Rev Left Radio - Marxist Theory: Engels, Lenin, and Dialectical Materialism

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Thomas Riggins is a New York university lecturer in philosophy and ancient studies. He is a retired city housing manager and a veteran of the peace and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He holds degrees from Florida State University and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently a member of the UAW and a former Teamster.  Professor Riggins joins Breht to discuss a collection of his essays on classic texts by Lenin and Engels put out by the comrades over at Midwestern Marx called "Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism".  Together they discuss Anti-Durhing by Engels, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, State and Revolution, and Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder by Lenin.  Check out Midwestern Marx here: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/ Find Riggins books, including the one discussed in the episode, here: https://www.midwesternmarx.com/books.html   Outro music "Which Side Are You On" by Pete Seeger 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 Thomas Riggins to discuss his newest book, which was actually published by the Comrades over at Midwestern Marx, entitled Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism. And in this text, he really takes four major works, one by Angles, anti-During, three by Lenin, materialism and imperial criticism, State and Revolution and Left Wing Communism and Infantile Disorder

and really goes through these four texts in depth exploring these concepts, writing multiple essays per text and really just bringing these texts to life, showing their relevance, you know, arguing over certain mischaracterizations and misunderstandings of these texts, and just a really interesting work that I really recommend for anybody out there who considers themselves a Marxist. Again, Carlos from Midwestern Marx was the one that set this up.

So I want to give a shout out to Comrade Carlos for making this episode happen. I really appreciate it. And I also wanted to say, as I think I say in this episode somewhere, but we cover those four texts. And of course, over at Red Menace, our sister podcast where we tackle these theoretical texts in the Marxist tradition, we've done episodes on left-wing communism and infantile disorder and state and revolution by Lenin.

So after you listen to us, discuss those texts. and you want to go learn more about them. You can hop right over to Red Menace and hear those episodes if you haven't already. Or of course you can buy this book, which I'll link to in the show notes, and you can go through those texts at even deeper levels with even more detail. So this is a fascinating, wide-ranging conversation. Definitely coming from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, 100%, which I appreciate. So here is my interview with Thomas Riggins on his newest book,

reading the classical texts of Marxism. Enjoy. My name is Thomas Riggins, and I'm here to discuss a new book I just had published for me by the Midwestern Marxist Institute called Reading the Classical Text of Marxism, which is their title. I didn't have a title for it, so that sounds like a good title. Wonderful. Yes, it is a good title, and it is a wonderful. text. So shout out to Midwestern Marx, who set this, that organization kind of set up this interview and obviously published this text. And so let's go ahead and just dive into it.

I guess the best way to start and help our listeners orient themselves to you and your work, can you just kind of tell us about your career and philosophy, how you got interested in it, and then how you came to embrace Marxism and Leninism? Well, to make a long story short, I got interested in philosophy way, back when I was a teeny bopper and grew up in the South and I had a friend in high school. Everybody was religious and going to church and believing in religion. And he said I should read a book by Bertrand Russell entitled, Why I'm Not a Christian. I read that book and I said, oh my gosh, there are adults that don't believe in Jesus.

I can't believe it. And so that got me interested in reading Russell, and then I read a book, a great book that if people aren't, haven't read philosophy, they should read the story of philosophy by Will Durant, which is a very popular exposition starting back with Aristotle and Plato and going right up to the 20th century. So that's how I got interested in philosophy. I was also interested in anthropology. Apology, though. After I'd read Russell, I read some books on the evolution of man, saw Neanderthals, and what we now call Homer erectus, but in those days it was called Piscontropus. I said, oh, Jesus, this, I hate to say that. But this whole story that I was brought up on seems to be contradicted by science. I went off to Florida State University, I won a scholarship, and I majored in anthropology and archaeology and minored in philosophy, but switched over to philosophy for a master's degree there and later for a Ph.D. at the Cooney, that is a City University of New York Graduate School. So that's how I got interested in philosophy. How I got interested in Marxism at Florida State University,

I met some people who were graduating, who were in Yipsal, which is the Young People's Socialist League. I met them just by accident. I was a freshman. They were leaving as seniors. They found out that I was not interested in joining a fraternity. And so they said, well, listen, why don't you take over this Young People Socialist League? So they gave me the little paraphernalia of what the young people's socialists. Socialist League was, and I was the only one, but I met some other people who were friends of

mine, and so we made a little chapter of five of us, and we ran that little league down at Florida State University. It wasn't actually recognized by the State University because it was socialist. One People's Socialist League was the youth section of the Socialist Party, USA, and the leader of that at that time was Norman Thomas. So we mutated. I mutated into a communist by reading Marx and Engels, and we weren't really in contact with the national Yipsol because they were up in the north,

and we were down in Tallahassee. We just figured out we should support everybody who called themselves a Marxist Leninist. And therefore, we ended up supporting the Soviet Union, North Korea, the Vietnamese, Cuba, We didn't know at the time that all of those states were anathema to the Socialist Party because they were communists, and they had a position of the third way, in between capitalism and communism.

But when we read their literature, we found that when push came to shove, the Socialist Party always sided with the capitalists over the communists. So, when I got to New York, I joined, years later, I got to New York, and I read the communist newspaper and I called them up on the telephone. They sent somebody over to interview me, and I joined the Communist Party back around 1972. Yeah, very interesting. I also came out of philosophy as an undergraduate. That's all I have is an undergraduate degree in philosophy. And obviously, every young philosopher, at least in the Anglo world, comes across Bertrand Russell. sort of interested in him to some extent early on. And I remember reading the history of Western philosophy by Bertrand Russell. And as my Marxism grew, really came to hate his chapter on Marx.

I don't know if you remember that text in particular, but Bertrand Russell was... I used that text for at least 20 years teaching introductory philosophy to people just because it's so readable. True, true, yes. I had two chapters, well, there are more than two chapters. Well, there are more than two chapters. The chapter I hated was the Hegel chapter. The Marx is derivative from the Hegel chapter.

