Rev Left Radio - Dialectics Deep Dive: The Final Installment

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

In this final iteration of our long-standing series "Dialectics Deep Dive", Matthew Furlong joins Breht to discuss Althusser's essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination" and in the process they discuss many aspects of dialectical materialism and Marxist philosophy.   Get 15% off any book in the Left Wing Books Library HERE   Check out Part 1 of this episode here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/dialectics-deep-dive-iix-contradiction-and-overdetermination-pt-1 Check out all our Dialectics Deep Dive episodes here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=dialectics+deep+dive Video at 21:47: "Alan Watts on Life and Death"   (Tricontinental Institute for Social Research - Hyperimperialism: A Dangerous, Decadent New Stage https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism Tricontinental Institute - The Churning of the Global Order (Condensed version of Hyperimperialism): https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-72-the-churning-of-the-global-order/ BreakThrough News - Hyperimperialism: US-NATO's Dangerous and Decadent New Stage (Rania Khalek w/ Vijay Prashad): https://youtu.be/CJDxxkVhlJM BreakThrough News - Israel's Descent Into Madness & The Holocaust Comparison (Rania Khalek w/ Tarik Cyril Amar): https://youtu.be/UbppCU7uiJw Electronic Intifada - How Zionism pushes liberalism into decay (Nora Barrows-Friedman w/Matteo Capasso): https://https://youtu.be/bK6-10H80Bs Zhun Xu - "Industrial Agriculture: Lessons from North Korea" https://monthlyreview.org/2024/03/01/industrial-agriculture-lessons-from-north-korea/ Red Clarion - "The Cult-building Tendency" https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2024-04-02-the-cult-building-tendency/ Red Clarion - "Undead Unionism" https://clarion.unity-struggle-unity.org/2023-08-13-undead-unionism/ The Government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam - Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism Part 1: The Worldview and Philosophical Methodology of Marxism-Leninism (translated and annotated by Luna Nguyen) https://www.lunaoi.com/product/ebook-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-marxism-leninism/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have the second part of Al Thu Zaire's contradiction and overdetermination with Matthew Furlong. This is, I think, the concluding episode of our overall dialectic deep dive series. Of course, we're going to keep working with Matthew. We have a whole thing planned about Marx's dissertation on ancient philosophy and Bellamy Foster's work. around eco-socialism, et cetera. So we have a lot more coming, but this is probably the last installment

of the Dialectics Deep Dive series proper. So, you know, if this is the first time you're hearing of it, we have three years plus of material in this series. I'm very proud of it, very happy with it, and this is a great way to bring this series to its culmination. So I couldn't ask for a better guess than Matthew to do these sorts of episodes with. And I also wanted to plug the fact that we have an ongoing agreement

with our friends over at leftwingbooks.net, associated with Chris Lebladev Publishing House to allow RevLeff listeners to get 15% off any book in their store. And they have a broad, broad range of books from theory and history to anything you could want on the Revolutionary Left. There's a book in their library that you can purchase and learn from. And wonderfully, because our projects are so similar in our goals between RevLeft and Leftwing books that we've come together and tried to give people an option. to access those books at an even more affordable rate. So I will link to that in the show notes,

and the link you'll hit will already have the checkout code Rev Left embedded within it. So you just click that link, find your book, 15% off right away. It's a great way to make important works of theory and history more accessible to more people, especially in these challenging economic times, which I know all of us are feeling deeply. All right, without further ado, here is me and Matthews' discussion on the second part of Althusaire's contradiction and overdetermination, but we touch on so much more.

Okay, we touch on the Holocaust. We touch on great man of theory, history. We touch on Althusair's distinction between base and superstructure and his criticism of angles in a letter in which Angles was trying to articulate some basic elements of Marxism. And we get into incredibly deep conversations about the crisis racking American imperialism, U.S. hegemony around the world, The campus uprisings and the encampments popping up not only all across the U.S. but now across the world, the ruling elites attempt to squash those and how it betrays every lie of liberal ideology about free speech, about democracy, about freedom.

We get into a bunch of stuff. So while the title says Al Thuze's contradiction and overdetermination, the substance of this conversation goes well, well beyond the confines of just that paper, as all of these dialectic deep dive episodes. episode to do. So even if you have no idea about what this essay is about, you have no idea about even Al Thusair, you will find plenty in this conversation to enjoy and hopefully stimulate your thinking. All right, everybody, we are back for part two of our Dialectics Deep Dive episode on Althusair's contradiction and overdetermination. Part one of this conversation came out. In February, our schedule's kind of been crazy on both ends.

We've tried to make this happen quicker, but, you know, it's happening now, so that's fine. Of course, we have back on the show, the person who is with me on all our dialectic deep dive episodes, which is our good friend of the show, friend of mine, Matthew Furlong. So Matthew, for the few people out there who might not know who you are, can you introduce yourself? Maybe give just a very quick sort of recap of part one so people can orient themselves to what we're talking about. And then I also know that you wanted to address a question or concern that a listener had. So maybe you can do that all up front. Yeah, okay.

So as Brett told you, my name is Matthew. And we have on April, April 21st, I think it was the third anniversary of our first Dialectics deep dive coming out. So it's been over three years now that I've been appearing on the show. And just working on a sort of sustained. inquiry into, I guess, the history and structures and practices of dialectics. And this episode, which is what dialectics, deep dive six, part two, will be the end of the project that I set out three years ago, which was to provide a companion to Torkel-Lawason's discussion about the principal contradiction and get into the sort of nitty-gritty of dialectics

down at the level of how we perceive and think and act, because as Latin says, dialectics is not just a law of what we think of as external nature, it's also a law of cognition. And with this episode, I think we're coming full circle because the essay contradiction and overdetermination by Alpha Zaire, which we discussed last time and we'll conclude discussing this time, was sort of very much lurking in the background for me in preparation for doing this sort of three-year project that we've done. And so I think we've pretty much, I think, satisfactorily done this exploration,

which I think is in many ways an exploration considering or, you know, considering that the contours and outlines of a Marxist philosophy of mind, I would say. I don't know if you would, do you think that's a fair characterization in a way, Brett? Yeah, an interesting one, but I think a fair one for sure. Yeah. And so what I think we're going to do for, I've suggested this to Brett for the next phase. It's like Marvel phase five, six, whatever they got. So this is dialectic, deep dive phase two is we're going to get to the episode about Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation on the atomistic systems of Democritus and Epicurus. And. go into a deep dive series about a philosophy of nature and to address ecology and eco-socialism in various topics sort of that intersect with that. So I'm interested, for example, in looking at this scientific discipline called biogeochemistry, which I find very interesting. And to look at the

work of John Bellamy Foster, who writes about eco-socialism. So he wrote Marx's Ecology was his first book. He draws on Marx's dissertation to mount that argument. So I think that that's where we're going to go next. But in any event, this is the last episode of the deep dives as we have known it.

And what would I? I also, go ahead. Do you think we'll have to, we'll come up with a new series name so we can leave this one as it is and then move on to it like a new series name? Yeah, we could do that. That might be fresh because you can only say that so many, dialective deep dive so many times for it stops making sense.

You say any word too many times. And so, yeah, last time we touched on, we sort of, no, touched on, we dug into this, we dove deeply into this essay, contradiction and overdetermination, which is, I think, really good for getting us to think about how things move and change historically in ways that sort of confound our expectations of them. And, you know, so why, you know, Alphazir spent some time talking about, you know, the Western Europe, were shocked that the revolution kicked off in backwards Russia, rather than, you know, regal, august Germany or something like that. So, and I, you know, I often think of, um, uh, at the,

at the end of blowback season two, uh, either what's it, Brendan James or Noah Coleman, one of the two most reads a letter or an account that Fidel Castro wrote about the whole Cuban revolution after it all happened. And he said, you know, looking back on it, I'm paraphrasing here, you know, with all the crazy twists and turns and weird, unexpected things that happen, who could as imagine? It still ended up with the outcome that we had. Because when you really dig into history and get down to a granular level in analyzing it, and I'm sure, Brett, you're learning more and more and more about this all the time with your present studies. It doesn't at all map the kind of, map on to this, this idea of, you know, history as like a royal road, you know, that the worst sorts of Hegelian influence people make it out to be like, again, Francis Fukuyama, the nadir of this form, and the nadir and the Acme at the same time of this form of thinking.

And so Althazir does a good job in this essay of helping us, like, stay honest about how history actually transpires and moves and to not get. get caught up in sort of idealistic schemes that we then apply onto reality in which force us to leave most of reality on the cutting room floor in order to make it fit our scheme, so to speak. So that's, and so this week, we're this week, so this episode, we're just going to clue up our consideration of this essay and I guess clue, clue up the deep dives and, and then see what's coming next. And I did have, yeah, I had some housekeeping in respect of a listener question. So this was for Ian back in February. And I found this an interesting line of question because I have seen it many, many times over the years. And it's good because it's something that a lot of people can easily fall into because, of the way that, you know, we are educated in a way that Western thinking is, is structured

or tends to be structured. So he says, basically says, and he's in respect of the example that we used from Graham Priest about when does one state change into another state? What is the instant of that transformation? In the instant of the transformation from one state to another state, do, then he's giving the example of a pen, you know, moving along a piece of paper as someone is writing and then lifting off as they're done writing. And the question is, um, in that instant when the pen leaves the paper, is it neither on nor off the paper? Is it on and is it on and not off the paper? Is it not on and off the paper? Or is it both on and off the paper? And, uh, Ian said, um, uh, in response to this, uh,

I can't say I agree with tossing out the, the principle of non-conciful of non, contradiction, which is to say that it, you know, it on some level offends thought to consider that the pen may be both on and off the paper at the same time, according to this thought experiment that Ray and Priest lays out that anyone is interested in, you can go back to the last episode and listen to it. And I think, and Ian offered a number of responses, but I think the whole thing can really be summed up by just responding to the first statement, which is, I can't see I really agree with pausing out the principle of non-contradiction. And the answer is, is that nobody suggested that at any point.

Neither Brett nor I suggested that. I don't believe that Graham Priest suggested that. And it doesn't need to be that at all. And it's just interesting because over the years, I've found that whenever you enter into a discussion about dialectical concepts or process concepts, like you find in Alfred North Whitehead. or Deleuze or somebody like that, you frequently see this reaction

that's saying to the effect that, well, you're negating and annihilating and throwing away the logic of non-contradiction, which makes sense in, you know, many everyday circumstances. So like if you were tried to cross a crosswalk, it's very,

very helpful to know that walk and do, or cross and don't cross are mutually exclusive states. And if you mess that up and think, well, in certain way, they're kind really both because one changes into the other, you may get totally smelt by a car as you're being a philosophical genius. Or for, you know, what's the other one? Oh, I had a number of other things. But just like, there is no reason at all for anyone to think that adopting or accepting

entertaining this kind of dialectical logic entails throwing out the sort of classical logic of non-contradictory or sorry, mutually exclusive states that cannot sort of obtain at the same time. And I would say that just in response to that, my position is more that

these two forms of these two kinds of logic sort of like complement one another because they do pertain to, they both pertain to different aspects of reality and are valid within their sort of sphere of applicability and in the sense, I think one of the, someone discussing this with Ian on the comments said,

it's the same thing as, you know, the introduction of quantum concepts and quantum rules does not negate or annihilate the classical concepts and the classical rules of physics, right? That's good, yeah, I like that. That was a really good one. Likewise, the establishment or the discovery of the real numbers does not annihilate or negate the reality of the integers, for example. And in fact, you know, you can't, like once, if you were to get rid of the real numbers, because the logic of the real numbers appears to contradict in, you know, a total way, the logic of the intrudence, you wouldn't really be able to do any kind of science anymore. But just in general, I think that the way that I look at it is that in actual, in actually existing, for whatever reasons this happens to be the case, there seem to be aspects of reality.

to which state concepts apply very readily and can actually help us do things. But then there are also these kinds of concepts of continuum or continua, if I could put it that way. And we are forced by experience and practice to deal with those things in order to like get around the world as well. In fact, we require both of these logics in order for things to work in order for us to actually do anything and think anything and accomplish anything. and it's you know it's very much like it really mirrors sort of the logic of like wave particle duality if I want to put it that way or if you want to put or anyone wants to put it that way so I just wanted to say yeah like but I've noticed that in in especially through the structures of academia people become very uncomfortable because when you introduce these kinds of you know

continuum logics or dialectical logic process logics they really people seem to really assume right off the jump that you're asking them to throw out this sort of more everyday common sense about, you know, black can't be white, up can't be down, all this kind of stuff. And I think that, you know, this is why we looked at Spinoza because Spinoza gives you a sort of a method for moving back and forth between these two sort of registers of logic without it being a problem. So I don't know if any of that is hopeful to you, Ian. But I think, yeah, the important thing is, is that, although I can understand why it might seem like that's where we were going with it, in dialectical materialism, we don't just chop off and throw out sort of older forms of

thinking. We try to accommodate, we try to accommodate different forms within our method, I guess. Include and transcend, continuity and rupture, taking what's useful in things and then carrying those elements forward. For people who might be a little lost here, because, you know, this is sort of, you know, logic and philosophy, and some people aren't totally caught up this. It's just worth defining very quickly and very simply the law of non-contradiction. For some, it may be obvious. But in like logic, the law of non-contradiction states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time, e.g., the two propositions, P is the case, and P is not the case, are mutually exclusive. And dialectics has this element,

which is visualized in things like, you know, the yin-yang symbol, where in the opposite of the thing being asserted is in some form present in the thing itself. And so that kind of creates this tension. But this is, of course, not to say that the law of non-contradiction is completely tossed out as a logical, as a valid logical form in many cases. It's just to sort of complicate that in some ways and take our thinking and our logical framework to a higher level while, of course, including certain aspects of things that came before like the law of non-contradiction.

