Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific -- Friedrich Engels

Episode Date: June 17, 2023

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Feb 11, 2019 For the debut episode of Red Menace Alyson and Breht discuss Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels. The video episode can be found on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdxX5eqQyk Outro Music by Adia Victoria - Invisible Hands Check out and support her beautiful music here: http://www.adiavictoria.com

Hi there. My name is Allison, and I'm here with my co-host, Brett, and you are listening to or potentially watching The Red Menace. This is a new podcast and YouTube project that Brett and I are working on, where our goal is to take a work of theory and to break it down, explore its main themes, discuss it, and then apply it to today. And our hope isn't to just do theory for theory's sake, but we're trying to focus on the way that theory informs our actual organizing and the mass work that we're involved in and show how these classic theoretical texts still weigh on us today and can inform our strategies and really useful and productive manners. So to that end, our show is broken down into three sections. In the first section, we're going to go through the text that we've chosen, and

we're going to try to focus on the main themes, pull out a couple of quotations, and really break down what it's saying. In the second section, we're going to propose some discussion questions for each other, going to have a little bit of back and forth and maybe get into some of our thoughts, concerns, and questions with the text. And then finally, in section three, we're going to focus on applying that text to the organizing work that we as communists are doing today and to focus on how it is actually useful for helping us work towards revolution. That's right. And if you enjoy what we do and you want to keep up with us, you can follow us on Twitter at the underscore red underscore menace or on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash the specter

haunts. Let us know what sort of bonus content you want to see from us on our Patreon because although Allison and I have structured this show, we're still sort of wondering about what sort of Patreon content we could give to draw in supporters and keep them happy. So if you get in on the ground floor right now, you can sort of guide what sort of content we will be putting out on Patreon going forward. But yeah, with that said, I think the best thing to do is just jump right in. Do you want to tell people what the text that we're focusing on today is?

And then we can go from there, Alison. Definitely. So today we are going to be focusing on a text by Friedrich Engels called Socialism, Utopian, and Scientific. And we'll get a little bit into the nature of that text. But we're focusing on it because it's a really good introduction to historical materialism and to sort of a lot of the contemporary debates within Marxism about Marxism status as a science and why that status is really important for us to emphasize. Yeah, exactly.

And we also thought it would be the perfect text to start our entire show with because it is so fundamental to the Marxist tradition. It is angles, so it's rooted in Marx and Angles as the original progenitors of the Marxist tradition. And, you know, as we go on with the show, we're going to be tackling theoretical texts from all over the left spectrum. But this is a solid, you know, sort of anchor to start our show with. And that's why we decided to choose it.

So I guess the best way to start this episode is to talk about sort of the background context and perhaps what Engels set out to do when he sat down to write this text. And I guess the main thing that Engels stresses is that he wanted an accessible alternative to reading Capital. So Capital is really the masterpiece of Marx and Engels work. But at the same time, because of its length and because of how difficult of a text that can sometimes be, angles wanted to find. a way to sort of synthesize the main ideas of capital of the Marxist tradition, of Marx and Engels philosophy into a single almost pamphlet-sized theory text, so it can be easily handed around and accessible to workers, et cetera. And so I think you'll find a lot of the core ideas of Marxism in this text, which is another reason why we decided to do it. And then also some more of the

context is that Engels is systematizing Marx's work in the face of Dr. During's attacks. And I think Allison will talk a little bit about the anti-During text that this is sort of taken from, but Engels said that my opponent, i.e.

Dr. During, gave me the opportunity of developing in opposition to him and in a more connected form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself on this great variety of subjects. And so I think that gives you kind of the idea of what Ingalls set out to accomplish with this text.

Allison, what else should we know about this text before we get into it? Yeah, so this text is not a completely original text for Ingalls, and as much as he's actually drawing on some of his previous writings. So there's a larger work, which is commonly called anti-During, which is this, again, broader response to during. And this is one of the really philosophically interesting Marxist texts, where Ingalls does the work of juxtaposing Marxism with a lot of other philosophical schools

and social scientific developments at the time. What I love about this text as well is that you see some of that carrying over. And so what Ingalls is trying to do in this text really is get at what it is that makes the Marxist approach to materialism different than everything that's come before it and why it is that there's a unique advantage to that. And so in order to do that, he's going to focus on how Marx's materialism is scientific, and we'll get into all the reasons that he provides for that. But that's sort of the main project.

One thing that Ingalls was very aware of in his own lifetime was that this is one of the most translated texts that he wrote. It became hugely popular. The English translation was actually one of the later ones. It was originally written in German, and then the French translation helped popularize it. But this became a very popular pamphlet for introducing people, especially people who don't have a very literary background in Marxism to the ideas of Marx and explaining why Marx is unique, important, and scientific. Yep, absolutely. and this book is broken down into three main chapters. And so this first part of the entire show is going to be an explanation of those basic arguments and ideas and themes going kind of chapter by chapter. And then as Allison said, we'll later, we'll dive into it, we'll criticize it, we'll analyze it, and we'll apply it. But for now, did you want to start with chapter one and just sort of talk about the history of socialism leading up to Marx?

Yeah, so Inglez starts by basically looking at the socialist movements that came before Marx. So while Marxism, obviously, since Marxist writing has been sort of the dominant form of socialism that people have adopted in order to work on revolutionary projects, there was a long period before that where people were thinking about socialism and trying to theorize it and coming up with their own versions of it. And so Ingalls is going to frame these as utopian versions of socialism or as bourgeois versions of socialism. or as bourgeois versions of socialism, and we'll get into specifically what's utopian about them. But Ingle's reading of them is interesting, because he kind of looks at the way that each of them makes a theoretical breakthrough that moves us closer to materialism while not quite getting to materialism. There's three figures he focuses on in particular, which is St. Simon, Foyer, and Robert Owens, all of whom had their own approach to scientific art to utopian socialism that fell short of being revolutionary, but started to progress us further. there and would end up laying a framework that Marx could modify and adopt later on.

Yeah, exactly. And he also makes a point to kind of contextualize what Marx and Angles are doing in the broader movement of philosophy and science at that time. And part of that is in Chapter 1, Engels goes back and talks about the development of capitalism as an economic system, coinciding with the development of philosophy as capitalism was materially developing. And so you saw alongside the development of capital these philosophies that really stressed rationality and reason, you know, coming out of the Enlightenment where, you know, feudalism was really underpinned by superstition and theological domination, the divine rights of kings, etc. And so, you know, in rebellion against the feudal order and alongside the material development of a new mode of production was a whole range of philosophies that tried to wrestle with.

with reason and rationality and, in my opinion, sort of reflected an obsession with rationality and reason by these early bourgeois philosophers. And so putting this into work, you know, putting these ideas into praxis really came, really blossomed, I think, the most in the French revolution. The French Revolution was really a bourgeois revolution. It was not a proletarian revolution. And inside the French Revolution, you really saw these ideas start to be put into practice. I mean, the French revolutionaries, the bourgeois revolutionaries, they wanted a revolution that aimed for a society and a government really rooted in reason and rationality. And they thought that if we could get beyond the superstition of the feudal age

and toward a more rational, reasonable interaction with our governments, with nature, with ourselves, that it would basically usher in some sort of bourgeois utopia. I mean, that was sort of the hidden promise of a lot of these ideas. And so I'm going to read from the text, angles talking about this bourgeois obsession with rationality and reason and then how it actually played out in practice so angles says but the new order of things rational enough as compared with earlier conditions turned out to be by no means absolutely rational the state based upon reason completely collapsed rousseau's social contract had found its realization in the reign of terror, from which the bourgeoisie, who had lost confidence in their own political capacity,

had taken refuge first in the corruption of the directorate, and finally under the wing of the Napoleonic despotism. The promised eternal peace was turned into an endless war of conquest. The society based upon reason had fared no better. The antagonism between rich and poor, instead of dissolving into general prosperity, had become intensified by the removal of the guild and other privileges, which had to some extent bridged it over, and by the removal of the charitable institutions of the church. The quote-unquote freedom of property from feudal fetters now veritably accomplished turned out to be for the small capitalist and small proprietors the freedom to sell their small property crushed under the overmastering competition

of the large capitalist and landlords to these great lords and thus as far as the small capitalist and peasant proprietors were concerned became freedom from property. The development of industry upon a capitalistic basis made poverty and misery of the working masses conditions of existence of society. Cash payment became more and more in Carlisle's phrase

the sole nexus between man and man. The number of crimes increased from year to year. Trade became to a greater and greater extent cheating. The fraternity of the revolutionary motto was realized in the chicanery and rivalries of the battle of competition.

Oppression by force was replaced by corruption. the sword at the sword as the first social lever by gold the right of the first night was transferred from the feudal lords to the bourgeois manufacturers in a word compared with the splendid promises of the philosophers the social and political institutions born of the triumph of reason were bitterly disappointing caricatures and so i think this is where angles really breaks down the the gap between what the bourgeois philosophies promised and what actually happened when bourgeois philosophy was able to be put into practice. And so, in response to the

disasters and broken promises of bourgeois theory and practice came the utopian socialists. And the utopian socialists were in the late 1700s, early 1800s. And Engel says, to the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions corresponded crude theories. And here he's talking about the utopian socialist who came up in the wake of the failures of bourgeois philosophy to be put into practice and fulfill its own promises. And as Allison suggested, three of the main ones that Engels touches on here is St. Simon, Fourier, and Robert Owen. Each of them had a few impressive insights, again, as Allison alluded to.

St. Simon, for example, talked about economic conditions being the determinant factor in political conditions. Fourier talked about a stages conception of history. as well as emphasized women's liberation. And Robert Owen, perhaps maybe the most interesting of all three because he really went out of his way to sort of run experiments in his own factories on these grounds. He came up with a real critique of private property

and advocated actually the workers' ownership of the means of production. So again, you start to see these little germs of ideas that would come to be basic principles for all socialists to this day, but because of the way that they were organized and because of the you know the the rest of the systems in which they were embedded they're still deeply utopian and there's no real basis by which to say this theoretical tendency is better than this theoretical tendency etc so you know angles says that these these were idealists and they saw socialism in terms fundamentally of ideas created in in rare minds and so what you saw as a result of this this cropping up of different you know schools of socialism was an eclecticism and a sort of a sectarianism, not so much in the sense of how we use the word today, but in the sense of actual sex forming. Somebody over here would come up with an idea and say, this is socialism and this is how we get there. Somebody over here would say, actually, this is socialism and this is how we get there. And so socialism wasn't a unified proletarian

movement, but at this point consisted in a lot of little sex running around, claiming that they had the best ideas about how to achieve socialism. And so again, going back to the text, Angles talks about these utopians and he says, to all these utopians, socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason, and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as absolute truth is independence of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered. With all this, absolute truth, reason, and justice are different with the founder of each different school. And as each one's special kind of absolute truth, reason, and justice is again conditioned

by his subjective understanding, his conditions of existence, the measure of his knowledge and his intellectual training, there is no other ending possible in this conflict of absolute truths than that they shall be mutually exclusive, one of the other. Hence, from this, nothing could come but a kind of eclectic, average socialism, which, as a matter of fact, has up to the present time dominated the minds of most of the socialist workers in France and England. Hence, a mishmash allowing of the most manifold shades of opinion, a mishmash of such critical statements, economic theories, pictures of future society by the founders of different sex as excite a minimum of opposition, a mishmash which is the more easily brewed, the more the definite sharp edges of the individual constituents are rubbed down in the stream of debate like rounded pebbles in a brook. To make a science of socialism, it had first to be placed upon a real basis. And so this is Engels talking about how utopianism inherently fells.

