know or at least defense the status quo of the nation state you know yeah but that that is i think the most important thing to remember yeah yeah before we get into the sort of special national characteristics that emerge at this time which disembark into the nazi third reich and the nazi ideology of karl schmidt and

and his extremely effective synthesis of these problems that is animating so many of our evil overlords today. Right, right, right. To put a final point on what we discussed last time, I thought that we kind of revolved our discussion And having played it back, I think that there are three really key elements that are essential to this Fourth Reich political theology that we're developing here that kind of emerge from all the thinkers that came before, all the thinkers that we discussed in part one. And these are certainly elements and sort of pillars, if you will, that will continue to support. the edifice of Fourth Reich political theology moving forward in history and, you know,

I'll give you a chance, Marcus, to comment on what you think. But at least the way that I see it, you know, the first one is this faux objectivity, this constructed sense of objectivity and neutrality that pervades all of these efforts to speak in a unified voice or to to consolidate bourgeois ideology around a sort of world-shaping point of view of El-Tan-Shaung, a worldview way of seeing the world. Yes. And they all kind of adopt this omnipotent voice in the way that they write, in the way that they observe the perspective, of these thinkers is that of, you know, the kind of God's eye view looking down on human affairs, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's the Cartesian terminal object, right? Like, in this doubt, you engage with the great doubt because you want to arrive at a terminal object. You know, one thing that you can no longer doubt. Of course, for them, it's a kind of, I mean, it's, again, this is their rejection, I guess, of Kant, even if some soon will be starting to call himself neocantians, I mean, Kant kind of like said that there is no such thing, you know, like the ding Anzich, the thing in itself, like can you really gain access to it? Probably not, you know, like his doubt goes longer. But they refuse it. I doubt they even never doubted anything. Like, you know, they are, you know, Pesedo philosophers.

Like they just want to be sure of themselves. Right. And of course, yes, this is their, that is why they constantly refer to this kind of like, yes, objective state of things or, you know, the status quo as being a status quo simply by the fact that it is a status quo. You know, this is the way it is. Yeah. Yeah. And it allows them to deliver very politically charged instructions for so. organization in a way that conceals their agenda behind it because it appears always to the reader that,

oh, no, they're just calling it like it is. They're just describing what exists. They're not making a prescriptive assertion about how things should be. They're just saying, you know, this is how it is. Therefore, we must do X, Y, and Z in order to, you know, better organize, to enhance the efficiency, et cetera, et cetera, something that we live with today in the neoclassical economic model that has kind of dominated mainstream politics for the last 75 years, you know, since the Second World War, since Hiroshima, really. Yeah.

Which, obviously, the starting point kind of belies the objectivity in itself. that is how you prove a point I guess we will eventually see yes but yeah I mean yes there's something very clever in this way of you know you speak about ambiguity

whilst they at the same time speak of like objective clarity like how do we fit these two things together and I think it is something you know like one has to understand like how axiomatic this like

reasoning is you know like of course we need dogmas i think to a certain degree i mean like mathematics can't function if like you you know when we sit down here and talk you know and then don't start saying that like no but actually in my world three times three is eight uh like of course we need some axiomatic thinking but i think if you really do return to uh you know the the terminal object you retract or like, you know, you retractively move through this line of axiomatic thinking of like, you know, this is this because that was that. You arrive, I think, at something that maybe there is the, you know, like there's an agreement

there. Like, you know, can we just establish that this is this so that we can continue to say what that is? And like, you know, that's a social communication to a certain. degree, you know, like, and I think that's what it's about to be human. But like, these people are clearly using the ambiguity for political reasons. Like, you know, like they want to, and we're going to see this more and more, you know, like how does it play in? Because it's clear, as we've stated time and time again now, that like this all develops

because of their incapability to see the problems caused by the proletariat. So there's clearly an in-group. and an outgroup for them. But at the same time, they don't want to recognize that that is the case. So you need an ambiguity to cover up the fact that we are not all invited philosophically to retroactively retrace our step back

to the terminal object from which our axiomatic science began. You know? Like, that's the fucking trick. And that perfectly sets up the second of these pillars that I have extradct. from our first chapter in this discussion. And that second pillar is the unifying thread of mythological backstory, right?

