Rev Left Radio - Marxist Humanism: Alienation, Subjectivity, and Class Society

Episode Date: November 3, 2019

Maximillian Alvarez is an educator, essayist, and host of the Working People podcast. He joins Breht to explain and argue in favor of humanist Marxism, touching on countless core concepts within the Marxist and socialist traditions in the process. Follow Max on twitter @Maximillian_alv Listen to his podcast Working People here: http://workingpeople.libsyn.com/ And check out his writings and other work here: https://activeforgetting.com/ Here is the Mandatory OT episode we did together with Coffee w/ Comrades and Beep Beep Lettuce that was mentioned in the episode: https://soundcloud.com/mandatoryotpod/037-orgs-with-friends Outro Music: 'Tear The Facists Down' by Woody Guthrie  ------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective: @Barbaradical Intro music by DJ Captain Planet. --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody, welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have on Maximilian Alvarez from Working People podcast to talk about Marxist humanism. I really love this discussion. I love talking to Max. This episode will probably create more questions than it answers, and that's the very nature of the dialectic, if you will. So more episodes on Marxist Humanism and then honestly like episode on episode on Althusay's sort of anti-humanist Marxism as well are going to be forthcoming over the next year to keep this sort of conversation and dialogue going.

But yeah, I love Max. He's a great friend of mine, a great comrade. Definitely check out working people. And if you like what we do here at Rev. Left Radio, you can go to Revolutionary Left Radio.com. You can find both this show as well as our sister podcast, Red Menace. And you can find our YouTube page, our Twitter, our Patreon, and all of that. If you support us on Patreon in return, you get

cool monthly bonus episodes so definitely do that if you're so inclined and have a few extra dollars laying around but having said that let's go ahead and get into this episode with max on marxist humanism so my name is maximilian alvarez um i am a writer and editor based in baltimore um also the host of the podcast working people um where I interview workers about their lives and jobs and dreams and struggles. Yeah. Well, Max, it's been way overdue for you and I to do an official collab. We've talked about it probably for like a year at this point.

We've spoken in front of a class together, but we haven't even done a podcast together, which is just amazing to me. But I'm glad that that's finally being done here and that we can get over that because, again, it is long overdue. I really love you. I love your work. I love working people. and I know for a fact that both of our goals and our projects are very, you know, similar in the trajectory they're pointed at and the things that we want to accomplish.

So it's an honor to have you on and finally be able to do an episode with you. Thank you, comment right back at you. And I love everything that you're doing. Thank you very much. So for people who might not know about your podcast still, can you just talk a little bit more about working people, what the idea is, what the goal is, etc.? Yeah, for sure. And I'll try to give the abridged version. version because I'm sure I've given the longer version too many times at this point.

But, you know, and I guess, you know, to mention our comrades at Mandatory OT, you know, they just hosted a nice forum that you and I were on along with, you know, our comrades from coffee with comrades and beef lettuce. And that was a really great conversation. But I kind of laid out the origin story of working people there if folks are interested and you should check out their their show as well. But yeah, I mean, the premise of the of the show, you know, like I mentioned before, is really, you know, simple, right? I mean, you know, like I got into kind of the left media space as a writer when I was, you know, a grad student at the University of Michigan. And, you know, the reason for that is very much tied into kind of my own life story and the experiences of, you know, myself and my

family, kind of going through a lot of hardships during and after the great recession. You know, we lost our house. You know, we were all working really shitty jobs, doing everything we could to get by. And that's why, you know, the very first episode of working people is actually with my dad, right? Because I saw, you know, just when every time I would go home and talk to him, I just, it felt like the lights were on, but no one was home, right? Like his heart had just been completely broken. by by everything we had lost in the recession and we were all feeling it we were all feeling heartbroken and lost and we were kind of retreating from each other further into ourselves and punishing ourselves and so

you know i wanted to to use this show as a as a place where people working people could really just you know open up about their lives and what they're going through and and you know really tell their stories, the ways that they wanted it to be told, and really feel like they had an open listening audience for that. And, you know, like that, the shape of the show has really kind of developed since then, but, you know, that very first episode with my dad, I really didn't know what I wanted it to be or where I wanted it to go. I just knew that, you know, I wanted to give him that chance to talk about what he had been going through, because he hadn't been doing that for so many years and he just you know we talked about his life in such depth and more

depth than i think i ever had with him up until that point and that really made me feel that there was something to this right that that you know going to the topic of discussion today right we were so alienated you know all of us are so alienated from you know ourselves and from each other that you know even the most basic act of you know human decency like listening to each other validating each other's experiences, taking an interest in each other's lives seems like such a foreign concept. It's not something we're trained to do or to listen to. And working people is really trying to kind of fill that void. And I see it as a very political project, right? If we are going to dealionate each other and ourselves, if we are going to rehumanize ourselves, you know,

out from under just the feted, you know, crust of capitalist alienation that we are all kind of buried under, then we have to start by, you know, listening to each other. We have to start by telling our stories and sharing our stories vulnerably, openly. And that's what I try to do at working people. I've interviewed workers from all over the country, from all walks of life, you know, just had an episode out with loggers in the main woods industry, truck drivers, teachers, fast food workers, sex workers, a plumber, auto workers. I mean, really just really kind of tapping into the vast well of experience and storytelling and brilliance of everyday working people around the country. Yeah. And that's something that I obviously love about your show and

that is what makes it so great and so enduring. But you know, you started this entire podcast talking with your father specifically talking about basically what boils down to is like the psychological and existential impacts of not only capitalism but capitalism in crisis right the very nature of the the great recession and how not only does it affect people's you know bottom line their their financial situation that their home economics etc but it often gets overlooked is it deeply impacts their sense of self their their sense of self pride their sense of where they belong in the world and what they do to contribute to the community as a whole. And that really is sort of the kernel that is inside of what we are going to talk about today,

which is Marxist humanism, right? We're going to get into the debates between humanism and anti-humanism in the Marxist tradition in a bit, but fundamentally this concern about the human subjectivity from a Marxist perspective is really crucial and acts as a bridge to this first question, which you can take in any direction you want, But for those out there who might not know these terms just up top, can you just define what humanism is broadly and then what exactly Marxist humanism is and how these things might differ?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, and, you know, I think that maybe as like a prelude to that, and as a warning to myself, right, you know, if I stray too far, right, like, I think one of the most basic things to remember is, you know, like, trust your instinct on this, right? Like when you hear the term humanism, what does that kind of immediately make you think of? And I mean, like, it brings you to kind of just a basic central concern for humanity and the things that make us human, right? And it, I think, arises from kind of a deep set belief that, you know, that who we are and who we can be, you know, is worth all this kind of deep, intellectual investment and that our, you know, project for building a better, more equitable

and sustainable future has to grapple with who we are as human beings and what we could be as a collective humanity kind of in, in harmony with our kind of surrounding environment and other species. And so, you know, there's a lot of baggage that comes with kind of the term humanism, especially after the Enlightenment, you know, when this kind of term really took shape. And I don't think we necessarily have to kind of go deep into that, but, you know, again, like, through all the ins and outs, I think the most important thing to emphasize here for listeners, right, is that, you know, like the strain, the various strains of humanism are deeply focused on kind of, you know, the particularities of the human race and the things that make us human or what we even call, you know, like human. What, what fits under that heading, right? And why is it important to kind of even focus on? that. And in the context of Marxism, right, you know, like the strains of Marxist humanism are essentially kind of taking that core concern for the human being and the human subject and trying, working outwards from there to understand how a, you know, liberatory Marxist

