Rev Left Radio - Debating Scientific Socialism (Ft. Srsly Wrong & Alyson Escalante)

Episode Date: May 25, 2019

Shawn and Aaron from Srsly Wrong join Breht and Alyson Escalante for a comradely debate and dialogue concerning Scientific Socialism.  Check out Srsly Wrong here: @SrslyWrong https://srslywrong.com https://www.patreon.com/srslywrong More From Alyson here: @Alysonesque https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB2Cbir6ac8 https://failingthatinvent.home.blog   Outro Music: Private Lawns by Angus and Julia Stone ----------- Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical.  Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com --------------- Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Red Menace (hosted by Breht and Alyson Escalante): Twitter: @Red_Menace_Pod Audio: http://redmenace.libsyn.com  Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKdxX5eqQyk&t=144s Black Banner Magic (Season 2) Twitter: @blackbannerpod http://blackbannermagic.libsyn.com Hammer and Camera (The communist Siskel and Ebert):  Twitter: @HammerCamera http://hammercamera.libsyn.com Other Members of the Rev Left Radio Federation include: Coffee With Comrades: https://www.patreon.com/coffeewithcomrades Left Page: https://www.patreon.com/leftpage Little Red School House: http://littleredschoolhouse.libsyn.com ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. You can support the show financially by: Becoming a Patreon supporter (and receive access to bonus content including the Rev Left book club) here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio - OR - making a one-time donation to the Rev Left Radio team here: paypal.me/revleft Get Rev Left Radio Merch (and genuinely support the show by doing so) here: https://www.teezily.com/stores/revleftradio --------------- This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Today's episode of revolutionary left radio is proudly brought to you by an exciting new leftist tendency, Marxism, Leninism, Mr. Rogers thought. Now, this tendency, of course, we start with Marx. Marx put socialism on a scientific foundation. From there, we build with the works of Lenin, who more thoroughly developed a theory of revolution. and state power, and to round it all off, of course, the contribution of Mr. Fred Rogers in how to build movements and societies where people feel like they belong, like they're esteemed and useful, that people want to be a part of. Well, neighbor, although me and you have some deep differences on theory and practice and even interpretations of certain historical events, I just want to let you know that I think we're going to be successful and we're going to win world revolution towards a much better

society. And I want you to know that I think you'll be there with us and you belong by our side. Oh, wow. You're imagining me there along with you in the end. We're going to pull it off together. It's going to be hard work, but we can do it. I'll be there with you. I'll be, yeah. Wow. Wow. That's like, this just hit me really hard. That's like, it's beautiful. Thank you. Thank you so much. We can do this. Marxism, Leninism, Mr. Rogers thought, a new development in scientific socialism. It all starts with us saying, we're going to win, and you'll be there too. All right. Now, today we have on three different guests, Sean and Aaron from Seriously Wrong,

and Alison Escalante, my co-host from Red Menace. This is a big discussion, and I think a lot of people listening to this episode probably are familiar, at least somewhat, with everybody in this conversation, but just to be extra sure, Sean, would you like to start introducing yourself and then hand it off to Aaron, maybe say a little bit about Seriously Wrong, and then I'll toss it to Allison to introduce herself? Sure, yeah, yeah. Thanks for having us on the show. My name's Sean. I'm one of the co-hosts of Seriously Wrong. We're a comedy and revolutionary politics podcast.

Our tendency is heavily influenced by social ecology, utopianism, post-scarcity anarchism, although we like to sort of pick and choose little elements from various ideologies. Yeah, it's great to be here on the show today. Absolutely, Aaron? Yeah, Aaron also co-hosts Seriously Wrong. I don't have a lot to say to introduce myself similar to what Sean said and also just like, Really thank you so much for having us on the show, Brett. I think your podcast is one of the most valuable resources in the left media sphere today. And I always appreciate that you're willing to have us on.

Oh, yeah. And just to say, I love the wrong boys. I always look forward to having a conversation with Sean and Aaron. So this is going to be really fun. And I'm always happy to have you on and to come on your show. I think it's really cool what we've been doing together and collabing together. Alison, would you like to introduce yourself? totally yeah so i'm alison uh like brett said we are co-hosts on red menace podcast which i guess is kind of like an internet marxist linensist book club

would be one way to kind of look at that uh and you know i'm really excited about this because on that show especially i think we talk about science and scientific socialism quite a lot and it's very easy for brett and i to have that conversation without a dissenting voice so to get to come together and have a discussion with people who see it differently i think is going to be really good and hopefully really productive and challenging for for all sides of this. Yeah, absolutely. And for those who don't know, Red Menace is we had three episodes out, and our fourth one is coming out in the next week or so. And then with Seriously Wrong, before we get into the discussion, do you want to touch a little bit on your Revolution Series and me coming on that show and what that's about really quick,

just so people know? Yeah, so we've started a series that we're calling the Revolution Series, and the majority of the episodes in the Revolution Series are patrons-only, and what we're doing is sort of doing a review of, different historical revolutions, doing an analysis of them, and trying to take lessons from them that we can apply to today, and also sort of come up with a generalized theory of revolution that will help in aiding us from moving from this society to the next, winning that inevitable, glorious worldwide revolution that liberates everyone and ushers in an era of post-scarcity,

total abundance, where everyone's taken care of, and so on and so on. So we started off by doing a little sort of brainstorm on different ideas around revolution that trying to find like interesting different angles on revolution that we hadn't heard before, did a study of the French Revolution first, and we've got a recent episode where Brett came on the show to discuss how sort of the Marxist-Leninist approach to revolution is conceived, and we had a really interesting and productive discussion on that. As coming from a different tendency, we had some disagreements, but it was a really, really fun conversation.

Yeah, exactly. It was a blast, and I really recommend people go check out that revolution series. I know it's something that you're primarily doing to give back to your patrons, but there's so much good stuff in there. It's genuinely hilarious, genuinely informative, and your money goes to support, you know, two wonderful comrades doing a lot of important educational work. So definitely go check that out. I was just going to say, there is an episode that you can check out that's not behind the paywall.

It's called Running and Hiding as a Revolutionary Act. Yeah, yeah. It's basically, it's part of the Revolution series in a sense. And it's just emphasizing the role that Running and Hiding has played. in historical revolutions and sort of playing with that idea because you think of revolution as this conflict, this like glorious conflict, but also a big part of revolution is just no one went to fold them and one to run away. Exactly.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Obviously, I don't think anybody else is putting out content quite like that. But it's super fun, super interesting. Definitely go check that out. But we are here today to tackle a very difficult, complex. and I think a lot of people have interest in this topic, even if they might have a lot of questions and concerns about it still, which is Marxism as a science.

We've talked about this on Red Menace. We've talked about this in previous episodes of Rev Left Radio. We have one discussion with some anarchist coffee with comrades who came on, but that's behind our sort of a gift to our patrons on Red Menace. So this will be a public episode where we have seriously wrong sort of, you know, throwing out their critiques and criticisms and concerns about this idea that Marxism is a science and then Allison and I, you know, trying to explicate and defend our position as Marxist who uphold the idea that Marxism is a science. This is not going to be structured like other

RevLeft episodes and the fact that it's not going to be me asking questions and other people answering. This is going to be an organic sort of unstructured conversation and we'll go wherever the conversation takes us. Probably the best place to start and I might toss it over to Allison to do the opening salvo. But this is just this basic idea of, you know, what is our position? Why is, why do we think Marxism is a science and how can these conversations sometimes, you know, sort of get muddled in semantics? Alison, if you want to start off and then Sean and Aaron can reply and I'll reply and we can just go from there. Yeah, sounds good. So, you know, I'll kind of echo what we discussed beforehand and some of the

notes you're doing for this. When I'm talking about Marxism as a science, I'm using that term in a way that I think is sort of out of touch with contemporary understandings of science. And so oftentimes there's a semantic problem that happens there. So theoretically what I'm drawing on when I'm saying Marxism is a science is originally really Ingalls' formalization of Marxism, which in the short form happens in socialism, utopian and scientific, and in the much, much, much more long form happens in anti-During, where Ingalls is presenting this view of Marxism as a scientific sort of departure from previous utopian socialisms. And so I think it's important to recognize that at least in the sense that Ingalls means it, and that's the sense in which I

think we should harken back to. Science has a more broad meaning in this context. It has not yet been formalized in the ways that we think of it now as hard science. This is prior to the invention of logical positivism as a philosophical movement, which tries to limit the meaning in a scientific context. So you don't see the same focus on quantifiability that you'll see in contemporary science. Angles in calling Marxism scientific, I think, is not going so far as to say that it meets the criteria that we would expect from a hard science today. And instead, I think that what he's doing is juxtaposing Marxism with utopianism or with what I would consider a philosophical ideal approach to socialism. And specifically contrasting it with sort of a metaphysical approach

to socialism. So Ingalls is in a sense claiming that Marxism sort of inverts the classical philosophical approach, where you start with abstraction, right? So especially if you look at early rationalist thought like Descartes, for example, you start with what's in your head, and you derive a coherent rational system from ideas and principles that you can derive just purely in the abstract. And then you use those to get to reality and apply those ideas to reality. So Ingle says that utopian socialism originally kind of fell into this trap with these thinkers like St. Simon or Foyer, who are not really looking at how capitalism functions to figure out how it's internally unstable and we can move beyond it, but

are trying to come up with these perfect utopian systems based on enlightenment values, and then apply those values from the abstract onto reality. And Ingalls, I think, is suggesting in saying that Marxism is scientific, that Marxism is doing something different than this. It is in fact starting with reality, with a deep dive into history, into economics, and into the material conditions of a society, and analyzing those first. So it doesn't move from, you know, the heavens to the earth, if you will. It starts on Earth. And then it looks at the reality that we're in. And then it interprets that through an abstract lens of dialectics. And, you know, Inglez explains dialectics as this theory of process as opposed to static metaphysics.

But what's important is that the theoretical and abstracted component comes on after we've already investigated the real world and matter in history itself. And then finally, after we've understood it abstractly through our theoretical lens, we can understand how we could change it. So Ingle's claims that Marxism allows us to see the internal contradictions in capitalism, which make it inherently unstable. and then gives us the ability to strategically focus on which contradictions we can sort of accelerate and organize around in order to make capitalism no longer a thing, and in order to overthrow it and move past it. It's in this sense that Marx famously says, right, communism is the real movement which already exists.

The seeds of capitalism's destructions are actually born within it. And I think when we say Marxism is scientific, what we mean then is that it does a scientific study into the reality of capitalism, and then from there moves to abstraction. And we test through what JMP is called the laboratory of sort of revolutionary struggle, which ideas, which strategies work. And that gives us an ability not just to interpret the world, but to actually change it in a way that is based on some level of testing and falsifiability, at least.

