Rev Left Radio - In Defense Of Libertarian Marxism

Episode Date: July 19, 2017

The host of Rev Left Radio, Brett, goes on a Libertarian podcast to discuss and defend Marxism.  Topics Include: Libertarian Marxism, Louie CK, Murray Bookchin, Automation, Antifa, Organizing, and much, much more.  Please donate to our  Patreon Follow us on Twitter: @RevLeftRadio Follow us on FB This Podcast is Officially Affiliated with the Omaha GDC and The Nebraska Left Coalition Random Song From Our Friends: Rogue Element by Rogue Element Audio clip used from Murray Bookchin Thank you for all of your support and feedback!

Please support my daddy's show by donating a couple bucks to patreon.com forward slash rev left radio. Please follow us on Twitter at Rev. Left Radio. And don't forget to rate and review the Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes to increase our reach. Workers of the world, unite! We're educated, we've been given a certain set of tools, but then we're throwing right back into the working class. Well, good luck with that, because more and more of us are waking the fuck up. So we have a tendency to what we have, we have earned, right? And what we don't have, we are going to earn.

We unintentionally, I think, oftentimes kind of frame our lives as though we are, you know, the predestined. People want to be guilt-free. Like, I didn't do it. Like, this is not my fault. And I think that's part of the distancing from people who don't want to admit that there's privilege. when the main function of a protect and serve supposedly group is actually revenue generation

they don't protect and serve simply illogical to say that the things that affect all of us that can result in us losing our house that can result in us not having clean drinking water why should those be in anybody else's hands they should be in the people's hands who are affected by those institutions people engaged in to overcome oppression

to fight back and to identify those systems and structures that are oppressing them. God, those communists are amazing. Welcome to Revolutionary Left Radio. I am your host and violently incompetent comrade, Brett O'Shea. And the reason I'm violently incompetent is because the Honorable Sound Engineer David was out of the country this Sunday, and I was left to my own devices to not only host the program as usual,

but to take over his recording and editing. duties, which I failed miserably at. So I had this great interview with the co-founder of the Anti-Racist Action Network, Mike Crenshaw. It was fascinating. It was really rooted in the history of the 80s and 90s, in the hardcore punk scene, fighting Nazis, fighting white supremacists. It was a great episode, but due to my belligerent talentlessness, we lost everything. Luckily, I reached out to Mike. I told him what happened. He's totally cool with it, and he's fine with coming back on in a couple of weeks and redoing the episode. We'll basically treat that first interview as a practice run, more or less,

which actually might turn out to be better in the end because his Skype wasn't working, and so we had to do it over speakerphone on my phone, and that decrease of sound quality. So I think this is going to work out for the best in the end. But since we didn't have the advertised episode for this week, we decided to go back and grab an interview that I did a couple of months ago on a Libertarian podcast, where it was me talking to a libertarian host and a libertarian audience, kind of outlining my defense of Marxism, of libertarian Marxism.

We discussed Antifa. We discussed the automation revolution that's upon us. We even discussed my childhood and some of my background. We discussed comedy and Louis C.K. It was an interesting interview, and I was glad I did it. The host, even though we don't agree politically, was extremely nice to me. And so I'm going to play that four years. today in lieu of the Mike Crenshaw episode, but we will have Mike Crenshaw back on in a few weeks

to redo that episode so that you're going to get it one way or another, just a little delay. So I apologize for, you know, my fuck up. So yeah, all of that aside, here's an interview with me on a libertarian podcast, formerly known as Neon Broccoli. Now I think it's the Ferrar Complex, but either way, here it is, enjoy. I think to start off with this conversation because so you told me that you were a libertarian Marxist, correct?

Correct. Well, how would you, like, let's define that term because that's not something I've really heard of. I mean, I know it, they seem counterintuitive, honestly. What is libertarian Marxism? Yeah, it does sound like a contradiction in terms if you're using libertarian in the, the traditional American sense of, you know, free market, small government libertarianism,

as we know here in America. But actually, the term libertarian stemmed from the anarchist movement in France. I forget the exact time period, but there was laws against the use of even the word anarchism, which was, you know, left-wing anarchism. And so some of the anarchist thinkers used the term libertarian instead. And so the libertarian tradition, the word and the tradition, stem from, you know, revolutionary left-wing politics. And so when we say I'm a libertarian socialist or I'm a libertarian Marxist, it simply means that we're, you know, on the anti-authoritarian

democratic spectrum, you know, part of the spectrum of the Marxist ideology. If we don't believe in, you know, bureaucratic, top-down control, we believe in democracy, and we believe in the people having control over their own lives. So I would situate myself in between. anarchism and Leninism. So I draw from both of those traditions, but I have critiques of both of them as well. But I'm fundamentally a Marxist in the sense that I'm anti-capitalist, and I think Marx's critique of capitalism and his sort of orientation to history is the most robust there is on offer. So that, so the revolution, now I'm not a historian, but the revolution as far as like in France was this a revolution coming from the Enlightenment or what era was this

yeah I think it was man I really wish I would have brushed up on this before because there's a thinker called his name is Murray Bookchin and he's kind of a famous libertarian socialist thinker and he has a little clip on YouTube that anybody could go find where he lays out the exact name and the exact date of this sort of genesis of the libertarian term we have in fact had a very rich history that I would call libertarian. Not in the sense of the libertarian party or the right-wing libertarians. That is a word that has been stolen. The people on the right who call themselves libertarians are proprietarians.

Their main concern is to own property as the basis for freedom. They're not interested in freedom. They're interested in what they call liberty. Liberty means that your right to turn land into real estate. Liberty means the right to own a redwood forest and cut it down if you want to. Liberty means, and there's nothing wrong with liberty in a more expanded sense, but it is so tied to property that it means literally owning the community. That is not what I mean by the word libertarian.

In fact, the word libertarian was invented literally by Elisier-Rae-Cluw in the 1890s when the word anarchist became illegal in France because of terrorist activities. Elise Rae Klu, who was a very close friend of the Russian anarchist Michael McCune, and it's just worth mentioning this in passing, had to invent a word for anarchist because if you called yourself an anarchist,

the flicks would immediately pick you up and throw you into jail. You couldn't call your periodical anarchist, you couldn't call yourself anarchist, you couldn't use the word in anything but a pejorative sense. So he invented the word Libertarian. And it seems been expropriated, or appropriated, if you like, by the right wing.