Is that a fair way of sort of summarizing? that up. Yeah, and priests in a number of places that I can't think of right now discusses how you can introduce this sort of dialectical logic that he's talking about and then on top of that reconstruct all the categories of like, quote unquote, classical critical thinking without anything being fundamentally changed within that register. So it doesn't, when you sort of adjoin this dialectical logic to this sort of classical logic, one doesn't destroy the other. And that's sort of like a fantasy I have is that someday I'm going to do a dialectical critical thinking primer where we start out with the dialectical layer and then move up to the stuff that you're

used to every day and then show the transition from one to the other. So yeah, that's one of my minor like dreams. That's awesome. What I'd like to do something. Certainly. Yeah. And so yeah, I hope anyway, and I hope that that was helpful. But again, I would say that the habit, of saying, as soon as someone introduces this kind of thing, they're annihilating the more classical, you know, very common-sensical and useful logic of non-contradiction, I find that very much in keeping with the way academia and the West works anyway, where it's kind of like, you have to cleave to this or that sort of system of thought or more narrowly a person's system of thought, and that anything else that comes into the environment, the choice is to

either adopt the new thing and reject what you already had or reject the new thing and keep what you already had. And there's this very just kind of like binary way that we're taught to think about these things. But in dialectical materialism, that's not how things operate at all. And it's because I think partly the ultimate answer, as Mark says, is always, well, what's going on in practice? Does practice force people to use both these kinds of logics?

Well, apparently it does. So we need to, we need to just deal with. it that way. So, like, Deleuze actually has something along these lines where he just says, stop trying to explain it. These are the two fundamental aspects of experience as we know them. And every time you try to reduce one to the other or come up with a third concept to house both of them, something bad happens and you end up with just, you know, crazy politics, you know, crazy shit happening. So just stop try to explain it and go with this duality and understand that they are nonetheless one, right?

So it's the unity of opposites. And Buddhism is what leads you to this kind of insight, for example. Absolutely. And the unity of opposites in the most simplest terms, you can think of the concepts of like, I don't know, anything, any binary, day and night. You know, does the concept day even make sense in lieu of the concept of night? They're mutually reinforcing concepts. But, of course, when it is daytime, it is not nighttime, right?

That's also true. But they're contained within one another at the same time. And so I think that's a sort of key to understanding this at, of course, a very simple level. But I think a helpful one for anybody kind of wrestling with this or finding any of this difficult. And life and death, obviously, that's a big one. That's a great one. And in fact, life and death is such a good one. Allison and I recently did an episode on AI and the Silicon Valley attempt to transcend death and create God.

And we brought that point up that an attempt to escape death is a disdain for life. what they think they're doing is they're trying to obliterate one side of the binary through all of our technology we can escape death and live forever but the moment you take death out of the table life itself becomes meaningless becomes a concept that it just makes absolutely no sense and so really hidden within this hatred of death is a sort of hatred of life itself and that's a dialectical way of apprehending what these people are sort of thinking of in terms of dualities and We can chop off one side of this binary of these, this coincidence of opposites and get the fucking thing that we want while completely obliterating its opposite. And that in and of itself is a fool's errand, which is why it is utterly impossible. And we made that very clear in the episode. And it's sort of neurotic in its attempt. But the attempt itself must be, necessarily will be futile ultimately.

Yeah, exactly. It's like people thinking about death. You can't imagine death. And so they, onto this void, one projects all sorts of things. People are afraid of death. They think, oh, what's it going to be like to go to sleep and never wake up? And they imagine themselves being shut up in the dark forever and get bugged by it. But on the other hand, when you start thinking about what will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up,

suddenly occurs to you that when you were born, you woke up without ever having gone to sleep. It was rather funny. And, of course, if it happened once, it can happen again. And that begins to get you real puzzled about what you mean by you. But everybody feels his eye. Everybody has this sensation of being in the middle of everything. Turn around and see more or less equally in all directions. And you feel that you're in the center.

Everybody feels in the center, just as much as I do. In fact, insects feel they're in the center. And I'm quite sure they feel that they're people. We don't cause to bother to notice them in any. great detail, therefore they all look the same, and therefore we say, well, they're not people. They're all alike. There's some sort of mechanisms. Well, they look at us in just the same way, and they can't make any sense out of what we're doing. So we're some sort of funny mechanisms going around so far as they're concerned. But so there's a lot of mystery

hidden in this self that we have. Well, of course, you see, we're worried about it. We see the organism vanishes, we're always defending our personalities and somebody accuses our personality of falling apart and say now you're not being consistent, you're not fulfilling what you said you would do, you're not playing the role you're supposed to play. Everybody feels that they're coming apart because they're not acting right as on the stage. So we are constantly on the defensive and also we're a prey to anxiety. Anxiety is a trembling motion. To be or not to be? That is the question. Because the minute you know you're

alive and really become aware of being alive, you realize that you might also be dead. Because to be implies not to be. And not to be, although we don't really think about that, implies to be. So we're always wondering, now if I do this, will I survive? Or would I better do that? We're never quite sure because you think when you get a really important decision you've got to make it you wonder did i take everything into consideration did i make a sensible judgment will you never know because in the best thought-out plan uh always chancey things occur you don't know whether you're going to slip on a banana skin or whether you're going to get sick it's all very unpredictable and therefore we did we tremble now

When it occurs to us, of course, it doesn't in the ordinary way, that there is no choice between to be and not to be. Just as there's no choice between front and back. Space implies solid, just as much as solid implies space. But conscious attention ignores that. It suffers from ignorance. We notice the figure and ignore the background. We notice the solid and ignore the space.

we notice the relatively moving in smaller object but we ignore the relatively stationary background that's with consciousness with noticing and so you see we don't notice that in order to be present you must also be absent because life is an energy system an energy is something that vibrates and whatever vibrates goes on and off

if I sit next to a girl in the movies and she attracts me and I put my hand on her knee and just leave it there she will in due course cease to notice it because it's a constant stimulus but if I gently stroke her or pat her on the knee she will keep noticing because it goes on and off

now all energy systems go on and off you can't know you're on unless you're off too so we get waking and sleeping we get every kind of rhythm and there are tiny rhythms that go dig dig dig dig so fast like a beam of light that you don't notice the spaces because your retina doesn't react

quickly enough it reacts to the stimulus of the on but before it can go off there's a new on see so you get what appears to be a constant stimulus the table appears to be hard

it's vibrating so fast I can't put my finger through it same way as an airplane propeller appears to be a solid or an electric fan but it's all going on and off now these very fast vibrations of on and off and there are very slow ones

like life and death now you see it now you don't that's what the world is but because of the focusing of conscious attention which regards on as real and off as unreal because you ignore it

regards solid as real and space is unreal it's like trying to have trying to think of waves as a series of crests without any troughs but a wave is a crest trough on off so off is as important as on you can't have anything happening without both

and although they are explicitly different on and off they're implicitly one we call it energy So if these neglected and ignored features of the world came to our attention, or in some way could impinge upon our consciousness, we should feel very differently than we ordinarily do feel. How would you feel? Well, I can roughly describe it to you. It's a very odd feeling indeed at first. you feel

that what you are doing and what happens to you are the same you can say of everything that happens to you I'm doing it and of everything that you are doing is that it happens to me for example when you're steering a car

are you pulling the wheel or pushing it it's push-pull isn't it both although the words push and pull are formally logically opposed to each other but that's what you're doing when you're steering you're push pulling so in exactly the same way when you are acting what your environment does

and what you do are the same process so when you feel that it's very odd you feel as you walk up a hill the hill is lifting you that a lot of people go crazy with this because they suddenly say well I'm God I'm doing everything and if they may start to tell everybody that they're God and people object and say well it's absolutely preposterous

that you should say you're personally in charge of the whole universe therefore should be bowed down to and given divine on us, you must be mad. Or a person may take entirely the opposite point of view and say, I do nothing. I'm just a little puppet on the end of strings, and everything I do is controlled by something else. In other words, it becomes a complete fatalist.

What he doesn't see is that both points of view are right. But of course, this won't fit in with an eye, of God, which is based on the ancient monarchies of the Near East. That is to say, it won't do with an idea of God conceived as the cosmic boss. The boss, the chief, that's a political image. And it just doesn't work too well for the Godhead. It leads to all sorts of trouble. And as I often say, for Americans, you'd believe, don't you as American citizens, that a republic is the best form of government?

How can you square that with thinking of heaven as a monarchy? If heaven is a monarchy, monarchy is the best form of government. What about democracy in the kingdom of heaven? How about that now? so you have to conceive God in accordance for some different kind of image or maybe wait a moment maybe we shouldn't do that at all images of God are idolatry aren't they

there are no image because every image is an idol and idols that are made of imagination and thought are much more dangerous than idols made of wood or stone nobody takes a wooden idol seriously you merely regard it as a symbol and it's such an obvious symbol but a concept that seems so spiritual so abstract but it's the most dangerous kind of idol as we shall see when we come to the study of buddhism how it gets rid of all the conceptual idols all right well that's a great intro to this conversation so

so you want to get into the first question here Um, yes. Okay. Now, now, to be fair, especially with the, this is a part two of, of a bigger discussion. So there are certainly people out there that could just tap in right now and enjoy the conversation for what it is, etc. There are also people out there that will benefit greatly from hearing the first half of this conversation, um, to make sense of some of the directions that we're going. So, um, you know, kind of feel, feel your wave as to which one you are and make the right decision for you. But, um, this is a part two. So let's go ahead and get into it. And of course, I'll link to part one in the show. So you can very quickly find it. But this is technically question five of a two-part episode. So the question is this, how does Al Thusser's refusal to accept the two idealisms that arise with Hegelianism in its non-inverted and pseudo-inverted forms tie into his critique of Frederick Engels's letter to Joseph Block? And maybe it'll be helpful to recap the two idealisms and kind of give an overview of what that letter entails. Mm-hmm. Um, okay. Yeah, this is, this is probably the most difficult, uh, part of the discussion. I've been agonizing over how to approach this for months now. Um, so yeah, just to go back to the, the, the, um, the prior discussion, uh, to help us get into this one. I'll just read, read question four from last time. Uh, let's look at the haggle problem in further depth. Uh, it's not, it's one of the, one of the many Hegel problems.

what is the danger of quote unquote developmental thinking for dialectics more specifically how does it lead us either into either substance dualism or vulgar materialism which are both forms of idealism and on this point why is it important oh yeah forget that we already touched on the stuff about the words as indices we did that last time so that's not really relevant um so basically the bad inversion of Marxism or of Hegelianism rather or that you know Marxism is a bad inversion of Agalianism entails arguing that nothing is really real other than the bare sort of material facts of what is going on, right? And I think I said before that if you follow this to its logical conclusion, what we call economism, there is nothing more to be said other than we are extracting nutrients and useful things from our environment and creating things out of them. and that's all the, you can boil it down to calorie counts, you know, like vitamin levels, you know, exposure to light, you know, no super structural stuff at all, just like the most nakedly material factors of life. Material reductionism, right? Reductionist materialism.

Yeah, reductionist materialism. If you follow this line, you end up with either a substance dualism or a vulgar materialism. substance dualism coming out of this line of argumentation would be like, well, I know that nothing's really real except the matter, the really mattery stuff, you know, like the most eating, shitting, getting sun, getting vitamins, like just, you know, the most like, like, edge lord accounts of what it means to be a material being. And but, you know, you may nonetheless feel, well, there's still this psychic life that I have. And, and, you know, you know, it's inexplicable from the standpoint of this kind of materialism that I have now adopted,

and I have no other option but to just posit it this psychic life just in its own right as a completely separate, you know, a chain of events, if you want to call it, that running alongside it with, you know, no, unlike Spinoza, no sort of unity underpinning it in just the infinite activity of the cosmos because, you know, vulgar, you know, Borswell's modes of thought, don't think about the cosmos or infinity. And so you end up with this kind of, you end up like a very wishy-washy idea of the mind that can be susceptible to any kind of like new agey crap, you know, corporate mindfulness, corporate neoliberal yoga, all this kind of depraved evil nonsense that's going on out there. The idea of being, I'm sorry, I'm jumping into kind of clarify things. The idea of being of substance dualism, this goes back to like Renee Descartes, you know, that the mind and body are two fundamentally separate substances.

And therefore, like in the Amazon Zen booth or whatever, there's this idea that you can sort of take care of your mind as a separate entity from your body, which is being brutalized by the toil in the Amazon warehouse. And so that is one form that this substance dualism can take. And of course, it is deeply, deeply integrated into modern society, even in Christian ideology, right? It's this idea that when you die, your body, your body rots, your mind, your soul is liberated and goes up into heaven if you're a good boy. But that substance dualism really is so deeply embedded within our common sense notions of body and mind that it's really pernicious in this way. Yeah. And so with this kind of this first sort of material reduction, because the reality of psychic life is, I mean, you can't get away from it, you're then forced into creating just nonsensical, fantastical explanations for the mind. Now, the second pathway of this vulgar, you know, reductionist materialism where you're,

commit to that. You end up completely denying the reality of the mind altogether. And I believe that I told a story a few years ago about my, my classmate and friend Brooke, back when we were in grad school at Wealth, being required to do a course about this sort of stuff. And he said, most of the other people in the class had bought it. And he said to them, so you're telling me that you're not actually experiencing any of what's happening right now, including me saying this to you. And they were like, yes. And it's like, and the experience you have when you look through a microscope or you do scientific, scientific inquiry into how the brain works or whatever, that's not really real either. They're like, yes. But the mathematical and scientific

expressions that you come up with to convey what is happening in the brain based on your scientifically structured perception of it, that is real? And they're like, yes. And I think we could read that that's not really tenable either. Right. When you, and I, there was a professor in that department, sorry, Andrew, I'm throwing you into the bus here and now. He, I remember I was taking a break one day from my own stuff and reading this paper he wrote in the student lounge. I was reading it. And it was about this pseudo-analytical philosophy concept called, zombies have you heard of this before philosophical zombies it's yeah you heard this one yes yeah it's kind of like it's what if we could imagine a being that's

absolutely identical to a human being in every single way including their behaviors they're you know apparent humanity all of this kind of stuff but they couldn't experience their own experience if their own self-consciousness wasn't really there but in every other way they were there for you and it's like why are you been thinking about this in the first place But for gamers, it's like an MPC, right? Yeah, it's like an NPC. And then he's like, and because none of us can satisfactorily prove to each other that this is not happening for all of us or any of us, including ourselves,

maybe all of us are zombies? Maybe we're just zombies. And it's like, okay. And then it gets to the end. And it's like, he says, so now the question arises, if this is true, if we cannot reduce or eliminate the possibility that all of us aren't actually really experiencing anything. What is the appropriate political system for that? Can you guess, Brett, what the answer is? Tell me. Some reasonable form of liberal democracy. Nice. What a nice coincidence.

