Rev Left Radio - In Defense of Marxism w/ The Sensible Socialist

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

Breht recently went on The Sensible Socialist podcast to confront, analyze, and dismantle the laughable misrepresentations of Marxism and the shallow anti-communism of James Lindsay.  In the process, we clarify core concepts within Marxism, respond to various arguments against socialism, and reveal the fallacious logic and conspiracy thinking that underpins anti-communism in America today!  Check out the Sensible Socialist here: https://sensiblesocialist.com/ Rev Left Merch: https://goodsforthepeople.com/all-goods/p/revleftradio-t-shirt

Welcome to the Sensible Socialist podcast, a podcast for The Rational Left. We need to unite and work together if we're all going to get through this. Sounds like socialism to me. The amount of people I see talking about socialism positively is actually staggering. Do you think, wait, I mean, do you really think that a proletarian revolution is just around the corner? Grab your pitch sports and stab your mayor. Go hair, Alabama. He's not my hair.

Oh, look at him. If Bernie Sanders were president, right? And he wanted to bring the same idea for socialism into this country. Do you think that would be a benefit? Yeah, yeah. But I just told you benefits me like eating rats. But I just want people with health care. I don't want, like...

Same thing you go to Thomas. Oh, my God. You people have like worms in your brain, honestly. all right welcome to this episode of the sensible socialist podcast i am your host kevin gustson and uh with me i've got a special guest repeat guest uh and uh obviously podcaster in his own right from red left radio uh brett welcome yeah what's up kevin glad to be back fun to do this i'm still kind of i'm kind of angry at you for making me listen to james lindsay but you know you know it's like in some ways like maybe it's the the the

the horrible nature of the YouTube algorithm, but it seems to keep like, maybe it thinks that because it knows I'm a Marxist, and so it spits me anything with like Marxist in the title, and he's definitely using that as a way to, I don't know, piss off leftist or something, but I'm sure he's also getting a boost in the algorithm anyway. But, I mean, part of it for me is like it comes out of this frustration

because I was, I, like, for the background on this, uh, in 2017, James Lindsay was part of the group with the philosopher Peter Bogosian, who was like street epistemology and kind of perspective on epistemology, epistemological rigor. I really liked. I really liked Bogosian stuff. And so Bogosian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose did this whole campaign, which is to kind of show that the critical studies, as we might call them, that they would call the grievance studies were. at sort of best being obscured by this, by kind of a slew of ideological actors, masquerading as like genuine scientific journal editors or like research entities, and then maybe at

worse, that the critical studies were like not scientifically or theoretically sound perspectives at all. And I do understand that to a certain degree. I think that there's obviously a core in the critical studies field that I understand. I think it's a legitimate course of critique of the status quo and the different ways of what we might call in the Marxist traditional term like the superstructure of society and the different aspects of how the base, the economic base kind of expresses itself. But I think that, you know, the way that they did it was there's also this other aspect

where there can be a kind of movement too far and there can be a kind of, you know, bullshit happening and not real good rigor when it comes to some of these. And I think they took advantage of that in the sense that they submitted a bunch of sort of bullshit papers with using the kind of lingo that is used in the critical studies generally and got some of them published. They did, I think it's important to note that they did get a lot of rejections. So while they did get some published and were able to make their point that like at least some in this field are not legitimate, there was still a kind of backstop that they hit.

And so it wasn't as some kind of, I think, a totally successful project, though they at least brought up the issue, which is, I think, okay, legitimate, let's have the conversation about which ones are legit and which ones aren't. And I think out of the three, you know, Bogosian doesn't seem really ideologically motivated, really, like, frustrated about the epistemological rigor aspect of it. Pluck Rose, I think, actually, like, comes from a more critical background or a sort of socialist background. She seems to can be concerned with, like, the lack of a class analysis in modern critical studies, which I understand and kind of agree. with in some ways.

But then James Lindsay, the one that didn't really come from academia, has like a math PhD or something, seemed to me to be the least legitimate of them and like wholly ideologically motivated. And I think since gaining notoriety, it's become very obvious that he's used this new platform that he's had from the New York Times articles and the request for, you know, talks and he was just on Joe Rogan. not that long ago, which is obviously a huge platform, that he's basically used to criticize this identity-based ideology

as simply a new form of Marxism. And so it's a, it's this, he's just an anti-communist. And this is not a new phenomenon, obviously. And, but he sort of pretends having read Marx and Gramsci and Marcusa and Lukash and other people to like tie it all back to the failed ideas of Marx himself. and I think it's fairly obvious and I think this is what I wanted to kind of bring out in this going through some of what he says

is that if you listen to what he says he either doesn't understand Marx though he kind of can underuse the language a bit and he doesn't definitely know like the tradition of Marxian thought or he's like either he just doesn't understand it or when he has read it he hasn't read it with any other purpose than to discredit him So it's just a pure example of not, again, not a new phenomenon of a bad faith take on Marx.

And so it's this recent episode, he's got a new discourses podcast where he comes out with something like every other day. I don't know what the guy, like, he's just like, well, he admits at least in this episode that he didn't prepare at all, which I think was somewhat like obvious. And he also makes a great claim like, well, he's coming out with the new book, but I'm in the point of having to do citations. oh, citation, like, oh, God forbid, I can't just, like, spout my bullshit on paper and then, like, somebody just publishes it. But so, but he wants to show how this modern identity politics is just, as he calls it, identity Marxism. And this is obviously not, you know, Mark Levin came up with American Marxism and that Dinesh D'Souza's got a book about, I think American Marxism, like this is a, this is becoming a trope. And so I wanted to invite you on, because I know we've had. good conversations and I just I appreciate your perspective and I think it's a good person to

illustrate some of the fallacies and sort of fallacious thinking as well as just flat out misunderstandings of a bad faith take on on marks so yeah that's kind of where I'm coming from but I know you have at least a kind of general things about like who this guy is and where he wants to come from that maybe could help us start before we actually get into like the nitty gritty of what he says in this podcast for sure yeah i i agree with with everything you said um he came across my radar less from that direction and more from like saying shit on twitter and seeing like my friend sean from the antifada just ripping him constantly and and so he kind of came into my consciousness through that and then obviously i i in prep for this i'd listen to his new discourses

podcast and the first thing to say is a point i like to make a lot which is that the the bar for like rigor when you're an anti-communist is so low and really always has been that you could say almost anything. And if you are anti-Marxist and anti-communist, you will find an audience and, you know, Joe Rogan will immediately invite you on to his podcast. And there's, there's some resonance with like a Jordan Peterson type figure, right, who also uses these terms like postmodern neo-Marxist. And it's very clear that when Peterson debated Gijek, he was completely revealed to be an absolute charlatan on this. And then all he did to learn Marxism was, I think, thumb through the communist manifesto, which is like a tiny pamphlet.

And so when you're actually, now, Peterson made quite a bit of money and got quite a reputation going around to right wing outlets, mouthing this nonsense. But then when he was forced to actually have on a somewhat competent Marxist to debate him, completely fell apart. And I think the exact same thing would happen if a James Lindsay took on even a somewhat competent Marxist. He would be revealed to be the charlatan he is, but there's money to be made, there's an audience to

be catered to, and the bar is so low that you don't really have to have a lot of intellectual rigor or deep understanding of this stuff. You just have to kind of sound smart to dumb people. And I think if you look in the comment section of that episode on YouTube,

well, first of all, it's all white dudes, which says a lot. And there all like very clearly oh thank you so much like this totally makes sense you know i flirted with marxism back in college but thank you for really telling the truth so they don't understand it he doesn't understand it and it's a beautiful little ecosystem of paying money and getting an audience and a reputation and getting invited on rogan to say this nonsense so i don't really know what his intentions are but it seems very very likely that he is on that cottage industry of like you know sounding smart to dumb people and being an anti-communist and there'll always be a platform

for you. So that's that's what he is. And in that respect, you know, I think it is fair to say that at least when he's talking about this, that he is a pseudo intellectual, somebody who is pretending to have a deep understanding of something he clearly does not. He's also an idealist and I think that will come through in his conception of Marxism as kind of just socialism and Marxism emerging as an idea in the head of like Marx and other socialists that not not at all attached or tethered to actual class struggle or the horrific history of capital. exploitation and capitalist society, and the way he talks about it is clearly in that vein. And then also, I think there's an argument to be made, especially in this episode, that he is a reactionary conspiracist indulging in the old fascist trope of cultural Marxism. I mean, he literally says that Marxism has infiltrated our law, infiltrated our media, infiltrated our schools. And, you know, if you have any passing understanding of American law on how it operates. If you watch American mainstream media, if you go to American

universities, you will quickly be disabused of the notion that these are Marxist holdouts or these are bastions of Marxist thought and perpetuation. But by saying that, he really is playing into a very old trope that is rooted in anti-Semitism, which is this cultural

Marxist idea that the Jews have infiltrated our institutions and are promoting their Judeo-Bolshevism. He might not use those exact words, but he's definitely in that lineage and pulling from that whether he knows it or not yeah yeah and i think that it's uh it it is when i listen to this stuff having to like dove deep into this it it's it's it's it's it's comedic in the sense you know this and it just makes me laugh because it's like oh my god do you does he

really think this and and there is a part of me that that does like i i do think it's a genuine position that he has but it's one of those where again it's just this deep seated bad faith it's like, I'm going to read marks or I'm going to read more, you know, like, even there's a few things like, God help me if I have to read Murkusa. It's like, yep, God help you if you have to read something difficult that takes like a little bit of intellectual rigor. And that goes to the point. A pseudo-intellectual is exactly what he is. And I think as we're seeing something like the Joe Rogan podcast, it's just a string of pseudo-intellectuals that, you know, you said, speaking, like sounding smart to dumb people is exactly what, I mean, that's the, that's the bread and butter of James Lindsay's whole.

whole life, I think. And so, um, we'll get a taste of it here. I want to, I want to, like, jump in. Um, this episode that we're going to go through is a long episode. And again, he, he literally says I didn't prepare for it. But, um, we don't even need to go into all of it, but into this, like, whole crazy tangled web. He goes, like, away from Markson into the Frankfurt School and all this kind of stuff, which is another trope that's developed in, like, modern, uh, anti-communism and stuff. But it's because, at least for me in this kind of kind of philosophical style, I think that we can evaluate the strength of his argument based on the premises that he states at the beginning. And even if we were to grant that his arguments

are somewhat valid in the sense that even the form of them is correct, the premises are so wrong that you can kind of reject even this long tangled web he can make to get us to identity Marxism by understanding that he doesn't even know what Marxism is. Right. So, all right, with that, let me pull up this this crazy thing and we'll talk as you're doing that I just want to say one more thing about what he's trying to do here just for people

is that he is like as you mentioned he's trying to show how wokeism or identity politics is actually a product of Marxism and he calls wokeism Leninism 4.0 so and we're going to get into like the Frankfurt school and stuff but the Frankfurt school was also like very critical of Marxism

Leninism but he's just sort of putting it all in a pot with his very limited understanding of everything and mixing it all together to call woke, liberal identity reductionism, Leninism just shows right off the bat. You have no clue what these words mean. Absolutely. All right. So let's enjoy this. I've been talking about a new idea lately, and I've mentioned it here on the podcast called Identity Marxism. I've got a book coming. You know, watch out always for somebody with a book coming. That's all they're going to talk about. I've got a book coming where I'm going to name

critical race theory race Marxism fairly soon that will be the title of the book so keep your eyes open for that. It's in the final kind of editing and typesetting stages and the references stages but anyway

I need to kind of lay out just going to be in a very simple straightforward, clear way what is identity Marxism and where did it come from and how do we get here and so I'm going to just real it back and just going to talk off the cuff. I didn't make notes for this.

