Rev Left Radio - Louis Althusser: Marxist Theory and Philosophy

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

William Chaney joins Breht to dive deep on the work and ideas of Louis Althusser, the famous French marxist philosopher. Check out our previous episode on Althusser's work on ideology and ideological state apparatuses here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/althusser Feel free to reach out to William for a full list of recommended reading on Althusser -- Contact William here: [e-mail] Check out the Center for Popular Economics: https://www.populareconomics.org   Outro music "Attica Blues" by Archie Shepp Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on Will Cheney to kind of do a deep dive into the theoretical and philosophical work of the Marxist known as Althusair, Louis Althusair, the French Marxist intellectual. We've done an episode on Althusair before with our good friend Melody over at A World to Win, which I'll link to in the show notes here. and that was kind of an introduction to his famous work on ideology, specifically ideological state apparatuses, the difference between repressive state apparatuses and ideological state apparatuses, and that conversation was kind of an intro into a core concept of Althusair and thus an intro into Althusair.

And I love that conversation. I actually relisten to it in preparation for this one. And I highly recommend it. So I will link to that in the show notes as well. You don't have to listen to it before you listen to this, especially if you already have some familiarity with Althusair in his work. But after this, if you want to learn more, you can go over there. You can listen to that first and then come back to this.

Either way, it's going to be two passes over Althusair, focusing on different elements of his work. And if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, you can support us at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. We put out one bonus monthly episode, but we're ratcheting that up. So I think in the new year, we're going to go from one to three or four Patreon exclusive episodes a month. I'll announce more of those details as we get closer to the turnover of 2022 into 2023. But that's definitely sort of the plan that Dave and I are working on because we want to give more to the people that do support us and hopefully bring in more supporters.

But if you like Rev Left, we also have two other sister podcasts. Most of you probably know about them. Red Menace, where me and Allison focus on Mark's sister. theory. We also do reactionary theory and anarchist theory. In 2020, we're going to do a deep dive back into angles and his origin of the private property and the family, which is going to be fascinating. And then over at guerrilla history, we do a lot of interesting work on proletarian history, on mass movements, and just kind of talk to people that we don't talk to on Rev. Left or Red Menace. And so between Rev. Left, Red Menace, and Guerrilla spelled with two R's,

if you're trying to find it in your podcast app. We really cover three different fronts when it comes to socialism and communism and Marxism. Rev. Left is sort of a catch-all where we just have conversations that I want to have on a slew of topics all over the place. Red Menace is more focused on theory, guerrilla history, of course, more focused on history. So if you haven't already subscribed to Red Menace or Gorilla History, do so on your preferred podcast app. Give us a good review, rating, or you can join the Patreon for any of those shows. support those shows directly and financially. All right.

Without further ado, here's my conversation with Will Cheney on the theoretical and philosophical work of Al-Thuzeer. Hi, my name is Will Cheney. I am a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the economics department. and I'm the, I just became the coordinator for the Center for Popular Economics. I've been a communist, I think, for a little over 10 years. I was in students for Democratic Society in college.

I've been a member of all the socialist parties. And, yeah, and I'm studying economics now. My research is on worker cooperatives in the economic theory of worker cooperatives. I'm really excited and honored to be here. I've been listening to Revolutionary Left Radio, I think almost since y'all started. So this is very exciting. Thank you so much for having me. Beautiful.

Yeah. It's an honor and a pleasure. I know we've been in contact for quite some time trying to make an episode like this happen. And I'm glad we're finally able to make it happen. You said that you're a graduate student in economics, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Well, it might be fun at some point.

Maybe it's too early to talk about a second episode. But one thing I've been really thinking about lately is kind of doing like an intro to economics, like some basic just not even like necessarily Marxist concepts, but like, you know, inflation. I was trying to explain inflation and the Fed jacking up interest rates to combat inflation to my grandparents the other day. And just like, you know, the, the core concepts are like kind of difficult to understand for average people and that can lead to confusion around the solutions to these issues and can lead to a lot of propagandizing about solutions, quote unquote, to these issues. So we'll talk about that later, but I would love to do an episode

like that at some point for sure absolutely yeah and uh the the center for popular economics is kind of this is exactly the kind of thing that we do so i would love to talk about collaborations in the future perfect okay but yeah but today we're here to talk about althus air and the first thing i want to say is a sort of and this is probably just me getting in my head too much but we did an episode in january of 2020 on althus air on basically his theory of ideology repressive and ideological state apparatus and in that episode i i don't know what i was thinking or you know why I was pronouncing it this way, but I was saying Al-Thusay. And I got a mean email about it, and I was listening to it in prep for this episode. And I kind of like was cringing a little bit

at my mispronunciation of the name. So I'll link to that episode because I think it's a really great episode. And I loved my guest, Melody and the stuff we touched on and talked about. It was kind of a 101 introduction to Al-Thuzear that might be helpful to some people who have like never heard of them or, you know, whatever. So I'll link to that show in the show notes of this episode but you know pardon me for my mispronunciation i've corrected that and we'll and we'll speak it properly um going forward for sure but the first question i have for you is how did you personally come across out through zaire and how did you get interested in him yeah um so the the first time that uh so we were i was in a students for democratic society sDS we had a reading group and we read i

think the first volume of capital and then another book. And then my good friend and comrade Ben Wallace suggested that we read four marks by Althacer. And we did it like a summer reading group. And I remember not liking it at all. I thought it was like abstracted, useless. And Ben kind of forced me to read it, you know, and kind of by the end of it or sometime later, things started to click. And I saw, you know, that there was a lot in Althacer that wasn't, you know, that was kind of missing from the, uh, the broad, you know, communist movement, you know, the left. And I think initially we picked four marks because my, uh, I don't know, my own personal political trajectory, Richard Wolfe was really important to be becoming a

communist. And Althacer is kind of one of the biggest influences on Richard Wolfe and Stephen Resnick. So it kind of seemed like we should go there. And the more that, uh, I've read Althacer, the, you know, at some point, you know, there's less insights, but, you know, that you get marginal, you know, insights. But he has a lot of very interesting questions. And I think he poses things that are really important for us to think about. So I found his analysis, you know, it's often called like abstract or, you know, structuralist. I'm sure we'll get into that. But I found it very useful for thinking about ideology, how to theorize, right about society. And yeah, and I I've continued to find, going back through his books and essays, I find a lot of really cool

insights. Nice. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. I find him to be a very interesting, unique thinker and, you know, somebody that if you engage with can really present some interesting, you know, challenges and some expansions on core Marxist themes and concepts that can be very helpful. Just thinking through complicated Marxist philosophy and concepts in and of themselves, whether or not you end up agreeing or not with any given point that I'll.

through Zaire makes. I did want to say, though, that we, uh, over at guerrilla history, we recently did an interview with, uh, with Richard Wolfe for anybody that wants to go check that out. Uh, pretty proud of it. It was a very, you know, interesting to be able to talk with him and get his views on some of the economic stuff going on. And so if anybody's interested, definitely go check that out at guerrilla history. Two R's. Gorilla is spelled with two R's for those that can't find us on their podcast app. But I guess the before we get into the details of his life and his work and his contributions to Marxism. Maybe a question I kind of ask up front, especially with slightly more complicated topics, is, you know, what do we want to achieve with this episode?

So before we get into it, what would you say the ultimate goal of this conversation is for you? Definitely. So I guess I think there's like three kind of big objectives that I had in mind kind of prepared for this. One is to do kind of like an introduction to some of all Alterser's big ideas and, like, his arguments. And, you know, kind of talk through those. What are their implications, right, in theory and in practice and all that? A second thing I want to do is to kind of like present the advantages of Althacer. You know, what is unique or what is, you know, beneficial about Althasarian Marxism, you know, this interpretation of Marx and how is it different, you know, a little bit of contrast with other types of Marxism. And then third, yeah, the third thing I kind of

want to do is respond to some criticisms, especially the criticism, I'm sure most of us have heard if we've heard about Althacer, which is that he's a structuralist and that he eliminates free will, right? And there's no room left for agency. But there's a couple other things, kind of critiques that would be worth getting to. But yeah, those are kind of the big three, like summary advantages and critiques. Nice. Yeah, and that actually works really well because in that first episode we did in January of 2020, that's kind of where we ended the conversation. It's like this discussion on, on sort of free will, some of the analysis and critiques around it, whether or not Althusair completely eliminates free will from his conception of society and individuals, et cetera. So that's a really cool

thing that we're kind of going to address that more in depth with this episode. Yeah, I'm looking forward to that as well. So now that we know that we want to achieve, we know how you got interested in him and sort of where you're coming from intellectually, let's get into the details. And let's start with a sort of biographical question. So who was out through Zer? What was his life like? What is the context and position of his work to the, you know, proletariat, revolutionary communist movement worldwide? Just kind of like who he was and what the importance of his work is. Right. Absolutely. So Althasur was born in 1918. He lived until 1990. And early in his life, he was in France. He was mourning France. He's French, right? But early in his life,

World War II started, and he joined the resistance to the fascist army. And unfortunately, pretty quickly, he was captured and sent to a German prisoner of war camp. And he was basically there until the end of the war. I think it was more than four years. And he had a lot of, as you could imagine, traumatic experiences in the prisoner of war camp. But out of that experience in the camp was the first time that he heard of Marxism, and he, like, met these Marxists. And he also says later that the, you know, being in the camp with, you know, and experiencing solidarity with the other prisoners was his first kind of experience, you know, with communism and, you know, all of that. So after the war, he, uh, joined the French

Communist Party. And he, uh, started or I guess kind of, you know, continued this career in philosophy and he ended up teaching and I believe being the department chair of philosophy at the uh le col normal superior which is kind of like the most prestigious university in France um I think Richard Wolfe said it was like putting Yale combined with Harvard combined with Stanford or you know something um so he was this like you know superstar intellectual and uh in that he had these very public debates within the French Communist Party you know a lot of this context is, you know, the Stalin period or Stalinism and, you know, processing the reactions to, you know, the end of the Stalin period. So these debates in the French Communist Party really

shaped his thought. And around this time in the, in the early 60s, he read or he led a really important reading group, or a reading group that ended up publishing, you know, some pretty incredible arguments about Marx and about volume one of capital. And we'll get. get in, of course, to this more, but the kind of, you know, mission here was to produce, you know, new ways of understanding Marx, Lenin, Mao. They read all the volumes of capital. They read theories of surplus value, the young Marx. They read all the Lenin and Gramsci, right? But they focused on Marx, and they kind of tried to apply a Marxist analysis to Marx. And this is kind of, you know, a response to the Stalinism, right? And during the period, the period of the Marxist, you know,

of Stalin and World War II and all that, there was a kind of like chilling effect on theoretical production. You know, in other words, like in the global communist movement, there was a lot more, you know, following kind of what the Soviet Union or the government or the Communist Party kind of, you know, said, what was the line? And after Stalin died, there was this kind of reaction to that, which the Stalin period, you know, is all about economic. determinism. So the argument is we'll just, you know, develop the forces of production. And that's the most important thing. But then after Stalin, there was this kind of humanist reaction. So the human or the individual kind of became the most important in some ways. So Althacer and his

comrades kind of are reacting to, you know, this situation in the middle of the 20th century, which we could kind of summarize in saying that Marxism was kind of being held back by its determinism, kind of finding one part to be the most important, right? The economic is the most important. The class struggle is the most important, right? So they respond to that. Officer also, he wrote a lot of essays. He gave lectures to scientists.

He had these debates. And he would probably say that he was trying to, in all of his efforts, right, his project is kind of to conduct class struggle in the realm of theory. And one of his definitions of philosophy is actually that philosophy is class struggle in the realm of theory. And out of this, let's see, I think we'll get into more of this later, but part of this project is that Marx did not write, you know, the dialectics, right? Marx did not write this book about what is dialectical materialism. And so Althacer and his comrades, especially with this reading group of reading capital, they tried to, define that, right? To say what really is, you know, the materialist dialectic? What is historical

materialism? What are the method? You know, how is Marxism a science? You know, if you take Lenin's, you know, quote seriously that Marxism is like a science, it's, you know, all-knowing and all-powerful. Yeah, so that's the content. Richard Wolfe and Stephen Resnick, who are very influenced by Althacer, they kind of call his contribution, the liberation of Marxian theory. And I really like this phrase because it's liberating Marxism, you know, giving us a lot more theoretical space, you know, room for maneuver and creativity, because before we were held back by these determinist type arguments, right, that we must advance the forces of production and, you know, and all that. So this liberation, this opening up of Marxism, where we were not,

you know, committed to, you know, essentializing class in every question. That, you know, opened up a lot of space and a lot of questions that Marxism has, I think, you know, responded to and developed in a lot of interesting ways. And Alterser's kind of legacy, you know, or his, his influence has been kind of all over, right? There have been, you know, right after he died, I guess we should probably talk at some point about kind of his mental health issues and the fact that he strangled his wife. You know, right after he died, there was kind of a decrease in the popularity for a number of reasons. There have been a couple, I would call it, or I guess they've been called Althasarian

revivals. And it's so weird because when I sent you an email, I think in the more recent iterations, two of my neighbors had just moved in in the apartment next to me. And I found out a week later that they were, you know, altasarians. And it was wild. And I bet, you know, altiserians here. Yeah, I was great. I was like, wow, this is incredible.