And I remember when my teacher, Jeff walked in just as I got to that part, I was like, have you read this? And he was like, oh, yeah. I was like, this is like a bad science fiction novel. He was like, oh, yeah, they just use metaphors. everything want, they just pull shit out of the air, they don't care. It's fine. They get the funding. They get all the funding, right? Because if, you know, that, the kind of being that that view wants you to be doesn't really need solidarity or to change their social conditions or human togetherness, it's just gears and lepers. You know what I mean? So these, and it, and it denies the immediacy of what's most immediately real, which is like your own experience. So clearly this is not. And it's your own

experience in conjunction with that of others that gets you the scientific insights that you then use to deny the thing that got you there. So it's like, okay, this isn't satisfactory either. Okay. And these are two forms of idealism. So that's just a recap to lead into. So really, really quick though, Matthew, the two forms of idealism is this substance dualism and this vulgar reductionist materialism? Yes, that's correct. And really quickly, just on that point, you know, I come out of a philosophy background. And of course, Philosophy of Mind is a big, you know, segment of philosophy. And we read figures like Dan Dennett, who just recently actually died. And, you know, I like Dan Dennett. I read his books. I don't

agree with his conclusions. But he's obviously an interesting and worthwhile thinker to engage with. And, you know, him dying is obviously not something to celebrate. It's sort of a sad thing. But he had this straight-up idea that consciousness itself is, is more or less an illusion. And there's a strain of thought within the philosophy of mind called Elimitivism, which, their solution to the problem of consciousness like what is consciousness you know etc is to basically say that it is sort of an illusion that it doesn't actually exist in any real way and that that would kind of make us in some sense you know some version of a philosophical zombie a zombie being somebody who outwardly has physical attributes who goes around and does

things but the lights aren't on on the inside as it were right there's no conscious person experience and reflecting upon experience on the inside it's just this sort of body in the world doing things and and that's that's what we mean by sort of reductive materialism but it is taken incredibly seriously in bourgeois academia and in philosophy yeah and again i think it's because it underwrites a lot of um uh especially in the you know the neoliberal period that we may slowly be coming us to now because the rest of the world is kicking the west in the teeth finally yes um It just, yeah, it just, you know, there are no political problems, there are no social problems, there are no emotional problems, there are no interpersonal problems, there are no ethical problems, there are any aesthetic problems.

Everything is just a technical problem and it can be fixed by something. And if your illusion is bothering you, we'll have a pill for that or something for that. But that's all that really needs to be done about it, right? And that's also a great point that highlights this vulgar materialism is this idea that a pill can solve your problem. because ultimately the mind is reducible to the body. And so neurobiology is matter is material. A pill is material that acts on the material of the brain, you know, the physical manifestation of the quote unquote mind, which doesn't actually exist.

It's reducible to the physical brain. Ergo, you know, putting this, putting this pill in your body that acts neurochemically will solve your problems, even if, you know, and that completely eliminates the possibility that these problems are material in origin, that the result of. of stress and needless toil, of exploitation, of alienation, all those questions are completely set aside and genuinely not even thought about because it's just a physical specimen in need of a physical intervention. And there's nothing mental, material, really important, psychological, or dare I say spiritual, that deserves even our slightest amount of attention. In fact, you mention a word like spiritual and you're completely laughed out of a room of people who think like this. So that's kind of, just kind of, you know, fleshing out that idea.

Yeah. And oh, man, there's a whole line of inquiry we could get into about that with who was, there is a French philosopher of science that a lot of people don't know named Michelle Sear, who's very highly respected by the people that we usually talk about. And Deleuze is sort of along the same wavelength, and it's like we need to treat consciousness. We, you know, we are comfortable with extensive qualities like length, width, and depth. but we don't think a lot about what are called in like chemistry or you know for example or also physics intensive qualities like temperature for example or pressure things like that he said they're both you know both of them articulate ideas and gutari is one of these people that comes along with this as well when they he and those talk about the brain you can get not postmodernist postmodernist postmodernist would not talk about the brain they talk about the brain for the whole last chapter of what is philosophy. And they're like, we just, we need to rethink the mind in a way that's consistent

with rigorous materialism, but still accounts for the fact that it's an incorporeal in relative to, you know, things that have, you know, length with and depth and, you know, hardness or softness and all that kind of stuff. We, you know, we need to think of the consciousness in the mind is something more akin to like a temperature or something like that. There's a whole line of inquiry we could, we could go down there. but not today. Sure.

Okay, so this will help us get into question five. So how does Althazir's, I'll just repeat it, how does Althazir's refusal to accept the two idealisms that arise with a galianism in its non-inverted and its pseudo-inverted forms tie into his critique of Friedrich Engel's letter to Joseph Block? And so this is important to me too, because this letter is actually, along with contradiction and overdetermination, I would say they are the two texts that I had in the background when we began the dialectics deep dive because on the surface of it and in many ways Engels's account here of how history works is very appealing and it makes a lot of sense and it actually can be helpful in a preliminary way in the same way that you know some of the distinctions and cons you know just Boers Ozzy forces proletariat without getting into the intermingling and the complications of that with you know

know, even though it doesn't, Orzazi versus Pauliteria just on a, so it doesn't raise to the level of the complexity of that, it's still enough to get you started. And what Engels does, I think, is enough to get you started, but there are still dangers in it. And I think Al-Azer's criticisms are very helpful because they, when we unpack it a little bit, hopefully it'll clarify a little bit more what we've been doing in the whole deep dive series now for the last three years. Cool. And so I'll just start with the letter to block.

just read a couple of passages from it that are key. So this is Frederick Engels writing to Joseph Block, and then we're going to talk about Althuzeres' critique of it. Yes, exactly. So this is to Joseph Block, I think written from London over September 21 and 22, 1890. So Engelus is quite up there at this point. And I've read this part before, but I need to read this so I can get into the next part. According to the materialist, oh, sorry, I'll start again.

quote, according to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this, neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence, if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure, 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 in the brains of the participants, political, juristic,

philosophical theories, religious views, and their further development into systems of dogmas, also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles, and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these, these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents, that is of things and events whose interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent as negligible, the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise, the application of this theory to any period of history one chose would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. Okay, so I'm going to skip the next,

the second paragraph where he talks about like linguistic shifts in Germany, over a certain beast trying to get these examples. So I've already read that before, so I'm just going to skip that and go to the next part. In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each again has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus, there are innuble intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant, the historical event.

This may again be itself viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole, unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus, past history proceeds in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that individual wills, of which each desires, what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external in the last resort economic

circumstances, either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general, do not attain what they want, but are merged into a collective meaning, a common resultant. It must not be concluded that their value is equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it, end quote. And that's a chunky passage right there. and hopefully we can we can break it down but on the on the surface of it um have you read this letter before brett um i don't think so i don't think i've read it yeah it's in the back of the the the marks and angles reader from uh w w norton company um there's a certain appeal to it that makes a whole lot of sense like a parallel to brain of forces is a concept that uh angles borrows uh from physics

And if anyone listening is better at me than physics and math, which you almost certainly are, you know, if you want to jump into the comments on the Patreon page or whatever and help me do with this, it's basically a concept to consider the application of two forces to the same object and then the resulting outcome of that. And in pure physics, I mean, again, I'm not that great at all this stuff. I've struggled with math all my life, and I'm still working on getting better at it. So I don't know, again, and it involves linear algebra, I think. So whatever I think the resultant would be, would be expressed in this way, in some sort of algebraic expression, right? And so he's transposing this physical concept to the situation of, for example,

it's like, I go to work and my boss comes into work, to the extent that bosses ever come into work, And he is trying to achieve his interest, and I'm trying to achieve my interest, both of us acting on this business enterprise that we belong to in these two, you know, asymmetrical ways in which he has the upper hand and I have the lower hand. And because of, but because of the way that both of us bring our will to bear on this object that we have this mutual, yet diametrically opposed interest in, the outcome is really not what either of us wanted. And anyone that's ever worked for a small business owner, you listen to how much they complain about shit and about nothing, has nothing is going their way. You know that Angles is on point here, even though it's like, you know, sorry, bud, you're, you know, you're starting all the revenues up and you can't stay ahead of your creditors, but, you know, that's not because of your workers. This is because of you. Anyway, sorry, a little specific there.

That's not as from any real experience, believe me, though. Anyway, purely made up. But that's the sort of model of it, right? In the big picture, it's bourgeois de proletariat on, you know, the, you know, the activities of the mode of production. And it comes out, you know, these two forces, you know, operate on the same field, if you can put it that way, or in the same spheres or domain, both bringing to beer diametrically opposed but mutually intermingled interests. And then the outcome is not what anyone asked for because you know that because it's an on-growing, never-ending struggle of pushing and pull. and each side trying to get their way, right? And, you know, of Marxism, Leninism, the answer is, well, ultimately, the work the class will eventually get their way.

But anyway, we'll set that aside for the moment. But so, so you can see there's a certain kind of, it makes a certain sign of kind of common sense. Really quick, can I do an example of possibly from history? Yeah, sure. You have the rise of Napoleon, right, as the emperor of France. And that is neither, that's, that is a result. of multifaceted amount of like sort of causal elements that created Napoleon as this emperor, but that is neither what the monarchists of the rest of Europe who were trying to stop Napoleon

and more deeply the French Revolution wanted, nor is it what the French revolutionaries themselves who created the conditions which gave rise to Napoleon wanted. So you can kind of see Napoleon himself as this sort of figure that emerges from a multitude of causes that none of the major contending forces necessarily, wanted, right? Napoleon is not in a hereditary line of monarchs. So even though he's an emperor, he's not what the monarchs had in mind. And of course, he's not with the French revolutionaries who created the possibility of this young Corsican to rise through the ranks and become emperor unnecessarily wanted, but that he's sort of the result of these sort of multifaceted

causal forces that emerge anyway. And I think that might be one way to highlight this historically. Yeah, for me, another thing I keep thinking about what I'm thinking about, This is just like a lot of my favorite rap albums from the 90s, people describing the situation of living, you know, as a black person subjected to capitalism and these like urban environments and having to compete with others to get yours at the end of the day, you know, like I, like New York state of mine by Nause. Like I ran like a cheated with thoughts of an assassin. You know, you, you're a will that's out there competing with other wills that are coming at you or it's like, you know, you and your crew are. whatever, but it's the same thing. And then the resultant of, um, of these activities coming at, you know, coming in the conflict with each other, trying to achieve their goals by operating again on the same field. The resultant is a world that nobody can really say that they really

wanted, even though they're living in it. And they helped cause it. Right. So this is what, um, you know, what, what, what angles mean means when he says, um, just because it's not what anybody in any individual will want it doesn't mean that they themselves, their causality and this is canceled out because the result does not correspond to their intentions. There's still a causal factor in the outcome of what do you call it, the result in which is the historical event, as he says. And so again, it makes a lot of sense, but Althazeri uses it. And I think this is the most difficult part of the essay. This is the appendix to the essay. And I, it's only 10 pages long and I've gone over this and I've gone over this and I find it so hard

and I'll do my best. And but basically I'll, you know, I'll just try to boil it down. And he's saying, first of all, where do the, where do the wills come from? Right. And Engel says, well, it's physical circumstance or physical condition or physical composition, physical Constitution and external circumstances. And for AlphaZera, I think because he's just spent all this time defending the efficacy of the superstructure, he's going to say, well, Engels is not doing a good enough job of showing the dialectical development of the wills, right? And Lenin also, I think in, I think it's in the question of dialectics, which is taken out

of his prospectus on Hegel's, of Hegel's science of logic. He says that, yeah, Engels in his writing. doesn't do a good enough job of showing how the mind is generated out of not just the economic base, but also the superstructure as will. And so the will itself is something that's unwilled in the first instance. It's not just the outcome of what they will, of the will-wills is unwilled. It's that the will itself, to some extent, is unwilled. And if you're a Spinoza, that's not a problem.

