Rev Left Radio - 21st Century Marxism: Neo-Marxism and the Value of Engels

Episode Date: October 23, 2017

Brendan Leahy is a local organizer and revolutionary thinker. He was featured on our Ideology Episode a few months back.    He sits down with Brett to discuss Marxism and Neo-Marxism.   Topics include: Key neo-Marxist figures, Eco-Socialism, misunderstandings of Marxism, Friedrich Engels, Dual Power, Jenny Marx, Marx’s gothic influences, Primitive Accumulation, Marxist Feminism, Post-Modernism, and much more! ---- Outro music Insurrection! by B Complex Please support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  and follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio  Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Theme song by The String-Bo String Duo which you can find here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/album/smash-the-state-distribute-bread  

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and turn it up loud Revolutionary Left Radio starts now Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host and comrade Brett O'Shea And today we're going to do an episode on Neo-Marxism, Marxism in the 21st century, if you will. We have Brendan Leahy on, who was on our ideology episode. That was one of our early episodes, actually.

That was one of the episodes that we got a lot of good feedback and we still get feedback on. So go check that episode out if you haven't already. But Brendan is here today. Before we get into the episode, I do want to inform listeners that we're actually thinking of doing a spin-off podcast. One focus, me and Dr. Bones, actually, one focus not so much on interviews or theory

and definitely not focused on sectarian tendencies because me and Dr. Bones have very different ones. but we were thinking about doing a show focused more on revolutionary news and current events around the world, revolutionary movements that are occurring all over the globe, and then also have a section where we take live calls. But in order to do that, we do need a little bit of help. We need to see what the interest would be. If you can give us any feedback, tweet at us at RevLeft Radio, let us know if that's something

you'd be interested in hearing, and then also contributing to our Patreon or rating and review us on iTunes are great ways to help the show grow and help more people hear the show. We put a lot of time and energy into the show. I know a lot of people out there are working class like myself and don't have even a dollar to spare, but rating and reviewing is a great way to help us without money. And if you do have some extra dollars laying around, some change in your couch or whatever, you can throw it up on our Patreon. But yeah, I'd love to hear anybody's feedback on the possibility of a spinoff show focused on current events and live calls. So yeah, Well, that being said, let's go ahead and dive into the episode.

Brendan, how are you doing? Well, and yourself? Very good. I'm glad to have you back on. Good to be back. Brendan is a close comrade of mine. We organized together here in Omaha. We're friends, good friends.

I think Brendan has one of the best historical minds of anybody I know. His historical knowledge is always really impressive to me. And it's so deep and interesting, but I don't want to praise you too much here. I'm blushing. I'm blushing. I thought I couldn't get any redder. Why don't you go ahead and maybe introduce yourself and say a little bit about your background? Yeah, I'm Brendan. I'm an immense nerd, so I love to just pour over theory and history books in my free time.

But I do a lot of organizing. I try to do networking and work with a couple different groups as well as do the studying I do at home. So I try to keep the theory and the practice balanced. Yeah, and before we dive into the questions about neo-Marxism, how do you identify politically? How do you think of yourself politically? I usually just identify as a Marxist to people. I would probably prefer the term historical materialism, but it's a little less popular. And I'm absolutely a leftist, absolutely a socialist. I try not to get too bogged down into any particular theory, but in college I studied.

a lot of Latin American history, so I tend to identify a lot with the theories there, and they tend to be a little bit less sectarian and a little bit more, there's a lot more engagement between different tendencies there. So, you know, there's that. Yeah, and I always think that me and Brendan share insofar as we have a specific tendency that we share a tendency in that we are Marxists, we're materialists, but we draw a lot from anarchism. We draw a lot from Leninism. And we draw some stuff from Maoism, different tendencies. We take a little bit of it all. But the materialism inherent in Marxism, I think, is what commits us to, you know, a fundamental Marxist, you know, tendency or orientation

of our leftist politics. Yeah, absolutely. The historical materialism. I think certain leftist tendencies tend to hyper-focus on one aspect of that or, I don't know, forget. You hear, a lot of people call anarchists idealists and some anarchists are excellent materialists if they've got good materialism check it out definitely all right well let's go ahead and jump into this topic neo-marxism um can you go ahead and please start off by just telling us what neomarchism is maybe pointing out what it's not is a good way of addressing this question yeah absolutely um neo-marxism is a very broad term uh it effectively refers to any non

non-classical maybe non-mainstream in some ways form of Marxism so that definitely excludes the classic Marxists obviously includes Marx and Ingalls because they invented the thing

it excludes Leninists Marxist-Lennonists Maoists but it does include a lot of people will refer to Gramsci as a neo- Marxist, so he kind of is like a bridge between neo-Marxism and classical Marxism to me.

Yeah, and in some ways, it's always weird because in some ways I think the term neo-Marxism, it's useful, but it kind of comes off as a bit superfluous to me, because to me it seems like Marxism, by its very nature, should update itself as history unfolds. It should orient itself to the realities that we're facing right now. And I know different sects of Marxist thought would claim that they do do that, but I think neo-Marxism has a real commitment to doing that. How do you think of that difference between just regular old Marxism in the sense that is always updating itself dialectically or the term neo-Marxism? What do you think about those terms? How should we think about that?

Well, yeah, in a sense, if you are a good Marxist, you remember the historical aspect of historical materialism as social conditions and all these factors of history, you know, which includes culture and things like that change, you know, you're going to need to update that. and some people really cling to, you know, practice that really evolved in a different time and in a different place. So while certainly their update, like a lot of the more traditional tendencies are updated, they tend to be updated in a very specific way. And some people tend to assume what works in some places will work in others when it doesn't. Also, I think it's kind of, it's a result on one hand of the Soviet Union as the come in turn kind of monopolized on like the line of how to interpret Marx. This was both very useful for the Soviet Union

to kind of keep as their own thing. And the same thing with the United States. It was beneficial to the United States to pretend that all Marxists had to be, you know, Stalin's interpretation of Marxist Leninism. Absolutely. So neo-Marxism is definitely a very broad term in most people who are neo-Marxists

wouldn't use that term. I never hear somebody say, I'm a neo-Marxist. They just say I'm a Marxist. And in our last episode we did on the Soviet Union, our guest, Greg, I can't say his last name, Afiniganov. He talked about one of the deficiencies in Soviet Union thought at the time because they were industrializing and that sort of domination of nature was very much present in the Soviet Union and how they oriented themselves to the world.

But in the 21st century, when we have climate change and we'll get into eco-socialism, later in the 21st century when we have climate change we have different sets of problems to address and that sort of industrializing mindset doesn't quite fit with what we're trying to do now in the post-industrial you know 21st century late capitalist epoch so those are just some things that that we should think about going forward but just for just for you know convenience and sake we will use the term neo-Marxism throughout this interview just so people know that we're kind of talking about the same thing but so speaking of neo-Marxisms who are some of the key figures or schools of thought in neo-Marxism.

Yeah, I think, like I said, Gramsci is kind of debatable as a neo-Marxist, but some people include him because he really expanded, as well as, in a way, critiqued Marxist concept of ideology. So there, that kind of led to a lot of different ways to interpret ideology that is a little different than, say, you know, the sort of under-communism ideology will be over a sort of perception. and especially in those Soviet or those socialist countries that claimed that the class struggle was over, you know, the neo-Marxists would say, no, it's not. Gramsci is very important.

You get the Frankfurt School, which a lot of people refer to as cultural Marxism. They tend to be neo-Marxists and that they're really looking at things like fetishism in a different way. So that's Walter Benjamin, or Voltaire Beniamine, more accurately. A lot of these people face persecution under Nazis, or they fled the Nazis, and they came to the United States. And under the United States, while more free than Nazi Germany, in a lot of ways, it's also not really acceptable to be a Marxist. This is, you know, the 40s, the 50s, this red scare you will lose your job if people even think you're a Marxist. So this kind of turns into critical theory. It kind of became a way to say, I'm critically examining our society.

I think that it can be improved and it should be improved. And I'm going to use dialectics, but I don't necessarily want to call myself a Marxist, even though I'm using Marxist theory, kind of critical theory. Critical theory ends up informing a lot of non-Marxist tendencies, too. It's very influential. Absolutely. Yeah, and I think critical theory bleeds into film analysis. It bleeds into examining products of culture and how they are reflections and concentrations of ideology.

