Rev Left Radio - Historical Materialism: A Marxist Theory of History

Episode Date: December 8, 2018

This episode is a unique collaboration between Rev Left Radio and Proles of the Roundtable. Both of us are publishing this episode through our own separate hosting sites at the same time, so you can listen to the episode on either feed! Breht sits down at the Roundtable *in person* to discuss historical materialism, the Marxist theory of truth, science and the humanities, the concept of Nature, anthropology, dialectics, and much more! Check out and support Proles of the Roundtable here: https://www.patreon.com/prolespod Outro Music: "Comrades" by Bambu. Check out and support his music here: https://bambubeatrock.bandcamp.com ----- NEW LOGO from BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Make a one time donation to our PayPal at: PayPal.me/RevLeft Please Rate and Review our show on iTunes or whatever podcast app you use. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/ Our official spin-off podcasts are Black Banner Magic and Hammer & Camera. Find them on twitter, Patreon, Libsyn, and anywhere else where quality podcasts are hosted!  

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure, that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in man's better insight into eternal truth or justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. The growing perception that existing social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason and right, wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production,

production and exchange changes have silently taken place, with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic conditions, is no longer in keeping. From this, it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present in a more or less developed condition within the changed modes of production themselves. These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system. of production

Frederick Engels Socialism Utopian and Scientific Hello everybody Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio I'm your host Anne Comrade Brett O'Shea and today we have a super special

collaborative episode with Proals of the Roundtable Now you might know Pearls of the Roundtable as their own show You might know them from coming on our show and doing that big episode about Stalin. You might know them from me going on their show and doing an entire episode about Mao. But for this episode, I actually went to Colorado for the Marxist Center in Colorado Springs. I went down into the basement where the proles record their episodes. I sat at the roundtable as an honorary parole and we worked through this entire episode on historical materialism.

We touched on the Marxist theory of history. We even touched on the Marxist theory of truth. and a lot of really other interesting, fun, and engaging stuff. I'm really happy with this episode. I'm excited to be able to share it. And I was excited to be able to go two years in a row now and sit down with my comrades from Proles of the Roundtable and meet them, talk with them, hang out with them,

drink beers with them. It's a really great time. And every single member of the Proles of the Roundtable is a legit, real-life friend of mine. I do want to say that they just release an entire episode on Ho Chi Men. So if you listen to our Vietnam War episode and you want to learn a lot more about Ho Chi Minh, which we could only touch on in part in that episode.

I really encourage you to go check out the new Proles of the Roundtable episode on Ho Chi Minh. Before we get into the episode, I just wanted to get the word out about something. I have a comrade who I met in real life at the Marxist Center, but who I've known on social media for a while now, and they asked me to do them a favor. They texted me and said that they wanted to know

if I knew of other leftist MMA or self-defense groups in the United States. And if I did, if I would feel comfortable putting them in touch with this comrade. So I don't know any at the top of my head, but I'm putting a call out to all of you. If any of you know any anti-fascist

leftist comrades who do MMA, boxing, any sort of physical combat self-defense work, if you could go ahead and let them know about this, the person would love for you to send them an email at T-M-R-O-C at ProtonMail.com. That's T-M-R-O-C at ProtonMail.com.

So if you have any ideas, if you know anybody involved in that sort of work, please reach out. This comrade has some questions trying to get their own organization off the ground and trying to do some good self-defense work with an anti-fascist bent. Now, with all of that said, here is our collaborative episode with Proz of the Roundtable on the topic of historical materialism. So we're very excited.

Today we have with us, Brett O'Shea from Revolutionary Left Radio, which you may have heard of. Perhaps you've heard of me. So, yeah, what are you drinking right now, Brett? I am drinking, and this is, you know, I'm a Nebraska boy. I'm coming to Colorado. So I asked the people at the place, like, what's some good shit that I can't get in Nebraska? And they gave me this, which is Eddie Line Brewing Company, Crank Yanker. Yeah.

Nice. I don't like saying that word. What it fucking says in the can. It's not biking. It's all right. And then, yeah. So then at the table, we've also got Ezra. What do you, what do you drinking?

I'm, first I'm drinking Bud Lights, coconut, Rita that Hyder provided. Thank you, Hider. And then I'm drinking coconut la Coa for my fans. So just lots of coconut happening. That's a theme. Yeah, perfect. And we've got Jeremy. Yeah.

I'm drinking Mama's Little Yellow Pills by Oscar Blue. It's a Pilsner, obviously. We got Hider. Well, in deference to my former colonizers, I'm having a genitonic. And very delightful it is. And then I'm Ethan, and I am drinking a red stripe, which is a logger from Jamaica. And then we have a full room here of other comrades. many of whom you've heard on the mic before,

but some of whom you haven't. But anyway, they're going to be listening and they'll be providing the laugh track, I'm sure. So tonight we're going to be talking about something, we're going to be talking about kind of a broad topic, but one that I think is very important for leftists of all stripes is just how we understand history. So Proles is a history podcast,

and then RevLeft talks a lot about history, like various historical topics. But something we wanted to address tonight is just how, as Marxists, as, well, some of us are Marxist line as, some of us have other tendencies here, but as Marxists specifically, we understand how do we look at history, how do we understand what happened, how do we use that to formulate like our understanding of what's happening currently, how do we use that to inform our ideology, our praxis, all these things. So it's sort of a, this is going to be kind of a little more freeform.

just because it's such a broad question but yeah more of a roundtable discussion so that's the direction we're going to be taking for this one so I guess I'll just start this really broadly like how do we understand history we'll zoom in in a little bit but like how do we understand history well I would say just to start the conversation it's an essential question right this is not nearly abstract

because understanding history understanding how it unfolds is also the way that we can understand present and then understand how we can get to where we need to go in the future. And so far as we do cover history on both of our podcasts, having this more like meta perspective on what we're doing and how we're doing our history is absolutely essential. I know that, and we'll get into this probably as we go on. But I think a lot of people on the left on the Marxist left understand that bourgeois history tends to focus in its idealist form on the ideas of great men, right? That history can be understood through the behavior and thoughts of great men of history.

And that leads to a whole slew of problems, not the least of which is sort of the erasure of the proletarian class in their struggles, right? Because the great men of history are in the ruling class. They tend to be elite. And so when you see history from that point of view, you're getting an elitist bourgeois version of history, which is incomplete at best and reactionary or erasing the struggles of proletarian, marginalized, and oppressed people, just by definition almost. Sure. And I think beyond that, there are things which capitalism does to the history of the non-dominant group. So via imperialism or settler colonialism or just because the narrative is not convenient to capitalist dogma, these things get pushed to the side or they

get erased and I think it's incredibly important to to note that there is no such thing as an objective history even if you are relating only the facts that that can be true but it is not honest whoever wrote that history had an ideology lived under a particular system and wrote that history based on a selection of which facts were important to them and not even consciously in most cases selected a narrative which feeds the existing narrative. Absolutely. I mean I think that's absolutely an important point to insist on. The other point to insist on actually is I think that on the left we have a sort of at the sort of mode of relating to the people, on the left is care we want to try to care for each other and hence the experience of thinking about

theory and theorizing can be a anxious one but i think we have to insist upon it especially for the working class because what the working class is not lacking is concrete historic examples they are the very subjects of history on which history is acting upon they will provide the concrete examples of history they are living it they are breathing it. They have no doubt what they're going through. The problem is, is the doubt is the connection from my simple story to the broader story of what's happening around me. That's what history can provide and it's abstract and you have to go back in time and you have to compose intellectual models to try to help with you, deal with this disconnection between

