Rev Left Radio - Continuity & Rupture: Maoism and the Science of Revolutionary Communism

Episode Date: March 18, 2018

J. Moufawad-Paul lives in Toronto and works as casualized contract faculty at York University where he received his PhD in philosophy. He blogs regularly at MLM Mayhem and is the author of The Communist Necessity, Continuity and Rupture, and Austerity Apparatus. Josh joins Brett to discuss Maoism, The Enlightenment, Post-Modernism, the science of Marxism, and much more! Find JMP on twitter @MLM_Mayhem But his books here: https://www.leftwingbooks.net/book/content/communist-necessity and here: http://www.zero-books.net/authors/joshua-r-moufawad-paul Outro Music: "Market Made Murder" by Sims ft. Toki Wright and Mike Mictlan , off the album "Lights Out Paris" Reach us at: [e-mail] follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB at "Revolutionary Left Radio" Intro Music by The String-Bo String Duo. You can listen and support their music here: https://tsbsd.bandcamp.com/track/red-black This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, and the Omaha GDC. Check out Nebraska IWW's new website here: https://www.nebraskaiww.org

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Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host, Ann Comrade, Brett O'Shea, and today we have on Joshua Malfuad Paul. Did I say that correctly? Mufawad. We have him on to discuss Maoism, his book, Continuity, and Rpture, and some leftist philosophy. I'm really excited to have Josh on the show.

I've been really getting into his work. Before we introduce him, I wanted to give a shout out to my friend and fellow organizer, Seth Darlington, who really, you know, gave me access to a lot of Josh's work and helped me kind of formulate the outline. He was on our first 101 episode of Maoism that we did a few months back. He was our guest on that show. And so a lot of people liked that first episode, and this is going to be a deeper dive into Maoism. So I'm really excited to have you on, Josh.

Would you like to introduce yourself and say a bit about your background before we dive into the questions? Yeah, I can do a bit. So I'm, you know, my name is Joshua. I'm Rufalwood-Paul. I have my PhD in philosophy, and I work right now as kind of contract faculty, which is what a lot of people with PhDs do now, very casualized contract work at York University.

And, you know, I've written a number of books. And right now I'm actually on strike. My union's on strike, so I have a lot of extra free time to read while I'm between walking the bigger lines. Wow. Well, good luck with that. I hope that turns out well for you guys. But yeah, we have a lot to cover.

So the first question, kind of an overview background, is how did Maoism as the tendency we know today come into existence? Well, yeah, I mean, one of the things that I started continuity rupture with was the claim that, like, Maoism as a full theoretical tendency doesn't really come into existence until the late 80s and early 90s, which seems counterintuitive because people were using the term Maoism before that. A bit of that background on that is that, well, before the term Maoism was, it meant something different. It was an anti-revisionist Marxism, Leninism.

And it's only with the Communist Party of Peru, also known as the Shining Path and the PCP, they theorized that Maoism was kind of a third stage of revolutionary science at the end of the 80s, and then the revolutionary internationalist movement, which had not only the PCP as a member, but a whole bunch of different revolutionary groups around the world adopted this claim and made this claim up that Marxism, Leninism, Maoism was the new kind of stage of revolutionary communism, and that's how it came into existence through that process. Okay, I see, and then so it kind of Maoism views itself as sort of the world historical revolution in China as the next sort of practical and theoretical stage of putting Marxism into

practice and so it sees itself. I think we'll get into this a little bit later, but it sees itself as kind of a continuitous with Marxist Leninism, but also a distinct rupture from that into something kind of new and different. Is that true? Is that a good way of thinking about that? That's a good way to put it. And I mean, this is, I guess we will be getting into this later, but just to think about it as clearly, you know, the world historical revolution in China being the basis of it, but it's after that experience has passed that the Peruvians and then the revolutionary internationalist movement kind of looked back and assessed that

to kind of think about it as a new stage. I see. Okay, and one of the things you talk about when you're discussing Maoism in your book, you say it's important to differentiate between the name and the concept of Maoism. So why is differentiating between the name and concept of Maoism essential to understanding it? Well, I mean, this is kind of a philosophical point

that we philosophers like to make a lot about how names and concepts are different. Like, in a very larger sense, right, a name can have multiple meanings. So if we think about it in a really banal way about a word like banks, right? You could have the word banks could mean, you know, banks where you store your money or, you know, the banks on the side of the river. There's two different definitions of the name banks, right? So that's a very banal sense.

And in philosophy, we think that often if you don't, if you aren't really clear about the conceptual meaning of a specific word or name, it can lead to this equivocation where you make these mistakes of relating two things together. So for Maoism, right, and the reason I talk about it is Maoism, it's important to make a distinction between the name Maoism and the concept of it, because, as I mentioned earlier, there was something that would have been called Maoism during the new communist movement and up to the end of the 1980s, right? And they use the term Maoism for that, but that kind of Marxism, Leninism, Mao-Sat-Tong thought was not exactly the same as what now is being called Maoism after, you know, the PCP and the rim, or Marxism, Leninism,

Maoism. So you can have these two tendencies, they share a name, they're connected, but they're also different. MLN asserts that Maoism is a third stage of revolutionary science. And also, I mean, we can also talk about the difference between the name of Mao and Maoism, right? So Maoism is a theoretical tendency, it's bigger than the person who it is named after. Like, we name it after Maoism, but it's also a theoretical tendency that's bigger than Maoism, just as like Marxism is bigger than Marx, right? And just as we can use Marxism and you know, to critique maybe wrong views Marx and Engels had, we can use Maoism to, like, even assess the person that was named after.

I mean, personally, I would prefer just to call it revolutionary communism instead of using these names, but there's so many different tendencies in communism that you kind of have to do this kind of naming to let people know what your tendency is when you're talking about it theoretically. Yeah, I have seen a lot of people, like left-wingers online that aren't in the Marxist tradition, sort of use the fact that Marxist of various tendencies, Trotskyism, Leninism, Maoism, that their impulse to use the name of an individual for their tendency is somehow indicative of a cult of personality or some sort of hyper love of the

individual person. And you talk about in your book why that's sort of a fallacious understanding and why this concept is so important to parse out from just the name itself. How do you think about that critique that Marxists are sort of obsessed with individuals? Well, I mean, there are, you know, Marxists who would be obsessed with individuals. And we've seen a history of, you know, different people have built cults of personalities around people. But obviously, just naming a tendency after the name doesn't lead to that, really. I mean, as I said, it has to do more with the confusion of all these different tendencies that when we're talking about, you know, when I do organizing work and I say I'm a communist, I'm not always saying, I'm a Maoist, I'm a Maoist, I'm a Maoist to people, right?

I mean, that's how I'll define myself when they ask. A lot of times I'll be I'm a revolutionary communist, right? And what does that mean? Well, it means for me, the tradition that goes through Maoism because Mao being the principal theoretician of the world historical revolution in China means that the analysis that came out under him and around him and through him, that we treat by that cipher of Maoism is important. It's important to recognize the contributions of theorists.

But I mean, I don't think in the end it's anything really authoritarian because then we'd have to say the same thing. Look, in philosophy, we use these terms all the time, and we're not being, when we talk about someone being an Aristotelian or a Platonist, right? We're not saying that they are like are worshipping Plato or Aristotaur. Right, exactly.