But if you were a Borsvae ideologue, that is a massive problem, right? if you are someone that is committed to being a philosopher, say, within the confines of Western Anglo-American academia, the idea that you might have to give up, you know, the quote-unquote the bourgeois self, that absolute starting point that is not caused by anything else, but that causes everything else. That is the most hateful thing you can possibly imagine. And I think that part of the terrible reception that the, you know, the four French thinkers that I have named a number of times,

so Deleuze, Guateri, Derrida, and Foucault, they have been smeared as postmodernist and post-structuralist precisely because they reject the idea

that this sort of consciousness of this like bourgeois consciousness that is almost, it's not really created per se by anything else, it's not generated by any other factors. It doesn't have, well,

as, as, you know, to riff on Tick. It's a self that does not have non-self elements. You know, these four thinkers, for example, is one that precedes them would say that, no, this is a self that must have non-self elements

or else you can't make any sense of it. And he's saying to Engel, I think, like, you're losing the non-self elements. And because you're losing the non-self elements, you're losing the self elements. And because you're losing both, your example kind of falls on its face. And all you're really left with is this sort of model of Borswaite ideology where it's like, hey, I'm here in the world, I'm out to get mine. And it's like, so it was a well-intentioned, um, It's a well-intentioned explanatory model, but the further you try to rely on it, the more troubling and the more problematic that it gets. Does that make sense at all? Absolutely. Very interesting. Yeah. So Angles has given this sort of, you know,

like you were saying earlier, this bird's eye view, this helpful concept, this way into understanding something. And Althuzer is saying, okay, as a very shallow sort of initiation point, that might be helpful. But once we start thinking about it very deeply, the nuances and complexities begin to arise. And this is not technically correct. correct. The point you made about the bourgeois conception of the will, you really got to think about this idea that this will plays this centrally, this idea that you are this self-directed, you know, from the inside out individual that can act rationally. This underpins the entire economy, the justice system, etc. This is the idea of homo-economics, right? This rational actor with choices who goes out into the marketplace of commodities and goods and services and makes rational choices in their own self-interest. right, which has a bunch of assumptions about the person having a will in the first place where that will comes from, their even ability to acknowledge or know what their self-interest actually are. And of course, in the judicial system, this idea of like libertarian free will, that your

actions are a direct product of your self-motivated will and thus are accountable and culpable to the broader society and you can be penalized for your choices because they are ultimately in the last instance your own. And any real deep dive into the philosophy of free will, even this sort of discussion begins to immediately cast doubt on that idea that that will even exist. And of course, if you go into Buddhism, right? What happens when you see through the illusion of the self? You simultaneously and instantaneously see through the illusion of free will, which is centered on this idea of a self. So, you know, and maybe there's a diversion between a Marxist and a Buddhist conception of the self, certainly. But in the Buddhist context, this also

vibes quite well because, you know, this debate about, does free will exist or not? You can go have philosophy classes all day long and debate, you know, are you a, are you a libertarian free will? Are you a determinist? Are you a compatibilist? If you meditate long enough, you don't have to have those questions anymore. You don't have to have those debates. You can look inwardly and immediately, and of course, this is a high level of achievement. But once you get there, you can immediately look inward and see that the self and the will that you think exists there in the first place are ultimately illusory. And I think Althusair sort of complicating this idea of the will as merely a product of nature and nurture, as Angles is sort of kind of asserting here, I think, disintegrates around the fringes and maybe even strikes at the center of this very idea of a will. So those are just some thoughts that came up when you were talking.

Yeah, thank you. It's all a very helpful commentary. And I'm just going to read from Althazir from the, I think it's just the first, like, page in a bit from the appendix to contradiction and over-defermination because he says, I think his light of argumentation is, if you rely too heavily on the model that Engels has advanced as, you know, I think, again, on some level, it is a helpful teaching tool, right? It's not, again, in dialectical materialism, we don't just throw the baby out with the bad fodder. We're constantly engaged in the kind of creative interpretation of flawed lines of argumentation according to the principles that we observe, which again, the unity of opposites, the dialectical transformation of quantity and equality, and these two in the context of history as defined by class struggle ultimately culminating in the abolition of classes, right?

So we're not just going to throw angles out. It can still be made use of and the truth in it can still be seen, but we also need to identify the dangers in it. And I think it's so it's not just the danger of relying on this model too much or too heavily, you're taking it too much for granted, is not just that you end up back in bourgeois philosophizing, but you lose the effectiveness of the superstructures. And with losing the effectiveness of the superstructures,

you lose the ability to carry out a Marxist analysis of those, of the effectivity of the superstructures and thereby actually get a better sense of what your will is actually composed of and how it's composed and how it operates and how it can be altered with bringing us back to Spinoza once again. So I'll just read

from, yeah, from this appendix here. So, quote, Engels has just shown that the superstructures, far from being pure phenomena of the economy, have their own effectivity. Quote, within a quote, the various elements of the superstructure in many cases preponderate in determining there, and then, sorry, in parentheses, Althusay just reminds you the angle means the historical struggles.

So their historical form, end quote, within a quote. But this quote poses the question as to how, under these conditions, we should think the unity of this real but relative effectiveness of the superstructures and of the determinant principle in the last instance of the economy. So just, I'm just to repeat that. So what's the unity of the real but relative affectivity of the superstructures and the, and the determinant principle of the economy? So what is the unity of the base and the superstructure?

Because we can't just see them as two separate things, nor can we collapse one into the other. We have to see them as two things that are distinct from one another, yet nonetheless in a unity with one another. or how do we how do we think that's the unity of opposites right continuing how should we think the relation between these distinct effectiveness what basis is there within this unity for the role of the economic as a last instance angles's reply is that quote without a quote there is an interaction of all these elements the superstructures in which amid all the endless host

of accidents that is of events and the things that immense whose interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent as negligible, the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary, end quote, within a quote. So the explanatory model goes like this, quote, within a quote, the various elements of the superstructure, end quote, within a quote, act and react on each other to produce an infinity of effects. These effects can be assimilated to an infinity of accidents, infinite a number, and with an inner connection so remote and therefore so difficult to discover, difficult to discover that it is negligible, amid which the quote-unquote economic movement asserts itself.

These effects are accidents. The economic movement is necessity, their necessity. So the sort of comment. So the economic movement is the necessity of the superstructural accidents. Right. So in other words, they're pure phenomena of what's truly essential, which is the economic base. So Alphezzi is indicating that Engels is already slipping back into a kind of bad haggalianism here.

Yeah. Continue. For the moment, I shall ignore the accident's necessity model and its presuppositions. What is remarkable in this text is the role that it attributes to the different elements of the superstructure. It is just as if. Once the action-reaction system was set in motion between them, they were charged with finding a basis for the infinite diversity of effects, things and events, as Engels puts it between

which, as if between so many accidents, the economy picks its sovereign way. In other words, the elements of the superstructure do have an effectivity, but this effectivity is in some way dispersed into an infinity, into the infinity of effects of accidents whose interconnection may, once this extremity in the infinitesimal has been reached, be regarded as non-existent. So comment. So what he's saying is that, yes, we're bombarded and, you know, so saturated all day long every single day with, you know, television news, memes, you know, social media streams, billboards, die with a sandwich board walking on the street advertising club sandwich that a die, you know, all this stuff, you know, political edicts, press statements, anything sort of, anything super structural that you could possibly think of. They affect us and shape us and move us, but then yet nonetheless, Althazey suggests, according to the way Angles is treating this, they nonetheless are all lost.

Like they're not in the end really part of the effectiveness of the will that you bring to the table when you're competing with the other wills and creating the unwilled result of the total historical event. So he's saying there's a problem here, right? So precisely that which informs and shapes the wills, and makes them what they are, is lost to all knowledge. And then we're still stuck back with this kind of like bourgeois starting point. So this is, this is a problem. And here, I think Al-Zer is really echoing Gramsheet, who's trying to say, who says

that we need to consider the way that the superstructures operate in our minds and, you know, motivate us to act, not as a psychological problem, but an epistemological problem. We need to study these things as though. they have structures that can be rationally apprehended and transformed into some kind of knowledge, right? So this is, for example, why I made sure that we did an episode about Marshall L. Cluyn. Because despite not being a Marxist and having certain blind spots because of that, he does a very fine-grained analysis of media formations. And, you know, he has a book called, I think it's called The New Science.

I can't remember what it's called. The New Science. And he co-wrote it with his son. and he's laying out these sort of formal epistemological structure that you can use to apprehend not just media formations, but their transformations into other formations and their interactions and their interactions with other formations. So that and also Althazir, I don't know if he was aware of McLuhan, but he would, I think Althazir would say, well, here's somebody, despite not being a Marxist and having some of the shortcomings that go along with that, who is nonetheless

showing that media effects, superstructural effects, are intelligible, and through apprehending their intelligibility, we can have a better account of their effectivity in our actions so that we're not just stocked with this model of, well, there's just the wills, and then they collide, and then there's an historical event. Al-Fazir is trying to say that as Marxists, we can and must go further, and the resources are there for us to go further and to get a better sense of what our minds actually are by being better materialists. So is that hopeful at all? Yeah. So let me try to give my articulation of what's being said here. That Al Thusair is saying that the will, and let me know if I'm wrong here because this is, you know, admittedly sort of complicated to

follow these lines all the way through. The will is sort of, it's not merely the result of nature and nurture. It's certainly not the libertarian will of just a completely self-motivated individual that is sort of concretized and bourgeois rule. It is in many ways super structurally constituted and this this gives rise or this is um you know the this is pointing towards the the superstructural effectivity that this that the will is super structurally constituted but the superstructural ephemera that constitute given wills historically is sort of lost to to to time in a similar way that all of the super structural effemera that you were just you were made a long list of these things that we deal with in modernity you know the tic-to influencers and the CNN image and the

the billboard and this and that. A lot of that is sort of, that ephemera is lost historically. When we look back on history, we don't necessarily see all the ways in which that superstructural ephemera were constructing wills. And therefore, by not seeing that, we kind of lose sight of that effective role that the superstructure plays and that losing of that the site of that superstructural role can then return us to this error of these ideas of the will constructed. in these poor or simplistic ways.

Is that kind of in the right direction? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a safe. What Al-Azer is offering you is a safeguard against all sorts of like chauvinisms and dogmatisms and all this kind of stuff that come along with falling into just sort of a philosophical model of these kind of philosophical abstract, like the will, the resultant, the forces, all this kind of stuff.

Althusay is saying, and he's saying to angles too, you know, don't lose sight of your own Marxism. We need, the answer is in the mode of production and in practice, right? It's all resolved in practice. It's like Alan Iverson. It's like, we're talking about practice. Practice, man. I've deterioratorialized his, and re-territorialized it into another, I delus and Guatari to Alan Iverson. But yeah, so, and again, by the way, by the way, I don't think Deluz and Guatari and Alan Iverson have ever been uttered in the same sentence ever in the history of Earth. So good job, Matthew. I'm always breaking new around, you know.

Although DeLose, he has a really funny analysis in John McEnroe, the tennis player, but we can talk about that another time. So, so yeah, he's, again, it's like, you don't, I guess the underlying point is that, yes, philosophical abstractions like the will or, you know, I may touch on SART's critique of dialectical reason here in a minute. You know, interiority, exteriority, yes, they have a certain value, but let's not forget that this is scientific socialism. So whatever and like our scientific investigations of how our minds are formed and, you know,

our actions are shaped and induced or brought forth, that doesn't have to map on one to one to a philosophical model of the mind. that we may happen to be entertaining, right? It doesn't, and again, this is very counterintuitive for especially, like, I would say, Anglo-American academic philosophy where everything kind of does have to line up like that. And if it doesn't line up like that, something's wrong, everyone's unhappy, you don't get funding, right? All these disasters fall off from it.

But in this approach that Althazir, sorry, is bringing, you know, influence. by Lenin, influenced by Gramsci, also influenced by Spinoza and obviously influenced by Marx, he's saying, we just don't need to even accept that whole framing of things because everything is in motion. And that's just how, like, it's just a fact of life that as you're doing these kinds of investigations into the base of the superstructure or whatever, some new philosophy of mind might come down the line. You're like, oh, maybe I should, yeah, let's entertain that and let's see how that might fit into something. But what is not asked for is before you even start playing the game, you get all your ducks in a row and you have all your inferences laid out and you have

all your principal concept. That's just not how Marxism works, right? And he's saying that Engels is, despite his best intentions, straying a little bit too far away from proper Marxism and giving people an opening for, again, a well-intentioned, a very well-intentioned and pedagogically well-intentioned and well-meant trope and turning it into a philosophical dogmatism. So we need to kind of resist that is what I think Althazir is saying. Well said. So two points before we move on to the next question. And as a side note, I just love that we can spend an hour on one question here. But going back to kind of closing the circuit on this entire discussion for this question, going back to the substance dualism and vulgar materialism and applying it not to the body and mind, but now applying it to base and superstructure. We can see a substance dualist approach to basin superstructure, which sort of sees them as separable, as things that aren't sort of co-operable. constitutive, you know, a sort of idea that the superstructure is merely a different substance and maybe, you know, one result of that is that it doesn't have effectiveness on the base, it doesn't

turn around and then influence the base, which can lead to errors. And then the vulgar materialism would be to try to reduce the superstructure to the base in the same way that, you know, modern cognitive scientists or philosophers attempt to reduce the mind to the body, that that can lead to a sort of economist of vulgar materialism in the realm of Marxism where the superstructure itself is sort of just reduced to the base and therefore it's stripped of its actual causal powers. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's just, it's just, it's just streaming by you and it doesn't actually mean or do anything. And so, um, so if you can understand what Alpazar is saying here and, and you, um, entertain my repeat.

he didn't claim that I've made over the last few years that people like Foucault and them are not postmodernists or anything of the sort that they've been described as in the West. And you understand what Althazir is saying is Brett and I have just laid it out. You can understand what they're doing and you can see how even if they're not perfect Marxists, even if they're not revolutionary leaders, which again, none of us are who are listening. You can understand how it's still useful, right? You can still engage with that stuff. And consider its errors, right, whatever errors they may be there, and still see how in the line of Althazir, what they're trying to do is precisely to give and to show the, give to and show the intelligibility of all of these superstructural motions and transformations and effects that are happening all the time in us, around us, through us, and that this is really what defines in many ways, like our life as social beings. our psychic life, you might say, as social beings.

And that's, you know, it just is a slight tangent. That's what sort of gutted me over the last 20 years. And I started out as a hater of Foucault. I was, I was, this often happens with me. I started out as a hater and I hated them because I'm a Marxist. And then I started to see, oh, geez, I've been misled by these certain ways of curating readings and pulling lines out and, you know, and I, you know, over a lot of hard work, I came to realize, wow, this stuff is really useful, you know.