But, yeah, so I think he's had, you know, a lot of influence. You know, maybe one more thing on this real quick. Oh, I guess I kind of want to do the read the list of all the people he's kind of influence. Yeah. I want to say that many people have taken Altister's work in different directions. Just as he argued that there's many different ways to read Marx, I think there's, you know, many different ways to read Althacer.

And people have taken his work up, you know, to talk about economics, you know, political action culture right ideology um there's like an altiserian analysis of jazz music that i found once for school and kind of like one one sign of success that altiser you know kind of made some good points or had this lasting effect is that most communists today we know that determinism is not good and like reducing everything you know down to just class or just one you know aspect is not good and Althasers in that group is the kind of the first, you know, Marxist to really articulate that in a deep developed philosophical kind of way. And I'm sure we'll get into all that later.

Maybe I'll just read this list of people he's influenced just in case, you know, y'all know these people but don't know that, uh, that, that, uh, they're Althasarian-ish, right? Yeah. Um, so we got Charles Lemore, Nicos Palances, Jakees, Rancier, Balabar, both of them were in the Reading Capital group, Pierre Bordeaux, Anglione, Judith Butler, De Luz, Terry Eagleton, Michelle Foucault, Jizek, Dominique LaCourt, Pierre Matre, who was also in the reading group, Jaquise Allen Miller, Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolfe, Anthony Giddens, Madi Amel, Roy Baskar, Stuart Hall, Frederick Jameson, Marta Harnacker, and her daughter is Camila Harnecker, who's one of of the leading cooperative economists in Cuba, and she's also Altiserian, from what I understand. And then the journal, Rethinking Marxism, which is like kind of an academic-ish

journal. You know, they publish really high-quality work, but, you know, not just economics, all sorts of things. And finally, I learned, but I haven't been able to find this, but commandante Marcos of the Zapatistas wrote his PhD thesis on Altasir, but I haven't found it. Wow. I'm sure that'd be really interesting to read. But, you know, really wide influence. Yeah. So that's kind of, yeah, that's kind of the, all the notes I've written here. That's wonderful. Yeah, I did not know that Marcos did his PhD thesis on Althusia. That's fascinating. But the kind of main thing to pull out of that response, especially regarding his work in the context of his work, is after this Stalinist, you know, period where a lot of

Marxist philosophy was filtered through, you know, Stalin, but also like just the Soviet. regime more broadly, and that kind of gave rise to a sort of reductive mechanical and overly deterministic form of Marxism. And Althusair and many others, of course, after this period, but Althusair notably, is kind of complexifying, expanding, and deepening the philosophical and theoretical dimensions of Marxism and bringing in things like psychoanalysis, Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis and some core concepts in there as well, and then goes on to influence all of these other thinkers who take aspects of his work in a multitude of different directions. So is that more or less, that summary more or less correct? Absolutely. Yeah. And

I don't know, it's difficult when we really get into this. I think the irony will become more apparent, but it seems like Althasarians sometimes go in opposite directions, you know, or they kind of they might have totally different political projects, which I think, you know, could speak to the power of this analysis. The psychoanalysis aspect of this is one thing about Althacer, because I'm kind of studying to be an economist, and I should look into this, but that's something I haven't looked into as much. But yeah, Lecon Freud, Althacer has very interesting readings and essays about both of them as well. And yeah, the whole psychoanalysis was really important. Althasur was very critical, of course, but he did use a lot of those kinds of concepts.

And actually, probably the biggest concept coming out of Althacer is overdetermination. And that one was taken from Freud directly, which it's a word to describe how dreams, you know, work. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, so in the first episode we did about Althus there, I did talk more at length about psychoanalysis and the sort of influence it had on him so if you're interested in that definitely go go check it out we also have a more recent episode on lecon so if there's aspects of of his thought or you want to be introduced to lacanian thought to help make sense of althouser or just in general you can you can definitely go check that out it's with todd mcgowan who's a wonderful guest oh cool yeah i love him as well

i'm also i also saw kind of looking through some of althus air's mini works that he has a book on rousseau that i'm particularly interested in trying to read and i think he wrote a a memoir of his life while in the psych ward after the murder of his wife and before his death, which will be very interesting to try to read as well. So, yeah, a lot going on, a huge influence and really is operating at a sort of crucial time politically in the middle of the 20th century, responding to all of the two moat that came before it and was still happening, you know, throughout the 60s, 70s, etc. So definitely operating in it in an important time.

All right. Well, let's go ahead and move on. And the next question I want to ask you is, what were out through Zaire's main contributions to Marxism? And as a sort of side question, what is symptomatic reading? Right on. Yeah, symptomatic reading, I think, is, that's the best place to start. So the symptomatic reading is the name that officer gives for this kind of like protocol or like a practice of reading. and so he says, right, there's many different ways to read Marx, right? You know, we can get different interpretations. So what he did, and he saw this as like the task of like a Marxist philosopher in 1960, right, was to do a type of analysis that would kind of, you know, try to figure out what did Marx do? Like what is, you know, special or different about his analysis that allowed him to, discover surplus value, right? You know, if you've ever read theories of surplus value or, you know,

some of the political economists before Marx, the concept of surplus and like profit being the result of exploitation was an idea that a lot of people had. But they wrote about it in, you know, what we'll call later like ideological forms, right? They wrote about it in ways that only let them see part of what was going on, right? Especially the classical political economists. So the the symptomatic reading is specifically like a way to kind of like tease out what's going on right what's going on in this theory you know about the economy or whatever and like a simple definition is that the symptomatic reading is when you read you know literally reading with attention to the questions that are being asked versus and also the questions that are being answered. Sometimes, right, the questions that are being asked are not the questions that are being answered. So the Althacer and friends are arguing that Marx did a symptomatic reading of the classical political economists. And then Althasur is doing and friends are doing a symptomatic reading on Marx, right?

So it's kind of, you know, there's a lot of symptomatic reading going on. But basically, the question that the classical political economists were asking, is what is the value of labor, right? So what is the value of labor? And then they respond, it's the value of wages, right? However much money, you know, it requires to keep people alive and happy at the average level, right? That's labor. So what Marx discovered in that question, in that answer, is that the classical political economists are actually answering a different question.

So they said that they're asking, you know, they're asking this question, what is the value of labor? But really, what they're asking is what is the value of labor power? Right. So we have a difference. And I think most, if y'all are, you know, Marxist, right? You know this. The labor, quantitatively, the labor is the amount of value that workers produce, right, in a day of working.

But the labor power is the potential to work, right? It's their ability to work. Or it's the amount of value that you have to pay a worker. so that they can come back to work the next day. There's a difference then, and this is what Mark's discovered, between labor and labor power, right? So if you ask this question like the political economist, Adam Smith and Ricardo, what is the value of labor

and you answer with the value of wages, you are giving a correct answer, but to an absent question, right? Because the value of labor is actually the value of the output, right? that workers produce, wages are the answer to the question, what is the value of labor power? And, you know, Marx didn't do this instantly. He kind of had to develop other concepts, you know, to get there. And we'll talk more about that process, you know, use value, exchange value that gets you necessary versus surplus labor. And eventually we get to this concept of

surplus value and exploitation. But, you know, kind of the main thing here is that classical political economists, right? They're materially ideologues, right? They get paid by the system to make the system appear good and invisible. And so they have this huge blind spot, right? They cannot see exploitation, right? Even though Smith and Ricardo knew that, you know, value came from labor and all that, they still have this blind spot, right? Because they just didn't want to, right? Or they just couldn't, right, from their theory, right, the way that their eyes work, they could not see exploitation, right? Then Marx discovered exploitation through this symptomatic reading. And kind of to summarize this, the symptomatic reading, right, is, you know, reading with attention to which

questions are being asked and which are answered. But the goal is to kind of create this, what Altyser calls like the field of vision and the field of non-vision. So every theorist and every, you know, theory about economics or society or whatever, each theory shows you certain things, right? It gives you the ability to see, you know, this set of stuff. But also every theory, especially theories about society, they also include a lot of blind spots, right, or a field of non-vision. And so this relationship, between what a theory can see and this field of vision and its field of non-vision, what it cannot see, together those are what Althacer calls the theoretical problematic, or it's like

the framework, right? How does your, you know, theory work? How do you, how do you see reality? How do you think about it? And so the way Altheser says, right, kind of the purpose of symptomatic reading is that it shows us, you know, what is this field of vision and what is this field of non-vision? And then we can try to figure out how they relate and make up, you know, or produce ideas about how theories work, right? What is the theoretical framework? And, you know, to hopefully we're not getting too far, but, you know, to get to the end, a theoretical problematic might be humanist, right? The concepts that, or the things that you can see and the things that you can't see are constructed around, you know, a concept of the individual or, you know, structuralists, right? people construct concepts of the structure, and that shows them certain things, but then it prevents them from seeing other things. So this idea of the theoretical problematic is, you know,

the questions that a theory asks, the concepts it produces, right, how the concepts relate, and in general kind of what the theory can see and what it can't see. And I'm sorry if this is, hopefully this is going on. Too luck for this question. I got the official definition. go ahead, yeah. That they put in the back of reading capital, which is a word or concept cannot be considered in isolation. It only exists in the theoretical or ideological framework in which it is used, right? It's problematic. So, yeah, it's this, you know, combination of absence and presence, right, a specific combination.

Okay, yeah. So I see that. And it's certainly sort of obvious with things like just in general, you know, talking to politicians or whatever, like just this general. like just this general working out of the muscle of being able to detect what question is actually being asked and what question is actually being answered. It happens all the time. I mean, this, I had an episode recently where I was talking about Sam Harris's podcast on like the Ukraine and Russia and he had on a historian to talk about it and he set forward a bunch of specific questions that the, that the expert went on to more or less not answer to, to jump.

aside of while giving the kind of vibe that these things were being answered. And if you don't follow it carefully, if you're not thinking about those things, you can see how you could be easily sort of misled. And then this idea of like theoretical lenses, putting on the lens, if you will, of a certain theory can help you see things that you otherwise could not see, but also by doing that it's going to and by funneling your vision through the lens of a given theory is going to limit what you can see as well. So there's almost like this need for a meta perspective, a standing back and trying to take stock of what an individual theory

allows you to see and importantly what it allows you to not see or it prohibits you from seeing. Is all of that more or less in line with what you're saying here? Yeah. Maybe just with the caveat, and this is again my reading of Althacer, but you know, with the caveat that and maybe this isn't even relevant, but we can never really get to like an objective truth, right? You know, the symptomatic reading and like this process of discerning different theoretical problematics, I think we'll never get to, you know, something that is like, you know, totally true, like water freezes at zero degrees Celsius. But the motion of the analysis is kind of what makes it effective at doing that, right,

at showing the field of vision and non-vision. Right. But yeah, yeah, I totally agree. And so these earlier theories of political economy that sort of gave a story and gave a set of ostensible answers to a set of political economic questions were asked and answered in such a way that something like the inherent exploitation involved was completely wrinkled over and not seen. So, you know, putting on the lenses of these political economists.

and reading, you know, their work through their lens, the, just one example, the existence of exploitation inherent in the capitalist mode of production and the relations of production gets completely washed out, such that you can't literally through those theoretical lenses, you can't see the exploitation that is taking place, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, this is, this is then the ideology, right?

