Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] On The Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People

Episode Date: April 30, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Apr 26, 2023 In this episode, Matthew Furlong and Breht dive into Mao Zedong’s seminal 1957 speech-turned-text "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" - a critical text for any revolutionary serious about navigating the complexities of socialist construction. We break down Mao’s dialectical method, his distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, and how this framework helps us understand internal struggle within a revolutionary movement versus conflict with class enemies. From mass line to ideological struggle, from unity-struggle-unity to combating dogmatism and liberalism - we unpack Mao’s sharp insights with a focus on applying them to today’s political terrain. This is Marxism in motion. Theory as a weapon. Revolution as a science.   Further Resources:   - Mao Zedong - Five Essays on Philosophy (1957)   - Ai Siqi - "Antagonistic and Non-Antagonistic Contradictions" (1957)   - Jones Manoel - "Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution" (2020)   - Radhika Desai & Michael Hudson: Geopolitical Economy Hour (2023 -)   - World Association for Political Economy   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Mi'kmaw learning resources: Atlantic First Nations Tech Services - Mi'kmaw Learning The Language of this Land, Mi'kma'ki (2012) ---------------------------------------------------- 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 Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have back on the show Matthew Furlong from many, many Reve Left episodes, but specifically our Deep Dive, our Dialectics Deep Dive series, long-time listeners of Reve Left will be very familiar with Matthew and his contributions to this show. And he's coming back on once again, and this time we'll be talking about Mao's work on the correct handling. of contradictions among the people. And we're going to think through Mao's work, but also, of course, as we always try to do, apply it to our present circumstances and pull out lessons that we can learn today.

So, welcome back on the show, Matt, and for those that might not remember you or might have missed those previous episodes, can you just go ahead and introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, this is Matthew Furlong, coming back on the show after a gap of about, what, it's It's been like six months or something. Just in time almost for the second anniversary of my coming on the show for the first time. And for the last couple of years, Brett and I have been doing a lot of episodes together. A lot of them are called a part of a series we sort of came up with called Dialectics Deep Dive,

which is sort of getting into the really kind of little nitty-gritty, sort of fine, logical and conceptual and practical points of dialectics in its history and its concept, or concepts, I guess you could say. We've done another different kinds of couple episodes, what about the Sopranos, sort of stuff like that? And today we are going to talk about the essay by Mao Zedong from 1957 called On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People. And why are we going to talk about that, Brett? it's important for a number of reasons. One, I just think it's crucial as a general understanding of dialectics to kind of read Mao

and Mao's interpretation and articulation of dialectics and the nuances he brings to the conversation specifically around contradictions. Of course, on Red Menace, we've done some texts by Mao on contradiction, for example, and then we've touched on, you know, Mao's dialectics many times in our deep dive episodes and across the entire history of this show. Very few revolutionary leaders and thinkers can put dialectics into such an accessible language as Mao does. And he's always wonderful when it comes to clarity on these issues. And there's lots of things going on, as you'll find out through the rest of this conversation,

that are directly applicable to what we're dealing with in the broadly conceived Western left, if you will, and the issues that are paramount for us today. So, yeah, what do you think? What do you hope that we accomplish with today's episode? I think the thing I really want to accomplish is to get people thinking about how it's really completely natural and right and good to think about all the problems we face in a contradictory way and to think about the problems that we are and that we pose for one another and ourselves in a contradictory way.

And as we've said before, you've said this before on at least one of our episodes that part of our work here is to help people sort of make a cognitive shift or sort of like a cognitive, some cognitive adjustments to the sort of the logic of their thinking about themselves in the world. And Mao's work, as he said, he's, you know, he's a paragon of clarity. And I think this comes from the fact that, or partly from the fact that he actually worked as a school teacher of children for some years. years. And I've always felt in reading him, like, that sort of teacher of children, that comes through in his work. And in preparation for some other stuff we might do down the road, I've been reading a fair bit of Nadiaaubska lately, especially her work on self-education, which is in an edition by Foreign Languages Press, which is a great little publishing house. And she says that in learning how to do this stuff, we really do need to be like children and to imitate

children. And so I think that that's the right mentality with which to approach Mao Zedong thought. Definitely. And it's always worth reminding people that, you know, I think the clarity that is so pronounced in Mao's work comes in large part from the fact that he is not sitting in an armchair philosophizing abstractly where, you know, obscurantism often can prevail or some, you know, some people even hide behind, you know, obscureantism to make their shallow ideas seem deep, but rather than sitting in an armchair, of course, we're talking about a revolutionary leader who is working through these issues out of practical necessity. And in this particular essay, this is a post-revolutionary situation where the Chinese communists

have won and now they are entering the period of socialist construction, and Mao is wrestling with all of the issues that the Communist Party has to deal with, going from. forward. And so this is really a really practical, as I said, text about the necessities of post-revolutionary issues and contradictions and how best to navigate them. And so you can't, you don't have the luxury of being needlessly abstract or overly obscure. You have to talk directly to the masses and to leaders and try to, you know, allow them to learn in a way that we can really move forward and solve these issues practically. And so I think that comes through as well. and that lends to the necessity of the clarity that is in Mao's work

and particularly present in this essay. So I guess let's go ahead and get into it. And maybe we can just start with some initial thoughts that you had after reading on the correct handling of contradictions among the people. And more importantly, perhaps, as I kind of alluded to right there, what Mao was trying to convey in this work. Well, what were my first thoughts after reading on the correct

handling of contradictions. This makes sense. That's a good one. This makes sense than pretty much everything anyone told me about politics growing up or even in my adulthood. And that this is, this is a very, not going to confuse this with the word helpful. This is a, this is a healthful way, a healthy way of approaching struggles first of all within yourself and first of all with people that you feel like or you actually do agree with because as Mao says throughout this one of the biggest problems that they are facing in the situation he's writing from within in 1957s he says we're 20 years into this thing right now is that people still have trouble telling when a contradiction between themselves and someone else or within a group setting or something like that is an antagonistic contradiction and when it's a non-antagonistic contradiction. And this is a fundamental, this distinction between antagonistic and non-antagonistic is really fundamental to Mao Zedong thought.

And it's important for us in the West, I think, to learn because, as I've said before, you know, through the various, you know, ideological state apparatuses and practices and institutions and, you know, symbolic superstructural representations and all the rest of it, in the imperial core, we're generally set up to kind of hate each other's guts and fantasize about getting one over on each other and getting revenge and all this sorts of other stuff that makes it not only hard to organize, but actually too hard to perceive pretty much all of reality around you in a very, very dangerous way. Yeah, absolutely. And so I have some opening thoughts as well. One of the things that really comes out when you read Mao in general, but particularly

when you read him here, is it really flies in the face of the bullshit myth that Mao is some bloodthirsty, brutal tyrant. Like, as you read through, you can tell that he is, he's nothing like that. He's a thoughtful principal leader and thinker, honestly trying to solve serious issues in society for the sincere benefit of the Chinese people. He is constantly telling zealots of various

sorts to cool the fuck out. He's educating everyone constantly. He's dealing with problems in a really well-rounded, wholesome often way. Like, there's a certain wholesomeness to the way that, that, you know, especially in this essay that comes out from Mao's writings. I mean, he's talking

about how do we treat, you know, the national bourgeoisie? How do we treat intellectuals who might have had or might be still retaining ideas of the old society? How do we treat minority nationalities? And in none of these cases, is he advocating brutal tyranny or

the one-sided ideas of how to deal with these people? He is constantly trying to apply dialectical materialism to these issues and see them in a full, holistic way so that they can be navigated correctly and that and that really jumps out and there's not a shred of brutality in and how he's

writing in fact he's telling people who who have certain you know errors deviation certain one-sided ways of viewing things um he's really helping them see through those problems he's constantly talking about you know yes we need a dictatorship for the enemy but we need democracy for the people you know we need to start amongst the people and the differences and contradictions that exist from a real desire for unity and then from there we struggle with them and we come to, you know, we come to unity through struggle and self-criticism and criticism in a comradly way. He talks about the right and left deviations when it comes to this dichotomy he's setting up between the enemy and the people. You know, there's contradictions

between us and our enemies, right, the imperialists, the fascist, et cetera. And there's contradictions between us and other well-meaning people among the masses, or maybe people who have different opinions, but are ultimately a part of this broad group that he calls the people. And so he's separating the enemy from the people and talking about how there's various deviations. The right deviation, he points out, is treating enemies as if they are in the people group, right? Like you're expanding the group of the quote unquote people so large that actual enemies are now being included and you're trying to treat enemies as you would a comrade. And that's a right deviation.

And then he says the left deviation is the opposite error. mistaking contradictions among the people as contradictions with the enemy. So it's not merely a comrade who has a disagreement, but this is a counter-revolutionary who must be eliminated. And Mao is saying both of these are errors and we can't commit them. And he's thinking very clearly and consciously about how we can avoid these errors in multiple areas of at that point Chinese life. And so I think that's just an important background context for people to understand how Mao is starting out this essay and how he's moving through it. Yeah, and I think, yeah, it's sort of,

it's a practical ethics for reducing antagonism amongst ourselves and also reducing antagonism in our way of dealing with contradictions that probably are antagonistic, right? So if you just, you know, you go into it knowing that the,

the principal contradiction is ultimately antagonistic and that therefore means that all the intermediate contradictions also immediately have to be antagonistic. And you see, so, for example, in Mao, but also I've been reading for the last little while, we've been reading Jose Maria Sison. And he says similar things, too, about sort of like the petty boreswazi, the sort of coffee shop owners, the newsstand owners or whatever, something like that, and the relations that they have with their employees. and Mao and Sisson follows him and this says, well, there's, there is an antagonistic aspect to this, but there's also a non-antagonistic aspect to this. So, for example, are you

like me, Brett and that you do have like that one good boss that you would actually may talk to again at some point in your life? Yeah, like maybe not a boss, but a specific actually landlord in this instance, who was personally like a very genuinely good human being. went out of his way not to be a scumbag landlord even when landlords around him were being scumbag. So yeah, like in that instance in my life, I immediately jumped to the thought of a of a landlord, right? There's a contradiction as a tenant versus a landlord. You know, we know a landlordism is. We're against it. But at the same time, there is this human being behind the landlord role who is a genuinely good person and made it very easy to be his tenant relative to

other landlords, right? How about you? Yeah, exactly. And I have, I have, or I had an employer aware that, well, he no longer employs anybody. And I just went and hung out with him the other day. I've known him for like 15 years. And yet, nonetheless, if he were to come now and tell me, I think I might go employ people again. And I might have to be like, brother, let's have a talk about that before you go any further with that. I certainly don't have the effective experience.