He saw Marxism getting his idea of some Hegel. I also didn't like what he said about Rousseau. Or Spinoza. He loves Spinoza, but he thought, well, you know, he can't have his philosophy. But Spinoza is also the great

grandfather. Spinoza leads to Hegel. Hegel leads to him. Fuerbach leads to Marx. Marx leads to Lennon and Lennon leads to reading the classical text of Marxism. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm not sure

that last step will be recognized by that I like it. That's hilarious. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm a big fan of Rousseau and Spinoza for sure. And we've done episodes on Spinoza for those interested. I would like to do more episodes on Rousseau, but I'd have to go back and

revisit that text to see what he wrong about them it's been quite a while but let's go ahead and just move on and get into this text itself the text that we're talking about um and can you just kind of talk about this book how you came to work with midwestern marks to get it published and kind of what's your main goals of this of this uh of this texts are well this this text grew out of the fact that back in the beginning of the century, I volunteered to work down at the Commerce Party headquarters, and my assignment was to help out with their theoretical journal, Political Affairs, which they have since liquidated. But at that time, I became an associate editor, assistant editor, associate editor, and I wrote

all of the articles, all of the chapters in this book, were originally articles that I published either in political affairs or on the blog that the writers were given a blog. And I either put them on my blog or in the magazine political affairs over about a 15-year period. and I can't quite remember how I got into contact with the Midwestern Marxists. I think a friend of mine, New Carlos, who is one of the leaders there, and he told me that I should contact them, and I contacted them, and we had a discussion, and I started to submit some articles to Midwestern Marx, And I figured, you know, what, these articles since political affairs had been liquidated, and I thought all of my articles now were orphans, I would just see if they would be interested in republishing them.

So I sent them in one at a time over a period of a couple of years, and they appeared on the website. You've seen their website in the articles thing. And they liked them, which surprised me very much. I mean, they liked them very much. And it was their suggestion that they collect them together and publish this book, which, of course, I had no objections to at all. Sure. So that's how the book came into existence. I updated, I had to, like, change things from Bush to Obama and then from Obama to,

from since the system remains pretty much dysfunctionally the same, it doesn't change very much by changing who the president was. Absolutely. The text itself, reading the classical text of Marxism, this sort of collection of your essays that have been updated and revised, but have been written over the years, it really focuses on the works of angles and Lennon in particular. Why did you decide to put together your essays specifically on Angles and Lennon? It was just my own curiosity. I said to myself, having read many commentaries and stuff, that people seem to think that anti-During,

I had read that if you only had one book to take to a desert island for Marxism, Take that book because anti-During summarizes Marx's work in capital and what he was doing and all the major things that angles up to. And it's a good one summary book. I met a person in an elevator once who saw me carrying that and was very upset with him. He was a Russian immigrant over here after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And we had to read all of that in high school. Everybody in high school had to read that in the Soviet Union. And I said, wow, maybe its influence wasn't as widespread as I thought.

If everybody read it and they got rid of the Soviet Union. But I feel, well, I'm going to read it and go through it myself until I get really familiar with it so that I will have like one book that has like the outline of the whole system in it. So, and to make myself understand it, I decided I would just sit down and read it and make commentary on what I thought was important. And I read it from the point of view of today rather than 100 years ago and see what's still living in this and, you know, what should be changed. And I felt that's how the books were chosen on Lenin, because, unfortunately, Unfortunately, in many of the Marxist-Leninist organizations, or at least one that I know of, the classical and orthodox theories are being dismissed for updating Marxism, 21st century Marxism, which I believe is sort of a mixture of Bernstein and Eurocommunism masquerading of Marxism, So I decided I'm going to read State and Revolution over again and make the same deal think about it that I had done with Engels.

And then, of course, all the revisionists in whatever party you happen to be in in the world that it happens to have a revisionist tendency to it likes to use the infantileist order book, left-wing communism, an infantilist order, to justify the revisionist changes they make by saying that, well, Lenin was getting on these people because they didn't want to support political parties and they didn't want to work with the bourgeoisie in certain instances. And so anybody that disagrees with this type of, which they think is Leninism, I think is reformism, they can label as ultra-leftists and this was the book that was most pushed by the web leadership in the communist party do you know the history of the communist party after the death of Gus hall the the chairperson becomes Sam Webb who was a liquidationist he had two terms

of office he finally left the the Communist Party and he works now with the Democrats or supports Of course, the Democrats. He's sort of a Clinton Democrat. Jesus. How he got to be chair of the Communist Party is a tale of its own that someday somebody should tell. Yeah, well, interesting.

So, yeah, just for people out there, the texts really covers four major works, anti-during by angles, and then the other three are by Lenin, materialism, and imperial criticism, state-in revolution, and left-wing communism, and infantile disorder.

We'll get into those as this conversation goes on. But in the preface of your text, written I think by the comrades over at Midwestern Marx, academic Marxism is particularly mentioned. And it is argued that academics have taken figures like Rosa Luxembourg or Gramsci and Marx, denuded them of their revolutionary essence and sort of reduced them to an academic niche. Angles and Lenin, it goes on to assert, have been, quote unquote, indigestible figures for academics and are usually ignored or maligned as corruptors of a pure Marxism. So can you kind of talk about how academia operates in this way, why angles in Lennon in particular are demonized and sort of what its impact on Marxism has

been? Well, I can give my opinions. It's true. The preface was written by people who specialize in academic Marxism, which I didn't specialize in academic Marxism. But I can see that academics, at least in the Western world, and especially in the United States, they have to, you know, if they're in philosophy or history or social law departments, they want to get tenure. They're interested in Marxism. But certainly, Lenin, Marx and Engels taken the way the Soviets take them, which was pretty orthodox way, is contradictory to. the American narrative of what the world should be like, which is a type of a capitalist system where there's free enterprise and makes wealth for everybody and the working class in the capitalist collaborate. And, of course, there are struggles between them over wages and stuff like that. But nevertheless, the democracy that we live in allows everybody to peacefully live.

you know, their lives and to prosper, even though some people prosper more than others. And that the Soviet Union and what it represents, what Eastern Europe, what the communist movement represents is a threat to our society and to freedom and liberty and all of this. And so professors and graduate students wanting to study Marxism are not going to consider Lenin. or his successor, who's name we shall not mention, as particularly people that they want to be associated with while they're trying to get tenure. And using Marx, everyone recognizes, I mean, when you study sociology,

they recognize, yes, there's something Marx did have something to say about this ideology and about the influence of the economy on people, and how culture operates. And we can take that as good social science that he has done, made great contributions like Weber has done and like Mannheim and other great thinkers have done. We don't have to make him into some type of idol that the communists have made him into

and worship him like they do. Like he can make no mistakes. and, you know, you go to jail if you disagree with him. So your academic career, you can be an academic Marxist and go succeed in the universities, in some university. You can't do it so much in the Southern universities, like found out. But you can do it up in New York and, boy, there are real big universities as long as you don't, you know, wear a hammer and sickle on your hotel.

