Rev Left Radio - The Austerity Apparatus w/ J-Moufawad Paul

Episode Date: September 3, 2019

J-Moufawad Paul returns to Rev Left Radio, this time to discuss his book "Austerity Apparatus". Topics include: Fascism as capitalism-in-crisis, accelerationism and its misconceptions about contradictions, bourgeois philosophers John Stuart Mill and Thomas Hobbes, the Vanguard Party as a partisan war machine, the inevitable next recession, and much more! Learn about and find JMP's work here: http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com/ Here is JMP's article on the theories of sovereign power, which is referenced during the discussion: http://www.abstraktdergi.net/the-transplanting-of-heaven-to-earth-below/ Here are previous episodes of Rev Left that JMP has been on: - "This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists - Marxism as Science" https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/this-ruthless-criticism-of-all-that-exists-marxism-as-science - "Continuity & Rupture: Maoism and the Science of Revolutionary Communism" https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/continuity-rupture-maoism-and-the-science-of-revolutionary-communism - "Methods Devour Themselves: Science Fiction & Political Philosophy" https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/politreks-colab   Outro Music: "Day One" by Bambu Check out his music here: https://bambubeatrock.bandcamp.com  -------- LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: https://www.revolutionaryleftradio.com/ SUPPORT REV LEFT RADIO: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical Intro music by Captain Planet. Find and support his music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com   --------------- This podcast is affiliated with: The Nebraska Left Coalition, Omaha Tenants United, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center.

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today we have on Joshua Mufawid Paul to talk about his book, Austerity Apparatus. I love JMP. We've had him on many times. We're going to continue to have him on. He's one of my favorite political philosophers that are working today. Everything he writes is absolutely fire to me. So it's always a pleasure and an honor to have him on. And I know our listeners love every time JMP comes on. But before we get into that, if you like what we do here at Revolutionary Left Radio,

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So thank you to our supporters and anybody who might become one in the future. And with that said, let's jump into this wonderful discussion with JMP on his work, austerity apparatus. Hi, I'm Joshua McBawad-Paul. I am a contract faculty at York University. So I'm a professor of philosophy. So my research is in. And I have written a number of books that are philosophical interventions in

problematics of Marxist philosophy. Absolutely. And people who listen to Rev. Left Radio over the long term, obviously no JMP. We've had them on many, many times. We're glad to have them on again. Everything, like I was telling him before we started recording. everything he writes. I absolutely love. And so, you know, pretty much every one of his works gets a Rev. Left episode of its own, as it should. So, yeah, today we're going to be discussing

austerity apparatus. And I guess just first and foremost, there's some basic questions. When and why did you decide to write this book? And what did you set out to accomplish with it? I'm not entirely sure when precisely it cohered in my mind as the, it's close to the version that we you have you read but i know it's when i think back on it it's probably a combination of two things led to writing this and the first would be um kind of my experience of being on strike in 2008 and 2009 when that when that 2008 crisis hit um and that was like kind of when the the language of austerity like well at least this round's language of austerity began to emerge right when we were going on strike and and being told that um because of the of

the crisis we shouldn't we shouldn't be on strike and things like that and then eventually you start getting by 2009 these claims about the age of austerity so I've been thinking about it a lot since then although of course the book doesn't come out until 2016 so and I think the other thing that happened much more recently to the book is is kind of at a time where this discourse of austerity had become very you know normal amongst in popular culture in news even amongst the left and there was I referenced this in austerity apparatus. There was this, a magazine, a Canadian arts magazine, but a progressive Canadian arts magazine that have been run for a long time on grant money and donations,

but always took this general left position on things. And their recent board of editors, would be their last board of editors, decided to close down the magazine because austerity meant that the grant model no longer mattered, which was this really funny situation where they kind of embraced austerity discourse and tried to spin it as this kind of leftist thing, right? Where they, it was, it was this, I kind of talk about in the moment, it's this moment where you see people ostensibly in the left embracing crisis ideology in the way that they frame things.

So the reason why I wrote was kind of about this, I guess the concerns that came out with that magazine, just around the kind of the ideological framing of austerity and how it even gets framed and understood eventually amongst, amongst the left, where it gets treated as if it's something that's legitimate in and of itself and not crisis ideology, right? So I wanted to think through what that meant and what that meant for organizing. Yeah. Yeah, no, definitely. And it certainly did the goal of helping me think through what austerity really is and the ideological role that it plays, etc. And experts have

been saying recently that we know we're sort of on the cusp of yet another recession. We all know how these cycles operate. And so whether that's in a year or in three years or five years, it's definitely coming again. And so once it does, it's important to have this understanding of what austerity is and how it operates ideologically precisely because it's going to be marshaled once again in similar ways, probably to the way it was after the last crash. And so that's why I think it's really important to tackle this text now, especially. I do want to talk about the structure really quick before we get into more questions about the text itself, because the structure kind of reminded me of

society of the spectacle by Guy Debord and that it's like a series of more loosely structured but connected meditations rather than a more orthodox linear nonfiction work. So why did you decide to use that structure and was society of the spectacle at all an influence in that decision?

Well, I mean, if it was an influence, it was a very background influence because I mean, I read Society of the Spectacle, you know, back in my kind of like a narco-Marxist or whatever period. The period of away from anarchism towards Marxism, So I'd look at my undergrad, the end of my undergrad, and that was so long ago. And yeah, I definitely back then liked the fragmentary style, though obviously I have a different perspective of Gita Bore since then.

