Rev Left Radio - The Iran War: A Dialectical and Historical Materialist Analysis

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

Alyson and Breht apply dialectical and historical materialist analysis to the current war of aggression in Iran. Together they break down the Marxist methodology into its three main parts - dialectics, materialism, and history - and showcase how they apply to the US and Israeli war on Iran, before bringing them back together into a coherent whole. Then they compare and contrast dialectical and historical materialism as a mode of analysis to other forms of analysis: from academic modes like liberal internationalism and Realism to common popular modes like conspiracy theories and moralism. Throughout the process, they aim to show the superior clarity and demystification offered by Marxism in understanding our world, as it unfolds in real time.    ---------------------------------------------------- Check out our NEW REV LEFT MERCH with Goods For The People HERE Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio https://revleftradio.com/

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Red Menace. All right. This is going to be a fun, if, you know, kind of perhaps challenging episode today. What we are going to do, and I'll talk in a second about why we're doing this, but what we're going to do today in a nutshell is basically take dialectical and historical materialism and show how it can be applied to a real world event, in this case, the war in Iran. We're going to break down dialectics, dialectical and historical materialism. into its three parts, dialectics, history, materialism, kind of break them apart to show how what each piece adds to the overall analysis, keeping in mind, of course, that they all ultimately go together and that will become clear as well. And after we go through that process, we're going to compare and contrast dialectical materialism to some other analytical lenses or some other ways of apprehending, you know, political events that are taken seriously in academia. in some that are like kind of folksy, that are that are that are alive and well in the popular consciousness, though they're not taken seriously academically, but still play a major

ideological role in our society. One of those, for example, would be like conspiracy thinking, right? And why we're going to do this, it's multifaceted on one, on one, and I am actually teaching a class for socialist night school tomorrow from recording this on historical and dialectical materialism. So I've been diving into it. You know, revisiting it once again. I've been making notes and it dovetailed really well with this episode because I actually got the idea for this episode from some comments from a really smart, close friend of mind and from a patron on Rev Left Patreon asking two related but kind of differently articulated questions. The patron said, you know, I love like dialectical materialism, like I love learning about

it sometimes though it feels very abstract and I struggle applying it to the real world. So I loved that question. I think it got a lot of likes, which means a lot of other people feel in a similar position. I've always said, you know, the last thing that I really grasped within Marxism, not to say that there aren't things that I can still deepen my grasp on, of course, but the core concept within Marxism that I, you know, struggled the most throughout the years, throughout my 20s to kind of understand was dialectical materialism. It is challenging. And so I totally understand as people are trying to understand it,

the gap between understanding it in the abstract and applying it to real world ongoing events, that can be a difficult thing to do. So we're going to try to help people with precisely that. So shout out to Lana on the Patreon who asked that question and kind of was the acute impetus for this episode. But I also have a very close friend of mine. We were actually in New York City together, and we were like, you know, having some drinks and talking. And, you know, he's probably the smartest person I personally know, very sort of academically achieved. And, you know, I won't say too much about him.

But anyways, I really respect his opinion. I like him a lot. He's not necessarily somebody who would self-identify as a Marxist, but he's, you know, structural leftists of some sort. Like, he's definitely on the left, you know, maybe Democratic socialists, although he doesn't really apply those labels to himself. But we got into a discussion about Marxism, and we always like to go back and forth on our disagreements. And he's like, you know, I'm on board with class struggle.

I'm on board with anti-imperialism, all this stuff. He's like, but I just don't really see, like I feel like dialectical materialism is kind of fetishized by Marxist. I don't really see how that is different from like common sense or just like a deep analysis of the situation. And I thought it was an interesting critique from somebody who, you know, thinks deeply, thinks abstractly, but couldn't quite see why dialectical materialism even matters, which is different and kind in the question of how do we apply it? It's like, why even apply?

Why? It isn't common sense enough. And so I hope that this episode kind of attempts to answer both of those questions, right? And kind of clarify why this is an important analytical lens to understand the world. And as I'll say again and again, it's not merely to understand, but specifically so that we can intervene meaningfully and effectively into these evolving processes as a terrain of struggle and change the world, right? The classic Marxist quote, philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world. We can analyze, we can try to clarify, we can try to understand, but the point is to change it.

So everything in the Marxist tradition when it comes to philosophy and analytical lenses and modes of analysis is ultimate and theory itself is ultimately. ultimately and always geared toward praxis, which is material intervention in the world as conscious subjects of transformation, right? And by entering that world and trying to transform it, we ourselves are transformed in the process. That's a dialectical notion right there. The last thing I'll say before I toss it over to Allison for some opening thoughts is there's a sort of indefinite nature to dialectical materialism. Me and Allison were kind of joking about this or kind of, you know, being amused. by it, by the fact that there's something deeply demanding about it. Like, you have to always keep

learning. And as you'll understand, when we get into dialectics and history in particular, like, your analysis will be inherently limited if there is a lack of historical understanding. And so there's a sense in which you can always deepen your dialectical materialist analysis. You can always deepen it by learning more. We're going to apply this to the region and to Iran and the war in particular. But the difficult part about this that Allison and I both articulated to each other was that like where do you stop the analysis, right? Like, because you could keep going deeper. That's all relational. So we could spend an entire episode just talking about the role that Jordan plays in, you know, the region historically and contemporarily, right? We could, we barely, I barely

mentioned Saudi Arabia in this, which is just like obviously something we could spend an entire episode talking about their role in this. So it's difficult when you're trying to, um, trying to explain it and apply it in the way that we're going to do today to kind of find the edges and the clean cutoff points of where our analysis can end. But, you know, truthfully, it never ends. It can continually deepen. And it can be as nuanced and complex as the world itself. And that's kind of the sort of impossible gap to leap is like all analytical lenses, all attempts to understand the world must be by their very nature a short hand for reality itself. because reality in all of its complexity can never be comprehended at once.

But the more we know, the more our background knowledge fills out, the more we know about economics, the more we know about history, the more we know about religious ideology and the cultures of the countries involved, our analysis will get sharper and sharper and sharper. And so that demands of us as Marxists in a way that I think is not demanded by almost anybody else on the political spectrum, a necessity to never, ever stop learning. Like to just make raw curiosity and the love of learning a part of your very being because our political project requires it. So, Alison, any opening thoughts?

Yeah, no. I mean, the good opening salvo there that hits at, I think, the enormity of the project. So I think a couple of high-level thoughts before we get too deep into this. So the first is, I think, like you said there, Brett, this is going to be, I think, honestly a pretty surface level overview of everything. We're going to get into the history of Iran. We're going to get into the economics at play. We're going to get into dialectics. But literally, I think both of us as we were putting this episode together, we're just like, oh my God, where do you draw the minds? Where do you cut it off? And so we are not going as deep as possible, but I would

recommend if you want to go deeper, at least on the dialectics and the economics side, our episodes on the dialectics of nature and Lenin's imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which, would probably be helpful for going beyond what we're doing here, because we're gesturing towards ideas from both of those. So I do want to shout out that, you know, there are deeper resources on those at least. And then, yeah, I think really the reason that this is necessary, aside from the two kind of inciting incidents that you talk about, Brett, is that one thing that I've seen a lot of people talk about is this sense that, like, the Marxist left in the U.S. has not adequately responded to the war in Iran. And I think that's a very

fair critique that is to be made. And I also think part of the reason for that might be that we don't have an analysis that can inform our actions necessarily. And Marxism really has this like very intense demand, which is that theory without action and action without theory are both insufficient. And I often think that when we have these conversations about like the failing tactics of the West, it's not just a tactical question. It is also a theoretical question. Those things are inherently wrapped up together. So when we try to, you know, break down, why are we failing at the current moment, these theoretical questions are not irrelevant, because they inform the types of actions that Marxists take.

So I do think that's the other kind of stake and the reason that having these conversations is worth doing just in terms of getting to practical organizational activity. The other thing I'll say is, like, I think one of the claims that Brett and I have made is this very classic Marxist-Leninist reading of dialectics, right? I think Brett and I both approach dialectics as a worldview, essentially, what people often call worldview Marxism, I think is not an unfair descriptor of my approach to Marxism, at least. We're both very informed by Engel's work on this, and I know Brett, you recently had, I think, actually a really fascinating interview with Joel Wainwright that got into some of these

different ways of thinking about dialectics and how totalizing it is. But one of the reasons to do this application of dialectics to specific things in my mind is to show how universal it is and to show how much it is this fundamental part of reality that needs to be accounted for in whatever it is we're trying to wrestle with. So I hope that this can also kind of be an application of that and maybe some backing for our, again, I think very classic Marxist-Leninist understanding of what dialectics is as opposed to those who want to treat it as an imminent critique or something along those lines. So that's the other piece of context that I'll add there. Definitely. And continue that a little bit. Speaking again,

on the depth of this analysis and how to go about doing it, you know, I always come back to the point that this is best done communally with comrades and struggle. Like if you're trying to understand and apply dialectical historical materialism to the war in Iran, for example, or to any situation, yeah, you can have a go of it yourself, and you know, and certainly like I'm writing up my notes, Allison's writing up hers, and we're kind of bringing them together. But it's best done face to face in the context of a cadre of an organization where each person can kind of contribute to the unfolding process of understanding itself because there are just limitations to any one individual mind. So if it's true that we have to have the biggest background

web of knowledge possible and an ever-growing web of knowledge to be as good as this as we can, then that would just obviously logically, you know, lead to the fact that then having multiple people with ever-broadening webs of knowledge coming together and working together would obviously be even more ideal. So I would remind people of that. I do, because this is an episode that requires precision and because I'm of course, have all these notes from preparing for my lecture tomorrow for Socialist Night School, there will be me reading it because I want to be precise with that language. So I have a bunch of notes. It's not going to be me off the cuff as much. as in other episodes perhaps.

And there's a reason for that is because I want to be incredibly precise with what I'm saying so that it can, you know, obviously be more meaningful and impactful for people because, you know, a discussion like this does not lend itself to mere extemporaneous riffing, as it were. And then the last thing I want to say is Allison said that we kind of are partisans of angles and have like a worldview Marxism and I don't make any bones about that. Like, yes, I do. That's my position. and, you know, I've yet to be convinced out of it.

And I've had disagreements and I've read other things that disagree with that take, and it's still kind of my position. But, you know, I'm writing a book right now. I'm almost finished up called something like Letter to Young Revolutionaries or Letter to Young Revolutionaries. And the whole approach is dialectical to the core because I'm trying to bring in existentialism, virtue ethics, Buddhist conceptions of transformation of mind and Marxism to kind of bring a well, rounded path of life as it were, as arrogant as that might sound to say out loud, but it's this dialectical interplay between these seemingly different philosophies to try to approach

the possibility of like how best should we live our lives. What is a good life mean in the 21st century at this crossroads of the human species? And so the dialectics of that are just embedded within it. And it's just how I think and I think is how Allison thinks. So, you know, take that for what it is but I'm also under contract with Iskra for a second book and I've I really kind of played with the idea of bringing Allison on board to perhaps do an introduction to dialectical and historical materialism which I think you know could possibly be helpful like it would be kind of like this idea but turned into a full book so it's just an idea bouncing in the back of my head it might be the first time I ever mentioned to Allison so you know what it's worth but yeah totally all right well in

that case let's go ahead and get into it so What we're going to do here is we're going to break down dialectics, then history, then materialism, and we're going to kind of explain what each component, as it were, contributes to the whole of the analysis. But remember, these are to be taken together. So I have some introductory notes before I dive into dialectics. And one of the things I wanted to mention up front is this concept from Marx. You know, dialectical and historical materialism come kind of after Marx. Angles does a lot of work, making explicit what is implicit in much of Marx's work and turning it into what we now think of and can talk about explicitly as dialectical and historical materialism.

I don't think Marx himself, at least in his work, ever specifically talks about those phrases or fleshes out that particular philosophy in full, though it's ever present in his work and certainly in his mature work. But there is a concept of abstraction, and I think that is worth mentioning up front. Abstraction for Marx is not just leaving details out. It's like the disciplined act of isolating a real aspect of a concrete hole in

order to understand it better, while never forgetting that the aspect isolated only exists as part of a larger social totality. So when we're breaking apart, dialectics and materialism and history, we are abstracting, we're taking an aspect, kind of

abstracting it out of the totality and trying to analyze. visit, but never losing sight of the fact that this goes back into the, into the hole. So that, I think, is something worth noting. And then my opening salvo, I'll just, I'll just read into my notes, is reminding people to keep these things together. Taking together, dialectics, history, and materialism do not just give us three separate lenses. They give us a unified method for understanding reality as a historically produced, materially grounded, contradiction-driven totality. Dialectics lets us see motion, contradiction, reversal, and development.

History lets us situate any present event inside the larger process that gave rise to it. Materialism keeps us anchored in real structures, institutions, class interests, state power, economic pressures, and the concrete material conditions under which ideology and politics take shape. So infused together, they allow us to move past surfaced appearances and grasp not only what is happening, but why it is happening in this form at this moment and through these specific actors. And that right there, I think, is an attempt to address the skepticism from my friend who says, like, what does dialectical materialism actually offer? So going on with the notes, this is what makes the method superior to competing forms of analysis, which we'll talk about later. liberal moralism can identify atrocities, but it usually cannot explain the deeper structures producing them. Realism, as we'll talk about in depth later, can see power and strategic rivalry, but it reifies the state and abstracts it away from class struggle and historical development.