The ideology is always waiting, you know, kind of in the, in the, in the, you know, kind of in the corner in the cracks, right, to jump out and fill the blanks, right? If we are experiencing exploitation, but we don't have a very clear theoretical concept of what it is, right? And to know that we should direct our anger and our political energies against the system, you know, instead you might hate your boss, right, which is maybe not bad, but maybe you take it out, though, on your family or your friends, right? You know, you have this frustration. And that's because of course there's a lot of surplus value and a lot of profit and money that is, you know, spent every day producing these ideas, right, that kind of reproduce the system. And Altusor has a really

unique, I think an interesting conception of this ideology or these ideas as not only just like ideas that we learn, but also that they are, you know, substantiated in practices, right? Everybody kind of acts out these ideologies. And so, yeah, if you're Ricardo or you're Smith, you know, you're still in ideology when you are allegedly writing this, you know, economic science. And, yeah, and that's why they can't see exploitation, right? They're not really paid to do that. And there's, you know, infinite reasons. But, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, and if you can't see exploitation or you can't see how this system is inherently alienating, one of the other things you can do in addition to hating your boss or taking it out on your family or whatever, and I think this is actually fairly common, it's sort of in turn. internalize it as a sense of depression, as a sense of self-loathing, as a sense of, I'm not good enough because the capitalist ideology broadly is going to, and any attempt that it can make is going to reduce structural problems to individual deficiencies. So, you know, you're not moving up in your job or you're frustrated and you have a job that you have, you sense gives you no meaning and no fulfillment. You're alienated. You go home and you drink until you fall

asleep. That's your problem. You know, that's your problem. You might have a chemical imbalance or, you know, you might need to go out and find another job. There's nothing structural here to point to and blame. These are just scientific, you know, quote unquote, scientific theories of economics that this is how economics work. This is human nature. These are how things go. And if you can't deal with that, that's an individual problem. That's a you problem. You know, so you can see how these things snowball and create much bigger problems in individuals as well as in societies. Exactly. And we always talk about, right, false consciousness or, you know, kind of having like the wrong ideas that prevent us, you know, from recognizing what's going on and changing the society. You know, I think Althacer maybe develops this idea a little bit further to say that, you know, these ideas that we have, like the distorted, you know, kind of wrong, you know, partially wrong ideas that we have that explain our suffering and our position. in society are very much, you know, connected to and shaped by our actual material position

in society, right, as workers and so on, right? And I totally agree. I mean, everything that has happened with, you know, hyper individualism. And, you know, since officers probably death or before that, in the neoliberal period, I couldn't agree more. It just, you know, the ideological explanations are, yeah, definitely pointing these things inward. at us and yeah i would just uh i didn't say this earlier i want to uh plug that episode the the one that you all did with a melody on uh ideology and ideological state apparatuses um because i think that connects uh very much here right um we learn you know ideology in our schools and the family in our churches and social media you know we're walking down the street all these places so

absolutely yeah and yeah the big sort of standard example of um like that hailing of ideology at work in physical sort of manifestations with regards to moving your body around spaces like you're walking down the street and a cop yells out like hey you and you turn and like that that before any ideas are swept up or you know you reflect on the situation you are physically engaged in ideology you're physically being hailed um sort of by an ideological apparatus if you will and your your sense of your subjective relationship to that is profoundly ideological before you even reflect on it, before it comes to the realms of like ideas and concepts and abstractions, the physical instantiation of ideology is the cop hailing you and

you turning around and answering that cop's hail. And so that's something that we talk about at length in that earlier episode, because we really are focusing simply on that essay, on that text about ideology. So if you're interested in kind of deepening your understanding of that, definitely go check that out. But while we're talking about Althusair's main contributions to Marxist, Another one of those is, of course, his conception of the epistemic break within Marxism. So can you kind of talk about that? Absolutely. Yeah.

So the epistemic break, the epistemological break, you know, if I could just say this really briefly, you know, kind of in like a vulgar, you know, deterministic kind of form. And then we'll kind of get into what each thing means. But the brief version is that they make an argument. that the young Marx, when Marx was writing, you know, the Communist Manifesto, before that the 1844, philosophic and economic manuscripts, da-da-da, you know, German ideology. In the early Marx, there is still this kind of humanist, you know, philosophy. You know, Marx is like a bourgeois intellectual, right? And he's, you know, liberal and he's got

these ideas and he likes equality and stuff. But he hasn't yet. developed a real, you know, original Marxist analysis of society. Um, so the young Marx is Hegelian and he's influenced by Foyerbach, right, idealism, materialism, da, da, da. So what all to certain them argue is that at some point, you know, over the course of years, right, when Marx was writing capital especially, but, you know, at some point, there was an epistemological break. And what that means is that the old Marx, the mature marks, which we find in capital theories of

surplus value, all that. The mature marks is a revolutionary scientist. The Young Marx was a revolutionary, but he was still ideological, and his theories that he were producing are still caught up in these ideas that ultimately kind of, you know, tend to reproduce the system. But the old Marx has developed the first scientific theory adequate, and I'm making this as extreme

as possible, right? Marx is the first scientist, or, you know, scientist who developed a theory that could study the object of human society, right, in history. So historical materialism is this science of history. Now, what officer says is that in every time there is a revolution, in scientific, you know, method, the two big examples being mathematics and physics, that those revolutions in science produce as like kind of an after effect

a philosophical revolution. And often the philosophical revolution is the part that kind of, you know, happens and doesn't get detected. And it takes a while for that to get, you know, teased out or declined, right? So for Marx, this argument is that the mature Marx, has practiced and kind of developed and, you know, tells us things about what historical materialism is, right? The study or the science of society. But Marx did not tell us very much about dialectical materialism, right? The philosophy of Marxism. And this is important

because if we do not have a concept or we don't really know, like, what is Marx's method? right what is dialectical materialism what is you know how did marks produce the concept of surplus value then we're going to kind of run this constant risk that the non-Marxist or the ideological philosophies are going to you know take the place of our dialectical materialism and that's of course what all the certain friends say is exactly what happens and oh goodness i said i was going to do the brief version um just to finish this yeah sorry i'm good the thing that makes Marx scientific and makes Marx's theory the first one that can actually study human society is that we're going to change the relationship between thinking and ideas and the reality that those ideas are about, right?

This is the big thing between thought versus being, right, material reality versus ideas about that reality. and what we're going to end up with is that dialectical materialism has displaced this concept of truth, right? We don't actually have objective truth in the sense that 2 plus 2 equals 4, but instead, because human society is too complicated and there's too much going on and everything is interacting, we have many different partial truths, right? So not one truth, but many truths, and we'll see later that thinking and reality co-shape and co-define each other is kind of where the argument ends up there. And, you know, just to put this really vulgar again, right, this is kind of saying that our concepts on our side, right, surplus value, exploitation, you know, overproduction crises, imperialism, the conjuncture, right, our concepts are more scientific than the

the bourgeois theories, right? So utility, preferences, the government, taxes, right, equality, justice, you know, whatever ideal, interest rates, right? All of those concepts tell us a lot less and they're qualitatively less good at defining society than surplus value, etc. So that's kind of the strong version of the arguments. So yeah, just let's pause right there. So Yeah, so before you were, I'm just want to touch on the epistemological break here. This is something we've kind of talked about on Red Menace as well, about the humanism versus anti-humanism debate. But all through Zer's contention was that, you know, as you said, summing up what you already said, the early work of Marx, specifically, you know, when he's working on concepts like alienation or concepts like species being is fundamentally humanist, which is fundamentally bourgeois ideologically. And it's often rested in ethical arguments, stuff like that.

And then around this mid-turn of his, when he starts shifting more towards stuff like capital and away from stuff like the philosophic and economic manuscripts, you actually have a new sort of approach to things that is inherently more scientific. And so the Althusarians would say, actually, that early Marx stuff, it might be interesting and there might be some interesting concepts in there for sure. but there's actually you can kind of like more or less kind of shuffled out off the board it's this new you know post epistemological break of marks that you get the real sort of scientific you know socialism that comes out the scientific aspect of Marxism and a lot of these humanist ethical things are sort of more or less left behind and so while most Marxists will think of all of Marx's work as a totality, you know, is like looking at different parts of his work and drawing them out. Althusair and Althusarians are going to say there's actually a pretty concrete split from, you know,

in his work that sort of separates his earlier work from his later work in really, really essential and important ways, right? I totally agree. Yeah. Absolutely. In Reading Capital, in the complete edition, which has all the all five authors, Althacer, Battlebar, Establay, Matry, Grants here. This is exactly what they do, is, and I'm looking here, especially Rancier's chapter,

and I think Matry's chapter, they really carefully take like, you know, okay, early Marx, you know, 1844 or the Communist Manifesto, right? Early Marx is talking about exploitation and alienation and these other things. How do those concepts change into the late Marx, right? And they do this very careful kind of analysis of, you know, not only, what those words mean like alienation but how that you know concept relates to the rest of the theory and how it kind of changes you know it's you know alienation of course is like uh one of these really important marks as concepts especially in the young marks but it famously kind of vanishes

right from the the later marks um and they have some discussion with that in there i think as well yeah we've talked about this as well but like you know whatever you whatever you ultimately decide on this argument, whatever side of this debate you come down on, and even if you do fully take on the Althusarian approach and sort of point out that things like alienation completely disappear and there's a lot more ethical and moral argumentation in the early marks than there is in the later marks. I still find those early concepts, particularly convincing to regular people who might not be in this stuff, right? So like it's much easier for me to describe to like an average working class person a concept like alienation and exploitation

and even to make, you know, concretely moral and ethical arguments against capitalism, that still has a role to play, I feel, in convincing people and trying to relate to people and their feelings about, you know, being a worker in this capitalist system, et cetera. even if ultimately we say that amongst Marxists and, you know, thinking epistemologically and scientifically, maybe these concepts don't really have a central place in our conception of Marxism. But I think certainly in our advocacy and our sort of rabble rousing, if you will, they really do play important roles that I find are very effective and at least convincing people to take a second look at Marxism, at least in convincing people to kind of get. to get rid of that first layer of ideology that they've been conditioned with, you know. So I just wanted to kind of point that out. Oh, I totally agree.

You know, to put all my cards on the table, you know, when I was like 13 or 14, my friend and Boy Scouts gave me the Communist Manifesto. And after that, I was a Marxist and haven't stopped because, you know, that was so convincing and, you know, it just explains society better. And I don't know, there's a phrase that I like, which is vulgar Marxism, right? The most vulgar, you know, profane, you know, messed up Marxism is correct 90% of the time. Yeah, that's good. I like that.

Yeah. And I agree. I mean, Wolf and Resnick put it like, you know, if you have what they call like a determinist or an essentialist, you know, explanation, we can't say ahead of time if that's good or bad, right? There's all sorts of good and bad, right, explanations that don't embrace dialectical materialism, right? So I totally agree, right? This is, I think more Althasur and friends are going for, like, qualitative differences between theories. And, of course, like, the more scientific is better, but, you know, not to turn around too many times, but Althasur also argues that the difference between science and philosophy is a distinction that we get from philosophy, right?

It's a philosophical distinction. And outside of that, it kind of breaks down. Yeah, that's interesting. So a couple more concepts I want to touch on. You've touched on the epistemological break. You've touched on the scientific aspect of Marxist theory. A core concept here, and you mentioned earlier that he takes the word itself from Freud, although he puts it to much of different use, is overdetermination.

So can you kind of talk about what overdetermination is and help our listeners understand that concept? Absolutely. Would it be okay if I took one step back? Oh, goodness, I don't know if this isn't the difference between relations of application and relations of constitution. Go ahead. I think that will get us there to overdetermination. Kind of to come back to science, right, and scientific theories, you know, Althacer doesn't make a lot of really general statements, but we could say, right, that every scientific theory has to develop tools, concepts, methodologies, right, to study the object. And as I mentioned before, Althacer argues, there's kind of.

two, what he calls continents of science, which are math and physics. And so the object of analysis, right, of numbers, you know, or math, right, mathematics gets you a lot of different tools and concepts. And people have been, you know, studying mathematics for thousands of years. So we have addition, fractions, derivatives, proofs, right, logic, geometry, numbers, et cetera. Physics also had to develop tools and concepts and, you know, a science for understanding physical reality. And so part of that is that physics uses mathematical concepts, right? You know, it uses that. But its own tools, it had to make its own, you know, tools and methodologies to study

physical matter. So we get experiments, we get observation, you know, measurements, modeling things, which also kind of comes from math, right, and so on. And so what we can see about these sciences, mathematics and physics, is that they are constituted by their parts, right? They have tools and concepts that are, you know, pretty good at matching with the reality that they're describing, right? And we kind of know that because they work, right?

We get actual results, right? In mathematics, we have. proofs. We know 2 plus 2 equals 4, da, da, da, da. In physics, we could say that we're successful at physics because we have all this technology, right? We can actually make it work. Yeah, it cashes out in the construction of the large Hadron Collider, for example, right? Exactly. So that's like total success, right? And maybe it's not a good direction, but we know we're going somewhere. So, you know, that's really great for math and physics. But when we change our objects of analysis to human society, then things get a little bit, you know, different and actually very different in a lot of ways.