I'm just going to roll a little bit and talk about what I mean by identity Marxism. I think this is very similar to what, although I haven't actually read his book to what Mark Levin calls American Marxism. And it's certainly an American Marxist thing. Even just to stop like quick right there. Like if you, if your intellectual position is that Mark, Mark, Levine or however you say his last name is on to something when it comes to like his take on Marxism it's already like oh my bullshit detector is already like rising to a significant level but

exactly I actually grew up listening to right wing talk radio so I have many many years of experience listening specifically to Levin and other thinkers like on Limbaugh and Savage etc and to think that they have any understanding of Marxism at all is just absolutely absurd. These are like right-wing reactionary culture warriors and it's yeah, just completely empty. So I've never read and I don't ever want to read American Marxism

but I can only imagine what nonsense is in between those covers. It's again like not to be too hyperbolic but it's like you know Hitler really understood Marxism and like really understood Lenin like okay yeah I guess but like maybe that's a bad source. All right.

It's what worked in America. Marxists are only concerned with what works. And that's actually going to be the first thing I'm going to put forth. So to do this, we've got to walk all the way back to Marxism, understand what Marxism is and how Marxism works. And then we're going to come forward to today where we have identity Marxism. And of course, all the, I mean, all the breadcrumbs for this podcast are out there in other podcasts. I've already covered basically all of this. We're going to talk about a number of species of Marxism. And one of those, the first of those, is going to be just Marxism. I'm not going to get into. This is an important tangential point. At some point, we've got to talk about the difference between Marxism and Bolshevism, I guess. But we kind of don't.

Bolshevism is the kind of very applicable form of Marxism that worked, that Lenin cooked up. The Bolsheviks were under Lenin, under Lenin's direction eventually. And that's what worked to achieve a revolution in Russia in 1917. And I've already pointed out that I think. I think Stalin basically brought to four Leninism 2.0, and frankly, Khrushchev kind of softened all of this. And then, but in Mao, I brought into what I call Leninism 3.0. And then Woke is Leninism 4.0. I did a podcast on that.

I think it centers on Antonio Gramsci. In Leninism 4.0, it's also, you could actually say that these are Bolshev, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0. So woke is actually Bolshevist more than it is strictly Marxist. But that's also to say that the theory is ultimately Bolshevist or sorry, the theory is ultimately Marxian underneath it and it's using a Bolshevik model on top of that to achieve its goals, which Bolshevism basically boils down to there being a vanguard party, an enlightened set of elites who are now going to walk society through the revolution because the stupid peasants won't. get their act together and form a solid workers party that becomes the dictatorship of the proletariat. So they're going to force a dictatorship of the proletariat and they're going to use, you know, as Mao had it, you know, power flows from the barrel of a gun. Nobody has to ask any questions about the brutality of Soviet style and Eastern European style, Bolshevism or Marxism, communism either. It's very clear that the goal was to create an elite vanguard.

guard that was going to enforce socialism on everybody. We call this anti-racism in critical race theory now. We have a dictatorship with the anti-racist as a vision for, so people like I've done that many times. I'm not going to do it again here. So that's like the first part of it that, again, yeah, like, I think you and I are having a similar reaction in just the sense of like, it's almost, it's just like a, what the fuck?

Okay, so like, Bolshevism, or sorry, so Marxism 1.0, then Bolshevism. So, no way, Bolshevism 1.0 is Leninism. And then Mao, this is this kind of like, even track right here is just weird to me. And then even the end part, that there's a relationship between what we would call wokeism in the modern era. Whatever how, whatever, that itself has a kind of nebulous definition is, is. Is Bolshevism? Like, I don't know. Maybe you give me your initial reaction and I'll riff off that because it's just, it's so wrong that I don't even know where to start.

Conflation after conflation after misunderstanding. The idea that we're living under a dictatorship of anti-racism and that that's a bad thing are two just insane claims. And it shows that he doesn't understand what the term dictatorship of the proletariat even means. If he's talking about that we currently live under the reign of a dictatorship, of anti-racism and then also why that would be bad like why anti-racism is or like something that needs to be feared and combated against it he's really putting his cards on the table there and then just the the conflation of bolshevism and Marxism trying to separate them but trying to bring them together using the very language of 2.0 and 3.0 is just utterly mystifying

and confusing and then also I think it's really indicative that he talks about Lenin cooking up ideas like you know this is again this idealism and this great man of history nonsense that socialism and the history of socialism is just like a couple of distinct people, Marx, then Lenin, then Stalin, then Mao, cooking up in their minds, ideas. No, these things are tied deeply to real material revolutions and class struggles.

Socialism as an entire project in Marxism more broadly arises not from the minds of individual thinkers, but from the material conditions created by capitalism. And you'll find throughout this entire discussion, there is a complete absence of any attempt to even wrestle with the critique of political economy or to even center class analysis whatsoever. Now, of course, he has to get rid of those things because his entire argument would make no sense if he actually wrestled with what Marxism is. But he's doing a lot of moving around of words and jargon. And again, like, you know,

the idea that this is a smart, sounds smart to dumb people is not just to like shit on people, but it's literally to say that these, you have to be ignorant. to take up his ideas. And what he's doing is throwing jargon at you, knowing that his audience won't understand what it means, and will then just assume that he's operating on legitimate premises and follow his line of argumentation all the way through. So, yeah, just like you said,

the very premises and the very beginning point of this chain of logical argumentation is flawed from the very get-go. And tying Abraham Kendi, a liberal, into this idea of Marxism, as if, you know, Marxists have not continuously critiqued Kendi and his work ever since it came out again just shows this complete conflation which you find on the far right

I don't know if this exactly fits because I think Lindsay is a liberal ultimately philosophical liberal reactionary conservative liberal but this far right conflation of everything on the left as being one thing there's no attempt to delineate

liberalism from socialism or Marxism which we'll get to later because you can't understand modern day identity politics without seeing it as a form of liberalism form of liberal individualism. But perhaps we'll get to that later. But and then this, one, I mean, I think those who do understand like Leninism, just even this quick, you know, it must have been a 30 second like brain fart that he had

in terms of saying that Leninism is this notion of a, of a vanguard party, of an enlightened elite that take everybody with them because I think the dumb peasants are too stupid to create a workers' party. It's one of those we're like, okay, so again, even to fundamentally understand Lenin, the project of Bolshevism itself, Russian, like communism in the history of that, Russian Marxism, you have to have a historical understanding of what was going on and why these ideas are emerging, right? Again, this isn't just something Lenin cooked up. It's an analysis of what's going on in the world and what you do about that situation, what levers you can. can pull and what situations you can, you know, attempt to arise based on actual action of individuals. And this, this is, even this vanguard party aspect is such a trope, even among a certain degree of, you know, online Marxists and stuff like that, that kind of overinflate this whole notion. The vanguard party idea is a Blankiest kind of position that goes back

way before Lenin that Lenin himself criticized in the sense that he's literally saying he says in many places we are not trying to create a vanguard party we are we are attempting to you have a mechanism to grab hold of the more the most advanced elements of the working class as they arise out of the you know struggles that they find themselves in of the actual working struggles of working individuals and to give them a kind of background that takes their own experience and connects it with the experience of other workers so that they can join together in some kind of organization to be the sort of leaders of the working class. This isn't some like enlightened, like, you know, this enlightenment factory of workers. It's really taking workers where

they are and they are going to be enlightened by their experience with capitalism being the oppressive force that it is. And so that's a nuanced, historically based, textual, based perspective on what Leninism is and what Bolshevism is partly, not totally, but partly about. And the idea that you can just, like you said, just mash these together in a Ben Shapiro style, let's talk really quickly so nobody understands what I'm saying, and then I'll just go, see, I'm right. It's just a kind of a charlatanism. It's pretending to know things you don't know. I'll just like mention Gramsci quick and not like dive into the depths of the prison notebooks and things like that, not place him in a historical period and time of being able to deal with

what he's actually talking about. And instead, like you said, idealistically extract him from the place that he existed in in order to say, oh, I'm just criticizing the ideas. Well, then you're not actually dealing with even the ideas, much less the point of what the writings are about. They're not expressing these standalone philosophical perspectives. They are attempting to analyze what is going on in the world in order to be able to arm the people who are oppressed by the current system with the tools with which to do so. And like, even this quote about Mao, sometimes that is the barrel of the gun, because history has shown time and time again, even especially, especially with liberals, when it comes time to point the gun either at, you know, the powers

to be or the workers who help, you know, liberals get into power, they turn the gun on you. And so sometimes the truth does come at the barrel of a gun and to to not be willing at least to admit that that's not some kind of justification for the worst excesses of incredibly difficult historical events you know like if you just make a claim that like Stalin is the greatest mass murder of all time it's like you don't understand at all what was going on you know between let's say 1918 and 1929 much less 1929 to 1936 and if you don't understand that then a claim like that is not only factually incorrect it's just a perspective that isn't worth a damn like isn't worth willing like being listened to at all but of course if you don't know or you're not willing to

do that research oh yeah like Stalin bad especially if you already if you already have like an inbuilt commitment to anti-communism but you don't understand it well somebody like James Lindsay can come in and just give you all this meaningless fluff that you can then take is like, see, I know I'm right, right? This smart guy can lay it all out. Maybe I can't lay it out like he can, but we know that we're both right. And the idea of the barrel of the gun is funny too, as if the political project that ostensibly he supports liberal capitalism isn't soaked through and through with blood,

with the elimination of entire peoples, with the slave trade, with colonization, right, never even touched on. And a huge thing that you mentioned that's really important to understand with all anti-communists, when they critique communism in Cuba or socialism in Cuba, in Russia, in China, anywhere, they will always extract it from what actually was happening before that revolution. You cannot understand the Cuban revolution without understanding the Batista regime. You cannot understand possibly the Bolshevik revolution without understanding Tsarist, Russia, World War I, and all this other context. And same with China. that you cannot understand Chinese communism without the Japanese imperialist invasion and then the civil war between the nationalists, et cetera.