It can't lead for a big movement. And so the solution to utopian socialism is scientific socialism, is to put socialism on a real material basis. And that's precisely what Marx and Engels set out to do. Definitely. Yeah. And I think there's a few interesting things in this chapter that I want to focus on on the end in terms of the relationship between history and theory. Because I think one thing that Ingalls points out that is, really telling is that the crude early conditions of capitalism produced crude theory, right? So it's not just a complete theoretical failure, but it's also the fact that capitalism was a new

thing that was emerging within history itself and had not taken on super concrete forms yet and was still really difficult to theorize. And I think what's interesting for Ingalls is that while he obviously condemns each of these theorists for having a universal theory of truth grounded, not in history, but their own subjectivity. He also is noting that there's useful things that they're realizing from the historical events which are going on around them. And that sets a progression later on for Marxism to take up. The other thing that I think is interesting with the text is also that it's sort of the emergence of the proletariat as a class and the recognition of that class is a historical phenomenon that then allows Marx to make a theoretical recognition of the role

the proletariat and the role of surplus labor is also important, according to Ingalls. So there's this really complicated relationship between history and theory. And part of the problem with the utopians is that they assume that they've sort of stepped outside of history and simply impose the ideal, rational, universal truth onto it. Whereas what we're going to see is the few things they get right and what Marx will later get right is taking things from history and then applying them to history itself. Absolutely. So you're ready to move into chapter 2? Yeah, so let's move on to chapter 2, which is a really interesting chapter, and this chapter is mostly devoted towards pointing out what the sort of traditional metaphysical theory that Europe

has relied upon to look at the world is, and then juxtaposing it with dialectics and explaining why dialectics is a more useful and actually a more accurate understanding of how the world works. So Ingle starts by criticizing what he calls the metaphysical mode of thought, and he points to a few different people as an example of this. And he specifically names Locke and Bacon as people who engage in sort of this classic form of metaphysical thinking. And for Ingalls, what's important about this metaphysical thinking is that it is abstracted from processes and it tries to understand things in isolation. There's a quote I want to look at specifically where Ingalls says, The metaphysician thinks an absolutely irreconcilable antithesis. For him, a thing either exists or does not

exist. A thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative, absolutely exclude one another, cause and effect stand in rigid antithesis. And so you can look to a lot of early modern philosophy and really see this view of the world start to come into being. If you want to understand an object, the goal of philosophy becomes understanding the unique properties of that object in isolation from everything else. And Ingalls thinks that there's some problems with this. This idea of static isolation, of thinking of things outside of everything else, actually forces us into really rigid and reductive thinking, where we can't understand the relationships between things. And this will later on become really important for

Marxism, actually, and later Marxist concepts like commodity fetishism, I think, will really reflect the failure to think about things in their relationships instead of in their isolation. But so Ingalls is critiquing this and actually argues that this abuse is not actually actually an accurate reflection of nature, and that when we move and look towards nature itself, we can see that the metaphysical view doesn't hold up. Now, Ingalls doesn't completely reject metaphysics as a category. He does say there's contexts in which it's helpful, and it allows us to understand an idea better, and I think that's important to emphasize, but at the same time, to universalize it as the only way to look at the world is really a problem, and it's a sort

of view of the world that has arisen alongside that bourgeois obsession with rationality. and foundational principles that we could extend more universally. Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, it's breaking things down and exactly into their constituent parts and analyzing those parts to get a picture of the whole. But by doing that, it is sort of static and it isolates different things from everything else. So in opposition to what, you know, Engels is referring to as the metaphysical mode of thought, which Allison just explained, is dialectics.

And dialectics is a form of what we call today process philosophy, whereby you understand phenomena, not by their individual. individuated, sliced up individual components, but rather by the mechanisms of change, evolution, development, and transformation that takes place. It's sort of analyzing things as a state of constant becoming. And this allows you a much broader understanding of things and their interrelatedness to all other things. Early iterations of dialectics, which some of you may be familiar with, they occur in both the East and the West. In ancient Greek philosophy, for example, you have somebody like Heraclitus. And Heraclitus had that famous line.

where he was like, you know, you can never step into the same river twice because the river has changed and so has the person stepping into it. And so right there, you start to see how change is the cornerstone of reality for Heraclitus. And this goes back all the way again to ancient Greece. And then if you look eastward, you find in Buddhist philosophy, for example, multiple dialectical ideas. One is the idea of the self in Buddhism, which asserts that the notion that you have a core static self. at the center of your experience is actually an illusion and that there is no actual core static self at all but just changing contents of consciousness

and then they also stress this idea of impermanence. You know, all conditioned existence and experience is without exception transient and impermanent. And then in Taoism, I think, you know, there's lots in Taoism we could talk about but I think everybody's familiar with the Yin and the Yang. And what the Yin and the Yang is is that there's a coincidence of opposites, right?

opposites coincide and we're going to get into angles talking about negative and positive pulls and really talks about how these two things give rise to each other right you can't have the day without night because the concept of day becomes incoherent without the other side of that coin and so so you're starting to see these things have long been in the human mind and only now you know in modern science are these things starting to have to wrestle with the scientific method itself and so with more modern examples and scientific examples of dialogue intellectual understanding of the world. He points out two really big examples.

One is Emmanuel Kant. And most of us know Kant as a philosopher, you know, critique of pure reason, et cetera. But Emmanuel Kant actually started his career with a paper on the solar system. And in contradistinction to the ideas of his time, Newtonian mechanics, which talked about the motion and the orbit of the planets and how those planets operate,

what Kant did is argue that the solar system itself goes through an evolutionary process. And he put forward the theory of nebulous gases as, you know, a way to talk about this. And the basic idea, which has been proven by science to be correct, is that solar systems don't just statically exist and circle their sun, but rather that they evolve through condensing gases in nebulas. And as they come and they form material objects, then the motions of Newtonian mechanics start to take hold of those objects, so they get bigger and bigger.

and then you see the solar system that we have today. But what Kant fundamentally did was say solar systems have a birth, they have a development, and they have a death. They're not static things. And then in the realm of biology, I think this is the most famous example. And again, I don't think Darwin's influence on marks and angles can be understated here. It's very, very important to this entire project. But Darwin did the same thing that Kant did with the solar system.

Darwin did to biology. And he showed through scientific evidence that life forms weren't categories that people were born into, but rather life forms evolved over time due to natural pressures from their environment, mutations in their genetic code, which we'd find out later through science, sexual selection, etc. So here you see both on the level of the solar system and on the level of organic beings on earth, this dialectical evolutionary understanding taking hold. And I'm going to go back to the text and Engels talks about this. Angle says, nature is the proof of dialectics. And it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very

rich materials increasing daily, and thus has shown that in the last resort, nature works dialectically and not metaphysically, that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution. In this connection, Darwin must be named before all others. He dealt the metaphysical conception of nature the heaviest blow by his proof that all organic beings, plants, animals, and man himself are the products of a process of evolution going on through millions of years. And some angles goes on to talk about some of the essential aspects of dialectics. He talks about biological death and says, contrary to the way that some people talk about this, the process of death is actually a protracted process with no

clear beginning or end. And he even, interestingly, way ahead of his time, I think, talks about pro-life arguments, where he talks about certain people of his time trying to, I think he says, cudgel their brains in vain to try to come up with a point at which life begins. And we see this debate today with the moment of conception, right? These are arbitrary dividing points placed on actual processes. And by doing that, you're actually not seeing the holistic whole that these phenomena operate in, but you're trying to set end points where they actually don't exist in nature. He also talks about cells and the human body, constantly taking in new things and expelling the old in a constant exchange with the environment. He talks again about positive and negative pulls, kind of like the yin and the yang, the inseparability of these opposites and the fact that they mutually arise and interpenetrate. And then lastly, he talks about cause and effect where he says they're eternally changing places. So you have a cause, you have an effect. That effect then becomes the cause of the next thing. And you see this chain of interaction.

And so the lines between this being a cause and this being effect really do get blurred. So again, you see angles really trying to show how things are processes, that they're mechanisms that evolve over time, and they're not static things that you can just break down, look inside of, and understand. So, you know, kind of in summary, in dialectics, you see the historicization of phenomena from biological organisms to the solar system. and finally, thanks to Marx and Engels, to human society's history and modes of production. In other words, historical materialism is what one discovers when you apply the dialectical, evolutionary, and scientific lens to the development of human societies over time.

Yeah, so Ingls has this really profoundly interesting view of dialectics in this text. Reading through it, I was incredibly impressed with his ability to tie in Darwin, tie in these biological questions, and you really get a complex understanding of what dialectics is. So the next thing that's really important for Ingalls, though, is talking about dialectics in relation to a specific philosopher who Marx was a student of, which is Hegel. Marx was originally part of a group of philosophers called the Young Higalians

who were interested in reading Hegel in a radical manner, most of them reading him in an atheistic manner, and often juxtaposed to the Wright Higalians, who wanted to read him in a more politically conservative manner. So Hegel's a very important theorist for Marxism, and he's also an incredibly difficult theorist to explain. So we're going to try to get into Hegel here, but honestly, he is incredibly difficult, and if you don't completely grasp it, that's okay, because it takes a lot of time. What is important with Hegel, for Ingalls, at least, is that Hegel takes this

understanding of dialectics and applies it to history itself and the entire world, and tells us how we can look at everything through dialectics. So he says that really the dialectical development culminates in Hegel in a way. And he says, quote, for Hegel, the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual is represented as a process, i.e. as in constant motion, change, transformation, development. And the attempt is made to trace out the internal connections that make a continuous whole of all this movement and development. End quote. So for Hegel, all of a sudden dialectics isn't just a thing that governs individual phenomena like life or like death or these other things, but it actually is a guiding way of looking at the world. And Hegel also starts to look at dialectics and trace

out these ideas of contradiction, thesis, and antithesis, and the way these things relate to each other, how something isn't composed just of itself, but the opposite of it, the thing that negates it, is also a part of how we understand phenomena. And this is going to become extremely important for Marx later on. Unfortunately, as Ingalls points out, Hegel is an idealist in one of the most intense senses of the world, uh, word. Specifically, Ingalls writes that for Hegel, thoughts within his brain were not the more or less abstract pictures of real things and processes, but conversely, things and their evolution were only the realized pictures of the ideas existing somewhere from eternity beyond where the world was. And so for Hegel, we see that while the world,

is moving dialectically, and it is a process, and it's not a world of things in isolation, but is rather one of change in relationships, that still is one that's fundamentally driven by ideas. History for Hegel is about the culmination of what he calls spirit, and this idea that spirit and rationality are driving humanity forward towards their perfection in a given society. This is also why right-wing theorists also liked Hegel and read him, because many people read Hegel as saying that reason and spirit and these sort of ideal movements had culminated in Germany itself. So there's certainly a right-wing leaning of Hegel that comes from this, and what Marx and Ingalls are going to take from Hegel isn't that at all, but rather the

recognition that history is composed of movement, development, and process, and that that process is one where different forces come to a head with each other and contradict each other, and some sort of synthesis and resolution comes out of those contradictions that moves history forward. And if this all sounds a little bit abstract, that's because due to Hegel's idealism, it is fairly abstract in Hegel. And what's so useful about what Marx and Ingalls do is that they take these concepts and apply them to real historical events that we can actually turn to and analyze in order to understand what these movements of contradiction and synthesis look like. And that's really where the big breakthrough is going to come from.

