Rev Left Radio - Approaching Marxism: Reductionism & Breakdown Theory

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

James from Prolekult joins Breht to discuss the nuances and complexities of various forms of reductionism and capitalist-breakdown theory within the Marxist tradition. Their discussion leads them to touch on many other topics and issues that are important for the Marxist left today, including advice for those who are relatively new to Marxism.  Check out and support Prolekult here:  YouTube: http://youtube.com/prolekult Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/prolekult Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/prolekult Twitter: https://twitter.com/ProlekultFilms Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/prolekultfilms/   Coalition of Disabled People (as mentioned in the episode): https://gmcdp.com/new-paul-hunt-ebooks Outro music "Your Dog" by Soccer Mommy Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on James from Prolacult. The other half of Prolacult is Lexi. She was not able to make it on the show today, but we do have James to talk about reductionism in the Marxist tradition, the various forms that reductionism can take. We get into breakdown theory, right? the idea about the collapse of capital,

it's ostensible inevitability, the timescales on which it might happen, et cetera, and we cover a bunch of Marxist concepts and ideas in the process. So this is a really wonderful and important conversation that I'm very happy and honored that James came on to our show to have, and I'm excited to show it to you. And as always,

if you like what we do here at Rev Left, you can join us at patreon.com slash Rev Left Radio. And as I'll make a formal announcement on the public feed soon, it's just worth saying now that there are major changes coming to the RevLeft Patreon. And one of those changes is going to be a tripling of the Patreon output that we do. So if you are a fan of RevLeft, you want to hear more contents, I'm going to be able to do interesting stuff on the Patreon that I can't always do on the public feed. One of those things is because the public feed involves getting guests and interviews, that sometimes it is scheduled on. month or more out. And then you have the editing work that comes with that. And so one of the problems is that I'll sometimes miss news headlines as they arise. You know, protests and

Iran, certain things that happened in the U.S. government, etc., that I really wanted to find a way that I could cover in a consistent way that necessarily might not even involve me having to go out, get guests, find proper times to schedule them, et cetera, which sort of gets us beyond the acute moment in which that story might be hyper-relevant. I'm going to be able to cover the news headlines in a more consistent and robust fashion, which is something I'm excited about. So if you like RevLeft, if you want to support the show, definitely go do patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio and join us.

All right, without further ado, here's my wonderful conversation with James from Prolocult on Reductionism and Breakdown Theory within Marxism. Enjoy. Hello, I'm James. I am the writer and narrator for the YouTube channel Protocol, and we do a lot of videos on crisis theory and on more recently anti-reductionist approaches to Marxism. Yeah, and people that have listened to Rev Left over the last several months, might remember that we played some audio from one of your videos recently on precisely the modes

of production, but it was an anti-reductionist approach to thinking about modes of production. And we found that very valuable. So after that, we were like, let's actually have a full-on collaboration because I've followed your work for quite some time. And, you know, it was past due that we touched base and try to do a collaboration together. And so today's episode, we're going to do that. We're going to talk about reductionism and anti-reductionism on. the Marxist Socialist left. We're going to discuss breakdown theory and just kind of see

where the conversation takes us. But the first question I have for you is just about your project. So let's start with Prolacult. Can you talk about it, why you started it, and what you're trying to achieve with it? Yeah. I mean, so first of all, it's an honor to be here. I've been following the podcast for a long time, I think, since 2018, which is when our project got set up as well. So, yeah, it's really cool to be here. In terms of Prolacult, we kind of stumbled into it initially. I'd been doing a lot of organizing work and I moved cities and there wasn't the kind of infrastructure to support it in my living condition and stuff. So I wanted to find another kind of political outlet. I met my friend at the time, Lexi, who we've been working

together since 2018 and we wanted to do a combination of her video stuff, which she'd done a lot of kind of stuff on shooting weddings and stuff as a job beforehand and my writing, because I'd done a lot of little things on Marxism and art. and wanted to kind of expand it as well as newspaper articles and things for the organisation I had been a part of. Initially, we wanted to do like a fictional thing about the housing crisis, but we didn't have the resources. So we then settled on documentaries.

We did one, History is Marching in 2018, which kind of covered crisis and the return of breakdown conditions in the Imperialist West specifically and focused kind of on relations between the EU and the US within that. Since then, we've kind of developed the project a lot and settled on the attempt to kind of turn internet infrastructure into a workers' school, as well as using our kind of documentary format and so on and so forth to offer interventions into contemporary developments and to continue to discuss breakdown theory. Nice.

Yeah, and I just want to give a huge shout out to Lexi. I know that they couldn't make it, but a huge shout out. I love what both of you do. Before we get into the topic proper, one more question, just out of personal curiosity, when and why did you personally get interested in Marxism? So I got interested in Marxism, from about the age of 18 onward, I kind of got into it as a response to austerity and the banking crash initially, because I kind of grew up around that period. And yeah, it sort of stuck with me. I got involved with the austerity protests, the Occupy movement a little bit when it was kind of starting out and then quite heavily later on. And through that, I kind of ran into a lot of the practical problems that come up from, like, organizing in a liberal or kind of liberal-adjacent way and really wanted resolutions to those, came across Marxism through that and some Marxist groups through that and started to seriously, like, think through that.

And then I was involved in activist politics for a long time. And since then, I've done this and done what I can in activist politics where I can as well. Yeah, nice. We were probably roughly around the same age I got in to act. activism, organizing, et cetera, through the Occupy movement here in Omaha, which was obviously not as big as some of the other major cities around the country, but certainly had its own momentum, its own energy. And it was interesting because not only liberals were present, but we also had a pretty obvious group of libertarians as well in Occupy. And so, you know, with enough time and looking back, you can see how that sort of big tent approach and some of the ways that things were framed can become problematic. when trying to build a coalition, but it was an interesting and educational experience, I think, for anybody who participated in it.

So it's interesting that you were doing that across the pond as well. But yeah, let's go ahead and get into the topic itself. And today we're going to be talking about reductionism and breakdown theory. And of course, you know, reductionism, combating it within our circles is anti-reductionism. So let's dive into anti-reductionism. What is reductionism within Marxism? And what are some examples of it that might help listeners orientes, themselves to the concept. Yeah, okay. So reductionism is in general a problem that

features in a lot of different disciplines, including what we would consider ideological philosophy and what we might consider as like the hard scientists. So there's a lot of different deployments of that word. And when we deploy it, we're obviously trying to get at what we think is a specific kind of ideological problem or a specific kind of methodological problem. And in all of those, there are different types of reductionist approach, and that's also true of Marxism. The broadest definition I think I could give as to what I'm kind of specifically talking about. And the reason I use the term reductionism is against, like, other terms, this similar things can be described like vulgar Marxism.

There's elements of opportunism and things like that that come into this is because reducturist Marxism is the approach of treating theory as a ready-made explanation of reality, into which, like, facts can be slotted for the process of verification. So instead of using theory as a method of inquiry into reality, theory is turned into a way of filing down reality to those elements which support and proof it. Does that kind of make sense in terms of a broad definition, then we can get into some examples. Absolutely make sense as a definition. I think examples will definitely help, but already I can see this problem proliferate on the left broadly conceived. But yeah,

why don't you go ahead and give us some examples? Okay, so the most well-known one, I think, is probably mechanical materialism in the form of economic determinism. And this idea we sort of briefly critiqued in the audio that you put up previously, and it's the idea that all developments in history are solely and straightforwardly determined by economic developments, often proved, quote, unquote, by an appeal to the authority of Marx's base superstructure metaphor in the preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy and his subsequent focus on the critique of political economy as this overarching kind of intellectual concern. theoretically though this is always going to be dissatisfactory on contact with reality

because it really requires human beings to be primarily economically motivated human beings in all that they do it doesn't quite deal with how people interpret and act upon their economic interests and how class formations come about and in its worst excesses that leads to like political complacency because why ever rebel except for when the marxist the market tells you that you ought too. And that can come in a lot of different forms. That breakdown theory will touch on later, and there are a few iterations where this can be sort of seen in breakdown theory. So the idea that revolution can only happen when there's a breakdown in particularly advanced capitalist nations, the progress to socialism there, which was held by the second international,

was a fruit of breakdown theory, a reductionist reading of breakdown theory, and kind of led into this mechanical materialism. There was no point without that kind of breakdown. within the advanced capitalist nations in attempting revolutionary activity. Another kind of example I think is kind of really illustrative and perhaps kind of more interesting as well is in historical formalism and that kind of form of analysis populates even early Marxist literature. So Engels observed this tendency and he was writing to Conrad Schmidt in 1890 when he remarked that too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase

historical materialism and everything can be turned into a phrase only to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible. And so there you see that this kind of theoretical outlook is kind of compensating for a lack of material investigation and everything's kind of being constructed into a theoretical system. And the fundamental problem here hasn't gone away because economic history is still really kind of coming, like, not massively detailed, and there's still a lot to fill in with regard to feudalism, antiquity, and even capitalism. And a more recent essay by the Indian historian

Jaros Banaji, it called modes of production and materialist conception of history, gives a really good critique of this, and argues that we have not produced enough materialist history, but what we have instead are a great number of neat systems, and something that is particularly pronounced in how Marxist's concept of a mode of production is commonly handled. So a mode of production, as comrades are probably aware, is that kind of broad, considered broadly as that epochal framework. Capitalism is a mode of production. Feudalism is a mode of production.