my life experience and what I'm being told about me. Because that's the big problem. Like, for example, a very interesting example. 1990s. Imagine being a working class African American at the time. Yes, you start to earn more money in the 1990s as African Americans, but not because pay increases, because they start working more hours. But what's reported back to you by the newspapers and then later historically is that the 1990s was the decades of the black people. They started to earn more. That's what we're talking about history. That you're being told how you should see yourself, how you understand yourself thus the gap when you go back to the 90s I was told that was the decade for black

people but I was miserable I was in debt my car was repossessed literally race riots yeah but then Clinton was I like I was the time magazine Clinton was our first back black president is what they said yeah exactly but that's history it's heavy and what it does to the psyche and the soul is incredibly destructive and unfortunately it's not just about providing concrete historic examples. We have to provide the theory because they need it. They're thirsty for it. They're doing it all the time. That's why a lot of our people go to conspiracy theories or what have you. There's a lack. There's a gap. And the gap is theoretical and abstract. It's not concrete. Because the history doesn't make sense to them in terms of their actual experiences

so they jump to conspiracy theories to explain why their life doesn't connect to that history. Absolutely. All that is 100% correct. And I would also add what Marxism allows us to do, especially in this crucial period of what we would consider late capitalism, neoliberalism, whatever, is that it historicizes capitalism. Capitalism is not some ontological state of human nature, right? It is not some unchanging thing. But the dominant mode or this sort of ambient background assumption of capitalism is that this is it, and what we do now is just make it better, right?

We just fix the flaws, but more or less we're in the right thing. What Marxism does says, no, no, no, no. Capitalism is a part of a historical progression the base of the society right is the thing that changes and allows these other things to change but capitalism is just a stage and I grew up like

or I came up politically like debating libertarians and one of the big things they do is totally lacking this Marxist historicization of capitalism does think it's the end all of be all of economic systems of human achievement on the political and economic front and so once you have that Marxist historicizing of capitalism

you can see where it came from and you can see that it must end Now, it might take us all fucking down with it, you know, but it's not going to last forever, and it's surely not a manifestation of human nature. Right, exactly. So that kind of brings us into specific, so specifically Marxists, a lot of Marxists tend to identify with a way of looking at history, a way of looking at the world called historical materialism. And so, like, what is historical materialism?

Well, I mean, the first thing to do, you know, with the term historical materialism, We should do this together as a group. It's just to unpack the historical part and the materialist part, okay? So, again, bourgeois history would look at classically well. I mean, we're talking about great men and sort of great defining moments. Sure. The battle of this, the battle of that, okay? The first thing to understand is that how heavy weight the Marxist project is,

is that yes, there's an economic model, yes, there's a historical model, but there's also a very important project where, Marx has to figure out the nature of what it is a human being is. Otherwise, if you can't figure out what a human being is, how the hell are you going to figure out what a kind of justice project would look like? You know, what would emancipation look like. These projects all have to come together in something like historical materialism. And what historical materialism wants to do is look at the actual material context in which people live in.

Now, the first things that we Marxists get excited about instead of a kind of scientific materialism, which is the technological aspect, right? So historical epochs are determined by technology. And that's actually very, very important for us to understand, right? Because you have like what? Like, Stone Age, Bronze Age. Yeah, Bronze Age.

I mean, our era, like this shift, like, sort of from industrial kind of capital to this kind of more immaterial form of capital that we find in the Internet, having to work on phone, a call service centers, what are they called? Call centers. Call centers. So as the material, as the material modes of production, the determining modes of production change, thus the modes of label will change and thus the very nature of life itself will change.

And it's that, which is in a sense of the first aspect of materialism, which is the hard intertwine between a form of existence, what human existence is, and what is made possible. in a given historical epoch, given the technological equipment available to it, because at base, the Marxist theory of human being is that human being is a cyborg entity, that it extends itself, that it haunts itself through technology,

through the use of guns instead of throwing, through the use of planes instead of running, or what have you. Now, these things are incredible, important for us. But there's one more aspect I would say about the materialist part of historical materialism that we have to focus on, which is to say every historical epoch, a given historical moment, what is it that hangs all the disparate projects that are taking place at a given historical moment together? What is it that binds that? And that is both ideology and something that we

kind of tend to ignore in Marxist thinking these days is the actual practice of life itself right is the actual what is the day-to-day mundane existence look like what is the working day what is a working day what does a day look like and that sort of stuff so that's the first thing I would say about the materialist bit so that's a lot so it is a lot and you know we could sit here and we could read you the definition from Wikipedia but you're not going to get much out of it right so what we're going to have what we're forced to do is take a more nuanced and a more difficult path to try to explicate what exactly we're talking. This is not an easy concept to grasp in some ways and other ways it is.

What I would add to that is Marx sort of saw himself trying to do with society and history what Darwin was doing with biology, right, which is try to find the fundamental laws of how a society evolves over time, how societies, how civilization evolves over time. And he took the scientific approach of how can we find these laws. What his conclusion was is societies are fundamentally forged and rooted in the ways they produce and distribute the material necessities of life. The replication of the base material things, food, shelter, clothing, and how that production gives rise to social relations, right? And so you have this concept in Marxism called the base and superstructure. We could go into all the critiques of it and...

We could do a whole episode on that. But the fundamental idea is at the core of society, the way that human beings create and replicate the mechanisms by which they live is called the base, and it gives rise to what they call the superstructure. This is an analogy, this is a metaphor, whatever you want to call it. But the idea is that the ideas, the culture, the religions, the way that we interact with one another, the sort of hierarchies that we develop in society are rooted in the material base. And as the material base changes from, say, feudalism to capitalism, the superstructure, the idea is how we think about our relations with other people, how we think about ourselves, changes as well.

That goes into the historicization of capitalism, but, yeah, go ahead. So now we can jump into the history bit, and this is the naughty Hegel bit. Okay, so here's the... Go off, King. All right, so look, so this is the bit... Let's a troll now. I'm not doing that I'm not doing that

We'll get one out of you So this is the bit Okay now look This bit for us is so crucial Because if we don't have this bit Is that look As lefties We're going to go through

A lot of bad times All right The bad time is what brought us to the left Okay If I was successful I'd be on the right guy Thankfully I'm not Thank you I'm not

I've made sure I'm not successful Self-sabotage, it's the path to leftism. Right, but still, but still. Called out. All right, but here's, okay, now here's the bit that's really, really important for us to remember. Through the darkest times, right, what is it about history? Okay, it's not that it's moving unilineally from the simple to the ever more complex.

What history is doing? It is the work that we put in materially to try to realize ourselves, to decide. discover ourselves. This work is continual and it's not intellectual. By Lord, is it not just intellectual? Much more important, it's physical and it's material. As we strive to understand ourselves, we work ever more with the external world. We work ever more with people around us, okay? History is the mode through of self-discovery that human being overcomes its alienation. Okay? That's very, very important to us. Okay? materialist bit is what explains to us the context the historical bit is the engine that's driving and it's us and it's us each and every single one of these bodies is nothing abstract about it

Jeff Bezos doesn't abstractly send his things to us there's somebody doing it for him right it's us every time thus the movements of history are the movements of peoples themselves sometimes they're slow some times they're this they're that but it's the people themselves and that's the historical bit that we're moving towards self-realization. There are periods where we go through negative dialectics, the opposite, where we foreclose the possibility of discovering ourselves. But then there are historical periods when we drive and surge forward to discover who is what we are to become, because there is not an essence that we're trying to reveal is an essence that we're trying to fight for. That's the big project. We're fighting for an essence. Who are we to become? That's the beautiful project of Marx, is that we're plastic, beings, we mold ourselves, and we become accountable for the very beings that we produce.