I'm long past my situationist thing. But yeah, I mean, the style of that is good. But it's not like, I mean, there's a lot of things that are written in that style. Actually, the more direct influence at that at the time that I wrote it, it would have been Ticken's introduction to civil war, which I quote, and actually was, you know, probably closer to the way of seeing the world that, like, in Gita Bore's Society, The Spectacle is that book. I've been reading it, and it's kind of like, I really, you know, I liked the format and the,

and the structuring of it, but I really disliked the book's content. Oh, so I wanted kind of to do something, but without that kind of communization nonsense that to Kuhn has. And also there's, I think there's some, you know, I ironically quote them at the beginning. And I also, like, use certain phrasing they have that they dislike and embrace it because I know they dislike it. There's a lot of that. I mean, but that, but that the style, that fragmentary, aphoristic style of writing that, that I, that I took on, it, it lends itself to that kind of thing, right? And I kind of just wanted to try, um, a different format and structure because it's, it's challenging as a writer and thinker to kind of like restructure and write like that and also people find different styles and structures like more accessible like so some people might find what I would do in continuity rupture that kind of like very linear rigorous style of things that that's what they like other people like kind of the polemical punchy shit like the communist necessity and then there's other people that kind of they they feel it you know it speaks to them more if it's

written in this style I'm sure there's other styles in the future that I can take on that make it accessible for other groups of people. Right. Yeah, no, I love, I love all the ways you do all the different books. And they definitely work together. Every time I read one of your works, you know, it's a little different. And, you know, maybe it's the way it's structured. Maybe it's what you're trying to accomplish, et cetera. And that just makes reading you that much more interesting overall. And so, yeah, I haven't heard of that to Khan work that you were referencing. And so that's probably why my mind went right to society to the spectacle because that was sort of, you know,

in my head, it was regards to the structure. So let's just go ahead and dive into the questions. now. And for those who may not know, just quickly, can you define what austerity is for us and then tell us insofar as you can sort of what you mean throughout this text by the phrase austerity apparatus? Yeah. So, I mean, first, I guess, to look at austerity is the way that it's used, right? The rhetoric and the functional use of it when it appears when politicians talk about it or when journalists who aren't critical about it, talk about it as normal. I mean, or, you know, like David Cameron originally coined it's an older term than him but like the you know the way that it was refrained is in 2009 after the recession you get David Cameron talking about the age of

austerity and then after then everyone's talking about austerity austerity and it's still a pretty common word to hear when you're talking about things and I guess the whole idea is that because of the it comes out this idea that because of the crisis right um and there's not enough to go around we got to like you know suck it up and live more austere lives right we can't we can't we can't pay for frivolous, useless things and we have to be more responsible and be thrifty, right, this kind of notion. But of course, it's always, I mean, it's meant to look like be wise and be, you know, but of course, what's defined as frivolous for, you know, the people pushing this is always like

social programs, right? So cut social programs. And also, it's usually given to the, you know, the people at the bottom of society, the proletariat, different aspects of the working class, even like homeless. they're the ones that have to bear the brunt of it, right? So, like, wage cuts and things like that. Because, you know, the people who are pushing this, the David Cameron's of the world and the classes that they represent

aren't taking any austerity cuts. They still want to keep the same amount of profit that they're making to begin with, right? So, you know, and I think the majority of the left understands this. Like, they understand this is what austerity is, is this kind of thing where, you know, the ruling classes are saying, oh, because of the crisis, we all have to suck it up, but what they really mean is not them.

Everyone else has to do it and that they're going to cut social programs. So that's kind of like what the austerity thing is about. Now, why I wanted to look at it in kind of this more, looking at it as what I call the austerity apparatus or kind of like almost like a coherent structured ideological form, right? I mean, that develops over the time is that it not only is just the rhetoric of telling the working class,

the proletariat, to see. suck it up and take cuts, right? Or it's not just the rhetoric of, like, hiding the fact that you just want to get social programs so, like, the private sector can make more money and things like that. I mean, this is always what capitalism does and wants to do, and it just uses certain circumstances to do this, right? But it's the fact that it started becoming this kind of normalized term even amongst the left.

So the left would be very, like, the general left, I mean, the broad left or the broad movement. And again, I want to be clear that when we're talking about, before I go back to that, this kind of a side point, I want to be clear that we're talking generally and mainly about the centers of capitalism, the imperialist metropoles, right? Because it's a very different way that things are deployed in the peripheries and the austerity apparatus,

what I call the austerity apparatus, and the ideology of austerity isn't as strong in those places for obvious reasons. So a lot of this book is aimed very specifically at the first world left. Anyhow, back to this first world left's general understanding of austerity. Yeah, they understand that it's a trick, that it's being duped. But in some ways, because it becomes normative, it became like the main thing to focus on over time.

Like this idea of resisting austerity, instead of resisting capitalism, it started to replace resisting capitalism, this idea that we had to resist austerity. And so, you know, it became this ideological mechanism where people would focusing on it as a truth somehow, side of bourgeois rule, that it had this truth in and of itself. It's like, you know what, we got to defeat austerity. And I gave that example of the, the fuse thing. It's like, well, because austerity is coming, you know, we've got to shut down this magazine and invent our own alternative models of funding. And it's like, okay, you know, we should be inventing alternative spaces for sure. We should get into the reformist thing. But then when you're like, let's just shut down what we've already been like being able to like, you know, scam off

of the government. And I don't mean scam literally, but they would see the scam. And, and and just hasten austerity is this bizarre thing, right? And all of this kind of discourse around, you know, we need to focus on now. We need to focus on getting some like social democracy back, right? Instead of like looking at like the mechanisms that are behind capitalism, that of course are always going to gut social democracy or build up social democracy when it's useful for capitalism to do so.

Yeah, you know, when you're talking about the way that austerity is presented to us by the ruling class, it is like sort of playing into this, you know, bourgeois mystification of the nation as one big family and they'll come out and they'll talk about how all of us need to pitch in with regards to, you know, living more austere lives. In reality, it is to sort of shield the overall system and the luxury that the ruling class enjoy while making, like, as you said, the working class and poor, you know, bear the brunt of the crisis. And I'm going to talk about this in a second, but I guess I'll just ask the question instead of, um, preempting it, which is what are some core functions of the austerity apparatus? How does it,

how does it function? What does it do in the world sort of thing? Yeah, I mean, well, I'm looking at it, like it's an ideological form. So we're kind of just theorizing what it functions as or what it does, right, and trying to work that out. It's not like there's this, I know, I know you know this, but just to some people understand, there's not this literal machine somewhere that someone turns on called the austerity apparatus, right? We're starting out how this idea. ideology coheres and is structured in that kind of ideological state apparatus kind of way, or similar to that. It's not like it's like an institution or anything.