So to even begin to touch on these topics seriously would at least require you to mention something about their historical context. And the last point is that a Lenin, a Stalin, a Mao, whatever you feel about them, none of them would have existed without the masses of people behind them, the peasants, the workers, an entire formation of millions and millions of people who were invested in this revolutionary project. And so to take all of that and reduce it to a single leader in their ideas is, of course, an anti-communist trope, of course liberal idealism. And it sheds very little light on anything whatsoever.

And that's what he's engaging in here. Yep. And we'll hear more about Bolshevism in this next clip. But I do, there is the thing I'll say just before we even hear it to this, you already kind of mentioned it. Bolshevism as the only Marxism that works, that is actually an interesting perspective in the sense that there is, as much as one might want to say, I think you might be inclined even to say that like Bolshevism is not necessarily the only one that worked, but is a kind of example of the fact that it was successful in a place where it was not successful other places. But at least in the tradition of Marxian thought, Lenin's perspective is not the only one. It is a massive simplification. of the philosophical tradition of Marxism to boil everything down and to constrain what we might call Marxist analysis or something like that into Lenin's like Bolshe, like Lenin's like perspective, right? There's obviously a philosophical aspect that Lenin had and is interesting and useful in analysis

of imperialism and the role of like a party or a workers' organization or something like that. All of those are really interesting and useful and part of the tradition. But there are people that criticized Lenin and that were critical of that project, including even Rosa Luxembourg, as much as she agreed on other aspects. And you do have the Kautskys, which there was obviously a major difference between those. And so this, I just, this kind of like, if you're not interested in really understanding the deep historical tradition that in terms of a thought process of that comes down to Marx, then a way to not have to deal with the kind of difficulty and the diversity of opinion is to just say, oh, well, I'm going to. just going to ignore all that because I guess it's easier for me to make my bullshit argument. Exactly. And in just one last point, even within, of course, the Bolshevik party, right?

Completely different arguments like Trotsky versus Stalin versus Lenin versus other figures who had different ideas, Bakunin, or not Bakunin, Bekharin, et cetera. So none of that has even touched on, you know, but yeah. None of these things are single masses of, you know, of perspectives. They are a diversity that is a rich diversity that deserves. It's due analysis. But here, let's listen to some more bullshit. But we're not going to split hairs.

When I say Marxism, it's applicable form that actually ends up doing something. Turns out to be Bolshevism every time we're not going to split hairs. I want to talk about the progression from kind of original vulgar Marxism into cultural Marxism, into what I now refer to as identity Marxism, which if we follow Jose Medina, who's one of the theorists in the kind of. of woke school of thought has gone kaleidoscopic now there are multiple very many you know there's this complicated matrix of oppression now right matrix of domination as it's complicated every possible line of social stratification that you can imagine based in identity or whatever is relevant but what this is is the adoption of identity politics by neo-Marxism and this is not a hard story to tell it's amazing that it hasn't been told clearly probably because our academics have proven

in themselves virtually useless, the ones who are who most of them don't know what's going on, their sleep or something. And then the ones who do know what's going on are, they tend to be so caught up in a like little minutia of academic detail that they miss the forest for the trees, as it were, and not told this story very well, which is shocking that, you know, relative amateur like myself is able to just see it so clearly and be able to talk about it. so so clearly he sees it so clearly

that that right there is a kind of it just feels like it's a kind of giveaway in the sense that like yeah dude um this is like a 150 year old path uh that it's dealt with that has been both this kind of this interaction between a kind of intelligentsia and a broad working class group that have interacted and come up with complex ways to understand things and a kind of jargon sure but the idea that academic who spend their time trying to really dig into the details and understand these kind of things and put it in historical perspective and be able to like explain what it's really going on and to find the nuance in it that they are asleep and that a relative amateur which a relative maybe is a is you know is sort of obvious but um it is able to kind of see through it it's it's an admission of the fact that the only way that I can make my arguments and that these arguments have any saliency is, by ignoring the fact that this is a rich tradition of intellectual thought and to boil it down to these kind of points that, oh, I have to create citations for. And I guess I can only cite

Levin and Dinesh D'Souza so many times that, you know, I have to like, God forbid I have to like read like read deep analysis on this and follow the traditions where they go. It's just, it's like a giveaway line that like it's one of those like you're kind of saying the quiet part out loud, games like, don't be so dumb. Yeah, everybody's sleeping but him with his crystal clear clarity and deep understanding. You know, he's brave for what he's doing as well as very, very smart. Yeah, and even this, you know, to me actually, the vulgar Marxism is an interesting. This is him having read a lot of, you know, critical studies and stuff like that, because there is this tendency in, in developed critical studies to make this kind of break between vulgar,

Marxism with its kind of deep focus on class dynamics and the and the and this claim that that the mode of production is the kind of economic base and that a lot of these the things that we see like the law and politics and social society and culture and literature and all this kind of stuff is this edifice that stands on a kind of foundation of economics is something that does get criticized that does that does say okay that was that perspective may not be the case and and I think that again If you're sort of honest and want to have a deep, interesting discussion, you can do that. You can have a critique of Marxism that says, hey, look, I think Marx was too simplistic in this grounding on class analysis. And maybe the hitherto existed, you know, the hitherto history isn't the history of class struggle, that there's other dynamics that go into place.

That's an interesting discussion. But then to just say, well, for those who say that, they're really just cultural Marxists or neo-Marxists. And then to get into identity Marxists, I guarantee you that there's probably, I just can't imagine anyone actually kind of identifying as an identity Marxist. Because to me, that feels contradictory. And maybe for Marxist, that's not a bad, that's not such a weird thing to be, right? It's dealing with contradictions. But if you're going to, if you're going to tie into Marxism, even if you call yourself a kind of neo-Marxist, maybe you just have it as a critique that, like, it isn't the old industrial bro. that's going to be the engine of revolutionary change.

It's actually like a new kind of techno-carriot or something, a new technologically capable and that the technological revolution that we're going through now may be actually the technological advance that's creating a fetter on the old capitalist system and capitalism was going to necessarily had to develop way farther than Marx thought it would because there was an overemphasis on the industrial working class, the industrial working class, rather than the mass of the working class taking advantage of the technological, like, and I'm sympathetic to that. That you might call neo-Marxism, but that's still grounded in a class analysis.

It isn't grounding it in something else like race or gender or something like that. Those are their own intellectual traditions of feminism or, you know, or something like that. And so I think tying it to Marxism is nefarious and does bring about this, again, this long and dirty history of tying kind of everything you don't like or that seems to be tearing down the, the bourgeois liberal order in the way that it exists as a patriarchal, racially divided, oppressive kind of system, shielded by these grand notions of equality, fraternity, democracy, and those kind of things is, you know, like, it's a, it's, there's a kind of yuck factor that that comes into me because I know that the forces who have used that are the forces who have themselves,

uh, not only gone after communists, but also, um, um, Jews and other people that they find to be purveyors of the potential downfall of the maintenance of the bourgeoisie's dictatorship, whether that finds itself in the liberal democratic form or the fascist form, which are two forms of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Yeah, yeah. Very well said. Yeah. And to the vulgar Marxist point, yeah, there certainly, I was just actually just did an episode and was reading of Walter Benhamene's work. And he told. talks about, you know, vulgar Marxism. And there's a long tradition of vulgar Marxism and there's different forms of vulgar Marxism. Sometimes it's being referred to as like this sort of mechanical or overly determinative or reductionist, as you mentioned, a version of Marxism, an over-emphasis perhaps on the productive forces and maybe not the social relations or whatever. And this long tradition of Marxism as well, you know, as I mentioned earlier, there's a

conflict between more traditional Marxist-Leninist approaches to revolution and class struggle compared to like the Frankfurt School move into the superstructure and analysis of culture in the wake of what they saw at the time of being a sort of failure of this more class-based movements. And so, you know, this is a long, rich tradition that has inside of itself many disagreements and conflicts. But what he's trying to do is draw a straight, unperturbed line through Lenin, Stalin, and Mao to the Frankfurt School and then to identity politics. That entire trajectory completely abolishes the deep contradictions that exist between those different forms of Marxism in and of themselves. And just to say what my perspective

as a Marxist on identity is, is that, you know, the identity is important, right? It's certainly used in a capitalist way to divide the working class, the legacy of colonialism, the legacy of slavery Lenin talking about the national question and the need to these huge decolonial movements in the 60s and 70s and today a Marxist perspective

might be something like identity is important there is a liberal tendency in the mainstream identity politics in liberal society is actually identity reductionism it actually seeks to individualize identity

and break it off from any capacity to unite across different identities what Marxism does rooted as it is in class struggle is acknowledges these identity differences say yeah to be a black trans woman in America is fucking way different

experientially than being like a white member of the labor aristocracy or the working class in general but what can possibly can you know unite those people is their shared interest in advancing the material conditions of themselves and their family which is to say

class struggle and if you look at on a union picket line what do you see you see people of all different identities and actually political differences coming together in a moment of unity to advance their class interests and you know the best way to do that is to actually acknowledge the difference and identitiesities but to unite and liberalism doesn't allow for that but again all this is is a much broader deeper conversation that actually takes this idea and parses it out and examines it not just runs rough shot over it you know smooths out all wrinkles to make this grand trajectory

that he's that he's on you know to do that you have to do violence to the marx tradition at every imaginable point. Yeah. And I agree with you completely on the kind of position of identity. It's not as if it isn't important. It in some ways has always existed. Identity is the way you understand yourself as it relates to the world around you and other people and all that kind of stuff. That's a common, it's a sort of genuine human tendency and thing that we're going to do.

The question is, how do we develop these identities and what do we do with them? And you can weaponize identities to differentiate people and individuate people. And I think that is one problem and one legitimate critique of a kind of reductionism to identity. But you can also say, look, you can totally adopt the notion of intersectionality and say, yep, there's lots of things that stack and layer. And you know what? If you think of it, in some ways, like intersectionality is a nice word, but there's a kind of sandwichness that I always like to do, kind of this different sandwiches that you can layer these things. But sometimes you have to drive, you know, to be able to keep that sandwich together, there's something that comes through it, the little like toothpick that you put through it. And to me, that's always been the kind of class.