This shows, this is their answer in a way because, like, I think Foucault, for example, is often taken to be critical of Marxism as a whole. I've found, you know, the more deeply you read, he's really criticizing French Marxism at the time that he's there and not even all French Marxism, basically the kinds of French Marxism that are influenced by like Merleau-Ponty and Sart, where they do sort of presuppose this kind of like unshakable baseline consciousness that is the sort of seat of the list. will. And so Foucault kind of lines up and Deleuzeo those guys, they line up along with Althazir, who is sort of lining himself up along with like Marx in the, in the trajectory of Spinoza, right? And again, as Hegel says, basically you can't even understand me if you don't understand Spinoza. You can't be a philosophy or if you're not a Spinoza's. So therefore you can't be a Higalian. By extension, you can't be a Marxist. And I think that that's really what they're bringing back is like this material analysis of the mind

as emerging through a social, you know, mode of organization, a mode of production, precisely what Voloshenov is talking about in the 20s, right? Anyway, so that's just a little tangent there. Well, I think you highlight the proper Marxist approach to all thinkers, to these thinkers, is that it's not a binary, right? It's not this person is right or this person is wrong. This person is good or this person is bad. You go into the thinker, you explore it skeptically, critical.

you understand the thought itself as a sort of product of dialectical materialism, right? Philosophy itself is a super structural phenomenon in the final instance, and you engage with it on those terms, and a thinker like Foucault, which is who is in part reacting to the Marxist tradition and particularly his cultural and historical iterations of Marxism, can at the same time be critical of core elements of Marxism, while at the other, at the same time offering, you know, kernels of very fascinating truth and lines of inquiry that might not always be present in mainline Marxism, and you can take that, engage with it, and your Marxism comes out better equipped to deal with the actual world in its actual state of constant evolution and not this dead, binary, dogmatic

way of approaching reality, which is this is either Marxist or this is not Marxist. And we can go back to Marx himself, who engaged deeply with figures like David Ricardo and Smith, and took insights garnered from them, they're by all means, by no means are they Marxist, right? But took thoughts and extended them, took the kernels of truth out of them, disregarded the kernels of untruth, and developed a deeper analysis of capitalism and of economics than they did. But if he would have came to them and said, oh, these are bourgeois economists, they're immediately wrong. I have nothing to learn from them. Das capital wouldn't have been

created, right? So I think that's important. And the other thing I wanted to say is one of the things that's at stake in these, you know, we're talking about substance dualism and vulgar materialism. We've talked about both of those and how they sort of manifest in our society. But interestingly enough, I'm in

currently in a high level, 4,000 level history class right now on the Holocaust. And we open up the class with struggling with these interpretations And in fact, our main paper, the bulk of our grade is centered on this paper where we take a position with regards to how the Holocaust happened. Do you take a structuralist position, which is basically that, you know, these deeper structural and functionalist forces gave rise ultimately to what we now call the Holocaust, the industrial attempt to eliminate European jewelry? or do you take an intentionalist approach, which puts the locus of the Holocaust in the intentions and

wills of Hitler himself and the top Nazi politicians and figures and architects, right? And this is, it kind of gets down to this idea of structural forces versus individualist great men of history theories of how the Holocaust happened. And I wrote the, I wrote the entire, my entire paper, of course, comes from a structuralist approach. My idea is like if Hitler himself had never been born. the Nazi party and the Holocaust, you know, they would have still happened because they were determined not by an individual's will, but by structural forces. Maybe the name of the party would have been different. Maybe the colors they chose would have been different. Maybe the Holocaust would have played out slightly differently. But the basic thing itself was not determined by the intentions or wills of any individuals or group of individuals, but by deeper structural issues that were operating above and beyond the conscious control. or even conscious comprehension of individuals. That doesn't mean that they're not culpable. It doesn't

mean they're not evil sons of bitches who deserve to die. But it does mean that the ultimate causes are much deeper than any one person's intentions. But I say all of this to say that when we're being taught that, the Marxist position is presented, and this is bourgeois academia, the Marxist position on this stuff, which is structural, which is nuance, which takes into consideration based in superstructures relations to one another, is presented in a high-level graduate course on the Holocaust as vulgar materialism. The Marxist position, as uttered by my professor, who I like, right, is that the Marxists think that the economic situation caused the Holocaust, that, you know, these fat cats, these capitalists wanted to maintain their economic control and regain

economic wealth in the wake of World War I, and that wills and intentions and cultures and ideologies are meaningless and don't matter. So the way that bourgeois academics teach Marxism is through the vulgar reductionist materialist error of Marxism. Christ Jesus, yes. Yes. It happened to me. Like, you know, I was first exposed to Marx and that before I went to university, right? And then, And to the extent that I was exposed to it in university, I, too, I got the impression for a long time that Marx himself is a material reductionist. Because that's what, I mean, Jordan P.

Like, he nurses everything and he just is an oppressor clock and send him, you know, all this kind of shit. And just to bring it back to Foucault for a second, that's exactly what the, so, you know, again, and I've seen so many people, I hate this French theory shit. hate that shit too, right? I hate that this way that these people have been packaged into this crap. But that is exactly, you know, we talk about structures and then, you know, features of structures differing even though those structures can be the same. That's exactly the kind of thing that's levied at Foucault, which is that, well, just as Marx reduces everything to class,

Foucault reduces everything to power and there's no agency, right? It's completely inane. It just, you know, and it's part of why I hated Foucault at first. Because, you know, and the same thing is sort of been done to Althazir. And I did hear, I think was in your discussion with Allison about the 18th Brumere, where you or Allison, and I can't remember which, said, you know, Althazir sort of leans more towards this structuralist tendency. And a lot of that in itself, too, is also the way he's read in Western academia, because another thing he does, he's constantly exploring like the agency of Lennon, for example. And it's like, there's all these structural things happening, but then there's Lennon, right? So he's there and like his agency

is key to what, I mean, the agency of everyone that was of all this key, but he's analyzing Lenin as this particular figure, right? So he doesn't reduce agency himself at all, right? But all of these thinkers like Marx, Altax-Zer Foucault, they all get accused of this themselves of this material reduction of vulgar materialism, which itself is what propels, Borswaite ideology, and it's a way of either bringing them inside or keeping them outside completely. And I would just say, like, don't ever underestimate how much distortion academia in the West applies to anything related to Marx in any way, shape, or form. And just like to clue up on that, just for example, go look at the debate with Chomsky. Foucault is like vigorously

defending revolutionary Marxism against what I think is a pretty appalling and violent a kind of anti-communism that Chomsky articulates to the point that he says, if I knew that there was a Marxist-Leninist movement happening in America that could lead to something, I would try to stop it. And Foucault is like, what do you? And Foucault is like, but these things that, you know, this representation of Marxist-Leninist is these bloodthirsty maniacs that doesn't really wash, right? I'm paraphrasing, of course.

And then Shomsky says, yeah, but which Marxist-Lander-ness would ever dare to say that out loud, that they want to destroy the whole world and kill everyone. Who would, which, you know, in Foucault, like, right? And then Chomsky comes out of that at the end saying Foucault is a moral. And then Foucault gets smeared in the West as this, um, nihilistic post-ma, it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. All you have to do is read the texts. Yeah.

In their, in their entirety. But just, you know, the Western academic pop culture is such a really, um, powerful, like, refractory or like refractive medium, um, that, you know, know, like, look at how bad they distort Marx. They do it to many, many others as well. Absolutely. Well said. And, you know, I'll have to read my paper that I wrote for that class on that topic of structuralism versus intentionalism because I robustly defend a Marxist approach to history. And I, in that paper, I talk about the relationship between the superstructure and the base and how Marxists do not discount ideology. We do not discount individual agency. We do not discount culture, et cetera. I complicate that entire narrative. And I only was giving. given 2,000 to 2,500 words and I went 4,000, so I'll see if I got docked on that. But I had to come in with it.

I did there many times. Oh, I had one last thing. Oh, there was one last thing to say. Oh, man, I lost it. Maybe I'll come back to me. I'm sorry. If it comes back, just let me know. Yeah, okay.

Let's go on to question number two. Okay, so in light of Althuzer's critique of angles, let's look more closely at the concept of a survival, quote unquote, a survival. What content does Althusair give to this concept of survival, and how does it pertain to our struggles with the superstructure? What are some key survivals that haunt us today? And how do they impede us from seeing things clearly through Marxist theory? Oh, wait, I just remembered the thing that I forgot. Perfect.

If you want to really understand where, like, Al-Fazir and the people that I just talked about is following from, where they stand in relation to structuralism, and this whole post-structuralism, it's a lot of crap. Basically, you can understand what they're coming from. If you just understand that for them, structures and transformations are not opposites, or in the sense of, you know, they cancel each other out. Right? That structures

themselves are motions and transformations. And if you can understand that, then you can understand what they're doing and they're not. So like when they're accused of being, or like Foucault or someone is being accused of being as post-structuralist, it's like, oh, they don't like structures, man. Everything's discontinuous and fragmentary. And

It's not what they're saying at all. They're just saying that we have to remember that structures themselves are also motions and changes and transformations. That's all. Interesting. All right. Amishers out there. I mean, sorry. All right.

So, yeah, let's get into that question around survival, maybe explain to us what is meant by that. And the survivals that haunt us today is an intriguing question. Yeah, well, I think the best way to get into this is to return to the 18th Brewer of Louis Bonaparte. And I highly recommend, if people, haven't listened to this yet, the excellent episode that Brett did with Allison about the 18th Brew, absolutely fascinating. One of the best episodes I've heard on the show, I think. Thank you.

And so really what he, I think maybe the best way to convey what Out of Azure means by survival is just to read from the 18th Brum Air. And you can just start really from the very beginning and read just a couple of paragraphs. So, quote, Hagel remarks somewhere that all great world, historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Cossidiere for d'Anton, Louis Blight for Robespierre, the Mountain of 1848 to 1851 for the Mountain of 1793 to 1795.

Comment, the university protests going on about Gaza today for the protests of the 60s over Vietnam or what happened in France or anything like there's an example of the survival that you know in that sense continuing the nephew for the uncle and the same caricature occurs in the circumstances in which the second edition of the 18th premier is taking place men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves but under circumstances directly found given and transmitted from the past the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem

engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past. Comment, remember the Tea Party in 2009? Right? Continuing to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise in this borrowed language. Thus, Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul. The Revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better than to do than to parody in turn 1789 and the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner, the beginner who has learnt a new

language always translates it back into his mother tongue. But he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can produce freely in it only when he moves in it without remembering the old and forgets in it, his ancestral tongue. So what Altaxer is trying to say is that the movements of the superstructure, of the various superstructural sort of items and dynamics and relationships and all that, and the way that they are expressed through us in, you know, social action does not map on to the way that the mode of production changes. There's delays, right? There's weird asynchronies or disynchronies, if you want to put it that way, so that

even though you're materially, physically in the present, you may be or have to in some sense, because the words aren't there yet, you may have to rely on tropes from the past in order to move into the future and develop new tropes that actually do pertain to the new material conditions, right? So, for example, you know, the Soviet Union is gone,

but nonetheless, it's still evoked in like so many ways by Marxists all around the world. And nonetheless, the Soviet Union is not something that, you know, despite what, like, certainly Vladimir Putin is not trying to restart the Soviet Union. Whatever comes in the future will never be just a replication of something like the Soviet Union.

Well, what comes in the future, well, in some, you know, to sort of give angles as due here, is something that, to a certain extent, nobody asked for. And then we'll have to deal with that, as Mao says, the contradictions don't stop. When you move from capitalism to socialism, and the contradictions continue. And so there's always this kind of like slippage

between your actual present material circumstances and then the super structural ways you sort of, you have of dealing with it. And so just to go on a little tangent, so the collection of lectures that I mentioned last time by Jacques Derrida called Spectres of Marx, that's exactly what he, in a way, it's like an Althazir,

it's like an Althazirian homage to the 18th Brumeir. That's one way of describing specters of marks. It's very much like the 18th premiere. Anyway, maybe it's like an 18th Bermarian way at paying homage to the 18th Premier. And he constantly starts out with quoting a passage from Hamlet. Let us go in together and still your fingers on your lips, I pray. The time is out of joint.

O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right. Neh, a come, let's go together. And he keeps hammering on this thing. The time is out of joint. The time is out of joint. and he's doing it to respond to among other people, Francis Fukuyama, and he's responding to the whole specter that it was posed to us in the early 90s of the end of history and interrogating that and being like, what is that?

It's insane. But you're now saying that the only sort of valid superstructural items that could possibly still exist are those that pertain to like bourgeois, neoliberal imperial imperial imperial imperial. capitalist capitalism. And everything else is obsolete now. And Derrida is, I think, you know, drawing on an Alta-Zera at a very deep level by saying, that ain't how it works, brother. And the more that you try to violently impose this sort of like monocronology and this sort of monoculture in order to achieve the objectives of this Western imperialist capitalism, the worst is going to come back on you in the end, right? All of these, I mean,

just look at the there's the profusion of forms of expression and the way that it's changing people's consciousness, young people's consciousness relative to Palestine, right? All that sort of you know, neoliberal fucking nonsense about how to live. It just

doesn't make sense to people anymore. Exactly. And they're, you know, young people are drawing on, you know, from the river to the sea. And I mean, even though that's the way that's been treated by these Western governments and so despicable and cowardly. But they're, well, pulling on resources, concepts, images, tropes, messages, all that sort of stuff from the past

that do not belong, quote unquote, to the present that, you know, the ruling fast wants us to stay sequestered within and using it to break that space that they want us to be sequestered within, right? So there's, there's always this kind of disjointedness to the actual material conditions and the way that the superstructures ramify. and the way that they take their efficacy and that their efficacy is exercised through our social operations. That's so good.