And a lot of the ways we talk about that in introductory Marxist literature, but also in more dense Marxist literature, is primarily by the form of exploitation deployed under each of those kind of modes of production. And that is itself a formal reduction. And you can see that why the use of the simple examples of the position of oppressed classes get under slavery and feudalism used by Marx in the first volume of capital. For contrast with this analysis of the proletariat are folded into an explanation of feudalism or slave states per se. And we've all heard the kind of argument that results from that.

Initially, under antiquity, slaves were owned by the state or the populi from the conquered nations or conquered tribes, etc., that became subjects or vassals, so that that formed the mode of production. Then as productive forces grew, slave rebellions swept away Rome, feudal bondage was instituted and peasants were tied to the land, working for themselves on some days, and their lords most days. and that became the form of the form of the mode of production then, and then on to merchant capitalists, colonialism, capitalism, which sees the exploitation of the proletariat dispossessed of all means of production through waged labour, instituted as the mode of production. So that's kind of a narrative we've all heard, and whilst there's a good critique that that's a stagist analysis,

that it assumes a narrow and definite line of development, there are deeper problems because it leaves a mode of production as something which results from an extremely particular number of its relations, that is particularly how labour is deployed, as we said, the form of exploitation. And that leaves out a considerable number of processes and relations which are necessary to understand the significance of the relations it describes. And we can see that in kind of the way Marx talks about the way workers need to be drawn together for industrial capital to occur, the way that separation from the land needs to occur, the way that there needs to be a ubiquitous market that things can be bought and sold on. All of these conditions need to occur and they aren't simply secondary to the mode of exploitation.

More importantly, though, the explanation is kind of flatly wrong about the periods it describes and narrows down relations to singular forms of deployment. So landless wage labors existed in both ancient Greece and Rome and under feudalism, chattel slavery and existed under merchant capital, which is quite a particular important one as well. That's not an edge case. That's quite a definitional process of how the genesis of industrial. capitalism comes about. And slavery has existed through under industrial capitalism, through fascism and black markets, for example. And those examples all show that reality is a bit more

complicated than simply the primary form of exploitation deployed. So all of those things kind of run together to a historical formalism, which is a reductionist view of history that moulds historical events in order to meet the criteria laid out in an already held theoretical prognosis, which is itself a reductionist understanding of Marxism, concerned with only like a few elements of Marx's own analysis, but kind of shows the fundamental process here. Did you have any kind of questions about those examples or anything like that, or any points you wanted to raise? No, that's really good.

Yeah, I would just say like, you know, just to kind of summarize what you're saying, like sort of reverse engineering from already established like conceptual conclusions to analysis, right? And that's a form of reductionism, when you have a conclusion already set or a formalized way of viewing things, and then you turn around and try to fit objective reality into that instead of the reverse process, which is, you know, examining objective reality coming to certain conclusions and going back and forth between the two and their dialectical relationship to better understand the concept. And so you can see this emerge in multiple, multiple different ways, correct? Yeah, absolutely. And I think the thing that I really like, the reason I call it reductionist Marxism rather than, as I think Benaji calls it vulgar Marxism as well, is because I don't think it's like necessarily a malicious thing, which is often how we talk about problems in tendencies or problems of development within Marxism because of the highly politicized nature of tendencies. The Benaji article I was referring to actually kind of treats what it calls vulgar market. Marxism, this historical formalism as a political tendency that Banaji thinks is what he would call Stalinism and what others would call Marxism-Leninism. And so it's kind of contained only within a specific political tendency for him. And without getting even into the tendency

debate, I think that's really kind of short-sighted because reductionism is much broader than opportunism or conscious distortion and its consequences are much more varied and in some cases more difficult than fighting against a particular tendency that one views is kind of malignant, because it can stem from a lot of different reasons, right? It can, it's easy to substitute a theory for reality if it's rhetorically convincing. And in a lot of ways, people will turn to texts and kind of read the theory and orientate themselves towards things that appear to verify them, unless you have a broader knowledge of kind of other material tendencies that the literature you're reading might not suggest and things like that. So,

there is like a genuine kind of pedagogic problem here as well as kind of more intentional distortions which do arise. So instead, would you say that it's fair to say that basically every tendency, even beyond Marxism, just like revolutionary tendencies, anarchism, whatever else, can have these sorts of issues, maybe specific tendencies give rise to certain forms of reductionism, but it's a more widespread problem than any one tendency, even though, as I said earlier, certain tendencies might have a tendency toward certain forms of reductionism. Yeah, and I think that's part of why this comes about. So if we look at the charge laid against Marxism, Leninism,

a lot of that refers to Stalin's work on historical materialism, which in the preface does state that it's intended as a popular introduction to something, which is important to remember because it's involved in a mass state-bolt building project. Now, whatever anyone makes of that project is a separate political question, but it is involved in that there's a certain point to it. The broader kind of learning problem is something that's common to all tendencies and all ideologies and all sciences, even, that there is always going to be a kind of commonality between certain types of phenomena or certain types of phenomena are going to appear to confirm more than they actually do in your research because of the way you are looking at those phenomena. you're going in with an intent to do so, and that becomes, you know, that is something that's particularly pronounced within political outlooks because, obviously, it's partisan. There's an objective that's place as well.

We want to get to communism, so we're going to argue from that standpoint. And I think this is something that just, it necessarily happens because social theory and sciences and all these things are incredibly difficult, and, like, building a realistic framework is not that easy, as well as kind of certain material factors in our present age which make it worse as well yeah absolutely so a couple points one is we just released an episode with joshua malphalpal on economism um which can be seen as as as a one of the varieties of reductionism and what we do in that episode in which you said here dovetails in that you know these things these errors need not be malicious and it's tempting when you have a tendency that's

not your own uh to assign you know malicious intent to other tendencies and then subscribe or various forms of naivete to your own mistakes and we obviously would want to to get past that that barrier another thing i wanted to say really quick to correct something i said earlier when when i had you when we played your audio from your video i said it was the mode of production one it was the base and superstructure one not the mode of production video but they came out roughly the same time and i watched them both so i kind of got confused on that just to clarify that but one more thing before we move on because when we think about reduction is especially in popular discourses and like, you know, basic argumentations on the left, one of the things

that would come up is, you know, a class reductionist, right? You call somebody a class reductionist or on the liberal side, you might call certain sort of neoliberal identitarian politics as identity reductionism, you know, critiquing people that boil everything down to class or critiquing liberals who boil everything down to identity and obscure class. Do you have anything to say on those fronts, do those fit into this matrix of forms of reductionism, in your opinion? Yeah, so I'd separate out the criticisms a little bit. There's some people who maintain Marxism as a whole, as rooted in a critique of Marx, is a form of class reductionism. I disagree with that, personally, but I think that's a longer discussion, and I think

that's something to direct toward that literature. This criticism has proliferated a lot, and I do think that's to do with reductive interpretations of class. So the next episode of approaching Marxism is actually going to be about this. Because there are some really ridiculous positions. You look at the debates on the so-called professional managerial class in the 70s and 80s and 90s. And you can see things that people arguing a kind of dogmatic understanding of a proletariat as anyone who is paid in wages leading people to argue that CEOs are workers. Because in the very strict legal definition, they don't own the company because they're part of a board.

and they can be fired and they're paid in wages. So you can sort of wrap yourself in a very kind of dogmatic interpretation there into that position. There's also another argument that I think is more recent and sillier kind of in its revival, that service workers are not part of the proletariat because they don't produce value. And that is extended even in the PMC debates of the 80s and 90s into the position that service workers actually exploit the industrial proletariat. And we can see that now, in sillier versions

of those are kind of arguments in the so-called patriotic socialist tendency's view that baristas are anti-worker because only strong men who hit girders can produce value. So, you know, you have a reductionism really that's deployed in those kind of forms of class analysis to separate people we like from people we don't like pretty much exclusively.

and entirely arbitrarily based on a kind of pre-formulated theoretical outlook and generally a social outlook, I think, as well. There's a reason that kind of fits together with some other kind of views about women and things like that that are more overtly reactionary. So I think that, you know, that there is a need for a discussion on this, but I think it has to begin by clarifying what a Marxist an approach to class is. And this is kind of a problem because although Marx wrote a lot about individual classes. There's not a single one of his texts where he says a class as a concept, the concept of a class is this. He begins to do so in the third volume of capital in the last chapter, and it goes on for five paragraphs and then stops. So, because he passed on, obviously.

So we never got that straightforward kind of illustration of what Marx's view of classes and analytical concept is. We have to work backward from these analyses of classes, which is a bit of a difficult proposition. But we can see from the way he does analyze the proletariat, you see even in Capital Volume 1, you have these long discussions of the way in which male workers sell the labour power of their children and their wives, and that turns them into a form of slave dealer, but is also, in Marx's own words, but is also maintains that the male worker is a proletariat because they're selling labour to the capitalist and so on and so forth. So Marx's analysis doesn't ever rule out these more exploitative relations

within the proletariat between men and women or between different people who are differently racially oppressed or not, and so on and so forth. Those are all things that he does consider and that the analytic can consider. So once we get out of that kind of reductionist reading of his approach to class, I think we can get a lot more into those other debates, which perhaps, which speak to historical grievances among sections of working class and oppressed who haven't traditionally been heard out by the Marxist movement. Yeah, really well said.