Yeah, Sean and Aaron, you can respond in any order you want. I can definitely appreciate that what Marx was doing and what Engels is doing with historical materialism is a kind of break from a lot of the previous approaches to these topics before and that they were attempting something like firmly materialistic. Their philosophy is attempting to, as you said, start with material foundations rather than starting from abstract principles and then trying to arrive at the material foundations. I don't want to erase that difference at all. One of the other points you made that science is not conceived of in the same way in their time as it is now is actually really important. Because when I want to argue that

Marxism is not a science, I'm talking within today's context and the way that we use them today. Because I think when you say Marxism is a science, people don't think, oh, there are arguing that Marxism is a science in this broader sense that people don't really use the term anymore today. They're thinking, oh, you're saying Marxism meets all of these kind of strict criteria for what we think of as science today. And Marxism can produce objective fact in the same way that biological sciences can. And we all seem to agree that that's not actually the case and that's not what Marxism can do. And there's a broad philosophical tradition since Marx and potentially even before Marx that attempted to base philosophies on material reality. I don't think that's

unique to Marx in that it may have been an innovation in his field at the time, but materially based philosophies are widespread and they're not all science. And I think it's important to, like, speak to people on the terms that they understand things in, and we don't want to pump people's intuitions incorrectly. And when I think most people think about what's a science versus what's a philosophy, they're thinking, okay, philosophy is based around arguments and narrative, and, yes, facts, it organizes itself around facts, at least philosophy that people should care about does. does. And it talks about what could be or what should be and what we should want. And it makes arguments and like qualitative distinctions. And when people think about science, they're thinking about like facts and like using empirical analysis to get quantitative measurements out of reality and like what can we say for sure. The most honest way to talk about science, especially in the

modern context and the way that people talk about it is, is something that's actually really, really bounded in the types of questions that it can answer. And the degree to which science can offer a certainty is proportional to the amount of bounds that we can put on the question. And so, like, the closer you get to asking questions about society, even questions about complex systems such as, like, the human body, they become less and less. certain and in a sense less and less scientific like it's it's broadly understood in the sciences there's a real difference between physical sciences which have the most amount of certainty and then there's life sciences biology ecology and stuff that are kind of less certain more complex systems

and then the social sciences which have far less ability to arrive at that sort of like objective bounded truth that we want to talk about. And Marxism and specifically historical materialism, which is the part of Marxism, I believe that you all are claiming is scientific, has actually a lot of presence in the social sciences already when I was reading about this stuff and trying to see what the relationship between the two of them is, I came upon conflict theory, which the whole basis of conflict theory, which is a subsection of sociology, is historical materialism. That's what conflict theory uses as its presuppositions. That's what it is. So we could say conflict theory is

part of a science called sociology that people use to confirm or deny that theory. So historical materialism fits into sociology in this one subsection. And it fits into other social sciences as well. There's a real overlap and connection between Marxism and sciences. But when we're talking about what Marxism is in the broadest sense, we're talking about a set of values. We're talking about narratives. We're talking about arguments. We're talking about qualitative aspects that are kind of a broader big tent that is a philosophy. It's ethical philosophy, it's political philosophy, it touches a lot of sciences, social sciences, but I wouldn't say that it's a science in and of itself. Yeah, and to expand on that, like, Marxism is a political philosophy. It does

have relationships with sciences. There's ways to see that, like, Marxism has had an influence on different, on social sciences, like, for example, conflict theory. I think it's also possible to participate in a Marxist analysis and praxis in more or less scientific ways and try to bring principles and ideals from science into our political philosophy and into our praxis. And it's also desirable to use scientific methodology as much as we can to test our assumptions, test our actions, and so on. But at the same time, I would really want to draw a distinction between Marxism and these sciences. So Marxism makes claims against anthropology, history, economics, and so on, a wide sort of sphere of different sciences that are seen to be on the softer side. But I would

argue that the testing of these theories, so like the testing of a Marxist anthropological theory is the act of anthropology. It's not the act of Marxism. Marxism doesn't have in itself the tools for certainty checking that sciences has. Marxism is often asserting hypotheses that can be tested, but the process of testing them isn't Marxism. The process of testing them is science. And another thing about science that I think is important to underline is, is that it can have a really strong predictive capacity. And a good example of that is the suppressed science from within ExxonMobil from the 1980s,

where internal scientists at ExxonMobil made predictions that the increasing amount of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was going to cause an increase in the temperature of the Earth. So we've seen now, 20 or 40 years later, graphs that were released internally at ExxonMobil that predicted accurately the amount of parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at 2020,

and also the related warming. So this is a really, really incredible prediction that was made using hard data and science. And I think that level of predictive capacity is on another level than the predictive capacity that comes through ideology, philosophy, and so on. And to be clear, I think maybe defining science would be useful here. So science, in the way that I see it, it's a method. It's a series of empirical processes for understanding the material world with increasing degrees of certainty.

It's rooted in experimentalism, skepticism, replication, and when it's effective, it can predict future events. It's a collection of tools that help us to determine what's true and what's not. And so to be a science is to be an area, a body of work or area of study which uses empiricism to come to results. The hard sciences are the ones that we're most certain about, and there's a scale of lesser or greater degrees of certainty based on different fields. So a quick summary of why I think that Marxism should not be considered a science. Firstly, to use this older definition of science, which you advocate for, is to grow the definition of science to an untenable size. All political philosophies are models with which to demystify the world. If we're going to say that the definition of science is anything that attempts

to demystify the world, we're going to expand that to basically include all political philosophies from libertarianism, libertarian socialism, liberalism, you name it. Suddenly, the world of science has grown to an untenable enormous size. Additionally, to call it a science is to assert that Marxism has features which factually Marxism does not have. Marxism does not have inherent empiricism, processes for increasing certainty, an embrace of them certain experimentalism, and et cetera. And what we risk doing here is taking what is a good theory, turning it into a bad pseudoscience. No Marxist should want to turn a good theory into a bad pseudoscience. It makes the Marxist position worse to assert a level of certainty that isn't there

and a process, a scientific process, which factually isn't there. If we say that Marxism is a science, we might start implying or asserting that hypotheses are conclusions, untested hypotheses, hypotheses that haven't reached a level of testing that we can come to certainty about them, if they're treated as conclusions, can have disastrous results. So just to differentiate between science as a process and science as the conclusions of that process, if we say Marxism is a science to say that we believe that Marxism has these processes for determining truth from fiction over time, but it's being used in a way we're saying Marxism is a science, therefore its conclusions are proven when factually they're not. We can actually commit ourselves to a line of analysis

and action which moves us further from our goals or have us floundering against the very things that have a chance at winning us our goals. And also we have a historical example for what the worst case scenario would be if you're mixing political power games, you're mixing the rhetoric of science with the ideology of Marxism. Now, this isn't an inherent feature, but I was I was really shocked the more I looked into sort of this strawman idea of Marxism as a science has come to life and history in the form of Lysenkoism. It was a Marxist pseudoscience in the Soviet Union, which claimed to increase crop yields, and that evolution would allow species to evolve into different species, like birds into different birds, oats into barley, things like that,

and that genes weren't real. The reason for this was that Lysenko, this sort of popular scientist in the Soviet Union, became friends with Stalin and spread harmful pseudoscientific ideas that decreased crop yields and suppressed opposing science, including geneticists. I would argue that this happening is a result of the mingling between the rhetoric of science and the rhetoric of Marxism, where an unduly scientific rhetoric, was applied to political philosophy. And it was so confusing to people that they were able to say, well, the study of genetics is bourgeois science. I don't think that this type of thing could have

as easily happened if people had a clear philosophical demarcation between science and ideology. And I'm really curious to hear what you think of that era in history. So maybe I'll just throw it back to you with the question, why do you think Lysenkoism happened? Okay. So this is definitely an experiment in dialogue, right? We're trying to cover a lot of ground and there's a lot of stuff put out on the table right there. But I think we're going to follow this Alice and Aaron, Sean, and then me pattern so we can all sort of respond and take notes while other people are talking. I'll start with your Lysenkoism question and then I'll move on to a robust defense of Marxism using the modern conception of science, right? Because I think there's some getting sort of confused about old versus new and like you think that we're just defending an older definition of science, not a new. new one, so I'll actually do that argument here in a second. But what Lysenkoism was, in my opinion, is not a failure of Marxism as a science. It's bad biology, right? It's pseudoscientific biology, coupled with a weird political environment, which may push things one way or the other. There's nothing about historical materialism in there. And turning a scientific approach, which Marxism

postulates, into dogma is not at all unique to Marxism, right? Dogmas are formed out of science all the time. You can look at stuff like creationism. You can look at stuff like flat earth theory. You can look at new atheism, which pretends to be completely rational and objective and empirical in a scientific way, but which really gives rise to a whole bunch of pseudoscientific race science nonsense and idealism, etc. So I think it's really important to parse out what the actual scientific methodology is from instances in history where people have claimed to be doing science and they're actually not. Lysenko has nothing to do, in my opinion, with Mark. Marxism as a methodological approach or a science, all science can be made into dogma and all dogma needs to be corrected by science, but these two things are not synonymous, right?

So when a Marxist is being dogmatic, it's not a hit against Marxism being scientific. It's a hint against that one person not being scientific and being a dogmatist. But, you know, going over into this broader conversation about conceptual science and a defense of Marxism as a science using our modern understanding. I'll even use your definition. You said science is a set of empirical processes for understanding, you know, the material world with increasing degrees of certainty. It involves experimentation, skepticism, replication, et cetera. So let's talk about how Marxism actually meets those standards. What empirical processes for understanding the world does Marxism offer? Well, it offers class struggle.

It offers revolutions. That is the empirical process by which societies turn into new ones. That's the class struggle is the process by which slavery turned into food. feudalism turned into capitalism. And so by analyzing class struggle, you're analyzing the sort of law of motion of historical materialism. Experimentation. Well, you know, what is experimentation? It's parsing out what does and does not work through empirical analysis. And when you have enough sort of examples of class struggle to look back over as we do over 200 years of history, you can see these methods tried in different contexts at different times. And some of them

work and some haven't. And the ones that have worked and the ones that we say are part of our scientific lineage that have not been disproven yet are the things that have worked in many different contexts, in many different time periods, and in many different situations, right? We can talk about the party structure or whatever, but, you know, that's sort of our idea with experimentation. Skepticism, I think Marxism is, you know, deeply skeptical of all things. Like, Marx says, like, there's a gap between how things appear to be in the world and how things actually are.

And demystifying that connection, closing that gap, showing the connections between things is an example of a scientific demystifying process. Then we get into replication and testability, both with regards to the understanding of how capitalism actually works and in regards to taking stock of different attempts to combat it, Marxism does have an ability to replicate and test things over time. You see this over and over again with like the spontaneity versus party structures, for example. The spontaneous things have been tried over and over again,

and they've all hit a limit. the party structure has allowed the spontaneous uprising of the working class to go to a higher level of class struggle. And that's what we're really getting at. We're not saying we know how things are going to end. We know all the truths there are to class struggle or revolution. What we're saying is that by looking over 200 years of actual experience, we can pull out things that do and don't work with regards to combating capitalism. And again, that's rooted in a deep understanding of what capitalism actually is, how it came to be, how it changes, etc. I pointed out in other places like ways that Marxism could be falsified, and I can get into that if people really want to push me in that direction, but you can listen to Marxism as a science or Red Menace's episode on Engels's text to hear me give a bunch of examples of ways that Marxism can be falsified.