Marks famously says that he takes Hegel and he turns him on his head, which is to say that he takes the general movement that Hegel isolates, but instead of placing the idea on top, which then forms the world, he places the historical, material, and economic development of the world, and then analyzes how that relates to ideals. And so this recognition that Hegel made actually sets us up to get to materialism while stopping short of ever actually becoming materialism itself. Yeah, exactly. Incredibly well said. And so as Engels Z, zooms in on the end of chapter two, what he's done looking back is that he's traced the entire development of these ideas of philosophy, how they manifest in bourgeois revolutions like the

French Revolution. Then he gets into tracing the sort of history of science itself and talks about how the metaphysical mode of thought has dominated for centuries. And then this new dialectical way of looking at the world is emerging around his time with people like Darwin and Kant. And then he talks about Hegel as being the first person to, as Allison said, really make make history subject to this evolutionary process, given all the other things that Hegel got wrong, at least he offered that on the table, and then Marx and Engels took that and ran from it. So you're taking the evolutionary ideas from biology and cosmology, you're mixing them with Hegel's conception of history, stripped of its idealism, incorporating the first ever class

struggles of the proletariat, which are occurring around this time. And by doing that, you're starting to see the historicization of the capitalist mode of production, seeing where it's come from, out of what system, it's grown, which we'll get to in a little bit in Chapter 3. And then also at the end of the chapter, Engels talks about how Marx discovered the mechanism by which capitalism was inherently exploitative, and that is surplus value. So at the very end of chapter 2, right before we get into Chapter 3, Engels writes, and this sort of sums all of it up for folks, the new facts made imperative a new examination of all past history. Then it was seen that all past history, with the exception of its primitive stages, was the history of class struggles.

that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange, in a word of the economic conditions of their time, that the economic structure of society always furnishes the real basis, starting from which we can alone work out the ultimate explanation of the whole superstructure of jurisdicial and political institutions, as well as of the religious, philosophical, and other ideas of a given historical period. Hegel had freed history from metaphysics. He had made it dialectic.

but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history. Now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's knowing by his being, instead of, as heretofore, his being, by his knowing. From that time forward, socialism was no longer an accidental discovery of this or that ingenious brain, but the necessary outcome of the struggle between two historically developed classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The socialism of earlier days certainly criticized the existing capitalist mode of production

and its consequences, but it could not explain them, and therefore could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. Therefore, it was necessary, one, to present the capitalist method of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore also its inevitable downfall. and two, to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus value.

The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were now both explained. These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history, and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, socialism became a science. The next thing was to work out all of its details and its relations. So that's him summarizing the entire, you know, first two chapters and explaining where they were at this point. And with that, I think we're ready to dive into chapter three, Allison.

Awesome. So chapter three is really cool. In this chapter, Ingls begins to develop what Marx's actual methodology itself is and also starts to draw some of the economic insights that Marx has made in capital and condensed them very extremely for us to understand in relation to that methodology. So the first thing that we really need to get into is what is it that Marx changes about Hegel? And Brett has already hinted at this, that now we're not understanding how ideas produce man's body, but how man's existence in the world produces ideas. And so the real fundamental change is that in our understanding of history, which is still dialectic, we're giving primacy to economics and to the material realities in which people live. And Marx has framed this in various different ways.

in many of his texts, it's framed in the communist manifesto, and the German ideology, you'll hear slightly different iterations of it. But Engel summarizes it fairly nicely when he says, quote, The final cause of all social change and political revolutions are to be sought not in men's brain, not in men's better insights into internal truth and justice, but in the changes in the modes of production and exchange. So this is interesting. What happens now is if we want to understand what causes history to move forward as this dialectic process. We can't look at the ideas people are coming up with. We can't look at the thoughts they're putting into the world, but we have to look at production and exchange and the economic and material base of a society

first. So there's a few ways that this is a huge break from what came before, and especially the utopian socialism. So for the utopian socialists, it was sort of the opposite, right? The world is changed by coming up with perfect rational ideas and then imposing those ideas. And then imposing those ideas onto reality, and from there being able to transform reality in line with those ideas. And for materialists, that's not going to be possible at all. And in fact, we have to start with reality itself and the historical development of how humans feed themselves, produce commodities, trade commodities, have all of these interrelations and processes which precede the ideas that we're forming. And so there's this interesting approach to looking at the world where we get a sort of

idea of what we could call imminent critique. It's no longer that we step outside history and we impose our perfect utopian ideals onto it, but rather that we look at history and we look at the contradictions that are already occurring and emerging within history around us, and we understand how to get critical insights from those. And Ingalls is going to focus on multiple contradictions within capitalism and how it is that those contradictions actually create a scientific assessment of capitalism. But I want to focus on the way that there is, sort of a very imminent aspect to this approach. Engle says that if we really adopt the Marxist's analytic and method, that, quote, it follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities

that have been brought to light must also be present in a more or less developed condition within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing systems of production. So what Engels is saying there is that, if we want to get rid of capitalism and all the violent contradictions that come with it, we don't make a radical break away from capitalism with new ideas, but we find the parts of capitalism that are already at odds with other parts of capitalism. The solution to capitalism is actually created and produced by capitalist development. And the real contradiction

that Ingalls is going to focus on here is a contradiction between productive forces and capitalist appropriation, which we'll get into in a little bit. But Ingle's suggestion that's really interesting is that capitalism has created forms of production that already make capitalism irrelevant and outdated and that the trick to overcoming capitalism isn't to build a utopia but to set those productive forces free and to take the good things that capitalism has built and use it to resolve the contradiction with the more negative socially harmful and individualistic things that capitalism has built yeah exactly and i think that and we're going to get into those in the discussion questions we're really going to dive into to what some of that

it means and what are some of its implications. But at this point in the text, what Engels does is says, okay, now that we've sort of established a materialist conception of history and what it means, let's sort of look at the evolution of capitalism, what came before it, and where is it going? And so they sketch out in really summarized form the transition from feudalism or what Engels calls medieval society to capitalism, talks about all the contradictions within capitalism, and then talks about proletarian or socialist revolution in response to the contradictions of capitalism. So starting with feudalism, aka medieval society, he just talks about some of the things that, you know, market as a specific period of historical development. He says

there's individual production on small scale. The means of production were adapted for individual use. So you have craftsmen inside of a building working through a product from beginning to end, creating it. The production was for immediate consumption. Under feudalism, it wasn't necessarily for exchange. So you produced goods so that you could consume those goods, basically getting by day to day. But at some points, there were a surplus in production. So at certain times, let's say, you know, I was growing corn and I had a particularly good season. The excess amount of corn that went above and beyond me and my neighbors need to eat was put onto what would be considered a sort of proto marketplace and exchange with other people who had surpluses. So that guy over there makes shoes.

He made too many shoes this month, you know, whatever. I'm hyper simplified. buying, but you get the idea. So I trade him my excesses of corn for his excesses of shoes. We both mutually benefit. But right here you start to see the seeds of commodity production. And what commodity production is is creating and producing goods not for their immediate consumption, but rather for their exchange on a market. And only in the context of creating a surplus in this feudalist environment, do we start to see the inklings or the seeds of commodity production starting to occur. And so here you can see some of the seeds that would eventually turn into capitalism. And so he goes over to capitalism, talks about

the capitalist revolution. What happens at this point is there's a concentration of the means of production, a transformation from individuals owning the means of production to capitalists owning the means of production, but employing multiple workers, the division of labor to make this product from beginning to finish. So this is where you first see actual capitalists appear. They appropriate the products and they turn them into commodities. So now, unlike in feudalism, you're producing things, not for immediate consumption, but again, to exchange them on the market for profit. So production becomes a social act at this point, right? It's not an individual craftsman in his building creating something, but it actually requires a bunch of people

coming together to produce things from beginning to finish. So there's a fundamental contradiction that arises here, which is the contradiction between social production and individual appropriation. A workforce produces the products and a capitalist, an individual capitalist appropriates the product of that labor. And so we see a contradiction, but I'll let Allison talk about that contradiction in a second here. And the end stage, right, looking forward now, is proletarian revolution, aka socialism. And in this stage of history, some of the fundamental contradictions begin to be solved, right? Social production and social property. So the things that produce socially no longer go to benefit individual capitalists, but under socialism, they

become property of everybody, and it goes out to meet people's needs, not the profit motivations of individual capitalists. It allows for socially planned production instead of having a bunch of different capitalist firms competing with each other on an anarchic market. Societies can see what do we actually need? What is necessary? How do we produce it in a way that has social benefits, decreases the environmental cost of producing those things, et cetera? Over time, this reduces or eliminates the anarchy of production. Angles talks about the anarchy of production under capitalism a lot. We'll get to that in a second. But once you get to that stage, you begin to transcend class divisions and class society as a whole. And looking

even further with class transcended, if you ever listen to me and Allison's episode on RevLeft Radio about state and revolution, you'll see Lenin giving a materialist analysis of the state, talking about the state as a manifestation of class society and class rule. So, with class transcended, then the material conditions are such that the material base for the state goes away, and thus the state itself begins to wither away. And so here you sort of see what happens when you take the materialist conception of history. You can truly understand how feudalism turns into capitalism and what's required for capitalism to turn in to socialism. And he ends this chapter very quickly. He says, to accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the

historical mission of the modern proletariat to thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement scientific socialism and that is how he wraps up that part of that book but did you want to talk a little bit before we go on to discussion questions, Alison, about some of those contradictions, especially that whole idea about productive forces and capitalist appropriation? Yeah, definitely, because I think this is really what's interesting. I mean, first, I just want to say that, like, that ending quote is really

incredible. And I think is one of the most profound moments in the text where Ingalls, I think, really gets at the fact that the proletariat coming to understand capitalism scientifically is crucial and is not an optional part of the struggle, but is necessary for understanding how we're going to combat it. And I think that's a part of this text that's really important for Marxists today to think about. But the other aspect of this I want to focus on is this relationship between the socialized productive forces and capitalist appropriation and how Ingalls says that this is a contradiction that's really difficult for capitalism to overcome. So we'll get into some of the ways that works. So what Ingalls means by this, as Brett already hinted at, is again, when capitalism