So let's go ahead and move on because you argue that the dominant common feature of various sorts of reductionism is a methodological error, an error that has many causes, perhaps. So what is the methodological error that is common to reductionism and what causes this error? So the fundamental misunderstanding, I think, is on the significance of abstraction in Marxism, how it should be deployed and what it means. So from that misunderstanding, so the reduction can run off in any number of directions politically, but this is kind of the beginning of it. To really understand that, we need to get into what abstractions are for Marx and for Marxism,

if we want to build a serious Marxism that moves beyond kind of reductionism. In the first preface to capital, Marx compares abstractions to microscopes and chemical reagents. That's like any form of scientific instrument. So he clearly identifies these things as instruments for investigation. Engels gives another one further insight into that in another letter to Conrad Schmidt, who was a German social democrat for the record and economist. And that was written in 1895. So this is very close to the end of Engels' life.

and he says that in any discipline the concept of a thing and its reality run side by side like two asymptotes always approaching each other and yet never meeting and that difference between the two is a very difference which prevents the concept from being directly and immediately reality and reality from being immediately its own concept so he's saying there's a divergence between any conceptual framework that we have and the reality of the matter and he makes the meaning of that for Marxism clearer in relation to general laws of accumulation, the rate of profit, and probably most instructively modes of production. And he asks if feudalism ever corresponded to its concept and says that the idea of the

peasant working the land for a period of time and then working the Lord's land for a period of time, was that ever the pure kind of correspondence, the actual reality of feudalism? And he says it came nearest to that in Jerusalem, but it was never actually achieved. And so that doesn't mean we have to throw out the concept, the analytical framework of feudism. It just means that we need to know that that concept is distinct from reality and it is a way of orientating closer to reality with further studies. The mistake that I think is made by reductionist Marxism is that it treats concepts, is if they already possess an identity with reality, and therefore we only need look for the things

that confirm the particular element of theory that has been transformed into a type of fetish. So you only need look for, if you're trying to prove that industrial capitalism can only employ workers, you only need look, for instances, where industrial capitalism only employed workers. Through wage labor, you can just ignore the elements where slaves were deployed.

You could ignore. any kind of utilization of existing feudal structures for capitalist accumulation, and you can simply say, this is that, and these things don't matter because they fall outside of that category. Whereas the actual kind of approach advocated by Marx and Engels always kind of goes into these edge cases or these kind of things that don't fit the overall concept and tries to explain them on their own terms in relation to the concepts in order to enhance the concept and to enhance our understanding. The reason I think that reductionist Marxism tries to treat concepts as if they possess an identity with reality is like a lot of different

reasons, but before we go into them, maybe we should see if there's any kind of questions or comments on the, this kind of, the kind of contrast between a Marxist approach to concepts and a reductionist approach to concepts that I've kind of tried to lay out there. No, I just would say that I really enjoy that I like how you said, you know, both Marx's sort of approach as this, you know, abstraction as a scientific instrument and then angles coming up talking about this confusion between concepts and realities, that they are parallel tracks, they don't actually meet, and the confusion of reality with a concept can lead to various forms of reductionism, which can be, may be in a simplified way, called various forms of

confirmation bias. Is that kind of fair? Once that concept reality is blurred. Yeah, no, absolutely confirmation bias, I think, is a massive part of this. That certainly informs the way in which it's carried out, right? But I think there's quite a lot of ways in that which that happens. So, like, the most charitable is the one I've already mentioned that, like, serious Marxism is not only hard and kind of assumes a great deal of knowledge upon entry if you're going to make a contribution, but also demands action. The point is to change the world.

And that kind of provides revolutionary enthusiasm, which can easily form into a more difficult zeal and refusal to kind of look at errors in one's own way of thinking. over time, as well as a lot of pressures to kind of live up to the mantle, whether those are organizational or simply like the political circumstances. And a lot of the introductory literature in the discipline puts forward simplified explanations of these concepts consciously as pedagogic devices, as of course anything must, that's trying to be popular literature. But when these two things meet, that leads to,

in the development of any sincere Marxism, there's going to be a bottleneck of sorts that we're all reductionists at some point in our development, and this is a natural part of learning, that can be healthy and positive for us in our movement if it involves more people and deepens the social basis that we're trying to build. But when it becomes a problem is when people get held up in that bottleneck, bottleneck, and it comes to actually politically dominate over our tendency, and when it becomes to determine particularly strategic decisions. And that can happen from a lot of different routes. And there are a lot in our present period,

like since the defeat of our movement in the 1990s, with the overthrow of the Soviet Union and the waves of, you know, defeats that the left had experienced in, particularly the imperialist nations, U.S. and Britain, the rise of neoliberalism, are very clear upon that.

That left us without a lot of, you know, institutions that had built up, educational institutions and organizational institutions that were once there that had been destroyed and those traditions that materially kind of ceased to exist and left a lot of smaller left-wing organisations who are still, you know, do good work on certain issues and certain things and certainly have good intentions but have low resources more often than not and quite high membership turnovers, which leads to a process of constantly going over the basics

as well as a need to do doctrinal reproduction in order to actually advance politically in public and kind of have propaganda campaigns and all those kind of things. That can produce a need and a drive to kind of just get the basics down in order to kind of say the point that the parties kind of all the organisations kind of relying on in that moment for its agitation. There's also the separation of Marxism. kind of inter-traditional Marxist kind of academia and then outside of that, which leads a lot of resources to kind of be hoovered up by the Bourgeois Academy and produces a certain type of

investigation within it, which also tends to include certain other prejudices. And that can separate the movement into two kind of broader spheres where the theoretical investigation, the detailed theoretical investigation is practically held at distance from the kind of activist space of Marxism. And that leads to a breakdown and further in pedagogy, so on and so forth. So those are kind of two causes. There are also kind of conscious manipulations. And then there's the internet, which I think the way social media has shaped our movement, particularly has led to a grandization of rhetoric and contrarianism in one sense, but also a way of trying to do the reductionist thing of summarizing everything within one quite easy to understand

political framework, that everything can just sort of be slotted. We see that a lot with the way we comment on the news that, you know, everything is just accredited back to capitalism rather than the kind of detail that we need to understand what that problem is in reality. And like, it's the detailed mechanics of how it works. That doesn't kind of falls by the wayside within the more popular, it's quote-unquote discourses and so on and so forth. Yeah. I think all that is spot on. I mean, personally, in my own experience inside, you know, organizations that, you know, try to be bigger tent or smaller tent, this high turnover and this repeatedly having to go back to basics as you introduce new people that eventually turn over themselves. I mean, that's a problem that I've certainly experienced firsthand in that separation between the activist on the ground organizing Marxist and the academic ivory tower Marxism and the sort of incentive structures and prejudice.

disses that sneak into academia. All that makes a lot of sense. And I really love that point about social media because one thing that has happened in recent years, and you know, I kind of came to political consciousness before the smartphone, before social media, et cetera. And I had to like learn the basics of Marxism either through organizations or through literally going to the library buying books, sitting down, reading them, trying to get through these concepts. But I see more and more young people, God bless them, coming up in the age of social media where they learn their Marxism, their politics entirely through social media, which is already reductive, which is already algorithmically inclined to outrage, to pithy statements, to

you know, hot takes, if you will. And you kind of leave, and a lot of these people also never actually are in or haven't yet engaged in actual organizing on the ground. And so there's a real detethering of some of these issues from this, I'm not saying everybody, but a significant portion of this new crop. And then you have people who have only learned Marxism through memes and being online build brands and careers as experts on Marxism, you know, and teaching other people, their sort of half-assed understanding of these concepts, which sort of perpetuates the problem. You get rise to a bunch of different things, but you're talking about patriotic socialists

and now the more absurd version, maga-communism, you know, these things certainly come from super egoic people who might have a, you know, a slight grasp on some basics, but not really. But because of their ego is and their confidence, their ability to talk in front of a microphone or be on YouTube or Twitch or whatever gives younger people the impression this person really knows what they're talking about. And then you're sort of learning, you know, this stuff from people that don't really understand it themselves and have obviously a lot of reactionary impulses. And they try to shoehorn their reaction into Marxism and say, actually, my reactionary bigotry is real Marxism and you just don't understand it. And so that's

a problem because at the same time that social media makes something like Marxism more accessible for people, it also generates these sort of issues at the same exact time. And it's sort of a difficult thing to navigate through. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that the internet's a really interesting one because in a sense, so a lot of the concerns and ideological problems that arise from the internet in a new way are themselves like old ideological problems. So fake news is just lies. You know, we go on as if it's the, you know, we go on as if it's the, you know, a lot of the bourgeois press, but also now, I think, increasingly due to the rise of kind of conspiracist Marxism, which is itself a reductionist kind of view, with more of the

reactionary views kind of baked into it, you know, any form of conspiracy and necessitates a cabal at some point. And there's a very particular reason that someone would want to mobilize a cabal that always leads back to a somewhat fascist view. But the kind of The way in which these things kind of proliferated on the internet really does highlight that this is a problem which can't be simply attributed to malice or to misunderstanding. It's both. Because what we have on the internet, which propels this process of reductionism in these discussions, these kind of pithy things, is an incentive structure towards pseudo-celebrity. And that's the core thing. And it's not the case that the people doing pseudo-celebrity in any form are, all bad because there's certainly a logic deployed within the way people cultivate their image in a lot of ways that, you know, they think they're doing something good, but then there are

obviously going to be negative actors who are intentionally malicious in distorting those theories that also, and I think we can directly say, definitely happens within the so-called mega-communism crowd, although possibly more within the patriotic socialist crowd, because it lives a bit softer at that point, and a bit more kind of useful. for corrupting kind of Marxist tendencies and stuff. But it also defines the way we can respond to these things a lot of the time. And this is something that kind of comes up in the base superstructure debate. So you see with the base superstructure debate, we had the kind of determinist of view comes up.