And then the final thing I'll say is this idea of predictive power. You know, there are things that Marxism has been able to predict that other things have not been able to predict, right? The boom and bus cycles and the tendency towards recession or the fall of profits, the concentration of capital over. time, the growth of the proletariat globally. The exploitation of capital inevitably creates backlashes in the form of proletarian uprisons and revolutions. These are things that Marx was saying a long time ago. And spontaneous movements or mere trade unionism, which we get into Leninism, they can't lead to a successful revolution, right? This is a Marxist claim. Purely spontaneous uprisings or mere trade unionism cannot lead to successful revolutions

and they, in fact, have not led to successful revolutions. A spontaneity's problem is lack of organization and the ability to take it beyond spontaneity and mere trade unionism, right? Trade unionism without a party is constricted to the terrain of struggle within the bourgeois confines, right? Struggle for higher wages or better conditions, but the working class cannot spontaneously develop, you know, revolutionary consciousness just in those sort of more myopic struggles. So even in a modern conception of science, right, I do think that Marxism, not only in its ability to understand capitalism, which no other tendencies, including liberalism, libertarianism, conservatism, they don't understand capitalism at that level. They don't

ever even try to say where capitalism came from or where it's going. They don't try to find the underlying laws by which societies develop from feudalism into capitalism and to other things. And one of the problems there is that liberalism, libertarianism, etc., they're already sort of confined within capitalism. They take the status quo as more or less for granted. And then they operate in that confine and figure out how they can do it. What's required to understand liberalism and capitalism is to zoom out right to take a meta view to see how liberalism and capitalism developed over time due to material forces and then that gives you a broader understanding of what liberalism is historically but people who are liberals or libertarians or whatever

they're in they're in the confines of their historical epoch they take a lot of stuff for granted that's not really scientific in the way that historical materialism is having said that i'll toss it over to allison cool okay so there's like so many multiple i know it's so hard yeah i'll start with lysenkoism first. So, God, inevitably some Marxist-Leninist on Twitter is going to light me up for not defending lysenkoism. But here we go, anyway. He was a good farmer. He increased millet yields. Oh, man, you'd be surprised the takes. Yeah, with Lysenkoism, I think if the claim is that Lysenkoism is a result of a conflation of philosophy and politics with science in a certain way, I think that that's obviously false, right? Because bad science gets taken up in political context all the time, even outside

of a Marxist context, right? So I think the other side to Lysenkoism, that also sheds some light on why Lysenkoism was so sort of interesting to the Soviet experiment would be the way that eugenics spun genetics at the time in a political direction. That was obviously also wrong, right? So eugenics was much more grounded in contemporary mainstream conceptions of genetics, and it took on political power around the world, but that was in context in which there wasn't necessarily a claim that the dominating political ideology had scientific status itself. So I think a conflation of science and politics is not the problem that created lysinkoism. I think just a sort of, I'll just go ahead and say it, non-functional political situation that was not operating ideally created that,

and you can see that by the way that eugenesis policies got taken up on the West based on even more traditional and orthodox scientific understandings of how genetics functions. So I think that that is not really something you can place on scientific socialism as a concept so much, as much as a political problem that really spans a lot of political situations, even outside of specifically Marxist situations. So that would be kind of my thought on Lysm. But there's a few other really interesting parts of this discussion that I wanted to look at. So I think that I would agree with Brett that on some level, we can say that Marxism meets your definition that you've given for a more modern idea of science. I don't think it produces the kind of results that say chemistry produces

or physics produces. But I'm not really interested, I guess, in setting up a hard boundary for science that's based on the certainty of the result it produces. I'm more interested in the question of the method. And so I think that Brett has made a good defense of Marxism being able to engage in a scientific method. Of course, it's a less controlled application of that method, because if we are understanding class struggle and revolutionary struggle to be the experimental phase of Marxism, there are way more variables there. And I'm actually completely fine saying that Marxism produces less certainty than, you know, the hard sciences, if you will. But I don't think the fact that there's a differential in the level of certainty that we get as a result of the application of that

method. I don't think that means that the method is fundamentally different. And that's where my concern kind of comes in. I want to say that Marxism can use that method. And yes, it gives us less predictive output than the hard sciences, for example, but I don't think that means that it's not a science. I also think this idea of, like, if Marxism is a science, then we can fall into treating conclusions, or hypotheses as if they're conclusions, is a problem that we can have with all science, right? Even hard science and the physical sciences often have to get rid of old hypotheses and older paradigms, you know, even the advent of quantum physics caused us to have to revisit a lot of more traditional physics and throw out certain hypotheses and figure out different

paradigms with new data that had come in and require new abstract theory about how the science of physics worked in the first place. And I think that similarly with Marxism, we can do that same thing. When Marxists fall into dogma and are unwilling to throw out the old thing, that is not because of science. That is because they have actually failed to understand that the scientific method requires a huge amount of skepticism towards the conclusions that you've reached through it. So when we say that scientific struggle through socialism has produced evidence that the state has to take a certain form or that the party is ideal, I'm not saying that's 100% certain and true in every situation and is unquestionable. That would be dogmatic. But what I am saying

is that there are past examples we can look to and that we can examine empirically that lend credence towards that. And perhaps it's a good thing that there are struggles that are engaging outside of those forms and that anarchists and, you know, other forms of communists continue to struggle outside of that because it keeps the experimental portion alive. And those experimental results could truly genuinely challenge the, you know, sort of hypotheses that we've reached as Marxism. And I think that actually by embracing Marxism as a science in terms of its methodology, we have a better ability to avoid that dogmatism and to throw those things out. So that's one thing that I think is kind of important. The other thing that I want to talk about in this context

is this claim that, you know, Marxism at its core isn't really about objectivity or facts. It's a qualitative ethical and political philosophy. Because I think there's one, approach to reading Marxism this way, but I don't think that it's the only approach. I would argue that Marxism, in fact, does not have a strong qualitative or ethical approach in it. I don't think that Marx's criticism of capitalism is that capitalism is unjust or that capitalism is evil in some way. And maybe too sympathetic to Althusser's delineation between the early and later Marx on this one. But I think at least by the time you're reading the mature works of Marx, there's not really even a normative focus on alienation or these other more qualitative subjective aspects of capitalism

anymore. What you have in the later marks is a criticism of the way that capitalism is internally contradictory and internally unstable. It's an empirical assessment of how the economics of capitalism functions that says not capitalism is evil, but capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, its own abolition, and its own negation. And we are opposed to capitalism because the dialectic movement of those contradictions has to be carried forward. And I don't think that that is a qualitative or an ethical philosophical approach, actually. I think that is an approach which is trying to deal with empirical facts and objectivity. And I think that this is revealed very much by how Marxism develops these tools of demystification

and these sort of theories that I think are meant to take us back to facts and objectivity. So two that I want to talk about really briefly would be first the idea of primitive accumulation, right? So the Marxist idea that capitalism actually was not born out of this liberal ideal of some people working really hard and consolidating money and, you know, the various liberal myths that even Adam Smith talks about to some extent. But instead, if we empirically look at the rise of capitalism, we can see that it was constructed through a concentration of power, through laws like enclosure and the bloody legislation, and through capitalist dictatorship, right? And what Marxism is doing with the idea of primitive accumulation is actually looking at these mystifications that we tell ourselves about

the history of capitalism and saying, no, those are actually just myths, and we can use historical insights and the materialist method of looking at class struggle to uncover actual objective facts about how capitalism was born. The other tool that I think Marxism has that, again, moves beyond the qualitative and actually tries to get to fact and objectivity would be the concept of commodity fetishism. So commodity fetishism, again, is trying to answer this idea that when we look at a commodity, we're not seeing all the things that went into producing it. We're not seeing all the things that make up how it got there into the market in the first place. And so what Marxism is trying to do is get us to facts that we could not see that have been mystified and removed by ideology.

And so, again, I think that is something different than what other political philosophies are doing. The final point that I'd like to make is that, you know, there's sort of this claim that other political philosophies do their own forms of demystification, that liberalism and libertarianism. And I actually just don't think that that is a very true account of what you see with a lot of liberalism and libertarianism, especially in the context of liberalism. sort of the classical philosopher who influenced it, like Locke, or the more contemporary philosopher of liberal political theory, Rawls, you can see that there's not really a demystification move. Both of them actually start with abstraction. Locke starts with the state of nature as a hypothetical situation from which we could derive natural law, instead of looking at the world itself and demystifying it. And Rawls starts with, you know, again, this sort of thought experiment

of the original position in the veil of ignorance and how we would establish a perfect society if we were ignorant about our location in it. That's not a demystification, actually. Liberalism, you know, is the predominant political philosophy that we're looking at, starts with the abstract and then applies that to reality, and in that sense, actually does mystify. So I do think demystification is unique to Marxism, or at least to socialism that centers class struggle in a specific way.

So that's kind of the last point I'd want to make on my prep. Just to jump back to Lysenkoism. God damn it. I think it's really important to underline here that in the Soviet Union, when Lysenkoism was developed, when it was popularized, it was popularized as a scientific development of historical materialism in relation to biology, and that it was claimed to be an objective science. It was not just claimed to be an objective science, but it was claimed to be an objective proletarian science that was displacing

bourgeois science, and which caused real scientists who were actually doing real science to go to jail. A great example of that is let me just pull up his name oh motherfucker that's his name yeah he was he was a bourgeois motherfucker Nikolai

Vavila Nikolai Vavlov A great example This is the Soviet scientist Nikolai Vavilov He was a target of Lysenkoist repression Now this is a guy that traveled the world For over 30 years Collecting seeds from around the planet

over 200,000 specimens, the largest seed collection in human history. This guy was a proletarian hero. He was the spirit of the Soviet Union. He was the spirit of socialism and pushing forward science in new directions, making the largest seed collection in human history on behalf of the Soviet Union. And what was his fate was to die in prison because he was seen to be a political enemy of historical materialism, which was considered to be an objective science. And I will not disagree with you that it would.