developed, the means of production themselves were changed. that now you didn't have individual craftsmen producing goods, but you had multiple collective people working in usually a factory context early on in order to produce a good. So there is a socialization which occurs there. And as we know, also alongside this, there's primitive accumulation and the proletarianization of the workforce. So people are forced to leave feudal society and become part of this laboring class that collectively produces goods. And there's something interesting there in as much as this is a socialization of production. Productions not an individualist enterprise anymore. It's something that a class together undertakes in order to produce goods. But the problem is that,

well, this is probably a very useful and good social development. It's hindered by a contradictory aspect of capitalism, which again is this idea of individual capitalist appropriation. So while one person profits from the goods that are produced, many people produce them, and we have this contradiction. On the one hand, you have a sort of primitive collectivization of production that only benefits an individual. And so for Ingalls, this contradiction has a whole bunch of implications within capitalism. One of the most important ones is he says that this contradiction expresses the antagonism between the proletariat and the capitalists. If we look at this, we can actually see how their interests are irreconcilable and at odds with each other. What

benefits the capitalist necessarily hurts the proletariat, and what would benefit the proletariat, which is to say truly socializing both production and appropriation, would come at the cost of the existence of the capitalist. And so what's important is that we're seeing that capitalism within itself has this contradiction where these two forces can negate each other in order to move history forward. And part of the problem in a sense is actually that capitalist appropriation is holding back the really revolutionary aspects of capitalist production. And there's a number of implications that this has for Ingalls. He thinks that this actually makes capitalism really unstable, and that there's a couple of aspects of this. One is that

the capitalist system creates needs for new machinery to be developed and for constantly creating new more revolutionary production methods. But as this happens, these butt heads with individual capitalists themselves. And there's a crisis that can occur when revolutions in production aren't mirrored by revolutions in exchange and appropriation. While production becomes more and more of a scientific underpinning, you can even think of the development of Fordism, as evil as many of its effects are, as this sort of scientific socialized production, capitalist exchange and appropriation remains anarchic in nature. Trade isn't governed by central planning or universal laws, but rather is guided by the invisible hand, as capitalists like to talk

about it. And the appropriation doesn't go back into furthering the benefits of the workers, but goes to enriching individual capitalists. And so you have this relationship where these things are constantly at odds and can come to a crisis where the interests of the proletariat and the interests of the capitalist often come to a head. And one of the things that I think is really interesting in this text is that Ingalls says that these crises are something that capitalism attempts to combat. So on one level, you have companies that will choose to get rid of crises as a competition by forming monopolies. When companies merge together, they no longer have to compete against each other, and an attempt can be made to try to stabilize the anarchy of

capitalist markets by doing that. But Ingle says this isn't a long-term solution to capitalism, because as other crises arise, capitalists part ways again. And the other thing that Ingalls talks about is that the state often can try to intervene and create central planning for capitalist production in order to avoid these sort of crises, but that doesn't actually resolve the underlying antagonism that creates the crisis in the first place, which is the contradiction between collectivized production and individual appropriation. So while the liberal state might try to come in and might try to essentially make peace between these antagonizing forces, they always are going to rupture over again because it's at the central core of capitalism. And this contradiction can't be

resolved with capitalist fixes, but needs to be resolved through proletarian revolution and proletarian rule. And I think that's the very important insight that Ingalls is getting at here politically. Exactly. And so I think that summarizes part one of our three-part approach to these texts. So right there, we just explained the entirety of chapters one, two, and three of socialism, utopian, and scientific, just sort of elucidating and explaining what the main arguments are and the thrust of the arguments. And then here in part two, we're going to dedicate ourselves to sort of analyzing and criticizing some of the ideas in here through the form of discussion questions. So Allison and I both created questions. We're basically asking

one another to spark dialogue and discourse about the implications of this text and what it means for us regarding, you know, thinking through those implications and those assumptions, et cetera. Did you have anything to say about part two before we jump into the questions, Alison? Not really. I think we're good to go. Okay. You want to ask the first one? Awesome. Yeah. So this is a question that I thought up because I think it's really interesting. So Ingle's argues that nature itself confirms dialectics, and that scientific inquiry shows us that dialectics is true. So when we turn to nature and we use science to investigate it, dialectics is confirmed.

And as we already talked about, he uses Darwin in cellular biology and the idea of death and life in order to demonstrate this. So the question that I have is, you know, does further scientific development confirm this claim? As we've gone on in, you know, the decades since Engels, have we realized that this is true with further scientific investigation? So this is a very, very good question. And I was trying to rack my brain about, you know, when did Engels, you know, live and write? And then what sort of scientific discoveries have happened since his death that could either confirm or negate some of these claims he's making about a dialectical approach to understanding the cosmos? and our place within it. And, you know, my interest in cosmology and theoretical physics kind of took hold of me. And I was like, that's a great place to sort of think about some

of these ideas because, you know, modern cosmology, general relativity were developed after angles's time. And so they would either provide evidence in support of angles or evidence against his idea that a dialectical approach is a more scientific approach and a more well-rounded approach. And so modern cosmology, for example, asserts that the universe is an a constant state of evolutionary expansion. Think about the Big Bang theory, which says not only do solar systems have a birth, but the cosmos itself has a birth time. And moreover, the recent discoveries of dark energy, which says that not only is the universe expanding, but it's actually expanding in an accelerating rate. So all of this, I think, is in line with the dialectical and

evolutionary ideas of marks and angles, especially when you think about how Darwin applied it to biology cons applied it to our solar system, a lot of modern cosmology applies it to the universe as a whole. In addition, general relativity, which was put forward by Albert Einstein, I think, like 30 to 40 years after Angles died, also confirms, I think, a dialectical, process-oriented account of the cosmos in contradistinction to static theological claims about the nature of the universe. General relativity suggests that space and time itself can only, makes sense in relation to all other space and time. If you, for example, approach the speed of light, time itself slows down to a halt. There is then a dialectical relationship between how

fast one travels through space and how time itself functions. Every object in the cosmos, according to these new theories of cosmology and general relativity and physics, is embedded in the space-time fabric. And therefore, they're not separate, discrete objects fundamentally individuated from one another, but rather they are interconnected, eternally interacting phenomena, which share an ontological foundation, namely the fabric of space and time. So I think that especially when you look at all of the advancements made in the last century when it comes to physics and cosmology, that these are very much in line with angles conception of what science is and what science does and has only, you know, provided more support for his claim rather than taking it

away. I think that, I think that puts angles on really good footing. And again, it gives us a way to sort of falsify, to a small degree, Engels claim here. If science, after his death, moved in a different direction and we're actually able to have more coherent understandings of the cosmos with a metaphysical approach to these questions, then that would have been borne out by now, and we would see that Engels was fundamentally wrong about something. But I, but I, I think all of the advancements in major scientific fields point in the direction that Engels was actually correct in his assessment and is still correct in that, you know, ultimately it bolsters the idea of historical materialism, being applied, you know, applying that same scientific evolutionary lens to history and societies, et cetera. Did you have anything to say in response to that? Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, I think the one other interesting place is that one of the examples Engels used, I think has actually become significantly more poignant is this fact that it's hard to identify the line between life and death and what those concepts mean. One of the interesting things is that as medicine has developed further and as we've had to develop also corresponding legal definitions, we've become more and more incapable of defining what death is and where the bright line for death is at. And I think actually more contemporary developments really push back against this. The concept of brain death, for example, which has been taken up as a very popular definition of death for a lot of legal

purposes, also has turned out to be kind of dubious with further scientific investigation. And with some of the people who really proposed it early on now saying that it's sort of an arbitrary bright line and can't be deduced from the data itself, but as a bright line that we just kind of had to impose to make sense of it, because death doesn't have a clear delineation from life that we can draw that easily. So I think that, yeah, like even on that issue, medicine has really confirmed a lot of Engel's claims and shown that as we've developed better scientific tools and insights, we've found the universe to be more and more dialectical. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's a human impulse to categorize things. And I think

the metaphysical mode really reflects that. But sometimes just by virtue of our habit to categorize things, we sometimes forget which categories are actually backed up by, you know, hard science and which ones are things that we project on the world so that we have a better ability to make sense of a fundamentally or seemingly fundamentally chaotic world. And sometimes I think people confuse those lines and they'll take what is ultimately a subjective delineation point and objectify it, make it actually ontologically true. And again, I go back to the whole pro-life debate. You do see people trying to set an arbitrary standard of when life begins. Well, you know, to the pro-lifers, it begins at conception. Therefore,

since life begins at this point that we've said it begins to get rid to, you know, to engage in an abortion, for example, is tantamount to murder itself. And so we see how this is not just abstract. This doesn't even just operate on the level of hard science, but rather it infects a lot of our political debates as well. And so having that sort of dialectical understanding of things, I think really bolsters a more robust analysis of current events and politics than a metaphysical mode of thought would. And I'll get in a little bit to the exact ways that the metaphysical mode of thought infects our society today, right? If I just told you, if Allison and I just explained to you some ways in which the dialectical interpretation makes sense, I'm going to show

you in a little bit about how metaphysical modes of thinking still exist in our time and how they manifest in our current time. But we're not there yet. So the next question, and you touched on this a little bit. I just think the term itself may need some clarifying and then expounding on But Engels talks a lot about the anarchy of capitalist production. And the term anarchy is definitely loaded on the left. Suffice it to say we're using the colloquial pejorative sense of being synonymous with chaos here. But it does raise an interesting question. What does anarchy of production really mean?

Why is it bad? And what are its consequences? Yeah. So, okay, yeah, there's definitely a semantic question to be raised here. So when Ingalls is talking about the anarchy of production, he's not talking. talking about political anarchism, as we've come to understand it as a revolutionary current. I think this idea of the anarchy of production does raise questions about political anarchism that we might want to get into to some extent, but I don't think that that's what he means.

So what is it that he means when he talks about the anarchy of production? Well, under capitalism, you don't really have planned production, right? What is it that causes certain commodities to be produced? Well, traditionally, capitalists have said, on the one hand, market demands create that, and then you produce in response to that, exchange produces that, and all of these forces that are decentralized and not focused in a specific set of imperatives, and that almost can't even be observed, create incentives for capitalists to produce certain commodities over others. So part of the problem that you get, actually, is that there is a chaos to capitalist production. Things aren't being produced to suit human need. they're being produced on the basis of a bunch of market forces that no individual really has control over. And quite frankly, that's just a bad way to run a society that causes you to develop shortages of food or certain other commodities,

or overabundances of certain commodities, there you then have a high level of surplus that you can't do anything with. And so for Ingalls, the Anarchy of production points to sort of the silliness in a sense of capitalist production being totally unguided and really just happening based on a bunch of forces we can't even totally pin down. Yeah, exactly. It loves to, like, defenders of capitalism love to promote this idea that, you know, capitalism really gives structure and organization to our lives and that through the invisible hand of the free market, things work themselves out. And, you know, if you take away that market, if you take away that invisible hand, then, you know, you'll see real anarchy as there's no ability to structure the market and structure what needs to be produced, et cetera. And I think perhaps in earlier times, central planning was made much

more difficult by the lack of instant communication that we currently have. But as technology is developed and we're looking at, imagine if the Soviet Union had all of the technology that we currently have today, the ability to instantaneously communicate across space and time and plan production about, you know, using that technology, it'd be much easier than it was at that time. And a lot of the problems with central planning that people point to and say, hey, socialism doesn't work, you can't plan this stuff, et cetera, I think can be alleviated or outright eliminated by the introduction of modern technology. I think that's an important part of this as well.