You have that kind of reductionist. Everything is determined by material economic things. If an artist paints, then it was because they want, you know, such and such a mode of production was this way, which is, as we've said, already a reductionist kind of view. But then you have the kind of liberal eclecticism that sneaks in the other way where it's like, okay, it's materially determining only ever in the last instance. And we can just sort of say that other stuff has an equal way to but be rhetorically materialist. And that reaction space is, it's not reductionism then we've left Marxism. But like that happens a lot in kind of the way we have to respond on the internet as well.

because when snappy things result, you end up in this battle of pseudo-celebrity having to appeal to already existing prejudices to gather an audience. You can't advance a new way out of that line very easily and carry people with you because it's all about the drama and the conflict rather than the actual analytic. Yeah. But I think the kind of the difficulty of those problems really all compounds into kind of all of these broader structures. that indicate that this is, in one sense, an effect of theory becoming popular. So there's a positive thing that it is happening on an increased scale. It means more people are interested in Marxism and that how we move out of that bottleneck and toward a more serious Marxism that deals with complexity,

which doesn't want to kind of tie up everything in a neat little theoretical bow, becomes a much more interesting question because there is a social basis that's interested than that now, the contest to win it over and set up the kind of institutions of education that we need in order to manage that is the challenge that we face in order to do that, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And that idea about these errors and these absurdities claiming to be Marxist, I mean, it's sort of an inevitable byproduct of, as you're saying, the general rise and the interest people have in Marxism, which is ultimately a good thing. But we should not be surprised that that increase in interest and popularity of things like socialism will

bring with them good and bad things, you know, as that hits more and more people and as the audience for that gets, gets broader. So I kind of try to keep that in mind when I get frustrated at various forms of what we're talking about is this like, this is an inevitable part of the process of, you know, in the U.S., especially where I am, like the left getting back on their after, you know, the defeat of the USSR and the internal, the full-on, full-court press of neoliberalism and the really destruction of the institutional left, et cetera. So I always try to keep that in mind and kind of temper my annoyance. But now that we understand what reductionism is, you've given many wonderful examples,

talked about the errors inherent to them, the causes of these errors. How can we combat it? So how might we as Marxists, you know, actively try to combat this error within our ourselves, first and foremost, as well as within our organization amongst our comrades and these broader sort of social circles of people that are interested in it. Yeah. So within ourselves, I think, is there are always going to be parts of your politics that are not perfect. We should try and set aside any notion that there is a perfect politic. And the attitude that we need to have is firstly, being wrong is positive because you learned something. Secondly, need,

jerk reactions to phenomena, the attempt to kind of rhetorically summarize them up or put them in a way that's sort of antagonistically rhetorical because it feels like we're doing something with that are not always analytically responsible and we need to be aware of them. And then obviously as well we need to be reading a lot and doing so in a way that is not always strictly tied to like this book explains this Marxist concept, but also testing ourselves. And actually engaging with literature that is antagonistic or ambivalent or critical of Marxist work is always really important because it helps you see where the potential weaknesses in the theory are and what needs to be attended to in order to deal with that.

So those are all things we can do within ourselves, I think. Just being responsible in how we conduct ourselves, being open to being wrong and open to criticism of being wrong unless it's coming from an obviously bad faith or reactionary position, and then also attempting to kind of read more and kind of humble ourselves in that way and take things in and talk really concretely. Then within kind of organizations and amongst our comrades, I think it becomes a bit more difficult. I think it needs the construction of a really healthy intellectual culture among the people

you either work with politically or discuss with politically. And that needs to allow for people to be wrong, people to have ideas that disagree with each other or disagree with if it's in an organization, even the kind of organization's position. And for those debates to be conducted in such a way where kind of there is space to investigate those questions and really go into them, as well as kind of an expectation that, that agreeing on a position as an organisation doesn't necessarily mean that the question is resolved in its entirety, that things need to be addressed and there needs to be a certain degree of conflict within organisations, even in order to kind of a friendly conduct, though, with detailed debate, in order to actually advance ideas. And that needs to happen all the time.

And preferably, there does need to be challenged from, like, broad membership. And if that isn't happen, it needs to be encouraged by getting people to read more, getting people to think critically about the text, highlighting within when we do introductory approaches and things like that, that there are multiple ways of interpreting these different analytics and things like that, and a little bit of the debates on them and so on and so forth, so that we are giving people both a basic introduction, but then suggesting that there's more beyond that that they can investigate and providing avenues for people who've already done that reading to do so.

Staggered education. We also need to fight against sectarianism. order to do this seriously. Like, there is an element in which doctrinal reproduction does, like, tend to foster certain reproductive tendencies, and that cuts across all kinds of tendency building and sectarianism of, you know, not even reading a Trotskyist argument or a Marxist-Leninist argument or a Maoist argument in full because of the tendency or kind of trying to use gotcha arguments and so on and so forth rather than dealing with the actual material or just straight up rhetorical

sword play aren't helpful and we really need to root that out and call it out where we see it yeah all that is great and i completely agree i love the just amongst ourselves like within ourselves this humility this oh this curiosity which can hedge against egoism and dogmatism to be genuinely curious about the world around you and wanting to learn more reading outside of your already existing ideas and tendency, not just amongst other left factions, but even I engage with liberal and conservative intellectuals and their most robust critiques of Marxism in my positions.

So I can understand them and I can develop responses to them and I can think through my own politics more deeply. But there is a sense in which, especially in dogmatic sex or micro-sex or whatever, and definitely online this idea that to do that is anathema. For a Maoist to read a Trotskyist is anathema. Why would you ever read a Trotskyist, you know, and vice versa, and those things, and to say nothing of the anarchist Marxist split. So I think that's incredibly important.

I'd also say that, you know, being wrong is exhilarating. For me, when I have a long-held belief challenged in a robust way or in some instances even overturned because I've been introduced to a new line of argumentation and new facts, that, you know, push on that already existing belief, that could be a scary prospect for somebody who identifies with that idea so much that it feels like an attack on self, but it can also be an incredibly intellectually exhilarating experience of learning something new, developing, being able, intellectually nimble enough to be able to drop an idea or to move beyond it or to transcend it or to deepen it or to make it more complex, even if it's a longstanding belief that you've had and so I think that those things are really important and the big thing I always

stress in this regard is the importance of communality that no one because Marxism is such a robust tradition with so many different lines of investigation and so much history that there's no one person, one mind that is going to fully grasp at all and all we have to do is sit at their feet and listen to them talk and so you know especially in the age of social media and brand building I always warn, especially newer, you know, more impressionable lefties that if anybody comes to you and says, I'm the real understander of this tendency or of Marxism or of communism and all these other people are frauds and phonies, that should be your, that should be a huge red flag that you just turn around and walk away from that person because this knowledge is so

complex, the analysis is so complex that it can only really be done well in a healthy communal organization, a political party, et cetera. And that I think speaks also to your idea about allowing conflict in a healthy intellectual environment within an organization or a party that doesn't immediately result in needless splits or purges or we see with left organizations people immediately taking to social media to vent out their frustration and personalizing their debates and their disagreements with other people. This is all very, very unhelpful.

And so to be able to create an organization or space, where that intellectual sort of sparring is encouraged, but doesn't go too far where it results in needless. I mean, sometimes splits are necessary, but needless splits or all the other things I mentioned, I think all that stuff is incredibly important. Do you find, is all that in line with what you're saying as well? Yeah, and I think, like, so there's certain,

so I think there's one, there's a couple of points I'd raise here. There's the first one, which is that, like, I don't think that this is, like, the solutions are all going to kind of cover. from organisations, and I think there is a need to reorientate outside of the movement with our education as well, which is, I think, what content creators can do if we take it seriously and use our spaces as educational spaces, which is something I've tried very hard to do with protocols like back infrastructure, like our Discord. We hold reading groups, and we have a lot of

discussions. It's explicitly stated. It's multi-tendency in that no one's going to be shut out simply because of a view unless it's a reactionary view and that inhibits other people from participation and such. And those are really important thing because you need like fun, curious intellectual environments to explore. And sometimes that has to be taken outside of a party tension, right? Sometimes there are really practical questions that like hinge on things and those articulate themselves in the way that an educational or whatever is conducted. And the ideas that are debated because it's a sort of becomes a sort of, staggered way of dealing with a conflict that is adjacent to it rather than actually like en rooted in it. And sometimes it is useful to have these institutions which are

outside of organisations, which still allow those spaces, but allow them in a more neutral way to draw together different tendencies in discussion, which they might not have elsewhere. Because generally, organizations tend to focus on a pretty specific tendency. The other thing I think is that the rule I have, this is perhaps a useful one, for an argument within myself, before I would try it out, if one of my arguments relies on a singular specific piece of material information that I cannot independently verify myself,

then it's a bad argument. Because it's reducing it down to a single phenomena. And if you can add that litmus test into things, I think you can separate out between what's just a reaction and what's actually like a meaningful thought towards something a lot easier. Yeah. No, that's great. Yeah, I completely agree with that. And I also agree with your point.

