Rev Left Radio - Necrocapitalism Revisited: Marxism, Fascism, & Capitalist Crisis

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

Johanna May Black and Devin Zane Shaw join Breht to discuss the collective project they contributed to: On Necrocapitalism. Check out our first episode on Necrocapitalism: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/necrocapitalism Buy On Necrocapitalism here: https://www.leftwingbooks.net/book/content/necrocapitalism-plague-journal Check out Devin's great book Philosophy of Antifascism here: https://www.leftwingbooks.net/book/content/philosophy-antifascism-punching-nazis-and-fighting-white-supremacy The episode Devin and I did on his book here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/antifascism Follow Johanna here: https://twitter.com/comrade_jo_may Outro Music: "Mama! There's a Spider in My Room" by The Black Tones ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on Devon and Johanna to talk about the project that they both contributed to, but who had more contributors, called On Necrocapitalism. Many of you will remember in the summer of 2020, I believe we had on bourgeois philosophy, our friend Mateo, to talk about the first 12 chapters of Necrocapitalism. capitalism, which is as far as that project had progressed at that point. And even in that show, we said this is going to be a continuing ongoing project. We'll catch back up. We'll touch back, you know, we'll touch base again a little down the line. And this is us doing that. So today

we have on two other members of the collective under the pseudonym M.I. Asma, Miasma, who wrote on necrocapitalism. And we're just going to cover the chapters 13 through 31, the the rest of that project and how it's developed since we last touched base with it. And then at the very end as well, because Johanna had to leave at the end of the interview, and so we said our goodbyes. Then I had Devin back on to ask a couple questions. I wasn't able to fit into the main section of this interview. So if you stick around past the outro music, you'll hear another 20 minutes or so of me and Devin

discussing fascism, the three-way fight, the distinctions. between system loyal fascists and system oppositional fascists, the liberal demand to return to normalcy and all of the mystifications and obscurantisms that that phrase entails and much more. So stick around, pass the outro for that little Easter egg. But the discussion itself with Devin and Johanna is really interesting, really enlightening,

and I assume that most of you will really enjoy it. And you can always go purchase it because it's free online, but it was also turned into a book over at Left Wing Books, which I'll link to in the show notes. You can get that as a book form, or you can just find it for free online. And as always, if you like what we do here at Rev Left Radio, you can support the show a couple dollars a month on patreon.com

forward slash Rev Left Radio. And in exchange for your generous donation, you get access to bonus monthly content. We really appreciate everybody who supports the show, who shares the show. Or even if you can't do that, if you can leave a good review, all those things help a lot and we deeply appreciate it.

And without further ado, here is my conversation with Johanna May Black and Devin Zane Shaw on their project on necrocapitalism. I'm Devin Zane Shaw. I'm the author of numerous books, including Philosophy of anti-fascism, punching Nazis and fighting white supremacy, egalitarian moments from Descartes to Roncier, and the pamphlet, The Politics of the Blockade. I teach at Douglas College in British Columbia. I'm Johanna Black, and I am the author of no books except this one,

and I'm a PhD dropout due to the violence of academia. I do work for an academic institution, though, at the moment, but I've been parts of numerous proletarian feminist groups and organizing circles. I was also active in some different union spaces when I was unionized. Unfortunately, I'm not right now. Part of a professional association, which I learned is not the same thing. Yeah, I'm just coming to you from Colonna, British Columbia, which is the unseated and ancestral territory of the Silk's Okanagan Nation.

Wonderful. Well, it's a pleasure to have both of you on. I know Devin has been on before. Johanna, this is our first time talking, but I'm very pleased to have you here. And this is a wonderful project. I know longtime listeners of Rev. Left will probably be aware that we did do an episode, I think, in the summer of 2020, when this project was only about 12 chapters in.

And I'll link to that in the show notes so people can check that out as well. This episode will really be focused on. you know, chapters 13 through 31, just so our listeners can orient themselves to it. As a refresher, and I think people can probably listen to this episode without having to have listened to that first one, because we'll talk about a lot of stuff that is just sort of important in and of itself. But just as a refresher, can you just talk a little bit about this project, why you did it, and sort of what you wanted to accomplish with it as a collective? So some listeners would know the author, Josh Mufuad Paul, who's been a guest on this.

And he and I have been friends for a while because we had similar circumstances for work as contingent or contract faculty for a long time. And we keep in touch pretty frequently. And during the pandemic, that was true as well. And there was a lot of back and forth and joking. And I would tease Josh that he is the author of a book called austerity apparatus. So I would tease him that he should produce a book called The Pandemic Apparatus. Because we were looking at some of the publications that well-known philosophers, like Georgio O'Gombin and Zhek, Slavoy Zijek, were doing at the time.

And I said, oh, you should crank one out like that. Now, he dismissed this because he said, you know, that's kind of cheap, I guess, in a way. But he'd have to speak for himself somewhere for that. That's how I remember it. But then later, after some back and forth suggests that we produce a serial work on a blog that would track the pandemic. So the idea would be that we would get numerous authors. and that they would all each do a week and we'd have a set order

and they would follow each other and we'd be free to write about what we wanted to write as a kind of chronicle of this and then at the outset there was a concept that we would bring it at some point to the form of a book and so Josh and I wrote up a prologue

and then distributed it to other people mainly people that Josh knew we both have been friends with D.W. Fairlane for a while But the other three authors, I think we might have chatted every once in a while possibly. But I don't know, you know, I didn't really know them, not in the way. Like, for instance, that, you know, I've spoken to Johanna a few times throughout this project and got to know her better that way. But, you know, it's distance. It's people that I haven't met in person.

So I found it to be a really great project for that, except that I also discovered I really hate writing on the time of the kind of deadline that we had. And I found it really difficult to do. the rewarding part is looking at it at the end and realizing that this was ended up being a very cohesive and thought-provoking project yeah it was similarly approached by josh i'll just call him jm p um and josh and i have been friends for years we both worked at york university and we're both very active in the union there and similarly have also been contract faculty for a long time And so another way we connected. The other thing is that I think Josh, Devin and I are all very active on Twitter.

And so there's a connection there as well. And so, yeah, Josh approached me and asked if I wanted to be involved. And I said I would love to. I agree with Devin that the deadlines were pretty tight. We would have about a week to write. For me, that ended up being the night before making several pots of coffee and staying up all night trying to write something. but I always planned on spending more time.

It just never happened because I had a full-time job at a women's center and also in a rural area where in Nova Scotia, where I was living before, where, you know, I don't know if you saw the news, but there was a mass shooting there last year. And so there was a lot of work responding to that. And then also I had a part-time job as well. contract faculty. So I was working like 60 hours a week and being involved in this project. So it was

a lot, but it was very rewarding. Because of that, I didn't actually write very many chapters in this second half of the book that we're talking about today. I actually wrote one of them, which was chapter 18. I wrote two of them in the earlier chapters. Yeah, that's sort of how I came to be involved. And it was really cool to meet the other authors and none of whom other than Josh, I knew. Yeah, that is awesome. And I remember the first time that I had on, it was Mateo, but it was under the pseudonym, and it still is. The book is under the pseudonym, M.I. Asma, miasma. At that time, they were not disclosing who all the authors were, because it was still a working project. But now we know it was Mateo Adante, Johanna, Allison Escalante, my co-host

at Red Menace, D.W. Fairlane, Jay Malfa, Paul, and Devin Zane Shaw. So just so people know, because at the first time, it was sort of a little bit of a mystery. who is behind this, et cetera. So it was kind of cool. And actually, I didn't even know that my good friend and co-host Allison was a member of the collective until after it was all done. So I was kind of tickled by that. But yeah, I love it.

And I think it's really important. And in fact, I reached out to Allison to ask us, Hey, since you're not going to be on this episode, is there anything you want to toss out there, anything that you might like to have addressed? And she gave me one of the first questions here. And Allison's saying this is something that she herself pondered as she was contributing to this project. And the question is this. Is this project suggesting some novel

philosophical analytic in using the term necrocapitalism? Or is it merely giving name to a part of Marxist analysis that already exists? I think it's a really good question. And I'm not even sure if we, if Devin and I have the same answer, because I don't think we've talked about this as a group. My personal sense is that this is giving a name to sort of like a pre-existing piece of Marxist analysis, right? Especially in capital, Marx is quite famous for you as in metaphors that sort of hint at like the necrotic form that capitalism can take, talking about it as a vampire and things like that. So that's sort of my sense, but I'll also, I'm interested to hear also what Devin has to say about that. it's a good question because it's in the book and I can also say that one of the discussions

that I know that the JMP and I had quite a bit and that he was very straightforward about is that it was supposed to supply something like one aspect of capitalism that we wanted to pull out rather than treat it as something completely new and I think the pattern of that that's why I mentioned austerity apparatus earlier is that the pattern of that was from this discussion where I was prodding and teasing and whatever. That's what friends do, right? Isn't it? On Twitter.

No trolling at least. I've got a few friends that's almost exclusively like trolling in the DMs. So, you know, the idea was that, you know, in the same way that he talked about the austerity apparatus and not getting caught up in the idea of looking at austerity as a policy and believing that fighting that back to the previous system, like something like social welfare state, was a victory. he'd say we need to continue to look specifically at capitalism.

