Rev Left Radio - Necrocapitalism: Plague, Ideology, & the Murderous Logic of Capital

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

In this episode, Breht is joined by a representative of an anonymous collective of thinkers and organizers to discuss their ongoing project "On Necrocapitalism". Topics include: capital's response to the pandemic, the Victims of Communism and their fascist lies, Zizek's newest book, Judith Butler's radical liberalism, dystopian fiction and its role in maintaining the capitalist imaginary, "outside agitators" and its ideological role, Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus, and much, much more. Find On Necrocapitalism HERE Donate to the Black Hills Legal Defense Fund: https://bhlegalfund.org Related Rev Left Radio episodes for further study:  - Gothic Marxism - Capitalist Realism - Defending Socialism: Deconstructing the "Communism Killed 100 Million" Lie Outro Music: 'Die for the Government' by Anti-Flag LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

From the prologue of On Necrocapitalism. A virus is haunting the globe, one of pandemic proportions, whose threat has necessitated unprecedented measures to forestall death and violence worse than the present crisis. But the cruelty, violence, and depredations that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic aren't merely detritus in the wake of its spread. They characterize the necrocapitalism of this conjuncture. From its beginning to its current senile form, capitalism has presided over a massive graveyard. The slavery and genocide that marked its bloody emergence, the workhouses filled with bodies

laboring to death, and streets glutted with the starving poor, these have persisted through the present, combining with exterminatory wars and environmental devastation. And then, beyond that, two world wars, the first a squabble between imperialist nations who forced to their poor to fight in trenches for the interests of the rich, the second caused by the most reactionary form that capitalism can take, fascism. There have been many others since then, all waged upon the oppressed nations in the global periphery in the interest of capitalist hegemony and accumulation. Half of Korea burned to the ground. Vietnam was invaded and brutalized in an attempt to prevent its national self-determination. Multiple overt and covert wars,

Too many to detail here, where regimes were overthrown, dictators friendly to capitalism installed, and all resistance murdered and disappeared, assassinated, mass murdered, hunted down like dogs, starved and tortured, thrown out of helicopters, and written out of official history. For others among the colonized and dispossessed, some combination of apartheid, forced assimilation, death squads, famine, and disease as a direct result of both military and economic, intervention. Meanwhile, the prisons in the most powerful capitalist countries have grown to such absurd proportions that it is entirely laughable to call a nation-state such as the U.S., the land of the free, when it houses 22% of the world's prisoners. It is absurd to call the global

north the home of democratic values when its prisons disproportionately house black, brown, and indigenous peoples targeted by wars on drugs, terror, or the poor, and all of this before we even factor in the bloody legislation that enables the dehumanization and detention of the migrant proletariat. Indeed, the identification of the U.S. and other such nation states with freedom was always ludicrous, considering that its legacy of colonialism and slavery has meant that it has been a prison house of nations since its inception. This bloody and ongoing legacy is not an aberration of capitalism. It is not proof that capitalism is broken, but rather evidence that it is functioning

very well. Capitalism's core logic, which in layperson's terms is simply about making the rich, richer at the expense of the labor of the poor, always points toward what Robert Beale has termed exterminism. The politics it eventually generates is like what Achille Mamembe has called necropolitics. Or maybe Syac Valencia's notion. of gore capitalism is an apt description. Mark Stevens' splatter capital analyzed capitalism according to violent horror films

and adequately summed up the exterminist necropolitics of this system. Quote, capitalism is both literally and figuratively the protracted splattering of human bodies, end quote. Necrocapitalism, a term coined by S.B. Banerjee, is an appropriate name. which is why all of the depredations and violence revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, all of the contradictions of capitalism laid bare, should not be surprising. Corona is a black light, comedian Megan Amran tweeted, and America is a cum-stained hotel room. But not just America, though as the most powerful capitalist country with the least level of social welfare,

it best represents this analogy, because every capitalist state's necrotic underbelly is being exposed. subsidies for the corporations and banks and paltry welfare checks for only some of the poor are hit hard by the crisis, entire populations exposed to death and disease, refugees and immigrants subjected to harsher deportation measures, quarantine law is subordinated to capitalist logic. New security measures, the preface for possible states of emergency continuing after the crisis, has run its course, are brought into being. Pigs now patrol every street, and in large numbers like they are. in a Mad Max movie, or more appropriately, filibusters and scalp hunters policing colonial frontiers, the settler garrison manifesting on every block. And when the pandemic ends, it is reasonable to expect in these various capitalist nation states that the new austerity

and security measures will remain, that the poor and marginalized will be expected to pay for the crisis for years while the people on top continue to get rich. And this is to say nothing of the global peripheries, who will bear the larger death tolls of the crisis, who may not even be given the vaccine if and when it arrives because they cannot afford to buy it from the biomedical corporations that will surely patent the cure when it is discovered, just as they cannot afford already existing vaccines for other diseases that result in yearly pandemics that could be easily cured. We are living in a necro-capitalism that has always been necrotic but is again wallowing in its exterminism. Or more accurately, this wallowing is being exposed at the very heart of its

quote-unquote civilization. The question is, how many of us will accept this exposure, laugh it off, and keep living right through it because its nightmare has become normative? Already, in the midst of the pandemic, some leftists are singing the praises of the government when it installs emergency measures, acting as if some version of a responsive state as opposed to the laissez-faire restrained state is evidence of socialism. It is rather shocking to witness activists who once militated against closed borders who advocated for migrant and refugee justice laud their governments for border closures, closures that most immediately affected migrants and refugees in the interest of community's safety.

What will we be primed to accept as the new normal when this emergency has run its course? And what factions of the broad left will be lured into a point? post-pandemic patriotism that dressing up reactionary notions and progressive-looking costumes will focus on rebuilding national unity while accepting that some populations deserve to live and thrive more than others. All crises, as Lenin once wrote, quote, make manifest what has been hidden. They cast aside all that is relative, superficial, and trivial. They sweep away the political litter, end quote.

And this crisis is not only revealing the hidden contradictions of capitalism, it is also revealing the contradictions in the left itself, contradictions that will take on new life in the post-pandemic reality. We intend to examine the current historical conjuncture as a moment of necro-capitalism. The term necrocapitalism should not be understood as an absolute break with capitalism hitherto. Proclamations of new phases are always accompanied by proclamations of new revolutionary theories that condemn what our revolutionary history has earned by its hard work and sacrifices to the historical dustbin. Not surprisingly, such proclamations tend to collaborate with the capitalist imaginary

by promoting a willful historical amnesia. What is often asserted as singularly new and unique is in fact a novel re-articulation of intrinsic morbid properties of the mode of production and its imperialist world system. Hence, globalization was once treated as an entirely new phase when in fact it was merely a newer articulation of the same old imperialism. Newer technologies, newer institutions, newer deployments and alliances of imperial power, but the same fundamental processes and relations functioned beneath the epiphenomena of the novel. Clearly it is not the case that capitalism has distinct stages beyond its imperialist apotheosis,

sense as a mode of production, it preserves its underlying meaning as it historically re-articulates itself. It was always cancerous, murderous, and imperialist. But this complaint misses the point. Capitalism does mutate through periods of class struggle. The bourgeoisie tinker with its ideology. We can thus talk of conjunctural mutations and the way in which capitalism, through these mutations, imagines and codes its reality, encouraging everyone incorporated into this