I didn't mean to say that simply and only an organization in the parties, I mean, as you're saying, there can be educational spaces and that are outside organizations proper that have the advantage of being able, perhaps, to have, you know, anybody of various tendencies, as long as you're not reactionary and you're engaging in good faith, we can all come to learn together. whereas perhaps in an organization, if you make that tent too big, you know, these line struggles and these problems and conflicts could be overwhelming to that organization. And just in general, I think what you're trying to do and certainly what I see myself is trying to do with Rev Left is create those open, you know, curious educational spaces. We can all come and learn. We're not pushing anybody out that is not a reactionary. You can disagree with my specific tendency, but you can still hopefully learn something from this show. And I, of course, have people on that disagree with me and we get into those. disagreements. And I think that is something that we both share as an approach to this stuff. And it really is a, you know, a hedge against various forms of dogmatism and hopefully even reductionism. But let's go ahead and move on because I think we really filled that out and people understand how to combat it within ourselves, organizations, our spaces, etc. But something that is often criticized as reductionism within Marxism and even Marx, which is important to understand, is breakdown theory.

So what is breakdown theory in the Marxist tradition? Maybe you can give some examples as well. So there's first the general premise, which fits within a lot of different frameworks, but stems from Marx's explanation of the development of modes of production in the preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy, which is basically that at a certain point in development, relations of production fall into contradiction with the way that production needs to be organized, and that leads to a dissolution of the social form and propels class conflict to new heights and leads to revolutions and so on and so forth.

That's obvious that's more fleshed out than simply that text, but it is a general view that a mode of production is a historically determinate way of producing things and therefore when the historical conditions for it either socially or materially in relation to the environment, which is important to evaporate or are overthrown or change in such a way that mean that that social system cannot reproduce itself anymore and cannot reproduce human beings anymore, those things are overthrown. So there's a general sense in which all social systems, all modes of production, break down within Marx's view of history, which is the first kind of general articulation. And then for our concern, there's a particular articulation in relation to capitalism, which is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall towards. zero, referred to as breakdown theory or crisis theory, often talked about without that last rate of profit toward zero, the last two words there are often left out, and that's quite important. And so that one is derived from third volume of capital, primarily, although there's links

as early as quite, I think, the midpoint of volume one. and that is the general tendency, which is as capitalism continues to accumulate and reaches new and higher forms of accumulation, the growth of constant capital, that is the machine's means of production, anything that is bought as an instrument of production, and deployed by the capitalist in the productive process, aside from Labour power, that is a grows in relation to variable capital, that is labour power, which is specifically the only commodity capable of producing more value than it is worth, because what it is worth is determined by what it takes to reproduce, and humans can make more than what they consume when they work in a single day, for example. They can make more than the food or whatever in terms of value that they consume and the housing, etc., in a single day through the exercise of their labor, which is a contradiction to do with the commodity form and how this works.

And as that constant capital increases, what happens is the ratio of profit to investment goes down as the value-producing component of the capital is reduced relative to the kind of constant capital, which either augments that value through increasing productivity and also tends to lead to its intensification as well, which is separate from productivity. But eventually that runs into a position where the ratio of profit, that is the amount of profit relative to investment, not the simple mass of profit, shrinks to such a degree that a capitalist is only making, say, a few percent on a return, the investment appears unprofitable. And the hypothesis is that will reach a point as that decline goes on towards zero, that

will reach a point where all capitalist investment breaks down as it is unable to. for return and adequate enough profit, not in mass, but in ratio. That has a number of countertenancies, so the destruction of constant capital, so new constant capital can be invested in either through economic devaluation, you know, you write off the machine, put in a new machine, or physical destruction in war, which is a really important one in relation to the world wars. The devaluation of labour power further below its value, either through wage cuts, the increase in the intensification of labour,

which is the amount of workers meant to cram into an individual hour, how fast and intense they're supposed to work, not simply their productivity, which is to do with the implements that they use. So it's the difference between working faster to produce something and a machine being there to augment how many you can make. And then there's also that increasing productivity, which can serve as a counter-tendency in certain phases of,

of class struggle, and then there's the export of capital to areas where two areas where labor, land prices, constant capital costs are lower in order to offset that profitability as well. So that gives quite a lot of elasticity to this, but still is a prognosis that capitalism is historically limited that arises from Marx and not necessarily on how it's historically limited. It's a value critique that shows that Capital has an end logical point in its own process of value composition. So it's a prognosis into the future, certainly, but it's also based on an observation of what was already happening in Marx's own time.

It's a general tendency that he identifies. It's become quite central to Marxism since the death of Marx as well. It was involved in the formation of what we consider orthodox Marxism or Marxism as a discipline, which is post-Marx's death and it is to do with debates in the German Social Democratic Party and with under Engels' discussion as well. And that became particularly acute through the 1890s in the 1930s following the publication of the third volume of capital,

which contains this about the rate of profit. And the key debates there are between Bernstein and Babel in the Social Democratic Party in Germany. Bernstein wrote eight critical articles disputing Marx's theory of the rate of profit, and Kautsky-Purton. those after Bernstein's death, and Babel was very much opposed. The idea, Babel was the head of the party in this period, and the idea that capitalism will collapse, and the imminence of that collapse become codified in Orthodox Marxism, and critiques of that become described as revisionism.

That's the origin point of the split between Orthodox Marxism, revisionism. That then kind of segues to an end of those debate, period of debate with Grosman, Enric Grossman, the Polish Marxists work, which has recently been republished in full. There was only in a bridge translation available until this year. And that's in the law of accumulation and the breakdown of the capital system, which is a response to a number of different kind of abstracted laws of development, which were claiming to prove the breakdown wasn't going to happen. And what Grossman does was just simply extend those to show that in the future it still does. But that was published in 1929, and it involved an analysis of contemporary capitalism. And whilst Grossman gives a really

good theoretical defense of Marxist's analysis of the rate of profit, he does clearly see the great depression as the onset of the breakdown, which is pretty understandable in context, but in respect, you know, he was somewhat wrong. And that leads him to fall into relative obscurity, along with a few other challenges he had to Soviet Marxism. He had been working with the Frankfurt School, but then moved to East Germany, toward the end of his life and worked as a teacher, I believe, and a lecturer. And his death and the kind of relative obscurity of his work led to quite a lull in the kind of debate over the value composition within Marxism.

It's picked up occasionally. There's a debate between Baran and Sweezy, who are at Monopoly Capital and Paul Matic, which is really useful, and more modern arguments have seen this kind of come back. So Michael Heinrich's latest work contests the legitimacy of the stuff in volume three. He argues that Marks wouldn't have said that and he would have edited it out if he had lived long enough to finish volume three. I don't think that's correct because volume one both prefaces the argument in miniature in kind of smaller terms and in more abstract terms and includes a explicit promise to explain the rate of profits tendency to fall towards zero

in a footnote, and Mark said it at that volume several times. So that argument kind of falls apart. David Harvey is also contested this. He argues that the mass of profits mean that the rate of profits doesn't matter because capitalists derive their power from the mass of profits. And whilst that is true, capitalists invest because of the profits it brings them and the ratio of that. And if they don't think it's worth it, they do not do that. And when they do not invest, capital ceases to be capital and becomes simply money because it isn't performing the specific productive role. It's meant to. And those have gotten, Harvey's gotten into particularly debates with Michael Roberts,

who's a really important empiricist defender of the rate of profit theory, and Paul Coxshot, who, whilst I disagree, are on most other things and particularly all social issues, particularly his quite rampant transphobia, is still quite correct on the rate profit worth reading there. So yeah, it's been coming more in vogue again, and I think that's a reaction to the contemporary crisis economically, as well as the rise of the environmental crisis, and quite an active discussion within even bourgeois circles that this way of producing things due to both of those features is not working anymore. So what are we going to do?

Yeah, perfect. That's an amazing summary of the various intellectual camps on this issue and the tradition of, you know, breakdown theory within Marxism itself. Of course, some very simple and obvious examples of that mentality of breakdown of theory can come when perhaps we look at old Soviet, you know, revolutionaries. You can find it in various revolutionaries from Marx and Angle to Rosa, et cetera, that there's this optimism about the timescale that capitalism will collapse and then it's inevitable transcendence, hopefully. You know, that optimism is sort of depressing as we look back from the 21st century and see how many people in our tradition and for various at various times for good reason thought that this was it that we were coming up

against the the end of capitalism and it was letting go of its final sigh if you will but even today breakdown theory i think is ushered into our rhetoric when we talk about late capitalism late capitalism is this idea that capitalism is in its late stages and that you know for various reasons people will articulate this in different directions and you know lay out different variables, but that capitalism is no longer going to be able to function for long, or at least that's implicit in the phrase late capitalism. Does that all sound right to you? Yeah, absolutely. Late capitalism is a really good book to read for some of the more empirical stuff on this as well. Nice. So now that we understand breakdown theory and understand its

role throughout the Marxist tradition, how is breakdown theory associated with reductionism, and how should we better understand it so as not to fall into the error of reductionism? So breakdown theory is kind of the elephant in the room when it comes to reductionism. So if we return to Engels' discussion of the separation between the concept and reality, there's a distinction between the identity of the concept and reality. Those are not exact the same thing, no matter what they're always going to be held apart. The goal is to approximate. What Marx has done in Volume 3 of Capital is to provide this critique in terms of,

terms of value, in terms of how those concepts work, how they develop, the laws that they develop under as an abstracted kind of directional thing, that this will enter into a historically determinate collapse because of its inner contradictions, which see this value kind of property eroded, which to him is not a prognosis in terms of capitalists will simply stop investing. what he's talking about is a breakdown in the function of what he says is a mode of production, which he is deriving from a critique of the concepts which correspond to capital, which are the expression of capital. What he is not saying is this will develop exactly like this.