But certainly the anarchy of production under capitalism produces, as Allison said, a bunch of really sparkling gadgets, right? Consumer goods. We have 300,000 different types of potato chips and deodorants, right? But look how much food we waste. Look how much food rots in the garbage bins behind restaurants. Look at how the anarchy of oil production causes a complete deodorant. destabilization of our of our environment. And so maybe the anarchy of production was really good

at a certain time in historical development. And certainly it allowed for an explosion of consumer goods. But at this point in history, when we're facing down global problems like climate change, which I'll get to in a second here, the anarchy of production actually starts to become an existential threat. And we have to overcome that in order to, to, you know, avoid, I think, the fate that we're staring down the barrel of right now if this anarchy of production is not ended and we can implement some sort of rational planning that does not care about how much profit you can generate

in a competitive free marketplace but rather cares about how can we organize production and distribution such that the most amount of goods that people need are given to them and that people all over the world can have the highest quality of life possible. That incentive system of structuring your society to ensuring that everybody has their basic needs met and has the highest quality of life

that we can possibly give them is antithetical to capitalist production. It can't happen, and whenever you talk about planning, capitalists hate it, because what it means is that you'd have to get rid of the anarchy of production. You'd have to get rid of the 300,000 types of potato chips and instead use that productive capacity and that distributive capacity to ensure that human beings

had, I don't know, health care and education and childcare, for example. Yeah, definitely. And I think this leads into the next question well, too, because one thing that I think Ingls gets at is that that anarchy holds capitalism back, right? Ingalls points out that this is why monopolies form or why capitalists try to make state intervention into markets is because it's really unstable and it creates a crisis over and over again for capitalism when you don't have centralized planning that's actually tooled towards making your society work in the first place. So the next question that I had is that Ingalls argues that state control over industry is not the same thing as socialism. And he says that state regulation and planning can actually be a way that capitalist attempt to quell the more turbulent effects of capitalist contradictions, while not actually resolving those contradictions. So what I'm interested in is what implications this has for socialist strategy today as it relates to the capitalist state and capitalist state projects of regulations and intervening into the market. market. Yeah, I think one thing that this really calls the mind is the way that liberals and social

Democrats and increasingly these people are calling themselves socialists, how what they do is not fundamentally about transcending class society or transcending capitalism as such, but is rather about maintaining it through regulation, right? The idea of social Democrats and liberals, for example, is that the capitalist system is worth protecting. The political institutions that it vomits up are worth defending and therefore we don't want to transcend capitalism we actually want to make it work better and that it requires regulation etc fDR right the new deal this was after the great depression and you know fDR did a whole bunch of you know enlarge the size of government to make sure that the anarchy of capitalist production doesn't lead to such a horrific crisis again and

what was he called by the leaders of industry and the mainstream media at that time he was called a socialist a bolshevik a communist etc but when they asked FDR at the end of his life, what was your greatest accomplishment? What did FDR say? He said, my greatest accomplishment was saving capitalism. So the social Democrats, the liberals who like to put on this facade of being super progressive, and maybe they even might convince themselves that they really do want to transcend capitalism through these mechanisms. And certainly there is an importance to reforming and regulating the free market so that it doesn't hurt people as much as it can and as much as it often does, right?

I'm not saying that all forms of regulation and reforms are meaningless and should just be dismissed. Of course not. But you have to see what's actually going on and how the state, in a capitalist context, actually serves to bolster it and perpetuate it, not overcome it, because it literally can't. The other thing that brought to mind was thinking about China, right? Now, China has no, I mean, I'm trying to phrase my words here. We'll edit this out here. So one thing about China is that it's a one-party rule, and there are benefits to that.

As much as we're taught to recoil at that term, the benefits of that is that it doesn't necessarily go through the horrific, you know, ups and downs, booms and bus cycles on these tight cycles that we're dealing with here in the U.S. It doesn't happen as often in China, and moreover, they can actually plan long term in a way that social or in a way that capitalist democracies literally can't. Not only are we talking about the underlying economic situations I just touched on and the role that the state serves, but even bourgeois electoral systems has this chaotic spin to it where because we're dealing with Democrats and then Republicans and Democrats from this back and forth thing, you can have somebody like an Obama that comes up and tries to do the bare minimum to basically protect capitalism, right, when it comes to climate change, how can we enter into agreements, how can we build up a green economy, et cetera, try to blunt the sharp. edges of capitalism. But then the next election, the system vomits up a Trump who says, forget all of that, toss all of that to decide. I don't even believe climate change exists. And then now, let's say a new Democrat gets elected, comes back in. They have to start from scratch trying to address these problems. So on every level, you know, the bourgeois democracy doesn't work for long-term planning. And China, you know, for whatever your views on it,

whether it's socialist or state cap, whatever you want to talk about China as, you have to see that the ability to plan long term is something that China has been able to accomplish in a way that the U.S. and Western democracies can't and won't ever be able to accomplish. So I do think that's important. And I also wanted to touch on the idea of markets, right? If we're talking about the implications that this has for socialist strategy, and if we're talking about socialism as a process, not a list of things you check off, then the question of markets comes up.

Are markets inherently capitalistic? Does a society that has any market presence at all immediately exclude itself from the label socialism? Or are markets simply a tool? And in the transitionary period, as long as we assume that there's an actual dictatorship with the proletariat, right? The working class is in charge of the state that markets themselves can become tools in a broader strategy of transition. How does that strike you, Allison? Do you think that that is more or less right, wrong? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, so I think there's two questions that are kind of that I want to comment on. So one is obviously the China issue is very tricky, and this is where probably even we personally disagree on this question to some extent. But I think, yeah, the focus on how not having the political instability of capitalism alongside the development of productive forces is a really good takeaway there, right? Because even the liberal impulse that might, you know, sort of get over some of the contradictions, is instantly undone when you have a new president or a new politician. And so part of what's important about proletarian rule, and again, people will debate whether or not China is that.

But what's important about it is that you have a party that is stable and constantly in place, which can make sure that productive forces are being developed and are being developed towards socialist ends, which I think then leads into the next question, which is important, which is, yeah, do we just get rid of markets? Is it impossible to have markets in a socialist economy? And I think the answer to that historically is no, that, you know, we can't simply make a complete break from them. and that markets can't exist alongside socialism. The question of socialism isn't, you know, one day we have a revolution

and we immediately get rid of everything related to capitalism. It's we have a revolution and we create a dictatorship of the proletariat that will push society and the productive forces of society towards the end of communism and proletarian rule, where Engel says the proletariat eventually abolishes itself as proletariat through this process. But in order to do that, especially in places which haven't seen, total capitalist production. It can be necessary to maintain aspects of capitalist productive forces in order to increase the economic viability there so socialism can be built. And there's a very

dangerous utopianism, I think, that thinks that we can just break from all of this immediately get rid of markets and have a perfect, pure socialist economy tomorrow. When the real question for us isn't whether or not we make that complete break, but whether or not a dictatorship of the proletariat has been established to guide the transitionary phase. Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's not only underdeveloped countries, too, like if tomorrow, you know, there is a socialist revolution, a proletarian dictatorship of the proletariat was established in the U.S. on day one, you couldn't just say, destroy the entire economy and start from scratch. It would be a transitionary process where key industries slowly were, or quickly, hopefully, like health care and oil production, et cetera, were nationalized straight out the gate, but certain markets would still have to operate. operate when it comes to certain consumer goods. I mean, you don't want to cause chaos in a transitionary period. You don't want to just burn everything down with no plan on how to

strategically and systematically move forward. You have a set of goals, you prioritize those goals, and you go about meeting those goals one by one. And that's going to mean that some you know, leftovers from the capitalist state, even leftovers that we find repulsive, will still exist and we'll have to wrestle with them in a strategic and tactful way. And it's really unhelpful in that context if somebody says idealistically, hey, I'm inherently against the idea of this thing that you're using to transition. Therefore, this isn't actually real socialism. You have to, you have to cause, I mean, what would, the argument would be, you would have to cause severe economic chaos and throw people's lives in complete turmoil in order for us to establish overnight the sort of

society that we want. And I think Marxists are just not willing to throw that many people, you know, into the gutter just because we have ideas about how things should be on day one. And I think that's important to think about not only when you're analyzing other countries and their quote unquote level of socialism, but also when you're thinking about our own socialist strategy here in the Imperial Corps. So next question. I think one of the least helpful strains within Marxism, in my opinion, is the overly deterministic and mechanistic strains that I think you see less and less of today, but which

have been dominant at certain times in the past. So, Allison, in what ways, if at all, do you think Angles, and this work specifically, contributes to that strain in the Marxist tradition? Yeah, so this would be my one concern with this text, I think, which I think is a really great text, and it's partially an interpretive question, right? I think in this text, Ingalls, frequently it sounds like he's not talking about the proletariat as the revolutionary force, but production itself and the productive forces as the revolutionary force. And if we were to make a crude reading of this text, one might almost get the sense that capitalism is necessarily deterministically going to go away absent any individual revolutionary strategy because of the

fact that the productive forces, as Engel says, are constantly revolting against capitalism. And I think if we read the text carefully, that's not what Engel's claim is, because he also says that the proletariat's antagonism towards the bourgeoisie expresses that contradiction. So the presence of those classes and their struggle against each other is important. But I can really easily see how someone who's not paying attention to that could come away with a very deterministic read of Marxism from this text. I'm kind of reminded of the analytical Marxist tradition and this particular theorist, Cohen,

who argues that the Marxist theory of history isn't so much a theory of class struggle, but a theory of productive forces developing over time. And I see how you could come away with that mistake. And so when reading this text, I think it's very important that we acknowledge that Ingle's is saying that the productive forces and the socialized productive forces don't exist on their own. Those have a relationship to the proletariat as a class who expresses the interest of socialized production. And that socialized production can only really win that struggle through proletarian revolution. And I think that's an important thing to read into this text.