We have to reclaim that word again because it has a much richer history and a much richer meaning. So when I use that word from here on in, please bear in mind the sense in which I am using it. Are you for small government then? What does that mean necessarily? I mean, if you can't, if you're not a top-down bureaucratic, I mean, if anarchists, I mean, if you can claim to be somewhat of an anarchist, Is there not some small government feelings there, I suppose? Yeah, so I would say that the ultimate goal of honestly, even Leninists is for a stateless, classless society. You know, Marx laid that out as when we solve the class contradictions of society, we move into a classless, stateless society.

And so the difference between Marxists and anarchists historically have been, how do we get to that society? Anarchists have said, you know, spontaneous revolution, insurrection. We go in that direction immediately, whereas Leninists have, and Marxists generally have said, well, there has to be a transition period where we do take control of the state and push things in our directions. You know, you can't just go from huge nation states to absolutely no state whatsoever. And so the libertarian Marxist tradition is where we believe that you might have to use the state. We're going to have to use, you know, the levers of power, but we're going to do it in a fundamentally democratic way. and we want the people in the movement to have the control

as opposed to a Stalin figure at the top who just becomes, in my opinion, a new boss. It's just the rulers in a capitalist society are the owning class, the capitalist class. The rulers in a state communist society like Stalinism, they're just a bureaucratic class. But either way, working people, average people, we have no more control over our lives under either scenario.

And so libertarian Marxism is taking Marxism and putting a heavy strain of democracy and sort of, you know, self-government into that Marxist tradition, which I think Marx himself was closer to. You know, I'm a believer that Marx would have hated Stalin and hated what Stalin did under his name. Yeah, it seems to be, but that, you know, like, that seems to be a tendency of people that, like, as far as historically, Lenin and anybody who claims communism or Marxism, they believe in this big state is there an example maybe of anybody trying to to push like maybe even in the modern world like would Bernie Sanders or is socialism a more ideal push towards your your thoughts as far as

like libertarian Marxism go or is that still that person's too center for you yeah yeah so we're fundamentally anti-reformists we're not liberals at all you know liberalism is to us a philosophical enemy of sorts, you know, we're anti-liberal in that sense. But Bernie Sanders, in the same way that maybe a really toxic, you know, fascist sort of right-wing person would support Trump as a means to getting towards their ends, you know, we would support a Bernie Sanders. It's just a little better, you know, a little more in the direction that we want, but certainly not the end-all-be-all of our political project.

And you asked earlier about a modern-day example of the sort of libertarian. Marxism that I espouse him. I would point to the Zapatistas and Chiapas. There was in the 90s, it's a southern state in Mexico called Chiapas, and there's a Zapatista uprising, and they fundamentally put into action, in my opinion, the libertarian Marxist political project. They had a Marxist critique of capitalism and the state, and they had a revolution. They detached themselves from the Mexican state and from capitalism. They do not interact with either. And they're autonomous. They run their society horizontally and democratically. And they're still thriving down there. They're not a big nation state or anything like that. But they've managed to

kind of carve out their own little niche in southern Mexico and go about implementing a true workers' democracy, a true people's democracy where the people have control. And they make their decisions in a democratic horizontal fashion. Now, with all of that in mind, do you really think that with the Constitution, I mean, as much as people disregarded, it's still a part of America and it's still part of law and people have to consider it, with the Constitution, with the idea pretty much, I mean, as far as what I know, is that the idea of the republic, the republic that we have was so that the majority you know, protecting the minority from the majority, you know, we don't want to be slave to tribal rule.

Do you think that it is plausible with the Constitution to have a Marxist society, even a democratic one? Well, I think this is a perennial problem for anyone who has an ideology outside of the norm, is how do you, given that the system that we have now is built upon these founding documents and these, you know, these institutions that seem immutable, how do we implement? implement an ideology that falls far outside of the norm. And I don't know your politics, but I maybe get the vibe that you're kind of a libertarian, minarchist sort of person. And so I'm sure, is that true or am I wrong there?

I think minarchists would be the best way to put it. Okay. So I think we both have ideal societies that are very outside of what we see in the actual world. So then you have to realize, you have to come to the point where you have your ideal, you have your analysis you have your methodology you have the society that you would like to have but then you have to enter the dirty world of actually fighting for that and that's just the material conditions that you have to operate in and so the best you can do is i do not think that the conditions are such that a armed revolution from the left or the right is going to be anything but horrific

and cause a civil war and result in in untolds amounts of needless suffering so you almost have to work in the most pragmatic way possible. So just because I'm a libertarian Marxist does not mean that I necessarily think that libertarian Marxism has a chance of being implemented in the next 10 years and that the revolution is just around the corner. No, it's my starting point ideologically. And then I enter the fray and organize with like-minded people

and do as best as we can to push it in every little way possible in that direction. Does that make sense? Yes. I just, yes. Okay, so, all right. I think that you just triggered a lot of people who listened to my podcast. There was a lot of talk about Marxism, a lot of talk about, you know, the left and revolutionary time. So I think that now that we kind of got that introduction out of the way, I think it would actually be good to kind of humanize, humanize people. Because like we said, we wanted to have a productive conversation, and I want people to listen to this and not just think that, oh, here's some bat shit leftists, something along those lines.

lines. So let me ask you, do you, I assume you have a sense of humor, correct? I hope so, yes. Okay, so do you, okay, here's something, I'm just bringing this up because I'm a comic and a comedy nerd. Do you have like a favorite stand-up comedy, comic, or a favorite movie? Well, go, tell me. Well, yeah, I'm actually quite a, I'm pretty, I consider myself an above-average fan of comedy. I think Louis C.K. is, is probably the pinnacle of comedy in today's modern world. I think he's my personal favorite, I would say. He's your personal favorite, say I wouldn't see that.