The reason this gets associated with reductionism a lot, and in a lot of deployments, is reductionist, is the tendency that comes with this to overstate that imminence of collapse, as we've kind of already gone over and you highlighted there, but then also the tendency to explain all crises by simply just saying the rate of profit, for example, which doesn't really work out in a lot of individual instances. There are often much more concrete causes and specific financial mechanisms that can be pointed toward or specific productive breakdowns that can be pointed toward that don't necessitate or actually imply and necessarily that it's rooted in the

rate of profit. The rate of profit forms the general backdrop for those things. That doesn't necessarily mean there's an identity between crisis and that general framework of lowering itself. More broadly, it comes across as a fatalistic or deterministic reading of history that we will simply reach this moment where capitalism irrevocably collapses in this predefined way and the proletariat all rise to power. It's an assurance, right? It's a kind of, if it's deployed in a certain way, it becomes a sort of almost akin to the role of the second coming in kind of biblical narratives, right? Capitalism will fall and the proletariat will rise and it's simply how it will be. If it's deployed in that way, it can lead to, you know, abstinence from class struggle

and the same with kind of all those things. So what I think needs to be done to rescue breakdown theory, because I actually think breakdown theory is fundamental to Marx's view. If we get rid of breakdown theory, then Marx no longer believes. that capitalism is a historically determinate mode of production and that, you know, history gets rid of these things and history develops. And the whole idea of the materialist development of history kind of falls apart if we get rid of this theory, which is something that I don't think is wrestled with in kind of partial attempts to jet us in it. And so what we need to be

clear upon is the nature of what is breaking down and the nature of the abstraction being made in order to actually get at what is being said by Marx. So what is breaking down is the mode of production. Now, to Marx, we've gone over a lot of reductionist theories, but to Marx, that's not just a straightforward kind of epistle concept. He also deploys it to refer to technical elements of production and a lot of other things. He does so because he doesn't see these things as imminently separable, but in general he will refer to a mode of production as this epochal framework.

And so when we say that, we mean this distinct way, which can be generalized to a certain degree and abstracted into our understanding of capitalism or feudalism, is breaking down. And the reason that we say that's breaking down is because modes of production are always also modes of reproduction. Now, Marx makes that argument quite a lot. It's a very important one. And it means two things. On the relational side of things in terms of how relations occur, each mode of production must necessarily reproduce the conditions in. order for it to continue to reproduce. Each time the wage labourer sells their labour, they must also be reproduced in order to sell their labour again, or someone else must be. The capitalist must

always be reproduced with more profits and more investment, crucially because investment is what defines their relationship to capital. Those relationships have to be reproduced. But it also refers simply to, can we make enough food for everyone to survive? Can we do this, that, the other, you know, can we reproduce humanity? And that allows us to kind of take a step back and go, okay, so what Marx has done in volume three is a value critique of breakdown and what we need to be doing now, if we are convinced that this holds water, which I am, is analysing those concrete processes in more detail

in relation to the reproduction of society. So it's what I'm loosely terming a use value critique of the theory, in that it pertains to the actual processes of production, the conditions for them as material things, and what limits we're running into there, just as much as it refers to the limits of the social equation. With that kind of in mind, I think we can begin to put together

an anti-reductionist framework for viewing breakdown, which I think is really important, given the degree of the crises faced by capitalism today. Wonderfully said. All right, so now that we understand breakdown theory, how it's manifested in the tradition throughout its past and how it's related to reductionism. Let's talk about our present moment, because as you alluded to in that last answer, you argue that despite various forms of breakdown theory being incorrect in the past or being reductionist,

we are currently living in capitalism's final, if protracted breakdown. Can you flesh out that argument for us in depth? Yeah, so we start with the value argument, which I think is important because it situates the whole thing, So, which is that constant capital has grown to such an inordinate degree that it is lowering a rate of profit towards zero. That's expressed in a number of economic phenomenon. So we have record breaking over accumulation. That is money hoarding. So money that is acquired by a capitalist as profit or dividend or whatever.

And then it doesn't go back into investment that stays into their bank account or, yeah, stays in their bank account isn't even consumed in their own kind of moral. lavish consumption. And so that becomes, like, over-accumulated capital, which weighs things down. Similarly, which is a result of over-accumulated capital in those industries. So there's too much constant capital in many of the industries that we see around today. I'll go into a few sector-by-sector in a moment. And that's globally. So we have record highs of over-accumulation globally. We then have record highs of debt. So on record, since the pandemic, this year, the World Bank stated that world debt had got to $300 trillion, which is obviously

much more than the entirety of the world's economy. And that has, that's the only, only the on book figures before the pandemic, the off book figures, a decent study estimated, would increase the scale of that by a little under double, which is quite a lot. More still. Another example of this is zombie companies, and those are companies that subsist by the good grace of their investors. That is they can't pay off their debts, but still are financed by their investors. And those are between around 16 and 20% of some European nations capital in total at this point. So that's roughly 20% of a couple of economies of their entire economy that is utterly unable to. to service, it's debt. That translates into certain different industries, but it's quite a concerning phenomena for a company to be wholly debt at that point. So we can see all that, and that's kind of the preface to that. We had COVID, which has increased both over-accumulation

of capital from rapid increase in automation and industrialization, which are extremely expensive machines and clearly reduce labor, employed. And we can see that in terms of, in a further accruing of debt and a further tendency toward monopoly, as in solving companies and landlords and properties and such, were snapped up by either banks, tech companies and so on and so forth. The COVID also gave it a catalyst because it introduced supply lines and put strains upon thing. So there's an element of real, real kind of use value critique that has to come in even at the value stage because it provided a quote-unquote exogenic shot and stalled the economy

in a lot of different ways, particularly shipping and kind of those elements, but also energy production. That then for a number of different factors, including competition and other ones, energy contradictions have continued and that has increased constant capital costs dramatically in particularly agriculture so you can see a knock-on effect there but that's not simply a market reaction at this point so there has been some fundamental transitions of the kinds of fuel that we use in the energy market which are driving up constant capital costs so at present it's 15% ish of all energy produced from oil that is used to refine oil because we are turning toward unconventional fuel sources more and more that require more

mechanisation and processing in order to actually turn into fuel. By 2050, that's expected to turn to about 50% of energy produced from oil will be used in the refining of oil. So the value component of that is that constant capital costs are going to rise exponentially because you're going to need to use more of the thing that you're producing as a raw material in order to produce the energy. And that's not a tendency that's just going to go away on a fossil fuel basis. And that poses the counter tendencies, right? So the value composition of capital at present is very much leaning toward this crisis mode of over-accumulation, over-accumulate capital. The response is open to the bourgeoisie when we get into the more kind of thorny questions here.

the use value outside of things in much more detail. So the first one is automation. Now, that is what the impact of increasing productivity would look like in the next century, would be increased automation on an expanding scale. I do not think that a lot of the kind of technical briefs that we see around automation are accurate. They're trying to sell a product to people. We're not at the stage where machines can just deal with all of production, for example.

That's absurd. that's not hanging around the corner either. But what is going to happen is an increasing deployment of automation, increasing deployment of robots, which will further increase those capital costs and reduce the amount of human labour involved in production. And that breaks down the capacity to reproduce the social laws of capital, that we won't be reproducing a worker in that respect anymore.

We will be producing unemployed workers who cannot get employment because they are technologically obsolete. and value production therefore comes under question, and therefore the whole social reproduction of capital on the value side comes into question with the rise of that technology. The more immediate concerns that this has done in terms of countertendency is the further reduction of wages and assaults on conditions, which we can see in the form of inflation, in one sense, the rise of the price of the means of subsistence, is always a decline in price of the wages of the labor power of the worker unless it's accompanied by price rises above inflation, which wage rises above inflation, which it is not in most

cases. There's a lot of resurgent union struggle, of course, but that's not something that can easily be resolved. And if it is resolved, it's simply deep in favor of the workers. It does simply deepen the crisis for the capitalists. That's not a bad thing, and we should still fight for those things, but it's just a reminder that. Union struggle for wages doesn't defeat the system. It's good and we should do it, but it does further play into those contradictions and blocks off a countertendency here. And that countertendency is going to get more vicious.

Strike breaking is going to get more vicious and so on, so forth in the push to reduce wages and heightened exploitation. We then also have the counter tendency of exporting capital abroad. Now that's running into a rather definite competitive barrier as what I would argue our imperialist powers are fighting for the redivision of territory and we can see that in the conflict

in Ukraine over direct resources like land and oil fields so there's oil fields in between Kharkiv and Donetsk that Britain was invested in before 2014 that would be potentially enough to end European reliance on either Russia or the US

if they were integrated within the European economy so there's a fight over that the US and Russia struggling over the dominance over the European energy market, similar things playing out land grabs in Africa, similar things playing out in Libya and Mali and all these kind of areas around the world, similar things obviously in the Middle East, in Syria and Iraq, Afghanistan. All those lines are kind of being redrawn up and that means the export of capital is impaired unless you can actually actively push into a new zone through increasingly violent methods

and that's going to run into a hard line at some point it's not fated to turn into a world war but the only way to resolve it under capitalism so far when competitive interests occur like that is through a contest of strength and what that means is a read division of those things and increasing consumption of resources in a destructive economy which is significant both in terms of it could open the ground for reinvestment and allow that further export of capital, but with the weapons we now wage war with in reality

the use value of those weapons when it escalates to a full blown peer-on-peer war are you know, nuclear war is not referred to all the time as a complete abstraction. It were not there yet but it's not a possibility anymore. And those are things that

won't simply go away on our real contradictions and they all feed it further into the fundamental thing that I think we need to get out with the kind of dual nature of this critique between use value and value, which is the environmental crisis, which is not simply, I don't simply mean the use value metaphor in that the use value of all history of capital is the environmental crisis. You could make that argument, but it would be kind of more metaphorical than what I mean. What I mean is that the actual use value of kind of capitalist agriculture, it produces food.

