Rev Left Radio - Demarcation and Demystification: Marxist Philosophy and its Limits

Episode Date: January 26, 2020

Breht O'Shea and Alyson Escalante interview J. Moufawad-Paul on his newest book Demarcation and Demystification: Philosophy and its Limits for this Rev Left / Red Menace crossover episode. In this episode we discuss the Marxist conception of philosophy, what separates philosophy from theory, the role philosophy plays in class struggle, an historical materialist analysis of the western philosophical canon, and much more!  Purchase Demarcation and Demystification here: https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/zer0-books/our-books/demarcation-demystification Check out JMP's blog here: http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com Follow JMP on twitter @MLM_Mayhem Video version of this interview on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/dUUq8Kwkw3I Outro music: 'W-4' by Dead Prez Find more of Dead Prez's music here: https://deadprezblog.wordpress.com/ ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, FORGE, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. So for today's episode, we're going to actually do a bit of a crossover with our sister podcast, Red Menace. The reason it's a crossover is because it's sort of a traditional Rev. Left Radio interview style show, unlike Red Menace, which is, you know, me and Allison, Escalante, tackling texts and explaining it and applying its lessons, etc. but I did do this interview with Allison, my co-host for Red Menace. And so we both go back and forth asking J. Malthwaad Paul different questions about his book, demarcation, and demystification, philosophy, and its limits. So it will appear on both feeds, but we wanted to sort of do a crossover between the two shows as we usher into 2020.

And so the only thing difference for Rev. Left listeners is that Allison will join me as a co-host, and we will both go back and forth asking JMP questions. about this text. So again, this text is about philosophy. It's about, you know, Marxism. It's about science and the role that philosophy plays in relation to science. It's about theory and practice and philosophy, what makes theory different from philosophy, et cetera. So it can be sort of challenging, especially for those who don't have sort of rigorous philosophical training on some levels, but on other levels, it's also really accessible. And at the very least, we'll challenge people who don't have that formal training into maybe pursuing more of it or reading this book

itself, et cetera. So no matter if you're sort of a philosophy veteran or completely novice when it comes to philosophy, this interview may be challenging, but it's still accessible, and so is the book. And as I say in the interview itself, even if you're somebody who's more, you know, not as into philosophy or haven't been trained in philosophy, the one thing about Jay Milford-Paul's writing that makes him so accessible is his clarity. So, you know, a lot of philosophers have a reputation of being, you know, obscure to the point of absurdity. We think of Hegel. We think of some people like Heidegger, et cetera. Philosophy sort of sometimes can have that stereotype where it is sort of obscurantist and, you know, impossible to slog through. But what I really love about a

philosopher like JMP is just how clear he writes and just the pains he goes to to, you know, make sure that you're still along with him for the ride at every point of the ride. So yeah, This is a wonderful, wonderful interview. I love everything JMP does is incredibly challenging. He's been on the show multiple times. So if you haven't heard our other interviews with them, we have an interview about Marxism as Science. We have an interview with his book, Austerity Apparadus,

his other book with his co-author Benjinin called Methods Devour Themselves. So if you like this guest and you like this interview, you'll definitely go back into Rev Left's Back Catalog and check out like the three or four, maybe five other interviews we've had with JMP. He's really sort of a hallmark of the show at this point, and we're very honored to have him on. So without further ado, here's the Rev. Left Radio slash Red Menace Crossover episode interview of J. Malfaad Paul on his newest book, Demarcation, and Demystification, philosophy, and its limits. Put out by zero books. Enjoy.

Okay. My name is Joshua Mufald-Wad Paul. I'm a philosopher who teaches as conference. track faculty at York University in Toronto, and much of my work is on the philosophy of Marxism. Absolutely, and we're very happy to have you back. I mean, at this point, you've been on Rev. Left so many times, it's hard to keep track, but everything you do is hugely influential to me, and so that's why you're on again. And I do want to say, I think, I don't want to speak for Allison, but I think I can safely say that, you know, you really have been a huge influence on me and Allison as individual Marxist thinkers, as well as on our show. Red Menace where we take a lot of the stuff that we've learned from your work and that you

forced us to think through and really put it into practice and help other people learn along those lines too. So thank you so much for all your work. And I just really want to just emphasize how much of an impact it really does have on us and how we think. So thank you for that. Well, thank you for the appreciation. It's good to know my work is useful. Absolutely. So let's go ahead and just jump into these questions. There's a lot of stuff to cover. So I think the best way to open up something like this, especially for listeners who haven't read the text is just maybe do like a bird's eye view of what you're trying to do in this text. So what was the motivation behind writing this book? And how would you summarize its main thesis or

argument? The idea of this book for me, it started nearly a decade ago, I think. I mean, I started writing it before the first books I published and it just kept going through different revisions. And it was something I was, even before I started writing it was kind of an idea that was percolating right after I defended my dissertation. And I was starting to think about methodology and you know the question of what made the kind of thing I did philosophy instead of political theory or political economy so when I began to think about that I also began to think about what made philosophy philosophy particularly in the book of what I call the shadow of the 11th thesis and

that means that you know the shadow cast by Marxism encapsulated in the 11th theses of Foybach which as I'm sure you know we all know if we've been Marxist for a while that, you know, that thesis has quoted all over the place. Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. So with that in mind, I guess you can say the main thesis of my book is the way in which I think through that 11th thesis of Marxist and how it should be read in light of the unfolding trajectory of Marxist theory. So, you know, I kind of have this way of looking at it where I see it as saying philosophers, have only interpreted the world because that's all philosophy can do even if it was once thought

that philosophy and thinking and contemplation was the basis for world change. And so my point is that philosophy can't change the world, even if its history has made this claim. So when we demystify philosophy, we come to the understanding that philosophy has a much more modest role to play, but still an important role. And in many ways, it has always played this role, but it's kind of veiled it in these kind of grandiose metaphysical notions. And that role is to clarify thought, which means investigation, interpretation, intervention, demarcation. And I also talk about how philosophy is always conditioned by what I call a political decision, meaning the philosopher's conscious or unconscious class commitments. And that's, I guess, pretty much the thesis in a nutshell.

Yeah, absolutely. And I just, like, this book did from my understanding of philosophy as a Marxist, very similar to what continuity and rupture did for me as a Marxist trying to understand science. And so I really like that, you know, having read CNR and engaging with this text, I really like sort of reading them next to each other or just having one in mind while I read the other because they do sort of, you know, address those two things that I think a lot of Marxists, for a bunch of reasons that aren't always, you know, their fault necessarily. It's hard to have a really good, robust principled understanding of just how science and philosophy exists within Marxism and how they relate to one another.

We'll get into that question specifically in a bit, but I'll bounce it over to Allison to either give feedback or go to the next question. Yeah, I mean, I was just going to say I also found this text very clarifying in terms of the 11th thesis in graduate school was something that would come up a lot in my philosophy department that we were wrestling with to try to figure out what it means from a Marxist perspective. And I actually think I'd kind of come at it more from one of the perspectives that you criticize in this text in the past. So really having like a text that focuses very strongly on reinterpreting that in a way that is sort of, of at odds with how it was taught to me in graduate school, I found really refreshing. I kind of come away from this book feeling like I have a more humble view of philosophy in a lot of ways, and I actually really appreciated how that sort of challenged a lot of my presuppositions about what, you know, philosophy is as a core concept. Oh, thank you. I mean, I definitely would

have come away with, you know, similar notions that I criticize as well. And it was, you know, kind of working through it and being self-critical of this kind of pomposity that a lot of philosophers have And thinking about it in the whole context of Marxism, that I came to that perspective that I put out in the book. Awesome. So yeah, let's go ahead in that case and just go ahead and get into the next question then. So I sort of had a question that might help for sort of introducing some of the terminology in this book. So demarcation and demystification, it sort of follows your previous work and employing this notion of terrains and theoretical terrains. So I was wondering if you could explain for our listeners just briefly what a theoretical terrain is and why you settled for a metaphor of terrain and carcline. when discussing this subject matter?

Well, you know, it definitely is an extended metaphor. And as I, you know, kind of maybe overstate in the book, it's not meant to be an ontological concept. It's, you know, an extended metaphor that I thought was useful in clarifying matters, and hopefully it is. And, you know, I started using train. I wasn't the first to use this terrain. A lot of people talk about theory as a terrain, but I do use it in my own way.