The big shift here is just to say one aspect that the pandemic really brings out is the necrotic character. Now for me, you know, there are, as many people can gather, there are many Maoist authors in this, and that's not probably the position I hold. I know that I think I talked about this on Rev Left before. I said, my main goal is to write from the perspective of a militant anti-fascists who holds a united front perspective. And so I'm going to keep sticking with that. Perhaps some of the other things, I'm prefacing it that way to say. A few of the other things I might say may then, you know, raise flags for people, is that I always think of these things in the same way as you read Phenon,

saying that in order to apply Marxist analysis into the colonial situation, he looks at, that you have to stretch it here and there. And I just want to also say that I don't believe that to mean people read it to think that he's dismissing Marxist analysis or he's departing from it. And the key point of this is the stretching is to say it's taking it outside of those contours. But, you know, I would say in the same way that I read Fanon as in line with a anti-colonial Marxist tradition, that I would say this fits within these parameters. In fact, there's plenty, because there are a number of authors who are Maoists in this. Everyone, everyone's got slight differences about what they think in there and I think you can see it in the writing and we're discussing this amongst ourselves.

There are certain places where you can see that we're having a discussion and back and forth in those kinds of things. But the core point, and always a central part, at least for Josh and I going forward when we were putting it together, was to say, we're just looking at one particular, we're following how one particular aspect seems to guide it at this particular moment. And it was really right in front of your face at the beginning of the pandemic with the whole. you know, grandpa and grandma have to die so that capital may live. And there's certainly aspects where that hasn't disappeared. And so that's just the feature.

And then, of course, just like everything else, it gives you a filter to go back and start looking at some of the classic texts and rethinking them, like going back and finding that quote from angles about the revenge of nature that is one of the epigraphs of the book. Things like this, you start looking at texts in different ways. And that's one of the key things I always really like to. do. So that's what I think was a core part of that. Yeah, I like that a lot. To the Phenon point about stretching the Marxist analysis to fit the colonial situation, I think by doing that stretching,

he actually updated and expanded Marxist analysis itself so much so that it doesn't necessarily need to be stretched because it's woven into the Phenonian analysis so well. And so I love that. And of course, as both of you sort of alluded to, this gothic character, right? This the vampires and the blood and the metaphors of blood, it goes back to Marx and Engels themselves. And there's been a strain of that carried through since them as well. But I am interested in that we probably touched on this in the first episode, but it's probably worth re-saying. If you could speak very briefly on just where the term necro-capitalism comes from, because I'm sure you didn't invent the term. What I can tell everyone is that JMP footnoted this stuff.

Yeah. And we were aware of its existence. But it was, our own thinking was just that it, there's, you know, Ashil and Bembe's necropolitics. And part of the origin of trying to frame it as necrocapitalism was to say, well, we want to move away from the biopolitical analyses that are floating around and put capitalism back right into the forefront of the agenda. because that that announces a big shift. I don't remember what the origin of the term is. We're not the first to use it. And then some people did.

One particular scholar. And really they were also, I don't think they use it in exactly the same way that we do. I read their paper. It was sort of like they were beginning to develop the term. And it's exactly that shift that Devin's talking about, moving away from the, the biopolitical and that sort of like Foucautian analysis, which does more to, I think, to obscure the way that capitalism works and really putting like that Marxist analysis in the center, but holding on to some of the points that Achille Mbembe specifically makes

in his discussion of necropolitics. So instead of looking at the, ways that the state apparatus sort of creates these death worlds, looking at the ways that capitalism and then the state as a tool of capitalism creates these death worlds. So it's really about like re-centering that Marxist analysis and re-centering capitalism as the source of the violence. Yeah. All right. So let's go ahead and move on. Let's get into the actual content of the chapters 13 through 31 of on necrocapitalism. And in chapter 13, When discussing pacification, you as a collective, say, quote, as noted from the outset of this project, capitalism possesses a strong purchase on our imagination.

It is difficult to think outside of its boundaries, even when we know that what lies within its boundaries is utterly necrotic. Hope for reform rather than hope for the monstrous impossibility of revolution, monstrous and impossible because these are the terms set by the capitalist imaginary, is indeed a pacifying tear gas. end quote. So can you talk about the role that sort of hope within the system and the prospect of meaningful reform play in actually pacifying the masses and sort of what the consequences are of falling prey to that to that reformist hope? Yeah, so a major part of like bourgeois philosophy in the 20th century, is that what century oldest? I don't even know. Whatever century it is, is based on this horseshoe theory, and that's the idea that really famously goes back to like Hannah Arendt's thinking around totalitarianism and this sort of, I would call it a myth

that communism is necessarily a totalitarian and also just as bad as fascism, right? And that has kind of been the dominant understanding in political philosophy for decades and I think continues for a lot of people. So when it comes to thinking about, okay, how do we change, how do we push for change under the violent system that is capitalism? We're really limited in thinking of reform rather than revolution, because revolution is seen as basically monstrous, as the book said, and impossible, impossible in that it will never lead to the utopian ideas.

that these sort of bourgeois thinkers imagine that Marxists are thinking about and monstrous in that it will always lead to a fascist-like state. So I would say that sort of dominant mythology is really what limits our imagination. And as someone who's spent a lot of time, you know, I taught as a contract faculty, Women and Gender Studies, I've been involved in proletarian feminist front organizing and worked at a women's center and now I work in sexual violence prevention. So a lot of my work is really feminist base. And I think the feminist movement is one of the key places where you can really see this where a lot of, I mean, the dominant sort of pushes that have happened have really been

about achieving reform within the capitalist model. And that leads to, to further violence, as I speak about in one of the later chapters, for example, with the importation of migrant labor in order to, so that white bourgeois women can work outside of the home and have migrant labors facing like ultra exploitation as nanny's caregivers and cleaners in that same home. Whereas if you take up a sort of proletarian feminist approach, you would be pushing for very different things. You would be pushing necessarily for a revolution and for an end to the capitalist system as a whole, recognizing that women's position in society, the exploitation of women, whether it's in the workplace or

the home, it all stems from the capitalist structure of the family and a number of other things, right? So, but it's really tough. It has been, personally, for me, really tough sometimes identifying myself. Like, I liked the term proletarian feminists. A lot of people, like, if I'm in a mainstream women's organization, like where I used to work, no one's going to know what that is. So I might say Marxist feminist. But then I, you know, I'm treated almost as if, like, again, my ideas are impossible and utopian. So I'm not. really taken seriously, but also that I'm not feminist in some ways, according to like the thinking of bourgeois feminist, because, you know, I do believe in revolution and a protracted

people, which would be happened through a protracted people's war, right? And so a lot of the dominant sort of feminist approach in North America has been one that is very much rooted in non-violence in some ways as a reaction to the violence that women face daily but also that's you know in many ways the message or the line that's been fed to us through bourgeois ideology that we shouldn't rise up that we shouldn't engage in violence and I think does link back to that same horseshoe theory yeah one thing I think that now that I looked at the timeline of the book and of the previous interview. It happens spontaneously that you happen to cover the first 12 chapters and those are the first three sections in the contents and the pacification starting with chapter 13

is where we're starting here. And it's to me one of the really important aspects of this book as a chronicle is that my memory, which is usually pretty good, is utterly jumbled through this period of the pandemic. It's just completely screwed up. and I really realized that when we were reading this material for the purposes of editing and just saying things like, I can't believe that happened that week. I can't believe that was then. I thought it was three months later or three months earlier. And we had one of our people who wrote a blurb for us and said,

aside from the blurb that I want you to put on the book, I want to say that this was in some way triggering in a good way, in the sense that it helped me remember in an uncanny way, the chronology and the timeline. And the pacification section is extremely important, I think, in this regard, for chronicling the fact of pacification as it happened. So that when people look back and go four years from now, when it's the same stupid election process that happens as an ideological process of sort of reconstituting hegemony in the U.S., which is what a lot of, this is about right in this section because it's the 2020 election kicks into gear right around this time because they had a few months off right it kind of stalled there was this kind of period where it wasn't the main thing and it was a breath of fresh air if you lived outside of the u.s because

the u.s. wasn't commanding the news for three months about about election stuff which was great since i don't live in the u.s. anymore it is where i grew up but the key out of this is that we wanted to chronicle so that people four years later can't say, oh, you know, you guys, you think X, Y, and Z, well, look, now we have it written out between July 16th and August 27th, that we track the way that this radical uprising that was happening was being pushed and funneled towards reformist and redistributive tendencies. We had a bit of a debate between different authors, and we probably still have different ideas about where defund or abolition went. I think that whether or not we want to embrace those terms, the authors involved in some of that discussion,

did note and highlight some of the problems that were going to come. And overall, what we saw throughout this process of pacification was that it wasn't necessarily one that was military pacification. Because in that sense, Trump lost, right? He said, we're going to go out and dominate, and they didn't dominate. And it was, it didn't work that way initially. And so it created a whole set of other social dynamics that needed to be analyzed because the ground was shifting underneath everyone's feet. And in my view, there were a lot of really sort of conventional analyses or people just saying, you know, because Trump said something, this is going to come to pass.

And we were trying to push back on those kinds of things because it didn't seem like he really had the kind of social forces together to make that, you know, remember he said dominate, the quote unquote domination of this uprising. and he didn't really have the cohesion or the social forces organized to make that happen. I don't think he realized or he just ignored the level of crisis within the capitalist class in the U.S. of trying to figure out how to manage it. And so that's what made it capturing pacification so important because we had different tendencies saying, well, let's push it towards reform and redistribution. But of course, the problem here is that these solutions don't get at the conditions that make these problems possible. In the end of reform and redistribution, the capitalist class still owns the social means of production.

And that doesn't change. And that's why it's important to highlight how reform and redistribution persistently fail. But the key thing was to take some of these prominent figures who might get, you know, credibility within defund movements or abolitionist movements and say, look, we see things where in the middle of the uprising, then you get Angela Davis, whose work I greatly respect, saying things like, you know, well, you vote for Biden because it's whatever, or Cornell West later saying it's an anti-fascist vote and readers can go read all about that description there. But the core out of that is, look, we can think about this two ways.