be really good if people treated Marxism like a science. However, there's an obscuring of what that actually means in the way that the discourse is used in practice. You run into people and now they're, you know, they're meme lords. They're making a joke, the immortal science of Marxism, Leninism, and so on and so on. But people do think about it this way. They do think about hypotheses as proven conclusions because it's underneath the banner of Marxism broadly. And we can see from the historical record the extreme danger of a non-scientific approach of Marxism. And I'm sure you would agree with that. This was a non-scientific approach of Marxism, but precisely claiming to be a scientific approach while taking a non-scientific approach. I think that's supremely, supremely dangerous, and it's

something you need to guard against. And I think it's a good reason to demarcate to say, yes, we should take scientific principles. We should approach this in a scientific way. But at the end of the day, it itself is not a science. Science is science, and we filter our ideas through science to ensure that they're correct. If they had done that in the Soviet Union, he wouldn't have died in prison after being a proletarian hero. Okay. So the first time I started thinking about this topic when Brett brought it up to us, and specifically the idea of revolutionary events as laboratories where this stuff is being

tested, that really captured my imagination. I think it is possible to have a science of revolutionary strategies in theory, because what we're talking about here is interventions in complex. systems. And we actually already have sciences that are interventions in complex systems. And they also happen to be sciences where a lot of kind of cultural flashpoint issues happen, vaccines, diet research, stuff like this is about trying to change the trajectory of a complex system. Human bodies are complex systems and trying to tweak elements of them to achieve optimal health is something that we already do and we already do science on. And it's something that I know a little bit about. So

that really caught my imagination thinking about it in terms of that kind of stuff. And so the first thing you would need to do to have a science of proletarian revolution is to have like strict, bounded definitions for what we're talking about. Like what is a successful proletarian revolution? Now, if I was a scientist and I was trying to design, what would success look like for a proletarian revolution, I would say kind of looking at the history, we haven't had one yet. We haven't had anything that successfully brought about a society that I see as a more advanced stage towards a better society. Like a moneyless, classless, stateless society with common ownership over the means of production where distribution happens according to me. I don't even think it would have to go that

far. But let's say like a society that attempts to have massive wealth redistribution while maintaining a direct democracy where every person in the society has as much say as any other in the way the societies run. That could be one definition of success. There could be other definitions of success. I'm not saying mine is the only one, but we would need to operationalize that and have something specific so that when we're saying which ones did or didn't succeed, we can point to that operational definition. So when we're doing intervention science and complex systems. The gold standard is obviously randomized control trials. You pick matched cohorts of individuals like 100 people and 100 other people who all have similar characteristics. You

control for things that might be confounding variables and you give a hundred of them the same diet they were on and you switch a hundred of them to a vegan diet and you see what happens, what changes. That's the gold standard of a intervention science. We obviously can't do that with revolutions. That would be maybe if we had parallel universes and you could pick a hundred different universes. And in, you know, 50 of them, you start a vanguardist party revolution. And in 50, you try more anarchist tactics and you have everything else is the same. You could run experiments like that.

But that's obviously a bit ridiculous and being silly. The first step towards a true proletarian revolution is cross-dimensional travel. It's a true proletarian revolutionary science. But lots of times, randomized controlled trials can't be done. So you move on to epidemiological data. And this is closer to what I think could possibly be done with revolutions. In diet, this would usually involve sending out surveys, asking people questions about what they eat and other relevant aspects of their lives that are relevant to the outcome that you're trying to measure.

And then you would collate these large amounts of data. and say, oh, the people who eat less meat also tend to have less heart disease. That's interesting. To have a good epidemiological study, you typically want to have thousands, maybe tens of thousands of instances that you would collect together. That would be ideal. That's what you do with meta-analyses and larger-scale studies that really get good insight into these issues. But I want to say that even those types of studies with tens of thousands

or thousands of instances can be completely rendered useless by some external element that wasn't controlled for. There's always the possibility of confounding factors messing this kind of stuff up. This is why you have stuff like, oh, butter and saturated fats really bad for you. And And more recently, some of the scientific community saying, oh, yeah, it does increase cholesterol, but maybe there's also benefits to it, and it's more of a trade-off. And, you know, maybe we were wrong about that because we didn't correctly control for all the variables. So that kind of stuff is really important if you want to get scientific outcomes. Additionally, like standardized methods of data gathering.

So if you wanted to gather data on all the revolutions, you need to be creating a format to extract data from all of them as best you can by its surveying history. So you'd want to have specific, again, operationalized parameters that you're measuring and then inserting into a data set that you can do analysis on in a scientific way. That's potentially possible with revolution. We have, I'm not sure how many successful Marxist-Leninist revolutions that created a state capitalist socialist state. There are maybe 20 or 30. Yeah. And then you could also also add to the pool unsuccessful attempts and anarchist attempts, other things. So maybe you have a data set of 100 or 200 revolutionary attempts.

And like that could be decent preliminary research, but it's not anything approaching a sort of mature science in this field. And I'm talking again about intervention studies. And there's other kinds of sciences that you could use the methods of. you could say maybe we'll take a more sociological approach, again, we get into conflict theory, or you take a more social psychological approach. And I think, again, you could do that stuff, but I don't actually see that happening in the world. I don't know who is taking the idea of different revolutionary methods and using those less strict social scientific methods to come to conclusions about them. And that would require the sort of social activity of science to be taking

place, which is a peer review process. Like, in sociology, the reason we can say conflict theory as part of sociology is a science that is heavily influenced by Marxism is because they're participating in the collective process of science together. They're submitting papers. Other people in the field look over the papers with an eye towards scientific skepticism and confounding variables and things they might have missed. And that is how we do science and how people think of science today in the world. So even though I think it's potentially possible to address this question scientifically, I don't know if that sort of group activity of peer review and science is going on with the question of what's the best revolutionary strategy. I don't think

we have the precision necessary to say that this is a science that is currently happening. Just one more extra thing here is I just want to emphasize that I strongly disagree with the specific claim that Marxism is uniquely scientific when compared to other disciplines and that the result and that the proof of this scientific nature is the fact that there's been more sort of quote successful revolutions because I think it's worth emphasizing that neither victory nor defeat can be measured on a single trans-historical yardstick here, and that we should strive to sort of avoid the totology that says, well, these are the inevitable stages towards the abolition of capitalism, which is our goal. Therefore, you know, anarchists have never even reached this

stage of moving towards the abolition of capitalism because there is most tendencies disagree with the Marxist-Leninist perspective that state capitalism is a transnational. sort of beginning stage towards the creation of communism or towards the creation of socialism. The equivalent I would draw is like, well, I believe that the creation of communism starts by

lifting up a glass. You throw the glass at the wall, the glass shatters, the glass falls to the ground, and then we build communism. And anarchists are just salty because they've never even reached the broken glass stage. Okay, so I will respond to some of those things, and then

Allison can respond to whatever I don't respond to. But I like it. I mean, this is good. This is a lot of good stuff. And even if we can't, you know, make sure we can't square every circle here, this is food for thought for listeners and they can take this up and run with it as all as what they want to. I just want to say I'm down to go extra long if you are.

Yeah, I mean, we're going to have to. Okay, so a couple things. So, Sean, Sean was talking about the Lysenko and the Nikolai and the treatment of that scientist. And, you know, I agree aside from, you know, we can talk about whether that's science, or the political dimensions involved there. But I would just say that I don't think that that is fundamentally different from the history and the underbelly of bourgeois science as well, right?

There's plenty of examples you can point to in liberal history and quote unquote real scientific method that has also had those sorts of deleterious, detrimental, or outright tragic circumstances. You can think of bourgeois race science, right? With the enlightenment and the establishment of science as a methodology was, also in complete tandem with the rise of liberalism in the bourgeois class system. And more than that, it was in tandem with the expansion of colonialism, right? So in that context, what did you have? You had weird shit pop up where bourgeois scientists would really claim and have a lot of authority and a lot of respect in our society by saying things like, you know, black people or brown people are less evolved than white people, right?

You had social Darwinism. You had eugenics. You had race science. You had people like Alan Turing in Britain being chemically castrated by the bourgeois government there for being gay. And you have astronomers before that put to death right before the Enlightenment, for example. So in a lot of cases, regardless whether you're talking about proletarian or bourgeois science, you see how science can easily become distorted, can be used as a political weapon, and can even be conceived of as a legitimate thing, even though, like with race science, we now know that that shit is complete.

And what proves that that shit was complete nonsense? Science itself, right? So a core pillar of science is this ability to update itself, this open-endedness, this ability to go back and say, even our very own tradition has made these mistakes. And they were contextualized in these social situations and these social context. And all science is sort of encapsulated in its historical epoch. And all science, even today, reflect the dominant ideology, the dominant ruling class ideology. You can have political scientists, for example, who write hundreds and hundreds of papers on the political developments in the United States and not once mention the word capitalism, right?

Is this a failure of specifically bourgeois science, or this is just the process by which science unfolds, it makes errors, and then it's updated over time, right? We go in the future 500 years. We will certainly look back at things that all four of us hold as pretty much scientifically valid today. We'll be upended. We'll be corrected, we'll be revised. You know, all of those things happen. That's not unique to Marxism. I think over-focusing on the Lisenko case sort of sets a bad president because we can do that all day with bourgeois history as well.

Going to what Aaron said about this idea that, you know, these transitions that no society is really good enough. You call this stuff state capitalism and you say, you know, no quote unquote ML society has done anything that we perceived to be true, real movement. toward the sort of society that we want. It replicated wrong hierarchies. It used the state, which we want to transcend, et cetera. But what we would argue, at least I would argue, is this idea that the very transition, that the first leaps from capitalism towards socialism

are only as good as they can be defended, right? The revolution itself is not to usher in this state of affairs, but it's to begin the process of ushering in this state of affairs. And the first step in that process is can you defend yourself against the inevitable attacks that will descend up, upon you. And even in that situation, you say, well, you know, none of these ML societies are really any better in any real discernible way from, from capitalist societies. But I would look at, and pound for pound, look at a Cuba and what it does for its people as compared to a United

States. And then flip those and imagine if Cuba had the wealth and resources of the United States. I think Cuba empirically is a better, or at least, okay, empirically, I'll let it go. Subjectively, my personal preference, I would rather live in a Cuban-style society. And that, to me, represents a true movement forward, a true progressive step. But all that stuff is only as good as it can be defended. And when you look at, again, anarchist situations and anarchist uprisings, you can look at the Paris commune, Catalonia, et cetera, the inability to defend itself results in the crushing of that movement

and the implementation oftentimes of a fascist or reactionary government. So if we want to get to the point where we all want to get to, right, a communist, classless, stateless, moneyless society, the very first steps have to be able to be defended and that is messy, and that results in imperfect structures. We still have to use the state. We have to use this. Sometimes we have to use hierarchical organizing strategies, especially in military context.

It's not perfect. We don't love it. We don't say that this is synonymous with communism, but it's a necessary first step. And as we see in the first steps from feudalism towards capitalism, you had similar sorts of failures, similar imperfections, right? The French Revolution was a bourgeois revolution transitioning out of monarchy and a feudal society, and it was steeped in bloodshed. and irrationalism and absurdity in its own way.

And so I don't think that's necessarily unique. And then the last thing I'll say is Aaron's contention about, you know, what does and doesn't account for the standards in science and not having enough data points. I think that Aaron's standard is just too high, right? The idea that we'd have to run like either computer generated or in another dimensions, 100 or 200 Marxist-Leninist experiments versus anarchist experiments to grab out universalizable truths or things that we think will work over other things, I don't necessarily agree with that. And when you look at other things in the hard sciences, the quote unquote hard

sciences, like you see things like the Big Bang, for example. It was a one-off event. That happened one time, right? You can make computer models and you can talk about it and try to think about what it was. And at some level that Big Bang is still mysterious, right? We don't know. Physics doesn't know what was before the Big Bang. But even in things like extinction events, we've had five or extinction events over the history of of life on Earth. And so those are other things that you can't run extinction event models, right? You have to take a

limited data set and draw conclusions from it. Similarly, you have gamma ray bursts, right? You have to develop technologies and instruments to be able to detect them, and they're very rare, and you have to be pointed at the right point of the sky when they happen. But still, scientists in physics use that and things like eclipses

to draw conclusions from. Like Einstein had theories, and they literally had to wait around until an eclipse happened, to see if Einstein's theories would hold up in the face of that eclipse. So these are not things that they can control in a laboratory setting. They have to go out in the real world and sort of wait for conditions to be right in order to test their theories. And even when you have a couple eclipses or a couple gamma ray bursts or five or six extinction events, that still does not disqualify on the grounds that it doesn't have enough data points.