politics could work within the kind of constraints of our humanity. Right. And, and, you You know, I think that, you know, the very foundation for what we call Marxist humanism is, is like strongly, I think it's this strongly held belief, you know, from theorists of the past century or so that, you know, the fundamental divide between Marx's earlier work and his later works is very much overstated, right? You know, even if at just the surface level, right, I mean, you have this notion that the young Marx was more of a philosopher. He was more interested in questions of human nature, and the older Marx was more sophisticated, more focused on, you know, political economy and the complex ecosystems and relations and, you know, society-wide apparatuses of economic production. And, you know, I mean, that's not exactly wrong. You know, if you look at the trajectory of Marx's works, you know, I think that that holds up more or less. But the real question, I think, is whether or not Marx himself or, you know, Marxism, you know, as an ism, you know, whether or not they actually refute or ever really move away from those core concerns about who we are and what makes us human. And I think that, you know, in the anti-humanist strains of Marxism, right, you get kind of a pushback from theorists and, you know, political actors who,

argue that you know like the the these questions about you know like humanity and and the focus on the human subject right like who we are and and what how we feel and where our consciousness you know what our consciousness is what we're capable of thinking and doing ourselves is secondary at best to kind of the larger historical forces and structures that you know human subjects are within, right? So, like, you can think all these great thoughts, you know, about, you know, revolution and what have you. But what really matters is the fact that humanity in the aggregate, right, is kind of pushed and polled and determined by the broader non-human forces, you know, the circuitry of capitalism, right? The larger societal systems of dominations of dominating,

that any human being, no matter how big their brain is or how big their heart is, is going to, like, be limited by. Yeah, absolutely. And just to continue clarifying this divide within Marxism a little bit, I think the big Marxist thinker that it really gets brought up in these discussions as sort of, you know, bringing in the anti-humanist Marxism and criticizing Marxist humanism is Louis Althusay. And the big thing with Louis Althusay was, you know, he really uses the term anti-humanism and attack, Marxist humanists as revisionists because fundamentally Atheuze's argument was like, you know, the structure of capitalism, the social relations engendered in capitalism, the ideology that permeates out of every pore of capitalism, those shaped the individual consciousness

to an incredible extent such that talking about the beliefs and desires and preferences of like individual people is really sort of missing the point because those are just the products of these larger forces. And so, you know, get away from talking about the subjectivity of human beings individually and talk more about the overall structures and relations between people as the primary focus of Marxist sort of analysis and ideology. And then a bunch of post-structuralist thinkers after him continued, I mean, rejecting some of the structuralism of Althusay and other thinkers in different fields, but carrying on the sort of dismembering of subjectivity, the calling into question of how reliable human subjectivity is, et cetera. And all of this

basically serves to just not really focus so much on how people, as you were saying, like feel about their position under capitalism, the psychological effects of individuals living under capitalism and focus more on the way history moves and these broader structures objectively and empirically and, you know, have a more scientific-minded approach to these things. And Al Thuze would really, he was the one that articulated this division between what he called early Marx and mature marks, right? The economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 where Marx really talks about alienation, talks about, I mean, love and sex and all these really human things.

He juxtaposes that as the young Marx to the mature marks in, you know, really peaking in a capital, Das Capital. And Althusay's argument was like, you know, the older Marx left behind that younger humanism and really tried to make it way more scientific and we should as well. well. And then a bunch of obviously Marxist humanists reacted, you know, being skeptical of that divide that Althusay puts up, et cetera. And in a lot of ways, I think we're still, especially in Marxist circles, we're still living through these debates in a lot of ways. And it doesn't really happen explicitly, but a lot of times implicitly when we're having arguments or disagreements

with comrades, these things will be operating just underneath the surface, whether we know it or not. So I think it behooves us to at least understand that divide in the Marxist tradition and and which people are on which side so we can have a clear thinking about how to go forward, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I guess to, you know, raise the stakes there and to try to kind of bring that down to eye level, right? I mean, like, you know, if we're trying to think about this in practical terms, which, you know, someone like, you know, Althusay, Althi Serre was really doing, right?

I mean, remember the historical context in which, you know, his work was being produced, right? It was a time of great, you know, political tumult, a lot of, like, you know, this emergence of the new left and trying to learn from, you know, the failures of Stalinism and so on and so forth. I mean, you get these kinds of questions about, you know, these age-old questions, right, about like, okay, Marx pointed out that, you know, the proletariat is going to be, you know, they're going to be the ones who lead the revolution, right? You know, like, you know, we're going, we're going 101 here, right? And anyone who listens to your show, you know, which is brilliant and an invaluable resource for the left, right, will be well versed in these subjects, right? But you have the basic, you know, structure that Marx laid out, the structure of history, the dialectic, whereby, you know, the structure of capitalism is such that it's inevitably going to lead to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of, you know, a few. and it's going to kind of put the rest of us in this kind of massive exploited proletarian class of the many who have very little and all we can basically do is sell our labor to get a wage to get by right and so then you get the question it's like okay

when's the right time to strike when are we going to have that revolution when are we going to overthrow the bourgeoisie how do we get there right and this is like I said an age old question where you know some people say you know, like, okay, you just got to storm, you know, the halls of where power is housed, right? That's what the Bolsheviks did. And they lived in a time and place where power was kind of concentrated, you know, in, you know, a city, in, you know, like certain buildings and in certain people that could be identified, right? It was a society that kind of, you know, could be gripped and taken over in such a fashion. but you have other people you know across the world who are like well we don't necessarily have that so what we need to do is we need to convince enough people in the proletariat that they're being fucked over and that they themselves have the means to to overthrow this oppressive power structure and so how do we how do we communicate to them to them how do we educate them right how do we make this marxist message you know like the most convincing it can be to the most to the greatest number of people that we can reach.

And, you know, this is where, you know, the question of anti-humanism that Althusai, like, posed is, becomes really central, right? Because if you are an Althusarian, you're going to be like, well, you know, it ultimately doesn't really matter how many people you convince of this, right? Because, you know, like the larger structures that govern our systems of production and that are so deeply intertwined with our systems of government that they all, but tell, you know, like governments what to do or force their hand to always, you know, benefit the interests of the capitalist class and to fuck over the working class, right? I mean, it doesn't matter how many people, you know, you kind of inspire to buy into this kind of Marxist message. What really matters is those larger systems and structures that all of us are, you know, kind of subservient to. And so the real question is, like, how do you change those structures? how many people do you need to change those structures, right?