Yeah, absolutely. it's kind of an interesting thing you talked about having anti during in an elevator and having somebody call that out i actually have a tattoo of a have the hammer and sickle up on my on my shoulder and i'm in a volleyball league and i had a woman from i think a Kazakhstan actually i saw the way that she was looking at me throughout the whole game and i was like i wonder which direction this is going to go and then after the game sure enough she comes up to me and she's like why why do you have that. And I just kind of give her my little spiel and we kind of go back and forth. She's very nice. And you could tell she doesn't really agree with me, but she just says, well, you don't support the

current war, right? You know, you're not in support of like Russia, what is doing to Ukraine in this moment, are you? And I just wanted the conversation to end because I knew it wasn't going to go anywhere nice. And so I was like, of course, you know, I'm for peace. And I really am. I want the, I want the bloodshed to stop. That's my position. And that's the position of this show. The slaughter of people needs to stop. But it just kind of interesting that those symbols and even that book that you had can draw the attention and the ire of people like that and you find yourself in an awkward social situation. But yeah, your points about academic Marxism in particular are really, really important. People do make a

career out of it, but you really got to lop off the revolutionary part or stay away from these quote-unquote scary figures, particularly Lenin. Yes, I hadn't thought of that in my younger days. though, if I had a visible tattoo of a hammer and sickle, I might have attracted women. Well, it's worked for me, but I'm just kidding. So, yeah, let's go ahead and move on. In my experience, core concepts like dialectical materialism and historical materialism can be difficult to understand or grapple with for even relatively seasoned to Marxist and doubly difficult to apply in one's real world analysis. So before we move on to the text proper, seeing your background as a Marxist philosopher of sorts,

how would you kind of explain these two concepts in as simple a way as possible and why they're essential to Marxism and Marxist analysis? Well, dialectical materialism is just the name that is used to describe the philosophical system of Marxism, of Orthodox Marxism. It comprises the materialism, the fact that the, I hate to use these terms, but we're stuck with them as philosophers, epistemological and ontological ideas. Ontology is the science of being, what makes the world work and what is made out of. And we are materialist.

We don't believe that there's any spiritual dimension that precedes. just the atoms and the whatever the physicists are telling us it's the basis of the big bang which is some type of little infinite point when boomer not a real bang but you know just suddenly the quantum mechanics people tell us it this thing just expanded and it's all made up of photons and electrons and positrons and some other stuff and that's the basis of all the material stuff in the universe and it took billions of years and finally we got the sun and the earth and the earth cooled down and then there was water on the earth and sunlight and some little slimy glob started to breathe and live and we all came from that and that's it no you know big guy

up in the sky saying hmm I'm bored up here I think I'll create yours so that's how we uh that's the materialism part. The dialectical part is that there are two ways of looking at truth that has in the Western tradition at any rate. You think of something as real and true if it's like unchanging. Or you can think, for instance, we thought species were unchanging because they created by God, they're always lions and they didn't change into something else. There wasn't some other little furry animal that turned into lions and your pussycat was related to the lion. Oh, what are you talking about? Dialectics is simply the idea that there's whirlism flux, and there are things, we call them contradictions,

but they're opposite things that happen. And it's a mixture of these opposite things that bring about change, and that's how we explain. explain matter and motion is the motion is the dialectical part. The matter is the basis. The motion is opposites. It's very hard to explain it without actually going over some of these texts. But that generally, this fluxy world that we live in, we just say that philosophy and dialectical materialism is how we try to approach the world.

Historical materialism is that we believe. that is the Orthodox Marxist position is that out of a material world in which life evolved and then consciousness evolved in life and you have different levels of consciousness if you have a dog or a cat you realize that they have their little plans too and human consciousness and interaction has resulted in different bands of people coming into contact and history begins to develop out of nature. And so historical materialism is using this dialectical method to look at social events in the human world. And the other part of dialectical materialism is using the dialectics for the natural, natural world.

we for some reason we said dialectical materialism and historical materialism rather than dialectical naturalism or natural dialectics and historical dialectics but that's just how it turned out i see yeah so just to sum it up and kind of put it in my own words uh dialectical materialism is like the sort of philosophical basis of marxism the dialectical aspect um sees the world as in constant flux as everything as is as a process instead of a static object, the unity of opposites or the co-incidence of opposites, and the whole flux is driven forward by contradiction. And so nothing is static. There's nothing metaphysical. There's no, you know, unchanging aspect within things. Everything is a process of flux. The materialism,

as you said, is the realization that ontologically, when we look around at the universe, even, I mean, we start from the basis that the natural material world is the thing that we can seek to understand, and we do not reference any supernatural being or anything outside of the material cosmos as a first cause or as above and beyond material. Even if that does exist, we can't know it, at least at this stage in our human history. And then historical materialism is more or less dialectical materialism applied to the evolution of, societies of human societies over time, such that you can kind of think of it in a simplified way as dialectical materialism being like the sort of philosophy of Marxism and historical materialism being the sort of scientific analysis that comes with Marxism. Is that more or less

fair and in line with what you're saying? Much better stated. I think you did a wonderful job of saying it, but yes, we agree. So I appreciate that because people do struggle with these things and we always try to clarify, because they're so essential, we try to clarify these ideas as much as we can. So I appreciate that. But let's go ahead and finally get into your book reading the classical texts of Marxism. Now, we can't possibly cover all the chapters and intricacies of this almost 500-page work in this interview. So let's just touch on the text your book covers and focus on important elements of those works. And the first one is on anti-During by Frederick Engels. Why did it?

angles, right, anti-During, and what would you say are some of its most important features or contributions to Marxism? Okay. Around the time of the 1850s and 60s, broadly speaking, the Marxism had, was being, the teaching workers were learning about Marxism, they had founded beginning the, parties begin to be founded with Marxist ideas in it, along with other ideas. And the most prominent spokesman for socialism was Marx and his works and Engels' works. Ugun During was a philosophy professor, and he joined into the socialist movement, and he began to write books in which he criticized Marx and Engels,

and he had his own theory of how socialism should develop. And he was beginning to get quite a following, and the followers of Marx and Engels ask Engels if he would write a book or do something to refute this During's positions. He was very busy and didn't want to do that. And it took several years of people, and Marx even maybe given some little pressure, too. He finally decided to do that, that he would write this book called Anti-During, but it's an analysis of Ugun During's philosophy, and to show how superficial it was,

and it was very superficial and silly. If you read the book, if you read Engels, you'll see that his arguments against during a pretty telling. He set aside, he made this a major work, he set aside several years in which he says he went and studied thoroughly. The knowledge of his day, you know, got all the science books from the bookstore to make sure he didn't say things. He wouldn't be caught up not knowing anything about chemistry or physics. Preparing himself, and then he wrote this book to eliminate the influence of During in the socialist movement. And it was pretty effective because During left the socialist movement later on. If you read what happened to him, he actually became an anti-Semite.