Sure. So that's the bit in the darkest part, is that this is history itself. Whether you know you're doing it or not, you're participating in it. Fuck. I really wish that anthropology was a required education course at the elementary to high school level, because I think it would shut down a lot of the arguments regarding human nature in terms of capitalism because if there is anything that I have learned

in studying particularly hunter-gatherer societies historically and currently is that there are material examples verifiable cases in which different societies behave in different ways based upon their material circumstances Okay, so it's not super complicated, but it is a bit difficult to explain, so I'll try to kind of do it slowly and then explain afterwards if it seems unclear.

In the case of hunter-gatherers, when resources are both centrally located, densely packed, and seasonally predictable, hunter-gatherer societies tend to become defensive, combative, and isolated. They tend to develop hierarchies more easily. In situations where resources are sparse, more broadly spread, and unpredictable, societies tend to be more egalitarian, less violent, and more likely to share information with other groups of hunter-gatherers. so the reason behind that is human beings they have an imperative to survive and they have a drive to make sure that their family unit survives as well yeah however broadly that family unit is right and that is that changes that can change based on the ideology of a group or based on um the again the material circumstances however what that means is if i can defend this territory and that makes it more likely that I will live and my family will live than I will kill people to defend it. However, if

it's spread out and I need to be able to share information with other groups because I might starve to death if I don't know where the food is, then I'm going to be less likely to attack other human beings and to and I'm going to be more likely to share with other people because

if I share with you that there's food over here, then next time that I can't find food, you'll tell me where I can, I can find food. And so that utterly destroys the idea that there is some sort of human nature to greed or to like violence or to, it is materially based. And that's the key. And I think, yeah, and I think that's one of the most pernicious things in, specifically, I mean, I grew up in the U.S. with the U.S. education system, specifically like U.S. or Western maybe, ideology is this idea of human nature. Literally anybody you talk to.

is going to say, like, oh, well, it's just human nature. Like, at the base level, and it, but, I mean, I also studied anthropology, and the thing is that human nature is limited to, like, if you're going to make a meaningful claim about human nature, is limited to a very specific couple of things about needing to eat, sleep, drink, reproduce, needing warm. Social interaction. Yeah, that sort of thing.

But beyond that, we have examples of societies throughout history that do just about anything else you can imagine. And there are even exceptions. So there's a society that lived in what's known as the Chulmun period in Korea, which is like 8,000 BC to 3,000 BC. Sorry, just a quick call out to the DPRK. My homie, Kim Jong-un. Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un.

Boost this episode. See you next year. So anyway, so there are exceptions. Even to the things that I just described, so particularly in the Chulmun period in Korea, which was, and I'm probably going to fuck this up because I can't remember up the top of my head, but it was, I believe, 8,000 BC to 3,000 BC, there were a group of societies who had resources which were densely packed, readily available, seasonally dependent. however they shared and we know that they shared because different societies had different art styles on their pottery and we would find broken pieces of pottery in these shell middens and so they were able to piece together okay well this society occupied this site here and then also this other society occupied this site here these were like Justin and I lived in Korea and they have these giant mud flats

And they still, to this day, people will walk out in these waiters and go, like, shoulder deep into the mud to pull, like, clams out, right? This is what was going on during the Chulmun period. And in these shell middens, broken pieces of pottery tell us that multiple societies were sharing exactly the same shell middens in exactly the same time. And that is wild. Like, so again, human nature garbage. So that's really important, right? We're looking at anthropology. We're looking at human history and showing how.

I mean, for lack of a better term, scarcity, right? The scarcity of resources dictates how people behave, how cruel they are to other people or how welcoming they are to other people, right? So insofar as capitalism, as we all know, creates a system where it artificially creates scarcity, right? It creates a context in which there is, there doesn't need to be a lack of the basics of life, right? But it's created in this marketplace, so it's prohibitive based on your poverty level.

But we talk about fascism and capitalism being intertwined, right? And going right back to what your anthropological evidence suggests is that insofar as capitalism does create that scarcity, fascism is a reaction to that scarcity. And what it does is it says in-group, out-group shit. So if you're white or whatever the fuck, nationalist American, you know, you're in my in-group and we're fighting over scarce resources. They don't need to be scarce. And socialism is the process by which we eliminate that artificial scarcity. and materially produce things to create a level.

That's why you don't have fascist movements, as I always say, in Mao's China, in the Soviet Union, in Fidel's Cuba. There's no fascist movements because this attempt to obliterate the artificial scarcity of capitalism is taking place. Exactly. I think, too, like, if you're going to talk about, like, my resources are plentiful, densely packed, and seasonally predictable, to me that says,

that wealthy people who have a lot of money which they have in their possession can be controlled are far more likely to one be selfish and to be violent than people who have fewer resources and we see that in terms of people who give to charity poor people give proportionally far more than rich people so I think that is on that same line so this Iraqi is about to go rogue

I'm going to turn on the both of you oh no oh no I'm sorry okay so I think on the one hand Look, so a brief background. So I grew up in a Marxist-Lennist family. It was exhausting. It was miserable. It was horrible. I wouldn't wish it upon my worst enemy.

It is what it is. But so I grew up, you know, under the kind of old-school, leftist world. And this was the conversation daily, you know. Oh, they just revealed Stone Age, you know. man did X, he could actually pick his nose with a toothpick and this means technologically

I mean I grew up in it, right? And it used to horrify me and I ran away with it. And I'm just, and I'm doing this on purpose. I'm not trying to oppose you. I'm just trying to show that there is a division that exists within Marxism and we can overcome it and I can show it like, though I'm mocking you now

I can kind of rejoin you. I can rejoin you after the mocking. It is that Look, on the other hand, we have to forget, don't forget about Marx is, yes, you're right about the Darwin strain. He loved that scientific strain. And that was, Engels over-identified with that scientific strain. But don't forget about Marx. He was also a German romantic as well.

Now, please, this is very important for our Marxist-Leninist comrades out there, is to understand that, look, I am a cultural anthropologist. I've been trained within the hermeneutic tradition. Philosophically, I'm part of the hermeneutic tradition. absolutely but within the marxist tradition there's also a scientific tradition right now what also Marxism does and this is why you know it's very very important intellectually is that we're trying to what capitalism has done is on the one hand you have these theories about what it is to be a human or the biological world and this is how the science understands it on the other hand here's the humanities how understands the material world and how it understands human being and they're

completely unrelated right now in the marxist world we can't have that remember it's combined within marx himself the german romantic the hard german romanticism while also the scientism of it right yeah so it's very important like i don't want to oppose what you guys are talking about yeah okay it is a strain within marxism so normally be like oh that's just a scientific yes and there's nothing wrong with it what what under capitalism has happened as well is that the sciences have been alienated. I mean, this is what people don't understand about what happens on the capitalism

is that alienation is so deep. Is that that fracturization that takes place within the human soul is then externalized into the world itself. And look, this is basic Marxist theory. I want to very quickly talk about the relationship between

historical about historical materialism to emancipatory politics. okay so I really want to give a very goofy example and I start this off and almost every course that I teach on religion it's about it's the first thing I teach and it's very it people look again I'm going to broaden this conversation again look look I I usually do the opposite of everything I meant to do a professor in my job right

they always tell me like listen these working class kids they don't understand a thing don't use a complicated word don't use a this or a that now here's the problem I was that same kid I was that very same kid I grew up in this I went to the