And so I think a lot of what the Frankfurt School was attempting to do at that time was kind of explain in the middle of the 20th century why certain countries hadn't ended up in revolt. Why America, for example, hadn't had such a powerful revolutionary movement that was kind of predicted, you know, that Karl Marx himself kind of pointed out as a possibility of happening. happening in the most advanced capitalist states, et cetera. And so it is really focusing on examining culture and emphasizing and extending the critique of ideology and how ideology operates in our society, which I think a lot of leftists are influenced by even if they don't know it.

Yeah, absolutely. So we've talked about the hyperadaptability of capitalism. One of the things that often gets accusationally thrown at Marx is that he underestimated the adaptability, of capital. And as capital adapts to new conditions and tries with increasing desperation to maintain its hegemonic domination, so too must anti-capitalist theory adapt. So in what ways is capital in our time adapting? And to what conditions do you see it attempting to adapt to? Yeah. I think Marx himself paints, if you actually do read Capital, you'll find

that capital, not the book, but capital, the system is always adapting. You know, to Marx, it was all about getting that surplus value, you know, so you're getting more money than the money you put in, you know, which is essentially profit, which is essentially exploiting labor. But this process, you know, it's not a static thing. It's in and of itself a process. So that implies movement and dialectics are very much about movement. capitalism is value in motion in a lot of ways so it's important to remember that Marx thought

that capital was adaptable I think it's also important to remember that Ingalls said pretty often that we're not really capable of knowing what's going to happen too much we have to really focus on like what's bad here so we can change it like he definitely like make some predictions about the family that are inaccurate or like how to deal with certain forms of oppression that might be inaccurate, but he sometimes will take a moment to say, but I'm not really sure. Like, only the people in the new society will know what they need to do in the new society. So, you know, capitalism, since Marx no longer operates under a gold standard, the sort of colonization that was happening at the time got farther, as Mark said it would. It got farther than it was in his time.

You know, if you remember Marx started writing before the Civil War. So, you know, even the U.S. economy changed. You know, you have Fordism, Taylorism, and you've got such a, we've got much more speculative economy now. And Marx did talk about speculation a little bit, but it's a different beast, especially now. Like finance capital has a lot more power when Marx is mostly talking about industrial capital. Often, again, he talks about it, but the focus tends to be, especially for people who like to talk about. Marks on that productive industrial type of labor. So we are definitely looking at a different beast.

It's adapted. People like to say that the revolution never happened in these industrial countries, but it's easy to forget there were actually, there was a rise in the workers movement after Marx. And the workers movement was well, very powerful up until, you know, in fascism, they deliberately broke labor power through, you know, the brown shirts and things like that. So it's not that, like, the revolution didn't happen.

It's just that, like, as worker militancy rose, you know, capital, and then the newbie's fascism, which didn't exist at Marx's time, came, and that they tried to break worker power, or maybe they moved some oppressions around, or it took new forms, you know. So a lot of the problems are still there. They're in a different form. Definitely. Yeah, and it's really interesting to think about fascism as an sort of extension of capital's adaptability. To some extent, after the Great Depression, we saw this rise in fascist movements. Currently, after the Great Recession, we're seeing the ravages of neoliberalism. We're seeing the rise of fascist movements, and that's something that Marx couldn't have foreseen,

but it's very much an aspect of capitalism in crisis, of capitalism with its back against the ropes, of capitalism as the center falls out and capitalism repeatedly fails to meet its promises, you see this rise of fascist movements, and it's like this historical dialectical movement. And so to think of fascism as one of the ways capital adapts is fascinating. I don't think it's talked about enough. We hear the phrase capitalism or fascism is capitalism and decay often, but I think we should start thinking of fascism as capitalism in crisis trying to defend the hierarchies and defend the status quo that capitalism has on offer.

Yeah, fascism is a lot like neoliberalism, and a lot of times you see the two equated, and I think they have very different ideologies, but the thing that's common about them is neoliberalism and fascism are both the restoration of class power. You know, we need to put the unions in their place. Same for both, you know, the minority races now they've gotten too aggressive, and they need to be put in their place. so the white man can stay in power. You know, the socialists are getting too powerful in such and such country.

They need to be wiped out, you know. Absolutely. And another aspect, I think, of the adaptability of capital, which we're seeing more talk of, and I don't know how this exactly this is going to play out, but this notion of a universal basic income. I view this as nice. I mean, for all of us could use a couple extra hundred dollars in our bank account,

but it's also going to be used as a way for capital to maintain its overall domination of the world if it can pay people off it can make people a little bit more comfortable and that may be a way that they're going to try to consolidate their power and weaken resistance movements so certainly i think that's something to be on the lookout for like it's complex because on one hand i think a ubi would certainly help people it would help us um with our workplace dynamic if we have more disposable income or more money in our savings account it would be less likely to take shit jobs or put up with shit, bosses, or whatever. So it's this weird dynamic at play

where a UBI would certainly help a lot of working people, but at the same time, it would help solidify and maintain Capital's domination. Yeah, and you'll definitely see Capital make concessions to socialism in order to kind of tone down the class conflict, and as soon as things die down, they take away a lot of those concessions. Absolutely.

You can see it with, you know, Kinesian, in a lot of ways. You can definitely see it like when the United States government starts copying some of the Panthers programs in the 70s and then immediately starts cutting them down in the 80s after the Panthers are gone.

Yeah, austerity politics. The rise of social democracies in a lot of way was Capitals attempt to give the worker something, give the working class something. And it has its gains for sure. But it's that pacification. so they can continue their domination, and in some ways the UBI is an extension of that.

But there's a lot of misunderstandings of Marxism that abound everywhere. You and I have talked about this a lot. From reactionaries to centrist liberals, even today online, you see so much misrepresentation of Marxism, so much confusion about what it means, so much Cold War propaganda and taboos still holds sway in people's minds. And even in a lot of radical leftist spaces, we see people of non-Marxist tendencies have just really absurd understandings of Marxism. So in your opinion, what are some of the biggest and most fallacious misunderstandings of Marxism? Well, I think first and foremost, libertarians would be surprised to find how pro-gun rights Marx was. He wanted to arm everyone. In fact, he got in legal

trouble because he was bringing arms to people, basically. He got in legal trouble for telling people not to pay their taxes, which I think libertarians would be surprised to find. Marxists It's not that Marxists don't think taxation is theft. It's that we think workplace exploitation is also theft. That's something that people miss. I think people tend to make Marxism a lot more stagist than it actually is. I think people think Marx was more dogmatic than he is. And you can certainly see when the conflict with the anarchists and the first international comes up,

why people get that impression. But he also, up until that point, was willing to work with anarchists and not only that but British trade unions which he was very disdainful of in a lot of ways for being racist and and kind of intolerant to women's rights he wrote about them in some of his letters that if they didn't deal with their racism then they were going to be a problem and not the solution but he worked with them and he tried to adapt so that's another thing about Marxism I think people kind of tend to oversight over-emphasize the materialism and less the like historic part and they tend to think of

it as again very stagist and um you know i think i think people don't realize how much marks and ingles understood things like morals were socially constructed um and how things varied and how perceptions were wrong yeah and um i also think anarchists sometimes have a very distorted view of Marx in relation to anti-authoritarianism. I know that's a term that it's debated a lot whether that's a useful term and people on the Lenin side would like mock the even use of that term authoritarianism. But Marx himself was very much in constant battle with the European states of his time, constantly being kicked out of state after state, having cops spy on him and his organizations, hound him. There's this one, in love and capital, a great book that

covers kind of Marx and Jenny Marks' relationship and the development of their theories and how they fed off each other. There's little stories about how they would be organizing in different states and how the police would hound them and how at one time cops came and knocked on Marx's door to kick him out of the country at late night. And Marx answers the door and is in his robe with the gun in his robe to deal with the fucking pigs. So there's a lot in Marx that I think anarchists specifically kind of don't get to enjoy because they're so ready to dismiss Marx and Marxism as just big stateism when Marx himself fought against the state so often in his life. Yeah, I think there's so much that is in Marx's letters or maybe are in like the

history books. Like, you know, people try to say that Marx said that there were only two classes. And if you read like the 18th Bramare of Louis Napoleon or the Civil War in France, he's very much aware that there are different classes besides the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. He just thinks that the central conflict of Victorian age capital is between those, you know. So, you know, I think definitely Marx would think that some of these classes can come into play in different ways. People think he didn't care about race or racism. And he certainly didn't talk about it enough for us in America being like in this supremely white supremacist society. But he did. He actually, he covered the civil war. He pointed out a lot of

times he spent a lot of his time actually writing articles about how the british press were being intellectually dishonest um the british press of course was allied with the confederacy initially yeah so they were very critical of the union obviously and and kind of painted the union as as you know destroying these like aristocratic gentlemen and like these poor ladies these poor ladies you know and and uh and one marks kind of goes off and he's like you don't care about irish women you know you don't care about indian women you know and he's naming places that are still, like, at the time, British colonies. Again, he's very critical of the British trade unions

for not supporting the Irish during their fight for independence. He was very concerned about that. I read an letter once where Ingalls mentions John Brown, which is, I think, something that was a news to me until I saw that. So, like, they care about America and American, like, history. And, you know, we have to remember that he's covering the civil war.

