Rev Left Radio - The Principles of Communism: Friedrich Engels and Communist Political Theory

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

EARLY RELEASE: Jared from Millennials are Killing Capitalism podcast invited Breht on to talk about Friedrich Engels' draft to the Communist Manifesto entitled Principles of Communism!  Together, they discuss the document, highlight and explain its theoretical substance, and have a wide-ranging discussion about Communist political theory, connecting the past to the present in the process.  Get 15% off any book from Leftwingbooks.net HERE   Outro Music: "Back In Blood" by Pooh Shiesty (feat. Lil Durk)   --------------------------   Support Rev Left Radio on Patreon or make a one time donation

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we're doing a collaboration with our good friends and solid comrades over at millennials are killing capitalism. This time I'm talking with Jared. Look forward, I think, in the near future to collaborating with Josh as well. But this time it's just me and Jared talking about Frederick Engels is the principles of communism. This is a really fun conversation. get into so many core features of the Marxist and communist theory and movement as articulated in succinct and clear ways by the one and only Frederick Engels.

So I had a lot of fun recording this episode and I think whether you're brand new to communism or a 20 year veteran of the movement, you will find this conversation not only educational and entertaining but hopefully also inspirational because I think it does rise to those levels at certain times. So I'm very excited to share this with you. And as always, I also want to let people know that we're always in favor of more education, of people getting access to more knowledge. And in that vein, the good folks over at Left Wing Books and Chris Blebodeb have reached out to us and offered Rev Left listeners 15% off any book in their library, I'm a wonderful left-wing publisher of, you know, books about theory and history, et cetera.

And so, yeah, beautifully they've offered our listeners 15% off any book. And I think if you buy over $50 worth, you get free shipping in North America. You just have to put in Rev Left at checkout, but I'll link to it. So you don't even have to do that. You just click the link. It's already incorporated into it. You can get your 15% off. If you go over $50, you get free shipping in North America.

and this is a wonderful way where left-wing books and Rev Left can team up to try to get more people, more works of educational theory for a cheaper price. And so we jumped at that opportunity to help our listeners out. So if you're so inclined, go check out and peruse their bookstore. They have wonderful new releases that I'm particularly excited about. They have stuff like the selected works of Lenin, what is to be done in other writings. They have on necrocapitalism, a plague journal, which we've had episodes, with the authors, and my co-host Allison was one of those co-authors of that book. Really, really wonderful book about the COVID pandemic writing in real time.

I'm employing, you know, communist analysis. There's the principal contradiction by Torquil Lawson, who we've had on in the past, the shape of things to come, selected writings and interviews with Jay Sakai, the communist necessity, second edition by the one and only Jay Malfa Wat Paul, who we've had on the show many times and is a wonderful and very succinct and clear Maoist thinker, philosopher, the urban guerrilla concept, so many other ones, I'm even just flipping through here, say her name, black women's stories of state violence and public silence, and just so many. They have a wonderful, wonderful selection. And by following the link in

the show notes, you can get 15% off. And yeah, bring those books into your organization. That's a wonderful opportunity. After you're done reading them, you could spread them around, put them in libraries or whatever, just help this information get out to more people that read and think in this direction, the better it is for us in our movement. So definitely check out those comrades over at leftwingbooks.net, and we'll link to that in the show notes. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation with Jared from Millennials Are Killing Capitalism on Frederick Engels' The Principles of Communism.

Enjoy. First of all, happy to do this collaboration with you, Brett. Really appreciate all the work you do with RevLeft Radio, of course. Also, you know, guerrilla history and all that. I know there's a lot of other podcasts as well that you've helped start up and been a part of. But RevLeft has definitely been a staple for me. And I know a lot of our listener, so excited to discuss this with you. Just to kind of remind folks for this, this is kind of a newer. It's in line with a lot of the work that you do, especially over also at Red Menace. podcast. Shout out to Allison as well. But, you know, we've started to kind of talk to people and say, hey, like, what's a, what's a classic text, a classic revolutionary theory text, a classic, you know, Marxist, scientific socialist, you know, can be anarchistic to, like, something that you think is just a, you know, a classic text that obviously we can't speak to the author about their work here because they're no longer with us, but it's something that

