Rev Left Radio - Dialectics Deep Dive IIX: Contradiction and Overdetermination (Pt. 1)

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Matthew Furlong returns for another installment of our Dialectics Deep Dive Series. Together, they discuss Althusser, Hegel, Dialectical Materialism, Marxism, Palestine, process philosophy, and much more! Get 15% off any book in the Left Wing Books Library HERE Interview referenced in the episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZDGvT04sNA&ab_channel=BreakThroughNews --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left Radio Follow Rev Left on IG 

Hey, everyone. This is Matthew Furlong, back on Rev. Left Ladio with breath. Can I start that? I said Ladio. Sorry. I'm going to leave that in, but go ahead. Reve Left Gladiou. Okay, also another recap. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Rev. Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show, fan favorite, Matthew Furlong, our favorite Canadian. the show to talk about Althusair's essay in 1962 contradiction and overdetermination. This will be, I believe, the sixth installment of our ongoing dialectics deep dive series. And, you know, it's worth saying that these, I would say that this is some of our most challenging

material that we put out. We really wrestle deeply with like philosophical concepts that are, you know, incredibly sophisticated and for people who don't have training in philosophy, it can be a very challenging episode to listen to. And almost certainly there are going to be parts of these episodes that go over my head, that will go over your head. But it's this, as I always say in front of these Dialectic Deep Dives episodes, it's this engagement with crucially difficult but important material that helps elevate your capacity to comprehend and to think. So, you know, when a period of time in this conversation might go by, well, you're not really picking up.

what's happening and you might think it's all lost time, there's still being work done on your mind, you're still forced to wrestle in uncomfortable ways with concepts or ideas that you find incredibly challenging. And that process in and of itself is an uplifting process that increases your capacity. So this is an experience also that I had just going through philosophy school, like for my basic degree and then a little bit of my graduate experience before I dropped out in philosophy was this, you know, reading really difficult material. Sometimes you'd have to read a page four, five, six times to begin to extract information out of it. And it could be incredibly frustrating, but it's also, I think, in a really important sort

of developmental process in one's critical capacities. So keep that in mind as you go through this episode. And of course, me and Matthew, we take a million different detours. We talk about Occupy. We talk about Palestine. We talk about, you know, a million different things that are generated from this this more philosophically dense conversation and we try to make these these high level conceptual analyses touch ground with reality in various ways through examples and through

detours in our conversation etc hopefully that helps people orient themselves throughout the discussion as well and as always we wanted to give a shout out to our friends kersblebledeb over at leftwingbooks.net they have a wonderful little collaboration with us where rev left listeners get 15% off all the books in their library, which is a wonderful opportunity to get, you know, awesome text of history, of theory, et cetera, for a cheaper price. So I will put a link in the show notes to this episode for people to click on. And if you click on that link, it automatically puts in the code Rev Left at checkout.

So you can just click that link, go through, pick your book, check out as normal, and 15% will automatically be taken off for you. And you're supporting a small left-wing publisher, which is important. own right. So highly, highly encourage people to go do that. And again, the link to that will be in the show notes and a huge shout out to left wing books for this collaboration they're doing with us here at Rev. Left Radio. All right, without further ado, here is my long conversation. This is part one of my long conversation with Matthew Furlong on Al Thuzei's contradiction and overdetermination. So this is over two hours. And that's, we only got to like question four out of 10. So part two will be

coming shortly as we make very clear towards the end of this discussion. So in the meantime, this part one, wrestle with these ideas, with these concepts, try to understand as much as you can in the interim between now and part two. You could always go on like, what is it, marxist.org or whatever. If you just Google Althusair, contradiction and overdetermination, the essay is free online. It will come up. It's really not that long. Slightly challenging for sure, but not very long.

You could probably read it within an hour or so. and might not understand everything that he's trying to argue, but we'll still set you up in a better position to understand and engage with the stuff we're going to talk about in part two, as well as, of course, part one. So without any further ado, here's my conversation with Matthew Furlong on Louis Althusair's contradiction and overdetermination. Enjoy. Hey, everyone. This is Matthew back again with Brett on Rev. Left Radio, and today we are going to discuss Louis Alfezze's essay from 1962, contradiction and overdetermination. Beautiful.

Well, welcome back to the show. This will be another installment of our Dialectics Deep Dive series, correct? Yes, yeah. So I think this will be Dialectics Deep Dive Six. Six. Okay, I couldn't remember the number. So that's awesome. Yeah, we have obviously an ongoing series over the last couple years where Matthew comes on and

we have these incredibly cerebral deep dives into the. philosophy of dialectics and connecting, you know, enlightenment, European philosophy with Eastern spiritual traditions and a million other things, you know, science, physics, etc. Today we're going to be focusing on Althusair's text. Now, I have to say this up front because there was an episode that I've done many episodes on Althusair, but I used the pronunciation Althusay at some point and got ridiculed in an email by somebody who was, you know, calling me every name in the book

for mispronouncing the word. So are you confident in your pronunciation of Althusay? Yes. However, that doesn't mean I might not be. But yeah, when I was younger, I thought it was Alphazay as well. And for a long time I did. And then I heard Al-Azer, I was introduced to that without having to be ridiculed by anyone. So, yeah, let's just stick with Al-Zazir and then we'll just take the lumps if that's wrong. And it's like maybe it's a pronunciation that doesn't look anything like the spelling at all. I don't know. Those damn French. Al-Fazer it is. I blame the entire French language. All right. Well, today's going to be a fun one. So let's go ahead and get into it. And, you know, I'm assuming that 99.9% of our audience has not read contradiction and overdetermination by Althus there. So what do you, what do we sort of hope to accomplish? And then we can get into sort of an introduction to the text, help people orient themselves to it.

And then we'll get into the actual meat and meat of the thing. Okay. Well, first, actually, I would just like to open by saying that since, I'm recording this episode today. I'm not at the March for the weekly March for Palestine in downtown. I just want to send shout out to the Palestinian youth movement and Palestine Solidarity and Al for the continued organizing about this matter.

Beautiful. In terms of what we want to accomplish today, we want to analyze what Althazir means when he talks about making a bad inversion of Hegelianism into Marxism. or to not properly distinguish between the Hegelian logic of dialectic and or specifically contradiction and Marx's logic of dialectic and specifically contradiction and how if you don't do the inversion properly, you do end up in another kind of idealism, which one word for it

is economism, and that can lead you into all sorts of bad organizational outcomes, ideological outcomes and so on and so forth. So that's basically the main target here is how to, as a Marxist, not end up as just a Hegelian is, again, without realizing it. Right. So there's this term that we're going to obviously get to at some point sort of like de-hegelianizing Marxism or, you know, not taking too much of Hegel and smuggling into Marxism. We have to be incredibly clear about what, you know, what Marx did take from Hegel and what Marx did not take from Hegel or else it gives rise to confusion at least and errors of various sorts at the most. So it's an important question.

It has implications that reverberate throughout the entire Marxist tradition. I'm sure to some extent, perhaps, many of us have been guilty at various times of, you know, sort of blurring the lines between where Hegel ends and where Marx begins, et cetera. So I think this is a useful thing to wrestle with. And obviously it was useful. It was important enough for Altheu's air to write. an entire, you know, pretty intense essay on. So it's worth at least considering in wrestling with that. So with that in mind, you know, this may be reinstated or elaborate on what you

were already saying. But what's the, can you talk a little bit more about the basic problem that Althusair addresses in this essay, what he's trying to do in this entire essay and sort of how it's relevant to us today? Well, he's trying to make sure that our understanding of dialectics is as close to actual scientific thinking and practice as possible. And by that, I mean, um, well, I mean,

liberals, uh, they love science. And not only that, uh, as you and I, I'm sure you've seen this, uh,

I think this was like a, a subreddit at one point. It's sort of like a thematization on the internet. Do you've heard this? Like I fucking love science. Absolutely. Yeah. It's like a 20,

2015 thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's like from the logic and reason crowds. Yeah. And really it seems to me that, what they really, really like is sort of the outcomes of science as reported in the descriptive ontology that goes along with science. So, you know, you have the descriptive ontology of what

kinds of things there are in the universe, what kinds of things there are in the solar system, for example, or the types of animals on Earth, or this, that, and the other thing. But what Al-A is trying to get us to see or get us close to is the fact that in its foundations, in its sort of foundational activity, sciences, the sciences really are about exploring changes and transformations and relationships between different changes and transformations. And that's what he wants our Marxism to be as close to that as possible as to pose to a kind of Marxism that just sort of enunciates the main concepts and sort of applies them sort of whole hog just to the situation before us as we are perceiving it at any given

moment, as opposed to entering into the situation with the sort of scientific techniques of Marxist dialectics and historical materialism and trying our best in this chaotic mess to try to actually figure out which way things are going. Are they going in the direction of closing down possibilities for revolution, or are they going in the direction of opening up possibilities for revolution? And here I'm already sort of alluding to two concepts that Althazar deployed in the essay, which is that of an historical interdition or a revolutionary rupture. And we'll touch on that once we get into the text.

Is that okay to start? Yeah, absolutely. And another thing I would like to say up front that a lot of people listening will probably have heard of, and maybe you could help flesh this out a little bit, is this idea, which, you know, Althus there sort of starts this essay describing this idea that a lot, all of us have definitely heard, which is this idea that, you know, Marx turned Hegel on his head, right? and there's this rational kernel within the mystical shell of Higalian idealist dialectics. And what we understand is that Marx took the dialectical sort of logic from Hegel,

but stripped it of its mystical, you know, spirit-oriented idealism and instead situated it firmly in materialism, hence, you know, economic base, superstructure, etc. So do you want to say anything about that or clarify what Althusair is doing when he's bringing that up? Um, yeah, but at first, by way of doing this, um, I, there are just, there were two little passages I wanted to, uh, sort of just, um, from, from two other figures that I wanted to read out, sort of just to set the tone and kind of wet our appetites for what's coming. So is it okay if I started out with that. Absolutely. Please do. Okay. So the first one is from someone that, uh, everyone listening may have heard of, uh, named, uh, V. I. Lenin. Um, and this is from, uh, a text from 1915, uh, called on the question of dialectics. And I think, think in the West, people are still who are interested in dialectics are still sort of struggling to come to terms with it. And since the sort of dominant institution that delivers philosophy to us is Borswell academia, we do end up with the kind of misunderstanding about what constitutes the dialectical struggle that in Mao Zedong thought you would call it the two

into one, right? Where two opposing forces collide with one another. And then the the stronger of those forces overcomes the other and either obliterates it or assumes it or absorbs it rather into itself. And as this can lead to the misunderstanding, for example, that the final confrontation

between Borswasi and proletariat is going to be something like Avengers Endgame where, you know, or a pitch battle, you know, where Thanos is on one side with his army and Steve Rogers is on his side with his army and they're all popping out of those holes. And then they run into a, each other and the superior force wins.

And Althazir is going to say, yeah, a lot of Western European Marxists seem to think things this way are this way. And for that reason, they were very, very surprised and taken aback when the revolution kicked off in Russia. So I'm just going to dip into this passage from Lenin to give this really, I think, really rich characterization of what dialectical thinking actually entails and what the dialectic itself actually entails. So I'll just begin here. Quote, The splitting of the whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics.