reality to think according to its imagination. This project is wagered as a disruption of this necrotic capitalist imaginary. That is, based on the truth that capitalism is the most murderous economic system that has ever existed, the following entries seek to disrupt its imaginary by engaging with the discursive mechanics in which this necropolitical and exterminist order has normativized its mass murder. We seek a rigorous critique of the present. a present that increasingly appears to have bypassed the antonomy of socialism or barbarism popularized by Rosa Luxembourg, where instead we merely end up modeling, like the potential impacts

of COVID-19, choices between competing barbarisms. Thus, our critique seeks to, one, provide an alternative to theories of the COVID-19 crisis that obfucate its material conditions, theories of biopolitics, necropolitics, and sovereignty that focus on power, but not capitalism. Although it is the case that these theories can and have contributed useful insights for thinking the crisis, and we have no problem in drawing on some of them if they are useful, by themselves they have been partial conceptions of reality. Rather than focusing solely on this crisis,

we need to also examine it in light of the broader processes of necro-capitalism. And two, think the general outline of a communist alternative, one which refuses all forms of nostalgia for, liberalism, social democracy, and the New Deal, one which seeks not merely the end of the present crisis, but all forms of oppression, dispossession, and capital accumulation, which throw us into one mortal crises after another. Such a thinking is not intended to replace the ways in which a communist alternative can and should be thought by anti-capitalist movements. Rather, we seek to emphasize what these movements are trying to accomplish so that we do not lose

sight of the goal of a radical political critique of capitalism which is always foreclosed by the capitalist imaginary making communism hello everybody and welcome back to revolutionary left radio on today's episode we have a representative from an anonymous collective who are working on a project called on necro capitalism really thinking through what is happening in our society with the pandemic and the uprising in real time through a sort of collection of lenses rooted in philosophy, critical theory, Marxist understandings, etc. It's a fascinating project. As I mentioned in the episode, particularly for those who are interested in episodes of the past, like our episode on the Black Book of Communism, our Gothic Marxist episodes,

our episodes with Frederick Jameson or even Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, anybody who liked any of that will absolutely enjoy this episode because in many ways it's taking a lot of those lenses and those methodologies and applying them to our current moment to help us have a better fully fleshed out principled materialist understanding of what's happening on a bunch of different levels. Before we get into this wonderful episode though, I do want to promote the Black Hills Legal Defense Fund and it says on July 3rd 2020 indigenous people and our allies were arrested in the process of defending our sacred lands in the Black Hills. Acts of courage and civil disobedience resulted in arrests and criminal charges. We were protesting the desecration of

sacred lands that were stolen from our people. So if you want to donate to that legal defense fund, help those folks get out of jail and beat their cases and show solidarity with our indigenous brothers, sisters, and non-binary comrades, absolutely do that. I will link to that in the show notes. Even $5 goes a long way. help. I know a lot of people out there are economically struggling, and it's sort of a cruel irony that poor and working class people have to come to poor and working class people's financial rescue in a lot of ways, but that's just the fucking disgusting society we live in. So if you want to throw a few dollars to the legal defense fund, it would be really important

and really appreciated. We've made a donation from RevLeft Radio as well, so we're doing that as well. And anybody else that can help and throw in, it would be greatly appreciated. So without further ado, though, let's get into this episode with an anonymous representative of the collective working on the project of necro capitalism. Enjoy. The idea for the project came from a general discussion of what to do during the COVID-19 pandemic and our discontent with many of the hot takes on the pandemic and mainstream discourse. We are a diverse group, a united front, as it were, and we draw influence and inspiration from revolutionaries,

philosophers, feminists, and intellectuals from the left. Wonderful. So from a bird's eye view, can you sort of like summarize what you mean by necro-capitalism and what does your critique filtered through that prism seek to accomplish or highlight? Yes, yes. So the term necrocapitalism has been used by a variety of authors in different ways, and so it's been coined multiple times over and over again. For the purpose of this project, though, it is being used mainly to draw attention to the violent and murderous logic that has defined capitalism since its beginning. It's not being used to suggest a new stage or something new that capitalism does,

but to draw attention to what it has always done that tends to get. get papered over in the ideological perspective of the most powerful capitalist nation-states. The pandemic is one shared event that is laying bare this fundamental necrotic aspect of capitalism. The rebellions that erupted months into this project revealed that it was becoming patently evident that there was a growing consensus and not just from the most marginalized and oppressed people. The consensus was that capitalism is a truly murderous order. At the same time, ideology is such that when people who are convinced that there can be nothing better than capitalism, that anything else will be worse or will never come into being and that capitalism is the end of history, those people have a necrotic effect upon the imagination of all of us living in the imperialist countries, an nihilism is prevalent, along with a desire to just accept coercion and a capitalist created. end of the world. This kind of capitalist realism imaginary, to use Fisher's terminology,

hamper's the revolutionary imagination. It's important to highlight not only the murderous aspect of capitalism, but also how it has murdered not. The point is to take hold of the radical anti-capitalist traditions that we are told are worse and more murderous in capitalism, And hopefully this project not only works to show the ways in which the pandemic and the rebellions that have exploded demonstrate how the most powerful capitalist states are content to just let people die and be murdered and exposed to death, but also why we need to pursue those revolutionary traditions that in the capitalist imaginary has attempted to forbid. In chapter one, you write, quote, capitalism's hegemony is such that it has produced an ideology wherein its murderist logic is concealed, excused, and shrugged aside, end quote. You also mentioned victims of communism and their attempt to add every COVID death to the communist death count on the basis that this virus originated in China and is therefore a, quote, unquote,

communist disease. Can you talk about the role of capitalist ideology and indeed capitalist realism, as you mentioned historically and then sort of highlight how that same process is occurring in real time today. Yes, yes, yes. Good question. So that chapter, following from the prologue was really about showing how the murderous logic of capitalism is projected on its antithesis, which is communism. We know that the Black Book of Communism narrative about how communism killed more people in fascism or the horseshoe theory that fascism and communism are the same, all of that is Cold War propaganda. Many of the old-style, old-time cold warriors have admitted it, and

established scholarship has demonstrated how these mass atrocities have little basis in historical fact. And organizations like the victims of communism are quite comical in that they include Nazi death squads killed in World War II as so-called victims of communism. Now, adding COVID deaths to this litany should demonstrate how absurd this ideological death toll is because it reveals it is straight up fabrication and conspiracy theory thinking that dovetails with reactionaries calling the virus, the Wuhan virus and other racist stuff. This is like even more laughable now that there's empirical evidence the virus existed in Spain in March 2019, many months before the outbreak in China, except the victims of communism is not going to retract their

statements or their choice for a continuously growing death toll and people who treat the victims of communism as a viable source probably won't pay attention to where the numbers are coming from. And all of this goes back again to the point of the capitalist imaginary and how the horrendous violence that capitalism visits upon peoples and nations and the environment is echoed by a necrotic effect on thinking itself. So you get what Fisher calls capitalist reasons. which is just his way of saying what a bunch of other people were already saying, where it is deemed unreal to imagine anything other than capitalism, just as capitalism murders, mutilates, and bludges people, it also disciplines our thinking and imagination at the same time, not just through ideological socialization that happens from the moment we're born, but with ideologues and pundits who are there to remind us that there can be nothing better than capitalism. And the kind of Anti-capitalist ideology that claims to challenge capitalism is actually, we are told, it's actually the real monster, which is that idea is most present in the first world, and all of that is part of this disciplining of thought. It can be repeated ad nauseum, and people are encouraged not to investigate the sources of who are saying it.