I went to a terrible school awful in a city London right and no resources and I kept all the liberal teachers were like oh they're too stressed we just have to hug them we have to kids

and every day that happened we were not being taught we were not being taught as much as you want to hug me and care for me you need to teach me and I was terrified of that I could see I was going to leave five years out of this high school with nothing I was already a bad high school and I could see all my middle class friends

who had meet up once a week playing soccer on a Saturday while I go boom boom boom so the point is as a working class kid right is you're constantly to supplement your learning right because the state is not going to provide it for you you won't get very far with what the state provides right as a public school teacher I can confirm that this is true right so but but my problem was that the scientists were relatively easy to me

but what was difficult for me I mean I came from an Iraqi society it was Ba'athist but it was sort of social scientific right so I grew up within that tradition I understood it and then the Western tradition was much in high school it was much more about interpretation what you thought

that was very very confusing to me now these get alienated in in the Western world as that's subjective and that's objective the objective is the domain of the science is and the subjective is the domain of the of human interpretation and they're both alienated

from one another what Marxism wants to do is reintroduce the subjective and the objectives so they coincide simultaneously with one another thus thus an analysis subjective analysis always already an objective analysis wow that's the whole point

galaxy green galaxy green but that's if you get the theory right and you understand what's going on thus to really complete the point look the big problem that has started like I assure you it is it occurs only within the capitalistic university is that the separation between the humanity that is to say that human being is some sort of special being over and above nature takes place within capitalist thinking right and Marxism reorient our understanding of human back with an understanding of nature right but no nature

that is predetermined the whole point of human being is that it is being that it's plastic that must realize it's nature in history, yes. So how does it benefit capitalism to understand humans that way as above nature? I can answer this question. And this was a theory

that at first I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? And then I was like, holy fucking shit. And it's going to happen to you right now. Get your L fingers out. Get ready for it.

Get ready to thunk. All right. So I'm going to make a statement and you're going to be like, what the fuck? And then I'm going to explain it to you. You're going to be like, holy fuck. The concept of nature

is white supremacist. What the fuck? Where? Where? Where? Where? Where. Where.

And. I mean, I'm going to say. saw a brett wang wang there that did not happen that's fake he just want like it's propaganda

so when white people as imperialists and as settler colonialists want to get into a particular territory

they have ways of describing land and it is virgin it is natural it is untouched and what they mean is

white people aren't there there is no quote unquote civilization it's not industrialized but there is nowhere virtually nowhere on earth that human beings do not live like with the exception of Antarctica

and some like random remote mountains parts of Nebraska it's objective it's a materialist physician Pripyat, I don't know Not anymore Not anymore So with those

Like random exceptions Everywhere on earth has human beings living in it It's not nature It is It's always muddy There is always some sort of You know This sort of

It's not quite You know Populated in the way that somebody Who lives in a city might imagine it but it is also not nature. And so there is a narrative which is constructed which says that this is nature and so it is not being used

by the people who live there in a productive way. And it means we can get in there and we can take it over. Well, and so we were literally talking about this before this episode started, we were watching this video of this Indian guy who does cooking, like without talking. It was awesome.

But like, but I think I said something about like, oh, this guy just lives in the wilderness, right? Like, just not thinking. And then Hider was like, no, no, this not. The snot was like, like, people have been living in these places for thousands of years. Like, say that. Okay, so.

Is that Hider talking? Is Hider from Liverpool? So, uh... I have one British accent. Every British person sounds the same. Say the next part in your American accent. No, no, no. I love it.

It's so funny, so funny. I can go, I can go, hey, Bob, what's wrong? So, look, I didn't realize this about the USA until I moved over here. I'm speaking to my international audience. They appreciate it. Hello, international audience. The things that you would freak out about it. First of all, all there is here is nature.

There's like, I don't mean to be read about Nebraska. It's like, you drive 20 miles. There's like three cows. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, forget about humans. There's three. I mean, so if you, those of you who have grown up outside of the USA and say like Europe, or Asia, you would be very, very surprised.

I mean, the land is just not utilised. It's just thousands of miles of barren nothingness and taco bells in between, right? Now, what people don't realize is, is that when they see, like, India or Africa, they think, oh, well, they're backward and they're what have you. What people don't realize about their wildernesses, their quote-unquote nature is that it's been utilized for tens of things.

thousands of years and especially this last 10,000 years has been heavily utilized in the process of civilization thus for instance the forests of Europe and Asia have much less variety in the flora and fauna just because it's been mined for 10 15,000 years by large civilizations and peoples for over 10,000 years. these when you go to india when you go to china there is no unexplored inch that exists there they all happen all nature when 10,000 years ago it was used up and you'd be very surprised when you go to europe if you grew up in america just say how limited like the the the flora and fauna is because i mean they've just been utilizing it oh that's why they had to go outside of themselves

I don't think people can understand just how overutilized Europe is It's sort of shocking That's incredibly interesting The furthest east I've been is Columbus, Ohio The furthest west I've been is Las Vegas, Nevada So that's really interesting that

I was one evening I watched his documentary about the Vikings And it wasn't a documentary about the Vikings This weird meta-documentary About documentaries about documentaries Of the Viking And you know you've hit Rob Bottom in life when you watch

two and a half hours and enjoy the hell out of it all right now what's so exciting about this I really will bring this back to somewhere we really cannot believe we where are we

what's happening so I'm watching this goofy documentary about the history of documentaries about Vikings and I'm like I'm looking at it anyway so in the 1950s it turns out the Vikings were very

noble and warlike and when they fought wars they did it for noble and just reasons right when they did it in 9th when they started doing documentaries in 1960s particularly the late 60s it turns out the Vikings were a little bit naughty they had weird sexual practices

they liked a few drugs and what have you then when they made the documentary about the Viking in the 70s oh they were depressed they weren't really that unified the unions were breaking apart The 1980s Was there a Margaret Thatcher

Wait wait With the 1980s The Vikings became entrepreneurial In the documentary Right Right I'm not kidding Look look

Look to really make us all laugh Look genetics When does the selfish gene The idea That a gene is essentially An investment banker In a film Wall Street come out

In 1982 Do you understand What we mean about history That the historical moment At which you exist The time is how You're going to see The previous historic

It's that in It's not ridiculous. What's interesting is on documentaries about the Vikings in the 90s, they were all hackers. I don't know. The Vikings actually invented the internet. They had Viking raves. But it's that absurd. I repeat to you once again, the selfish gene, the theory of genetics, essentially a selfish investment bankers, comes out in 1982.

years later comes the film Wall Street. It's that absurd. Sure. And that's exactly the point being made is how the underlying conditions of society will give rise to these ideas. The ideas don't exist independently. They don't exist as some

dehistoric thing. And we will construct history in that way. And again it's not like people consciously are like, I'm going to describe the Vikings as entrepreneurs. They are just living in the 80s in the United States and making documentaries about the Vikings, which reflects the society they currently.

Exactly. So what is to say, which is to say what, history is always retroactive. We have to understand it. And as Marx is, we have to understand our own retroactivity. That doesn't mean we can't have access to history. But if you deny that retroactivity, that I'm understanding it from a historical now, then you've got no chance of it. So is a solution to be self-conscious about that urge and that impulse?