You know, like what tactics can you use to really upend those, you know, systems of production? You know, those are the kind of, I think, you know, practical context in which this kind of discussion of humanism and anti-humanism, you know, was taking place, at least in Althusser's sense. Right. Yeah, and that is, as you were saying, that's like a totally fair sort of intervention to at least make the Marxist tradition more reflective. on these on these questions and to really like think through where do we place our emphasis you know what really is important and what is sort of secondary etc so regardless of where you fall on on that exact position al-thus a intervention i think is still an important one because it made the marxist tradition sort of think in in new ways right yeah absolutely and and yeah it's

i mean it's it's a worthwhile intervention right i mean but it's just like you know taken to its kind of logical conclusion, it actually ends up foreclosing more political possibilities than it opens up. Right. For sure. Now, we've talked about the difference between humanism and Marxist humanism and, you know, anti-humanist Marxism and humanist Marxism. Let's talk a little bit about like bourgeois liberal humanism because I think this is where a lot of the critiques against humanism broadly come from. You know, they come from a critique of the specific liberal humanism that we see around us today. So can you? you just talk about like what bourgeois liberal humanism is like the NGOs and and philanthropy and

stuff like that just to give people an idea of what a non-Marxist bourgeois version of this philosophy would look like yeah so i mean i think i think a non-marxist bourgeois version of humanism right is is you know i guess i guess we could call it more of like a humanitarianism versus humanism kind of thing right at least in the terms that that i understand humanism men, right? Because I think that the liberal bourgeois way of understanding humanism, right, is one that, you know, I think has a genuine concern for humanity and, you know, the joy in suffering of human beings, right? I mean, we all know lots of, like, well-meaning, bleeding heart liberals, right? I do truly believe that for so many people, right, they're concerned.

for, you know, the suffering of humanity, you know, comes from a good place, right? And I guess, like, again, to give, like, a concrete example, you know, I would, I would, like, point to, you know, like, John Oliver's last week tonight, right? I mean, like, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an entertaining show. I love watching it. But, like, you know, the, the elephant in the room, right, is that this is what human, you know, humanism or humanitarianism looks like without any sort of systemic critique of capital right you know like it is it is always focused on you know john oliver's show is always focused on like kind of the human costs of the ills of of capitalist society the human toll of the contradictions within this kind of brutal political economy right you know the ways

that you know the poor and working classes are fucked over by the medical system right or that are you know further punished by a kind of corrupt uh policing system that itself is, you know, organized around kind of the protection of the needs of capital, so on and so forth, right? I mean, like, again, I think that John Oliver and his staff and the people who watch them, like, I think they have a genuine care for, you know, the people that they're talking about. But without any sort of, like, kind of political analysis of, you know, the system that is causing all of this, right? It's just going to all end up nowhere, right? It's all going to end up nowhere, right? It's all going to end up. as just kind of pure, I don't know, emotive, you know, desperation, right? Or at best, it's going to kind of be focused on, you know, like some sort of like minor kind of adjustments that we can make to this system to alleviate some suffering, but still by and large, permit, you know, like mass suffering of the poor and working classes. And I think that if you first understand that, right, if you, if you, you, you you take it as you know if you accept my premise that like that's kind of the real problem with with john oliver's show and and people in that liberal bourgeois vein who think like him right then you have to kind of ask you know like okay well then you know is is what what's underneath that right like what are the kind of core philosophical assumptions that are being made right that that lead them to you know be so desperately

incapable of, you know, understanding kind of like this problem as a systemic problem that needs a systemic overhaul. And I think that that's really where, you know, we get to kind of the the meat and bones of liberal humanism, right? Liberal humanism as, you know, in the kind of enlightenment tradition, something that that takes for granted like a human essence or a human nature that just is and exists, right? That is kind of like, like, like a historical. There is some, you know, kind of, you know, like inherent value of humanity that all of us are born with. And that, you know, in our system, right, you know, like that inherent kind of value and dignity is not equally kind of recognized. But I think that, you know,

like a really materialist, Marxist kind of evolution of the question of humanism is linked to kind the ways that Marx, you know, like, you know, in many ways understands the question of history, right? You know, history never repeats itself, you know, like, you know, verbatim. It never, never goes point by point the way that it went before, right? History is always in flux. Systems are always changing. People are always adjusting to new cultural forms and norms and what have you, right? But like, in this, and I think that the same is true of, you know, humanity itself, right? The very things that make us human and the very definition of our humanity is by nature, you know, in conversation with, you know, the world around us, right? Marxist materialism, the, the very kind of like premises of Marxist politics, and we can get into this in a little bit, you know, I think that Marxist project doesn't exist if it doesn't presuppose the human being as like this sort of open-ended thing, right, as this kind of being

that, like I said, is constantly, you know, shaped and made into what it will be in constant conversation with the world and people around it. And, you know, we, we, we know that, you know, whatever humanity is, whatever the human self, you know, is, right? We know when we have less of it, and we have more of it, but we can't kind of just like put our finger on it and say that's it and that's all it's ever going to be. And so I think that one of the big ways of distinguishing kind of liberal humanism from Marxist humanism is that kind of core understanding of the human being is not some sort of like self-contained, walled off, you know, independent consciousness or soul-like substance, right, that exists in all of us. But that is like, you know, a sort of, as Marx says,

a sort of potential, right? A sort of, you know, potential for creating, you know, more just and equitable worlds that we ourselves can inhabit and that, you know, in the process can make ourselves more human, right, by building worlds that allow us to kind of express the fullness of the potential of our humanity. And liberal humanism doesn't do that, right? Liberal humanism takes much more as kind of fixed in history, including the human being itself. Yeah, wonderfully said. I mean, you summed up so much in that

that like sort of static, autonomous, rational conception of the human subject of the self as this sort of isolated, you know, I am an island unto myself sort of figure is the starting point for so much of liberal social contract theory.

It really cuts to the core of the liberal conception of the self. And again, I'm not going to talk too much about that right now because we're going to get into the Marxist understanding of the, human being in a second where we can really expand on some of these ideas. But I just want to drive home this idea of the limitations of bourgeois liberal humanism being pretty much synonymous with the limitations of the bourgeois enlightenment. These grand universalizable

or proclaimed to be universalizable projects of liberalism really are deeply, deeply limited in the very machination of capitalism. Right. And so far as liberalism says, yes, free markets are the best way to protect individual property rights, etc. Well, that very capitalist structure gives rise to colonialism, gives rise, and helps structure racism and gendered violence and imperialism the world over. So there's a very sort of universalizable humanism put forth by liberalism is immediately undermined by the economic and political systems, which it ties itself to, which I think is an important thing to understand. It's not only just a critique of like this one philosophy of humanism, but the critique of the entire liberal project of the

Enlightenment. And if Marxist is an Enlightenment thinker, he seeks to go beyond the limitations hit by liberalism in the Enlightenment tradition and finally make good on that tradition, whereas insofar as there's been a liberal enlightenment, it's only been a half enlightenment by definition because who Franz Fanon would call the wretched of the earth have sort of been excluded from the category of full human, right? They're subhuman, they're dehuman, they're savages, enter slur here. And that is a way for the liberal order to say, yes, our rights and our values are applicable universally to all humans. Those people just aren't human, right? Yeah. Well, well said. I do want to read something really quick before we

move on, because I think this really just hits the nail on the head. It's from David Harvey. It's actually the last chapter of his book, 17 contradictions in the end of capitalism, where he talks about a sort of revolutionary humanism. And he has this paragraph, I'm just going to read it and you can take it wherever you want. You know, David Harvey says, there is, I believe, a crying need to articulate a secular revolutionary humanism that can ally with those religious-based humanisms most clearly articulated in both Protestant and Catholic versions of the theology of liberation

as well as in other movements within Hindu, Islamic, Jewish, and indigenous religious cultures to counter alienation in its many forms and to radically change the world from its capitalist ways. There is a strong and powerful, albeit problematic, tradition of secular revolutionary humanism, both with respect to theory and political practice. This is a form of humanism that Louis Althusay totally rejected. But in spite of Althusay's influential intervention, it has a powerful and articulate expression in the Marxist and radical traditions as well as beyond. And this is where it's important.