He lived until 1921, which is interesting when you consider the dates here. Angles died in 95, 1895, Marx in 1883. And this professor during went on and on and on into 1921. He died just a couple of years before Lenin did. So if he had have been a good Marxist, he would have seen. the whole development of practically from the beginning to do the establishment of the Soviet Union. He died one year before the establishment of the Soviet Union. That's why he wrote the book, at any rate. And the purpose of the book was to provide for the members of these new, the working

class who are joining becoming socialist and joining like the German party or the French parties and stuff, to have in one book an outline of all the major positions that we call dialectical materialism now. They had, Marx wrote a chapter in there on economics, where they condensed the first volume of capital down there. This is what you need to know. Then he had books, he wrote about science, he wrote about almost everything you can think of. If you look at the table of contents of that book, let me look here. I have the table

of contents, and you'll see the philosophy that he wrote about is the type of philosophy that Lenin is going to write about in materialism and imperial criticism. But here he talks about the philosophy. These are contents chapters from Antiduring. The philosophy of nature. the law, morality, and equality. He has a whole book later on on the state and stuff like that. Freedom and necessity. And then on dialectics. He's got chapters on dialectics, on negation, on negation, quantity, quality.

He has chapters on political economy. And then he has, of course, the criticism of during. He has a force theory of during. He has a chapter on a theory of values on labor, on and Karl Marx's chapter on political economy in there. And he has a history of the development of socialism. And the family, the origin of the family, on education and a chapter on S-E-S-E-S-E-S. which would have been a better cover of this book, I think, and sold more copies.

Absolutely. If we had a comrade on there that represented that. Absolutely. I do wonder specifically given the deep scientific aspects of anti-During, I always talk about angles and marks coming across the Darwinian theory of evolution, right? They're more or less contemporaries with Charles Darwin. this breakthrough theory comes out of, you know, the evolution of organisms through time, driven on by contradictions between themselves and their environment.

And you could just see how, you know, angles and marks getting this from biology would be just all the light bulbs going off. Like this is perfectly in line with our conceptions of what would later be understood as historical and dialectical materialism. No need for a supernatural force guiding the evolution. of these species they are material in that sense they operate as organisms in a deep profound relationship with their environment and are constantly changing and evolving always in a state of process um of development and so i and of course marks wrote to to charles darwin saying how much he he loved the book and charles darwin responded although his historians believe darwin didn't actually read anything by marks but was kind of just being compliment

mentory back towards Marx. But Darwinian evolution in particular, it was just so in line, I think, with Engels and Marx's conception of dialectics and historical materialism. Yes, there's no chapter specifically on Darwin in Antiduring, but in the index of the book, there are nine references to Darwin. So he was not ignored. When Darwin came out, marks and angles you're perfectly correct they they went uh like i want to say they were like crazy fans of darwin the groupies they really loved darwin they thought wow this is what they were thinking about sort of independently popping out here in science and in darwin but there's another guy too that uh for that's darwin for nature and

And then there's Morgan over here in the United States for historical materialism. He studied the Iroquois Indians, and then he wrote a great book on ancient society and the evolution of what he called the clan system, the gins, the stages of savagery, we don't like these terms anymore, savagery, barbarism, and civilization, which Marx and Angles thought was, wow, this guy has also independently discovered historical. and that's the basis of Engle's book on the origin of private property in the state, which is really one of the books I wanted to also go through and have included in this classical text, Marxism, but you can't do everything. That's true. Yeah. And we have another sister podcast called Red Menace, where we tackle texts by, you know, Marxist thinkers.

And we're actually in January, we're going to start on Engels' text of the origin of, of private property and the family, so people can stick around and check us out on Red Menace if you want to get deeper into that text in particular. But let's go ahead and move on. And next is Lenin's philosophical tome, materialism and imperialism. Why did Lenin write this text, and what were its major contributions to Marxist theory, in your opinion? So he is, they're building the revolutionary movement in Russia. This is before the revolutions in 1908 or something like that. They're around that era. They've had the 05 revolution, which failed against the Tsar, but they're building up the party. And Lenin is an orthodox

Marxist, and many of the intellectuals that are joining the Communist Party are not clued in to what type of philosophy they're supposed to be doing, as opposed to just a political analysis with getting into working class and overthrowing this art. And they are adopting as their political, as their philosophy of nature, bourgeois philosophies, Lenin said they are bourgeois philosophy. They're professors, like people like mock and other thinkers, religious thinkers, and they're spoiling the idea of what Marxism is supposed to be according to Lenin. They're letting in idealistic premises from idealistic thinkers, thinkers who are influenced by the classical German philosophers or the British philosophers who are idealists, and they are not strictly being materialists.

And so he's thinking that this trend to bring in idealism and agnosticism into our movement will weaken the movement, that we have to have a consistent philosophy that everybody can agree upon, a materialist philosophy. We have to leave God out of it and religion out of it and ideas out of it, that things only exist, because human beings can see them or if it wasn't for consciousness, there wouldn't be an external world and that spirit is primary and matter is secondary, that all this is just bunk, according to Lenin. So he wrote this book to justify the materialist philosophy that Marx and Engels had developed before him. and he does it through criticizing Mock, who is a very famous physicist. He still studied in physics department. We have the speed, the airplane scale, like Mock 7.

It's supposed to be seven times the speed of sound or something. So Mock's name is still around in physics. But his philosophy that things have to be perceived, and it's our perception of them that brings their, reality about that sort of stuff was too religious, I had religious, even though Mark may not have been a religious, Lenin thought that leaves the basis for religious people to always bring in the possibility of spiritual answers. When physics or science doesn't have an answer for something, then that's God gets the job.

That's what he's called in as the handyman to fill in your, philosophy where there are gaps in it that science can't give you a materialist answer. And he wanted to eliminate that. And he talks about, as I say, not only Mach, but Avanarius, we don't know much about us. I mean, we know a lot about him, but he's not having influence anymore. Mock is still around influencing, but that's physics. And it's a criticism of dialectical materialism.

was being taken by some of the leaders of the Bolshevik movement. They were saying in this time of Lenin that Engels had written, well, they didn't know about that book, so I won't bring that one up. But they were saying that Engels really went beyond what Marx did. And Marx wasn't as materialistic as Engels was. Marx really was concentrating on social problems, on economics and politics, and that Engels applying this to physics and chemistry and nature and all this other stuff, that was something Engels was doing on his own, and then even more after Marx passed away or died. Engels was engaged

in this dialectics of nature. At least he had the book wasn't published in his lifetime. But people knew about it. He'd written essays, little essays here and there, it popped up maybe. And so Lenin wanted to have Marx and Engels sort of together, that there was no gap between them, no shadow area between them, that they were together. They both agreed on this. This was a joint philosophy.