Definitely. And just to the general claim that Marxism is deterministic or mechanistic, I think you could actually go back to Marx and angles and find a lot of evidence to the contrary. I mean, Marx believes that insofar as this transition to a socialist state of affairs, a transition away from capitalism is to happen at all, it's going to happen through people. And also, it's not guaranteed. He talks about the, you know, it could just as well end in the common rule. ruin of both classes. Rosa Luxembourg talks about socialism or barbarism. We're looking down the

face in our own time of an insurgent fascism and climate change. And if we don't get our shit together soon, it's not that these things will naturally, organically take place, but it's that we have to become conscious of ourselves as members of the proletariat, right? The class becoming conscious of itself and understanding what its historical role is and then beginning to organize along that basis. So this can happen, but it requires people to understand the situation where we come from, understand what needs to happen in the future, i.e. be guided by theory, and to take it upon ourselves to be the mechanisms by which history pushes in this direction. We can't just sit back and think, well, with technology advancing,

the productive forces will change such that socialism is an inevitability in the next century or whatever. First of all, we don't have that time. And second of all, you fundamentally don't understand the mechanism by which a proletarian revolution comes to the fore. And that is through, human beings being conscious of their role as the proletariat and, you know, behaving thusly. And I think that's essential, not just for this text, but for that critique of Marxism broadly. Definitely. Okay, so let's see. The next question that I had, and so this is sparked by the recent JMP article,

this ruthless criticism of all that exists, which deals a lot with this question of Marxism as a science. And I'm really interested in the relationship between science and philosophy. in Marxism. So the question that I have here is, what is the relationship between science and philosophy? English, or sorry, Ingalls distinguishes Marx from the philosophical projects which preceded him, so metaphysics. But does this mean that Marx breaks from philosophy in favor of science, or does Marx create a scientific philosophy? Okay, well, first of all, Alison, this is a huge question. Why'd you ask me, it? Right. No, it's very, very difficult. It's one that I've struggled with a lot in my life. I came up not only through philosophy, but I also was very into science. I, you know,

I operated in a neuroscience lab as an undergrad. And so science and philosophy were always very close to me, but you always heard this claim that Marxism is not a science. And, you know, to say that Marxism is science is almost met with, with, you know, mockery, like how absurd, how could you say that, et cetera. And I'm not going to be able to address every single aspect of this argument in this one little question, because, again, this could be. be 10 episodes, and on Revolutionary Left Radio, we are having JMP come on at the end of the month and talk about his new essay and really flesh a lot of this out. But I think a good starting point is to ask, what is science? And I went on, you know, online and found just a couple

of the most succinct, non-controversial definitions of science as my starting point. One definition was a method of procedure consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. And another, definition was the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. And then the question asks itself, how does this differ from philosophy? Well, in my opinion, philosophy is much broader and is not confined by the scientific method. Philosophy can engage in a whole array of speculation without ever needing to feel tied to empirical evidence.

It can engage, for example, in the formal deconstruction of logic. It can engage, for example, in the formal deconstruction of logic. It can talk about the best way to live one's life. It can talk about the existence of God, how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and it can even take a meta-perspective on science itself, examining many of the assumptions and conceptual framings within science. So philosophy and science are deeply related. They stem from the same basic intellectual and reflective urge in the human animal, and they often inform one another, but they're not the same thing. So taking a step back and looking at the problem, given these two basic definitions, it would seem as if historical materialism falls far more neatly into the category of science than philosophy,

as it is dedicated to the systematic observation of history and society. It then analyzes and researches the empirical data of political economy and history in order to formulate its hypotheses. It does have a mechanism by which to test those hypotheses in the empirical natural world, namely proletarian revolutions and class struggle. It records the intricate data and empirical outcome of seven, revolutions in order to test its hypotheses against the evidence, and then it modifies and or keeps aspect of the theory that were successful and roots out and discards aspects of the

theory that have been proven to fail in the crucible of those class struggles. It takes those lessons, and then it formulates new hypotheses, right? It updates theory, if you will, and then it tests those again in the crucible of the next proletarian revolution. So in this way, Marxism, unlike other purely philosophical, theoretical tendencies, has, in my opinion, an in-belt mechanism by which it is constantly updated and tethered to empirical outcomes. Marxism is inherently open-ended and continuously being updated by new data and experiments in class struggle. It is not confined by cultural conditioning in the way that

speculative philosophy often is, which is why we have East Asian philosophy and European philosophy and indigenous philosophy and feminist philosophy, etc., etc. But we don't have these geographical and cultural qualifiers to science, right? There is no distinction between Chinese science and German science. It's just science. The way that sciences contextualize how it's applied by certain societies, et cetera, does and often has led to the tool of science being abused and pressed into the service of, you know, oppression, colonialism, et cetera.

But it's from within science that those deviations can be made to or can be seen to be failures, right? They're failures of science and they're rectified by science. Think of phrenology or race science, for example. So in the same way, or did you have something to say there? Oh, no, I was just agreeing with how good that example is. Okay, yeah. And in the same way, Marxism has within it mechanisms by which it can be developed internally, and its past failures or short-sightedness can be overcome.

So both science and Marxism can be held in a dogmatic way, right? We all know dogmatic Marxists who adhere to doctrine more than dialectical materialism. And we all know how science is often fetishized and used dogmatically by people like the new atheist, for example, or technocratic neo-liberals whose solution to everything is more Silicon Valley tech startups and more apps. Hell, there's even a whole movement based around overcoming death by uploading one's consciousness into a computer. The idea that science can solve all of our social problems, including the problem of death, is an example of dogmatically fetishizing science. But just because something can be used dogmatically by the ignorant doesn't mean that the thing in and of itself inevitably gives rise to dogmatism or that it is in and of itself a dogmatic approach to the world, right?

So ultimately, I do think Marxism broke away from philosophy and towards science. When he said, when Marx said, the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, the point is to change it, I think he signaled his frustration with the limitations of philosophy proper and realize that only a scientific approach to these questions can give us the clarity, direction, and open-endedness that we needed to fight back against our historical rulers. so I'm going to wrap it up here but given the I think this is an important part too this talks about the distinctions between hard and soft sciences and this catches a lot of people up I know in my earlier periods of development it caught me up a lot but given the vague

hard to control and cacophonous nature of society and history compared to say physics and chemistry where the variables being studied are much more precise isolatable and can more easily be tested inside the confines of an actual laboratory where the scientists can control the conditions and variables of the experiment, there is an urge for people to set hard boundaries between what we know is hard and soft sciences. But this dichotomy is ultimately unhelpful and arbitrary,

as it merely props up a wall between certain types of things studied, not walls inside the field of science itself, which has no such boundaries. Science only has to end when the thing in question doesn't exist inside the natural world or can't otherwise be scrutinized

according to the scientific method. Marxism does not make this error. Marxism is all about analyzing the material and natural world in an attempt to empirically investigate the internal laws by which societies developed and their connections to the ways in which human beings materially produce and distribute the necessities of life. The goal of Marxism, as is the goal of all sciences, is to demystify the natural world and provide natural explanations for natural phenomena. This is a criteria for science which I think Marxism absolutely meets. Allison? Yeah, I mean, I think that. really, he said it fantastically. And I think very importantly, too, this distinction between hard

and soft science, which is where a lot of more sort of crass positivists, I feel like, push back on this question, you know, that serves a ideological bourgeois function to make sure that science can never get applied to the political in the first place, right? And to create this false division that stops us from doing exactly that demystification, which is our task. And so I think Marxism as a science really offers something revolutionary for saying no science can be applied to the political and has to be applied to the political and concludes in favor of socialism yeah and i just want to before we move on in the next question i think um the the issue of falsification is really important here um and in this in um j malphawad paul's latest essay is it's entitled the ruthless criticism of all

that exists Marxism as a science i really highly recommend people go and check that out but um Talking about falsification, he writes, this is JMP writing in that essay, he writes, Reactionaries and liberals who reject Marxism because they laugh at the notion that it could ever claim to be a science might understand what is at stake. Karl Popper theorized science so as to exclude Marxism and place it on the same level as the failed scientific attempts of Freud and psychoanalysis. As I have pointed out elsewhere, though, Popper unintentionally rendered a small service to Marxism thanks to his unscientific grasp of social categories. His conceptualization of falsifiability did not exclude historical materialism from the privileged domain of the sciences, but because he was too lazy to grasp Marxism as a historical process, cinched its inclusion. Historical materialism can indeed lay claim to falsifiability as one of its criteria for scientific veracity,

i.e. revolutions are the crucibles in which the unfolding theoretical terrain is tested, and whereas hypotheses can possibly be rendered false. And this is how we judge its development as a discrete science. So there you have JMP reacting to the Paparian critique of Marxism that is not falsifiable. And so what I took that as is like, hey, Brett, could you think of some things that would make Marxism falsifiable? Like, what are some things that could happen that would say, hey, Marxism is either totally wrong or fundamentally flawed and it needs to be updated, right? And so I came up with some ideas and I'm going to bounce them off you. And, you know, Allison doesn't know what these are.

so I would like to hear her like, you know, intuitive take on it, but also people listening, if you find any, like, flaws in what I'm about to say here, bring them to my attention. I think they're interesting. But again, this idea is how can Marxism be falsified? What could happen that would say, okay, Marxism is definitely fundamentally flawed. One example, anarcho-capitalism gets established somewhere, right? Because a core claim of Marxism is that the state is a manifestation of class society and that capitalism literally cannot exist without it.

You might be able to start up the beginning possibilities of anarcho-capitalism, right? You might have a new territory and go there and say, okay, no state, no government, no bureaucracy. We're just going to let the free market dictate everything. But that will either crumble into revolution or the bourgeoisie will find ways to, you know, protect. You have like little private fiefdoms where the rich and the wealthy can, you know, defend their own interests through private security. or you would have more than likely the bourgeoisie coming together and establishing the basics of a state that would give rise to more state, et cetera. We talked about FDR earlier in capitalist crisis and how the state is an essential component in correcting it. So anarcho-capitalism is implemented and succeeds over a period of time.

Marxism is false. Another example. If liberal democracy successfully mediates class conflict out of existence, right? if bourgeois democratic institutions over the next couple of decades or a century or whatever somehow manage to overcome class contradiction to mediate class conflict and to take away that as an historical engine of progress then it would say hey Marxism you have something fundamentally wrong with you how is liberalism the ideology of capitalism able to mediate class conflict out of existence so that's one way liberals could also prove us wrong another one a non-Marxist theoretical tendency successfully builds and defends a global proletarian movement, right? Some tendency on the left completely divorced fundamentally from Marxism actually goes about, you know, creating and developing, leading a world revolution and be able to defend it, suppress the capitalist oppressors, transition towards communism. If somebody using, you know, a non-Marxist approach can do that, and even a lot of tendencies on the left are really rooted in Marxism, and so you have to be very careful here, you can't just say, oh, I call myself. this tendency, but I'm fundamentally using Marxist

analysis. But if somebody that truly rejected Marxism built and defended a global proletarian movement, that would be like, wow, Marxism wasn't the best tendency on display. It wasn't actually scientific. Somebody else came up with ideas out of the blue and were able to compete with Marxism as the leader of the

proletarian movement. And then lastly, this might be a little bit more of a stretch, but I actually don't think it is. If fascism and imperialism are rooted out of all capitalist societies, never to return, right? You talk about Lenin talks about fascism being capitalism in decay or imperialism being the highest stage of capitalism.