So, of course, he can't write about what happens after the Civil War, during the Civil War, you know, they're historical materials. They're not, you know, future tellers. Yeah, it's not, you know, there's no magic globe that Marx is like, oh, what's capital like for all time? You know, he's, he's pouring with what he's got in the British Museum. But he cares a lot about women's issues or, like, racial issues, even if he doesn't have a great understanding of them or their limitations, there's still that concern.

And compared to a lot of the other political philosophers of the time, you know, you're not going to find anyone who even cares except for in the case of women you've got john stuart mill right you know and he was an abolitionist marks and angles were abolitionists absolutely they wrote about it they talked about it um yeah so i yeah so that's something that people don't think about a lot and some of the critiques of of Marxism as class reductionism um are unfound are unfounded because you can trace a lot these like environmentalism feminism things we're going to get into later in this discussion, they might not have been perfect on those topics, but the seeds of the Marxist analysis of those issues were very much present. And of course it would take people after them

to build and expand on and take those thoughts and new directions. I think that's what a lot of neo-Marxism is really. It's people who not, they don't necessarily dismiss everything that say Lenin or whoever believed about Marxism necessarily, but they also recognize, you know, as a historical condition. That's Lenin's interpretation of Marx. And so they are, I think, they tend to look and reread Marx and Ingalls a lot more and not just assume that like Rosa Luxembourg and like Karl Kotzky had the perfect definition. They don't.

So you'll see them kind of take things that like Marx may mention in Capital and say, well, this is like a basic framework. What's right with it? What's wrong with it? How does it apply? Yeah, and some people might be confused about why we're talking so much about marks and angles in a neo-Marxist episode, but it's precisely because so many of those seeds existed in the original Marx and Engel thought. And you can trace so much of it back to some of those original arguments that they were making. And so we are going to talk about Marx a little bit in this. And this next question we're also going to because something in our discussions that we've talked about recently in preparation for this episode is you made something, you made an argument that I thought was really interesting that I haven't actually never heard before. You've argued that Marx, when he was writing, speaks in four different voices, generally. Yeah.

What are these four voices that Marx writes in? Well, and this is definitely not something that I realized entirely by myself. You know, David Harvey talks a little bit about it. And everybody's kind of aware that Marx is influenced by Hegel and Bruno Bar and, like, the German ideology, which is a philosophic tradition. He's reading Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo. So these are mostly British, Scottish political economists. But actually, before Marx was very famous, which it took a long time for Marx to become famous,

and even before he was super well-known, even in the socialist community, he wrote some fiction. and he actually, he loved fiction, Engels love fiction, they loved realism, and they loved Gothic stuff. So, like, when Marx is getting really into, or maybe he's being hyperbolic, he tends to write in a very gothic style. It's very melodramatic.

I love it because I'm a goth in the sense that I like Gothic literature and also the music of modern goth culture. So I eat this up. When he talks about, like, a specter haunting Europe or he treats capitalism as a vampire, you know anything like that he's very much using these metaphors of you know vampires and and things like that it's very gothic it's monsters you know what i mean and it's very victorian and at that point

you know it becomes a lot less dry than when he's you know comparing the prices of of commodities which is very boring and it's reeks of of you know political economy which is you know very dry like nobody very few people enjoy reading capital or the wealth of nations yeah yeah what are some other voices though that he writes in like well yeah so he's kind of got a voice when he's talking about philosophy you know it sounds a lot more hegelian um i'd say probably um it's less dry uh than the um then the um then the like political economy voice but it's also kind of highbrow as compared to like again you know when he's when he's propaganda There's a very different tone of voice in, you know, when he's talking about history than like in economic manuscripts than in, you know, the Communist Manifesto. And everybody loves the Communist Manifesto. But it's it's a it's a propaganda piece essentially that Marx and Ingalls were asked to write. Not everything that is in there they wanted to write. They were given some instructions. But so people take this very seriously. But this is the this is the you know, you have nothing to lose but your chains. There's a specter haunting ear.

up you know if he talks about he likes to talk about how like blood capitalism is you know comes out of blood basically and and so like he's got different voices depending on what he's been he uses irony and humor and a lot of his stuff yeah he and angles both actually can be very sarcastic that's something i think gives people the wrong impression about what they're writing about sometimes um because um they they take him seriously when they're making fun of things um an example is is a When I was first, you know, reading Marx and Ingalls and I was younger, you know, I read The Auntie During, which is like so famous or Herr During's revolution in science. And this is supposed to be this guy, the socialist thinks he's like figured it out. Hegel is trash, which is an argument can be made for that.

But, but like beyond the pale, like nothing he said is valuable. You know, Darwin is crap. I've got the new science and socialism is going. to be improved by my thought. And Inglis, you know, writes this book that's completely overshadowed Herr Doreen called, you know, Herduring's Revolution and Science, which even the title is sarcastic,

and it's kind of boiled down to the anti-Durring is usually what people call it now. But the whole thing is very sarcastic. I mean, he kind of, a lot of what he does is he paraphrases Dornring, and then he parodies it with the last sentence of the paragraph. So I was rereading part of it the other day, a couple weeks ago as a joke

and I read just for like I needed something to read that day or whatever I don't remember and I realized how funny that book was and the first time I didn't read it I didn't get it it's like when you read Shakespeare the first time and you're in elementary school you're not going to get all of the

lewd jokes that Shakespeare has and then if you're a theater kid who's you know done Romeo and Juliet you realize you know after you do midsummer's night's dream how perverted Shakespeare was You know, and that's something, you know, so everyone's like, oh, you know, that's old English when technically it's modern English that just is in a different, you know, historical circumstance, if you will. Same thing with Marx.

We're not Victorians. We're not necessarily used to Victorian writing. We're not necessarily versed in, you know, German idealism. So we miss some of that sarcasm sometimes. And there's a propensity to take people old writers very seriously. And you approach them assuming everything they write is going to be. highbrow and straightforward and intellectual and all of that when in fact you have to realize these are human beings they enjoy fiction they enjoy humor when he was critiquing max sterner didn't

he call him saint max like don't they have little nicknames well he called them all um max because they were all or saint sorry because they were all they were all pretty um concerned with religion like the old hegelians you know they thought religion was good and and like christianity is a a powerful force in history. And the young Higelians thought that was BS. Fribeck kind of introduced materialism. You've had ego as son before, so they've talked about Sterner,

who in some ways, I think, is more materialist than the other ones, in some ways less, Bruno Bauer. But Marx is kind of trying to figure out his place. And Ingls is too. They meet, they don't get along immediately, but they become like great friends and they're writing each other letters and they're talking about who exactly uh angles and marks right okay and um so ingles uh and marks you know they're trying to develop

their thought and they know that like something's not quite right with the german idealists even the ones who are materialists but they're not quite sure and so like you know when they write the german ideology part of it is to clarify where they stand in regards to all of them um and it's it's kind of long and uh it's still kind of early on so like i think they get better later later and they have a better conception later on. But it's very sarcastic because they're kind of making fun of, you know, the holy family of German ideology. So they're all saint, you know, even though some of them, you know, hated religion.