The place they intersect is this class dynamic. Because, yes, each class, the bourgeois class and the proletarian class, are made up of different people, different identities, right? Now, we can look and we can notice patterns in terms of the degree to which some groups have been in positions of power and gotten into the bourgeoisie. But there is a tendency in which to say, well, if just more people who look different were in the bourgeoisie, things would get better. And that is a kind of failure of analysis of understanding that, no, it wouldn't, because the identity isn't what's central.

It's not unimportant. It's just it can't be central. What has to be central is the relationship we have to what it is that we're doing with our lives. And if your identity is the center by which you do that, or if you think identity should be the center of doing it, the confluence of creating and placing different identities in different places is merely going to add diversity to an already oppressive system. It isn't going to fix in itself the oppressive system. You need to uproot the oppressive system. And the only way to do that is to unite among identity groups, not to differentiate among those groups. And so it's like that is a vulgar Marxist position.

And so that seems to be justified. It lays a kind of critique of identity reductionism, which is what one might call identity politics if you wanted to do that. but is much more intellectually rigorous, if you say identity reductionism. Are you reducing everything to identity? That is legitimate to critique. If you're talking about identity politics, everyone is coming to politics with the perspective that they have, which is how they understand themselves in their relationship to society. Including Lindsay, including him.

Yes, obviously, yes. He's got a, you know, like it's whatever his background is. Part of that is being a white man, but part of that is where he came from, who his parents were, all these things that he didn't necessarily choose and yeah it's there you're no one stands above these but these are not the the core aspect of what it is that that will lead to some kind of political project that will ultimately lead to something that we might call liberation much less even progress or something like that it's a really it's kind of in that sense of the critique i would have is that it's a it's a bit of a dead end or maybe a cul-de-sac more so than a dead end

you can circle around there for a while and you can have interesting discussions but if the goal is to get to a location, you don't seem to have good signposts on, what you have is a lot of intersecting lines. And that tends to be confusing. Yeah, well said, absolutely. So, all right, so let's hear what James has to say about what identity Marxism actually is, because I think even he understands that it's a confusing thing to say. But so, all the way back to Marxism, so we can get to identity Marxism, which is just Marxist theory and aim. and application through identity politics. It's all I mean by identity Marxism.

It's using identity politics to do Marxism to achieve something like a modified version of communism, which happens to be now, and this is the, if we go back to Leninism or Bolshevism 4.0, that is blended with the, the, with, with corporatism and actually communism and fascism have blended themselves, which is very useful as a cloak for them. They can't see, it becomes very difficult to see that this is a communist movement if it's simultaneously fascism. Because the second you say it's communist, they can say it's fascist. The second say it's fascist. They can say it's communist, which is anti-fascist. And they're actually lying. It's both at the same time mixed together. And Deng Xiaoping and China actually pioneered that model after Mao.

And that's the model that runs in China today. The difference, by the way, between Western and Chinese in this case would be that the Western attempt is going to put the fascism on top and the communism beneath. And then the Chinese model, the communism's on top and the fascism. underneath but I digress yeah I digress indeed like to me into like fucking insanity like in this is lunatic okay so this the the I've been I've been reading a bit about the the period of of sort of what you might call the Stalin ascendancy the kind of beginning of the four the five-year plan and and the sort of coming out of Lenin's death and stuff like that And there is this discussion about what are the similarities between the project of Hitler's Germany and Stalin, right?

And there are some similarities in terms of the idea of like a one-party state, a deep bureaucracy that's inclined to specific goals and something like that. There are some links. But those are only in terms of being able to see, like, to be able to analyze why, why you would have some of these kind of similarities in that particular. period to not dehistoricize them, right? And because you're talking about deep crises between both in both situations, the crises of the lack of a proletarian revolution coming out of in 1980, the failure of the German revolution between 1918 and 1921 or so. And then in some ways, that same failure of the revolution in Germany producing a failure of the social Democrats in Germany to really sort of be able to deal with the repercussions of having lost World War I

and a kind of opening up for this for this this whole fascist rise so but the idea that that what you analyze like let's say China now is this notion of like fascism and communism mixed together misunderstands both what communism is and and fascism is now you could call under whatever a particularized definition China a kind of totalitarian state in the sense that it's an attempt to kind of totally transform a very old society into something new and like and the means by which you do that is through a kind of single party control and and you can have even legitimate criticisms of that you can have illegitimate criticisms of it too and deciding what is legitimate and illegitimate is a very deep and nuanced kind of discussion it isn't well china is what fascism on the top and communism on the bottom what the fuck is on top oh yeah okay what the fuck does that mean like i don't that what like what is like what is the bottom fascism, what's the top

common, what they have, because they have a communist party rather than a fascist party? I like, I don't have a fucking clue what he means by a few things he says, do Marxism, that identity Marxism is attempt to do Marxism through

identity. I don't know what that means. I'd be curious what you might think. Modified communism, like, there is no single communism. All communism is modified communism it has to fit certain historical like historical social cultural economic conditions and and and like it nothing there's no this is not the bible or some kind of like

playlist or or roadmap that you just say like yep do one two three four five and you're at communism it's historically politically economically contingent things and so none of this has anything in my view to do with even Marxism this is how you show that you don't understand what the fuck you're talking about any of these terms absolutely and like i think it does come ultimately uh this this this insane conflation between everything that is contradictory um from this sort of very shallow liberal idea of just authoritarianism like you know if we have we we have our two parties we have real democracy can only exist under capitalism everything that's not exactly this liberal democratic capitalism is ultimately the same thing i mean it is just horseshoe theory, right? It's just like, it's horseshoe theory. Like, if you go far enough to the right or left, you end up at the same exact place, it sheds light on absolutely nothing. And to say that Marxism is blended with corporatism and fascism is like to completely entangle, I mean, even a middle school understanding of like the 20th, you know, century is like, you know,

this big three-way battle between fascism, communism, and liberal democracy or capitalism. And he's just combining them all. Like, well, how do you explain the fact like, that one of the first things, you know, fascists always do wherever they arise is trying to take out and kill communists and socialists and anarchists and labor union leaders if all of it is just the exact same. I mean, to have any understanding at all, you'd have to break down these terms and what they actually mean and there's no understanding on his part of what they mean. And it is ultimately a fascist lie. This idea that liberals love to run with, but is ultimately rooted in actually rehabilitating the fascist image, is to say that actually they're the, same well communists are fighting for an egalitarian society rooted in you know free and open ideally you know cooperation and no longer exploitation right so how is that at all in any way

the same as as fascism which is exactly the opposite of that and which sees the socialist threat as an impetus to the formation of fascism itself but to say that fascism one of the most brutal evil genocidal ideologies to exist of the last century is the same as communism obviously makes fascism look better and muddies the water around any critique of capitalism at all and I think that's what he is doing sort of from this knee jerk not thought through not reflected upon liberalism that is never you know he never aims a critical eye at all towards liberalism or capitalism or democracy or to even begin to think down the road of like what is the fascist critique of this of this of this

society what is the communist critique that's a fascinating discussion um and you'll soon learn that they're very fucking different but um we're asking too much of them i think yeah and i i just think too it's it's it misses again this deep tradition of of marxist even self-critique because it's it's not as if what was happening in russia after the failure of the the sort of world revolution that was that they sort of anticipated and was and were banking on i mean the idea that the bolsheviks wanted that revolution to change Lenin's idea was to change an imperialist war into a class war

and they thought that taking out the Tsar which is even going back to Marx was like the big bullworth of conservative reaction in Europe that if you could do that if you could take that leg out of international imperialism that that's the kind of like hey everybody stop

fighting each other in the trenches and go after your officers you know that was the goal and that didn't happen and so to understand that that that like that kind of project did not get off the ground in the way that they anticipated happen to happen means that you that helps understand what would eventually develop in Russia and why there are or some things that were going to be inevitable what you know there's there's obviously even in the left this debate of like what if Trotsky had like like been the leader in you know post-Lenin Russia rather than Stalin well a lot of the same shit would have happened because if you actually understand it too much of what happened what and eventually did was, despite it having a kind of anti-Trotsky as stent, was the, there's many of the ideas of the sort of left opposition. And so there, but there is disagreement. Obviously between Trotsky and Lenin, but between a lot of different people in Russia, in the party about

where to go and what to do. And there, this, none of this is a kind of inevitable conclusion of like adopting a set of ideas. It isn't. It's, it's a massive experimentation effort and a kind of like we need to make a decision about what to do, given that our expectations about what our project was about at the beginning means for us. That's different than what, especially what Hitler was doing in the sense of both selling out the sort of social democratic or even trade unionist or communist aspects of what was part of the German socialist democratic or the socialist workers party in the sense that there was an element of that that was absolutely excised because it had to be excised because the

capitalist who said, well, it's either we're going to have another revolution in Germany and we're going to go, like, they're going to get their world revolution, or we're going to, you know, we're going to have the sort of iron, what are they called, like the iron circle put around the eroding barrel of capitalism of fascism. If you don't understand that fascism is a form of capitalism and that Soviet Russia is not, or at least if it is a, like you might have a sort of state capitalist critique, but it, you know, but it, uh, it, it, uh, it, it, uh, it, it, uh, it, it, uh, it, is at least not the attempt to maintain the bourgeoisie's leadership in sort of the class war, then you don't understand what those words mean. And you're looking at, again, even the kind of superstructure rather than the base. And that's not, that's certainly not arctism, but that's not even intellectually rigorous. And so, again, pseudo intellectual becomes the word of the day. Exactly. And that point you made about fascism arising out of liberal democratic capitalism over and

over again in the face of a, of a left-wing threat is a very interesting line of inquiry, but it's just never picked up on it. It's just like, yeah, it's all the same. Yeah. And I mean, I think even, you know, there is a legitimate critique from the, let's say, the Jimmy Doors of the world and other people of the Democrats, you know, I mean, Glenn Greenwell makes this, that the Democratic Party gets a free pass in the sense, and they're quite fascistic in the sense that they are tied to corporate controls. They want to manipulate the working class to not talk about class struggle and the actual like things that are in their interest but they want to divert their attention away and like do all these kinds of things this is a kind of uh even in some

ways less obviously fascistic kind of sense but it is almost a more pernicious one in the sense that it's this slow moving combine rather than the kind of sickle that hitlerism was and it very well easily could lead to war as we're seeing in ukraine at the moment right yeah it creates the conditions for fascism over and over again and And, you know, we know how the right separates the working class by race, white identity politics, but the liberal democratic apparatus has for a long, for many years now, been actually weaponizing identity politics against anyone with a class or anti-imperialist critique. I mean, they call like Jeremy Corbyn and even Bernie Sanders, like, anti-Semitic just because even their social democracy was too much of a threat to the liberal democratic order and the parties, really the donor base that funds that party behind the scenes, right? It's the history of the 20th century has taught me anything. It's to be more, to be just as worried about social Democrats as you are ultra-rightists

because they're both going to, they're going to stab you. One's just going to stab you from the front and the other one's going to stab you from the back. Exactly, right. All right. So to be honest with you, this next kind of part of this is where we get even crazier if we can't do it. And I think really pulls the kind of, pulls the curtain and we see that. the real kind of nefariousness of all of this. So let's enjoy this.