Like, when I experience being around him, he doesn't make me feel. the way that like the CEO of what is it, Loblaws grocery chain up here in Canada feels, where I want that dude to get blasted into the sun. I would like to this other guy that I know, I'd be like, what if we gave you an alternative way of doing things, right? The same thing, like, if you're going around with Mao, comrade Mao, he's taking you around and let's see who we're going to,

let's see if you can judge who to get first here. So if he brings to you a change. Chinese feudal lord and a 95-year-old grandmother in i don't know jersey city or something like that it has a little base in an apartment he's not going to ask you to say well we're just going to like not change anything with the grandmother but and we're only going to change things with the feudal lord he just wants to know like who are you going to go after first uh what we're what are you prioritizing are you going to go attack the big guy and say that the old lady you know what that person in the apartment,

they're just going to live here from now on until we decide with them if they want to live somewhere else and you don't need to do this anymore, right? So like Csaint says in the Marxist, the prime run Marxos in Leninism, just like and Mao says this, right?

The people on the lower end of those relations, they're going to see that they have reasons to buy in. And if we can get them to buy in, even if they haven't read Das Kapital up to volume three, then wouldn't it be better to get them to buy in then to engage in an antagonistic confrontation with them,

which is going to waste resources and energy and all sorts of stuff, right? And just be completely unnecessary in most cases. And again, I think in the West, we really need to think carefully about that, especially in the age of these like social media algorithms where so many people participate or engage with each other online. And we know that social media algorithms are rewarding us for making contradictions as antagonistic as possible.

And that there's a sort of thrill in that, whether it's like the dopamine rush of getting people like, fuck yeah, you go get them. Or it's the sort of fight or fight thing. You know, how many times, oh, my God, all these people replied to me after I said this thing and they're probably, you know, I'll come in to get me and all this kind of stuff.

So, you know, a lot of the ways in the West that we interact with each other are driven by these systems, which benefit capital, uh to see all contradictions as antagonistic and pretty much no or anything or rather not in the instead of seeing any contradictions as non antagonistic we think that wherever there's non-antagonism there's no contradiction um and then that's i think that's we've been talking about like russell brand and some of this kind of stuff for the sort of like the the progressive wing of the anti-vax trucker kind of stuff

and they're always talking about their vibrational levels and it's like this we've got to get this unity and then we can go politic so it's like we've got to reduce the antagonism so with coming together in this I heard some of them they call it like the collective and the vibe we you know we optimize our collective vibrational levels so there's no antagonism

which means there's no contradictions and then we can go out and do politics and then all of our little pop-up entrepreneurial businesses will thrive and we'll have a great little, you know, hipster neighborhood to live in or something. So we're really, really messed up. And just to give an example of the kind of mixed, you know, crazy, you know, mixed messaging we can get and, you know, very confusing messaging, not even by deliberate propagandists.

Just here's something, right? So the first time I ever heard the Black Panther spoken positively of, was on a live hardcore album. People my age who were into hardcore may remember it. It was by Victory Records and it's called the California Takeover. It's where three

upstate New York sort of more like metalcore bands so Strife, Snapcase, and Earth Crisis went out to California and played a show out there. And at the end of their set, Earth Crisis played one of their most famous songs which is called Firestorm.

And the singer starts out, he goes like, this one goes out to Huey P. Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party for self-defense. And I was like, that's interesting. But then the song itself is this representation of this like orgiastic apocalyptic

just well, a firestorm of just indiscriminate violence. And it was, it's extremely contradictory to have that attached to Huey P. Newton. Right, right. Even in a lotatory way, right?

So, you know, if you're a white kid, living in upstate New York or where, you know, in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean, like me, you might be left wondering, like, or thinking like, oh, I guess this is what the Black Panthers are about. Right. But that's exactly what white racists and, you know, all these pieces of shit said about them, right? And that's what sort of justified the ability to marginalize them and then end up murdering Fred Hampton and, you know, just causing havoc and ruining people's lives. And so that's, it's kind of like, um, you heard this on the internet sometimes. It's like people heard all the bad stuff about the Soviet Union and decided it was cool or the bad things that are said about the Soviet Union and they've decided it was cool

and so all these ways were driven to prize and to love antagonism and we think that that's part of being like a good comrade and that's not true. Yeah. And in fact it works against our interest over the medium and long

term without a doubt. Yeah like the bourgeoisie loves seeing us fight each other. Definitely. All right. So, of course, just to set the table once more, on the correct handling of contradictions among the people, there's this dichotomy, the enemy, and then the people, and then he's focusing. He makes that distinction very clear in the first sort of chapter, and then he goes on to talk about the various contradictions among the people and how best to handle them. So that's the basic idea of what the text is trying to accomplish for those that haven't read it.

So before we get into more detail, though, can you remind us of the dichotomy that we've talked about in previous episodes, those, and that is really important to dialectical materialism in general, which is this dichotomy between metaphysics and dialectics that Mao often emphasizes. Yeah, so I guess to do that, the best thing to do would be just to read from contradiction. So I will read just a passage from Section 1, the two world outworks. Throughout the history of human knowledge, there have been two conceptions concerning the law of development of the universe, the metaphysical conception, and the dialectical conception, which form two opposing world outlooks. Lenin said, quote within a quote, the two basic or two

possible or two historically observable conceptions of development, and then in brackets evolution, are development as decrease and increase as repetition and develop as a unity of opposites. And he opens parentheses, the division of a unity. into mutually exclusive opposites and their reciprocal relation. Close parenthesis, end quote, within a quote. Kier Lennon was referring to these two world out, do different world outlooks. In China, another name for metaphysics is Shuan Shui. For a long period in history, whether in China or in Europe, this way of thinking,

which is part and parcel of the idealist world outlook, occupied a dominant position in human thought. In Europe, the materialism. of the bourgeois Z in its early days was also metaphysical. As the social economy of many European countries advanced to the stages of highly developed capitalism, as the forces of production, the class struggle and the sciences developed to a level unprecedented in history, and as the industrial proletariat became the greatest motive force in historical development, there arose the Marxist world outlook of materialist dialectics.

And just going to skip a little bit here and just jump to the next paragraph. The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static, and one-sided. So this is sort of the key description you often hear from now of what metaphysics is. It's a view that sees things as isolated, static, and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. Such chains as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change. change of place. Moreover, the cause of such an increase or decrease is not a change of place, or sorry, pardon me, or change of places not inside things, but outside them. That is, the

motive force is external. And I'm just going to skip a couple of paragraphs. As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing, we should study it internally in its relations with other things. In other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated and interacts with the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external, but internal. It lies in the contradictoryness within the thing. So the basic distinction between what Mao calls metaphysics and what he calls dialectics, is that under dialectics, a thing is what it is

because it's strictly identical with itself. And under dialectics, a thing is what it is precisely because it is not strictly identical with itself. And so, like, in the English-speaking world, the ultimate metaphysician, she's so metaphysical and she's not even allowed in philosophy is Ein Rand, because her first principle is A equals A, which is an abstract way of saying everything is strictly identical with itself and not even the most outrageous idealist in history have ever thought that because for them the fact that everything is changing is the problem and idealism is their way of solving and she just like just cuts the gordia knot by being like there's no such thing as difference really so that's the you know and many many

people have been persuaded by her way of thinking and you see metaphysical thinking sort of permeating sort of all of all sorts of aspects of life down to the minutest level so for example how many times have you been at work and something the you know some corporate head office person or some manager or someone something irrational and unfair happened and you're like god damn and someone turns to egos it is what it is have you had that yeah absolutely i've been at work where i hear people respond to something shitty with that all the time right and that in a way is sort of a dressed up version of fine rann's basic logic of a which is that things are what they are because they do not contradict themselves in any way

and dialectics on the other hand holds that the opposite is true so for example in the paper wage labor and capital mark spends you know many many pages arguing that the rapid accumulation of capital is the worst possible prospect for the for the for the for the working class and then in the it's the in the very last sentence of the paper he just finishes off by being uh never by saying nevertheless the rapid rapid accumulation of capital is is the overall most favorable circumstance for the working class um or wage labor rather and so he's then he's saying to you that this is both a good and a bad thing not for different reasons but for one and the same reason and this uh violates an abstraction, which is very important in the history of Western thought.

And Iran takes it to ridiculous extremes. But this is the law of non-contradiction, which is, can you tell what that is off the top of your head? No, can you? Yeah, well, it comes from Aristotle. I think it might be in the metaphysics. If it wouldn't be anywhere, it would be metaphysics, because this is a very metaphysical thing to say. but at some point he says the

what is it a thing cannot both be itself and not itself in the same respect so it can be itself and not itself in like different ways like you can recognize that every object has diversity

within it but it can't contradict itself in its own essence right and that sort of like puts Marx's claim that this thing is both capitalism is both the best and the worst thing for the exact same reason, right in the crosshairs. Someone who's been, so I've been reading lately who's been doing interesting work on this

as someone you had on the show not long ago named Graham Priest. And you had him on to do with Buddhism. I'd been reading him for a while from the other end of his work, which is about analytic philosophy and logic being used to tell people inside Western academia that dialectics is perfectly, rational in a language that they can understand. I've been looking at a collection that he edited

called the law of non-contradiction. It's called a law of non-contradiction. Another work that he's put together, it's sort of an advanced introduction to what he calls non-classical logic, which includes a kind of logic that priest works on a lot, which is called paraconsistent logic. And what paraconsistent logic, at least as priest works it out does, is it just says that, you know, what, like actually scientific observation and just common sense kind of contradict the law of non-contradiction. So what would happen if we just said we don't really need this and set it aside? And it turns out once you do that, you can actually get dialectics. And then when you build back up to the level of everyday sentences and speech, all the, all the different categories

of critical thinking that you would find in the first year course still apply. So that's, but that's what dialectics sort of rests on in a sense is the idea that everything both is itself and not itself, both in the sense that it can be diversion, consists of sort of different components and different elements and different features. But it's, it's contrary, it's not, it is itself and not itself in a much more fundamental way in exactly the sense that, that, that, that dialectics and dialectical materialism describes. Is that, is that helpful at all? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I apologize for not fielding your question just because I was focusing on the text because I was going to read this other quote to help people understand a little bit more about what the metaphysics are in this context, which you did a great job explaining. I just want to kind of hit the nail one more time. In the quote, in the two world outlooks by Mao, he says they, meaning the metaphysicians, quote, contend that a thing can only keep on repeating itself as the same kind of thing and cannot change in anything different. In their opinion, capitalist,

exploitation, capitalist competition, the individualist ideology of capitalist society and so on can all be found in ancient slave society or even in primitive society and will exist forever unchanged. They as ascribe the causes of social development to factors external to society, such as geography and climate. They search in an oversimplified way outside of a thing for the causes of its development, and they deny the theory of materialist dialectics, which holds that development arises from the contradictions inside a thing. Consequently, they can explain neither the qualitative diversity of things nor the phenomena of one quality changing into another, end quote. And a simplified way to talk about what he's saying here is either the explicit human nature argument that capitalism is human nature or the implicit idea that many defenders of capitalism have, whether they've interrogated it consciously or not, that capitalism is the end-all be-all of economic systems.