The creation of these origin stories through narration that the political economists are able to come up with, you know, to varying degrees of convincingness. but really they're accessing raw materials in creating these narratives that they're readers you know if you're talking about a bunch of bureaucrats a bunch of sort of quasi aristocratic fail sons that find themselves in the position of bureaucratic power all of a sudden in the 19th century like they're going to be susceptible to receive any story that rationalizes their position atop the social pyramid, right? And that's another running thread that goes through all of these guys. And it's, you know, in some respects, it's straight up Machiavellian,

right? He wrote the prince to ingratiate himself to the sovereign of his time. It was a reaffirmation of the legitimacy of autocratic rule by the prince. And he rationalized it through this entire backstory. And I think that's a good kind of crystallization of this process. And it's something that we see time and time again from everybody to Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill to Max Weber. They're all constructing a path that, builds upon itself and creates in that process an inferential algorithm of sorts, right?

Like, you know, a lot of these inferences that are built up through these mythological backstories, whether it's a nationalistic backstory, or whether it's a class-based backstory, or even a secularized quasi-religious, right? Like the Christian Democrats, like how can you actually be a Democrat and still be Christian if you're not enforcing absolutism

on the subjects of the populace? But there's ways to do that by injecting arbitrariness into the rationale. Like if you actually inspect any of these things, and this is something that Lukash does very well, and other Marxist theoreticians, too. I mean, we're using, or at least I'm using Lukash because it's top of mind

and because he does it so effectively and so systematically. But once you scratch beneath the surface, there's really a lot of assumptions that may not have such a sound foundation in reality, but these guys make it up, and, you know, it holds together like a, story. Yeah. No, for sure, right? And like, I mean, Machiavelli is, you know, it's like the early first bourgeois revolutions, you know, that ultimately fail, right? Like, they're going to have to wait until the Enlightenment. They're going to have to wait until the Paris Revolution. And, but, you know, like, you see time and time in Ken that, of course, it wasn't that the bourgeoisie convinced the

aristocracy to give up their power because of the sound reasoning of their economic theories or like, you know, the ownership of the means of production. Like, you know, it was the actual possession of the means of production and the money extracted from that, the surplus value extracted from that, to, you know, in Machiavelli's case, right, like fund the armies of these concieres, right? Like these private armies and these mercenaries. And I mean, that's how the 30-year war is fourth as well, you know, with mercenaries. It's not really like, like, you know, on the level even of nation states fighting each other.

when you have, yeah, hired Dutchmen fighting for the Protestant cause in Sweden or, you know, some Savoyan or, you know, Rhenland mercenaries fighting for the, the Prussian objectives, you know, like they want to hide this fact, you know, of this relationship between violence and economy and revolution. Yeah, fuck it, bring in the Mamalukes.

Why not? For the Napoleonic conquest of the Iberian. Peninsula, whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, yeah, these things don't fit so well in, too. Yeah, the mythology that you're talking about, you know, that's going to make a more palpable explanation as to how we came so far, you know, starting from, what is it that Drake says?

Yeah, starting from the bottom, now we're here. Or I'm sorry for quoting rap in a very bad way, but, yeah, they don't want to talk about, like, yeah, the dirty shit that they did along the way, right? Right. And the third pillar, the third sort of fundamental element that I think we covered last time that will pervade the rest of this discussion is this appeal to an arbitrary quasi-religious category, you know, whether it is actually a theological force, whether it's actually around theological, ideological formation, or, you know, more commonly what we see, in these more secular orders, a quasi-religious category like the god of the market. You know, the ultimate arbiter that is arbitrarily imposed on the logic of the ruling class, like the laws of the free market, right? These laws that are considered above reproach, above human intervention,

and, you know, governing human behavior in, a metaphysical way that these theoreticians conceive of, again, as a sort of post hoc justification, but that the masses of people and that the masses of school children, right, throughout the 20th century and up till the present day, learn as almost like the Ten Commandments, you know, on the same par of... Secular Ten Commandments, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Quasi secload.