Meanwhile, actually documented mass violence under capitalism and during the era of colonialism that brought it into being is so tremendous, it's so tremendous to consider that the depredations are just innumerable. In a few later chapters, Federici's quote about the world being an immense concentration camp is used, and she didn't mean this figuratively. Capitalism has indeed transformed the world into a vast concentration camp. But this reality of capitalism, which its primary exploited and oppressed victims, know intimately, is considered ideological, whereas the supposed crimes of communism are not. Reality is turned upside down and thought is atrophied. This is important. Yeah, this is important when it comes to the pandemic and the rebellions. We are already being enjoined to think that these capitalist states are responding well, even when they are exposing the most vulnerable,

sectors of society to harm and putting the economy before people's well-being. We are being told that the rebellions are going too far and that good liberal politicians will fix them and that the radical demands of abolish the police or even demands for socialism are irrational and akin to like flatter thinking. Yeah, incredibly important. You know, we've covered in many episodes this this sort of ideological projection of capitalism wherein it displaces what it actually does onto its enemies, you know, communism. And we've had episodes for those that want to dive deeper into that particular realm of thought and analysis. We did a whole episode on the black book and debunking the communism killed a hundred million lie, which I'll link to in the

show notes for people who haven't heard that yet, because it really takes that whole idea and we spend two hours just dissecting it, showing the sources of the black book, showing how it's used ideologically, et cetera. So that dovetails quite nicely with stuff we've worked on here at Rev Left before, and it's really important to understand how that works and the ideological role that it plays in broader society. But let's go ahead and move on. And in the next chapter, you talk about Jizek a little bit. Can you tell us about Jizek's newest book, why you focused on it in Chapter 2 and why it fails as a meaningful and principled analysis of this moment? Yes, yes, of course. So we felt some initial reticence in basically reviewing Jijek's book as part of

this project, Zijek certainly does not speak for the revolutionary left, so we didn't want to give the impression at all that he does. But Zijek is prominent enough to rush a bookout, and he gets positioned as the far left or the communist voice by both tepidly left academics and reactionaries. So it is important if he's going to appeal to communism that we meet his errors head on, which is why we chose to refer to his politics as communism without communism. Jizek conflates state planning with communism. When state participation in planning does not mean either socialism or communism. This conflation means that he dispenses with the basic idea that the state, the bourgeois, necro-capitalist state, is a form of class domination.

We'd have to believe against all the evidence that with the pandemic, the state loses its political and oppressive character. When it comes down to it, there are no shortcuts to revolutionary struggle. And at the time, there were people organizing to provide mutual aid and assistance to people in need of basic supplies, getting prisoners freed from the hellish conditions in jails and prisons, rent strikes organizations were forming. and a month later, a rebellion against the police kicked off in Minneapolis. By contrast, Gijsijek argues that, like minimal measures to ensure bourgeois hegemony in the midst of this crisis amounts to communism. So just to get back to your question, to summarize that at the beginning of the project,

we aim to set the parameters of possibly revolutionary imaginary in the midst of the pandemic. On the one hand, we reject the vapid anti-communism that tallies COVID deaths as victims of communism and other such nonsense. And on the other hand, we reject the purely verbal communism without communism that is like we reject these simplistic appeals to state planning, which Jizek represents. Absolutely. And I think a good rule of thumb, especially for people who are trying to navigate the left broadly, left philosophy, etc. is that, you know, there are a whole swath of sort of academic careerists that are completely disconnected from struggle and from any sort of organizing like Zhijek. And, you know, the overall institutions put a lot of stock in them and make them representatives of the left. And we can see through their analysis just how disconnected they actually are from the ground. Because at the same time, Zijek is making some of those claims, as you said, there are countless struggles going on,

countless confrontations with state violence and state repression and things that, you know, diametrically opposed to some of the things that he's saying, and that just really goes on to highlight how these people that are totally divorced from any real material struggle, but are positioned as mouthpieces for the broad socialist or communist movement is always sort of, among many other things, a mechanism by which a lot of that revolutionary energy can be co-opted and funneled back into, you know, just sort of academic naval gazing and theory for its own sake and that really is a weakness and so jizek i think represents that and continues to represent that as we as we move forward um well let's go ahead and move on in chapter three

i thought this was very very interesting you argue quote theory goes wrong whenever it fetishizes the surface froth of capital end quote and you go on to claim that theory chasing novelty is an error can you flesh out this position for us and help us understand what you're arguing here yeah yeah so um What we're trying to say there, we're saying that the logic of capital, the logic of capital accumulation is inherently endless. So there is no such thing as having accumulated enough capital. If you stop accumulating, you risk falling out of the bourgeois class and into the mass of workers and unemployed. The pressure to accumulate entails constant economic churn and presupposes constant economic growth. But there are actual, there are real limits to that growth.

such as eventually overproducing goods that no one has a need to buy anymore. And this entails a falling rate of profit, layoffs, social unrest, all of the things typical, all of those things that are typical of capitalism. One of the temporary fixes to that problem that is available to capitalists is to constantly innovate for innovation's sake. That is to say, fashion, which mobilizes, yeah, mobilizes consumers to buy more of something that they wouldn't actually need if we were just looking at its use value. The comment about the surface froth is about how the apparatus, I'm sorry, about how the apparent

stunning novelty and turnover that we witness in fashions, including theoretical fashions, or the latest fixations in theory, is not very interesting in itself, because whatever else it is, it is also primarily an indicator of this particular fix in action. The point is that the fix itself is responding to contradictions of capitalist accumulation, which lie at a deeper level of analysis. And anyone who supports some version of a revolutionary communist position should bear those contradictions in mind and avoid being seduced by novelty for its own sake. Now, it's certainly interesting to see how fashions trend in theory, things like biopolitics,

the so-called new materialisms, necropolitics, and the world. alike. And these new trends often produce useful concepts and analyses, in addition to sometimes centering previously marginalized voices. But if we chase after what is newest at the expense of a grounded materialist analysis, we risk ending up with a new version of idealism. And it will quickly become yesterday's idealism. And this goes for all of those new materialisms that for all intents and purposes blot out human subjectivity and attribute some kind of agency in a cryptoidealist way to objects and assemblages. In this connection, there's a kind of dark humor in watching Agamben and Gijic constantly one up themselves over the course of the past

decades, as if the only way to stay irrelevant is to provoke their readers with worse and worse takes as time goes by. Yeah, absolutely. I think about it this way and tell me if you did disagree, but novelty, fashion, whether on the sort of consumer market with like the newest iPhone every two years or on the realm of theory in the way that you're talking with Jizek and whatnot, that novelty tends to replace real progress, real material progress, and gives a sort of distorted sense of forward momentum under the capitalist system, which is an illusion because all capitalism can do is sort of spiral that the drain. And so, you know, we have these reoccurring sort of trends or fashions that take old trends and fashions and refashion them into something new and different.