So when I employ it, I mean, just to kind of talk about this, extended metaphor and what it means. I mean an organized body of theory. So theoretical train being an organized body of theory. And that is an organized body of conceptual thought that attempts to make sense of the world. And the kind of theoretical trains could be religious or artistic, social or psychological or things like that. You know, a theoretical train doesn't have to be correct to be a theoretical train. It's just that something is put forward as a theory of saying what there is. But I do point out that the most important theoretical trains or at least I try to argue this, and I hope I do it well, are scientific ones since they

established truth procedures. And of course, I include historical materialism as one of those scientific terrains. And, you know, I call them terrains. You know, I like that metaphor, too, because, you know, these kind of bodies of theory, they tend to have something like a topography and they have what you could call different provinces within them. So it's useful to kind of think about it like that, again, metaphorically. So, you know, for example, you can think about religion as like, you know, a broad theoretical terrain and then, you know, have these kind of different regions, different expressions of religion being different regions. And even within those regions, you have different theological commitments that are, you know, different kind of like

sub-sub-sub-theoretical terrains. And they all contribute to a kind of theoretical topography that philosophers of religion study, say, for example, in religion. And, you know, and since I said, again, that the most important ones are the scientific ones, it's really easy to see how the sciences, you know, as when you think about them as a terrain, that metaphor, that they also clearly have sub-regions. So if you think of like, you know, just the divisions between the so-called hard scientists being these different provinces like biology, chemistry, physics, whatever, and then even within, you have these different, again, articulations within them, different types of biology, different types of chemistry, and, of course, borders that are shared often between

them. But, you know, one of the, one of the reasons, of course, that I use it is also to explain the second order practice of philosophy and that, you know, brings up the metaphor of cartography. And so, you know, what I'm trying to get at is that, you know, philosophy, when I talk about it just being about interpreting the world, philosophy by itself doesn't establish the theoretical sense of the world, although, you know, it's been conflated with that in the past and the way philosophy has understood itself. And I think we have other questions that we'll probably get into that, especially in the way that, you know, philosophy used to be tied to religion or, you know, emerge from it. But, you know, seeing philosophy is this, it's this practice that intervenes on

what is theoretically established. It's kind of like mapping a terrain, right? It's also a good metaphor to explain demarcation and demystification, you know, because, you know, cartographers demarcate and they demystify and, you know, demarcation and demystification. It's the title of a book. Definitely, yeah. And I mean, I very much found it to be a helpful metaphor, I think, especially the exploration of subterrines, I found very useful for thinking about the relationship of certain fields of theory to sort of a broader overarching theory and body of theory. So I found that very helpful throughout. I don't know, Brett, did you have any thoughts on it? No, yeah, I really, the first time I really engaged with the sort of conceptual analogy of a terrain

was with continuity and rupture. And ever since then, it's really helped my thinking. And this only, you know, emboldened and deepened my understanding of it. And I think it's really useful because, you know, as you mentioned in the book, it helps clarify what we're we're doing here and how these sort of actions are taken on the terrain of a given, you know, practice or whatever we're talking about. But let's go ahead and move on because this question is pretty central to your overall book and pretty central to your argument. And I referenced it a little bit in the first question I asked you, but that is just what is the relationship broadly between science and philosophy and what is the relationship between philosophy and science within

Marxism specifically, especially in relation to Marx's 11th theses on Feuerbach? Yeah, I mean, this is a really big question. It's a question of the most of the book, you know, concerned with and also what a lot of my writing is concerned with, but I'll try to do it justice in this interview. So, I mean, let's just begin with kind of the, I get possibly a well-known notion that science and philosophy way, way back used to be part of the same discipline. And you used to call philosophy, anything that talked about the world, and that would include, you know, kind of early conceptions of what we would now call science, right? And so, you know, within the so-called, like, Western tradition, you know, the pre-Socratics were called natural philosophers.

And that whole point was that, you know, they were called that because they were trying to give almost the scientific definition of nature. But if you read them, it's pretty wacky. But, you know, they're trying to make sense of nature in a matter that, you know, it prefigured kind of, kind of, the scientists of early modernity, but their tools and, you know, the basis of their knowledge was obviously not up to the task at that period of time. But it is interesting to see that, you know, the Ionian Enlightenment with these philosophers was an attempt to break from the mystification of kind of the poets and priests, right, that kind of world, you know, the worldview of the Odyssey or the Iliad or something like that. And, you know, similarly, in every region of the world,

you find this in so-called Eastern philosophy and African philosophy and things like that. When philosophy first emerges, it does seem to share something similar to the sciences, the attempt to kind of explain why things happen and how and demystify things, an attempt to make sense of reality to predict it, to say what there is and how it works. So, you know, that's the first point I want to get to is kind of how, you know, these things get conflated together. But, you know, it becomes a little bit different now, right? So there is a sense that, you know, a lot of philosophers want to remind everyone how philosophy. is the queen of the discipline.

And, you know, in a certain sense, philosophy did birth most of the modern disciplines, which is partially the reasons philosophers still like to imagine that, you know, philosophy is the most fundamentally important thing you can study. But eventually became clear through this whole history that, you know, what we started calling the sciences weren't the same as philosophy, no matter how many philosophers, and you can think of like Hegel here, like to call their ontological system science with, you know, a capital S. But, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book is how, you know, you look at Kant, right?

There's something really interesting here in modernity. Kant, you know, the great enemy Kant, so many of us in Neo-Contraism, but we have to study him. But, you know, the Purdickett Revolution being really, really important to the sciences, right? This whole notion that starts the emergence of the so-called new sciences and the idea that nature can be explained according to natural causes. Because it was so important that philosophers like Kant realized philosophy was being outpaced by these new sciences, right, over a period of time. And Kant wanted to do the same thing with philosophy. But, and I point this out of the book, his whole point of this notion of a Copernican revolution in philosophy was he really just wanted to put philosophy back in place as the foundation for all of reason, including the sciences. And this is because, in many sense, he was reacting to Hume, right?

And we know like Hume, you talk about Hume awaking him from his dogmatic slumber. And Hume, you know, was very troubled by the empirical method because he thought that it released, you know, created this problem of induction and, you know, induction couldn't be philosophically squared with formal logic. And in many ways, we can see this, you know, not actually being a problem with science, but maybe a problem with philosophy. Because even though he points out that sciences have this problem, the sciences were actually succeeding at that time in general. generating applicable material truths. So in many ways, it kind of might have made philosophy seem dubious, which is where Kant comes in, and he hoped to demonstrate that, you know, human was wrong and that you could square, you know, the sciences with a foundation of philosophy.

But, you know, as I point out in the book, this conceit of Kant demonstrated what Mayasou called the Ptolemaic counter-revolution, because what he does is instead of actually doing what the Copernan Revolution does and says, you know, that the Earth and the human, living at are not the center of the universe like conceptually he puts a very specific type of rational autonomous subject that really could only be a philosopher right back at the center of knowledge right that's just kind of attention to the sciences in any case you know what i'm getting at here is that science was coming into its own as a discipline and the theoretical terrain that could generate actual truth procedures but the philosophy has

always been troubled by this because philosophy was in some ways displaced At the same time, because philosophy is merely about thinking, thought to clarify it, every scientist, and I point in the book, too, also functions as a spontaneous philosopher. But they like to suddenly make all these explanations and meanings of what they're doing. But often it's very, they do it in a very poor way, right? That it's unreflective of their class commitments. And we just need to think about some people like, you know, Dawkins and Harris. They like to pass off these claims about science.

that are actually very philosophical, but just very shitty philosophical understanding and brand them as science. So, you know, science also is conditioned by class struggle, which I guess brings us to the second part of the question about Marxism. And, you know, I feel too that Marxism was a break from the perspective that philosophy was foundational to science and, you know, instead proclaim that philosophy only interpreted the world.

And this becomes clear because Marx and Angles' core project in the way they said it, and they didn't say they were creating a new philosophical system. They said they were creating a science of history, right? And the project that they initiate becomes the unfolding of revolutionary theory that's intended to be scientific, what, you know, they called and what we now call historical materialism. And you get this whole history in Marxist philosophy of trying to make a distinction between the science and the philosophy of Marxism, which is something I talk about a bit.

I'm not going to get into big detail here, but, you know, understanding how the science is foundational. But it's also a science that is aware that class struggle is the motion of history. Yeah, and that was an incredibly large question, and it literally is what the book's about. So I just want to reiterate sort of up front, as I've done in the past. Listening to this episode will hopefully get you into wanting to read the text, but, you know, 10 questions, 12 questions with the author isn't enough to completely sort of replace reading the text. So if you're interested at all in this conversation and there are questions we don't get to or things that you still have questions about, highly, highly encourage people to check this book out.