So this naming of kind of theoretical tendencies is pretty common, and it's not just common with Marxism. Absolutely, yeah, great point about philosophy. That's absolutely true. Speaking of sort of your philosophy education, I found it was interesting that your PhD advisor was a Gramscian's

scholar and so I'm sure that you've been you know influenced by Gramsci to some extent in your opinion what does Gramsci offer to the communist movement broadly and to Maoism specifically well I you know I think I think it offers a lot I mean he was a very important Leninist philosopher and and I think there's you know a history of I guess more of the kind of post-Marxist attempt to to use Gramsci's ideas and kind of like take them away from that from the very, like, intentionally Marxist framework he had them in. I mean, you mentioned my advisor, and, you know, I should plug, I should plug Esteva Morera, who is my advisor, the main advisor of my doctoral thesis, because, you know, he's a very

influential Gramsci scholar. I took a reading course of Gramsci under him, which was fascinating, right? And I know that, like, his work, Gramsci's historicism kind of influenced the whole generation of Gramscians who, you know, were for ones that are very popular, who refer to his work because it was kind of this work that brought, you know, Gramsci back to the center of a Marxist analysis and, you know, attacked kind of the LeClau and Moff's post-Marxist reading of Gramsci. And, you know, it's funny, though, at the time of completing my doctorate,

I, you know, I didn't really see the influence that Gramsci and Morera had had on my thinking, right? It's not something I thought about at that time. It's only much later when I finally read Marrera's work. Like, I actually didn't read his book, Gramch's Historicism, as his first book, until, like, after I'd finished. And when I read that, I could kind of see his fingerprints all over the way I was thinking, right? Which happens when you work closely. I mean, there's a lot of things Esteva and I would disagree on,

but I know that there's some things that comes through this Gramshin way of thinking that have influenced me and also might have guided me more towards Maoism than even he would have thought it would. So, like, I think there's a number of concepts from Gramsci that are very useful for thinking about Maoism, right? I mean, the concept of Fijemone is very useful for thinking about how a revolutionary movement needs to make its ideal. common sense, how to maneuver in what Gramsci calls the war of position, so as to become hegemonic. And I think in like, you know, the, you know, a very important theoretical concept for Maoism is protracted people's war, PPW as we shorthanded as. It's essentially a strategy, Maoist strategy of making revolution. And I think it's like, you know, in PPW, like part of the

importance of PPW outside of its military aspect is, is the aspect of seizing hegemony and kind of expanding the sphere of hegemony and, you know, in talking about, you know, the Peruvians would have talked about this as in their talk on concentric circles and things like that. And so getting the broad masses to see your ideas, your conception of reality and the counter-institution you build as legitimate. I mean, this is really essential for any kind of revolutionary takeover. So, you know, a people's war, as they have historically happened, builds counter-hegemony so as to bring into being a socialist hegemony. And I think, again, Gramsci's conceptions of what constitutes degemony, and even using that to think about how capitalism came into being as well,

how it ceased to Gemini. It's been very, very useful that those aspects of Gramsci. I mean, there's other aspects of Gramsci, two that I think are important, like his concept of the organic intellectual and his discussions on civil society, but I haven't thought through those recently. Yeah, I read Edward Said's short book, representations of the intellectual, and in that book, Saeed has a lot of references to Gramsci's concept of the organic intellectual I urge people to check that out. I know that we should do an episode on Gramshy,

just an entire episode dedicated to him and his thought because I think there's a lot there that we can draw from. But moving on, and something we mentioned earlier about continuity and rupture, it's the title of your honestly wonderful book, and it's a reference to Maoism, being both a continuation of Marxism, Leninism, as well as a clear break from it.

I know this is a big question, but how is Maoism a continuation of Marxism-Leninism, and in what ways does it represent a rupture from it? Okay, so this is, you know, as you just pointed out, it's a large question. I wrote a whole book dedicated to looking at this, but I'll do my best to summarize some of the key aspects. It won't be obviously perfect in this time frame, but I kind of, you know, I can give you kind of a sketch, right? I mean, the first thing I point out is that I see kind of continuity and rupture as, you know, a dialectical relationship, right? it's not like you can speak about them separately when you're looking at kind of new

periods of revolutionary science coming into being and I know I know you mentioned we're going to be talking about you know science and what I say about science later on in the show but so this will be maybe some I have to talk about it a little bit here yeah that's fine to do that so maybe you can build on this later but you know so you know one of the things I argue is that a new stage or you know what Thomas Coon calls a paradigm of science is is in continuity with the science as a whole, right, because it develops that science's core logic, which in the case of Marxism, that core logic, you know, I claim is the logic of class struggle. But a new stage of a science has reached an eruptial moment, and, you know,

Kuhn calls us a paradigm shift, a bachelor calls it an epistemic break. And that's when, you know, new universal conceptions are achieved. And for Marxism, these, these conceptions are achieved, or they're proven in revolutionary practice. And in retrospect, these kind of reorient the field of thinking about that theory. So, you know, a good example, the early one before we start talking about Maoism is thinking about like Lenin's, the Leninist moment of continuity and rupture.

So, you know, Lenin's conception of the party and the state did this, and I do talk about that in chapter three of continuity and rupture when I look at kind of Tom Clark's discussion on that too, right? So, you know, Lenin's conception of the party and the state are this ruptural moment.

You can find motivating evidence in marks and angles for these things, And Lenin used that to a rhetorical device, but you can also find evidence for anti-Leninist readings, like Kautsky was giving off different readings too, so it was Bernstein, and they were finding evidence for it. And you have now this whole kind of back, this whole like kind of pre-Lennon back to Marx tendency

that works really hard to show that Lenin's conceptions of the Vanguard Party and the state are not essential to Marxism. And it's because they can find the same kind of things, just as Lenin could find, right? So it's more like the event of Leninism, because of the concrete conditions that Lenin, that, you know, that that world historical revolution encountered, produced a retrospective reading on Marx and angles and but established this revolutionary continuity through that rupture. I know that threw out a lot there.

Yeah, no. There's a lot. Okay, so I mean, let's, so as for Maoism, right, I think one way to kind of look about how Maoism does this is to actually look back on Mao Zedong's theoretical work leading up to the cultural revolution, because it's kind of the cultural revolution, the theory that kind of circulates around the culture revolution is really what the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist see as the Maoist moment of continuity and rupture. So Mao maintained that he was...

So it's important up to the revolution that Mao himself maintained for a long time that he was just a faithful Marxist Leninist who was localizing Marxism-Leninism for the Chinese concept and not, he maintained this for a while at not developing new universal revolutionary

concepts, right? This early point is important to make because the, you know, the 1981 Communist Party China Congress, they actually used those claims to defend revisionism and socialism with Chinese characteristics. And they said that Leo Mao's later work around the Cultural Revolution was all garbage. His earlier stuff where he said he was just localizing ML was all that was correct and they kind of threw out everything about like the Cultural Revolution. And they grounded themselves on this very specific reading of, um,

what Mao was claiming in the Yan'an period. And also I think it's important to note, too, this period because I think even some people now in the Maoist camp, because within the Maoist camp, there is a debate about, say, the universality of protracted people's war. This is like a side thing that, you know, there's a debate within the Mao's camp. And people who rejected as universal,

they always quote Mao from that period, from that pre-cultural revolution period, where when he talks about people's war, he says, oh, I'm just talking. it's only specific. It's only specific. It's particular to China, right? But the point is that he was saying everything he was doing then was specific to China. So it's kind of weird for the people in the Maoist camp who still want to hold on to Maoism as universal to use. And this is maybe where Maoism, again, goes beyond the name or the person of Mao.

Because they always want to use these quotes about Mao saying everything was just specific to China and not universal. And for them, they ignore all of that except for PBW. They're like, well, he said PPW is specific, so we should throw it out. So, you know, that aside, I'm just saying for, you know, if you're going to throw up PPW because of what Mao said then, then maybe you should do the same with everything that gets grouped into Maoism because that is what he maintained as a whole in the unanimant period. But again, so moving beyond that, but it's with the cultural revolution that Mao begins to speak in the language of universality. And this is just, you know, not me saying this. Like a lot of, you know, people who do historical work on Mao's thought have talked about this.

And these aren't necessarily Maoists. They're just like the, you know, academic experts on it. So Nick Knight, for example, wrote a book called, like, Rethinking Mao, where he just charted out all the way of the developments of Mao's thought. And he points out as sort of a lot of other people that, yeah, you find with the cultural revolution and maybe just like the decade leading up to the culture revolution and the cultural revolution, you find that Mao begins to speak with the language of universality. Part of this has to do with the Sino-Soviet split, too.