And so what Althacer and their friends are arguing is that before Marx, and I want to say specifically in the capitalist period, right, when capitalism is dominated kind of the world, Marx was the first, you know, person to your first scientist to do. develop a science that is constituted by its relations, which, oh my God, that sounds so abstract. But that the tools of Marxism, the concepts, the methodology actually do match

human society that objects. But the other theories, the bourgeois theories especially, right, Adam Smith and David Ricardo, is what they did was they made a theory of society, but they

built it out of concepts that were taken and applied from other places. So, you know, first off, mathematics and physics, right? They take from those sciences their results and their methodology and then just kind of like apply that to human society. Well, those tools were not developed to analyze, you know, human society. So you end up with a lot of blanks, right? Or a lot of questions. And that's where you can get your philosophies and your ideologies to kind of fill in the blanks. So for the classical political economists, right, they had math tools, they had physics tools, but they also had the Enlightenment conception like of liberal human, right, the individual subject with rationality and, you know, choosing and, you know, all those things.

So the critique here is that when you make up your theory of society or anything, right, Right, but, you know, a theory of society built out of these relations of application, right? Just taking and applying, you know, the concepts from other theories, you're going to miss a lot, right? And this is kind of what ideology is, is producing this knowledge where, you know, you start with kind of an idea and you kind of end with the same idea. So the joke in economics is that neoclassical economists, you know, assume that everybody is selfish and then they prove that everybody. is selfish right you know nothing really happens um for marks it's different because you know overdetermination and uh he changed the the relationship here so let's see yeah maybe we should just go into that um what is over determination um oh goodness gracious i'm so sorry that's one more

thing on this yeah you know kind of the way to look at this um epistemologically uh in terms of like truth is that the science of math was able and, you know, it was allowed to reduce the reality, you know, and find its ultimate truth in thinking, right, in the process of rationality. And like thinking through, right, we can do all the math problems and stuff, you know, in thought. So mathematics is rationalist, right? It reduces reality to ideas. Physics is kind of the opposite, right? Even though physics includes, you know, math as it's, you know, constitution, you know, physics is made up out of, you know, math, physics has to find its reality in observation. So Althasur, and especially Wolf and Resnick, would call that empiricism.

So empiricists, right, reduced reality to what history shows, right? And if you're a Marxist, you know, it's this is the class struggle showed this, so we know that. If you're a Marxist who's a rationalist, then you're going to quote Marx and you're going to quote Marx and you're going to quote Mao and you're going to quote Rosa Luxembourg and da-da-da-da-da. Altister argues that Marx's science of society is neither rationalist nor empiricist. And it kind of got out of this dualism, these deterministic ways of thinking because all the other social theories were stuck right in rationalism or empiricism. them. But Marx was able to, you know, kind of practice this, and maybe he didn't fully understand what was going on here, but understand that the relations between these things change. And so we get the 11th thesis on Feuerbach, right? Mark says, the philosophers have only interpreted the

world, the point is to change it. Then we get this thing about the inversion of Hegel and turning Hegel on his head, right? You know, Althusser is saying that this actual theoretical revolution, you know, what makes Mark scientific is that we now have thinking and reality that co-determine and co-define each other. So we have true and false and not true or false. And, you know, this is captured in that concept overdetermination, which, I mean, to define it, you know, kind of briefly, overdeterminism, overdetermination means that every single concept or every single process in your theory, from cars to wage labor, to the fuel structure of traditional households, to prisons, to, you know, the Ukraine war, right? Everything happening

in society does two things with all the other parts of society. Number one is that everything is co-causing and affecting everything else, right? Everything is a cause and effect of everything else, which I think a lot of Marxists have, you know, effectively argued that. Yeah, it's core to dialectics. Exactly, like the dialectics, yeah. So Althusser says there's actually a second part to this, which overdeterminism is catchers this too, and that's the actual definitions and our, you know, understanding of all of our concepts, surplus value, war, money, interest rates, all of them are co-defined with every

other existing concepts, right? So everything is a cause and an effect of everything else, but also everything is co-definitional with everything else. And if you change one term, right, it changes everything, at least a little bit. So that's kind of overdetermination. I see, I see. And how is that different from a determinist logic, if you want to restate that? Absolutely. A determinist logic finds an ultimate cause, right? It finds one process or one entity, one part of the theory, that, you know, ultimately causes everything else. So when, you know, we could talk about theoretical humanism. Altusor was very critical of theoretical humanism, right?

So a theoretical humanist takes the individual or their idea of the individual to be the ultimate cause of everything else that happens. So maybe an individualist Marxist might, you know, essentialize or make, you know, the most important, the human struggle for liberation, right? Or a structuralist might make the, you know, development of the forces of production or the rising organic composition of capital and the falling rate of profit, right? Might make those to be the ultimate cause, right? So we just have to wait for the conditions to get right, you know, and then we'll have communism. none of that is allowed. There can be no in Althasarian Marxism. There cannot be any last instance determinism, which Althacer is not immune from that criticism at all. And there's like two really big examples I think that are important that Althacer kind of had these, you know,

survivals, right? These carryovers of essentialism and determinism in his work. But his work, you know, kind of points us in the direction to get out of those. Oh, and sorry, one, more, I guess, to define like a determinist explanation, I find it really helpful to think about a determinist story or position or argument is presented as either true or false. And if it's true, then the answer is supposed to give us some kind of closure, right, to the question. But an overdeterminist or anti-determinist, anti-essentialist, explanation is true and false. And it shows how all the different, you know, parts are specifically related to each other, you know, not that they're wrong, right? There's no false consciousness. There is something true about reality for why you're

angry at yourself and not the capitalist system when you're exploited, but that truth is partial and actually it, you know, gets you to go back to work on Monday, right? So these are all relevant parts. So, yeah, no ultimate truth. Okay, so one example of a determinist logic, and I think you even said this yourself, is something like reducing the complexity of the transition from capitalism to socialism to communism down to something like developing the forces of production. So what we need to do is just develop the forces of production as rapidly and robustly as we can. And that in and of itself will be the motor of, you know, let's say the transition from capitalism to socialism and toward communism. But obviously that is far too

reductive. It's pointing out a more or less a single causal factor in a complex social and historical development and is therefore wrong, and overdetermination and contradistinction to determinism would posit that there are a myriad of causal relationships and their interconnection that can basically result in any given social phenomena such that you can't reduce it to one cause. You can't reduce it to one principal cause at the end of the day, but is overdetermined, meaning there are numerous relationships and numerous interconnected causal factors that give rise to a given result. And that, I think, is in line with his complexifying after the deterministic and mechanical Stalin era, as it were, the complexifying of these core concepts. Is all of that more or less track with what you're saying?

Most definitely. I totally agree. And I don't know, maybe this would be a good time to, this made me think, right, everybody knows Khrushchev's secret speech, right? Stalin dies. Khrushchev gives this speech. He denounces the crimes of Stalinism, right? You know, the horrible violations of socialist, you know, rules and laws, legality and all that. So, Althacer even criticizes the reaction to Stalinism and this whole argument about the personality cult, right? The cult of personality. Stalin was just a monster, right? He was just a bad guy. He broke the rules, he wanted power, da-da-da-da.

That kind of essentialist, you know, determinist explanation, even though it has been accepted by millions and millions of communists, right, and still today, that is not a Marxist explanation because it is essentializing, right, this, you know, personality of this guy, you know, who existed. And so he says, right, if we want to examine the Stalin period, then we need a social analysis, right and yeah no i totally agree and an example of that could be like a trotsky is saying that the reason the soviet union inevitably collapsed was because of the tyranny of Stalin and if only it was trotsky in charge instead of Stalin things would have gone much different and that's that that is a one example of a deterministic logic right absolutely agree yeah i see i've been uh i've been in some

of these trotskyist parties before and had the same discussion and is that is that kind of fair to there? I'm I'm sure there is more sophisticated Trotskyists, but is that an argument that you would hear? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and maybe to like contrast that because Richard Wolfe and Stephen Resnick wrote a book about

the Soviet Union where they basically argue that it was state capitalist and that, you know, the state had become the capitalist class, but we still had two classes and, you know, they don't make the argument that that was the reason why the Soviet Union failed, but

they're like, we should pay attention to how maintaining this, you know, at least exploitative or, you know, not, you know, communist class structure between the workers and the government, the state apparatus caused conflicts, right? And they also talk about the invasion and they talk about, you know, World War II and like all these things without giving like priority. Right. So you could definitely, you could even talk about, you know, Trotsky would have been better than Stalin, but exactly like when you make the argument that if Trotsky had, you know, done, you know, taken power, then we'd have, you know, communism. No, that's determined. That's right. Exactly. Absolutely. Yeah, there's a myriad, as I said,

a myriad of causal factors for any given outcome, such that, you know, taking one away or switching one wouldn't necessarily alter the outcome. And that is overdetermined. That's the concept of overdetermination, more or less. Exactly. Okay. What is, because this is kind of related, the complex contradiction and how is it different from the Hegelian simple contradiction? Because I think this is also really important. Most definitely. Yeah. So the, so Hegel's, okay, there have been criticisms of Altheser's reading of Hegel. And to be honest, I can't really answer to that. But, you know, this is the argument is that in Hegel, contradiction is simple, right? So contradiction is a unity of opposites. So we have,

you know any contradiction we have um two you know terms that are brought together so they're you know unified but they're also opposite right in some way so just to explain that night and day you know those are two it's a binary system they're complete opposites but in order to comprehend one you have to comprehend the other that the entire concept of day makes no sense without the concept of night and vice versa so that's a simple binary contradiction more or less or just a way to highlight what he's talking about absolutely Absolutely. Yeah, that's a great example. You know, then if you were to make it instead of night and day, the capitalist class and the working class, then you can no longer have that simple binary, right?

Because the capitalist class is not the opposite of the working class, right? They actually have relations, and this is true of all social entities, right, which is why it's different from night and day, is that every social entity has contradictory, you know, relationships and is a part of, you know, all the other processes, right? Everything else going on. So the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class is complex because workers also experience ideology and culture and maybe they know a capitalist or maybe they hate capitalists or maybe they want to be a capitalist, right? There's so many connections, there's infinite connections, right, that go between all different parts of society that basically, I mean, that really just prevents it being possible for us to have this kind of simple contradiction like in Hegel's analysis.

And of course, for Hegel, the contradiction develops toward the idea, right? So we're kind of moving towards this more rational, you know, order. And, you know, it's rationalist, right? We can say that truth is coming from how we're thinking. But for Marx, this contradiction becomes way more complex, right? It's so complex and everything, you know, is overdetermined. so we can't even think about it, you know, in these ways. You know, it's a subtle difference in some ways, but it's very substantial.

And I guess the Marxists who kind of, you know, read Marx through Hegel in this way, you know, and read Marxian contradictions to be simple contradictions can miss a lot of the complexity and the nuance in Marx's analysis. Oh, and one more consequence of this is, that with the simple contradiction, you know, the, oh, geez, I think I'm being too negative about Hagel and Althusert felt this way too. The argument is, is not that simple contradiction is like bad, right? Or that Hegel, you know, didn't contribute anything to Marx or, you know, none of that. But the argument is that Marx developed the idea of the contradiction from

Hegel to match the object of human society. Haigle's object, was more like, you know, just thinking, right, or philosophy. But, you know, with this complex contradiction, right, you know, the social reality that we theorize about is a part of, right, the social theories, and we have all these, you know, interactions. So this is why we have to talk about processes instead of entities and truths instead of a singular truth. Right, right.

Yeah, and processes is something that, you know, Althusair takes very seriously. I think it's crucial to have a sort of a, dialectical materialist analysis to center all of that. And so I really do think that that point is crucial for sure. So I'm trying to read this outline here. Where do you want to go next? Would you want to talk about the characteristics of Althusian Marxism and how it's different from other forms of Marxism? Or do you think you've touched on that enough? Yeah. Let's go to the five reasons why Marxism is scientific. So this is a list that I've made with my Althasarian comrades in the reading groups and stuff. So I take all responsibility

for the inaccuracies. But the five reasons are the first one is that Marxism has the scientific attitude. And, you know, Marx, you know, one of the things he got from, like, especially David Ricardo, was this, like, attitude, right? We're going to try to understand this thing that is the political economy and we're going to, you know, narrow our analysis. We're going to have a specific object, right, which ended up being for Marx, basically, the capitalist mode of production.

So we have that scientific attitude. Number two, since this is the science of society, all of our concepts and our logic and the basic structure of our theory are overdeterminist and they're complexly contradictory. Number three is kind of an implication. All of our concepts are processes. Everything that exists in Marxian theory is in change, right? There are no entities, right? the working class is not an entity, you know, it is, but really the more important thing is that the working class is a process and it's a set of social roles that people have. So, you know, all concepts, you know, the basic unit of analysis is process. And really quick, of course, capitalism itself is not a static entity, but a process. We see even within the capitalist epoch how it evolves, it adapts, it changes, you know, the shift from, you know, the shift from, you.

you know, whatever, neoliberalism from what came before to what comes after, all under the rubric of capitalism, but still capitalism itself is a thing in process, not a static entity that we can talk about as if there's like properties of it. I mean, there are some core properties to it, but the details of it are constantly moving, constantly changing, constantly evolving. And so understanding things as processes instead of static entities is fundamental to dialectical thinking as opposed to metaphysical thinking. But go ahead. Oh, I could not agree more. Oh, my goodness. And I'm kind of thinking this is a major advantage for us.