I was thinking, I think I was thinking you'd say something like David Cross. Oh, and I mean, I enjoy some of his work too, but honestly, my favorite, I saw Louis C.K. Live this year, and I just think his intelligence and his ability to craft, craft jokes, it's just really unparalleled in my opinion. Did you see his abortion bet? Yeah, I did. I saw it live. Yeah, brutal.

that that that it's not just brutal I think it was really fair and I really like that like because a lot of people especially with because I I do line we talked about libertarianism and stuff like that but I a lot of libertarians as far as right wing libertarians they're very pro life and stuff like that and I don't find myself very pro life I I I have I I'm pro choice okay and so I really but there was like a level of empathy that Louis was giving them that I was like damn man that's like really good comedic talent right there. I mean, to say, like, they're killing babies. What the fuck? Do you want them to not have signs? Like, that's such a, like, I really, I think that was probably one of his strongest bits I've ever seen him done. I was really impressed with his last special.

I think, I think that's really his brilliance when he was talking about abortion. He does it in a way where whatever side you're on, he's going to give you a little bit, and he's also going to critique you a little bit. He's going to make you uncomfortable, and you're laughing, so that helps the medicine go down in a way. But he's absolutely right when he says they think that babies are being murdered. And if they really truly believe that, then they should be out there protesting. They should be out in front of every abortion clinic. Because in their perspective, you know, that is a, that's a horrible thing going on there. And so you're laughing, but you're also being like, wow, I can sort of, I can

see now from that perspective a little bit better. And I think Louis C.K., his comedy, although it's often brutal and extremely edgy, it's also just deeply empathetic and deeply human. And that allows people from all over the spectrum to kind of relate to his material, you know? Yeah, yeah, I agree. And, you know, that is, that is, like I said, like, things like that. Like, just a lot of people like Louis CK. And so, like, when we're talking, like, I think that when we talk on the Internet and we argue on Twitter and Facebook, this level of, like, you know, it's easy to dehumanize people and not have a real conversation.

Like, I don't think, like, anybody has ever had a great conversation as far as a Facebook debate and gotten anywhere. Right. Like, has anybody been yelling at each other over Facebook and, like, you know what, that's a great point. I'm really going to consider that and change my perspective. You know what? Maybe I have been a piece of shit and wrong my entire life. Thank you, stranger. I haven't met before.

I appreciate that. Right. Right. That's never, ever happened. No, I don't know. And I think when we're getting in these discussions, I try to do this a lot. when I really want to have a constructive, you know, because I flame more with the best of them if it comes down to it online like anybody else.

But when we're having discussions like this, I like to point out that even though that we're on different sides of the political spectrum, the fact that we care, the fact that we spend a lot of our intellectual and moral energy thinking about these problems and having discussions with other people about them, that means that we have a lot of commonality off the top. I mean, we have more in common than we do with somebody who just goes to the club every weekend and doesn't ever think outside of their own little, you know, shitty life. So in that sense, I think if we can establish that commonality, like, yeah, we're human

beings, we're thinking people, we deeply care about society and we want people to have a better life than they currently have, I think that's a good, you know, common ground that we can take off from and have a constructive discussion. Well, there's one thing that I noticed that, you know, when you see people talking about, when you're part of groups I mean people will say Republicans are evil and Democrats are evil

or they'll say libertarians are evil and Marxists are evil and I find that very fascinating because I don't think anybody ever sets out to do evil like they act like they act like Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are just

you know being like you know what we're going to do we're going to fuck up this place that's our goal I think they're like you know and it's important to remember that these people have what they believe our good intentions.

So, like, when people are, like, they're evil, disgusting monsters, it's like, I don't think that's how you're going to win this, the argument here. They're trying to do good. Like, everybody who's, every great, every great monstrosity throughout humanity, I don't think has been done

from people that were like, you know what, we're going to just fuck shit up. Like, I think even the worst of people, and I think Lenin is probably one of the worst, not Lenin, I'm sorry, Stalin, is one of the worst people. or Mao. I mean, these people had good intentions. Did they not? I mean... Yeah, I would... I think even if you went to an ISIS leader and asked him about his

worldview or something, he would pitch it to you in such a way that he's trying to liberate his people and, you know, get out from underneath the yoke of Western imperial aggression or whatever it may be, you know, establish the caliphate in the name of God. So even the most fringiest, you know, to folks like me and you, ISIS are the epitome of evil. really nothing redeeming about them. But they would still conceptualize it in their own head as doing what's right given the premises that they are operating from, you know, in radical Islam or whatever it may be. And even like crazy Nazis, very hard for me to find the humanity in them. But certainly if you talk to them, at least maybe a more articulate one, they might have

some sort of conceptualization of what they're doing that frames themselves as the good guys. because at the end of the day, we're storytelling apes, and we tell ourselves stories about the world and about our role in it. And we are always the protagonist. You know, we're never the antagonist in our own stories. Yes. So here's a question then, since we're talking about Nazis. Do you, do you, do you like what Antifa is doing?

Not what they're standing for, but what they're doing. Do you agree with some of the Berkeley protests or some of the more extreme side of things? I had to curiosity. Yeah, this is an interest. I mean, obviously, this is very topical. And I was on a podcast yesterday and the same discussion came up because everybody's talking about it and thinking about it. So I would add a little nuance here. When you talk about, there's a couple different angles we can attack this from.

You can do it from the public opinion angle. And on that front, you know, I don't think that necessarily. Antifa is winning over hearts and minds all across the nation necessarily. But if you can also look at it from a, I would say a more strategic, nuanced

historical perspective where, in my opinion, where Antifa is coming from is they've studied history. They see what fascism is and what it does when it gains power. And liberals historically, I mean, Hitler rose to power within a liberal democratic

framework. I mean, the Weimar Republic was before Nazi Germany, and that was a pretty progressive, robustly democratic society, and he didn't use guns and weapons in a revolution to take power. He just worked the system well enough and got to power. And so we, or the Antifa, I would say, would think of liberal approaches to fascism as being toothless and ultimately putting other people in danger, and so they believe that confrontation is the way to go. And maybe we can talk, I really want to talk about the free speech issue specifically because I think that the biggest critique aimed at Antifa is centered on this notion of free speech and that it's never okay to shut down free speech. And my argument on that front

would be fair enough. I also believe to some degree, I mean, I believe in free speech, but it's also an abstract philosophical value. And you can't analyze it in a vacuum. So in the same way that you can't scream fire in a movie theater, you can't just go out and say, hey, all I'm doing is using my free speech, but what I'm actually doing is recruiting and organizing violent racists to come together and carry out our political project, which is inherently against free speech, because in every situation where fascists have even grabbed a modicum of power, they've taken away the free speech of folks like you and me. I mean, you're talking, you're a libertarian, so that means you're not on the hardcore authoritarian right, or I'm

I'm sorry, not a libertarian, I'm an anarchist. So you're not on the big state, you know, fascist right at all. So you are a political enemy of them. I'm a political enemy of them. And historically, they have always taken away those very rights. And I would say that it's also about balancing their right to free speech with the right for vulnerable and marginalized people in our society to not have to live under the threat of organized fascism.