So this is where he claims that – this is where he makes these, like, kind of very claims that he wants to be seen as universal, And those are the claims that socialism is a period in which class struggle persists. So these are kind of these ruptural moments that have begun. So socialism, so class struggle continues under socialism. He begins to produce new concept of organization and strategy. So, you know, the concept of the Leninist Party, he kind of alters that according to the concept of the mass line. You know, I dealt with how he talked about this altering of the Maoist party in continuity and rupture.

but the idea of the party that is essential to Leninism as the general staff of the proletariat, it reaches an impasse, right? And Mao establishes a relationship between party and masses that ruptures from the faithful Leninist conception, but renews the concept of the Vanguard party, this idea that the party can be held to account by the masses, right? This idea that the bourgeoisie can end up within the party. And again, I mentioned Nick Knight again, like in Nick Knight's rethinking Mao, he points, he does point this out. He's not a Leninist or a Maoist, but he just looks at literature and he's like, this is actually

a very heterodox claim to make as a Leninist. And he points out the way that Lenin kind of conceived the party and this idea that the party could be held to account by the masses outside of the party. You don't find that anywhere in Lenin's conception of the party. And in fact, Knight thinks that Lenin would have been maybe horrified by that notion. It's hard to know because that's all like, you know, trying to psychologize people. But, you know, I do know that. Orthodox Marxist-Leninists after this kind of mouthing, they do try to claim differently.

And they try to make these claims that, you know, oh, you can account for all this stuff in Leninism. Oh, there was this cultural revolution that happened under Stalin, right? And this is all kind of very spurious historical claims. There really is no moment you find in the Soviet Union under Lenin and then Stalin, where the masses are mobilized to bombard the headquarters in order to renew the party in socialism. And just because you find Lenin and later Stalin using the words culture revolution, it's conceptually different, right? It's that name again that has a different concept. In fact, you find actually in problems of Leninism, Stalin actually literally he asserts that under socialism, there is an obliteration of contradictions amongst the people, which is completely different for what Mao starts bringing to the table now.

He's claiming that contradictions persist. They can be antagonistic or non-intaginistic even underneath socialism, which is. a very different ruptural claim. But beyond that, as I mentioned earlier, about Maoism emerging later in the late 80s in the early 90s, these insights of Mao are not fully realized as universal by Mao. He started speaking in that language of universality,

but they weren't systematized, right? Actually, you find it very close to Mao. The first people to actually start claiming their universal more than Mao did was the so-called gang of four. So they were the first to realize these insights when they use the language of continuing the revolution under socialism. And using that, with that claim continuing the revolution under socialism was never a term

that Mao used, but it was a term that the so-called gang of four used in their attempt to renew the struggle against revisionism. And then, as I noted, you know, new stages of revolutionary science are systematized in retrospect when a world historical revolution's successes and failures can be viewed as a laboratory by other revolutionary movements. So again, it's not until the PCP and the rim, And the force is generated by contemporary Maoism that we witness theorizations of the ruptural moment of what we now call MLM. So then you get these, the kind of that rupture represented by the cultural revolution and what it means for the party and the masses and for strategy and organization begins to be assembled, right? And you find it in like different examinations of how the party, the party of the new type under Maoism should be, right?

You get the PCB's conception of the militarization of the party. you get like ages work on on the Maoist party that the Indian Maoists put forward and we can trace these lines of systematic development since then around these related concepts of masses party protracted people's war and cultural revolution okay I hope I like that was a bunch I kind of threw at you it's a huge question yeah it's a great answer but yeah but I think that's kind of the way to start thinking of your question without me just reading the book and I and I genuinely like seriously even if you're not a Maoist I encourage people to go read that book because I think there's so much in it that, you know,

every sort of revolutionary can learn from and pull from. And this is really well done and it's really accessible. But one of the things you talk about a lot in this interview thus far and in the book itself is, is world historical revolutions. So I was just kind of wondering if you can, like, give a quick definition of what that means. And then the second question to that would be, so since, you know, you had the Russian Revolution and in retrospect to that, you could sort of codify Marxism, Leninism, into a theory and then you had the Chinese revolution, which gave rise

in retrospect to Marxism, Leninism, Maoism. So the second part of that question would be, is it possible that a third world historical revolution would happen and then that we would have to move to the next stage of the revolutionary science of Marxism? Yeah, I mean, again, that's a... The term world historical revolutions

is not mine, right? And I think I was clear in the book. I took that from Smyroman in this early work. where he was like much more closer to thinking about this and it was like he used it in I believe class in nation but um what you know following his view I say these world historical revolutions are

is you know a revolution that will create kind of that that moment that ruptural moment that produces that you know through the revolution it takes kind of humanity further on the road towards communism right on the road towards liberation and in doing so produces these new concept that are universal for like other people trying to do the same kind of revolutionary work and and it's world historical because it produces this like global experience that people can share from and learn from and it's also that kind of laboratory it's you know if we talk about historical materialism being a science revolutions are the laboratory and the world historical revolution is is the lab is kind of like the similar to those great revolutions and science that you see were new concepts like either Einstein or before that Newton

emerge right and um this is so yeah i mean that's i'm just kind of summarizing a lot there but yeah i mean the succession of world historical revolutions are such that like in order now to make another revolution towards socialism world historical it'll have to like go further than the previous ones did right um so the chinese revolution went further uh than the russian revolution did um sustained itself longer was able to learn from the failures of the russian revolution and set an attempt to try to overcome them. Eventually, it met its own failures, and that's why it's collapsed with the onset of revisionism. So, yes, I mean, the reality is there can be another world historical revolution. I mean, I think that, you know, the idea with Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, is to push

for another world historical revolution, clearly, that will bring us closer to communism. And if the problems that were, you know, theorized with Maoism are overcome, then, yeah, we could have this different ruptural moment in this chain. I mean, those are the problems. that are like put forward by cultural revolution socialism is a class society um so you can get to socialism but if you can't smash uh the the lingering bourgeois ideology then then you'll be pushed back possibly down the capitalist road so that that needs to be that that needs to be figured out in order to make a successive revolution world historical like to go further than we've gone before i mean hopefully like you know there's not much as i as i talk elsewhere in my most pessimistic view there's

There's, we look at climate change and things like that. There's also like the clock is ticking for humanity. So I would hope that another world historical revolution, if we do get there, would be the last one. Right, right, right. Because, yeah, I don't know how much longer humanity will survive with, you know, just what capitalism does. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I totally, I mean, I totally agree with that.

I very much feel that the clock is absolutely ticking. But moving on a little bit, in chapter five, of continuity and rupture in the chapters entitled a new anti-revisionism. You argue that, quote, there can be no anti-revisionist communism that is not Maoist, end quote. Can you inform listeners as to what revisionism is broadly and why Maoism is the only possible manifestation of a truly anti-revisionist communism? Yeah, okay. I mean, that statement was me actually referring, I mean, I agree with it, but just to give

it a historical context, it was referring when I said there can be no. you know, Maoism is the only anti-revisionist communism or Marxism. I was referring to one of the long-lived Marxism, Leninism statement that the rim made where they're even a little bit harsher, they say any anything, any communism that is that is pre-Mao is just revisionism. They don't write, but, so that was that. So what is revisionism then? It's, you know, it's a long-standing history.

And I've talking about revisionism in kind of the Marxist movement and not just Maoists talking about it, but, you know, other people talk about it as well, because there's, you know, the very, very famous historical moment is the revisionism that happened under the Second International with, like, Kautzky and Bernstein in charge in Germany with the, you know, the SPD, the Social Democratic Party in Germany that went revisionist and also, you know, ended up killing Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebnik and all that. So, I mean, revisionism is basically, I mean, it's important to talk about because we, when I'm talking about Maoism, I'm also talking about in Leninism, I'm talking about how like kind of revolutionary communism does get

revised, right? So what do I mean when I'm saying revisionism? And so revisionism is usually just the term talking about when what makes Marxism, Marxism as a whole, like it's core basis, and that's the theory of class struggle, right? That history and society changes through class struggle, right? When that is revised in favor of a reformist perspective, right? So it's a rejection of what makes Marxism, Marxism. So, you know, the basic historical one, would have been, you know, Bernstein and then Kautsky's position on the second international. That's, you know, the one that everyone still talks about, where Bernstein claimed that, you know, you could get socialism just through elections. Right, right. And the doctrine of class struggle was dead, right? It was just, we could just have elections and we could peacefully get, you know, the class could be, you know, the bourgeois class could be voted off the stage of history.