He says, it's very different from bourgeois liberal humanism. It refuses the idea that there is an unchanging or pre-gainting. giving essence of what it means to be human and forces us to think hard about how to become a new kind of human. It unifies the marks of capital with the marks of the economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844 and arrows into the heart of the contradictions of what any humanist program must be willing to embrace if it is to change the world. It clearly recognizes that the prospects for a happy future for most are invariably marred by the inevitability of dictating the unhappiness of some others. A dispossessed financial oligarch, which cannot any more partake

of caviar and champagne lunches on their yachts moored off the Bahamas, will doubtless complain at their diminished fates and fortunes in a more egalitarian world. We may, as good liberal humanists, even feel a bit sorry for them. Revolutionary humanists, however, steal themselves against that thought. And so I just like some of the initial distinctions that David Harvey here is making between a liberal bourgeois humanism and a revolutionary or Marxist humanism. I think that's interesting, and I didn't expect it out of the pages

of a David Harvey book, to be honest. Yeah, no, I'm like, give me more of that, David. It's really good, yeah. And, you know, I think, you know, it goes to, I guess, if we could backtrack a little bit, you know, to where we started, right, of trying to kind of lay out kind of the basic terms of humanism, right?

I mentioned, you know, earlier on that, you know, like a big distinction between Marx's humanists and anti-humanists, right, is like this kind of belief that, you know, that there isn't that big of a distinction or as clear of a distinction between Marx's earlier works and his later works, right? And but this is like something that as you kind of noted, I'll say, you know, was, you know, he was definitely on the other side of that divide. He, he like so many other. others fully believed that Marx kind of evolved his thinking and, and, you know, grew up in many ways. He matured in his kind of analyses and pointed them on larger kind of systems and structures and not on kind of some individual human essence or species being or what have you. And, you know, like I said, I think that, you know, for Marx, for a Marxist humanist, however, that is defined because, you know, there are many variations of. this and and you know i think but i think that that for for those of us who kind of put ourselves more in that camp you know we marks as earlier work you know like i see it all over his later

work like i i see it as kind of the very bedrock from which you know his later work could emerge right i mean and and i think one concrete example or perhaps the the biggest concrete example we could give is one that you mentioned in that quote from david harvey right he talks about alienation, right? And, you know, this is in Marx's earlier manuscripts, like, the concept of alienation is central. And, you know, I think it's something that a lot of people have heard in their lives, or at least a lot of people have felt, even if they didn't have those terms to kind of describe it, right? But, like, you know, the very notion that, as Marx, you know, puts forth, that, that we are alienated under capitalism, right? We are alienated from ourselves. We are

alienated from each other, right? The very notion that, that, um, that the problem with capitalism is that it alienates us from something, you know, that tells you that, like, there's, there's something that we are being alienated from, right? And that's where the kind of question of humanism comes in, right? Like, you know, otherwise, like, why would we give a shit? Why would we care that, you know, about changing capitalism, right? You know, unless, you know, there was some kind of basic accepted premise that capitalism has made us less human, right? You know, or that has made us into something that, you know, depresses our capacity to express the fullness and of our humanity, right?

And, you know, I think that that's, you know, again, like all of the, all of the kind of critiques that Marx launches into later in life, you know, kind of is steeped in that, right? I think that the politics of Marxism is the politics of becoming more human. we define that, right? And that's another thing that I really loved about, you know, Harvey's point, right, as he mentions multiple humanisms. And I think that that's why it's so important to draw that distinction between, you know, bourgeois liberal humanism as kind of closed off stagnant, ahistorical things. And Marxist humanism, right, as understanding the human

as more of a kind of, you know, potential, right? And he talks about this in terms of of like, you know, this untapped potential for humans to kind of, you know, be free in their productive relationships, right? To be free in the ways that they, you know, make the worlds in which they can be and become themselves, right? That is the kind of free labor and productive capacity that we have, you know, if we are living in a state of non-alienation. And it sure as hell is not the state that we're living in, you know, under capitalism.

I guess to, again, like, you know, try to kind of bring this this down to eye level, right? You know, I mentioned this, you know, on a great little philosophy podcast that's just called podcast with Cooper Cherry. And, you know, when he had me on there, we were talking about postmodernism, right? And, you know, I mentioned in that discussion that, you know, when I was teaching back at the University of Michigan as a graduate, student, you know, especially when we were trying to kind of grapple with big, uh, heady topics like postmodernism or humanism, right? I would always kind of tell my students to, to trust their gut, right? You know, to trust their feelings. You know, you, your, your body and your brain and your heart and the thing that you call yourself, you know, these are the best diagnostic tools that you have

for testing the things that, you know, postmodernism is supposedly describing. If, you know, postmodernity is like ostensibly describing a moment in history when institutions like the church or, you know, the state, if they can no longer provide the foundation for, you know, these metanarratives that define what truth is and what the meaning of life is, you know, then I would ask my students, you know, Do you feel like right now in this time and place, you know what truth is? Do you feel it in your bones, right?

Do you know it in your heart? And if not, then why? You know, what's getting in the way of that? And that would always lead us to have, you know, really great discussions about all this stuff in more concrete and personal terms. And I think that's what really made it stick. And so, you know, I bring this up because, you know, I feel the same way about the, the deeply human questions posed by Marxism.

You know, there is a lot to wrap your head around with Marxism, right? I mean, our, you know, analyses of our political economy can get very, very technical. But, you know, I really think that the hardest part about grappling with a giant body of theory like Marxism is that, you know, you are dealing with so much deep and painstaking thought about the intricate workings of the world and the reality. and the reality that we take for granted. You know, the hardest things to see are the things that have, you know, settled into the backdrop of what is.

You know, the things that are so constant and obvious that we don't even have like a frame for looking at them or questioning them from a distance. You know, it's like the David Foster Wallace, this is water question, right? Like fish don't know what the hell water is, right? And, you know, Marxism, is like a centuries long collective effort to understand the mechanics of the capitalist world that we live in.

But, you know, when it comes down to it, like I was saying before, none of that exists. If it isn't like undergirded by the fundamental questions from Marx's, you know, earlier days about what it means to be human, you know, we have no frame of understanding what capitalism means for humanity if we don't have some. deeply rooted sense that humanity can be something else, right? And that's why it's so important to remember that, you know, you, the person listening to this, you yourself are the best diagnostic to, you know, you are all you need to know to test whether or not Marx was onto something. And I mean, shit, that's what makes me a Marxist, I think. You know, the evidence, I think, is all around us. It's inside of us. We feel it every day. But, but, you know, the evidence, I think, is all around us. It's inside of us. We feel it every day. But we are, you know, like so rarely

provided with the means for diagnosing or articulating it. But I think, but I think, you know, we feel it. Something deep inside of us hurts, but we don't know where. We know we are, you know, missing something, but we don't know what. And we are, we are so alienated from ourselves and each other in this dehumanizing system that, you know, reduces us to the most basic scraps of profit and productivity, and it hurts. And, you know, I think that that anyone kind of living in the society will know that hurt, right? They will know that feeling of alienation. They will know that, you know, whatever they are as a human being on this earth, you know, like, that there's something missing. There's something more that they and we can be.