It's only about 200 pages, too, so it's not really. a big book to read. And it's very accessible with regards to just how clear JMP writes. So I would urge people to, if you're at all interested in any of this, you know, to go and actually read the text directly. But Allison, do you have anything to say before we move on to the next question? Not really, actually. I think the next question sort of, for me, at least, deals with some of these ideas about the relationship between philosophy and science. So I'm ready to just get to it if that works. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess for me, like my takeaway at the end of this text was having a much more humble view of philosophy compared to how I've thought of it in the past. So this idea of

philosophy as like a means of interpreting and intervening, as opposed to sort of this classical, maybe self-aggrandizing narrative that philosophers tell themselves of philosophy as the father of the sciences, it really does in a lot of ways, like limit the role that philosophy plays within revolutionary struggle, but also within sort of academic inquiry more broadly. So my question then is sort of if the role of philosophy becomes so limited when we take on this view, from your perspective, why is it worth studying? What is it that we gain by specializing in and focusing on philosophy in particular? Yeah, that's a great question. And I think, yeah, because there's this idea that, again, that's pointed out that you know, you want philosophy to have this like, oh,

is the father of everything. The philosophy likes to tell the story about itself, and we're trained if we go through academic philosophy to think that. But, you know, all I'd say here is that simply because something has limits doesn't mean it isn't worth studying. I think, you know, all of the sciences have limits, too, and points of questions they can't answer and, like, you know, disciplinary boundaries, right? My point is that if we have a more modest understanding of philosophy, maybe we can work better as philosophers. But this more modest understanding doesn't make it worthless because we should get away from creating grandiose abstract ontological systems. And just because we can't do that doesn't mean we can't. shouldn't pursue philosophy. It's not some zero-sum game of like grandiose abstract ontological

systems or no philosophy or some bullshit analytic philosophy does or no philosophy, right? So I think part of the reason why it feels like to have this humbling view could feel like what's worth then is because I think we're trained in philosophy in a way that we've inherited a kind of conceit, right, from the discipline. And I know this. you know, from, you know, not going to name names anymore because I can't remember them anymore, but think about, you know, college, I'm grad school and everything about that and, you know, people in different departments I've met or things I've read by different academic philosophers. And the reality is that lots of academic philosophers want to see their discipline as extremely important, right?

And, you know, in some ways, I get that they want to see it as extremely important because there is this very anti-philosophical and neoliberal reasoning that has crept into academia that, you know, wants to say, well, what's the point of philosophy? We should just, you know, turn, you know, universities into a professional school or something like that. You know, I've run into these kinds of people, right? They think, you know, the university should be medical school, law, the sciences, and business, right? But, you know, philosophy, a lot of philosophers want to project this aura of importance

and alignage through whatever they accept as the canon, right, to defend the preeminence of the discipline, right? And as preeminence, they feel it's being lost. But, you know, in many ways, we don't have to, you know, capitulate to this neoliberal reaction, all we have to do is think that it's important, you know, it's worthwhile to lose the conceit. If all we lose is the conceit, when we walk away from this illusion and think through what we are actually doing as philosophers, maybe we'll gain a better understanding of what our practice is. And in this case, you know, I think this, this,

this humbling view or modest view of philosophy means that philosophy is still important because, you know, as an act of demarcation and intervention on theoretical terrains, which is how I define it, philosophy is largely concerned with thinking thought. And, you know, and we want to define it kind of simply like that. That, I guess, a very pithy definition about this book is about philosophy, is about thinking thought. And in this day and age, we're not really taught well to think thought, right? It's actually very difficult to think thought. You know, even within our own kind of revolutionary traditions, it's difficult to think thought.

like people fall more easily into like dogmatic phrase mongering things like that and actually really trying to think concepts through um not to not you know not well actually shameless self promotion my next book which is a very small one that's you know coming out sometime in 2020 um concerns the importance of thinking thought within Marxism leninism Maoism or how to think Maoism and how we really need to get better at this so we don't fall into either dogmatic or eclectic styles of thinking So if we understand that, right, if we understand that when we think thought, we are always doing so according to a class perspective, and this is the broader question, we can understand how we are thinking and intervening. And, you know, another way to think about this is about the number of critical thinking courses that philosophy departments, you know, tend to provide these days. And they're, you know, they're not always good courses. You know, I've had to teach many of these because they're the ones that contract faculty always get. they pay my bills no one else wants to teach them they're kind of boring um so but you know it's part of the whole claim is like philosophies about critical thinking here's this course just on critical

thinking and if you look at critical thinking textbooks they they generally concentrate on kind of rules of formal and informal logic the problem of fallacies you know distinction between induction and deductions structures of arguments and a whole bunch of other formulaic notions and these aren't bad into themselves, but when I teach these courses and what I think that, you know, when we talk about philosophy, really being about critical thinking, meaning how to think thought, it also means how to understand our political commitments, the underlying tension of class struggle and the ways in which ideology, and here particularly ruling class ideology, structures the world and our thoughts. So when we demystify this, when we figure out how to practice critical thinking that

is aware of class struggle and ideology, then we really are practicing philosophy, and this might have limits, but it's actually a really, really big thing to do. It's a difficult discipline to get. But it also means that philosophy is not only practiced by the academic experts who can figure out the meaning of like Hegel's logic, right? Rather, it means, and I think this is important when you make it kind of modest, but importantly modest, that philosophical practice can and should be part of any revolutionary movement. Cadre can and should become philosophers who struggle to think the thought of the theoretical train. And this is hard, but it's not impossible.

It's not some specialized knowledge, right? You can learn it. But it is hard, especially when you are conditioned to be one-dimensional thinkers who are better at memorizing and repetition rather than thinking and understanding. And this is, you know, a very important role I think philosophy has to play. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think especially I'm very excited for that next book, because when thinking about the state of sort of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism,

in North America today, I think it's very easy. to see the need for sort of that critical approach to thinking thought carefully and doing it well and providing clarity through that as opposed to just falling into, as you said, either eclecticism or dogmaticism, which, you know, are so dominant within how the movement looks, led talks about itself in many ways. And yeah, I definitely have that, I think, sort of experience of coming through academic philosophy constantly having to hear philosophy justify its right to exist in the academy at all. So every philosophy class, I feel like, sort of started with, here's why philosophy is the most important thing in the world just as a sort of justification for that class's existence

and why you should sign up for it. So stepping outside of that after sort of years of hearing that, it is sort of refreshing to get this view of actually no, maybe that is a self-conceit that we've been telling ourselves and maybe actually what we're doing is more focused and modest than that in a way that's actually very useful. Yeah. And I think by putting it in its proper place and not letting it spill outside of the boundaries of what it can only do, it can actually make philosophy more effective, especially when we think of it in terms of, you know, the fight against capitalism, imperialism, and fascism, et cetera. So, yeah, I think that's incredibly important. I do want to move on, and I want to talk a little bit about Althusay, because this book is, you know, clearly

influenced, to some extent, by Althusay, and although you do make sure to gesture towards your disagreements with him, you also admit his importance as a philosopher of Marxism. So can you just talk about Althusay a bit, specifically what you think is sort of essential in his work, and even if you have time where you think he fails or comes up short. Oh, man, this is a, you know, I mean, this, there's like an entire essay or book could be based on my, the things I appreciate about him and the things I do not like about it. You know, actually, I'm kind of writing this. I was starting to write this, you know, long piece on the concept of the subject,

which has a lot of my agreements and disagreements with Elthus are in it. And it was a piece that got way out of hand. And I've had to shelve it because I don't know where I'm going with it anymore. Because I just ended up on these whole tracing of disagreements that ended up like going, you know, too far beyond the bounds of the project. But, you know, I'm going to try to figure out how to keep it, you know, kind of short here within kind of the, you know, the limits of this discussion related to the book and the way that I connect them to the book. So, yeah, I mean, the book is influenced by Altusar. He isn't the loose by a lot of people, but him specifically because when I was going through one of the first initial drafts, when I only had kind of an introduction, a bunch of other chapters that I eventually scrapped.

I mean, this is before the communist necessity. I decided I had to return to a lot of people in the Marxist tradition that talked about the meaning of philosophy. And one of them, of course, was Altuzar. And before that, I kind of had dismissed him because, you know, it came through this, the way that I was taught Marxism was by people. that didn't like Elthazar, right? And that usually, that obvious conditions your thought to anyone, right? And after a while, you've got to get beyond that and be, okay, I'm going to read these people fully by myself outside of this, the way that I've been taught. And so, you know, I'd only read a few essays of his from, you know, the famous ISA essay and, you know, the one, and I read

the four Marx book and, you know, sections of reading capital, the old version of reading capital when it was just Balabar and Elthazar. So I decided to return to him when I was also returning other philosophers to read specifically what he had to say about the meaning of philosophy because he'd written a number of essays about that back then I hadn't read yet and actually it was there that I found a very specific love for him in that area right I found he was one of the clearest thinkers on the meaning of philosophy from a Marxist perspective and a lot of what he was saying either accorded with what I was starting to think about at the time or clarified some of my own positions and where I was going it was very helpful I mean other people were as well

but you can see the, I guess, the influence of Altesse are there, right? And also, it's, you know, refreshing to find a philosopher who's considered one of the great Marxist philosophers defending the notion of historical materialism as a science, at least in like, you know, that period of his work, the period I care about, and trying to think what philosophy meant in relationship to the science of historical materialism. And, you know, I think his work on the history of philosophy, and particularly here, I'm thinking about, you know, philosophy for non-philosophers is very useful. But inside of that, there are a lot of areas I disagree with him. I mean, there's a lot of other areas I like him into now, but there are a lot of areas I disagree with him. They were outside the gamut of this book, so I didn't really get into them. But, you know, I can mention some here. Sure, yeah, please do.