Cultural and religious analysis can recognize the force of ideology, but often treats ideas as self-moving rather than socially and materially grounded. So dialectical and historical materialism can preserve what is partially true in each of these approaches. approaches, right? They all have a kernel of truth within them while at the same time transcending their particular limits because it situates law, ideology, class, geopolitics, state strategy, military force, religious ideas, etc., inside one, interconnected and historically developing totality. And most importantly, to wrap this part up, this method is not just for contemplation. It is not merely a way of interpreting the world more elegantly, as I said earlier. It's a way of understanding the world in order to intervene in it more consciously. It asks not only what

exists, but what force has produced it, what contradictions sustain and destabilize it, where its pressure points lie, what forms of action might actually transform it. So in that sense, dialectical and historical materialism is different for most rival frameworks because it's oriented not toward near spectatorship or elite policy management, but towards praxis, right? So its ultimate purpose is not just to describe reality, but to demystify it, to clarify the terrain of struggle and help human beings act within history as conscious agents of transformation. So that is kind of an opening. Salvo, kind of an attempt to address the main concern from my friend in particular of why this stuff matters, what makes it different from other forms of just deep analysis and common sense and bringing knowledge together. and I think it really does in a lot of ways go back to that quote for Marx about the point being to change the world.

And you just don't see that a lot from competing forms of analysis, which we'll get into later. So let's go ahead and get into it then breaking these things apart, abstracting them out of their totality. And we can start with dialectics. So dialectics at its core, right? If I had to summarize it in a single sentence, it would be like apprehending, in this case, the Iran war as the product of a voluctor. evolving processes driven forward toward culmination by internal and external contradictions, right? Dialectics is about an unfolding process and evolving process that is driven forward, that the motion of evolution itself is driven forward by contradictions.

So, you know, some initial thoughts is October 7th can be seen as forcing this contradiction to the forefront and toward a real resolution instead of allowing it to be wrinkled over, ignored, submerged, or otherwise worked around. not the contradiction of Iran in particular, but the contradiction within Palestine, right? The contradiction between the occupation of Israel and the settler colonial apartheid nature of that state and the insistence on behalf of Palestinians for self-determination. And there was an attempt going on with Saudi Arabia and the Abraham Accords and all these other maneuvers to kind of move past that contradiction. Can we kind of wrinkle beyond it?

Can we kind of ignore it and move forward? you know, installing Israel as a legitimate actor in the region. And what Yaya Sinwar and Hamas and October 7 did is said, no, motherfucker. You're not moving past this. You're not ignoring this. This must be resolved. And October 7th was the explosion onto the scenes of that contradiction that had been boiling under the surface, had been implicit the entire time, but was trying to be ignored.

And that was just no longer tenable. So what are the core contradictions at play in the Iran war in particular, right? The contradiction, this is, you know, this is not what's the biggest contradiction in the world. It's not the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. We talk about imperialism as the primary contradiction in the global system right now, talking about specific contradiction leading up to this war. And there are many contradictions. But the core contradiction in some sense is, and this is my opinion, Alison can disagree,

the contradiction between U.S. and Israeli imperial and colonial domination of the region required for the stability of Israel's project, which itself is required for U.S. imperial control of the region, and the persistence of forces just unwilling to be subordinated to that order. So the Iran, the axis of resistance, Palestinians, all who seek self-determination, regional autonomy, and freedom from domination. We see that there is a core contradiction in the region between the interests of the U.S. and Israeli-led Western colonial and imperial powers and the people of that region, the indigenous people of that nation, resisting that imperial and colonial domination. Allison left a note here that I think is worth noting. She said resistance to subordination is part of it, but I think the other thing to note is forces that have been excluded from the economic order the West has sought to establish due to sanctions and embargoes.

That economic dimension matters here, I think, because it's facilitated the broader multipolarity pivot. And we'll get into the materialist aspect of this in a bit, but that's a huge thing, right? In lieu of subordination, whatever countries around the planet and specifically in this region do not submit and subordinate themselves to this project, they are then also excluded from the economic order through, you know, sanctions and embargoes are probably the two most obvious, you know, things that we can. see. And what does that do? It drives forward the need to extract these countries need to extract themselves from the overall economic order that the U.S. has established. So by trying to weaponize the global dollar and its power, trying to weaponize that to subordinate various countries, that creates a dialectical sort of response where in countries seeking to get out from underneath the boot of subordination will begin to try to find other ways to

trade and build up and grow their economies and ways that can work around that domination and thus weaken it, right? And that's kind of an aspect of dialectics as well. So the core contradiction is between an imperialist regional architecture that seeks strategic supremacy and a resistant block of forces led by Iran that both emerge from and react against that architecture. So that's the broad view of dialectics evolving processes driven forward by contradiction. Contradiction is what drives motion within this framework. So without contradiction, you're just like left with flat descriptions basically, right? Like kind of static forces, competing interests, bad leaders, tragic clashes. But contradiction actually tells you why the situation could not remain as it was. And it's not just a tension between things, right? I want this. And you. And you. You want that, it's a unity of opposed forces that are bound together in a relationship that constitutes and destabilizes the whole. I'll get into, I'll get into that actually right here, because I want to talk about that internal connection. It's not just this separate force over here versus this

separate force over here. They have two different interests and they kind of slam into each other. No, this gets into one of the laws of dialectics, which is the unity of opposites or the interpenetration of opposites. Modern Iran in its actually existing state form has been literally forged through the long process of resisting, surviving, and adapting to U.S.-backed regional domination and Israeli-militarized supremacy. In turn, the U.S. and Israel have been strategically and institutionally reshaped by the need to contain discipline and defeat Iran and the wider axis of resistance. Their regional doctrines, alliance systems, threat perceptions, coercive practices, have all developed through this antagonism. So the unity of opposites here means that these antagonistic state projects, Iran on one side and the axis of resistance versus U.S. and Israel and the other and all of their allies, are not merely confronting one another from the outside, but have been historically constituted and transformed through their struggle with one another. Their opposition is therefore real and mutually formative. The modern Iranian state, the modern Israel,

state are the way they are because of one another's presence in the region and the contradictions between them and their relations between them, right? And they've literally co-evolved in a way that they have been shaped in the U.S. as well, shaped by their confrontation with one another. So this really breaks down this idea of things being separate. These are mutually formed entities, literally mutually formed, right? You could not understand, for example, and we'll get into this with the history part, you could not understand modern Iran without understanding its place relative to the U.S. and Israel in the region as well as all its other contending, you know, neighbors in the region as well. But we're focused on this war, and so we're staying focused on these three states in particular. So that's one of the laws of motion of dialectics, right?

The unity of opposites, interpenetration of opposites. The next one, as many of you will be familiar with, is quantity into quality. Right. So think about it. Zoom out a little bit. Years of sanctions, proxy conflicts, covert wars, like Israel assassinating nuclear scientists within Iran, Palestinian oppression and resistance culminating in the recent genocide, explicit military strikes, the 12-day war, what we're seeing now, well, what we're seeing

now is the result of all that, but the 12-day war last summer. All of these are accumulations of quantity that build on each other until there is a qualitative rupture, a qualitative leap. And in this instance, the qualitative shift takes the form of open war. You know, these things have been happening for decades and decades and decades, and they've been in the context of kind of preventing or keeping the contradictions from resulting in what is actually happening here, which is something like open conflict. So through these proxies, through sanctions, through assassination attempts, through rhetorical saber rattling, through all these things, there has been a build-up, an accumulation of quantitative differences that eventually

will have to leap into rupture from a previous state of affairs into, in this case, open war. So we have an evolving process, driven forward by contradictions, shaping the state forms of all actors involved, accumulating over time to the point where the contradictions could no longer be managed or displaced, and thus phase shifted, if you will, into explicit open war. And here we can see a bunch of seemingly disparate events like the Syrian Civil War, the overthrow of Gaddafi and Libya, October 7th itself, the formation of the GCC Alliance, Sykes-PICO, colonial border construction, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, et cetera, et cetera, as both like kind of total in themselves in the sense that we can zoom in and look at each one of these events

and kind of use dialectical materialism and historical materialism to make sense of them, while at the same time zooming out to take them together in their totality. And when we do the latter, we can see the quantitative buildup of forces, events, contradictions, et cetera, all throughout the region that eventually spills over into this qualitative shift, which is open war in Iran. So both in the sense that it is an open direct war instead of what it has been for decades and in the sense that whatever happens in this war will determine the dimensions of a new order. And that's the importance of the qualitative shift.

Yes, it's a qualitative shift into open war. And this war will also, I mean, you know, I don't think it's going to end in like a stalemate in a reversion back to the status quo, right? That status quo that we lived with our whole lives, that's dead. That's what's being ruptured from. And so whatever happens, you know, whatever happens in this war, a new regional order is emerging through this war and through all the other contradictions in the region. but this war is obviously the inflection point. So there is no going back to a previous state of affairs. This is the core mistake of all reactionaries.

They always want to go back to some golden age, and dialectics insists on nothing but forward movement. The only way out is through, as Allison and I have said many times on this podcast. So the contradictions that brought us to this point will be resolved in one direction or the other. In that process, it will create a new order in the region and reverberate throughout the world, and in that synthesis will immediately generate a new set of contradictions that will drive the next round of conflict and change. The qualitative shift from the Iran War could be anywhere on the spectrum from subtle to intense, right? So on the subtle form of like what will this new qualitative order like, you know, after this rupture and this war, whatever happens,

what would this new state of affairs look like? It could be more subtle being, you know, something like Iran effectively deters this attempt to destroy them. cements their place as a regional power that can no longer be invaded or sanctioned effectively, right? It flexes its control over the Hormuzh straight and keeps that as leverage in their pocket going forward. The U.S., kind of, you know, although it still will always have an interest in the region, it backs off in a serious way. Perhaps Israel is forced to narrow its scope of what it can do in the region, etc. All these would represent something like a new order established through the outcome of this war, in this case, in this example, Iran more or less

drags out the war long enough or effectively establishes deterrence so that the U.S. and Israel have to back off. So that's a subtle way that this could happen all the way to an extreme qualitative shift, right? It could be as extreme as the end of Zionism in the region. Nuclear war. The destruction of the GCC is an alliance with Western imperialism. The total defeat of U.S. imperialism in the region

and a total like internal restructuring of the empire. and the American state domestically in the face of its sort of humiliating defeat as a declining imperial hegemon, right? And the rise of Iran as a regional superpower. Like that's on the extreme end of what a qualitative shift after this war could look like. And so many other trajectories in between. We can never know what the future holds. Dialectical and historical materialism are not a crystal ball that we can look into the future and predict how events will happen. We can only know this war will be determinative one way or the other.

represent the end of the older order as it was and the rise of a new one, though the dimensions of that are still literally being worked out through the historical clashes we're seeing right now. Finally, this is going to be a longer episode. I'm sorry for that, but this is the nature of what we're trying to do here. Finally, another law of dialectics is the negation of the negation. So we could go back indefinitely on this, right? Like there's an order, there's a negation of that order, there's a negation of that negation. And it just kind of keeps going backwards. So you can go back and start in, you know, 1,300, you know, or go back to ancient Persia.

And if you had all that knowledge, if you could possibly have all that knowledge, you could work through the negation of the negation in various senses. But in this sense, let's start with like the original order. So, you know, just having some sense of an arbitrary cutoff here, but we got to start somewhere. The original order. What was originally negated? So following the 1953, you. U.S. and UK backed coup of Mozadec and Iran, right, over natural resources

and oil production, the Shah's regime became a key pillar of U.S. aligned regional order. They did a coup. They installed a basically a Western puppet dictator in the Shah, and that created a situation in which in the case of Iran, it meant

deep political subordination to Western power, the suppression of internal opposition, a strategic role broadly compatible with the U.S. and Israeli regional interests, right? there were many other dimensions to this order but for our purposes that's the essential point so that's the kind of the order now the negation of that original order you could think of the 1979 revolution in iran right it shattered this arrangement it negated this order by overthrowing

the shah the revolution negated iran's prior role within the u.s backed regional order and brought internal and external contradictions violently to the surface the Islamic republic then consolidated itself in significant part through opposition to the U.S. and Israeli domination, and over time became increasingly linked with other forces in the region, resisting that same order, helping to give shape to what would become the axis of resistance. I'm a millennial born in 1989. This has been the order for my entire life, right? If you're older, you might have lived to see the 1979 Iranian revolution, but this is kind of the order that we're used to. But, you know, this is the negation of that negation. The U.S. and Israel in turn, because the face of this new Iran that has bucked off this U.S.

puppet dictatorship and asserted its own self-determination internally, we are going to organize our state along these lines no longer dictated by the U.S. and its allies, right? The U.S. and Israel, in turn, intensified their efforts to contain, we can isolate and roll back Iran in the broader axis of resistance through, as we've discussed, sanctions, proxy warfare, assassination, massad infiltration, Mossad infiltration, CIA infiltration, bombardment, siege, encirclement, the direct attack across Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and elsewhere, Iraq, Syria. But the second negation did not restore the old equilibrium. It didn't take us back to a previous era. Instead, it hardened Iran and its allies. It intensified militant resistance across the region. It deepened strategic coordination with Iran

and the axis of resistance. And then on the other side, Israel and the U.S., expanding. asymmetric forms of struggle, increased the use of geopolitical and economic leverage points, and pushed Iran toward deeper ties with other states outside the U.S. controlled orbit, including Russia and China. That's also, of course, the order that we're growing up in because it's a response to the 1979 revolution on behalf of the U.S. and Israel. So that's kind of the situation that we're in. And so what we're seeing now is that that order arising out of dialectical negations

and driven to a crescendo by the contradictions of the current order, then the process is in the process of being negated itself. And this is how dialectical processes advance. Understanding the basic laws of motion of dialectics really does help clarify the whole process so that it can be more effectively intervened and enacted upon, ideally by an organized political force that's able to exert real power, right? In the hands of, let's say, a highly developed vanguard party,

such analysis would allow that party to operate consciously at the bleeding edge of the process itself. We do not have that in the United States. We do not have a Vanguard Party, and thus we do not have any real political power. And so we are relegated because of our lack of organization to a sort of reduced state of analyzing and interpreting and pointing out and cheering on the forces of resistance without being able to effectively intervene ourselves. And of course, that gets back to our need to construct a Vanguard Party.