people should really check out, read. It's important for a variety of reasons. And so, you know, I'd reached out to you a while ago. We were talking about a couple different things. And, you know, this came up as one that we wanted to do. So we're here today to talk about angles, principles of communism and excited to get into it. And yeah, I don't know if there's anything else you want to say just as a kind of, you know, opener. Sure, yeah. The main thing is the love is absolutely mutual, as we were talking before we started recording both of our podcasts have been around for roughly the same amount of time six going on seven years lots of podcasts have come and going in the meantime i think there's always been a shared spirit of the sort of basic approach that we take the basic things that we emphasize of course we've collaborated in the past so i always keep an eye on on your work and i'm genuinely a fan and i really do think that both of our projects are really aimed at the same thing and it's really cool to see that that you guys are still putting in the work and still making, you know, wonderful educational content, which is, you know, incredibly important and is the precursor to higher levels of organization, the more people that are educated,

that can make sense of their world, that can use Marxist methodology to demystify the world, the better. So, yeah, props to you guys for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Definitely appreciate that. So, yeah, as we get into this, I mean, you know, I was sort of jokingly wrote out in this first question that, you know, we might call this the first FAQ for communism. And so could you say a little bit about the kind of context in which this piece was written and, you know, why you selected it for a discussion today? Sure. Well, the context is kind of interesting because I didn't actually know too much about it before sort of preparing for this episode, like the broader historical context of the text, but it turns out it's basically the draft to the communist manifesto. So when

Marx and Engels are working on what would eventually become the Communist Manifesto. This principles of communism written mostly, I think almost exclusively by Angles, was sort of a highlighted draft. You know, you can think of it as an outline for some main points and some clarification that would go in to making the manifesto. Now, the manifesto versus the principles of communism are a great display of the differences between Angles and Marx's literary approach because you can tell in this one, the questions are very clear. The answers are very concise. There's nothing superfluous. There's no flourishes. And in the manifesto, you can see Marx just picks up the pen and starts talking about vampires and, you know, everything that's solid melts into air and

really gives it a literary sort of boost. So it's really cool to kind of see that trajectory. And of course, you and I have both done episodes with China Miavill, who I think last year or so released a book on the Communist Manifesto. So if people want to learn more about that, text in particular in the backgrounds to that text, which this one would eventually become, definitely check out either of our interviews with the one and only China. But yeah, so that's kind of the background and the history of it. And why I selected it is because, one, I've never actually, unfortunately, done any work on this, right?

Red Menace, we've talked about it. We never got to it. But importantly, two, I think it is wonderfully concise. It's wonderfully succinct. It wrestles with some really big questions that you would often get asked the moment you tell somebody you're a communist. And I think it would be, it's a great orienting text for people who are new to Marxism and a great sort of reminder, refresher text of the main points of, you know, of Marxist theory for even veterans who, you know, maybe spend some time away from engaging directly in theory or get so caught up in the nuances and complexities you sometimes lose the forest for the trees situation.

So I think it's a really succinct, accessible, clear sort of delineation of some basic points. And of course, it's a doorway into more exploration, but a really, really useful doorway. Yeah, right on. And yeah, this next question kind of touches on, you know, this origin and also the discussion we had with China. And like you said, I know you had one with China in Miao, as well. And, you know, there were, and also this question of their two kind of styles and kind of, you know, thinking about this text at, in some ways the kind of, it's not the beginning, but it's definitely in the early, early stages of kind of the communist movement as a kind of pushing towards a scientific interpretation of, you know, of, well, pushing towards scientific socialism, right, against sort of utopian forms and things like that. Yeah. But one of the things I find really interesting, and this is something that China does talk about, is that, you know, there were kind of earlier versions of this,

one that he references is called the communist catechism elsewhere there's like kind of a reference to the confession of faith um and i i just find this fascinating you know just kind of in terms of just kind of trying to think about and understand the world that marks and ingles were in at the time um obviously angles is really known and famous very much so for advocating a scientific orientation um to tom to communism to differentiate it from these idealistic notions but i do think it's really important also to situate that Marx and Engels came up in a world where there were a lot of faith-based advocates of a, you know, what was called or what was thought of as a socialism of one form or another. And, you know, I know we'll get into that even a little bit more

as we get further into this discussion and kind of talk about some of Engels' critiques here of different types of socialists, which comes up later. But I also know it's something you, You've spent a lot of years now kind of studying communist history and philosophy through the work you do on your podcasts as well, and I'm sure through your organizing as well. So, you know, I'm curious if you had kind of thoughts on these ideas of faith and catechism and even manifestos, which, you know, are documents that come out of kind of certain religious, kind of sectarian religious traditions in Europe. And maybe, you know, maybe it doesn't say something specifically about Marx and Engels. Perhaps it says more about, you know, the people they were seeking to relate to in their own efforts to build a revolutionary movement. But I'm just curious if you had thoughts on that kind of dynamic. Yeah, yeah. So to kind of clarify that point that you made, confessions of faith was the precursor to the principles of communism, which was the precursor to the communist manifesto. So it's like the first, second and final draft, if you will.

