Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Louis Althusser: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Jan 23, 2020 On this episode, Melody (aka A World to Win!) joins Breht to introduce and discuss the work of Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, specifically his work on ideology. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE Outro Beat Prod. by flip da hood

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade Bred O'Shea. And today we have on Melody to talk about ideology and ideological state apparatuses. It was originally an essay by Al Thusei, but it eventually became the appendix to a much bigger work called On the Reproduction of Capitalism. And in this episode, we talk about ideology. We talk about psychoanalysis. We talk about how Althusay took Marks and Engel's original concept and expanded it.

We talk about RSAs and ISAs and interpolation and a bunch of different stuff. I really wanted this episode to sort of be a 101 introduction to the main ideas of Althusay and, you know, deeper dives in the future perhaps. But I really wanted to help listeners orient themselves to Althusay's work just because if for no other reason, we mention him all the time. Like we mentioned him in our psychoanalysis episode, we have a philosophy episode coming up where we talk about him. Just mention him a lot and I realize we've never done any real work on him. So this will be a really good, hopefully 101 introduction with a lot of fascinating detours in our conversation about quantum mechanics, free will, science and math, etc. So it's really interesting, wide ranging and we hope that everybody listening enjoys it. And as usual, if we like what we do here, you can go to revolutionary left radio.com.

a supporter on our Patreon in exchange for bonus monthly content and if not you can also find our youtube channel our sister podcast red menace etc so without further ado let's get into this conversation with melody on al-thusay and his philosophy surrounding ideology and ideological state apparatuses enjoy Hi there. Thanks for having me on. It's an honor to be invited to talk with you. I'm Melody. I use she-her pronouns. I'm a Marxist, Leninist, and I create educational YouTube videos for revolutionary leftists on my channel, which is called A World to Win. I talk about history, philosophy, political theory, and so on, but I don't do so being any kind of

expert or professor, my background is actually in physics. I'm simply an intellectually curious person who likes to read and then share what I learn. In terms of my personal theoretical approach, I'm very much a Marxist and also an institutionalist thinker. For those who are unfamiliar, institutional economics was founded by the American economist Thorsten Veblen and carried on by others such as John R. Commons, Seyright Mills, and others. And on the Marxist side of things. My biggest influences are people like Kim Moody, Harry Braverman, Paul Barron, Paul Sweeney, the whole monthly review crowd. And on the institutional aside, my biggest influence is JK Galbraith, who is the author of The New Industrial State, and he was host of a BBC

documentary series called The Age of Uncertainty. And he was kind of regarded as the Carl Sagan of economics as sort of what he did. He had a, it was kind of the people's economist who would get on TV and explain these things in very accessible terms. So I do what I do because I think it embodies kind of the fundamental pedagogy at the heart of Marxism, which is that, you know, history and philosophy and so on shouldn't be abstract academic pursuits, but tools that everyday people can pick up and learn to use to forge their destinies together. As I often remind my own audience, I'm learning right alongside them. I'm not a professor handing down the holy word of our Lord and Savior, Carl Marks. I'm humbly reading these books

and sharing what I learn. That is what I see my mission as being, and I think I share that mission with all you at Rev. Left and Red Menace. And Marx has a really wonderful quote that I just wanted to share on this, which is, in that case, we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle. Here is the truth. Kneel down before it. We develop new principles for the world out of the world's own principles. We do not say to the world, cease your struggles. They are foolish. We will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to. So the way I see it, we're in the United States,

anyway, emerging from this long period where the revolutionary left has been kind of a marginal voice in terms of its size and impact compared to previous epochs in our history. And something new is emerging, and what that something is remains to be shaped. And the way I see it, the work we do here and now is going to lay the contours for what that something will be. It is thus our job as educators in the infancy of this rekindled interest in social politics to learn the lessons of past struggles and through our organizational praxis become the living memory as us Marxist Leninists often make reference to the need for a political party to bring life to such praxis an organization that's

capable of collective education and being as Lenin said a tribune of the oppressed to be a weapon wielded by the oppressed classes to wage war and emerge victorious against capitalism so I see our respective projects as kind of preliminaries to such an organization. We can do our best to provide a solid foundation of our class history and a theoretical framework with which we can adapt to the specific needs of our present fight. A little bit more biographical. I've lived in the city of Portland, Oregon, my whole life. I'm a proud member of the Portland DSA, where I'm active with the political education working group, bringing into the real world what I do online. So, big.

shout out to the amazing community of activists both in Portland DSA and the rest of Portland I would not be the revolutionary socialist I am about your support and teachings so thanks guys that's awesome shout out to all the comrades in Portland for sure and thank you Melody for coming on for tackling this text with me I know I wanted to work with you for a while and we settled on this text as a thing to sort of tackle together and so it's an honor to to have you here and just so my listeners know this will be a bit of a 101 introduction like we're not going to go into every nuance of every major idea or minimal idea that Althusay ever had. We're not going to go

into all the criticism of Althusay's work from Marxist and non-Marxists alike. What I wanted this episode to be was really just an overview of his main ideas in the most popular essay of his ideology and ideological state apparatuses. So this is very 101. It will help orient yourself to who Althusay is and what his basic ideas were so that when we mention him in other shows, you'll have some idea of who we're talking to. And we're also going to have an upcoming show on Gramsci. And as you'll find out through this discussion, Al Thuze is very much sort of operating after Gramsci in response to Gramsci, disagreeing and agreeing with Gramsci, but is heavily influenced by him. So we have an episode on Gramsci coming up. And so it's nice that we can tackle some of the

main themes of Althusay's work before we get into that. And then obviously, like we mentioned Althusay a lot. Like I think in our psychoanalysis episode we did in our upcoming episode on Marxist philosophy, we mentioned him a lot. So I just wanted my listeners to have. a 101 orientation to him and that's what this episode is going to be but before we get into the ideas of al-thusay i was hoping melody that you could just very quickly sort of talk about al-thusay's just life but specifically his mental illness and sort of how that culminated you know because it's it's often associated with him people that don't know al-thusay's ideas will know that oh he was mentally ill and killed his wife right so could you just briefly talk about that sure so yeah so