The same part of like religious dictates or even moral precepts or whatever. But it's something that is almost imbued with a superhuman potency above and beyond the control of man that men are subordinate to and cannot overcome. But of course, again, these are simply bourgeois norms. that are communicated as supernatural for the purpose of instilling discipline in the working classes that inures again to the continued domination

of the bourgeoisie of the owners of capital over life on earth. Right, right. It is the a priori, it is the always already, it is the, yes, the norms, as you say,

which is, you know, perfect, like I think the perfect segue because we're going to see that now this during Weber's fall or the Weber brothers fall we start to see the rise of the

neo-Cantians who do believe that there is this yeah like it's you know this what did you say the superhuman potency you know it's very connected to Leibn's philosophy like existential philosophy again

the vitalist you know feeling like you know if you don't know with your brain what is right and wrong when you beat somebody to pulp you will feel it don't worry about it man and follow your heart into the bloody battles of the streets

and of course what the liberals couldn't do which is to channel that power in a certain direction they only try to subdue it and insofar that like it was used against the socialists of course they knew how to channel it.

You just give some fry corpse and some fucked up, you know, ether smoking, you know, veterans, the power to shoot against union organizers and so on. Then they do know how to maintain the status quo. But to take society to the next level, insofar that that is a higher stage of Caesarism and fascism, they didn't know what to do. But there were people ready to take up. up the mantle. And a lot of that groundwork was laid by liberals.

Exactly. And I think with that, we can get into our story. And before we jump in then to talking about like the purpose of this ambiguity and the sort of like usefulness of it, which I think we will definitely see when we begin now, which Smith in a short while proper and the way that he uses the Leviathan of Hobbes, which we did mention Hobbes a little bit in the first episode. I think can we just try to think a little bit together here? You know, you as having a mandate much closer to legal theory in general, but okay, in an Anglo-Saxon setting. But the German problem, which is constituted as the original

German problem of sociology, which is the problem of Geminschaft and Geselschaft. which I think is the running thread for the rest of our conversation in a way because here appears a kind of like it's seemingly unbridgeable gap right but which they have to gap in some way and to explain like yeah what is geminshaft and gaseelschaft and this was also you know picked up by by emily dirkheim and you know the other sociologist but it's mainly like yeah via berturnist and simmel it's turning who writes this book and the title is even

Gemmainschaft and Geseltzschild. So the title itself has the problem in it. Let me see here. So Weber, Max Weber, he writes to Ternis towards the end of the 1800s and he says that Geminschaft is rooted in a subjective feeling that may be affectual or traditional.

Whereas Geselchapst is. based in relationships, again, according to Weber, which are rooted in rational agreement by mutual consent, the best example of which is, of course, the commercial contract. So that is to say, there is a division of social life into a natural group, you know, the rational group, I guess, at least insofar that, you know, we use our rationale to understand what the natural group is, even though be it faulty. And this is the foundation in kinship. this is Geminschaft you know like so the the blood relations let's say for just for now to make a clear image of where this is going

and then the cultural group that has its foundation in free choice you know so this is the slightly more irrational level you know like who do you feel like you belong to i guess you know and this is the geselt shaft and this is you know again like yeah the commercial contract right you know where you make a decision to be part of something And so I made, and like maybe we can start our discussion here a little bit about this at least, that this original problem. So I said that it doesn't really say anything. I mean, of course already this produces a categorical antagonism, right? Like that one group is there because of natural non-choice. and the other one is there because of social choice, right? So there is already in a categorical antagonism.

And then if we were, because we are Marxists, so of course we ask the real political antagonism, what is that, you know, between these two groups, you know? Because of course we know that there are those of the, you know, who are of the Geminschaft, the natural non-choice group, but who refuses to be part of the Geselschaft, you know, like people, who are anarchists, who people who are communists, you know, people who for political reasons might be

American, but they don't agree with the American project, you know, like they are American by birth. And then, of course, Americans, there's nobody who loves going back further than being American than Americans themselves, you know, always saying, oh, actually, I come from this place in Europe or whatever. I'm European or, yeah, unless they are originally Americans. and then they are not listened to at all. But, you know, that's another problem. Right. But those are still nevertheless.

You know, Native Americans is another category that you could imagine as like an outlier. Exactly. Or Native Americans or, you know, a first generation immigrant that is born here after their parents fled something in some periphery country that imperialism forced them out of through these wars like in the 1980s, right? Like you have a lot of people that are accused by the mainstream of being non-conforming. Exactly. Of not assimilating into American way of life. But nevertheless, form this problematic element of the community, the political community.