That is precisely how Hegel, too, puts the matter. The correctness of this aspect of the content of dialectics must be tested by the history of science. This aspect of dialectics, for example in Pleckinoff, usually receives inadequate attention. The identity of opposites is taken as the sum total of example. examples, open parenthesis, quote, for example, a seed, unquote, quote, for example, primitive communism, unquote. This same is true of angles, but it is, quote, in the interests of popularization, end quote,

close parenthesis, and not as a law of cognition, and then another open parenthesis again, and not also as a law of the objective world, close parenthesis. Now Lenin gives comment, Lenin now gives several examples. In mathematics, positive and negative, plus and minus. rather, differential and integral, rather, in mechanics, action and reaction, in physics, positive and negative electricity, in chemistry, the combination and dissociation of atoms. The identity of opposites, it would be more correct, perhaps, to say, their unity, although the difference between the terms unity, rather identity and unity, is not particularly important

here. In a certain sense, both are correct. So just to say the unity of, the identity of opposites, of the contradictory, mutually exclusive, opposite tendencies in all phenomena and processes of nature, including mind and society. The condition for the knowledge of all processes in the world and their self-movement, in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites. Development is the struggle of opposites. Dialectics as living many-sided knowledge, with the number of shades eternally increasing, with an infinite number of shades of every approach in approximation to reality, with a philosophical system growing into a hole out of each shade, here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with quote

unquote metaphysical materialism. Human knowledge is not or does not follow a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed, transformed one-sidedly, into an independent, complete straight line, which then, if one does not see the wood for the trees, leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism, where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes. Rectilinarity and one-sidedness, woodenness and petrification, subjectivism and subjective blindness, voila, the epistemological roots of idealism, and clerical obscurantism, open parenthesis, equals philosophical idealism, close parenthesis, of course,

has epistemological roots. It is not groundless. It is a sterile flower, undoubtedly, but a sterile flower which grows on the living tree of living, fertile, genuine, powerful, omnipotent, objective, absolute human knowledge, end quote. Now, the second passage, the very short quote, that I want to read here is from Michael Cherito, who is the character Tom Seismore played in the 1995 movie Heat. Quote, the action is the juice, end quote. and both of those they're supposed to bounce off each other action is the juice

clarifies the meaning of when it's passage so to yeah just to return back to the main line story where are we at right now of the questions yeah I'm just just I was just asking you

about the turn it on his head rational kernel in a mystical shell etc yeah okay so the error that Althaza sees people making is the idea that Marx takes Hegel's account of the development of a bourgeois nation state in which the material life of the state and the people in it are just a reflection, or sorry, a development out of this kind of kernel, which is, and idealism is so weird when you start getting into it. It just sounds ridiculous when you say it, but it's the spirit of the people in a way.

It's it's it's abstract. It is what really grounds, um, all phenomena you see in the life and the culture of the nation state. And they are just sort of, um, almost like frost on the pain in a way compared to it. Um, so for example, um, and he says he'll, you know, Alfa Zay talks about this. Hegel will say that, um, the, um, the, the trappings of cultural life, aesthetic life, all these things, they're just the pure phenomena of the idea. And here I'd just like to take a moment to comment on the concept, like make an

etymological comment on the concept of phenomena or phenomenon, which is that it's derived from the Greek, the Greek word, a verb, rather, phino, which means I shine. And when it's put in the form of the Greek word finomenon, if I remember correctly, that's a, that's the neuter noun. And a neuter noun, it allows you to use the same form for the subject of the sentence, finomenon. So that's what's called the nominative case. And it takes the same form when it's the accusative case, which is when the noun is the object to direct object of the action of the verb. And so there's a certain sense in which the sort of etymological derivation gives you the idea

of a phenomenon, a phenomenon as being something that light hits, and that's what makes it phenomenal, phenomenal. And it's merely this sort of very, very outward and kind of like, in a way, we've used the word epiphenomenal before. It's really, the phenomenon in Hegel's use of it here is just. the sort of very outward surface of what is hidden inside and what is revealed in the outward surfaces of the life of the state, for example, but which is never exhausted by it and which actually abide those things and it actually governs them instead. Does that make sense

at all? Yeah, a little bit. It's some, it's tough stuff to fully wrap your hand around, but I think people as we go on will hopefully continue to get a knack for it. But yeah, absolutely. Well, we can, yeah, we could come up with all sorts of things. Like, you know, the life of the American people is industry and, you know, this, this, this striving and great, you know, achieving success and all this kind of stuff. And it's, the Hegel will say, well, class relations themselves, including the, the opposition between rich and poor, are themselves just a, a pure phenomenon of the American spirit, right? So if you are poor, you're expressing the American spirit just as completely as if you are rich. And therefore, from the standpoint of

the development of the idea, it's kind of, it's kind of okay if they're a rich and poor. Yes, yes. That's clarifying for sure, yes. Yeah. Well, you know, now that we have like the basic orientation of the text and what Althusair is trying to do and, you know, this de-hegelanizing Marxism and wrestling with these deep concepts within dialectics to do just that and be very clear about what he's doing. Althusair is obviously doing Marxist philosophy, right? You know, Marxism is many different things. You could be doing revolution. You could be writing theory. It's important to, to segment. meant Althusair is interested in explicitly the philosophical development of Marxism.

And so that's why we get into the philosophy of Hegel. You see Marxism emerging from, you know, Hegelianism, left Hegelianism, et cetera. So I think that's also important. But another question I have for you are what are the key background texts that Althusair draws on for this essay? And why are they relevant to his overall argument? I would say some of the key ones here are. Mao's on contradiction because the structure of contradiction that Mao articulates in that paper. Angles's 1890 letter to 1890 letter on historical materialism to Joseph Block, which Alphzze critiques later on in the appendix to contradiction and overdetermination where he says that. Angles tries to explain the dialectic through the images he uses in this letter and then sort of misses the target and kind of fails and creates. a kind of misleading picture.

I think that'll be really interesting to look at. Marx's his preface to the contribution to the critique of political economy and obviously Hegel's elements of philosophy of right, Hegel's philosophy of history, and I would say Antonio Gramsci's work on base in superstructure and ideology as well are very major for him. I would say possibly the two most important texts are probably Gramsci and Marx's preface to the contribution to critique of political economy.

And just to jump back, you know, we should look at the text directly now. I'll just go back and reiterate in Althazir's own words, what it is he's worried that we're going to do if we don't invert Hegel properly. Is that okay if I do a little reading? Yes, yes. Okay. Wow. So just to set it up, this inversion of, you know, turning Hegel on his head.

Althus there is trying to be very clear about what exactly does that mean? Because there's a certain one-on-one understanding of like, oh, you know, Marx took the idealism and turned it into materialism. Hence he turned Hegel on his head. But obviously, that's incredibly surface level and simplistic and has a bunch of implications that Althuzear is trying to work through rigorously. Yeah. And, well, he's just to set up what I'm going to read here. So he's worried about developing economism, which is, the direct inverse of the Hegelian picture I just examined, which is really just that

now nothing is real but the economy and everything political, anything ideological, anything, aesthetic, spiritual, anything like that, that is now the pure phenomenon. And everything can be reduced to each other, pulling stuff out of the ground for nutrition and all that sort of stuff. And I had a teacher that sort of saw things this way many years ago. He's dead now. his name was Kai Nielsen. And he identified as a Marxist, but he also, he rejected dialectics.

He was sat on my master's thesis committee. And at the end of it, he was like, well, there's nothing here I can really find fault with, but he still likes paradoxes too much. And that was, that kind of, like, he really had taken Hegel's inversion, or sorry, Marx's inversion of Hegel to mean that the only thing that's real is, is, the economy in the most sort of minimalistic way that you could possibly think about it and everything else other than that is an illusion. So as long as we just make sure everyone gets the right calorie count and all that sort

of stuff, everything is basically taken care of. That might be exaggerating this position a little bit. But the idea is that politics engaging directly with the superstructure, that sort of activity is sort of in economism is sort of separated from what is taken to be the quote unquote real task of just resolving these economic problems. Right.

And here I'll just read it in Al-Azer's own words here. Quote, while for Hegel, the politico-ideological was the essence of the economic. For Marx, the economic will be the essence of the politico-eco-ideological and comment. People may have heard

this kind of construction before a politico economic or if you were in university the last 20 years anytime working in this kind of stuff. Ethico political and I didn't understand where that came from and I used to ask people when I was in the word, what does

this co thing? This oh, what's that mean? How do you conjoin ethico and why does it work that way? And I've realized years later that it's part of a Latin noun case called the ablative and one of the of the ablative is, is expressing whiffness.

So when you say politico-ideological, it means sort of politics with ideologics means like a kind of a conjoinment of the two of two things. Yeah, and we also hear the term socioeconomic a lot, right? Same thing. Yeah, exactly. And that's another ablative. It's a, it's a derivative of the Latin ablative construction. Yeah.

So up there just to clarify that. There was I. The political and the ideological will therefore be merely pure phenomenon of the economic, which will be their quote-unquote truth. Or Hegel's quote-unquote pure principle of consciousness, that is to say, of the epoch's consciousness of itself, or the simple internal principle which he conceived as the principle of the intelligibility of all the determinations of a historical people, we have substituted another simple principle, its opposite, material life, the economy, a simple

principle which in turn becomes the sole principle of the universal intelligibility of all the determinations of a historical people. Is this a caricature? If we take Marx's famous comments on the handmill, the water mill and the steam mill, literally, or out of context, this is their meaning. The logical destination of this temptation is the exact mirror image of the Hegelian dialectic. The only difference being that it is no longer a question of deriving the successive moments from the idea, but from the economy, by virtue of the same internal contradiction. This temptation results in the radical reduction of the dialectic of history to the dialectic generating the successive modes of production, that is, in the last analysis, the different

production techniques. There are names for these temptations in the history of Marxism, economism, and even technologism. But these terms have only to be mentioned to evoke the memory of the theoretical and practical struggles of Marx and his disciples against these deviations. And how many peremptory attacks on economism there are to counterbalance that well-thumbed piece on the steam engine? Let us abandon this caricature, not so as to oppose the official condemnations to economism, but to examine what authentic principles are active in these condemnations and in Marx's actual thought. For all its apparent rigor, the fiction of the quote-unquote inversion is now clearly untenable. We know that Marx did not retain the terms of the Hegelian model

of society and quote unquote invert him. He substituted other only distantly related terms for them. Furthermore, he overhauled the connection which had previously ruled over the terms. For Marx, both terms and relation changed in nature and sense. And, quote, brother. So that's how Althazir characterizes it. And I think Hidur will be good. to turn to the passage in Marx's contribution, the preface, rather, in which he talks about the relationship between base and superstructure. This is one of the texts that Alpazir turns to to sort of backstop his own argumentation. So is it okay if I just drop that in there? Yeah, definitely. Okay. Quote, in the social production of their existence, men inevitably

enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into

conflict with the existing relations of production, or this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms, with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hit there too. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations, it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophic, in short, ideological

forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production, end quote. So what Alpese is going to draw out of this text, for example, is the argument that, yeah, it isn't enough just to attend to these economic problems and sort of treat, you know, political, ideological, superstructural problems as just sort of window dressing or just sort of like a fireworks display that has

nothing to do with the actual generation of things. What we're going to see in this essay is that the base and the superstructure are completely intermingled with one another. And then plus the fact, since both the base and the superstructure and they're, I mean, they're processed through human brains. coexist in the human brain together, obviously they're going to impinge on each other at that level as well as at the level of social and political acting together with one another, against potentially one another, for one another, all those sorts of things. The base and the

superstructure are sort of bound up with each other in a dialectical process of their own. Yes. And one of the implications of that is that by merely changing the base, like let's say you could snap your fingers and change the material base overnight or something, you know, hypothetically, that the superstructure would continue on, like there'd be a lag of the superstructure. The superstructure isn't merely the foam on top of the economic waves or the steam that is emitted by the, you know, engine of economism, but there's a dialectical relationship between them. And there's, in some sense, it has a life of its own already. And if we take that idea very seriously, what did Mao say? The necessity of a cultural revolution,

right, a revolution in the superstructure was what Mao concluded from a, you know, I would say a pretty sophisticated grasp of dialectics. And does that all sound right? Yeah, and just to give an example of the kind of lag, right? So this is in one of the episodes

of Chris Wade and asked back Christman's hell of president series, I think, were Chrisman, very, very good. I learned a lot about the U.S. presidents for that. actually I say I got it for I got it from my dad for Christmas so he was pretty stoked to get this he has no idea who these people are but I mean wait in Crispin not the president yeah of course but yeah Chrisman says you know we are all uh whether you're my age or your age Brett or your 20 or you're 18 or 15 or whatever we're all sort of narcissistic boomer subjects in a way and And what that is, so like, you know, the baby boomers do have an actual claim to legitimate generationality in the sense that this was a demographic boom.