Marx didn't give a shit about the working class and things like that. Oh, my God. Okay. So Marxism, the first thing you have to understand about Marxism, Marx is Marx did not give a shit about anything you talked about. And you might think that that's ridiculous. No, the only thing Marx cared about was tearing down the society that he hated, the society that he resented because maybe he wasn't elite enough or he wasn't respected enough or whatever.

Maybe he's just a Satanist. I mean, he actually said he was, so, you know, and Satanist can be interpreted quite literally that he wanted to tear down God or reject God or whatever. It can also, in a kind of a theological literal sense, it can also be interpreted as hating the order of the world in kind of a Petersonian, you know, religious metaphor sense. And Marx was unambiguous that this is his driving operation. So Marxism has to be understood as a set of ideas used specific. to achieve the revolution. Even just before we keep going down this insane rabbit hole, again, look, a quote

that Marx didn't give a shit about anything he talked about. Oh, my God. One, how would you know that? Two, where does that come from? Three, you do know the guy, like, was on some barricades in 1848. So, what? Like, that's just, obviously, just not only an insane,

but a completely unsubstantiated and, again, just pure bad faith kind of argument. The Marx was just resentful because I guess he didn't get his professorship in Jenna. So that, I guess that's why, that's how we get Marxist. It's not a deep and long-term and even kind of ever-changing philosophical perspective that deals interesting with Hegel and the history of like German idealism and all this kind of stuff. No, no, it's really just that like he was a pissed off kid who, you know, It is like, and talking about Petersonian. So Jordan Peterson gets his own theoretical tradition now. Like, okay, so Carl Young, which is just what Jordan Peterson is, a youngian, doesn't, is not a tradition anymore in the YouTube age.

It's Petersonian. And like, he just hated the world. And even the mention of Satanism like, one, objection relevancy, two, what the fuck are you talking about? I even try to look it up and like, I guess there's some like letter that he wrote where he's, like we're being Satanous and stuff like that. But man, if you if you read everything that Marx wrote with this like notion that he's speaking super literally all the time and like, you know, that he has no like ability to use a pen.

I mean, the guy was an incredible, sometimes super difficult and dense, but an incredible writer. You read the 18th Broomer and it's like some of the best political journalism ever. And so the idea that you couldn't understand. understand something in context. Again, it's just like, that's how you can come up with this notion that I guess Marx didn't give a shit about anything he talked about. Both Marx's heart and his mind were infinitely larger than James Lindsay. Like, James Lindsay is an aunt compared to the giant of Marx's intellect, whether you

agree with him or not. And to think about like angles his time looking at the working class conditions in Britain and being wretched open by the horrors that he saw, to think about how Marx was hounded in every state that he tried to find residence in, how police would would hound him everywhere he's constantly being spied on, the relationship between him and Jenny and their deep commitment to trying to create a better world. You know, Marx's amazing father, right? He loved his kids and was just like a, you know, you can disagree with them or whatever,

but this is somebody that is deeply concerned with a brilliant intellect and the critique of capitalism that he offered is still by far and away the best most exhaustive analysis of this entire mode of production to boil it all down to he was just resentful he wished that he was an elite he was just envious right that's like the that's the Venezuela iPhone argument

on the level of intellect is like well actually you know you're just a socialist because you wish you had money you're just jealous of the rich like that is a kindergarten ass understanding of why people are brought to this And it shows not only an intellectual depravity and missing link here, but like a lack of like giving a fuck about other people. Because at the center of the moral critique of Marxism is a deep love of human beings and a deep hatred of injustice. You know, you can disagree or agree with his whole idea of communism, etc.

But it's like we want to get out of this horrific situation where the masses of human beings toil and dredge away their life. and are exploited at every turn, you know, and live lives, half lives that are mutilated. Like, this is deeply heartfelt stuff on the part of Marx and Jenny and angles, et cetera, and all their comrades they ran around in. And just the exhaustive nature of Marx's life where he, you know, he could very well coming from a privileged class, he could very easily live a comfy life and traded that all in to be constantly on the run, to live in poverty, to have to have to. be like selling his pants just to make rent constantly asking angles from like come on man

don't do my boy marks like that and yeah i mean if he didn't give a shit why would he have why would he have been so involved in the creation of the international working men's association right well i guess like because he doesn't give a shit enough to like i don't know do something like he did do something so like it's just it's it's historically untrue and and it is it is this example of a kind of idealism and the notion that this is really just the politics of resentment and like if Marx did resent something, which I think he did, he resented the idea that the bourgeoisie clays claim to the ideals of, say, the French revolution of this notion of equality, liberty, fraternity, you know, and then they do what they do, which is ruthlessly exploit people and

position themselves as a new kind of nobility. And again, this is irony because that's the criticism, I think, in some ways that Marx had. And Lindsay's going to say that the goal of Marxism is to create some kind of new nobility. And so this notion, even if there is resentment, and I think there was much in Marx that is really even trying to consciously avoid speaking in hyper-moralist sense of really just calling out bullshit for bullshit and not saying like, these people are bad, but they're just wrong and they're and they're liars and they're corrupt. This is not the policy, if that's resentment, that's a, that's legitimate and justified resentment.

It certainly isn't resentment because I'm not able to be among them. That's all he means. That's all he means by the resentment point is just that he didn't get the elite status that he wanted, which is just insane. But yeah, what you're saying about resentment is like a much deeper point about like, well, what is Marx's actual resentment? You know, like that's a deep point. But this is just like he just wanted the money. He wish he was a capitalist, you know? Yes, this is the, you know, he said kindergarten criticism against like the, in some ways,

the ultimate critic, one that's so, like, ridiculous. The ruthless criticizer of all that exists. Exactly. And so, but again, we're going to tumble down the rabbit hole even more with this next part where, again, more of the curtain is being pulled back and we're seeing really the thing that Lindsay wants to talk about, like wants to be for, which is always nice. I would articulate in the language that I now use that the goal of this revolution is actually to pull society back out of a free state, which is capitalism, representative democracy, universal liberalism, freedom, liberty, you know, the whole thing, secured

property rights, et cetera, the kind of Lockean vision, which could be adjusted, of course, from Locke himself, but it's to pull people back. If we look at Marx's stages of history, you know, he says, the first stage of history is this kind of primitive communism in a tribal sense and then it progresses into slavery and then it progresses into feudal estates with certain aristocrats in charge who he hated and resented and then it progresses into this new stage of capitalism and freedom that gives everybody kind of access to do the best they can with what they have and to be treated as individuals and all of these things and he says that the goal is to go forward into us administrative economy of socialism that is actually going to achieve a successful, you know, transition into a stateless, classless utopia called communism. But this is, that's, that's words. It's words.

The goal is actually to achieve the revolution to go back to a new feudal estate economy or structure of society, a new feudalism where the Marxists are in charge. They are the new aristocrats. The goal is to replace the elites with themselves, is to tear down a society that has become more free, but obviously still stratified and still hierarchical, and it still has the elites, is to tear down the existing structure and elites so that they can become the new elites. And socialism is unambiguously futile. It's just that the party with its overbearing ideology becomes the organizing principle of society. And the Marxists, of course, are in charge of that ideology. they're the only ones allegedly who understand it, so they get to naturally be the new aristocracy, that gets to live off the, the largesse of society and basically run it into the ground.

It's actually a pullback. It's actually a very reactionary thing. It's, oh, my God, this freedom means that I can't succeed because I suck. And therefore, this is the Marxist view. And therefore, let's tear it down and go back to a, let's go back to a system where there's a hierarchy in society that I get to be in charge of. And the way they're going to bill it out is that if you keep going backwards far enough and you see what happens when the bolshevism comes. in, you actually retreat back from the aristocracy into a form of literal, like slavery. You do what the party tells you.

You work according to them. They pay you some pittance. There's bread lines. You can't get your goods. Everything's rationed. It's the equivalent of slavery. And then eventually the idea would be that, oh, now we're going to have a universal communism. Communism becoming the last stage.

They're going to be this universal thing that happens. It's no longer tribal communism. It's not going to be universal communism. It's not going to work. and it never works and it's just a catastrophe but it's actually an extraordinarily reactionary position to have and again like as we tumble down this and become more thing that it just gets even more and more ridiculous so Marxism is regressionary I guess you didn't know that I guess were regressionary people we're feudalists yeah feudalists new feudalists where what we want

what we want ultimately is to be the enlightened leaders of a single party state in perpetuity in which we get to be in control where we don't do any work and we get to say who does what I don't know about you what that sounds really familiar to a system that might exist already

but no don't don't misunderstand that that is the free state of universal liberalism whatever the fuck that means that's based on ah yes the deep basis of this system property rights go to go to any major city and look at the

blocks and blocks and blocks of homeless people and just know that's freedom you know that is that's freedom that's the society that gives everybody access to do the best that they can with what they have this is what socialism wants to take from you right and and build up a new feudal

utopia in which the party is the and I quote this quote the party is the organizing entity in society the party not the means by which we like to move into this new society but is the perpetual maintainer and organizing entity of the society and that we really want to tear down

this society that exists because we suck and we can't be the leaders of that system and ultimately that you can just dismiss all of this away with the wipe of a hand because it's a pipe dream that isn't going to work and hasn't ever worked and is just a disaster.

Again, this is like a long string of tropes that we have heard so many times before and you, you know, You turn on any time Fox News talks about socialism. And the first thing they'll mention after Venezuela and iPhones is that socialism has never worked. Show me a place where it's worked. You know, a complete dismissal of, let's say, the success of as difficult and potentially problematic as it was, the first five-year plan or the subsequent five-year plans in China that has been the single greatest engine of the decrease in poverty the world has ever known in the shortest period of time.