And obviously, Rosa Luxembourg wrote a famous response to that and, you know, Lenin and everyone else. lined up against that and rejected the Second International in that time. And I wrote my book when I was looking back over this that I was like, well, you know, everyone obviously, you know, in the communist camp, rejects the Second International, understands this as revisionism. But I might, I guess I'm wrong about that because actually just, you know, about a year ago, I shared a panel with someone that outright claimed that, you know, we needed to go back to the Second International's perspective, which was kind of shocking for me.

So there are still people that, like, actually openly think it's okay to be revisionist, I guess, right, in that way, in the historical way. So, yeah, so that's the, you know, the Bernstein, Kautsky one in the second of the nationals, the famous one. The one that Maoists tend to talk about a lot is Khrushchev's, you know, peaceful coexistence with capitalism claims. So, you know, when Khrushchev took over the Soviet Union and you had the sign of Soviet split, Khrushchev declared that, you know, you could have a peaceful coexistence with capitalism, that, you know, you didn't always have to reach it through revolution. And that was seen, again, as repeating the same doctrine of revisionism that Bernstein and Kowski repeated. So, you know, for me, I kind of think that, like, part of Marxisms, and I know I argued in that chapter, is that part of Marxism's historical development has been through a struggle between revisionism and anti-revisionism, right?

And so this is why you kind of can see, like, the struggle that Luxembourg and Lenin had against the elements of the Second International. And then, of course, I think a lot of what Leninism is emerged from that struggle against Kovsky's revisionism, right? And then, you know, China's struggle against the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which led to the sign of Soviet split, where they put forward the famous statement long-lived Marxism, Leninism. It's like a lot of the theory that Mao, you know, the moment when Mao actually starts talking about in the language of universality, as I said, is also the moment that they're struggling against the revisionism of the Communist Party, the Soviet Union. So there's this kind of dialectic of revisionism and anti-revisionism going on. Okay, but why I would say that Maoism now is the only possible anti-revisionism? I have kind of two reasons for that. Look, I see, and my position is that Maoism is, you know, the accomplishment of revolutionary communism.

It's that moment, it's the highest stage so far of revolutionary communism if we treat it seriously as a science. And so to reject it is to reject the science of class struggle, right? because it's in continuity with that. So I see it as like, if it is, if it becomes the accomplishment of the science of class struggle, then rejecting how it is developed to this point is a form of revisionism, right? It's rejecting the actual development of what makes it a science. This is actually how we got this term dogmatter revisionism,

of these people that are like, oh, let's just read everything that, you know, either Marx is or Marx and Lenin says as if they're these holy texts and anything that exists beyond that is, you know, we can't study it, right? That's kind of a dogmatism that is very opposed to seeing revolutionary communism as something that is dynamic that develops according to these specific scientific rules. So that's one point. That's a very large one I know, and that's why I spent large sections talking about that. And I'm pretty sure that some of the things that we get into later will come back to that. But also another reason that I'd say it's the only possible anti-revisionism is that more than any kind of any other tendency, like Maoism,

its history before when it was just Mao Stedong Thad and then up to its development into Maoism, it has this history of mapping out the meaning of anti-revisionism more than any other tendency. It's the one that is always mapped out what revisionism is and has actually, maybe sometimes has obsessed too much over revisionism as opposed to other tendencies. So it is at its core an anti-revisionist and a very consciously anti-revisionist, Marxist tendency. I see. And one of the ways I kind of think about revisionism and

correct me if I'm wrong here, but revisionism can kind of be seen at least one form of it as a sort of liberal deviation dressed up as communists, so it still wants to regale itself in communist sort of rhetoric and put itself in the communist tradition, but it's cynical and liberal in that it pushes towards more capitalist or liberal mindsets. Is that a fair way to think about revisionism? Yeah, I would think that's the most common form of revisionism, this kind of like this like left in form but you know right in essence where it's like this liberalism that's dressed up in like red clothing and obviously that's what you know bernstein typifies perfectly right this idea that it's just reform right you can't have it's not class

struggle anymore it's reform and i think it's important that that is the main the main tendency of revisionism but one of the reasons why i think it's important to like talk about revisionism just being as a rejection of the core doctrine of class struggle and the science of revolution is because we can all there's also i think like you know types of revisionism that may be very um revolutionary minded it may not be openly saying they reject class struggle but that's the dog matter revisionism version that i'm talking about that you know um this idea that's not being open to say to seeing the you know revolutionary science is developing and saying oh it's just this old we just have to look at like what marks and lenin said and everything they said is correct and like

using that kind of dogmatic religious way of looking at text, it kind of ignores what needs to be done in order to make class struggle. So it rejects the possibility of class struggle in another way by dogmatically clinging to old ways of thinking about it. So I mean, that's a very hard point to think about that. And it's not the main way that revisionism manifests. I think the main way it manifests is in the way that you talked about. But this other way I think is important too. And that's why I think just thinking about it as a rejection of the theory of class struggles is the best way to think about it. Yeah, whenever anybody criticizes Marxism as being dogmatic is highly ironic because it's such a fluid dynamic and inherently open-ended

sort of approach to the world. It's like if you really abide by it, it's as anti-dogmatic as you can get. But what you said in that sort of section, something that you said really hit me and I thought it was really important because in my own political development, at times, I've fallen into this sort of subconsciously. I kind of intuitively have fallen into this and you have to be aware to not fall into it, but you said that certain segments of the Marxist left fall prey to revisionism by, quote, pushing revolution beyond the horizon of a foreseeable future, end quote. Can you talk about that sort of instinct in some leftists and why it's a problem? Yeah, I mean, this is kind of a problem we definitely get at the centers of world

capitalism, right, where we have certain elements. They can always, they're always take it's not even right you have a certain elements of like freedom of speech the ability to assemble and all this kind of thing that like people are like okay so you just fall into this reformism right because it's the easiest thing to do and it's actually what we're we're taught is how change happens that's how we're like socialized to think like that in capitalism so you know you fall into these tendencies where you can say okay class revolution is what will bring us communism And you can be open about that, but instead of actually thinking about, how do I organize to bring that about, I don't want to get into that there for security reasons or something like that, just in the general pattern, you're just like, you just concentrate on doing things like reformist stuff. You'll be like, oh, let's create another big tent unity of leftists that, you know, generally falls apart because everyone hates each other.

And then, or you're like, let's just, you know, work with the union movements, you know, which is just working with the union movement. It's not, you know, let's just hope that things will develop spontaneously, that they'll, you know, that, you know, this is the kind of the whole the hell draper socialism from below thing that I critique, which has become popular a lot recently, especially in the circles Ryan in Toronto is this idea, well, you know what, it's like, you know, a party and revolution is important, but those will just come about spontaneously through the labor movement. So we just need to, you know, agitate or something like that. And that just keeps pushing the, you know, the necessity of making revolution further and further along. And the same. it's the same practices just keep repeating themselves over and over and over again. So, yeah, you can fall into that very easily. Definitely. And I would urge listeners to be aware of that in themselves, because, like, as you say, we are very much conditioned to do it. And when we're not being sort of vigilant and aware of our own instincts and our own motivations at the bottom of things, sometimes we can just easily drift to sleep and fall into that direction. One thing I really respect about Maoism and especially, you know, through your work, is Maoism just clear-eyed focus on revolution and militant

and this continual call to make revolution now, that it's not something that's in the distant future. It's happening now and we need to act now and push as hard as we can in that direction. So I find that really refreshing. Now, we've talked a little bit throughout this interview so far about science, about Marxism as a science. And throughout your book, you refer to MLM as a revolutionary science

and draw really interesting analogies between the said revolutionary science of Marxism and the hard science of physics. But a lot of non-Marxists and even some non-Leninist Marxists, leftists of all sorts, have a very difficult time understanding how Marxism is a science. A lot of people just kind of recoil at that very concept. Can you flesh that out for our listeners and sort of make an argument for why Marxism is and should be viewed as a science?