We could say, again, like I said, I really respect Davis's work. She gets a real prominent voice for some good reasons in abolitionists in defund circles. but you'd want to say, even from a real politic perspective or pragmatic perspective, was there really an Angela Davis vote that needed to be swung to hand the victory to Biden? And this is where I think it's a failure of discursive strategic thinking. Well, Davis, what is your motive for this? Because if you're thinking you're purely giving a pragmatic answer, then do you actually think that there's something that you can swing or some effect you can have?

otherwise you're just saying something and and you're holding a position that's pragmatically untenable and ideologically incorrect and flawed by saying oh yeah well the electoral process can cause can bail us out on x y and z in this kind of pressure and i think it's it's model in a certain kind of thinking that still thinks that there's somewhere there's a tributary of social movements that there's a social conscience up there and i think that just that just shows a profound disconnect from how things have worked, I mean, for my lifetime as an adult. So, you know, I can start saying for at least, you know, three decades that I've been able to watch and felt sometimes the temptation to think, like, is there a way that we can push this where there's change in, in this process? And you feel that temptation when it comes around and you wonder. And I wouldn't say I felt that. I don't feel that anymore. But, you know, you work through these things as your position changes and your, and your career moves on. And your career's a thinker changes and your organizational connections change. you get pushed, right, and you have to make decisions and you have to always remind yourself where you started and why you've left that behind in that regard.

And looking at Davis and following that stuff and Cornel West and some other prominent figures, I have a lot of criticisms of quote unquote liberal anti-fascism, both that pepper this book and that I did a quite extensive analysis across a number of articles for the Three Way Fight blog for falling into these same things. of going the immediate emergency has passed and thus, you know, we can kind of get back to normalcy. And that's the thing we criticized for that. Yeah. Yeah, really important stuff. I have a couple points before I want to move on. One, you know, to your point, Devin, about analysis that develops in real time paralleling these processes is a much different and much more difficult thing to do than a retrospective analysis, right? Once the smoke is cleared, you can look back on something and have a pretty good analysis, that doesn't really help us get through that present moment when it's happening. And so this has the benefit of trying to do that and nailing things

down as they're happening, because you're right. Things were happening so fast. Our sense of time was radically warped. We will look back on this retrospectively, regardless of what happens in the future, decades down the road, and see this 2020, 2021 period of time as being one of the most historically significant and packed full of history moments in all of American history. And even now, I don't think people fully appreciate that fact, but that's one of the strange. I mean, I also hope that what comes next is more historically significant. Yeah, exactly. I just want to just throw that in there.

I would like for what comes next to put this in a shadow. But also, I want to touch on a couple other things. One, Johanna, you said about Marxist or, you know, coming across as a proletarian feminist and then being labeled an idealist or a utopian or in some circles an extremist. And that's very amusing to me, not only because Marxists have like the best analysis and actually tries to solve problems at their core, but also because people that want to maintain the status quo are actually the idealists, actually the utopians, and the extremists. This is a dying already dead system.

And to insist that we must maintain it and live within its confines is a form of, idealism and extremism in and of itself. And the last thing I just wanted to say about the question itself is this hope for reform. And Devin, you really got at this with the temptation that you said you're past it. But I think even many radicals, there is this reoccurring temptation. Well, maybe this political leader. Maybe if the Democratic Party put these policies out front, you know, maybe they could get something changed.

Maybe they could solve these core issues. But we're seeing with the Biden and Kamala Harris administration that, that doesn't happen at all. And in fact, that defund and abolish the police energy, which was so easily co-opted by the Democratic Party in this pacification process, actually led to just like funding the Capitol Police much more and did nothing else whatsoever. So not only is that energy co-opted by the Democratic Party, it's actually then weaponized against those who came out and made that clarion call and then used to fund the police even more. So it's, you know, Tripoli sort of nefarious in that way. But Johanna, I do want to move on to this next question

precisely because you alluded to it in your last answer. And, you know, it really goes across chapters 15 through 18. You talk among other things. And by you, I mean the collective, as I will throughout this episode, about how our children are actually weaponized against us by the ruling class, how the very concepts of child and childhood are intrinsically and intensely political. and, as you said, how well-off bourgeois families benefit for migrant labor. So that's a lot of topics. But can you just flesh out some of these arguments and maybe give us some examples and just deepen that point? I think it's really important.

It is really important. And childhood is really like a concept rooted within like that bourgeois ideology, where children for the first time were sort of seen as childhood, It was seen as like a unique stage of someone's lifetime rather than children just being like smaller and younger versions of adults. And so the way that we've thought about children in, at least in like Western European culture shifted radically during like the advent of capitalism, children really became especially in the bourgeois sort of nuclear family, not only like the property. of their fathers, but also the family was for the first time positioned as the one unique place responsible for the raising and rearing of children. And of course, that became sort of women's unpaid labor. And I sort of talk about how that's in the chapter 18, how in some ways that's

always been a myth because bourgeois women have always relied on the labor of women who were either enslaved or proletarian to do that work in the household. And also proletarian women have always worked outside of the household in these positions and other sort of positions. So it's kind of a mythology. But yeah, this idea that moving away from sort of collectivist cultures that existed before the advent of capitalism in different shapes and forms and some of them in ways that were still oppressive. But the definition of the family added an extra, like another level or a different type of oppression in that it divided society into these small units of the nuclear family. Right. And then someone in their chapter mentions Margaret Thatcher's

quote about there's no such thing as society there's individual men and women and their families and what this does is it creates these like units who are like responsible for themselves um for raising their own children so rather than child rearing being seen as like a collective practice of everyone within the social group the way that for example some indigenous societies in um north america saw child rearing as like a collective practice and it also separated women in particular from other women and so it was much more difficult for women to resist not only capitalism but the patriarchal control that went with it. Women were made property, women were kicked out of the guilds. In an earlier chapter, I talk about the sort of violent repression where some women's

collective spaces, whether it was some of the heretical religious movements or groups of women that lived together in cities were destroyed through campaigns of sexualized violence and things like that. So it made it a lot harder for women to resist and women's labor, which was once collective, is now individual. And it really becomes this sort of mindset. And immediately where my mind's going when I was reading that question, I don't know why, but I was thinking of, there's a new movie coming on, I cannot remember what it's called. It looks terrible.

But in the trailer, I think it's Gerard Butler who's in it. There's some sort of disaster happening. I can't remember what type of disaster. All I remember from this movie trailer is like, people are going up to Greenland or something. And Gerard Butler, who's like the patriarchal heroic dad figure,

is saying, like, I need to get my family onto that ship or whatever it is, or plane, whatever's taking the people to Greenland. And that, for me, really symbolizes like this bourgeois ideology of the family, right? That it's the one heroic dad protecting his family and just fuck everybody else who's going to die in whatever disaster this is. As long as Gerard Butler and his family are safe, then the rest of us watching this movie are going to be happy and we're not going to care

about everybody else who dies. So it's really that sort of like dividing up of society. And so rather approaching problems, whether they're disasters or like capitalism, the pandemic, rather than approaching them as these broad societal issues that require collective efforts in order to change and revolution in particular, looking at them as individual problems. that we face in our individual families. And this goes into a lot of the ways that we've responded in the pandemic

or the bourgeois state as a tool of capitalism has responded in keeping schools open so that both women and men can continue to labor outside of the home and keep the economy going while at the same time promoting that sort of natalist idea and kicking out undocumented children and unaccompanied minors or putting them in cages, right? And part of, I mean, I'm not American, so I don't pay as much attention to the American elections. But I do remember some of the discourse on Twitter being like, you know, if you don't vote for Biden or if you're not voting, then you don't care about the children in cages. Like one of the reasons we have to vote for Biden is because there's children in cages. And yet absolutely nothing has changed.

If not, it's gotten worse while Biden has been in office, which, you know, is pretty predictable if you're looking at it, right? And what really needs to happen if we actually care about children is a revolution and a return to, like, collectivist child-rearing practices. The other thing that this creation of nuclear families and that division of society has done is that it's allowed sexual violence and physical violence to sort of flourish in these individual families. It's given both bourgeois men and working class men a place to practice violence and enact violence

on those who are seen as their property, who are seen as below them, and to vent some of those frustrations by taking it out on others. That's a lot harder to do in a collectivist society when you have others watching and others involved in the raising of your children. So the child can then talk to someone and say, you know, that this is happening, right? A collective approach really goes a long way to preventing violence in the family, whereas this nuclear family, bourgeois ideology, does a really good job at hiding violence in the family, while at the same time propping up the family as the,

one place that we're supposed to find love and emotional fulfillment and attachment, right? So, yeah, I have so much to say about this, but that's a good chunk. For sure, really quickly just bouncing off what you said, this collective conception of child raising as well can counter not only the obvious, most explicit forms of violence, but all the various nuanced forms of childhood trauma that comes with being stuck with one or two people solely as your caregivers and raisers. It also does a lot to solve the problem of the unpaid and ultra-exploitation of women's labor in the home, right? Whereas reform under capitalism has just led to this exploitation of migrant workers.

Or, you know, one of the other ways that capitalism has attempted to solve that problem is through creating new devices for women to use in the home from that. vacuums to washing machines and things like that. That was supposed to solve the problem of women's labor in the home. But what it led to, again, is exploitation of women in countries outside of the imperialist center, who are the ones building these machines for, like, absolutely shit wages in, like, these export processing zones and things like that. so yeah every attempt at reform in solving this problem has has just made things worse for women

in other parts of the world and led to other forms of exploitation and then just to get at what you were saying about the way children are used against us is just the like often the framing of people who push for revolution as being sort of unsafe and and not good for children not caring about the children like you can't bring your children to protest they're going to get tear gas and that's blamed on parents rather than the state who's tear gassing everyone and things like that. And or even, you know, that sort of individualization of responsibility, like if you're not working enough, if you're if you're spending your time organizing, then you're not working

to make enough money to support your children and their education, right? So even one child now is so expensive, especially to save for their education, you're working like multiple jobs just to be able to do that and both parents working multiple jobs just to be able to do that right under this capitalist system and it also reminds me of the book which Josh actually recommended to me Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marman Silco it's one of my favorite books of all time so good but in that book um there's uh an indigenous woman who's engaged in sort of Marxist organizing in the Global South. And she talks about how almost what she loves about Marxism is his love for children.