And tying it to that quote from the 18th Bremere is a great thing to do. I actually started my paper on that paper I was just talking about with that quote about how men don't make their own history but not of their own accord to kind of get into that entire concept. But you mentioned the Soviet Union

and immediately I started jotting down you know a survival of a past era and, you know, the very existence of this Ukraine proxy war against Russia is premised on the basis of NATO, right, as this thing that must crush the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union itself has died. The threat that NATO was coalesced to confront is no longer there, but the momentum of it is still there. And so even though Russia is a brutally capitalist society just as brutal as American capitalism in every single way, the survival of not just NATO, and U.S. hegemony in that post-war era, but the ideology that it generated is still very much alive in the minds of these 70 and 80-year-old fucking zombie freak fucks who run this world order. And so you can see how that ideology is still so, so present. It's shaping material reality, even though the material basis that gave rise to that ideology and those forces in the first place have, in some ways already have dissipated and evaporated. But they're still

trying to shove the, you know, the square peg of post-war ideology, whether that's neoliberalism at home or, you know, Russia must be stopped and brutal imperial hegemony abroad, that ideology lives on. And that's a survival in some sense that is haunting us today. Yeah. And yeah, so there's a good side and a bad side to it, right? And we are being haunted by the bad side, but we're also being haunted by the good side. And you can see the bad side. is working like still out this international rules based order oh i saw a i was seeding that we need to get these from the funds to ukraine because it's the best way of defending democracy geopolitically like all of these phrases and words like they're just so empty now i mean do you do you find that

as well it's just so empty it doesn't resonate with anybody under fucking 40 and that that that that is giving rise to this crisis where the political establishment is desperately trying to squash these campus uprisings because the people in those uprisings have a different ideology. They're informed by different mediums. And what we're seeing with the Democrats and Republicans freaking out about campus, right? And they've been doing this for years, but it's really coming to a head right now is precisely the contradiction of this ideological survival of a time and a totally different context that young people are alien to. They no longer accept the basic premises of that era. They grew up in completely different material context in the people.

people who want to carry forward that ideology still and this material clash between the police state and the youth and all the contradictions of these fucking idiot asshole freaks in the Democratic Party talking about you have to fucking vote for us if you want to stop fascism and preserve democracy as they as they are marching out the fascist troops to squash our First Amendment rights to assembly and free speech. It is fucking insane. But that insanity is a product of the fact that this ideology no longer has any tread with real material reality. And so, of course, crisis is the result. And that's what we're saying.

And while it's an ugly thing to watch, Palestinians are still being slaughtered and college kids are being brutalized by fucking 45-year-old men in body armor at the behest of the fucking state. That is a transition period that necessarily must occur to rid ourselves of this old ideology, of these survivals that are haunting us. And that is going to take the form of a prolonged crisis abroad. You know, externally, there's a crisis of empire. Internally, there's a crisis of legitimacy. And those are products of this sort of material dissidence between the super structural ideology of those in charge and the material reality of people trying to start and build their life in the actual context that they exist. And that is what we're seeing right now. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, these guys, these people out there still seeing this stuff. I mean, it's kind of like you're in a relationship with someone and there's, you know, the first time you say, I love you and then it falls dead and doesn't feel like anything. And then for a while after that, you'll still do it. You know, like all this kind of stuff. And then the relationship itself actually ends later. But that's sort of where these people are right now, it seems like, you know, like this stuff is still like standing at this like triumphalist messageing about NATO and the IMAT, like the World Bank and all these, like this whole. you know, or when they were like trying to do the Red Sea, I like,

we've got a coalition of seven nations and it's like, yeah, Canada sent two officers, the Netherlands sent the boat with no staff, no personnel, like this, they're still saying the stuff, but the reality doesn't correspond to it. So it's like this deleterious kind of survival, whereas the survivals being called upon

by the protesters in this sort of movement against genocide and ultimately against Western imperialism, they are drawing sort of productively and generatively off these sort of absolutely whenever I hear the term rules-based international order my eyes roll in the back of my head vomit begins emerging from my throat a laugh escapes my lips it is the most absurd fucking thing in the world the moment you hear rules-based international order you know somebody's engaging in ideological mystification and it's utter bullshit that should

immediately set off all your alarms everything that comes after that is pure propaganda nothing of substance and and the hilarious idea about aOC talking about you know re-entrenching this idea that we need to give money to ukraine because you know they're fighting against the authoritarian russians ukraine is before this war objectively the most corrupt country in europe it is an oligarchic anti-democratic corrupt state just as corrupt in every way as the u.s and russia and to think that you are helping the ukrainians defend democracy a democracy they don't even fucking have neither do the other two states involved is absolutely fucking laughable but that is the absurdity that comes from trying

to again you know enforce this idea whose time and whose material um basis has completely passed but you're still trying to impose the the superstructure where the base no longer exists this is what we get yeah yeah and um i've been meaning to make this comment too i have been thinking and i think part of why they're part i mean part of why they're leaning so hard into this because they don't want to give up their position, their class position or whatever. But on a deeper level, I've been thinking probably since around November or December

that the movements that are happening now, what I'm seeing, the changes are bigger, way bigger than the fall of the Soviet Union. I saw this one analyst, Andre Martianoff, he kind of goes in those circles with some of those more right-wing dudes,

like Scott Ritter and those guys. But he's, he's, he's, I find him very on point. And he does speak highly of the Soviet Union from time to time. And he said, and he's Russian. And he said that too. He's like, what's happening right now is, and this was like last month or month before he said that this is bigger than the fall of the Soviet Union.

What's happening to the West is bigger than that. And I've certainly, I've certainly felt that since pretty early into the post-Daloxa flood October 7th day. And that's part of why I think they're hanging. and on so completely is because they know that, I mean, depending on how you periodize it, like between 500 and 2,000

years of brutal, violent Western domination are now, it's coming to an end. And there's nothing they can do to stop it. They're begging China. It's like, please please like don't be free market with us. Like, nonsense they're getting on with.

It's just over and they don't know how to be human beings. Um, you know, they don't know how to do it. The, you know, the hilarious part of, when the Soviet Union collapsed, of course, there was this period of triumphalism in the West. And we get the, you know, Francis Fukuyama is the end of history, sort of emerging out of this triumphalism that just had this concrete idea that, you know, liberal, democratic, quote unquote, capitalism and Western, quote, unquote, values have ultimately triumphed. And now we're moving into this era where those ideas become absolutely hegemonic. But the truth of the matter is, is not that the U.S. and the West defeated the Soviet Union. It's that the Soviet Union collapsed just a few decades before the West collapsed, right?

It's not that one beat the other and then the other one gets to rain for a thousand years. It's that the entire system, the Soviet Union collapsed for complex internal and external reasons, right? We can get into it, revisionism, all this other stuff. But the U.S.-based order and U.S. liberal capitalism is now also in a state of collapse. So it's not like the U.S. fucking one. It's just that its collapse was a little delayed, was able to be propped up a little longer. And I think with 9-11, we got the first shot across the bow of the end of history. And with a 2008 financial crisis, the beginning of the end has officially started.

And we are still living in that crisis period generated by all of that late 90s, early 2000s history. And this process is going to continue to play out. And I don't know how much longer we have. you know, maybe the internal contradictions and the external contradictions will continue to mount for several years. Maybe something happens next month. I'm not exactly sure how this plays out, but that is what's happening. There was no victory, just a delayed collapse as well. And so I think that's what we're living through. Oh, I mean, like 2008, you said 9-11 was a shot across the bow. 2008 was a torpedo in the hull. Exactly right. And now I'll share one of our Newfoundland

cultural jams with the listeners. Here, uh, it, If you get a hull breach, you sprung a leak, we got a saying here for that. And it's, the arse has gone right out of it. So, like when COVID came and,

um, everyone, we had to do the lockdown and everything. I, I came on to like the message board like Reddit and see what people are saying. And people had this meme where it's like, we need to restore the arse. Restore operation restore arse.

That's all means. Yeah, but in this case, Western imperialism, the ars shall not be restored. The ars has gone. Right. out of her. That's it. Anyway, we love it. Next question. We love it. All right. Number seven. Let's return to the notion that dialectical change is fundamentally characterized by unevenness.

Althusair calls it a primary, not secondary law of the dialectic. What does he mean by this? And how can we wrap our heads around it? How does it help keep dialectics tied to the sciences? What is the connection between unevenness and the transformation of quantity into quality? that's been like four months now since I wrote through the devised this question for us to remember exactly what I was thinking well I mean we can just follow on the last question that we just went over and see the the unevenness there right so like when you're in a new set of material circumstances the superstructural aspects don't just catch up right away there's always that's there's so there's that kind of unevenness but then there's also the unevenness of

you know, the material dialectic of, um, you know, um, factors and events and everything piling up to, you know, to the point where you get to the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. And then all of a sudden you're like, you're in a different world, right? Um, so for example, um, look at what just happened with Operation True Promise that Iran did on Israel and really, I think, you know, slapped the, the bejesus out of them, you know, gave them gave them a real fright. It said, you know, you had these, you know, 20 years of this war on terror crap and the United States projecting this apparent omnipotence, like, you know, they can just absolutely

control everything, destroy anything that's falling out of their control and make sure that they permanently stay on top. While they're slowly, you know, neoliberalizing their military, slowly moving away from, you know, traditional combined arms, military forces and operations, one of the, someone in the army that are like, Audrey Martinianov, he could talk about this way better than I could, but just slowly, you know, altering their military formation so that it's more just like urban combat with small squads and they're just like putting down insurgents and all

this kind of, which is the safe liberation fighters. And, but then they run into this incident with Iran and then it becomes, more and more clear, like, exactly how we can do they've become, right? And so there's this this sort of like, I think to some extent, a certain kind of like break that happened with the Iran response where it's like, wow, we really are the next world now. Like, they really can't just do whatever they want to people and, like, really get away with it anymore the way that they used to be able to. And that that is not something that, like, that set of, um, transformations is not something that maps on to the kind of like bad Hegelian sort of dialectical

process that Althazir is talking about where everything comes in its due time and develops of its course and you kind of kind of anticipate it to a certain extent. Where we find is that, you know, we're constantly being smacked by these things that were unforeseen to us, but then when we go and investigate the things that were unforeseen, we can deduce or like adjuice their intelligibility and it's like oh that's why this happened but the relationship that they have to the way that we actually perceive things doesn't operate in that way does that make any sense at all yeah this is really this is stuff i find very tough yeah yeah it is tough for sure um one thing i was writing down when you when you were speaking is that

they're they're in a you know kind of thinking about you know you're talking about iran and you know Hamas and all this the obviously the conflict going on right now and and one of the things that I've noticed that has changed, even since 9-11, especially since 9-11, is the inability of the ruling class to convince their own people of their cause via ideological mystification. And there's lots of reasons for that, in part, the communicative technologies, which allows us to get around corporate media, the material conditions that young people have grown up in. You know, young people right now, if you're on those campus protests, you're 19, 20, 21 years old.

You were like 14, 15, 16 during 2020. you were like five or six during Occupy you know you've come up in like a totally sort of different material context and then you have access to brand new modes of information like a show like this a conversation like this 20 years ago would just happen in a bar between me and Matt you know it would not be programmed out to thousands tens of thousands of other human beings and so there's lots of these things that have shifted but you remember after 9-11 the u.s ruling class was absolutely a able. And there's a lot of like, you know, in hindsight, a lot of people saying all these critiques of the Iraq war and everything. At the time, for a good span of five to ten fucking years, the American people were ideologically mystified in to believe that this was a fight about freedom and democracy, that, you know, Islam is this inherently violent and primeval religion. Thanks new atheists for that ideological contribution. And most people believed it. Most people across the political spectrum imbibed that propaganda, internalized it, and externalized it in the form of their beliefs and their politics and who they vote for and what politicians say, etc.

And think about how, you know, Arabs and Muslims were able to so easily be utterly demonized after 9-11 and how impossible it seems, especially among young people, for the ruling class to play that same game today, even though they're trying. Their whole thing, Israel is this innocent, you know, fascists always present themselves as innocent, right? Even as they are the aggressor, they're always saying, actually were the real victims. The Nazis did this, you know, racist, fascists in the U.S. do this, Zionists do this, where they're simultaneously, you know, a victim of these evil Muslims, but also the most brutal, asshole, violent enforcers of just complete mass murder on people. You know, you can kind of see that. But out of the 9-11 era came a lot of this idea that like Americans are fucking ignorant. Like the whole rest of the world is much more informed on what was happening and Americans were so ideologically mystified that, you know, everything they said was fucking ignorant because they were echoing in so many ways the ideological narrative being given to them by the ruling class elite.

And that no longer works. That no longer works. And you can see that the ruling class is coming to terms with the fact that that no longer works via the brutality that they need to impose. But here's the funny thing about dialectics as well. The more you try to repress something, the more you inflame it. You know, that's true emotionally. Like if you have issues, like even using the terms of psychoanalysis, like Jungian psychoanalysis, you know, like you have a shadow side. And if you repress it, that shadow side comes out in all these neurotic and unhealthy and self-sabotaging ways.

And only by, you know, actually addressing it and looking at it, reflecting on it and integrating it, does that shadow become no longer. sort of harmful. But what we see here is this desperate attempt to clamp down on the protest and in that very act of clamping down, it spreads the wildfire. It pours gasoline on the fire. And I think that shows the incompetence of the ruling class elite and really foreshadows this whole era is coming to an end because all we see is it growing. And not only do we see it growing over more campuses in North America, we now see it expanding to campuses all over the fucking world, including in Europe and including in West Asia and the more videos

there are of fucking big burly piece of shit cops slamming fucking 50 year old professors onto the ground and brutalizing fucking 19 year old students the more people around the world pick up the Palestinian flag and go out on their campus and

start to occupy it so it's really this fascinating fucking thing that we're watching but their ability to convince us of their narratives is completely being destroyed and that's why they want to ban TikTok and that's why they want to crack down on campuses and that's why they want to demonize the youth is because they know on some level

even if it's not fully conscious they are losing their fucking grip and their time in power and their ideas are coming to an end. Yeah, and it's happening faster every day. It's certainly happening faster than I even anticipated, that's for sure. And there's nothing you can do

to slow it down at this point. I don't think other than just killing everyone. Which, that's not a rule. I mean, they, they, a lot, you know, I think Joe Biden would love to slaughter way more people. Absolutely, absolutely. But I just, yeah, I wanted to touch on that sub-question. So how does this concept of, given this help keep dialectics tied to the sciences? And again, science, I'm struggling through it and I will continue for the rest of my life to get better at this stuff.