But yeah, these languages of confession of faith and then a catechism comes directly out of the European religious tradition. Now, a catechism is, and I looked at the definition to be sure, quote, a text summarizing the basic principles of a Christian doctrine, usually in question and answer form. And so they're using the sort of form of a catechism here to talk about communism, so it makes sort of sense to use that word. And although Marxism stands against religion in a final ultimate sense, in a historical materialist sense, right, that their opposition to religion is not dogmatic or doctrinal or like religion is bad in some a priori vows. vacuum. But, you know, they see religion as a sort of super structural manifestation of the base of a given society at a given time in a given culture. And so it's not really whether you're anti or pro religion. It's just a seeking to understand it. But of course, in the 1800s in Europe, the European mind was, and to a large extent at this time, is still, and even to this very day throughout the world, people's minds are often dominated by the religious form. And in Europe, this has been. been, you know, it has shaped the European mind for millennia. It's not an exaggeration for at least a millennia. You know, Europeans have been living in a, in a world saturated with Christianity. So these are relevant cultural references. These are terms that everybody understands. These are

doorways by which you could reach people that otherwise may be completely new to your ideology or your theory. And so I think it's just sort of the cultural momentum of, um, the cultural momentum of, of Europe to start to use these words and use these references. So, you know, I think that that's interesting. At one point, let me read this quote. Yeah, this is actually from principles of communism to talk more about the Marxist view of religion. Engel says, quote, all religions so far have been the expression of historical stages of development of individual peoples or groups of people. But communism is the stage of historical development, which makes all existing religions superfluous and brings about their disappearance.

One interesting word there is all existing religions. I mean, I think a lot of Marxists would argue that they're talking about religions purely, straight up, all religions, all future, or possible religions. He says all existing religions. This could be a debate within the Marxist movement, not a particularly relevant one at this point, but this idea, and I've sometimes wrestled with this on my show as well, of like, you know, even in a context of complete material stability and, you know, a complete lack of scarcity where everybody has. you know what they need to live a decent dignified even better than decent life under communism would there still not be a religious impulse would there still not be wrestling with your own finite existence as a creature in the cosmos this human urge to connect with the divine or the eternal whatever that may be that will probably persist what forms it takes could be so

radically different i mean we literally can't imagine the forms it would take it'd be like going back and asking a 13th century peasant to try to understand the, you know, the mind of a 21st century American. It would be literally incomprehensible. So those are just some musings, kind of aside from the main point that I think are interesting, if not super relevant

at this time. I mean, obviously I'm a long standing advocate of not over-stressing atheism. You know, I don't think at this time, at this place, that hyper-advocating atheism and shitting on religion is going to do anything for a communist or socialist movement at all. At the same time, we

can't integrate superstitious or religious ideas into our sort of scientific approach to changing the world. But I do have an episode because sometimes, and this is relevant to this question, sometimes critics of Marxism, you'll often hear this. Marxism is just religion. It's just, you know, Christianity turned on its head, made material, communism is heaven, you know, Marx is like Jesus or whatever. This is a very lazy critique, but you do hear it. And for those interested in exploring that and hearing a rebuttal to that idea, I did have an episode a while back called Is Marxism Just Religion by Another Name? I think I put it on RevLeft and Red Menace. It's about a 20-minute episode where I just deal with that one argument. If you're interested in that, definitely

check it out. But yeah, I think, you know, the use of religion here is just convenient. It's just the language of the time. The catechism makes sense because it's sort of taking that form and applying it to communism. Yeah. So that's kind of how I would sort of approach that question. Right on. I really appreciate that. So to continue on this point and get into this, you know, talk about this text a little bit, what are some of the important interventions or clarifications that you think angles is making in this piece? You know, and yeah, feel free to share, you know, quotes or just summarize, whichever you would prefer. Okay. Yeah. So a couple things. And I've, Of course, I set some things aside that we're going to touch on later through direct questions.