And whether or not you agree with Soviet or Chinese communism, both of those societies were able to go from backwards, largely peasant, poor, underdeveloped societies to leading world superpowers in not only an unprecedented amount of time, but with actually out having to do the entire slave trade and colonialism and genocide to do it. They were racing the Americans to the moon. And even today, China is displacing slowly but surely America as the global economic and, you know, leader overall. So regardless of what you think about these societies, their achievements are fascinating. And that was all done, mind you, with the relentless and ongoing pressure put on these societies from the outside led by Western U.S. led imperialism. So if you want to talk about why socialism has never worked, first you got to deal with whether or not it has worked in what ways it did work. but also you have to deal with the insane pressure put on these societies from the moment they try to stand on their feet by the rest of the global capitalist imperialist order. All of that is tossed aside.

Now, he also said something funny, which is Marxist hate and resent feudal aristocracy. What is the basis of bourgeois revolution, if not the liberal, disdain for feudalism and aristocracy? I mean, it's absolutely absurd that his own tradition. I mean, you know, these were, there was the liberals that were the progressive force at this time. time and toppling feudalism and moving in to capitalism, but he somehow is confused on all of these fronts because he doesn't know what words mean. And for him, capitalism is simply synonymous with freedom and democracy. Never mind we don't have either, right? Never mind in the U.S. today, we don't have democracy. I have no control over, you know, who represents me,

what, you know, what even my city government, let alone my federal government does. And then also when you talk about democracy, when I walk into the workplace, I don't have any democracy. I am now in a totalitarian hierarchy that I have to submit myself and subord myself to the whims of the actual owner of that business and their managers. You know, the experiment with Soviets, you know, this idea of radical democracy. Even in failed socialist states, the attempt, the experimentation to build these radical forms of democracy, in many cases left liberal capitalism in the dust, at least for a period of time, with regards to what actually is and isn't, democratic um and so that's fascinating and the last thing i'll say is this idea of the individual you know marx was concerned ultimately with the development of healthy individuals which is tied to the development of healthy collectives healthy societies you know he talks about alienation

for example in his early work and what is that if not a deep concern over the psychological spiritual and existential well-being of individuals as marxists we just know that if you really care about individuals, you also have to care about the dialectical relationship between individuals and their community. We want healthy, fair, just, equal societies because they produce more well-adjusted, better-fed, better dealt with human individuals, and better individuals can then feed back into a healthier collective. So even on the liberal individualist front, capitalism utterly fails to develop the majority of individuals around the planet. at the you know all that's all traded in for the hyper comfort and hyper luxury of a relatively

tiny group of capitalist elites and their families all right um if anything capitalism reproduces the basic structure of hierarchical feudalism than anything socialism has done absolutely and and i and i just cringe every time and this is another kind of trope that you hear utopianism or that word the goal of this is utopia no it fucking isn't and I got and I got

a like you know there's always this discussion it's it's kind of an unfortunate thing that this is called even Marxism because damn it's Marx and Inglesism you know and Ingalls gets fucking forgotten all the time and he wrote a lot clearer honestly and in some ways a lot better and man it was one of the best things

if anybody asked me for an introduction on on socialism or Marxism I don't send them to the manifesto. I don't send them to anything but socialism, utopian, and scientific. Because that's the shit. And it is just so clear and such a great way of not only explaining historical materialism, but to differentiate it from this old notion that what we're trying to do is create a system that we maybe don't ultimately think can actually work,

or that is like that is really tied to an old idealist sense, that what we really need to do is change the hearts and minds of people. And that it's really different from that. And it's in some ways, like, scientific can be a word that needs some nuance in the sense that it's attempting to use science and scientific reasoning and means to get you to a place that isn't relying on pulling on the heartstrings of people. It isn't a moralizing system even. I think Engels was, you know, Marx did use a lot of moralizing language, like, but not that much, honestly, but English even wasn't. It's just like, this isn't, like, maybe when you know, when you always even writing about the, the, you know, when the conditions of the working class in England, it's like, I can just describe to you what it is. If you think it's horrible, yeah, well, I think that's a universal position.

I don't have to tell you, like, people are living like, you know, like dogs. And then you say, like, well, somebody reads that and goes, well, that's bad. And it's like, well, yep, like, I didn't have to tell you it was bad, right? you can just tell we don't have to even engage in this like this complex system there's no like Marxian morals even it's really just an explanation of what's going on and a way to say if you don't find that to be a justifiable system which it isn't justifiable it's anarchic it's destructive it doesn't lead to the human flourishing it doesn't lead to the advancement of the individual in fact it degrades the individual it it organizes a system on social production but private

extraction of the value from that social production this system is just doesn't make any sense and it leads it's crisis prone and it leads to war and chaos and so you don't again you don't even have to make a moral claim you just say well do you want a system that has those aspects or a system that at least is better in the sense of having some kind of plan some kind of way to organize some kind of way to give people the ability to more freely associate and you know the irony of it is that i would often define the goal that i want to create as a communist is that to give everybody access to do the best they can with what they have. What fucking Lindsay says, we have now, which we obviously don't. And so it's like, dude, don't, don't piss on me and tell me it's raining. You know, God damn it. Like, this is bullshit. And I want, like, I want us to stop pretending that we live in the society that we do because we're not utopian.

You are. Exactly right. And it's so funny because the last point you just made about, um, You know, the options that people have, you know, a lot of like liberals and pro-capitalists will argue, you know, the socialists, they want equality of outcome. But what we provide is equality of opportunity. And then you can, you can make your own decision. You know, capitalism has never, ever, ever produced anything close to the equality of even opportunity. And in fact, it's actually socialism that seeks not to create necessarily the equality of outcome, whatever that would mean, but actually the real true equality of opportunity. And the moral critique of capitalism, you're right, falls out of the structural critique of capitalism. It's just let's look at the fucking thing and then immediately the moral critique falls out. And we use moral language rhetorically. If you're kind of convinced somebody of the, you know, we often fall into the use of moral language.

But Marxism itself does not rely and goes to great extent to skip around front loading the critique with morals. Because it's really about structural critique. And even when we say like the greed of these evil capitalists, a real true backing up and thinking principled Marxism would say, let's not actually put the blame at the individual greed or the individual neuroses or whatever of these specific capitalists. But let's look at the entire structure that produces the capitalist and the capitalist is operating according to a logic that makes sense to the broader structure. And so if you really want to overcome this stuff, it's not about like hanging Jeff Bezos or

hating Elon Musk, right? it's about altering the structures of society such that it no longer gives rise to those sort of figures. And that's true. And the other project, you know, we do Rev. Left, but we also do Red Menace, which really breaks down Marxist text. And the first text we ever did was socialism, utopian, and scientific, precisely because I think it really is the best introduction to Marxism. I mean, infinitely better than the Communist Manifesto. Like, if Lindsay or Peterson even just read just that text, they'd be on much, much firmer ground. with their understanding, but that would take, you know, time and energy and commitment.

So it wouldn't take an afternoon, yeah. Yeah. But even that, I think social and utopian and scientific doesn't take much. It's not that long. It's not that long. Tiny little book. Tiny, just take some time. All right.

So down the rabbit hole we go here. And in fact, what you have to understand, though, about Marxism is that all of the Marxian theory is just tools to try to achieve the revolution, which enable the Marxist to become the new aristocracy to run. new feudal economy that in its failure will become a slave economy with the pipe dream that it will become a utopia at the end of the rainbow, the end of the communist rainbow that they don't know how to get to. So Marxism shouldn't, we could talk all day long about labor theory of value, surplus value, exploitation, whatever, reject all those terms. There's no reason to talk about this.

Marxism is the attempt to use class as the dividing tool in order to achieve the revolution that's going to put the Marxists in power. That's it. Marxism is a revolutionary ideology. It is how do we get to a revolution? Marx saw economic class material conditions and the agitation under, you know, kind of very abusive industrial capitalism in the mid-19th century. You saw that as the most fruitful place to agitate. Well, there are other places to agitate as well.

As Marcusa points out, for example, and we'll talk about this, the energy left the working class and it switched into identity classes. And that's the birth of identity Marxism that we're going to get to in a little bit. so wow that's my favorite claim of this entire thing is when he explicitly says ignore everything that Marxism is just let me tell you what it is like ignore all the major key concepts labor theory of value surplus value the fact of exploitation whatever it's just really about identity and the Marxists just want to control right like if I'm going to listen to somebody explain Marxism to me for over an hour and I mean that that sentence aside you don't even mention like the phrase historical material is or dialectical materialism or any key concepts whatsoever, that you just know that you have nothing to add to this discussion whatsoever. And the fact that you could say, here's something that we're going to, I'm going to talk about. I'm going to opine on.

I'm going to fucking write a book about. But let's immediately just ignore and reject all of the key concepts that make this thing make sense because I'm just going to actually backfill it with my own nonsense and those things are actually obstacles to my little line of reasoning. Because if you would really follow the path, of like, what is the labor theory of value? What is the Marxist critique of exploitation? What is historical materialism?

You would have to actually wrestle with the understanding of the thing you're fucking talking about. So he has to just knock all of that off the table and replace it with his myopia and his simple-minded nonsense. But, I mean, just giving the game away, I was basically saying, let's just ignore everything that actually matters about this thing. Wow. No reason to talk about what Marx spent the majority of his time talking about. Because in order, if you want to really understand, And Marx, it's, you don't read the full body of Marx's work, you just read, I don't know, because it's the idea that this is the, this is the Petersonian idea too of the idea that what Marxism really is is the division of society among groups that like that, that it's, and what Lindsay and I think even both Peterson will say is the why you can like tag on Marxism to any, any ideology that does that or any like mode of thinking that does that is that in the,

In the Communist Manifesto, I guess, there is this discussion about how societies have been historically divided among class groups and that we're now kind of centering into this, into two classes that capitalism has this incredible tendency to take what were class, like class divisions of a multiplicity and kind of barrel them down into these two owner. And that creates a dynamic where it basically sows the seeds for its own demise because one of them knows how to run everything and is the large. are part of the population, and the smaller amount is just the sort of people who just take from them and don't do much other than, like, invest the capital that they're able to accumulate from them. A superfluous class, ultimately a superfluous class. And the idea that because you get in capitalism this division among two groups, that Marxism as an idea is that you can always divide among groups and, like, there's a good

and bad. This is the Jordan Peterson thing. There's good and bad, that the proletariat is good, and the bourgeoisie. is bad and that that's that that's the whole point of Marxism no dude as we talked about it is even moral it's just to say there's a group in society that is as you just mentioned not necessary their their role is is is not isn't isn't needed we have some people who know how to run things already we can just give it to them it's not as if they're bad like you even said too the Elon Musk isn't bad he's fulfilling a logic that certain people in certain positions like

he finds himself, are incentivized to the heel to do. They are in some ways crazy not to do that, given the logic of a system that incentivizes people towards that activity. Exactly. Yeah, and that point about Jordan Peterson and what James Lindsay is doing is the very same thing is actually blaming the division of society on Marxists, as if Marxism did not just point out the fact that capitalism already splits people up into these groups of exploiter and exploited, and these contradictions are operating at all times,

society all that is pushed aside and it's actually like no society's fine it's these marxists that want to come in and divide us against each other right like as if we're just coming in and just making up the fact that these people are already radically divided um and so it's like yeah you know i don't like Marxism because it divides people and insofar as Marxism divides people well it's identity Marxism because you just replace white people with capitalist and POC or oppressed people in that slot and then all of a sudden it all makes sense I mean it's just absolutely absurd and there's no real attempt to grapple with the system that they're always implicitly defending.