Does that make sense? So it's a, like, a battle of rights situated in a material reality. Let's back up. So you said free speech was an abstract ideal. Please go into that a little bit more. So not a natural right, it's an abstract ideal. All rights are fundamentally human made. They're constructed from the human mind.

Economies, nation states. None of these things have deep, objective reality in the fabric of the cosmos. human beings create them and give rise to them and a right is only as good as the people are willing to fight for that right you know that's why rights weren't we didn't have the right to free speech 700 years ago you know people had a fight for that right and then codify it in founding documents but so I'm not I'm not trying to downplay its importance by saying that it's it's socially constructed to that it's an abstract right I'm just pointing to a metaphysical an ontological reality about the position of of things that human beings create now you can codify it put it in the and then have a system that's based on those rights, and then those have very real, concrete, objective consequences in the real world. But at the same time, I don't think that there's any God that hands us downs our rights or that nature gives rise to rights objectively. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, yes, I understand where you're coming from there. I get the idea that it's a social construct. I understand those ideas, because everything is a social construct to some degree, right? Probably not so much biology, but. to some degree there is these are social constructs but do you not agree that every human being on earth deserves the right to speak to speak freely without you know repercussions right and i was i would say that's i mean they can speak freely i don't know about without repercussions so i would argue that we're you know we're not me and you are not the government so our personal views are not going to be

codified in the law and take people's first amendment away but there are consequences to free speech. If after Trump got elected, we saw in D.C. that Richard Spencer rally where he was literally saying hail victory, which is the English translation of Sieg Hail, and there were people in that audience throwing up Hitler salutes, you know, that is above and beyond just expressing yourself. That's organizing in a historical legacy that is extremely violent. And people that are, you know, under threat there, you know, Mexican immigrants, Muslims, Jewish people, those people, their right to live comfortably in society without the threat of being under violent attack. Those people's rights count too.

And so the question becomes, what do you value more? Do you value the right for fascists to organize and recruit people more than you value the right for just everyday citizens to not have to live under the fear that there's a Nazi rally going on next door or I'm driving to work and I see a bunch of Confederate and Nazi flags at a rally of, you know, alt-right neo-Nazis. I mean, all rights conflict with other rights, and so it's just a matter of prioritizing certain rights morally. But if the people with the Nazi and Confederate flags

aren't actually imposing violence upon anybody, who's to say that that's not their right to have those flags, as disgusting as they may be, they're not causing anybody any physical harm? Do you see what they're saying? Has there ever been in history a fascist movement that has not been violent? Well, you just, you keep the fascist, the fascist, the fascist. Like, how, who in, so yes, I understand that Richard Spencer is a fascist.

I do not see how Donald Trump, who is a person who has no worldview. I mean, can. Right, he has no ideology. He has no ideology, he has no worldview. He's not, he is not anything, he's not the dangers. He's very similar to, I feel, Bush, where he's not the guy who's the evil madman behind all the legislation you may oppose. I mean, those people are Paul Ryan and Rens Previs and things like that and the lovely elf man, Jeff Sessions. Those people, those people are the, those are the people that you should be mad about, but these people don't believe in fascism.

They don't want to, they don't want to end anybody's right to free speech. And there's a meme about how people, and I know that there's a thing going around with, they want anti-fah to be domestic terrorists. And I don't, I don't agree with that. But it's because of the thing is they have the right to hold rallies. They have the right to speech, much like every other ideology I don't agree with, as long as they're not infringing upon anybody else's physical or natural, or I guess you don't believe in natural rights, huh?

Let me frame this differently. So unless they're literally taking from somebody, taking from somebody, or causing them actual physical objective harm, like reality, real harm, not, why don't they have the right, because they got the power, now they're fascist? I mean, I would say that President Obama did a lot of things that I didn't agree with, that I would say. He literally killed kids. Yes. yes he did a lot of bad things that was he a fascist as well i'm i'm all for opposing power i like that i don't think that they should be attacking the people though that are i think equally as misguided as themselves at these rallies you do you like no no i think that's a very fair

point and actually i'll agree with you to a large extent on this point because you touched on it earlier there is a fallacious over applying of the term fashion And I'm concerned about it. People on the left, we have internal debates about it. Trump is not a fascist. Obama is not a fascist. Jeff Sessions is a racist, but is he a fascist? No.

So I totally agree with you that by over-applying the term, you dilute it and you make it meaningless. And then you raise the ire of people that said, wow, they just attacked this person who, like at that one rally where that person was wearing the make-Bitcoin great-again hat. and was pepper sprayed. You know, in my opinion, I disagree with that. That is way over the top. That person is clearly more like a libertarian sort of person, not like a Nazi. And so I'm very concerned with the over-applying of the term. But there are fascists and there are Nazis,

and when they're actually doing Hitler's salutes and they're actually self-identifying as white supremacist and white separatists and they're advocating for, you know, the forceful removal of immigrants or Muslims from their community, those are the people that I really truly believe you know, should be stood up to in a way that is more than just debating them in the realm of ideas or fighting them in electoral politics because real people's lives are at stake. But certainly, we cannot over-apply the term.