It's articulated by Fukuyama in the idea that capitalist democracy represents the end of history. And it's just represented in the ideas of people who defend capitalism, often without knowing it, because there's this assumption that there's nothing better than capitalism. And capitalism is more or less here to stay. And not only that, but it is in line with our nature as human beings. Now, of course, under feudalism, the same sort of metaphysical, static idea held. and you know for fairly good reason if you're 500 years into you know feudalism and it's another 500 before anybody sees the other side of it that you could convince yourself that this is how things are god ordained things to be this way that guy's the king because god ordained him to be a king i am a serf because that's what god ordained me the role for me to play and things more or less carry on as they always have and always will and we can see how that opinion is challenged by dialectics which says no, these things evolved from, you know, lower orders, feudalism out of more ancient slave societies and capitalism out of feudalism. And if we take that idea seriously, then that means capitalism

itself is just another stage in a larger evolutionary process and will, by definition, one day be transcended. You can see why that dialectical apprehension of history is anathema to people who want to defend capitalism as more or less the end-all-be-all of economic progress for human beings and don't want to see that there's even the possibility of getting beyond it. And that would be very metaphysical in that it would be static, one-sided, and presuming that things don't constantly change and evolve beyond the state that they're currently in. So I just wanted to mention that because I think it would be helpful, hopefully, and people kind of grasping the argument being made here.

And one thing I've been thinking about a lot, like a sort of, this is sort of like a metaphysical sentiment that people assert, I hear this sometimes, what is it? You know, you know, capitalism does something bad again. And someone goes, capitalism, working as intended. And that's metaphysical and one side of and highly idealistic, highly idealist, rather, because capitalism wasn't intended. It grew out of feudalism. It's sort of like, a whole, it's a complex of unintended consequences of feudalism and other sort of things that are in the mix. And when you say that capitalism is working as intended, it really sounds like somebody planned it, like Adam Smith may be planned it, and just handed the plan down again and

again and again. It's basically been reproducing itself identically for the last, you know, a couple of hundred years. Whereas if you actually pay attention to actual history, so much of what happens is a complete or a partial accident. So for, For example, like I said before we started recording, I've been reading, I've finally been reading Michael Hudson's book, Super Imperialism. And it's very interesting to see how the United States' approach to extracting war debts after the First World War from principally France and Britain kind of actually screwed up things for their own economy. And then in an effort to avoid that after the Second World War, that's how they drew up programs with the Marshall Plan. And it really wasn't because somebody was sitting up on high in a throne like a philosopher king saying, I've had an idea, we should do this. It's more like, okay, let's do this, guys, we're going to win big.

And then all these unintended consequences happen. And then you have to cope with it, right? And so likewise, the way that the United States was screwing up its whole internal economy by waging the Vietnam War, they were hitting. sort of like they were hidden the capacity of what they're sort of like that their gold bullion could uh could allow them to like you know leverage as debt and so that's a big part of that's why they went off the gold standard is like we can't we can only on this current system we can only fund this war um to a finite extent but if we got off an asset we stopped backing our currency with an asset then the sky's a limit baby and that's you know this kind of you know some a lot of what we're

dealing with now is like unintended consequences of this sort of like desperation play that they made. And so that, but that when you look at things that way, you actually do see, you do see the dialectical movement, right? So, you know, the point is that a lot of the work that Mao is talking about in, in this paper and other papers is this sort of internal work. We have to keep like checking these habits, right? Because when you make an assertion like capitalism is working as intended, you're basically like throwing down a debate, debate point. And you actually don't have the knowledge backing you up. And if you do say something like that, you probably haven't really studied economic history or history or anything like that. And you're just, you know,

fed up with capitalism, basically. You're just going to reproduce dogmatism and antagonism and all this kind of stuff, because it's really just talking points that are being thrown around rather than analyses. And that's the sort of thing that we want to avoid. Yeah. And I would also say that's a point I like to make is that, you know, the transition, as you just said, from feudalism to capitalism was not a conscious process. It grew organically and often unconsciously, collectively and individually out of, you know, the contradictions within feudalism and certain other developments that, you know, people were not consciously pursuing this shift out of feudalism into this thing called capitalism, even as they were living it and perhaps even contributing to

that process. They weren't aware of it. I think what Marxism really offers for the first time in human history with historical and dialectical materialism is the ability to grasp this basic evolutionary process. Maybe not all the details all of the time, but this basic process. And then that means that this next transition from capitalism to socialism and eventually on to communism would mark the first time in human history where a transition was done consciously. And Mao, in the Communist Party of China, as they're engaging in revolution, winning the revolution, constructing socialism after the revolution, they're doing it all incredibly consciously,

seeing themselves with full conscious attention as moving, trying to move from capitalism to the next stage of human evolutionary development. And I think that's a very interesting sort of thing to realize that we really are sort of the first people in history, broadly speaking, to understand the development and then consciously be able to take it into our own hands in attempt to build that next stage

and push in the next stage through the tools of historical and dialectical materialism. And I think that's absolutely fascinating. And really, I mean, if there could be anything like a Nagalian end to history with the proper materialist corrections, that's what it would be.

It's when you become conscious of being historical, which is this wild process that Marxism allows you to analyze, and so that it's no, not no longer, but you reduce the degree to which, like, we've talked about that painting that Walter, Balta Ben Amin discusses, right?

The angel being blown back by history, you know, all that with he's, the, the future was flying over his shoulder from behind his back and, you know, creating this gigantic pile of detritus and debris. And it's just, you know, the two and fro and what Hagell will call the slaughter bench of history. A Marxist sort of permutation of the end of history would be, like, well, now we know that this is a process that's actually happening, and that's a big advantage over not knowing that it's actually happening. Right.

Of being in, you know, subjected to metaphysical dogmatisms where we're like, we're like this now. We know that people in the past were different, but we can't possibly explain how we got from here to here. So it's like being caught in a series of like freeze frames. And that's completely dissociated and disconnected from everything. So you can't understand anything. you can't know anything and then you can't do anything so um so yeah that's but that i think it's worth

maybe thinking about hanging on to the end of history um in in in the concept of the end of history in that sense which is that it's no longer something that just has us by uh just by the you know the shirt collar and like shaking us around with no ability to get a handle on it at all yeah yeah yeah an important point for sure all right actually i'm sorry um not to interrupt but yeah there was one, just a passage that came to mind when you were reading the passage you just read and then what we were just saying. And it's just that it's very, very important for Mao and also for Lenin and also for Marx and Engels and everyone in this sort of sphere that we have to understand that contradictions do not end with the moment in revolution where like the state

apparatus is apprehended or taken away from the capitalist class. I'm just going to read something from now, from this is, I think, maybe still in Section 1 of the correct handling. Yes, it is. Okay. Quote, Marx's philosophy holds that the law of the university, a university, which there was a university of opposites. The unity of opposites is a fundamental law of the universe. This law operates everywhere in the natural world in human society and man's thinking. opposites in contradiction unite as well as struggle with each other and thus impel all things to move and change. Contradictions exist everywhere, but as things differ in nature, so do contradictions. In any given phenomenon or one thing, the unity of opposites is conditional, temporary, and hence relative, whereas struggle between opposites is absolute. Lenin gave a very

clear exposition of this law. In our country, a growing number of people have come to understand it. For many people, however, acceptance of this law is one thing, and its application in examining and dealing with problems is quite another. Many dare not acknowledge openly that there still exist contradictions among the people, which are the very forces that move our society forward. Many people refuse to admit that contradictions still exist in socialist society, with the result that, when confronted with social contradictions, they become timid and helpless. I'll just repeat, that line. When confronted with social contradictions, they become timid and helpless. They do not understand that socialist society grows more united and consolidated precisely through the ceaseless

process of correctly dealing with and resolving contradictions. For this reason, we need to explain things to our people and to our cadres in the first place to help them understand contradictions in a socialist society and to learn how to deal with such contradictions in a correct way. end quote. And I think this is important because, you know, just as Mao said in his time, you know, people, maybe young people, or maybe any people, thought that, okay, once we get, you know, the bad guys cleared out of the way, then all the contradictions stop and, you know, we all just hold hands and sing. And that's clearly not the case. There's going to be all sorts of work that needs to be on and you're going to run into problems and disagreements about it. And the important thing is that things actually work properly and not that somebody like is that they're right or that somebody else is wrong or they destroy the record or the revision or whatever it's it's not about that kind of seek and destroy kind of mentality that again we often find over here in the west right and and it's important to note as you were saying that under socialism and you know contradictions don't as as mouth says doesn't vanish under

socialism i think what he's saying here is that simply unlike capitalism socialism opens up the possibility of being able to resolve them. He's like, you know, and I'll even read this quote just to make this point clear because it's right after the quote that you just said. He says, contradictions in socialist society are fundamentally different from those in the old society, such as capitalist society. In capitalist society, contradictions find expression in acute antagonisms and conflicts, in sharp class struggle.

They cannot be resolved by the capitalist system itself and can only be resolved by socialist revolution. The case is quite different with contradictions in socialist society. On the contrary, they are not antagonistic and can be ceaselessly resolved by the socialist system itself. So I think that that point being made is that it's not that they disappear, not that they go away or that they vanish under socialism, but that merely the door opens to the very possibility of you being able to apprehend and thus attempt to resolve them in a reasonable way that results in good, that results in positive things, which is literally impossible under capitalism because of the way that it's inherently structured. So I thought that was important.

Yeah, and just I'll read a little bit more from Section 3 here, just to give a sort of concrete example of the kinds of contradictions that can pop up. So this is in Section 3 under Agriculture Cooperation. We have a quote, sorry, we have a rural population of over 500 million. So the situation of our peasants has a very important bearing on the development of our economy and the consolidation of our state power. In my view, the situation is basically sound. The organization of agricultural cooperatives has been successfully completed, and this has

solved a major contradiction in our country, that between socialist industrialization and individual farm economy. The organization of cooperatives was completed swiftly, and so some people were worried that something untoward might occur. Some things did go wrong, but fortunately, they were not so serious. The movement on the whole is healthy. the peasants are working with a will, and last year, despite the worst floods, droughts, and typhoons in years, they were still able to increase the output of food crops.