These two things from a Marxist analysis, fascism and imperialism, are fundamentally parts of capitalism. And so if you could root those two things out, never for them to return inside the confines of a capitalist society, it might not overturn Marxism completely, but would certainly strike a heavy blow against some of the absolute pillars of Marxist analysis and Marxist theory. So those are just a few ways in which Marxism could be falsified. What do you think about that, Allison? Yeah, I think those are really clever. I mean, I think each of those challenges a central tenet of Marxism, especially the first two challenge our central views on the

state and the state's relationship to class contradictions. And yeah, I think if you prove those things, yeah, that would probably falsify the Marxist claim. And actually, yeah, I think that last example is really good, actually, because I think it's pretty central to our theory that fascism and imperialism cannot be separated from capitalism and are necessary developments. And yeah, somehow as unimaginable as it is to me, UNs to accomplish that, it probably would falsify it. But yeah, no one has come close to accomplishing any of those claims. Exactly. Exactly. I thought that was a fun thought experiment. And I really, if people want to add more ways in which Marxism could be falsified, I'd be really fascinated because even, like,

I have friends who are, you know, post-doctorates and neuroscience, like high, high, level scientists that are my friends that, you know, adhere to the Popperian concept of falsifiability and exclude Marxism on those grounds. And so, okay, we can play your game. You tell us those are the terms of the game. I'll play it and I'll still show you how you're wrong, Popper. And so I think that's an important thing. But this also leads into the last question for part two. And I think this sort of sums up what we were talking about in the last question. And my question to Allison is this, why is understanding Marxism as a science and not just another theoretical system among many essential to the integrity of historical materialism and the Marxist project as a whole, in your

opinion? Sure. So, yeah, big question as well. And I think I'm going to have to draw on the answer that JMP gives in that newest article. One, the obvious reason is that this is what gives Marxism a claim to the truth, right? If Marxism isn't scientific, then it's one more interpretive philosophy among a huge catalog of interpretive philosophies. And this is very frequently how we see Marxism get treated in the humanities, right? Where Marxism or Fucodianism are treated as just different interpretive modes that we might take up that give different angles and ways of analyzing the world that aren't themselves totalizing or scientific. So part of the reason that it's really essential for us to say Marxism is scientific is because it gives us a reason to favor

Marxism over these other methods and techniques that have been developed by people like Foucault. So I think that's a very, very important reason. But also, I think that you can't separate Marxism from its claim that it is scientific, right? One of the starting points that Marx and Ingalls make is, this is a science, and we can demonstrate it's scientific, and this is not made from fundamental principles, but from an analysis of the world, and again, what Ingalls calls the stubborn facts. And so, So in one sense, I think it's also just sort of rude to the legacy of Ingalls and Marx to say, okay, we'll adopt Marxism, but we won't adopt the scientific view of Marxism.

Because central to Marxism is that claim to science itself and the claim that that can differentiate it and make it better than the utopian theories, which came before it, and also which have preceded it. So I think that you really can't disentangle that claim from what the Marxist methodology is. Yeah, and just to sort of wrap up this part two, and especially talking about Marxism as a science. I was talking on Twitter today about how, you know, me and Allison are doing work on this front in this episode, and then I'm having JMP to do a whole episode on Rev Left, because I think that this is such an important issue, and I know from my own

development, right? I'm about to turn 30 years old. I've been a radical for over a decade, and a lot of that radical period of my life, I've been fundamentally confused about this exact topic. I've refused to, you know, even when I started calling myself a Marxist, I said, yeah, But it's actually not a science, you know. I even contented myself with saying, well, it's a scientific approach, you know, whatever. But what you're doing is you're seating the ground to the enemies of Marxism, and you're losing, as Allison said, what makes Marxism the thing that we uphold, which is it's inherent superiority of methodology compared to all other tendencies. It's not just a set of ideas about the world that we came up with in a vacuum. It's actually a methodology and a scientific assessment of proletarian struggle over time,

which then can be synthesized into new theory, which guides our actual activity on the ground day to day. And that is an essential component of Marxism and of the proletarian movement. And to say, even as a Marxist, that it's not actually a science, is to basically say that Marxism is just another thing you can choose between. It's just another option on the table, whatever fits your subjective fancy, Go ahead and pick it up and you can claim that that is just as legitimate as anything else where I think so many Marxist theorists and so many Marxist revolutionaries have put in such huge amounts of work really applying the science of Marxism to understand their conditions and then operating successfully in those conditions because they took Marxism serious as a science. And that is our strength. And to hand that over is to cripple what makes Marxism so useful and what has led so many movements on every continent.

and on the planet to pick up Marxism as a tool by which to liberate themselves from national oppression or to build socialism in their part of the world. And so, yeah, I think it's a fundamental pillar. And people, if you're still, if you call yourself a Marxist and you're still fundamentally confused about this issue, I don't blame you. It's very difficult. But Allison and I are doing work to try to illuminate that. And I really encourage you to go take this concept seriously and dive into it and learn for yourself why it's an essential part of what we're doing here. Awesome. Yeah, no, I strongly agree with that. And also sympathize with historically not understanding this question and having to work really hard diving into what Marx and Ingalls say to come to terms with the question of science. Do we want to go ahead and move on to the application of theory section? Absolutely, yeah.

So now we're going to go ahead and move over to part three, which is our application of theory. So again, what's really important for us here isn't just that we're giving you theoretical explanations, a theoretical text, and then we stop there. The question is, what does that mean strategically for us as communists? Communism is not having the right beliefs. It's the real movement for the abolition of the present state of things. And we are supposed to, as communists, be a part of that. So we want to move beyond just having this theory to how it applies to our strategy and our work that we're doing today. And I think this text can do that. So the first real point of application that I had is I think this text speaks very, very interestingly to debates about the capitalist state,

reform and regulation and how we relate to it. So while there is a large movement of self-described socialists on the left who want to just sort of reform the capitalist state, we as Marxists need to push back against that. As Brett said, it's not that all reforms are useless or that there's no place for reforms, but I think what's crucial that we get from Ingalls in this text is that the drive to reform and regulate capitalism isn't just not socialism. Sometimes it can itself be a way of recuperating and trying to save capitalism. In response to crises, it is not enough to simply paper over the contradiction. We have to resolve it through proletarian revolution. And the FDR example that Brett brought up is really a fantastic example of this.

You can save capitalism by socializing certain things and by regulating markets and pushing back against the anarchy of production. And strategies which call themselves socialist, but ultimately don't have a plan for socialist revolution won't get us anywhere for resolving the contradictions which are creating crisis in the first place. And I think this is a real thing that needs to be considered in the context of communist organizing in the United States. There are times when we will overlap with social Democrats

and calling for strategic reforms that will just literally save people's lives. But we need to make sure in all of our work that we're doing that we don't confuse those reforms or those regulations on capitalism for socialism itself, and that we make sure that they're strategically adopted and not instances where they can actually be used to rehabilitate capitalism and keep it moving on its destructive historical path. We need to remember that revolution is the only actual way to resolve these things, and that proletarian rule, not as some abstract thing, but as a real concrete political reality, is the only path going forward. And all of our strategic

organizing work needs to be geared towards that end. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say, sort of like incredibly well said and piggybacking off of that, I wanted to point out that, you know, a lot of times people will online and stuff go really hard against people like AOC or Bernie Sanders for using the term socialist. And, you know, there's really a hard line leftist that will just have no mercy when they criticize these folks. And there's people that's like, yeah, I get it. You're right. But at the same time, they're trying to make the system a little bit better for people. And in the meantime, they're destigmatizing the term socialism. But here's the problem with that. is that socialism as a term may be destigmatized through people like AOC and Bernie Sanders, right? And that may ultimately prove to be beneficial to people who want actual socialism. But at the very same time that it destigmatizes it because it's liberals claiming to be socialists, it dilutes the meaning of socialism and it confuses and muddies the water around the discourse concerning socialism. So when you see comrades going hard as fuck against AOC or Bernie because of something they said about, socialism it is not because they they're purists who just want to shit on everything that isn't

really revolutionary but it's that they're taking it upon themselves to do the refining and clarifying work of concepts so that these terms don't get taken away from us and made into something they're not no socialism is not the fire department you know so and it's important that we push back on that at the same time we can be leading these reforms pushing the these reformers leftward and making them, you know, have these reforms be more robust and meet people's material needs. Radicals have always led reforms in this country and elsewhere. But at the same time, that conceptual work of clarifying what these words actually mean and that, hey, theory is actually important.

And, hey, it is actually important that we don't get the definition of socialism wrong now that so many people are finally for the first time in decades opening their ears to the idea. And so I would urge people to just have more patience with your comrades when you see them working on one of these two fronts, right? I think that's important. Okay, so moving on to my first point. I was really thinking about the metaphysical outlook, right, and ways that we could really teach people what it looks like

by tying it to contemporary situations, situations that people that live today would immediately understand as like, oh, yeah, I'm familiar with that. And so the question I asked myself was, what sort of errors are produced today when one assumes the static metaphysical outlook over the process-oriented a dialectical outlook

as Engel says in quotes in the contemplation of individual things it forgets the connection between them and so that is sort of angles quick and fast definition of the metaphysical outlook and its problem so I was thinking some examples

that we'd all know that would reflect this and I think the obvious example is one bourgeois individualism where atomized workers and consumers operating according to their own will and quote unquote rational self-interest, detached from responsibility, a sense of community, and a cooperative economic environment have to compete in order to gain and keep resources. So, I mean, you know, this is just one way that all of society and the way that wealth is produced

is social, but under liberalism, under the metaphysical outlook, these things are reduced to individuals. And we talk about individual rights, the individual right of a capitalist to own a factory and profit office workers, et cetera, but that individualization affects all spheres of our life and, you know, the sense of alienation and lack of community that we often feel, I think is a product to some extent of that sort of outlook. Number two would be the idea that capitalism and bourgeois democracies are the end-all, be-all of economic and political systems. It's just a matter of refining them. I think lots of liberals, lots of people invested in the status quo have

that idea, people that are invested in capitalism and in bourgeois democracy. democracy really do, even if they won't admit it or think through it consciously, assume that this is the best that we can do. And it's just a matter of, you know, blunting the edges and making it work a little better as time goes on, but that there's nothing beyond this. That idea of like capitalism is human nature is basically a call to say there's no more progress needed. We've achieved what we need to achieve. And now we just need to make it as good as we can. The third idea that I came up with is a liberal conceptions of truth, property, and justice. A lot of times bourgeois rights, liberal conceptions of rights, liberal conceptions of

abstract ideas like truth and justice and property are talked about as if they exist outside of real conditions in some platonic realm. And by individuating these things and saying we stand for truth and property and justice, but you don't actually analyze them in their connections with how they actually operate in class society is one way that this metaphysical mode of thought infects our world today. The next one is the post-Cold War triumphalism that announced the end of history. I mean, the end of history to claim that history has come to an end is a complete abandonment of dialectics as such and is this idea that we can segment human history with an end point in the same way that you place an arbitrary block on when the person lives