I believe something like the only vehicle possible to achieve the high level of organization needed to intervene to accumulate political power so that you can intervene meaningfully. So again, not exhaustive, just kind of a run through of dialectics overall. The role of contradiction is some of the basic laws of motion within dialectics. But already we can see what it would take to take this analysis and continue to develop it. And so I think that's the goal for these sections. Is it to lay it on the table, show you the basics, and then encourage people then to take that up as a form of analysis and deepen it in their own, you know, in their own minds and ideally in their own organizations and cadre.

But Allison, I'll bounce it over to you for any thoughts on that. All right. Yeah. So I think there are a couple thoughts that I have building in all of that. I mean, first, thank you for taking the time to put that together because I think it's really hard to take these abstract notions of dialectical materialism and do that application, even though that's precisely what we're, you know, sort of tasked to do. Once you actually sit down to do it, it's a surprisingly challenging thing. So I think this does a really

good job. There's a few things that I want to hit at. The first is I think, you know, you made this comment about halfway through of like, we can try to use this to be predictive of what transformations are going to take place, but we don't have a crystal ball, right? And this is often one of those things that I think would dialectics people get kind of hung up on is when Marxists talk about Marxism and historical materialism as a scientific analysis. They think that Marxists are saying that we have this incredible predictive power basically to know how geopolitics and all these things will shape up. And I think your analysis here does a really good job of showing, well, no, we know possibilities, right? We can trace out this trajectory of transformation. And I think the thing that dialectics really brings to the table is it really insists that if we want to look at history, the thing that we know, the one thing that we know for certain,

is that it is in a state of motion. It is going to change. And what the current status quo is will not be sustainable over the long term. And I think that really comes out through all of your analysis here, especially this focus on the negation of the negation, and showing how even these like massive reversals in what the situation looks like are themselves temporary. Their momentum can only carry for so long before something else emerges as a result of internal contradictions and pushes things in the other direction. And so I think this gets at this aspect of dialectics very, very well. The other thing that I want to point out, again, is this kind of idea of the unity of opposites expanding on that a little bit. We'll get into

the history of Iran and the U.S. and how much, you know, they can't really be disentangled from each other in so many ways. And oftentimes, I think when leftists talk about this, they talk about U.S. intervention in Iran, right? And the way that the U.S. has shaped Iranian politics. But I think at the present moment, it's actually a very useful time to look at the way that Iran is shaping the U.S. right now through this conflict. There's actually something fascinating here, which is that in real time, I think we are seeing a transformation of the U.S. as a global actor through what is happening here, and that unity of opposites can very clearly be seen at play, mostly because of the fact that I think, by all accounts, the U.S. is losing this war right now. Our fighters are being

shot down. The Strait of Hormuz is closed and is absolutely devastating us economically. and the U.S. is saying we're not even going to try to reopen it. It is up to Europe to go reopen it if they want to. We are watching what is already an ongoing process of the U.S. going from being a unipolar hegemon to something weaker, accelerated through the actions of Iran. And so that unity of opposites and that mutual transformation that is being enacted, I think you can see it like shockingly clearly in this present moment in a way that is really fascinating. And so I want to push, you know, to, a little bit more on that analysis as well. The other thing that I'll add as I think one of the, you know, call it a law of dialectics or not, that is relevant here is the transformation of contradictions from antagonistic to non-intaginistic forms. And this really develops most clearly in Mao's work on contradiction, where Mao says that contradictions shift back and forth in terms of their antagonism and how outright hostility is taking place within them. And I think you trace that really well, Brett, with the way that, you know, October 7th,

becomes this antagonization of a contradiction that has moved in and out of more or less antagonistic periods. And what's so fascinating about October 7th is it has taken a whole host of other regional contradictions and also forced them into an antagonistic form. And so I think we see that transformation that Mao talks about very clearly at play here as well when we're trying to get into the dialectics of everything. So I think this is a very useful framing for helping us think about, again, what can feel like these abstract philosophical concepts are actually very useful for wrestling with what is happening and what could otherwise just be a bunch of disparate data points rather than something that can be helpful for clarifying the processes unfolding

in the world around us. Yeah, absolutely. And it was one quick more follow up on what you said is I also try to emphasize how like contradictions are, they're attempted to be contained, right, in indirect form. Like there's always this attempt. And that's what we mean by kind of things are bubbling up underneath the surface of appearances. You know, if you're not paying close attention, you might, you know, not know that this was leading here. And a lot of liberals, for example, are perpetually perplexed when Ukraine and Russia break out or the genocide in Palestine, if they even acknowledge that, if that breaks out or the Iran war breaks out, they're perplexed.

Like, what is happening? They're confused because they're only grasping it, trying to apprehend it at the moment that it bursts onto the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the surface of appearances. And so understanding this attempt to mediate contradictions and trying to keep the lid on a boiling pot is how I sort of envision it. But if it boils enough, you know, the lid flies off and that's when we see these ruptures, as it were. So, yeah, great points.

But, yeah, Alison, you want to take us into the historical aspects. Yeah. So real quick, I'm going to go ahead and dive a little bit into the history of U.S. interrelations with Iran. I think this is where I need to put a whole bunch of. asterisk because where you draw the line on this history is so difficult. I mean, if we wanted to do a very holistic understanding of Iran from a historical materialist perspective, we would be going back to ancient Persia, probably, and tracing economic development all the way out. And even just like

a more moderate one that would still increase the scope of this episode by ours would wrestle significantly more with the Ottoman Empire and all of these things. But for the sake of trying to give us a more condensed history that will fit in a podcast that is at a length that you, the listener, will actually want to listen to. I have limited the scope a little bit here to really focusing on the 20th century. I will say, again, everything discussed here, there is background context of 19th century developments very much and even further back that are leading to this. But I'm really narrowing the scope to how have the U.S. and Iran related to each other and had this mutually transformative impact on each other in the 20th century in particular.

So all that to say, I hope this will be useful, but I also think if you want to practice dialectical materialism and historical materialism, you need to go beyond what is provided here. This is just what we can fit to try to make things work. So with that said, let me go ahead and dive into this history. So in the 20th century, the U.S. started to show a particular interest in the affairs of Iran as part of its broader imperialist ambitions, and I think this is important for us to contextualize. So we see this most clearly in 1923 when the U.S. actually sent an economic advisor of Iran to push for some of its own economic interests in Iranian relations and to try to develop closer relations

to the Iranian government as what was very clearly articulated as a strategy of out-competing European influence in the region. As a background, it was Britain and Russia who had a particularly high level of influence in Iran at this time, and so the U.S. is very much conceptualizing this as a counterbalance on that. American friendliness towards Iran throughout the early 20th century largely focused, again, on this reduction of British and Russian influence. Later British backing for Rezacan's coup led the U.S. to feel the need to increase its own influence on the Shah over time, and World War II would eventually somewhat disrupt competition between Russia, Britain, and the U.S. in terms of Iranian influence as all three actors ended up relying on Iran as an aid corridor.

So throughout this period of the early 20th century, we see this competition taking place, but again, it really becomes disrupted by World War II. Then in a post-war context, we see a U.S. pivot toward opposition to perceived Russian expansionism. Obviously, all of us who have some familiarity with the Cold War know the broad structure of this. But the U.S. really became concerned with this idea that Russia had planned. for Iran. U.S. influence ultimately took a major hit in 1951 with the nationalization of Iranian oil and the election of Prime Minister Mohammed Moseek. While the U.S. stood in support of Mosec

officially, the government actually allowed the CIA to begin covert operations that would result in the 1953 coup d'etat, which we will get way into more details with. The important thing here again is that while the U.S. talked about self-determination and democracy in terms of of its foreign policy, this behind-the-scenes covert operations really were the beginning of CIA influence operations in the region and show this shift to an American imperialism that is going to take this form that involves clandestine intelligence work alongside traditional warfare. So in August 19, 1953, Mossadegh was overthrown by the U.S. and a British coup. Britain and the U.S. justified this internally through appeals to anti-communism, suggesting that

he was falling under the influence of the Communist Tudov party and therefore was entering the Russian sphere of influence. The coup was also used as a, you know, real pretext to purge leftists and supporters of Mosec and consolidate all power under the Shah. And so this really is this turning point in which we begin to see the U.S. not just taking this passive role of trying to build influence and trying to do its own economic development within Iran, but to actively trying to shape the state of the Iranian government. With the Shah now thoroughly in the control, the U.S. sought to bring Iran into the fold of the U.S. imperial sphere of influence even more directly. Eisenhower somewhat ironically actually helped Iran develop its initial nuclear program, which again now might

sound very odd. But the U.S. supplied Iran with a nuclear reactor and with enriched uranium in order to help bring it into the U.S. nuclear sphere of influence. This closening relationship between the U.S. and Iran actually played a broader part in the U.S. approach to the Cold War. As Iran bordered Russia, having a strong U.S. ally in the region was seen as a check on Russian expansion. And the U.S. engaged in considerable arms sales to Iran at this time as part of this broader Cold War strategy. So again, we can see the way that this competition between the U.S. and Russia on the international stage really begins to become the pretext for U.S. action here. During this consolidation of U.S. influence under the Shah, there was also notable opposition

that began to develop in the country. By 1963, Ayatollah Rola Khomeini had begun to organize Islamic resistance to the Shah, really articulated in, you know, actual religious terms, but interestingly, also in a broader context. Comani's rhetoric would get him exiled for up the next 15 years, but it's very interesting because he started to develop this form of Islamic resistance that began to develop an almost third worldist orientation, denouncing colonialism and imperialism not from an economic perspective so much or a materialist perspective, but from the idea that Islam offered an alternative vision, and this obviously will become a very, very influential concept in 20th century Islamic resistance. Islamic resistance groups were, of course, not the only

organizations that were beginning to kind of develop dissent against the Shah and spread the seeds of rebellion. There were liberals and there were also communists that had begun to agitate and propagandize against the Shah with a particular focus on American influence. And within the communist camp, there were some very interesting groups, including groups like the people's Mujah Hadin, who had a sort of like Islamist-Marxist articulation, actually. That made them somewhat unpopular with both the Marxists and the Islamists, unfortunately. So during this period, divides between the Islamist and communist groups already existed, and their significance varied at different moments. Sometimes there was more willingness to work together.

Sometimes those contradictions were a lot more antagonistic. But the tensions that would later become more obvious once the revolution came about were still present at this early time within those groups that were opposed to U.S. interests and the Shah. The protest movement that would eventually develop into the Iranian Revolution had already begun as early as January of 1978, with seminary students taking to the streets in opposition to the Shah. Hundreds of students were killed, and the opposition movement pushed for religious authorities

to recognize these students as martyrs. Again, we can see this really important role that Islam plays in the revolution at this time. And by February, more large-scale rioting occurred, and the Iranian military had to be deployed in response to put down the protests. By September, the Shah had declared martial law, And on Black Friday, 89 protesters were shot after defying the order to disperse. This was a turning point in the revolution that saw the establishment of oil strikes and eventual general strikes.