We can't attack anybody that's to the right of center and call them a fascist because we lose our moral and intellectual high ground and we turn people that aren't even close to being fascists against, you know, left-wing ideas. I'm not talking about Antifa specifically. I'm talking about the left generally because it's a sense. associated with the left. And if our political project is to make progressive moves in our society towards a more egalitarian society, we have to think about hearts and minds, and we have to win people over. But at the same time, we also have to confront the most toxic and violent forms

of racism and bigotry that exists in our society. And, you know, maybe that does require a more militant confrontational attitude than, you know, the average liberal would be willing to go. so with that in mind do you feel that Donald Trump is more of a response to a lot of the left than anything else do you like I'm sorry oh yeah I was gonna um I actually think that he is a response to he's actually a product of and ironically also a response to neoliberalism this globalization of of capitalism that leaves the working class even in first world countries in dire straits. You know, for the last 40 years, working people have been really beaten down, and we have unprecedented levels of wealth inequality, and wherever there's wealth inequality, there's going to be power inequality. And it's in direct proportion to how bad the wealth inequality is, is how bad the power inequality is. So globally, we see the rise of far right movements and far left movements in response to the centrist, bipartisan consensus

of neoliberalism all over the world. But Trump, is also a product of it, you know, the spectacle of the quote-unquote democratic process in America, when we all know there's no democracy here. It's run by a relatively small elite of extremely wealthy and powerful people, and what the people say doesn't really matter. And if you're sitting in society and you might not have a robust understanding of how neoliberalism works, how global capitalism works, how workers are oppressed, somebody like, Trump comes along and he's, in some people's eyes, just the strong man or just the grenade that we can throw into, you know, the institutions of power and blow shit up. So I don't think that he's

necessarily a response to the left directly, but certainly that probably plays a role too, but I think more so he's a response to, you know, 40 years of this neoliberal world order that hurts most people and benefits a relatively very small global elite. would you not at least concede that the that global capitalism has at the very least diminished extreme poverty almost across the globe entirely i mean it's almost destroyed would you not concede that point or what what is that it says that the inequality the inequality matter more than the fact that people's lives are better i'll not only concede that point i'll i'll take it further. I might surprise you a bit here. Marx himself and Marxist people, thinkers that have been

in the Marxist tradition, they viewed capitalism as a necessary historical development and a huge, huge plus over feudalism, what it was what it were placed. So the move from feudalism to capitalism is undeniably progress. And the capitalist world order for all of its failures and limitations has been a huge boon to people all over the world in that it has produced this massive amounts of wealth that is really truly unprecedented in human history. But then it also distributes that wealth in extremely absurd, you know, tilted, unbalanced ways

and that is what we now have a problem with. So as somebody in the Marxist tradition, I think that capitalism had to have happened out of feudalism, and furthermore, that it had to full, develop before we can move on to the next historical stage of taking all the wealth that capitalism has created and then spreading it around to ensure a high quality of life for average people and not just filling the pockets and buying the 17th yacht of, you know, a multi-billionaire

global elite. And so I do agree that capitalism was a huge progress over feudalism. I do agree that capitalism has done a lot to raise the standard of living for people all over the planet. and it was an absolutely necessary historical stage. But I think now we're bumping up against its limitations. We're seeing the environmental nihilism and the short-sighted profiteering that the system inculcates and perpetuates, and I just don't think that that's a sustainable way to move forward.

Where does the... Okay, so at what point... When you said 17th yacht, okay. So at what point... I was being hyperbolic. I know, but I know, but it stems from, I think, the difference of worldview. So, like, when you say the, let's just say the second yacht,

so is the first shot okay or no? I mean, it depends. I mean, in a society, I'm always morally. So I think a lot of our political disagreements, they ultimately boil down to moral values that you just have where you don't. And you can't really argue, like you can argue stats or, you know, reality of objective facts about the world,

moral values are kind of at the core of all of our political ideas, and then we build up this logic and these reasons and this evidence to back up our moral intuitions. But I think it's fundamentally immoral to have a society with both billionaires and homeless people. I don't think it's right for somebody to have a yacht while somebody else doesn't even have a home. Or, you know, one in five or one in four American children live below the poverty line, while the richest 20 families in America own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans combined. I mean, that sort of absurdity is fundamentally immoral to me. And so in that context, even one yacht, I think, is just extremely indulgent and absurd, and it's not rooted in hard work. So that's the big argument from the right is that these people worked really hard.

Well, eight men on the planet just came out from Oxford or, yeah, Oxford, I'm sorry, UNICEF. They just found out that the eight richest men on the planet own more wealth than the bottom 50% of human beings on the planet. that's that's you know 3.5 billion people are we supposed to believe that those eight people just worked 3.5 billion times harder than everybody else well there's just to interrupt i mean there was as far as as far as the founding fathers and they were very anti people um i don't know we can't recall the term but they're they wanted a very high um fuck what's they wanted that when you die they wanted a very high tax because they didn't want in Europe the Rothschilds and stuff like that that was already a thing they didn't want the inheritance they didn't want it to be ruled by

an inheritance class they didn't want people to continue to be able to get wealth after wealth generation after generation essentially leading to a monarchy so where you say that the eight richest people a lot of that I do disagree even though I don't know exactly who they are but I'm sure that the

eight richest people at least four of them would say probably inherited some money and inherited it some money and inherited some money. Just to counteract, but the idea that somebody like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs didn't work hard to achieve what they achieved, would you say that that was just dumb luck or that wasn't inheritance? No, that was that was hard work and good for them and a lot of people work really hard work that don't make billions of dollars but also are socially necessarily necessary labor. And they don't necessarily get paid what I believe for their time and labor that they deserve.

But somebody like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, they do do great work and great for them. But at some point, they're amassing tens of billions of dollars. And it's like, okay, they've been rewarded by society. Is it really just about making more money? Are people motivated to make breakthroughs in science or philosophy or art? or whatever, just because of money? I'm certainly it's an incentive, but I think if you look at the biggest breakthroughs

in human history, they've come from people being internally compelled by motivations that fall well outside the realm of just monetary gain, and those advancements are made because people have an internal urge to be creative or set their mind to certain tasks. And I'm not saying take away all Bill Gates' money and put a bullet in his head.

Of course not. But I'm saying there has to be some more reasonable distribution of wealth where Bill Gates can still be rewarded for his contributions to human society, but in such a way that it doesn't produce this grotesque disparity in the amount of wealth that he has. Because honestly, I mean, $10 billion, I mean, yeah, he's done a lot of great things. But at what point do we say, okay, enough is enough. Now, he does a lot of philanthropic work and gives a lot of that money back. But still, just the system of incentives inside of capitalist society,

it skews towards piling up wealth and once you've accumulated a little wealth you can then leverage that wealth to gain more and more wealth and so that gives rise to not only economic inequality but ultimately political inequality and I think that hurts and is counterproductive to anything even resembling democracy. Do you think that it is

so with the ideas of Marxism and mind and capitalism and all that stuff do you think that people act out of their own self-interest almost inherently and subconsciously, it is their nature to act out of their own self-interest. Would you agree with that statement? I would agree with it with a caveat. I think there's, when we talk about human nature,

there's two sides of it. Certainly there's a self-interested side. You know, I need to grab and hold on to my material well-being and supply for my family and, you know, have do things that, that makes sense for me and my life. But there's also a deeply social component to the human being and to human nature. I mean, we evolved as social apes. We are deeply desiring of community and solidarity and cooperation.