And she says that his love for children comes across when you read Capital, for example, and you see how much time he spends documenting the outrageous abuses and violences against the child laborers under the factory system, right? he's you read that part of capital and you feel this incredible anger and sense of outrage that this is happening and so she talks about in the book that it it for her in a sense it is about a love for children right that's beautiful and uh yeah marks was a great dad you know everything you hear about him he was he loved his kids so deeply he lost many kids way too early but all of his kids have always said that they absolutely adored him and loved him. And I think that's important.

It says something about somebody. It's important. And it's reflected in his work, as you said. And I just wanted to really double down to that point you said, Johanna, about bourgeois families and like the statarian idea that they're the largest relevant social unit and anything bigger than that is irrelevant or meaningless, like society itself. But the bourgeois family really does become particularly for the male patriarch simply an extension of his self and his property. So you can see how the family gets morphed and molded into a very capitalistic thing underneath that mode of production, and a patriarchal thing, of course, as well. And that was an explicit legal principle for years. In British common law, it was called Coverture, where the family was

seen as one legal person, and the legal person was the male patriarch. Yeah, very explicit it right there. Yeah. So later on on necrocapitalism, you argue, quote, so our job remains, as we have maintained since the outset of this project, to remind our comrades, friends, and fellow travelers of the necessity to foreground the fact of the protracted civil war and the meaning of the general antagonism, to treat liberals and reactionaries as our enemies, because they are both invested in this pitiless state of affairs, end quote. So can you maybe talk a little bit about what the protracted civil war is, what it means, and then how the particular antagonisms between liberals and conservatives obscure the general antagonism between social classes?

I think, you know, for me, personally, and again, like, I don't think I have as much background as I need to answer this question, but I firmly believe, like, from a proletarian feminist approach that protracted people's war. is the only way forward to achieve the revolutionary change necessary to get rid of capitalism. And that comes less from knowing exactly what that might look like and more from knowing the failures of these attempts at reform, the failures and the traps at, especially like again in like the the women's movement is what I know a lot about historically so that's what I go back to right every attempt at reform has just created exploitation for women

elsewhere or other types of exploitation it's just moved the exploitation around it hasn't solved the actual problem at the heart of things which is the division between the proletarian and a bourgeoisie, right? And I think in many ways, the, just the sections in particular talking about the American electoral system, the election, and that trap of, you know, voting for Trump or voting for Biden, which essentially in my mind, and again, I am not American, they lead to the same thing. Either way, it leads to upholding capitalism. The changes are very minor. And in my mind, the structure of capitalism, the way it operates, is always heading towards fascism. So whether you vote for Biden now and maybe hold back a little of that fascism for a moment, it's always going to head that way.

It's liberalism that sets the stage for fascism to occur later. And so liberalism isn't really an answer to fascism. because fascism is in many ways built into, or the drive to fascism is in many ways built into the capitalist system, right? So, but I think Devin can say more to that. I think on this point, if I remember where this takes place in the book, it's that particular passage is it's, it's that shift from, I'm going to look at the table of contents again for our sections,

because usually I can, I can sort of predict. So it's that kind of shift that goes. on from pacification to capture and part of that again we're trying to chronicle these things as they happen and part of it is to say in the midst of one of the biggest uprisings in American history that if it's not one of the biggest it's at least the most monumental since the 1960s right in terms of the scope and the amount of people and the different locations where it was all happening and the idea is to say if there were going to be reformist effects that come out of this this would be the place where this happens. And if it doesn't, that should be a lesson in telling us the

limitation to that. As Johanna said there, one thing I would add to this that I think is really important, especially for understanding, especially when we talk about fascism, is to also talk about there was a certain analysis I think came out of this kind of perspective of this picture of Trumpism or whatever. And it does adhere quite a bit to some very dogmatic forms of Marxist thinking, is that the capitalist class already captures everything in advance and that those kinds of, it's a foregone conclusion that they've already co-opted something that's going on or there's some kind of way they can spin it to their own advantage.

And I really think the summer and winter, fall in winter, the second half of 2020 especially, I think you can see across the globe that the capitalist class was subject to crisis too, and there were weaknesses there that were exposed, And there were ways in which we saw, I mean, I don't know the exact way to phrase it, but I think we could say we could see rifts between transnational capital or capital that thought the way forward is those transnational paths.

And those that thought the way to stabilize this is through a nationalist path. And then, of course, there's the social movement's all happening in connection to this. So, you know, I think there's a big, messy picture. and one advantage of this book is trying to capture just some of those currents that are present there. Now, I know the phrase general antagonism, just one last thing is that's pulled out of Harney and Moten because we were reading, a few of us were reading Harney and Moten's under Commons through that, and they talk about the general antagonism. And so that's to say, amidst all the other antagonisms, the general antagonism is always to point back to the class antagonism.

And so it's used in that sense to say, you know, there is an aspect of that same discussion of the protracted civil war is that class antagonism is itself, class war, carried out even though people don't recognize it as such. And this goes back to the concept of the idealism there is there's a certain form of idealism to see capitalist stability as social peace, when really it's a continuing class war in ways that we, that it's not just. pulling out, you know, to use the 19th century metaphor, it's not just pulling out the pitchforks at every way, shape, and form, but it's ongoing. And that's, I think that's how the phrase general antagonism is adopted out of Harney and Moten in that. If I remember right, I think that they even pull it from, I think it's one reference in angles or something like this. If I'm, I could be remembering wrong, but I mean, that's what I think is just one more comment about that particular term is I think that's the lineage of it, if I remember correctly. Yeah, and just to speak really

quickly on the protracted civil war. Johanna, you talked about the need for protracted people's war as a solution. And I think, Devin, you're pointing in this direction that the protracted civil war, that concept goes back to Marx, which is the idea that under capitalism, the civil war, the war between classes is always ongoing. Sometimes it becomes more acute. Sometimes it's more dispersed. But what happens in the U.S. and in liberal democracies broadly, especially in the U.S., because a lot of our listeners will be from there, is that all these antagonisms, these contradictions, get filtered through the lens of liberal versus conservative. So the actual antagonisms, right, the ones between classes, the one between colonized and colonizer,

those are all obscured and in their place is given the liberal versus conservative box. And all of those things are then, you know, sort of funneled through that lens, which obscures and mystifies the truth of social conflict as opposed to demystifying it and bringing it out into the open. So I think that's really important to think about, and I think it also help hedges against this falling into the hope of reformation when you understand that this much bigger picture is at play. And so the idea of picking between the Democrats and the Republicans become sillier and sillier in the face of it. And obviously, as we've seen almost two years now, into the Biden presidency, with the Democrats in control of the House, the Senate, and the executive branches, that they still cannot do anything. and they're really not interested in doing anything because the fact that you have the specter of Trumpism

or the specter of them overturning Roe v. Wade it very much helps funnel their donor class into their pockets and get them reelected. They can't offer anything else, but they can say, hey, if you don't vote for us, the Republicans are going to take away your reproductive rights and they'll have fascism again, right? And so I don't know.

We have to see through that. And the sooner we see through it, the quicker we can actually come up with real solutions to our problem. One really important thing to highlight for that, though, is that every time they pull out the card of the reproductive rights, look back at the 1970s, and you can say, since the 1970s, how have reproductive rights improved versus how have they been whittled away? And there's never response to that answer. Well, we've got to protect it. Well, you've never advanced it. And so because you've never advanced it, in fact, that produces the conditions for it whittling away.

And yet, 40, 50 years later, they're still using the same canard of, well, we've got to. we have to protect Roe v. Wade. Well, what have you done in the last 40 years to do that? Exactly. All you do is say, we're going to stick with the status quo for four years. And then we're, and then we're going to, the election's going to come around. And believe me, there's Canadian versions of this. And I think I'm in a, you know, I know we have a list of questions. I'm giving away how this works sometimes. There's a question about environmentalism. So I'm really waiting for that one. Because Johanna and I both live in British Columbia. Yeah. This is a serious issue with a social democratic.

party. So we can circle back to that one for sure. Interesting. But yeah, just to add when we're talking about reproductive rights, it's reproductive rights for who, right? And the movement for access to abortion was really rooted in like a bourgeois feminism, a bourgeois white feminism that focuses on women's rights to choose. So to choose to participate in sex work or to choose to get an abortion, and they frame them these issues as the feminist issue that is supposed to represent all women. When we actually look at the experiences of, in particular, black and indigenous women in both United States and Canada and women in many parts of the world, one of the bigger issues is

actually fighting against coercive or... forced sterilization, right? Forced sterilization, even in recent years, there's been a number of scandals in Canada where indigenous women have come forward in the like 2010s having experienced coerced sterilization. It's actually depressingly very widespread. My mom was coercively sterilized when after she gave birth to my brother. And we lived in a northern region that had a large indigenous population. So I think it was just common practice to coercibly sterilize women while they were giving birth. And it's just been buried.