Yet some people have stirred up a miniature typhoon. They are grousing that cooperative farming won't do, that it has no superior qualities. Does agricultural cooperation possess superior qualities, or does it not? Among the documents distributed at today's meeting is one concerning the Wang Guafeng cooperative in Zunhua County, have a province comment. I'm sure I butchered all those pronunciations. Continuing, which I suggest you to read.

This cooperative is situated in the hilly region, which was very poor in the past, and which for a number of years depended on relief grain from the people's government. When the cooperative was first set up in 1953, people called it the Poppers Co-op. But as a result of four years of hard struggle, it has become better off year by year,

and now most of its household have reserves of grain. What this cooperative could do, other cooperatives should also be able to do under normal conditions, even if it may take a bit longer. It is clear then that there are no grounds for the view that something has gone wrong with the cooperative movement, end quote. And so that's a pretty simple way of thinking about these kinds of very concrete contradictions, and it's pretty like something just go wrong. We have a plan and, you know, what's the same?

No plan survives first contact. It makes first contact, and we go, uh-oh, we got to go back and work on it a bit more and then go back again. And people may often disagree and even sometimes argue and fight, you know, hopefully not physically. But the point is that Mao says that you have to recognize that in and through, you have to look for the forward motion in it. And again, in the West, another thing that we're induced and trained to be is deeply pessimistic. And, you know, to the point now, it's like, what is it, doomerism, doom scrolling, all of that. Black-pilled, yeah. Yeah, black-pilled.

Oh, socialism sounds nice, but there's no way it could work, like, that kind of stuff. And, you know, that is, you know, people might think that they're just, you said this many, many times on the show. Like, people think, you've done it, I do it, I've done it, and I'm sure I do do it, and I'm just too embarrassed to admit it right now. but you think you come up with your ideas entirely on your own out of thin air. Right. And you don't pay attention to how many people around you are saying the exact same things. Or the people that you're associating with are saying the exact same things. So you can go on to discussion forums on the internet or just all about, you know, collapsing and the black pill and all the rest of it.

And it's like you're, you guys aren't really reporting on reality so much as you're kind of like reinforcing a paradigm of, of, um, interpreting the world and your place in it that doesn't really seem like it comes from any kind of deep analysis at all, right? It's this cultural training of, you know, we're trained in the West to like, and especially in, you know, the closer you get into the states, the more it's like this, this, you know, we have, you know, champagne dreams and then it's just like everything we're down in the gutter and, you know, easy come, easy go, you know, all of these hopes and highs and lows and we're all over the place. And again, like this way of approaching things and thinking things kind of like settles that down, right?

This is part of why this stuff goes so well with meditation and Buddhist practice and stuff that helps you to settle it down so you can have a sober, non-panicky, non-trying people's heads in way of assessing these things and then moving forward and then understanding that setbacks too are also part of the process of moving forward. so we don't have to keep, you know, being like, oh, God, the humanity and, like, just going home and pulling the blankets over our heads all the time, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, one big issue that you and I have discussed in previous episodes is this idea that many on the Western Left in particular frequently mistake non-antagonistic contradictions as antagonistic or vice versa. You're certainly alluding to that in this conversation so far. Maybe we can make it a little more pronounced and explicit.

So can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, we, well, like I said, like we've been saying, in the West, we often, the one big thing is mistaking non-antagonistic for antagonistic contradictions. But that's almost sort of on easy mode a little bit. Like when you go on Twitter and everyone's just like, you know, you're this, you're that and you suck and fuck you and all the rest of it. But then, you know, when we don't study enough and we don't practice enough, then it's the sort of the antagonistic contradictions masquerading as non-antagonistic contradictions that are very, very dangerous. And here's one that I'll give. So this is an antagonistic contradiction masquerading as a non-antagonistic contradiction by representing a non-antagonistic contradiction as an antagonistic contradiction. Yeah, yeah, maybe.

It's getting real dialectical now. And it's, I've heard, you know, I'm not going to say their names. You've spoken about some of these characters before, and they deviate to the right. Some of them have beards. Anyway, and a pension, I imagine, for maybe affliction T-shirts. And I've heard this, they make out the contradiction between productive and unproductive labor in Marxism as an antagonistic contradiction. Like the bourgeoisie invents unproductive laboring positions in order to, what, drain the wages away from the productive labor. Whereas if you actually read Das Kapital, you find out that the point of unproductive labor is to augment productive.

labor. It's to make it more efficient and to make it more profitable. So unproductive labor is actually a part of productive labor. It's not, you know, but then you go, you, you hear these takes where it's like the unproductive, somehow there are just all of these positions for lazy people that want to sit with their thumb up their ass and just collect a paycheck. And somehow in a system that's driven by profit, this came into being. Right. And then through that misrepresentation, they, have people thinking that, you know, to be on, to be on, like, the socialist left is to attack nurses and stuff like that, right? Right. And it's, and, and, and then, and baristas, purple hair. Or baristas or whatever the hell else, right? And, you know, if you read, you get into volume two and volume of three of dust capital, I mean, he says, well, you know, transport workers are productive labor. You're not, productive labor just, just doesn't end when the, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, when the widget, I hate using that turn. All the boomers use that as the abstract commodity.

A bobblehead. That's the new generation's abstract. A bobblehead. A funco pop. Like a lad, Joel from the last of a, whatever. And it just doesn't fall out and sit there, right? And it's important to remember where the, you know, the etymological derivation, which is itself bound up a material practice of the concept of productivity.

It's a Latin compound for pro, right, for or toward or whatever, and the verb duco, I lead, and it means I lead forth, right? And productivity in Marxist sense, in the very first instance, it's we lead things forth out of what? Our metaphysical, sorry, our metabolic relationship with our non-organic body that he talks about and what the philosophic, the manuscripts of 1844. And for Marx, this, this productive process doesn't actually stop. until the commodity reaches the point where the consumer can get a hold of it. And so you really want to piss those guys off. You could argue that by definition, then baristas are productive labor because they make the last trip of the coffee into the cop on the counter.

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, guys. But yeah, so you see like these little kind of subtleties and these kind of tricks that people can get away with. And sometimes it's just honest errors or whatever because they haven't read enough themselves can lead you to mistake one kind of contradiction for another. So by misconstruing a non-antacic antagonistic contradiction as an antagonistic contradiction, they've diverted your attention away from the fact that in relation to the politics they're trying to infiltrate into debt, that is an antagonistic contradiction

and now it's been disguised as a non-antagonistic contradiction because they made you feel like you understood something. All right, right. Yeah, absolutely great, great point. Is there anything else you want to say on that issue or are you ready to move forward? Because I think we have touched on that in this episode and beyond pretty extensive. Um, yes. Yeah. Okay. So two, two related issues here are the problems of seeing things one-sidedly, as Mao talks about, and desiring non-contradictory resolutions to existing contradictions. Um, so can you discuss these issues, kind of Mao's thoughts and maybe give us an example of each? Well, the problem of, of seeing things, uh, uh, uh, one-sidedly, um, is just, you know, you may, um, how would I put it? you know that that old saying you got to take the you got to take the bad with the good um i find oftentimes when i hear people actually use that that's really just an excuse for

ignoring the bad uh so you know maybe we would brother say you got to take the you got to take the good with the bad which is to say when there are bad things it doesn't mean that the good things aren't real so for example when we talked about the sopranos and the scene in the episode where AJ tried to kill himself by jumping in the pool, even though Tony is, I mean, he's unspeakable. He, you know, his genuine fear and concern and love for his child is also real. That's not negated or neutralized by the fact that he's a violent criminal. And likewise, so, you know, in the West, I mean, this is a big problem with actually existing

socialisms, right? we're over here. We've done nothing. We got nothing. We don't have a leg to stand on about anything, basically. And yet we sit here and we wag our fingers at other countries that are telling us, look, we're trying to do this, you know. And that's not to say that we, you know, with an informed criticism, preferably informed by critics in the place where it's happening, you know, that we would want to listen to. We want to hear these voices. We end up just, it's almost like hockey commentary or something like that. And so people get into this with the People's Republic of China.

And again, it's not that there's nothing to be criticized necessarily. It's just that over here, for the most part, people often criticize on the basis of, you know, representations made by certain alphabet soup sort of type outfits and the kind of media extensions that they have. and you know with with china um you know i've been struggling for a long time to try to really like understand on their own terms like what is what is their actual political economy like what is actually going on um i know that i'll never understand all of the details because it's it's i mean i'm from a place with 500 000 people on the whole landmass and this is a billion and a half people like what like am i going to criticize a galaxy you know what i mean right um i just

have to understand it and I was just you know like so the you know and you know the big uh the big knock that often seems to be as well well they still have they still have billionaires and yes that it's it's true that they still have billionaires um but again i've been you know and i have to thank ben norton for um putting michael hudson out there because he's he's pointing out that if you get into das capitol two and three and it's true you will see see that um The layers of what's going on is much more complex and difficult to untangle than what you'll get if you just read volume one, which is really about the immediate antagonism between the worker and the boss, basically. But by the time you get to volume three, you're getting into like global finance and central banking and stuff like that. And you realize, oh, my God, all of this has been going on the whole time anyway.

And on top of that, debt at interest has existed since Mesopotamia. Like so when they discovered all those tablets at the end of the 19th century, they found all these, like, all these, all this documentation in these tablets that show that there was debt with interest 5,000 years ago. And it's been, you know, running through, running through different modes of production the entire time. And so, you know, if, if what China is saying is true about how they are trying to, you know, let me, let me. put it the other way. Let me put it over the way. If it's true that they are just a straight bourgeois nation state, and that's all that they are, then on those terms, Adam Smith would say, you guys are doing it right. You're doing it right. Because if you actually read the wealth of nations and you read the section on profit, Smith says that, actually, can I just call it up

real quick? Sure, yeah, go ahead. While you're looking it up, I just want to tell the listeners in this essay in chapter four, the question of the industrialist and the businessmen is pretty interesting to read, especially in light of modern day China and the debates around it. So if you're kind of interested in going a little deeper, and this is like three pages where he talks about what the relationship between the Communist Party and the national bourgeoisie should be, I found it pretty interesting and enlightening, especially with regards to China today. So just food for thought. Yeah, and the further when you go into the essay, like it gets up to like international trade at the end

in dealing with different countries, and it's very, very interesting and thought-provoking. But yeah, here's the, here's this myth quote. It's from, it's from book one, chapter 11, part three of volume one of the wealth of nations. Quote, the plans and projects of the employers of capital stock regulate and direct all the most important operations of labor and profit is the end proposed by all those plans and projects. But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension comment. He means like decline of the downfall of continuing of the society. On the contrary, profit is naturally low in rich countries and high in poor

countries and is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin, end quote. So for the godfather of capitalism, he's saying MCN Prime is a big problem already before Lux even articulates it. And so from the, you know, China's, their argument seems to be like we are industrializing and the Communist Party of China is subordinating the financial class so that it doesn't take over and then hollow out industrialization. like what's happened over here in the countries that we live in, right? And so, okay, we can say, you could say, I don't know if they're socialists. However, I do know that if this is what they're doing, they're at least operating in a way that Adam Smith says a bourgeois republic should operate if it's actually going to make life good for its people.