Altusar was born in 1918 and served in World War II and ended up in a prison of war camp for, I think, five years and suffered from either as a result from that or other factors suffered from a lot of depression and schizophrenia and other forms of mental illness throughout his life. he spent a lot of time hospitalized and for psychiatric reasons. And in, I think it was 1980, he, in a psychotic episode, tragically murdered his wife, Helene. And that was used to by both his Marxist detractors and his, you know, kind of the bourgeois haters of Marxism was used to discredit him. And so a lot of his work kind of fell into the, into the background for many years. And recently there's been a bit of revival in interest in his work now that, you know, he died back in, I think, 1990 or so. And so there's been kind of a renewal of interest in his work. But there, he does carry that baggage of, you know, being the, nobody wants to be remembered as that guy who murdered his wife.

it's not it's not a good look right yeah and you and you mentioned before we started recording that like he like after it happened right he grappled with it he had like 10 years after the murder of his wife until his own death and so there were moments of clarity and coherence where he could wrestle with sort of the the fallout of what he did to somebody that he loved right yeah yeah that's rough um but yeah so i think that's the big thing people know like when they know when they hear his name they're like oh that guy that killed his wife and so we just wanted to talk about that up front so people know that that is who we're talking about, but there's a lot more to him than just that,

and that should never be used as a thing that discredits his ideas. Sure, and I mean, his impact is just, like, huge when you think of not necessarily exclusively in terms of Marxism, but, like, you know, he was a teacher, I believe, of Michel Foucault and Alon Badoo, so his influence on the world of philosophy more generally is kind of hard to overstate. Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, he had a lot of students, and they went in a lot of different directions. I mean, just, you know, the direction that Elaine Badoo went in compared to Michelle Foucault. I mean, there was like many trajectories off of Al-Douzé. It's really interesting. Right. I'm digging for quotes here, but I'm thinking it was Jean-Paul Saunt, who said, Foucault, the last barricade, the bourgeoisie can erect against Marx or something like that. That's a great quote. Some goofy line. Saw in his silly.

one-liners yeah that's great we also have an episode on uh on sarcher coming up too for people that are interested in all right so yeah um all right but let's go ahead and get into the main ideas and the main ideas will be from uh originally from the essay ideology and ideological state apparatuses which eventually became the appendix to the bigger book called the reproduction of capitalism which is well known i think if people saw the cover of this text they would immediately know it if you've been around on the left you've probably seen it if you haven't read it but that's what we're going to focus on today so let's start off by getting just your thoughts, melody on the text overall. Did you enjoy reading it? How was the

experience, et cetera? Yeah. Did I enjoy reading it? Frankly, no. It was a pretty tedious read. This book was a slog, but it definitely had some very interesting ideas in it. I don't particularly care for Al Tusser's style. If you're new to reading the more philosophical as opposed to historical or political Marxist text as I am, the approach can be a bit of a jolt and takes some getting used to. So I'm, as I said, in my biographical introduction, I'm a little bit more accustomed to the economic side of Marxism, so guys like, you know, Braverman and that whole crowd. So Altusair takes us through a number of main topics in this book, foremost being, of course ideology and its relationship to the state and the reproduction of the conditions which

make capitalism possible. So if capitalism makes us as the working class so miserable, why hasn't it been able to revolt across the whole system yet? So Altusair answers this broadly by saying that ideology is what does that job of creating some level of buy-in for the working class. They have to be convinced on some level or another that this is how things have to be. But what is ideology this is another question that altusair sets out to answer and does this in a very novel way and we'll get into that shortly yeah absolutely and you know the things that i pulled out i sort of so i agree with you that it's a slog right and uh any any sort of philosophy text at all is going to be sort of a slog in that way but i also think there is a sort of clarity with the way that he writes that

you know more or less allows you to really follow his argument and understand to some extent what he's saying he's not an obscure antist that's for sure no absolutely he writes very clearly it's just i don't think it's any less tedious it's a good way to put it yeah it's not it's not like say reading uh hegel which i've also done yeah not like that it's a uh as as as lennon said it was it's the fastest way to get a headache to read hagel yeah that's true um it's not nearly that bad yeah yeah i agree and you know another thing to know before we move on is not only is obviously i'll do say a marxist and doing work in Marxism, but he's really drawing on both Freud and importantly, Lacan.

I mean, I think earlier in the Frankfurt School, in the 50s and 60s, you had a lot of focus on Freud, and then Lacan popped up, and you see Althusay really taking Lacan and weaving it into Marxism, as well as Freud, so you have him making analogies to Freudian conceptions of dreams. He really takes on board a lot of Lacan's structural linguistics, the Lacanian terms, like the symbolic order or the Freudian notion of the unconscious. these things are really woven in. And so I think, at least I think of Althusay is really taking Freud and Lacan and using

some key concepts in psychoanalysis to help us understand how ideology works. But I think in this instance, psychoanalysis is sort of subordinated to his Marxism, right? It's not start from psychoanalysis and also do some Marxism. It's like, I'm a Marxist, but here are some helpful concepts from psychoanalysis. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned Lacan, I think Althusser has quite a bit in common with Ola Kahn's concept of the subject and how he talks about how we develop our subjectivity under capitalism.

And we will get into that because we had a recent episode on Marxist humanism. And in that episode, obviously, you know, Al Thuze was brought up as the critic of humanism and we'll get into basically how more or less Al Thusay sort of eradicates the subject that would make humanism reasonable. But maybe that's getting ahead. Let's just go to the next question for now and we'll get into this. that. So for those listeners who haven't read the book, and I assume most of them have not, and may have little to no familiarity with Althusay, can you just give a summary or overview

of what Althusay is basically doing in this text and what the main point of it is? I know you touched on it, but just sort of re-say it. Yeah, sure. So the big thing that this text is setting out to achieve is to develop a Marxist conception of ideology, as the title suggests. Marx and Engels did, of course, comment on the nature of ideology, but neither developed a systematic approach to it. So Mark says, for example, that it is not man's consciousness which determines his being, but rather man's social being, which determines his consciousness. Similarly, for Altusir ideology can't simply be reduced to a list of tenets and beliefs that a person or group of people submit themselves to explicitly, like the teachings of a religion,

for example, but involves the practical activity of people participating in those social institutions. To greatly simplify Altusera's view of ideology, it could be condensed into this short aphorism. It is not action which follows belief, but rather belief which follows action. This is not unlike Blaise Pascal's advice to the non-believer who wants to believe in God, that is, which Altusera himself echoes several times throughout the text, kneel down and say your prayers, and belief will come to you. The reference to theology here is relevant as Altutera was a Catholic, and this certainly colors much of his work. So to illustrate this idea, the philosopher Slavojizhijek frequently references the story about the field.