Right. And this is, I think, you know, like where the real, the politics of Marxist humanism really comes in. It is driven by that force of a potential of, you know, that untapped, as yet untapped potential of what humanity can be. And I don't think we ever will have a kind of full definition of what that can be, right? And I think that various strains of thought, you know, in post-colonial thought, in indigenous thought, in radical feminist thought, right, has brought new perspectives. to what that potential can be, what it can achieve and how we can achieve it, right? But the real question of Marxism, right, is like, how is that potential being, you know, cut off and limited and extinguished? And how does that, you know, translate to who we are and how we live today as the, as miserable human beings who's, you know, creative potential to love and live and build, you know, is being so wasted so that, you know, a few rich fucking assholes can make a buck off of us and destroy the planet in the process, right?

And that is really, like I was saying before, you know, that's the project of working people. And it's the project of, I think, so many other kind of humanist, you know, like Marxist, you know, endeavors, including your podcast, right? I mean, podcasts in general, if they have this frame, I think, do play some sort of role in that. because, you know, if nothing else, if we are at least putting these conversations out there, if we are at least inviting each other to discuss these things with one another, if we are at least reminding each other that we were meant for more than this and that we are capable of more than this and that we deserve more than this, right? That we are and should be and must be more human than we are allowed to be in this rigged,

horrifying system. If we can at least remind people of that, then, you know, I think that that unleashes kind of the force of politics that we are going to need to change such a vast and deeply, you know, inhumane system. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, beautifully, beautifully said, I definitely have some thoughts on that. And I think overall, you're completely right. And I do take your position on this, that the early Marx and the latter marks can't really be fundamentally separated. If anything, the early Marx was getting out ideas, like sort of exploring the problem, reflecting on, you know, how it's injurious to the human psychology and the way of life to have to operate under these brutal conditions. And then later in life, when you get up to capital,

he does this scientific analysis of capitalism to explain the objective causal factors. you know, with the hopes, I think, ultimately, of moving beyond capitalism precisely so that human beings can have more freedom, more dignity, more liberty, more control over their own lives. So trying to distinguish between early and late Marx and saying this was a totally different person, concerned with totally different things, I think is absolutely flawed. There's no, and also like just broadly speaking, there's no division necessary or really even possible between the subjective and the objective, right? The two things are constantly inter-penetrating one another. Like my psychological condition and my objective material conditions are deeply fundamentally related. And so to try to suppress the subjective in favor of the objective or to suppress the objective in favor of the subjective, which more idealist forms of philosophy often do, both of those errors are wrong. And a dialectical tension and unity between the subjective and the objective, I think is the way forward.

that can take all of Marx's work and move forward with it as one. And if anything, when we talk about building socialism, I think a core metric for how much progress we've made or how our sort of construction of socialism is cashing out is precisely to see what levels of sort of psychological dismay are present, right? There's objective stats in today's capitalist society, depression, anxiety, all these sort of neurotic symptoms are occurring at higher rates than they've ever occurred in human history.

And I don't think you can separate that from the material conditions in which those minds are embedded. Those two things are inseparable. And then lastly, I would say that you're also 100% correct. And at the very least, Marxist humanism is strategic. And this is, I think the claim is much bigger than this, but at the very least, right? It's strategic in that, how are you going to motivate other people to come over to this side of things?

How was I or you motivated to come over to things? It wasn't some objective understanding of the dialectic or the flow of history. It was precisely the humanist elements. I felt alienation. I look in my loved ones, my wife or my father, my mother. I see in their own drudgery and their psychological problems the grinding nature of this overall system on them and their minds. And that, that humanist impulse to like alleviate suffering in other people.

people, that was what pushed me in the direction of Marxism. And then I build up, you know, the theory and the understanding and explore Marxist philosophy to come to a deeper understanding of it. But I really think that that humanist romantic almost impulse to say, hey, human beings are suffering, you're suffering. This is how you suffer. This is why you suffer. And we don't have all the answers. But certainly we could change these conditions and we could work towards a future in which a new set of conditions prevail. And that would, I think, be a fundamental catalyst to a re-sort of orientation of subjectivity overall. So, yeah, I just think these two things are just deeply inexorably connected.

And I don't think any distinguishes are trying to cut off half of the dialectic is a good move here, you know. No, absolutely. And, you know, I thought that was, yeah, so well put. And, you know, it was very similar, you know, in my circumstances as well, right? Like, you know, I've said on many other shows, right, like I grew up very Catholic, very conservative. And, you know, what really radicalized me, right, was like our family losing everything, working in warehouses, factories, restaurants, and all these shitty jobs. And, yeah, just, you know, feeling that misery that so many of us feel on a daily basis. And what that, like I was saying before, right, like you are the best diagnostic for this.

And yeah, the theory really builds around that, right? Because you know, you know, like what is true in that sense, right? You know that, you know, like your potential as a human being, your flourishing, right, is being so incredibly stifled alongside, you know, the potential and flourishing of every, you know, worker around you and every, you know, everyone who is oppressed under, you know, these kind of horrific interlocking systems, right? That's what you need to know first and foremost. And from there, you know, you can you can really sort of, yeah, like, start to understand, you know, where those forces come from, how they operate, and what we need to do to change them. And I thought that that's something you said that I just really want to kind of underline in red pen because I think it gets to what we were talking about between the distinction, you know, in regards to the distinction between like liberal and Marxist humanism, right, as being something that, you know, understands, you know, the human self, right, as an open-ended thing, right? I mean, you, you, you kind of drew the coordinates there where you said that, like, you know, your internal psychology, you know, like your, you know, very kind of bodily, you know, feelings, right? The, you know, your bodily health, right?

Everything that we think of as, you know, ourselves, right? Everything that's contained within, like, the fleshy walls of who we call ourselves, right? Our brain, our heart, our feelings, our vision. You know, these are not walled off from the world around us. We are not some sort of a historical, you know, human beings that, that, you know, just kind of bounce surround like rats in a maze, you know, in an equally closed off, you know, world, right? You know, we are beings in process that, you know, like our, you know, that develop, you know, in conversation with the world around us, right?

The material conditions that structure our lives do have a strong impact on us, right? They do determine so much of what we can experience. You know, they kind of set the table of response of possibility. for how much of our humanity we can actually realize, right? You know, they don't determine us completely, right? But they really do kind of set that stage. And what that tells us, right, is that, yeah, like, you know, there is no kind of clear distinction between self and world, right?