Marx always said this is a joint philosophy that Engels and I worked on, and Marx credited Engels with giving him ideas and helping him. And yeah, I also believe with regards to your last point about Lenin trying to show how angles and Marx were a sort of unified whole is a lot of people that want to return to Marx, or there's a pure Marxism that was distorted later by figures like Angles and Lenin and Stalin. They make great use of this idea that there's a sort of Marx separate from angles when that just does not bear out philosophically or historically. But let's go ahead and move on to the next text.

And I want to just remind my audience that although we are taking this, you know, text by text, every single text in this book has a dozen or more individual essays on that text. So if you're interested in any of this, highly recommend going out and getting the text, which is again called Reading the Classical Text of Marxism, and I will link to that in the show notes. But next up is the highly readable, relatively short, and essential text by Lenin, State and Revolution. What elements of this text do you think are undervalued, and what can we as Marxists learn about the nature of the state from this text? Well, I think the important part of State and Revolution is, and Marxists, Lenin is pointing out what the real relationship is between the working class. and the capitalist class.

And it is not one of working together cooperatively and sharing the goodies between the two classes based on some idea of justice and fairness that the law provides for them. Based on the fact that the manifesto has established that all hitherto existing history is the history of class struggle. There's a class struggle going on

between the working class and the bourgeoisie, that is the capitalist, the people who own the means of production and distribution, and the people who work for them and create the surplus value. I mean, this requires people to understand the Marxist economy and the capital.

What is the state then? The state has been interpreted by the bourgeoisie, at least by their philosophers, as some type of referee above the class struggle. It has a bureaucracy that works for the government, and the government tries to balance the needs of the capitalist and the needs of the workers to see that neither one gets unfairly treated by the other. And this is a bourgeois democracy that allows for this to happen

by electing representatives, et cetera, et cetera. And state and revolution, Lenin wants to point out that the government, the state, is actually controlled by the ruling class and the ruling of whatever ruling class it is, whether it's the Roman patricians that owns land and territory and farms, whether it's the feudal lords, and now it's the capitalist that own the banks and the factories and whatever, means of production and distribution, the merchants. That these are the people, they have the ones that have the majority of the wealth that is produced. It goes to their group and is redistributed down to the workers as only as like the minimum they need to get by.

And if you're lucky and you live in a country that can get some colonial money in there, they can give the workers a little more to make them happy and support what they, what their government does. And therefore, to get socialism, you have to destroy the present state, which is basically a state of the capitalists. He uses a term like the board of directors of the capitalist class. That's what the state is. And you have to replace it with a state that represents the working class. This will be a different state.

He doesn't think you can reform the capitalist state and change it into a working class state. There's some evidence that there are some statements here and there that people have made, including marks and angles and maybe Lenin once or twice too, that seem to not necessarily preclude that 100%. that it could be possible for Angles thinks at the end of his life he thought that German socialist was so powerful, that it might be possible for them to take over the state and then dismantle the parts they don't like and have a socialist state. But in general, the idea was that the state would have to be replaced by a term they used called the dictatorship of the proletariat, which causes all sorts of problems with people today.

For instance, there are people in my party that say, oh, we can't have a dictatorship. Nobody wants to have a dictatorship. That's a dumb idea. Taking the term out of the historical context and applying it incorrectly to every type of government in which there is extreme power. The dictatorship of the proletariat, Engel says, we have Yari live in a dictatorship, and it's the dictatorship of the capitalist class. So you're going to replace the dictatorship of the capitalist class

with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and that doesn't mean Hitler. It doesn't mean Putin, although Putin is nothing like Hitler. Agreed. but it's a strong man type thing. It simply means that the working class will have all the political power in its hands, and the capitalist class that used to dictate everything will be subservient and gradually as the dictatorship of the proletariat progresses and takes over and literally,

how to manage the economy and nationalizes the means of production and distribution, the capitalist class will disappear. And when the cat will disappear peacefully, retire them to Miami or simply think of it. And they can, they will not have power anymore. And then the state itself, since the state is by definition a tool of one class to oppress another, once you have gotten rid of the oppressor class and you the everybody is now in the working class as it were you won't need a state per se the state itself will gradually disappear and its functions will be all local so you'll have like local communes and people get together it'll be hunky dory land that's the um the theory for state and revolution and The basic premise there is still correct that the state we live in is a state of the ruling class, and that applies here to the United States. So it's a book that Americans should read who have the illusion that one of the two political parties here is somehow the friend and buddy of the working class.

and you can read some paper, some newspapers published by people claiming to be Marxist-Leninists headlines like Biden has our backs. That's a working class newspaper saying that. You say, hmm, I don't know what's going on here. These people haven't read State and Revolution. So it's one of the books that the revisionists of all sorts, want to say, well, that's outdated. It's, you know, forget that one. So I thought that's one we should, I put that in here. That is, I wrote on that one because I thought it's very

important to have that as a counterbalance to the misinterpretation of infantile, the infantile disorder books. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it's one of those texts that, that I would recommend to any sort of, you know, person that's just becoming interested in Marxism and wants to read Marxist theory. Once you really understand this theory of the state, a lot of other things can make sense. And this whole idea as well of dictatorship is just this idea that the nature of the nation's state is, as you said so well, class rule. And so it's just it's not a question of dictatorship or not dictatorship. It's a question of as long as the state exists, what class controls it. And in a country like the United States, it is a dictatorship of the bourgeois

of the owning class. And there's also this idea that eventually the state will wither away and some people treat this as silly or naive or even utopian. But really what Lenin is saying is once the class divisions are transcended, once we live in a society in which human beings are no longer divided up into different classes, some that own and some that have to sell their labor, then the very basis of the state, which again is class rule, disappears. And so you would be left with something like, you can call it an administrative state or whatever you want to call it, but the nation state as we've come to understand it would no longer have the premise, the foundation upon which it currently exists. That is, dividing

society into classes and having one of those classes dominate the other. And so I think that's very crucial. And I would just ask you one more question because I think this, there's a lot of confusion about this. And I'll even hear people use Lenin's state and revolution against China, and I think it's kind of amusing when they try to do this. But in your opinion, at least, what does Lenin's analysis of the state tell us about, let's say, modern China and its Communist Party? Well, this has to do with the theory, original theory, that Marx and Engels had, that the socialist revolution would come about in the most developed capitalist states, that when capitalism had shot its wad and had nothing more to give, it would break down.