But the way that it's come to function as this ideological form is mainly to direct our attention to the problem of austerity rather than capitalism itself. And what it does is it just works to generate reformist sensibility amongst leftists as well, and also, of course, to shear up amongst people that are pro-capitalist, this idea. that oh yeah like this is we got to have this austere thing and what's in every time a cut happens that you know amongst the capitalist class for austerity they just kind of accept it as normal and then becomes the new normal and the left also starts thinking about it as the new normal as the new normal as well i mean i guess i could also kind of you know the um the quote i have from from page 19 um and it says you know the austerity apparatus normalizes crisis capitalism by functioning so as to draw attention to itself as a social fact it obscured is the logic of its construction, or at the very least distracts us from focusing on this logic. Austerity apparatus proclaims its existence as a fact, as austerity meaning, more real than that which generates its facticity and demands collaboration. Austerity is here. It is a reality

that cannot be denied. Focus on this and only this. In the same way that capitalism broadly is sort of naturalized, you know, you hear these arguments about capitalism being human nature. Austerity itself, the boom and bust cycles of capitalism which give rise to austerity is sort of naturalized and that is one of the core ideological components of the apparatus itself is that correct yeah well so far i mean obviously capitalism is very good at throwing up new ideologies as long as it progresses um i mean i don't see the austerity ideology going away because i mean it's even older than when david cameron said it had different terms um but yeah something like that where where capitalism just kind of normalizes this

idea that you know the the the poor have to bear the brunt of the ravages of the system right all right and that you know that social this idea that comes through that social the social programs are frivolous or they're kind of like gifts that are given by capitalism right yeah exactly so throughout the text you bring up what what you call three regulatory functions of the capitalist state of affairs and these include a state of social peace associated with welfare state capitalism. You can think of social democracy there, a state of anxiety associated with what we'd normally call neoliberalism, and then a state of emergency associated with fascism. You can think fascism is capitalism and decay sort of thing. So can you talk a little bit about these three

states of capitalism, their connection to the austerity apparatus, and sort of where we stand in relation to them today? Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I think I use this term and also use the term state of affairs as a way of getting people to think about the state, right, in a that um because you know a lot of times the language we use use the state the state the state right um and we don't really think about what that means what a state is except oh it's just you know it's you know the government or the police or something like that right so in a way to like get people to think through the problematic of the state i kind of like look why don't we just think about like where the word is derived from this idea of a state of affairs right like when you

talk about like water having different states right um and you know it's so the way of thinking It was mainly I used this term state of affairs and looked at kind of three states of affairs that exist. It was to think of how the state is the political state of affairs of a mode of production, right? So you have the capitalist mode of production, which, you know, it breaks down to just being the division between, you know, proletariat and bourgeoisie. But it's not enough just to have that economic relation. As Lenin points out, there needs to be a state has to rise to, like, you know, make sure that everyone accepts that mode of production. and, you know, it has an ideological function and a repressive function. So looking at how this kind of the capitalist state can deploy itself in different ways,

I think is something that's always important to do because people get in, especially people that aren't, you know, Marxists, they get into their mind that it's almost like capitalism is always liberal democracy, right? And so fascism can't really be capitalism. Of course, we as Marxists don't think that. We just think, you know, fascism is a different type of, state formation that can like protect capitalism right and there's different ways there's different states that it can take on i mean liberal democracy isn't even that new in the history of the world right

in those old forms of democracy and even for capitalism it's not something that came in at the beginning of capitalism right even the even the even the um the founding fathers of the u.s you know they wanted a slavocracy in a republic and they thought democracy was kind of a dirty word people forget about that right you know it's there's a different ways that capitalism kind of can can the ruling class kind of reorients the state or struggles between different factions of the ruling class reorient the state in different periods and so I kind of divided into these three trends which I talked about social peace you can look at that that's kind of the state where like you know when capitalism is able is forced into kind of a situation with the working class where it has to give

something to them and it also has the means because of you know super exploitative elsewhere and a whole bunch of other stuff and it's not in a in a crisis at the moment that that state of social peace with you know with the where it can foster this like social peace with with with with the classes um is through the terms of like you know welfare capitals and give like welfare reforms and things like that um and then you know uh the other extreme would be in a state of emergency which is fascism right when when class struggle is attenuated or when there's crisis and there's things like that you know the ruling class can become monolithic and imposed kind of a fascist order. And this is the state we see like this, this kind of leaning towards the state of affairs is what we're seeing in a lot of the imperialist metropoles right now. And then I kind of talked about this kind of vacillating middle point, which, you know, I call the state of anxiety. And I like in neoliberalism to this kind of anxiety because neoliberalism is such that

it always wants to gut the welfare reforms and things like that. And, you know, it bolster the free market, but it's always like it doesn't want fascism or even even though it kind of does so it's like it's this anxious vacillating between those two kinds of states right and it's more to think of these these things they're not like it's it's a way just to think of kind of the continuum that the capitalist motive production is always in right and and states different states represent different intensities they aren't there's no there's no real giant separation between like liberal democracy welfare state and fascism, right? It's not a, it's not a giant category leap, right? It's just a different state of

intensity of capitalism. Right. And so I guess the second part you were asking before I went off on that tangent was what the role of austerity in here. And I think, you know, austerity is kind of that the austerity apparatus emerges in that state of anxiety, right? It's kind of in that period where crisis is happening. The state is teetering towards fascism, and the austerity apparatus is it fosters this ideology of like wanting to go back to the state of social peace, this anxious

longing for that state of social peace in order to avoid fascism instead of saying maybe the problem is that these things are all different states of the same shit and we should be focusing on that instead. Yeah, no, exactly. And I think that's so well put and so so clarifying. I mean, in this text

you say, I'm going to quote right here, you say since the state of social peace, i.e. welfare capitalism, an imperial detente between labor and capital, is that which the austerity apparatus seeks to normalize by making it the goal of all who challenge the reign of crisis capitalism, class struggle is repressed through this sublimation. And in the case of the state of emergency, which means the onslaught of fascism, this civil war, i.e., the class struggle at the heart of every state, will also be repressed. Right, populists are often adept at tricking the dangerous classes into adopting a substitute civil war, the Volk against the other, end quote.