So in the same way, I think you could use that argument for Marxism and say, Marxism like any other science, is limited in the things that it can test, given our ability to look out in the cosmos and detect certain things, but that does not disqualify it from being scientific. Can I ask just a clarifying question here? So with considering Marxism of science and with 20 plus examples of sort of these Marxist-Leninist revolutions, none of which ended in the worker control of the means of production or a moneyless, classless society, what scientific basis do we have to claim that the state capitalist approach is the first step towards communism or a more advanced step towards communism? Would you consider

that a hypothesis or would you consider that a proven conclusion? A hypothesis with evidence in its favor in the form of like the Vanguard party right? You know, again, you're calling it state capitalism. What these movements were able to do... But Lenin used the term. Sure. But I'm saying

regardless of how you think about that terminology, what these movements absolutely had to do as a prerequisite to go further is twofold. They had to topple the bourgeois government that was in place, the repressive power of the bourgeois state, and they had to defend it against the inevitable imperialist attacks. Now, It's hard to get beyond that level, right?

We've never gotten to a level where the socialist movement in the world has been so powerful that it's successfully beat back imperialism and toppled global capitalism. So we can't transition into these other phases because we know time and time again, whether anarchist or Marxist, the moment you do anything significant on the revolutionary front, you will be hit with a tidal wave of repression, of sabotage, of assassination attempts, of imperial invasions, toppling. Look what's happening in Venezuela. They're trying to go after Iran at this point.

And so we know we all want the same world, but what MLs have been able to do that anarchists have not is be able to, you know, defend themselves against that inevitable invasion and look at little Cuba with way less wealth, way less resources, every advantage stacked against them. They've still been able to survive over half a century with the U.S. 90 miles off its coast. If that's not at least a testament to some really interesting power within Marxism, Leninism, I don't really, you know, I don't know what is. specifically sort of what what is so you said it's a hypothesis with evidence that backs it but it seems to be a hypothesis that has evidence that you can you can get to the stage of being sort of like this state capitalist state defending against global capitalism and so on but i don't see what the evidence is that to reason to think that we've gotten closer with those experiments towards the realization of communism towards the realization of even something as basic as the worker control of the means of production um or democracy like what what evidence as there specifically of this sort of like, because it seems like a tautological sort of philosophical, like political philosophical prediction about stages of history, not something that has any evidence backing it whatsoever. It seems like an unscientific claim. And that's not an insult. I think unscientific claims can be right and they can be valuable in the creation of even

moving towards science. But I'm just not seeing the evident, the evidentiary connection between a project like Cuba or Russia and the realization of worker control of the means of production. and a stateless, classless, moneyless society, et cetera. Can I take a stab at that? Yeah, go ahead, Alison. Well, I was going to say, so I think there's two levels here, right? So I think one, we can say that there is scientific evidence from these examples that at least Marxist-Leninist tactics can take us up to the point of a successful revolution against a capitalist state. We could all, you know, not maybe that turning into communism, but can we all agree on that as a starting point?

Yes. I'm genuinely curious. Well, so for like this, the way that I would see it is like with the Soviet Union and the capitalist states, you still have a mixed private and public sector means of production. You still have, there's a lot of common feature. They've been able to seize states in the name of socialism, but have they been able to realize it as a different question? Sure. Yeah. And I do think Cuba is good in some ways, just to.

Oh, yeah, for sure. No, and don't get me wrong. I do think that these projects have really good features, the literacy stuff, super impressive. I'm not like a dogmatist about this. I'm just, sorry, go on. Well, because I think I would defend the statement that from a scientific socials perspective, we can claim that the Marxist-Leninist strategy has empirical backing for its ability to seize to see state power. So I think that claim is easier to make. The secondary claim that you're

pushing us on of, okay, but then what reason is there to believe that that state that has now been seized to build a transitionary period to socialism will ever get to socialism is a separate question than some of the methods that we've defended as scientific, right? And so I think that if we want to look at the empirical evidence for that whole theory of a transitionary period, we can't really look to socialist struggle, because again, you're correct, I think. None of the contemporary socialist struggles we've seen over the last hundred years have moved past that sort of transitionary phase. I'm willing to grant that, at least. I don't think any of them have moved past that. But I think that we can, I do think we can look historically

at the development of capitalism to draw out these forms of how revolutions function, i.e. capital Capitalism had a whole host of revolutions associated with it throughout Europe that did not immediately repeal monarchy and often did not even immediately repeal feudal relations, right? The development of capitalism was uneven across the globe. It was not instantaneous, and it really did have transitionary periods where within a single nation, you could have some level of capital's property relations existing alongside feudal relations. And obviously, those were often at war with each other and at conflict with each other. But the development of capitalism, I think, does serve as some sort of empirical example, that it was a multi-century process of transition that did not immediately get rid of the conditions of feudalism, which led to the eventual universal totalizing system of capitalism that we saw today. So maybe I would say there, we cannot look to, you know, Lenin to give us that answer, but to Marx's original assessment of how revolutions function, there's empirical data that I think he is looking at, often when he's looking at how capitalism developed, that is relevant to that question. I don't know if that's more satisfactory or not. And I would say,

really quickly just budding in here. And then Allison can respond to other things that have been said previously. But, Sean, you know, you keep saying this thing of state capitalism. And your claim, unless I'm misunderstanding you, is that these did not represent actual progress for proletarian working class people. That these things were, you know, state capitalist, meaning that they were basically coups, right? This is what you hear coming out of some anarchist circles, libertarian, socialist circles, is that, you know, these ML states and this ability to defend itself against imperialism don't actually represent. proletarian power but they're just you know sort of co-opting of the state and they have a bureaucracy political bureaucracy a class um that whatever does the same things sort of that the capitalist class

would do i think that's wrong right i think that in and in the situations with the soviet union you know you had the soviets now whatever happened between the civil wars and two world wars and the rise of Stalin and all that stuff and the nationalization we can talk about that but the early days of that revolution were spearheaded by working class people and the soviets were by which working class people had control over their own life. If you go to Mao's China, you see this amazing infusion, right, unprecedented effusion of revolutionary agency amongst the people, building, industrializing their country, trying their hardest with very limited wealth and resources to, you know, develop their country.

And it wasn't just the state bureaucrats at work, right? It was from below. Mao even went so far as to unleash the people on the party itself in the form of the cultural revolution. You know, in Cuba and other ML states like Burkina Faso under Sancarra, you also have this agency, this revolutionary energy, this true proletarian power being developed. It might not be perfect, and it's a process of tactical retreats and tactical advancements for sure, but I don't think it's fair to say that these states did not represent anything close to a real advancement for proletarian power. I think they absolutely did as an imperfect, as flawed, as an error, as sometimes they were. They still represented to me true working class power, and Cuba to this day still does, even though, again, it's not perfect, and we'd like to see more worker control, and we'd like to see the decrease of a bureaucracy, but a lot of those things are also manifestations in the face of inexorable and constant attack by the West. So, I don't know.

I guess I just disagree on that claim, and calling it state capitalism is sort of sneaking a conclusion into your question, you know, and sort of taking it for granted. I don't think these things were ultimately just state capitalist, but... Sure. And that's kind of why I want to call it, like, a transitionary period. Because I think that's a more neutral terminology for it, perhaps. Yeah. Well, transitionary period sort of carries the implication that there's something that's going to be transition to that we can be certain of.

So I think in both cases, you sort of have this, the language is going to lead to a certain sort of conclusion. But I want to agree with Brett, in a limited sense, and say that these revolution movements in various countries. We can see very clearly that progress was made for people living under these regimes in various ways, like Parenti says, communism has worked for people around the globe. I think there's a truth to that. But at the same time, I'm going to broaden that and say that there was progress made there, and there was also progress made under social democracy, made under anarchist experiments, made under even like liberal revolutions. The French

revolution was a massive step forward for the people of France to no longer live under monarchy in feudalism. So it's true that you can have a step forward that's positive and a good thing and that you can say, like, I definitely support the decrease in homelessness, the increase in literacy, and so on, of these projects without committing to the idea that the framework that they're using is necessarily, in conclusion, not in hypothesis, a better road to leading to communism than alternatives. Generally speaking, certainty is unscientific and uncertainty is scientific. So I want to have a broader open-ended thing to say there's a lot of possible ways that we could transition to a much better society, the stateless, classless society of our dreams.

Who knows? Maybe it is, maybe it's just really, really hard tackling the issue of patriarchy under capitalism and working for a resolution to the historical gender violence. Maybe that's the first step towards creating a communist revolution. The fact is, the scientific approach is we don't No. I just want to quickly add my perspective on those experiments and whether they represent progress or not or real proletarian power or not is always going to be it depends and yes in some ways and no in other ways. I think there's very real ways in which a lot of these socialist experiments have created real benefits for people, as Sean said. I think there are ways in which these socialist experiments actually are worse than liberal democracy.

in certain ways, as libertarian socialists will love to argue. We don't have to get into authoritarianism versus libertarianism, but that's part of this discourse. I think that saying whether they move things forward or not is a bit too simplistic of a narrative. Like Sean Mention's social democracy. I think in some way social democracy does move things forward, and in other ways it props up capitalism and makes it more strong, and that's a negative aspect to it. I don't think any of these things are just one thing that are either a good, moving towards the good or not. They're complicated and there's good and bad aspects to them.

Yeah. And, you know, like with anarchism as well, like, you know, like in Catalonia, there's, you know, the great progress. Really, like, that's the thing that you're really looking for is this immediate worker control over the means of production in that little area of Catalonia. But, you know, what was the downside of that? It was like people were slaughtered, right? Children, men, women, because it wasn't able to defend itself, they were killed in this brutal, fucking way by the forces of reaction. I'm genuinely seriously interested

in this idea that defense is a prerequisite to move forward, that you have whatever you build, regardless of it's anarchist, even if it's really good democratic socialist, as we see in Venezuela or Chile, or if it's Marxist-Leninist, the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to be attacked. And can you survive that first wave of attack?