And that would cause the markets wouldn't work properly because they saturated the markets. And the working class would have to take over the means of production and distribution just to keep them going. And they would have to give up the idea that you have to expand, expand, expand and make profit, profit, profit all the time. and you would use this big economic facility that the bourgeoisie had created for need and use value rather than exchange value. And that would be the basis of socialism. And therefore, it wouldn't happen in some feudal area. And where did the Chinese revolution? This is very simplified here.

Where do the Chinese revolution take place? It took place in a country that was like 90. 80%, 80, 90% peasants out in the countryside, illiterate peasants at that. And the Communist Party that formed there was basically a peasant party, but it had a proletarian, the working class was very teeny. It was in the cities, and it really got smashed by the anti-commonist of Chiang Kai Shack back in the 20s. And so they found themselves in charge of this great big, country with a very small working class and a very poor economy and where how are you going to

are you going to skip stages can you skip the capitalist stage and go directly from peasant hut to modern air condition department and people had thought about maybe that could happen in Russia because the Russian peasants and serfs had some communal system that was going on. Maybe we could use that as a basis. They turned out that they didn't go that way.

So what has happened in China is this. The state has been taken over by and is run by a communist party that's basically trying to build a Marxist-Leninist type of state.

socialist state, and they don't have the economic background to do that. So they have had to make what the Italians, it's an Italian term. It's not how the Italians did it, though, but it's a historical compromise. And that is, you know what, we're going to have to build up this economy, and we live, the world as capitalist. And so we're going to have to deal with markets, if we're going to sell products and buy food and export our rice or whatever and build up ourselves so we're going to have to have some capitalism going on here but it's going to be directed by the state it's not going to be a state in which the capitalists tell us what to do which happens in other in capitalist countries the capitalists tell the politicians what to do it's going to be a state where the

politicians that is the Marxists are going to tell the capitalists what to do we're going to keep them on a, you know, a leash. And as we develop and become more and more industrialized, and our economy, we will use this machinery to raise people out of poverty, to start to introduce these type of socialist reforms that will lead eventually to this capitalist sector of our state. It's not a capitalist state because the big private industries, the commanding heights are still under control of the party. But these big capitalist firms will gradually be reined in and will gradually put communist people in there, and they will be integrated together into the type of socialism that we believe is possible.

They talk about 100 years from now. Good. I'm glad to have a nice cushion because we're not going to see it really away. There's nothing that they're doing that is contradictory to that. So, in fact, this new leadership that Xi Jinping has brought in, the problem with capitalism in China is that the Deng Xiaoping reforms, his successors were going more and more. right wing and more and more

away from socialism and towards free market economy. And if they had been left without being reined in, that is, if the Communist Party intellects in the

inner core that we don't hear about hadn't said, look, look, we're getting out of hand here. We have to get back on the right road. And this is where James Al-Ping came into the leadership was to put a halt to the power that the capitalists had because they could see throughout China, the whole world was talking about corruption,

how people, Chinese, local Chinese officials were abusing peasants, were building houses, were taking state money. It was really getting out of control. And Xi Jinping has stopped that and reversed that, And it's putting China back on the road of what Mao should have been doing if he hadn't gone a little crazy in his old age. Should have been doing is a planned economy. They don't call them five-year plans, but they have a planned economy where they're going step by step towards eliminating poverty and trying to make what they say a moderately. wealthy country considering

the billion, 200 million people there by 2050 and that's a big step forward. It's a transitional period. It's something that Marx and Engels didn't write about. A little bit of this was done by Lenin called the

New Economic Plan in Russia when he realized we got to call the capitalists back here and get them in there. We don't know how to manage these factories and get them going. and stuff. But they too were under state control. After

Lenin's death, Stalin put an end to that and started the five-year plans. And he built, he industrialized Russia. It was at great cost. But if he hadn't

done it, he probably wouldn't have been able to keep Hitler out when Hitler came in. Exactly. But the cost, it's one of those that it was, it was a great cost. So if you're going to build, I can only think Fidel gave good advice. I remember back in the 70s, Fidel gave advice to the working revolutionary groups in South America and Latin America.

He said, don't try and become what we are. Do not try to introduce socialist states. when you come to power because if you knew the problems we had trying to skip stages here there was a Soviet Union that kept them afloat

the Soviet Union would collapse then they had the special period in the 90s now they're back in economic problems again he said we're not ready for it so I don't recommend that you try to just go right in there and take over the government writer

and think you're going to build socialism them. The places that try to do that, Ethiopia failed in doing that. All these other backward places, the Nepalese are fighting with each other. It's very complicated. And if you can just go build up your economy, the real problem is, as long as the United States is around, with the number one big superpower capitalist country, it's going to be very difficult. for any new country to actually come in and become a socialist country. And not only has the United States stuck, Cuba is the last one that actually proclaimed socialism. I mean, the Vietnamese were already socialist. They just took over the South, but they had proclaimed socialism before that. I think Cuba is the last one to build socialism. The United States has prevented anybody else from going down that road.

except the Vietnamese who defeated them. But they already had socialism before Cuba. They had it from the 45 bomb with Hucci Men. And they succeeded in overthrowing the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist world, socialist world. So they couldn't have had socialism. If our theory is you go from slavery to feudalism to capitalism to capitalism to socialism, we don't have a regression where you go back. No capitalist country has gone back to

feudalism. No feudal country has gone back to socialism. So I don't know what the Soviet Union had. They did do in a sort of macabre way. They did proclaim socialism. Stalin said we had the socialist constitution. Khrushchev said we have a state of the whole people. So they had a state of the whole people. They eliminated the capitalists. And then they did what they were supposed to do. They withered away, but they were replaced by Putin. That's not what was the – that's not what was in the book. What I'm going to replace that.

Actually, they were replaced by Yeltsin. Putin is actually a progressive compared to Yeltsin. Yeah. Yeah, that's very interesting. And I really appreciate that breakdown of a very complicated history and theory, but I'm of the same opinion that there's nothing that China is doing, that is anathema to Leninism. In fact, it fits right in line.