And so here we see what was just, you know, this mass protest movement turning into this economic movement as well. And this is where we see some of the impact of those communist and leftist groups involved as well, in addition to the Islamic resistance groups. By October, a protest broke out at the University of Iran in which, which protesters engaged in an exchange of fire with soldiers, and rioting spread to the British embassy in Tehran, which was burned down. And so the development of this contradiction becomes more and more antagonistic as there's outright fighting between both sides. Komeni called for protests during the Islamic month of Muharram, which led to extremely large protests across the country. And these explicitly called for the abdication of Rezabh, Havlavi, the Shah, and also called for the return of

Khomeini to the country. These protests ultimately succeeded and the Shah stepped down and Khomeini would be allowed to return to Iran. So this is really this moment of building tension. By December, soldiers were actually already beginning to defect and often in some cases were turning on their own officers and trying to pivot to being associated with the revolution. Now, as all of this is happening and it becomes more and more clear that the Shah is going to have to step down, the Shah decides to try to put a secular politician Shapura Bakhtiar into power and believe that Bakhtiar could offer some sort of secular alternative to Khomeini. Bakhtiur did ultimately become prime minister and the Shah left the country to enter exile,

but this led to a new period of tension within Iran. Khomeini eventually returned from exile at the invitation of Bakhtiar, and Khomeini quickly publicly stated his opposition to Bakhtiar's government and declared that there would be a new provisional revolutionary government for the time being. And so interestingly, this actually really reminds me of Russia in some ways. This led to this period of dual power within Iran, where you had two declared governments that were engaging in conflict. An armed conflict broke out between sub-factions of the military that were loyal to different sides. Rebelling army units were quickly joined by protesters and non-military rebels,

who at one point actually seized tens of thousands of machine guns from the military and were able to distribute them to people engaged in the uprising. On February 11, 1979, power was fully consolidated under Khomeini as revolutionaries took control over the country. A major development in the history of U.S. and Iranian relations also occurred in November of 1979 when revolutionaries occupied the U.S. embassy in Iran, where they took American diplomats hostage. The hostage situation lasted for over a year, and covert U.S. action attempted to release the hostages, increasing tensions even more between the new Iranian government and the United States. And this is one of the actions that led very directly to the U.S. putting a ban on Iranian oil imports into the country and freezing of Iranian assets. And so here at this point, I think we see this very clear impact that the revolution has as this turning point in which the U.S.'s approach to Iran becomes trying to economically isolate it and really push it out of the broader global markets and to make it

embargo, to make it sanctioned, and to make it impossible for Iran to interact with the rest of the world. There are so many more things that come after this that I could talk about, but there are a few points that I'm going to hit at going through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s to get us to the present that just show again how the U.S. begins to develop in this direction towards Iran. So in the 1980s, the U.S. use the Iran-Iraq war to place even further sanctions on the Iranian state, while also providing military support for Iraq through the sale of anthrax and other biological agents to the Iraqi government. So again, this very clear imperialist interaction. In the 90s, Clinton imposed even more draconian measures in terms of sanctions and asset freezing against Iran,

and Clinton put in place what was now a total oil and trade embargo. And here we see new language beginning to develop. Clinton began to develop this language of the idea that Iran was a state that was sponsoring terrorism in the region, which is rhetoric that we still hear to this day to justify the current war that is taking place. In the 2000s, U.S. focused on Iran increased even further. George W. Bush began to employ the language of the axis of evil, arguing that Iran was pursuing the development of weapons and mass destruction. and Bush also pushed this idea of Iranian as Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism even further,

as well as the idea that Iran was part of a broader set of states that were intentionally trying to destabilize the region. Again, quite ironically, as Bush would oversee wars that would have a massive destabilizing effect. But a lot of the rhetoric that we hear today begins to solidify even more under Bush's war on terror, and Iran becomes an important aspect of that. Under Obama, the U.S. placed even further sanctions on Iran in order to force it into talks that eventually resulted in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. The GCPOA resulted in Iran agreeing to limiting its own nuclear development, as well as agreeing to a continued monitoring from the IAEA. In 2017, Trump renewed even more sanctions against Iran, and in 2018, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA, alongside declaring the Islamic Revolutionary, Corps to be a terrorist organization. This led to increased hostility against Iran under Trump's

first term, which also, of course, led to the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani. So again, we see this continuing development of antagonism. And then on February 28, 26, the U.S. and Israel launched a surprise attack against Iran, leading to the death of Ali Khamenei, and we are now here at this moment. And so I think, you know, this is a very high-level history. But the thing that we can start to tease out is the extent to which these two states were shaping each other very clearly are exercising, again, this unity of opposites and this mutual transformation upon each other. And now we are entering, I think, kind of a new phase of that that has a higher level of antagonism than we have seen since the original U.S. involvement in the coup that occurred in 1953. So that's a broad level overview. We'll get a little bit into the economics of all of this.

But any thoughts about the history, Brett? Yeah, I mean, one thing you see is that, you know, the war really is a new phase. Like, you know, all these things had happened over generations, over decades. The actual straight up bombing and perhaps now we're seeing an imminent attempt to invade on some level, either Karg Island or some of the islands or Iran itself. Like, this really represents something new. And that's why, you know, this is such a tumultuous, rupturous moment in this long history. I love that you touched on, you know, briefly by. necessity, but perhaps at some point in the future, perhaps when our government isn't trying to

destroy Iran, we might be able to sit down and have a conversation about the internal contradictions of the Iranian revolution itself and the sort of fate of the socialist and communist elements, which were essential to the Iranian revolution and which in some sense were sort of betrayed by the religious conservative right eventually within the revolution. That's a touchy subject. But I think it's, I mean, fascinating on one level. certainly worth knowing and understanding. There needs to be a part of us as communists that harkens back to that history and honors those Iranian comrades who in many cases fought, sacrificed and died in that struggle for self-determination. But, you know, perhaps for a different day,

but you did touch on it. And I think a lot of us on the Marxist left don't often talk about it. You know, is the perfect time to talk about it when our government's trying to drown that country in blood, of course not. But it is worth keeping in the back of your mind as an important part of that internal contradictory history of Iran itself, you know, which we can't turn away from. The other aspect is like what this historical dimension sort of gives us is like genesis. It gives us development. It shows internal and external contradictions over time, sort of periodization, certain orders that were established and then resisted against and then an attempt to oppose a new order, et cetera, how crises internally and externally sort of advance historical

processes that really like when when there isn't an open crisis things kind of stagnate for a while and when you when you study history you see that almost every transformative rupture came through sort of insane crises and so that that kind of for me what that does is it contextualizes what I'm living through yeah I'm living through transformation of course I am an old way of being in the world is dying and not just with Iran and not just with the U.S. and Israel globally, civilizational, ecologically, we're living at a point of crisis

precisely because a global crisis, precisely because it's also a moment at the same time of global transformation. No way to know where that transformation goes. But that crisis and transformation in some sense are like sort of historical synonyms. They come together. And so if you're surprised by that,

I just, you know, you should, you know, study more history and learn not to be. And that kind of helps you. that helps ground yourself living through the crises of the 21st century because we all know something has to change. Like we all know the present order that we've grown up in is literally fundamentally, biologically unsustainable. And so there has to be transformation. And the crises that we're seeing erupt all around us is precisely sort of nature and history's way of goading on that necessary transformation. Like the status quo is unsustainable.

it must change and it is and it's changing through crisis so i think that's what the historical dimension really adds and imagine trying to apprehend the iran war uh or any serious event without knowing that history like having like let's say none of this history in your head and then like you know you're just an average liberal or conservative who watches CNN or fox news or whatever the fuck and um this happens and then like what resources do you have to reach for to understand, you know? And so this history is so essential. And in fact, when you talk to average Americans, you'll hear the products of them not being able to understand. I've heard in my many discussions with regular people in my life, and you'll probably hear this too,

things like they've been fighting for thousands of years. The people over there, they've been fighting for thousands of years. There's nothing we can really do. I mean, just like that right there is just an abortion of thought. That is just a complete, in the void of where historical knowledge should be is a is a sort of platitude that's been implanted into somebody's head to spit out when the complexity of the situation is literally incomprehensible um to them and and to think that's not only average americans but this is what's this is what's fascinating trump himself is an average american that knows none of this you know i mean now that he's in it he might have heard some words like the shah or the iranian

revolution. But if you really ask Trump, like, can you give us even like a 30,000 foot basic history of Iran for just the past 50 years? Imagine the incoherence that would be that would spew out of that guy's face trying to come up with anything at all about the real history here. And that, to be very clear, is deeply to Iran's advantage because Iran does not have that ignorance gap about the United States. And the, the memes that. that Iran makes about American culture shows that they're very much informed on the internal, political and cultural developments of the United States up to date, informed on those things in a way that the administration in the United States towards Iran is absolutely not.

And the final thing I just wanted to mention is this is not just about knowing the history. It's about connecting it and seeing how each, seeing the movements of this history. how one state of affairs bled into the other, how contradiction and crises advance the ball into a new, a new situation, how the escalation spiral moves upward over time, how contradictions refuse over time to be mediated because they're heightening and becoming untenable. It's not just knowing these facts. Like we're taught history in school often as a as a chronology, as like a flow of dates and names. But dialectics and historical materialism allow us to take that, seemingly disparate chronology of facts and put it together into a living, breathing, unfolding hole that can make us better understand how we got precisely to where we are and what is likely, although we can never predict, what is likely to come next depending on how certain things turn out, which again is most Americans in particular totally oblivious to any of this and thus they literally can't understand what's going on. Yeah. No, I mean,

it is kind of horrific how much even this basic level that we've presented here is not in the mind of many people trying to understand this. So hopefully it is helpful in that way. Again, I think like a real deep Marxist history would have to go into the economic development of Iran and really look at, you know, again, going all the way back to the Ottomans at the very, very, very latest. And, you know, look at how it developed in relation to the global economy. But for the next section, I'm going to try to add some of this economic analysis a little bit by looking at materialism. Because in that little history that I told, you got a list of events and you can kind of start to trace the movements there.

But some of the exploration of the underlying economic conditions and the class-based contradictions which are at play, I don't think become as clear in just the historical overview. So I want to take a moment to be a little more explicit dealing with what is happening in terms of economics, in terms of class, in terms of the material assets. aspects of society that are shaping the present war with Iran and have also shaped the history a little bit. So I'm going to go ahead and dive into a bit of analysis here. So, you know, again, big picture plug here.

You should listen to our episode on Lenin's imperialism if you want to get some of the theoretical grounding that's going to be drawn here. But ultimately, I believe that imperialist dynamics remain at the forefront of the current situation and are really the framework through which we can understand what is happening. So at the beginning of the last century, Lenin theorized that the logic of capital export and finance capital would increasingly lead to a division of the world amongst imperialist powers. And we really saw this at its height leading into World War I, when the world really had been carved up by these imperialist powers and these spheres of influence had developed, which of course led to the complicated geopolitical arrangements and alliances that made World War I explode into what it was. But after World War II, we really saw the amount of actors dividing up the world shrink as the anti-communist bloc in the West consolidated and a competing communist bloc took shape

with various non-aligned nations forming a third block as well. And so this consolidation into these various blocks really did change the dynamic a little bit in a way that I think is important for us to wrestle with. And then obviously after the fall of the USSR at the end of the Cold War, there's this period where the U.S. is really conceptualizing itself. as a unipolar hegemon on the global stage where the rhetoric under Bush and even under Obama to some degree conceptualizes America as the power that, you know, treats the entire world as its sphere of influence. And so you could trace perhaps through the 20th century the world moving away from what Lenin had theorized.

And this is what thinkers like Fukuyama would argue when they declared the end of history with the neoliberal world order. But I would say the last couple of years have, really decimated that belief. What we're seeing now in terms of imperialism, I believe, is increasing competition for spheres of influence as various actors compete for control and access to foreign policy or foreign markets. As we saw when we looked into the history of Iran, this struggle has always been at place there. Russia, the U.S. and Britain have long sought to oversee development in Iran, and the growing trend towards multipolarity and economic unions designed to compete with the historical Western anti-communist bloc really shows a renewed global

conflict, and Iran has gotten caught up within that conflict in many ways. The U.S. as a flailing and I believe declining empire is currently engaging in a desperate form of limited militarism to try to force open markets overseas. And this is so clear in Trump's language, actually. We can see this very clearly with U.S. action towards Venezuela, which was explicitly justified in terms of opening Venezuelan markets to U.S. finance and investment. And Trump very much has said the same thing when he talks about Iran and Gaza. In both cases, he talks about pulling their markets open to the United States and allowing the export of U.S. capital to these areas. And so, you know, as much as the trajectory of the 20th century

might have seemed like it was moving away from this descriptor that Lennon put forward, I think the economics of imperialism and finance capital really, you know, really, do remain key here, and Lenin's analysis is incredibly important for providing this economic understanding of what is happening. Capital export and resource extraction from a region are absolutely central to the current situation. Control of Iranian oil has long been a goal of various imperialist powers as well. The British had secured access to it originally through the Anglo-Persian oil company, but they obviously lost control of that company's assets when Iran nationalized oil, which again really actually was this very big moment that led the British and the US to

suggest and then carry out the coup. The US also sees similar opportunities in a war of regime change in Iran, with Trump really assuming that he can gain access to Iranian oil if he can force regime change in some way, tweeting out, should we keep the oil, for example, could not be more obvious what the resource aspect of this is. He likely envisions a system of resource extraction that was actually very similar to that original British system. U.S. aggression is therefore inseparable from this desire to forcibly open markets in countries, which have resisted integration or sometimes been excluded from the U.S. global economic order. And that desire to open markets is primarily driven by finance capitalism,

which sees development opportunities in underdeveloped countries as a way of generating massive amounts of capital. and this, I think, is still what is clearly driving here. Now, at the same time, I think it's important to think about this in terms of the class politics of the U.S. because I think Trump is doing this somewhat incompetently. Rather than rallying oil markets around the perspective, or around perspective access to Iranian oil, the war has really devastated oil markets. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has had a massive impact, and the spillover to broader trading markets beyond oil has already been notable.

What's clear is that this current imperialist lashout is really a desperate attempt by Trump to appease finance capitalist interests, while even though they remain somewhat skeptical of this conflict. Trump is in a moment domestically where he feels the need to consolidate power because of his own unpopularity with the broader populace, and he needs the backing of capital and finance capital in particular if he is going to be able to stabilize things. And I think that that domestic class politics also allows us to understand some of that international action that he is taking and the motivation behind it. Ultimately, the U.S. established a global order in the 20th century that excluded Iran, excluded countries like Venezuela and Cuba, and pushed them outside of the Western economy on the whole. Now Trump wants to forcibly reintegrate them through regime change for the sake of very clear exploitation.

and capital export to those nations. And this really, I think, is the thing that unifies his hostility towards all of the countries he has taken hostile action against or stated he wants to take hostile action against. So again, if we're trying to wrestle with what is the materialist aspect of this, I think the logic of imperialism, almost very similarly to how linen, you know, really developed it a hundred years ago, remains the best causative explanation for what is happening here, both in terms of domestic class politics, but also those broader global structures of finance

capital and investments that have been at the core of imperialist development and aggression since the beginning of imperialism as a stage of capitalism. So that's my kind of salvo on what we could conceptualize as the imperialist view here. Any other thoughts on that, Brett? Yeah, expertly done. You know, Lenin's analysis and imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, just simply has not been defeated. It still offers so much explain it. authority power and helps you demystify so much nonsense when these conflicts erupt. And I think Allison did a great job of pointing out so much of that. And then just like, you know, you really got to understand. I think that materialism is the nucleus of this entire analysis. It is what it is what grounds it.