And if they actually are on a socialist trajectory, then they're basically still being consistent. with Marx all the way through Das Kapital, who's saying that it's increasing, progressive, intensifying industrialization that will lead to the turnover into socialism. So if the Communist Party of China is trying to keep the working class of China down

permanently by industrializing, then we should just keep our mouth shut and let them keep doing it. Because they are creating, if this is all true, they are creating the conditions where if they're not socialist and they're doing this as a bourgeois republic,

they're creating exactly the conditions under which Marx said socialism would come about and doing the one thing that Marx would, you know, if he were to read Lenin would say this would cut off that process. If financialization took over, it would cut off the industrialization process that would lead into socialism.

So, you know, so, you know, that doesn't give us all the answers, but that's a like thinking about things this way and recognizing that there are all these contradictions and having faith in our brothers and sisters in China that even if it is like what you know you know really negative critics over here say it is that they're they're going to they will work it out and they will succeed in in socialism if it's not already socialism so you know that's you know seems to me a much healthier way of assessing all these questions and problems then this, you know, China bad, China Mecha Chi with his two cups of tea and all this kind of stuff like that.

You have to analyze what they're doing according to the contradictions and not according to a one-sided representation that's taken out of a slice of time. So, yeah, so that's the first one. And then the second one, yeah, the desire for non-contradictory resolutions to existing contradictions. And you, you know, there are all sorts of different iterations of this. So I was in an organizing situation where, you know, someone's, they just, you know, you've heard people say this. I'd never actually heard someone say this myself before. I'd just seen it on the internet.

But they said, yeah, I just want revolution because I don't want to work anymore. All right. And it's like, wow. Like, you really just think that you want, like, that is completely disconnected from reality. Oh, what was the other one I thought of? this is one I hear you hear all the time once the baby boomers are gone it'll be okay oh yeah yeah

yeah and it's like as soon as this problem is taken away all the contradictions will stop and we'll have a socialist utopia or something like that but that's you know we have to understand that they're in you know as a cultural segment with a lot of media representation yeah they're annoying the boomers are wicked annoying as a as a kind of media object in a way right but we also have to remember that they came

into infancy surrounded by people who are like you know what all of those struggles are all over now you know like we worked it out like we got fDR and there are no more contradictions right and they were they were raised being told that and who were they told that by they were told that by the generation or a generation that generally we we admire a lot which is, you know, the pre-World War II sort of a union movement and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, nonetheless, they are part and parcel of, you know, that generation being as outlandish and just destructive as it is, partly because they themselves made the compromise that it should never have been made. And that enabled all these representations that everything is all good now and everything will just reproduce itself identically forever. So your kids' lives will be the same as your life and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so if you understand that, that the boomers are the way they are, partly because of the way that the people before them were, you will understand that once they're gone, that the process isn't going to change, or, you know, the state of things isn't going to change if we don't have a social revolution and, you know, a revolution entirely. So there's all these ways of insisting on and desiring things to be non-contradition. contradictory that take us away from a sensible analysis and then that takes us away from the ability to make the right decisions and side with the right people, oppose the wrong people, and move forward with the right plans and the right, what am I trying to say, projects and programs and all that sort of thing. Is that helpful at all? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I really like this chapter where he goes into, can bad things be turned into good things? And I think this goes in the direction of seeing things one-sidedly.

So he says, to sum up, we must learn to look at problems from all sides, seeing the reversed as well as the obverse side of things. In given conditions, a bad thing can lead to good results and a good thing to bad results. More than 2,000 years ago, Lao Zhu said, quote, good fortune lieth within the bad. Bad fortune lurketh within good. When the Japanese shot their way into China,

they called this a victory. Huge parts of China's territory were seized, and the Chinese called this a defeat. But victory was conceived in China's defeat, while defeat was conceived in Japan's victory. Hasn't history proved this to be true? He goes on a little later to say, The United States now controls a majority in the United Nations and dominates many parts of the world. This state of affairs is temporary and will be changed one of these days.

China's position as a poor country denied its rights in international affairs will also be changed. The poor country will change into a rich one. The country denied its rights into enjoying them. a transformation of things into their opposites. Here, the decisive conditions are the socialist system and the concerted efforts of a united people. I think that's interesting in its own right. It says a lot about, you know, history and politics.

It's also kind of prophetic in its own way. Now we're living in the age of China's rise and America's decline. This was, of course, written many decades ago when the situation was very, very different. And we can see things turning right now. And he goes into a whole bunch of things about how World War I actually created. the conditions. It was a terrible thing. World War I by any measure is terrible. Created the conditions for the Bolshevik revolution.

World War II, absolutely terrible. Created the conditions after World War II of decolonization and the increase of Marxist, socialist nations, etc., including China. And on down the line. And he says, you know, if there's a third world war, that would be a terrible thing. But it

would also produce these other, on the other side of that war, you know, obvious positives. And so nothing can ever be seen as one-sided. And since everything is always shifting and moving, something that is, you know, explicitly bad can turn into something good. For my own example, the Batista regime in Cuba, bad, created the very conditions for the Cuban revolution, which was good, which then triggered the United States to impose this brutal

blockade and embargo, which is bad. But the perseverance of the Cuban Revolution and the people under that brutal embargo has been inspirational for countries and for movements around the world, which is good. And so, you know, that really goes to just trying to see things from all sides, seeing things as constantly in motion, and never falling prey to one-sidedness. And this is what Michael Parenti calls a differentiated object appraisal. I like that term a lot. And he's very simple. It's like, yeah, some things about this are pretty good.

Something's not so good. It's not so good. But they're in a unity together, so you've got to take them both. You've got to learn how to handle them both so that you can mitigate. the bad aspect and sort of enhance and proliferate the good aspect and it's a constant

right so it's not about seeking balance right and there's a part where I got to try to find this where he talks about balance as a temporary unity of opposites yeah yeah he's like balance is not permanent we we yeah that's not something like an equilibrium

is not something that we should ever strive for because just well, nature and matter itself, even in a socialist or even a communist society, things about the planet that we're on are going to keep changing. And so we're going to have to keep altering our way of doing things and understanding things and understanding ourselves, right? So once you desire a sort of terminal state where you just get to sort of kick back and chill, I mean, you're dead, basically.

No more, there's no more, like you're not really doing anything anymore. you can't interface with anything anymore and this is you know this is probably a very painful thought for a lot of people in the west to have i mean for years um i've heard you know i've listened to both democrats and republicans in a disguised way express their deep deep desire for a one party state um which is like god damn it this time we're going to put those guys out of business permanent majority forever and it's like that's impossible um What you're saying is impossible. And even if you did, you can't keep them down forever just by voting them out or something like that.

That's not going to happen. They're going to come back with more. They'll create more contradictions. And then your little plan for having this permanent stasis, this permanent balance is going to get taken away from you. So like, you're really putting yourself in a vulnerable position by even desiring to have balance or desiring to have like a terminal point where everything stops changing. because it's an idealistic fantasy and nothing else, right? Right, and it's never really, it's very rarely explicitly stated in those terms, but it's very implicit in our electoral delusions and our politics all the time.

There is a huge chunk of like the pro-Trump Republicans that really do believe if they can just fully defeat the Democrats and get their guy in there and unleash him, let him do what he has to do, that we could get back to a place where, there's like a balance struck and a more or less implicit utopia achieved. And the same delusion operates on the other side. If we can just beat these dastardly Republicans, and we can just reveal them to be dastardly to the people

and everybody can finally understand how dastardly they really are. You know, we'll get to a point where we can expunge them and we can take over. And once we do, we can make things right. Just got to keep voting for us, you know. And then when the Democrats are in power, then the opposition on the right swells, and they, you know, they kind of take the lead

and they point out all the ways in which the Democrats fail and then maybe opinion shifts in their direction and then they take over, they fuck up in a bunch of ways. People start to absolutely hate them. And then the Democrats get to use that to say, see, if we can get back in there, we'll make things right. And then, you know, it's just a never-ending sort of cycle, a Ferris wheel that you're on

where you're kind of thinking implicitly you're getting somewhere and all you need to do is have this final defeat. But in reality, just the hamster wheel keeps turning. nobody ever fully wins and the delusions march on. And so every single election you can say something like this is the most important election

of our lifetime with no sense of irony and then four years later say the exact same thing again and four years later say the exact same thing again and kind of believe it the whole time but get nowhere in the entire process. And that's like a definitive reality of our modern two-party politics

in the U.S. today. Yeah, and it's so intense too, like the way it gets into the midterms and then there's like even it's just it never ends the states is in election mode constantly in a way it's not in Canada I can't remember when the last federal election was and and I'm not exactly sure where the next one is anymore I partly checked out because it's just a complete clown show but just yeah like you're you're in the states you're constantly being presented with like down to the municipal level like this is going to be the one so it's like all these levels and all these different rates of

repetition and all this kind of stuff. You guys must be exhausted with that. Yeah, it is. It's harassment almost, you know. It really is, yeah. It's wild. Like, I don't know how you have time to not be able to afford rent and groceries. It's crazy.

Exactly. For real. Just on that note really quick, because in this essay, Mao talks about the two-party system and how some people in revolutionary China are saying that, you know, in his essay or the chapter of the two types of contradictions differing in nature I guess it's the first chapter in this essay

he talks about a certain people wanting a two-party system being as if that would you know the opposition party being out of power fighting the party in power as if that would guarantee sort of democracy and he says this quote in our country there were some others who wavered on the question of the

Hungarian incident because they were ignorant of the real state of affairs in the world they think that there is a top little freedom under our people's democracy there is little freedom under our people's democracy and that there is more freedom under Western parliamentary democracy. They ask for a two-party

system as in the West, with one party in office and the other in opposition. But this so-called two-party system is nothing but a device for maintaining the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It can never guarantee freedoms to the working people. As a matter of fact, freedom and democracy

exist not in the abstract, but only in the concrete. In a society where class struggle exists, if there is freedom for the exploiting classes to exploit the working people, there is no freedom for the working people not to be exploited. If there is democracy for the bourgeoisie, there is no democracy for the proletariat and other working people, etc. And I found that very interesting, especially in light, I think, on social media in the last month or two, there was a little bit of debate on left Twitter about whether socialist countries should have

a multi-party system, right, or democratic centralism. And that was sort of argued about on Twitter. And I thought that that little quote right there spoke to the, you know, the side of the argument that says that, you know, this whole idea of multiple parties is a device for the maintenance of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It is not something that we need to fetishize as socialists in our transition. So. Yeah. The Democrats and the Republicans market themselves to, well, they represent, you know, to more or less well-defined factions within the bourgeoisie. And then they market themselves to various demographics and sets of concerns amongst the population. But at the level of, you know, the military practices, central banking practices, international trade practices, they persisted in the same direction over decades, no matter who's in office.