Because they got the passport, they got the citizenship. Exactly, exactly. And they're here. Yes, exactly. So they are of the Geselschaft because they have an American passport. But they don't want to be part of the Geminschaft, you know, because they are not, you know, like, you know, like I'm not white the way that you are white, you know, like Jews or Muslims or Roma, you know, might not feel like, you know,

your tradition is not my tradition. Or, and that's just suggesting that maybe that is a choice by them not to be for wanting to assimilate. but they might also be forced you know like of course at this time you know in the 1920s there's rampant anti-Semitism in the countries where this idea of

Geselchaf and Gemmaidstaff is developed who are not even allowed them you know like you know they by by default they become members of the Geselschaft but they are refused to be members of the Geminschaft you know like you are part of the society but we will not let you be part of the community

Right. And many times, you know, the values that unite the Geminshaft, the community, the subjective community, are exclusionary on the basis of race, on the basis of religion, whatever arbitrary categories you want to build in, you know, the in-group sentiment in order for it to exist at all has to be exclusionary. Yes. That's why, you know, I think any good. Marxist must as a very fundamental element of ideology come to terms with the fact that nationalism of any kind is necessarily chauvinism in some respect, right? You can have liberationist nationalism for subjected populations, right? Like Palestinians or the Irish or other groups that have been subject to colonial domination, that have a cohesive nationalism for the purpose of liberation.

But as a framework for organization, nationalism is always exclusionary. It's always chauvinistic and it's never liberatory in the final analysis, right? It's something to be overcome through some kind of struggle towards a larger class struggle of broader liberation. It's never something that is an end in itself. And so many fucking people cannot get around that. And it's like, are we still having this conversation a hundred years later? Yeah. I mean, just take, wow, the best example for any Marxist or leftist, take Cambodia, man.

Like, yes, of course, it's good to fight as a United Nation against the brutality of the American imperialists, but when you start to make sure that the only people who are allowed to be communist cadres are people who are Khmer, and you start killing all the Vietnamese cadres because they are of different people, even though they have the most experience

in fighting the American imperialists, well, on the one hand, you have probably CIA infiltration, making sure that this happens, but you also have a faulty, understanding of like how a revolutionary movement is to be built, right? Yes. Yeah.

Or, you know, to give even a more recent example, you see these American quote unquote self-described communists who position themselves against quote unquote illegal immigrants as part of this mega-communism utter bullshit framing that believes that you can embrace an American national identity, which what does that mean except white nationalism? Let's be fucking serious. And exclude the targets of imperial suppression and torture and repression

and ultimately genocide of all of the brown people that have arrived to these shores as a result of the heart. harvest of empire, right? The creating conditions of life that are unsustainable and unsurvivable in the immediate imperial periphery in Central America, Mexico, South America, etc. And it's like those people are just so fundamentally wrong about how liberation works. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they have already jumped. far ahead in our discussion, right? Because they're already on the

Smittyian exploitation of this antagonism, right? Like first, I think the liberals, and like this is, you know, it's the same thing because the liberals have had hegemony now in America for like, you know, a very long time, like especially when you

look at like post-Obama years, right? Wait, are you still there? Now it sounds like you're dispel. Can you hear me? You know, they're still shipping them over here. They put them in the cars. They put them in the TV. They put them in the stereos and on the radios. You're sticking your ears.

They put them in your watches. They got little teeny grimums for watches. Okay. Yeah, so we see, I think, this categorical antagonism, then, between Geminschaft and Geserchaft, between society and community. Of course, the liberal approach here is to try

to as as was famous during the Obama years right to to heal the divide right like you know they want to they want to try to come up with something that's kind of like solve this categorical antagonism now when we talk

about this in German terminology you are going to understand very well all the English speakers probably why this is somewhat impossible because of course the first term is or not impossible, but it's problematic. You know, like the healing of the divide is not...