And I love how you put that, but also you use words in here like you mentioned the term social fascist and often people on the left might hear this term left wing of fascism to refer to social Democrats. For newer comrades or people coming up on the left, might not be familiar with how those two things are connected. I know you gestured at it, you know, in that last answer, but could you make those connections like closer and more obvious? Like why would somebody call social democracy the left wing of fascism or social democrats social fascists sometimes this language can be like very polemical and rhetorical and obscure things and i definitely used it for that reason um but i mean yeah a lot of it is is because if if if you have this situation where fascism is

emerging right and you have the other area where what what should be really happening to end And fascism is, you know, and to fight against it is you need a fighting communist movement, right? And what social Democrats do in this period is because they want, I mean, they are capitalists. They want to preserve the state. They may feel they're, you know, it's not like they all think, it's not they are fascist in and of themselves. They think that they're the answer to it, that they're like kind of the solution to

fascism, right? But because they want to preserve the state, they tend to, you know, undermine, like, more like, fighting communist. movements, you know, tell people that they shouldn't follow that. They shouldn't instead vote to, you know, follow the voting system, just vote the fascists out. Sometimes they might directly collaborate in order to protect the state, right? That's why they end up becoming the social wing of fascism in these moments. And of course, there's a reason that this language emerged to begin with. And that's because the social Democrats, and that's why we even use the term social. The reason, you know, social democracy used to be, it used to be a synonym for communism, right? It's even what Lenin was using at a certain point. The reason that word is so tarred is because the biggest party connected with that name, the socialist democracy party of Germany or the SPD, it is the party that, like, betrayed the working class to the Nazis, right?

It's also the party that went revisionist, right, and rejected, like it's the party of Kautzky and Bernstein and all that kind of stuff. So when every time we use the term social Democrat now, we mean that kind of way of, way of thinking, right, the idea of voting out capitalism, which comes from Bernstein and Kautzky. But then why we use social fascism is because that is the same group that was, you know, in power. And there was, you know, the Spartacist uprising, right? And that was with, and I'm pretty sure it's 1919, led by, you know, Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebnik. And that was put down by an ostensibly social democratic party. And they also turned over Luxembourg and Leibnick to the Frye Corps.

to get executed, right? So there was collaboration at the end of the day in order to, in order to have this social peace, right? So that's why we use the term social fascist to refer to them today. Definitely. Thank you so much for that. I appreciate that. I know our listeners appreciate that as well. So let's move on. Now, in the first chapter, you talk about the idea of accelerationism, and this is an idea that is sort of sometimes poorly understood on the left. It's thrown out a lot, but I think a lot of people that use it might not totally understand what it means. And you also talk about the sort of misunderstanding of contradictions that come along with it. People often, acceleration often talk about, you know, heightening the contradictions, et cetera.

And you talk about how that's sort of an incoherent idea. So can you just like reframe that argument for us, basically deconstruct accelerationism for us and show how it's connected to this misunderstanding of contradiction? Yeah. So, I mean, accelerationism has a long history and it has both right and left expressions. But the one that I guess we're going to talk about right now is the left-wing expression. because it's become quite popular. I mean, but both the right and left share this idea that, you know, to accelerate the

contradictions that are latent in capitalism, which will lead to, you know, capitalism's collapse and we can move into a post-capitalist situation. I mean, for the right-wing, like, neo-reactionary version, they mean, like, some kind of, you know, return to monarchic rule or something like that in light, you know, this kind of, that kind of view. It depends on who you talk to from that position. But obviously the left-wing version is that you accelerate the contradictions latent in capitalism. It leads to its collapse, and we move into kind of a post-capitalist situation that, you know, we can call socialism.

So, I mean, most, you know, this accelerationism, it goes back to, you know, I don't know how far it goes back. But one of the way that, like, say, the accelerationists now, the contemporary ones, they kind of ground themselves in Duluse, right? the losing guitarie and there's a there's actually really good um small but like your punchy book on accelerationism that's like a critique of it by benjamin noise called like malign velocities and it talks about that kind of um it makes this kind of come of the delusian thatcherian view of acceleration acceleration um but yeah so i mean but the contemporary version is is mainly kind of was you know re re you know put back up by um Alex Williams and Nick

Cernichick, right? And they wrote this thing called Accelerate Manifesto. And I can't remember the actual date, but it was within the last 10 years. And then they've had books since then. And you get these people who have other people that are connected to that trend like Paul Mason's stuff on post-capitalism or even that fully automated luxury communism stuff

is kind of connected to that way of seeing things, right? And so, but I mean, so this this, this the left, the contemporary left wing version. It takes its cue from, there's this passage, they always go back, they say it's like in Marx, right? So, you know, there's this

speech that Marx made in 19, not 19, 1848. I'm looking at my door and trying to talk to the same time. I would say 19, 1848, right? And it's about how he has a speech about free trade where he talks about how he's in

favor of free trade because it would hasten the social revolution. Right? And it's a, it was a, it was a polemic rhetorical, punchy thing. And I want to return to that maybe just a bit later because I think they misunderstand what he's saying, even when we, even with the rhetoric. But the idea here is that they take from that and they build is that all of the functions of capitalism are such that if we just, you know, accelerate the process, we will hasten

the destruction of capitalism again. And also this will lead to the emergence of socialism. So, I mean, the best way to get to this is, you know, is the quote from them. So let's see if I can find this wonderful quote from these guys. Okay, yeah, so this comes from the Accelerate Manifesto by Williams and Cernich. And so it says that, here, accelerationsists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material platform of neoliberalism does not need to be done. destroyed. It needs to be repurposed

towards the common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism. So this is kind of, you know, the idea is that the contradictions are inherent. You just got to push them forward and you'll get yourself

socialism. And for those that, you know, are not familiar with accelerationism, but maybe familiar with the history of communism, this should look like something very similar that, you know, at different stages in the history of communism, a lot of theorists have, like, you know, torn apart.