We are ourselves, like, these open circuits, you know, between each other, right? We become who we are because of the relationships that we have with other people, because of the relationships we have to our surrounding environment, right? And, you know, that really, you know, cap, and the kind of final point I wanted to make there, right, is that, you know, the whole Marxist critique of capitalism, right, shows that, you know, these large material structures and systems of, you know, economic production, government, policing, all of that shit, right? I mean, these, if nothing else, they are these kinds of attempts to limit human potential and channel it, you know, however haphazardly, however wastefully, towards the ultimate ends of making profit. Yeah, exactly right. And last thing I'll say before we move on to the next question, just trying to think about how inexorably connected that human psychology is to the entire anti-capitalist project. if capitalism sort of existed like on another planet and we had evidence that the people of that planet had no internal lives right they were automaton's maybe they were robots they had no sense there the light was not on on the inside if you will there's nothing looking out of the eyes there's no human subjectivity at all the the big moral impulse of Marxism the the immorality inherent in capitalism this suffering that it causes would no longer be relevant and so we wouldn't mind as much right like it's almost like if if like

inanimate objects were having this hierarchy and robots were doing this work. It wouldn't matter. It matters precisely because it causes human suffering. It puts a lid on what a human being can do. It prevents self-actualization. And it promises you the world, but only delivers for a tiny, tiny segment of the population. The rest of us are sort of fated to toil. So it's precisely human subjectivity that makes the anti-capitalist struggle so essential. And I think that goes a long way to defending the Marxist humanist position with regards to this stuff. But bouncing off of that, let's move forward. And I just want to see, like, what are some thinkers in the Marxist humanist tradition that are particularly influential for you? Yeah. Now, I mean, this is, you know, a really interesting question, right?

Because, you know, like we were saying, you know, about kind of the different directions that, you know, your understanding of humanism could go. Right. I mean, I would really, yeah, encourage people to kind of like cast a wide net when they're looking at you know kind of different humanist thinkers right and and you know understanding you know how they grappled with these same questions in their own kind of time and place and and how that you know you know how they their kind of theories about political change you know were were a dialogue with those kinds of historical conditions and you know one person that you know i was thinking with a lot recently is um you know kind of the great educational philosopher, critical pedagogy philosopher,

Paolo Frere. I just had, you know, I just had, you know, maybe my last academic journal paper, we'll see published in a journal called Media Theory, right, where it's called Digital Media as Critical Pedagogy. And I really, really kind of got deep into Freire's work, kind of the long tradition of critical pedagogy. and, you know, I was trying to kind of connect those to my, you know, existing interests in media, media, you know, history and media theory and radical politics, right?

I mean, that's what my academic work was largely focused on, and it's what practically I kind of try to work through every day as a podcaster, a writer, and, you know, so on and so forth. And so anyway, the reason I bring out Frere is because, you know, I saw. and I tried to write out in this kind of journal article, right, that, you know, Frere's conception of, you know, the value of education, right? And the, the sanctity of education, the reason that education was so damn important to Frere, and the reason it was such a crucial ingredient in kind of systemic political change, right, was because he, you know, understood that, you know, like, human. beings are these open-ended things, like we've been saying, right? That, that, you know, his whole premise of critical pedagogy is that, you know, you can't just come up with kind of a basic syllabus to give to every student in, in a country, and hope for the same kind of results that are going to kind of, you know, defer on each student's individual kind of learning capacities and nothing else. I mean, he knew deep down that that kind of idea, that kind of static idea of education

was bullshit, right? And the reasons why he knew that are the reasons that, you know, make critical pedagogy so interesting and in the vein of Marxist humanism, right? It's because, you know, he understood that, you know, schooling was this kind of essential, you know, ideological training factory that we all kind of go through and that in so many ways, you know, conditions us to reproduce ourselves as the very capitalist subjects we need to be to sustain this system, right? But he also saw in education, right, the capacity to change that, right? If you took a different approach, if you took a different model, you know, and, you know, opened up to your students in a different way that was attentive to kind of like who they were as human beings what they as human

beings kind of desired in the you know struggle to become more human right one of his like essential terms is is humanization right you know that he saw the process of of learning and education itself right as the process of becoming more human and you know a static notion of education that just kind of beats, you know, facts and arithmetic into students, you know, like is a dehumanizing way of approaching education, right? Because it limits their kind of inherent creativity and it presupposes that, you know, they are not going to kind of be influenced by their own individual kind of working conditions, right? That if they just try hard enough, they're going to learn the curriculum and it doesn't matter if they're poor, you know, if they're, you know, living

in an abusive household or if they're of a different race or so on and so forth, right? But if you actually understand that those sorts of conditions for learning, you know, are, you know, heavily, you know, influential in what students learn and how, right? You take it as a given, right, that we are all, A, you know, striving, you know, to be more human and that that striving, you know, depends upon, you know, like an engagement with the world and learning how we can flourish and how we can act upon the world in a way that opens it up and that changes it to the point that other, you know, human beings, our fellow human beings can realize their full potential as well.

Beautifully, beautifully said, I mean, I'm just loving listening to you, talk about this stuff. On point. I'll just give my answer. I have two answers, actually, to this question of, like, you know, influential Marxist humanists for me. And certainly one of them is Che Guevara. I think it's sort of undeniable that he was a humanist in this way,

a revolutionary humanist in the way precisely David Harvey described earlier on in this conversation. For the monthly review, somebody, they're writing about Che and his humanism, and they had this little snippet that I think was really good and gets to the core of why Che was so, not only so great as, Marxist and a fighter and all that, but why he instilled to this day inspires people, right? It's precisely because of his humanism that I think he's still so, like so palpable to people, still to this day. And the quote goes, quote, Che was not just a heroic combatant. He was also

a revolutionary thinker, a harbinger of a political and ethical project for which he fought and died. The philosophy that gives cohesiveness, color, and warmth to his ideological thrust is a profound and original revolutionary humanism. For Che, the true communist, the true revolutionary, is one who regards the greater problems of mankind as his own personal problem, one who, quote, unquote, feels deeply troubled every time a man is killed anywhere in the world and is filled with great joy whenever the flag of liberty unfolds anywhere in the world, end quote. His internationalism was the most original, purest, combative, and concrete expression

of this revolutionary humanism. And I just think that's beautiful, and I think Che absolutely, even when his famous quote, like, if you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you're a comrade of mine. Like, trembling with indignation, he is talking about the subjective sort of explosion of passion and emotion that we feel inside us, that compels us to become revolutionaries in the first place. And so he'll never stop being inspiring to me for that reason. And then the other person I mentioned, I think already in this conversation, is France Fanon. On our sister podcast, Red Menace, we're working through his classic text, Wretched of the Earth. And just to, and his goal in that entire thing, the colonial struggle decolonization, the goal of the thrust of that entire book is eventually to build up what he refers to in his own words as a sort of new socialist humanism. And I think Fanon's humanism also was manifested in like his dialectical thinking.

thinking with regards to the psychology of the subjects involved, right? Wretched of the Earth is this dialectical going back and forth seamlessly between the material conditions of colonialism, how it actually objectively, empirically unfolds and develops, and going back into the psychology of the colonist, as well as importantly, the colonized, right? And he's famous for, like, articulating this conception of revolutionary violence. and it was precisely his sort of humanism that provoked this tactical revolutionary violence, like the very act of being revolutionarily violent against the colonizer

and purging the colonizer through violence is not only necessary to clear the board and to be able to build up your own society, but is also like inherently and existentially therapeutic for the person going through. It humanizes the act of revolutionary violence. against colonialism is a humanizing factor and is the mechanism by which colonized people get back their dignity. And that is like so incredibly sort of powerful. I mean, the book is powerful, but just the entire figure of Franz Fanon like looms large and is so powerful for those reasons. So yeah, I definitely, and we could sit all day and just talk about the different