Yeah. Everything in every, every wave of people interpolated as a quote unquote generation since then. So Generation X, the millennials, what is it? Who's in there? Generation Z and then Generation Alpha, yeah. Generation Alpha. These are more like marketing concepts. And what they really denote is like, here's the way that you are getting screwed by capitalism in the, in the wake of the post-war bubble that the boomers grew up in.

And your subjective disposition toward that reflects the disjunction between the expectations that the boomers reasonably had. And that somehow because of, you know, the educational system we grew up in and the pop culture thing and all that stuff, on some level or other, those same expectations or, you know, comparable ones are built into us. And then being a millennial, being a Gen X, being this or that is the, it sort of reflects the disjunction between what's actually happening and these expectations that are sort of still hanging around that don't make sense, right? So does that make sense that as a example there? So this sort of boomer, the expectations that were ultimately, you know, a product of the certain post-World War II material conditions in which the boomers grew up are continuing to live on in the minds of millennials and Gen Z, you know, ideas like I have a better life than my parents and then my kids have a better life than me, you know, all these different things that the hyper individualism, the self-expression through consumption, those things continue to live on even though the material basis that created those expectations and that entire mindset has radically shifted. Millennials and Gen Z are growing up in starkly different material conditions than the boomers grew up in, but yet this superstructural sort of boomer mentality, if you will, continues to sort of haunt us in a way that makes our changing of those material conditions

and the collectivity needed to make those changes much more difficult than the otherwise would be showing that the superstructure is not merely foam or steam, but has a sort of robustness of its own. And if I could, if I could add on to that, you can know, you can see that it's not just foam and steam, not just gossamer, because, I mean, how were these concepts, say, of millennial and Gen Z, for example, how are they propagated to us through the mainstream media, basically? The whole point of their propagation is to help the ruling class in the sense that it's not, the media doesn't, and mainstream closer, they don't present it to you, in the nature of the disjunction between the boomer frame and the material conditions that

are actually happening, it's attributed to you, like, as, well, that's just the mindset. It's the millennial mindset. There's people, it's just, they just come into the world like this. I mean, we can't be explained. It's just, they're just millennials, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, I had, I had a boss once, and she was a millennial, and she, she was like, you know, I really, I consider myself something of a millennial whisper. I really get, I can get any of their heads and really young and it's just like you're you're really um uh you're you're operating at a very superficial level if you think that way and you think that there is some kind of something just like a millennial mind or a zoomer mind that just popped into reality out of nowhere it really

what it is is the growing disjunction between the frame that was given to us about what it means to have a life and what is actually happening around us in reality yeah there's sort of a you know these generations are short hands for certain demographic cohorts but they get fetishized and reified into like essentialism millennials are like this boomers are like this you know gen z is like this and it's like there's no taking of note of the different worlds in which they grew up and there's just a sort of psychologizing of generations which is obviously fetishistic absurd overgeneralizing right she says she's a millennial whisper well which millennial like fucking charlie kirk or Brett O'Shea, you know, or the million other people between us. So then that breaks down very

quickly. But there is this sense in which it gets sort of ossified in people's minds in this sort of idealist way that like these generations have certain personality types. And now you're off to the races into La La Land. Yeah. And so and so the important thing to take away here is just to remember that what Altaxir is trying to show us is that there are certain forms of sort of, you know, chronological or temporal historical disjunctions in sort of splits, discontinuities that are happening that constitute our subjective experience and our objective experience and those things need to be dealt with as well, which is why ideology critique is so important. And maybe here actually it would be good just to read a couple of little

short passages from Antonio Gramsci as background to what else is you talking about. Yeah, but could I make one more point really quick? So just to kind of continue to re and say what we're saying, reiterate this point, there's a certain vulgar inversion of Hegel, which replaces the geist or the spirit with the economy. And that simple one-to-one swapping out, that simple inversion gives rise to errors. Among those errors are things like economism and this sort of reductive vulgar materialism that collapses everything into merely the economy. And so we want to interrogate this inversion, this idea we take for granted that Marx turned Hegel on his head to really explore the nuances of what exactly that means so that we can avoid falling into this trap of the vulgar inversion. Is that fair? Yes. And this vulgar inversion works in service of milk toast, dog shit, Borswater University Marxism that absolutely everybody should reject for you.

health for the health of the world. But it really, I mean, it does, when it gets filtered through those categories, right, I mean, then this is part of how Marxism becomes sort of through this, you know, this false reading becomes available to these, you know, Chauvinas, Pats Sox, all that kind of stuff where it's like, really what we got to do, you know, we got to expel the financial bourgeois Z that's taken over, you know, the base national industrial Borzozzi and then have this like red-brown alliance and then you know without the the globalist financial exploiters the industrial capitalists will be more inclined to look after the needs of the workers and there'll

be this reciprocity and blah blah blah all this kind of hogwash is licensed by things like this bad inversion of of haggle and of ours great example yeah um so yeah yeah so gramsci um let me see here so there are three fragments here on structure and superstructure And let's see. Okay. I'll read, yes, the second and third fragment. So the first one is long, but we might have an occasion to jump back to it then. So the proposition, quote, the proposition contained in the preface to a contribution to the critique of political economy,

to the effect that men acquire consciousness of structural conflicts on the level of ideologies, should be considered as an affirmation of epistemological, and not simply psychological and moral value. From this, it follows that the theoretical, practical principle of hegemony has also epistemological significance, and it is here that Illich's greatest theoretical contribution to the philosophy of praxis should be sought. In these terms, one could say that Illich advanced philosophy as philosophy insofar as he advanced political doctrine and practice.

The realization of a hegemonic apparatus insofar as it creates a new ideological terrain, comment. So in Althazir's essay, ideological state apparatuses, that's kind of what he's talking about, a hegemonic apparatus that helps reproduce labor and property relations through the superstructures, through ideological formations, continuing. And we have an episode on that for people who want to go listen. We have a whole episode on Althusair's work on that, so. Yeah. You have several episodes, I think, too.

Yeah, several episodes on Althusair, for sure. Check them out. Yeah, listeners, please do. sorry, the realization of a hegemonic apparatus, insofar as it creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of knowledge. It is a fact of knowledge, a philosophical fact, end quote. And I'll just read the third one, quote, structures and superstructures comment by here, structure he just means base. Structures and superstructures form a historical block.

That is to say, the complex, contradictory, and discordant on. of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production. From this, one can conclude that only a comment, you're going to hear a word now, and it doesn't mean what it's going to sound like it means, okay, but we can talk about it. Continuing, that only a totalitarian system of ideologies gives a rational reflection of the contradiction of the structure and represents the existence of the objective conditions for the revolutionizing of praxis. If a social group is, formed, which is 100% wholly genius on the level of ideology.

This means that the premises exist 100% for this revolutionizing. That is that the quote-unquote rational is actively and actually real. This reasoning is based on the necessary restoposity between structure and superstructures, a reciprocity which is nothing other than the real dialectical process. So, end quote. So again, here, if we are to think of the superstructure as something which is merely super added to the base, And again, it's just ornamental, just like, you know, a foam on the wave. We've made a very, very serious mistake, according to Marx and according to Gramsci and according to Lenin and also according to AlphaZer.

And I'm sure Mao would agree as well. And we know Stalin agrees because of the stuff that we've looked at from him on language and linguistics in the past. And I would just also like to recommend as companions to this episode right now, Dialectics, Deep Dive 3B on Marshall McLuhan and our episode on the Philosophie of language of Vian Voloshenov. Absolutely. I'll link to those in the show notes as well. So then we obviously know that two of the core concepts in this work are contradiction and overdetermination, hence the title of the essay. But there are others. And so could you please talk about some of those other core concepts within this text and sort of why they're relevant

to his broader argument? Okay. Well, yeah, I'm just going to just do a quick rundown, like a list of them, the ones that I've pulled out, and if I've missed anything, maybe you've pulled out something that I haven't. But the ones that I think I really want to hit on are obviously contradiction, overdetermination, unevenness, survival, historical inhibition, and revolutionary rupture. Is there anything there you think should be there that is not there that is not there that you still should be there? No, those are really good. Those are absolutely the core concepts. Oh, okay. So yeah, what I'll do then? We'll start with contradiction and then we'll just noodle around Then the, not noodle, that's like when you're playing nonsense on your guitar.

But we'll, we'll work around in the text a little bit on some of the other ones. Noodling is when you try to catch catfish with your hands. What's, this is like a Nebraska thing? It must be. It must be. That's cool. I didn't doodling trying to catch it. That's cool.

I like that. So, I want to, you know, we've already, I just read from Lennon. And I'll just start from the beginning. again. I'll go back to the beginning. The splitting of the whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics. So as we've said before in dialectics, deep dive, dialectics, dialectical thinking does not start with two foreign objects meeting with each other, colliding with each other in some way or other, and then resulting in a sort of a synthetic outcome that is, you know, arises from the smashing together

of these two things. We know from say on contradiction by now and in this passage that we just read that we have to start with first the internal, the inner contradictoryness of each individual thing. And as Lenin says, it's not good enough just to be like, well look at a seed, for

example. You know, it starts off as this thing and ends up as a plant and then that dies and it becomes, you know, mulch. And all those opposing those different moments of the life of the seed, they're in a unity. Just like, you know, Descartes with the wax that we've talked about, I think, in Dialectics,

deep dive one, where he says that although, you know, the wax starts out in this sort of cold, hard, you know, palpable shape and ends up as this kind of like liquid, nonetheless, the proper way of identifying, I think it is not to say, well, the beginning stage is the real wax or the end stage is the real wax, but to say that the reality of the wax is in the contradictions of the transition from one end of existence to another. end of its existence. And as Leiden will say, it's not good enough just to examine that in terms of external examples. It's also, we have to remember, that is how our minds work. That is how our lives work as well. And as we are there with Descartes observing the wax, we have to reflect on

the fact that we are very much the same as the wax and that we are going forward in time with this sort of same internal differentiating process as the wax, and we are the same in that sense. Do you see what I'm saying there? Yeah, we're not a static thing. We're not defined by any one point along the spectrum of a given process, but we are process, whose engine and pistons are contradiction, right? That's the thing that drives that inherent process forward, but once again, we are grasping everything, not as events or discrete objects, but as processes.

Yes, exactly. And the difficult thing to grasp is the contradictoryness of each moment of that because we're tempted to, you know, say like, at this moment, I was in this sort of state. And at this moment, I was in this sort of state. And what, you know, Western thought is very, has become in its sort of dominant modes because, you know, dialectics is also an expression of Western thought and it has been subordinated to Borzellate metaphysics. Western Borswa metaphysics, because it rests on the assumption that everything has to be purely identical with self and it cannot admit of any difference. So which is to say that Ticknott-Haan's famous saying that there is no self without non-self elements is not admissible in Western Borsal metaphysics.