Insidious even. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to pave the way for a actual proper fascist non-solution. Because, like, of course, the first one is the folk, right? Like the people, you know, like, oh, are the people, you know, it's ambiguous enough, right? Like, are they the gesaelschaft or are they gemanshaft? You know, are they the community or are they society? You know, like, who is allowed to be part of a people, you know, especially when you say,

American people, it's very, very ambiguous, you know, like, who are they? You know, what religion do they have? What pigment? The first words of the constitution, we the people. Who is we? Who is we? Uh-huh. And so, yeah, the folk, very, very problematic. And the concept of the folk, the people, it arises here in the 1800s, you know, it's never been talked about before in the same way. like I mean like as a solution to this to this problem of course there were notions of like

you know genology and things like this goes back to all the way to antiquity but but this like you know yeah let's leave it at that this ambiguity around the folk and in Germany they also have another

solution here the liberal sociologists which lasts to this day, you know, and that is the notion of the bund, you know, like a forbund, we say in Swedish, and that's why, like, for example, Germany today is a Bundesrepublic, you know, it's not a federal republic, it's a Bundesrepublic. And then you're going to start wondering, like, okay, so what is that? You know, like, what does the Bund come from? Well, now again, we have a few different, like, interesting, you know, because we wanted to trace everything back. We have, for example, one very reactionary notion here, which is the Mennebund, which I've talked

about a little bit before in my own show, where one of the German sociologists, the second generation of Weber-Ternius and Simmel, he was called Hermann Schmallenbach. So he's also popular during the Weimar period and the interwar period and before the First World War. and he said that like you know they are natural you know because they are determined by gender menabun means men's band right and they are you know actually warrior bands but they are still voluntary you know because even though you are a man not everybody is an alpha right like you got to make yourself an alpha right yeah like that's the selling point of like the monosphere right you know you're got to put some work into it otherwise you're going to succumb to the feminization of the of the of the liberals

again this is a liberal actually introducing this notion here but we're going to see how it's quickly appropriated by the fascists and so they are held together neither by love or family nor like you know voluntary submission but this kind of like common emotional experience you know of an almost religious character and now we are back here to this political theology you know but on the very highest vitalist levels you know of the experience you know of like just being with these feels that we talked about before.

And we're going to see like how then like I mean without any control or any channeling this is just like a like a mob run amok right? Like the monosphere is today. I mean the most it can do right now is like fucking singing

singing Kanye West's Sig Heil song in a club you know like that's the level it's at right now you know like which is like please keep doing it. that because it's so silly like at least i think well either that or surrounding a guy on the street of minneapolis and shooting him 11 times yes while pinning him down uh-huh you know that's kind of the two sides of the coin i guess today yeah and that was like yeah like a little peak that we we got a taste

of like just a few years ago if you're referring to like yeah the um no today this happened today Oh, this happened today. I thought you were talking about Floyd. No. The black guy. No, all right. This was an ICE execution that happened just today that, you know, I don't know how many agents surrounded and pinned this guy down. And he apparently had a gun on his waistband.

But they took the gun. And after they took the gun, they fired 11 rounds collectively into him and murdered him right there on film. Fuck. All right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, this is like ISIS. I've been having this a little bit like of an issue. Terminology wise like when I see a lot of Americans talking about, you know,

some talking about ISIS as a Gestapo. And, you know, when I've been thinking, you know, is it actually more of like an SA level of organization? The warrior ban or the menibund, I think sort of now temporarily solves this problem because it's still, it's unclear where ICE is. is going to go, right? Like, they're really trying to make it. I mean, why I say it's not Gestapo is because it still seems to be too public, right? Like, at least that's the, you know, because I see everything through Twitter and people filming it, so it looks very public to me.

I'm sure they come to people in the dead of the night as well and just take them from their house and they have a lot of like, you know, behind the scene movements as well. But it seems like they are not, I mean, people are still resisting, is what I'm saying. So it looks like there's still a public outrage towards it, which means that maybe it's still more of a storm up Thailand, like the SA level of organization rather than the Gestapo or the SS, when they have punity to do whatever they want. But these are different developments of the Mennebund, I think.