But we need methodology. And Marx provides us methodology. It's not just about consciousness. I mean, that would be just ideas. We need a concrete methodology. And the other thing that we have to do is maintain a scientific method whereby my thinking should be made available to others so that they should hold me to account

and I must respond to them. That is knowledge. Knowledge is me being healthy and other who I can respond to. So your work must be available to the other. Right. So a phrase that gets tossed around a lot these days on the left is scientific socialism. Can we before we move on?

Can I bring up the topic? Yeah, yeah, please. Go for it. Go for it. Go for it. Go for it. So I think something which is, there are words which exist in other languages that don't exist in English. and I think that is part of the confusion that people have in terms of maybe not the confusion but the reason that maybe people see history is always objective or always as you know this is this narrative is not biased because they're just telling me the facts is that perhaps there is no distinction between history as it happened and history as it is written there are there are other languages so like in in Latin

there is Dres Gesta which is or also Historia and then Rerum Gestarum

which is the writing of history and then in German there is Geshista and then

there is also Geshista Shreibung which is the writing of history and we don't distinguish between those

things it's history if I'm talking about what happened in the past it's history if I'm talking about what

someone wrote about history it's still history you know and there's historiography but that's a different

thing historiography but like that's a different concept, right? So I think that that English literally helps to obfuscate the truth. The language of English helps to obfuscate the truth. Well, I mean, and that's a really interesting thing is the linguistic ways that these things are obscured. But specifically in the U.S., a lot, like most, like any idiot's going to be like, oh, history is written by the victors. But that idea, like,

I mean, that's a very profound idea, actually. But I don't think that people really give like think about that or really follow that through to its logical conclusion and the bourgeoisie or the fucking victors absolutely exactly exactly as far as like a popular thing that people might know is like the people's history

by Howard Zinn and what it was was an attempt to tell American history from the side of history that was never told and that that is a you know it might be imperfect but that's a Marxist attempt to try to show the other side of what history is how it's formulated and what it really was really driven

by which is class struggle. So I think one way to understand this is also how systems have changed over time, right? So as Marxists, we talk about, like, primitive communism, slave societies, feudalism, and capitalism. And like in the enclosure of the commons and stuff like that, do you have anything to say about that? Anything in that realm that you want to talk about? So, yeah, with that, so how we've been told how capitalism, like, formulates and how it becomes capitalism as, we see it today is through this, as we've talked about multiple times, this big manned history that people pick themselves up from their bootstraps, and like the biggest of the guilds or

whatever workers' communes were able to succeed, and they were the ones that were most profitable and things like that. But this gets into primitive accumulation, which marks labels and pretty much identifies, and also historically counts that essentially, capitalism had to exist through a revolution, like a violent revolution in which you first take away serves land and then you urbanize them into either going into these towns to become industrialized or you have them just eradicate from their land. So it's a complete overthrow of where they exist and who they are as people. And then we go further into, which Brett is very aware of Sylvia Friichi in which

this becomes even gendered in which women have to be killed and labeled as the witch in order for them to be subjugated to this violence like capitalism comes to force through violence there's a good article by

Joan Anker she writes is capitalism gendered and racialized and you have to understand there's an heresy of racialization and gendered politics within capitalism like first with the witch hunts but then also slave trade made it possible for capitalism to become as it is now like as soon as Portuguese sellers were able to

create ports into Africa that's when you start to see the Atlantic trade come into fruition and then again capitalism becomes because again as Hyder was saying Europe didn't have very much like material like they needed to that's how they saw it they need to expand and it was through this kind of education like they wanted to learn

about the people that were going to these places but also I think we can talk about that as well what does imperialism and like how has it changed like we want to learn from the people and we want to learn how they exist

but we also need to know their knowledge so that we can exploit them better and the thing about Europe is you could almost say there are the people without history exactly bouncing off what you just said

which is really important in angles work socialism's utopian or scientific or whatever it's phrased as but it's a really important work talks about a lot of this and transition from feudalism and capitalism in part was this

enclosure of the commons and what had to happen was you know in feudalism in some areas of feudalism what was enough for subsistence was just using your plot of land to create enough for you and your family and any surplus that you generated

you could trade on like a proto marketplace the enclosure of the commons was was an attempt during this transition from feudalism to capitalism to strip those people of their land and make them make them then you know I own the land I get to work for me and you have to

you know so that so that sort of historical change definitely happened and I highly recommend Sylvia Federich's work Calvinianna Witch because you know it fundamentally would disagree with a part of Marx but it's very much Marxist and that it takes that

Marxist tradition develops it through principled criticism. Okay, so listen, what I want to do is our last injection of abstract theory before I too will descend into the Maya of materialist history. No, because I know we want to get there,

and I know we're all witching, because we've all got our historical examples, but let me just one more bit of abstraction and then we can just move on. Okay, so this is our last bit of abstraction, and I really want to do this to help our, to help our comrades, raise think about this and i and i and i do this uh as a naughty monkey in my job every course i teach

i swear to you i throw in a bit of frubergh right because it's not marks and there's anything about him right but it's marks and they don't know it okay and i just want you to understand this little bit because i'm telling you i can turn i turn people in madison wisconsin do you know how tough it is to turn people in madison wisconsin they're milking cows all day long, all right? They're confused by dairy, all right? There's like multiple layers to like Madison, Wisconsin.

Yeah, cheese as well, but like you have the working class and then you have the bourgeois, like students are coming to it. Exactly. You see this in the 60s. That's true. But just to really like again, to give our

comrades just some tools to begin to start to analyze themselves you know historical moments and sort of the development of history okay and again we're going back to the historical part of the historical materialism which is the emancipatory bit whereby you know human being discloses itself through its practices in history okay so Marx is very excited about Fruberbach's reading of Christian history Fruwabch was an atheist and he wanted to understand how Christianity formed as a historical entity and as an atheist he just knew

he couldn't countenance the idea of because there was a god right so this is the structure for a basic structure by which to understand both historical and dialectical materialism it's very naive but if you if you can just understand these sort of basic moves are very very important okay so

Christianity why is Christianity important. Well, because you're a Marxist. Why do people start to imagine there is such a thing as a god? Well, Fruebacher and Marxist theory come back with this idea. That human being begins within an essential unity as one, but it doesn't quite understand itself. In its attempt to understand itself, it turns away from itself to the external world. Now, what it recognizes is, in its labor, in its work, there is a force that exists within the world. That's what it starts to feel. It doesn't allocate that force to its own labor, to what it does.

Like today's workforce, they recognize their workforce through Jeff Bezos. They don't recognize their workforce through their own labor. Their own labor is alienated from themselves. Thus, what is the result? The power, the thinking, the beauty, the majesty of, of human existence is alienated from the human subject and they have to externalize it into another entity, God. Think about what God is. All God is is the perfection of human being. God, he's a human being but smarter. God, he's a human being but knows stronger. He's like you

but better. That's all a human being. It takes the human being, cuts off the bad side and throws the good side up into the sky. Yeah, but look at the movement. Look at the historical movement. The only way that it can begin to understand itself is initially through alienating itself. It's externalizing itself, recognizing itself, sorry, it's initially through an external object when it's created, a god. And then Furobach and Mark says, Mark says that this, this dialectical distinction will historically be annihilated, whereby human being can finally appropriate its true majesty as its own. It won't have to

externalize it into God. It can appropriate at itself. We are the wonderful things. We are the beautiful things. We are the majestic things. We can appropriate ourselves. And again, that's what Marxism is seeking to offer. Please let's remember this about Marxism.