Yeah, part of like my motivation for writing this book, and the kernel of that thought appeared a bit in the communist necessity was to re-sense, this kind of understanding of historical materialism or Marxism as a science. So, like, it's using the term science to refer to anything other than the hard sciences now, it's no longer on vogue, and that's why I think people have been taught to think about sciences if it's just like physics, chemistry, biology, right? And this is actually a much more recent, contemporary way of thinking about things from what was understood as a science in the rise of the new sciences, right?

And so it's, you know, when people started actually conceptualizing what science meant in kind of the, in the period of modernity and the enlightenment, which we can talk about later, but when they were actually conceptualizing that, they had a very different definition of science and one that actually explains how, you know, chemistry, biology, and physics are sciences other than just saying they're just sciences because, right? So I think it's important to reclaim the term or in the larger sense, I think if we don't recall, claim it. And this is one of the things I've argued, not just in that book, but elsewhere and with people and some part of like something that for a long time in the last, maybe in the last six or seven years has like been something that I thought is very important is that if we, if we don't reclaim that term, then we can't really make sense of what Marxism is, right? So like I know there are some Marxism, Marxists, for example, who don't like using that term. And, but they don't like using it at the same time, they still want to claim that historical materialism is the best theory, right? And so for me, I'm saying it's like, what makes it the best theory? On what standard

can you say it's better than anything else? And the fact is, the way they describe it is they're actually describing it in the way you would describe a science, but they just don't want to use the word. So I'm like, okay, fine, let's use the word and we can actually theorize what it means to think about it as a science, right? And as soon as we start theorizing what it means to be a science, instead of describing it like a science, without describing it like a science and hedging our terms, then we can think it better, right? So, you know, for me, this reclaiming, I want to reclaim a general definition of science with which marks and angles were familiar with. Because when they called it a science, they were thinking about it in this

enlightenment definitions of science. And so that kind of definitions of science has these following characteristics. A science is that which demystifies the world, right? It strips the world of kind of the sacred mystified thing and is able to look at things in a materialist sense, right? And part of this is explaining natural phenomena according to natural processes. And in all the sciences back then, you would have these different definitions of explaining natural phenomena according to natural processes based on the different sciences. So people agree, not just Marx and Engels,

but even like bourgeois, people that were interested in the new sciences would say that you can have such a thing as a social science. What would a social science be? Well, unlike biology, which tries to explain biological phenomena according to biological processes, instead of say supernatural process or something else, a social science would explain society and history

according to social and historical process. right that's what it would do this understanding was was very was very common in the time they're writing and it isn't something that is like they're not they're not trying to think about say the way they think about social historical phenomena in the same way that a physicist does they're not ascribing in according to the language of physics although they might use some analogies they're trying to build its own scientific language right and in doing this uh you would you would theorize general laws of motion right so marks and angles come up with this general laws of motion of history and society right and that can be reduced to the the concept of class struggle or class revolution and then you know more important to this science generates truth procedures right you can speak in this language of truth truth is a process though not as this absolute religious kind of sense right where it's opened up to the future that it's something in development just as we understand say the the discoveries of say physics are such that they change they're open to the future right the Einstein's paradigm is very different than the newtons in the way that gravity was conceptualized but it's still built on that and you know as i say ruptured from it as well but this

idea of a truth procedure, like a truth in development. And so basically, like any science, for me, I claim that historical materialism, it establishes universals that are applicable in every context, but under the rule of situated particularities. What do I mean by this? Well, I mean, if you think about math is a science, right? The one plus one equals two, it's universal. It's applicable everywhere, that concept, but of course it has different particularities, right? It appears in different languages, different symbols, but the concept is universally applicable. one plus one equals two is the same anywhere you put it it just might be like registered differently with a different notation so like any science too i think historical materialism is testable but it's laboratory so this also rejects karl popper's view like karl popper tried to claim that historical materialism wasn't a science because it's not falsifiable yeah it's conspiracy theory thing but i mean you know his analysis and his understanding of historical materialism was really driven by cold war ideology and complete bullshit because it is testable, right?

But its laboratory is different. It's laboratories based on its general law of motion, which is class struggle, so it's laboratory our revolutions. So once we start thinking of historical materialism as a science, my claim is that we can understand how it develops. And my main argument in that book, of course, is that if we understand that, that should lead us to Marxism, Leninism, Maoism. Very well said.

I think that's one of the more articulate and clear-eyed sort of definitions that I've personally heard, and I hope people really think about that because I think it's important, and it's a really useful way of thinking about Marxism. But let's go ahead and move on, because there are Maoist movements happening now. There's robust Maoist movements in the Philippines and India and Afghanistan, among others. Why do you think Maoism has been and continues to be so relevant and inspiring to so many people living on the global periphery of capital?

What does Maoism specifically offer to people in countries who have been victimized by colonial and imperial powers throughout history? Yeah, I think maybe it's important to answer that question. I kind of want to just flip it on its head a little bit and point out to begin with that revolutionary movements in the global peripheries have always been the most advanced, right? And this goes back to even Lenin saying that revolution tends to happen with the most frequency at the weakest links. And people like Samiraman would say this is because they can see through the contradictions better. So they understand that, you know, revolutionary communism is going to benefit them more than people who, you know, are, you know, are living off of the benefits of imperialist super exploitation, right? So it's not Maoism, I'd say, per se, that is an issue for these movements, but revolutionary communism, right?

But in carrying, but these movements, since they're the ones that they carried forward the struggle for revolutionary communism, like you mentioned the Philippines, you mentioned India, these have long histories of, like, a revolutionary movement that has gone through different, changes to get to become the Maoist movement that it is today. So in carrying forward revolutionary communism, Marxism, Leninism, Maoism was encountered and theorized in the global peripheries first, right? That's where it was theorized. So it's like revolutionary communism is what they understand. Maoism is what they developed out of it, right? It's like Maoism is a theory something that actually comes from this experience of revolutions in the global peripheries struggling, right? So, you know, and this of course goes back to me claiming that

revolutionary science develops through actual revolutions. So what does, the big question is what does revolutionary communism bring to the movements and the peripheries? Well, definitely freedom from imperialism, from the exploitation that they, the super exploitation they experience more than we do. And Maoism is the word it goes by because that is what they have developed through their revolutionary communist struggles. Yeah, absolutely. Super interesting. And I do want to have future episodes where we dive into these movements because they're happening now and they're happening in huge you know places like India the fate and future of India is something that's important to the entire world and you have

this large robust Maoist movement happening right there and it's like we should pay attention to that we should focus on that but but that being said I know you have a lot of experience in colonial studies you have said that you've read france fanon's wretched of the earth several times if I'm not mistaken colonial and post-colonial studies aren't something I think a lot in modern leftists think about, particularly those here in the imperialist centers. Could you say a few words about the value these kinds of texts have for modern revolutionaries and why we should continue to study them? Yeah, I mean, actually, like, my doctoral dissertation was on kind of a philosophical assessment of anti-colonial theory and its relevance to, you know, anti-colonial movements and

just revolutionary theory now. That's why I would have read Franz Fanon's, in fact, I've read, I'd like, you know, I, for a while I was like, I kind of, you know, had to become a bit of a fanon expert because that's what I was doing a lot of my work on. So, yeah, I'm very familiar with that. But it's actually, interestingly enough, my, my experience of writing that thesis that led me towards Maoism over the years. So, so, like, why would I say that? I mean, I think a lot of it is that, you know, I see, to begin with, I don't see Phenon as a post-colonial theorist, right?