And so as a libertarian Marxist, it's not that I just want to take away the individual and just trumpet the collective. I just want to have a balance between individual rights and individual human dignity and the health of the society as a whole because I believe that individuals flourish better in a healthy, educated, stable society. And I think capitalism and liberal democracy focuses too much on the individual,

and that gives rise to a whole slew of social ills, not the least among them, addiction and mental health problems, where people who evolved for millions of years in social contexts have now been ripped away and stripped of any sense of community and it's just a dog-eat-dog world, and that's kind of antithetical to our human nature.

So I would just have a more robust view of human nature than I think you necessarily propped up at the beginning of this question. Well, the idea was, and this is the morality debate as far as capitalism, where it goes, or people are going to act out of their own self-interest. So therefore, that's why capitalism is moral, because out of people acting out of their own self-interest, they will eventually raise society up as a whole. Now, there's obviously different examples,

but there's good examples such as the automobile, and we can debate, I don't want to debate as far as industrialism, but let's say industrialism has its ups and downs, and then let's say like telephones and the Internet, which is giving people rise to all of this information that you may not be able to have before, where somebody can look up libertarian Marxism and they can find out about it

and they can agree where they might have been just, you know a factory worker hating their life their entire life do you not so that is that not the where does that where does that end where does the I guess my question is when there when you take away people's need to to make something salable or make something you know marketable where does the benefit of society come from where when do they help people when do they rise things up or do they just sit around and are they happy being garbage in their entire lives. Where's the ambitions? I think

that's like a really, does ambition die in a Marxist's land? Where does it come from if it's not from monetary value? If it's just inside them, well that's not always true, is it? Well, certainly not for all people. If you had a situation where everybody

had a certain amount of money given to them, like, you know, let's say like a basic income or something, there would be a certain segment of society that would be content with sitting on their couch, drinking absurd amounts of Mountain Dew and playing video games for the rest of their life, you know? But I think that segment of society is actually pretty small. I think a lot of people have urges inside of themselves to create, to be productive, and to contribute to

society, to partake in certain hobbies or to pursue their own interests. And I don't think that would go away if people became more, if there's a more egalitarian society. I mean, I'm not getting paid to make podcast or to make Facebook pages or to be an activist or an organizer. I do that because I'm compelled inside and I find meaning and value, existential meaning and existential value in pursuing these goals and getting these ideas out there and talking to people like you, you know, we're not getting paid for this, but it's something that we still do because we're human beings and I think human beings for the most part are fundamentally creative and ambitious and desiring of being productive in and of themselves. That doesn't always have to be a

carrot and stick situation where, okay, you have to be productive in order to secure a certain amount of money so that you can eat and feed your kids and clothe your kids and put a roof over your head. I mean, I don't think that human beings are so myopic and so needing of such a harsh and sort of crude incentive system. It certainly works and at certain historical times it's necessary, but I think we're developing to a point where people could live, outside of those structures and many people could live happily. Now, when you say developing, and I started to think about the podcast, and I started to think about you have successful pages throughout Facebook and stuff like that, I'm sure you do more,

but that is kind of, does the future, does the future give you actually kind of more hope towards Marxist ideal sense? And I'm saying, you say, we're not getting paid for this, but you still have to admit it is not, those reactions. Even though they may be mild, they still have, like, their science behind, like, those have given people as far as dopamine and stuff like that goes in their brain. That's a reward system in itself. And with the future and automation seeming to be imminent, at least, do you believe that, I mean, I'm kind of skeptical of it just because I don't know if people are going to just be like, oh, look, everything's automated now. Here, we live in this equal society where here's basic income, basic universal income. But does the idea of the future, which seems inevitable with the automation and with Facebook giving people reward systems?

I mean, technology is giving people rewards. They get likes for having, I think, sometimes bad ideas, but, you know, that's not the market doesn't agree with me. So if everybody wants to, you know, share an Eddie Griffin joke from the 90s that somebody stole 40,000 times, then you know what? That's what the market. Or better yet, a Jeff Dunham joke or a Dane Cook. joking out. Yeah. Well, the gods of comedy. Yes. Well, I just have a problem, like, the internet leads to a lot

of stolen jokes, which pisses me off. But it's fine. But do you have, like, hope that that now, not now, but maybe like 50 years from now, it's actually going to be, maybe you think it's reasonable now, but maybe you think it'll actually be 100%, there will be, it will

actually eliminate most of people's arguments against Marxism. And then, like, let's say, if everything becomes automated, the reward systems, different, you know, Facebook could cause ambition and blah, blah, blah. Does that give you hope for the future? Yeah, I think that's a great point, and it's something that I had written down that I wanted to address because I think it's really, it's very important moving forward

that instead of looking to the past, Stalin, and all that stuff, let's see how these ideas will manifest in the future. And I certainly, certainly think that automation, it's not guaranteed, but I think automation gives us the opportunity to create a more egalitarian society and a more liberated society. I fundamentally think that wage labor for most people is dreary. It sucks up most of the time we have on this planet, this small, insignificant, minute flash in the pan of existence that we all get to experience. We spend 70% of our waking life doing a job that we would never choose to do, but that we're forced to out of economic necessity. And I think that

that fundamentally undermines human self-actualization. What automation does is gives us the opportunity to be freed from that. And the problem there is, in a capitalist structure, that automated technology is going to continue to enrich the rich. The people that can afford the automation, they'll kick workers to the curb once it becomes profitable to exchange the human worker for a machine. It's just the natural incentives inside capitalism.