We can disagree on everything else beyond that. But to me, that is a very, very important step to take. And I think we've seen social democracy, obviously, get co-opted by capitalist forces. We've seen anarchism either get relegated to the periphery of global capitalism or crushed. And Marxism, Leninism, we've actually seen it be able to defend itself over a period of time. I want to get to that next level, whatever that may be. Experiments are still unfolding

all over the world in a bunch of different ways, and I'm excited to see where they go, including here in North America. But at least on that ground, I would make that argument. On the defense front, I want to be sort of a Hegelian here for a second and say, what are the pre what are the preconditions of the need for defense well the preconditions for the need for defense are the ideological basis around the world this sort of historical anti-communism in these states that have embedded in the sort of DNA of their secret service agencies because of historical contingency this idea that communism is a threat to them and must be destroyed maybe it's not the way to revolution and so I'm just being uncertain here being as

scientific as I can to be uncertain. Maybe there is no way to be in that ideological context where there's the need to defend yourself, whether you're anarchist, social, democratic, or communist. Sean, it's more than ideology, though, right? Because the real reason behind imperialism is not because you don't like communism or you want to defeat this ideology. The reason behind imperialism is that it wants to dominate wealth and resources. It wants to extract from the global south and siphon to the global north. So whether it's in Venezuela or Cuba or China or anywhere else in the world. If you try to nationalize your resources, you try to make the resources in your country about public interest and not private profit, you're going to get attacked. It's

not ideology. It's material reality, right? It's domination of wealth and resources for further domination. That's the core underlying, you know, structure of imperialism. It is wedded to capitalism. It's a form of capitalism. It's materialist, not purely ideological. But perhaps the way, the same way that the social Democrats pacify the poor and underclasses of North America by giving them welfare benefits. In the transitionary phase, we could pacify the bourgeoisie so they no longer want to dominate imperialistically and collect wealth because, oh, I'm getting my daily massages. How am I, I can't crush communism.

I'm so pacified. This is a great cover. I just want to say maybe we should steer it back towards the science. Like, maybe not. Okay. Yeah, I was going to say, I kind of have some thoughts on like the commonalities that I think we're sharing already, so I'm comfortable moving to that. Right now, do you have anything to say first, Allison, or do you just want to move straight to that?

Yeah, we've flicked a lot of boogers. I would be surprised if there was nothing you wanted to say. Yeah, so I'll talk a little bit about the conversation that we've been having, and then I think I'll try to then transition into commonalities. Cool. Yeah, so I guess I agree with Brett, right, that in the context of defense, if that's what we want to focus on, like, the empirical examples, I think, do go in favor of Marxism-Leninism. And I think that there's several factors in which that's the case. And so Brett, I think, continually alludes to Cuba, which to me, like, really does seem like the best example, right? You can look at the level of intensity that Cuba has been repressed by the global capitalist class and by the U.S. specifically is sort of, you know, like the imperialist power today. And the fact that Cuba still exists, still is charting a socialist road.

And maybe that is a point of divergence for us, but at least in some sense, charting a socialist road that is different from capitalism such that the capitalists feel the need to crush it and destroy it at the very end. least. And I love their doctors. Yeah, I mean, they're great, and they are doing an awesome job. And so I think that is an example of Marxism-Leninism functioning for that survival and defense in the first place. But the other thing that I think that is important to take into account is that Marxism-Leninism has this very, like, historically applied instance of internationalism. And you can see this with Cuba the way they use their doctors today when, you know, the Ebola outbreak broke out in Liberia. I don't I remember what year that was. The last big outbreak, it was Cuban doctors who were on the ground first, reaching out en masse more than doctors from any Western country to do the important aid work

and lend international support to a global South country that has historically been a victim of colonialism, right? And so building those state structures that we as Marxist-Leninists seek to build, I think also doesn't just lead to the defense of those states, but also can allow for new forms of internationalism that I think at least are pushing us forward in a way that we don't see with social democracy, for example. The USSR armed rebellions and national liberation groups throughout the world, and I've never seen Sweden do that. So I think there is some level of difference there when you look at how the foreign policy began to shape up and this idea of actually using your revolution that you've achieved through Marxist-Leninist ends, and then using that to help

national liberation and other international movements. So not just defense, but also spreading revolution in a way that I don't think you've seen from non-Marxist-Leninist approaches, at least. So I would want to add that as maybe one possible other thing that would be worth looking at in terms of Marxism-Leninism, moving the struggle forward, at least. I don't know what people's thoughts are on that, but. Sure, I think I would, I would grant that, so I think history doesn't move in one direction. There's a lot of different potentialities, which we can sort of grasp from future potential scenarios, and it's possible. It's, it's, it's, I think, an unproven hypothesis but not impossible that the, like, Marxist-Leninist approaches could be successful someday.

We don't have nearly enough examples. It could be that it takes thousands or tens of thousands attempts at this in order to get one that wins, but it really, really wins and establishes global communism, you know? Like, that could be the case. I'm not sure. but I think it benefits us to take a broad scientific approach and admit what we don't know and be very, very careful and wary of people

who sell us hypotheses as conclusions within science specifically. Now, within ideology, the name of the game is selling hypotheses as conclusions. That's how you organize, is you claim things are true, and you hope that they are true, and you test to see whether they're true.

But I think we'd always agree that if you find evidence that they're not true, then maybe you tweak your trajectory a bit. And I'll give another, I'll give another positive comment to our Marxist-Leninist comrades here, which is that if there is to be a objective and scientific study of revolution, a scientific study of the actualization of communism, the actualization of utopia, there's no doubt in my mind that Marxism would be a big influence on it, that Marxist-Leninism would get some discussion. You know, like that would be part of the preconditions of the discussion and creation of that science. But I think we just need to put very, very sort of firm criteria

on that science and not commit, not commit to our hypotheses turning out to be true. To be scientific, we need to embrace the uncertainty of it. We need to have a sort of model agnosticism that says there's multiple potential ways to consider getting towards this end. And we need to be willing to discard whatever it is that's proven to be untrue. Yeah, and I think that's the side of agreement, right? Is I think all of us agree, even Brett and I, that that ability to discard that which is proven untrue is really central and important. And I guess maybe we're getting to that in different ways. But I think we all agree on that question at least. For sure. And I would, you know, now that we're sort of descending to the end of this conversation and talking about

what some of our similarities are, you know, the things that I really do respect and agree with both Sean and Aaron on is this concept. that you know science is open-ended and the scientific approach is one of uncertainty right you you if you're if you're truly open-ended and you're truly about you're taking in the data then an over certainty is always going to work against that and over certainty too much will devolve into dogmatism and there are a lot of Marxists historically and presently who instead of doing the real difficult very challenging work of of doing the psych the scientific analysis of events dues to sort of pick it up dogmatically and that is true and unfortunately

you know, it's pretty prevalent. And because of that, a lot of people who come into contact with that dogmatism dressed as science are immediately put off. And to the extent that sometimes I have, I have discussions with my anarchist comrades who just think they're the same thing, right? Who actually think that this dog, this dogmatism is what we mean when we say we're scientific socialists. And I hope that at least on that front, we've shown that that's not actually how folks like Allison and I are moving forward. That's not, you know, the sort of bad faith approach that we take it all. We genuinely are interested in the scientific methodology. And then lastly, I think we should all be weary. And you've pointed this out many times, Sean and Aaron, of building our

conclusions into our premises, right? That's definitely true for Marxism and what we view of the world. But it's also true for people who don't agree with Marxism as a science and build in the conclusion that Marxism is a priori not a science into the premise of what science is, into their very definition of science. And so that sort of cuts both ways, right? I think we could all do a better job of being hyper aware of not building in our conclusions into our premises and take for granted certain things. And these sorts of dialogues and discourses hopefully, you know, help push people in that direction and make people more aware of that. Yeah, I'll toss it over to the seriously wrong boys. And you guys can tell me what you think we agree on or where our similarities and

differences are. So there might be some places here where we agree conceptually and then the difference that we have is ultimately going to be semantic and it's going to be based on sort of picking affiliations in some sense or another. But I do want to underline something about semantics. And that is, semantics means meaning. So in order to have a semantic disagreement, you're having a disagreement on the meaning of things. So semantic arguments are often treated as sort of distractions or side pieces. But semantic disagreements are often at the very hard of these issues. And so for us to say it's only a semantic disagreement might deviate us from the hard issue here, which is that a semantic disagreement is a disagreement on the fundamental

meaning of things in relation to each other. So the reason that I would exclude Marxism from the category of science or the category of a science, now it could have scientific hypotheses, like I said, that could be tested through branches of science, is that I think that a science is best determined by and discussed as different branches of science. So like, for example, you've got your physics, biology, ecology, et cetera. You can even go down to like history as a science broadly, or that could be more or less scientific or sociology, anthropology, et cetera. And to include Marxism as one of those categories, or even historical materialism as one of those categories, is to like sort of put your thumb on the science scale by injecting something that has an ideological

basis. Now, even if it is formed from a dialectical process which starts with first looking at the world but moves on from there, I think it's much better to take the scientific aspects of Marxism and then filter them through existing more neutral

tense of science. And that's going to be more beneficial for even the study of Marxism. And something that I think distinguishes this sort of really well is that, so Brett, you mentioned the pseudoscientific racism that was popularized in the West,

really, really popular discourse. You know, this is something that people on both the left and the right were participating in for decades, and they believed that they had found something scientific. It's absolutely condemnable, disgusting, idiotic, and if you really evaluate their claims, they never really made sense in the first place. It was a pseudoscience from the start.

And this is a distinction to, so I'm going to draw the Lysenkoism parallel here. They weren't like, oh, anything that contradicts our pseudos a scientific racism is contradicting the science of liberalism, is contradicting the science of democratic participation, is contradicting our science. No one was saying that the Western ideology was a science that you test sciences against, but the inverse is unfortunately true in the Soviet Union. They said effectively that dialectical materialism, Marxism, was itself a science that other sciences should be tested against. And I think that's a deviation from the

ideal sort of scientific approach to Marxism that you all are advocating for, and I think that's a good thing that you're advocating for not that, because that's horrible. But we need to be really, really wary about, so Marxism is something that we test against sciences, and we should never be in a position where we're getting science and then testing it against Marxism, or getting science and then testing it against libertarianism, or testing it against anarchism, or whatever. If the science is what we test again. And so that's how I see it sort of like operationally nested within each other, and I think that's sort of where we disagree on this. And so if that's a semantic disagreement, and at the end of the day, we're all going to

commit to tossing away which is untrue, creating new theories, new hypotheses, and testing them through scientific methodology, well, then I think we can sort of reach a truce on that, but at the same time, I would strongly emphasize, I think, the need for separating these scientific categories from these ideological categories. And that's not a diss on these ideological categories. I think Marxism, so social ecologists, we think Marxism is immensely valuable. It's core to our ideology. It makes

it, like, we read Marx. We, we think that this stuff is important. It's integrated into our philosophy. But even though social ecologists actively take cues from nature, take cues from ways to think of human ethics from nature,

and stand up to sort of the fascist naturalism that says, because we're able to project human hierarchies onto nature, and say, look, hey, that crab is like the landlord of that other crab. That type of fascist naturalism is what we stand up against. We say, no, you're taking a human concept and you're projecting it onto nature, and then you're using that projection onto nature to justify the human hierarchy, which is uniquely human.