And so while, you know, rights to abortion are important, this is not the only or even the most important, I would say, issue when it comes to women's reproductive control over our own bodies. Yeah, well said. I just really quickly, I have a niece in high school and I have a daughter in middle school. Both of them are very interested in feminism, right? And but they're both obviously coming to their social consciousness as Black Lives Matter and the women march during the Trump era. And but, you know, in our culture, it's very liberalized, a girl boss, slay, you know, Kamala and Hillary sort of feminism. But, you know, one thing that's been nice is I've been able to intervene in that and develop a more proletarian feminism, re-center class, re-center women around the world that are the

victims of, you know, a girl boss Hillary Clinton's imperialism, for example, and to sort of broaden that. So to see those sort of puzzle pieces fall into place, it's really rewarding and a beautiful thing to see. I love that. For sure. I want to talk about the subjectivity because I don't know if either of you wrote this exact part or if you have anything to say on it, but can either of you kind of explain the sort of subjectivity that is created and maintained under necrocapitalism and how that subjectivity impacts the so-called radical left. So the question of subjectivity, I think, really goes throughout this book. It's been something that's been important to, you know, all the books

that I've written. I'm going to admit this and I didn't, you know, we made a decision to say it's all collectively authored and that we're not going to attach names to it and people want to try to figure out they can. I'm pretty sure I'm not the one who wrote this particular piece. And I'm saying this because I might say something that's not the same as what that particular essay says, just because my own work has been so connected to looking at subjectification, right, the process of creating a subject. And in my own view, which comes out of, you know, a lot of the French philosophy from the 70s and 80s, like Elam Badu and Jacques-Hancierre, even Sartre or Bois. is that there's a way in which subjectivity for them, true subjectivity means the kind of

creation of a collective subject that challenges the status quo or the way things are. And that it's not just everyone is a subject in the historical sense of, you know, I'm a subject who's an individual who does X, Y, or Z. So there's, there's kind of a difference because some of the description in that chapter is a description of a kind of everyday subjectivity rather than revolutionary subjectivity. So I think that's an important part to seeing that part of the discussion where a lot of it is the way in which, and it comes back to some of the previous questions we've looked at is that the subjectivity we're looking at under neoliberal policy. And we say specifically policy, again, to say it's one way of implementing capitalism or under necrocapitalism

if it has some kind of policy aspect to it is, of course, a very individualistic bourgeois sense of subjectivity. One that I think the more I work on this to myself for my own pursuits of trying to sort things out is deeply attached to that concept of the basic family unit that is patriarchal. I think it's incredibly important. It helps us really understand certain aspects of settler colonialism and how it was affected that aren't necessarily through the pure use of force, but rather the decomposition of indigenous structures of kinship and governance. And so one of the ways that this impacts our discussions is we can't assume an uncritical concept of the subject because it's tied up with those things.

And I think that's really important. And the other aspect I would just say writ large is, and my own work is really pushing on this, is looking at, you know, the kind of stuff I'm working on right now that only I get to look at. so I'm just hinting at these things is really, again, posing the challenge of not trying to import in the midst of this kind of point of the present conjuncture, which is we see strikes happening, we see whatever, there's a very strong temptation to rewrite political struggle back into the terms of the labor aristocracy, which is overwhelmingly male and white, and in the parameters in which they've set those terms and and their default concepts that a lot of people have without realizing that the demands and and again I work for union presently and so I'm not just saying well scrap unions

unions are bad but I'm saying people that are involved in these kinds of struggles even at that very basic ground level union struggle that happens there need to be conscientious of these aspects and the assumptions that go into it now it really presses on me because now that I've just said what I do for my work presently, is that, is that there's still ways where these things that look like purely financial gains or benefits, they're traded against certain things. And these things are racialized. They are gendered. And we have to be able to start. They are, they're ablest in some ways. And I don't mean that in the, you know, there's strikes. We get that kind of like bad faith, a criticism that strikes are ablest or something

where it's like, but that means that you don't have a connection to how the strike think works out and to the ways that those things are accounted for quite frequently and quite often with virtual strikes with alternative forms of work making sure the strike pay is available to all kinds of people but there are prevailing ways this gets pushed that flaps back into just look the core is if all these strikes pan out and people go back to work and whatever there's still some prevailing issues that have been raised throughout the years that if we lose them we're we're losing major things, which is there's still a large part of the labor aristocracy, or as Broma calls it in a pamphlet I really like, the worker elite, and the worker elite still

has some very basic components attached to it. And one of those major components is that it is, it lacks solidarity with those below them and those struggles. And that's a really important aspect to it. So it's, it doesn't think strategically beyond its own interests. And then there's an aspect where right now that we that we would say is a present danger is when these strikes resolve and these people win and some of them are winning right their organizations are winning against their employers that when they win they go now we're back to normal now we're ready to jump on board with this you know it's the american project we're back on board with those are dangerous things because what they mean is they put aside all the all the other gains that we would have

in being mindful of of setting these parameters and and pushing us back this is This is where labor starts pushing towards a return to normalcy that we reject. Yeah, incredibly well said. I want to make a point about subjectivity, and it's only sort of tangentially related to your point, but I think it's worth saying, which is that on the left, a lot of us talk about capitalist realism as a sort of confine in our imaginary, not being able to think beyond the confines of capitalism. And that in and of itself is a sort of subjectivity. And when internalized by the so-called radical left, has the effect, as we were talking about earlier,

of tending to shoehorn them back into electoralism because the capitalist imaginary says if you want change this is how you do it and if you want radical change that's impossible that's monstrous all the things we've already talked about and so even people that really feel themselves to be radical and might even have some truly revolutionary values and principles tend to be shoehorned back

into this playing Democrats' first Republican game and then just the cynical weaponization of individual identity against collective action which we've seen taken on board by liberals and by the Democratic Party such that they'll actually use the language of social justice as a weapon against those who are involved in a collective class and anti-imperialist politic, which is an innovation of liberalism that we've sadly been able to see develop over the last 10 years or so. And it's interesting, Devin, that you used abelism because if we look at the biggest source

of disability in our society, it is capitalism. It is workplace injuries. It is the effects of working in certain ways sitting or standing for your entire working day of life, like your lifetime that impacts the body and breaks down joints and things like that. And it's also like I think in my mind a lot of the mental health issues that so many of us face, if not all of them, come from the capitalist system and the violence that is is part of inherently part of it, right? So, yeah. And the low self-esteem, the low sense of self-worth when you don't rise to what capitalist

society says is success, wealth, status, et cetera. It really impacts people. And the profound sense of stress of trying to survive capitalism, to just survive, to make enough money to survive, and, you know, that constant stress over our entire lifetime And there's more and more research showing how horrible stress is for our bodies and health, right? So not to mention like chemicals and other things that we're exposed to in workplaces or as the result of like dumping from these capitalist corporations, right? And imperialist wars and as one of the biggest sources of pollution too, right? Absolutely, absolutely.

Well, Johanna, I want to be very sensitive to. your to your schedule here. So a couple more questions if you still have a few more minutes. So the very last sentence of on necrocapitalism states, no matter what the figureheads of imperialism say about justice, and no matter how many times they project a faux optimism about things getting better, only the political rule of the proletariat can stop the rampage of necrocapitalism, the rampage, rather, of necrocapitalism, end quote. Great way to end this project. But with that in mind is sort of zooming out. Can each of you tell us what the primary take-home message of this project ultimately is, or put another way, what you hope readers take home from this project?

The last piece that we wrote was the epilogue. So that this, it's a reminder that this project is still available online for free as the blog, although I'd pitch the book and say the book is edited. So it's improved because of that. And we did write an epilogue that that is only in the book itself. And it was, what we wanted to provide, we closed early and we acknowledged that we closed early. We said what our goal was was to get to the point where there was a pivot where we moved from the pandemic to the concept of the end of the pandemic, even though we could say, look, we could see a lot of developments coming where it doesn't look like it's the end. But there were practical reasons why we needed to end. There's work. There are several, several

people participating have family commitments or health problems or or various other things coming up that are beyond their control. And trying to keep our aggressive schedule was very difficult to do. We did 32 chapters that pretty much, you know, never, never stretched more than I think two and a half weeks. And it's a difficult schedule to maintain and to keep everyone involved. And it started to narrow and we said the core of this is to be able to chronicle what what this period was and contribute to a kind of historical memory of this as it played out because it's so difficult and in retrospect retrospect can be very important but there we we always thought one of the core components of this was to chronicle because it was so foggy and so hard to remember

where things happened and and like I said I found myself um going back and rereading it and just being shocked at, oh, that was in May or, oh, that was in, that was in August or that was in November. And even reading other people, you know, could lead to that as well. And we wrapped because we said, what we believe we have here is a fairly coherent structure with a number of tools that we can apply hence forward or other people can apply hence forward. And that in that regard, it accomplished what we wanted it to set out. That we wanted it to portray or model certain ways of analysis or sorting things out. And in that regard, I feel like it was successful in doing that.

I still find myself, because I only wrote, you know, I'm one of six authors. I still find myself going back quite a bit to reread what the other people wrote, to remind myself what they said, because I found that they had lots of good tools in there. And it's the downside of the collective part is that I want to give everyone credit, but I still want to play coy for a while and have some fun with them. that I've had people they've written me and they've said, oh, I know this and this is you. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're wrong. And if they're right, I tell them. Oh, yeah, you're right. That's the piece. Sometimes they're wrong and I'll say, well, actually you're wrong there,

but I'm flattered that you thought that that was something I wrote because I really liked that analysis. And as much as I'd like to take credit, I can't for that particular thing. So that was one of the core aspects of this. I think I'll leave it there because otherwise I'd start talking about the actual points in the epilogue and we don't really need to do that. I really encourage people to read it because one thing at rereading it did help me summarize is at the end there is a bit of a big picture discussion of if we're looking at the end of neoliberalism as a policy of the implementation of capital that let's not fall into these traps or patterns of or of mistakes that we could make for thinking again on that same model I've already said about the concept of

austerity of saying the return to normalcy is actually a victory. Johan, anything you want to say about the take-home message? Yeah, for me, it's really about, you know, pointing out, I think in the beginning, one of the main goals was pointing out that the pandemic isn't necessarily something new. It's all of the conditions for the pandemic to happen have been laid for decades by capitalism

from like the clearing further and further into sort of untouched natural areas to take resources which leads to contact with different animals and into the spread of the diseases from animals to humans, for example, to, you know, globalization, which means that

the virus can literally spread like that because of how networked we are and how easy it is just to move things and certain people across borders, right? And the imperative to keep all of that going despite the need to take certain measures to to shut down the spread of disease, right? Like keeping the economy going and things like that. At all costs. Yeah, the whole, all of the conditions for this pandemic were set before it happened. And unless there's radical change, it's very likely that another pandemic will happen. It's just the question is when, right?