Our analysis, of course, has changed built in. But if you go on, like, you know, Fox News or MSNBC or whatever, and you see, like, one of these official economists, you know, talk about, you know, this policy or that policy stop inflation, right? And that policy they're talking about was like 70 years old, you know, or 150 years old. Exactly. You know, they just, like, get frustrated and don't understand why it doesn't work.

Yeah, right. But, yeah, totally agree. Go ahead, though. Cool. Number four is that Marxism accepts itself as ideological, right? It accepts that we live in ideology. There's really no outside to ideology in the sense that we're always kind of in it and practicing it. And it uses this like acknowledge and acceptance, kind of combined with the scientific attitude and, you know, overdetermination to criticize itself, right? Marxism criticizes itself in ways that are. different than other social theorists and it you know problematizes the relationship you know ask questions about the relationship between Marxism Marxian theory and the society that it exists in right so this is how we are able to conduct ideological struggle on ourselves right and with each other number five and for me that this is kind of the ultimate reason this is why I'm

convinced by Marxism in a lot of ways is that Marxism has the ability to critically import other social and non-social theories into its body of knowledge. And it does so in a way that does not fundamentally dissolve or change, right, Marxian analysis. So when there is change, and especially when, you know, a social or a non-social theory, you know, interacts with Marxism in ways that change Marxism substantially, the result is usually quite positive. And I'm thinking, you know, especially in the last half of the 20th century, before, right? Marxism has engaged more with theories of racism, theories of patriarchy, theories of colonialism and imperialism. And, you know, not to say, of course, there's Marxists

on all sides of these. But, you know, before Marxists, tended to focus on class, and it, you know, ignored or didn't discuss the racism, patriarchy, colonialism. Right. But when those things were added, right, it did not destroy Marxian theory, but it actually made it a lot stronger. Yes. And it opened up new, you know, social processes and new forms of exploitation that we can theorize, right, in this overdeterministic way. So this is what keeps Marxism contemporary. And this is also, like, you know, number five, right?

that we can critically import these theories has a lot to do with the fact that Marxism has you know, kind of always been, you know, built with, you know, within and by social movements, right? The global communist movement. Let me take a second right here to point something out because I love this point and it's so crucial because there is, as of late, this crop of, you know, right reactionaries masquerading as Marxist. And it's this infrared bullshit. It's this mega-communism bullshit. But this is precisely their argument. This is why it's not Marxism and it's an abandonment of Marxism because when they're transphobic, when they're anti-LGBQ, what they'll say is, hey, Marxists from a hundred years ago would never accept

a trans person. You know, Marxist from the Soviet Union, you know, in the early days, Lenin and his comrades, would never have been okay with gay people or whatever. They had these reactionary ideas. Therefore, we should have them too. And to be a proper. Marxist is to be a transphobe, to be a reactionary to these movements. And it's like, no dumbass, that's exactly the opposite of everything core and fundamental to Marxism as process. Marxism as an open-ended experimental movement that grows and develops alongside social changes and movements and incorporates them.

It is not some static entity from 1917 that never, ever changes, and that we have to go back and look at what people thought a hundred or two hundred years ago to figure out what we think today. It's an absolute abandonment of Marxism. And I'm quite sick of seeing these people masquerading as Marxists and pretending their reaction and their bigotry is actually legitimate Marxism and all of us who care about our LGBT comrades, who take the trans issue seriously, who update our Marxism with social movements and new developments. We're somehow, you know, leftoids or secret liberals or whatever and they're the true Marxists. It's absolutely nauseating and it is a core abandonment of this principle of Marxism that you're outlining. So I just

wanted to kind of take a little moment to get on my soapbox and point that out. Yo, right on. Absolutely. I did not agree more. Like, I didn't believe what I was seeing when I looked at that infrared stuff. It's wild. It's so wild. Yeah, exactly. But that's what happens. That's what happens when you learn about socialism on like a weird internet forums run by like egomaniacs and that's your only you know no organizing no getting into community organizations no attempt to really think of Marxism as an open-ended developing process but just a metaphysical understanding of Marxism and then using it to bludgeon the the heads of marginalized and oppressed people I mean it's it's really sickening but yeah I'm sorry go

go ahead oh God I totally agree and I mean we could you know probably measure this and you know some kind of objective way that infrared you know and those types of organizations are probably not going to succeed you know at the communist revolution a hundred percent but yeah there's a there's this quote that I had on my list of quotes that I should read for this episode um which I think might go good here uh this is the very last two paragraphs of uh Althacer's book philosophy and the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists and he says the demands of the crisis the crisis of Marxism, make us see what is missing in Marx, because henceforth, we urgently need to see clearly into the state, ideology, the party, and politics. And I would add to this,

as he says elsewhere, underdevelopment, imperialism, right, all these other things, right? We have only to read Marx and Lenin to see that Marxism, even when it was living, was always in a critical position in both senses of the word, fighting the illusions of the the dominant ideology and incessantly threatened in its discoveries, because Marxism was always engaged in and surprised by mass movements and open to the demands of the unpredictable history of their struggles. Now more than ever, even in the midst of the worst contradictions, the masses are on the move. Today, Marxist theory can and must re-adopt Marx's old dictum and not forsake it. We must settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. And first of all,

with that of Marx. And we should realize that this is not only the business of philosophers, intellectuals, leaders, nor even of a single party. For all humans are philosophers from Gramsci. In the last resort, it is the business of the popular masses in the ordeal of their struggle. So I don't know. I think that kind of. Beautiful.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, really clearly. We are, you know, in the social movements. I mean, that's it. I mean, you can't just start. Yeah.

I don't know. I shouldn't say what I think about it for it. Well, we all agree here, and everybody listening absolutely fucking agrees. Right now. Yeah. All right. Before we move on to the advantages of all through Zerian Marxism, is there anything else you wanted to say about anything? I know there's a point about ideology and ideological practice versus scientific practice. Do you want to touch on that or do you want to move on? Oh, I'm thinking, yeah, maybe we should move on. Okay. Maybe real quick, and I think this has been touched on. But, you know, just to briefly go into officers like, you know, critiques of the other, you know, Marxists, the empiricists and the rationalists, you know, just to list some examples, we've all heard this, but, you know, economic is determined in the last instance, you know, development of the forces of production, base causes of the superstructure.

Another version of this is the revolution is inevitably going to triumph. Another version is that the contradictions are always heightening and the immiseration of the proletariat is always increasing. Another one is from kind of Mao. Consciousness determines, right, class struggle, but especially the consciousness of the proletariat. So we need to focus on culture. Another version, which, I mean, I'm at UMass Amherst and I'm a Marxist, you're studying to be a Marxist economist. We have this thing called analytical Marxism, which tends to, you know, focus on and essentialize individual decisions and agency. So there's that set of, you know, essentialism, but also like voting, right? Some people essentialize politics, right? Some people, like you said, essentialized taking over the state. Some people essentialize union struggles, right? Or the spontaneous, you know, worker, you know, organizing, the spontaneous, you know, organizations of the masses. And, you know, all of this is to say that, like, sometimes essentialist, you know, determinist Marxists produce very good, you know, results and they're successful.

And I don't think Althacer would say that the Soviet Union or the Chinese Revolution, you know, is bad because it was genera. deterministic, right? But the deterministic features prevent, you know, you from seeing things and prevent us from, you know, getting to roadblocks. And I think that probably gets us to the advantages. But I wanted to touch up on that real quick with the determinist Marxist, right? Yeah, that's great. And that's interesting. And that really sort of summarizes, you know, Althusair's sort of critiques of different strains of Marxism or different ways that Marxists can often think or fall into the habit of thinking. So all those things are. are definitely important. All right, well, let's go on and move to this next question,

which is just kind of now that we understand some of these main concepts that Althusair sort of advanced, what are the overall advantages of this, what we're calling Althusarian Marxism for, you know, the international proletarian movement, proletarian revolution, class struggle, et cetera. What are the advantages of Althusair's type of Marxism for us and our goals? So I think there's kind of like three major advantages. to Althasarian Marxism. And this is that kind of narrowed it down, but first, and I would argue, and this is kind of why it's convincing for me and a lot of Althasarians, is that his interpretation

or, you know, reading or, you know, type of Marxism is better. You know, it's a better interpretation of Marx. And, you know, I guess by better, I mean, you know, specifically this was a very intensive philosophical study there have not been you know even you know on the scale there have not been very many comparable attempts to you know philosophically study marks and to like come up with these you know things about theoretical problematics and all that i think it makes intuitive sense and it tends to um you know displace or kind of make a lot of these you know problems that confronted marxist throughout the 20th century you know it uh it makes those problems you know not problems

and, you know, Altasarian Marxists have, you know, taken this interpretation and produced a lot of works that I think show that it's, you know, a good, you know, useful interpretation of Marxism. But, you know, significantly, they don't have to jettison anything, right? Altasarian Marxists do not have to, you know, let go of the theory of exploitation because their, you know, mathematical standards don't allow, you know, that in the transformation problem, right? It's like the end. analytical Marxist. You know, there's no, we're not tied, of course, to like this class essentialism so we can kind of, you know, open up our analysis of society like Marx, you know, was doing in his life to all these other objects, the state, right, not just classes, the state, you know, different types of classes, ideology, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, et cetera. So I guess this first advantage, I don't know, maybe I'm just like wearing my heart. my sleep here, but I think it's just a better interpretation of Marxism.

You know, there's a lot of positive results. Just to list the contributions from Wolf and Resnick, you know, they have a unique solution to the transformation problem in a couple essays from like 1982 and 1984. You know, I think that's an extremely, you know, solid solution and you don't have to do all this, you know, matrix algebra and, you know, the Perrin-Fronbos theorem and all that, which they use, but whatever. They've also analyzed the Soviet Union. They've created an argument between that capitalism tends to oscillate between its private and its state forms.

They've made arguments with others about the, you know, tributary or feudal class structure within the traditional household. You know, there's a lot of results, right? So I guess the first reason is that it's a better interpretation of Marxism. And I'm, I guess, realizing now that, you know, since we're on this podcast and, you know, you know, y'all are listening to us talk, I would just have to encourage you to read, you know, reading capital or for Marx, you know, to kind of decide for yourself if it is a better interpretation of Marx, you know, and maybe there's better interpretations out there, right? But it's quite useful. Oh, and before we get to the second advantage, I just want to mention this because I believe it, you know, and I've been thinking this for a few years, is that Altasarian Marxism is extremely competitive. compatible with Buddhism.