The first is one I mentioned earlier on that I started when I was writing that essay about the story, subject, right, is his treatment of a subject, which to my mind didn't do a good job of demystifying of what, by his time, was a confusing notion. So you get this concept of the subject that comes from, you know, Descartes, or the modern notion of subject that comes from Descartes, and it starts, you know, appearing in all these different works and things like that. And, you know, Althusar kind didn't do a good job of actually thinking, in my opinion, thinking see what that meant. It was actually pretty convoluted under, like, or at least a pretty convoluted philosophy. of it. And in my opinion, kind of open the door to Foucault's work on the subject, which I

disagree with. And I've dealt with that elsewhere, so I won't get into why I disagree with Foucault here. But I do. Also, the other area, the second area, that I kind of have a disagreement with him is his notion of the epistemological break between the young and mature Marx on the way within this discussion he sometimes treats the German ideology but at the same time I get why he did it right it was this it was to break from this petty bourgeois Marxist humanism that was all the rage at the time and I also understand that like when you when I go back like having read Forbock and studied him now like going back to read Marxist essay on alienation you can really see that it's just largely under the spell of Forbock in many areas like the fingerprints are

all over it and and Theses in Forbock seems like a direct reaction to essays like that by Marx It's like a break from that. But I think Elthazar kind of overstated the distinction. And to be fair, that's what we do. I might be overstating many things in this book that you're reading, right? Because philosophers like to overstate things. And Elthazar did admit that. Like he was quoting Lennon saying that he, you know, perhaps bent the stick too far in the other direction in order to correct it and things like that.

But, you know, still a lot of people when they talk about like what Elthazar's philosophy is, they bring that point up a lot. And I guess the final area, which is, I guess, a larger, just more of his practice and the more of the way he saw himself as an intellectual. And this is this area that I disagree with him is his refusal to break fully from the revisionism of, you know, the Communist Party of France, PCF. Even though he tried for a long time to wage a line struggle within the PCF against this revisionism. But there's the fact that he never leaves. He never declares solidarity with the anti-revisionist and other groups of his time. In fact, he kind of shits on them in May 68, losing a lot of his students. And he even tries to square those aspects of his philosophy, which are anti-revisionists,

with the doctrinaire PCF revisionism, which leads to some of the worst confusions in his work. So on the reproduction of capitalism, there's these criticisms of communism, but at the same time, post-May 68, he keeps trying to push this economist. So there's this kind of weird tension that happens there. So I guess that would be the final area where I really disagree with him. Yeah, in the book you mentioned May 68, and I think I don't have the exact paragraph with me right here, but you said something about, something like relating his, sort of the limitations he hit with the sort of historical limitations of Marxism, Leninism at that time. I think you touched on that a little bit, but is it fair to say that some of the limits that Althusay as a thinker hit were also indicative or in some respect reflective of the limitations that non-anism,

anti-revisionist, Marxism, Leninism, was hitting around that, that period of time? Oh, definitely, definitely. I think that's a really interesting way to think about it. So I just sort of wanted to emphasize that a bit, because I think that's really important. Yeah, I want to talk about sort of what I think is an interesting distinction in this book, which is that you do some work distinguishing between philosophy and theory, which are two terms that all the time, I hear, flattened into each other or conflated without much thought to what the distinction between them might be. So I was wondering if a little bit you could explain for our listeners, you know,

how you understand this distinction between the two, and what do you think is at stake in making a distinction between them? Yeah, I mean, first I should probably begin by noting that that distinction I make is, you know, a philosophical distinction. Ha, ha, ha. It might not, it might be very semantic. And, I mean, it's useful as part of the metaphor in the way I'm trying to think things. And perhaps I too may have also bent the stick too far in one direction.

But I make it, I make that philosophical, distinction for reasons of clarity. After all, and I discussed this in the book, like historically, there is the fact that two have been conflated. And I feel that that conflation has largely caused a confusion. And that's the confusion I wanted to get around to kind of just really think what philosophy is. So, you know, if we think in the background of what I already said about the theoretical terrain and the second order practice of philosophy and to summarize that, right, so theory is largely what theorizes what there is, how it works, and that's what reality is according to a given theory's perspective.

So biology, do you think of that example, explains reality according to biological matter, physics according to physical matter. If you look at, like, you know, religion is a theoretical terrain, you know, it explains reality according to notions of God, theological concepts. So theory is kind of, you know, this is X. It's about this is X and this is what we call X. But, you know, philosophy did that. Again, remember I talked about a philosophy used to be conflated with all of these things as well, but what makes it distinct as a practice. And when I start thinking about what makes it distinct as a practice and we demystify it, and how it seems to always be recursive on these kind of like theoretical concerns, philosophy is a second

order of thought that tries to think the meaning of X, right? So if theory says this is X and this is what we call X, philosophy tries to think the meaning of X. Sometimes when two conflicting theoretical explanations are given, right, it gets involved in trying to mapping the root between them and also just mapping the root of meaning on the topography of the way the theory is presented, right, the presentation of theory. So, you know, think of an example here of like, you know, two political economists, they might explain the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in two different ways. I mean, this is political economists get involved, especially Marxist's political economists get involved these debates all the time. And they, and both of them might actually have the same amount of empirical data. So what is the role of the philosopher in that debate? And it's to think outside of the theory of political economy.

So as to clarify the debate, it's that kind of second order from outside kind of position where it comes in and says, how do we like draw the terms of the debate? What's at stake? What position makes more sense according to what the theoretical train of political economy is meant to explain, right? Of course, as I mentioned earlier, you know, we talked about like, you know, kind of scientists becoming spontaneous philosophers. Well, a lot of theorists in every theoretical train like to become spontaneous philosophers because they also can't help making philosophical judgments, but they don't make them with the same clarity or awareness that they're making philosophical judgments. They'll sometimes say that's part of their theoretical terrain or something like that. So appealing, what they do is they appeal to meaning and interpretation beyond their theoretical claims, which is,

why, in my opinion, they should get better at doing philosophy and being aware when they are doing philosophy. And that's kind of a way that I make that distinction, if that makes sense. Yeah, that's super helpful. And I just ask because I think a lot of the times in our more common use of the terms on the left, we just do not do any distinguishing work there. And that's a very helpful explanation that I think for people who may be struggling to think about what that distinction means in the context of this book. So thank you very much for that. That's very clarifying. Yeah, and I would like to add one thing, too, because I think the inflation happens again with a of political philosophy that also gets called political theory when you look at a lot of this stuff

is like oh are you reading this theorist or that a lot of them what they do is in one sense they're doing philosophy when they're trying to make these second order claims and they're actually they are intervening on like these things that have appeared in the realm of presentation but the other time that they're they're doing theory as well and and not very good theory possibly like they're suddenly saying this is the name of you know it's like well look at deluz and guitari we can call these processes detort de-territorialization and re-territorialization which is just a philosophical way of thinking about the world but they're putting it forward as if it's this kind of theoretical fact underlines things or you know the famous on biopolitics right this is just like a philosophical

metaphor really there's no scientific fact beyond it right it's just a way of talking about the way power operates on on life right but suddenly it's like people now talk about it as like oh biopolitics as if it's this actual thing. So it's, it's this theory, right? It becomes this theory. And it's that kind of confusion between theory and philosophy that just keeps it going. Yeah, it's definitely very helpful. Yeah, definitely. I think it's important for, for listeners to sort of understand this, maybe just by restating this and correct me if I'm wrong. But I think you say in the book, there is this tight dialectical relationship between practice and theory. You know, we all know the famous Lenin quote. What is it like without a revolutionary theory?

There can be no revolutionary movement. Tying theory and movement in a dialectical back and forth is essential. And then philosophy is seen as, as you, you keep saying the term second order, and I just hope people can understand this, is, you know, philosophy is an intervention in that already existing dialectic between theory and praxis, which sort of informs and helps understand what exactly is happening on that first order terrain. Is that a fair way of explaining it? Yeah, definitely. Cool. Okay. So I'll just move into this next question. And I am talking, I'm going to ask another question about Althusay, kind of. And part of that reason is because we're doing an episode on ideology and ideological state apparatuses, and I was actually reading

Althusay along with this text, so it's sort of in my head going back and forth between the two books. But in Althusay's a book on the reproduction of capital, he opens the text, which you reference in your book with the essay titled, What is Philosophy? And he does what amounts to an historical materialist analysis of the history of philosophy itself, showing how certain philosophers are canonized based on the concrete material conditions and politics and science, specifically. that their philosophies reflect. I just hoping that you could talk about this and maybe even give a few examples

of well-known philosophers to help our listeners understand the sort of historical materialist analysis of philosophy itself. Yeah, I remember that passage in the book. I was actually, you know, I was looking for it recently, but all of our bookshelves are now boxed up

because we're painting, which makes it really hard to find shit. that I hate. But, you know, I'll see how much I, you know, I can remember of that. And just in general, there's, you know, there's the general point is salient in so many ways even beyond what Elthazar would have said. So, you know, I talk about the book and I've noted in this interview about how all philosophers are driven by class commitments, even when they're unaware of the political decisions they make. So it makes sense that the ways in which philosophers have been canonized have to do with concrete historical conditions of their own time and even later times. Maybe philosophy is like these kind of, you know, it's codified thought. And as we know, like, you know, matter generates thought. That's, you know, that's a point we make as materialists. And of course, you know, thought is influential matter.