And that almost gives a sort of surface sense that progress is happening. Well, you know, three years ago, I had the iPhone 10. And this year I have the iPhone 11. Therefore, progress is real. And so in that way, I think it plays an ideological function of sort of covering up the inherent non-progress of the capitalist system because real progress, real material progress, can only come through the trend. transcending of the overall capitalist mode of production in the capitalist system overall. Does that sort of make sense and dovetail with what you're kind of arguing? Oh, yeah. Yes, of course. It totally makes sense and it totally dovetails with what we're saying

here. And I think a lot of us who have spent time reflecting on this share that impression or the way that you characterize it in terms of like apparent progress with new models of iPhone or newfangled technology. In reality, we're not really really. moving forward, what's happening is that capitalism is actually drilling down. It's like spiraling into an inevitable catastrophe. And we need to start taking steps to avert that. Yeah, we totally agree with that perspective. So continuing on with your focus on philosophy broadly, can you talk about Judith Butler's recent interview with George Ansi concerning COVID-19, sort of what it represents ideologically and you know what a proper communist approach should look like yeah um so the yancey

and butler interview is interesting for a variety of reasons um so on the one hand both scholars are often understood to represent a left-wing position within the academy and butler is often portrayed as something akin to a radical voice within philosophy as a result of her work on gender and mourning both of those thinkers show a response to the pandemic coming from the academy that has certain aspects of a surface-level radicalism to it, but which doesn't move beyond the veneer of radicalism. Both Yancey and Butler correctly recognize that the pandemic is political in nature and can draw our attention to various disparities within our culture. So in line with Butler's general views on morning, she suggests that this is a moment that we can all recognize our own interdependence and mutual vulnerability, which is an inherent feature of human life in general and of social life in particular. While she gestures towards the need to demand equality in light of the different effects that COVID is having on communities that are already marginalized on the basis of race and disability, she does. address the conditions which produce these differentials in any sense. Her critique never moves

beyond a basic concern for inequality and into a consideration of the material conditions that produce inequality. Thus, the supposedly radical philosopher still operates on the level of the most basic form of liberalism. Butler refuses and is seemingly incapable of pointing towards a potential solution to this inequality or to a concrete sort of politics which might be mobilized to ameliorate the current problems that she points to you. Yancey pushes her on this in the interview and she still refuses to give a real answer. Instead, just continuously provides a description of the situation rather than any sort of prescriptive political goal.

In this sense, she positions herself within a broader phenomenon politically to descriptive continental philosophy, which seems allergic to normative claims that could create the basis of any sort of political movement. Ultimately, when pushed over and over by Yancey, Butler simply gestures to a strange sort of liberal universalism that insist that the virus ought to make us come together, not come apart, and should make us realize that all our lives are at once inherently at risk by the virus, but also by the basic conditions of human vulnerability, which define our existence, according to Butler. All her recognition of disparities on the basis of race and ability, and ability, disappear

when she's tasked with pointing us towards something useful, and she leaves us with this a weak kind of, we all bleed red, universalism. You know, we think that this inability to point to another sort of possible future and insistence on falling back to the most banal forms of liberalism points to an inability for Butler herself to see beyond the capitalist imagination that defines the limits of political possibility. Butler simply papers over the material conditions

and social contradictions that result in some groups suffering worse from the pandemic because to recognize them and to develop a politics based on them, she would be forced to imagine a world which has been deemed impossible by the ideologies of capitalism, which Butler herself still operates within. Yeah, well said. And, you know, I want to take a moment to sort of drill down on this

and help other people understand this as well because I think this is a trend happening broadly over liberalism, you know, whether you want to call them rad lives or left liberals or would-be progressives, whatever you want to call them. We see this manifest in a bunch of different ways. For example, Ezra Klein, you know, Vox, a big liberal. thinker, a big neoliberal technocrat for many years, has a progressive instinct but is unable to think outside of the box of liberalism. And so his biggest thing he's pushing lately, and he just wrote a

big book on it, is about polarization. And the general thesis is that, you know, America, for various reasons, is very polarized. And that's why, you know, so much of our institutions are being undermined. The social fabric is being ripped apart. And again, what this shows is a liberal inability to think materially, to think economically, to look at the roots of the social problems, which are, you know, at the most crudest level, just capitalist, just class society, the depravities of a brutal class society. But liberals, because they are liberals, it's not that they know that in a lot of cases and don't want to talk about it, like some conspiratorial thing, but it's literally that, you know, we're talking about capitalist realism, the cap on the

imagination, is literally that they can't think in those terms because of their sort of already commitment or the existing commitment to liberalism. Another example is, you know, what I would call the John Oliver effect. John Oliver's show is actually funny. It's engaging. It's really helpful if you want to understand a given issue. But what it does is it represents this liberal discreteness, right? The examination of events unstructurally, not connected to other things. And so here's an episode on facial recognition. And here's an episode on prisons and jails. And here's an episode on immigration and all these things suck and you know you could contact your your senator and act for this policy change right but there's no attempt or even ability to connect those all those

disparate events up or those disparate things up and show how they are all materially deeply connected to the broader capitalist imperialist system and so you know that's really also descended from the daily show and the colbert report which did that exact same thing so i just think that this is really interesting liberals will continue to do this um John Stewart, for example, is sort of coming out and trying to grapple with what's going on here. But he just released a movie, which does the same thing, which shows an inability of the liberal mind to think through this moment because it's so drenched in liberalism. And the last thing I want to say, just going back to the Ezra Klein polarization thing, citations needed another podcast put out a great episode on polarization, tackling it and stripping it down and showing you the ideological role that a hyper focus on polarization. what it represents.

And I think it's really important if you want to understand the liberal mind in this moment to go check that out and put that piece of the puzzle in place. It's very helpful. And I like how you guys get at it through Judith Butler, who represents, you know, a very intellectual and even almost a radical facade, but still represents this general liberal thrust, right? Exactly. Yeah.

So this aspect of liberalism is cutting across all dimensions of bourgeois society, The media, pundits, and intellectuals are obviously neck deep in it. Absolutely. So this next chapter is actually, you know, one of the more moving ones. And, you know, I think, and for various reasons, this doesn't get talked about enough. And it really cuts to the core of capitalist lack of morality and logic in which you cover. But it's this idea of long-term care homes and particularly how the virus is ravaging them. So what has the pandemic meant for these long-term care hones, particularly in Canada, which you guys focus on in this chapter?

And how is it related to, you know, a proletarian feminist critique? And what role do these factories of death, as you call them? What role do they play in our overall capitalist society? Yes, yes, good one. Good question. So the pandemic has exposed, we feel that the pandemic has exposed the myth of long-term care as a viable solution for Canada's aging, population. If the idea of compassionate care and a relaxed lifestyle in a community of your peers was already shaky at best, very few people actually believe that this was the true

experience in these homes, by the way, the pandemic has illustrated the real structural violence, exploitation, and extreme neglect in these death camps, while Canada has a hybrid public and private health care system, which is often mistakenly called a fully public health care system, the neoliberal government reforms have been pushing for increased privatization of the health care systems since the 1980s. Chunk by chunk, the Canadian health care system has been packaged up and sold off to the highest bidder in this continuing neoliberal privatization drive. The concept of long-term care in Canada is caught in an uncomfortable intersection between health care and social services. So residents span a continuum of people

needing continuing care, that is, the continuation of health care outside of the hospital setting in the community, and as those receiving a social service, getting help from support workers with basic tasks such as cleaning their apartment or bathing without necessarily needing medical care. So that ambiguity between social service and medical care has meant that the successive governments have been able to repackage the idea of long-term care as more of a social service and thus something that should be privatized and less of a medical service that should remain public since the majority of Canadians are against privatizing the health care system. Between 1977 and 1995, the Canadian government provided limited funding to each of the provinces for long-term care.