I mean, we know that, right? So it's like really, you know, they're taking. you down a road where in the case of Democrats, where the selling point is always, you know, there are certain marginalized groups that are going to be, you know, destroyed if the Republicans do this, that, or the other thing. And that's all well and good. But you guys are also creating the economic, you know, like when you offer these formal protections, right, remember Marx and Engels, like these are just formal protections, right? You are also helping create the conditions where nobody actually has the wealth, the means to actually access and exercise those rights.

Exactly. So, you know, you really are throwing people under the bus. Like, I've seen people say, well, the Democrats just do nothing. And again, we're not saying there's absolutely no differences at all. Like, I watched the footage of those two young men that got thrown out of the, what is it, the legislature in Tennessee. Right. I saw that too. And, yeah. And I thought Justin Pearson was quite a powerful speaker.

especially he really ripped it and obviously I think there are probably would be contradictions between our politics and theirs but these guys are not like Joe Biden or something like that and you would not find them on they would never be allowed in the Republican Party or something like that so we're not saying there's absolutely no differences but in the overarching movements that they help accomplish the Democrats are rendering the people that they say they want to protect through these formal rights. Like, it's not like AOC is going to come out and be a human shield for marginalized people. They're trying to do it through formal rights. Like, you can

access this to the legal system or this or that thing. But as with everything in America and in Western countries in general, you need money to do anything. And you're taking, you're making sure that people don't have money because either they can't get wages, they can't get a job, or all their money is going to like, you know, debt servicing and fees and rents and stuff like that um right so in the big picture they represent two tendencies within one sort of well the same mode of production and the sort of ideological sort of whatever that goes along with that and um if they were actually a one party system if they were one party in agreement about the things they fundamentally agree upon the other differences that are there would sort of be like well you know that's that's

happens there's factions within parties and then it could be explicable um so you can see how in some ways a one party system would actually clarify things one way or another. So there is an argument to be made for it, for sure. Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I wanted to say, like, this idea of bipartisanship you're talking about, like, on the things that matter, war, the basics of the economy, is just there's bipartisan agreement. And, of course, the Democrats and Biden in particular will often fetishize

bipartisanship as like an end in and of itself as a goal worthy of pursuit. And a lot of people are tricked into believing, like, yeah, you know, when they reach across the aisle and work, together good things happen but in almost every real instance of bipartisanship i reach for my gun because that means the ruling class and its factions are consolidated around something in their obviously entire class interest and it's almost never good for regular working people when they come together to agree on something like the fucking iraq war or what you know bailing out the banks or whatever it may be um so i always found that interesting they present bipartisanship as like

a solution and a good in and of itself but so often in practice bipartisanship means that somebody in our class is absolutely getting fucked over and there's actually scary unity in the ruling class so yeah and no I think in my lifetime

I'm not I'm just really sure how old the sort of theme of like the fetishization of bipartisanship is but nobody was worse than Obama yeah I know and look what happened oh my god yeah he completely recapitalized Wall Street And yeah, like what we're going through right now, it's the end of the approach to dealing with that contradiction or that set of contradictions that he implemented, which is not to recapitalize the working class, but to recapitalize Wall Street. And then we've spent 15 years with 0% interest rates.

And then, you know, as Marks points out, when capital recognizes that it's in crisis, one thing that it does is like chip off little bits of itself, right? this is what like venture capital and like started little tech startups and stuff like that are about right and for the last 15 years a lot of people have been getting you know low like low cost low overhead low interest startup capital for little little tiny like one person businesses and stuff like that and i saw this in nova scotia right like there the province that i was living in when we first started doing shows and there there was this uh it looked like a government agency on the surface of it and it was to help people start up like little little tiny tiny businesses but I looked into it more and it was a front for a bunch of banks and they're like oh shit you know

like we have all this like surplus you know we and we can't reinvest it we're not going to reinvest it in public works and stuff like that because that's not profitable and it would empower the poor and the working class so we're not going to do that so let's funnel it through something that appears to be a public organization and then get people on these these debt loads and we can you know we're getting, we're getting it on like, you know, 0% or whatever, and then we can charge like a little, little tiny thing. And now all of a sudden, you know, central banks are having to raise interest rates and all this kind of stuff to save their arrangement. And all of those businesses are going to implode, right? And then that whole thing is going to collapse. And sorry, how do we

get on? That's okay. That's okay. No, that's okay. I was tempted to continue to make some examples but i think we have a i have a have a have a hard stop in about 30 minutes so let's get into this last little section so yeah having laid all that on the table and kind of worked through some of those those issues about dialectics and contradictions and giving examples so hopefully people can follow us and understand um let me toss out some questions for you to field and you know kind of keep in mind that there is a 30 minutes here that i have left and so maybe we can handle these with some more speed here and i'll try to hold myself back from digressions as well um here's the first question. How should and can people get along with one another in organizing situations based on

what we learn from this text and our explorations of dialectics and contradictions more broadly? Well, one thing we all really, really need to do is work on vulnerability and humility or humbleness, rather, because we have a lot of work to do in overcoming the perception that contradictions are inherently antagonistic. So we're all prone to getting our, our to be being very offended if we're criticized and to perceive every criticism as an attack and to feel that when we criticize, our job is to attack immediately.

And that makes organizing very, very hard. And speaking especially to us honkies out there, all, you know, us white men, young white men, got to dial it down a little bit. We ought to accept we don't know, really don't know much. And we all have a lot to learn. And there's really nothing wrong.

with, as Krupskaya says, we're remembering what it's like to approach things as a child and to tear away that ego that's been built up where it's like, I have this self to defend. My God, if somebody calls myself into question, I don't exist and then I have no power and then the revolution won't happen or something, right? And that's something we really got to get over like that, that kind of aggressiveness, the cynicism, the deep mistrust of other people, the dislike of other people. and also looking at the kinds of social, cultural, like media inputs that generate that.

So like just a quick example, I was in an organizing meeting and there was a question of picking a delegate to go to this other thing like up in Toronto or something like that. And it was a relatively small group of people, but there was like protracted discussion about who, like can we even trust anyone to send

because like power is inherently corrupting and all this kind of stuff. I think they thought that they were they were being Foucauldian or something like that. And I just was like, look, this person's good. I vote for them, whatever. And then there was this ongoing discussion about just mistrusting people and how we all mistrust ourselves and other people with power and all this kind of stuff. And then they finally, we picked a delegate and then we got to the general discussion, welfare part of the meeting. and the people, the person who was the most paranoid and suspicious and skeptical of everyone else and one of the other people started talking about their favorite reality show that they just

watched, like they watch it every week, and it's all about people betraying each other. And then they were laughing at how entertaining it was and stuff like that. And it's like, hmm, do you think that that might feed into your attitudes about, you know, you are what you eat, right? Yeah, yeah. So, like, we got to really constantly be doing critical work and thinking about all the, the, the tributaries of those attitudes and those habits in us, right? Like all the way back to, and I'll stop after, I'll stop answering this question right now.

When I was a kid, one of the, a very well-known pro wrestler was Ted DiBiase, the middle million-dollar man. And his finishing move was the million-dollar dream where he put you in a sleeper hold and then shove like a $100 bill in your mouth. And he grabbed the mic and say, everybody has a price. Right. And you get into high school and you get, people start wearing no fair shirts in the 90s and they have slogans like second place is first. loser and stuff like that. And then you're like, oh, whatever. And then you actually get out into the world and you're inside an incentive structure and like a punishment structure that actually those messages fit with. And you don't need to be propagandized. Like think this, do this. You just

have to exist in this cultural media environment. And when you get into the right incentive structure, this right incentive system, all the moving parts come together and you're interpolated as that kind of subject, even though you didn't go through like a clockwork orange style indoctrination program, right? We've got to constantly be self-criticizing about all the things that are coming into us from outside and how we're projecting the back out. Exactly. And not seeing that, as you're saying, leads to hubris and leads away from humility by not being able to see all the ways in which you are influenced. You're not above that. You don't stand outside of that. And that's not only important in and of itself, but it also goes to this thing I'm always saying,

which is that there's no individual that is right. Like, there's no one person that can have all the knowledge fit into their brain. And you can often get that idea through these cultural things, through the libertarian ethos in the U.S., through the hyper-individualism that is rewarded on things like social media with their algorithms. And it's really in the context, ideally, of organizations that you can really come together with other well-intentioned people and work through these issues. And as Mao says in this work, the only way, quoting him, the only way to settle questions of an ideological nature or controversial issues among the people or among comrades is by the democratic method, the method of discussion, of criticism,

of persuasion and education, and not by the method of coercion or repression, or as we're talking about egoism, individualism, I have the answers, you don't, etc., or treating the very act of criticism from another comrade as an attack on the self, which is another way that individualism and egoism manifests in these contexts. And so the really only way to get good at that is to get is to practice it is to be in communion with others and to really dedicate yourself consciously to practicing that within the context of collectives of organizations ideally eventually of parties and that's the only that's the only way forward so i would think about i would think about that so the next question i have to throw your way how are national contradictions we're

going to get to international in a second how are national contradictions to be solved particularly with regard to Mao's point about contradictions among exploiters and exploited, having both antagonistic and non-antagonistic aspects, which you and I discussed earlier about the nice boss or the nice landlord that we have had experiences with. Well, yeah, really the thing is, is to try to create or help create, help foster as many defectors as possible. You know, Marks will tell you this. Mal will tell you this. Man will tell you this.

Not all petty bourgeois people are ideologically committed to being a part of this, partly because, you know, so many of them are so small that they'll realize at some point that they can't win. And so in order to, in order to save themselves, they may be willing to, they may be willing to join up. actually here's a funny example recently the Star Wars animated series

The Bad Batch had an episode where a group of miners collectivized their mind over through their employer and they offered him first he struck out at them in violence he pulled a gun on them and he was disarmed

and thrown over a bridge like over this like lava pit or whatever and he's hanging on by one hand And the workers go to him and be like, it doesn't have to be like this. Just work with the join us. And we'll just do this together and we'll all have lives together. Like what, like what's the big deal? And he decided hanging on off this bridge to still try to attack them from that disadvantage.