That's breaking down due to value compositions as fertilizer, costs skyrocket, but also due to environmental conditions breaking down, due to increased consumption of water due to, and drought from extreme temperature, which is due to oil industry exploiting and so on and so forth. So it's intimately tied into the capitalist organism, but also undermines the conditions under which capitalism can reproduce itself, because certain key industries like agriculture, energy production, and so on and so forth, become increasingly unreliable and breaking down. And that week we're seeing play out already in the Horn of Africa and around the globe

with a lot of farmers going bust, fertiliser production in Europe slashed considerably. And drought reigning across the globe, Britain, and normally quite a protected nation from drought, had drought into late October with reserves in some places below 30% of their total capacity, which is a very strange thing for a European nation, particularly Britain. So yeah, there's a lot going on there. And the way these things interact amount to, in my opinion, a breakdown in the ability to capitalism to reproduce itself, but also a breakdown in the ability of capitalism to reproduce humanity. And that's not just the environmental crisis, it's all these other economic phenomena too. And how it will play out

It's not something that's predictable to say. We can say that from our present advantage, we can say agriculture is going to break down because of these conditions. But how elastic that system is, we don't know until it happens. No, I think that that analysis is absolutely fascinating. I really, really enjoyed hearing it all laid out like that. And then there's a bunch of questions that obviously crop up from that. One is a question of time scale. And of course, we don't know these things.

There's no necessarily inevitable aspect to them. There's no known time scale. But do you have any sense of which these things are sort of coming to and head or will create a real problem at a certain time, or is that just too far beyond anyone's ability to account for? I think it's beyond her ability to account for, but I think there are indicators that we're entering more potential catalysts. So particularly in the last decade, I think we've seen the crisis tendencies.

if capitalism really, really accelerate. And that's had a lot of very bizarre social and political expressions from Donald Trump to the shortest government in British history to so on and so forth. You know, there's been a lot going on in that respect as it's becoming less and less possible for the bourgeoisie to find a stable social basis or any project to actually kind of drive forward their political rule at this point. We can already see those political tendencies. In some nations, it's much more pronounced.

than in others, and that is something. They will have to wait and see how it develops. But we can also see the intensification of the environmental crisis. We passed a really key tipping point according to a few studies in 2020 or 2020, which is the Amazon, which is in terms of singular ecosystems, it's not a singular ecosystem, but in terms of things we consider singular ecosystems, is the most influential on climate patterns possibly on Earth in a lot of different ways, and that has gone from being a net sink of carbon to a net emitter of carbon and of methane, which is a phenomenally scary point to have reached. It's 80% of the rainforest in the world. That's not something we can simply reverse engineer, and those environmental

conditions are becoming more strained in a lot of different countries. And whilst I wouldn't want to imply a linear development, because I think of thinking, Keith, that climate change is, is that it's irregular, it's irregular as well as kind of a deterioration in climate conditions. What the new ones will be are incredibly, well, quite impossible to predict outside of general ballparks

if it's going to get hotter and drought will happen and so on and so forth. But it's not possible to say exactly what those weather patterns will look like and where. But as that continues to get more unpredictable, it's going to undermine the other countenancies for capital kind of

as well, like in agriculture there's the land and such but then in energy production so-called renewable infrastructure actually becomes a lot harder when the wind and the sun that you use to generate your energy is unpredictable

and so all of those things point towards in my view if with the current trajectory with the speed of development of the environmental crisis and the failure of any kind of capitalist adaptation to land at all to that and the continued deepening

barbarity and the razor sharp tensions we're seeing in the geopolitics as not only in Ukraine, but also with the realignment of OPEC as a more considerable political bloc. We are seeing those challenges all really pick up pace. So I think this, not a definite prediction, but I don't think we have more than a couple of centuries of capitalism left, possibly one. Yeah, absolutely. So then that begs this next question, which is throughout the history of,

of breakdown theory within Marxism, as we've talked about earlier, there was at various times certain forms of optimism that were later turned out to be wrong. And Marxist had to sort of deal with the consequences of, you know, perhaps believing that this was more or less the end and then seeing capitalism adapt in new and, you know, interesting ways that that prolonged its existence well beyond what some people in the past thought. So, you know, with that in mind, is there any way that you could see capitalism responding to these varied crises such that it could prolong its life into the next century and make this latest round of believing in the breakdown theory incorrect as well? Or is that, yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

So at present, I don't think so, but that is obviously viewed from this perspective. What would be the perspective of our reality now? What would be required, in my opinion, for capitalism to survive? I wouldn't rule it out as a theoretical possibility. But what I would think would be required is, first of all, a dramatic increase in the ability of capitalism to use technology to adapt to climate change and climate crisis on the one hand. And that would require not only kind of energy infrastructure or carbon capture devices to dramatically in the latter increase in their productivity and in the former increase in their reliability. or somehow come not to contradict with the profitability of energy under capitalism, which there's been a study from MIT which shows that on certain sunny days,

where solar is used, prices fall into negative because of the abundance of electricity on the system. So automated abundant energy, even if there are environmental problems from where the machines come from, already contradicts the value system which values and determines the profit made on energy from those kind of isolated studies. So unless there's a way to deal with that social problem, that kind of contradiction in terms of value, which I cannot see any basis for within capitalism, or a rapid increase in the, you know, adaptation technology. So carbon capture, the largest, there's two operational, I believe, the largest one captures about two seconds of energy use globally. Yeah. Which is, you know, it's a start, but it's not enough.

And it also installed could increase the water requirements of factories by about 300% in its current iteration on the more extreme end. So with the drought and stuff, that kind of poses its own problems. So unless there's a technological revolution that we literally cannot see yet, which we have no basis for believing which will happen other than hope, I can't see that those kind of adaptations happening. And if they do, what it will require ultimately is a destructive economy on a scale we have never seen like the First World War, the Second World War, fascism, all of these things were needed to resolve the for capitalism, not for humanity, were needed for capitalism in order to resolve the crisis of profitability that arose for it and redivision that arose for it in the early half of the 20th century. what that looks for on the expanded scale of 8 billion people with ideas like overpopulation floating around and the modern weapons of war and so on and so forth and the contamination of modern production in terms of environmental sense

is a system of brutality that I think would overshadow all of the worst crimes capitalism has ever done which is not something And, you know, it's in some ways you could look at that and say that, you know, breakdown theory is a way of insulating ourselves from that. But actually, I think that's the pessimistic thing is I think capitalism will try to do that even as it breaks down. And it really is a moot question in some ways how we respond in terms of the theory. But I maintain that the breakdown theory is important because I think it provides us various different angles in order to stop these things from happening and to understand where those processes are being driven. by.

So yeah, I can't see it happening unless there's some kind of massive acceleration of Maslow's law, fundamentally. What are your thoughts as a complete side question on these new breakthroughs of fusion energy? I don't know if you followed that, but there's been recent stuff in the news is saying they're able to maintain it for longer and longer. I've heard, I haven't confirmed this, but I heard that China is able to keep a fusion reactor going for up to minutes, which is, you know, blows out of the water, the previous record of mere seconds. And what do you, what do you see on that front? Because fusion has also been

promised for decades and decades and decades and decades and has never come to fruition at the same time. So do you have any thoughts on that at all? As I understand it the most, yes, China has made a breakthrough in terms of keeping the reactor on. But as I understand it, these are still reactors which are testing the premise of fusion energy. And in order to produce effective, real energy, I think the productivity would have to be increased by, I read 10,000 times somewhere. So whilst those are in, you know, I don't know enough about the deep science of fusion energy to understand the significance of those tests, but I do understand, in relation to the actual hard science behind this.

And I, but I do understand it is a breakthrough in those respects. But in terms of commercial or productive energy production, I don't think it's made that breakthrough yet. And it could, but again, I think that that requires a lot more than we can vouch for, if that makes sense. Yeah, I agree. And in fact, one of the most recent breakthrough in the United States that was being touted last week was simply that for the first time in the U.S. history with fusion attempts, they were able to produce more energy than they had to put into the system, right? So one of the, and only for a few seconds, a tiny marginal amount. So the big problem up till now is like just to be able to generate energy the amount of energy you have to

put into the process itself was you know sort of canceled each other out and so that's not even you know as far as milestones go in the development of a technology that's not particularly screaming it's right around the corner you know no and with the present tech you know you could interpret it's just the present tech and that's one possibility but the other possibility is there might be a threshold where there's an absolute amount of energy which would then post into the production that then leads to an increase in the relative produced and you get a massive dissonance between those so it is producing more but that amount might be way more than we can reliably produce from other sources so it becomes a bit of a difficult one the other problem

that arises from all of these technologies i think is if we stake our bets on any individual one then we enter into potential crises if either the environmental or resource bases empty out. So we need to build something that reproduces the resources it consumes. Exactly. Yeah. And the very last thing before we move into the conclusion, just because this was brought up a few sort of answers back, is capital's collapse in this sort of determinist and naive belief that that implicitly and inherently means that the proletariat will rise. But we've seen in the past in moments of profound capitalist crisis that that's not always the case.

And in fact, you need an already perhaps existing organized, you know, socialist movement to be able to push in that direction. And it could just as easily give rise to various forms of barbarism, fascism, et cetera. So do you want to make any point about that before we move on to the conclusion section about capitals collapse not necessarily being synonymous with socialism's rise? Yeah. So, I mean, this is always a possibility that Marx has entertained either the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large or the common ruin of the content. ending classes. There have been common ruins throughout history. We know about collapsed societies.