But this funding was eliminated in 1996 with the creation of the Canadian health and social transfer, which essentially provided one large lump sum for all health care and post-secondary education in each of the provinces with no specific targets for the money transfer. This meant that each province now had full control over decisions for what to fund and how much and also what to privatize when it came to various portions of the welfare state. Now, the pandemic is opening our eyes to the results of that privatized long-term care. So the majority of debts from COVID in Canada have occurred in privately owned long-term care homes. Furthermore, the pandemic has also exposed the gender inequalities of this model with more women in care than men and not only because of their longer lifespan, but because of capitalism's gendered division of labor in the home with more elderly women caring for aging male partners than elderly men providing care for aging female partners in heterosexual relationships.

Canada is one of the few countries where more women have died from COVID than men, and this is because of the heavy impact that the pandemic has had on these homes. Essentially, the pandemic tells us that elderly women unable to produce any labor that is deemed valuable by capitalist matrices of worth are disposable. Not only to broader society, but also to their families who do not have the capacity to care for them at home under strains neoliberalism. economies. And because there is still a fairly high level of trust in the state, in the state healthcare system, as a supposed public system, although increasing neol liberalization makes this less true with every passing year, Canadians have been unable to increase, have been unable to see the very predictable suffering that these profit-driven homes have wrecked on both the older working class women who live there and the younger working class.

and often immigrant women who work there. Many of the problems exposed by the pandemic predate COVID. It has merely exacerbated pre-existing issues. For example, the deliberate understaffing of these homes, the low-pay, part-time shifts, the lack of sick leave for workers, has been a problem for over a decade. Widespread reports of negligence leading to death

where patients have died from infected bed source because there are not enough staff to see to everyone's needs also predates the pandemic. Families have been speaking out about the horrors faced by their loved ones in these homes, despite the very high cost that the same families pay and have been ignored. They've been totally ignored until the COVID pandemic swept through and laid a trail of mass death in its wake. So to answer the question about what role these factors of death play in society, they are simply a place to send elderly women to die. The deliberate understaffing and low pay of the employees make this clear.

Capitalism can no longer suck excess value from these aging bodies, and yet they make up an ever-growing portion of our aging society. So to deal with the sexist population, these homes have been created. Better yet, capitalists have found a way to turn a profit from these homes, extracted from the working class families who send their elders, and from the low-paid migrant workers who work there. With the pensions of Canada's public service workers, including the military and the RCMP,

invested in these for-profit homes, major segments of society have a continued interest and having these profits be substantial. I mean, absolutely just terrible, heartbreaking, horrifying. And, you know, you're talking about Canada, you're focusing on Canada, but this is just as true here in the U.S. with the general, you know, just the role that these,

homes play, how capitalism throws away the people that it no longer deems productive, et cetera. And just to just to point to some contrast, again, you know, we can see particularly in indigenous traditions and indigenous communities, which existed for thousands and thousands and thousands of years on this, on this continent, a juxtaposition, a different way of organizing life. And what you see in many of those indigenous communities, unlike a capitalist societies is a deep respect for elders and understanding that the the older people in one's tribe or community represent a lifetime of wisdom of community leadership oftentimes they were the mechanisms of the passing down of essential oral traditions and so you know in complete

opposition to the capitalist model which says you're no longer productive go into these you know these basically prisons of a sort there's an indigenous juxtaposition an indigenous traditions that point to a different way, a different way of thinking about existing with and treating the elderly and the oldest members of our community. And this pandemic is really revealing the depravity, the murderous depravity of the capitalist system and its logic. And I think going to indigenous traditions and indigenous history to show a juxtaposition, another way of doing things is an important part in overcoming the capitalist realism and prison of the capitalist imaginary and showing that for her you know millennia indigenous people

did this completely differently and this is not natural this is not human nature the different world truly is possible and just the way that the elderly is treated i think it says a lot about the society overall and what they value particularly a society that loves to talk about being pro life and this the sacredness of god-given life and and you know life and liberty in the pursuit of the ideology that capitalism, you know, projects about itself compared to the actual reality of capitalism is jarring, to say the least. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And definitely, you're right to point out the indigenous and First Nation traditions regarding care for the elderly and the role that elderly play in non-capitalist societies. There is definitely a different way.

There's definitely a better way, and we shouldn't settle for anything less. absolutely so so moving on the next chapter you tackle dystopian sort of rhetoric and literature and just sort of the role that it plays ideologically so what role is dystopian rhetoric and its tropes playing in our pandemic ravaged societies right now and what role does it play more broadly and historically within capitalist realism yes um so the mainstream dystopian literature is in effect it's a literature of the capitalist imaginary, and it functions to, what we think is that it functions to atrophy thought. As this project has pointed out from its outset, there's no system more murderous than contemporary capitalism with its roots in settler colonialism and modern slavery. If you just think of that massive and murderous history, that is just mind-blowing.

You either have to admit that we have been living in a natural dystopia for centuries, to which these fictional dystopias pale, or go into denial capitalist realism mode. Mainstream dystopian literature is the literature of capitalist realism. Forget for a moment that George Orwell was involved in colonial management in India, or that he was giving names out to the MI6 while he was writing 1984, and just pretend he was warning us about the supposed horrible violations of capitalism's actual claim to historical totalitarianism. And we use that term ironically because it's a word that comes from this mainstream

dystopian garbage. So how does the world of Big Brother or the world of the Hunger Games look as anything worse than our actual reality? In fact, it is not worse. It pales in comparison. But we are invited by this literature not to think of the foundations of actual reality but instead to believe that current reality is A-O-K, and any violation of it is what is monstrous.

Like the project pointed out in the very first chapter, blame is projected on the challenge to capitalism, communism, and this is what mainstream dystopian literature does. There's a resonance here in the way the pandemic is interpreted as some sort of break from reality, as if there haven't been pandemics, intentionally caused by capitalism, and as if this one is not one more that is not one that more humane systems could have managed differently.

Violence and disease are the norm of capitalism. Real dystopia has been here for a long time, but dystopian literature demands that we think instead that totalitarian orders are what happens when we violate the constraints of capitalism. Like, how silly is the story of the Hunger Games? How silly? Is it weirder than a world in which the CIA created extermination regimes in Jakarta and Brazil and used those as a pattern for how to win the Cold War? How is Orwell's supposed Big Brother in its assault on the truth, the evil of capitalism's other

when capitalism has always been about widespread surveillance and has worked to suppress historical evidence of its violence? Religious reactionaries in the American South promote slogans such as reason is the enemy of faith and believe that their backwards opinion is truth itself. Yet facts about settler colonialism and the plantation system are explained away. The founding fathers are sanctified in bizarre musicals such as Hamilton. And to be clear, there is another side to dystopian literature. There are other more progressive treatments of dystopian literature, as we noted in our chapter. particularly London's The Iron Heel and Lem's memoirs found in a bathtub.