Scientists were predicting this pandemic for decades before it happened as well, right? So they're, you know, it's built into the function of capitalism and imperialism. And I think one of the key lessons of the book is that we need to organize and take down capitalism. For me, that's the main lesson. We need to destroy capitalism and build something different because this is going to, this isn't going to be the last pandemic. under capitalism. It's going to keep happening, and it will get worse and worse. Yeah, not the last pandemic, certainly not the last crisis, and all the problems that we want to solve can only truly, fully, ultimately be solved with the transcendence of the capitalist

mode of production and its social relations. Looking forward, and particularly in light of other looming crisis, particularly climate change. And I know you say you both live in BC. I have a really, my best friend lives in Seattle, and I was actually up in Seattle for that historic heat wave this past summer. So that crisis is already here and going to get worse every single year for the rest of our lives. So how will or can the concept of necrocapitalism continue to be useful for Marxists when we look down the barrel of that gun and others? Well, what we see like for me just to start is like even the way of approaching like the earth and the environment, Instead of understanding the earth and the world around us as made up of living things, of a living system, right?

The earth itself is a living organism made up of other living organisms. Capitalism approaches all of these as things that are only valuable if they're dead, right? Trees are valuable if they're dead and cut down. Minerals are valuable if they're pulled out of the earth, right? So the functioning of the ecosystem as a whole is not valuable to capitalism. And again, that also plays into imperialism and colonialism and the myth of Teranolius, right? This idea that land that isn't being used is like fallow, right, to use the language of John Locke, that it's just going to waste and that we need to improve in quotations,

because that, again, is Locke's language. And I think at this point have realized that we are not improving anything. We're making it worse. We're destroying everything through this system where we are assigning an economic value to these living things, a living thing as in the earth and the ecosystems that's more valuable under capitalism if it is dead. I moved from the east coast to the west coast of Canada this summer for work, and I drove the entire way, which Google Maps said was like 25% of the perimeter of the globe.

Wow. So that was kind of cool. But for over half of that drive, which took me 10 days, there was so much smoke in the air that I couldn't see like beyond a few feet in front of me in the car because the wildfires were, you know, in BC they were particularly bad on the way. west coast of Canada, but they actually stretched like far into the interior. So I was driving through like the sort of necrocapitalism, the effects of necrocapitalism right there in destroying the planet. Yeah. And just really quickly, I was actually, I flew into Denver during last summer during the where Denver, Colorado had the worst air quality in the world on that day because of the wildfires in Colorado, but also mostly mostly outweigh.

coming through and I couldn't even see the you know and the plane looking out at the wing I couldn't see the end of the wing because of the smoke in the sky it was outrageous there were days where I would go outside and if I didn't have a mask on it after like two breaths it felt like I just smoked Shisha and like that dizzy feeling that's what it would happen just from the air Devin do you have anything to say about climate change or anything that Johanna touched on yeah so I'll just read for a second the it's angles right it's the epigree since I mentioned it earlier, I'll just read it and it says, let us not, however, flatter ourselves over much on account of our human conquest over nature,

for each such conquest takes its revenge on us. And I think that really touches on those concepts of the deepening exploitation of natural resources. And I think that there's one other aspect where there are two ways that's really important for this, is that again, like we mentioned, that the new Democratic Party, the NDP, is the governing party in the province of British Columbia. And they are all in on climate catastrophe because they're pushing through pipelines. They're sending, you know, the RCMP to, you know, to attack whatsoever land defenders and various other groups doing land defense and things like this. And so when people say things like social democracy is the thing to bail us out yeah like widespread logging and

especially the old growth forest just like they're going full steam ahead with that people so there's those environmental concerns um that are that are there and when people say social democracy is the answer we effectively have what is supposed to be the social democratic party in canada in our position of governance. It's committed tons of mistakes when it comes to dealing with COVID-19, and it follows the Swedish model of labor discipline. And so it, in fact, affects fairly major labor discipline under its own rule in line with all the other parties, with the exception of many of the organized labor groups feel like there should be an affinity and are in some ways unwilling to challenge the relationships that they've built with that party. So that's one way in which this really impacts,

you know, the day-to-day life of those of us in British Columbia. And we're supposed to be living in the, you know, the social democratic province. And I tell people when I talk to them that are outside the province, I say, if you ever want to be disabused of the notion that the NDP is different, you just need to move to British Columbia. It only took me, you know, a few months before I was already like, holy crap. You know it, but then when you experience, it at that day-to-day level, it really drives at home in that regard, right? Daily practice is guided by their system of governance there, which is supposed to be the panacea for the reformist.

And instead, you know, like I said in one of my pamphlets, every major party in Canada is part of the party of oil. And so there's no distinction there. Now, there's a second half about the question about climate change that I think can be answered here where necrocapitalism does, could continue to matter. um is that of course we're going to have a situation of climate refugees um if the if if and when the climate continues to to bring extreme weather into places there's going to be displacement um i've seen people say what's happening in british columbia is the is the future um but i'm like that's

the present of course you know that you know how these rhetorics work look it's the future happening here and it's the present here there are people that are that are refugees they're moving from place to place to avoid fires and flooding and displacement. And for much of the province where it's not affected, there's still that push for business as usual. It really, for many of the criticisms I might have about how higher education is a bubble, there's a certain perspective of being able to watch that push to normalcy continuously happen in our sector as everything else is shifting where they say, no, no, your thing is still going. You're staying, your thing doesn't change.

You're going to be a point of stability in the midst of all these crises. When we have schools that can't function and operate and they're going online, they're saying, look, in the midst of your house is flooding or you're displaced, that your place needs to get back online and even be in person in a couple weeks. With profound flaws in infrastructure that they're saying won't change over time, they're going to take months to correct highways being washed out and things like this. I'm going to refer to it since I live in the lower mainland is up north, even though I know that it's not as north as what I mean is.

But up north where some of these are happening and there's colleges, I know that there's serious service disruptions and they're still being pushed to operate as normal. And I think that if you're in a certain sector, even though I might have criticisms of how bougie that sector can be in terms of its workers' ideology or its internal understanding of its state of affairs, you still have to be able to remember, we do have a window onto something. And post-secondary education in British Columbia, they're really asserting that we're one of those paths to normalcy where we need to continue to operate throughout all these

things as if there aren't these other problems, which for me makes it very strange because in some ways my own job and my own place where I live is not seeing these disruptions and we're still trying to respond to many of these disruptions that are crossed the province and affect our sector. And that was a bit of a diversion from the big picture of the climate refugee. We commonly think of people moving from one place to another in the terms of crossing borders. We have a worry of xenophobia. We have a worry of what at the end of the book we called it democratic chauvinism, which is going to say things like, well, we're not xenophobic, but we need to practice some kind of pragmatism that effectively works as xenophobia, but doesn't

come off as badly and appeals loosely to worker elite ideological principles of saving jobs or something rather than seeing borders as a constant source of arbitrage for these kinds of things that actually work against those. So there's a lot of, again, a lot of present threats. The last thing I'd say is, again, everything is about revealing a certain aspect. And so maybe as climate change advances, we'll want to say there's a different kind of aspect that can bring this to us where the phrase necro-capitalism may not do that. But again, the core component is always that capitalism is the general antagonism, class war under capitalism, is the general antagonism, and that all these things that are presented as external or natural disasters are

connected to that general antagonism. They just press on it and reveal its internal contradictions. Beautifully said. Yeah, I mean, you know, the last two questions for me as a takeaway message, And one of the things that comes out of this analysis on necrocapitalism is that increasingly, in order for this global capitalist system to continue, particularly in the face of climate change, more and more and more death will be absolutely necessary. And last year, the ruling class, whether they're conscious of it or not, realize that Americans at least will put up with a lot of fucking death as long as capital never stops flowing and the more well-off privileged people are more or less okay. and that's that's what one of the lessons is uh i just want to say thank you both so much for coming on thank you for this project and all your other contributors it's really interesting i think it's very useful um to read this work to see how you can analyze an ongoing developing situation in the present as well as the power of collectives to work through complexity as opposed to

simply individuals and i think that gives it an interesting flare as well and broadens the analysis more than any one person could possibly do. So before I let you go, though, can you please let me know where people can find, obviously on necrocapitalism is free online, but there's also a book that's really cool, a beautiful cover art, where they can find that, and then where they can find each of you online as well. Well, you can find the book at left wingbooks.net. It's widely, it's available through other sources, but I would always encourage people

if they can to order directly from the publisher there. because, you know, it's a small publisher, Kersplebadeb. So it's the book side, it's the store side of Krasblebadeb. And Krasblebidab is committed to, you know, it has a very specific mission attached to it, which is publishing work from people that are in prisons or people that are interested in armed struggle. And so, you know, the person who runs it has very much been committed to that. And, of course, it's a small press for that result because, you know, they're not been saying, well, let's pepper it with some, you know, how do we change the Democratic Party or something. So I guess I'm sub-tweeting in real life, some of the other leftist publishers for what they do to sort of fund some of that.