And you can say, I really do believe that G is a committed Marxist. And I think he very carefully and meticulously has learned from the failures of previous attempts. And they are doing a more long range experimental approach to building socialism. The way that I put it is that China has a communist political party overseeing the development of the forces of production. it does have currently a capitalist mode of production and capitalist social relations, but capital, as you said, is subservient to the state. And the general idea is that once China is militarily and economically strong enough to not be devoured by imperialist wolves or cut off from the rest of the global economy

and isolated as Cuba has been, that it can make a proper transition towards socialism, i.e. revolutionizing the forces and relations of production. Now, if they never ever do that, if they never make that move, you know, then perhaps you could say that the anti-China left will have been vindicated. But if they do make that move, they will be the most advanced socialist society in human history. And all the anti-China leftists will have basically cut themselves off from that profound achievement and have functionally joined sides with the liberals and the imperialist and the fascist launching slander and hate at the Chinese people and their revolution. And so, you know, you can, you can perhaps maintain some sort of agnosticism saying, like, well, right now there's the capitalist mode of production, there's capitalist social relations, we shall see where they go from here. But the basic idea that they're a communist party in charge of the entire society, developing the forces of production, overseeing the development of capitalism, and then once the time is right, particularly when China is economically and militarily powerful enough, at the very least to defend itself from a rabid dog like the United States, that they can

make a more proper transition. But one of the beautiful things that I think China has done, whether fully consciously or not, but this has been the case, is unlike other socialist experiments in the past, they've thoroughly embedded their economy into the global economy such that it's essential for the functioning of the entire global economy. And that is really a quite profound achievement and is different in some ways than the Soviet Union, which had this sort of, you know, these blocks. Your split, the global economy is split into these these two blocks. China has done something different, that China has embedded its economy in the entire capitalist global economy such that it is essential. It's an essential jangle block,

if you will. And I think that puts them in a very unique position. And the last thing I'll say is that I do think that Xi sees himself as carrying on the revolutionary momentum of Mao. He sees Mao as having, you know, let the Chinese people stand on their own after the century of humiliation, start the revolution and win the civil war and kick out the Japanese imperialist setting the stage for a more robust development. Then Deng Xiaoping comes in. There's economic reforms, the economy over the over this several decades. is built up to the largest economy in the world absolutely essential for the functioning of the global economy. And now I think Xi's himself is having to develop the Chinese into a military and continue to develop it into an economic power to make it more robust and more able to persevere and fight back against what we know and we already see is the U.S. and its allies attempting at every turn to undermine it, to destroy it, to weaken it. and to attack it. And so at the very least, I think it is a new and interesting experiment in the

history of socialism. They're doing things in a more long-range plan. And I think it is completely in line with Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Well, do you agree with that? Or am I wrong on anything there? No, I agree. The only problem I have with that is Chinese is so difficult to learn. I've taken some courses and it's like, I thought Russian was bad. I would love to learn Mandarin, yeah. Well, let's go on and move on and let's cover this last text here. I want to be respectful of your time here. So just a couple more questions.

The last text that you cover in your wonderful book is another classic by Lenin and one you've alluded to throughout this discussion thus far, left-wing communism and infantile disorder. Can you remind us of the sort of historical context in which that text was written? and what you think its major contributions to Marxist theory really are? Okay, to make another long story short, after the success of the Russian Revolution, and they were in power, communist parties and people started the form around the world,

that is to say, the old socialist parties, that had failed to stop World War I, And the rule was all the socialist parties of which the Russian Socialist Democratic Party was one had said, if World War I breaks out, none of us will support the war and we'll all vote against it if we're in parliaments and stuff. And what happened was just the opposite, all the big parties, almost all the big parties. I think the Chilean party didn't do it. The Russians didn't do it. The Americans didn't do it either.

that matter. And there are a couple other parties. But most of the big parties, at least in France and Germany and England, they voted to support their own governments. And this just, this was an imperialist war in which the working class of the Germans fought the working class of the French for the benefit of the capitalists of those two countries. And this was anathema to Lenin. all right so he had his revolution the soviet the soviet union didn't come into existence yet but the russian state was there uh they were fighting they had come to power and other communist parties some not all some communist parties in in the netherlands and england uh became so pro-soviet so pro russian so pro-communists that they would not cooperate

with any other forces except their own little group to fight for the revolution. They would not make what we now, they didn't use the term in those days, the term of a United Front or a popular front, well, or a United Front. They would do it alone type of, and they wouldn't work with regular unions, they'd form their own unions. And Lenin said that this is not the right way to go. You have to, in the real world, you have to make compromises. It's just one step forward, two step forward, one step back, that of the thing. And if you try to not work with your local unions, you won't be with the working class. I mean, you have to be with the working class to convert. If you're going to lead the

working class. You have to go out there and talk to them and be with them and work with them and gain their confidence. It doesn't mean you should follow them. We had a headline in one of our papers the other day said, follow the working class. No, that is not what we do. I mean, that's not what we're supposed to do. This was like the working class was voting for the Democrats so we should. You should go where the working class is and gain their confidence. but you want to be a vanguard party and a vanguard party doesn't follow it leads but you have to earn that you have to work with people and you have to follow them in the sense that okay we're supporting you but we're telling you this won't work you know and we've got plan B and when they find out their plan A doesn't work they'll listen to our plan B this is a theory and then we will be able to lead them more success So he wrote this book, The Infantile Disorder is the Disorder of brand new communist groups that are forming that haven't had this experience that the Russian Party went through with the 1905 Revolution, 20 or 30 years of working with all these different groups. These are popping up, new groups popping up, and they are full of youth.

yes he said we support them you know I love these guys doing it but they it's really very infantile for them to say that they're not going to work with the if there's no communist movement and it's a labor party guy against a liberal or a conservative guy you support the labor party guy and and and have plan B there for them a hundred years later we're So that's the point. And the thing is, he said, don't, to the other communists, the other parties who are doing the correct thing, don't really get on these people's cases. It's an infantile disorder.

They will learn through their experience that, preaching to them and telling them their ultra-leftist or this out of the other thing, that's not going to get you anywhere. They will learn through their own experiences over the coming years that what I'm telling them is correct, that they have to make compromises, they have to work with other groups, but they have to keep Plan B there. They shouldn't give it up, and they should always mention it to people, but not be obstructionists about it. And they will be part of the movement.

they'll join the movement on their own as they learn. The way that book is used by people today who are revisionists is they just call another group ultra-leftists and they don't even want to have anything to do with them. Oh, we're not going to work with them. We don't work. We don't work with the Green Party. We don't work with this group. They're ultra-leftists.