And I'm a Buddhist. I know, Brett, you're a Buddhist or, you know, influenced by Buddhism. And the, you know, epistemological understanding, especially like overdetermination. Everything is a cause and effect, da, da, da, da, is extremely congruent. And I think, like, you know, matches a lot of, like, what we could think of as Buddhist epistemology, right? If a Buddhist was to accept that as a legitimate thing. So, yeah, I've found that, you know, to be convincing as well.

and you know there's probably more there yeah i'll comment on on that really quickly because i think i think you're definitely on to something and in fact what i'm reading this stuff um i constantly am thinking about sort of core buddhist concepts um you know this this famous sort of concept by althuzer of like history without a subject right and this whole idea of how subjectivity is constructed ideologically through ideology uh it's very interesting in tandem with the concept in Buddhism of no self, you know, what is, if you do the Buddhist work to see through the illusory nature of a solid central self, you know, that persist through all the other changes happening around us, and you really take that idea seriously, and you try to match it up

without the Zer's concept of like, you know, history without a subject or this ideological construction of subjectivity, at the very least can present some very interesting tracks of thought to go down. How would ideology work if the self is fundamentally seen through? You know, that's a fascinating sort of thing to explore. So I do think there's a lot of things here that is underdeveloped. There'd have to be somebody smarter than me to work out all these connections, but there's certainly something there. And I think about it very often when reading through and prepping for Althusarian philosophy and Marxism and conversations like this. So I definitely think you put your finger on something really interesting and crucial here that

somebody smarter than me will have to work out or maybe I'll have to dedicate significant chunks of time in the future to trying to draw these connections but there's something definitely there. Right on. No, I feel the same. There's got to be a project for someone else. You know, there was like a sentence in a Tikna Han book that I was reading at some point a little while ago. I didn't, you know, I tried to find it from the episode, but I couldn't. It was in the heart of the Buddhist teaching. And he's like, you know, everything is, you know, co-dependent, interdependent, you know, co-arizing, da-da. And I was like, wow, this is exactly like an alter sentence that I just read a week ago. Yeah, no, I think there's

absolutely a lot there. Yeah. That's a, I think Buddhism is inherently dialectical. It's not always dialectically materialist, but it's always dialectical. So from that point, straight up, you can start drawing connections. And I think in that quote, it really highlights the dialectical nature of both Buddhism and Marxism. Absolutely. All right. Well, that's number one. Number one reason is that it's a more developed interpretation of Marxism and addresses

some of the most important issues confronting Marxism at that time. It's really revitalizing Marxism, deepening certain concepts within Marxism. And even if you walk away from reading Al Thuzeir fundamentally disagreeing with his conclusions, it will have been worth it because you will have had to have wrestled with certain complexities that you otherwise may never have been faced with. you have to deal with some of your own core premises being called into question. And I think that in and of itself, even if you disagree, is an intellectually important activity for you to engage with and one that will deepen ultimately your understanding

and your ability to put into practice Marxist theory. So that's the first one. And then you can go on to the second one if you're ready. Right on, absolutely. Yeah, so the second one is, I'm thinking of this as, You know, Altasarian Marxism gives us better theoretical tools for both understanding society, you know, studying society coming up with political action, da-da-da, but also it gives us better tools for engaging in ideological struggle, right, with non-comrades, especially. So I think it, you know, makes more precise and, you know, accepting overdeterminist, you know, methodology, whatever, epistemology, it allows us. us to do, or it gives us the philosophical framework or practice of philosophy to both do

better scientific work, right, understanding society and to do ideological work in the war of position. So I think that's a pretty bold claim. So I have a couple of examples that I'd like to use. And before getting into that, right, you know, one of the key features, right, the defining features of Altasarian Marxism is that no one has the objective truth, right? Everybody brings their partial truths to the table with them, right? Whether you're going to work or you're showing up at the Communist Party meeting, right, the local Communist Party that we need in this country. And so when we have conflicts and disagreements within the movement,

Altasarian Marxism doesn't, you know, even permit that one person or a small group is going to be correct. right so we cannot even you know endorse like class determinism and say that racism is a secondary product of the class structure right you know the conflicts and the disagreements that we have I think was captured really well in that up that last episode uh Melody made this point about how in social media right we're kind of encouraged to just react right so somebody posts an opinion you're encouraged to just react right away and I was thinking about that in terms of like defending our essentialist, you know, arguments, right, our chosen, you know, topics that we think are the most important for all the reasons. And social media kind of encourages

that, right? And we end up with this, you know, non-conversation, right? It's just people stating what they already thought, right? Their, you know, immediate reaction. And the type of reflection that overdeterminist Marxism requires, you know, just does not allow that to happen, right? You have to, you know, think about and process all the connections that you can, you know, see or, you know, the ones that the conjuncture in our, you know, moments in the class struggle direct us towards, right? But, you know, you can't just, you know, latch on to one of those, you know, statements. You have to listen to your comrades, right? You have to process what other people are saying, right? because you have no guarantee that you're correct ahead of time.

So, you know, one of the best, like, living examples of this, which I want to get to in a second is Richard Wolfe. And I think a lot of communists have actually criticized Richard Wolfe for selling out, right? Or for, you know, not being principled or, you know, playing along. But I think this is exactly one of the most important benefits of Altasarian Marxism is because Richard Wolfe can go on, you know, Fox News or, you know, CNN or whatever and, you know, make arguments that make sense in the context of, you know, what, having your entire brain shot full of ideology, right? If you're

Stuart Varney, you just are ideology. But Richard Wolfe can still talk to you. Right. And, you know, make some points that get people thinking, you know, different. So, you know, here's an example of an essentialist argument I've heard Richard Wolfe make, you know, a bunch of times. If workers, controlled the, you know, surplus production, you know, they controlled the means of production. They owned it, right? They did all that. And we had work for cooperatives. Then workers would never vote to outsource their own jobs, right? That is an essentialist deterministic statement, right? It's economic determinism, if you look at it on the surface. But what, you know, the reasons why Richard Wolfe picked this particular essentialist statement is because he's speaking to,

you know, in this case, like generally a conservative, you know, Fox audience. And this other, you know, part in this, you know, Stuart Varney thing, he says he's like principally opposed to universal basic income, right? You know, which is true and false, right? I'm sure that most communists would think that universal basic income is going to have some positive effects, even if they're not going to support it. But, you know, if you're an Althasarian Marxist and you know that the audience you're talking to has an ideological conception of universal basic income, right?

Or like has this idea of revolution as violence, right? Or, you know, thinks of the government is, you know, all that. Then this type of Marxism, this overdeterminous, you know, commitment to no determinism, gives you a lot better theoretical tools to have those conversations, you know, especially with our, you know, ideological opponents. So, you know, we, you know, Althasarian Marxism kind of, of, you know, sets us up better to talk with our opponents, but also with each other. And I think this part of that advantage is actually more important in a lot of ways. So if you're committed to

anti-essentialism, then the revolution in our organizing is going to go a lot different. So, you know, let's imagine that we start the local, you know, Communist Party, you know, chapter, right? Not Communist Party USA, but a real one, right? You know, an actual. And you get, you know, 10 or 15 people show up to this meeting, right? You're going to have a couple class determinists, right? You know, the Orthodox Marxists, they show up, they've only read the Communist Manifesto, they think it's all about class.

Then you have, let's say, a Latin feminists, you know, showing up, who's never read Marx, but, you know, her entry point is anti-patriarchy struggle and the structure of imperialism, right? Then you have another person joined, and she is, you know, really into Bernie Sanders, but before that, didn't really think about politics. And then you have another person who is, you know, really involved in his union, but he's like a transphobe, right? And so you bring all these different people together, which, I mean, you know, all of us as communists should know this. You know, you don't get to take a shower

before you get to the Communist Party meeting. You bring the muck and the disgustingness of society into that meeting with you. Right. So if we start from that point, right, all of of us have partial truths, then no one's going to win, right, the argument, but we're collectively going to be able to struggle with each other and learn, right, from each other and learn from everybody's partial truths. And in the same way that Marx discovered surplus value, we can, in that Communist Party meeting, come up with a political strategy of our conjecture and an analysis. And what are we going to do, right? We're going to run this political party. Okay, we're going to come up with the worker cooperative sector. Okay, solidarity economy, da-da-da. And,

I think this is just essential, right, without making an essential point, you know, I think we really need as communists to be able to, you know, talk with each other and debate, you know, and think and act collectively, right? We cannot, you know, be binding ourselves to our essentialized entry points, right, our chosen favorite, you know, topics. Exactly. So, yeah, I think that's really the major advantage. Yeah, and I think that's incredibly important in something that I talk about a lot, which is that the construction of knowledge and the construction, importantly,

of analysis that could guide, you know, real world effective praxis in one's community is a communal construction of knowledge in tandem with others. No one brain, no one person can possibly, by definition, have it all figured out and have all the answers. As you said, we all bring our partial truths. We struggle together and we construct our understandings together and through working on the real world together. And so one of the things that comes out of this is that you should always be incredibly skeptical and utterly suspicious of anybody who claims to be the one true holder of Marxist analysis. The one true understander of Marxism has logged on. Everybody else is a fraud, is fraudulent, is a secret liberal, has no clue

what they're talking about, blah, blah, blah. These egomaniacs, which of course is very huge on these right-wing insane deviation weirdo freaks online that we were talking about earlier that really do and have really come into their understanding of socialism and Marxism and communism through the rantings of like one or two people that that really present themselves as these non-humble whatsoever as incredibly overly confident as incredibly sure of themselves as pointing out that everybody who disagrees with them is a fraud and a fake and a phony and is an enemy and that their understanding of Marxism is the full complete true understanding and everybody else's is bullshit. So if you really want to be a good Marxist, you should just listen to me and all

the people that I tell you to hate, you got to hate because they're fakes and frauds and I'm the real holder of Marxism or me and my small micro sect are the true, you know, holders of Marxist analysis and understanding. That's always been a sort of manifestation on the left, you know, throughout time. There's always been these people and these subgroups that present themselves as having all the info and as having the true and one analysis. And I think anytime anybody or any group talks like that, you should immediately turn the fuck around and walk away. Because we are engaged in a communal struggle. No one person can possibly understand it all. And even if you did have a really good understanding of the theoretics of Marxism, I've read every single book on Marxism,

there's still the problem of putting it into practice in the actual conditions in which you exist, your actual community, talking to real people and advancing the ball in a material way through organizing. And even if you've read everything and have an abstract understanding of all the theory, there's still the problem of applying that theory in your lived conditions. And that's always going to be, if it's going to be efficient, if it's going to work at all, is going to be a communal effort. And so I always like to stress that.

Oh, my, I agree so much. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I, uh, we, uh, my SDS group in college, uh, we got to meet Richard Wolfe because we brought him to a campus and we got to drive him, um, you know, to and from Kansas City to Kirksville. So it was like seven hours in the car with this guy, which was awesome. nice yeah uh and one of the things that we asked him is like what do we do right you know you're the sage you've been around like you know how do we get communism and uh richard wolf said you know nobody knows right nobody knows what to do like and it said the same thing that you just said it's like if anybody you know tells you they know then you better go the other direction exactly

exactly and i also wanted to say your your argument or your example of richard wolf going on Fox and talking about like, you know, if workers owned the means of production in this cooperative way, then this thing you care about Fox viewer, i.e., the offshoring of good manufacturing jobs, would never have happened, right? And this is, as you're saying, deterministic in that it's like, if this than this, there's a single causal mechanism here. If this takes place, then this other thing will inevitably result. And we know, and through Althusarian Marxist analysis, we understand we have to complexify that. It's much more complex than that. There's a myriad, a whole ecosystem of causal factors that would determine whether

or not a given co-op would agree to offshore their industry. You could come up with scenarios in which even a worker-owned co-opt would agree to offshore their production in exchange for, let's say, like, double the market value of their business or whatever, right? But because he knows who he's speaking to, because he knows what their concerns are, he is attaching a fundamental Marxist concept, workers should own the means of production, a really radical revolutionary idea, especially for conservative Americans, and he's connecting it immediately with the thing that they'll actually care about in a way that will make that point hit, even if you must engage in some essentialist or deterministic thinking and argumentation, right? And so I think

that is, is that the point that you were making? Absolutely. Yeah, I really like how you said that. And, you know, this Richard Wolfe's main example for cooperatives is the Mondragon Corporation, and they did exactly that, you know, during the 2008 Great Recession, is they outsourced a bunch of jobs and they voted for that, right? Right. You know, and they also, you know, voted to decrease their hours and stuff, but exactly, that's not really a reputation because, you know, a worker cooperative did that in these circumstances, but, you know, exactly. I agree totally. all right so that's is there anything else you wanted to any other point you wanted to make before you moved on to critiques and responses oh yeah real quick um and i don't know the uh there's like a third advantage that i've written down here sure but i don't know if this is um an advantage or an implication but you know altiserian marxism kind of has this implication that it is everybody's duty to advance the theory right um and and we've been reading a bunch of quotes can i read one more quotes for this? Cool. This is one of my favorite altus or quotes.

It comes from philosophy and spontaneous philosophy of the scientists. And I think it makes the argument. So he says, the political practice of communist parties, which, I mean, we could take that to mean, you know, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, unions, right, anything is the Communist Party. But the political practice of communists

and our communist parties can, in fact, contain in the practical state, certain Marxist principles or certain of their theoretical consequences, which are not to be found in existing theoretical analysis. From the viewpoint of the theoretical content itself, the political practice of organizations of class struggle can thus find itself, and in certain cases on certain points, vary considerably in advance of the existing theory. One can then derive from that political practice that

contains them the theoretical elements in advance of the state of our existing right Marxist theory. These can be political analyses of the situation, resolutions which fix the party line, political discourses defining it and commenting on it, programmatic slogans recording political decisions or drawing out their conclusions. These can be the actions undertaken, the way that they are conducted as well as the results obtained. These can be the forms of organization of the class struggle, the distinction between its different levels and between the corresponding different organizations. These can be methods of leadership of the class struggle and of the union with the masses, the way the problems of the union of theory and practice

in the party between the leadership and the base, between the party and the masses, etc., are resolved. So, you know, I think officer, you know, takes this idea from Gramsci that everybody is you know, a social theorist and, you know, everyone is this. But he's, you know, he's not saying, like, even though Marxism is this, like, science of society, it's not up to this intellectual elite, right? No intelligentsia, you know, Vanguard is going to produce all the scientific knowledge and give it to the masses, right? The masses produce the knowledge, too.