But science, the sciences really don't deal with like equilibrium states so much as they do of like one state. tending towards another state, right? This is what calculus is about. This is what so much of, you know, just so much of mathematics is about. It's about the transformation of one thing into another. And that means, like, things not staying in an equilibrium. Things are always tending toward the next thing. They're moving away from what was before.

And in sort of like Borswa ideology, everything is sort of in a kind of like false stillness. They don't accept that, or it doesn't accept or it doesn't want you to accept that. Everything is slowly transformed, even though you can't perceive it, everything to some extent is transforming into something else. And the qualitative transformation will succeed or come at the end of a series of quantitative transformations. So quantity and quality are in a sort of condition of unevenness relative to each other as well.

And that's what I think it's, you know, mathematics, I think, for anyone interested in dialectical materialism, mathematics is an extremely important thing to learn, I would argue. I have found some forms of it that, again, like I struggle with math my whole life. I'm one of those people. It's like, I suck at math. And everyone's like, no, you don't suck. You just had the wrong condition. Like, all that kind of stuff. I sucked at math.

But I found, I've been, I found, because it, you know, we really just had like a colonial curriculum to be, you know, shopkeepers or fishermen or something like that. There's this revival, even though that wasn't realistic for the material conditions we were going to go into with the rise of neoliberalism and then NAFTA and all that stuff. They were still training us to approach learning as though it was like 1910 in a way, right? And but I, so, you know, we started out just arithmetic and then moved into algebra and that's when I lost, I found it, I'd never recovered through all of high school. but later in my twenties I started reading set theory and that you know slowly over many years I've gotten a better grasp of things but then in the last year or two I discovered category theory and I found that that stuff is very very helpful and just yeah learning more about the calculus

learning more about topology and like transformations and again like I'm the opposite of an expert so I'm probably saying ignorant things here or getting things a little bit wrong but I'm not wrong about the fact that mathematics can only bolster your skill as a dialectician and as a dialectical materialist. And it's relation to the sciences as well. And like Trotsky says that chemistry is like the ultimate science of dialectical materialism. That's helpful for us to learn physics, biology, and chemistry from the standpoint of dialectical materialism and to consider the unevenness of processes. absolutely, which is why I'm notorious for using evolution by natural selection as a teaching tool to explain to people dialectical materialism, that the cosmos actually works this way. And you can apprehend it better, whether it's chemistry, biology, physics, by apprehending it through the dialectical lens, which is absolutely fucking beautiful and deepens your understanding of the cosmos. And if we are the universe experiencing itself and becoming conscious of itself to understand itself at deeper and deeper levels is in some sense. the goal of all of this.

And so, you know, dialectics helps in that regard. And so, yeah, if I can characterize the unevenness thing, one last way. Yes. It's not the case that you have one state of affairs or one object and then instantaneously, boom, it's replaced with another one completely, completely replaces it and completely exerts its own presence. In reality, and the more we look at the sciences and mathematics and consider dialectics and practice, practice and societies, we see that it's not that way at all.

things are coming into being, forming as sort of what they are with antecedents that themselves came into being and then tended away from their own being towards other things through death or dissolution or reproduction or whatever it is. And then whatever is here now is already in the process of dialectically giving way to what will appear to you next. Absolutely. And the last thing I'll say about this is you can think about this unevenness and this transformation, this, you know, the dialectical change is being characterized by And even as you can look at the shifts from feudalism into capitalism. I always bring this point up.

You know, it was not merely this like, okay, once things had reached a certain point, boom, now you have capitalism and feudalism has ended. No, it is this, you know, this uneven development, right? Some countries advance faster than others, and then those countries that advance faster than turn around and exploit those who, you know, are making this change at an uneven and slower, at a slower rate. You see false starts, you see repressions, you see the French Revolution, and then you see Napoleon. This is how dialectics actually fucking works. And so if we understand that that's that 500 plus year transition from feudalism through mercantilism, through revolutions and reactions to modern day, you know, monopoly capitalism, then we can also understand immediately that the shift to socialism will also be similar.

That is going to be these jumps and these starts, these fallbacks, these retreats, these reactions. And so, of course, the Soviet Union could not be perfect socialism, nor could it never end. had to sort of take two steps forward, make incredible advancements theoretically and materially, and then dissolve away and fall away to be replaced by other movements, trying their heart. You know, then you have China rising up, trying socialism in the Chinese context. And then, you know, then you have the Deng reforms and, like, let's see if we can do it a little different. Let's see if we can integrate into the global economy strategically, you know. And so this is the nature of dialectical change.

And that's what we have seen historically and we'll continue to see. And I think it really helps people sort of schematically, tactically and strategically to understand that the fight for socialism will be like the, you know, the transformations of previous times from other motive productions into others. It's never clean. It's never done on the first try. It's never perfect. And it's, you know, and it's still to this day, we have feudal arrangements. There are elements of the global order that still are futile or semi-futal in their character. We have slavery in the modern world.

We have slavery, even in the most advanced industrial, you know, post-industrial capitalist society on earth, America, we have slavery in the prison systems. And so these older modes of productions also don't fully go away. They linger. They haunt us, right? They survive in these various ways under class society. And perhaps we can get out of that only when we get out of class society. So, you know, socialism is this attempt to move from capitalism, a classless society. And so maybe socialism itself and the process, the global process that it that takes place under this this this you know however long it takes movement into socialism will also have these elements as well um they'll be maybe brought to

higher levels or they'll be expressed differently maybe slavery will fall away but there are still semi-futal society who knows um but i think we should really think in that complicated and nuanced way so that we don't fall into this trap of of hyper simplistic stages dogmatism right yes yes exactly all right so number eight is what can we draw from our discussion so far about the relationship between historical and non-historical objects or processes? Yeah. So the interesting things about what Alfezer says in the appendix when he's critiquing angles is that the superstructural effects, that is to say, how they actually operate in us,

on us and through us, they are all arguably intelligible in some sense, like Marshall Malcun can make them intelligible, right, this, that, or the other way, or, you know, some other media critique type person or not in the vulgar sense of media critique but in the more higher philosophical sense that McLuhan does but the question is what of those effects is intelligible

historically in the sense of in the life of the class struggle and so Althazir is saying we need to have the right techniques to make those superstructural effects intelligible from the standpoint of this problem that we have of history. And but and there's, but, but nonetheless, those ones are still not categorically different

than the, the, the ones that do not get taken up in the historical intelligibility. So there's just kind of like, oris, uh, border between the historical and the non-historical that I think, uh, is right for exploitation, not in the capitalist sense. And here is, I actually just want to bring Foucaulte one last time and reads, I, I, I, from what I think is the most influential on me thing that he wrote, I would say that I would say most people listening have never heard of. And it's an essay called Return to History. Have you ever heard of this?

Yeah, I'm not sure. It's from 1972, so like the same year that he defended Marxism against Nolmchomsky. Sounds familiar, but yeah, I don't know. So he basically, in this essay and an interview from the same, it's either the same year or the year before called on the ways of writing history, He lays out this sort of epistemological duality that he posits of what he calls a series and what he calls an event. Now, this brings us right back to the beginning of the episode, where I talked about how practice forces us into adopting state concepts and continual concepts. And he says that everything in history can be looked at from the standpoint of event, which is to say a state, right?

structure without change in transformation or rather structure emphasized over change in transformation or from the standpoint of series, which is to say transformation emphasized out front of or over structure. And everything, every historical object can be looked at and is in fact both of these things at once. Yes. And he says, I would like to quote, I would like now, I would now like to show how certain methods currently employed by historians make it possible to give a new meaning

to the notion of event. Here he's comment. Here he's, I think, sort of critiquing a very well-known school of historians in France called the Anali school and the most famous one of them is Ferdin Brodell.

And you'll probably encounter Brodell if you haven't already in your historical studies in school. And what Brodell does, a very influential historian and a very historical influential historical approach is that he says

there's basically three kinds of historical time there's what he calls long duration in French long durée that's like you know thousands and thousands of years there's long duration time

and then there's a sort of like intermediary time of you know 50 to 200 years and certain social trends changing changes and stuff like that and then you have what he calls event time and he's like an event is just something that happens

in a very short period of time like an assassination or something like that, or a bridge collapsing. It's brewing up Baltimore, right? Or something like that. But Foucault has a very different concept of event, and he called his definition of an event is two series, two material, chronological, historical series coens are intersecting with one another.

And it's sort of not that entirely dissimilar what Engel says about the parallelogram of forces, right? So it's, on one level, two forces colliding and creating a third thing, which is the result in the collision of those two forces. But Rufuco, following Althazir, writes into this, is that we cannot lose sight of the fact that the two series are themselves composed of events, which are themselves composed of series. And so you see this kind of like, you can see generation and change written into and

perceivable within moments of stability. This is why Althazir and Etienne Balibar praise Foucault, Ohio. in their book, Reading Capital for 1965, because they're like, yeah, he's got these techniques for perceiving, not only that structures are transformations, but also at the same time that transformations have structures. And this is, and I'm just going to, you know, I've used the word flux a number of times in the deep, in the deep, up. And I hate the term flux for the same reason Foucault likes it. He's like, it's too romantic and just hand wavy. We need to be able to show that even changes have structures and differences have structures. Anyway, so continuing.

People are in the habit of seeing that contemporary history concerns itself less and less with events and more and more with certain broad general phenomena that would extend through time, as it were, and would remain immobile through time. But for several decades, historians have been practicing a so-called serial history in which events and sex of events constitute the central theme. Serial history does not focus on general objects that have been constituted beforehand, such as feudalism or industrial development. Serial history defines its object on the basis of an ensemble of documents at its disposal. Thus, about 10 years ago, a study was done of the commercial archive of the Port of Seville during the 16th century, everything having to

do with the entry at exodus ships, their number, their cargoes, the selling price of their goods, their nationality, the places they came from, the places they were sailing to. It was all these data, but only these data, that constituted the object of study. In other words, the object of history is no longer given by a kind of prior categorization into periods, epochs, nations, continents, forms of culture. One no longer studies Spain and America during the Renaissance. One studies, and that is the sole object, all the documents relating to the life of the port of Seville at such and such a date.

The consequence, and this is the second trait of the serial history, is that this history doesn't use these documents to immediately decipher the economic development of Spain. The object of historical research is to establish, on the basis of these documents, a certain number of relations. In this way it was possible to establish, I'm referring again to Hugette and Pierre-Show News study on Seville, year-by-year statistical estimates of the entries and excess of ships, classifications according to countries and distributions in terms of goods. Based on the relations, they were able to establish the show news were able also to plot the curves of development,

the fluctuations, the increases, the stoppages, the decreases. They could describe cycles and establish relations, finally, between this group of documents concerning the port of Seville and other documents of the same type concerning the ports of South America, the Antilles, England, and the Mediterranean ports. The historian, you see, does not interpret the document in order to reach behind it and grasp a kind of hidden social or spiritual reality. His work consists in manipulating and processing a series of homogeneous documents relating to a particular object and a particular epoch and the internal or external relations of this corpus of documents are what constitutes the outcome of the historian's work. Using this method, and this is the third feature of serial history, the historian can reveal a

events that would not have appeared in any other way. In traditional history, it was thought that events were what was known, what was visible, what was directly or indirectly identifiable, and the work of the historian was to search for their cause or meaning. The cause or meaning was essentially hidden. The event, on the other hand, was essentially visible, even if one sometimes lacked the documents to establish it with certainty. Serial history makes it possible to bring out different layers of events, as it were, some being visible, even immediately knowable by the contemporaries comment. By this, he means the people who are contemporary to these events.

Continuing, and then beneath these events that form the froth of history, so to speak, there are other events that are invisible, imperceptible for the contemporaries, and are of a completely different form. Let's take up the example of the show news work again. In a sense, the entry or exit of a ship from the Port of Seville is an event with which the contemporaries inhabiting Seville were perfectly familiar, and which we can reconstruct without too many problems. Beneath this layer of events, there exists another type of events that are a bit more diffuse,

events that are not perceived exactly in the same way by the contemporaries, but which they have a certain awareness of all the same. For example, a lowering or an increase of prices which will change their economic behavior. And then, beneath these events as well, you have others that are hard to locate, that are often barely perceptible for the contemporaries, but nonetheless constitute decisive breaks. Thus, the reversal of a trend, the point at which an economic curve

that had been increasing levels off or begins to decline. Such a point is a very important event in the history of a town, a country, or possibly a civilization, but the people who are its contemporaries are not aware of it. In our own case,

despite a relatively precise national accountancy, we don't exactly know that the reversal of an economic trend has occurred. The economists themselves don't know whether a stop and an economic curve signals a great general economic reversal of the trend or simply a stop or a little intercycle in a more general cycle. It is history's task to uncover this hidden layer of diffuse, quote-unquote, atmospheric, polycephalic events that determine finally and profoundly the history of the world, for it is quite clear to us now

that the reversal of an economic trend is much more important than the death of the king, end quote. And what I found interesting and, you know, hopping from Althazir into Foucault here, is that the sort of schema of analysis that Altheser sets up and that Foucault here continues enables you to shift seamlessly from non-historical to historical events because let's just go back to, thus about 10 years ago, a study was done of the commercial archive of the Port of Seville during the 16th century. everything having to do with the entry and action of ships, their number, their cargoes, they're selling price of their goods, their nationality, the places they came from, the places they were sailing to. And so you can move from that level of analysis up to considering the historical import, their historical import, but it also opens you up to a whole reality of non-historical events or non-historical happenings that help contribute to historical happenings.