So I want to this is one of the biggest conversations we can have and one of the most important, but I want to kind of bring it back around to specifically how we understand history in specifically the 20th century because that inspires a lot of discussion amongst the left so we talk about places like the Soviet Union, Cuba, China under Mao,

all of these different revolutionary societies. A lot of the history that is taught is of these places as oppressive, totalitarian, quote unquote, whatever you want to say and so it's just I think it's really important for us to think about

how history is passed down to us and I want to talk about that a little bit like how history is passed down to us how history is passed down to people in like to starting with school and then and then through adults through the news through just the popular

culture through popular ideology I think it's one of the most important things we can talk about because as leftists this is something we have to spend so much time combating understandings of communism Marxism all of these any sort of collective action even the concept of unions we have to fight the history of it so yeah thoughts on this yeah I mean it's summed up really well I think Mark said it the ideas of any epoch are the ideas of the ruling class right and so it's no it's no mystery

while why proletarian communist socialist movements are in the mainstream discourse labeled as authoritarian or totalitarian or repressive, right? It serves a very fundamental interest. Those words themselves are meaningless, right? In a vacuum, they're meaningless. What does it mean to be authoritarian? And how is capitalism not that? Right.

I mean, it's the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Nothing more authoritarian than saying, oh, you want to eat and fucking have a roof over your kid's head? Work for me so I can extract your surplus value. How's it not authoritarian? So this is the base superstructure shit. This is how the ruling. class the dominant ideology gets formed in the first place and this is what we have to combat

as principled Marxists. So we all know like everyone around this table we know that the Holocaust happened like absolutely that occurred but then you have ideas about this came up a lot after our the Roebloodon episode. The Holodomor is treated is like held up to the same level like so the Holocaust happened the Holodomor as it's described did not. How do we as Marxists where is that separation because a lot of times oh you do not the Hall of the Hall of Tomorrow? That's basically Holocaust denial. So listen, back to Jeremy's very early point in this podcast about

sort of the choice of historical fact. It's very, very important to understand. The fact in itself might itself be true, but it still could be ideological. Like a very easy example would be Goebbels' famous quote about the 92%

of burning lawyers are Jews. It was absolutely true. But my God, the report. of it isn't just the fact and that again this is why you have to understand why you need a Marxist historical materialist and dialectical materialist analysis

because understand if you're in that historical moment and you read that how else can you read it other than we're being taken over by this group if you don't have that theorising you don't understanding you're in a lot of trouble because you're going to take the fact as the fact not understand that the fact itself is

ideal it can be true and still be ideal And the fetishization of empiricism or the fetishizing facts as such. Exactly. Again, especially in the USA, and I was having more and more UK, is the informationization of knowledge, where it becomes fact, fact, fact, fact. And you have to spend your whole time as a professor after they come from a high school, unpacking the fact to show up, the fact is inclining you to think of the world in this way. And if I don't get rid of this fact, you're going to still think in this way.

And that's how determined these facts are. They're terrifying. And I'm going to give you a concrete and definitive example of this, because as materialists, that seems like a good idea. So when I was in fourth grade, I lived in Mesquite, Texas. And in fourth grade in Texas, you are required to take Texas state history. And one of the focuses of Texas state history is their war for independence, right? And the Battle of the Alamo is one of these great, like, rallying cries for the people. of Texas, they were fighting for their independence from Mexico, and they stood on their own,

and they founded their own nation, and wasn't that heroic, and all of them died, but, you know, one of them magically escaped to tell the story, and weren't they heroic? And remember the Alamo was the battle cry of all these people who were fighting for independence, except that the Texans who were in Mexico, because it was Mexico and not Texas, were not from, Texas. They were from Missouri. And what they wanted was to keep slaves. And they moved to Texas to keep slaves. And when they got there, they set up sort of on what was the border of Texas, the east side of Texas. And Mexico outlawed slavery. So Mexico was happy to have them there because they were worried that the United States was going to invade them anyway. Because they had declared

independence from Spain and they were like we're not strong enough to fight the the United States so they were like let's keep these fucking racist ass people up against our border and that will discourage the U.S. from invading but then Mexico outlawed slavery which was a huge mistake when

there's white people in your country so these racist ass slave-owning people who were there because they wanted to keep slaves fought their war for independence to keep slaves. That's why they did it. And they didn't declare independence because they wanted to be an independent nation. They just knew that if they integrated into the U.S., they were in line to be a free state. They needed to wait until another state had been brought in, because at this point, point they were in that weird before the Civil War. This state comes in its free. This state

comes in its slave. This state comes in its slave. So they had to wait until a free state came in before they would join the union. And they wanted to make sure that they had the bargaining position to say, we're going to integrate, but only as a slave state. So they had to wait until Oregon was declared a state before they would join the union. That's the only fucking reason they declared independence. They wanted to be part of the United States, but they couldn't they couldn't if they wanted to keep their slaves until Oregon was a slave.

Real motherfucking John Brown hours. But so why did it so in Texas it's taught that in a certain way. Texas it's taught that it's right. So in my little elementary school it's all of freedom and independence and we're our own country for like what seven years or something stupid

bullshit. But again none of that other stuff. None of the coming from Missouri. none of the because slavery none of the outlaw of slavery none of the white supremacy narrative goes in there and it's still facts they were still fighting for independence

they still defeated Santa Ana they still all died at the Alamo they still yelled out remember the Alamo those are all fucking facts those are not lies that's all truth but there is a narrative in which this exists

and a way in which it is told which obfuscated the reality that it was white supremacy that drove the independence of Texas. And that's the whole conversation around the Civil War in the United States. We're still trying to discuss like, what was the civil? It was about states

rights. I mean, when you've got the Confederate States of America in their motherfucking constitution, they're saying we're creating this thing so that we can own slaves, we can do this. States rights to own slaves. Yeah, exactly. I just have to do a quick plug. Everyone out there, please, Dominique LaSauder,

liberalism a counter history it is incredibly important listen Verso published all of his book except for the Stalin book before he died the Stalin book they refused to publish the Stalin book is an extraordinary book

please please look at it's going to be published very soon as well no but yeah this that that ties in with the Civil War and this idea like we're still having this conversation it's like oh well it's not about like this sort of thing taking objectivity like what we can say of

objectivity things that we know happened for sure. And then it's all about the interpretation of them. It was about states' rights. Yeah. If that's all you say, cool, I can accept. That's states' rights. Technically true. Yeah, totally. It was about states' rights. But that is within

again another particular narrative. So this has all been a good conversation, but we've kind of been talking around, there's a very basic concept that we need to address, and that gets brought up a lot from people of all ideological standpoints. And it's

this, it's, it's probably one of the oldest philosophical questions. What is truth? We talk about truth a lot in history, like this happened, objectivity is tied in with truth. What is, like, how do we understand truth? Like, how do we understand what has happened? What is real? Yeah. I think it's, it's, it's a complicated answer, honestly, because, because there, there is, I think, an objective truth. I'm not somebody who thinks oh well everything is relative and uh whatever it's it's like however i think there is an objective truth um the problem is that even if you're there to witness that objective truth your your brain's filter is going to see it differently there's a good there's a good story

on how this works um and i can't remember who the who the author is maybe hider remembers and i'll start talking it'll be like it's somebody you little prick uh anyway so So there's this story, there are these two men, they're soldiers, and they're walking through this forest. And they're in sort of the back of the line. There's other soldiers further on. It's in the Middle Ages, whatever. And one of them sees this unicorn. It runs, like, just next to them, right?