You know, history and dialectics, these can kind of sometimes be abstract. Like they're big picture things. Materialism is precisely the anchor that allows us to move forward through and actually coherent analysis, right? The inversion of Hagellian idealism was a core inaugural move by Marx that allowed the rest of his project to be able to develop. Historical materialism is literally looking at the evolution of human societies over time through the crucible of how human beings produce and reproduce the means of their own existence and perpetuation. It really can't be understated how important materialism is to this entire project of ours. Once you understand, like as Lenin said, you know, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.

It is monopoly capitalism on the global stage. We see imperialism itself as an output of the mode of production, the global dominant mode of production, which is capitalism. And when we look at colonialism, you know, understanding America as a settler colonial society, Israel itself at sort of an earlier stage of settler colonialism, in real time, though, in the 21st century. colonialism is the part of the primitive accumulations, the inauguration of capitalism and imperialism is its sort of highest global expression. But these things don't happen chronologically. They happen dialectically. And so we see at the exact same time, Israeli settler colonialism, right, occurring and unfolding, which is based on what land, right? Land and the domination and control of land and the expansion of land is the greater is a real project. So land is a form of material value. It is a resource in and of itself,

right? It's the kind of, in some sense, a core resource. And we see imperialism, the U.S. being a hyperdeveloped capitalist, you know, declining hegemon, engage in the region in the same way. So we see colonialism, imperialism, not as colonialism is somewhere in the past. And because we're at this stage of capitalism's development, we see imperialism, but actually they're overlapping processes that still occur. In the same exact way, that although we are obviously in the capitalist mode of production historically, we still see feudal and slave forms of production existing on the margins of the dominant mode of production around the world. These things don't just go away into history. They're brought forward into

new forms under a different dominant system. So I think that's a dialectical point to make here. But when we come back to the materialism of it, which I've actually never left, we can see a bunch of these different aspects to the current situation that are material to the core. I mean, the 1950s coup of Iran is about oil production and the attempt to nationalize it on behalf of Iranians under Mozadec and the need by, you know, big multinational corporations in the UK and the U.S. fossil fuel corporations, the need for them to control that oil supply and the entire relationship between Iran and the U.S. in particular, although it cannot be reduced to oil, is centered around the material necessity of oil production, oil being the backbone of the global economy, the main

energy source of the last century for human beings and industrial and post-industrial capitalism, the world over. And that is such a crucial material resource that that has really structured in a lot of ways the conflict between Iran and the U.S. the whole time. As I said earlier, Israel, going back to a material analysis of Israel-settler colonialism, is about land and the capture of land and the expansion of that land, and that's implicit in the Greater Israel Project. We can also look at the petro dollar and the U.S. dollar is the global reserve currency as two aspects of what made the U.S. post-World War II and specifically post-S. the global unipolar hegemon.

It's not just the overwhelming military force. It's precisely their control over the economics of global resource extraction, production, and distribution, the petro dollar and the reserve currency status of the U.S. are fundamental pillars of that order. And those are not dead yet, but they are certainly being challenged. And dialectically, amusingly, the more that the U.S. weaponizes them, the more that the U.S. weakens it. The more that Trump tries to express American international hegemonic power, the more that power unravels and the quicker in unravels. That is fascinating, right? It's the more that they try to do something, the more they actually weaken their position. And the deepest

irony of the entire Trump administration, as I've always said, is under the banner of renewal, aka, make America great again, they have done nothing but accelerate the decline. That's a beautiful dialectical irony that those of us on the Marxist left can look at and see like, wow, wow, that's it right there. But a couple more things I want to mention, the material interests of the military industrial complex. Why is the U.S. always motherfucking at war? There's lots of reasons. One of them being that it is profitable, literally it puts money into the pockets of certain people. It takes public taxpayer dollars and turns them into private profits for the military industrial complex. And they make more money when they're selling weapons.

And when war depletes weapons needs the production and selling of new weapons, there's a core base in the deep state of America itself that has a financial, material interest in perpetual war. And so that's one layer of analysis here. And then, you know, we could talk about sanctions. Kissinger talking about in Chile making the economy scream. That is the fundamental premise of sanctions. It is to make the domestic population suffer materially in hopes that they can turn that domestic population against the government that the U.S. and its allies want to overthrow. So it's a core component of the attempt to weaken Iran over the years.

And that's material to the core. It's about money and trade flowing. into a country or not, you know, that look at Cuba, same situation. And then internally, the U.S. has racked up trillions and trillions of dollars of debt through these wars in, particularly over the last 20 to 30 years in West Asia. And that debt creates an internal contradiction within the United States that more and more Americans are waking up to, which is the material quality of life for working Americans is on the decline. The increase of the national debt, whatever you want to say about it, does put real pressure on the real economy,

and that itself is a contradiction that has to come to a head at some point. You cannot indefinitely rack up debt to 100 and 200 percent of your GDP. Things will crumble at some point. And so these are internal materialist forms of analysis of the United States that also adds another layer of understanding here. So, you know, I could go on, of course, but I think you get the point. that the materialist layer of analysis and dialectical and historical materialism is the anchor. It is the nucleus. It is crucial. Yeah. No, I think so. And I mean, I think the pitch that I want to make a little bit, and maybe this will lead us into contrasting us with other views,

is that if materialism does provide the necessary context for understanding what is happening, it lets you get past some of these ideas that, like, Trump is just insane, right? Or that Trump is just acting like an idiot. I actually think in the analysis we've drawn out, like, we can show economic conditions that are driving Trump's actions, right? Trump is not free from the forces of history, even if, yes, I do think Trump is an idiot. I don't think that that means that he acts with full libertarian independence from these economic realities. And there is a sort of sick economic logic behind a lot of what he's doing. Again, I think that like forcing open of markets, there's something there that genuinely serves the interests of finance capital.

in a way that you could trace out a sort of rationality to it. It's a demented rationality, perhaps, but it's one that is understandable. And I think that's what's valuable about imperialism. I think, or materialism. I think one of the difficulties in our world is that often it's easy to look at what I think is a decaying state like the U.S. and just say, oh, it's just, you know, it's an irrational lashing out run by a bunch of idiots.

And again, all of that is true on like a less descriptive sense. but there's still logic at play. There's still a guiding kind of economic impetus, which is driving all of that. And materialism gives us access to that, gives us the ability to start to see that and hopefully to formulate responses. And I think that is what's very powerful about it as an explanatory framework that doesn't have to fall back on mystification or individualism in order to try to explain what's occurring in the world. Absolutely. And on the other side of that, though, we can't fall into. a vulgar materialism, right? The dialectical and historical aspects balance out what could be

the vulgarity and reductionism of a mere materialism. You know, when you hear something like, this is just about oil, right? Right. There's a truth there. Like, the oil plays a huge role, but if that's your analysis of why we went to war in Iraq, which we often hear, or why we went to war or why we're going to a war in Iran, it's all about the oil. That is a thought terminating cliche, and that is vulgar reductionism that has jettisoned. That's the way that we're going to the historical and dialectical aspects of it. So by itself, it truly is insufficient. It's only when it's married to the historical and dialectical aspects of this analysis,

that it comes alive and can anchor a real thoroughgoing analysis that can operate again at different levels. We can talk about the psychology of Trump. We can talk about the internal contradictions of the United States, the regional contradictions of West Asia, you know, the global dimensions of what this war might mean. We can go up and down to different layers. of analysis with historical dialectical materialism without losing anything in translation and without reducing any complexity to any other simpler explanation. So that's an important point as well.

Yeah, no, I think definitely that it is very totalizing in terms of what it is able to encompass, right? And again, like, yeah, oil is part of the problem. Like, we have to wrestle with that. But it could have been any other resource in Iran, and we still would have seen the same imperialist developments in many ways, I think. That's one of the kind of complicated things that we have to wrestle with. Yeah. And another way that this sometimes gets reduced by like the America First or anti-Semitic right is like this is all Israel. This is all.

This is the Israelis have infiltrated our government. And so there's no real actual materialism there. It's conspiratorial. It is the idea that the outside of any reasonable interest of the U.S. The sneaky Israelis, AKA on the right, this is literally what they say, you know, Jews. Yeah. have come in and infiltrated our government and opened up all the borders to dilute, you know, whiteness in the West and then are using the American military that it infiltrated to fight its own wars. And again, is there a truth to the Zionist interests here?

Of course. And that's a huge layer of this. But once you reduce it to that, you lose all clarity and you begin a remistification process, not a demystification one. And one more quick point, too, about the materialist aspect here. just ask yourself if the U.S. was able to radically succeed in all of these ventures, if it was able to take down Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, and China, let's just say those countries, and replace them with totally sycophantic and capitulatory leaderships, puppet dictatorships or whatever, that were completely aligned with U.S. interests,

what would be the first thing they do? They would unleash Western corporations into those new markets. So that is like the driving force here. And when Lenin says that imperialism is monopoly capitalism, that's exactly what he means. And that is what would happen. And it's precisely the inability to fully penetrate and dominate those countries on behalf of Western corporate interest that makes them decisively an enemy of the U.S. that then needs to have ideological justifications built up around it and racism and Islamophobia and all these other things to justify what at the end of the day truly is the logic of imperialism. which is that we want to wrench open these very rich resource-wise, materially rich parts of the world

so that our corporations can continue, can go in there, devour them and turn around and create even more profit. And if you have a crisis of the falling rate of profit, opening up new terrains of exploitation and profiteering is obviously high on the goal list of multinational corporations. So we have to keep that in mind as well. Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean, point it would be interesting to have a conversation too. I think about the extent to which the countries that Trump is focused on right now, Venezuela and Iran and Cuba, which are these unopened markets, are that way because they were forced out of the international market by the U.S. in some ways, right? It is the history of sanctions and embargo that have created those

conditions. And I do think there's an interesting, you know, kind of read to do about the internal politics in the U.S. between different imperialist factions, between those who would like to keep those states in a state of isolation and those like Trump who want to force the contradiction into a more antagonistic form to overthrow the state there and then reintegrate that territory into those markets. Again, this is where we see some of, you know, the inter-bujois competition, I think, at play that can be traced out into its own very interesting dialectical historical read of U.S. foreign policy towards these countries. And it's precisely why like the liberals are better at this than Trump because what Trump does explosively,

and undermines the goals of the American state as such, liberals would do with much more diplomacy, and they would understand the need for soft power. They would understand the need for these international institutions, like the IMF, like the World Bank, like NATO, that are actually like fundamental pillars of a world order in which they can maintain the imperialist relationship and the extractive mode of production from these areas.

But Trump, in this belligerent attempt to do it by force, undermines the very mechanisms that actually make that possible over the long term. And that's, again, what Trump does best. Yeah. So, yeah, so let's go ahead. So now that we've got like, I hope people understand, okay, dialectics, history, materialism, put them all together. This clearly, whatever you think about competing forms of analysis, this clearly gives us

a deep, rare and unique ability to understand things. It demands a lot from us. It makes it very hard to sell it to regular people. people because you know you're kind of like I find myself in conversations all the time where there's just like no historical knowledge that I can work with here to try to make an argument to convince this person of my position on this or that issue. So it does demand a lot of us not only as learners, but as teachers. But okay, if you're going to be in this world, that's that's the demand. That's our responsibility. That's our duty. But okay, so we can see how this obviously has serious benefits that it's not just common sense or it's not just pure abstraction. It actually has. helps clarify and demystify what's actually happening in the world. But it comes up against, as we're going to move into this last section, other forms of analysis that are much more predominant, especially in capitalist countries, especially in the U.S., that are much more predominant that fill out the worldview of the entire elite class, even dissident elites, have one of these

things that we're going to talk about here. And I don't think you can understand dialectical and historical materialism as an analytical lens without addressing competing visions, as it were to it. So with that in mind, Alison, if you kind of want to take us into some of the, we'll get into the popular and folksy ideas, but take us into some of the academically respected forms of kind of internationalist analysis that might contend with a dialectical and materialist, historical materialist worldview. Yeah. I think there's two that are on the more academic side that we can address that are interesting and worth wrestling with, and then we can look at some of the less academic ones. But broadly, I think we could look at

a sort of liberal internationalist analysis and also a realist analysis. And we can kind of do some compared contrast there. So when I'm talking about liberal internationalism, within the broader context of international relation theory, I'm referring to several schools such as liberal institutionalism, but broadly to the kind of post-war under of the global order in which liberal institutions play this mediating function on global conflict, and that war primarily is about ensuring international liberal values and bringing states in line with international norms, which are again enforced through those institutions. And this is a well-respected school of international relations thought that liberal institutionalism sounds about as

academic and fancy as it can get tidal-wise. And I think we have to wrestle with the way that liberal institutionalists have taken several views on this. So a liberal internationalist, and I actually don't think you see that much of this right now, but this was very popular under Bush and Obama, for example. One form it could take would be sympathetic towards military action in Iran, but liberal internationalism would have to conceptualize that not as about resource extraction or opening of markets, but as about imposing liberal norms onto Iran. And so when we hear a discussion of, you know, liberation of women in Iran or of pushing back against Iranian authoritarianism or against, you know, this idea, pushing for this idea of human rights in Iran, these are these appeals that this more traditional liberal internationalist perspective has taken.