Like, this ship was delayed. This ship was delayed because one of the guys went on shore leave while we were in port and he caught a communicable disease, like a respiratory disease, and everyone got sick for a week and we were delayed from leaving. And so there's this, these things in it of themselves are resolutely non-historable. And if there's one instance of it, even the whole ship being. delayed for a week or something like that is non-historical. But if you have a, like a pandemic, for example, that shuts down global shipping,

which is really nothing other than a whole concatenation of little events like that, that is historical. And so, again, against all these, these amateurs out there that call Michelle Foucault, a post-modernist or a post-structuralist, here is a man who is a thinker, doesn't matter that he's a man, a thinker who's a responsible materialist who is showing that you can actually segue from the non-historical into the historical end back by using these methods. This is why I hate Western academia. Fascinating stuff, man. Fascinating stuff.

But that's the thing. So I think that, you know, history and non-history are opposed as opposites, but here you can find their unity and then actually navigate through them. Absolutely. Beautiful. All right. Well, to wrap this conversation up, What are some takeaways for us here considering present-day debates among the Western left, such as it is, like those of settler colonialism, the national question, or sectarianism? What can we learn? To temper our expectations is probably the most immediate practical takeaway that we can have, because how often do you go on social media or all pop on to Reddit or, you know, whatever,

and something happens and people are caught in the immediate, immediacy of it, right? So, you know, and there's, you know, we've talked about the before, there is a pervasive doomerism among Westerners, a pervasive, like, fatalistic, pessimistic mea that you see. It's like, no, you know, no faith in humanity or just like, I look, this, I've seen this before, I look at what Israel is due to Gaza, and I realize humanity is disease and we all need to, the humanity needs to go. And it's like, you're saying that you want the Palestinians to die, you fool. I know, yeah.

Right? And part of it is just we get presented with these specters, these images of what is happening, but they are not, the immediacy and the sort of apparent permanence of them is not in keeping with the processes that delivered those appearances to you in the first place. And so the kind of quasi-mathematical way

that Althazir takes up of considering events and that I just, you know, supplemented with a bit of, Foucault there. I think it can hopefully help us develop just more realistic expectations and like not panic all the time, you know, not take what a meet, the first datum that appears to you was the whole answer and all that kind of stuff. And then also, well, expect the unexpected.

Right. Again, to go back to, you know, we talked about settler colonialism last time in the way that some Western Marxists think, well, this, you know, this, this fucks, you know, the Scotches, the whole conceptual scheme of bourgeoisie and proletariat and the whole system of categories and inferences that go along with that and it's like, yeah, but

the world isn't responsible to that scheme. That scheme is responsible to the world. Exactly. This is why Mao says it's not a religion. It's a guide to action, right? Or to bring back, take off someone from the past. Even, you know, Thomas Aquinas

says, if you are reading the Bible and then you go out and you explore nature and nature appears to contradict the Bible, then you're reading the Bible wrong. It's not that nature is wrong. Because if that's true, then there's no reason for science. And as Aquinas works out in the very first passages of the Summa Theologica, we need science. And what science tells us should modify our reading of the scripture. Now, if Thomas Aquinas, you know, who is what, like, I mean, he's, the golden boy of the Roman Catholicism can make that concession, and certainly Marxists can make that concession.

That is that the scripture is accountable to reality and not the other way around. And that's what makes it scientific socialism. Yeah, I think that's the takeaway. And Altaxer, you know, it's the Schotinger's name pronunciation, whatever. It's neither. It's both until you actually say it. What he's giving you a means to sort of rash, take that on board and incorporate it into your being and the way that you conduct yourself

whether you're trying to communicate about this stuff to people or engage in you know some kind organizing but you know but trying to change or you know trying to bring people over to our side those who are ready to have their minds change to give them the best possible account of what it is to be on our side yeah yeah beautifully said beautifully I don't know what free I'm sorry to interrupt you you're praising me. I love when you say beautifully said. I don't know. What about you for takeaways?

No, I really like that. I love that point that you made that, you know, that we're supposed to orient ourselves towards reality. We can't shift reality to orient themselves towards our dogmas. And the case of settler colonialism and the people who want to act like that is all in the past. It has no relevance for today. It's just convenient for their schema.

It's convenient for the schema of them as the, you know, gritty proletariat who's fighting the bourgeoisie and this settler colonial situation, well, that's sort of a, that's a wrinkle, you know, that's a complication that I'd rather not deal with. So let me, you know, invent a reason why it's actually in the past and we don't have to worry about it anymore because that's much nicer for me and my outlook on the world. And it fits much more neatly into my dogmatic perspective of what this tradition that I am identifying with, you know, should say or what I want it to say. And I think that's a beautiful, that's beautiful buttress against all forms of dogmatism and chauvinism if you can if you can actually

sort of reorient your perspective in that regard and understand that the scientific part of scientific socialism is dealing with reality as it actually is not trying to obscure mystifier hide inconvenient parts of reality but to take the whole thing on and if anything needs updated it's not reality it's your schema and and that's always a very important thing to keep in mind Yeah. And again, like I said last time, these, this raft of techniques that we now identify a settler colonialism, by the time proletarianization happened in Europe, that was, it was antecedent or prologue to that proletarianization. But it's also the case that that was repurposed to so the West could do what it's done in the Americas. I'm sorry it's not easy. I'm sorry it doesn't fit into a smoothly operating philosophical scheme. But that's actually what happened. What are you like, what do you want? me to say hey you know what i mean um we need to just we need to deal with it sorry nature doesn't need to be updated your bible does yeah very simple yeah all right my friend another great dialectics deep dive um we obviously have much more uh to to do together we're certainly not ending our cooperation

or episodes together we're just sort of putting an end to this this three years long dialectic deep dive series which i'm very proud of um elements of our audience and really really love for some people. It's the favorite, their favorite thing that we do on this show. And I obviously could not do any of this without you and your extensive knowledge, my friend. Before I let you go, is there any recommendations you want to give? Any plugs you want to give? Any last words? Anything at all? Yeah, I have a list of recommendations. So when I did the AMA with you back in, was that March or February or whatever, I recommended, and instead I would recommend again, the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Researches, New Study, Hyper-Imperialism, a

dangerous, decade new stage. And also, that one, it's 186 pages long, but it has like

a 50 page long executive summary called the churning of the global order. And I, I think, yeah,

I've seen sort of some anxiety about the term hyper-imperialism, just like with Michael Hudson's super-imperialism, because I think

people are afraid that what they're doing is sort of what, like Janus Verifakis is doing. We's like, we've left, we've left capitalism behind. We're in techno feudalism. And it's like, bro, I don't know about you, but I work for a wage.

I don't know where you're at, but anyway. Yeah. But that's not what Hudson, that's not what Hudson or Vijay Prashad are doing with these terms. They really are just trying to analyze sort of inflections of imperialism, like how it's acting, depending on where it is at the point that the analysis is made. And the Tri-Continental Institute's report on hyper-imperalism is extremely valuable. I think it's a bit, like if you read imperialism by Lenin, neocolonialism by Nekhruma, super imperialism by Hudson, which is in a way he's analyzing the development of the

super structural instruments that were used to affect neocolonialism as Nekhruma describes it politically economically. And then this new study, you'll have a very powerful understanding of what's happening in the world's right now. And just to even make it a little bit more palatable. Also, Ronnie Ocalaq did an interview with Vijay Prashad last month called Hyper-Imperialism, U.S. NATO's Dangerous and Deccant New Stage. So I'll give you the little things for the show notes.

I also want to recommend a book that some of my comrades alerted me to. So this is a translation of the Vietnamese government's sort of mandatory first-year university the text on Marxism, Leninism that they, have you heard about this one? Yes? No, I don't think so. It's translated by someone named the Luna Wing. I'm terrible at this. When I was a kid, I thought it was

Proustic, the Goyan. And then I was like, no, it's Nguyen, and now I've heard its wing, so I apologize. I also apologize, because until I found out about this book, I thought this person was a gaming streamer, I deeply apologize for that. But the text is called, the curriculum of the basic principles of

Marxism, Landonism, Part 1. the worldview and philosophical methodology of Marxism, Leninism, and Luna, I'm just going to call her by her internet name, Luna Hoy, because I'm going to embarrass myself again. She translated it and annotated it, so gave philosophical, conceptual, historical commentary on the text all the way throughout. There's some stuff in there, I would debate with her over, like, her use of the thesis synthesis scheme. but I think this is an excellent piece of work for anyone. So, like, my best buddy here finally is finally at age 44. It's like, fuck it, I'm going to learn light it. I'm going to learn all of it.

None of this other shit works. It doesn't make sense. What you've told me makes sense. Give it to me. And I was like, check this book out. Because this is accessible to people, you know, just coming out of high school. We, I saw a commenter on Pastrio and said that they're a high school drive. pop out and our episodes have been helpful to them.

That's exactly the kind of person I want to reach. I'm not interested in reaching people like perfectly formed inside an academic laboratory or something like that. I want to reach real people. And I think that this text is good for helping real people. And it's available for free in PDF. You can order a hard copy to, but it's available for free in PDF, just like the Tri-Continental Institute's report and the executive summary are available for free.

So I'll put a link for that in the show notes. and thank you to Comrade Luna for doing that work. It's a lot of work. I do have to say back in 2021 on guerrilla history, we had on Luna to discuss the Battle of the NBN Fu. Okay. People are interested in that. There's a precedent.

We interviewed her on guerrilla history, so go check that out. Cool. I had missed that one, so I'm going to go listen to that. An interview that Electronic Intifada did with Matteo Capasso a week or two or more, I think. How Zionism pushes liberalism to decay. And like, I just, again, want to highlight that this guy is an analytical Marxist powerhouse. And I have so much respect for this dude. I would love to meet this guy someday and talk with him. He's both anecdotally powerful and obviously extremely compassionate and Karen,

which I think is very important. And the Western Marxism needs to get, get its act together with that combination, I would say. Another interview from last month, Israel's descent into madness and the Holocaust comparison Rani Akalik interviewing the historian Terrick, Cyril Lamar, which is very good. This is just out of interest. Really interesting article I read in monthly review

by a Jun Shue called Industrial Agriculture Lessons from North Korea. So there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. And two pieces from an outlet called Red Clarion, which is produced by a group called Unity, Struggle Unity, which is, I think, more up around like New England. Have you heard of this crew before?

Yeah, I've heard of them. Okay, so two articles by Comrade Katzvoter, who's one of the editors. The first one is called The Cult Building Tendency, and it's rather long. The second half is like a personal testimony about somebody's bad experience with an org, but it's just like a really good look into some of the things you should be keeping an eye out for if, like, you've gotten into a bad organization where there's like abuse of behavior happening and stuff like that, because we know that that's sort of been a hallmark of Western parties for a long time.

So that's, I think, you know, young people out there who are trying to find their way into different orgs, give that a read. I'll put that, I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And again, you know, whatever judgment, you know, people are making about this or that organization in giving their testimonies, maybe you see something that makes you, I don't feel that way about this group or that group, you know, that's whatever. But the opening analysis, I think, is very, very helpful,

regardless of how you feel about any organization that's named. Cool. And then the last one also like Conrad Katzvulture is called undead unionism and sort of how unionism in the West got into the situation that it's in and what it needs to do to get out of it because without a strong labor movement, the parties are not going to be revitalized and actually get to be able to do anything. We need to build that base layer up. And I might have more to say about that on a subsequent episode.

All right. Well, that's a great list of recommendations. I'll put all of those in the show notes for people to go follow up on. And thank you again, Matthew. This has been a wonderful, fascinating episode, as always. And we'll do it again soon. Yeah, for sure. And so we're going to take a break.

I need to take a break for a while because I've been in basically continuous preparation for three years. So maybe like the new year early in the spring or something. So I'm going to get down and do my research on Marxist dissertation and get into that John Bellamy Foster. Then we'll come back with a new series about Marx and Eco-Socialism and Ecology. Oh, yeah. Stay tuned for that, my friends. All right, talk to you soon. Love and solidarity.

Take me off the face. Yeah, yeah, yo. Picture perfect. I paint a perfect picture even though the words are worthless to a missile when it hits you or the bullet when it rip you while the shooter's screaming nigger. Does it really make a difference if it's black or worship Hitler, Mr. Officer? No one understands this why you shot the ball. He ain't even do like nothing wrong to why you stop him for.

Who got the cure for all of this? It's a raw deal. These right-wing freaks gonna get us all killed. Y'all chill. I ain't got time of the patience to try and debate shit with liars and racists. I got one voice, homie, why would I waste it? For motherfuckers who think their life is the Matrix. It's stressful.

No one is safe. They'll turn you into fucking Destro. Crone to your face. Think you did it because they said so. Throwing they wait. Can't even go out grocery shopping because some cracker come and blow you away. I wouldn't know to explain what a river to the sea means, but I know it's wrong.

kids to smithereens b if you want that dumb shit don't even need to see me free palestines nah hard shit's easy dope night monrovia slash dc nickers just trying to stay alive like bg's so i gotta view this shit from a macro level they want to make us dig our grave with a plastic shovel from sudan to yemen ukraine to molly big men with weapons we pay for armies he slayed and we make the bodies keep shit on replay no team saying sorry now look up in the air it's a place carrying pain with a payload of bombs that's American made committing genocide bearing your name sharing the flame the world's whack everyone's going weird insane fucking out take me off this ride take me off this ride take me off this ride take me off this ride take me off this ride Oh, please.