The unicorn runs by. And he's like, oh, my, did you just see that unicorn? That unicorn that just ran past, and the other soldiers just sort of caught a glimpse of it. But they were like, I kind of, I did. I saw something sticking out of its head, right? and he's like so yeah maybe it was a unicorn and then they sort of run up to the other soldiers and they catch up to them and they're like

did you see that fucking unicorn back there that was wild I've never seen a unicorn before it was amazing just horns sticking out of its head and they all together are like you know talking about this unicorn and how incredible it was and the other three soldiers they didn't see it but they're like wow that's I can't believe that that just happened and then they get up a little further

and there's a larger group of people and one of the people in that group was like I hit a deer like right in the forehead but it didn't die and it ran back of that direction did y'all see the deer with the arrow in its head and so I think that at the very least there is a social component to the construction of truth

we all to some degree have to agree upon what we're seeing or or it's not really real which is kind of a weird concept but like again I think there is an objective truth but there's a there's a lot of complexity around it okay listen okay so listen Marxists listen Marxist you need to listen to this all right okay it's not a joke the theory of Marxism okay we literally depend on other people to understand the world. That is why, look, I'm an anthropologist of Iraq, and as alienating as it has been,

I have forced myself to interact with Western academics and Western sort of military figures to produce my research on Iraq. It's painful, it's alienating, but it must be done. But what you have to understand is the weird predicament of human beings is this, is that as an individual, I don't understand very much, if anything, at all. I am completely dependent on the other understanding that are contained

in all the other brains that are around me. Thus, let's start to think about what a Marxist notion of truth would be. A Marxist notion of truth would never be one that is final. It would always be one that is provisional. And secondly, it would be one that would be dependent on a communal understanding and agreement of what is going on. And that's how truth functions. You see, what you have is you have many beings around you.

You try to justify your argument. You dialectically work it out with the people around you to you reach an agreed truth. And that agreed truth will be dispensed with till a more adequate truth is arrived at and so on and so forth. Such is the struggle. But it's the struggle for truth.

That is crucial, much more than what is the truth in a sort of final definitive sense. That really is what we're doing. It's the struggle for truth. And through other people, never just, I read this and I think this. It has to go through each and every one of us. It's the dialectics of truth. It is. Last thing, an anthropologist, Maurice Block, not a Marxist, has a wonderful book called

Going In and Out of Each Other's Body. want to tell you this is really in a sense of the most beautiful understanding of what materialism is about that what we do as human beings is we continually go in and out of each other's body yes through sex yes through giving birth but intellectually as well asking somebody i don't know how to get to x they tell you i i don't understand this theory open it up for me i've never seen this picture you help me us we go in and out of each other's mind each other's body ease each other's souls all the time understand how beautiful materialism is it's a wonderful and vivifying thing and capitalism has to kill it to kill that vivacity that is part of a practical

everyday everyday life itself and under capitalism you're discouraged from sharing that information right under capitalism you're discouraged from sharing exactly from that vivacity exactly you're discouraged from helping other people and therefore you're discouraged from communicating connecting to them and therefore you're discouraged from developing that truth exactly you're essentializing their it's just like their systematic oppression and you're validating that they they don't deserve to be part of you yeah they're not part of you nor are they part of their community they don't deserve to know the history that they're a part of they don't it's a similar thing with indigenous

culture in which you have to essentially go into these communities you have to tell them that you're not even part of the community that you're part of you have to do that through blood quantum and validate it through the United States. You have to validate through the United States government that you're like, through blood, essentially that you're not allowed to be a part of a community and therefore you even know the history. You can't, so there are, yeah, okay, so here's the thing that I can bring this back to.

So in the United States, uh, there are, there are tribal groups who's, whose tribal lines cross into Canada, right? Yes. There are tribal lines across into Canada. And they are allowed to freely cross the border back and forth between Canada and the United States in ways that other people are not however

their lineage must be proven through their father and they must hit a blood quantum racist ass bullshit you must be able to prove I can't remember there's different percentages required by different tribal groups

how fucking racist is this nation but that's you're right that you are you are erased from your family and your tribal history if your mother if your mother is the source of your your your connection to that tribe my grandma is my connection to my tribe and i am not allowed to attain to that i am never allowed to attain to that i cannot because it's not lined with my grandpa because i don't even know who the fuck he is right and again you're willing to destroy families through this kind of connection

i you have to listen to the stories of your family and that's the only valid validation you'll ever get is through the family. This is kind of the last point I wanted to make for my part. I don't know if anybody else has anything else to contribute, but Pierre Trillo is this, he's a Haitian anthropologist historian who has this concept of silences. And silences, so I'm just going to read this short little passage on how silences enter historical narratives.

So silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments, the moment of fact creation, so that is the making of sources, the moment of fact assembly, which is the making of archives, the moment of fact retrieval, which is the making of narratives, and the moment of retrospective significance, the making of history in the final instance. so there is the person who initially the primary source basically is the first point at which silences enter the narrative so i i witness this thing but i leave out details when i write it down or i tell the story to somebody else then when somebody is writing down that story or taking it down or in the case of this podcast literally recording it right that that is the making of the archive uh silence is can be put there when we edit it. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. When we edit the, when we cut out particular sections, which we will, because this is,

there's a lot of goofiness. A lot of goofiness happen tonight. Then, when somebody else is listening to this and what they pick up on from listening to this podcast, their brain may filter particular pieces of it out, and so new silences are created. And then if they go and tell somebody else about this, the first. final point, they may have left out more details because they don't want to talk about that part. And so silences are places in which things are erased, whether intentionally or not,

by all of these various processes. And so I think that's really tied in with the Marxist what we're all doing as Marxists when we're talking about history. The entire reason we do this podcast is we're trying to compensate for some of these silences, trying to give voice to some of these sciences, there's this massive, dark matter of history, the part, like, the, even more, like, the larger part that's not said that's there, counterbalancing everything that we do hear about. We're trying to give a voice to that, trying to explain that, trying to understand that, and how to take that into ourselves and how that inspires how we understand the world today

and how we want to understand how we want to move forward as, like, through politics, through just as the human species you know Ethan I mean I want to go back to a point I made you know earlier in a podcast it is that once again is that the working classes are historical beings especially that they are not sure

of history and they're not sure of access to it that's not the problem to it it is the it is the ability to access it right and let us not let us that is not a patronizing claim about the working classes it is a problem of access to the bourgeois researcher

who has had seven years, okay? Now moreover, what the working class person has to deal with is an alienation of their own experience and an obfuscation and a pettifogging of their own experience through the media and through other people's reporting of it. So we once again say that the quantum of history is already available

to the working classes. They're not short of history. They don't necessarily have to start reading history books. They have it. what we must start to do is allow them access to their own life experience as already an understanding of history itself

that's so important because look I really have to stress this if you think I'm a smart guy I grew up in the project I got this all from the project it's not some patronising nonsense is we were living it every day

we would come back from high school listen those liberal teachers are pretty nice but why do I feel shitty about myself right And it was that question, because it was a concrete feeling every day. Yeah, they were smiling at me. Yeah, everyone else doesn't smile around me. But why do I feel shitty about myself after that one hour?

So on that note, Ezra, I know that previously you've talked about this, but I don't know if you'd be willing to do this again. We've had some recent conversations and discussions around the idea of making things, quote, unquote, more accessible to the working class or to people who have, you know, other issues that they might have in their life that other folks might see as a hindrance. And therefore, I don't know, it's a difficult concept to explain, but I, Ezra, you'll probably be more, more astute. I'll try it to be anyway. Yeah, so I think we're getting that is to this argument of how do we make things accessible?