Well, it's probably an apocryphal story about something that's very near and dear to my heart as a student of physics. It's a story about the physicist Neil Spor, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. who was an atheist, and yet he kept a horseshoe nailed above the door to his countryside home, which is an old superstition to keep the evil spirits away or something like that. So when his similarly atheist colleagues inquired, Boer, you're an atheist and a scientist, I do have this, you know, silly, superstitious artifact nailed to your door if you don't actually believe in it, to which Boar is said to have responded,

I know I don't really believe in it, but they say it works even if you don't believe in it. So this is, I think, really illustrative of, you know, like this is what I keep coming back to whenever I got hung up or confused on anything that Al-Tu-Sara was saying about ideology. So in this text, Al-Tu-Ser is also developing a further Marxist conception of the state, which is something that Marx had intended to do more systematically in his writings after capital. But, of course, he passed away before he could. He had planned, you know, several other volumes on the state and all kinds of other big topics that were going to be developed into books that were of kind of comparable size and scope as capital. And, of course, Lenin's writing on the state and revolutions, another seminal Marxist text on the state. So in this text, Altersera proposes two aspects of the state, namely ideological state apparatuses and repressive state apparatus. We'll get into what those are later in this interview, but briefly, the state for Altusir is a much more expansive and elaborate set of institutions whose demarcations aren't always super cut and dry.

Absolutely. And I think it's really important here because I was watching an actual interview with Al Thuze speaking about his ideas and the whole role that, you know, in both the repressive state apparatus and the ideological state apparatus, the role of the state is obviously sort of. of Central and he's working from some stuff that Gramsci put forward. And I think Gramsci even used the word hegemonic apparatus. And Althusay himself said, you know, Gramsci was on to something, but he didn't really fully put the state as the focal point. And what Gramsci did do, though, and this is what Althusay really picked up on and ran with. And I think as Marxist, this should be pretty commonsensical, even if we haven't heard it laid out for us, is saying that the distinction between private and public life is really a construct of bourgeois law. It's not really anything that really exists.

There is no real separation between public and private in a capitalist society. And thinking that way can really, really be confusing. And when people that think that way that there is this hard and fast distinction will say, you know, well, and we'll get into what the ISAs are. But, you know, why are the ideological state apparatuses, which aren't actually formal parts of the state as we know it? Why are these included in the state? And we'll get into why that is. But I think the important thing to know for now is both Gromshi and Althusay, as, any good Marxist should do, rejected this distinction as if it, you know, this distinction between

public and private life. Not rejected it entirely because it does exist in bourgeois law, but rejected it as a way of really thinking where capitalism and power ends and where it begins. It doesn't. It's ubiquitous, right? Right. And they're coming at it from an angle of just viewing it much more fluidly. So not that there's no distinction whatsoever, but that, you know, there's, um, the barrier between them, the divide between them is a little bit more fuzzy. than we'd be led to believe. Definitely, definitely. And that is really brought out

when we get into what the RSAs and ISAs are. Before we get there, I always do that. I always sort of foreshadow, but I think it helps people sort of follow the conversation and, you know, we plant seeds that later will blossom. But the next question for you, because I want to sort of root it in marks and angles,

is that, you know, in some ways this text is, of course, building on the concept, the bare bones concept of ideology developed by marks and angles. So before we move on, Can you just talk quickly about what the core idea revolving around ideology was in the original Marx and angles? How they thought about it? Sure. So the most concise definition that Marx gives of ideology was in the German ideology, which I will quote at length here.

The phantoms form in the human brain are also necessarily sublimates of their material life process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development. But men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. So plainly, for Marx, ideology doesn't exist in the realm of pure thought as such, our direct experience of the world shapes our ways of thinking. This is similar to how another thinker of political economy and sociology that I mentioned

in our introduction, Thorisd and Veblen conceived of ideology, a complex reproduction of social behavior that takes place foremost at the material level. This is what Vablin and the institutionalists call institutions. So for Marx and later Marxist thinkers of ideology, including Altusir, the praxis the praxis of everyday life is what forms the structures of belief. The ruling ideology for Marx is the ideology of the ruling class in any given historical epoch, the church in feudal times, or the more secular ideologies of liberal capitalism in our own time.

The function of the ruling ideology is to both create and reinforce the hegemony of the ruling class, such that its rule is viewed as good or at the very least natural and unchangeable. The classic example of this in our current era is the ideology of capitalist realism, which is a term popularized by the late Marxist writer Mark Fisher, and best exemplified from that infamous quote from Margaret Thatcher, that there is no alternative to liberal capitalism, Tina. Yeah, yeah.

They even made an acronym out of it, Tina. I remember that, damn. Yeah, so that's great. and yeah so you think of just basic marks and angles thinking about ideology some things come to mind obviously what melody said plus you know the ruling ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class this idea of false consciousness and just the basic materialism that undergirded all of marks and angles and all Marxist you know thought moving forward those are some of the basic ingredients offered by Marx and angles but I would argue that the reason why later thinkers like the Frankfurt School and Althusay

could expand on those ideas and make ideology much more comprehensible and wide-ranging is precisely because some of the concepts needed to unlock the depths of ideology were sort of yet to come in Marxist time, and they came in the form of Freud and then ultimately also Lacan by expanding it. So a lot of those ideas with the unconscious, especially, you know, those ideas come into play here. And without that sort of conceptual toolkit, it is sort of hard to understand ideology in a way that we do today, right? Like try to think of ideology before Freud, and there's some basic conceptual tools that we don't have

that could help us make sense of it. And so I think a lot of people will understand this when we think about the perverts guide ideology, right? What Zijek does is try to combine Lacanian psychoanalysis with Marxism, and it does, for all of Zijek's flaws and faults, it does help understand how ideology works and how it functions. and they've really been able to expand that beyond what even marks and angles were capable of conceiving at their time. Yeah, I mean, Gishech definitely carries through that.

His lens on ideology is clearly informed by Al Tusser's work, which you'll find in a lot of his books, such as the opening chapter in Absolute Recoil actually is all about Al Tusser. Interesting. Yeah, that's great. Definitely sort of, you know, Gijek can be seen like sort of in the, in the, one of the trajectories off of Althusay, right? I think that's a helpful way to think about him, just on some extent. Okay, but let's go ahead and move on.