I see him as an anti-colonial theorist. I think it's important to put on, right? And I think his work intersects with Marxism, Leninism, Maoism very well. I mean, this may be my own experience, but the reason I actually got drawn to, like, studying Mao was because of reading Phenon and reading people talking about Phenon and mentioning Mao and all this kind of stuff. So like old 60s text about that, right? So kind of like led me there. So like, Wretched of the Earth kind of emerged, was written in a class struggle. And that class struggle, you know, it's in Algeria.

which is a, you know, revolutionary. It was a national struggle for national self-determination, but it was still a class struggle, right? It's when the revolutionary experience of China was something that everyone would have been familiar with there. And, you know, that revolutionary experience of China was a beacon to numerous anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements worldwide.

I mean, around, I think, way, way back at the conference, I can't remember I did present a paper on the connection between Phenon's understanding and Mao's understanding of things, both things that were the same and both things that diverged and found a lot of interesting points of intersection. But in any case, I think the reason I would say,

like, you know, and I do think it's important to read post-colonial theory. I mean, you know, Edward Saeed was very important in the development of my thought before I was a Marxist, and I still think, you know, his work is important despite some things, qualifications I have about some of the anti-Marxist stuff, he says, in it. Right. In general, I think, you know, all radical anti-imperialist theories are worth studying, right? and worth learning from, even if some of them might possess errors,

you know, especially work that radically... So it's, you know, they might possess errors, I say this, because, you know, we should be reading all this stuff just because all, you know, in the Marxist milieu, it's like, like, Mao read all the stuff that he didn't disagree with this, still was, like, radical. Like, Lennon read all that stuff. Marx and Engels read all these things as well, right?

They engaged with this material, right? And it's important to engage it, because you can always learn things that are, even if you don't agree with some of the aspects, you can learn about things that are, you know, correct that can develop your own theoretical understanding of the world. So, you know, work that radically de-centers the global metropoles is very important to read, right? It's kind of the work that comes from the wretched of the earth or people have a certain

different perspective of a subjectivity that, you know, goes against the grain of imperialist ideology. You know, and that being said, there is post-colonial theory that I don't think is very good. Of course. That I don't think that we can gain anything from, right? I kind of see, you know, there's, like, I'd say this is homie baba, right? Like, homie baba is like one of those people that I feel that when you read his work, he treats settler colonialism and imperialism as if they don't exist or they only,

they existed in the past, right? Like he really takes that post to heart, and that's a really wrong way of thinking about things. And it's interesting to note that he didn't have a problem with the invasion of Afghanistan. So kind of that way of thinking is definitely not going to teach us something. Other post-colonial theory is, you know, is primarily cultural. I think Spivak has this aspect, is this kind of primarily cultural aspect of understanding colonialism and imperialism. I understand this primarily cultural. So I think the tendency of denying these things are real or treating them as primarily culture should be combated.

And I think Phenon is useful in combating this, because Phelon does talk about, you know, colonialism being very real and materialism being very real and materialism. But, you know, a lot of post-colonial theory has a lot of important stuff to say, but its foundations are very hampered by post-modernism, and that's important to understand. Definitely. And we'll get into post-modernism in a bit because I think it's important to realize that. You know, the word gets thrown around a lot, but that's a couple questions away. The next question I want to ask is about anarchism. Many of us in the process of developing politically, you know, we embrace different tendencies at different times throughout our development. If I'm not mistaken, you used to be an anarchist a long time ago. And in your article, misconceptions about Maoism, you talk about your willingness to work with anarchists and how you applaud anarchists for, quote, keeping militancy alive. Can you talk about your thoughts on anarchism today?

What do you appreciate about it? And what do you criticize in it? Well, I mean, anarchism, yeah, I used to define as an anarchist. I mean, that's always a funny thing. It's like, back then it'd be like, oh, I don't want to use those labels because that's authoritarian man. But, I mean, I was reading anarchist theory, and the people I was reading were inspired by that. in, you know, just like beginning my undergrad. And, you know, I went to, I went to the FTAA summit in Quebec City, you know,

around the same does just right after the Seattle one where, you know, there's a massive convergence and, you know, it was tear gas by the pigs and all that kind of stuff with my affinity group and all that. So, you know, and it's like I got that experience of like, of like, of struggle, of kind of like militancy, right, of being, of learning a kind of in the street militancy and willingness to fight with the cops was something that, you know, I did, I learned from, and I appreciated that, as opposed to it always seemed to me at that time. And that, you know, a lot of the, what I call the revisionist communist groups, they would

like always just, you know, march in the peaceful demonstrations. They get mad. They would call any kind of, like, you know, any kind of militancy that was not just marching around in a parade, you know, they would, they would claim was an ultra-left deviation, and then they would make up conspiracy theories about how we were. all cops and things like that. Just like this ludicrous stuff, right? They still say this shit, right?

I mean, you know, as pointed out, you know, cops can be agent provocateurs, but there's a lot of cops that actually in movements have been shown that they try to get the movements not to be militant as well. So you've both edges happening. So both happen. So, yeah, I appreciate the militancy of anarchism at the centers of capitalism. I want to be clear that I'm about the centers of capitalism. I talk about a preserving militancy because revolutionary communism in the peripheries has been

very, very militant, right? It's like here when you have this, I think that just the strength of revisionism, the strength of the way communism has fallen to that revisionism in the centers. And that has led to generally amongst a lot of, you know, mainstream Marxist groups, this refusal to be militant where anarchists really pushed forward this militancy in the 90s, right? Which is important. And I learned a lot from. And that's why, like, you know, for organization work I do with. like my my comrades we also like you know we do we think it's important to be in coalitions with anarchists um who are into that kind of direct class struggle stuff and willing to struggle ideologically

with them but like on the ground being coalitions um so you know so that that kind of militancy i feel was lost by a lot of socialist movements here and i also appreciate kind of um the decentralization to a certain extent right because i still believe in democratic centralism all these things that I eventually picked up because of becoming a Marxist. But this idea that you can have this diffuseness, this willingness to experiment with this rejection of authoritarianism, what I would call now as a Maoist a rejection of commandism. And I feel that, you know, there's been a lot of good direct action work done by people that identify primarily as anarchists that, you know, I've learned a lot from.

One of the reasons I, though, moved away from it is because I felt that it just was theoretically impoverished. Like it didn't answer the questions I felt needed to be answered, right? And that I, when I started exploring in, you know, after my undergrad through my MA through my PhD, but outside of that, just my experience in the struggle, my experience on the streets, it just there was just, it just couldn't account for what I felt needed to be accounting for. And of course, for all their claims that, you know, Marxists were authoritarian and all this, there, there was this ugly hypocritical side I found to like pretty much every bar, like anarchists kind of convergence I was involved in, right? There was this,

authoritarian anti-authoritarianism do you know what i mean yeah yeah it's like this idea where they be oh we don't we don't you know it's like we don't want you know bosses we don't want the structure of any kind of like decision-making thing it's all based on consensus but always be like the dude with the loudest mouth would be calling the shots and everyone would see him as a superstar right and it's like it was this kind of it was and it was definitely authoritarian but always be like no i'm not being authoritarian i'm just you know just being me right and uh and of course there's a dogmatism that would be connected claim they're anti-dogmatic but they'd be so into these dogmatic claims about Marxism, a lot of them inherited from like the Cold War ideology

and this claim that they're not sectarian, but there's some that have been so sectarian that refuse to work with anything that is a Marxist organization. See them primarily as enemies because of this dogmatic claims they've made and have been very, very sectarian about it. So, I mean, that's the kind of ugly, hypocritical side of it too. But generally, I think the structure provided by revolutionary communism, the stuff I talked about the scientific development of theory, That's like what led me out of anarchism towards what, you know, and I think maybe the reason I'm a Maoist is because of the stuff about Maoism that I feel preserves what I thought was good about anarchism.