And one of the big ones, it's kind of returned to the theory of productive forces that was seen as the revisionist line in the Chinese Revolution. Right. And it's the idea that all, you know, all, you know, we shouldn't be focusing on the, on, you know, class struggle and social relations and the productive relations, right? Instead, all we need to do is just get the technology on track. And this technology, the productive forces, if we speed the moment, and we speed the up it'll lead to full automation and it'll get rid of you know capitalism and all these kinds of

things and it's that kind of techno determinism yeah exactly um and so it's and it's connected to other things like economism and all this kind of stuff so it's the acceleration has kind of returned to that way of seeing things and this was also lambasted by by walter benjamin and dc's on the philosophy of history he saw it inherent in what the spd was thinking too right it was the view of social democracy he thought at the time um the revisionist forces there he saw that in you know Kautzky and Bernstein. So it's this, it's that, that view again, but it's been repackaged with a lot of, like, Delusian terminology, and then this kind of, um, left washing of Nick Land's reactionary writing. Uh, so anyhow, and then you ask the thing about contradictions, right? And, you know,

this idea of accelerating the contradictions is kind of weird, right? Because a lot of the core contradictions of capitalism have nothing to do with the category of speed. I mean, what does speed have to do with the contradicted, like the antagonistic contradiction between bourgeois and proletariat? Does it mean that they just have to work faster in the factories against each other? It's a ludicrous, it's a different category, right? I mean, we can talk about, you know, maybe speeding up overproduction, but that's pretty sped up already, I point out, right? That's, you know, that's the, um, but this idea of one of the contradictions being, you know, overproduction and, and the space to expand. Um, overproduction. Um, overproduction.

is pretty speedy it's like I don't know like if it moves to light speed do we suddenly get it's this weird of this like it's almost like it imagines the mode of production is like this train on a track that you just got to like

there's these barriers in the way you just got to speed that shit up and break down the barriers but that's that's not what contradictions don't always have to do with speed right or you know they may have something to do with duration and time

but you know it's it's all different all of them right so You know, that's my issue with the way that they look at that kind of thing. Also, to go back to that point about the Marx statement, right? When he talks about like the, you know, he's all for like free trade breaking things up, he actually connects it to the contradiction, not not a speeding up, he just says, oh, it's, he connects it to this notion that it's good rhetorically because it would sharpen the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie

and be useful for actual class struggle. this is where, you know, you know, accelerationists wouldn't, you know, they kind of depart somewhere else because they actually reject in all their writing political organization, you know, in Marxist sense. They claim,

they claim in like their writing that that it's less important to have people in the street seizing power than like trying to like, you know, get grants and funding and all this kind of stuff, which is, you know, this leads to this kind of reformist practice. So, you know,

it's this. And then also, more importantly, yeah, there are contradictions that will lead capitalism to collapse. But if you don't have an organization in place, that collapse is not going to look very good, right? It's not going to suddenly be, yay, it's capitalism is collapsed. And suddenly we have socialism. It's like you don't get that without organizing for it. Exactly. Exactly. So this whole argument is really rooted in a determinist, sort of reductionist understanding of Marxism. And then, yeah, an incoherency with the understanding of contradictions, as you were talking about the speed element in contradictions, which is sort of an incoherent idea. So, yeah, I appreciate that.

So let's move on to the next chapter. In chapter two, you say that the novelty of the austerity apparatus, quote, concerns its operation as an ideological apparatus, the way in which it produces subject positions and a peculiar, discursive framework about contemporary crisis capitalism, end quote. So can you expand on this idea a bit more? And just as a follow-up question, you can get to this whenever you want. In what ways is your concept of austerity apparatus, influence, directly by Althusay. I'm going to talk about kind of a particular discursive framework about contemporary crisis capitalism.

I just feel like I've already kind of like talked about that, right? But just to bring it back so that, you know, people are thinking about it. It's the idea that it makes people think of like crisis capitalism. And I also think about capital. It goes through these different recessions, but it's a long crisis altogether. Capitalism is the crisis as the old rhetorical slogan used to say. But it frames the discussion, again, about, like, going back to kind of get what we used to have. We, meaning, of course, like, you know, the working class in the imperialist metropoles, to get what they used to have, like, what social reforms they used to have, to get back to that state of social peace, right?

And that's pretty much what the discursive framework does. It's this restraint, it's this idea to be, like, you know, restrain you from complaining about capitalism and to orient you just to. to like kind of fight for disappearing rights. As for, and of course, this contains a lot of other stuff that we've already talked about, and I'm sure that some of the things you talk about later in your questions will get into this in more detail. But, yeah, the influence of Altusar, well, you know, I always, there's things, I always feel a need to qualify, there's things I like about Altusar, and there's things I dislike about

Elthusar. I won't get into what I like and what I dislike. I've mentioned it here and there over. But, you know, I think that when, you know, him trying to think through kind of the idea of how ideology can be kind of systematized, it was his attempt to kind of, like, think, you know, Graham Shee's concept of common sense and hegemony. And so when he talks about, like, ideological state apparatuses, I mean, I was thinking austerity apparatus in that kind of way. It's definitely not like this kind of institutional state apparatus that, you know, Altazar lists in all of his list. listing of ISAs or whatever church school etc yeah it's kind of similar and of course it I think kind of breaks into maybe all of these things but it's kind of the idea that it has become almost this kind of like a strong ideological form with its own way of kind of structuring us as subjects right later on and we can talk about that later on the idea of austerity subjects

and you know it's and so this is kind of part of the particular discursive framework about contemporary crisis capitalism that it keeps spraying up it also gets us to to think a certain way, imagine things a certain way, to kind of limit our imaginations, right, and to think as kind of ideological subjects. So in that way, it's similar, although it's not really an institution. I was just kind of playing with the language. If people were familiar with that, they'd be able to think about that I meant something that was a much more kind of structural thing, although I talk about it as being kind

of jerry-rigged and a messy kind of thing in and of itself. Yeah, yeah. And I really love that about your writing, which is sort of twofold. The one is that you read and pull from a bunch of different thinkers, often outside of your own tendency and tradition, which makes you just a more robust thinker overall. And then specifically in this text, the way that you play with language, right? And sometimes just having a thing that you already know said in a way that you've never heard it said can deepen one's understanding of the thing and in itself. And that's something that you do throughout this text brilliantly on a bunch of different fronts, which I really love. But for anybody that still might be struggling with this idea of producing subject positions

and a particular discursive framework, one way you can understand it. And I think you referenced this in the text is just, you know, people know capitalist realism. They understand this idea of capitalist realism, which is, you know, a confinement of political imagination, the naturalization of capitalism as if it's some sort of inevitability or built into nature or human nature itself, et cetera. And so what we mean in this way is just the austerity apparatus does that thing, but for austerity specifically. Is that a good way to understand it? Yeah, that's probably a good way.