That's why we're also dialectical materialists. I'm not going to get into that. So in many ways, when you start looking at the concrete conditions that produce certain philosophy and allowed that philosophy to persist over time, like, yeah, if you think back to Plato's philosophy, right? That's, you know, classic example. Plato being a classic philosopher in the canon, so-called canon. So you can't imagine Plato's philosophy without the limits of class struggle reached in ancient Athens,

and the collision of that time between its so-called democracy and the fact that that democracy was buttressed by slavery and patriarchy. And so Plato's philosophy is, in fact, this great reflection of the contradictions in a society. Whether you love it or hate it, it's still a reflection of those contradictions. So on the one hand, you have in his philosophy, he inherits this pre-secretions, pre-Socratic disdain for the order of the poets, right? That's why he banishes them from the Republic because the pre-Socratics also. I mean, because poets, and I point this out, poets, everyone's like, I don't know, I feel this

is a tangent, but I feel it's important to get out there. There's reasons to hate Plato. There's many reasons I hate Plato, but because he bans poets from the Republic is not a good one because people say that, oh, man, Plato was so anti-poetry, so anti-art. But the reality is what he meant. Like, poets back then weren't like people doing, you know, this amazing art or something like that, right? They were considered mouthpieces of the gods.

That was the definition of a poet. They were part of the priestly order. So he banishes them from the Republic because they speak lies. This is the kind of notion they don't speak logic. They speak, they're all these contradictory views of the gods, right? The different versions of the story of the Odyssey, different versions of the story of the Iliad. So that's, his disdain for the poets is actually inherited from that kind of almost kind of quasi-scientific view that the pre-Socratics had.

But on the other hand, at this period of time, he's also seeing with the, you know, kind of the disintegration of the political order of Athens, that he's trying to replace the religious order with its own, right? This whole kind of theory of forms and things like that is the way that kind of philosophy suddenly wants to kind of beat religion at its own game, right? And this demonstrates, I mean, Elstar says this elsewhere, that philosophies, you know, philosophy first emerges as an attempt to replace religion, right? And that's what, you know, Plato's doing. And especially at this time that is very politically meaningful in terms of class struggle. And then we can think about, you know, moving on from Plato, right? We can think about like Aristotle. And I do remember Althazar pointing out that, you know, the end of the Greek city state in the beginning of the Macedonian Empire is this crucial period of time.

And Aristotle's philosophy appears there. It also appears when the idea of biology as a science emerges, right? It's kind of, this goes back to Althazar's. And one of the things I pick up on is notion. about, you know, philosophy tailing the sciences. Yeah. Or the emergence of what we would eventually call the sciences, right? At that time, they're still incorporated and, as I mentioned.

But also, I think we can go further than that because a lot of what we understand as philosophy's canonized later, almost at various points, there's all these various points of canonization that eventually lead up to the most recent kind of Eurocentric construction, right? It's this notion of an internal West that goes, again, back to ancient Greece and tries to pretend Greece was part of this Eternal West, which is, a lot of people pointed out that's a weird bullshit construction, but it still plays into

this construction of Eurocentrism. But, you know, even before that, and the stuff that leads up to that canonization, you have these very important political moments that bring these philosophers back up again, right? Like, so Plato, who I mentioned earlier, like,

many generations after he's alive, he's canonized again by Imperial Rome when it was Christianized, particularly through the work of Augusti. And those material facts of the Christianization of Rome and how Rome started to understand itself as the empire and the emergence of what we would eventually call the Roman Catholic Church, that goes back and recanonizes Plato,

but in a very specific way. And Aristotle gets recanonized later by Thomas Aquinas, whom self becomes historically important because he best reflects and justifies the fetal order of Western Europe. I do recall because they're talking about Aquinas and the order of Western Europe. And of course, later on, all of these people who survived because of these concrete class struggles, they're further canonized by Europe's colonial adventures and, you know, the Europe becoming the birthplace of capitalism and then world capitalism.

And as they seek kind of philosophers who justify notions, specifically notions such as natural slavery and hierarchy and things like that, are very, very important when Europe comes into its understanding of itself is this conquering. civilization. So I think even we can talk very recently about, you know, liberal philosophy being a really, really good example about these kind of like concrete political situations that canonize philosophy, right? So look at the, you know, the saints of liberal philosophy and they're core of the canon. And in fact, they actually form now kind of the lens through which we read philosophy's past. Like it's always read through that kind of period, right? of canonization and we read the entire past through these liberals right and we lead and actually

we read the present through these liberals as well at least dominant philosophy does the dominant ideological perspective of philosophy does um and and these liberal philosophers were definitely canonized based on the concrete material conditions of european hegemony right i mean even if we look at hobbs hobbs is this ideologue of monarchy but you know he's an ideologue of monarchy delinked from the great chain of being right so the beginning of this notion of of this authoritarian rule that, you know, is not necessarily connected to this feudal conception. And also, you know, Hobbes is this ideologue of European sovereignty and individual autonomy and all that kind of stuff. And so, and then after him, you get Locke, Bentham, Austin Mill, that whole rogues gallery, right?

So, you know, they made a political decision to side with empire and the work, right? Even if they're critical of its feudal vestiges, they're still, you know, all into, like, you know, the empire and things like that, and their work served as justification for empire. And again, you know, I think the point to going back is that, you know, science comes into this because a lot of these philosophies emerged in connection to scientific theoretical terrains that preceded them, or, you know, maybe not coherent theoretical trains. If you go back to Plato, right, they're still kind of submerged in this philosophical stuff, but it's still these notions kind of start coming up before them right so plato emerged after euclidean geometry

was complete liberal philosophers come after newtonian mechanics and early biological conceptions like modern biological conceptions are theorized and all of them you know especially the liberal sciences so as to justify philosophical interventions and and obviously as we know sometimes in some pretty disgusting ways yeah i really really like that actually that actually is incredibly clarifying when you say there's not only an historical materialist account of sort of when these philosophers appear, but there's also sort of a historical materialist account of sort of how in the moments in which they get canonized sort of retrospectively, which I think is, you know, definitely adds a layer of analysis to what Althusay offered in his book.

So, so thank you for that. Allison? Yeah. I mean, I think it fits with a theme that comes up in this text over and over again. That's really helpful to think about is that philosophy is not separable from class struggle and that philosophers are coming from a class perspective. And obviously that, of course, you know, is going to be. play into the canonization that's occurring there, which is really useful to think about, I think.

I'm going to just go into the next question, which I might try to relate to this a little bit, which is you talk about how sort of the Marxist rupture and philosophy, it's led to almost like philosophical struggle and the need to respond to Marxism, whether or not one agrees with or disagrees with it. It sort of has to be responded to on a certain level because of the nature of its rupture. And in the text, you talk a little bit about how some of the post-structuralists and postmodern theorists pushed back against parts of Marxism. in their own sort of annihilation-based impulse. But I was wondering if you could talk about today in philosophy as a discipline, perhaps,

what are the struggles against Marxism? How are people choosing to oppose to it? And which theories are, which theorists, or I guess I should say philosophers, really? Which philosophers do you see is sort of engaged at the forefront of a struggle against Marxism within philosophy today? Oh, yeah. I mean, it's such a big question, too. I mean, obviously to feel in many ways to be to be kind of a Marxist that has

actually committed to the project of, you know, making communism a reality is to be, you know, alone in many ways in academia. And even, even Marxists that aren't that, but just do Marxists as a theory, a lot of them are outpaced by kind of other, especially in philosophy. I think you see Marxism making this comeback in other ways outside of philosophy, but philosophy still seems strongly mobilized against it in most in most places um so trying to think of like the main tendencies opposed to these or the philosophical struggles against marxism i mean my my initial instinct is to say what all of us who are marxists like to say and just say postmodernism but i feel that that often you know it's a pretty simplistic way to look at a lot of different currents and you know

I think much of what gets grouped under postmodernism, which definitely has its problems, it's not the main struggle against philosophy, you know, a main philosophical struggle against Marxism today in philosophy departments. I mean, definitely the thinkers grouped under this rubric, and we can discuss, well, actually, does not have that discussion. You know, we can, you know, the whole idea of whether postmodernism is the best term for them, because it's kind of, it's more the pithy term to explain a lot of them. But those that, we would say are grouped under them, like Foucault, Derrida, Leotard, and people like that, they definitely have promoted, and their adherents still promote, like they're, they're most

faithful, not people that just borrow from them, but people that are like, I am a Foucotean, I am a Doridian, I, you know, whatever. They definitely promote like all these different strains of anti-Marxism. But, you know, they're far from the main philosophical struggle against Marxism, at least in academia. And in fact, I think they're becoming, you know, people still like use their stuff and use their points, but to be this kind of a Foucodean anti-Marxist or a derridian anti-Marxist is kind of minor, I think, these days. And I think partly this is because for all of their antipathy to Marxism, they still possessed an ambivalence to many of Marxism's tenets and were in fact inspired, though, in a pretty warped way a lot of time, by Marxism's

radical impulse. So I definitely think struggling against the foundational concepts of what is grouped under the term postmodernism remains an important task. And I I continue to do so, and I've done so in many places, but it is, but to suddenly say, you know, postmodernism, modernism is the main enemy is entirely ignorant when we actually try to think about what the made opponent to Marxism and philosophy is. I mean, a lot of anti-Marxist thinkers, and you think about, you know, charlatans who like what Jordan Peterson has to say, they also have a disdain for postmodernism and have this weird notion that is the same as Marxism, right? So, you know, it's not, I don't think that what gets called postmodernism is necessarily the main, the main enemy within academia, at least. I think what is, you know, probably the main problem. And also this might be what makes postmodernism a problem, too, is the overriding liberalism of philosophy. So, I mean, postmodernism has this.