And as we shall see, a lot of, like, you know, these, you know, people who you might have heard about, like Anst Jung No, not Jung what is the name the Stalhelm author that everybody loves

who's a Junger conservative Yeah, yeah yeah exactly and Schmidt as well you know like they believe that society had to arise from these kind of like warrior bands

like that's how the first states were made and you know in so far that class society was probably a very violent takeover of the monopoly and the institution of monopoly of violence, maybe to a certain degree they are right, but society, you know, as a good thing, didn't come from this. You know, it's repression and things like that. Yeah, and it's ironic how Weber came up with the concept of the state

as the monopoly having the monopoly on violence, right? Wasn't that a Weberian concept that is attributed to his sociology, I think so. Between the Protestant ethic and the other main thing that he's known for in contemporary political education and the theoretical underpinnings of the state that you learn in the American university system is the state is the possessor of the monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its borders and that concept belongs to the mind of Max Weber so ironic, if you think about it, that he, like you said, paved the path.

He's neutral liberal. So easy for the fascist to just, yoink, I'll take that. I could do a lot with that. Yeah, no, most definitely. Right? Because, I mean, Max Weber was like, you know, a very depressed character. most of his life and I think to be honest like a lot of it comes

from this like irresolvable core in his thinking where he tries to be you know very rational and pragmatic in so far that sociology is just you know going to be this neutral observer but of course he cannot help to you know

help himself to to put forward some kind of solution to the disintegration that he sees happening during the Weimar you know like what is it that it's threatening his cherished, neutral, liberal, Western democracy. You know, what is it? You know, of course, he doesn't have a real analysis of that,

but he does have a solution. And I think that's the other, you know, like, he's not, he never goes to the level of consciously exploiting the antagonism between Geselschaft and Geminschaft, but he does provide the solution, you know, of the Caesar. Like, so in the conversation, according to his wife's notes which he had with Ludendorff

and so Ludendorff you will know is the leader behind the well he's involved in both of the two early pitches during the Weimar Republic like the Beichler push and then also the Ludendorff push which I think takes place in Berlin right it's 21 and 23

if I'm not remembering incorrectly but most importantly Ludendor was the de facto dictator of Germany during like the war, right? Because he's the leader of the German army the First World War we're talking

about here. And so yeah, in this conversation he said and like now you will hear like what does it sound like when a liberal talks to an outright dictator and how an autocrat you know like how do they find common ground? And I think this

the great credit, I've heard this quote before but it's to the great credit of like Lukach to remind me of it. them to put it there as like, you know, don't get lost in the details of like all the liberal mumbo jumbo, you know, like when they talk to each other, this is how they talk to each other.

Play that shit. Let's go. Yeah, play that shit. In a democracy, the people elects as its leader a man it trusts. Then the man elected says, quote within the quote, now hold your tongues and obey.

Neither the people, end of the quote, within the quote, neither the people nor the parties may contradict him. Afterwards, it's for the people to judge. If the leader has erred, then away to the gullals with him, end of the quote, in its entirety. And so we can see it's not surprising then that Luden Dorff said to this, oh, I like the sound of such a democracy. End of quote.

I like the cut of his jib. Yeah. Yeah, no, he can vibe to that. And so, yeah, I mean, and the thing is that this has already happened time and time again during the 1800s when the bourgeoisie tries to establish their power as a class, you know. You have the Bonapartist Caesarism already of the first Bonaparte in a way, Napoleon, but especially, you know, the 18th premier of Napoleon III, right? which Marx talks about when actually the bourgeoisie votes to

dissolve all further voting sometime in the 1850s right when the when the French once again lapse into imperialism and we have the same thing in Germany with Bismarck you know like a constitutional monarchy in a way with a parliament

but which is ultimately ruled by an iron chancellor you know and that's the only way that you can be kept together and that's like like you know how the German state is born in a way and you know and of course you have anti-socialist laws and people talking about other more important antagonisms as to why this is breaking down. So you know that that is the Cesarism and Cesarism I mean Gramsie talks about this a lot as well you know like it's a very complex concept but I think like you know you can see again there's

some ambiguity ambiguity here and Cesarism is a kind of solution to this problem that the bourgeois sea isn't a unified class you know like they they are fighting amongst each other to be the biggest you know industrial owner of the means of production and it doesn't matter to them if like you know if they have a common nationality or you know if they have a common gazelschaft or common geminschaft you know it doesn't make a fucking difference to them but the Caesar can produce this kind of false icon that that maybe is the case. You know, maybe we are actually at our heart Americans or Germans or, you know, of the white race or, you know, depending on how big the Caesar gets, you know, there are these false common denominators that this kind of grotesque body can personify, you know. I mean, with Trump, I'm sometimes wondering if it's just the will to be a bully or like, you know, being mean.