The idea, for example, that the majority of cells in the human body are not, quote, unquote human creates problems for Borswa, Western Borswa metaphysics because then your own identity depends on all these other identities and their identities depend on your identity. And then the sort of A equals A scheme

starts to fall apart. So just to get us thinking about the sort of interior logic or the internal logic of contradiction, I wanted to read a passage from Graham Priest's book from 1987, I think, called in contradiction, a study of the transconsistent, and it's from chapter, I think, 11.2 about the

instant of change. And I should say here, he does use the term metaphysics here. He says the chapter 11 is the metaphysics of change. And here he's not using metaphysics in the way that word metaphysics in the way Mao uses it, which is to say a system of thinking that holds that everything is separate from each other, unchanging, cannot pass into anything else and can only transform in the sense of increase in size or quantity. Here, priest is using it in the sense of abstract sort of general concepts that are used to sort of frame reality, discuss reality. And say, for example, in his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus and democratist, Marx uses the term metaphysics in this way. In the book,

materialism and imperial criticism by Lennon, Lannin uses metaphysics at certain points as a term in this way. So again, just because we see a word doesn't mean it necessarily pertains to a concept that is our enemy. Especially in philosophy where words are routinely retooled and, you know, set to different meanings and, you know, used to push a concept in a different direction than you would immediately assume. That's what makes, you know, cold reading philosophy so difficult. Like if you try to pop open Kant or Hegel, you're completely lost because they're using very common words, but they're using them in fundamentally different ways than we're used to

reading them. And this touches on why, again, as I've said before, you know, Lenin would want you to read very widely, even read your enemies, and to trust that you can distinguish between something correct and incorrect, because even people that may use very different terminology than you can be conceptually correct. And in that book, materialism and imperial criticism, Lenin does say, you know, here's someone who uses a completely different vocabulary, but he's actually quite close to dialectical materialism. Here's an instance in which a person who's ostensibly Marxist and using Marxist

is further away from the truth than someone who's using a completely different terminology that isn't Marxist, but conceptually they're more on point. Yeah, exactly. And he says, that's why you need to read even people that you think are snig. oil salesman, you need to be able to read incorrect ideas and follow your own line. And it's so much more true and it's people that are in the same sort of sphere as us, but not maybe don't belong to our same, our own little tendency that we prefer. But you should be able to read a text like that without fear in confidence that you can follow your own line correctly and not be

sort of, you know, just because you read being in time, you don't end up becoming a Nazi, right? You have to stand firm and the, the command you have of these principles and, and you can say, well, no, here, Heidegger has fallen into error, for example. Yes. That's, that's the hallmark of a sophisticated intellect that can wrestle with ideas that are not your own, have a certain sort of critical lens through which to understand them and not just be taken by anybody who makes a compelling point in an articulate way, you know. Yeah, I mean, you sort of, you know, like you had people balk at you because you, you,

you pay attention to what John Mearsheimer says. Right. Yeah. Right. And it's like, you know, I think part of the what's going on there again, right, is there's, you know, in our sort of the Western left is still sort of philosophically underdeveloped. And there's a kind of fear. Well, like, if I read someone who's, who's, you know, seriously wrong about certain things that are very important, I might just start believing that too. And Lenin will say, no, you don't have to do that. Just stand firm in your principles and you can, you can stand in the tide. You'll be okay. So well put. Anyway, so just to. think about the interior logic of contradiction. So he says, quote, this is priest, quote, let us start by discussing the thorny old question of the instant of change, which may be illustrated thus. As I write, my pen is touching the paper. As I come to the end of a word I lifted off. At one time it is on. At another, it is off. That is not on. Since the motion is

continuous, there must be an instant at which the pen leaves the paper. At that instant, is it on the paper or off? We may formulate the problem more generally. Before a time, T-subscript 0, a system S is in a state, S-subscript 0, described by the Greek letter alpha. after t subscript zero it is in a state s subscript one described by um negative alpha or not alpha a comment just anyone listening you may want to write this down may find it hopeful that take notes on this continuing what state is a alpha in at t subscript zero that is to say at the beginning state at the zero state of time a priori there are only four possible answers capital

uh capital Greek letter alpha S is in S subscript zero and S subscript zero only that is to say the system is in state zero and state zero only capital Greek letter beta

S is in S subscript one and S subscript one only so in capital alpha it's it's on the paper and on the paper only in capital Capital beta, S is off the paper and off the paper only. Capital Greek letter gamma. S is in neither S-subscript 0 nor S-sub-script 1, so that is to say it is neither on the paper nor off the paper.

Capital Greek letter, Delta, S is in both S-substcript 0 and S-substrip 1. And comment, it's funny, it's cool that he set up the four Greek letters because delta is what's used in like the calculus. to describe change. So that's why he did that. It's just saying A, B, C, D. So Delta, S is in both S-0 and S-1, which is to say it's both on and off the paper. Of course, there may be no uniform answer. Different changes may be changes of different kinds. The question, the crucial question I wish to ask is whether there are any changes in class delta, that is D-L-Athea changes. And what he means by D-L-Athea is when two things that are contradictory are true at the same time.

If classical logic is assumed to be correct, so the classical logic is what represents on the principle of non-contradiction, which states that something cannot be both itself and its opposite at the same time, that all changes must be of type A or type B. Clearly, we are not making that assumption in the present context. Moreover, we can even take it that what is at issue here is the very correctness of classical logic, comment which is to say the correctness of the principle of non-contradiction as a basic structure of reality and thought. Continuing, hence the issue cannot be partially settled in this way without thoroughly begging the question. I shall argue that there are some changes of type

delta. First of all, by the analysis of negation in section 4.7 above, we can rule out the possibility of type gamma changes, which is to say there is a state, a moment in which the pan is neither on or off the paper. One of A or alpha and not alpha must always hold. So it must always be either either on or off the paper or both at the same time. It cannot be neither. It remains to argue that not all changes are of type alpha or type beta. Let us to turn to the pen. At times zero, the pen leaves the paper. Is it on or not on the paper at this instant? The trouble is that there seems to be no good reason to say one rather than the other. It seems as much on is off and as much off as on. Thus, the asymmetric answers, alpha and beta, seem inappropriate. The symmetrical answers

gamma and delta would seem much more apt. There is, however, a way of breaking the asymmetry in this case. Since the motion is continuous, there is presumably a last instant at which the distance between the point of my pen and the paper is zero, but no first point at which it is non-zero. Perhaps more precisely, there is a last point at which the electrical repulsion between my pen and the paper is equal to the weight of the pen, but no first point at which this is not the case. If we identify being on with being zero distance from, this makes the change of type alpha, but the identification is highly suspect, an arrow is fired into the ground. At the instant of impact, before the point of the arrow penetrates the ground, is the arrow

on the ground? Even if some suitable way of preserving the asymmetry can be made to work in this case, the method will not work in general. This is because in a number of cases, there is no objective fact that can be appealed to to break the symmetry. A particularly striking example of this is a phenomenological one. For days, I have been puzzling over a problem. Suddenly the solution strikes me. Now, at the instant the solution strikes me, do I or do I not know the answer? the situation is again symmetrical. Before I do not know the answer, after I did. Moreover, one cannot suppose that in this case there is some tie-breaking ulterior fact. My epistemological state is all there is, and that is symmetrical. It makes little sense to suppose that I either did or did not

determinately know the answer at the instant of change, the way I'm unaware which. One more example will suffice. Am I, I, I am in a room? As I walk through the door, am I in the room or out of, which is to say not in it. To emphasize that this is not a problem of vagueness, suppose we identify my position with that of my center of gravity and the door with the vertical plane passing through its center of gravity. As I leave the room, there must be an instant at which the point lies on the plane. At that instant, am I in or out?

Clearly, there is no reason for saying one rather than the other. It might be suggested that in this and in similar cases, we are free to stipulate that I was, say, in. Unfortunately, this is not a solution, but simply underlines the problem. I am free to stipulate in this way only because neither being in nor not being in has a better claim than the other. I am neither determinedly out rather than in, nor determinately in rather than out. Thus, intrinsically, the change is symmetrical and therefore not one of type A or type B, in quote, and he means in which I have to be one or the other.

And so what priest is trying to say is that what we're going to find, that is that although under, you know, bourgeois metaphysics, we are trained to think of things in terms of stasis. You know, you see an object before you, and in its stasis, it is most real. If it were to begin to change, it would somehow become a little bit less real in a way. You sort of, it's kind of funny, you sort of see a kind of an iteration of this kind of logic. and you ever seen someone post a screenshot online of their phone or something on their phone and then they get a dogpile because their battery power is too low? Like, oh my God, it's like 5% and sickening.

I'm going to have you ever seen that before? Yes, yes. Yeah. That's, I think that to me is sort of an expression of the, the Western sort of metaphysical bias toward fullness and unchangingness and the fear of change and the disappearance of Like it's, you know, it causes anxiety. And I think so what Althazir is going to try to show is that, no, in fact, we actually have to do, we have to treat the moment of change as more foundational to reality than moments of apparent non-change or rather moments of non-change themselves are predicated on change. Does that, do you see what I'm saying?

Yeah, definitely. The whole on off the paper sort of thing goes back to this idea of like trying, you know, we were talking about a process earlier. and trying to pick out a moment in a process by which to define the entire thing by or to you know define it in this exact moment whereas if we zoom out and see it as a full process then you're kind of saying a similar thing with the use of like sort of formal logic under priest's pen right yes exactly um and so that's so what when we're talking about uh for alphaser talking about the contradictions of capital we don't mean the boriswazi and proletariat as two self-contained

objects that oppose each other diametrically that smash into each other, and that's how the end of capitalism happens. He's saying that within the bourgeoisie, within the proletariat, we need to understand the internal contradictoryness of them as well. And not just the first contradiction. So for example, one of Marx's major errors

in, this is in volume three, is his assertion that industrial capitalism will permanently subordinate finance capital to itself. And as we know, that's imperialism, the highest state of capitalism is a response to that saying, no, that's not correct. And in fact, a finance capital has taken the top position once again, and it is subordinated industrial capital to itself. And so therefore, there is a contradiction within the bourgeoisie.

Now, however, I should also make the note, as my comrade Mike pointed out to me, We should not take that to simply mean that there are two factions within the bourgeoisie that are in contradiction with one another because industrial capitalists can become finance capitalists, finance capitalists can, you know, obviously they invest in industry and stuff like that. But it's the contradiction lies in the movement of those two forms of capital accumulation. So this is, so when Althazir wants us to see contradictions, yes, there is a struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but those themselves,

each of those two quantities, if you want to put it that way, they themselves are characterized by contradiction. So another thing is, like, for example, since the post-war era in the Western countries, like, you know, during the big, the great society era and all that, you had the establishment of these major public pension funds. And that is a form of, that contributes to a form of like bourgeoisification of the working class who depend on these pension funds, which are themselves overseeing. administered by the Boers Wazi or, you know, and invested in war against working class people

in other countries, for example. So there's, just as the Borswasi, with its internal contradiction between industrial and finance capital, carries a trace of the proletariat within it because of its dependency on the proletariat. In the case, for example, of public pensions, the proletariat contains a trace of the bourgeoisie within it because of its, its involvement, its complicity. in Borgia production in that sense. So we have to, this is what Al-Azer is trying to say.

We've got to look at everything completely contradictoryly if we're actually going to find our way out of the mess that word. And the simple visual representation of exactly what you just said, and I think we've talked about this in previous episodes, it's a simplified visual sort of approach, but it still kind of helps fill out your point, which is the yin-yang symbol, where you have the black and the white, right,

going against each other. And that's the sort of simple, vulgar proletariat versus, you know, bourgeoisie, you know, Marvel movie attack and see who win sort of approach. But within each of those is the opposite color as well. Yes. Signaling an external contradiction between the two blots of color and the

internal contradictions with the differentiation of color within each side of that, of that dialectical contradiction. Yes. And this is why I would certainly recommend the study of Taoism. There's a lot of food for thought there. Totally. And yeah, and that you see, yeah, the trace

of the other being carried in the self. There is no self without non-self elements, as Ticknon-Han would say. Yeah. That's a very important principle. And, like, you know, you see this, like, this was very sad. It's a young, young socialist out there who does, you know, does some media content and stuff. I'm not going to say their name. When the Russia-Ukraine thing kicked off, they posted online this image of, it was almost like a concept art for a Zelda game or like Shadow of the Colossus or something.

that and it's these two video game avatars facing off against this gigantic hydra and the two video game characters are Russia and China and the hydra is is NATO and it just it creates the appearance again of this head-on battle where you just run into it and collide without noticing all the internal contradictions in all of the characters in play here so for example I read last week that the U.S. has started buying oil from Russia again. even though they're still fighting with them. Right. So just stuff like that.