Marxist humanists in our tradition, but those two definitely stand out to me. Yeah, no, that was that was fucking beautiful and and you know i guess to to to the kind of round this um this kind of section off you know i'd actually pulled a quote from from frere that i thought um you know was really great and that i that i used in that article and that i think fits um you know so well with uh with the quotes from you know about chay and fanon that you just read and so this is this is from um pedagogy of the oppressed and so frede writes Reality which becomes oppressive results in the contradistinction of men as oppressors and oppressed. The latter, whose task it is to struggle for their liberation together with those who show true solidarity,

must acquire a critical awareness of oppression through the praxis of this struggle. One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it, and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness. Functionally, oppression is domesticating. To no longer be prey to its force, one must emerge from it and turn upon it. This can be done only by means of the praxis, reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it. And it was when you were reading Phenon that came back up to me because again it, it really, all of these quotes kind of really get to the heart of everything that we've been talking about so far, right? In this quote that Frere writes, right, you know, anyone who knows Frere knows that like, you know, praxis is, you know, inextricable from everything else that he talks about, right? Like, there is no learning without praxis, right? And there is no praxis without kind of a substantive material engagement with the world that oppresses you, right? Just like, you know, revolutionary post, you know,

decolonizing violence, you know, is, you know, like, humanizing in the ways that you were mentioning in regards to phenon, right? So, like, again, the question is like, why? Why is it, you know, why is it humanizing, right? You know, in the same ways that, that Frere, you know, writes that, like, you know, to act upon the world that oppresses you is to become more fully human, right? It is to realize that not only that, that you are, you know, being dehumanized by this system but that it is it is you know fundamental to the project of a humanist politics to recognize that we as human beings collectively you know have the capacity to shape the world that will in turn shape us and and so on and so forth right like so acting upon you know the material structures

of society resisting right the kind of forces of oppression that we face in every day like that is that is like working on ourselves as well right it is hacking away at the phantom limb of of ourselves right that is that is kind of the fundamental understanding uh that critical pedagogy and that you know these other thinkers you know kind of buy into as as you know an essential ingredient of their kind of human centered politics right it understands that the human is not some sort of like you know enlightenment thinking walled off being that can just kind of, you know, determine for itself, you know, like what the, the right course of action is, right? We are all, like I said before, beings in process, beings in dialogue with the world around us. And to act upon that world, Contra Altuser, is to act upon ourselves, right? It is to, you know, create the kind of world in which we can become who we are meant to be. It is to, you know, reshape the world that will thus provide kind of the, the open possibility for us to express the fullness of our humanity or more of that humanity than

we are currently capable of expressing in this, you know, gross dehumanizing system. Yeah. Yeah. Incredibly well said that. That whole idea of like, you know, you learn through praxis or the very process of liberating yourself from oppression is the process of developing a self, of humanizing yourself, of getting dignity and taking the person. and subjectivity to a brand new level. That is, yeah, exactly, process-oriented, and it's very Marxist, and it's sort of dialectical open-endedness, which I absolutely love and adore. So let's just go to sort of zoom in towards the end here.

And I think the last question that I'll ask before I let you let listeners know where they can find you is maybe just talk about the relevancy of Marxist humanism today. Maybe we talked earlier about, like, the questions of determinism and what to do with our political energies in lieu of this conversation. So if you could tie all that together and just talk about the relevancy for, you know, people sitting as we are in 2019 as the world burns around us. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, this is, this is, you know, absolutely the question that that all of us kind of should be left with after discussions like these, right? I mean, like, you know, because it's, it's there, it's never going to go away.

I mean, like, you know, if studying history, especially the history of kind of like leftist factions in, you know, Western Europe, the U.S. and Latin America taught me anything, right? It's that we're going to keep rehashing these debates and we're going to keep adjusting them to kind of the historical conditions that we're a part of. And so, you know, I guess I'll kind of get meta here, you know, about the fact that, you know, we are talking to each other on a podcast. People are listening to this podcast right now, right? There is a lot of discussion going on in the kind of left podcasting community about, you know, whether or not, you know, podcasting, writing, you know, producing propaganda, you know, or anything like that, is politics, right? Is, you know,

in any way kind of contributing to, you know, a Marxist politics or even just a general leftist politics, right? Like, what role do these kinds of cultural products, you know, to put it crudely, you know, what role do they play in the kind of struggle for liberation, right? And this is, you know, again, something that we kind of talked about on the mandatory OT podcast. You know, we've talked about it outside of this recording in other respects. And again, it's, I think it really kind of gets to the heart of, you know, what we understand politics to be and where we as human beings. fit in that, right? Because I think there, there can be, you know, in the same way that I don't want to be just kind of this like, you know, more liberal-leaning, you know, like idealists in saying that, like, right, the right, the right article can change the world, right? You know, I can tell you, as a writer, especially when I was like starting out, right, I put so much time and effort into every sentence that I crafted because I was like, if I just get this right, if I find the right,

alignment of words that open up the right pathways of feeling and thought in the people who are reading this. That can that can really kind of galvanize people to, you know, act out these sorts of politics that I'm describing, the politics that we need. I think everyone has that. And again, I think it comes from a good place most of the time. But yeah, of course that can be idealistic. And of course, in our current, you know, media ecology, right, where where this sort of content has been has become the currency right of what jody dean calls communicative capitalism right the content we create is the fodder for this kind of circuitry of you know web 2.0 that makes money off of content right that makes money off of us right and so i'm not an idealist

i'm not you know being polyanish about this like i mean i think we we need to really recognize that when it comes to culture itself, right, when it comes to, you know, these sorts of, you know, podcasts and articles and online discussions and what have you, right? They're, they're, there, that's only a small slice, right, you know, of the political playing field. But at the same time, you know, I don't want to be kind of this, you know, like melancholic, uh, stereotype, you know, that, that thinks that, that, that writes all of this off as just kind of, you know, bullshit, right? Or that, you know, argues that, you know,

podcasts are, you know, are just flat out, not politics, you know, they, and we are kidding ourselves to pretend as such what we need in an altusarian vein is like kind of real material change and the way that we get that is through, you know, violent revolutionary struggle, um, so on and so forth, right. Again, I think, I think drawing the distinction that, um, crudely, right? It misses everything that we've been talking about in this discussion so far, Brad. I mean, I think, I think it requires such a kind of crude and reductive understanding not only, you know, of the world at large, but also of who we are as human beings, right? And if nothing else, I hope that this discussion has kind of left listeners with a sense that, you know,

like how you conceive of the human, right, is, is fundamental to, you know, like how you will understand, you know, not only kind of the political critique of Marxism, but how you yourself will see that as a, as a possible action for changing the world for the better, right? And what I, you know, really kind of want to drive home on that, right, is that, you know, these these sorts of these sorts of cultural products right you know like this is this is like you know where the question of determinism comes from

right that like Althusser said right you know like it doesn't matter what people think it doesn't even matter what they say right you know because ultimately we are all kind of shaped and conditioned and our paths are determined by the larger material structures and systems of global capitalism right I mean that's that's

Again, it's just a very kind of crude and reductive way of understanding, you know, like the flows of human potential, the ways that history can change when you build up kind of a critical mass of empathy for your fellow human beings, a sense of injustice and a belief that things can be different, right? And what I, I guess, am trying to kind of say against, you know, the more melancholic view that, you know, any of these kind of cultural products, you know, like are superfluous or that they're explicitly not politics, right? Is that, you know, if that is your kind of understanding, right, then, then what's the point, you know, like, I guess, you know, like, then why do it, right? You know, like, I think that deep down we all feel some sort of kind of deep potential for kind of human connection in these media that we engage with. The media themselves are not going to give them to us by themselves, right? I mean, like, but we can try to recode them, to repurpose them, and to use them for ends that will kind of make a Marxist future more possible, right? because how the hell are you going to change the material structures of society if you do not build up a critical mass of people who can throw themselves upon that system and change it and destroy it, you know, and build something better and more just and equitable in its place, right? Where else is it going to come from, right?