Right. That's super interesting. And I know in my sort of experience organizing, and I have lots of comrades from different tendencies, Maoist and anarchists do kind of seem to come together organically around certain goals and projects, and they work together pretty easily, at least that I've seen in my experience.

I know that the notion of certain anarchists, being very hyper sectarian. I've had many, many episodes on anarchism and I have close comrades that are anarchists that I organize with that I would take a bullet for honestly. But there is a certain subsection of them, especially the ones that are very much online that seem to be very dogmatic about how they view any sort of Marxism or any non-anarchist form of socialism. And I remember we did an episode just on Marxist-Leninism and we cover all tendencies. And so we had obviously tendency episode on Leninism, and just because I did an episode on them, I had, you know, a certain amount of anarchists, just hating on the show, calling me a tankie, dropping off

Patreon, refusing to, refusing to listen to Rev. Left Radio anymore, just for the gall to have a Leninist on. So, I mean, I just, I really, that stuff is just, it just weighs on me. It just is so, it gives me a headache. But again, that's not all anarchist, of course. Yeah, I know. And I mean, it's obviously dogmatism, I think. is a problem that is, you know, that the left as a whole has different, like, it's in Marxism too, right? For sure, for sure. And there's reasons why it manifests, and I just as there's reasons why revisionism manifests.

I think it's much easier to be a dogmatist and not think you are one than it is to, like, be critical, right? Because we're taught, I think, by capitalism since we're born to just, like, not be critical in that kind of way, right? Definitely. So, yeah, I understand that. But I mean, hopefully me being on here is not going to get you in trouble with anarchists, those anarchists.

We'll see. We'll see. But let's go ahead and move on. A couple more questions. And these last couple questions really came out of your essay. And I know I'm praising your work throughout this. And I've been praising it on Twitter a lot because I find it so fucking useful. But your essay, radiating disaster triumphant, you talk about the enlightenment,

you talk about postmodernism, and you talk about how leftists should think of the enlightenment. And this is really timely because a recent crop of so-called liberal intellectuals, like, you know, Stephen Pinker, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, etc. They make a lot out of the Enlightenment, and they think about liberalism or their centrism as carrying on the values of the Enlightenment against Marxist and other non-liberal movements. How should communists think about the Enlightenment, and to what degree are we inheritors of it? Yeah, I mean, this is a great question.

It kind of also follows pretty closely to what I was talking about the definition of science. And, you know, I feel if these people would actually think about what the Enlightenment thinkers were arguing about back. then and how they're thinking about the world, they would come off with a different perspective. I mean, I think someone like Peterson, for example, is, despite his claim of being in the, you know, tradition of the Enlightenment, he's a very anti-enlightment thinker, right? He likes to imagine that he's part of the Enlightenment. He'll say all this stuff. But, I mean, he studies, like, Jungian psychology, which is, like, completely, like, occulting.

It's completely not what the Enlightenment is about. And he makes these claims that are just anti-scientific. It's that, and obviously, this claim that, you know, Marxism, which was an expression, I mean, you have to, even if you, like, this is the one thing, is like, if you're a serious scholar of the Enlightenment, and every serious historian of the Enlightenment, even if they're an anti-Marxist, will admit Marxism was shared something of the Enlightenment. It came out of the Enlightenment thinking. They'll say it's the bad part of it or something, right? But you'll still admit it. The moment that you suddenly say something

that, like, you can make this claim about Marxism and postmodernism being the same, is the moment that you don't understand what Marxism is or what the Enlightenment was. So, you know, I just want to get that Peterson comment right out of the gate because, you know, I definitely see him as an anti-enlightment thinker. And I feel that actual enlightenment thinkers would have hated him, even ones that would have been antagonistic towards what Marxism would become. But, you know, how should we think about it then, right? Like, I think that Marxism is, you know, and one of the things that I argued in that essay, but is that it's the most radical expression of the Enlightenment in that, and, you know, I quoted a man here too, which I quoted him earlier, that he uses this term to talk about,

you know, Marxism as a modernity. critical of modernity or elsewhere, Enlightenment thought critical of the Enlightenment as that possibility, right? So, you know, going back to kind of the things I said about science, right, the Enlightenment in general, it's where the new sciences arose, right? So its proposition was it wanted to demystify the world, right? You know, and use that claim. That, let's talk about, you know, natural phenomena according to natural causes instead of like saying, you know, a flood is caused by God or something like that. And it was, it was trying to do that. And that's, you know, that very important new scientific kind of way of thinking about things, you know,

is core to Enlightenment thought. But at the same time, as I pointed out, the Enlightenment, it emerged, you know, along with the emergence of capitalism. And so its core logic was also determined by bourgeois logic. So the claims of mastery, property, all these kinds of things were part of the way that it claimed to demystify the world, which led to a remistification of the world according to, like, bourgeois social relations, right? So let's see the world in terms of this very capitalist way of doing things and colonialist way of doing things. Actually, it was interesting that

like right before you called me, one of my friends and colleagues, Jude Welburn, he sent me this, you know, the proofs of this essay he has coming out in some journal, if which journal it was, I would like to plug it, but I can't remember. But the essay itself was called like Empire and Utopia. And he makes, it's about Francis Bacon. He's actually making a very similar argument in it about the way Francis Bacon understood enlightenment and modernity and the way he spoke about it was this language

of like colonizing the new world and the language of like capitalist property relations and he traced that out very strongly in that essay I wish I'd read it before I wrote my essay because I would have cited it but it was you know you can see this running up through like all the main enlightenment thinkers just how they think about sciences and modernity

really important things that contribute to humanity but they think about it in terms of like mastery and bourgeois social relations. So I see Marx then being the most radical expression because what Marxism is doing is pushing for a full demystification, right? It's pushing for full, and of course it gets it wrong at different times and things like that, but its whole push is to demystify all the social relations and everything like that, right? So yeah, I see it as a modernity, critical of modernity, and, you know, the most radical expression of the Enlightenment that is able to criticize those aspects of the Enlightenment that, you know,

were connected to, you know, capitalism. Right. Yeah, and I think the notion that the original enlightenment was out to demystify nature, to demystify the sort of supernatural fog that people had with how they interpreted the natural world is really interesting. But your call and I think other people's call that you cite in your paper about demystifying social relations, I really want to emphasize that. And one way, one example that I think we can give to kind of think about what that would look

like or what the failure to demystify those relations look like. Like the Sam Harris new atheist sort of anti-religion, like the new atheist anti-theism that crops up, it's very much rooted in imperial and bourgeois values. And it just sort of takes them on board as assumptions and premises. And they're sort of, for the sort of people that claim to be so rational and so so into critical thinking, they don't analyze their own assumptions. They carry so much on board sort of instinctively. and there's a whole bunch of imperial and social relations that they continue to help mystify. They help kind of keep it in the closet, and they serve as sort of apologists or advocate for, you know, bourgeois values and imperialism broadly. So I think that's a good way to think about what liberal centrists who claim the Enlightenment get wrong.

Definitely, definitely. So the last question, I guess, would be about postmodernism. And if I'm not mistaken, you framed postmodernism as, at least in part, a reaction to Marxism. In what ways is postmodernism a reaction to Marxism? And what, if anything, can Marxists learn from postmodernism, in your opinion? Okay, I mean, there's a lot. This is a big question, too, because it's reactive in many different ways, you know, despite what someone like Jordan Peterson would have us believe.

So I think, you know, one of the most, you know, after I wrote continuity rupture years after, there was like an article that was published that was even kind of proved a much more concrete reaction in the popularity of postmodernist theory to Marxism than like, you know, I would have, I would have thought about at that time. And that's because of declassified CIA documents. I don't know if you, did you see this? It was in a philosophy magazine where they found out that the translations of people like Foucault and Derrador into English was actually pushed by the CIA. Oh yeah, I did see that. I did see that. And it's like, yeah, this is not a conspiracy theory. they actually have it's like the documents exist this was in a major journal when they wrote about it

and they actually had interviews with some of the people that were connected to it being like yeah that's what we did and what they were saying with the former CIA people that were interviewed were saying they're like look you know obviously people like buco and derda they would have been critical of us as well but um we just didn't want people in radical theory to be talking about Marxism anymore so this stuff is you know doesn't talk about it and it's really critical of it too and so this explains why you know you have such an industry of Foucault translation in the English language where Foucault is important in France, but even as people pointed out, he wasn't the most important thinker in France at his time, and it wasn't even as popular as he was in the English world.