And if we, you know, work on some of this raw material of the existing communist parties, we can, you know, learn some of these lessons doing Marxist analysis on them. But they produce knowledge, right, that is, you know, scientific as well. And so I think that, you know, urgent task, right? All communists have this urgent task to produce theory and treating everybody as a theorist makes Althasarian Marxism pretty anti-elitist, right, anti-intellectual elite, which I know is also a criticism levying on Althasur because he can be hard to, you know, read sometimes. and he does get a little abstracted, but yeah, and I don't know, the big example, and this is in part because I was reading this book when I was, you know, getting into this stuff with Officer, the book Jackson Rising, you know, the book by Cooperation Jackson,

yeah, includes a lot of essays about their projects there, which is to build, you know, a solidarity economy and get, you know, economic and social determination in the city of Jackson, Mississippi. but there's a lot of those, and I keep going back to that book, right, there's a lot of these scientific results, right, that are produced by this revolutionary organization, and it's rare in the United States to get an organization that, you know, understands itself to be revolutionary communist, da, da, da, they're also doing the practice and they're also writing their, you know, they're, you know, what officer is saying,

their programmatic slogans, their strategies, their forms of organizing, et cetera. Yeah. So, you know, in some, the third advantage, advantage of Althasarian Marxism is, you know, we can't have this intellectual elite, da, da, but also, you know, that knowledge is produced in the struggle, right, by the revolutionaries. And people like Lenin, who Althasur regarded as like a top tier philosopher, right, you know, are in the struggle. And so they're confronting these realities and so they produce this, you know, scientific knowledge. Right. So that's the third. And that's very scientific in the sense of like, you know, cooperation jackson putting forward, their methodologies, their analyses, the things that they're doing in their community, giving it out to Marxists or revolutionaries outside their communities everywhere. And you can engage with that and learn like a lab in like neuroscience, putting out a paper of the stuff that they're studying and then other neuroscientists read it, take it into consideration,

see what parts are applicable in their lab and what they're trying to do and what parts are, you know, specific to that other lab and what they're trying to do. And that's a very scientific concept. That's a very scientific way of going about doing things. And that's why we are scientific socialists. Right. I totally agree. There's like that haunting sentence in that book, Jackson Rising, where they say,

we know we've taken risks in, you know, showing our cards, you know, giving all this information to the public and the ruling class is going to use that against us. But that's what we got to do. Right. This is how to do the revelers. Yeah, totally agree. Exactly. All right.

Well, we've talked about the main contributions to Marxism, and now we've just discussed the advantages of an Althusarian approach to Marxism and what it can mean for us and how we can put it into practice. All those things are essential. But of course, with anybody that advances any sort of theory or any claim, there's going to be critiques. There's going to be responses and reactions to it, even within, and especially with Marxists, within the realm of Marxism. So other Marxists are often the harshest critics of other Marxists. So with all of that in mind, you know, what are some legitimate or non-legitimate critiques of Althus there? And what would some of your responses be to some of those critiques? Absolutely. So kind of to start out with a couple of a little bit more, I guess, minor critiques or things that I have less to say about. Personally, I guess, yeah, I'm going to start here.

You know, I personally have found my most frustration with Althacer when he opens up a bunch of questions. and then he starts to answer them. And then he says, oh, wait, we got to talk about this other thing, and then you never get back. So he kind of opens up these questions and just doesn't answer them very much, which, you know, you could be generous and say, well, you know, he didn't have to do everything, right?

You know, he could pose these questions, and then it could be up to us to answer them better. And people have done that, but that can be frustrating. So, you know, if you read Altiser, don't expect, you know, him to answer all his own questions or to give you very good answers. The big example of that is his model of theoretical production, where he talks about generalities one are like raw materials. Then you have generalities two, which is this production process and labor process. And then generality three, you get this result or product, right?

So, you know, really schematically marks inputted value, you know, French socialism, class struggle. And then his generality two was the Hegelian dialectic. Foyerbach materialism, and he worked on those concepts, and then he produced surplus value, right? That sounds great, but he didn't really tell us what generality too is, and it was up to other Marxists to figure that out. So that's a feature. Another kind of short criticism is that he can be, like, hard to read, you know, or like, if you're not used to reading philosophical type stuff, sometimes he references these, like,

classical European philosophy debates or like, you know, the French, you know, contemporary to him like structuralism stuff. But a lot of this, I think, is also comes from the fact that Althacer tries to be really precise in how he uses concepts. And like, when he defines a word, he tries to really consistently use that word to mean that thing. But then, you know, if you do that, then you end up with like three different kinds of theories. theory, right? Theory in italics, theory with a capital T, and theory with quotation marks, right? So that can get confusing, right? Sometimes you have to read Althacer very slowly to pick up those things.

And, yeah, I don't know, I've been reading Althacer for like four or five years or something, and I mean, a lot of the, you know, some of these things still just don't make, yeah. Totally. But, yeah, so that's part of it. some more substantial critiques, I think there's three, and really two. You know, Altusur has what we could call like deterministic survivals. You know, survival is that concept from Lenin, right? There's survivals of the capitalist system that, you know, make it difficult to build socialism. Althacer has these survivals, and there's two that Wolf and Resnick really focus on,

and I think these are the most important, which is overdetermined. But the first one is that Althasur does state that the economic is determinant in the last instance, right? He says it multiple times. Of course he like, you know, negates that. He says the lonely hour of the last instance never arrives, right? But he still does have that slip up, right? Especially in the earlier works, you know, economic determinism is something that he fell back to. The second one is the dichotomy between science and ideology.

And so if you take science, you know, like we've been saying, you know, not to mean objective truth, but it's, you know, truth about society, then maybe this is less of a problem. But, you know, and I hope, you know, from our discussion so far that, that y'all aren't thinking that I think we should preserve this distinction between science and ideology as like hard distinction. But instead, those are, you know, a division, you know, that kind of comes out of philosophy. philosophy, right? That there is, you know, things that we can think of as scientific and ideological and that will da-da-da. But the real issue that comes out of this is what everybody's been thinking about the whole episode. Altyser is a structuralist, right? Althasur has this, like, critique of humanism, and he produces this, you know, this concept of ideology, and there's no outside the ideology, and ideology is totalizing. And he says that, you know, we should not, you know,

focus on these like human, you know, individualistic, you know, centric arguments. And, you know, and this is kind of the main critique. I think that people make against Althacer. There's the E.P. Thompson essay and there's a whole bunch of things like that where people just, you know, criticize Altheser for disappearing the subject. I don't know. Before getting into that more, is that kind of your understanding of this, like, criticism of Althacer?

Or is there anything you'd like to add to that before I try to ref referexious? a little. No, I think that's a fair enunciation of the basic critique. So I think you're on the right track for sure. Right on. Cool. Yeah, so at one level, you know, this is kind of Althasor's fault. You know, and Althasur said this about Marx and Engels, right? Ingalls had that letter. I forgot which one. He's like

everybody thinks that me and Marks are economic determinists and that's kind of our fault because we just focused on class and the economic, da, da, dot. Altusir tended to focus on structures as well, whether or not, and that's just true, right? He does discuss the structure of ideology. He has this thing like structured in dominance, which is kind of an earlier version of overdetermination, you know, saying that the causes, you know, happen within the structure, and you can come up with a primary contradiction that's more important than the secondary contradiction, right? So Altiser definitely talks about structures. And he, you know, does do that. One, you know, reason for that is that he was

debating against this, you know, socialist humanism of after Stalin, right? The socialist humanism of the 1950s and 60s. So he did focus on structures. And he produced concepts that are about structures. Now, does that make him a structural essentialist or a structuralist, right? Does he reduce everything does he disappear free will i think the answer to that question depends on how you read altiser and there have been enough people who have read altiser as a structuralist that uh i wouldn't want to tell you like that's an illegitimate reading that is an incorrect you know reading but there are ways to read altiser where he's not a structuralist um you know you really find that in wolf and resnick and the journal rethinking marxism you know they take that but if

you don't read Althacer as a structuralist, then I think a lot of these arguments about agency and free will kind of evaporates. And, you know, like to make like the essentialist argument, for example, that I think Althacer does in that ideology and ideological state apparatus is, you know, he says, you know, it is not, you know, thinking that determines being, but it's being that determines thinking. You get sentences like that where Althasur ascribed is a lot of power

and causal, you know, to the structure. But how you read that then is kind of a choice. And I think because Althasur directed his project explicitly at criticizing determinism and essentialism and reducing reality down to one thing,

you know, that opens up a lot of space for reading Althacer as an anti-essentialist and being, you know, essentially, you know, generally, he totally committed, right, to these things. There are survivals, there's slip-ups. Althacer argued that this was also true of Marx, right?

Marks had Hegelian slip-ups, or he used Hegelian, you know, simple contradiction language for the purposes of explaining something. But that's fundamentally different than, you know, being a humanist or being a structuralist. And I guess the last thing that I want to say on this, is that Althasur is extremely clear that when he is criticizing humanism, he is explicitly criticizing theoretical humanism. And he's got some articles like Marxism and Humanism.

And there's a really good one called The Reply to John Lewis. And John Lewis is this humanist-type Marxist philosopher and Althasur responded to him. It's kind of funny. But he makes a lot of really good criticisms of like theoretical humanism, right? Altiser is a humanist, right? in the sense that he wants humanity to do better. But his critique is aimed at a lot of these theoretical humanists. And what we think of since a lot of our Marxist debates are trapped in essentialism still in

2022 is we think you're either a structuralist or you're a humanist, right? Either you believe in the agency of the worker or you believe in the totality of ideology. Right. I think it is extremely possible. and maybe I'm lying to myself, but I think, you know, I've done this to read Althacer in a way that is not a structuralist, right?

And maybe that does require working some concepts, you know, structural causality, economic determinant in the last instance, but the lonely hour, da, da, da, right? But, you know, I think mostly structuralism, like interpreting Althacer as a structuralist has to do with those readings and it has to do with kind of a failure

to understand who Althacer was responding to and what his theoretical conjuncture was, right? And I don't know, I hope I'm not sounding really mean. You know, also, disclaimer, I have spent way too much time reading Althacer to be able to get to these kinds of things. And I don't want to, like, fault anybody for that. I've been pretty lucky, you know, to be honest, to get into graduate school and kind of have places to do this.

And, you know, it takes a long time for ideas that are revolutionary, like Marx or like I think Althacer is done, to, you know, work themselves out. So you get these, what we could call, misunderstandings, right, or misreadings. Sure. And, I mean, in the process of responding to certain things that he sees as errors, he is going to prop up their sort of alternatives, right? Like if he's so, and that could give his whole philosophy the sense that it's essentially this thing. But it's really taking the form of this thing as a response to and a corrective to, you know, movements or thinkers that don't take it seriously enough or that have made it. error in some way. So you have to understand it in relation to what he is sort of responding to

and reacting against and not necessarily as in a vacuum. These are exactly, you know, my thoughts or I am a structuralist in a vacuum. It's like I am responding to certain crises and certain developments within the Marxist tradition. And that's what I'm doing. I'm not trying to forward something in a vacuum. Is that more or less kind of what you're saying such that you can't really label him as a structuralist once and for all he's propping up kind of structuralist arguments against people that aren't structuralist enough if you will is that a fair way of of kind of summarizing what you're thinking absolutely i really like how you put that and uh you know this is what we could say about marks too is like right marks talked about class you know not because it was

the most important thing for all questions but it's because it was the blind spot right it's what people were not looking at and not talking about, you know, and absolutely, like, Altusers, you know, structuralism, you know, in a lot of ways it anticipated then or, you know, probably in part caused the structuralist postmodern revolution of the 80s and 90s, right? So we went from being humanist to being structuralist, you know, and that's going way too far. But absolutely, yeah, it's like, here's the things that we haven't been looking at, right? you could even maybe say that like the purpose of altusarian Marxist science is to see things that we haven't been able to see right pointing out the blind spots yeah so ultimately in

your analysis i mean you are you arguing that there is room within althusarian analysis in theory for a robust human agency or free will or are you just sort of complicating that picture and not necessarily giving a concrete answer to it right no this is where altusarian give a lot of frustrating answers, and I've spent some time trying to figure out how to not do this. I think the simple answer is that there is, I mean, there can definitely be like a robust, you know, theory of political agency, you know, human action and all that within Althasarian Marxism, but the very definitions of those terms and the way that we pose the problem about individuals has to change. And I want to use this.

example that's not humans. It's a little bit simpler. And that is the word explain. What does it mean for a social theory to explain something? Altisaria, or, you know, overdeterminism that says there's no objective truth, right, says basically you can't have explanations, right? You could never possibly, you know, get information on all the infinite overdeterminants that explain interest rates or the class structure of households or whatever. But there is an explanation in the sense that the definition of explain changes, and that's how we get from explaining things in terms of true or false to true and false. And, you know, Wolf and Resnick make this kind of Hegelian argument, too. That'll tell you. It's kind of wild. But like an Althasarian

explanation is more like taking a position or making an intervention or telling a story, right? None of these, you know, intervention, storytelling, right, those are not committing you to the ultimate truth, but they're showing you the motion of analysis, which is, you know, what explaining things is supposed to do. Right. So I think similarly, we could, you know, do some theoretical labor and, you know, reproduce or, you know, produce a new concept of free will or a new concept of agency or, you know, and change, you know, all the definitions that we're using here.