Eventually, at the end of the day, you can find that a lot of the postmodernist claims are pretty liberal. But, I mean, outside of postmodernism, just what many philosophy departments, which are not continental, they're like, analytic, right? There's this overriding, like, you know, line it, an overriding liberalism, like a lineage they trace back to classical liberalism. And this becomes a big deal in political philosophy, or what gets called political philosophy in the analytic tradition, where it's the, you know, anything Marxist is considered, you know, you can't think about that. It's wrong. It's

totalitarian. They use all those kinds of terms, right? So, you know, political philosophy, mainstream political philosophy is the enemy of Marxism and has been the enemy of Marxism since its inception. So I think everything from Rawls, who's dead, but Rawls is still a name that summoned. But if you think about like kind of modern liberals like Martha Newsbaum and people like that, or anybody who abides by Mills' conception of a harm principle, that's the status quo of political philosophy in the analytic tradition of political philosophy.

And it mobilizes very strongly against Marxism, right? in fact, it normalizes a non-Marxist view of politics, and it works over time to eliminate Marxist conceptions of reality from its framework. You just got to read these people, and you can see how much they're under the shadow of Marxism because they need to account for things Marxism talked about, but they just want to obliterate it without actually referencing in any critical manner, like Marxism, right? But I think even outside of political philosophy and this kind of, you know,

this kind of analytic, you know, these analytic North American departments, liberalism is just all over the place to the point that, you know, many analytic thinkers due to their submers in positivism, they think they're qualified to talk about political matters like a reactionary biologist who thinks that he understands politics because science is superior to the humanities, right? This is like, this is the way they think, right? I think I remember, you know, it's very simple things. I remember like, you're, I mean, I've been involved in many strikes contract. I remember the first strike I was involved in 2008 and 2009. And I remember just the poor show out from the philosophy department, right?

There was like, there was 15 of us. And it was good. We had a line and there was like a small amount of this. But because we were like felt attacked by the department, we had a pretty radical line. But there was people in my department who were like, oh, I don't, I know everything there is to know about this because I study philosophy of math. Right. And it's like, in the moment you mentioned Marx, they're like, they suddenly believe all.

the anti-communist shit, right? And they've never really looked into it. They just assume they're, you know, the experts on that. In fact, they think they understand every political issue simply because they studied formal logic or normative ethics. This is the way they think, right? So this is this kind of tradition, all these trajectories, these are quite like the antithesis of Marxism,

which is, you know, why, you know, now get these chauvinist ideologues, such as like Kathleen Stock or Holly Lofford Smith and, you know, Brian Leader and these these like shitheads, right? Like they declare themselves, the experts on gender and feminism, and they write these transphobic screens, but like none of them have ever studied the body of literature on the philosophy of gender at all. Yet they assume that there are these like pure, like logical souls that can understand

everything because they studied analytic philosophy, but there's this political commitment they have, that political decision they make that they're just very unconscious of. And in fact, these are definitely like much more kind of material enemies in philosophy departments because people like them and they themselves like play a particularly nauseous role in attacking graduate students who disagree with them and trying to discipline departments for challenging their chauvinism. And those are just three names, right? But there's other examples and there's an entire industry also of defending the so-called Western canon and its analytic expression and driving out people that are critical of that, which is why. you know, philosophy departments are still largely white and male. So I think that's a definite, that whole liberal concocitation is a definite enemy of Marxism in philosophy.

And then I would say one more, I might be going on too much on this because I just think about this a lot and I hate these people. But I would say, you know, outside of analytics, so I've just did the whole analytic philosophy thing. And I mean, one of those people that's in that gray zone between analytic and continental philosophy, like, because that's because when you study Marxism, you are. So there's things I like about both and hate about both traditions. So when I say, you know, outside of analytic philosophy, there's, you know, there's also the post-Hydegarian

kind of these, that's what I think is the best way to call them now. It's like these people that come from kind of like Agamden and folks like them. And, you know, I think they're more intensely influential as anti-Marxist than even the so-called postmodernist now. They're kind of become new things, right? And they definitely don't, you know, a lot of them would definitely not see themselves as postmodernists. Even if they borrow now and then Thruco, they would do the same way that someone else would, where they qualify that they don't agree with the other things that Foucault says, and they seem to have this kind of commitment to modernity or a specific notion of it. So it's these folks that, you know, like, again, men is a good example.

like he combines interpretations of Heidegarian phenomenology with Carl Schmitt, both Nazi thinkers, right? Definitely a modernist, not a postmodernist. And so despite the fact that a Gemben will utilize Foucault here and there, he always checks it with this Heidegarian-Schmidtian kind of analysis or foundations, right? And this makes him an anti-Marxist thinker, I think just because those foundations are so reactionary. and because he rejects anything kind of Marxism has to say about stuff. And then this view leads to what's now this particular notion of sovereignty that has become really important in political philosophy, which I actually tried to engage with in a recent essay.

And this notion of sovereignty really gets in the way of Marxist work about social power within the discipline of philosophy. And then, you know, following him and that kind of post-Hydegarian blue, you get Nancy Esposito and a bunch of others who try to remystify social concepts that Marxism actually demystified. And that's a problem, right? They're taking these things that Marxism is demystified and they're making them more confusing again, which is completely against what Marxist philosophy is meant to do. Yeah, I really appreciate that answer. I think moving away from just talking about postmodernism or post-structuralism in this context is really helpful. It always sort of surprises me

as much as I understand why as Marxists were so focused on pushing back against that tendency within philosophy, it's also just my experience in philosophy is that when I was hearing strong anti-Marxist perspectives, it was kind of like you said, much more likely to be coming from a Rawls scholar than from someone who would consider themselves a Foucodean or a Doridian, or sort of in the department that I came from, it was also sort of American pragmatism and this desire to revive sort of John Dewey's work that got spun in these really weird anti-Marxist ways. And I think it is useful for us when thinking about anti-Marxism philosophy to get beyond just that scope of postmodernism, whatever we take that term to mean, and to sort of think about liberalism more broadly and how that crops up in other forms of philosophy, as you sort of gesture to. Yeah.

Yeah. And for my part, I mean, I think, obviously, both Allison and I went to grad school for philosophy and ended up dropping out for various reasons. But I definitely appreciate you saying that philosophy departments specifically are not, I mean, you know, you hear this trope in popular cold. like, you know, universities turn people into Marxist, and one might naively think that a philosophy department might even be more Marxist, but in my experience as an undergrad and a grad, it was completely liberal, and I even, like, would put forward Marxist arguments and write papers on Marxism that we know were received sort of lukewarmly just because of what I was engaging in. And I remember in graduate school, our political philosophy course, we obviously read Rawls, but then we went through all of Nozik's Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

And just in retrospect, thinking, like, who is more relevant to today? You know, never once did we read Mao or Lenin or Marx at all, but we trudged through all of anarchy state and utopia. That really does go to show the sort of inherent liberalism, especially, of philosophy departments. And it's not even necessarily always brutally explicit. It can just be like, what do we study and what do we never even ever mention, you know? Yeah, I know. It's like, that was my experience. And I stuck it out.

I mean, luckily, I went to the university that has. had a good number of Marxists on staff. And, you know, the one sole one in my department. I mean, the political science department at the time was overrun by Marxist, but the sole one, there was only one in the philosophy department, and he was a Gramsci scholar. He's also cross-listed with political science, but his tenure was in philosophy.