because it's like it entertains me too sometimes yeah and we'll get back into that with Schmidt too I think you know with the appeal exactly of cruelty and terror as well because Schmidt doesn't only put the Caesar there as a kind of solution to this problem Schmidt is going to give the Caesar certain tools to channel society to evolve to the next level which he does better than anybody has ever done before, which is why, of course, we had the Third Reich once upon a time. Yes. And, you know, but we see at least like, if we end our long recap here,

we can see that the liberals, and we're going to be kind, to a certain degree unconsciously pave this way because they don't understand or they don't want to admit the major antagonisms inherent to liberal society between classes, you know. they refuse this kind of, yeah, essentially Marxist analysis of history. And of course, you see around this time of Weber, you also see another solution to this,

which is what we all know as revisionism, the revisionism of Bernstein and the social Democrats, who all agreed to go to war in the First World War and, you know, fight for these emperors and these Cesar's. And, you know, trying to take everything that Marx said, but with one little detail of, you know, not talk so much about maybe the dictatorship of the proletary art or materialism and, you know, the dialectics of philosophy and so on, you know. But keep it. Yeah, what Lukash calls with tongue in cheek, realpolitik reasonableness is how he kind of insultingly refers to this brand of capitulation that the social Democrats brought about in the,

interwar period. Definitely. And they can never get away from the fact that they did rule during the Weimar Republic and they did rule during Red Vienna in Austria. And still somehow they managed to allow the rise of like the most barbaric social formation that we have ever known so far. So there must be something wrong in their solutions. I guess it's of what we are thinking. And should I end maybe here then with like just a recap like Luccache's concrete?

of this century? Yeah. Okay, let's do that. So the 1800 is a very confusing time, right? And I think Lukach says, if we're going to see, like, you know, he has a nice conclusion here, like, where does the liberalism end and where does the fascism begin? And so in his conclusion of the shortcomings, I think, of the liberal project, you know, and the philosophical degeneration of the bourgeoisie, not being able to see where.

where the true division in society lies. He says this, quote, confused though these studies are, and despite the inevitable meagerness and eclectism of their intellectual results, we must not underestimate the importance of such essays of a sociology of leadership. And I'm here he's talking about again,

sort of like this vitalist understanding of producing a little bit. leadership class based on charisma and we talked about that a little bit before you know like the true capitalist knows right how to take risks how to be economically intuitive and still be you know a gentleman

about it right and so this is like their hope right in creating a mental going on with the quote in creating a mental climate favourable to the acceptance of the Nazi mystique of the furor you know because he's the ultimate

business man right like he knows how to resolve the contradiction between the industrial classes and the landowning classes, you know, the man of the art of the deal, let's put it that way. Going on with the quote. A methodological foundation was now achieved in as much as the whole problem complex was made the necessarily irrational object of subjective experiences. Lacking such a climate, the fascist theory of the furor could never have gained credence among the intelligentsia. The experiential, irrationalist character of the choice of leader

in the Hitler movement was only a facade for the corruption and tyranny which characterized this movement, and it had its own very clear-cut, rational principles of selection, trustworthiness in the eyes of monopoly capitalism accompanied by the most barbaric of means. These latter motives were very far from the thoughts of Max and Alfred Weber, But none of this at all affects the objective connection in the development of German ideology towards fascism. End of quote. All right. Hell yeah.

Who is going to do? Yeah. And who is going to do what Max and Alfred Weber, what Durkheim and Simmel and Ternis, what they could not. What the liberals could not do. Who is going to do what they cannot do? Well, enter the stage. our Carl Schmidt, right? Oh yeah, you know that Carl Schmidt is about to make his grand entrance.

However, that will just have to wait. If you absolutely can't wait any longer, not another day, then head on over and sign up either for the Fourth Reich Archaeology Patreon or the return of the repressed Patreon support Marcus. He does incredible work if you like what he's putting down here. The man has an extensive back catalog over there for your listening pleasure, for your edification. And we have much, much more to get to with Marcus

to come on Fourth Reich political theology. But for now, I am Don, on behalf of Dick, on behalf of Marcus, saying farewell and keep on digging.