or dies. They're trying to do that with history itself. The next example is since class struggle implies a process and a continuous one in the Marxist tradition, it's, it's must be either de-emphasized or ignored completely in bourgeois culture and politics in favor of something more static like the reliance on enduring bourgeois institutions to resolve competing interests, i.e. to resolve fundamental contradictions. As Engel says, the lies of the bourgeois economy are that the interest of capital and labor are the same and that the universal harmony and prosperity will be the consequence of unbridled competition. So we hear that all the time to this day. Next one is that the state is often seen as something in

to societies and civilization and not as a manifestation of underlying class antagonisms, which develop change and can be transcended along with the need for a state as such. I think the liberal conception of the state rejects the idea that the state is fundamentally a manifestation of class society. And second to last is that our subjectivity is dehistoricized and our behavior is desocialized and tied to one's individual and presumably inherent natural characteristic. and moral fortitude. This outlook results in justification for punitive approaches to crime and moralizing approaches to poverty. This is behind the bootstrap rhetoric, for example, and focuses

our justice system on punishment rather than rehabilitation while refusing to acknowledge how underlying socioeconomic conditions are connected to and give rise to poverty and crime in the first place. And then finally, and this applies to many leftists as well, I think, just like the entire world is a process, so too is the transition to socialism. It doesn't happen overnight. And when it does happen in this or that part of the world, it only begins a process of more change. They have to defend their gains. They have to struggle with contradictions that arise in the transitionary period, etc. Socialism, contrary to the way that many talk and think about it, is not a state of affairs that one reaches or a list of things one checks off,

but is a process out of capitalism and toward communism. To view socialism as anything but a process like this is an example, in my opinion, of a static, metaphysical idealism. And so those are just some of the examples I came up with to sort of, you know, to make contemporary this mode of thought and this work and show how it still operates with us today and how, in fact, it's a huge part of capitalism overall. Definitely, yeah. And I think, like, it's so relevant for the left today. day, especially. I mean, one thing that I think is really crucial, too, is this idea of

socialism as a process, right? And so much progress that is being made in socialist development in a lot of instances does get rejected for not being seen as this perfect instant theoretical break from capitalism. And that's a huge problem, because it takes away our ability to learn from attempts as socialist development. Even when they don't work out super well, if we just completely dismiss them out of hand because they don't live up to our utopian interpretation of socialism, then they're not productively useful for us getting better strategy. And I think another point where this sort of metaphysical idealism comes in is often how the left, and more the liberal left, will talk about identity without focusing on how identity is constructed through

social processes, and instead taking identity to be something that is just sort of an apolitical inherent fact to individual people, rather than a reflection of structures that have relationships to capitalism. Yeah, incredibly good point. Absolutely. all right you want to go to the next one yeah so the other thing i wanted to talk about somewhat is this idea that socialism isn't really about coming up with the right ideas from the perfect deductible truths but comes as a result from dealing with again the stubborn facts of reality and interacting with them and theorizing from those and i think what's really important here is that this ain't that theory alone isn't enough and that the goal of socialist isn't to produce the right theory but

But actual mass work that begins with the realities of the masses is really the task at hand. And emphasizing that mass work doesn't mean that we get rid of theory, but it rather shows the relationship between theory and praxis in the first place. And this is obviously an important theme in Marxism. But a lot of the times, I think especially in the imperial core where we have these very academic versions of Marxism and socialism, we treat this like it's about having the right ideas. And it's about coming up with the perfect, irrefutable theory.

regardless of sort of how that theory plays out in practice and in organizing and in strategy. And what Ingalls is telling us is that this is actually an idealist way to approach the world, and that Marxism, by its nature of being scientific, doesn't start by trying to come up with the ideas first, but it embeds itself within the processes of revolution and within revolutionary organizing, and it comes to theoretical insights from that. It's the movement of the proletariat as a class that gives us the insight into capitalism in order to critically approach it and figure out how to overcome it. And I think this is something that the U.S. left is really bad about, actually. We have a lot of tendencies whose distinctions are defined not on the basis of the kind of work they're doing or the scientific credibility of their approach to capitalism, but by a list of doctrines that they believe and have tried to divine from fundamental principles in the abstract.

And that's an interesting way, I guess, to look at the world. That's very philosophical. But it's not a materialist or a scientific way of understanding the left today. And I think, you know, both of us are members of organizations that have relationships to base building and this dual power approach that sort of says it's not so much about having the perfect ideas as doing the mass work on the ground to create the conditions for proletariat revolution. And when we go out and we do that, when we're working with the masses, when we're hearing their needs and when we're. synthesizing those with Marxist approaches to strategy, that's when we're going to start developing scientific insights into capitalism today. This is the insight from this text that I really want to hit home today. It's not enough for you to listen to this podcast and say, okay,

I understand Marxism as a science now, and that's that, and it's another intellectual thing to check off. If you take what this episode is saying seriously, it means you need to go get out there and be doing work, organizing, involved in the actual revolutionary movements that exist today and helping to build that movement now. And it's only then that you've actually understand what it means for Marxism to be scientific. Absolutely. And I would just add to that is that, you know, as you alluded to, there is this dialectical relationship between theory and practice. One informs the other and turns back around and informs the other, etc. So that dialectical thinking, even in our own organizing, is absolutely essential. And a crucial part of

praxis of engaging in actual work is also coming back after engaging. with that work and synthesizing new ways forward as an organization. You don't necessarily need or even can synthesize brand new revolutionary theory that's universalizable globally, but in your own little communities where you're organizing, taking stock of the material conditions and letting that influence the programs that you create, then going out, carrying out those programs coming back and adjusting your theoretical orientation locally to see what can be the next move, I think is an essential part. These two things cannot ever. be separated and operate.

They're absolutely embedded together and they must operate together in this dialectical fashion. So, my last point, and I think this is the last point of the entire show, is that eclecticism in revolutionary theory is not, as it's sometimes thought to be, by those who embrace it, a strength, right? Nor is it a sign of a more advanced understanding

of the situation. And by eclecticism, I mean what Engels was talking about with the utopian socialists and this mish-mashing together of ideas and theories to come up with your own unique approach to politics. Oftentimes, eclecticism is a product of idealism, whereby one picks and chooses the ideas they subjectively prefer and mashes them together into a political philosophy all their own. Now, when I was younger and before I became a Marxist, I would actually do this myself all the time. So, like, I know, I'm not just criticizing other people. I'm saying I've learned from my own flaws in my past. So, yeah, I would do this all the time with political ideas.

And the sad thing is that I often felt superior because of it. I wasn't adhering to anyone else's dogma, right? I was a free thinker. And the fact that my eclectic ideas were eclectic was seen by me as evidence that I'm actually thinking outside the confines of any dogma and doctrine and being a revolutionary in my own way. And this idea is very tempting. It's also very bourgeois and individualists.

It's the political equivalent of being a cafeteria Christian. What Marxism and historical materialism offer is a concrete analysis. analysis of concrete conditions, a methodology that can be applied across space and time, a critique of capitalism that undercovers and explains the specific mechanisms and internal laws by which it came to be, by which it operates, and by which it inevitably enters into periods of crises. Marxist theory is then tested in the crucible of real-world revolutions. The results are studied using a materialist analysis, and parts of the theory are, as I said earlier, updated, discarded, or universalized depending on their real-world successes or failures.

In this way, Marxism as a tradition develops and gets refined over time as more and more experiments, i.e. class struggles and revolutions, are attempted and thus analyzed. On the opposite end of this approach, which we still see plenty of today, are idealist and eclectic conceptions of socialism and revolution, whereby ideas about the world are tested and accepted not on the basis of their successes or failures in real world conditions, not according to the results of testing theories in the laboratories of world historical revolutions and refining them based on their objective results, but rather on the basis of whether or not those ideas cohere with one's subjective preferences. This idealism can only lead to dead ends, like the utopian socialism's before them, because they are not rooted in empirical

investigation and practice, but rather in the subjective mind. And subjectivity, as we know, is historically and culturally shaped, limited, and contingent. You can never unite the geographically international and culturally diverse proletariat and successfully assist them in overcoming their bourgeois pressures on these flimsy, subjective, and arbitrary grounds. And I think when you look back over the entire history of proletarian movements, when you analyze which one succeeded and which ones lasted for more than a few weeks or months, when you ask yourself whether said revolutions offered material support to other proletarian movements or isolated themselves and little territories cut off from the rest of the world, you will find that, even with all

of its flaws and excesses and failures, it was and still is Marxist movements that have successfully conducted, defended, and developed proletarian revolutionary movements better than anyone else. So it's by embracing a materialist analysis and a Marxist methodology that we tether ourselves to the real world and its real conditions, rather than floating away in our own subjectivity by picking and choosing an assortment of radical ideas that we personally find compelling. So I think that's an important point to make, and I think it's very much in line with what Engels is telling us in this work. Definitely. Yeah, I mean, I think that's really the important thing. And like, what the takeaway that I want, you know, in addition to the need for mass work,

is this idea that materialism is not just another option among a bunch of other options. When you look at how it's played out in history, you can see that it is scientific and that it has a dialectical understanding of how the world works. That's confirmable. Okay, so that wraps up our first ever episode of Red Menace on Socialism, Utopian, and Scientific by Frederick Engels. We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on our analysis, so reach out to us on Twitter or Patreon and let us know what you think. And remember, this is important. We do not cover theory for its own sake. The point of this show, as Allison and I have both said throughout is to explain, analyze, and critique theory with the

single-minded goal of putting this stuff into practice. So take what we taught you today and organize. Solidarity and good night. Like when the way is Like when he makes the branch and swine Nice the branch is swine I cried to the long I swore I wouldn't do I The next thing you may the devil

Put me to end The viscable hands Wap around my throat Rollin'all Baby, won't let me Run, run, wall Let me go I would have to wait

When my devil got a devil in my wrapped in chimes Because when the devil gets a hold of you Devil got your cradle to cry I don't want you I'd like a little edge I know I want you to talk about it I and place my hands Walked around my phone

Won't let me Know you walk and like me Go her out gotta get her out of me her out gotta get her out of me get her out of me get her out of me ooh i know you think you know me tell me devil do you know my night or am i just another haven't screaming while you play your little guy

it is a certain kind of nausea got feeling a swine like when the waves get to rock and in the wind it makes their branches sway and beautiful hands look around my throat walking like me

baby what I'm like me go oh and let me go To hear I got to get it out Heron got to get out I'm going to hear a lot get out

Heron got to get out Heron got to get out And hurrah got to get out We're going to be able to be. Ask myself questions like, What does your fear of life? Is it a prey cutting across the sky?

I know like the first good river coming Earth clay that I'm never know. These have all this happened to be quickly. I cannot account for the flash of Armageddon. What I do know is that after the glass and new ashes the fire scenes colorily up in the air. The dark dies and by the man is darked in mind. point in this I think

It is a tear of hallibria I go back to the room My new destruction The long will never know. The wrong will have never know. The long way never know.