So in this way, it's kind of got caught on through that. So that's kind of the level of real politic about thinking about it as a reaction. But, I mean, I want to think about it maybe the way that, you know, because someone like Foucault, you know, they did this behind his back. It's like Foucault would have been, you know, horrified if you thought of the CIA was, you know, translating his work and like pushing his stuff right um but i mean his work and the work of other people like leotard and derrida you know get put under the rubric of postmodernism even though they all wouldn't have been capable of using it but now we you know we use that as a term to refer to

a lot of them um is you know the way i kind of see the way they would have thought about this is that you know because of the collapse of the eastern block that you know was happening and you know eventually the collapse of the eastern block but before that you know you had the rise of roaders in China, Marxism temporarily retreating, at least in the imperialist metropoles, and the emergence of the end of history discourse starts becoming prevalent. This is kind of everything that will come to typify postmodernism, or these tendencies are starting to appear when those postmodernists are writing. And so I kind of see it as the result, like postmodern thinking.

I mean, there's good things to get out of postmodernism, like some of the stuff Foucault writes about about how, you know, the history of prisons or history of madness, there's good things. But underneath its foundation, the way it kind of looks at reality, it is the result of, or maybe not the results, but it's like very influenced and parallel to kind of that end of history discourse, right? The idea that, you know, capitalism is the end of history because it, you know, it doesn't, it's not happy with any other kind of resistance that can challenge capitalism, any other molar totalizing resistance that sees that as just as murderous.

It's almost like there's, you know, they wouldn't, people like Foucault would never want to define himself as nihilism. You can see that nihilism or some level of resentment kind of comes out of that, right? So postmodernism I see is, you know, connected to this end of history discourse. It tries to account for things Marxism could not account for when it was in retreat. I mean, that's important, too. Like, it does provide some things or some signals where it tries to account for things that Marxism was unable to theorize when it's in retreat. But, you know, at its foundations, it's a reflection of, of, you know, what Jameson would have said, you know, like late capitalism, right?

It's a very late capitalism way of thinking. So, you know, in a book I have coming out in August that I actually co-wrote with a fiction author, whose work I really like, Benjamin and Sri Danku, that's kind of half fiction, half nonfiction. I write the nonfiction. She writes the fiction. It's a book's called Methods Devour Themselves. But I have one section in there where I talk about this capitalist imaginary that results in kind of the atrophy of our thought, how our thought is kind of atrophied

under this end of history discourse. And I think postmodernism and its foundations is a reflection of that kind of atrophied thought and the ability to not want to imagine kind of counter or to imagine any kind of counterclaim to capitalism as equally murderous and equally bad and all that.

Anyhow, but on the plus side, I think there's good anti-systemic gestures in postmodern theory that you can like parse out from its problematic foundations. Again, what I said before, it's like I think that radical anti-capitalist theory of all types should be studied by everyone, right? I mean, in Maoists, and I think it's like, you know, it's dogmatism to not study it. But, I mean, you can study it critically, get things from it and realize what's wrong with it. I mean, Marx did that with the bourgeois theorist of his time as well.

He pulled things from Adam Smith and from Ricardo as much as dismissing what their foundations were, right? So, you know, I can think of many examples, but I think one I think would be, It's very important now, it's kind of like, you know, Judith Butler's work on gender. It's something, you know, anyone who wants to fully develop a materialist conception of gender should look at, right? I mean, obviously the foundations of a historical materialist account for these questions of, like, the trans-sist question, the trans versus cis questions and understanding what transgender means in a historical materialist way and coming up with a theory of that is something I think historical materialism really needs to encounter because of a lot of, you know, the problems of transphobia that exist within, say, certain spheres of the old Marxist left, right? And I think, you know, Butler's work is useful for beginning to think through that. And I can think of other examples in other areas, too, just like, you know,

Saeed was useful for me and thinking through Orientalism. It led me to think about it differently. It led me to different writers and different readers, but it was definitely an important text. Right. And, yeah, the Foucault and Derridae program to translate them into English, we'll post a link to that on Twitter when we post this episode, because I think it's really interesting to study. Did you have anything else that you wanted to say about postmodernism before we wrap up? No, I mean, I think it's just like what I would say is that, you know, ultimately postmodernism is

idealist, right? It's hampered by these idealist foundations. It even talks about power in this like idealist sense, right? Like it doesn't, it's unbound. It exists. It's almost trans-historical. And, you know, and the general suspicion it has of totalizing narratives means that it doesn't really produce a useful praxis.

Right. Absolutely. Before I ask you about where people can find you in your work, this is a personal question, but I think listeners might find this valuable too. If I was going to try to find a book on the history of the Chinese Revolution that is really well written and from a left-wing perspective that you would recommend, anything off the top of your head that you can point people to learn about that history? Oh, I mean, there's a number of them. I think there's a number of different ones, and they're all good for different reasons, right, because of when they are written. So I think, you know, Han Suyans, she has a two-parters. Like, there's the first part is called Morning Deluge,

and that is kind of the early part that, you know, is where, you know, it's about the up to the end of the Yanan period. And then there's wind in the tower that she writes, which is about the Cultural Revolution period. So they're companion pieces, right? So her work is good. I mean, one of the problems I have heard is that it's like such a, like her work on the Cultural Revolution is really good until the end where,

because it's written, she writes it kind of just in the early 70s. So she actually thinks that, you know, that Deng Chou Peng is, you know, carrying on Mao's legacy. But so did a lot of other people at that time, and it led to all these splits in the left. So she wouldn't have been any different at that time than other people. I think generally the work of William Hinton is very good. He's written a whole bunch of different things in different periods of, like, China's history. Again, his view, at one point he actually did also thought that Deng was correct,

but he switched later on, right, when he realized it was going on. So there was that, Hinton being one. And there's a whole bunch of others that will come to me as soon as I'm finished this interview. Of course, yeah, that always happens. So that's what I'm going to say there. Okay. Thank you so much for coming on, Josh. I really enjoy your work.

Your new book coming out that you mentioned, methods devour themselves. When that comes out, you know, I'll be on the lookout for it and we'll push it out. And maybe we can have you back on to discuss some of the ideas in that book because I really find your work valuable. Can you please let listeners know where they can find you. online and where they can find your work? Okay, I mean, you can find me online. I have a blog. I used to be much more frequent in posting,

but I just don't have as much time anymore. So the blog is, like my name, move forward, Paul. dot blogspot.com or whatever that one is. I mean, if you just check MLM Mahem is the name of the blog, MLM Mayhem, so you check that out. And there's links on there to like my work.

But, you know, my work, I have, I have, like, three books published and, you know, a fourth one coming out. So my first and third book, and that's the communist necessity is my first book. My third book is Austerity Apparatus. They're published by Chris Blebedab, a radical press running of Montreal that puts out Sakai Settlers and the books on Red Army faction and a whole bunch of stuff. So that's, if you just look up, I think it's left-wingbooks.org or something like that, is there is where you can buy books

directly from them. And then my other book that's published Continued Re rupture that we've been talking a lot about, that's available through Zero Books. So, I mean, you can find it, you can order it from your bookstores or from Amazon,

or you can do that my other books too, but also just check out the Zero Books website for that. And that's also where my fourth book Methods Devour themselves that I co-authored with Benjamin and Sridanku, that's going to be coming out in August. That's also by Zero.

Awesome. All right. We will post as many of those links as we can in our Twitter feed and our Facebook feed when we post this episode. Thanks again, Josh, for coming on. It's been an absolute honor to be able to speak with you. Keep up the good work and good luck on your strike.

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