Or just there's contradictions within Russia. There's contradictions within China. There's contradictions between Russia and China. So of course, we're not like shitting on this person or never. We get the point of the thing that they made. But again, like we're just using it as an entryway into like a discussion of these nuances and how we really have to think deeply about these external and internal contradictions and contradictions between things that you think are on the same side because those

exist as well. And those are going to determine how that ultimate conflict eventually plays out. Like Russia wanting to go to war with Ukraine is very different than, you know, China's desperate desire for stability and economic growth within its domestic population. And China understands that, you know, setting itself too much off of, you know, the rest of the world to set itself in too direct of an opposition to too strongly take Russia's side in the conflict might risk their own ability to stabilize their country or to pursue these long-term goals that they have. And so they have to sort of play this game with their supporting Russia economically. They sort of support them on the global stage to some degree. But there's a line that they won't cross. Of course,

Russia would love China to come full steam ahead, join them in the fight, troops on the ground, etc. Because there is a sort of difference in, you know, the Russian set of interest in the immediate short term and the Chinese interests in the short term. They both share certain medium and long-term goals, but there's still these contradictions that if we really want to understand the situation, we really want to have a good analysis of it, we have to take that into consideration as well as, of course, the myriad contradictions with the NATO itself, right? Yeah. And yeah, just, I mean, just imagine what things would be like now if NATO had admitted Russia back in like 2002 like they wanted. Right. Very interesting. Putin was ardently

lobbying for the Russian Federation to be allowed into NATO. Like, he wanted to be part of the gang. They wanted, or rather the ruling class of Russia wanted to be part of the gang. And things would be very, very different now if the United States had just done that. Yeah, absolutely. They might not be losing quite as hard as they are on a number of the funds. Yeah, good point. But yeah, so I think we just done a fairly okay elucidation of the logic of contradiction from a new perspective we haven't used before, which is grain priests. So maybe we could talk a little about a little bit about overdetermination. Absolutely, yeah. So maybe, Maybe we should start with the colloquial understanding of what overdetermination is, which...

Yeah, I'm trying to come up with one at the top of my head. I was just going to say, like, the basic definition. People might not know what overdetermination means, but it means, like, the result of a certain process, you know, the causal variables that result in a certain process are overdetermined, meaning that multiple causal factors resulted in this end result, such that you could take away any given cause. like cause B out of cause A through Z and it would still, the result would still occur. You could take out causes A, J, H, and G, and it's overdetermined such that the result would still occur. So that's kind of what we think of when we talk about overdetermination.

But of course, Althuzer is going to put a slightly different spin on it. Is that more or less correct? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Yeah, thank you for that. Yes. Okay, I'll just start here. this is in, so I have, this essay, my copy of it is in the Verso Books edition of Althazir's

book for Marx. And this is page 104. Quote, thus the Marxist, quote unquote, inversion of the Hegelian dialectic is something quite different from an extraction pure and simple. If we clearly perceive the intimate and close relation that the Hegelian structure of the dialectic has with Hegel's quote unquote world outlook, that is, with his speculative philosophy, this quote-unquote world outlook cannot really be cast aside without our being obliged to transform profoundly the structures of that dialectic. If not, whether we will or know, we shall drag along with us 150 years after Hegel's death and 100 years after Marx, the shreds of the famous, quote-unquote, mystical rapping.

Let us return to Lenin and thence to Marx. If it is true, as Lenin's practice and reflection prove, that the revolutionary situation in Russia was precisely a result of the intense overdetermination of the basic class contradiction, we should perhaps ask what is exceptional about this, quote, exceptional situation, and whether, like all exceptions, this one does not clarify its rule, is not, unbeknownst to the rule, the rule itself. For, after all, are we not always in exceptional situations? The failure of the 1849 revolution in Germany was an exception. The failure in Paris in 1871 was an exception. The German social democratic failure at the beginning of the 20th century

pending the chauvinist betrayal of 1914 was an exception. Exceptions, but with respect to what? To nothing but the abstract but comfortable and reassuring idea of a pure, simple, quote-unquote, dialectical schema, which in its very simplicity seems to have retained a memory, or rediscovered the style, of the Hegelian model and its faith in the resolving, quote, unquote, power of the abstract contradiction as such, in particular, the, quote, unquote, beautiful contradiction between capital and labor.

I do not deny that the, quote, unquote, simplicity of this purified schema has answered to certain subjective necessities of the mobilization of the masses. After all, we know perfectly well that the utopian forms of socialism also played a historical part and played it well because they took the masses at the word of their consciousness, because if they are to be led forward, even and above all. This is how they must be taken. One day, it will be necessary to do what Marx and Engels did for utopian socialism, but this time for those stills schematic utopian forms of mass consciousness influenced by Marxism, even the consciousness of certain of its theoreticians in the first stage of its history, a true historical study of the conditions

and forms of that consciousness. In fact, we find that all the important historical and political articles written by Marx during this period give us precisely the material for a preliminary reflection on these so-called, quote-unquote, exceptions. They draw from them the basic notion that the capital labor contradiction is never cynical, but is always specified by the historically concrete forms and circumstances in which it is exercised. It is specified by the forms of the superstructure, the state, the dominant ideology, religion, politically organized movements, and so on, specified by the internal and external historical situation, which determines it on the one hand as a function of the national past, completed or relapsed bourgeois revolution,

feudal exploitation, eliminated wholly partially or not at all, local quote-unquote customs, specific national traditions, even the quote-unquote etiquette of political struggles and behavior, etc. And on the other, as functions of the existing world context, what dominates competition of capitalist nations or quote-unquote imperialist internationalism or competition within imperialism, et cetera, many of these phenomena deriving from the quote-unquote law of an even development in the Latin sense. What can this mean, but that the apparently simple contradiction is always overdetermined? The exception thus discovers in itself the rule, the rule of the rule, and the old quote-unquote exceptions must be regarded as methodologically simple

examples of the new rule. To extend the analysis to all phenomena using this rule, I should like to suggest that a quote-unquote, over-determined contradiction may either be over-determined in the direction of an historical inhibition, a comment. So there's one of the other concepts, concepts we were hoping to hit on, continuing. A real, quote-unquote, block for the contradiction, for example, Wilhelmine, sorry, Germany, or in the direction of revolutionary rupture comment. There's another one we limited hit. For example, Russia in 1917. But in neither condition, is it ever found in the

quote unquote pure state? Quote unquote, purity itself would be the exception. I agree, but I know of no example to refer to, end quote. And sorry, do you have any, is that helpful all to read that message? Is the purity that he's talking about

is that pure contradiction between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, which is, he says, which is useful in mobilizing the masses and helping people understand the basics, but in and of itself is wholly insufficient to understand a revolutionary situation, the possibility of a revolutionary rupture, etc. And so he's talking about all of the contradictions that were piling up in Russia that made it the European country that was able to do the first ever proletarian revolution successfully in contradistinction

to like Marx and Engels' belief that the most advanced capitalist country would be the one that was ushering into socialism first. And so, you know, this proletarian versus bourgeois contradiction is existent, but to try to just see things through that lens reduces it almost to laughably elementary level of understanding a given situation. And thus, you can never, through that simplistic sort of contradiction, you can't really grasp the situation that any given society happens to be in. No, I mean, it remains at the level of fantasy.

and, you know, Marvel Brain is, well, first of all, Marvel Brain was around before Marvel Brains. Its current name is Marvel Brain, but, you know, so much American cinema is like that, right? It's just the pitched battle between two opposing forces and may the best man win, so to speak. Absolutely. And what we're going to find is that there's these two quantities, bourgeoisie and proletariat, they're very, they're more porous than it will seem if you look at things that way. And it's, um, it's, it's, what we're seeing what, yeah, what you'll find is almost like this kind of like contrapuntal play of forces, uh, where all the contradictions within the principal contradiction do have some bearing on the principal contradiction. Right.

They have an important theory on the principal contradiction. And as we're going to, you know, work through this text, um, we are going to, uh, we are going to, um, see how the superstructure and ideology. broadly play an important role in that struggle and we're working out those contradictions. So let me think here, see if there's another good little passage I could read here from Altazir. Yeah, Darrell, I'll just read this person. Whoa, listen to the old angles of 1890, taking the young, quote unquote, economists to task for not having understood that this was a new relationship. production is the determinant factor, but only, quote, unquote, in the last instance, quote, or sorry, I guess now, quote within a quote, more than this neither Marx or I have ever asserted.

Anyone who twists this so that it says that the economic factor is the only determinative factor transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, empty phrase. And as explanation, the economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure, the political forms of the class struggle and its results to with constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, et cetera, juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles of the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views, and their further development in the systems of dogmas also exercised their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many

cases preponderated and determining their form, end quote, within a quote. the word form, now that is here continues, should be understood in its strongest sense designating something quite different from the formal. As Engels also says, quote, with it the Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic causes, but it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic, and after the Reformation, also, the religious difference between north and south, and not by other elements as well,

end quote, within a quote. Here, then, are two ends of the chain. The economy is determinant, but in the last instance, Engels is prepared to say, in the long run, the run of history, but history, quote unquote, asserts itself through the multiform world of the superstructures, from local tradition to international circumstance, leaving aside the theoretical solution Engels proposes for the problem of the relation between determination in the last instance, the economic, and though those determinations imposed by the superstructures, national traditions, and international events, it is sufficient to retain from him

what should be called the accumulation of effective determinations deriving from the superstructures and from special national and international circumstances on the determination in the last instance by the economic. It seems to me that this clarifies the expression overdetermined contradiction, which I have put forward, this specifically because the existence of overdetermination is no longer a fact, pure and simple, for in its essentials we have related to its bases, even if our exposition has so far been merely gestural. This overdetermination is inevitable and thinkable as soon as the real existence of the forms of the strupistructure and of the national and international conjuncture has been recognized, an existence largely

specific and autonomous, and therefore irreducible to a pure phenomenon. We must carry this through to its conclusion and say that this overdetermination does not just refer to apparently unique and average historical situations, Germany, for example, but is universal. The economic dialectic is never active in the pure state. In history, these instances, the superstructures, etc., are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done, or when the time comes as his pure phenomenon, to scatter before his majesty of the economy, as he strides along the royal road of the time.

dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the last instance never cumps, end quote. So, yeah, what he's saying is saying as well is that all of the different ideological forms and institutional, superstructural forms themselves have their own role to play on all this. And you need to work through the logic of those things, too, to really understand what's going on. And I'll just read some Grams fee here. here's a little bit from the structure and superstructure one from Gramsheet. It is not sufficiently born in mind, quote, it is not sufficiently born in mind that many political acts are due to internal necessities of an organizational character.

That is, they are tied to the need to give coherence to a party, a group, a society. This is made clear, for example, in the history of the Catholic Church, if for every ideological struggle within the church, one wanted to define that immediate primary explanation in the structure, one would really be caught napping. All sorts of political economic romances had been written for this reason. It is evident, on the contrary, that the majority of these discussions are connected with sectarian and organizational necessities. In the discussion between Rome and Byzantium on the procession of the Holy Spirit, it would be ridiculous to look in the structure, again, the economic base, continuing, the structure of the European West,

or sorry, the European East for the claim that it proceeds only from the Father, and in that of the west for the claim that it proceeds from the father and the son. The two churches, whose existence and whose conflict is dependent on the structure and on the whole of history, posed questions which are principles of distinction and internal cohesion for each side, but it could have happened that either of the churches could have argued what in fact was argued by the other. The principle of distinction and conflict would have been upheld all the same, and it is this problem with distinction and conflict that constitutes the historical problem, not the banner that happens to be hoisted by one side or the other.

I'll just reread that last part. The principle of distinction and conflict would have been upheld all the same, and it is this principle of distinction and conflict that constitutes the historical problem, not the banner that happened to be hoisted by one side or the other, end quote. And you had a passage you wanted to read there, right? Sure, yeah. This is going to get us into the idea of unevenness, one of the concepts that you said we should. But it's also really good because it's out through there talking about Lenin's analysis.

of the weakest link in the chain and why Russia was the country that did the proletarian revolution ideas come up of overdetermination etc so it's a long passage but I really do think it's really interesting and worth mentioning in this part of the conversation so quoting out through there but here we should we should pay careful attention if it is obvious that the theory of the weakest link guided Lenin in his theory of the revolutionary party it was also the inspiration for his reflections on the revolution itself How was this revolution possible in Russia? Why was it victorious there?