Many of them hated religion, the young Higalians. Yeah, that's always interesting and funny to realize that they're kind of like talking shit to each other when they're dissing each other and creating nicknames for each other. One of the things that you mentioned that I think is fascinating is you talking about Marx's use of Gothic terminology, the specter, you know, vampires, that's something that I actually use a lot. If you go like on our Facebook page, you'll often hear me talk about vampires. I think I made a post today talking about Jeffrey Dahmer in a reference to capitalism and whatnot. And I'm very influenced by the horror genre. I'm fascinated by serial killer genre and all of that stuff.

And so I found myself using gothic imagery to talk about capitalism just because of my own influences. And then you and me had a discussion about Marx's Gothic influences and it just kind of came full of circles. Like, oh, yeah, of course. And you'll see Marxist writers and leftist thinkers kind of indulge in that sometimes depending on who they are. And I found that extremely fascinating. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah. And you out of everyone I know really focuses on how much Frederick Engels is underrated.

You have a soft spot in your heart for Engels and you can talk for years on him. So can you tell us why Angles is so important and what you find most interesting about him? He was a warm, sweet guy, first or foremost. And he truly loved Marx. He truly loved the people he knew. And like, he was the bourgeoisie.

And he goes to England and sees how, I mean, he gets involved in the German, revolutions. Let me take that back. But as he, you know, as he sees, you know, especially after he sees the conditions of the working class in England, he really takes to heart, like, the goodness of the proletariat. He takes it very seriously. He gets involved with an Irish woman, Mary Burns, who he very much loves, absolutely. They don't get married. They're kind of on and off, but over a very long period of time, because he doesn't believe in the bourgeois institution of marriage because he thinks it's oppressive to women, you know? So I think like Ingalls is kind of underrated

because he actually very much cares. People kind of treat it like Marx and Ingalls didn't really talk about women until the origin of a family, private property in the state. But even if you read the conditions of the working class in England, you know, a lot of these proletariat, they're not, you know, English, big strapping Anglo-Saxon men always. A lot of them are Irish, and a lot of them specifically are Irish women who are being oppressed under this. I think Ingalls also just we talk about a lot of people

who don't like Marx and Ingalls talk about how all their predictions are on. And a lot of us who like Marx and Ingalls are like, oh, they're not profits and they didn't want to be taken as such. But they actually did predict some things. And one of the ones I think most interesting is I think in two different occasions,

Engels successfully predicted basically World War I, and he died before it happened. He says, you know, he says, like, you're going to have France and England and Russia on one side and Germany on the other. And, you know, he thinks that it'll be better for Germany to win because he thinks if Germany wins, then the revolution will happen there. And he thinks that if the other countries win, the revolution will happen in Russia first, which it does. he also predicts that it will be terrible for the environment it totally did it was awful for the land it took a long time and parts of Europe are still deforested from the trench warfare he predicted the death count of infantry I don't remember the exact number

but it'll be very easy to look up if you Google Ingalls predicted World War I you'll see it and I think the estimates a lot of the estimates are between like 8 to 10 million and he says it's nine million or something like that you know he's kind of right in the middle of the estimates right um and he says there's this great line uh he's like the heads uh the crowns will roll off the heads of kings or something and a lot of you know monarchies world war one was the end of them so i think that's really important yeah that's funny and um or not funny but just fascinating um what is what is funny is um the notion that angles when he was a young man was kind of, you know, wayward, not really knowing what he wanted to do with his life.

And Engles' father figured, if I let him take over, what was it, a textile mill? I mean, he just sends him to be, like, basically a manager. He doesn't even in charge at first. One of his businesses. He's like a clerk for a bit, too. Yeah, send him to be a manager, help run one of his businesses. And his thought was like, this will get these radical ideas out of his head and get him on the straight and narrow path.

But in actuality, it just exposed the exploitation and absurdity of the capitalist factory to Engels and Engels dedicated the rest of his life to, assisting Marx in fighting against it. Yeah, absolutely. He's fully committed. He actually fought in the revolutions. He used to rob armories and arm the proletariat. Like, the dude was on the front lines.

And even before, uh, even before, like, everybody knows of him as kind of bankrolling marks. Um, and he certainly is, Mark's listening board and, and most books by either one of them, you have to assume the other one at least helped on, you know? Yeah. Um, and almost. always. But beyond that, even before he was wealthy before his father passed away, he was giving money to Mark's third of his income before he was wealthy, like individually wealthy. So he was,

he was committed. He was committed again. He didn't want to get married. And neither did Mary Burns. They didn't get married. She died. It kind of is weird, but hands up getting with her sister, which some people really have a problem with, I think, or might. But they're together. until she dies and the story is is she she again a proletarian truly proletarian Irish woman who you know at the time England was terrible terrible to Ireland as some of you probably know and and so you know the Irish immigrant classes is definitely very persecuted at the time and so they didn't get married either until she's dying and this I assume because she's

Catholic kind of if like Connolly needing that confession in the end. It's like we need to get married because they've been living together and he marries her like on her deathbed for her, you know, so he's very much committed to what he does. Yeah, yeah. And you know, the notions of he went with his, her sister after Mary died. I mean, you know, you can criticize that and I'm sure there are good criticisms, but love is messy. And people hurting people in a situation where somebody that they really care about dies. Sometimes the closest people to that person are the ones that are there for you in the ruination of what just occurred.

And so, I mean, the human propensity for love and tragedy is, you know, plentiful. And so I don't necessarily hold that against him. I think he was a good guy. Yeah, I think we should be careful to hold him to bourgeois family standards, you know, especially as more and more of us are exploring, you know, things like polyamory or trying to eliminate patriarchy in the family. Oh, absolutely, yeah. I'm really interested to see where, you know, the millennial generation's sort of breaking down

of some of those norms that Engels talked about. I'm interested to see where that goes into the future. So, yeah, stay tuned, I guess. But neo-Marxism is, in a lot of ways, we've talked about this, simply, like, updated Marxism. It's a living, breathing theory and praxis that evolves with the times and conditions. Much of what Marxists wrestle with today weren't exactly on the menu at the time Marx and Ingalls were writing. So let's touch on some general topics that are relevant to us in the 21st,

country, and you can touch on them from a Marxist perspective tracing the history of these ideas in the Marxist tradition. We're going to touch firstly on primitive accumulation. I know this is something that interests you and that you talk about a lot. So what is primitive accumulation and why is it important? Yeah, primitive accumulation is discussed in Das Kapital as, you know, capital in motion involves things like commodities, you know, the mediation of value through money with those commodities, producing those commodities, exploiting labor.

But before those things could happen, you know, you needed a proletariat, you needed commodities, you needed the goods necessary to have those things in motion, you know. And primitive accumulation is essentially the accumulation of capital before capitalism was the dominant system. To get to the starting point where then capital could then... Yeah. So like, you know, Marx talks a lot about how, you know, the elements, like the seeds of socialism are in capitalism, you know. Similarly, the seeds of capitalism were in the pre-capitalist Western Europe. And these lead to a couple things that were necessary, like socially necessary in terms of this is what happened. So clearly it had to happen. Otherwise, it wouldn't have in terms of, like, not necessary as in this is the only way it could have played out, but necessary in terms of this is how it played out.

Right, right. And primitive accumulation boils down to several things. According to Marx, it was the conquest of the Americas, basically. You know, the seizure of land, gold, the exploitation of native labor power. You should learn about the incommienda system if you ever get the chance terrible. Incomienda system, it's the Spanish, how Spanish used native labor, which obviously was devastating. huge genocide and the cultural erasure. So, you know, this sort of exploitation of the new world, including resources, is part of it.

The other part of it is the Atlantic slave trade. He basically says that the, you know, the proto-capitalists turned, you know, Africa into a warren for hunting humans, you know. And so the slave trade is a big part of it. and what he mostly talks about in depth both because it's more available to him living in Europe at the time as opposed to the Indian wars and stuff, this stuff is still playing out.

So he's got very limited knowledge that we really just can't say that Europeans are ever going to fully have. He's really focused on what he does have and that's enclosures. And enclosures is how public land was turned into private land, you know, for kings, for barons, you know, maybe for the church in some cases. And this is how you get the proletariat, you also get, you know, capital.