And then eventually a few of them, I'm not going to call them out today since this is the end. But a few of them, you know, they've lost sight of the entire mission of where they started because now they're just cranking out those books. for their for their market share i guess um so that's where you can find the book um and i'd encourage people to get it from there um you can find me at on twitter at at devon z shaw um i think that's the twitter handle i'll link to it just be sure that yeah uh you can find me there um and so i'm often on there these days just because i i tend to get home from work and i'm like oh i don't want to even get started with the discourse um but you know i i try to keep with people and keep up with things and answer questions. If people send me good faith questions,

you know, I try to make sure that I can answer those for people. So, you know, that's one place you can contact me. Cool. Johanna? Yeah, so my Twitter is at Comrade underscore Joe J-O underscore May, M-A-Y. Used to have my real name, but I was looking for jobs this past year. And so decided to finally, after like years of having my real name, I finally changed it. But it's still, I mean, my real name is Johanna May Black, so it's still pretty close. Wonderful. And I will link to all of that in the show notes so people can find it as quick as possible. Reach out if they have questions or at least engage with the text on necrocapitalism. Thank you again so much. This has been wonderful. You're both always welcome back on Rev. Left anytime. Thank you for having us.

Yeah, thank you. Mama As a spider in my room I said Mama as a spider in my room Hey girl Why you're still in bed

I'm going to buy you real good Until you're dead I said I live here man Who are you Mr. Spider He said Hesh up, girl

And hold my hand So I yell, mama There's a spider in my room I said Mama There's a spider in my room You said Quit screaming, girl

You're going to give me a headache I'm going to crawl up and down you I'll make you say I said stop, I don't want to go to bed. All right, so now it's just me and Devin. I have a couple questions we didn't get to in the main episode that I wanted to toss out there and make sure that we cover in this little post script, if you will. So the first question is, can you discuss the demand by the Biden campaign,

now the administration and by the Democratic Party more broadly for a return to normalcy what such a call obscures or mystifies about the nature of the system and how capital is using this crisis to quote unquote tighten its grip so there's one way we handled it in chapter 29 so chapter 29 is the two errors of normalization and so we catalog two two temptations there might be going forward let's as things normalized. We all hope someday the pandemic will end, right? But of course, most of this is about the beginning of the end, right, and the path to normalization that's offered through that. And, you know, subsequently since the book, of course, there's, you know, reopening and the way

that the Delta variant affected that and affected that path to normalcy. It clearly showed that the pandemic wasn't over. But there's still two core things to this criticism, which was the first was from a radical perspective, we need to refuse appeals to the return to normalcy because going back to what was normal was already bad. And there are many ways we can say this. We can say, of course, there's capitalist exploitation. Of course, if you go back to February of 2020 in British Columbia. There was the there was the RCMP raid on the Wetsuette and land defenders in Unistotin. So going right back to that, of course, is problematic. And in ways we are back to that. Because that's again in the news and again, what is going on. You know, it's hard not to think that

the floods and the disruption of the public infrastructure for travel in British Columbia led to the strategic thinking of the RCMP deciding to go into the blockading that the land defenders were doing because they knew that solidarity movements or other organizers would be hindered in traveling to assist in that. So it's hard to miss that particular part, right? So we have capitalist exploitation. We have indigenous dispossession. But there's already also other aspects of capitalism that are emerging as points of criticism that we have to remember, especially if we're thinking about climate change and long-term, long-term environmental effects of capitalism that, for instance, in the work of Andreas Maum,

who we talk about in Chapter 29, if we just go back to normalcy, we just go back to the realm of fossil capital, as he calls it. And he says in his book called Fossil Capital, he says the thesis that drives this analysis is that globally mobile capital will speed up the consumption of fossil energy through its perpetual drive to maximize surplus value. He says that's not what it's aiming to do. It's not aiming to make the environment worse, but it's its own attempt. Remember, in capitalism and competition, people are following, how do I keep afloat by maximizing the expropriation of surplus value?

Well, the means for that involve, you know, fossil fossil fuel, right? going right back to that, it's just going right back into that perpetual cycle. It's going right back into pursuing resources further and further into what might have been untapped in natural areas or even you could say areas where there were still in some places like, for instance, rainforest, where there's still indigenous stewardship. They're pushing in there and displacing indigenous peoples and then exploiting those those areas for for natural resources. So it's going right back to that is deeply problematic.

So that's why you'd want to say we want to refuse returning to normalcy. And then the other part about this is the return to normalcy is another author I was reading as we were going through this. And a few of us were reading was Angela Metropolis. So she published a book called Pandemonium. And it was building on some of her prior work that was talking about one of the core components to this again is we treat it as this, you know, it's a natural disaster or it's a natural phenomenon that we don't have control of. And she says, and I'll just quote this and read it

here so that, you know, we have what she says, because I think she says it better. And we've been on for a while. So, you know, I could stop drifting and rambling. She writes, what prevailing understandings of neoliberalism have obscured is the importance to capitalist extraction and accumulation of a political economic boundary between the demos, the ostensibly proper subject of political representation and lawmaking, and the practices of managing properly productive populations. And so as she highlights it, if we go back to that, we're going back to that kind of situation where there is a narrower strip of people that are supposed to be within the ambit of citizenry or political subjectivity, and a much larger group of people who may have

we could say dejure protections, right? But they don't have those de facto or in practice. And so they are indeed subject to these forms of oppression. And they're not considered to be properly those that were that these kinds of governments, these governments are concerned about. And so those are the aspects like you'd say things like those populations who are marginalized within our societies who are subject to premature death under these conditions. So that's why we want to refuse normalcy in that sense, because we're just going back to that.

And so the second thing that I think we have to refuse and recognize in an appeal to normalcy that we need to refuse this is that we must not confuse, as we write on page 304, we must not confuse the deployment of equitable or perhaps more accurately, aspirationally equitable patterns of vaccination with underlying, transformations of social, political, or economic relations. And so I think a lot of people, this goes right back to the very beginning of the pandemic and our criticism of Zhechik said, oh, well, there were ways in which the economy got shut down or directed by the state. And Zhejik sort of, oh, that's kind of like communism and that's kind of like socialism.

And at the end of this pattern, you know, there's a real danger. let's say, for instance, patent waivers finally happen, right? And people confuse that as a victory against capitalism rather than a transformation of using that to stabilize the system because the perceived risk. And they'll say, fine, what we're doing here is moving, basically waving patents for a second is really an issue of redistribution of resources. But it's it's not getting at the core component of the means of production and who controls those, right? Because they'll say it's temporary or whatever. So that's why we would say the use or deployment of equitable patterns of vaccination or of resource distribution. Again, these are not

revolutionary in the sense that we mean revolutionary. Yeah, absolutely. Well said. And then there's another call to, okay, maybe we can't return to a normalcy, but we can return, we can have a new normal. And that's just really a more complicated, convoluted way of trying to get back to some sense of normalcy. But in both cases, it is, you know, carte blanche for capitalism continue to ravage everything it comes across. And that's really, I think the huge point of so much of this discussion and everything is there is an unlimited, infinite supply of people and institutions that will continue to mystify an obscure capitalism central role in creating. and mismanaging all of these crises and crises we've yet to face, and some we can't even possibly imagine on the horizon are coming our way. And so to get at the core of the problem is to, in most cases, become a revolutionary because you understand that these problems can never be

fully solved within the confines of this mode of production. The last question I wanted to ask, and I know this is really your area of expertise, if you will, which is this intersection between capitalism and fascism, and the pandemic was clearly an acute crisis point. And as you all point out on necrocapitalism, these moments of crisis are incredibly revealing, particularly in their revealing of the dysfunction within the ruling class, as well as areas of cooperation between different factions of the ruling class. You know, where do they disagree, where can they come together, where can they coordinate, etc. The tensions between national bourgeoisies and more international corporations, for example,

come into play as well with these ruling class disputes. Can you just talk about the role of crisis within capitalism, what the latest set of crises have revealed, and importantly, what fascism's relationship to capitalist crisis is? Yeah. So this was one thing that, as you know, I published a book in 2020, and we did talk a little bit about this when I was on the show in August, I think. Speaking of never remembering when things happened in August, and you had asked some questions like that. And a lot of my writing was trying to work through some of those issues as they arose. So, you know, one thing that I think is really important, again, as I said earlier, was just to say that sometimes in very dogmatic circles of Marxism,

remember, you got to criticize the worst and embrace the best of the critique, right? So there's always this aspect of saying, I don't buy this, but, you know, there are people out here to do this. And I don't think it actually represents a Marxist analysis very well, is that, you know, they'll kind of treat it like we're always already trapped. You know, Capital has already kind of hoodwinked us before we even get a chance and a chance to respond or whatever. And I think one thing we really should have seen throughout the last 18 months, God, it's almost two years, right? two years of this. Let's start saying two years. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. The two years of the pandemic is that what we saw is, I think, a really legitimate crisis within the capitalist ruling class itself and the ways in which it expands, you know, its power or it coalesces in hegemonic blocks, right? So, you know, it has some relation to the worker elite, to petty bourgeois, strata that are that are in jeopardy in the point of crisis um so i you know i went back and i was i've had a lot of interest in rereading you know marx's period marx's writings from the period of

the revolutions in the 1848 and onward you know so that's the 18th brumere i still think there's a lot to learn from that and i think a lot of it gets buried because people see that text and you start referencing it and the first thing they start saying is oh god here comes bonapartism or something like this. And they have various ways that they understand it. And then there's various subtexts for different ways that Marxism has splintered. And I think there's an important way where we have to put that aside and go back, because there's ways where Marx is describing in the midst of crisis,

how the hell did the ruling capitalist class try to get it back together in a position that was beneficial to itself, where eventually they could. it even if they needed that hegemony with other parts of society, how could they still play it to their advantage? And he, I think he has, you know, we, you always need to modernize terms. You need to stretch it, as I said. But there are ways in which I think that he's very perceptive and that his own view, if you read the class struggle of 1848, in class struggle in France in 1848, that text, right? 1848 to 1850 and the 18th premier, there's some subtle shifts of emphasis as it plays out, which I think is also an extremely helpful way of understanding