It was possible in Russia for a reason that went beyond Russia, because with the unleashing of imperialist war, humanity entered into an objectively revolutionary situation. Imperialism tore off the peaceful mask of the old capitalism. The concentration of industrial monopolies, their subordination to financial monopolies, had increased the exploitation of the workers and of the colonies. competition between the monopolies made war inevitable, but this same war, which dragged vast

masses, even colonial peoples from whom troops were drawn into limitless suffering, drove its cannon fodder not only into massacres, but also into history. Everywhere the experience, the horrors of war were a revelation and confirmation of a whole century's protest against capitalist exploitation, a focusing point, too, for hand in hand with this shattering exposure went the effective means of action. But though this effect was felt throughout the greater part of the popular masses of Europe, revolution in Germany and Hungary, mutinies and mass strikes in France and Italy, the Turin Soviets, only in Russia, precisely the most backward country in Europe, did it produce

a triumphant revolution? Why this paradoxical exception? For this basic reason. In the system of imperialist states, Russia represented the weak, point. The Great War had, of course, precipitated and aggravated this weakness, but it had not by itself created it. Already, even in defeat, the 1905 revolution had demonstrated and measured the weakness of Tsarist Russia. This weakness was the product of this special feature, the accumulation and exacerbation of all the historical contradictions then possible in a single

state. Contradictions of a regime of feudal exploitation at the dawn of the 20th century, attempting ever more ferociously amidst mounting threats to rule with the aid of a deceitful priesthood over an enormous mass of ignorant peasants, circumstances which dictated a singular association of the peasants' revolt with the workers' revolution. Contradictions of large-scale capitalist and imperialist exploitation in the major cities and their suburbs, in the mining regions, oil fields, etc. Contradictions of colonial exploitation and wars imposed on whole peoples. A gigantic contradiction between the stage of development of capitalist methods of production, particularly in respect to proletarian concentration. The largest factory in the world at that time was the

Poudalov works at Petrograd with 40,000 workers and auxiliaries, and the medieval state of the countryside. The exacerbation of class struggles throughout the country, not only between exploiter and exploited, but even within the ruling classes themselves, the great feudal proprietors supporting autocratic, militaristic police czarism, the lesser nobility involved in constant conspiracy, the big bourgeoisie and the liberal bourgeoisie opposed to the czar, the petty bourgeoisie oscillating between conformism and anarchistic leftism, the detailed course of events added other exceptional circumstances, incomprehensible outside the tangle of Russia's internal and external contradictions. For example, the advanced character of the Russian

revolutionary elite exiled by czarist repression. In exile, it became cultivated. It absorbed the whole heritage of the political experience of the Western European working classes, above all Marxism. This was particularly true of the formation of the Bolshevik Party, far ahead of any Western Socialist Party in consciousness and organization. The dress rehearsal for the revolution in 1905, which in common with most serious crises set class relations sharply into relief, crystallize them, and made possible

the discovery of a new form of mass political organization, the Soviets. Last, but not the least remarkable, the unexpected respite, the exhausted imperialist nations allowed the Bolsheviks for them to make their opening in history. The involuntary but effective support

of the Anglo-French bourgeoisie, who, at the decisive moment, wishing to be read of the Tsar, did everything to help the revolution. In short, as precisely these details show, the privileged situation of Russia with respect to the possible revolution was a matter of an accumulation and exacerbation of historical contradictions that would have been incomprehensible in any country, which was not, as Russia was, simultaneously at least, a century behind the imperialist world and the peak

of its development. And the very end here, I just want to say this because this is where he gets into the uneven part. This is the last part of it. Althuzer goes on. Lenin said this time and time again, and Stalin summarized it in particularly clear terms in his April 1924 speeches. The unevenness of capitalist development led, via

the 1914 through 18 war, to the Russian Revolution, because in the revolutionary situation facing the whole of humanity, Russia was the weakest link in the chain of imperialist states. It had accumulated the largest sum of historical contradictions then possible.

for it was at the same time the most backward and the most advanced nation. A gigantic contradiction which its divided ruling classes could neither avoid nor solve. In other words, Russia was overdue with its bourgeois revolution on the eve of its proletarian revolution. Pregnant with two revolutions, it could not withhold the second even by delaying the first. This exceptional situation was insoluble for the ruling classes, and Lenin was correct to see in it the objective. conditions of a Russian revolution and to forge its subjective conditions, the means of a decisive

assault on this weak link in the imperialist chain in the communist party that was a chain without weak links. Excellent passage. Fascinating, fascinating stuff, but also showing the myriad contradictions within just the bourgeoisie,

the different forms of nobility and aristocracy, the oscillating petty bourgeoisie, right? All these different things, as well as the external circumstances of a world war, of the influence of Western European Marxism and political traditions on the Soviet, you know, the Bolshevik leaders in exile, et cetera, just kind of piecing together this entire picture of all of these contradictions, the accumulation of these contradictions over history, the fact that Russia was a century behind the rest of

Europe while at the same time having the most advanced revolutionary vanguard party, just a fascinating analysis of that and really helps clarify a lot of the stuff we've been talking about with regards to contradiction, over determination, et cetera. Yeah. It's, I mean, so different than, again, the marvel brain picture of the pitched battle in which the virtuous army overpowers the villainous army or something like that. And I just want to read quickly the very next paragraph after that about the sort of Western Marxist Europe expectations of things and how they were confounded by the Russian Revolution. What else did Marx and Engels mean when they declared that history always progresses

by its bad side? This obviously means the worst side for the rulers. But without stretching the sense unduly, we can interpret the bad side as the bad side for those who expect history from another side. For example, the German social democrats at the end of the 19th century imagined that they would shortly be promoted to socialist triumph by virtue of belonging to the most powerful capitalist state, then undergoing the rapid economic growth, just as they were experiencing rapid electoral growth. And in parentheses, such coincidences do occur. They obviously saw history

as progressing by the other side, the quote-unquote good side, the side with the greatest economic development, the greatest growth, with its contradiction reduced to the purest form, the contradiction between capital labor. So they forgot that all this was taking place in a Germany armed with a powerful state machine, endowed with a bourgeoisie, which had long ago given up, quote-unquote, its political revolution in exchange for bidsmarts and later Wilhelm's military, bureaucratic, and police protection in exchange for the super profits of capitalist and colonialist exploitation, endowed, too, with a chauvinist and reactionary petty bourgeoisie.

They forgot that, in fact, this simple quintessence of contradiction was quite simply abstract. the real contradiction was so much one with its quote unquote circumstances that it was only discernible, identifiable, and manipulable through them and in them, quote. So, you know, I think that's such an important passage because I think in a lot of Western left discourse, there's still a lot of the same sort of confusions floating around, you know, like sort of like, well, why isn't it us? Why aren't we doing it right? And then also, where is, yeah, like, you know, you often see on the internet, you know, something shitty happens.

And then all of a sudden there's a whole, you know, you know, 10,000 people being like, we need a mass strike. We're just going to do a jumble strike. Show up here on March 11th and at 9 o'clock a.m. and there will be a mass strike. And there's just this kind of belief in the spontaneity of the dialectical development that, it should go towards socialism, that people are left very confused and sort of left off kilter because you don't see the development happening. But, you know, what we need to be looking for is all these things, these kinds of structures that Althazir is discussing, which are not intuitive at all from the point of view that we're

sort of critiquing here. And, yeah, I just think that's what you just read and then the last paragraph that I just right. That's a very important passage in the text. Do you have any comments or thoughts on that or anything? Yeah, just that he's talking about the bad, you know, progressing by the bad side or from the good side and this idea that, well, you know, because that Germany is now the greatest we're in the most advanced, you know, bourgeois level of the forces of production, we're the most economically advanced in all of Europe. We have the greatest economic growth.

The contradictions in our society really are down to like its purest form, capital versus labor. And they're sort of one-sidedly thinking that those elements of the good side of the contradiction, that we have all these things going for us, ergo, you know, it's almost more or less inevitable that this revolution is going to be successful, that proletarian revolution is going to happen here. But they did not take into account all these other contradictions on the other side, et cetera. And it was precisely the bad sides of Russia, the backwardness of Russia, that allowed those sort of contradictions to accumulate to the point that made. Russia the most revolutionary opportunity compared to Germany, which would have been the Marx and angles this sort of idea, you know, the most advanced capitalist economy that has produced the forces of production to the furthest will be the most likely to tip over into socialism first. And so viewing it from that side of things, all these good things are piling up as opposed to

all the terrible things piling up in Russia, but it was precisely the piling up with those terrible things in Russia that opened the door for the Russian Revolution and close. it in some sense for the German one. So yeah, fascinating examination of, you know, how the revolutionaries in those two countries were sort of trying to grasp the contradictions of that were happening and the one-sidedness and the errors that can that can be produced by a sort of one-sided, you know, analysis of contradictions or trying to understand the nuances of the manifold contradictions in merely its purest form of capital versus labor. Yeah, exactly. So instead of looking for that, the build up of the pure contradiction,

you need to be looking where you don't expect, I guess. So for example, I mean, just think about the, I mean, the United States, I mean, it's been saddled down with this insane contradiction since at least 2008. And, you know, here we might return to the distinction between an historical inhibition and a revolutionary rupture, right? Like this whole thing they were doing with interest rates ever since 2008 and just, you know, backing, you know, trying to keep the contradictions in the financial sector of the economy under control, you know, in itself, you might look at it and be like, my God, how are they continuing to do this? But now there are other things that are piling up that are changing like the nature of how that interacts with every other aspect of American life. And that may, and what we're started to see now is a real weakening of the U.S. as an empire on the world stage and domestically.

So like, you know, you often see this kind of like dumerous attitude. Well, the state is so overwhelmingly powerful that we'll never be able to fight them. They're just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, but the U.S. military is like 25% sure of its recruitment goals every year. Just like the Canadian military, maybe not the same numbers, but they, they can. can't meet the recruitment goals either. And most of their funding goes to like, you know, the officer class. They can't resupply their carrier groups at sea because they've neoliberalized even the military. And also, Lloyd Austin just went missing for four days and the Pentagon

didn't tell the White House. And also it turns out the Texas, I didn't know this until like two weeks ago. Texas has its own military as a government department and they've been entering into conflict with the U.S. Border Patrol can't intervene with the, you know, the people that are fleeing from the consequences of the war on drugs, and all the insane terrorism. The United States has been committing in Latin America for X number of decades. And you'll start looking at it that way and realize that your impression of the United States is this omnipotent, overwhelming death force. And certainly they can still kill like crazy. They can do a lot of damage, but it's just not quite what you thought, you know, anymore. And the way to see that is,

by starting to see the contradictions. Absolutely. Just imagine, like, I mean, if Texas, first of all, what kind of crazy assholes let Texas back into the United States in 1870 and didn't dispel their military without anticipating that they might start doing this? I guess that's American as apple pie to do something like that. But just like when you start looking at these tensions, then you start to see the possibilities of like what things,

could be like, because it may not be the case in 20 years time, as we were talking about this on the Nazi and parliament episode, that what you take to be permanent and non-negotiable may not even be there in the same way. Yeah. And so you have to, um, you have to look, um, uh, to transpose a line out of St. Paul, uh, which is we, we hope not for what is seen, but for what is not seen, right? And this draws on the concept of unevenness as well, which is, part of the, this, you know, that pertains to the dialect of quantity and quality. You're looking at the big display before you of Genocide Joe and the, you know, the state apparatus trying to maintain its prestige and legitimacy. But if you look below that, you start to see that

things are getting real flaky around the edges, which is a sign that the center cannot hold. And your analysis must take place in there and the flakiness of the edges in the non-holdability of the center. And then you're analyzing dialectically, contradictorally, if that, if that makes you get what I'm saying. Yes, and let's take an example of the other side of that debate. What happens when you do try to reduce things to this peer contradiction and the errors that it generates? One of the things that happened in the last 20 years in the United States is this phrase, the 99% versus the 1%, right? It's really, it's even reducing the contradiction between capital and labor down to something even more simple of just a 99 versus 1% despite the fact that, first of all, that is not the right sort of mathematical statistical equation.