So, you know, now we're getting into ideology. We know where Marx and Engels sort of left the question. And then Althusay, you know, develops this underdeveloped concept of ideology throughout this text. And a good way to understand his view is to talk about what he calls the two theses on ideology and what they mean. So can you just explain that to our listeners? Yeah, sure.

And we can do this pretty briefly. They're not terribly difficult concepts to wrap our heads around. They just require some clarification. So the first of these theses reads as follows. Ideology represents individuals' imaginary relationships to their real conditions of existence. This reinforces the point made earlier about ideology not simply being a belief system, but how we are even able to make sense of the world around us. We have the facts of our material existence on the one hand.

hand, and then on the other hand, we have our rational ability to narrativize those facts and understand how they fit together in some kind of coherent whole. So in the second thesis, Altusir writes ideology has a material existence. This, again, marks Altusir as centering praxis in his analysis of ideology. We do not act because we believe. We believe because we act. So we repeat all kinds of habits, social customs, handshakes, transactions, and so on. and these embody materially what ideology is. Remember from Pascal earlier, kneel down and say your prayers and belief will come. To be more specific, we habituate going to our jobs, exchanging commodities with money,

taking orders from our bosses, et cetera, et cetera, to the extent that these things seem as natural as a dog chasing a squirrel, and while we're caught up in the act, it's almost impossible to see it. So this Althusser posits is what makes ideologies so gosh darn effective. Yeah, and I think that's really important. I mean, I think the first thesis ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence is good. And I think some people on the Marxist side should be more or less sort of oriented to that concept. But what I found the more challenging or interesting one was Althusay's insistence

that the second thesis, ideology has a material existence. And I think what you said is perfect, right? What Al Thuse is arguing is not that ideas come first or that ideology even manifests primarily through our beliefs, but he says ideology manifests materially through the physical practices and behaviors that we do. And I think one of the examples is walking across down the street and a cop says, hey, you,

and you physically turn around to look at the cop signaling you, And in that moments, right, ideology is manifesting. And so I think really, really anchoring ideology in the physical patterns of behaviors and practices of individuals. And then the beliefs come sort of after the sort of physical rituals that we all conduct. I think it's a really interesting, at least, a way to understand and think about ideology. Yeah, absolutely. And this is, as I said earlier, this fits really well together with the institutionalist

framework that's developed by Veblen about the habits and customs of a capitalist society. Yeah, definitely. He takes a little bit more of a kind of a behaviorist approach, I guess is what you would call it, but... Yeah, so I just really like that idea of

like, you know, the performance, the physical performance of ideology sort of instantiates us as subjects, and I think we'll get into more of how that constitutes subjects when we talk about interpolation in a bit. But just thinking, this this is pretty new. This is a pretty interesting way to think about ideology, and it might

not make total sense at first, but it's worth thinking about and thinking about how ideology manifests, not just through cultural products or in the realm of peer ideas and beliefs, but really in our physical behaviors and practices. I think that's fascinating and helpful. Right. And I mean, it's like the things that I think that Altuser would say are like really exemplary of ideology that is kind of like what I said about a dog chasing a squirrel. which is like if it's working right you don't even know that it's there and you might even like you know stamp your feet and say this is not ideology this is not ideological you're ideological what are you talking about yeah um you know and i think that's really clear when you have like conversations with people about um a number of things like especially about capitalism and just like oh what do you mean that's just the way it is it's not ideology it's just that's just how it's just how the world works it's human nature Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Like it's as kind of Mark Fisher again described, it's like inscribed in our like social ontology. It's like irrefutable. It's as natural as as the sun coming up every morning. Right. Exactly. And a lot of people do think of it that way. And that does play in a capitalist realism like limiting your your political imagination. But I think we're all very familiar. We should be. And I think I've said this multiple times on Twitter and on the show that the most ideal. Ideological people in the world are the ones that really believe themselves to be operating outside of ideology to say, no, I'm not ideological. I'm just practical or I'm not ideological. I'm just focused on how to get results through policy. Those people are the most ideological. And I started thought of this metaphor when I was reading this book of a puppet. Think of like a Pinocchio type puppet who believes themselves to be a real boy. And somebody comes to the puppet and says, no, look at you're a puppet. I can point out the strings holding you up. And the person looks up

and still doesn't, the puppet looks up and still doesn't see the strings, you know, that's sort of a metaphor of like, no, I'm not ideological. I don't have any ideology. I operate outside of it, but, you know, you're caught up the most deeply in the web of ideology once you start uttering statements like that. Yeah. And I think a lot about that in the context of the world I come from, which is, you know, physics and science. And there's all, you know, it's, we're saturated with, with people who think that they're totally above politics and that science has nothing to do with politics or philosophy or anything like that. And of course, we as Marxists know that's a bunch of nonsense.

But fortunately, there are plenty of, you know, politically minded scientists out there. For sure. All right, well, let's go ahead and move on. I think this question is actually really easy. I think people will immediately understand this. But it's worth saying because I think understanding this will help you understand. understand the next thing. So what is a repressive state apparatus, aka the RSA, and maybe give an example or two? Yeah, sure. So this one, as you said, is very straightforward and recognizable.

A repressive state apparatus is what the classical Marxists like Lenin are generally referring to when they talk about the state, the special bodies of armed men who are given privileged rank and so on to enforce the law. So the repressive state apparatus is the system of cops, corps, enforcement agencies, bureaucracy, and so on, which give body to the violence that's necessary to perpetuate capitalism. But for Altusayr, the RSAs are simply one dimension of what the state is. To achieve a more holistic understanding of what the state is, he develops the accompanying concept of the ideological state apparatus, ISA, which we'll get into shortly. And just briefly, this is why his contribution is so important, which is that I think there's a tendency in Marxism

to think of the state purely as an element of the so-called superstructure in that model of base superstructure where the base is constituted of the economy and the forces in relations to production and the superstructure is the legal system and the cultural apparatus and so on. But I think that this analysis kind of pushes the state to be more interconnected with the base than the superstructure, frankly. At least that's my take on it. And we can get into that later. Sure. Yeah. No, absolutely. And then so the next question is sort of the focus of this essay and this overall conversation, which is, and this is really, you know, Althusay's unique contribution to Marxism, and that's known as the ISAs or the ideological