What deus ex machina is going to swing in if it's not us, the people, the proletariat, who are doing this? And how are we even going to get there if we do not kind of do the work every day of rehumanizing ourselves in each other's eyes, of recognizing and validating each other's pain and of encouraging every one of us to kind of not only desire to, but to act upon the will, you know, to become more human than we are right now and to feel this kind of deep sense that that is what we all deserve. If we're not doing that, right, if we're not using podcasts and writing and knocking on doors or talking with our neighbors and coworkers, right, if we're not constantly kind of trying to do the work of that, you know, ideological air conditioning, right, of changing people's minds, of building solidarity with each other and of like I said before, of at least reminding each other that that we were meant for more than this. that it doesn't have to be this way, right? If we can at least use, you know, like our media for that ends, right? That is an essential part of the kind of struggle for liberation. And if we are just going to kind of write that off, right, as, you know, just from the beginning as having kind of no inherent value or potential

to play a role in that revolutionary struggle, right? if we're just going to sit and bemoan, you know, the uselessness of, of this, you know, pseudo-politics of podcasting or writing or so on and so forth, then I honestly get the fuck out of the way, right? Honestly, you know, like, then give your platform over to people who will use it to more effective ends, right? Working people, my podcast is not, and it's not going to change the world, right? But what, again, what I hope it can at least contribute to, right, is like, you know, building this sense among, you know, this massive and diverse working class in this country and beyond, right? Building, you know, like this kind of desire in people to reconnect

with their family, their friends, their neighbors, their coworkers in ways that capitalism doesn't want us to, right? In ways that capitalism largely forecloses, right? Because capitalism always pushes us to see each other as nothing but, you know, like kind of, again, the potential for profit, you know, like, and kind of the use value that it can squeeze out of us in our labor. Right, a commodity, right? And so if we, you know, are not doing the work to remind ourselves and each other that you are more than a commodity, that, you know, that we are more than commodities and that human society can be driven to much greater and more beautiful and more just and equitable ends then the kind of soulless quest for profit at the expense of just millions and billions of people

in suffering and the destruction of the planet, then we might as well give up, right? And I'm not willing to give up. And if these are the media that are available to us, then I say that we use them to the best of our abilities to actuate, right, that kind of Marxist-Humanist principle, to inspire, you know, our comrades and our would-be comrades. you know, to believe that that they deserve more than this and they are capable than more of this. Yeah, incredibly well said as always.

And like I just, I just want to come back on this last note is at the end of the day, I became a Marxist and I think this is true for you as well, precisely because I saw so much unjust suffering in the world amongst my family and amongst strangers that I'll never even know or meet. And I wanted to end that suffering.

And everything beyond that, all the theory, all the organizing that I've done, everything was ultimately traceable back to that basic humanist impulse in me that I wanted other human beings, innocent, good human beings to not fucking suffer so much, so unnecessarily. And that is the sort of Marxist-humanist kernel at the core of our entire project. So thank you so much, Max, for coming on. You're a master with words. I love listening to you talk.

This conversation probably created more questions than it solved. so that means that we'll have more episodes probably talking about this. I certainly want to collaborate with you again in the future. I know that will happen one way or another. But before I do let you go, can you let listeners know where they can find your podcast and your other work online? Hell yeah. And thanks again for having me on, Brad.

I really appreciate it and really love the work that you're doing and the approach that you take to this work. You know, I just want to, again, say that, yeah, in terms of opening the media that we have available up to others and really kind of trying to repurpose them in ways that, you know, move the revolutionary struggle forward. I think that, you know, we owe a lot to you and the folks at Rev Left Radio. And, you know, if folks want to check out my work, you know, all –

I try to kind of put all my writing and all the interviews that I've done and stuff like that on my website, which is very Nietzschean. It's called ActiveForgetting.com. But, you know, like the podcast, Working People, you know, it's on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. You know, you can follow us on Twitter at Working Pod. Check out our Facebook page. You can follow me on Twitter. I kind of always forget my handle, but I'm Maximilian Alvarez.

And I'm always posting new episodes and stuff like that. And, yeah, I mean, reach out to us. You know, if you have, you know, workers that you want us to interview or topics that you want us to cover, right? Like Rev Left Radio, we really try to kind of make this a collaborative project that listeners feel like they have a hand in shaping so that, you know, we are addressing kind of the pressing concerns that are on their minds. So, yeah, if you want to listen to conversations with workers about their lives and their jobs, and if you want great bonus episodes, you know, where I get to talk with. writers, podcasters, and organizers about the issues that matter to working people, then please subscribe to our Patreon page. You know, everyone knows that, you know, podcasting doesn't really pay well.

So, you know, the more subscribers we get, the more interviews that, you know, we are able to do, the more worker voices we are able to lift up. And, yeah, that's, I think that's pretty much it. Awesome. Yeah, definitely listen to working people. I'll link to the website and the podcast in the show notes. this episode. Listeners, keep those hearts pumping bright red blood.

And Max, let's keep in touch and do this again some time, brother. I love talking to you. Sounds good, buddy. All right, solidarity. Solidarity. There's a great and a bloody fight around this whole world tonight. In the battle, the bombs and shrapnel rain, Hitler told the world around, he would tear our union down. But our union's going to break them slavery chains.

And our union's going to break that slavery chains. I walked up on a mountain in the middle of the sky. I could see every farm in every town. I could see all the people in this whole wide world. That's a union that'll tear the fascist down, down, down. That's a union that'll tear the precious down. When I think of the men and the ship's going down while the Russians fight on across the dawn,

there's London in ruins and Paris in check. Good people, what are we waiting on? Good people, what are we waiting on? So I thank the Soviets and the mighty Chinese vets, allies the whole wide world around. To the battling British thanks, you can have 10 million yanks if it takes them to tear the ashes down, down, down. If it takes them to tear the ashes down.

But when I think of the ships and the men go in, down, and the Russians fight on across the dawn. There's London in ruins and Paris in change. Good people, what are we waiting on? Good people, what are we waiting on? So I thank the Soviets and the mighty Chinese vets, the allies, the whole wide world around. To the battling British thanks, you can have 10 million yanks.

If it takes them to tear them, lashes down, down, down. if it takes in to tear the prices down