Because, you know, when you lose your land, the capitalist can use that land for rents or for building a factory or whatever it is. You know, and now you have this landless population who at first was, they could live and not have to deal with the king because they could grow their own food. You know, now they have nothing. But, their labor time. So, you know, you have to have that in order to have capital. So I think primitive accumulation is really useful because, one, it explains how capitalism arose in a very accurate way. I also think it's really important because this is one of the places where Marx talks about some of the things people don't talk about. And the other element of that is that

he didn't talk about it enough. So there's a lot we need to talk about in terms of, you know, racism and the necessity of white supremacy for the creation of capital or you know again the conquest of the Americas one person I really think does a great job talking about primitive accumulation is Sylvia Federici in this book Caliban and the Witch it's a Marxist feminist book that largely looks at the ways that talks about a lot of things but what I find really fascinating is how the witch hunts which Marx doesn't mention is also part of it you know you're stealing professions, medical professions, midwifery from

women, you're essentially enclosing, the enclosures affect them as well. The patriarchy is really like expanded and one thing I find really interesting is that the witch hunts tend to be really, really popular in these Protestant areas that are going to

become the capitalist powers that have basically a capitalist bourgeois sort of work ethic compared to some of the Catholic countries, there aren't as many witch hunts. Ireland, in a period where in Britain, specifically southern Scotland, England, and Wales had thousands of witch hunts. Like thousands and thousands of people are being killed in these witch hunts. Like Ireland has zero.

Wow. And so you can really see how, you know, the capitalists, they had to disempower women. They had to control the sexual behavior, not just of women, but of, you know, people who are not interested in having just like a heterosexual. family structure and just producing kids, you know, this is where, you know, a lot of traditional knowledge is probably lost. Like there's probably herbal medicines that we will not know about because these witches were persecuted. Wow, that's fascinating. You said the book was Caliban and the witch? Caliban and the witch. Yeah, and I think it's really important for leftists to bring up

and think about the notion of primitive accumulation precisely because the way that land and wealth and property is distributed in modern times has historical roots. And you have to trace back how wealth and property and land were distributed before capitalism, how they were distributed during the rise of capitalism, how they're distributed now. Because you'll find a pure line of lineage from back then to right now and who dominates the world and who has the disproportionate amount of the wealth and resources in this world. And it goes all the way back to that. And women, people of color, non-Europeans, any sort of minorities were systematically excluded during the birthing of capitalism. So it's essential to

understand that. Absolutely. Another topic we want to talk about is eco-socialism and the metabolic rift. So what is the history of these ideas? Eco-socialism, it's really interesting. A lot of people think of like eco-anarchism or eco-socialism. They tie it to Murray-Bookchin and sort of the libertarian municipalism and social ecology. But Bookchin before he was an anarchist was actually in a pro-Stalin communist youth group and then he was like Stalinism's not so hot

and then he decided that most Marxists were not so hot, but he was inspired to get into ecology by something Ingalls wrote. Again, Ingles comes back. I think he was talking about how basically pollution and these sorts of negative health yeah these things that are impacting negatively the health of the working class here you kind of see like the social sociology of health in Ingalls as well but how part of it is because of capitalism and because of urbanism and you need to find

some balance between like basically town and country in order to solve these like ecological problems and Ingalls certainly is mostly just talking about it in terms of health conditions for working class people or at least just people, period. But it's highly related to the environment. So, you know, Buchan, like, kind of starts talking about, like, figuring out a way to, like, find this balance between, like, town and country. Essentially, you know, he's not a Marxist, but he upholds certain elements of Marxism, even, even later. And he picked up that line specifically from stuff that Engels wrote about. Yeah, I'm a good 95% sure of that.

maybe even more so because I'm pretty sure I read it from Bookchin's editor but and then John Bellamy Foster is a really prominent eco-Marxist this idea of metabolic rift

is Marxism is all about relations you know it's it's not that there aren't individuals and there's not society and you just can't look at them separately even though the individual is separate from society it's within society

influences and is influenced. Similarly to Marx, humanity is a part of nature. It's not the same thing as nature. You know, you can really talk about human beings are different from a lot of nature, but we're still part of it. First off, you know, we came out of nature through evolution, which Marx and Ingalls were very excited when they read Darwin because, you know, they felt like a lot of their ideas were validated. And I think we take a lot of Marx and Ingalls' ideas for granted now in regards to that. I'm digressing. But so this idea, is that there's metabolism between humanity and nature. And so capitalism kind of messes with this metabolism through its sort of globalizing processes. So this idea of metabolic rift,

and I'm not a, I'm not a specialist in any sort of ecology, so forgive me if I'm being a little vague, but as capitalism creates this world economy, specifically exploits things from nature, let's say you've got a tree. This tree needs nutrients to produce fruit. It takes the nutrients from the soil. Now, the capitalist is going to, first off, plant a bunch of these trees and destroy other life. It's going to take the fruit from these trees and it's going to ship it to another continent where this fruit doesn't grow naturally. All of these nutrients have been taken from the original soil. Usually if a fruit is either

eaten by an animal, it will disperse the seeds eventually and you know, you're going to poop or whatever. And those nutrients are going to get back to the soil or it's going to fall off the tree and it's going to rot. But if it's rotting in England and it's grown, you know, originally

supposed to be grown in Peru, those nutrients aren't in Peru where it needs to go and this messes up the metabolism of nature, you know, the sort of like natural functions of nature like these processes in the same way that like if you were to take you know your organ and you know move it somewhere else it's not part of you even anymore it's gone you have something missing you know right yeah and i think um it's interesting i'm not clearly i'm not an

anarcho primitivist but we've we've done an episode on anarcho primitivism and i think there's something very important in one of their critiques which cuts beyond just capitalism and cuts to civilization and the sort of mindset that we have towards nature. I talked about earlier how in the Soviet Union episode we talked about how they view nature as something to be dominated. But certainly capitalism and humanity generally views themselves as separate from nature and nature is something to be confronted and suppressed and submitted to our desires. That gave rise to capitalism.

Capitalism is a form of that sort of psychological thinking. but it's something that we really need to re-examine and if you're on the left you have to think about how we should live in a sort of balance an adaptability to what nature provides us a sustainable way of living

and that cuts deeper than just capitalism self that cuts deeper to the human mindset that arose even out of the enlightenment of using reason as a bludgeoning tool to beat nature into submission for our own wants and desires yeah and I think in certain ways Marks and Ingalls can be guilty of some of that themselves,

but I think they also recognize that we can't completely dominate nature because we're part of it. You know, we're not, we're a natural being. Absolutely. Yeah, and I always talk about this. I mean, it's kind of not on the left spectrum, but the Buddhist concept of through systematic meditation, de-egoizing yourself,

blurring the boundaries between yourself and others, yourself in the natural world, it's sort of a psychological mechanism that we can practice to get ourselves into a better mind state as far as our relation to nature and our relation to other people. And I just think it's important to think about those issues and they don't get enough airing on the left. But we really need to reevaluate the way we view ourselves in relation to nature because we are it.

We bubble up out of it and we return to it. And the civilization cannot continue indefinitely on the premise that we need to beat it into submission. Yeah, I think, you know, you really need to resolve some of that dialectical tension, if you will, between, like, civilization and nature. I think Ingalls and Marx recognize it to a degree. Certainly. And a proto-degree, but that's the point of neo-Marxism, taking those seeds and nourishing them and letting them blossom into different fields of thought. Yeah, exactly.

So another element of neo-Marxism that you know a lot about and you talk a lot about and you care a lot about is Marxist feminism. So what is the history of this field of thought? thought and how has Marxism and feminism co-evolved over time? Yeah, absolutely. Feminism obviously has its own history, but has always had a close relationship with socialism, not all the time, but I think the best feminists are socialists and the best socialists are feminists. But Marx and Ingalls, again, they did care about women.

Marx tried to increase women's involvement in the international. the International Working Man's Association and some of the, again, the British trade unionists, as well as a lot of French, like, anarchist, socialists, were very opposed to that sort of thing. So it's kind of a struggle. They didn't get all the way, and I'm not going to say that this was Marxist number one priority

by any means. He also thought that you can only really judge how liberated a society is by how much women are liberated, which he didn't originate, but it is something that he recreated, and I think Marxists kind of forget to do that when they're analyzing whether a society is socialist and stuff,

they tend to not look at the woman within that society. And real quick, before you continue, the Kurds and Rojava and Zapatistas and Chiapas, both struggle, and so have socialist states, but they're struggling, figuring out how to bridge that gap, how to end that patriarchy, and bring women up to that level.