Rome was a common ruin, but there are others in particularly the ancient world. And they lead to mass depopulation, at least. What the kind of thing for us to remember is the thesis that says that the proletary or rise, I think we can describe as the dispossession thesis, because it's the idea the circumstances will simply become so intolerable that the proletariat will then necessarily rise up. But the problem is that desperate people don't tend to behave in that way in reality. They do what they can to survive. If that falls into organized political conduct, that is due to either political struggles they've gone through before themselves, as the case

of 1905 in Russia compared to 1917 in Russia. The Soviets were an organizing structure that had been tried before and from political organizations kind of holding on to those traditions and keeping people together in a conscious form of resistance is another really important factor that has to be present I think how those things come about is harder now that we have particularly in the West a very spatially and socially alienated working class that has seen a lot of decomposition in its social institution political, destruction of its political institutions, and even the destruction of masses of its economics organs for struggle in the unions. And without that, we've seen its dispersion

of communities and through increased privatisation of housing and so on and so forth. And that provides a very difficult thing to try and find unity in, and this is something I think the journal Endnotes explores in useful ways. I disagree with them on some of the conclusions they derive from it, but it's useful to consider this kind of as a process of class decomposition. And so in short, I don't think the dispossession thesis is realistic. It relies upon the most vulnerable people to sort of axiomatically know what to do, the most desperate people to be gallant heroes of a revolution, which can happen, but I don't

think is the thing that human beings tend to do. It's only going to be by conscious organization and political intervention that people see the need for those things in order to resolve. the more fundamental problems. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. So we're coming to the conclusion of this episode. And I really appreciate the depth and complexity of your thinking through Marxism, broadly conceived. And I really, you know, have learned a lot from you. And I love this conversation. We'd love, of course, to have you back on any time to talk more politics and philosophy, whatever else you're interested in. But I have an interesting question

for you before we totally wrap up, which is, you know, as we talked about earlier, earlier there's more and more people, especially young people, seeing the environmental crisis as one example, but many more things like the lack of opportunity, low wages, just a shittier and shittier life here in the U.S., you know, this sort of cultural idea that you'll have it better than your parents has come to a halt with the millennials and Gen Z. And that certainly is a catalyst for some to look for alternatives and many are moving to the left in interesting ways. So what bit of advice would you give to a young person today who is just getting into Marxist politics or we can even broaden the umbrella, just say socialist or left-wing politics

broadly? First of all, try and always maintain a bit of a perspective upon yourself and how you come across to other people. And that's really, really important because Marxism kind of tends, particularly in modern context. It's become a bit countercultural in terms of not only the fact that it's suppressed by the push-poise and stuff like that on a much broader scale than countercultures, but also that, you know, it's come into those kind of milliers of people who are a bit kind of disaffected and tend to be a bit alienated and those kind of things, which can create in groups really easily, particularly if it's being done online or if someone's isolated in their pursuit of it. And so just really try and be

conscious of how you come across to people outside of the groups you're talking to. and like consider other opinions really seriously not even necessarily as an indication that something is wrong with your deeper politics but certainly in terms of how we conduct ourselves that is important um secondly um you know stay true to what the original principles of what you were trying to get into here are you know don't try to deviate too strongly because something's a popular argument or whatever stick stick stick to your guns if you have a if you have a if you sincerely believe in something, you need to articulate that openly and honestly. Thirdly, most of the people who treat you with malice in acting as a Marxist or appear to don't really mean it. They're just sort of acting politically in terms of it's not a personal thing about you, even if it can appear that. It's really important to learn earlier on. I think I would have really liked people to have told me this in some of the debates I've gotten into about Marxism war against anti-Marxists in the past.

but sometimes you can like just take it with a pinch of salt not really care about it too much in terms of if it's a friend or a family member and they disagree with you it doesn't have to matter that much in your relationship with them and finally just keep yourself humble and study a lot and in terms of practical activity do what you can but never bring yourself to the point of breaking because the revolution isn't tomorrow

we need to organize as much as we can but it's not literally going to be tomorrow yeah um yeah so yeah so so for the agenda for sure and things can change quickly but prepare yourself for the marathon not a sprint um yeah and i would just add to that and something i've seen obviously we talked about this sort of reactionary movements masquerading as as marxism is that you know the cultural winds will blow back and forth like here in the u.s 20 20 was this profound moments where we had the largest street protests in American history under the Black Lives Matter banner that took, you know, multifaceted forms. They're feminists and socialists, you know, embedded in that movement.

And it was certainly a moment when the wind was blowing at the left's back, if you will. And then that was, of course, predictably met with this new wave of extreme reaction that here in the U.S. in particular we're living through right now. And this cultural wind shift away from the left and towards the right has taken some people who were in 2020 and 2021, ostensible Marxists and socialists, and driven them to the right out of this idea, especially among young people who haven't seen this process play out multiple times, that actually the energy, the revolutionary energy is with the right, with the January 6th types, with the MAGA movement.

And that is in part a product of perhaps opportunism, but also just not being around long enough to see how these cultural win, cultural and political wins can shift back and forth and rooting yourself in an analysis and values and an approach that anchors you no matter which way the winds are blowing, I think is really important. And then of course, spending not saying never get on social media, but spend a lot of time away from it with real people in your real life, and that will also hedge against certain forms of, you know, social media-induced psychosis, which takes people's minds over because if the only thing you're doing is sitting for 12, 15, 16 hours a day in echo chambers, your perception of reality and what the average

person thinks and goes through can really become warped. So those are kind of in line with what you're saying, and I would just add those on top. Yeah, I think those are all really, really good points. I think particularly about that kind of warping that happens. I think if there's one thing that's perhaps comforting and sad to people who are coming to Marxism, the revolutionary enthusiasm that a lot of younger Marxists get is fantastic and can be a real boon to our movement. But there's an important brain of salt that always needs to be taken about it, which is until we're organizing a mass movement, which is kind of codified into really identifiable, institutions and structures that are serving particular, clear political roles.

Messing up isn't going to matter too much. People won't remember it. If something goes well, that's always a boon. But just keep trying. That's the core. Absolutely. Well said. All right, my friend, this has been a wonderful conversation.

Again, I really mean it. I learned a lot from this conversation and engaging with prolo-cult more broadly. So before I let you go, can you just let listeners know where they can find you and prolocult online. and you can give any recommendations or any other plugs that you want here as well. Okay, thank you. So first of all, thank you again for having me on. It's been a fantastic discussion.

From my end, too, I've really enjoyed the material we've covered, the kind of questions you've had and the discussion of the political questions at hand. In terms of protocol, we are presently doing a series on reductionist Marxism called Approachy Marxism, which takes people through the basic concept. shows some ways in which they can be interpreted in reductionist or liberal ways and then discusses kind of hopefully more useful questions

in terms of advancing those analyses. So that we have two episodes out on our YouTube channel already if you're interested in that subject matter and that is our YouTube channel is YouTube.com forward slash protocol or just protocol on YouTube. We have Twitter, we have Instagram, we don't really use it that often

And we talk a lot through our Discord, which can be accessed to any of our patrons from $1 a month and includes educational meetings, reading groups, those kind of discussions all within that $1. It's never going to raise, it's never going to go any higher than that. We do have quite a lot of coming on the crisis critique as well. We have a few videos from this year that we're quite proud of on Ukraine. and on the food crisis, and those are also on our channel. Just a few plugs as well. My comrade who I do the Prolacop podcast with, Luke, has recently edited together a volume of Paul Hunt,

who was a leading member of the Revolutionary Wing of the British Disability Movement, and his collected works are available as a free PDF on the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People's website, now, and they provide a really instructive look at disability politics in Britain, and it's long and arduous development through the revolutionary wing that Paul Hunt led. So I'd really recommend that. If there's books that you want to check out on these discussions that we had today around breakdown theory or anti-reductionism,

I'd recommend Jaros Banerjee's theory as history on modes of production and forms of exploitation, from which one particular essay, a lot of the kind of historical formalist discussion is initially derived. And then I recommend that new Grossman that's just been published and capital as well. Don't be afraid of capital. It's really good. We do a capital study aid on our on our Patreon as well, if anyone who's interested in that. Beautiful. Yeah, you're doing wonderful, wonderful work and I'm a full supporter of it. And genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, open invite, anytime you want to come back and talk about anything else that you're working on or any topic that you feel is important and would be worthwhile to get out to our audience. So thank

you so much, James, for everything you do. I'll link to as much of that as I can in the show notes. And hopefully we can talk again soon. Thank you very much, Comrade. It's been wonderful. I don't want to be a fucking talk that you drag around a collar on my necktide to a pole leaving in the freezing cold I don't want to be. I don't want to be little pet at the edge of

a fatty bed you're sleeping body stretching out guess I'll curl up on the couch always talk to always talk to other people don't my eyes across the room

Forehead kisses Break my knees And leave me cold Back to you Because I don't want to be your fucking talk That she'd drag around To the collar On my necktide to her pull

Leave me in the freezing And you're calling Always talk to other people dart my eyes across the room. Forehead kisses with my knees and leave me calling back to you. Because I don't want to be a big thing. Girl, that you show up to. The moment when you decide you want to feel like it limits of something I feel I'm not a problem for you to refuse

When you're lonely you're confused I'm not a love that it lets me breathe I've been choking on your leash You know,