There's almost never, in these critiques of Marxism, a robust defense of the system that Marxism is critiquing. It's a lot of muddying the water because they know, and we know, they don't have the intellectual fortitude and understanding to actually prop up justifications for capitalism in the face of actually dealing with the real Marxist critique. That would be interesting. I actually do appreciate liberals and capitalists who understand the Marxist critique. and meet it at that level.

And they all understand that there is a real critique here to be met. But that's not even present here. Yeah. And he was saying, you know, he's critiquing a kind of, what is it, brutal form of 19th century capitalism, right? That's hand-waving, too. One, in the sense that, like, the idea would be well-look with the system of capitalism we have now is, like, not as bad as 19th century, you know, 19th century industrial capitalism. And then you go, well, like, hmm, why did.

What brought about that lessening of the situation in terms of the brutality that's inherent in the capitalist system? Fucking Marxists, who are the ones who organized the working class to fight against it. It's like, if you even think that we've made progress, who is making the progress? Was it the benevolence of the owners of the means of production? Hell no. Throughout that whole struggle, they were killing people. And ruthlessly using the police and politicians and the whole. state apparatus to decrease and to diminish and to ruthlessly oppress the people who are trying to make it less bad. So like even if you think that we've made progress, the people who made the

progress are the people that you're now attempting to criticize. Exactly. And that's so well said. And it's a paradox at the center of liberal thinking, especially these sort of conservative liberals, because they look back and they'll acknowledge, even if they don't fully understand. And all, you know, feminists and the civil rights movement, you know, these things are important, you know, all this stuff is good, like clearly to make this society even somewhat tenable and actually to produce the society that they want to defend, which is modern day, you know, capitalism, not like industrial 18th century, Robert Barron shit, right? They have to say that those things were necessary, but they have to delink them from the actual critique of capitalism, socialism, which those movements almost always were at least infused with. And then they have to say more or less implicitly that there's no reason anymore for that struggle, right? Like a conservative says, okay, maybe a liberal conservative, maybe those movements in the past were essential, but now more or less we're good. And so going forward, we don't really need any critique of the social order.

We don't need any like mass movements to fight against injustice. That's implicit in all of this. And it's a paradox really in liberalism because they want to take credit for these earlier things that happened. Like, they want to say the civil rights movement was the best of liberalism, but then they want to say Black Lives Matter, shut the fuck up. And they'll always be in this, in this, you know, paradox and they can't think their way out. And there's nothing ironic about the fact that the guy who owns the business where the workers piss in bottles and have to, like, wear armbands that track their labor is the one who's funding his own private space program. Exactly, yeah.

There's no, there's no oddity there. But, all right, there's a few minutes left of this stuff. And, like, it's almost beginning to get ridiculous. but there's a bit more that I think is necessary to go through. So you have to understand that Marxism has nothing to do with economics. Has nothing at all to do with economics. It's not even economic theory. It's a revolutionary strategy.

And the point is to achieve the revolution so that the Marxists get to be in charge. And the thing that Marx saw, and so the thing he focused on, but it could have been anything else, had it been something else to be more fruitful, to tear down the existing society and establish himself or people in his orbit as in charge was, economic class under the literally abusive stage of an exploitative stage of industrial capitalism. There's no reason to believe that Marx actually gave half a shit about the working class. He wasn't in the working class. What you see in Marxism, in fact, Marxism of all these stripes is actually a disease, a

psychological disease of the lower upper class. It's people who are not the upper upper class and resent them and hate them and hate the society that enables them to be better while also having a revulsion and disgust against the lower classes that they don't want to have to consider themselves a part of. It is a resentment-based psychological disorder of the lower upper class. And the class can be defined in all kinds of different ways, social class, economic class, etc. And it's a rebellion against that in an attempt to tear down those elites that you hate without

ever having to become the nasty working class slubs that you don't want to be. This is why the very smart people are this part of the problem, by the way. They are in that. They aren't as resentful. The very smart people are not resentful of the elites. They do, however, have that same innate, nasty revulsion against the everyday working class, normal, not even working class, normal people. They have, they have this kind of elitism about this, about them. We've talked about elite overproduction. This is how that piece of the puzzle fits in. So you have to understand Marxism as just a set of tools to get to a revolution that's going to establish that the people who adopt a Marxian theory get to be in charge of society afterwards in a new aristocracy that, like I said, because of its intrinsic tendency toward failure is going to eventually become a new slavery that's eventually going to, and the carrot, you know, that's driving this donkey down the road that's being hung out in front of it is that we'll get to this primitive communist state. again, where everything's shared equally, it's classless, it's stateless, but it'll apply globally, or even at least nationally, but globally is the real agenda, rather than in tribes that we can create one giant global tribe of communists who act in a communistic way, which turns out not to be the case.

Human beings turn out not to work that way. And it's very important to understand Marxism as that. So here we get to a kind of thing that, again, another trope that one, human beings don't work that way, which I don't know what we're even talking about. But to go back, we both had the same reaction on Marxism has nothing to do with economics. Oh, really? So, like, Capital, like the whole fucking thing? The one book that, like, even if you don't know anything else about Marx, you know that you wrote a book called Capital that's about capitalism and like an analyzing capital. The guy spent, like, a decade sitting in the fucking London Museum, pouring over, you know, economic reports to understand what the hell was going on.

It's like when Elon Musk tweeted, actually, Carl Marx was a capitalist. He wrote a whole book on it. You remember that tweet? Just like that level of intellectual understanding. But like, yeah, to say the Marxism has nothing to do with economics is like Darwinian, you know, Darwin evolution has nothing to do with biology. I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? And idealism is taken to a whole new level of insanity when he says that it's actually about a resentment-based psychological disorder. So not only is all of Marxism up here in the mind, but it's actually a psychological disorder.

It's like that I think it was Michael Savage, the AM Talk Radio, that wrote that book, Liberalism is a mental disorder. I don't know if you remember that, but it's that level of discourse here. It's like it's not only idealist, but it's like pathology. the idea that's just it's like a psychological disorder all this stuff comes out of it's not i mean the centuries of brutality and exploitation and the struggle for a decent life and control over your own existence no it's all the psychological disorder of the lower upper class whatever the fuck that means and then you and then you but in the same sense what you'll hear from the same people is this critique that like oh yeah you know the critics of the stalinist system would get uh would get labeled as you know that they were crazy you know it's like well what the fuck dude you're doing the same thing you can't just say that somebody who's critical

of your system is somehow like it has a resentment based psychological disorder and only of a particular substrata of a class too so like okay I don't know about you but I you know

I work for money and I don't make a huge sum of money, but I definitely don't make, you know, I would say I'm probably in the mid range of wage earners in terms of the level, in terms of wage earners, because there's some wage earners who make hundreds of thousands of dollars and some who make 30, right? And I would find myself not definitely in the lower upper strata, not class, I want to use strata of that.

But I'm not exactly, you know, among the most privileged relative to those who have access to at least a greater amount of commodities or the ability to, like, have money to invest with the goal of having some kind of return on other people's labor. And so, one, I would, you know, I think the majority of the people who have called themselves Marxists would not be considered a strata of definitely the upper class, maybe a kind of intelligentsia, what you might call a middle class or something like that, but very few people in the history of Marxism were from the upper class. Now, you know, hey, Jenny, you know, what, Jenny, Westfallen, right, was, had Vaughn in her name, right?

She came from a noble background. So, yeah, you've got some people who are, you know, don't necessarily, like that reject some of that. But I think most of the people who are waving, waving red flags are people who go to work in a factory or, you know, work for a living. And so these are not the, these are not people, you know, suffering with the psychological disorder of an upper working class. If they are suffering from a psychological disorder, it is the psychological disorder that it comes from a deep alienation, which is actually what Marks talk about, and we even talked about in the sense that if you're looking at levels of stress and mental health crises that we are experiencing right now, it is not because we live in a society described as, you know, described as the free state and one in which everyone is able to do with what they have, what they can.

it's because we don't live in that society that we're actually dealing with real psychological disorders, critiquing a system that promotes that kind of widespread, I mean, where you have for the first time a lower life expectancy because so many people are fucking killing themselves or shooting heroin into their arms because they'd rather do that than live in the world where people are having to have where like the big buzzword on the internet right now is the side hustle and the notion that let's create an artificial scarce, like, object called the NFT in order to, like, extract money from people so that they can show their social status. These are the kinds of things. A media environment that only shows

the kind of lifestyle that you can't actually attain and makes you feel bad about yourself. These are what produces psychological disorders, not those of us who think, hmm, there might be something worth changing in a system that produces all of that. Yeah. Hear me out. What if we built a slightly better world? Yeah. Whoa. You're psychologically disturbed young man yeah um you know my fucking you know it's i don't want to harp too much on it but it's worth pointing out like yeah these diseases are you know these these deaths of despair the the actual white working classes life expectancy going down um all the opioid epidemic backed up by the billions of dollars of profit for the sackler family who who profits directly

from the immiseration and destruction of individual lives my dad just passed away from alcohol is and he got fired during COVID from his Pizza Hut job. You know, that's the death of despair. You know, these motherfuckers don't care about these people. They don't care at all. He cares about his show, his money, you know, grifting, getting on the Joe Rogan show. You know, I care about the fucking human beings right now as we speak, sleeping in the fucking streets when it feels like negative five degrees outside, you know, freezing to the concrete

because they don't even have a home to live in while countless homes go empty because they're the fifth home of a rich guy who's summering in whatever the fuck. You know, there actually is no care about like, you know, because implicitly in all this stuff is like this is bad because it like is bad for people. It like destroys people. It makes them slaves

and stuff. You're sitting on a mountain of corpses looking at a decaying social order where most of the people are suffering with little to no hope in their own future and you're critiquing the only fucking people in the world that actually have a program to try to

benefit the world in a positive way and reduce some of the injustice and fucking misery that's shot through it right now. To say nothing of, I don't know, saving the planet from total ecological collapse precisely because of the anarchy of market production, et cetera. So, yeah, you know, the intellectual, they're trying to claim the intellectual high ground and we can laugh at that all day. They're also implicitly trying to claim the moral high ground. And they are, you know, in the fucking subterranean depths of both the intellect and the heart.