Marx's willingness to revise his own views, even though he doesn't quite trumpet it and say, I expect you to know this other essay published in a newspaper somewhere. His views are revising and changing over time as he's watching these patterns play out. So I think that's very instructive and helpful for this, because I think it's a good thing to say. say we see this role of crisis within capitalism and that this can be exploited by a lot of different things. And what we saw was a lot of this being exploited by far right movements. So those who know my work will know where I'm going with this. And those who don't, I'm in a briefly explained, is that my own position is connected to the three-way fight position, as articulated

on the three-way fight blog. And there's some core aspects to that is one of their core beliefs is that the three-way fight takes place between militant, anti-fascist, or revolutionaries writ large, and the system, which we sort of see as bourgeois liberalism. But as you know, there's, of course, caveats and complications to all these things. And then another side, which is what they view to be an insurgent far right. So by that, what they mean is it's not the picture of the classic line of Demetrov from 1935, the popular front line revived later by the Panthers in the late 1960s, again, as for a popular front, which was to locate fascism in a very narrow strata of capitalism

and the capitalist class. The most extremist terroristic one commandeers the system and exploits fascist movements on the ground via demigogy and things like this. And they reject that line and I reject that line for the more complicated picture that says there's a there are trans class um connections here so yes there is an aspect where if fascism as a social movement is going to gain traction somewhere part of that is going to be through collaborate class collaboration with um capitalists but they're not necessarily the ones who their first interest is in let's get the let's get the fascists running because they're doing typically you would say as a class overall the bourgeois seat does quite well under capitalism in its supposed social peace right so they're

not reaching for that but in periods of crisis there is that there is that those lines being drawn and in my view and in the view of the three-way fight is much of the ground troops or the social movement organizing on the ground is petty bourgeois and worker elite. and white, right? And male overall. And I think it's important to stress those characteristics because even if there are variations in those different groups, those are where the aspirations are cast, right? It's cast in making whiteness and settler colonialism work in a certain way to their advantage, having masculinity work, a reassertion of patriarchy, these kinds of things. And then there's the trans class alliance as it moves. Now, of course, the big thing that

happened, the book tracks and some of my other work tracks is in the middle of this crisis, a lot of even a lot of people were challenged in trying to suss out, well, where was, what were far right movements doing? And I interpreted Trump's, again, I think the important thing is tracking far right movements on the ground. And Trump tried to exploit an avenue of a path towards re-election that tried to pull what we would traditionally consider to be system oppositional groups that also organize in system oppositional ways, back towards system loyal vigilantism. And I said, no matter how this election plays out, we're going to be dealing with the ramifications of that going forward. And I think we see a lot of that. We see, we can see

the re-inscription of Kyle Rittenhouse and what he did as a kind of concept of system loyal vigilantism, right? You know, the upholding of, you know, certain values in this regard that the, at the same time, we see a push of right-wing movements and the Republican Party towards more far-right formations. Now, there's one last question that's always really important that these things are always fluid and moving, is that the key thing is that it really brought to my mind was to say, we really then are confronted with two problems. We have a an ideology that waivers between system loyal inclinations and system oppositional inclinations. And sometimes that rhetoric is empty.

Sometimes it's inflammatory and it's not meant to translate into organizational forms. At the same time, we have far-right movements that are organizing in the way that the three-way fight classically understands it, classically for an analysis for the last 20 years, is to say that it's an insurgent system-oppositional movement. movement that is organized in system oppositional ways. And so it is going to attack the system in some way, but the way that it attacks it in its organizational forms, its rejection of the Republican Party, its willingness to take up armed action that, for instance, remember, the Boogaloo Boys were shooting police, right? And so in many ways, that was viewed to be contradictory.

But it makes sense in if a group is organized as a system oppositional organizational group that's going to attack security forces, for example. And mainly it was trying to create an analysis that could look at these various gradations and try to identify these things as they're fluidly moving. And I think the biggest problem, so to conclude, is to say that the big criticism here is that liberal anti-fascists, so people that widely consider themselves to work within the electoral system who are against fascism. So they exist, and I don't want to say that they don't have, they have a coherent ideology, even though I believe it's incorrect.

And I'm going to explain why in a second is that largely for them the crisis was fascism taking power and that it was defeated electorally with the election of Biden and Biden's inauguration. And they said, all right, well, the immediate threat has passed. And now this problem can be dealt with, um, uh, ideologically. in extremist studies, studying extremism, and then through the security apparatus

and not understanding how that also redounds against left-wing movements, or maybe they're happy that it redounds. I know the security apparatus is pretty happy it redounds against leftist movements. But for your liberal anti-fascists, they're going to be confronted with the fact that when fascist movements reorganize and regroup,

that they're going to go, oh, well, I guess we just destroyed and undermine all the organizing from the previous few years through law enforcement, and then they're going to go, oh, shoot, how do we arrive at this again? Because they're not thinking organizationally. And so the criticism here is to say, they said, well, Trump lost, and so Trumpism is now in a box, and they white, you know, they wash their hands of it, and then they move forward. Well, the threat is passed.

And the main core problem that we're living in the aftermath of is that this is not past. It's in a stage of reorganization. And so the threat of fascism and the threat of far right movements and the continued threat that they pose to marginalized and oppressed communities within our society or, you know, within the communities we are in, that threat is ever present. And while it may be in a process of reorganization, it's not in a, there's no way we're in a moment where you'd say it's been defeated at this period. Yeah, that is really insightful and really helpful, particularly that rubric of system loyal versus system opposition on the far right, because we can see system loyal fascist formations in the form of the proud boys or the three percenters, right? they're especially the three presenters they see themselves as veterans police officers constitutionalists etc proud boys certainly see themselves as pro america uh whatever they they take that to mean but then you have system oppositional fascist movements that are more

intense like adam waffin the base various neo-nazi formations etc you know the the zog conspiracy theorists who think that you know the zionist occupied government and go back to the oklahoma city bombing etc. And so those that interplay and where there's porousness and where there's the Republican parties attempt to maybe turn slightly system oppositional far-right forces into system-loyal ones, but that comes at the cost of the Republican Party itself moving to the right, right, to lure them in. But there's also system loyalty and system opposition on the left. And I think with the specter of Trump in the past, but even in 2024 going forward, the Democrats, one of their co-optive strategies is to turn system-suspicious or system-oppositional

leftists into more system-loyal leftists that can more easily be co-opted with presenting them with the threat of fascism, vote for us or else you get more fascism, etc. I don't know if you have anything to say about that duality on the left and any insight onto that at all. Yeah, I think, I mean, you know, the left for a long time has had that, that, I mean, we're radicals, right? We're revolutionary. So the issue here is to say, we have the terms. We said there are reformists, there are opportunists, there are chauvinists, all kinds of different permutations of this. And one of the key things out of the three-way fight perspective that I think is extremely important is to say, instead of treating a lot of this far-right opposition as a

monolithic block, is to be able to identify that many of these same tensions are here, because organizationally, you can defeat them now on these differences, because they they you put organizational pressure on them and they're going to fall into that kind of they're going to fall into that kind of infighting because I well I think in a lot of ways without I don't want to say that they're just demagogues and opportunists because there's clearly people in the far right that believe what they're saying and we need to take them seriously and at their word for this but they do have their own interests to protect right they have their own niche that they're that they care about they have their own power within certain systems and and and you know,

you can exploit those things by by pushing on them with pressure they organize stuff you can get in there and then because very commonly their their their their alliances at least if even if they believe it or don't their alliances are very commonly of convenience that because they're of convenience and they're unprincipled very commonly just to try to get numbers out for their particular things because they know they're marginalized the really you know the really far right groups know this you can put that pressure and they'll snap quickly And I think we saw a lot of evidence of this in the last four years post-Charlott's bill for that. Now, back to the point about on the left, I think the most important part going forward is again reiterating.

One of the big issues of Trumpism is again the reformist left presenting itself as the left. And it's again an ongoing and long-running tension and difference where there are, That's not the same as the revolutionary left or the radical left or whatever you want to call it. There are differences. And it behooves, in my way of saying this, it behooves social Democrats to blur that for credibility. Because it gives them in some ways discursive credibility. And it doesn't help the radical revolutionary movements at all because it's it syphens that kind of behavior because it's again presented as we've pushed. we've pushed we've pushed oh well now we have to we can't go too far because we're going to lose

people and very commonly we have to remember that the phrase of saying we're going to lose people or we can't accomplish it is is bearing on the same things that we already find within the system in my book that I argued in much of my research I've argued is that it's the settler state hegemony where liberalism as an ideology has made peace with white supremacy and and as a normative subjective core said when we say we don't want to push people or we don't want to push this, it's again going back to a kind of ambit of the aspirations of very commonly white settler patriarchal norms that are and abelist norms that are set in place. And what they largely say is we don't want to disrupt that. Well, the revolutionary side wants to disrupt that because all of those other things

that I've listed grow out of this sustained capitalist exploitation, exploitive settler state hegemony. And that's exactly what we have to get to. And that's why I said we kind of came up with a term at the end of democratic chauvinism. And it's going to say when going forward when there's disruptions from the left and disruptions from workers movements or various others that are going to come with economic crisis continuing is that they're going to want to re-send, or right back into that normal ideological point that pre-existed when, again, that was a defensive

reaction for decades. And we have to advance the struggle. Incredibly well said.