Now, interestingly, again, I think we heard these justifications for Bush and Obama's foreign policy very clearly. But these are not super popular right now, right? Part of it is that the U.S. really isn't bomb. to provide these ideological justifications for what's happening. You know, Trump doesn't really talk about fighting Iranian authoritarianism or whatever very much. He talks about oil, which makes this, I think, perhaps a less viable view. But I do think it's worth noting that a lot of the kind of pro-war Iranian diaspora have employed this analysis and have employed this language about U.S. action liberating Iran.

And so we see some of that popping up that is probably still playing some ideological function, even if it's kind of been more isolated. Now, I think liberal internationalism can also come at this from another direction in opposition to the war and then trying to analyze what is happening. And this is more, I think, what we see with a number of the European states who have expressed their skepticism towards the war and who have tried to wrestle with what the U.S. is doing. And in the framework that these states have adopted, sort of the best explanation that is possible for U.S. actions is that the U.S. is basically behaving as a rogue state. based on having a president who doesn't care for international norms and institutions.

So the explanation here would basically be that the U.S. has put itself outside the bounds of liberal institutionalism itself and is now acting like the states, which previously would have needed to be pulled back into the fold under this framework. And I think this might capture some of the truth, but to a large degree, one of the problems with this form of analysis is that the United States then gets conceptualized outside of a structural class analysis. Trump as a rogue actor starts to become very plate up. This idea that it is about this particular government that is an aberration starts to really get focused on and this idea of a turn towards like oligarchy or authoritarianism, again, decontextualized from a political,

economic context and treated as an aberration of Trump really starts to pop up. And so in the liberal internationalist framework, we really do get this interesting explanation about the role that international institutions have played historically, but by and large, what is happening now just gets conceptualized as a violation of norms and a stepping outside of institutional frameworks, which again, I don't think gives a causative explanation of what is happening and really causes us to lose access to a kind of structural analysis. So that might be the liberal internationalist perspective, which again, I think it sees some aspects of the truth, but it misses others. Now, the other very academically respected position, and this is the one that I find

Marxists tend to be more sympathetic towards, is realism. And realism has various strains within it, and there are a lot of thinkers who have pushed for particular articulations of realism, whether offensive realism or defensive realism. But broadly, what realism as a school of international relations holds as a central premise is that the global stage is fundamentally anarchic in nature. There is no actual international order that can meaningfully impose some sense of stability or justice or order and that the global sphere ought to be understood as anarchic. And as a result, states are engaged in rational decision-making out of some sense of rational self-interest in order to continue their perpetuation and their position within this global

anarchy. Realism has at its core, then, this assumption that there's some sort of rationally deducible self-interest, which states can act in defense of. And states then really get treated as unified actors. A state is an actor with its own interests. And for Marxists, this is going to pose a bit of a problem. There's a couple issues here, I think. First, I think the idea that the world is inherently anarchic in nature and that states are merely self-interested, actually kind of struggles to explain some of what is happening in the world today, and it forecloses the possibility that solidarity can exist. But I actually think it is hard to explain the actions of some of the actors within an axis of resistance, for example, other than out of something

that goes beyond self-interest and something that looks like solidarity. Yemen, I think, is the most, you know, kind of difficult to wrestle with here. the Yemenis have engaged in offensive actions which have put them in a worse position, which have put them in a position of being, you know, at war with other countries, of facing strikes from other countries, seemingly out of solidarity. I think it is hard to explain some of the offensive actions that they have taken other than a genuine solidaristic commitment to the broader axis of resistance and to the pushback against U.S. imperialism.

And so I think that, you know, to a certain degree, the anarchic self-interest claim of realism over states reality and that we can see actual solidarity take place. The other issue that I think really comes up here is that, you know, realism struggles to explain internal contradictions within a given state. Realism assumes that there is this unified national self-interest, which operates wholly independently from class struggle or class interests. And as a result, it treats the state as sort of, you know, this unitary, autonomous thing. which exists above politics, which exists above economics,

and has its own perpetuation as its driving goal. And from a Marxist perspective, this is an issue, right? Because Marxism insists that the state is not autonomous. The state is an expression of class power and class domination. Again, this is where, as always, I return to Lenin's State and Revolution as this groundbreaking text that shows how even the offensive armed aspects of the state are an expression of class domination. And so realism is, I think, very complicated in this sense because it notices something that Marxists are quite keen to recognize, which is that the world is structured by conflict.

That struggle is really at the core of what is moving history forward. And while making that correct analysis, realism then mystifies the form that that struggle takes by trying to reduce it to something like a national struggle. again, in terms of this national self-interest that states as unitary actors have rather than a class struggle. And so though it comes closer to seeing the reality of international affairs than liberal internationalism does, I think it's still ultimately kind of obscures in a way that the dialectical materialist perspective can get us out of by recognizing that, yes, the global stage is structured by conflict, but it is structured by class conflict, not just the conflict between nations, and that nations themselves are moved by internal contradictions which develop along class lines as well. And so I do think realism comes quite close to seeing reality and then misses the mark at the end

in a way that historical materialism can much better account for. Yeah, I think that was honestly perfectly said. I've always, you know, I do get, you know, I do get something of substance from listening to high-level realist thinkers. You know, John Mearsheimer, for example, is a classic example of somebody that really does produce useful analysis for Marxists. I mean, he burst under the scene with the Ukraine-Russia analysis, and still today, you know, talks about the genocide in Palestine, you know, talks about the Iran war in really interesting, you know, ways that are useful and that we can take on board. But it is just very limited in the ways that Allison was saying. And one of

those ways, which again, Allison pointed to expertly, is just like the complete lack of class analysis, not only the class nature of the state itself, but class dynamics within states. And by taking states as sort of singular actors, like singular entities that are sort of coherent in and of themselves as their starting point, they lose a lot of the materialist and contradictory aspects within that society driving of certain choices. And they'll make overtures to like resource control and the level of states competing with other states, but their materialist analysis is often incredibly lacking and can be frustrating for that reason. One of the things I think that comes out of realism is not really a competing analytical lens like some of these are, but kind of

will often fall as a mode of analysis under realism. And let me know if you disagree with that, Alison, but that's like game theory. Yeah. And you hear a lot about that lately. But, you know, game theory is kind of like it's not in and of itself a mode of analysis overall, but it's a, it's a way of looking at it. If you start from a realist standpoint, you could find yourself very quickly into like game, game theory analysis of what's going on. And game theory kind of, it's like, it's looking at actors in this case, like the state in particular states as making decisions under conditions of like strategic interdependence, meeting each other's choices, depend on what they think other people will do.

It centers things like deterrence games and brinkmanship and prisoners dilemmas, bargaining of war, stuff like that. It can be good at clarifying certain things within it, within a conflict, like strategic incentives. You hear a lot of talk lately of escalation spirals and the escalation ladder, which I think has some reasonable things to offer us. The logic of deterrence, you know, the idea that Iran needs to, completely sort of it can't back down it can't accept ceasefires and negotiations right now for a whole

slew of reasons one of which is that it needs to really punish the u.s and israel um to establish a deterrence to make sure that this doesn't happen again if they back down declared a ceasefire went into negotiations we know what israel and the u.s would do like they've done in the past they will use that as just a time saving measure so they can reconstitute their forces and make another attack um on on iran right there's the question of miscalculation you know, all these, all these things that can be helpful. You hear a lot of game theory recently, but what game theory doesn't produce, it does not ask, for example, is the questions we've been asking, right? How are these actors or these states historically produced?

Where do their interest actually come from? What class forces are shaping their goals? You know, why is this strategic field structured this way in the first place? what larger imperialist or economic or colonial or ideological orders produces the game being played in the first place. So, you know, it has, again, things to contribute, but has real limitations. And I think dialectical and historical materialism addresses the weaknesses of all of these modes of analysis in a way that they can't really see and that they don't address. And to your point about liberal internationalism, so many things that you, I mean, everything you said is, 100% correct. My broader critique of liberalism is that it can't see outside of itself, right?

So that's true domestically. That's true internationally that liberalism does not have a meta perspective from which it can criticize liberalism. It is boxed in its own worldview and operating within that. And what Marxism is is a stepping outside of liberalism, looking at it and an analyzing of it. And that meta perspective that, you know, even in like spiritual mysticism, we talk about stepping back and watching the ego so you're not trapped in it. Well, there's a really interesting analog here. Like Marxism allows us to step outside of liberalism and to look at it, to critique it, to understand it from the outside. And so if you're operating within liberalism, as most conservatives, libertarians, and liberals are, there will just be inherently a sort of box that you can't stand outside. of and analyze itself, you know?

Right. And I think that on the international level, that that is just as true as it is on the domestic level and that is one of the real weaknesses of liberalism. Yeah, no, I think so. And, you know, one broad thing I want to touch on the game theory is that game theory is so fascinating because, you know, cards on the table, I've actually feel like I've been very impacted by realism and by game theory, right? These are schools of international relation that I take seriously while maintaining this

critique of them. But game theory often, it reminds me a lot of like Rawls' veil of ignorance, where it's trying to like abstract reality away to get to pure decisions, right? In Rawls's work, that's like, how would you build an ideal society if you didn't know anything about your place within that society? So you can abstract out just what the ideal decision is. And I think game theory often does that as well. And there may be a place for that kind of thinking, but it is like precisely the opposite of materialism, right? because from the materialist perspective, decisions don't exist outside of those contexts, right? They simply are not present. And so I think that's one of the things that, you know, is worth thinking about is methodologically, whether or not game theory does a sort of ideal theory move very similar to like liberal, you know, political philosophy. I find a lot of similarities there.

One thing I will shout out is that I think if you're interested in this question of realism right now, there's a very interesting debate going on back and forth in the letters. section of Cosmonaut Magazine about the Zog thesis versus the unsinkable aircraft thesis, aircraft carrier thesis, in which people are really getting into this critique of realism in actually some really fascinating ways. So I do want to shout out the letters of Cosmonaut, not the articles presently where people are starting to have some of this debate that I think is really productive and hopefully can push this discussion forward. And I would suggest is worth reading if you are interested in where realism and Marxism diverge from each other. Nice, nice. Yeah, I'll have to look at that. That's fascinating. And I love that that debate is occurring. It's really important.

Yeah. So yeah, do you want to go in and do the next one now? Because those are the two big ones. I think, you know, when you're listening to Syria, academically informed, you know, pundits talking about this war on most mainstream and even, you know, independent media, you'll have some version of one of those modes of looking at the world. So we're getting kind of into some other ones that are perhaps less represented on. on that stage or that are not as academically favored. And so we'll move in that direction here. So yeah, go ahead, Alison. Yeah, you know, it's tricky. As Marxists, we like the academic ones more. But I think the academic ones are not what the majority of people necessarily believe, right? Most average people in the U.S. are not engaging in academic debates about realism versus liberal internationalism. And so I think it's worth looking at some of these other frameworks that get adopted. And one of them that, again, I think it's like really easy for Marxists not to take seriously because it falls so outside the realm of how we think is like a religious fundamentalist explanation of what is

happening here. And unfortunately in the U.S. and in Israel, this religious fundamentalist viewpoint, I think is remarkably important for how people are interpreting these events. Thinking about Israel, one of the really fascinating things that has occurred in Israeli society over the last like 30 years or so, is this transition from more secular iterations of Zionism being one of the driving forces to the integration of religious Zionism into the broader governing coalition?

And for the religious Zionists, I mean, this is a religious struggle in nature, right? There is this idea of a greater Israel that needs to be fulfilled as a part of literal destiny. And so I think that is at play for much of the core of the sort of ultranational religious side of things within Israel. And again, like religious Zionism has its own divides within it, but I do think it is worth recognizing that it is increasingly being integrated into

the Zionist coalition within Israel and its government. But on top of that here in the United States, I think that we have to account for the extreme levels of religion among the right wing in this country and the extent to which evangelicals, as an example, really do see war in this region and struggles around Israel and Iran to be a part of religious prophecy and part of their own apocalyptic understanding of how the world is going to end. And so, you know, again, this is not an academic perspective. It's very easy to reject this. But for so many people in this country, their understanding of what is occurring, which is kind of their common sense understanding based on their religious beliefs, really is that this is some sort of spiritual

conflict that has something to do with biblical prophecy. And I think, think it's worth putting that alongside realism and internationalism as one of the competing explanatory frameworks that is dominant in this country. I don't think that most of the people on the level of politicians pushing this war are likely sincere believers in these ideas, but they make appeals to them and they make strong appeals to religious prophecy and religious beliefs of Americans in order to rally an evangelical base. And so this is another explanation. And it's kind of tricky, right? I think it's very, straightforward how Marxism is more explanatory than this. This outlook is sort of pure mystification,

but that mystification has a strong hold on factions of the United States and of Israel that has to be accounted for. So I'm going to throw that out there as another thing we could contrast Marxism with. It's almost so hard to contrast it because they're obviously polar opposites of each other, right? But it is worth, I think, putting that on the table as well. Well, I would actually advance this idea instead of necessarily, I mean, they're polar opposites when taken by themselves, but, you know, Marxism integrates this perspective, and it integrates it through the analysis of the ideological superstructure. You know, once you have base in superstructure, which is an outgrowth of historical materialism, you can account for religious fundamentalism without making it the sort of, you know, core of your analysis. But you're absolutely right that lots of people, you know, way more than think dialectically and historically, think religiously on this matter.