And I think that would show us a lot more about our agency and what we perceive to be our free will, you know, than doing any of these rationalist or empiricist, you know, conceptions or, you know, falling back into this humanism. It might be pretty dissatisfying at first, and we might feel helpless. Like, I mean, not going to lie. Like, I've read Altasur, and then I woke up the next morning, and then I felt like I couldn't do anything and that everything was totalizing and that the spectacle had eaten my brain. You know, but you come out of it. it's like we got to get out of it so we can change the world in like 11th thesis right the point is to change it so um you know no one's out here trying to be right we're trying to get to communism absolutely yeah and that's the properly dialectical i think way to to go about things it is it is profoundly dialectical his entire approach and exactly what you're talking about as sort of a response to other things and an emphasizing of certain things because of the things that came before it um and then the redefinition of certain things and then the redefinition of certain things certain core concepts, and sort of never arriving at like an ultimate truth, Althusair is never going to hand you one of his texts and saying all the answers are in there, he is going to

prop up questions, you know, push back on certain conceptions, complicate your view of something you thought you fully understood. And that is the point of what he's doing, not trying to come to some set of claims that can ultimately be considered true or false, right? I couldn't agree more absolutely uh yeah and this is uh this is dialectics exactly this is uh dialectics you know the commitment to dialectics taken all the way to epistemology and ontology right um you know other you know marxists have attempted to make things dialectical but have stopped you know shorter than uh althacer did in this way so yeah exactly right this last question is just there's a lot that we put on the table today a lot of people might be like i would like to learn more about this but where

the hell do I start? So what are some resources you would recommend to people wanting to learn more about anything that we've discussed today? Absolutely. So the resources I have are mostly Althacer books and, you know, in part because, you know, there have been so many different directions taken by Althasarians and you get a lot of, you know, contradictions, you know, I don't want to recommend too much of the secondary literature type stuff, but Wolf and Resnick's knowledge and class, which I think came out in 1987 in their newer book, contending economic theories, Marxian Keynesian and a neoclassical, really especially knowledge and class though, that book does a really excellent, very, you know, simple, clear presentation of what an Althasarian political economy is. So, you know, right off the bat,

you know, explaining surplus, you know, in, you know, the, in the overdeterminist kind of way. And they tend to be really great, you know, simple writers, right? And Richard Wolfe, of course, has, you know, gotten successful at, you know, talking to normal people and not just, you know, communist and economists. So knowledge and class is a great book. So the, the officer books, the two standard books, which usually are thought to or said to contain, you know, most of Althasers major arguments.

everything we were talking about with the epistemological break, overdetermination, complex contradiction. The two books to go to are four marks and reading capital. And within four marks, there's two essays that are really great, contradiction and overdetermination and on the materialist dialectic. I think it's like chapters three and five or three and six. So I recommend those two chapters. And also, I recommend the very first chapter in that book, Four Marks, which is, I think it's the first one, but it's like on the Young Marks, which gives you that analysis of like, what is the difference between the Young Marks and the Scientific Marks, right? The Old Marks. So Four Marks. Great book. The second book, I would recommend reading Four Marks first, you know, if you want to get the basic ideas. And if you like that, then do reading Capital. Or if you're more philosophically, you know, minded, maybe start with Reading Capital. I don't know. It's a really big book. Reading Capital is like five or 600 pages. There is this thing called the Complete Edition, which they came out with a few years ago. I highly recommend doing the

complete edition because the first versions that came out left out some of the more important essays. But Reading Capital is going to take you a few months. It's not going to be the same as reading volume one of capital, you know, but it does take a while. And a lot of, I mean, I've basically only had experience reading officer when there's been like a book club around. So I also recommend that. So those are the two big ones, four marks reading capital. A third book that's really cool is on ideology, right? Or the reproduction of the capitalist system. You know, those two books, they have that essay, ideology and ideological state apparatuses. If you are not really interested in, like, learning, you know, Althasur's arguments, but you want to,

you know, kind of get some of the benefits or the results out of Althasur, ideology and ideological state apparatuses is really great, because that one's clear, and that's kind of written more for anybody. After that, there's a book that I've referenced called philosophy and the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists. This book is not, you know, taken to be like the major statement of all this or stuff, but the first two chapters summarize a lot of things. And they kind of answer questions that came up because philosophy and the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists was written 10 years after, or some of the essays,

a bit after reading capital of four marks, or maybe not 10 years. but that one, that book is really cool because it talks a lot more about science and ideology. And that book has this lecture series that he gave to the scientists. So if you're interested in the stuff about relations of constitution and relations of application, you know, the difference between physics and math and Marxism, that's in that book, philosophy and spontaneous philosophy of the scientists. So, yeah, there's that book on like, we're sure. so and he's got essays on montescue those are cool and he has some stuff later on about

alliatory materialism which i think might also be a whole episode or something uh which is is pretty interesting i would recommend against reading the autobiography and you know i you know go for it obviously i can't i have no power you can do whatever you want uh but it's not very useful and like it's really sad because i mean altiser really had you know psychotic break like you know just totally checked out of reality at a lot you know in the last you know probably 10 or more years of his life yeah um and in that book and in some of these you know later writings he says things like i never read capital like i never read volume one of capital or any of it and then you know the critics take that and they're like oh officer was a phony you know but that's bullshit you know if you read reading capital

it's impossible for this guy to have written any of this without, you know, so the later stuff, I don't know. It's really sad, like how his life declined at the end, probably overdetermined with the political defeats and also with this trauma that he got in the prisoner of war camp. But I don't think that one's super helpful. It doesn't seem to add a lot to the analysis. And maybe there's all the Syrians who say there is good stuff in that autobiography.

The future lasts forever. But those are the big ones. In general, I don't know. I always recommend reading, you know, things that have interesting looking titles. And certainly in Alphyser's books, you don't have to read them in order, except for reading capital. Probably read that one in order. Yeah. But, yeah, not really.

So, yeah, that's super interesting. I did hear that about, you know, his memoir and some of the stuff that he said in there being taken out by critics of him to, you know, basically lampoon him as not serious or somehow undermine all of his theoretical work because of something he said in his memoir. I mean, he's writing his memoir, as far as I understand, in the sanatorium, in the psych ward, that he was staying in the last 10 years of his life, not unlike Nietzsche, right, who went crazy and spent the last 10 years of his life in a more or less catatonic state. He was not catatonic, Althus there, of course, but it's worth knowing if you decide to read his memoir, not for his theoretical contributions, but just sort of get a sense of the contours of his life and how he views his own life. I'm sure there's interesting things that could come up, but definitely don't read it. as an introduction to his theory or anything like that. Right. And always take it and always keep in mind that he's writing it from that position of a psych ward after he killed his wife and all of that. But I did want to say that most of the things that you recommended, especially for Marx and I believe the entirety of reading capital, is on Marxist.org in the Althusair Archive.

So you can read pretty much all of that, or at least most of that, for free online at that wonderful resource. that is Marxist.org. So I'll link to that in the show notes as well. Cool. Do you plug for Library Genesis on this? I don't know. No, go ahead. All the other books are.

Yeah, there's this website, Library Genesis. The, well, I can give you the Earl. It's an illegal Russian website, I think. We're hosting on a Russian whatever that gives you free books. It's L-I-B-G-E-N-R-S is what it looks like. on R.S. So library genesis, that can get you like all the free books. But yeah, Marxist Archives is fantastic. Yeah, that's wonderful. It warms my heart to hear that they put the whole version of Reading Capital on there, too. I believe they did. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. I believe

it's all of it. I could be missing something, but it looks like it's a lot of it. So in any case, you get a good start on it from there. All right. Well, Will, this has been a wonderful sort of deep dive into a really central Marxist philosopher, Al Thus, there. And I really appreciate all the work you did, just constructing the outline and prepping and getting ready for this episode and then coming on and wrestling with, you know, some of this is very difficult, high-level stuff. And you did your best to make it accessible to our listeners. And I deeply appreciate that.

You are always welcome back on. And if you have any of your friends or comrades that you think would make a great guest on Rev Left, we are 100% open to accepting that. Is there anything else you want to say before we let you go or anything that any of your own work or your own organization that you want to plug before we go? Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This has been wonderful.

I feel a lot of revolutionary energy after chatting about this stuff. Hell yeah. And we'll definitely make some connections happen. I've been talking to the comrades. And yeah, I think that that'll be really good. Yeah, as far as, well, I don't really have social media I mean, I think you can find me on Facebook and Twitter.

I really want to plug the Center for Popular Economics, CPE, which I've been involved with here at UMass, and I think I mentioned I became the coordinator. We are kind of in a period of reorienting after the pandemic, and we're going in the directions of, well, some new directions and some old directions. Oh, geez. The big thing that CPE has done in the past has been to do radical economics 101 trainings for activists. And before the pandemic, we did this in the summer, and it was like a week long and, you know, as participatory education model, you know, and all that.

And we've had some interruptions in the pandemic. We're doing them online now, and I think we're going to try to get them back in person. But we'll be figuring that out over the next six months or so. the other two projects that we have that we're going to get started, one of them is a writing projects and we're trying to figure out, you know, what's the best way to do that with like blogs versus pamphlets or, you know, booklets. And then the third thing that we started doing actually during the pandemic, but are also reorganizing is making Popular Economics YouTube videos. So there's a Center for Popular Economics YouTube channel, which exists and has

some of our older videos, but we're kind of retooling to get that back up and going. But, yeah, I would have more information, I think, on where these things are going to go in the next couple months. But if you're interested in the Center for Popular Economics, you can definitely reach out to me. I can give my email or whatever else and contact information out for that kind of stuff. I would love, you know, I think with CPE, we could do some, you know, introduction to economic stuff, absolutely.

you know students for democratic society is a great organization shout out to them yeah uh i think that's it cool well i'll link to as much of that in the show notes as possible and i'll you can send me an email um with the sort of way you want people to be able to contact you and anything you want me to make sure i include in the show notes but i'll add as much of that as possible into the show notes so listeners can find all of that as quickly as possible and absolutely would love to have you back on thank you so much again for coming on and doing this with me and I look forward to talking with you again.

Great out. Great to talk, Brad. Take it easy. Every child could do more than that dream of a sky I'm just trying to death one seat and I Pouring it into a war! Oh my wife and get you thinking about the human soul, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah If I had a little bit of your forces I'd never get in all Oh Yeah If I had to do If I had the chance To make the decision

Every man could walk this earth On an equal condition Every child could do more Than just dream of a star I think about it. Oh, and that's worth a year. And I want to get it. I want to worry, up a worry, can you think about the human star?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh my hundred and a matter of a forest. Yeah. Yeah. Go I'm worried. Can you think about the human song? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. I would have had a chance to make up a decision. How many men could watch this hurt on equal conditions. Every child would you fall and dream of a star. I'm the shot but death would see an eye at war. Put it into one. I'm a little bit more. That's getting home.

You're worried, I'm worried. Can you take it by your mother? You're not going. If you're going to be able to make a chance When I would have had to walk Thank you. You're worried, I'm so worried. Can you think it's nothing you must

Oh, yeah I'd have had a chance To make the decision Well Every man could walk in equal condition Every child was too hard In the tree of a star Under death and sacrifice

And I want Put it in the war Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah I'm sorry You're thinking about

you want to You have to think from the human song Oh yeah Yeah, I'm trying to get to do it on

Oh Oh Yeah If I had a chance to To make one the scissors Living and could hold it at an equal condition Well, yeah, The job could you are that dream of a star

On the death and strike would see And I'm going into war Yeah Yeah Oh yeah Yeah Oh, yeah! Oh, we're running down to get in hot!

Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah!

Have horses! Can't tell the world can't get it home? Oh! Oh, yeah! Oh, yeah! Can you dig it by the human? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, run and down you're talking about your horse! Oh, yeah! Can you have been getting home? Give a hand to win! No way! Can you take it by the human life?

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! No one does that's getting on. Oh, yeah, yeah. Somebody can you dig it about the human soul? Can you take it by the United States? When I want to get through Boston?

When the natural mind? Let's get it home. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. There's a worry and some worry, can you dig inside the human side? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.