These conceptions of dystopia were intended to reveal how capitalism and imperialism were themselves dystopian. London, despite his patriarchal problems, predicts fascism with his notion of a completed capitalist dystopia, and Lem mocks the paranoid capitalist Cold War. the he mocks the paranoia of the capitalist Cold War mind to do as thoroughly dystopian. But those are minor trends in dystopian literature, and they serve to tell us what capitalism has always been. And there is a reason why they're minor and are largely neglected in studies of dystopian literature. The point of that literature as a whole is to warn readers that challenges to capitalism are worse than capitalism. now this kind of thinking causes people to think of the pandemic and the rebellions in the wrong

ways the pandemic is disassociated from the real dystopia of capitalism and the rebellions are understood as harbingers of dystopia yeah that's incredibly interesting i mean we could we could do a whole episode and just breaking down different dystopian works of literature or film and and tying them into to this broader critique one thing that jumps out to my mind is thinking about how in dystopian films sort of like you know 1984 or whatever when you have a sort of it's it's rarely called fascism but it's sort of some some dystopian works can present some version of fascism as an alternative to or you know something outside of capitalism itself and you know in this broader you know your broader points taken fully and noted and embraced

this is one little element of it whereby it sort of shifts the goalposts a little bit and says fascism isn't just what capitalism does when it's under pressure, but fascism is like a whole other quote unquote totalitarian system that would represent an end of capitalism or a failure of quote unquote democracy. And what that does is it sort of reifies capitalism as synonymous with democracy and detaches fascism from capitalism, presenting it as something wholly different as opposed to a form capitalism takes when put under pressure. Yeah, exactly.

We need to start thinking of dystopia and dystopian literature in a way that averts that move that you just described. And we were signaling in that direction with our piece. Yeah. And one more thing I just jumped in mind before we move on, because I'm a fan of the Twilight Zone. And I forget the name of this episode, but it's an episode where a single man goes and faces a trial.

and it's obviously a rigged trial and it has very big brother overtones and the judge sits on like this 30 foot high desk looking down on this man and the overall idea is that it's you know individualism is replaced by a brutal sort of totalitarianism

and the dystopian society is not presented as explicitly fascist or as explicitly communist but what it does is a it does the liberal horseshoe theory where the Anna the Hannah

a rent sort of, it's all totalitarianism idea. So you don't know, are they critiquing the Soviet Union or are they critiquing Nazi Germany? It doesn't really matter because what they're basically saying is capitalism and individualism is good. And any deviation from that is totalitarianism, which might as well be either fascism or communism. And again, it plays into that overlying victims of communism sort of trope that ends up whether or not the intentions were there or not, ends up sort of defending fascism and separating fascism from capitalism and making fascism more akin to communism than fascism is to capitalism, and that is hyper ideological. Yeah, exactly. I have a vivid memory of that episode that you're talking about, although I don't

remember the name of the episode. Yeah. But you're definitely right. And, you know, growing up in the imperialist countries and reading, being exposed to this literature, it just becomes part of our understanding to sort of value individualism. And then you come across revolutionary thinking, and then you're faced with having to tear all of that down. And, yes, we want to contribute. We see ourselves as contributing a little bit to that project. Absolutely. And it's valuable, valuable work. So as you were writing Chapter 7, the one we just talked about, concerning the pandemic, you know, historical uprisings exploded onto the North American continent

and indeed the international stage forcing you to reflect on them in Chapter 8. So in this chapter you interrogate the good protester versus bad protester dichotomy as well as the outside agitator discourse which we have seen in literally every black-led uprising throughout American history and in fact it was a common trope

in pretty much all slave rebellions dating back centuries even before the Emancipation Proclamation. In the Haitian Revolution, for example, we find the French colonialist slave masters using the outside agitator trope in the face of major slave up uh slave rebellions and uprisings on that island and during civil rights this was common as well often communists were blamed as the puppet masters behind the scenes stripping black people of agency and fortifying conspiratorial anti-communist and often anti-Semitic thought um can you talk about this in

the context of the current uprisings and just sort of give an overview of your arguments in chapter eight yes yes of course i'm so glad that you that you brought this up We think that tropes, such as the outside agitator, do a number of things. First, we hear them, and we cannot but think of their long history, as you mentioned, as a kind of rhetorical device that for the white supremacist kills two birds with one stone. In one trope, they get to voice both their anti-black racism and their anti-Semitism. But of course, not everyone hears that. we think that the outside agitator or the dichotomy of good and bad protester or other such

strokes are counterinsurgent frames that serve to pacify political struggle. For this analysis, we have to look at these dichotomies in their immediate uses and within the totality of struggle. In the immediate sense, the good protester diverts a lot of energy from movements with marching for the sake of marching and worse, touting legalism, nonviolence. and reformist political forms, like appealing to elected officials, et cetera. But within the overall struggle, when the good protester touts open collaboration with the police at a demonstration, which is typical of them, they harm the movement by renouncing

the open antagonism between protesters and police. That's why we stress that, conceptually speaking, anti-police activism necessitates breaking with the paradigm of legalism and nonviolence, though there are practical concerns that militate against using violence that ought to be considered when you're organizing in a highly mediatedized environment means pushing the envelope to show the cops for what they are, and that is the armed wing of white supremacy and state power. In addition to try to lay claim to the moral high ground of good protesting, what ends up happening is that it hangs out, it hangs out to dry anybody who faces charges for rebellion. In

effect, these people become political prisoners, although the U.S. doesn't recognize them as such, but you're hanging them out to drive. In retrospect, regarding that chapter, we think we would have stressed how the dichotomy of good and bad protester works as part of a broader strategy of pacification. It is one facet, like the trope of the outside agitator. No doubt there are police infiltrators once a movement hits a critical mass, but bad jacketing people as outside agitators puts people in harm's way, like handing people over to the police. And it so's distrust, paranoia, and demoralization on flimsy pretexts. These dichotomies exist because some organizers still have a desire to claim the moral high ground on terms conductive to the status quo or to their own oppression. In a sense, they desire to claim a moral high ground, which is still under the heel of the pulley of the pigs.

It undermines us out in the streets, and it undermines every comrade who faces charges. By contrast, we call for full amnesty for protesters. And, you know, the outside agitator, it's used right, left, and center. In the early days of the uprising, liberal Democratic governors and mayors were saying the outside agitation was coming from. White supremacist on the right. It was anarchist. Even on the liberal, in the center, it was white anarchists were the outside agitator. So all different sort of status quo aligned political formations had their own unique flavor of outside agitator.

But it all served the same general purpose, demoralized, split organizations, take the momentum out. So it's suspicion against one another. and what one of the effects was is this surreal display of protesters attacking other protesters and handing them over to the police. So, you know, the exact opposite of kill the cop in your head. It's reified the cop in your head. Become the cop. Everybody's a cop to everybody else at a protest.

And that does so much damage. It's really hard to overstate it. Demoralization, of course, is just one aspect. And then still to this day, you know, President Trump, quote unquote, President Trump, whoever's president he may be, he's not mine. But he continues to push on this, to talk about thugs, to talk about anarchists, radical left, terrorists

who want to, you know, dismantle America. There's a bunch of fascists that make flyers, like on this 4th of July weekend, there was a big fascist made flyer that said, Antifa flag burning at Gettysburg, you know, Antifa face paint and show up. And obviously this was made up by fascist to trick conservatives into hating and fearing the left even more.