it's brutal yeah uh one i i'm sorry to hear about your dad dude that's a fucking nightmare and unfortunately it's unfortunate that you're not alone you know like it's your own individual struggle and that's a legitimate human struggle and we as people who actually care about other people which is why most of us adopt this critical perspective do care about individuals and their struggle but at the same time we recognize that they are not unique stories and that they are part of a system that produces that and you know who else gave a shit about those people fucking Carl Marx God damn it

Okay There's a minute and a half left of this bullshit Let's wrap it up Because it ends with if we don't If we don't understand Lindsay's perspective We don't understand Marxism So let's get our last bit of education on So that we can understand Marxism I guess

So all of these strains of Marxism are the same Because that's what Marxism boils down to Economics was just the convenient tool at the time to try to achieve the revolution that would then empower the Marxists. It's a totally self-serving ideology. It's a complete, as Eric Voglain put it,

a complete intellectual swindle. Marx knew that his stuff didn't actually line up. It didn't actually add up. It doesn't work. And he even said, don't question me. You know, it's, don't question it just believe it. Only the people he said who are socialist man. Only socialist man can actually understand this,

which is just this Gnostic consciousness. And it's also just a guru. kind of Jim Jones bullshit that, you know, the enlightened elect can understand it and everybody else cannot, but it's actually trying to pull back what it doesn't matter which sector of broadly using the word economy, the social economy, the material economy, the information economy, whatever happens to be, it's just an attempt to pull back from freedom into a new aristocracy with different people in charge who happen to be these highly resentful upper middle class

or sorry, yes to a degree but also lower upper class people who are then using the downtrodden as their human shields and props to make their argument and that if you don't understand Marxism is that you don't understand it and then

So if you don't understand Marxism as a psychological disorder of a certain substrata of the upper middle class who want to use the bottom people who they resent as human shields to be able to create a new aristocracy in which they alone are at the top and that really it boils down to some Jim Jones bullshit

that it demands that you don't question it that is only self-serving then you don't understand Marxism. Damn dude, I don't understand Marxism then for sure. I've wasted my entire life. You know, I spent a decade studying this stuff and I don't understand it. And, you know, like the Black Panther Party, they didn't feed kids and make sure old women had food and backed up their community members from getting killed by the police when they were pulled over.

They didn't do that because they cared about it. And they were Marxists. What they really wanted to do was become the police officers, was just use these kids and their grandmas as shields on their path to be the new elite. Like, absolute insane. There's absolutely actually nothing to say. It doesn't deserve a response. I mean, we'll give one, but it doesn't deserve it. It is, it's one of those where the, I think part of my desire to do this as sort of, again, clownish as it is,

is because there was a kind of initial frustration with just, like, even what we said at the beginning, that there is this group of people who are just like, wow, James, you really like, you really boiled it down for us. Thanks for, like, you know, taking a work that takes, again, decades to really understand and boiling it down into a 60-minute segment that ends up saying that it's a psychological disorder that uses human people as human shields. Ah, thanks for that, you know? And like, it's, uh, it, um, I can't, it's, there was a, there was a feeling for me that just couldn't let that kind of go out into the world uncriticized. And I think maybe there's a sense that there was, that people see that as such low hanging

fruit that it's not worth it. But I don't think so because I think there are a lot of people who are maybe interested in this or, or even have kind of struggles or issues with, you know, a rise in. in an identity reductionism, where they're trying to get, they're looking for a sort of critique that makes sense. And if it ties into something else for which is part of our social milieu in the United States of sort of anti-communism and bad faith takes on communism, like you were saying before, it just feels like it fits.

It's like, ah, yes, this is the thing that I already knew was bad. You know, I mean, I got into this whole game because I wanted to engage in a debate when I was like 15 or 16 years old that I knew I was going to lose. And so I argued that we should adopt a communist form of government, whatever that meant, because I had learned in my school that that was the losing argument, right? And that's what we have all kind of learned and is part and parcel of the almost entire intellectual tradition of the United States and definitely a mainstay of our education system and stuff like that. And it's like anytime that we are not triumphalist about the United States or willing to acknowledge a long,

history of genocide and racism and oppression in our own country, this is some kind of major threat to like, you know, and some infiltration of the baddies. And the baddies are always the Marxists and the anarchists, whereas we need a new Palmer raid. Ah! You know, like, my God, like, it's so, it is so kind of infantile in one sense, but extremely useful as a means of like continuing this massive misunderstanding that are that the working class of the United States is even like specifically susceptible to and so it's one of those where uh you need to be able to take on these people as laughable as they seem because you know even the gestures intellectual or otherwise are sometimes the most pernicious and I think that the Jordan

Peterson's of the world and the James Lindsay's of the world are deeply, deeply nefarious characters in our common day. And I'm not, again, I'm not even saying that they're even totally self-conscious of this nefarious role that they're playing, that they are tying into an intellectual tradition that they think has some kind of merit, or is at minimum benefiting them in a way that they feel inclined to continue. But it's, it is, it needs to be sort of called out for what it is. And what it is is dangerous propaganda that does lead, and this is not hyperbole, to places we don't want to go, which might be a sort of mob attack on the capital or a more nefarious long-term rise of new fascism that, I don't remember who exactly said it, but fascism will come with in America waving an American flag.

And that is the kind of intellectual tradition. that is supported by this knee-jerk, lame, very weak, and again, like you said, kindergarten critique of a tradition that is actually the thing that will be the liberating force, intellectually as a kind of bulwark against reductionism, whether it's race, gender, or any kind of identity reductionism. And that can still communicate in that language about oppression and the need for something to change, but recognizes that it isn't about putting black faces or women in positions of already existing exploitative power structures, but uniting that diverse working class and recognizing its own interests, which is the interest of liberation, freedom, and a real society that represents the interest of freedom, equality, democracy,

and ultimately solidarity, which is, I think, the thing that the egality, fraternity, and liberty didn't fully capture or realize. exactly right incredibly well said and yeah when i said it doesn't deserve a response i was being flippant and sort of jockey but you're absolutely right these things need to be engaged with because they're so prevalent they're out there and through the critique of this sort of stuff um we actually do clarify concepts and there's people out there that have their whole lives have heard this nonsense in human nature my phones this and that you really just want to be a new elite blah blah and so it's good to get this stuff condensed and then respond to it systematically precisely because it does help a lot of people who are socialist or want to be or interested in socialism, clarify

and actually build up a bulwark against these common arguments, which are never pushed back in our society. Like I said, the bar is so low for anti-communism, you can say and do anything. But if you're a Marxist, if you identify publicly as a communist, you have to know fucking everything. You need to know your philosophy, your economy, your history, your sociology. The bar is insanely high for that. And so, you know, it's worth tackling this stuff.

But I also think it also, there's something deeper here. And we've been seeing it emerge over the last several years, which is as the center falls out of, let's just talk about American politics, there's a new precarity for liberalism and the liberal order that makes them insecure. In the 80s and 90s, you didn't really need figures like this because, you know, it was end of history, triumphalism, blah, blah, blah, Soviet Union collapsed. There's a few people holding the flame of Marxist critique in those times, but you really didn't need to make a big deal out. because it was common sense. Communism bad. This stuff fails. You know, capitalism the way forward.

Now that whole fucking order is crumbling. And so we see the emergence of these figures, and they don't even know that they're actually just manifestations of underlying social currents, right? But even like a Trump talking about the anarchists and the Marxists, and now Marxism is on the right, comes out every time they talk. Because there is a fundamental insecurity here. And so while we can see this stuff,

grotesque and fascist, and it is a form of fascist paranoia and fascist propaganda and leads to fascism, the very authoritarianism he claims to be against. We can also see it as a deep insecurity within the heart of liberal capitalism itself that needs to now go on the offensive and attack these other forms because a lot of people, especially millennials and Gen Z, rising up in this decaying social order, are looking for something different. And the bourgeoisie needs to protect their privilege and their wealth and their their place atop this, this ladder.

And so, you know, just from the basic under churning of society will vomit up the James Lindsay's and the Jordan Peterson's and the Joe Rogans right on time. And they don't even know that they're a part of that deeper force, you know? Yep. And as it has several times and it will continue until we get there, it's a question of socialism and barbarism. And damn it, I'm going to take my flag on socialism any day. and it's a naked fact that the James Lindsay's Joe Rogans

and Jordan Peterson's of the world are arguing for barbarism and that has to be confronted. Without even knowing what they're arguing for. They just want to have money and successful podcasts and places on which to pontificate and do their references, I guess. So all right, Brett, I know we talked about trying to keep it to an hour, but damn, it's gone to two hours. What can you do?

but I really appreciate it always awesome to talk to you I literally listen to the latest episode of Rev Left I think yesterday on the Soviet intervention which is super awesome so I will do the plug for anybody who's listening to this

check out Rev Left Radio Red Menace you got like 10 different things going on it you're like in terms of at least busy the James Lindsay of the coming out with shit all the time but um so uh yeah you know check out all of that kind of stuff it's well worth doing and um you know we'll uh talk another time about something that's important i know that we you and i even have an idea talking about um Buddhism uh and some of that kind of stuff i think that would be a super

interesting conversation it's an interest of mine and i think that's a worthwhile discussion so yeah let's do it maybe i can have you on rev left to have that conversation as we had this one on yours sweet um but yeah i love what you're doing with the show we go way back i I think we've talked about that before. Before either of these shows existed, we were aware of each other and talking to each other. And so, yeah, it's a pleasure and an honor any time we get to talk together. And, you know, if James Lindsay is listening, come on a sensible socialist and debate me and Kevin and see what happens. Absolutely.

That's an open invitation any time. We can even say that, like, your podcast, it will do no preparation. We'll just do off-ic-off. No preparation at all. In fact, I'll cripple myself a little bit and get high before. There you go. All right, Brett. Well, it's always a pleasure, and we'll talk soon.

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