And even in Maoist thought, you know, women hold up half the sky that reverberates throughout all different leftist tendencies. Yeah. And to be like very, very frank, a lot of leftists are terrible about it. They, you know, they know that it's something that they believe, but they don't really explore it. They kind of take it for granted. They're like, oh, you know, communism is going to liberate women too, and they don't, like, work to address, like, women-specific or non-binary-specific problems under capitalism enough. But Marx and Ingalls, they were, again, not perfect, but they were aware that it was something

that most people were bad at, including themselves, and they tried to, especially over time, they cared more. Ingalls has his origin of the family private property in the state, which I don't think he would have published, but the socialist movement at the time was starting to wrestle with the quote-unquote women's question, Babel had a book.

You've got people like Clara Zetkin, who are very concerned with it. And I think, like, Ingle's is like, I haven't developed this enough. I'm, you know, kind of basing it off of Marx's notes, and it's not perfect, but I need to get my voice in there while I can because I'm getting old.

And in it, he says, in the preface, rather, to the first edition, he says that, and I'm paraphrasing, the, like, production and reproduction are, like, of equal analytic weight. And what he's talking about is, like, production in terms of like the act of creating you know commodities or maybe new technologies things like that as opposed to reproduction which includes like family life you know you create a worker

but that worker needs to eat and things like that in order to continue to work so the the act of keeping that worker able to work is important to capital so a lot of Marxist feminists have really tried like focused on this idea of reproduction have really developed it and or they've talked about, you know, domestic labor, housework. And the Marxist feminists, a lot of their history has been erased, and even some Marxist feminists, I think, kind of gloss over certain Marxists who were also part of the women's movement, like Alexander Colontai. She was a Bolshevik.

She was actually the first woman ever in a cabinet position, and she got it because she participated in the October Revolution. And she struggled in the Bolshevik Party. don't get me wrong. There were plenty of chauvinist Bolsheviks. I think in the long run they won out because the Soviet Union early on, they made abortion not only legal, the first country to do so, but also in some places free, in some places at low cost, and they were trying to make it accessible to allow women to do work. In the 30s, actually coincidentally around the same time as some of the purges and things like that, they reversed a lot of

of those sorts of benefits, which is, I think, a real shame. And I think probably turned the women's movement off of that path and erased sort of the history of some of these women, Bolsheviks, who are very key to the movement. Marxist feminism kind of gets its return with radical feminism. Some of the early radical feminists thought of themselves as Marxists, and you see kind of a break initially with liberalism, and then the Marxist feminists kind of don't like,

the direction radical feminism is going, you know, especially, I think, you know, if, I'm not going to get into that, probably unwise. We have a Marxist feminist episode. We've struggled with those issues and talked about them, so. Yeah, probably not wise to get into that too much, but it starts to develop as its own sort of tradition from there again. And, you know, Sylvia Federici, I again, highly recommend Cowban and the Witch as a Marxist feminist and they've done a lot of really great work in examining the way you know sex workers are

exploited or any number of things and when i wonder i talk about this a lot but the influence jenny marks had on marks and angles yeah jenny marks um marks his wife yeah uh i think um again mary burns is underrated uh people people kind of you know assume that marks and angles are just pontificating about um about the working class but i think i think you know it's highly likely that Ingalls was guided. In fact, I'm almost certainly guided by Irish women through Little Ireland and these things he talks about. And that's how he's introduced to people. And these are the people he's engaging with. And a lot of them, again, are women. The proletariat is not a bunch of white men. That's a myth that I think really the Soviet Union and the United States

both kind of perpetuated through their imagery as the trade union. movement kind of got in certain ways co-opted in the in the 20th century you know they're going to they're going to encourage the like sort of more bourgeois white male elements of the trade unionist movement and you see the way that they legislated unions so that they couldn't have socialist or communist certain like in members in some cases in the same way you know they're going to be more fond of the the wider unions than the ones that are more mixed race or whatever it is and they co-opped some of that yeah and yeah and and as far as as jenny marks you talked about mary burns's effect on angles um and the irish women proletariat's effect on angles but jenny marks

acted as a sounding board for carl marks and his ideas she was an editor she helped write his stuff sometimes he would talk and she would help write it down um she edited his work and his daughters edited his work yeah and jenny marks brought the issues of women directly to marks and put it in his face and made him think about it um and So Jenny Marks often doesn't get the credit she deserves in the Marxist tradition, but she was fucking fundamental. Yeah, and Marx's daughters, too. They're all very intelligent. They didn't go to higher education, which some feminist kind of critique Marx for, but I think they thought that they didn't need it. They could already speak multiple languages. Eleanor, I believe, helped edit capital, you know, as Marx was older. So she literally grew up helping Marx, right, this behemoth that grown men can't read sometimes.

Plenty of grown men can read capital. Yeah, I get what you're saying. But, you know, but they wrote some of Marxist daughters did their own work. They got involved with the women's movement. They got involved with the anti-colonial struggle in Ireland. And they're also underplayed. They're very critical of bourgeois feminism as opposed to proletarian feminism, which is interesting. read some of their critiques and kind of apply it today, you know, it's very interesting.

But they're kind of erased from it. And they're absolutely key to Marx and Ingalls as thought. Yeah. I mean, and we could talk about that all day. We do have a Marxist feminist episode again that people can go listen to. We did an entire interview based on that. We'll retouch on, we go in a little bit more in-depth in some of those issues. But another big term that gets thrown around, and it's connected to neo-Marxism somewhat.

And you have people like that fool Jordan Peterson or whatever in Canada talks about cultural Marxism and postmodernism all the time. So I know postmodernism is a word that gets thrown around a lot, especially by enemies of Marxism, often as an undefined stand-in for things people don't like or understand. I'm in some debate forums with right-wingers, and they, you know, right-wing libertarians fucking love Jordan Peterson, and they love using the word cultural. Marxism and the word postmodernism, but I ask them all the time. I was like, okay, can you just define it in your own words? I don't want you to copy and paste something from the internet.

Can you just define for me what postmodernism is and fucking none of them can do it? So it's just like this buzzword that they use that they don't fucking understand. But so what is postmodernism and what is its relationship to Marxism? Yeah. Part of the reason postmodernism is so hard to define for these people is because it's actually hard to define and the postmodernists like it that way. A lot of people who are key, sort of founders of postmodernism would not want to be referred to as postmodernists. Postmodernism, to me, kind of just reflects a period within capital, you know, within late capital, if you will. But I don't think, I think the distinctions even between postmodernism and modernism, you can kind of argue with heavily. I think, you know,

in people like Picasso and Kafka, you find certain artistic elements that are attributed to postmodernism. And if Kafka isn't writing about modernism, I don't know what he's writing about. I know he's right. There's dad and things like that, obviously. But beyond that, like, so the postmoderns as a school of thought, and it'd be more accurate in a lot of cases to treat post-structuralism as a much more coherent field. They're kind of, they're really upset. Like, it's about narrative.

It's anti-grand theory. You know, so any all-encompassing grand theory. And I think people forget how flexible. Marx and Ingalls's grand theory is because it's entirely dependent on the historical context. You know, the material conditions according to Ingalls, they're only determining in the last

instance, which means like they kind of set the limits, you know, but they're not, they don't really set what happens. But, but you know, it is, it is, there's still, you know, you think that history and your environment matter.

Whereas in postmodernism, a lot of times it's experience. or it's the narrative or it's the text. It's a debasing of objective truth. It's the argument that objective empirical truth doesn't exist at all. They're just a bunch of narrative shaped by power and whatnot. Yeah. And I think for a Marxist, there is an objective truth.

Even if humans are only interpreting it, it's there. It's atoms and it's, you know, it's energy and motion. And, you know, we're interpreting that and, you know, we're going to have our biases. That's what historical conditions are. But there's still an objective reality, you know. and Marxists kind of are committed to the idea that there's an objective reality, whereas postmodernist are not. So there's actually a deep contradiction. You can't be a Marxist and a postmodernist, which is like people like Foucault had to get rid of their Marxism to embrace their postmodernism, however, whether or not he would put it that way, you know.

Yeah, and I think a lot of post-structurists and postmodernists are influenced by Marx and by the critical theory, but they are not historical materialists. And similarly, some Marxists could be concerned with, you know, things like interpretation, ideology again, is a Marxist concept, and that plays in a lot to that sort of thing. But they're still going to be historical materialists, you know. And postmodernity is usually not historical, and I don't ever think it's materialist. And so there's definitely interaction between these sort of theories. but in any pure form, they're different. And, you know, people kind of on the right like to lump them all together because postmodernism is highly popular among certain crowds right now. But it's usually they're confused about what postmodernism is and what Marx is.