You're going to push more and more people into the understanding. unemployment line. You know, the welfare state is either going to have to cover millions of more people or they're going to have riots on your hands. It's going to be a fundamentally destabilizing force. Marx thought that the industrial revolution was going to be the huge change in productive forces that gave rise to the possibility of a socialist society. I think he was one revolution too early. I think the automation revolution is going to give us that opportunity like the industrial revolution never could. And so it's just a matter of having to fight for it, to fight for a structure in which automation can take place, but that it benefits everybody

instead of just the owners of the machines. And so capitalism is going to bump up, in my opinion, against its own limitations. It's going to, it sows the seeds of its own destruction. It gives rise to these automated technologies, but then those very technologies that it birthed are going to turn around and make it very hard for capitalism to continue. So, yes, I am optimistic in that sense, but it's not guaranteed. It's going to have to be fought for. It's going to be, but why, but don't you think you need, you need capitalism then, if you say it's going to sew its own seed?

Don't you think you need capitalism at the moment for these people to produce these robots to automate the world? And then when that happens, don't you think that fight is a much better fight to have than like, hey guys, I see a fucking meteor, right? I see, like, it's really far away, but like it's there. like don't you think like once it starts getting in the area that's when you should start pointing it out no or it well yeah I think I think that's true but I think that we have to start laying the groundwork now we have to start making people think about it because this stuff's coming

I mean it's not it's not 200 years away I mean you're having self-driving cars that are already working think how many people drive buses drive semi trucks that work for Uber or that drive a taxi I mean these all these jobs can go away in you know a relative blink of an eye. And so I don't think that it's as far off media coming from a long distance and we should just, you know, wait for to have that fight later. I think we have to start preparing the groundwork now. And in my opinion, building up a social democracy, although it's not my end-all

be-all of a political project, but sort of the Bernie vision of America will move us in a direction where wealth is starting to be distributed in a more egalitarian way, you know, universal health care, access to higher education. And that will actually set the material grounds for the automotive technology so that when it comes, we're not scrambling around trying to figure out how to make the system work, but that we more, we ease our way into it as opposed to wait until the very last minute. I don't know if that's going to happen. In all likelihood, I think automation is going to come. Wealth inequality is going to continue to increase destabilization. You're going to have the far right and the far left

continually battling out as neoliberalism kind of does its death spiral. And it's not going to be clean it's not going to be pretty humans we're not proactive as a whole we're often reactive and we're only going to do things when we're only going to make big changes when we're forced to yeah so in that sense i'm like not optimistic but ultimately i think we have to keep fighting we have to start laying the groundwork now is that so what now here's the thing and you're talking about higher education what good does higher education do for anybody if we don't need to work um well that's that's that's a great great question because I think our educational system, under capitalism, has historically been tuned to making us good workers.

Just like the way that even the elementary school day is segmented and how there's authorities in the form of teachers telling you when to go to the bathroom or all of that. I think that it's kind of, it comes out of the economic system and serves to maintain the economic system. But when you have a radical alteration in the way things are made, let's say the automated technology in this case, I think it could give rise to people not doing education to get a job, but people doing education to self-actualized to, you know, make themselves, because I mean, I want to be educated regardless of it. I mean, I got a goddamn degree in philosophy. So I'm not, I wasn't sitting there thinking,

how can I make the most money possible? I know a degree in philosophy. It was something that I just loved and I did it even though I knew that it was not highly marketable, but it made me a better human being. It made me a more reflective human being. And existentially, gains there. We're in the market, there's virtually no gains. Well, don't you think that, like, as far as education goes, we're hitting, we're, we're going

towards a weird area. And the internet, like, still, we're, we're, we, our institutions are not cut up to the technology we currently have. So with the, with the internet, I mean, let's, I am not an educated man. I, I, I dropped out of high school. I, I, I'm not an educated person, but through the internet and through things like YouTube and iTunes you, I've been able to take classes from Berkeley, but I mean, maybe not get the teacher feedback, but I mean, I've been able to listen to lectures from Harvard, from all these places. So why do we need to take people's money, I guess is what I'm asking, to educate people when we probably should just change the way we look at educations through our institutions, right? Maybe they're, you know what I'm saying?

Because like, there's no really need to go to college at this point as far as the amount, maybe not, maybe not for philosophy, you know what I'm saying? Like, maybe for engineering and stuff like that. Like, I understand that concept, but like, man, there's so much information on the internet for free. That's got to be, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a good shit, right? Yeah, actually, right here, I think we totally fundamentally agree. I absolutely think that's true, and it, it gives us a wonderful opportunity to become more intelligent without having to go to school, without having to spend thousands and thousands of dollars on a degree. You're very smart. You have a podcast. You do these shows for an audience and you were able to use the internet to educate yourself. And that's awesome. And that's going to become more and more prevalent. I mean, we grew up just when the internet was coming online. I had a pager in high school. You know what I'm saying? It took a little while for me to, I mean, I'm a little older than you. But the kids growing, like my kids growing up in this next generation, it's just ubiquitous for them. And so I think that's really going to shape how things go from here. I don't exactly know the details of how it's going to shape.

it, but I certainly think that education in the way that we currently know it and use it is going to be fundamentally undermined, and I think that that's good. I think there should be, like, state tests, like, not, like, classes. Like, if you could pay for people to go take the test to prove to the instant, the, the, the corporations or whatever, that you're educated so you could get the job, that It seems, instead of being like, look, I have a bachelor's degree that costs me $60 or $1,000. You know, if there's a way to prove your knowledge, because isn't that what degrees are for? Like, hey, you proved that you have some knowledge.

Thank you. Now you can come work for us possibly. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Go ahead. No, go ahead. I was rambling.

Yeah, there's lots of people, and this I think is really interesting because I totally agree with you there. There's lots of people that I knew in academia. I went to grad school for a year. So I had, like, kind of a full range of the academic. experience. There's lots of people that have degrees that are that are total, you know, they're not at all intelligent, deep intellectual people. And there's people like you, I have a lot of friends that, you know, never went to college, but were motivated by an internal curiosity to develop their intellect. And then they're extremely smart and reflective and can speak authoritatively

in a wide range of subjects. So that's, that's a destabilizing effect. And I totally agree with you that I think that that's the way to go. I have no disagreement on that front. All right. So But we only have a little bit left. I'm sad. I'm actually having, I thought we're having, I think we're having a good conversation. I have more questions. Absolutely. So I guess my question is, how do you come to Marxism?

Because I think that's important. I think the idea of where you're from and how you eventually got to where you are right now is important to look at as far as people go, because it gives people empathy. It lets people understand what your mindset is. And I think a lot of people's mindset, obviously, it's for the best intention. But I want to know, like, you grow up in, like, a rural place and you saw the devastation of when the factory left, or what, what, what, what happened? Yeah, that's really great question. And I do that on my podcast, too.