And so I worked with him, but I remember when I wrote my dissertation proposal, and it had to, there was all this rigmarole of like, you had to, the department had to go and look it over and see if it was a proper philosophical dissertation. And I remember this, this, this, this, this, this asshole philosopher of science, you know, was one of the people who was the commenters on it, admitted that this wasn't his area, but was like,

I don't think this is philosophy. He thinks capitalism is bad for some reason. Oh my God. Right. What is what is wrong with these people? I mean, thankfully my committee was like, this guy admitted he doesn't know the area. So why are we? Right.

I mean, but it was just like, It was just so the fact that someone felt they could write that without, you know, realizing how dumb it sounded. That's philosophy departments. Yeah, exactly right. All right. So let's go on to the next question. I wanted to add a question like this because you obviously wrestle with it in your book.

You talk about it in all of your work. It's very important to Allison and I in our show Red Menace to always connect this theoretical or philosophy stuff with, you know, our actual on the ground organizing, et cetera. So a broad question. what are the implications of this book, in your opinion, for how we should think about and go about organizing as Marxists in the real world? I think this is a great question following the last one, right? Because while it's the case that these anti-Marxist trains of philosophy are a problem within academia,

the actual philosophical expression of them isn't largely an issue outside of academia. You don't know, you're going to deal with, oh, man, this person is a Rawlsian. People on the ground. I mean, obviously, it's good to know it because there's a default liberalism, right, due to ruling class ideology. And so, you know, liberalism can play with and transform into these kind of dominant notion within philosophy. But, I mean, really what you're dealing with is, like, kind of liberal ideology, not that people are really seeped in the works of, like, Rawls or Nozic, right? And so it's not like they're out there being, like, I'm reading theory of justice or something, and you can't be against that. And also, there's less of a chance that they're, you know, they're reading at Gembin or Foucault.

this is not to say the positions of these people have and philosophy don't reflect what what what what what certain ideological positions people have in reality because obviously these philosophies are ideological reflections but only you don't have to realize that you don't have to worry about like having this like uh like philosophical argument about about this stuff right um in any case uh yeah so that was just you know a preamble to go to answer this question uh so i mean i think the book to be with a book, the book occupies a kind of troubled position. So on the one hand, it's written for people familiar with academic philosophy, so people like myself, people like you, have been in departments, right, both of you. And, you know, it's, and it's an attempt to exercise the kind of this ghost of grandiosity in any way. But on the other hand, it's trying to explain philosophy to the lay reader involved in political organizations. They can understand the importance of philosophical practice freed from this canonical conceit conceit. So I don't know how strong it is on both ends.

I'm trying to try to make it communicable for both, but sometimes I might, you know, horribly fail in both ways or maybe not be, maybe if I just focused on one and off the other would be stronger. I don't know, but I was trying to do it both at the same time. So with that in mind, what I was advocating for in the book was the importance of philosophical practice, you know, at the end of the day, the way that I ended at, you know, for the importance of philosophical practice for politically committed cadre. And kind of it's, you know, a partial foundation for how to think thought. Because as I said before, I think critical thinking,

and I mean that in the broad sense, right, not the sense of critical thinking textbooks. You know, that's important for political projects. And, you know, I said it, I say it's a partial foundation for how to think thought because, you know, I know it's incomplete that there are some things I overstated or understated, and that it's, you know, only one small step forward in thinking philosophy from some, from people that are in positions that are committed to radical politics. That being said, there are some things I say in the last chapter about the relationship between the concrete and theoretical spheres, about how philosophy kind of forms this circuit that can cut through these spheres for useful interventions and thought. I think these insights are useful

and they serve as reminders, Reinders also myself, right, all the time of how to think our politics. And really just it's just kind of saying, let's bring, you know, the way that we practice, this practice of philosophy, this idea of thinking thought, let's bring into organizing

so we can make our organizing stronger, right? Because in the real world, it's always best to proceed critically. You know, without getting lost, I mean, if you get lost in dogmatism, then you end up getting really weak and broken and you're not, you know, it's just, it's not.

not going to, like, religious thinking does not help a movement. And eclecticism, that kind of weird shit that people start theorizing new stuff, that doesn't go anywhere as well, right? So having this kind of trying to, like, you know, bring back the importance of rigorously thinking our revolutionary theory, that's important, right? So in this sense, it's about how to figure out how to be good mass philosophers. And I think that matters. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. You said you're doing both at the same time, we're trying to make it accessible and also, you know, invigorating and challenging to somebody who, has been, you know, in philosophy for a long time. I think you do that really, really well. Obviously, the intellectual rigor is there for veterans and people who are more accustomed to stuff. But I just think everything else aside, just the clarity of the way that you write makes it accessible to people that might not, you know, otherwise find these sorts of texts accessible. So, so that's really good. And yeah, completely tying it in your whole, your whole job

of sort of understanding what philosophy actually is, is to sort of subordinate it to practice in theory and put it in its proper place so that it doesn't pretend or conceive of itself as doing more than it actually is or even can, which I deeply appreciated about this text overall. Allison? Yeah. Well, so I'll try to connect this maybe a little bit to the next question as well because I think that this idea of sort of like being good mass philosophers is very useful. And so obviously as we've touched upon throughout this interview, like doing philosophy in your view that isn't this grand ontological project. It's not building the foundations for some sort of metaphysical picture of the world.

And so I was just wondering then, like, in a very, like, concrete sense for philosophers who are in academia today, how is it that they should approach doing philosophy? So you tell us it's this interpretive process, but what practically can they go about doing that to make it the sort of mass philosophy that you're talking about? And are there any, like, Marxist philosophers today who you think are doing that well? Yeah. I mean, again, it's hard to, you know, I almost feel that if I, especially with the second part of the question. If I mention people that are, you know, doing it well, then there's people

that will, like, call me up and, like, why didn't you mention me? Sure. It's a, so I got to, you know, try to think best about, about that. But in terms of the broader, before I get to naming names, which might be in hot water, look, I mean, within academia and this kind of struggle, I think, or even just thinking about academia, it's like, we should be doing our best to argue that the practice of philosophy is not trapped within academia. It is something politically conscious cadre can also practice. But at the same time, right, just because we should be doing that on the one hand. That's so important to say that, you know, academic philosophy does not represent what philosophy is. It doesn't have the final say, right? You know, we can even use Altazar's concept.

You mentioned them earlier, you know, schools as ISAs, right, ideological apparatus is, right? There's definitely the dominant ruling class ideologies involved in there, right? So we should be emphasizing that, you know, it's not trapped within that, you know, politically conscious cadre can also practice it. But, I mean, at the same time, we shouldn't retreat and take on that kind of anti-intellectual reaction to the existence of academic philosophy. So, you know, while I agree that academic philosophy should largely be held to account, of course, and that as authorities have largely been complicit in the maintenance of ruling class philosophy, it is still, you know, a space of struggle, right? and we actually understand that all these things in space is a struggle and it's interesting too because I mean right now we're witnessing the rise of the I mentioned this earlier kind of this rise of the neoliberal university and it actually wants to obliterate philosophy of the entire humanities in this need to

turn universities into professional schools right and since a large number of humanities professors are more casualized than you know professors and other disciplines like we work most of us work as adjuncts and contract, such as myself, right? The neoliberalization of the university has had this effect of kind of creating a space of struggle. It's, you know, I wouldn't go so far as to say it's like proletarianization, but it's a quasi or, you know, semi-proletarianization of our lives, right? Because we always have to struggle for a living wage. We always have to go on strike. We have to accept the worst shittiest jobs and extra, we take on all the extra dumb work no one else wants to do just so that, you know, we can pay our bills in order to be academics as well. And it's, and it's become part

that. So, you know, it's at the same time, though, you have, like, a large number of academic philosophers, and particularly those who are tenured and those who buy that ideology of tenure, like they fantasize that they're going to be tender and become these kind of lap dogs for those people. Like, they've sadly chosen to accept the fate of the neoliberal university. Some even actually celebrate it, like academic philosophers, because they have this whole idea that, you know, philosophy will still function as an adjunct, the neoliberal reality. We're liberals, too, right? You know, and, uh, And so I think it's worth struggling against that tendency, just as we should struggle against anti-marketing tendencies in our department. There's still spaces that struggle. They're not the prime spaces, and those definitely exist outside of academia, but there's spaces nonetheless. And in fact, there are also spaces, at least in my experience, like, I don't know, like, it's different. I know that every university system is different in the U.S. than it is in Canada. I mean, Canada doesn't have the same level of privatization in universities. So, you know, in my university, specifically, the undergraduate department is filled with students from proletarian backgrounds, specifically students from, like, racialized immigrant backgrounds and things like that.