But even with that, like, extremely focus on, like this extreme focus on ecology and science, what the social ecological perspective says is that no, Science is a very, very limited criteria of things that's useful. And the reason that we separated is because we're looking for sort of like it's the highest degree of certainty that we can, especially for the development of technology and so on. And then there's a wider spectrum of things, political philosophy, which science can sort of fit under or science can overlap with that's useful in other ways. So to say something that isn't, say that Marxism isn't a science, it's not an insult to Marxism,

and it's not a compliment to science. Science has limitations. It just means a specific thing, and there's, I think, good reason to make it mean that specific thing. It has to do with how we communicate certainty in society and how we communicate methodology in society. And the risks of blurring those lines, I think, are demonstrated through the episode of Lysenko and the Soviet Union,

where the language, the familiar language, the liberatory language of Marxism, was weaponized against scientists doing science, science. I just want to make sure we have protections against that. And that is, that's how I advocate for protecting against it, I think. Yeah. So a number of thoughts. I mean, I think I'm going to try to focus on some of the similarities and like what we can take away productively from this. So again, like, I think we all want to be able to think about uncertainty and certainty in more nuanced terms, right? And we disagree about how we're doing that. But one claim that came up

earlier, I think that the seriously wrong voice brought up that we didn't have time to get into is this idea that, like, for Marxism to be scientific, it would need to develop the social practices of science. And so, again, peer review and these other things were brought up there. And I actually think that this is, like, a really productive thought. And I want to touch on it a little bit as we're concluding. Because I think that on some level, there's a difficulty to that, which is that Marxism is sort of like, you know, it's an intellectual movement, but it's also a dissident intellectual movement in a lot of ways. A lot of it exists outside the formal bounds of the academy and the resources that we have to even produce those kind of social practices are really

limited because, again, in the West at least, the academy is where that gets done. And a lot of this theory is being done by organizers, thank God, who are outside of the academy, and who are engaged in struggles and don't have the sort of constructed institution that allows for those social practices. And so one thing I think productively that we could take away from this at the end, hopefully is that we could kind of get back to building those practices for us in our activist communities and in our organizational communities. I think that obviously like how you peer review writing about a revolution is hard, but we could try to move towards that. And I think when we have these theoretical disputes that are not grounded in just pure abstraction, but about like, here,

let's look at this concrete struggle and interpret the data that we have there, we're kind of doing a preliminary version of that. And it would be awesome for us as a movement to try to formalize that. and actually to try to develop the social practices of science and use those in the context of Marxism. So I think that, like, ultimately, I think that that is easier to do than I think you all think it is to do. But I think that it's something that we could all agree that we should be striving for. If we want to treat Marxism as scientific or as intersecting with science, those practices are good, and we have to be able to try to build them. My hope is at least what we're all doing over on the side of things of Marxist Center and our journal, which we're trying to have

focused more on these concrete debates, looking at real struggles and having those discussions about real practice and the results and the data we collect from them is moving in that direction. And I think that Marxism, on the whole, could take developing those practices more seriously. So I think that critique is really well played out that you all put forward. And I hope that we as Marxists would take that to heart. Absolutely. Aaron, when I think about scientific socialism. I, like, I use that term sometimes in more, let's say, normy discourse when, like, not talking about these kinds of older philosophical disputes and Marx and Engels' conception of scientific socialism. I just think about it in terms of socialist politics, and the socialist part of that

isn't the scientific part. It's the socialism is the part about what we ought to do, what our values are, what we want, our narratives, our arguments, our goals, all of that stuff I see as part of the socialism. And then to say that I want my socialism to be scientific is to say that our approach to doing this and the types of policies that we suggest and want for ourselves should all be based on the stuff that we all agree, our science. Like our science should, shouldn't go against biology, as Sean has really enjoyed pointing out in the episode. Our science... I was just blown away about this chapter in history, dude.

Our socialism shouldn't go against the climate science we have, that there's an ecological catastrophe looming. It shouldn't go against even less strict sciences, like sociological data we have or social psychology to the extent that those things can bring us conclusions that are replicable and there's a replicability crisis and a lot of the social sciences, but still to the extent that they can bring us things that seem to be true, we should always organize our politics around things that seem to be as certain as we can think they are based on the scientific method. One more thing from earlier, I just remember. Brett had brought up the Big Bang and theoretical physics. And that was actually, it was part of my whole spiel there that I cut off at the end because I was going on for so long. But like, indeed, like theoretical physics involves like creating these theories and then going out into going and trying to confirm them via observations of things through telescopes and like redshift and like a little specific things. But those are all super specific, quantified.

hypothetical hypotheses that they're testing. They're saying it would be this amount or they'll be moving at this speed. And they make these complex mathematical models of what they think the Big Bang might have been like and then what would that result in, what observations would that result in today? And they can confirm that with actual measurements of things that are numbers. Side point, I just wanted to make sure I threw that in there. But like all that kind of stuff, the hard sciences, the less hard sciences, life sciences. We all agree that needs to be taken seriously and our socialism, our goals and

things are subservient to that in a sense. Like if it was ever proved that they were wrong or impossible somehow, that would mean we change them because the science is the part that is actually illuminating objective reality. All right. Well, that I think is where we're going to have to end for today. Now, the point of this discussion, obviously, was not to have a hardcore debate or come out with some, you know, conclusion that everybody agrees on. The point was literally just to work through these problems, to talk about our differences and our similarities, and then offer it to our... Sorry, Brett. Brett, can I do one more thing? I'm sorry. God damn. If it's about Lisenko, I'm cutting you off. It's not about Lysenko. I feel bad because it was like, I got on a groove and I was like,

oh, I didn't say any of the things that I wanted to say at the end. I didn't realize we were ending. Go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. So, like, here's some approaches that I think that we could integrate that could increase the amount of our, like, scientific integration into our theory and practice. So embracing uncertainty and specifically things like A-B testing is a way to get short-term results that you can compare to two options, say, try something, try one thing here,

try another thing there, compare the results. In the context of statecraft, you can run, like, a pilot project in a smaller area, I try to see, can try out different modes of, say, like, worker democracy and stuff like that. And consulting with experts in fields and making sure that our theory is, to the greatest degree possible, sort of subservient to that best possible evidence to different fields, rather than the sort of nightmare scenario where you have the opposite, which I won't comment on whether or not it's happened in history. But the, so I had this idea that I thought, when I thought of it, I immediately. thought of you, Brett. This was after we had this recent conversation. And I really like to hear Alison's thoughts on this as well, which is that we talk a lot about the revolution as the site is like the laboratory for these ideas. And it occurred to me one night after a few drinks.

Of like, well, revolutions, revolutions happen sort of more or less spontaneously in the example of the like the Russian revolution. Like this was something that was percolating for a long time, but came legitimately from the masses, from the working class, from the peasantry, etc. And that it was in that context that the sort of transitionary state within Marxist linear is able to be set up. So when we talk about revolutions as something that we're, as a laboratory, where we're testing and et cetera, I want to turn that on its head. I want to be a good Marxist and try to turn things on their head.

What if we don't need a science of revolution, but what we need is a science of communism? a science of utopia, and to sort of signal jam angles here, scientific utopianism. If we can see from the historical record that these revolutions have happened in various contexts and that they've been successful, even without the Marxist-Leninist theory in the example of, say, Haiti, France, the American Revolution, etc., these revolutions happen. And if we accept that these revolutions happen, we don't really need to worry about experimenting how to create them.

What we do need to experiment is how do we create communism, how do we create utopia? So how can we have a science of the actualization of utopia that we start our testing now? We start our experiments now. And we get our theory together strongly now. So when we get the historical opportunity for world revolution, we're able to implement this ideal outcome. So I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on sort of that distinction of the science of revolution versus the science of communism. Okay, yeah, I'll go first. Then Allison can take it.

So that's a really interesting idea, right? And some aspect of that is prefigrative politics in the sense of trying to work through some of these issues, these social relations, patriarchy, racism within our own cadres, within our own organizations. But one thing that I think about, and, you know, maybe I'll get torn to shreds by both anarchist and Marxists for this one. That's how you know you're right. You know, what if instead of this inexorable antagonism between anarchists and Marxists, right, this necessarily spilling each other's blood and hating each other and being radically distrustful of one another, if we can form these relationships so that if we ever do get the opportunity to, you know, take over a society and build our own shit up, is it necessarily impossible that we could have a situation

where the Marxists form the party, we take over a state apparatus or something? And then instead of suppressing the anarchists or the anarchist blowing up our speeches, if we can set aside territory inside our new society for anarchist experimentation, right? So maybe the anarchists don't agree with our party concept. They don't agree with taking over the state. But we say, you know, if we do do this, we're going to have a bunch of territory where we can run anarchist experiments. Now, the anarchist experiments that fail are reabsorbed into this new proletarian state apparatus. You're taking care of. You still have housing.

You still have health care. You have all this shit. You don't have to worry about getting crushed by us. And the anarchist experiments that succeed, we help that expand, right? So, wow, anarchists in this corner of the territory really did interesting shit with how they organized their society and the workers' controlling of production. So now let's take that model and see if it works over on the other side of our territory, right? And so in this way, there's a sort of dialectical and creative tension between both the Marxist and the anarchist. But the way the prerequisite for that, of course, would be some level of trust, some level of not attacking one another, some good,

faith attempt to work together despite our differences, right? I'm not trying to collapse our differences. I'm not trying to say anarchists join our party or support our state. And anarchists aren't trying to tell us, hey, we think you're just as bad as the fascist or the capitalist, right? But we can actually work together. And maybe that's something close to what you're talking about in experiments toward communism. Maybe that's something we could try if we don't stab each other in the fucking backs. You don't need to. Yeah, we got to start with the trust building exercises now. And I'll just say, I'll put it all out there. Allison and Brett, I don't want to spill your I want you to keep your blood inside.

That's the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me. Alison, do you have thoughts on that before we wrap up? Yeah, so first on that idea that you had, Brett, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. One of my comrades from the World Workers Party was talking about that on Facebook the other day, where she was kind of talking about, like, maybe we do need to rethink our relationship

with anarchists in a post-revolutionary context and granting that level of autonomy to do those experiments if they don't want to be a part of our dictatorship of the proletariat. It could be an interesting way to do. that. So I'd actually been thinking through that thought a little bit just from someone else and our Marxist Leninist actually floating that idea around. I agree that the question is trust because obviously like this conversation is great and I love it and like if this is how our two sides always talked with each other, that would be a lot easier. But also then when I

see the way that anarchists talk, I mean, even just about like me and Brett, like the amount of like vitriol that some of them have towards us, you know, it's a little harder to generate that trust. So I think episodes like this are good in that sense because I think like when you're sitting down and talking to an anarchist or Marxist Leninist, like there is a humanizing effect to it. That's awesome. But I think we got to work a lot harder on building this bridges for an idea like that to work. Shut your eyes and fall into my arms. I promise I will catch you. On this other idea of like a science of communism, right, as opposed to a science of revolution, I'm sympathetic to that. I think on a historical note like where we

we would diverge is that I don't think that like the Russian Revolution was spontaneous. I think the insurrections that led to it were spontaneous, but I think it was the pre-planned organizing of the Bolsheviks that was there to seize upon it. So I would disagree with that historically. So I think you still need to have the science of revolution. But I think that you can have that science of communism alongside it. And this is probably where I think I'm more sympathetic to prefigurative politics than a lot of other Marxist-Leninists are. I don't think like prefigurative politics are like inherently revolutionary in the way that some anarchists who or more interest in sort of lifestyle politics might say. But I do think that, like, if our

revolutionary movement isn't experimenting with the forms we're going to employ later on, we're really behind, and that means we're going to be rushing to come up with the forms of governance and social life that we want in a really unideal context of civil war, right? Which is just not great. And so in my mind, that's part of why, like, the sort of dual power movement that's cropped up within revolutionary socialism in the U.S. is so hopeful, is that it wants to start building these kind of institutions now and experimenting with different forms of caring for people, caring for each other, and building mutual aid and solidarity. And I think that prefiguration is good. You know, my article that I wrote for regeneration about like climate change