Definitely. And, yeah. And, you know, just a comment on your thing about bringing in sources from elsewhere. I mean, it's, I feel it's like really useful within to get kind of ways to think, especially in Marxism, to not be afraid to use other sources that may not be Marxist or maybe fellow travelers. And maybe sometimes, it depends on like how you're using them, right, in my view. But you also remember that, you know, Marx and Engels and Lenin, they were quite creative. in what they used in their sources, right?

It was like, you didn't get the, a lot of, you know, Lenin's imperialism. He used some pretty bourgeois sources to think through that, right? But he's just very clear about it. Exactly, yeah, Marx and Lenin, both, you know, angles, they all did that. They, especially, like, in capital, you know, looking at liberal economists and then, like, Hobbswam and Lenin's work on imperialism, et cetera. So, yeah, it's just important. And I see this dogmatic sort of recoil on the left today on all different tendency sides is, like,

I don't want to read anything that is outside of my tendency. I have nothing to learn from, you know, liberalism or anarchism or whatever else it may be. And I think that is sort of a, it's sort of an abandonment of dialectics, of critical thinking, right? It's a sort of dogmatic posture, and I don't like it. Yeah, I mean, and I've said this many times elsewhere, I think it comes from that there is, you know, this, there is like really eclectic takes on Marxism here because people get so into reading this other stuff. That's how you get the stuff like tycoon or the invisible committee or what have you, right? So there's, you know, eclecticism is a danger, but then, you know, dogmatism is as well, right? And the best way to be, to, you know, be on guard against both is to like do a lot of, you know, be organizing and also be like reading all the kind of scientific texts that we have, right, and knowing them very well.

Yep. All right. So in the next chapter entitled A Crisis in Hegemony, a Crisis in Security, I love what you do. You outline the rise of liberal bourgeois ideology and hegemony, referencing liberal political philosophers like Hobbes and Mill to highlight your point and saying, quote, we are meant to forget that the social order defended by Mill's liberalism only came into being by the kind of violent suppression he attempts to banish to the past, end quote. And I really love what you do with liberal philosophers. As a philosophy student, you know, you are as an undergrad, you know, you're reading Hobbs, you're reading Mill. these people are really put up as, you know, high-level minds and political philosophy, and in a lot of ways, of course, they are. But what isn't done is this sort of deconstructing of the historical context in which they emerge and what they're actually doing, which you explained perfectly and succinctly in this text.

So I was hoping that you could just explain and elaborate on that argument for our listeners. Yeah, definitely. And if I miss anything here, I mean, I tend to return to like talking about liberal philosophy a lot because it's such a, you know, it's so connected to the way that, you know, capitalism emerged. and the way that it's also deployed under kind of liberal democracy. But, you know, I had that, I think on my blog, I had this piece called Right Against Right I put up against there that was, you know, just a short kind of like essay, had several parts that looks at this as well. And then recently with that essay trilogy I did for abstract, the most recent one I did, the name of which I forget, the name of my own essay, I forget, but it's abstract site, is the one that's talking about sovereignty.

I go into the discussion of kind of liberal, liberal views as well. But to kind of sum it all up in what I would say there and that passage that you said, I think the best way to look at is to kind of look at the way that Mill frames things in connection to Hobbs and then look at the material processes that were actually having that kind of go along with this, right? So, you know, so Mill, if you look at Mill, his whole understanding of liberty, which is his idea, you know, that it's his principle of liberty that, you know, you shouldn't harm anyone. and the only moment the state is justified is if you like are physically assaulting anyone

but everyone's free to say and do anything as long as they aren't punching someone out in the street or causing them bodily harm. Although he gets a little bit iffy on that where he says well if you have an assembled mob in front of the corn dealer's house even if you're not saying to beat this person up but you're just talking about how he's starving the poor

then the police can step in because you know speech is you know is you know getting it's riling people up to storm the corn dealer's house. an interesting example he uses is, you know, example that it's very key to capitalism at that point because of the corn laws, right? But, okay, that's a side point. But anyhow, he has this, he bases his whole understanding of liberty on this on Hobbes' conception of natural right, as do all liberals. Like, all liberals, like, so Hobbs, maybe, you know, being this guy that is like, I want an absolute tyranny. I want a monarchy to stop the, you know, the state of nature where humans are just like monsters killing each other because their liberty is wild, right?

this idea that humans as these liberal, you know, individuals with this, you know, ability to do whatever they want, is their desire is going to get in the way of other people desire, and it's all these individuals running around with pointed sticks stabbing each other at some unknown point in history, right? This is Hobbs' view, and so that's why he thinks there should be a monarchy, but all liberals accept that this is an essential view of human nature, that we're naturally like this, that we just want and want, and we are individuals, and we have this natural right of just having this liberty, right so mill says that this is you know correct and even an on liberty he talks about oh yeah this is a correct view

but he says that um the solution is no longer monarchy or you know the absolute tyranny um uh but a liberal republic and he says that you know when humanity was in its infancy uh the excess of liberty which he meant the state of nature where people were just running around and killing each other uh warranted hobbs's solution which was some form of tyranny but then he's like humanity is grown up This whole idea, everyone always complains that, you know, Marxists have this idea of, like, this view of that, you know, of progressive growing up or something that we're like, you know, that kind of view of human nature that is, but it's a view of human nature that is, but it's actually liberals have this. Yeah, exactly. Much more so, they're the ones that actually have it. He's like, humanity has grown up, and so it is mature enough to function in a liberal republic, right?