And they come through these departments because now even to get like a job, like a proletarian job, everyone wants you to have a BA, right? So they appear through philosophy departments. And I think it's important that people are there to like teach them a perspective of philosophy that resonates with their class experience, specifically the one they're going to have when they leave university. as well, right? So academia, at least in my experience and where I'm at, still remains a space despite all its problems where people have the time to encounter important ideas and study them with the, you know, just before they go back to like the shitty proletarian reality where they're like, you know, worked without, you know, necessary job security or anything like

that, right? The kind of people we want to recruit into movements, right? But they have a period of time where they can study revolutionary ideas with time and rigor that's not afforded to them in society at large unless they're part already of a communist project that can do that for them. So, I mean, we should be trying to establish spaces that can do that for people outside of academia and can give them that rigor in that space. We don't have them yet, right? We need them. But we can still struggle in the academic space while not accepting that it's primary for organization. I guess that would be my very convoluted way of answering that question

before I get to in naming names so when I think of other philosophers who are trying to do kind of this work in academia that you know that are you know to see the importance of political struggle and you know aren't supporting themselves to this

liberalization or capitulation to the neoliberal university I mean I think of my thesis advisor Esteva Morera he was like a lifelong Gramshian scholar he's been a lot of his youth involved in a lot of struggles around the world and he's you know he taught me, you know, he reinforced, you know, like I already had, he reinforced the idea that, you know,

we shouldn't be detaching political to commitment from academic research. And there's also people I know, like my generation in philosophy, like Devin Zane Shaw and Matthew McLennan, who, you know, they're not fully Marxist, although they're, like, very sympathetic to, like, more Maoist traditions of Marxism. But, you know, what I, what strikes me about them is that like me, they're dedicated to transforming academic space into a space of struggle and they've never hidden their political commitments. They've refused to renounce them. They still do mass work and things like that. And then, you know, outside of philosophy, because it's not just, maybe just because, you know, academic philosophy sucks. So there's not many of us. But, I mean,

there are, you know, academics who are philosophical mindset, you know, who are performing similar struggles against the liberal tide of academia and in interest of doing mass work outside of academia. So some names I think of are people like Rachel Gorman, who works in disability studies. Tyler Shipley, who does like kind of political history, Paris through Saberi, who does like, you know, radical geography. Jude Welburn, who's, you know, does stuff on like kind of, you know, literature, actually. But these are people that, you know, have, all of them have, are committed to some form of Marxist or Maoist, even, a view of things. And then there's, you know, two upcoming scholars who, you know, are my circle. who, you know, whose work, I think, is going to be really good when I get out there.

And that's Louise Tam and Homiun Rastikar, both of who are Maoists. And all of these people, like, they share close to a Maoist ethos, and all of them are struggling against the most pernicious aspects of anti-Marxism and academia all the time with their work, right? And we need to kind of build that community of people that are struggling against this kind of anti-Marxism. And much of their practice is philosophical, even though they might be a side of philosophy. And, you know, it's, it's from all of us, and names I named, we all know it's hard to make a dent in this edifice, but, you know, we're struggling to see who you can bring into, like, movements outside of academia, right? And also lending our services, obviously, not really their services, but owning our skills to, you know, the mass mobilization that we do outside of things. So, yeah, I mean, I think we really need to support each other while also finding the roots of our struggles and movements outside of academia. Awesome. Yeah, that's really helpful. And yeah, I think my sort of thought process going into the question is as much as we want to insist that philosophy isn't bound exclusively to academia, you know, like you acknowledge sort of the spaces for philosophical education outside of academia are still being built and still have to be built by a communist movement to a large degree. And communists are in academia at the current moment. So this idea of just sort of what do you do if that's where you're at, I think is helpful. And definitely, you know, just hearing some people who are taking that seriously and who are trying to work as Marxists.

or semi-Marxists, as you say, in academia while also not seeing themselves as detached from broader political struggles. It's just helpful to hear, I think. Yeah, and as I was reading this book before I asked the last question, it sort of occurred to me when you're thinking about like philosophers of Marxists that are doing the sort of thing that you're saying, well, you're doing it, right? And like in the same way that like in Wretched of the Earth, which we've been reading on Red Menace, Fanon talks about combat literature. And he simultaneously explains what it is and shows how to do it. And in a similar way, I think with all of your work, JMP, you're explaining really important things to explain at the same time you're showing us how it can actually

be done. And I think that's what makes your work so unique and so treasured by us on the left. And our listeners, who, you know, the ones that have engaged with your stuff and have learned from you through our shows, just hit me up like months later and say, like, thank you so much for, you know, having that interview or making me read CNR or whatever because you do play that wonderful role. So thank you for that. And as the final question, if readers and listeners can take one thing away from this book or this interview, what do you hope that it is? That philosophy matters at the same time that it's not impenetrable, that it's not too profound for them to grasp as a practice, and then when they realize this, they'll understand they're also potential philosophers. Also

that, you know, no philosophy functions outside of class struggle. And, you know, how to go about thinking thought and why this kind of critical thinking matters. And, you know, connecting to that, of course, I hope, you know, it leads readers back to the question of the political decision and what this decision means, which for me, you know, is rooted

in the concerns of continuity and rupture where, you know, not to, you know, be all sectarian or whatever, we're still, you know, Irish is the most salient political decision, the Maoist decision. And I think I do it in a non-sectarian way, but, you know, anything is sectarian these days.

Yeah. so but you know but what that means is what I'm getting to behind that very specific talk about you know Maoism or things is what I'm really saying is like involvement in a revolutionary political project and I've been certain about that for over a decade absolutely well thank you so much for coming on again with your new text I will definitely invite you back on everything you put out there will be a Rev Leff or a Red Menace episode on it because that's just the effect you have on on our shows and whatnot before we let you go can you just let listeners know where they can find you you and your work online? Yeah, well, I'm on Twitter, and I have a blog, which I have not been very good at being faithful to putting out regular stuff on it just because of life anymore, and that's MLM Mayhem. And, you know, my work is published in so far by both Chris Klebadeb and Zero Books. And this book specifically was published by Zero Books, and you can find the links to all

the different online stores that have. habit from there. Yeah, absolutely. And again, I'll just reiterate, like, don't take these interviews with authors as replacements for actually reading the text. If anything we said today sparked your curiosity or hit on something that you want to develop further, definitely read the book because, you know, we can only ask so many questions and only cover so much of what he covers in the text itself. So definitely, and we'll link to all of that in the show notes to help people find it. Alison, do you want any last words before we, before we break? I just really would like to reiterate how, you know, appreciative I am for this interview. Really, your work

has been super influential on how I look at Marxism. And I feel like constantly on Red Menace, especially, we're referencing your work to sort of clarify how we're approaching different texts. So it's been a really awesome experience. Thank you so much for coming on. You're welcome. It's always great to be on. for all the hard work and fun this country my new world I'm not sure everybody on the grind

every day 9 to 5, 8 to 12 Who you do is Jesse Know how we do it on a big Hand-to-hand, whatever Y'all I've been working all my life But ain't got nothing to show I ain't telling you nothing

You don't already know I've been working all my life but ain't got nothing to show Like this world just don't want us to grow I've been working all my life but ain't got nothing to show I ain't telling you nothing you don't already know I've been working all my life but ain't got nothing to show Wanna run up in the White House and kick in the door Where a nigga go eat when the refrigerator empty work all week

Let the boss man pimp me Can't pay no rent to the 15 landlord call the police to evict me looking for a job and it won't ask. Have you ever been to jail? No, they're gonna ask. Ever took a piss test that you didn't pass in between jobs in the past? How you get cashed?

I don't work over high-ass stoves. I don't picked up trash off roads. Winter time in the streets and the cold. Many time I had to sleep in my clothes on the flow, what you know by being poe. Seeing most of your kinfolk be on dope. Ain't nobody in the hood. Got no hope in this fucked up system

and that's why we don't vote. Still paying niggas 425. How the fuck we're supposed to survive. I'm close to the edge. Government taking most of my bread and taxes might as well had a toast to my head. nigga want a while out run up in the white house with the gauge out click clap give me my shit back i've been working all my life but ain't got nothing to show i ain't telling you nothing you

don't already know i've been working all my life but ain't got nothing to show like this world just don't want us to grow i've been working all my life but ain't got nothing to show i ain't telling you nothing you don't already know i've been working all my life but Ain't got nothing to show. Want to run up in the White House and kick in the door. Whoa, whoa. Oh, oh, who, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. No my uniform.

Just a number on a double your fold phone. See where I'm from. It's a few ways out. Either rap, get the sports. Either dope or the casket. You can work to the bone, but I'll take it. Please don't put all your eggs in one basket. We don't never get a piece of the pie.

Work 50 years. Then die State Pope Rich folks Is a criminal But you don't Want to him be though So thank God

This Friday Ain't it's Friday Ain't it what we live For Nika got to get up Out the plantation Same job That my pop

Had before me I'm gonna pass it down To my seat Fucked up Situation Make a nigga When a wild out Run up in the White House

With the cage out Click clack Give me my shit back Yeah I've been working All my life But ain't got nothing to show

I ain't telling you Nothing you don't Already know I've been working All my life But ain't got nothing To show Want to run up in the white house and kick in the door.

Whoa, whoa. Really? Oh, no. My day-old. It's just like a plantation. They owe me. But got me feeling. out this application

my J-O-B is just like a plantation. They owe me and got me filling out this application what I look like