The bourgeoisie in all of its forms take up a bigger chunk of the American population than merely 1%. And it also totally overlooks the different ideological currents within that 99%, the different interests of different strata of the technical proletariat, etc. I remember being in those Occupy Wall Street marches and movements next to, you know, pacivist priests and Ron Paul libertarians and Marxist Leninists and anarchist Radlibs. And it becomes incredibly clear that this sort of reductionism to the purest form of contradiction, the 1% versus the 99% might have been helpful in mobilizing the masses for that moment, as Althusair points out. But by doing that, it also weakens the movement and ensured that the movement could not progress beyond merely a sort of spontaneous protest-esque movement with no real strategy, no real approach to how to change things, et cetera. you're starting from this hyper reductive idea that is the 99 versus the 1%, which, of course, again, has this short-term benefit of getting people together and has the other benefit of showing that we have more numbers than the people who are

dominating us, but that's about it. And all the other contradictions that flowed out of that attempt to bring 99% of the American population onto the same page, of course it was going to fall apart from the beginning. Absolutely it did. Yeah. And again, yeah, it's certainly. the purpose in the most general sort of, you know, mobilization possible, but you just, you can't stay there because if you stay there, I mean, it's really a reactionary position in a sense, not in the sense that the sheriff of Malibu and the Big Lebowski is reactionary, but it's

just the nine, when you're stuck in that way of thinking about things, the best that you can really come up with is the 99%'s refusal of the one percent. And that is to enter back into the bad version of dialectics where you just, you know, one fourth smashing into another force, not actually being able to do a good, yeah, you don't have a good analytical method for understanding the motions and transformations that are happening inside the forces of the enemy and happening inside your own forces as well. So, yeah, I found, yeah, during the Occupy era and all that stuff, that schema of the 99 and 1% very unsatisfactory. And I think that it actually helped sort of impede the movement a little bit, or maybe a lot, actually.

I mean, yeah, I think it shut the door on it being able to develop any further. It was only going to be a sort of temporary, spontaneous movement that would eventually be crushed and scattered to the wind because it closed the door on its own progress by having that conceptualization be the thing that people mobilize around. You can see how the 991% thing lands itself, you know, in a bad, like a vulgar Marxism, it lends itself to economism because it's like, yeah, we just need the shift to radio, the ratio. We just need, what if it's, what if we're switched more? So it's like, you know, 80% of the former 99% are now doing better or something like that. And it evacuates it of like the true political content of the whole thing.

So yeah, it's a perfect example of a very inadequate formula for trying to relay the problems of class struggle, class war and how to make revolution to people. Yeah, absolutely. Interesting stuff. All right. Well, you ready for it to move on to question number four? Did you have any other concepts you wanted to elucidate here? Let's see.

No, I think we're good for the concept. My God, question three, are you okay for time? That's okay. Yeah, what I was thinking as we were talking is it might have to be a part one and a part two. Yeah, I was thinking that too, yeah. Which is totally fine. And sometimes it even helps to like take a step back, digest what the first half of a thing like this and then come back. Like, okay, now I just have five questions to focus on and really, you know, get down into.

So let's ask at least one more if you're cool with that. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, let's go ahead and then move forward to question number four. And let's look at the Hegel problem in further depth. Of course, this entire discussion is sort of started in this essay by talking about this inversion that Marx does the Hegel and de-Hagelizing Marxism, etc. So kind of bringing that back to the center of our focus. What is the danger of developmental thinking for dialectics? More specifically, how does it lead us into either substance dualism or voluble? vulgar Marxism, which are both forms of idealism. And on this point, why is it important that Althusair encourages people to think of words as indices rather than names, tags, and labels? And maybe a way to start here is just to define what we mean by the, by developmental thinking for dialectics, so we can then critique it. Okay.

Well, like in Hegel's elements of philosophy of right, and also in the philosophy of history like the this the god again idealism when you try to talk about it is so silly that you almost tend to laugh but it social effects social structure social phenomena develop out of this sort of ideal kernel which is the spirit of a people and in the elements of philosophy of right he has a whole opening section where the way that people fuse together into a political community itself is actually based on a very bourgeois idea of the self, which is that you start out sort of in your own integrity and then you find that there's something else. And then the first movement is to try to reject and negate it because its existence

negates the complete universality of your own existence. And so there's like almost like a really shitty like libertarian sort of moment built into the development of the state for Hegel. And it's that when you realize that your ability to even reject the negation of others' potential negation of yourselves relies on a state structure, a political structure in which to mediate that relationship so that you just don't annihilate each other, the entire notion of a political community is based on this kind of like Borswa individuality in which A just equals A, you are strictly yourself, and all the togetherness springs out of the sublation of your rejection of your rejection. of others into your need of others in a structured system in order to accomplish your rejection of their attempted so-called negation of you in a structured and orderly way. And then out of that, all of the particular trappings of a society in the form of a bourgeois nation state all really really come out of this sort of conflict between the self and others in a social situation. And, but leaving that part of it aside, the problem is really that Hegel gives you the idea that communities must develop into a certain kind of political formation.

And this is, this is where Francis Fukuyama and the end of history comes from. I'm sure that you've talked about this on the show before. Yeah, but great connection. Absolutely. Francis Fukuyama is Higalian and his work, the end of history is a Higalian work. Yeah, I mean, the guy sees an archvill. But yeah, he draws directly on Hegel, right? And I remember when the Soviet Union was destroyed and people were going out there,

you know, media figures, political figures were quoting, citing Fukuyama on the end of history thing. And I asked grownups like, what does that mean? And they're like, well, I'm not really sure, but it sounds like he's saying that because we found out the best way for humans to do things, there doesn't. doesn't have to be any war anymore, there just has to be like adjustments to countries that aren't there yet. Yeah, a sort of domestic liberal incrementalism, sort of shoring up the system as it exists, and then the expansion of basic liberal democracy and capitalist markets to the rest of the world. And that's sort of the end of history in that, you know, this is the pinnacle of human development.

And we're, yeah, there's problems. We've got to solve these problems. but fundamentally liberal political systems and free market capitalism is more or less the pinnacle of human development and is the sort of sociopolitical economic, you know, reality that humans are going to live in. And the problem for us now, the task for us now is just to shore it up domestically, make it run as a finely tuned engine and machine and then expand it internationally. And that expansion internationally will also reduce conflict, war, et cetera. Yeah. And I remember going around for the rest of the 90s wondering, like, but how? Like, how is that real? How, what sense does that make? And then in undergrad, I read, um, I would say the best book by Jacques Derrida, which is Spectres of Marx. And that's the book that made me realize I had to read Das Capital because it's, he made me realize it ain't over. And he directly goes at Fukuyama about this. He's like, so the West, has subjugated all of these societies, all of

these all of these modes of life, all of these histories, all of these visions of the cosmos, all of these things have just been subordinated to liberal democratic capitalism and basically

he just says, buddy, what is wrong with you that you would even think something like this? Right now, and Derrida was somebody who was oppressed by French colonialism, first of all. And it's important to remember the French tested a nuke in Algeria near populated areas, right? And then he was oppressed by the Nazis who had taken over colonial Algeria during the Second World War. So here's a man who, like, I mean, and people forget, like people always call Derrida this, you know, white European,

Derrida is African. Really? And, yeah, he's this Sephardic, Algerian Jewish guy. And Spectors of Marx, I think is, that book is mad, righteous, and it taught me a lot. And it shows the complete incoherence of the idea of the end of history. And really, very, very deeply what Derrida is drawing on in that book is the logic that Althazir articulates in contradiction and overdetermination. So he's like, if you think you can just shut down all the other contradictions with just one big contradiction that you're going to hold in place, it's, you're going to lose. it's over. It's like you actually like really kind of what he's saying is that the West has kind of

defeated itself. And this was the inspectors of Marx isn't really a book either. It's actually a transcription of a series of talks he gave in 1994. This is three years after the Soviet Union came down. And Derrida at that point was like, this ain't over. And it's because he had the logic of contradiction and overdetermination backing him up. Absolutely. And you can you can read Fukuyama's intellectual book, you know, as this sort of intellectual peak in manifestation of liberal capitalist triumphalism in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sort of heady high that they were on where they really thought their shit didn't stink and that they had figured it out and that the collapse of the Soviet Union was basically just proof that

all these other systems had completely failed and that this was the reigning triumphant system and so you know the ruling elite of the western capitalist states of course loved this narrative this fairy tale put together by you know a genuinely intellectual seriously serious person, Francis Fukuyama, as a sort of manifestation of this triumphalism in the 90s. But yeah, history quickly reasserted itself on September 11th, 2001. And ever since then, we've been running back into history's arms. The end of history lasted 10 years. It was a recess of history for a very specific elite in a very specific part of the global stage. Yeah, yeah. And but I also

also wanted to talk a touch on the developmental thing and the problems with a danger of it in respect of the struggle of the Palestinians. And this is just like one of the many, many, many disgusting evil things that Zionists and their supporters say about why Palestinians have no claim, no legitimacy, no rights. And it's because, oh, they didn't have a state. Right? And it's like, well, what do you really mean when you say that? What you really mean is that they don't have like a Westphalian nation state.

And why would they have a Westphalian nation state? Because Palestine was under the British mandate up until it was parceled out to the Zionist entity. Right. Right. So there's a deep cynicism and evil that can be drawn out of this developmental scheme of Hegel. And, you know, I actually just want to take a moment here to honor my teacher, Omid Pairo Shabani, who just died. on December 23rd, who taught me the elements of philosophy of right and showed me why it's basically a rationale, a justification for imperialism and imperialist violence and neo-colonialism

all around the world. And I just, you know, Omead, he was involved in the Iranian revolution as a teenager in 1979 and was persecuted and had to flee Iran. And even when I was his student, his parents were still having their house tossed like once a month by the police looking for him to harass them to try to get at him even though he was in Ontario and he

also this is to touch on what's happening in Palestine and stuff again I've talked before about how easy it is and it is to some extent rational I guess to be cynical about the United Nations

because of how it's been rigged to favor the United States but nonetheless Omid to at the end of his life insisted on the necessity of a paradigm of international law and as Marxists, I think internationalists, we should insist on that as well. And I just, you know, want to send love and solidarity at Omeed in his memory and to thank him for teaching me that.

And to, you know, to use his teaching to point out this very cynical tactic that the Zionist entity and its supporters used to de-legitimize and dehumanize the Palestinians as if they have any less right as a people. because they don't have a Westphalian nation-state structure built up on top of their nation, which I think is one of the many confusions that Western leftists have about the national question. I think it's that failure or sort of lack of a distinction between what constitutes a nation and the existence of a Westphalian nation state, which once again to recommend Chris Wade and Matt Crispin's hell on earth to think about the fact that the emergence of a Westphalian in state, which we take as the norm as the paradigm of what a state a nation and it like combined or, you know, formed as a state is, it happened as a result of a set of accidents. It happened as

a set of compromises made between the powers that fought in the 30 years war, how to parcel out the territories in the land and not produce religious conflict anymore. It had nothing to do with the development of this internal idea like Hegel talks about. Like, and this is why it's so dangerous. It's so important that you have to do the correct inversion of Hegel and Marxism or else you might fall into that stuff and you might end up believing in the bullshit lies of the Zionist entity. Yeah. And two responses to that. One is of course the United Nations from its very conception was driven by contradiction. Of course, any attempt to create an international sort of order of a world, you know, formed into nation states is going to give rise

to many contradictions. The, you know, the disproportionate amount of power of Western Europe and the United States and the United States in particular. Of course, distorts and warps the UN, but the fundamental idea of an international institution is a worthwhile one for sure. And the other thing is, you know, your point about, you know, Zionism and, you know, what was their famous slogan when they went and took over Palestine, a land with no people for a people with no land? And I think that that really gives the game away to the European nature of this endeavor because the Europeans, you know, in the wake of the 30 years war, in the wake of the French Revolution, eventually in the wake of German nationalism, sort of had this nationalist concept as the thing that defines a people as a people, such that when they went to Palestine and it wasn't already fully, as you said, a Westphalian nation state fully formed, they literally sort of in some regard, of course this slogan was very cynical, mostly. But in some regard, given its Euro-nationalist obsession, You know, the lack of a proper nation state that were existing in Europe at that time was sort of the justification they said that there's no people on this land.