And you look at a figure like Huckabee, and you think that guy's fully, he's a true believer, he's bought in. Ted Cruz, he's like a cynical snake. You're not quite sure what he actually believes or if he even has real beliefs anymore. But he will articulate a lot of these views. Certainly there are people within Israel and within the Lakud Party in particular that have apocalyptic religious views that genuinely drive their day-to-day decision-making and life choices. So this is not something that you can poo-poo as total. irrelevant. But, you know, again, Marxists can incorporate that into an analysis of the ideological superstructure as an important layer of analysis, but again, one that we don't reduce anything to.

And that's, I think, truer of all of these things. It's like a dialectical and historical materialist account of things can absolutely take on board realist insights and can actually even take on board if it wants to and where it's useful liberal internationalist insights, but without reducing our entire mode of analysis to them, whereas I do not think the opposite is true. A religious fundamentalist is incapable of taking on board the dialectical and historical materialist account. A liberal internationalist, as I said earlier, can't see outside of itself to be able to do. They can't get outside of itself to be able to take on that perspective. So, you know, we can understand where those perspectives come from.

We can find the kernel of truth in them. We can adapt them and embed them, integrate them within. our broader analysis, but that often can't be done in the reverse. Because if you were trying to do that in the reverse, you would just end up being one over to a mode of analysis that can already incorporate your insights without being reduced to them. And I think that is the, you know, that's the epistemological superiority of dialectical and historical materialism, in my humble opinion. Yeah, no, it's a good argument. So going even further down the sort of ladder of coherence, when it comes to analyzing the world.

Two big ones, and I've mentioned them already, and people listening will probably be familiar with them, obviously is like some form of great man theory or liberal moralism. Liberal internationalism is more sophisticated. It's more academic. It takes more things into account. But there's a reduced version of that,

and we see it all the time, where you have great man theory, which basically just puts the locus of control and choice-making, and the reason that events happen, happen into the persons of historical figures. You know, why did Ukraine and Russia happen? Because Putin tried to invade Ukraine and take over, is once to march on all of Europe.

You know, why is the war in Iran happening despite low approval from Americans? Trump is crazy and, you know, orange man bad and he's getting us into these decisions. You know, or even somebody that says Trump is being tricked by Netanyahu into doing things without any other analysis would fall into something like a great man theory. You're adding another great man in this case, Netanyahu, but you're still kind of operating at the level of individuals and their psychologies. But we understand as Marxists and as structuralists that those incentives, those ways of thinking, those ways of being in the world, the entire subjectivity of a Trump is sort of constructed

through bigger and broader processes and structures that we can analyze and get a lot more out of. and liberal moralism will come in here and just kind of condemn things. It's the both sidesism. It's like, why can't we just have peace? You know, it's the hippie putting up, you know, two fingers with the flower in their hair. Like, let's just all get along. Like, you know, why are we doing this? You know, we want a ceasefire for the sake of a ceasefire.

You know, Marxists are like, do we want a ceasefire? No, because we understand what a ceasefire would actually mean, who that would actually help. This is a culmination of contradiction that needs to see itself play out fully in order to come anywhere near. resolving actual contradictions that make such a conflict inevitable in the first place. And so it's not as simple as saying war bad. Of course, war is bad. And we hope one day that human civilization advances and evolves to the point where it no longer has constant perpetual war, which it's had through every mode of production, every mode of production thus far. We hold out the hope that we can evolve into a truly intelligent species. And I believe that if we

went out and found intelligent aliens that had a billion year head start on us, they would not be blowing themselves up with munitions, you know? So I truly believe that, like, as we build up our intelligence and our civilizational capacities, our sphere of moral comprehension also increases, you know, and who knows, you know, the universe is vast and perhaps infinite. There could be, like, predatory alien species that are far more intellectually advanced than us. But, okay, whatever.

I'm getting too far afield, literally. But, yeah, so liberal moralism is something you'll often hear. But I think a big contender here, as I mentioned earlier again, is conspiracy thinking. In lieu of any serious motive analysis, in lieu of any framework that you might use to understand the world as it actually is, empirically attempt to understand the world, the fallback position is conspiracy thinking. And conspiracy thinking has been rife throughout history, through, you know, all different types of events. there has always been hyper-conspiratorial elements among the populations that lean back on conspiratorial thinking and that becomes the framework. You'll notice conspiracy theorists never just believe in one or two conspiracies.

They believe to some extent in all of them because conspiracy thinking itself becomes the framework. And when I talk to, you know, regular people often notes of conspiratorial thinking, will come to the forefront. And sometimes there's something real they're grasping at with that conspiracy thinking, right? Sometimes the conspiracy will be about like a cabal of big business, you know, but that can quickly move over into like the Rothschilds and Jews controlling everything. Yeah. Which is just, you know, again, an abortion of real thinking. It's an abortion of thought. But it makes the conspiracy thinker feel satisfied. In lieu of an actual answer,

they will construct one that feels good to them, and that will perpetuate the conspiratorial mindset, because there is something subjectively and emotionally that the conspiracist gets out of conspiracy thinking, because one of the things conspiracy thinking does is without having to do any of the work, it gives you a sense of superiority. I understand how things really are under the surface. All these other sheep don't quite get it, but I get it. And you earn that without actually having to earn it, without actually having to read books and understand things and study history.

You get that feeling without having to earn it. And that's what's so intoxicating about it. And that's why I think it's so widespread. And again, that's just filling a vacuum where a real framework should be in many cases. Yeah. No, I think both those are really good to call out. I mean, on the conspiracy thinking one, too, you know, this is where I think we get into some of the realism questions in some interesting ways, actually. There's some strange overlap.

But with the conspiracy thinking, I think one of the things that is important to point out is that I do think, like, when people talk about anti-Semitism, and I'll expand that to conspiracism, because I think it's often not even explicitly anti-Semitic in its framework as the socialism of fools, I think that is a useful framework for what's going on. You know, one of the things that I, you know, think we have to wrestle with, and I think this might be controversial to me to say, is that there are more dissident right-wing figures who are willing to use a conspiratorial framing to try to make a critique of Zionism, to try to make a critique of Israel and to try to understand what is happening. And again, I think, you and I are probably on the same page here. I think Tucker Carlson is like the fucking epitome of this.

You know, for Tucker Carlson, he'll always stop short of ever actually blaming Trump or anyone in his administration who's not like a potential conspiratorial actor influencing Trump. I think Tucker has increasingly peddled in this idea that it is like Israel who is driving U.S. foreign policy, which again, my issue with that isn't strictly like, oh, that's anti-Semitic. My issue with that is that it's wrong, right? I think Israel does have an out, you know, a larger role than it used to, but I think that it often does function as this nationalist attempt to let the United States off the hook, right? And again, if we think about the cosmonaut debate that I gestured towards one of the interesting interventions that a comrade made in there, is the idea that the realist notion of national self-interest actually helps the conspiratorial perspective, because it assumes that there's a national interest that then can be pushed away from by these conspiratorial actors.

And I think we are seeing that with the sort of, again, more dissident right, who is willing to condemn U.S. foreign policy, but has to conceptualize it as the U.S. being led astray from some pure rational national interest, right? who has to conceptualize it as a result of third-party actors or bad actors within the U.S. government. And so conspiratism, I think, has this difficulty similar to realism where often it will recognize some level of truth. I mean, the fact that clandestine conspiratorial aspects of the state exist is fucking undeniable, right? Like, that is absolutely the case. And they need to be understood. And we should actually, I think, make an attempt to study those things as best as we can. But the more conspiratorial view then kind of uses their existence as a way of whitewashing the United States itself and whitewashing some potentially pure, well-motivated U.S. action, which would be impossible on the basis of the U.S.'s role of an imperialist power in the world today.

And so I think the risk with the conspiracy theory thing, again, is that it catches something correct and then engages in this last second mystification that takes us away from being able to honestly analyze imperialism. colonialism as these like core structures of what the United States is. And there is this weird overlap with realism in some ways that I think can start to develop there. And you can actually get these very, I think, quite intellectually serious articulations of conspiracyism when people start to overlap it with realism. And you get some of the overlap of the mystification as well, which I think is important for us to wrestle with and against in order to articulate the centrality of U.S. imperialism and colonialism and how much that is not separable from the existence of the United States. Very insightful. Couldn't agree more. As I was writing Tucker Carlson, you mentioned

him and then I'm writing American, American innocence as you mentioned that as well. Like, yes, Tucker Carlson, both with Trump, and you could say maybe he just wants to continue having access to Trump, although it doesn't seem to fucking matter anyway. And Trump shits on him all the time and like holds up Mark Levin and defends all of his enemies. But like it's a weird thing where Tucker Carlson tries to set Trump aside from any moral culpability, even as he goes through the entire process of how this entire administration and everything is doing is wrong, but somehow Trump is like fundamentally naive or manipulated or innocent. And in the same way, he presents America itself as that. That America is being distorted, that something like true America wouldn't be

engaged in these things because true America is good. And it's like, no, Trump is true America and this is true America. And to try to car. carve out fundamental innocence will always be a sort of losing strategy and will actually continue to perpetuate the very problems that we have. I also want to mention that Tucker Carlson is very, very close friends with J.D. Vance. He is perhaps the single biggest reason that Trump chose J.D. Vance as his vice president. Tucker Carlson is absolutely, you know, they talk about Tucker Carlson wanting to run for president or whatever, and that very well might be the case. But I don't think he'll do it to win. I think he'll do it as an attack dog against the other candidates on

behalf of J.D. Fants. J.D. Vance. Joe Kent, who just came out as like kind of this brave whistleblower against the Iran war is also deeply embedded within J.D. Vance and the Tucker Carlson network. And J.D. Vance himself is an outgrowth of Peter Thiel, right? A Peter Teal project. So those oligarchic interests are still very much in play here. And you won't hear Tucker Carlson talk about Peter Thiel in particular. Very often. So, yes, it's crucial to understand that because Tucker Carlson is really carving out this niche on the America First Right as this brave truth teller, right?

I'm not anti-Semitic. In fact, my Christian religion prohibits me from hating people based on how they were born. It's a genocide in Palestine. I'm against killing people for who they are, right? He'll do all these things that sound very reasonable and morally compelling to, regular people and actually has a critique of things that so many others won't even touch. But then, as you said, in the last instance, remystifies it once again. And I think there's an analogy here to liberal Zionism.

Insofar as Tucker Carlson wants Trump, but more importantly, America, to be carved out as fundamentally innocent, liberal Zionists want to carve out Israel itself as fundamentally innocent. It's the Lakudites, you know, it's Netanyahu, it's this or that. But, you know, and Bernie Sanders is a perfect version of this. It's not Israel itself. The moment you realize that actually it is Israel itself, liberal Zionism becomes untenable. The moment you realize it is America itself, Tucker Carlson romantic nostalgia becomes untenable. But that is what we're seeing being fundamentally advanced.

And of course, there's plenty of figures in the ruling class who, can coexist with the Tucker Carlson critique of Israel and these wars and still fundamentally advance the American imperialist and capitalist project. But on the other hand, like when you start talking about conspiracies, there was Operation Gladiot. There was Operation MK Ultra, MLK and JFK, we're almost certainly killed with help with the CIA or FBI or both. And so, like, you have to, you have to concede some true ground to, quote, unquote,

conspiratorial thinking. but, you know, the moment that these things are confirmed, they're not really conspiracy theories in the colloquial sense. They're conspiratorial in that there is conspiring behind the scenes, but they're not, you know, in the same realm as like the Earth is flat or like we never landed on the moon necessarily. Or, you know, or George Bush did 9-11 or whatever. And, you know, not to say that there's not real questions around 9-11 or whatever. We can get into that a different time. But I'm just saying, like, there are real conspiracies. And so to face off with the conspiracy theorist,

Like there is some ground you have to concede, which makes it difficult because how and when do you cut off that thinking, you know, because we don't have fundamental proof that JFK was killed by the deep state and any, you know, but it's like, it's circumstantial evidence mounts. It's like, okay, I can see that totally being true. And if you put a gun to my head and said, you know, was JFK killed by a lone shooter or was there a deep state plot, I would side on the deep state plot. But I can't ever come to an empirical proof of that yet, right? Perhaps more more information will emerge at some point. And so, you know, I always say with conspiracy thinking, yes, we can say that some conspiracies have been true historically, but often you will just find yourself when you're trying to seriously investigate a conspiratorial claim. You'll find yourself falling indefinitely in like an infinite regress of rabbit holes with no real conclusion. And the perfect figure that represents that endless falling into rabbit holes without ever getting to solid ground is a Candice Owens, who is less sophisticated than Tucker Carlson, much less sophisticated, much more just hyper insanely

conspiratorial, but always leading on the edge, like next time I'm going to have some brain blowing news, you know, next time we're going to deepen the plot. Hey, they're getting, the Zionists are getting angry. We must be getting closer to something. You know, what is Erica Kirk's role? You know, Charlie's bride, this whole investigative series into Erica Kirk. And it's like, well, she had these connections and she had these. friends and went to these places, it never ever gets anywhere. It makes Candace Owens a lot of

fucking money, but it never ever reaches any firm conclusion. And once you're on that ride, you can realize that this ride never stops and just get the fuck off. Right. Yeah, it's really hard to find the balance, right? And I think, again, I do think we have to try to analyze the clandestine nature of what class conflict can look like. And I think for me, the heuristic that I always try to apply is, is this taking me away from class conflict or not, right? Is this substituting some other struggle for class struggle as the central moving thing of history? And so, you know, in the context of Iran, right? I mean, like, there's this clandestine aspect to the coup, right? The coup is organized by the CIA behind the scenes as the United States publicly speaks in support of the

Iranian government. And so the question of these covert and clandestine and conspiratorial actions happening, I think, isn't necessarily up for debate. But if we lose sight of the material interest that those conspiracies are serving, then we've gotten lost in what I would call conspiracy theory. And that's kind of like where I draw the line. And I think it's important, like, this is why we need to be critical of conspiratorial thinking. I think, you know, I in one of our live streams, I think, gestured towards like this broader conspiratorial anti-Semitism that is developing on the right. And we got some response that I said, sovereign people being like, oh, well, like, you know, there was kind of like some offense at me

bringing up anti-Semitism as this thing that was developing. But I think the reason that I'm critiquing that is not out of like some concern that anti-Semitism is going to become a structural force in the United States immediately. I kind of agree with thinkers like Shal McGid who say that anti-Semitism in the U.S. doesn't constitute oppression, really. It might be discrimination at most, but it's not this systemic oppression. But the reason I bring up that, anti-Semitism isn't out of some concern like that or out of like some liberal Zionist concern. It's because anti-Semitism is an incorrect explanation of what's happening, right? The thing that I am actually bothered by is the mystification that it provides.