How do we make it not just for the working class, but the working class are disabled? But like we have to acknowledge that capitalism also perpetuates like an idea of what disability means. And that kind of understanding that I'm disabled, not because of who I am as a person, but because of the system that was built around me. Without the accommodation and acknowledgement of who I am, how I have to be accommodated,

or even accommodated with like yes so and then most of I feel like some of us in this table and those who are participating in it have had learning disabilities and have been told you cannot do this because you're too stupid and they literally have told I've had teachers tell me that I'm an idiot because I do not understand something through the ways in which they have taught it yeah so essentially you have these liberal teachers coming to you like Hyder is saying you have these teachers coming to you and say essentializing not only like your being but as like a person in the working class that you don't deserve to even go up to where you should be that your education isn't valid and to teach you isn't also valid that you

deserve the language you don't deserve the master's tool which was has been hammering at you as you're learning what I mean those words have been utilized by Audrey Lord but yeah like I'm not allowed to visualize and understand the tool tools that have been cemented on to me and literally been hammered down. It's patronizing and excluding at the same time. Exactly. Because what you're saying is that these people, these working class people, are incapable of understanding these fundamental concepts.

You've got to dumb down the language, which is corny. It's corny, first of all. Second of all, it's disrespectful. Third of all, it's patronizing. You're saying, I understand and I can grasp these concepts, but I've got to dumb down this language for you. I've got to bring it down to your level to explain it to you. But beyond that, what you're saying is I'm unwilling to educate anyone.

I'm unwilling to take those steps to bring someone up, to elevate someone. I have to bring myself down to their level. And that's gross. It's gross as fuck. As was brought up in the Ho Chi Min episode, we're talking about individual. So Ho Chi-Man, when he was in France, translated French articles into Vietnamese to educate people. Vietnamese partisans on Route 559 educated people who were illiterate, not on basic understandings, but on high-concept Marxist theory.

And they did this again to people who could not read. And you're telling me that I've got to speak at an eighth grade language level. Exactly. You. Okay, listen, this is very, very important. Listen, my working class, comrades, I understand. You're overworked. You're tired.

You're depressed. You have anxiety. Your head is noisy. I understand. Every time you try and pick up a book, you look at three or four words, and it's exhausting. I understand. But you have to understand who did that to you in the first place. By Lord, understand who did that to you in the first place.

that to you in the first place. I understand the initial struggle. It is horrible. It is horrific, but it is the only way out of this predicament. Please understand. I don't want you to be suffering, but it's not my fault. It's not my, it is caused from up above. You're already suffering. You're already in pain. I understand what it takes for you to read a fucking Lenin or Marxist book, but you have to do it. You have to do it. I'm begging you. We all had to go through this but once you go through you have a community of people that understand you and understand as well today what we face in the left we're facing mental health disorders we're facing the LGBTQ have nowhere else to turn to this is what we are ready we're ready to receive people

who are in pain and in agony but you have to be prepared to receive these people to understand what has caused it and it's not their individual struggle that has resulted in them being in this position but the objective conditions which they live in under historical conditions I'm begging you a little bit of work you're already suffering

you're already in pain but at least you can understand why you're in pain and there's a cadre of people there who can support you please I'm begging you it's tough I know that's why we're here

exactly gently to end this because it should have been ended by all of your beautiful poetic and deeply profound statements but I think as a way to end this pedagogically for someone who still might be struggling with these concepts is to provide an example of what isn't historical materialism what isn't a way of understanding

history and i would talk about this as an easy example all of us are familiar with anarcho-capitalism right right it's a course it's a joke but it's it's going to be a tool that we can use to learn here because when lennon for example wrote state and revolution what was he doing he was fundamentally trying to understand the state in the context of historical materialism from whence does the state arise and how do we get beyond it and it isn't this idealist concept of I oppose the state

I just want to be without it immediately it says okay fine but at the root of the state is class conflict and class society the state is an organic manifestation of it you cannot simply toss it aside as if it's a beer can that I can throw in the trash. The conditions which give rise to it must be transcended.

And that transcension takes struggle and is a transitionary period. Anarcho-capitalism is extreme idealism. It refuses to understand the state as a historical manifestation. And so you have these absurd things which says that you can continue

class society, but have no mechanism by which to enforce it. So I hope that that is a clarifying mechanism to understand and what we mean by a Marxist theory of history. So I know that the project of Proles of the Roundtable, and I know that the project of Revolutionary Left Radio as well, is to empower.

Everybody who's listening to this is to empower people to claim their birthright as human beings. We have tens of thousands of years of human history, and all of this leads up, has led to where we are today. And where it's leading now, I don't know. There's not a teleology. There's not a specific destination where we're, moving towards but everything that has happened has led to where we are today and and it is your

yeah it is your birthright that history belongs to you as a human being and so but you have to struggle for it exactly you have to fight to obtain it we have to fight to obtain it because it's kept from us that's the historical element in all of this you do not fight for this you will not get it exactly and that's why we have to fight for it and so that's what we're trying to do that's what all of us around this table are trying to do is we're trying to help you fight to understand where you came from and where we're going Take it from all of us who are, none of us are, none of us are savants, none of us are geniuses. Yeah, we're all just a bunch of people trying to, trying to obtain, trying to fight for what belongs to us and our understanding of who we are as a species.

Yeah, and trying to understand how we can obtain the future. There ain't a drone up in the sky that I'm afraid of. Not a single pig alive that I would run away from. Shout out to your pay stub and fuck your supervisor if he's a dick, homie straight-up. The homie told me he'd been working around the vets. Filipinos that they use make promises to and left. Promises that they have spoken out coaching them with a check and neglected the fact they laid on a compensation bet the comrades get it popping up.

He said with confidence, man, I smoke a half a zip or day dealing with politics. I said, I feel you, bro. I wrote another and we talked about how we could get it structured by the summer. Said I am down a rally, I, I will call you. you family because I will take a bullet for my comrade gladly I am down a rally I I will call you family because I will take a bullet for my comrade happily building with the comrades sharing with the comrade did he bob and Bali with the comrade down a couple tricks with the comrade criticize the comrade take the criticism from the comrade and try and

get bitter for my comrade solid with the comrade never ever read on any comrade i gotta stay Shark for my comrade, depending on a comrade, take a couple bullets for my comrade. There ain't a drone up in the sky that I'm afraid of, not a single pig alive that I would run away from, I'm still high for Arab Spring, shout out to your pay stub and fuck your supervisor if he's a dick, straight up. She put her hand out with a standardized flyer, had a baby in her arm, other children right beside her, she said she was trying to spread the word to get the message out that if they send her back to Halisco or her kids will be without hands that Don't feed a little one, literally sick of them. Forcing a family to leave her home so they can profit from.

Told her I would see her at the meeting after work, walking extra laparana, black to burn what I can burn. And said, I am down a rally, I, I will call you family because I will take a bullet for my comrade gladly. I am down a rally, I will call you family because I will take a bullet for my comrade happily. Building with the comrades, sharing with the comrade, Did he Bob and Bali with the Comrade,

down a couple drinks with the Comrade. Criticize the comrade Take the criticism from the comrade And try and get bitter for my comrade Solid with the comrade Never ever read on any comrade I gotta stay sharp for my comrade Depending on a comrade

Take a couple bullets for my comrade Right 8 o 2 8 o 2 What I'm just you Ahead 1 2 A2 A2

A2 A2 But I see love I guess I always be