state apparatus. So what is an ideological state apparatus as compared to a repressive state apparatus? And what are some examples? Okay. Yeah, sure. So an ISA is an institution such as a trade union, a political party, the school system, and so on, which will fulfill the function of inculcating society with the norms, values, behaviors, and so on, necessary for continuing capitalism. Altusayr stresses the centrality of the school system as the main ISA, as it is where in most Western capitalist societies, where the church has kind of faded away in terms of its being the main ISA, young people spend a tremendous amount of time where they learn the basic functions of cultural literacy, skills they will perhaps learn, eventually

to use at the workplace, et cetera, et cetera, along with, of course, regular reassurances that the way society is doing business is all well and good. Altusay notes that RSAs and ISAs differ in two key ways, first of which is the fact that, as their names imply, RSAs function primarily through violence, whereas ISAs function primarily through ideology. Two, RSAs are given a much greater degree of organizational coherence and consistency of message, as opposed to ISAs, which, because of their much more diverse function, within society are accordingly relatively autonomous, in Altusera's words. The ISAs have more of a life of their own, and they have a bit more freedom to potentially stray from the official story of the state ideology. So the police, the FBI, the NSA, ICE, and so on are all following the program to a much

stricter extent. Their purpose is specific, violent, and almost always direct. school systems, trade associations, the news media, chambers of commerce, think tanks, and so on, by contrast, all upholds some dimension of the status quo, but in a way that's much more general, less immediately violent, and much less direct. Finally, Altersera notes that ISAs and RSAs can't function all on their own. They need one another. On a similar note, ISAs do not function exclusively through ideology. They sometimes employ violence. Likewise, on the flip side, RSAs also have their peculiar ideologies which pertain to their particular mode of violence like the police are our friends they protect and serve and so on. Yeah. Yeah, incredibly well said.

And another ISA would be even like the family unit. I think that's a huge one, especially like I haven't read Engels as a whole book on the family yet, but you know, I plan on doing that at some point, but I'm just interested to read this first and then go see what Engels has to say about it. But like when I think it's an important thing that you said is You know, the ISAs and the RSAs, they depend on each other. And while the RSAs are primarily repressive and violent, using explicit violence to get their way, right, the army, the Navy, the police, etc., they also use ideology as a secondary strategy.

And then that's inverted in the case of the ISAs where it's primarily ideological, but it can still be violent. And one way it can still be violent if we're talking about the family unit, you know, think about an abusive patriarchal dad who uses physical violence to beat his kids and wife into some. mission or think of like Catholic schools where they used to have rulers, they'd smack your hands if you got something wrong. So violence is still right there, but that's not the primary thing that they lean on. And the last thing I wanted to say, because I think about this a lot when it comes to the school system, well, clearly everything that Melody said, you know, is very true when it comes to schools, what they teach, trying to make you a competent worker for the workforce, etc. But, you know, I have two kids myself. And I also think about how just the

structure of the school day is a sort of ideological conditioning for the structure of the work day. You know, obviously, it's built around like parents' work schedules. These kids who should not be waking up at 7 a.m. every morning are they're going into a place that the older you get, the less you like it, right? When it comes to school, maybe as a kindergartner, you were excited, but, you know, past fifth grade, it fucking sucks. Your teachers are your bosses. You have to raise your hand to go to a bathroom break. Some schools have uniforms. You know, you have a lunch break that segments your days. And this whole thing is started off in the U.S.

with the Pledge of Allegiance, standing up and pledging your loyalty, your undying loyalty to the United States of America, to the state as such. And that whole process is carried over in the workplace. And that's why I believe most workplaces are deeply infantilizing, especially my experiences with bigger corporations that have HR departments. I remember, you know, working in one of those places where, you know, if we meet this mark for the holiday we'll get a pizza party and they even took us out to the fucking pumpkin patch for a field trip at work and I'm like yo I'm not fucking a fifth grader you know I feel infantilized

I have to ask you when I can piss and shit I have to ask you what I can wear I have to cover up my tattoos you know I have to be there when you say I have to leave when you say yeah so this and we get like these little disgusting little childish rewards for doing good you know making profit it's just really gross and so that's just one way in which not only the explicit teaching of schools with like you know u.s. history and how that reinforces ideology but just the structure of the school day itself and how that is ideological yeah yeah absolutely and i think that's part of what altusair is getting across in in um talking about the isa's which is that it's not just about the explicit um overt messaging that we're receiving

you know like the u.s is the greatest force of good in the world blah blah blah um all that bullshit that we get crammed down our throats for 12 years um but also just like as you've just said like we're inculturated with the the habits and customs of you know proletarian work life yeah exactly and if you take seriously the idea that you know ideology manifests primarily in our physical behaviors and practices well you know standing up and putting your hand over your heart for the pledge of allegiance as a kid shuffling from one class to the next shuffling from your classroom to the lunchroom at the time when the teacher says you can go to lunch, those are physical, those are embedded in our physical practices and physical behaviors.

But every time we do them, we sort of reinstantiate the ideology of, you know, the dominant ideology of the ruling class. It's just, it's a fascinating deep way to understand it. So let's go on to the last big idea and then we'll zoom into the conclusion of this episode. And again, I said this in the beginning. This is really 101. We'll do deeper dives, perhaps, at a different time. But this is a really important concept, and that is the concept of interpolation.

So can you just explain to our listeners what interpolation is and how Althusay uses the term? So interpolation is a unique term that Altusay develops to explain how ideology in capitalist society weaves us into its social fabric. interpolation or hailing or addressing is the mechanism by which ideology imbues us as individuals with subjectivity. We are hailed by society at large, one could say, and hence provided with a point of reference for our identity. In this way, Altusir argues we are subjects in a dual sense of the word. First, we are established as subjects in the sense of being a gential human beings going about our lives and making choices in the world and so on. And second, we are subjects in the sense of, you know, like the king's subjects that is subjected to the authority

of capitalism, sociological rules. Yeah. Yeah. And this was sort of a difficult concept for me to grasp at first, but it really, it really is crucial. And I don't think I'm wrong in saying that what Althusay is really saying with this point and what makes him controversial and this gets into the whole humanism versus anti-humanism thing is that I think he's like literally saying that this process of interpolation is the process by which ideology sort of constitutes individual people's as subjects. Like, you know, the very subjectivity, it's hard to almost put in a word. but it is sort of crafted and shaped by this process such that your very subjectivity, what you think is free and that you have free will and human agency and can do what you want,