I'm trying to do it more and more, like, at the end of episodes, ask people, you know, what was your political evolution? And it's really fascinating to see all the, you know, twists and turns people taking a life. but I was fundamentally raised in a low, like lower end of the working class, like very small house. My parents worked, they worked really hard. You know, every day they went to work and I would come home some days and the lights would be turned off or we wouldn't, you know, the water would be turned off. Or one day I came home from school and my mom's car was getting repossessed. And, you know, this is a, this is a woman that worked really, really hard and worked her entire life. And that was the first time she was able to save up and buy something nice for herself.

And she just couldn't keep up with the payments. And she lost it. And she was totally mortified. And so I grew up in a context where I saw people around me working hard. And they worked faithfully. They went to work every day. These were not lazy people by any stretch of the imagination. But they still caught bad breaks over and over and over.

My stepdad worked for a corporation. He worked his way up over 20 years. That corporation sold to a new corporation. the new management came in, you know, through the contracts out from the old corporation, cut wages and started putting pressure on people not to unionize. And so I kind of grew up in that context, but I never had a political apparatus that I could apply that would make sense of why this is happening. And as I grew older, I went to college and in a philosophy program, you're inevitably

going to bump up against the ideas of Marx and all of that. And so I started seeing like, whoa, this really fits. in with the experiences I've had, this gives me a way of understanding why good people who work hard don't always make it and why, you know, those annoying rich kids that we had in all of our high schools that just were so entitled because they were born into wealth with, you know, a silver spoon jammed in every orifice of their body. And, you know, they didn't work any harder than my parents did, but yet they lived a way better material life just because they happened to fall out of, you know, the right woman, the right mother.

in a certain patch of land with a certain historical lineage and they were kind of fell into this this life of wealth and stuff and so I thought it was very arbitrary as to who overall is rich and who overall is poor who has to struggle and who doesn't and so that was kind of my political evolution and as I learned more I read more I started seeing that the Marxist perspective gave me the most profound critique of this economic system and was most in tune with my life experiences so you didn't start so you as early as you remember then as far as when you started to gain a political ideology you grasped towards Marxism is that what you're saying well all that was on offer growing up was you know liberalism versus conservatism so I went to liberalism I was I was a

liberal I mean kind of a boring lame liberal but as I as I grew and I read more then I started you know I'm talking like late teens early 20s I'm a liberal because that was the only thing that was on offer. But then I went to school, I bumped into books, I went down certain paths, and then I became an anarchist for a little bit, more of an anarcho-communist type. Well, who did it? But then I realized, I felt that Marxism gave a better path forward than anarchism personally, and so I ended up, I ended up a libertarian Marxist.

All right. Do you have, is that, are we, do you have to go? Yeah, I do. I would love to come back on. This is really great. I mean, we might not agree, and I know a lot of your listeners are probably thinking, like, you know, damn, another Marxist. This is all bullshit. But just try to understand it from our perspective.

And I hope that some people at least got a little bit, a little bit of a perspective from where, you know, people on the left are coming from. We're not all monsters. We're not violent thugs. We're not out to hurt people or take away hardworking Americans money or anything like that. We just, we're egalitarians. We care about people. We believe in democracy in the workplace and in the economy. And we just want a society where human beings, all human beings, are allowed to self-actualize to the greatest extent possible.

Hey yo, imagine this. I never was given the gift to write rhymes. I was sitting in the sidelines of life. But my shit's so absurd. The way I work words in the music is preserved. You're the worst of the worst. You don't know a half of the history of the game that you claimants are preserved. You dirt on my screen I spit that shit clean

I'm Mr. Sheen A polish rhymes Abolish your fucking dreams Yo, that's rogue element Mean is my method For checking up all the records Achiever has been selecting A second to nothing

Beats are bumping I'm sobbing that summer summons I'm that shining your eyes As you climb to the summit You're feeling on top With the world My work's worthy I'm furnishing your time on this earth

That's right verbally Slack you in the face Till your skin turns burgundy I'm so ill The dog claims that I'm terminally Permanently Permanently spit in my position to the limit.

My tongue's dripping shreds through the heads of the timid criminally gifted I'm spitting my shit immaculate the thing that you lack is the fact that you ain't passionate fashionable rappers are mass and become the mass of us

hazard that we have like our comics becoming panelists I'm the analyst that I don't love bomber yo that's rogue element strengthen up your repertoire catalog stronger blinds are going on

like a million man conga billion bars a minute you've been in your whole genre this for B jammer I'm a drama king specialist Keep your head of laugh You're better off as a separatist I'm a Methodist

Managing the madness Make a shave on the floor Absorb your sadness A bang a narrative A beat to eat your dinner off It's how my house is assemble Like a temple or a synagogue A break next speed

We tote ten parts of here For you're popping off pills And you're pit and fully pissed So your misery persists And I'm illuminating lyrics Luminaries in the building Building with the physics Breeze block of beats

Asteroid Bonanza Giba drum machine And a bobby cool stanza Yo, that's rogue element Elements. Make you my meander. Flip it somewhere serious. Feed your brutal images and make your belly bilious.

Ten a penny idiot, singing from the hymn sheet. Listening to stained glass waiting to hear him speak. It's an eageless and tree guard, a trivial pursuit. Got your lined up like peopards. I'm ready for the shoot. It's a fruitless endeavor. Like putting crosses in ballot boxes or moaning about the weather. We scrape by with a miniscule of thievery.

Tiny in comparison to having the indecency, a government machinery. Believe me when I'm telling you, they're all the same enemies. The MPs are Senators realize I got my facts raw Cause what the rest you're in the street for The shipping in the back door And that's all the more reasoning To be deceiving them Yo, that's rogue element

Leave them in receivership Reliever of the leadership How's your seamanship? Because pretty soon we'll be sailing On the high seas of treason Korean system ain't the reason you should feel more This next time we'll slay him in the car On the way to the theater

Break the glass, take the mask off Smack him in the reptilian thrill Kill them and just blast off That's rogue element Yeah Yeah Analogue Bob Rogue element

Spip fire Olive Cheebo Thank you. Thank you.