And he chose death. And then the managers are just like, oh, oh, no. Anyway. And then they're like, well, now we can just work. Wow, we don't have to be poorer anymore. That's awesome. And so, you know, we're probably trained to think that every person in the Petty Bors or even in the bourgeoisie or even in the bourgeoisie are going to be like that guy but there are people out there that won't be like that like angles for example and so i think

what Mao is advising is like keep your eyes open. Don't assume that every contradiction is antagonistic and you may be able to make gains without actually having to hurt anyone or be hurt and you can get access to resources to help the revolution and stuff like that. But then again, there are going to be guys that mine owner in Star Wars. They'll choose the lava and if they choose the lava. But there's no reason to assume that everyone's got to go into lava, especially when they can be of use. Yes. Well said. All right. So moving to the international sphere, how should we assess international affairs?

And perhaps you might be able to give an example using the current war in Europe because it's so timely and topical. Yeah, I mean, again, fundamentally has to be done in a contradictory way or according to the logic of contradiction, I should say. And, you know, one question that's been thrown around a lot is the question of, is Russia also imperialist? Is this an inter-imperialist war? And I can see why people say that it is, and I can also see why people say that it isn't. You could say that you could argue that it is because even though right now Russia seems to be pursuing

a strategy of state-led industrial capitalism, there is no doubt a financial class in there somewhere. And some, if not all of them, would love if they could have the opportunity to find a way to put Russia in the position or at least find themselves in a situation where they're the world, you know, they're the world's bank. They're the world's, you know, reserve currency holder and they get to select the sort of economic and financial arrangements that go on all around the world. And so as long as you have a capitalist mode of production, there's going to be that financial

class there and they're always going to have a reason and a desire to be like, could we make this happen, right? So in that sense, you know, they belong to a capitalized. capitalist mode of production and that tendency will necessarily be there. So you can't strictly negate them from saying that, you know, it's completely divorced from any kind of imperialism at all, right? And that's to say nothing, you know, we don't have the time now to look at the different trade arrangements. They might, we don't, you know, we're not prepared to do an analysis like that right now. But, you know, we know that there is necessarily, since it's capitalism, there is a financial

class and the financial class always has a reason or a desire and incentive to smother in the industrial economy, or, you know, as Hudson says, the real economy of production and consumption with this financialization. At the same time, I can see why people say that it's not, because you know, Russia's GDP is so tiny compared to the United States that it could never possibly out-compete it. And the next biggest competitor that's going to come forward and be the world leader does not appear to have any imperialist ambitions in anything resembling like the United States. So even if there is a Russian financial bourgeoisie or financial capitalist class in there, it doesn't seem like they're probably going to get the leeway to do that thing.

And right now, the country is not powerful enough economically and doesn't have the kind of reach and sort of relationships with other countries to enable it to do that. So like Richard Wolfe pointed out a month or two ago that, you know, in the media, we, you know, we're trained to think of Russia, like the big, the bears come, like this big monstrous bear is coming to get us, but the United States's GDP at the, you know, the year that both maybe last year it was, was what, $21 trillion, and Russia's GDP was one and a half trillion dollars. I think that's smaller than Canada's GDP. So they're not a big dog in that way.

And they, even if there are people in there that would love to be the bank, to be sort of like the way Athens was the treasurer of the Delian League and the way the United States is at the center of this absurd financial scam, you know, money laundering scheme that it has going on, they most certainly, it's not really appropriate to call them imperialist either. So you kind of have to, you do have to analyze it in a contradictory way. And the same goes with, you know, analyzing what's going on in Ukraine. We know that not everyone in Ukraine is a Nazi. Of course.

We also know that the Azov Battalion and Bandera-Nazism is a part of what's driving this. And you saw people at the, you know, at the beginning in the big, in the big, head rush all the adrenaline and the dopamine and everything and people picking sides and telling who's good and who's bad you had people just like ukrainians are shit fuck them what i mean you know what i mean there has to be there's contradictions everything is full of contradictions and we have to analyze everything that way and the kind of moralizing that you see especially online about this kind of thing and that you know getting into great man theory and representations of leaders and stuff like that it's not really part of of marxist analysis

or socialist struggle or dialectical materialism or anything. Yeah, I think that's important. And of course the Nazis, insofar as there are ultra-nationalists in Ukraine, outright Nazis in Ukraine, they're obviously useful tools for the U.S. in this context because the U.S. is using Ukraine, in my opinion, as a proxy war against Russia to degrade Russia's military capacity and to cut it off from the international system. And they don't really care about good versus evil. They'll tell you that's what they care about.

tell you they'll couch this entire thing in terms of morality and freedom and democracy. But if that were the case, why are you outright using funding, arming literal Nazis because they're useful for you. This is not a moral game you're playing. This is an imperialist game you're playing. And the Nazis are useful. And if it was a moral game, you wouldn't be arming and funding, you know, literal Nazis, which they are doing because they're useful.

On the other hand, I also think with the rhetoric is the exact opposite of reality. So the U.S. will present this war. as Russia going on the offensive and Ukraine and then the U.S. and the West in general playing defense backing up Ukraine. But we all know if you zoom out and take the full context into account that Russia is, while they're technically playing offense by invading Ukraine, they're actually playing defense to fight back against NATO expansion. And so you have to understand this thing holistically, not just in the simple ways that you are fed as good versus bad, right, verse wrong, big country invades smaller country, big country, bad, smaller country, good, right? This is much more complex than that. And they're going to feed you those narratives. You have to have

the critical capacity to think dialectically, to think holistically, if you have any hope whatsoever of being able to counter that rhetoric. And in the last point I just want to make, and you can tell me if you disagree with this, and this is a simplified analogy, a very, very simplified. But, you know, if you were to say that, yes, there are some imperialist element, right? If you go down Lenin's checklist of what makes a country imperialist you could say that russia might be a little imperialist power going against a big imperialist power the u.s and its allies and NATO more specifically is kind of like if you know we're against capitalism but let's say there's a mom and pop grocery store and it's going to be gutted and replaced by a big box walmart store or something like that

you know and in a community maybe this mom and pop store means something has connections with the community this big box store doesn't and let's just say for the sake of it whatever okay we would take perhaps the side of the mom and pop shop being displaced and destroyed by this big monopoly capitalist institution while still maintaining our anti-capitalism because in this context given these two options you know it would be more sensical for us to take the side of the small mom and pop ran by a esteemed member of the community perhaps against this big corporate behemoth that's just seeking to destroy it. And so yes, they're both capitalist, right? But would it

make sense that didn't just say, hey, they're both capitalist fuck it. I think that is a childish and naive and one-sided way of looking at it. You have to be more nuanced and complex than that. What do you think about that basic analogy, as simple as it is? Yeah, and it's not to, and again, this is

not consist in rejecting the judgment that a small business and like capital or employment relationship is is unacceptable because it is unacceptable. Yeah, exactly. Even when you get along with

like the guy used to work for, I get along with him great, but that is still an unacceptable arrangement. And I think if he really understood it, in the big picture, he would be like, yeah, this is unacceptable. On the other hand, just you know, this was a horrible experience. This was my second cooking job.

And it was at an Indian restaurant here in St. John's. And it was owned by a medical doctor. and he had two brothers. I never, I presume these are not their given names. And if they're not, I never learned what their given names were. But they went by Kenny and Eddie.

And they were really talented cooks. And we had an open kitchen where everyone in the restaurant could see what we were doing and all that kind of stuff. And I learned a lot from them about Indian cuisine and all this stuff. And they really, Eddie, especially the older brother, really influenced my life. about cooking and food and stuff like that. And near the end of my time there, I was called down one day by the dishwasher and he said, can you come in? And I was like, what's going on?

He was like, just come down. And I went down and there was no one in the place except for him. And there was a complete house full of, it was a middle of a dinner service and it was full tables and nobody sitting at them and just full dinners everywhere. And Kenny was sitting on the countertop in the kitchen. in holding a cold compress to his head and Eddie was nowhere to be found and it turned out that they had attacked each other in front of the whole dinner service and then I found out after that that the doctor who owned the place had induced them to come over from India on the promise that

they would make higher wages here that they could send back to their families and he got them here and he trapped them and garnished all their wages and they were working a hundred hours a week And then after they were gone, I found out, or no, after Eddie was gone, because Eddie took off to Toronto, I found out that they had actually been living in the restaurant next to the dry goods room. And he had starved them pretty much of all their wages to the point where they couldn't even send money back to their families in India. And so those are like, you know, two kind of extremes on the spectrum.

And even though he was, this man was hateful and I hate him. Um, and the other guy that I work for, I love it. Um, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, is even, even as a possibility cannot exist. Um, and so, even though I would say to the, the guy that I like, you know, I have a non-antagonistic relationship with you, the medium in which we were working, and I was working under you, allows for this stuff. And this was literally across the street. So the, the place I worked for him was literally years later across the street from the restaurant I worked at. And this cannot stand, right? Even with non-antagonistic relationships, the system itself cannot stand.

And when it comes time, when you have to have a confrontation with people that you care about and you have a non-antagonistic relationship with them in the contradiction, it may have to turn antagonistic when it's time to put your foot down, it'll be like, no, right, no more of this shit. And then you've got to roll with it then when that happens. absolutely yeah well said that was that was an enlightening example all right my friend well let's go ahead and wrap this one up this one was fun i highly recommend people read it i mean it is very short you can find it free online um it's incredibly accessible anybody can read it and follow along

with his arguments um of course what we're doing here is just touching on it and trying to apply some of its lessons to our current situation in 2023 internationally and nationally um but of course it's it's interesting in its own right and i highly encourage everybody to go check it out. Is there any last words or any essential takeaways that you want to kind of advance before we wrap up and go into recommendations and goodbyes? Yeah, just, you know, I really do have to recommend the Foreign Languages Press collection that this is in five essays on philosophy because it's on practice, on contradiction, on the correct handling of contradictions among the people,

on propaganda work, and then like a two-page thing at the end, weird or correct ideas come from. And as we know, you know, it all starts with practice in actual life. And so the topic starts, it moves through the logic, right? So we move from perceptual knowledge to not logical knowledge. And then we get into the question of how to interact with each other. And then we get into the question of how do we do propaganda work outside of the sort of organizing situation that we're in. And then the last little essay is just like a little bonbon. It's, it's really nice, just two pages or whatever. So yeah, I, I, I, I think there's a free PDF on their website that's downloadable.