Because if there were a people here, then there, of course, would be a sort of nation state like there is for the French and for the Germans and for the Brits, etc. So I think that gives the lie to the reality that this was a Euro-colonialist project from the jump. and even the way that they conceived of the Palestinians as they went in there leading up to the Nakhva was a result of European colonialists thinking. Yeah, the concept of Tyrannulius. Yeah, that if a land is not being appropriated by the people that inhabited for the purposes of making it, quote unquote, productive, which is to say, of capital, it is by definition not being used and therefore effectively empty, and it can be taken. So you're quite, I mean, the Zionist movement and the underpinnings of the creation of the Zionist entity as a state are entirely European, entirely colonialist. Absolutely. But I love, I love seeing white girls with American accents say that they're indigenous to the Levant.

It's just wonderful. I like to just marinate in that, in that insane ideology. Yeah, and actually on that point, if I could just take a moment to absolutely 100% condemn Michael Rappaport. and just point out in passing that his most memorable film role is that of a white supremacist skinhead who blows his brains out at the end of the movie. That's a great point. I thought I'd throw that out there. Definitely. And to make one nuanced point as well with the, I said, you know, white girl from America with American accent.

Of course, the white, black, brown scale is not necessarily in and of itself indicative of any sort of indigenity. You know, the northern Africa, you know, West Asia, sort of connective. crossroads of many different continents of course historically has had many different people many different um sort of skin tones etc but it's this fundamentally people with your holy european backgrounds you know who were born and raised in either western europe or the united states then claiming indigenity um to to Palestine is particularly what gets me not the whiteness or non whiteness of anybody so i just wanted to make that point clear i was being a little flippant but you know it's like chris hedges said the other day he's like most

these West Bank settlers are Brooklynites. Yeah, exactly. And when decolonization comes, the people that get in a plane and fly back home prove the point that they were never indigenous there in the first place. If you can jump on a plane with a passport and fly back to Brooklyn, New York or to California or whatever, it really just gives the lie away that you are from a different place. And the Palestinians cannot jump in a plane with an international passport and go back to anywhere because they're from the fucking land that, you know, these,

European colonialists are, as we speak, destroying and mutilating. So I don't know. It's just, it's clarifying, but it's also, you know, crazy making to live in this world in the West with the Zionist propaganda shoved down our throats with all of its contradictions and utter face value absurdities that we're all still supposed to choke down as if it's a reflection of reality and not the fever dream of European colonialists and the European mindset. It's just, yeah, it's like we're being gaslit on a on a global level and people feel that dissonance as like you know it's a real stark feeling to have that dissonance where I'm watching the fucking news I know what's happening and to be shoved my my face shoved in this nonsense and people who are supposed to be very serious thinkers and the ruling class elite you know acting like that everything they say isn't bullshit it just it is a sort of fun house mirror world that case and point back in November, I think it was, a Palestinian man was arrested in Calgary for chanting at a protest for chanting from the river to the sea.

And then the whole, oh, it took a call for genocide and all that. And, you know, Trudeau came out and, you know, made his pious remarks that he has to make. Guess what Canada was doing at the UN General Assembly that same weekend? What? They were for the ninth year in a row voting against the UN resolution to combat Nazism. again. Yeah. They voted against it every year since it was introduced in 2014, right?

So here is Justin Trudeau out wagging his finger at this Palestinian man who's supporting his family of loved ones and friends back in Palestine and calling him an anti-Semite at the same time, a genocidal anti-Semite at the same time that the Canadian government is voting down a resolution to combat. Talk about contradictions. Absolutely. And just the idea of like Zionist calling people. who are saying slogans in countries far away from Palestine, calling them genocidal,

while Israel is actually conducting genocidal mass murder campaigns. And then Zionists in America are, like, weeping, we feel unsafe, people saying free Palestine is the calling for our genocide as the Zionists are literally doing genocide. It's just, it is just, I mean, I've almost had a stroke a few times. I'll put it down. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But yes, to get us back on track here, this will be the, you know, this will be part one. So this will be the last question of part one.

But is there anything else that you wanted to say about, about Hegel, developmental thinking, this last question, or, or any other broad thoughts that you have to sort of like bring this part of the conversation to a call? Oh, yeah. Actually, I'm no longer sure now why I added the point about Althazir talking about words as indices, what the connection that is to the meme. But I can talk about it for, just throw that out there for you and move on, which is, yeah, we've talked about this a number of times before that words, like the word materialism or even matter, for example, they can be, they can have different significations. And what Althazar, what he wants to call them indices, he says the indices is that every use of a word is indexed to a certain practice. So that, say, for example, I've seen internet anarchists in the past get upset about the fact that the term anarchy has a negative sense too. Like, well, my God, it's just mere anarchy, that sort of stuff, right? And I think you would agree with me that Western leftists get hung up on terminology a lot.

And there's a lot of anxiety about that. And I think a lot of it does have to do with our educational systems being shit and the insecurity and fear that comes out of that and uncertainty about what it is you're dealing. with. But if you think of a word as in each of its uses as indexed to particular practice, that kind of like loosens the grip of the anxiety about that. And you can read texts more easily and just say, okay, well, materialism in this sense, it means this thing because it's tied to this practice instead of political goals and economic interests and all this other kind of stuff. So I just, yeah, I don't know why I attach that to question for, but it's, but it's there. So it's

So it's not as simple as a word just naming one thing. And if you happen to be, you're attached to that one thing, that your, your uses of the word is the correct uses of the word and everything else is just made up bullshit. That's not really that simple. And I think Althazir's concept of words as indices is just, is very helpful there, I think, for study. For sure.

Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Well, I think that is going to wrap up part one of this discussion. As always, you know, we set a time limit, but we go beyond it because these just open up, I mean, open up so many lanes and routes of thought and thinking and things to discuss, conversations, trying to tie it to present realities and help people make sense of it. So, you know, these deep dives, well, they're deep dives, so they go a little longer than anticipated. But we'll come back very soon. You and I, behind the scenes, we'll figure out our next recording date.

We'll put this out as part one, and then we'll record that within, you know, a week or two and put the other. half out as part two. So if you're listening right now, you have heard half of this discussion. We certainly have more to cover in the interim. If you haven't already tried to wrestle your way through Althusser's essay, we'll link to it in the show notes. You can try to read it. And that might help make sense of some of the stuff we've said today, as well as set you up a little bit better for the rest of this discussion that we're going to record soon. With all that said, Matthew, do you have any last words, any recommendations, anything you want to say before we sign off for I do have a recommendation, an interview that Ronnie Ecolic did with an Italian Marxist

named Mateo Capasso back in November called Renewed Fascism in Gaza, Western Elites live out genocidal fantasy against Global South. Mateo Capasso's analysis of the situation is very robust in keeping with the kind of logic that we're talking about here. So I would recommend it, I would recommend it very, very strongly. I don't have any particular media recommendations at the moment that I can think of. Other than once again, Chris Wade and Matt Christman, Hell on Earth, for thinking about the sort of accidental character of the development of modern nation states

and the fact that they're not actually tied to an intention that has anything to do with human liberation or democracy or anything like that. That's another good, very long, in-depth series they listen to. But I just wanted to close in terms also of thinking on the kind of, contradictions and overdetermination and historical inhibition and revolutionary rupture, and also to keep this person in everyone's minds because he just did an episode recently, I just wanted to read from the conclusion to Kwame and Krumas' neo-colonialism. That'd be okay if I did that?

Nice. Absolutely. Okay. Quote, in the introduction, I attempted to set out the dilemma now facing the world. The conflict between rich and poor in the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, which was fought out between the rich and the poor and the devour and the deviant. nations of the world ended at a compromise. Capitalism as a system disappeared from large areas of the world, but where socialism was established, it was in its less developed rather than its more developed parts, and in fact, the revolt against capitalism had its greatest

successes in those areas where early neo-colonialism had been most actively practiced. In the industrially more developed countries, capitalism, far from disappearing, became infinitely stronger. This strength was only achieved by the sacrifice of two principles which had inspired early capitalism, namely the subjugation of the working classes within each individual country and the exclusion of the state from many, say, in the control of capitalist enterprise. By abandoning these two principles and substituting for them, quote-unquote, welfare states based on high working-class living standards and on a state-regulated capitalism at home, the developed country succeeded in exporting their internal problem and transferring the conflict

between rich and poor from the national to the international stage. Marx had argued that the development of capitalism, which would produce a crisis within each individual capitalist state, because within each state, the gap between the halves and the have-nots would widen to a point where conflict was inevitable and that it would be the capitalist to be defeated. The basis of his argument is not invalidated by the fact that the conflict, which he had predicted as a national one, did not everywhere take place on a national scale, but has been transferred instead to the world stage. World capitalism has postponed its crisis, but only at the cost of transforming it into an international crisis. The danger is now

not civil war within individual states provoked by intolerable conditions within those states, but international war provoked ultimately by the misery of the majority of mankind who daily grow poorer and poorer. When Africa becomes economically free and politically united, the monopolists will come face to face with their own working class in their own countries, and a new struggle will arise within which the liquidation and collapse of imperialism will be complete, end quote. And so I just wanted to end on that and just draw tie and Krumas observations there to the fact that whether or not you agree with how China operates domestically or think it's socialism or anything like that. And again,

like acknowledging that under Putin's governance, the life expectancies of Russians because there was, remember after the downfall of the Soviet Union, there was a six-year life expectancy drop in six years. Do you remember that? Yes. Yeah. And it is true that Putin did objectively make people's lives better or the government with Putin leading.

It did make people's lives better within the context of what they're trying to do. We do know that the contradictions of capital will catch up with them too, right? So we don't, we don't stand Putin. But nonetheless, the things that are going on, the way that China and Bricks are trying to take America out of its position as the holder of the world's reserve currency, all these ways of trying to cut off the imperialist chain. And again, like, multipolarity is not socialism. However, given what Ngruma says here about how when all of the imperial, the former imperial holdings one by one, like it's like 10 pegs being pulled up. right as they break free that will mean that the conflict that we're concerned about it's common for us and that is accelerating and so that is what we need as you said before to be we need to be

mentally prepared we need to be physically prepared we need to be spiritually prepared we need to be organizationally and ideologically prepared and it's through all of these uh all of these contradictions uh in over determination that we need to seek uh like we need to to look and seek knowledge about what's coming for us and what we can do and what we have to do. Yes. Very well said. I love that in the Krumma quote, absolutely. It harkens back to that idea that Fanon said, you know, in the colonial context, Marxism must be stretched a little bit.

That's the beauty of Marxism. It's never dogmatic. It's never doctrinaire. It's this open-ended, developing sort of tradition that is constantly updated as the material conditions globally continue to change. And when Marxism went out of Europe and went into the global south, you know, brilliant thinkers. you know, brave revolutionaries, took Marxism, found what was useful, but also expanded it, updated it, made it better. And that contribution to Marxism from decolonial movements and anti-colonialism more broadly is really beautiful and makes the tradition so much more robust and so

much more deserving of our praise. So salute to Nekruman, salute to you for ending with that wonderful question. Thank you. And just one last remark, I would say, no matter what anyone thinks or wants to believe there will be no viable Marxism on this continent that is not de-colonial. And for those who are opponents of the concept of settler colonialism, I would just ask them to remember that the eventual proletarianization of the European working class is predicated on the original, originary dispossession and displacement of Irish and English peasants. And that in a very real way, settler colonialism in the Americas is an example of why, Alta Zer would call a survival because it was transplanted over here after European bourgeoisification

and then eventually and as proletarianization happened. So I understand that there were people out there that think that the concept of settler colonialism strictly negates that of the contradiction, the principal contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but that is an a historical argument and it is materially the case that settler colonialism is a structure that was reconstituted over here after it was initially inflicted on the peasantry in Ireland and England by taking their land and by converting its use and by making them all homeless wanderers basically coming into towns, which is how the wage relation was established, also an accident, not the result of

somebody having some insight into how we have to do things. exactly and far from being an event that happened in the past that we've moved beyond it is an ongoing process and that's why dialectics is so fucking important to understand 100% all right my friend until next time thank you you know it's it's it's getting dark out there things are getting more and more intense and uh i just you don't want to send love and solidarity everyone keep your spirits up steppe, But the

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