And obviously, yes, it can then spill into something bigger if a fascist movement develops. But the primary reason I'm bringing it up with Marxists right now is that we should be materialists. And anti-Semitism and conspiratorialism are this obfuscation of the material reality that is at play that take us away from the centrality of class conflict and lead us down those various rabbit holes. So again, the heuristic for where does a materialist assessment of conspiracy begin and end and where do we get into conspiracy theory is, in my mind, are we substituting the core contradiction of class with something else? And if we are, then I think we are engaging in the socialism of fools, whether or not that's anti-Semitism or

some sort of like, oh, Islamofascism that like the new atheists like to talk about as this global structure, all of those things do this substitution that push us outside the realm of materialist analysis. And that's the mistake we need to avoid. Perfectly argued, perfectly said, I could not agree more. And, you know, I just, I really do think that reaction comes from being beaten over the head with the stick of anti-Semitism in the face of the genocide, such that whenever, you know, people hear it, there's like an automatically, don't even fuck and don't even bring it up. I don't even want to hear about it.

But what you're saying is, no, no, hold on. Like, it's really important we don't fall into that, not because, again, that we think it's a big problem where you're trying to divert from the actual issues of genocide and all of that, but because it's a deviation from dialectical and historical materialism and feeds in to reactionary politics. And I am talking right now to a Jewish person.

I have close Jewish friends. They are on the forefront of this fight, you know, and they always have been. And if you're going to accept or allow for the, the proliferation of anti-Semitic forms of analysis, like on the right, then you were going to end up dividing and hurting real close and hardworking fucking comrades who are in this struggle. You know, and that's why we oppose, for many other human reasons, we oppose all forms of bigotry.

Again, this is a secondary layer. The real thing is because we're human beings and we fucking, we stand against hate, but also because it is a form of divide and conquer. It's a way in which the ruling elite can separate us. artificially. Oh, they're that and you're this. You can never fucking, you know, rectify with one another. You can never work together.

You're so fundamentally different. Fundamentally different interests. And no, we throw all that away in favor of internationalism and solidarity and, you know, anti-racism, anti-bigotry of all forms. So, you know, that's why those things are so important. And let's kind of shift here towards the end. This is not on the outline. We're kind of, we're at the end of our outline here.

But as we wrap up, kind of, okay, we've talked about dialectical and historical materialism. We've explained what it is. We've applied it to the current Iran war and as much as we can. All the caveats and nuances already on the board that we've discussed throughout. Then we compared and contrasted with various other forms of analyzing the world and this conflict in particular to make sense of how our mode differs and actually, and we would argue, transcends and includes many of the insights that these other things can generate. And so as we wrap up here, I'm kind of thinking, well, we also have this vision for the future, right? We also have a vision for the world no longer run by capitalism, imperialism, and an international order would have to take place in a socialist and a communist context. And that is where we advance the vision of socialist or socialist internationalism, that we actually, what it would actually look like to uproot at their, at the, their core capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, and fascism, would on the global stage look like

something like socialist internationalism, where domestically we have socialist modes of production. Globally, we have the dominant mode of production is socialism that fundamentally rearranges the sense in which different countries, different states, different parts of the world interact with one another. Would it be the end of all contradiction? No. Would it be the end of all conflict? No. I could imagine a socialist, internationalist order with socialism as the dominant mode of production, especially early on in the transition, where

you'll see these ravenous, rogue, perhaps fascist states, you know, trying to dig a foothold in and fight back against socialist internationalism. There could be a world in which there's a war under global socialism, you know, to prevent that or fight back against it or whatever.

So I'm not trying to be utopian about this. Contradiction will still continue, especially and as we learn from now can often heighten in a socialist transition. But our vision of the future is one that has uprooted colonialism, capitalism, capitalism, and socialism, and fascism, and that we see each other across borders, whatever's left of them, as cooperating equals to produce the highest quality of life for human civilization, and in fact for the biosphere itself, and that we would use diplomacy and friendship

to work through problems. And that sounds naive, but really it's not. Like, I even think in this rotten fucking global order, if the U.S., this wouldn't happen materially and structurally, but if, you know, in a vacuum, the U.S. had a complete ruling class elite that was like totally open to just attaining whatever nationalist needs it has through pure, dedicated diplomacy and Frenchly.

You could reach out to China, reach out to Russia, reach out to Cuba. You guys can do your own mode of, your own form of governance, your own mode of production. We'll trade with you. We want a complete open, you know,

there's a world in which that could, in theory, happen. It doesn't happen precisely because of the materialist structure of capitalism, imperialism itself. So it's an idealist fantasy to think that that would happen, but it's not to say that it couldn't,

that it's fundamentally irrational for states to look at one another, not as hyper-competitive, fighting to the death over resources and control of everything, but as cooperative equals, as a truly intelligent species with a civilizational mindset working together to safeguard the biodiversity of the planet and to organize global production and distribution around meeting human needs and increasing the quality of every fucking human life on the planet. And in fact, if we are going to survive as a species long term, we are eventually going to

have to move in that direction. And so I just wanted to set out a socialist internationalist vision of what the world could be when it is uprooted from the strangling roots of capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. But yeah, what are your thoughts, Alison? Yeah, I mean, I love that ending. And I think insisting on the possibility of something else is so fundamental to Marxism, right? I think, again, like, if we want to take dialectics seriously, the thing that dialectics is telling us is that if there's, is one constant throughout history. It is change and transformation, which is constantly taking place. And so, yes, I think we can look at the state of the world today and how dire things look,

and it can be very hard to imagine an alternative to it, but dialectics and historical materialism insists that an alternative can exist and must exist, I think, in some normative sense, and that it is doable. I think this is precisely the way in which Marxism represents this very fundamental break from all conservative ideologies. Because I think the central claim of modern conservatism as a political outlook is this sort of resignation towards tragedy. Right. And so if you think about like Burkean conservatism that develops, it really does put forward this very tragic view of humanity, that human nature in some way is inherently flawed, is inherently aggressive, is inherently selfish, and that ultimately the reason we need conservatism politically

is in order to mitigate those inherently tragic aspects of the human condition, and that attempts at progress will always be hijacked by human nature and these baser impulses. And in a sense, this is very similar to realism, right? Realism just takes that same impulse and applies it to international actors. There is an inherent anarchy, which cannot be overcome. And the actors living within that state of anarchy are not capable of acting out of anything other than self-interest. And there's this resignation and this sense of tragedy that defines conservative politics. And Marxism is precisely a break from that inasm as much as it is a rejection completely, utterly and totally of that sort of defeatism, of that sort of fatalism, of that sort of willingness to wallow in tragedy.

And Marxism, on the other hand, suggests that no, no state of a state of defeatism. affairs is permanent. There is no human nature which has always existed because even humans have not always existed. We evolved just as societies have evolved and history itself is the story of struggle and transformation and change in which opposite forces engage in these unbelievable clashes through which they're both reworked into something new and in which something new is born that could not have even been imagined before. And so for me, within dialectics, the thing that gives me hope is that if dialectics is true, if this form of change is necessary, then we are not at the end of history. Things have not stopped. We are not stuck in the tragedy of human nature

or the tragedy of great power politics, as Mearsheimer puts it, whatever. We are not doomed to that. It is possible to imagine another world because human behavior, the behavior of states does not come from eternal or divine laws or fundamental parts of evolutionary psychology. It is a result of material conditions which themselves change and can be changed. And our task is to change it because if we change those conditions, we will change the social structures, the global order, which is created on top of them. And so I think that socialist vision is the thing that we need to emphasize at the end here. Why is the last reason that dialectical materials and matters? Well, because if dialectical materialism is true, then there's reason to hope. There's reason to believe

that this is not the way things have to be forever. And in fact, that believing that this is the way that things will be forever, is a delusional denial of reality itself. And that gives us the basis for political hope, even in pretty horrific moments like this one. So I think that's just important to put forward. This isn't some ungrounded spiritual type of hope. This is a hope that is based in a sober assessment of the fact that nothing is static and no longer moving. And that is at the core of dialectics. And I think that's maybe the last argument that I want to put forward, at least for why the dialectical and historical materials approach offers us something unique that might let us change the world. Amen. I mean, beautifully said, beautifully articulated. I urge everybody to just turn it off now,

but I will, you know, due to my nature, make one more argument. Please. But yeah, which is just like kind of based on what you're saying, like, what you'll often come across when you start articulating these visions of our species evolution is like, well, humans have always been at war. You know, humans have always had an elite class that exploit the lower classes. This is just how human nature is, as Allison was saying, a very conservative response. And we say, no, no, it doesn't have to be that way. We've come a long fucking way from climbing out of the trees as primates to where we are today.

And we can keep fucking going. There's nothing static about our nature. We ourselves are co-evolving with our historical structures and our natural biosphere and the planet itself. And there's no reason to think that given enough time, if we do not destroy ourselves, that we can't continue to deepen and become more wise and more compassionate and be better stewards of the earth and move out of this epoch of class domination, this of class society, right? I always talk about bursting out of the rusted cage of class society.

Like our species can, and if we survive long enough, I truly in my heart of hearts believe one day will transcend this rotten way of organizing ourselves on this planet, that itself is pathological and unsustainable. And then you ask yourself, as Allison was alluding to, what vision for the future does realism have? Just an eternal international Hobbesianism. You know, what vision does liberal internationalism have? Just this desperate white-knuckling attempt to keep these systems and structures and

institutions running and humming so that everything can be okay and dandy. But that's pathetic and never going to happen. And in fact, has gotten us right precisely to this point. what what vision does religious fundamentalists have that the world blows up in some bloody orgy of violence and collapse and one of their messiah's return to murder the rest of the non-belie or whatever the fuck like okay i reject that vision i do that's not true and i don't want it and that's a horrific vision for the future of humankind it's a sort of nihilism that wants to get out of the world that wants to end the whole goddamn human thing all to fucking gather and escape to paradise and we reject that and then what does it a conspiracy thinker? What is their vision for the world? Just constantly trying to unmask conspiracies that pile up over and over again and that never lead anywhere and that never have anybody ever held accountable and never reach any solid conclusions and never reaches any sense of justice ever. Like just a spiraling down into psychosis, the more that you get into those worlds. That's not a vision

of human future. And ultimately, what's the vision for people that adhere to liberal moralism or great man theory? It's not a vision at all. It's just a it's just a size. in the face of of accepting the psychologies of whoever rise to power and that's the personalities of people in power that's even less of a vision and explanatory uh you know thrust than anything else so really when you look at all these other ways of analyzing the world you say yes there's this conservative of just like belief that there is no future like it's a form of capitalist realism that there is really no future to have it's more of the same forever and we just reject that And we just reject that.

And actually looking back over history, understanding evolution of species of the planet itself, we just know that that actually isn't true, that nothing is static, change is the only constant, and everything is like moving not just meaninglessly in a linear fashion, but kind of more like in an upward spiral way that dialectics unfolds kind of coming at higher and higher levels, revisiting things at higher levels, working through contradictions and being propelled forth. And there's no way you can look at human history and say that it's all just the same. There's no progress. There's no evolution. There's no deepening of wisdom or compassion. There's no extension of the moral sphere of concern. It's just more or less the same with some technology, you know, littered on top. And that's just not our view of humanity. That's not our view of the future.

And we're willing to bet that we are right. And we're partisans for this worldview. Yeah. All right. Well, that's our analysis of dialectical and historical materialism as applied to the war in Iran. We hope it's clarifying for people, both the structure of the framework itself as well as how to actually apply it, how it compares and contrasts to other ways of analyzing geopolitics and the international world order and what our vision for the human species ultimately is. So love and solidarity. We'll talk to you soon.