So it's a good thing to have together and work through them all together. But just in, yeah, I guess just in general, as things keep moving forward and we all keep trying to find organizing possibilities and organizing spaces and relationships like that, we need to, because as this goes on, all of the things that we're living through and everything over the next five, 10, 15 years, it's only going to get more real. This is not going to settle down. and we're not all going to be eating chili dogs and hanging out watching the baseball game or something like that. This is going to get more real. And we need to, in the West, work on,

we need to work hardcore on that vulnerability, on that humbleness, on overcoming all the tendencies that are put into us into turning every contradiction into an antagonistic contradiction of having revenge fantasies, of having violent fantasies that are like really indulgent

and then border on the erotic and stuff like that. These are all things that need to be worked on at the same time that we're finding our way into whatever organizing scenarios that we're in. And I think that overcoming that kind of hardness that belongs to settlers especially. So some comrades I'm organizing with recently, we started calling it settler brain. That sort of those set of habits and concepts and perceptions and logical inferences and all that affects and all that stuff that make you be this spasmodic, scared, you know, insecure, your unreliable cracker, right?

Like those are the things that we need to overcome. And there are many, many, many, many, many, many comrades where we live and around the world to expect to see that from us. And they need to see that from us. And we need it. Or we're done, right? So that inner conflict that's within ourselves and the desire for solidarity, the desire for revolution, but also the desires that are put in us for attacking and fighting and

vanquishing each other and hurting each other and annihilating each other with our own correctness and our own superiority that's got to go we're not going to get anywhere yeah well said all right is there any recommendations outside of this text that you'd want to offer anything you want to applaud any any way that listeners might be able to get a hold of you if you so desire um jeez um i'm i'm still pretty unplugged and and not doing a lot of online communication so maybe I'll answer that question on the next episode or something like that. I'm still a, I'm a very offline person for the most part. And so, yeah, but I'll think about that for sure and maybe set up a new email address

or something where people can reach me out eventually. I'm kind of shy. Yeah, absolutely. I would like to recommend, again, this is an excellent paper from three years ago, Comrade Jonas Manuel, he's from Brazil. Western Marxism loves purity and martyrdom but not real revolution and that's a really good one because it can make you feel

uncomfortable but you've got to take it you've got you got to go through it you've got to feel offended by it and be like that's not me and all this kind of stuff it's a really I think it's a really important piece of writing I heard I was talking to a Brazilian comrade in a meeting several months ago and he was

like he was like yeah I can't remember the professor's name but some like white Canadian university professor attacked a man well over this paper. And it's like, yeah, that's what that's what that's kind of thing we would do. But this is an excellent paper. And it really, especially in all that he talks about the sort of hidden ways that like Christianity, like the worst tendencies of Christianity, had sort of infiltrated Western Marxism and led to several or three principal errors. So this desire to not have a pure doctrine of Marxism threatened by really existing contradictions when you're building socialism, to having a fetish for suffering in extreme poverty and thinking that, witnessing

that or experiencing that is somehow revolutionary and superior. And then the third thing that comes into Western Marxism from Christianity, which is the idea that salvation comes not from work, but from grace. So it's like Manuel quotes a Brazilian professor after Bernie got his ass kicked the last time in the primaries, which is like, well,

we failed again like we always do, but maybe next time it'll be AOC rather than we need to organize, right? So everyone should read that paper, Western Marxism of purity and martyrdom but not real revolution. Oh, yeah, we didn't get to this piece. A really nice short little piece

that I've looked at before is by a comrade named I.C. Chi, who lives from 1910 to 1966. It was a pen name. His real name was Lee Shenghuan. And he wrote a book called, well, it's several

books, but the paper I have is a selection from this book. It's called lecture outline and dialectical materialism. It's called antagonistic and non-antagonistic forms of struggle. It's just four pages long, so it's a good, condensed little thing if you want to think about these concepts that Brett and I have been talking about. And I would like to say to Foreign Languages Press,

like if you can get a hold of this guy's books, please, please, please publish them. I will absolutely buy them. I think that there's just good stuff in here. I have another recommend or a couple of recommendations more for people living in my region in Atlantic Canada, where the First Nations are Mekma.

And I've gotten, I've wanted to, learn how to at least read the Mi'kma language for some time now. And I found a couple of resources that people in the Atlantic region might find useful if they want to learn this. So the first is a book called The Language of This Land, Mikmaki, by Trudy Sable, who is a settler and Bernie Francis, who is a member of member two First Nation, which is on Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia, which the Mikma called Mikmaki. And then, And this other book called the Micma Grammar of Father Pacific, which is, was compiled by a Jesuit priest who was working and living among the miqma in, I think, the late 19th century. And so Bernie Francis, who's the co-author of the other book and a settler scholar named John Houston, updated it and revised it and sort of just made it, I think, a little bit more accessible.

And if you are, you know, your language learning is at a little bit more advanced where you can look at systems of syntax and grammar and all that kind of stuff. This could be a very helpful resource. But I think I think we, those of us in this region, we really should all do this. It's really silly not to learn this, at least how to read this, if not to just belong to communicate in it. And what else? Oh, yeah, this is just to wet people's appetites. a little bit. So I have a complete outline done of

the episode we've talked about about Ziga Virotov. So if you don't mind, I could just tantalize people with just reading a first part of that one. Is that okay? Sure, yeah, absolutely. Okay, so Ziga Virtov was one of the pioneers of Soviet montage in cinema. Montage

is incredibly important for the history of cinema. So here we go. I don't have a title for it. Oh, no, I do have a title. Revolutionary Cinema Ziga Vertov's Kinoi and Soviet montage theory. So introduction to revolve around the following quote. And this is a quote that the editor of the English translation of Ziga Veritas writing put at the beginning of the book is from the manuscripts of 1844, quote by Marx.

The supersession of private property is, therefore, the complete emancipation of all the human qualities and senses. It is such an emancipation because these qualities and senses have become human from the subjective as well as the objective point of view. The eye has become a human eye when its object has become a human social object created by man and destined for him. The senses, therefore, become directly theoretical in practice, end quote. And so just to tease the second section, this is historical materialist background discussion. So there will be grammatical notes on the concept of phenomenon, a discussion about the, uh, the,

early Renaissance art theorist Leon Batista Alberti and the development of perspective in European art and in human perception. The next section will be the optical lens, dialectic of quantity and quality one. Mechanical technology and the mechanical view, dialectic of quantity and quality two. Photographic film technology,

dialectic of quantity and quality three. And there's more, and I think that could be a really, really fun episode. And I also have, have in the last months prepared a list of 12, no, no, actually I mentioned you already, 10 potential other episodes that we could do, including Dialectics Deep Dive Zero, Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation on the difference between democratist and Epicurus' philosophies of nature, an episode about Althazer's essay, Contradiction and Overdetermination, an episode about

the Godfather trilogy, capitalism and U.S. imperialism, especially in Cuba. I know I promised you a robust defense of Michelle Foucault two years ago and I have that on the cooker and all those post-structuralist post-monerists out there I'm going to run through you like crap through a goose an episode about Graham Priest's

dialectical analytic philosophy and logic an episode about a really not very well-known French philosopher over here named Jean Cavailles who wrote a book called On Logic and the Theory of Science who's incredibly influential on Foucault and de los and those guys. No one really knows about him.

And he really stands out because he actually was a resistance fighter. And he got captured trying to blow up a U-boat station. And I think he wrote this book in prison while he was awaiting trial and executed. And it's a really, yeah, he's a really powerful figure that no one really knows about it. And I think we should. Potentially an episode about the Coen brothers. The Big Lobowski, no country for old man, a serious man. the Cohen brothers disassembled actions, meanings, meaning actions and events.

Dialectics and Analytics and Late Soviet Philosophy on the book, on the book subject, object, cognition by Lectorski, V.A. Lectorski. The medieval dialectics of Nicholas of Cusa from 1462 in his book On the Not Other, which is a sort of like, it's like a Christian non-dualism. It's very, very interesting. And then if you ever felt like nerding out, Star Wars and Dialectics and Or. So there you go. There's potential things we can do.

And then, and if no one wants Star Wars, that's fine. I'll keep it to myself. But, oh, yeah, one last thing. People really should be watching Ben Norton's geopolitical economy report right now, especially the weekly geopolitical economy are that Radica Desai and Michael Hudson do because it's really, they've given a really good sort of account following the de-dollarization process and what it means. And it's very, very helpful stuff.

and oh yeah and one last thing through watching some of their stuff I found out about this organization called the World Association for Political Economy and they have a bunch or they're involved in a bunch

or it's like part of a network of like a bunch of journals and different groups and stuff I think that's meant to be more open access or easy access like low overhead access to scholarly material which is like academia doesn't do that

and I joined on their low income members plan for 10 a year, U.S., which is going to be, I don't know, worth a chocolate bar or whatever, whatever. And they have a lot of, they have their whole, their journal is called the World Review of Political Economy, and they have every issue available going back to 2010 with really in-depth, like, quantitative analyses and like just interpretations or explanations. Like, for instance, what is, what are actually the political economic practices of China? So that's a good resource to try to learn about what's going on over there, for example,

and then to try to analyze the practices and the outcomes of the practices in an actually dialectical and contradictory way according to the logic of contradiction. So if anyone is really wanting to gain more understanding of that stuff and of political economy in general, because political science and economics, no, political economy. yes. And we need to lean on that. And I think that the World Association for Political Economy is a good, accessible, pretty affordable resource for people. We can learn a lot. And I think that's all the recommends I have right now. Awesome. Well, that's a wonderful recommendation list. The question of de-dollarization, the petro dollar, the implications of what that means for U.S. hegemony

and the West's ability to sanction countries they don't like going forward. That's incredibly crucial. So shout out to them doing work on that front. I want to learn more that as well and yeah all the all the possible future episodes that you just outlaid means that although we're two years into our collaborative efforts we have many many more years hopefully to go if the listeners will allow for it so i definitely look forward to you coming back on for us tackling more um topics for us having the sort of unique conversations that i think only you and i have and uh yeah thank you so much for coming on this time and talking about this wonderful work by mao i look forward to working with you again my friend oh thank you and

oh i do i have i just remember one last recommendation Hit me with it. And I really recommend Chris Wade and Matt Christend's recent miniseries about the 30 Years War, Hell on Earth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if anyone can pass this along to those guys, like, guys, please, after some window of time, please make it all available for free because people, young people really need to learn about the impact of the 30 years war at our present and about the development of what we call a nation state now in tandem with or sort of in a. a dialectical relationship with the development of company states like East India companies because I think a lot of Western confusions

about the national question and all this kind of stuff are bound up with events that happen in and around after the 30 years war, which is an extremely important event for the development of capitalism in the end. So yeah, hell on earth, Chris

Wade and Matt Christman, if you can access it, you really should. And again, if someone can pass this to these guys, guys make it for you eventually because the people are. Oh, yeah. All right, my friend. Well, good talking to you. I'll talk to you soon. Stay safe up there.

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