that is called deeply into question. The entire concept of free will is basically eradicated with this concept. So it's really doing a lot here, you know? Yeah. And so, yeah, so what you just brought up is really important. And it speaks to the other aspects of what Altus Square gets into with ideological state apparatus, which is what constitutes our subjectivity. And what I would say is that I think, you know,

looking at things through a lens of ISA, as we can say that we have, you know, many multiple constituted subjectivities in this way. You know, if you are a student and you go to school, your identity is kind of, you know, you are interpolated as a student. You are addressed in that social context, interpolated, hailed, addressed, et cetera,

as a student. And you acquire all the, you know, norms, habits and customs of that. And then, you know, when your classes are over, you go and you start your shift at a fast food restaurant to, you know, help pay for your tuition or whatever. And then you are interpolated as a worker as a capitalist, you know, subject. So I think part of the point of this concept of interpolation is that, like, our subjectivities are, you know, know, there's a plurality of them. They're, I think, you know, without fearing too far out of my intellectual lane here, that's kind of parallel to what I think Gil de Luz calls the schizophrenic nature of capitalism

that kind of, you know, separated marks of subjectivity that we adopt by engaging with different aspects of ideology. Yeah, and I think you said it really well, too, with the roles that you play, whether you're a student or then you go into work and you're a worker, you go home and you're the father or the mother or whatever, and you're always playing these roles and your subjectivity, how you think and introspect is shaped by these roles that you play, almost to the point where, I mean, in Althusay is sort of reading that there is no free will,

there's no way for you to have any other subject, your entire subjectivity is structured by the, you know, of capitalism. The way you view yourself, the way you experience yourself, you know, is completely controlled by that. And I know you're into science and I don't know what your position on free will is, but, you know, he may be right here, right? Like if the, if we take seriously that the universe is determined, that there is no free will, which I think is pretty popular on the scientific side of things. Like a lot of people in science, you know, can pretty much be convinced that, yeah, free will, especially as we think about it, colloquially, it certainly doesn't

exist. Well, then, you know, it's sort of interesting to think, like, okay, if that's true, then maybe Althusay is onto something, but this is where the anti-humanism comes in, right? Because there is no subjectivity outside of these confines, outside of this domineering imposition on you. So you can't, there's no sort of subjectivity that is humanist outside of these ideological confines. And so that subject that can exist outside of the confines of capitalism is really erased in the Althusian take. And so that's what we mean by sort of, you know, anti-humanism. There is no something there that unites all humans, right?

Everything about subjectivity is structured by the dominant capitalist society and its ideologies. Yeah. And so if you'll allow me a brief detour since you brought up science and my kind of opinions on that, which is so just to familiarize those who are outside of the field. In physics, there's a major problem, which is that in the theory of how the universe works, which is that we have two theories, one which is general relativity, which is the theory of how gravity works and how the cosmic timeline unfolds. And it works very, very well for describing things of massive scale. And then on the other side, we have quantum field theory. And the standard model of particle physics for describing the very, very small things.

And it works ridiculously well for predicting those things that are, you know, going on over in Switzerland over at the large Hajon Collider. You can predict things to a ridiculous level of precision. But the trouble is that these two theories do not mesh. They don't work together. And to come around to this discussion of, you know, determinism versus free will, one of the problems that I see at least, and this is maybe in my kind of naive reading of it, which is that, you know, general relativity is incredibly deterministic and the idea that, you know,

if you have the initial conditions of a, say, you know, like a planetary system, a star with planets going around it, you can predict its motion effectively for all eternity if you have all the right variables, if you have enough information. But then there's this other side, which is quantum mechanics, which says that at the most fundamental level, reality is actually probabilistic, right? Like, if you look at something like the double slit experiment, which I would encourage listeners to go look up on YouTube, you find a million videos on it, which is such that you can only kind of predict the potential trajectories of a given quantum particle, but where

it actually will turn up is actually still a well-defined point. So there's that kind of clash as well, which is, you know, so you have on this cosmic scale, this incredibly rigidly deterministic universe, that on the quantum scale you have this layer of unpredictability, which to say, you know, what does that lead us to conclusions about how our, you know, social world looks like?

I don't know. And that's just, that's, that's purely, you know, speculative for me. But it does kind of does make me think about it, which is to say, to what extent is our, you know, and where's free will involved there, if at all? Like, we have determinism on the one side and then, as Einstein would put it, God playing dice on the other. Yeah. Yeah. So now you're getting me really excited because this is definitely an interest of mine outside of politics and philosophy. You know, people will, you know, listen to the. double slit experiment and then in quantum mechanics right we often hear this mini worlds theory of like you know how do we explain that you know two particles separated by enormous distance in time

can you know sort of act simultaneously in the exact same way right Einstein I think called it spooky action at a distance right yeah quantum entanglement exactly and so you have a lot of randomness at this level and you know the mini world's theory is one theory that might explain why these things happen, right? There's other dimensions and they pop in and out of those dimensions, etc. But when it comes to free will and determination, because this is also a question in philosophy, like scientists and philosophers wrestle over this, and this is sort of where the two fields can overlap at times, you know, the sort of quantumness, at least it's my argument, that that doesn't necessarily provide a way for human agency and free will to exist. So even if we say, yeah,

the world is not fully determined like the Einstein general theory of relativity might say that it is, at least on the quantum level, it's not determined that way. And there's randomness that happens on this level. Well, I'm not so sure that that level of randomness allows for any free will either, right? Whether it's fully determined or completely random, it's out of our control either way, right? Absolutely. And I mean, like my angle on it and this is why I tend to side on the more kind of determine, like overall on the more deterministic side, which is that, The things on the quantum level don't, the effects are so negligible at our macroscopic, you know, level that the world that we inhabit is, for the most part, Newtonian, right? We don't even need general relativity to talk about, you know, just the everyday workings of, you know, machines and, and, you know, kicking. Yeah, soccer balls, basic, you know, physics of everyday life. We still pretty much live in a Newtonian universe in that sense, which is completely deterministic. And then there's another thing, which is that even in quantum mechanics where the so-called wave function, which determines the probability of where particles will end up, it's still, its time evolution is still deterministic. So it's a probabilistic function, but it still evolves in time, in a deterministic fashion.

fashion. Interesting. Yeah, that's fascinating. Well, Dan, this really could be its own episode. I'd love to come on with you sometime and just talk science. Let's do that. That'd be a pleasure. And I know for a fact that a big chunk of my listeners are into that and are interested

in that and like when we talk about it. So, yeah, if there's interest in that, hit me up if you're listening and want to hear more of these sorts of discussions. I do a little bit of it on Patreon, but there's certainly more room for us to explore these things in. Yeah. As we know, as Marxist, you know, talking about science. is not not talking about politics because everything's connected.

Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And for those who are interested in, who maybe don't have a background in math and science and want to have a very accessible introduction to the topic of what we were just talking about, I would suggest a series of books called Theoretical Minimum by the physicist Leonard Suskin. Yeah, they're really a fabulous guide to kind of. acquainting oneself with the fundamentals of physics without, you know,

needing a whole bunch of math and, you know, as prerequisite. Yeah, because that's exactly where my scientific inquiry ends is the moment I have to start putting pen to paper. I suck at math. And so, yeah, my shit really exists. It's sort of theoretical and stuff. I can't get into the math to do it myself. But it's funny you should say that because I was always absolutely dreadful at math all the way up through, uh, until I got to college and decided that I wanted to study science, like, as a potential career. And then I was just like, well, I guess I have to get good at this now. So I pounded it into my head for the better part of eight years.

And now I'm functionally okay at math. Enough to kind of say these things about physics and science, you know. Me and the chalkboard didn't make friends until I was well into my 20s. Well, that's interesting. And as somebody who failed algebra one in college, that gives me some hope. So thank you. Oh, yeah. That's my other belief, just also as a Marxist, is that, you know, those experiences change you, right?

And, you know, I think a lot of people have kind of a bad taste left in their mouth from the ideological state apparatus, which is the science instruction system. Nice. It's a nice connection. Yeah. No, no. I really, really bringing this back home, which is that, you know, it's always taught in this very kind of esoteric way, which is like almost deliberately constructed to confuse you and, you know, make you go, oh, this is just for smart people. I'm going to, you know, leave this alone, which I think is like I talked to so many people for whom that's their experience. And frankly, it was my experience. And the only way I was able to get around it was in a very kind of pounding it into my head. until it hurt. And that shouldn't, that shouldn't be how it has to be.

I really think that there's a better mode of pedagogy to approach, not just, you know, math and science, but just learning in general. And that's what I try to do with my, my YouTube channel and my other things. Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. And I think sometimes, because I'm guilty of this as well, like your first forays into math don't end up well. And so then you start convincing yourself like, oh, I'm just not mathematical.

You know, other people have mathematical minds. I don't. I did that my whole life. And then I started hearing my, my, my preteen daughter start to say that, like, you know, start to have that narrative in her mind. And I said, oh, I see the danger here because what you're doing is you're cutting yourself off from any future attempt at even trying to get good at it and saying like, you know, I'm, I'm constitutionally unable to do math.

And that's a problem. It's bourgeois thinking. Yeah. It's a static, reified thinking of, oh, I'm not a this person. I'm a, you know, et cetera. Really good. Yeah, bourgeois thinking. That's a great point. Okay, so let's go ahead. Let's go ahead because it's an hour and just do the last question before you let listeners know where they can find you in your work. Sure. Which is just, you know, what's your favorite part of this text? And what do you think what revolutionaries, Marxist, leftists today can learn and should learn from it overall? Like, what's the big takeaway from this conversation in this book?

Yeah, okay. I really liked Altrucera's clear. kind of anatomization of the state into ISAs and RSAs. It's a framework that's flexible enough to be adapted to historically specific conditions, as all good Marxist theory ought to be, yet also clear enough to provide relatively stable categories for talking about different aspects of the state. I think that for revolutionaries, its confrontation with the RSAs is like an inevitable part of class struggle. However, the ISA is. as Altusir argued, are a powerful weapon in the bourgeoisie's arsenal in this class war. So for us, as revolutionaries, I think it's critical to take from his materialist conception of ideology, at minimum, two things,

that we are all being inculcated with capitalist ideology at virtually all times, not simply through direct overt messaging that, you know, capitalism is good, but also through the practical activities of our banal everyday lives, right? So this is something that, you know, like we as revolutionaries who are still living under capitalism have to have to wrestle with, like, you know, capitalist thinking kind of seeping into our very pores just by being here sociologically and absorbing the systems and thoughts and habits and so on of being in society. And then the second thing that I think we should take from it as revolutionaries is that in building our own anti-capitalist institutions, you know, things like dual power. structures and our organizing spaces and so on. I think we really have to take this theory of ideology into account. So I think that means being, you know, conscientious about minimizing to the extent that we are kind of reenacting these capitalist social habits that we, that we learn from growing up in a capitalist society, living in a capitalist society, et cetera, and that, you know,

on the flip side of that, we need to be doing the active work of culture. production, that is say counterculture, institutions of our own that consciously defy those capitalist structures, both in words and in practice. And this is why, and dear God, I struggle to follow my own advice on this like nobody else. I always tell folks to stay the heck off of social media to the greatest extent they can. I say, as my thumbs twitch, reaching for my phone to scroll through Twitter for the 17th time in the last 10 minutes. I'm kidding, I think. But, no, but, like, really, like, I think social media is just like a great example of this, you know, it's designed to, in this, like, here, here's a great example of an ideological state apparatus is Facebook or Twitter or whatever.

It is an ideological state apparatus in that way because it's encouraging us to think in this very short-term capitalist way, right? like get your quippy response out there to every new thing that's happening right right now right now right now and you've got to have the funniest smartest hottest take right it's a very qualifies the individual absolutely and you know we're kind of uh i think what it really like what i see this happen on you know is twitter especially but just social media in general over and over again which is that like somebody and this maybe applies more loosely to social media but i definitely see it especially in kind of leftist circles, which is, you know, somebody will make kind of a, like a bad take or say something kind of mean or whatever, and then they'll get called on it. And then instead of

learning and growing from it, they'll double down because now it's like, you know, you have to kind of defend your brand, as it were, and you can't be seen as being like self-contradictory or whatever. So it's like a lot, I think the kind of instinct on social media is to like protect your ego and protect your brand rather than just being like, hey, yeah, I fucked up. I'm sorry. I'll avoid saying those things in the future or whatever. Yeah, that's a great point. And yeah, and those sorts of self-reflections and honest self-criticisms, they can't happen on these websites that are structured against that and that, you know, they privilege anonymity. There's no accountability. It's really just everybody out there,

brand building and fighting other brands. And that is neoliberal subjectivity to the fucking core and I look at I look at Twitter and I look at Facebook and stuff and you know I've deleted my Facebook I've got my my social media presence down to a very small amount of things just for my own mental um well-being but I often think about Mao's combat liberalism and the things that out absolutely yeah as Mao points out in that book like these are ways of behaving and operating in the world that are liberal right meaning anti-communist unprincipled sloppy individualistic And everything about social media, from the algorithms to the structure to what's incentivized is what Mao's warning against in combat liberalism. So to think that Mao and Al Thuze were writing these things way before the advent of even the internet, let alone social media, and then to be able to say, wow, both of them were 100% right.