So while no actual protesters showed up, armed militias and white supremacist and, you know, neo-Nazis of various sorts and just Qa-Non weirdos, etc., they all showed up with guns just standing in a park alone looking at one another. So just on every level, it just so's chaos and discord and confusion. And just to see how like the MSNBC liberal types just immediately ate this up because they're so committed to liberalism and they're so committed to their own place in the class hierarchy of liberal capitalism that to see poor black people rising up setting police departments on fire and arguing for radical change which threatens their under their bottom line giving them the out of saying actually it's these white anarchists that are doing it not black people it allows them to continue to think of themselves as not racist and as on the right side of history while being able to say all the the things that we don't like or that might even challenge my place in the class hierarchy is actually not black people, it's white anarchists or whatever. So it's very convenient for a bunch of different

people along the political spectrum. Yeah, no, you're totally right. That's why, you know, as activists and as, you know, people who are keeping an eye on what's happening on the streets, we really need to just, we need to focus and understand how these tropes are being used and avoid falling into those traps. And yeah, no, I couldn't agree more with your assessment. Yeah. And I agree with you saying, you know, we have to understand this so that we don't fall into the traps so we don't perpetuate these narratives because oftentimes even well-intentioned people just get tricked into it and then they think they're doing the right thing and they're actually, you know, perpetuating these narratives. And so being understanding of it, noticing it, being sober-eyed about it, and realizing

what it is allows us to not only not fall into it ourselves, but help us navigate if it pops up in our organizing circles, which is essential. Exactly. So moving on, in chapter nine, you interrogate the role of slogans. And you open the chapter by saying, quote, Lenin warns that too often when history has taken a sharp turn, even progressive parties have for some time been unable to adapt themselves to the new situation and have repeated slogans, which had formerly been correct, but had now lost all meaning, lost it as suddenly as the sharp turn in history was sudden, end quote.

Now here we are in the midst of a sharp historical turn. Can you lay out your analysis of slogans? Tell us how slogans are being used and indeed co-opted during this latest uprising. and what slogans you argue are genuinely revolutionary and sort of meet the standard of the moment. Yes, yes, yes. So let me take the last question first and say a little bit about that. So our collective is not, and we have no ambition to be the vanguard of the masses or workers or unemployed. And for that reason, we hesitate to say anything definitive regarding which slogans measure up at the moment or at any given.

moment. What we do say is that in general, slogans are useful when they reflect back and amplify progressive popular desires in a timely way. Amplify to the point of crystallizing existing desires and giving them a rallying point and sweeping new people into the insurrectionary movement. Defund the police, which we discussed in Chapter 9, was such a slogan because it provided a definite course of action that seems possible to an increasingly wide swath of people. But since it implicitly recognizes the legitimacy of the neoliberal state, we need to be prepared to drop it or push beyond it as soon as the necessity or the opportunity presents itself. And so the first part, like invoking Lenin in this chapter was a way of underscoring

how insurrection is an art and not specifically as something. at a minimum, crafting and disseminating, crafting and disseminating a slogan, a good slogan requires thinking with the flow of events and anticipating the next moment, something that we are aspiring to in this project. Can you talk about the role that the universities are playing in all of this and sort of how it relates to all through Zaire's work, which we've covered on Rev. Left multiple times? Awesome. Yes, yes. Of course. So the universities are a major battlegrounds. during in the epoch of necrocapitalism.

In Chapter 11, we described how racist professor Gordon Klein of UCLA wanted to penalize students participating in anti-police brutality protests by not granting leniency and grading during this time of major social upheaval. In his response to students petitioning leniency for protesters, Professor Klein rehearsed the variety of racist fables for which he was suspended from teaching. by UCLA. So that's one dimension of the class conflict that takes place at universities, reactionaries versus people who are fighting for justice. Another dimension is exhibited by liberal thinkers like philosopher Jason Stanley, who took to Twitter to defend Professor Klein,

citing against the students who pressured UCLA to act. In a tweet thread, Stanley insisted that the university should not have this type of power over professors' freedom to dictate the content and direction of university courses. Now, Marxists generally, including Al-Tusser, understand universities as institutions of ideological control and sites for the ideological class struggle. Al-TuSer analyzed the class's control of society in terms of two devices. One of them is the repressive state apparatus, which includes the violent repressive forces of class domination, like the police, the prisons, the so-called justice system, and the government. The other is the ideological state apparatus, which includes universities,

the media, religion, and cultural and political associations. What it means for universities to be part of the ideological state apparatus is that ideological discourse at the university is for the most part dominated by the ruling ideology. In countries like Canada in the United States, that ideology is the bourgeois liberalism of the ruling capitalist class. We are witnessing rebellion amidst the global pandemic, and students and workers are rising up against capitalism in the streets, and this rebellion reverberates at the university. The ideological state apparatus works to suppress dissenting ideology, and we see it at work when both academic reactionaries like Klein and bourgeois liberal academics like Stanley come out united against students protesting

white supremacy. The students at UCLA were able to pressure the university to remove a racist professor, but on the whole, the university as an institution continues its ideological mission, preaching reaction and anti-communism at every turn. And it may end up contributing to the body count of necrocapitalism because administrators are currently debating whether or not in-person classes will resume in the fall with the potential of endangering students, educators, and staff in order to continue business as usual. Absolutely. And, you know, I've said this many times in this show, but far from universities being bastions

of Marxist brainwashing, it's really important to understand them and to realize and to argue that they are, in fact, not Marxist at all, but they reify the neoliberal world order. They reify the class hierarchy. they defend and provide cover for and perpetuate the logic of the broader capitalist society. You know, I've had, I dropped out of grad school after a semester or two because I couldn't afford it, but even while I was in grad school for political theory, right, it's like sort of a subdivision of philosophy. I was really focused on political theory. It was, I mean, we spent weeks reading through Robert Nozik's Anarchy State and Utopia, which is a sort of just short of

anarcho-capitalism, hyper-libertarian work of political philosophy. And of course, we studied a lot of John Rawls, which is liberal political philosophy. But never at all did we cover any text from people like Marx or Lenin or Mao. And in fact, me doing a lot of work as an undergrad and a graduate on Marxism through my various papers, even my paper to get into grad school was on Marxism as a science, whatever. I was seen as, I was very much seen as sort of an outlier, a radical you know, not at all. If it was, if these universities were Marxist brainwashing camps, I would have been seen as, you know, a centrist in these places, but I was absolutely not. And in fact, there were some sort of, even I, maybe I perceived this that it wasn't there, but I perceived

a little bit of sort of scoffing or apprehension or reticence at my engagement with Marxism through undergrad and graduate school. It was almost like, it wasn't explicitly discouraged, but sort of implicitly the topics that I chose to focus on, it was sort of understood that they would limit my ability to move up in the philosophy world and in the academic world. And I ended up dropping out anyway, but I'm just saying it's just hilarious whenever I hear reactionaries talk about universities as Marxist brainwashing bastions when they are quite the opposite. Yeah, exactly. I think some of our group members share the similar experience of what you described of being in academia. Robert Nozick is, you know, we get a lot of that. And, and sometimes

even, you know, if you're a Rawlsian, sometimes they might, the reactionaries might even position you as a socialist. When you're just like a middle, you know, like just like a liberal, yeah, it's absolutely, it's absolutely wild. And I understand exactly what you're saying. Yeah. Definitely. So one more question before we wrap this up. And, you know, this is a good question to end on and might, you know, bring up some of the stuff we've already discussed. But what are some other ways in which liberals are actively and currently trying to sanitize the protest and individualize blame? And how do these narratives sort of reinforce capital and its ideological realism? Good question.