So then it can have this liberal republic with the harm principle functioning. but but so this is this is the story he tells but it's it's also worth noting in other texts that you know mill was a defender of colonialism and all the all the ravages of british empire and he was outright racist right and which is his stuff on empire is the stuff you don't they don't let you read in your undergrad courses they just want to read on liberty you look at oh look he's for you know speech and stuff but he was you know he held the colonial conquest and you know was a good thing because he thought that, you know, Africans, Asians, and indigenous Americans were like humans in their state of infancy, right? And so he had this, like, that whole, the whole story he tells about how, you know, humans living in the past needed tyranny. That was the past only for Europeans. It was the present in his view for anyone that wasn't European. And so he had this idea, so that racist view that everyone, the, all these other civilizations are uncivilized, right? And so he believed that, you know, since they were in a state of infancy, then they required the conquest of more civilized states like the Europeans to civilize them through tyranny, or that they too could be brought up to the level of, you know, being able to live in a liberal republic, right?

So, you know, behind all of that, so I told that ideological story, it has kind of to show that behind this, there's a very real story of the tyrannical imposition of bourgeois social relations, right? behind all this you have you have mill talking about colonialism and conquest and and it just reminds us too that this this kind of liberal republic that he talks about um what does he mean by us growing up how do you know how did that happen right like how did it get brought into being and and we know that like you know the first versions of capitalism were quite tyrannical to begin with and violent right and and we know that the capitalist liberal society eventually emerges after capitalism was violently imposed through what marks called so-called primitive accumulation, right? And, you know, he talks about that. There's that passage in his, you know, in capital, the section on so-called primitive accumulation, where he talks about, you know, workers being violently torn from the land and how the pedestal in Britain and Western Europe required slavery and colonialism and the violences of those, right? And he talks about this entire history being one of blood and fire, right? And that's, that's, that's the violence behind that allows this, this nice liberal society to come into being. And

Also, that liberal society requires violence all the time in order to, you know, to keep itself functioning. Exactly right. And so it's so funny because, you know, looking at this sort of stuff, understanding liberal philosophy broadly, it really helps you make sense of liberalism as it manifests even to this day. Like, thinking about the corn, the corn dealer issue, the mob shows up outside his house and Mills, like, you know, that's infringing on his liberty as a corn dealer or whatever.

And the liberals sort of are disgusted by that. And I remember, like, last year when they had that sort of mob protest outside Tucker Carlson's mansion. And, you know, liberals all across the spectrum were just feigning outrage. And then you even mentioned in this text, the Antifa stuff, where liberals were saying, hey, if you want to avoid Trump fascism and this horrible, horrible fascist future, you have to vote for Hillary Clinton, you know, the hardcore neoliberal candidate. But in the moment that Trump gets elected and fascists are marching in the streets, those very same liberals turn around and start, you know, finger-waving at Antifa who meets them in the streets and combats them.

So it's like this liberal hypocrisy is really rooted in a really interesting and fascinating and direct ways to the philosophy of these big liberal political theorists. And it's so fascinating to see that line traced out. Yeah, I mean, it's actually, it actually flows logically. It's not like, I'm sure there are some liberals who are like, or people using it cynically and things like that. but there's a lot of like died in the wool liberals who are convinced that their definition of fascism is illiberalism like they don't have they don't understand what fascism is they just think it's like it's it's not liberalism right so that's that's why they are opposed to like kind of you know anti-fascist tactics the stuff that actually works against fascist because what they think

fascism is is just you know illiberalism right right that's what they think fascism means the end of like fascism is just not free speech not that that that's it right it's like they're It's like totalitarianism, right? So this is why the, you know, this is like the ACLU. And I remember when Nadine Straussen was like the head of the ACLU and hearing her speak. And this is like, this is the story she tells. She's like, you know, the ACLU is important because it's defending liberalism and liberalism is the enemy of fascism. And so, you know, and she says, she says that it's because it's because of things like the ACLU and fighting for free speech and free expression that the civil rights movement.

was one. Like, she literally believes that. And then also, this, this leads her into saying why, you know, why this kind of idea of free speech and stuff and pursuing that is important because it's, it's the antithesis of fascism. And then, of course, underneath it, never mind the fact that the ACLU is actually in their pursuit of their supposed anti-fascism, they spent like the 90s defending fascists, right, like getting white supremacists off of hate speech charges and things like that. And then they're like, oh, no, we're the, you know, so it kind of is drawn, There are all these, like, contradictions beneath it, but they have this belief that that's with this poor definition of fascism

and that they think that this is. And then, of course, this comes from the history of American society and the way that it tries to conceive of, and also Canadian society where I am, the way that they try to conceive of why they fought against fascism, right? They have to create a narrative and forget the fact that they were quite happy with the fascist until it, like, it affected their economic interests. Absolutely, yeah.

And that's boiled down in the phrase, you know, Antifa are the real fascist. And as a symbol, as a physical or video symbol, that famous clip of that Antifa dude punching Richard Spencer in the face, if you watch the rest of that clip, there is a fellow protester on ostensibly the side of the anti-fascist who was clearly a liberal, who after the Antifa dude punched Richard Spencer in the face, chased down the Antifa dude and try to grapple with him and wrestle him and pull his mascot because that's not civil, that's illiberal, that's the real fascism.

And so it's hilarious to see that play out so obviously. yeah all right so moving on we have a couple more questions for you here coming up on an hour the solution to not only the problems of austerity but you know to the bigger problems of capitalism and fascism that you offer in this text is what you call beautifully if i might add a partisan war machine and it's counter state and this really speaks to what i was saying earlier about the way you use language so effectively and to sort of shift people's perception of these things that they think they understand deeply so can you summarize and explain what what this phrase means and why it's the only way forward. Okay. So, I mean, I use the term partisan war machine. It's just a synonym for

the Revolutionary Party of the avant-garde, right? The Vanguard Party, right? And the reason why I use it, and sometimes I like using synonyms like this, is because people that are already think they know what is meant by, like, you know, Lenin's conception of the Vanguard Party, never mind they haven't read stuff on it, but like they have this idea behind it. They, as soon as you use the term revolutionary party or vanguard revolutionary party or revolutionary party the avant-garde even which is you know they the thinking shuts down right it's like they don't want to engage with it so sometimes it's like you know I'm I'm all for

preserving the language that comes from the classical text the text that form the backbone of our tradition I think that should be fought for and preserved but I think we should also use synonyms here and there to communicate this to other people while also saying this is what we're talking about right and not to like hide it but to kind of give it a a different, a freshness that the synonyms often do. So, um, so it was partisan war machine, right? Because what is, what is a revolutionary party, right?