You know, a lot of... They don't know shit. They don't know what they're talking about. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people just clearly blatantly misrepresent Marx. I don't know if it's out of ignorance or out of a desire. But a lot of people, you know, the neoliberal economists, the neoclassical economists, they're like, oh, Marx is wrong because of the labor theory, or not the labor theory, the like iron law of wages. But Marx is not all about the iron law of wages. I mean, he thinks it occurs sometimes, but he also, he lamblasts a socialist for using the term. He's like iron. There's the sarcasm again. And it's not the only thing going on. He thinks it's Malthus.

You know, Marx, he's limited because the political economy at the time again, it's Adam Smith, it's Ricardo, it's Malthus. So he's working with those things, but he's like, they're kind of BS. And a lot of, like, a lot of neoliberals will kind of refute Marx on the grounds that he believes in all of that stuff, some of which he explicitly doesn't believe in. And yet they're saying that Adam Smith was better. yeah yeah and i and i think one of the important things to take away from the notion of of postmodernism for marxists is there's something valuable in the postmodern critique of knowledge you know postmodernists think that knowledge itself is shaped by power relations and and wealth and power dynamics in a society and so even the narratives of science itself can't be trusted because they are just interpretations mostly of white male privilege and colonialism and all that there's plenty to learn there but there's a dialectical relationship thesis antithesis synthesis um in some ways i view postmodernism as uh the antithesis of the thesis of modernism but then there's

a synthesis to come afterwards and that is a bringing together of some of the critiques um that postmodernists put to knowledge it's certainly true that a lot of narratives are shaped by power it's certainly true that a lot of things that we take as objective knowledge are actually just interpretations that funnel through power. And those are things that Marxists can learn from and adapt to. But to embrace postmodernism in its entirety is to debase objective truth and to leave yourself at a non-Marxist position. So I think we can learn a lot from postmodernism, take some good things, read Foucault.

I think it's important, but also not completely embrace it. Look for the synthesis beyond postmodernism. Absolutely. I think post-structuralism has especially benefited, like, sort of our understanding things of feminism, and it asks a lot of questions that Marxists need to answer, and I don't think that Marxists had all of those answers, but I think they could. I think the big problem with sort of, and again, I don't like using the term because it's not defined by nature. They don't want it to be, you know, Foucault probably doesn't want to be thought of in association

with Therida. And so I do hate using the term, but the postmodernists, I think, they tend to really want local politics, local solutions. And they do, they reject any sort of grand narrative of history. They kind of reject the notion of history in a way. And, you know, even as they use it, it's kind of similar to Nietzsche, you know, uses and abuses of history, if you will, and Foucault is in many ways a great historical. and also kind of history as a field has kind of been rejected by a lot of

who we'd consider postmoderns. And I think if you're a Marxist, you do have to recognize there is a global capital. There's a global capitalist system. It's moving commodities from Latin America to North America, you know, and you've got things like iPhones that are made in multiple continents and then sold in another continent.

You know, these things, interacting, they're happening. And even if the like, you know, historical or local conditions or whatever, the experiences are different, you know, a black woman's not going to experience capitalism the same way I am. Right, right.

We're still both experiencing capitalism. And our different, our experiences may be different, but capitalism is still a global problem. And for a Marxist, I think we need a global solution, even if it's a step-by-step protracted people's war, it still needs to be international, you know? Absolutely. Lots of food for, I mean, we could do many

episodes on that concept. It's very deep and there's a lot to talk about. And so we're not going to do it total justice in a flyby analysis like we're doing here. So I encourage people to go out and explore that concept a little more. But you and I, Brendan, share a deep appreciation moving on and sympathy for the concept of dual power. We've talked about it with Dr. Siccarella Marr before, but I would like for you to explain what dual power is and maybe make an argument for its importance. So this is kind of where this sort of idea gets rooted. You know, the anarchists, the communists both really like this. They see a mechanism for overthrowing capital in what happened there. And so they write about it a little bit. And then the Russian Revolution comes around.

And you have this situation where the workers set up these workers councils and there's a provisional government in not October Revolution, but after the February Revolution. And there's this tension because, you know, the provisional government will try to do something and the Soviets will try to do the opposite. And they're both kind of, you know, the provisional government is more like officially legitimate, but people see the legitimacy and the power of the Soviets. And it kind of creates this like tension between the two that eventually resulted in, you know, the provisional government's going to try to crack down on certain party papers, i.e. the Bolsheviks. And the Soviets have armed themselves to defend Jews against pogroms, which is interesting as well.

And pogroms are basically programs of Jewish targeting and annihilation. Yeah, absolutely. And just, you know, terrible, terrible stuff, terrible, terrible stuff that is very much part of the Jewish European experience. And Brendan, Brendan is Jewish, so you have that history very much in your heart and your mind and yeah um so you know the the the Soviets they've got some weapons and they've got uh sort of a alternative power structure to the government and that results in a tension that needs one to dominate the other and the Soviets end up emerging victorious a court you know and that's

you know and that's how the october revolution happened so the dual power is this period of that tension um lenin mostly writes about it and he's kind of the one who really uses the term dual power popularized it yeah um and so um it's very popular among a lot of, you know, libertarian municipalists. The Kurds, I think, care a lot about it, but it's, you know, it's not just creating an alternative. Some of the analytical Marxists who are non-dialectical Marxists and another form of neo-Marxism, they sometimes talk about effectively co-ops being dual power.

I don't think that's dual power, I think, unless there's tension, you know. Like a citizens, like police or like a community, you know, guard that refuses to call the police and handles its stuff internally, that's dual power. You know, living on a farm by yourself isn't really dual power, you know. Like growing your own food as a socialist and giving it away for free is one thing. But like living often and doing your own thing isn't necessarily to me because I think it needs that dialectical tension. Actually, you know, Bookchin agrees with that sort of concept. And there's another example of in Venezuela. the Bolivarian government under Hugo Chavez and Almonduro,

and then the communes in Venezuela, there's a dual power between the state being taken over by a pink-tide government and then people power in the form of communes operating parallel to that socialist government. That's an example of dual power. Yeah, so when the people fulfill the obligate, like things that are traditionally viewed as exclusive to the state or maybe to private corporations in some cases is only being legitimate. You know, for example, like a Weberian monopoly of violence, when the people question that and they say we could do it ourselves and do it themselves and by doing so challenge the legitimacy of the government, that's dual power. So, you know, we're not at dual power yet, but a lot of people think that we need to build up these alternative structures in order to create that tension.

And that's how we build socialism from within capitalism rather than just waiting for it to happen. So the overarching, to be clear, because this is something maybe I'm a little confused about, the dual power between the people and the state, the state need not be sympathetic. The state could be enemy. Absolutely. Or does it have to be? If you have a socialist state and a people's movement at the same time, is that dual power? If the two are in opposition, then it's dual power. That's my opinion.

I mean, to an extent, Venezuela, the state is somewhat in opposition. sometimes you get like middle management being the ones who are really opposed to the communes versus the executive which you talked about on that episode and and dr sickerill-l-l-mar made that like some of the hardest people that the communes had to face were the local you know a middle management of the you know um bolivarian government yeah so like london when he talks about dual power he basically says when the people like the people's representatives fill out the bureaucratic functions when there's like an alternative to the police when the people like abolish the police so black panthers practice that so i would say the black panthers truly did um uh operate in a form of

dual power not completely because they never really had their own production but in terms of distribution in terms of uh needs food programs police watching yeah exactly so they became an alternative to the police and unfortunately in that case uh the sort of dialectical uh tension was resolved in favor of the United States. But you see the United States deliberately picking up some of those programs and, like, violently, violently oppressing the Black Panthers because the Black Panthers, by doing something themselves for their community, it challenges the legitimacy of the state.