And with this totally new social formation known as social media, these things are still true as ever. Absolutely. And actually, it's funny you mentioned Mao, because I saw it. a Red Menace podcast. And when I was following along when we were all reading Mao together, when I read on contradiction, I was like, huh, you know what this reminds me of is all two says essay contradiction and overdetermination, which is like it fits right in with what we've been talking about. And it's less about kind of the, it's a little bit more focused on kind of that the dialectic of base and superstructure. And, um,

you know, what's really the driving motor of capitalist society's dynamics and so on, which I think, you know, there's just a lot of kind of similar topics that are covered by Mao in Contradiction and by Altrucera in that essay, which is in a collection of essays called Four Marks. Yeah, it's awesome. And it's awesome when people employ the same materialist analysis in totally different contexts and totally different epochs and come to the same conclusion. That is a point in favor of the sort of efficacy of the Marxist materialist outlook and the mode of analysis that comes with it. Last things I'll say before I let you plug your stuff is, you know, a big criticism of Althusay to kind of wrap this up. One criticism is, you know, his understanding of how subjectivity is really shaped and dominated by ideology. It leads to questions like, you know, how can we understand those who fight back?

How can we understand people who from all points of view seem to be the sort of people that would have their subjectivity completely imposed upon them in this way, but do somehow find a way to overcome it, to learn through it, and to fight back. And if there is no room for human agency, if there is no room for, you know, taking control of your own subjectivity to some extent, then it sort of leaves open the question, how do we explain, you know, the Fred Hamptons of the world, the, you know, enter person here who did fight back. even though they were completely inculcated in their society, and that's something that you don't totally get the answer to in Althusay, and also the Gramscian notion of organic intellectuals who, you know, fight back, you know, grow up in the working class and then fight back against the dominant ideology and offer new ways of looking at the world. I'm not sure in the Althusarian model where the organic intellectual could come from if we take seriously this anti-humanist, anti-subjectivity sort of position that he takes. I don't know. Those are just questions. I don't expect you to have the answer. But no, I don't. But I mean, I have kind of loose thoughts that are definitely coming to mind, though, and I will go ahead and kind of expound on that a little bit, which is that I think that maybe a very, like, strict reading of Altusar on ideology kind of maybe precludes human agency. But I think if, you know, we account for, you know, the fact that, you know, like class struggle happens, right? And I think that, you know, this is how.

counter hegemonic ideology itself develops, right? And it's like, it's in constant dialectic with the ruling ideology. And the ruling ideology is always going to, you know, try to, you know, do that process of what DeBoard called recuperation, right? It's always going to try to take those rebellious elements, those, and turn them into part of the machine, right? And I think, but I think that, you know, accounting for things like class struggle makes it clear that the ruling ideology isn't the only ideology that there is and that there's plenty of, like, ideology going on outside of the so-called ideological state apparatuses, right? You know, there is, like, of course, because otherwise, how would there be things like, as you said, like Fred Hamptons

and, you know, Bolsheviks and Black Panthers and, you know, countercultural music scenes like punk rock and and so on right i i hear you and i think maybe if i'm hearing you correctly something like you're saying is is in the process perhaps of class struggle in the process of struggling against the the ruling class in whatever way that shapes maybe new subjectivities can be born maybe in the actual material practice of confronting class society um it allows us to maybe escape or at least reflect on or have a meta perspective on how ideology functions and thus allows us a way out. Absolutely. Yeah, I'd say that it definitely, like, when we have these big eruptions of class struggle, like I think of a couple of things in recent history in the U.S. I think of, you know,

Occupy Wall Street. I think of Black Lives Matter. I think of the teachers' strike wave that hit the red states in 2018, right? There's a huge, kind of a sea change in the way that a class struggle has been in the U.S. in the last 40 years. And I think that that's kind of like, that's, that, that's what helps shatter that illusion, right? And I think that, I mean, I have kind of very partisan opinions on this, but I think that that's kind of part of what, you know, the Democratic Party tries to do is when they see this kind of thing going on, they go, oh, I see people are interested in getting all these funny ideas now.

Let's pretend like we are on their side and then recapture their energy and turn them all into good neoliberal subjects again. So we can all go back to sleep. Yeah, exactly. Go back to brunch. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, well said, well said. All right, well, I'm going to wrap it up there.

Of course, there's a million more things to say, but I like this episode a lot as an introduction to the main points of Althusay's main work. And hopefully we can do more in the future. And of course, if you mentioned this in this episode, like if you want to come on and have a talk, even if it's just for our Patreon supporters, it's purely about science and quantum mechanics. and stuff. There's definitely a need and an interest in that on the left, and I think we can address that together for sure. Wonderful. All right. Well, thank you. Before I let you go, Melody, can you let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Sure. So my YouTube channel can be found at YouTube.com slash C slash a world to win. I'm on Twitter at a world to win one. And my blog can be found at patreon.com slash

the world to win. If you're interested in a Marxist educational project, which shares many of the same visions as Rev. Left and Red Menace, I encourage folks to hop over to my channel and check it out. Right now, I have an ongoing series on the history of the Democratic Party and why the left should stay as far away from it as humanly possible. It's the most pernicious ISA that the U.S. has, in my opinion. Anyway, thanks for having me on. It's been a real pleasure. I hope we get to talk again soon.

Absolutely, Comrade. Thank you so much for all the work in this episode, and we will definitely be in touch and definitely work together. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening. RevLeft Radio is 100% listener funded. If you like what we do here, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash revleft radio

or make a one-time donation at BuyMea Coffee.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. Links will be in the show notes. You know,