They don't vote for the Democrats. That shows are all bigoted. And it's a big misuse because the idea isn't to put. push people away, but to try to bring them slowly over to your point of view. And you don't do that by insulting them and refusing to deal with them. Right. Yeah. And so Lenin calling it an infantile disorder is not Lenin saying that they're babies or that they're childish necessarily. He's like their movement is young and so far naive. And through experience, they'll come to see that strategy and sometimes compromise. These things are a part of the movement and the way that you develop

the movement and these a priori sort of commitments that are outside of any context these things are not the way that you should orient your movement around so he's not really name calling as much as he's just saying there's a certain naivete and youth to this movement and through you know experience will become more seasoned and we'll be able to grow up and develop right correctimente absolutely and i just would like to say as well that um over i mentioned our sister podcast red menace where me and my co-host tackle these texts. We already have episodes on both Lenin's left-wing communism and his state and revolution. So if you'd like to do deep dives into those texts, we walk through the entire text with our listeners,

we summarize it, and then we have a discussion and reflection about it. So if anybody's interested in learning more about that text, you can buy this wonderful book, reading the classical text of Marxism, and you can also check out our podcast over at Red Menace, where we cover that text in depth. Well, we had you for 90 minutes here, and I'm just going to ask a couple more questions, just kind of a concluding set of questions that I'm interested in, given your position as a seasoned veteran of Marxism, if you will. So as a veteran of Marxism and Marxist theory, what are your thoughts about this new generation of millennial and Gen Z Marxists? And how have the material and ideological conditions in the U.S. changed since you were coming up?

well i'm not too familiar with these new groups to tell you the truth i'm still a a clark gable guy i know these groups don't know what i'm talking about when i say hey you know humphrey bogart right you've seen casa flanca hell yeah um it seems to me i don't think in terms of the of generations but just individuals. Young people today have to learn. Of course, if they read my book, they will get it right. They have to learn, but I have to go out there and work with the,

if they want to be socialists and they want to get rid of capitalism, they're going to have to go out there and work with all sorts of other people. Some that have reformists, other Marxists, they have people going around being hoaxists and Maoists and Maoists and Trotskyists, they're all these different people out there. Somehow you have to work with them to get a unified movement. Because right now, the left doesn't really exist in the United States. It's more of a, okay, we think it's there.

But actually, the capitalists have a lockstep. The Democrats and Republicans run the whole thing. And the idea that we can change in election, that the left could stop, Trump from taking over is the whole left organized Marxist left. Not how a DSA is not Marxist. They're a big group. There's a little Marxist group in there. But the Marxist-Leninists, the people who call themselves communists, they couldn't fill up

Yankee Stadium. So the fact that they think they could go out there and prevent fascism from taking over and they're going to do that is like, okay. So I don't know. how to answer your question. Your generation is going to have to figure out how to work with your own people and with the old and with the powers that be to try and get Marxist-Leninist ideas permeated into the working class.

The problem is with the union movement. The unions under capitalism, unions are a part of capitalism. And they're institutions that capitalists use to control the working class. The idea that the ruling class is anti-union is crazy. The Republicans want to keep the unions down, but the Democrats, which represent the working, you know, Bezos is a Democrat. So they're billionaires, Democrats out there because they're, they're, it's their part. party. It's a capitalist party. They understand, you don't want the working class out there running around with red flags and Lenin posters in their offices. You want them to support

your party, your capitalist party. And the leaders of the unions, I don't think there's one major union in the United States that says that socialism is on their agenda. Their slogan is a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. They just want more. of the pie. They don't tell their workers, listen, we made the whole pie. Why should the capitalists get a slice? They just want, yeah, the capital is going to have, you know, they're taking five-tenths, the half, they're taking half the pie, or they're taking 75% of the pie. Why can't they give us another 5%? That'll keep us happy for a generation. So unless we can get the working people in this country to be interested in Marxism or to see Marxism,

If they don't feel exploited, if they don't, if they're really being exploited, it should show up in their consciousness. And it's not showing up in their consciousness. They vote Democrat. Some of them vote Republican. Some of them are for Trump. Not many of them. But there's a significant percentage of maybe 10, 20, 30 percent working people in unions even. although I think they're in AFL rather than CIA unions that support Trump.

If we can't get to those people, then if the superstructure is supposed to reflect the reality of what's going on in the substructure down there, which is exploitation and exploitation is going on, but their working people aren't blaming the proper people for the expert. They're more interested in cultural wars, or they're blaming liberals, or they're blaming people with gender dysphoria or something for their problems. That's your generation's job. My generation failed. The generation before us failed. Before my generation failed, we've been failing a lot.

It's your turn to go and fail. But I hope you guys make it where we didn't. Hell yeah, absolutely. We did stop the Vietnam War. We stopped it because of Vietnam. Because of Vietnam, Kong beat the crap out of the army over there, our army. Right. But we helped.

Right. And every generation of socialists have the obligation to advance the ball for our movement, for our class, for our vision of humanity's future. And we all do our best to do that. And of course, the reason, one of the reasons why the unions are so conservative in so many ways and so wedded to the two-party system, part of that is, you know, the concerted attempt by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie over the last century to dismantle, especially during the 20s and 30s, the early IWW and these radical unions that did identify with socialism and communism, those had to be destroyed. And then with the advent of Reaganism and neoliberal ideology, even just unions in general

were decimated. And so there's a lot of work to do on that front. But to summarize your points, you know, we got to get out there. We got to organize in the real world. We can't just spend all of our time yelling at each other on social media sites. We have to be able to work with people who don't necessarily already agree with us, whether that takes the form of somebody else on the socialist left of a different tendency or just the regular working class guy. that's your neighbor or that works with you as a co-worker that might have retrograde views, but you have a shared economic interest. You have to be able to talk to and engage with a wide swath of people, not just isolate yourself into these tiny microsect silos where you all

just confirm each other's already existing biases. So I really take those lessons to heart and I concur completely. So our generation has kicked the can down the road. Now it's your turn to get that can. It's our turn. Well, I really deeply appreciate you coming on the show to have this fascinating, wide-ranging discussion. I really appreciate all the knowledge you bring to bear on these issues. The book, again, is reading the classical texts of Marxism. I will link to it in the show notes. Thank you so much for coming on. I would love to have another discussion with you sometime in the future. Well, thank you for having me, as they say. Which side are you on, boys?

Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on? Which side are you on? They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair. where which side are you on boys which side are you on tell me which side are you on boys which side are you on my daddy was a minor and I'm a minor son he'll be with you fellow workers until this battle One. Tell me which side are you are, which side are you are? Sing it! Which side are you are? Which side are you are? Oh, workers, can you stand it? Tell me how you can.

lousy scab or will you be a man Which side are you are Which side are you on? Tell me Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Come all of you good workers, good news to you, I'll tell of how the good old union has come in here to dwell. Tell me which side are you on, boys, which side are you on? Tell me which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?