Absolutely. Yeah, and that's the tension. An idea that I have often, and it might not be perfectly defined as dual power precisely because there needs to be that huge tension. that dialectical tension, and perhaps there could be a dialectical tension between a socialist state and anarchist territories, but it's neither here nor there, an idea that I have a lot, and this is kind of idealist, this is me thinking, a possibility, but I like the idea of, and Lenin and Trotsky actually talked about this, of having a socialist state and then setting

aside territory for anarchists to operate and basically run experiments in. The idea that, let's say America got taken over by a socialist revolution. We take over the state. We use the state as a mechanism to provide health care and food and housing for all people. We use it as a leverage of power to fight against our enemies and defend the revolution, et cetera, et cetera. But let's say we set aside the Southwest territory for anarchist exploration. Like you guys can go and try different things here and if it fails, we'll reabsorb you into the socialist state. If it succeeds, we'll help you expand. You will get funding and protection from the state. It's kind of a fantasy, but it's just something I roll around in my mind as like a compromise

between, you know, Marxists on one side and anarchists on the other. That's a really interesting concept. I think it's nice to play around with those sorts of concepts, because to be honest, I think it's very unlikely that the anarchists will succeed in a revolution without state socialists and vice versa. I mean, I think most of our modern examples, that the anarchists like to give, like the Zapatistas and the Kurds, they still have very, even as they move away from Marxism, those foundations are still there.

Absolutely. That understanding of capital being a global problem is still there. And there's no complete absence of hierarchy, even the Zapatistas. You know, the power comes from the people, but it's still, it still functions. Certain people fulfill. And anyway, so I think some of these, like, end up being high. hybrids of certain anarchist and Marxist ideas. I think dual power is something that people usually can agree.

Some anarchists say that dual power is just another form of state power, and I certainly see why they would say that. But a lot of anarchists, especially, again, the ones kind of influenced by bookchin, like the idea a lot. And I think it's a compromise, but it's important to, if you do have a compromise, is because you want some united or popular front for evolution, then you need to be able to figure out what you're going to do once you win. And I don't think it's a good idea to fight each other before, you know,

we still have capitalism and fascism to deal with. I mean, fascism is back. You know, not that it ever was totally taken away. And we have this new sort of hybrid of the two in the form of bureaucratic authoritarianism, like the sort of Pinochet-style government, which has neoliberal values and is very pro-capital but is still a police state

and very similar to fascists as well those are so hostile to anarchism and socialism that it seems very silly to me for that infighting. So I think it's fun to play around with those sorts of ideas. I think a lot of people need to remember

that the end goal of communism is a stateless, classless society. So whether you think to use Engel's words withered away, or if you use Ingalls' words, the worst parts need to be lopped off, which is usually also forgotten. Or if you use a more absolute,

the state is inherently bad, which I think is a fair point. I think, especially from a Faberian monopoly of violence standpoint, the state is inherently bad. And if you think that any interaction with the state is going to compromise you, you know, that's, there's, whether, whatever you believe,

you should know that the socialist next to you or the anarchist next to you or the trade unionist or the syndicist next to you still is going to benefit more from fighting the capitalist than from fighting you and you will benefit more from fighting the fascist than fighting the anarchist or whatever so I think left unity is important

fuck yeah yeah well said and you know that's what this fucking that's what this show is all about that's what we try to promote we try to promote the cross pollinization of ideas we try to promote leftist solidarity because there's a material need for it not because it feels good to think that we could all unite and have a party, but precisely because we materially need to unite

and fight against our real enemies in here and now, and we can work out our problems a little bit down the road. And I said this the other day, like, when you're out in a protest as a leftist, you're simultaneously fighting the far right and the pigs. Always. The advantages are stacked against us all the time. Whether you're an anarchist or a Marxist, you face the same material problem when you hit the streets. And that's something that we should all recognize, and we should all kind of loosen the bolts on our dogmatism and our tendency sectarianism because we need each other now more than ever. Absolutely.

All right. So final question. I haven't even checked the time, so I don't know how long this interview's been. But one thing we want people to walk away from is the relevancy of Marx and the relevancy of Marxism. So what is the relevancy of Marxism for all leftist, the anti-capitalist thinkers in the 21st century, if you could just sum it up? Yeah.

It's very hard. But again, I think it kind of boils back to even in the things that Marx and Ingalls don't talk enough about. They may plant the seeds that might give us a good starting framework. You know, maybe we need to supplement those things

like maybe with Freud, if you like Lacan or whatever, or Zijek, for example. Anything like that, you know, maybe you need to synthesize theory, you know, existentialism and Marxism if you're Sartre, whatever it is. Maybe you don't need to synthesize theory.

Maybe you just need to go to Marx, look at the question and say, what is the answer right now? We don't have a gold standard anymore. So the way capital looks under Marx is different than under now. But what's the same things? We still see capital in motion. We still see exploitation.

We still see surplus value. If anything, there's an even greater global economy than there was then. We still have financial crises all the time in an accelerated rate. I think crisis capitalism is an excellent proof that Marx still is valuable today. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on, Brendan. Good friend and comrade. I always enjoy having you on the show.

I love probing your mind for some of this stuff. But before we leave, do you have any recommendations that you would offer to anyone who wants to learn more about anything that we've discussed tonight? Yeah, absolutely. I think something that came up often, Marxist feminism, I think Caliban and the Witch is a great book. There's a book called Marxism and the Oppression of Women towards a Unity Theory, which actually is part of a debate within Marxist feminism as opposed to more of a dual systems theory of patriarchy in capital.

I think those are great books in that regard. I really like David Harvey. I would call him a neo-Marxist. I don't know if he would call himself a neo-Marxist or just a Marxist, but he comes to mind as being very interested in what capital looks like now. Capital is a dynamic theory. He is a history of neoliberalism that's great.

Spaces of global capital is great. he's got the enigma of capital it's great it's great stuff he looks at what's valuable in marx in marxist political economy what does and doesn't apply today and like what are the changes how are they changing i think that's really interesting and he talks a lot about um the right to the city like the right to our living space which is very important uh he talks a lot about um sort of in a way gentrification he kind of gets this from something ingle says about moving about how basically capitalism doesn't solve its problems it just moves it you know you've got a problem and you're having a crisis in in you know the internet and the computers and things like that you move

it you know and to a housing bubble well a housing bubble breaks and so you push push that problem on the proletary you know doesn't solve the problems it moves them around or gentrification when rich people come and genderify neighborhood they just push the poor people to a different area they don't solve poverty by any means yeah yeah when when you gentrify an area like unless you kill everyone who lives there which i'm not saying capitalism would not be willing to do because again look at primitive accumulation but um if they you know don't think they can get away with that or if that doesn't come to mind then they still have uh you know poor people who have to move somewhere else you know it's not like the poor people living in an area

are suddenly rich when they gentrify it they get pushed out but they're not gone so they'll just move to another area and that area will still have the problems of poverty because unless you solve the poverty which is the root all you're doing is pushing you know you're pushing people out and David Harvey talks about that. And he has online lectures so people that don't have time to read a full book, they can go online, correct? Yeah, he's got, you can find some of his, uh, some of his lectures online. He does a whole thing on Capitol. He does a whole thing on Capitol.

Uh, he teaches Capitol, like Das Capital, like, every year, and his lectures are free online. I haven't watched all of them, but some of them are quite good. Cool. Um, yeah, David Harvey again, uh, Sylvia Federici, I think some of those people are really great. All right, comrade. Thanks so much for coming on. It's been a blast. I don't want to work in offices until I'm Stardust.

I wish I could commodify my art. Attach your market value to my fucking bleeding heart. Yeah, that would be so swell. I wouldn't have to serve coffee to yuppies from hell. I wouldn't have to slave away my days for a wage and hit the grave, which presents written all over my fucking face. I watched my parents play the same game. They broke their backs every day for insanely lame pay.

I got Molotov cocktails. to toast the next president, slaughter the elephant on the altar of decadence. Pants sagging, straight tatted with a black flag, black pants, black pants, black cookies and black masks, hawking movie on every Mercedes Benzazi, smashing the wind moves of fortune, 500 companies. Tomorrow I come to pass that like a gangman. You'll get shot. Or a truckload of soldiers can't be blowing on.

Part of the plan When I say that one Little old man die Well then everyone Loses their minds Introduce Anarchy Upset and established

order And everything becomes Chaos America justice and liberty for all yeah right we ain't falling for that dumb shit we know exactly who run this banks and corporations for whom this entire system functions profits over people that's the way they run the game fam and voting Democrat ain't gonna change that we gotta hit the streets and organize and fight back radicalize Radicalize, radicalize!

Damn!