and looking at Cuba, I argued we should model some of the organic urban agriculture Cuba is doing in our organizations here because we can test to see how well that'll work and whether or not once we win someday, if we win, that'll get us the ability to build, you know, a climate just socialism. So I'm really sympathetic to that. I think it has to occur alongside the sort of more science of revolution that us Marxist-Leninists are into. But I think that prefigurative experimentation with the things we are going to actually build to move into communism is actually really awesome. And it's something that I would like to see Marxist thinking about more. The year is 2119. The transition between capitalism and fully automated post-scarcity space

communist is well underway. The Left Unity Treaty, signed in the liberated Marxist-Leninist free state of socialist Palestine in the year 2103, specified an ongoing collaboration between the free territories liberated by the techno-utopians, the anarchists, and the communists, a coalition which began the interdisciplinary scientific field of paradisology, the study of actualizing perfect utopia, a commune of communes, worker control of the means of production, and a moneyless, classless society working to cash the great check of the history of liberatory movements guided by science and utilizing the most advanced technology possible revolutionaries from multiple tendencies

were working together for the first time in history in harmony under the leftist unity coalition which while holding only 56% of the world's landmass accounts for 72% of the world's population and has reached an unsteady truce with the bourgeoisie. States. This pact rests on the leftist coalition agreeing to cease organizing around instigating proletarian revolution in the bourgeois states, especially in the imperial core of capitalist Australia, as well as limiting access to prolet net, the online directly democratic system that the left unity states use to arrive at decisions on a global scale, so that proletarians and bourgeois states can no longer vote in global proletarian matters. In return, the bourgeois states have agreed

and all economic blockades and to cease using their intelligence and espionage agencies to form it coups in the left states. This uneasy piece has allowed the left unity states to pursue the science of paradiseology unhindered for the past 16 years. We now go to the world's central library and Paradise Actualization Research Center in Confederalist Catalonia,

where the head commissar of revolutionary transition is delivering his final report to delegates from around the world. And a kiss from me to you, won't you say you love me too? Oh, thank you, everyone. Yeah, that's our national anthem here, Left Unity States. And without further ado, here is the Commissar. Thank you, everyone. Yeah, very warm and comradly.

Welcome. Fellow citizens, neighbors. We have in front of us a absolutely unprecedented opportunity. Now, of course, we've got an uneasy treaty with the capitalist world. Our best analysis has shown that they've continued to plot towards coups against us. And don't get me started on the crippling economic sanctions that capitalist Germany has been placing on the mutualist experiments. of liberated Greece. But, comrades, I've got good news. Pearl Net was never deactivated. Thank you, yes. The Global Proletariat has been able to continue to exercise democratic control of the

liberated means of production, no matter their geographic location. Additionally, they had said, if we are to be non-antagonistic partners, we need to know that you're shutting down your supercomputers that are running intense database modeling experiments on how revolution could be more or less successful with more or less bloodshed. We agreed to those terms, but we didn't stop. And it's proven to be the right choice because our calculations show that we have two months to complete the process of history and liberate the world's people. In order to do that, the first step. Oh, hey, hey, hey, sorry to interrupt. You're more of a Marxist-Leninist-leaning paradisologist. Is that way? Sure. Before the treaty, yes, I did identify as a

Marxist, Leninist, now we'd say Leninist school, Paradiseologists. So just before you present this plan, I was wondering if there's anything in there that will protect against the dangers of Lysenkoism. Anarchist inspired paradisologists, is that, is that right? Anarcho-communism. Fuck yeah.

We're all paradisologists here. I would just request now, one of the conditions of the Left Unity Treaty is paradisologists inspired by Lenin would cease referring to historical materialism as a science. And some people even said that was too gracious of us, but we graciously did it. But in exchange, all that we requested of our

anarchist neighbors was to just not bring up Lysenkoism anymore and going for cheap dunks. Hey, I'm just noticing that you aren't laying out a plan for how you are going to avoid Lysenkoism. And that's kind of what I'm curious about. I'm sorry, could we people's guards, could you respectfully escort him out of the, he's violating the left unity treaty and I'm like trying to get through this. Just escort me out then. Just like a little. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, yeah, What do you think they did in the anarchist projects, Chappas and Rojava? You think they had no police there, you idealist? They didn't have Lysenkoism.

Before you take him away, this guy hasn't hidden a bomb in here to blow me up. Just because I'm an anarchist, I'm going to blow you up. I'm so glad we could have this mature discussion. That's an ugly stereotype. Those people who said that anarchists are unserious, petulant children are totally disproven by this. I think it's really telling that you can't even answer the question. I think it's really telling that we are on the precipice of overthrowing global capitalism and perhaps the anarchist comrade over here is showing his true disposition towards supporting

the global capitalist egemony in the imperial core of Australia. I think that's maybe showing up here a little bit. While we're interrupting the presentation here, I just, before you drag him out, guards, I was thinking, you know, I'm also a paradiseologist. We're all paradisologists here. But I'm a bit more influenced by liberalism, actually. I think there's, you know, a radical history there worth engaging with. The Haiti, definitely, good liberal revolution.

And I don't know if anyone needs to be dragged out of here. I also don't know if it's good manners to interrupt someone else's presentation. You know, maybe everyone has stepped over the line a little bit here, both sides. Maybe done something a little bit wrong, but... Aren't you shut up? Pretty serious? You know, guards, can you let the anarchist go and stay for the presentation and instead pull out this nerd?

I really want to see the presentation. Bye, bye. Sorry about that. everyone. Now that he's gone, I just want to apologize for interrupting. Please go on with your presentation. And thanks. Just to be clear, I mean, in our working group on this, you know, there's anarchist-inspired paradiseologists, there's even Trotskyist paradiseologists. Just kidding, Craig. He's a great guy. I just, ugh. And actually, we did have some internal guides that even mentions Lysenkoism by name once as part of a larger argument about

ensuring fidelity to the scientific process and does anybody want to know what our modeling says the one true glorious revolution that will end capitalism forever and liberate all humanity is going to look like let's get into this shit motherfuckers and so the left unity coalition sprung into action the conditions were ripe a two-decade long revolutionary public relations effort had won popular support, even in the highly propagandized capitalist powers. On May 5, 2119, the LUC, Luck, began the process of overturning the world order. Sleeper cells locked out the capitalist partisans, rendering them effectively without networking tools during an unexpected moment of crisis, which allowed the transitionary guard to find

and capture the titans of capitalist industry, politics, militarism, and the most vulgar and reactionary public figures who made their living spouting utter trash against the redistribution of wealth and power in society. These captured human beings with a high potential for counter-revolution were put into nice cages where they had free room service 24-7

steak, cereal, nuts, fruit, you name it, and all the newest video games. I'm talking full VR and the classics. And there's large common areas where the captured counter-revolutionaries can engage together in the meaningful grounding work of gardening, connecting them for the first time with the processes that sustain human life. Some of them get out later because they're chill about the whole thing. They're like, this is actually pretty cool.

Now that I see y'all in action, this was the right choice. My bad forever even doubting this. The other ones resentfully live out the rest of their days, complaining like spoiled children, living in a material abundance, their ancestors, who are no doubt. looking down on them in shame could ever dream of. Now that the outside threat and the prospects of international civil war were eradicated, the LUC coalition began the process of building world communism, the abolition of patriarchy, racism, fascism, and defense against ecological and astronomical

crisis, which posed a threat to human flourishing. It was not the end of conflict and strife and power games for humanity, but it was a step forward towards a more liberated society, which was never undone. For the first time, humanity united under global, good faith, and scientifically socialist confederation began the hard work of living up to our responsibilities to each other and the ancestors which toiled and suffered through history to bring us here. The Left Unity Coalition, standing on the shoulders of everyone who struggled against injustice, cruelty, and mistreatment of humans and nature, they had done it. They achieved full communism. The hypothesis was proven correct. and the people turn to one another saying we won and you were here too and you and you and you

all right okay so I think that is the end of the conversation thank you guys so much honestly I think I speak for Allison and myself when I say that we couldn't ask for better interlocutors for this discussion this is very complex this is difficult for me you know this is difficult for all of us this is not an easy subject but having people come to the table with such good faith, such decency, such kindness really matters a lot. And I really hope, you know, our antagonists aside, the people that really hate us, they're always going to hate us on both sides. But there's a huge chunk of people in the middle who genuinely like to hear these conversations and really want to learn about the differences here and are struggling with these

concepts themselves. And if we can walk away from this, not hating each other, but having a better understanding of one another and realizing that at the end of the day, we want the same world and that we're comrades, despite our differences. I think that's important and it creates a foundation for us to be constructive going forward. So thank you, Sean and Aaron, so much for coming on. Thank you, as always, Allison, for coming on. This is really fun, really exciting. And if everybody wants to just tell people where they can find you online as we wrap up, that'd be awesome. Definitely. Thank you as well, again, for having us on. It has been a blast, and you two are fantastic, and both of your podcasts are really good and informative and interesting. And if people

want to hear more of us in our podcast. It's seriously wrong. You can Google that. There's no vowels and seriously, but you'll find it either way. S.S.L. Y. We had that choice in 2014. But, and also similarly, I want to say that this has been like an awesome conversation. And I have like, honestly, for years since I first interacted with the Marxist-Leninists online, I always really wanted to have more in-depth conversations about these issues, not through this partisan lens of saying like just trying to pull up the worst examples from the Soviet Union as like as just this battering ram to like avoid addressing the issues or something like that. But I've always had a really hard time finding spaces to actually have these conversations. So I really appreciate that

that this is something that you're doing on your show and that I feel like we've had a really productive and positive conversation overall. So I really, really appreciate it. And to echo what Aaron says, listen to both your podcasts, and I just found them very, very informative and thought-provoking. Obviously, you have disagreements with anyone if you hear them talk long enough, but I enjoy them a lot. Thank you so much. Alison. Awesome. Yeah. So I just want to echo what everyone said. I think this has been incredibly productive. And I hope for the listeners, like, I don't know that we'll change anyone's mind on either side of this, but I think it's good to put these ideas in dialogue and to challenge each

other. So I really feel like this has been in good faith and really solid. Um, if you want to find me, again, me and Brett have the podcast, Red Menace. You can find that on Twitter at Red underscore Menace underscore Pod. Um, and you can also find my personal Twitter through there. It's in the bio. And I also blog on WordPress at failing that invent.com.com. Um, which is more long-form pieces that I write on socialist stuff in general. Um, so yeah, that's where you can find some of that. But yeah, I'm really happy with that was conversation with it. I'm really thankful that we all got to do this. Absolutely.

All right. Good night, everybody. pretty but they ain't got what we got no surrey they've got private loans

and public parks well they've got those minstrel shows Pretty ladies With the big shot pose With our private laws And public parts

I just from the Windy City The windy city The windy city Is mighty pretty But they ain't got What we got

No story We've got Private Law and public parks They've got private loans In public parks They've got private loans In public parks