So, like, we've argued that one of the ways the protests have been sanitized is specifically in relation to the pandemic. itself. So in the rush to displace blame for the spread of COVID on the protesters, we have argued that liberal news outlets have ultimately erased the risk that protesters are taking and have obfuscated the ways in which the state itself has not only failed to respond to the pandemic, but actively exacerbated it through its response to the protest. NPR in particular declared that the protests were not spreading COVID, but individual parties and people's houses were spreading COVID. While on the surface, it seems like a nice defense of the protests from disingenuous accusations of spreading the virus and endangering public health, the reality

is that it lends credibility to the underlying assumption of those accusations, which assumes that if the protests had indeed led to the spread of COVID, they would not have been praiseworthy. The reality is that the protesters were taking a risk by going into the streets. That risk was not so much about the protesters themselves causing the spread, but the police and the state weaponizing the conditions of COVID in order to punish and deter those who dared to rise up. Exactly.

In response to the protests, for example, Los Angeles and other cities closed their testing sites as an obvious form of retribution during the protest themselves, police fired chemical weapons, projectiles, which induced coughing and highly increased the risk of transmission. And they did that right before jailing protesters in mass and crowding them to jails where social distancing is impossible. Pretending that these protests were harmless in terms of the pandemic, on the one hand, seems like a nice way to protect the rights of the protester, but it also ignores the harms perpetuated by the state in the face of a decaying capitalist order.

The cops in full riot gear with full, you know, masks on to protect themselves. You know, they don't have that same level of fear and of threat of the virus. And like, you're exactly right. They weaponize that against the protesters in a myriad of ways. One of the ways, and you're just talking about being in jail, but also if you've ever been arrested at a protest in a mass arrest way, you know that you are held oftentimes in, in buses or big vehicles for hours while they continue to process arrest other people.

And then you're all taken to jail together. So even outside of the jail context, you're often handcuffed, sweating, oftentimes with injuries of some sort, even open wounds, packed into a very tiny bus or like SUV type vehicle for an extended amount of time with obviously not the windows open or any sort of air conditioning going through the car to push the particles around or anything like that. So on every level, from the actual firing of chemical weapons to the holding before jail processing to the jail itself, the pandemic, the virus is absolutely being weaponized against protesters. And I think that's an incredibly important element of all this to remember.

And then another thing that's come out recently, which is sort of pretty adjacent and related, if not directly related, is this new book on white fragility. And lots of people are putting episodes out about it. You know, lots of critiques, et cetera. But one of the things I think is important when it talks about how liberals generally try to individualize blame is that it sort of roots racism in a psychological defect of white people. And it doesn't tie that into deeper structures of capital, of white supremacy, of colonialism, ongoing colonialism, etc. And so for liberals, white fragility is great because it fits inside the liberal narrative that, these social problems

have individual solutions whether that's climate change you go out and buy new light bulbs or racism you go to this lady's $12,000 anti-racist class but you're always going to be racist etc and it's just pathologizes and individualizes racism

and what that does among many other things is obscure the systematic structural and historical process of slavery of whiteness of white supremacy of genocide of colonialism and ultimately of capitalism itself. And that's why, in part, liberals absolutely love this book because it doesn't challenge

their underlying liberalism. It reinforces it. Yeah, no, exactly. And I think, you know, like revolution minded people, structural leftists and structural Marxists have been talking about this for a good amount of time. And it keeps coming up. And now there's bestselling books about it. So exactly.

And one, the last thing I'll say on that is what the solution. that come out of that individualizing process are, they become largely symbolic, representational. You know, we hired a person of color here. We took Anjima's bottled syrup down. The statues, symbols, are being toppled. And, yeah, we support that. Anything to divert away from real material change

that would threaten the class and racial hierarchy of society. So as long as they can individualize blame, they can individualize the solutions and make it largely a symbolic sort of fight and not a material one. And that's what liberals are in the process of doing right now. And as radicals, we have to see it, combat it, and point to the underlying material causes of all these social ills and problems. Exactly.

Okay. Well, the last question I have for you is this is a wonderful project. It's very timely. It illuminates so much of what's going on right now. I encourage all my listeners to go read it in full. You know, we can ask questions. we can touch on some highlights, but to engage with the sort of ongoing project itself, I think, is essential. And if you're at all interested in what we've talked about today, it'll be linked

in the show notes so you can go read it and engage with it more thoroughly and deeply. But where do you see this project going from here? And importantly, where can listeners find this project online? So the project, the project is developing according to what's happening in the real world. It's hard to know where it will go because it ultimately is tied to the unfolding aspects of the pandemic and now the rebellions that are happening in real time its entire structure is designed to be able to respond to these unfolding events so its future remains unclear but if you want to stay up on it your listeners can find it at the URL necrocapitalism dot wordpress dot com wonderful and again i will link to that i'll continue to track the ongoing developments of this project and i'll just

reiterate my urge to listeners to go engage with it, see where it goes. And it really is so important because it helps you think through this historical moment as it's unfolding, particularly those people who liked our episodes on, let's say, Gothic Marxism or on capitalist realism, on Jameson's work, et cetera, really like the work around Marxist ideology and Marxist conceptions of ideology. This is right down your alley. So definitely go engage with it. Thank you so much for coming on. Keep up the great work. And I'll be in touch as this project develops

and I'll continue to shout it out and promote it. Awesome. Great. Thanks for having us. You got to die. Got to die. Got to die. Got a government.

Die for our country. That shit. You got to die. Got to die. Got to die. Got a government. Die for our country. That shit.

There's a cold for that die in a so-called death, die in a so-called death, and the government says we don't know the source of a sickness, but I don't believe what what they say because the government is lying they've done it before and don't try now they'll do it again I'm sick a test

of a bill virus subject test through a competitive you're gonna die gonna die for your government die for your country like shit you're gonna die

gonna die gonna die gonna die for your government died for the country that shit Reservant, rain slaughtered, by generalizing power, you give them your life to give you a stabbing up back. Radiation, aging and orange tested on. getting pigs for Western corporations I never have I never will pledge allegiance to the flag

you're gonna use the other you're gonna die gonna die gonna die for the government time for the country that shit you're gonna die gonna die gonna die gonna die for the government

dies for the country that shit I'm done you to tell me what to do and I don't need you to tell me what to pay Fuck you, I don't need you to tell me what to say And I don't need you to tell me what to think What to think, what to think, what to think, what to think, what to think, think, think, think, think. Die, gonna die, gonna die for your government, die for your country, that shit You're gonna die, gonna die, gonna die for your government,

die for your country, that shit You gotta die, you gotta die, you gotta die, gonna die for your government, Die for your country, that shit We're going to die, going to die, going to die for your government, die for the country that shit. We're going to die, going to die, going to die for your government, die for a country that should. You're going to die, going to die, going to die, going to die, going to die for a government, die for a country that shit. You're going to die, going to die, going to die for a government, die for a country that shit. We've got a die, got to die, going to die, going to die, going to die, going to die for a government,

You're going to die, going to die, got a dark for your government, darkly action. You're going to die, going to die, got to die, got a dark on a government, like for a good election. You've got to die, going to die, got to die.