It's, it's, it's meant to be this kind of like structural thing that wages war on the state, right? That's the whole point of it, right? And partisan, well, it's a party, right? A party is a partisan, uh, partisan structure or partisan apparatus where people are devoted to a certain ideology within it. Um, and so it actually, and ironically, here's the irony too, is that, remember I said I was like, you know, that that tecun piece that i had ironic references to and that like the structure but hated the content in that piece uh tecun actually it's it actually comes from them and they they they were using

it as a term for the party for the vanguard party in order to also but they were also like attacking it right they they they they were it comes from you know passages where they're mocking the notion of the vanguard party because they're like oh it's just this partisan war machine that is you know and it's obsolete and and they had nothing but disdain for And I was like, okay, I'm going to embrace this. I love the partisan war machine. That's awesome. And so, you know, I find the synonyms helpful in that.

As for the use of saying counterstate or counterstate of affairs, that was just because we were talking about these kind of like, you know, state of affairs and a way to get out of that. And this was a way for me again to talk about, you know, this long thing that we Maoists talk about, which is, you know, protracted people's war. Because, you know, part of the theory of protracted people's war is not just, you know, It's also this political theory that as it develops, the parties should be setting up, you know, points of counter-hegemony. This is where you get, you know, Mao's notion of red base areas and things like that.

And those form the seeds of a counter-state, right? That's the whole idea, the seeds of a counter-state. In order to you can move towards a position of dual power or a strategic equilibrium. So that's why I used those terms there. And also was like, it put it in nicely with the language that we were already kind of talking about. it makes the party seem like a fresh notion instead of the way that it feels stale to people that already are refused to think through it any kind of way and it introduces this notion of what a party should be doing revolutionary-wise it should be pursuing to set up a counter-state

of affairs right it should be trying to set up like a socialist state of affairs while it's struggling absolutely yeah i love i loved i loved that wording i love the language i love that entire chapter absolutely fascinating and again for people that want to learn more like obviously we're not going to be able to cover everything in this in this conversation this book is short it's accessible it's fun and punchy to read and and the structure of it is is less intimidating than a longer linear you know chapter by chapter 350 page book so definitely read this book like it's really really good um and that leads into this last question because as i said earlier you know many experts are arguing that another recession is very likely in the next few years when the next

recession or depression comes as they always do the rhetoric and ideology of austerity will once again be marshaled to the fore and intensified it might be changed a little bit as you mentioned throughout this text you know historically this this language and ideology of austerity has sort of been put into different language and different concepts but the same sort of thing keeps coming up and it will come up again so with that prospect in mind what is like a main theme or idea that you hope readers take out of this text well i mean the first thing i'm going to say is that it's yeah a next recession recessions always keep coming right um but it's not like the, since the last one, the last big one in 2008, 2009, the rhetoric of austerity hasn't

disappeared. It's still being used. So they'll just, it's funny, right? We're supposed to have gotten over that, but people are still being like, oh, austerity. Austerity, because of course, lo and behold, all the things that are, you know, that they cut, right, to the neoliberal's cut. They don't restore when the, you know, when the recession ends. People just adapt to the new normal.

or try to struggle for a return to social democracy which is pointed out the wrong and I think we're still trapped in that I think we have a subjectivity that comes out like austerity subjectivity where we are you know scornful cynical pessimistic right of anything that we think we can't focus on these long things and of course we're anxious right this kind of anxiety that's created around it and so when the next one comes I just feel they'll just like tap in and reinforce what they haven't stopped saying

like they still are saying this shit I like the politicians in my city of Toronto are still talking about austerity it's like so clearly it's it's a way that you know folks think and the next recession just means that they they haven't stopped saying it they may make it even more gross and monstrous but I think people have already been conditioned to accept that so and and in this way I talked in that one section about like kind of the domestic domestication of of the left right that this has resulted in the left again in the imperialist centers and they've been largely domesticated and I think what we we need um and some

people obviously not doesn't mean everyone the left is like this I'm talking about the broad trends right um as we need to become a threat to capitalism again right um and and so yeah what I what I want and what I want people's takeaway to be what I always want people's takeaway to be is is to move towards revolutionary communism and uh and this work as all your works you know do that very well and uh I for one deeply appreciated. I appreciate you coming on again. We are going to have you back on again soon to talk about your newest book. Do you want to plug that really quick before we wrap up? Oh yeah. So that's coming out, demarcation and demystification. I think I might have actually plugged it on your, the last day. You did, yeah. I'm happy to plug again. It's coming out

with zero books, and it is just, it's more my, probably the most philosophical I'll ever get because it's just kind of about the question of what is philosophy and what is Marxist philosophy and what is the practice of philosophy that, you know, the way I conceive it as a Maoist and things like that. So that's pretty much that book. I also have, just to point it out, the second edition of the communist necessity is coming out because apparently it's sold out. So Cristobab is releasing that also in 2020, second edition with like an introduction by Dalian Chow and a new afterward by me. And that should be nice too. Yeah, I can't wait for that.

I've read the Communist Successity, absolutely loved it. That one and continuity and rupture were huge for me, really, really clarified things that I was struggling with that at that period of my political development, so I appreciate that. And then for your text on Marx's philosophy, we're teaming up with Allison, my co-host from Red Menace, who is obviously very well-read on philosophy, and we talk about Marx's philosophy a lot on Red Menace. So all three of us, JMP, me, and Allison will come together to do that next text when it comes out. So definitely be on the lookout for that. And just where can listeners find you and your work online

for people who just want to generally find your stuff? Oh, yeah. I have a blog called MLM Mayhem. I'm less frequent posting on there now, just because I don't have as much time, but still some things appear. And, you know, I have a number of, I have books published by Zero Books

and Books published by Kirst Blobodeb. So you can check out their websites for my books. Cool. And we'll link to much of that as we can in the show notes. Thanks again, JMP. It's always a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Talk to you soon.

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