But there's a couple points maybe I can point out. I'll read at length, parts 13 and 14. All of these questions are sort of given a number. And it's like 20, 22 questions. But this idea that capitalist crisis is built into the competitive and decentralized and individualistic nature of capitalist production, right? Like capitalism based on how it is structured, based on its incentive structures and how it actually operates. necessarily and continually creates crises. And if you're a millennial or you're living in America today, you've been through several of these crises. You know, the Great Recession, of course,

the reaction to the COVID pandemic. We're living through inflation right now, making life for working families almost impossible. It seems like this system is very crisis prone, and of course it is. And that crisis often cashes out, not in the form of like big, rich and wealthy and powerful people being destabilized, but working people. You know, the inflation rate of a few percentage points could mean the difference between being able to buy groceries and not being able to buy groceries for working people. So it concerns us very much to, you know, as to the question of why capitalism seems to continually throw up these periods of economic crisis in particular.

And Angles makes it clear that this crisis is built into capitalism and can only be solved by collective ownership of the means of production and thus the abolition of private property, which we will get into. But let me go ahead and read these points really quick. They're not very long and all these answers are as succinct as he can make them. So in 13, the question is proposed, what follows from these periodic, you know, crises of capitalism? And Engel says quote, first that though big industry in its earliest stage created free competition, it has now outgrown free competition. That for big industry, competition and generally the individualistic organization of production have become a fetter

on it and must and will shatter. So as an aside, individualistic organization of production is basically saying these individual capitalists employ social labor. They employ armies of workers to make profits. But then they individually accumulate that profit, put it in their pockets, and also make all the decisions. This individualistic organization of production is not rational it's not planned it doesn't it's not geared towards necessarily meeting people's needs it's geared towards can you make a profit and individuals seeking self-interestedly profit organized production in this sort of chaotic way that leads to things like as angles will point out overproduction i don't want to read too much of these quotes because i think it can sometimes

get bogged down but let me read this one point he says but now however the development of big industry has ushered in a new period. Capital and the forces of production have been expanded to an unprecedented extent, and the means are at hand to multiply them without limit in the near future. We can think of AI. We can think of quantum computing, right? This is the telecommunications revolution with the internet that we now are beginning to have, and in some sense already do have, the means by which to take over and plan production, to meet human needs not to generate profit for a few and in angles this time he's seeing these things coming on the horizon that these possibilities will be there and of course now they're arriving and that's

creating lots of problems within capitalism what does AI and hyperautomation create under capitalism well under socialism it could mean the freedom of human beings from toil under capitalism it means oh now you're competing with robots for a job and the capitalist who own the robots will then replace you robots don't need piss breaks they don't need days off they're grandma never dies, they can replace you, and all of that money that the robots could, they don't even need a wage, all that money that robots create can now go into the pockets of capitalists. This is obviously creating already and will continue to create a simply unsustainable system. Now you have a toiling class that no longer toils, you know,

and we hear things like UBI, for example, as these band-aids on the broken leg of capitalism. Well, maybe all the money that these robots generate, we can toss a few pennies, to the peasants, so they can at least continue to consume the products that we make, even if we can't employ them. That's a half measure, and there's plenty of contradictions within that. But Engels goes on, moreover, the forces of production have been concentrated in the hands of a few, while the great mass of the people are more and more falling into the proletariat. Their situation becoming more wretched and intolerable in proportion to the increase of wealth

of the bourgeoisie. So this is another aside. Isn't it fascinating how capitalism generates massive amounts of growth, massive amounts of wealth. It certainly does that, especially compared to feudalism and slave societies. It is hyperproductive in that sense. But at the same time, in the richest country that's ever existed, medical bankruptcy is the number one reason that families go bankrupt. In every major city in the richest country to ever exist in human history, there are miles and miles of homeless, desperate human beings, right? Many with untreated mental illness, untreated

addictive issues. Addiction just is a traumatic cope with a traumatic situation, right? so how can a society multiply its wealth thousands folds over a short a period of time and yet still give rise to the amount of misery that we see in our streets in some ways and in some places worse than certain situations under feudalism even I mean it is fascinating and it's tragic

but it shows the irrationality of this entire system he goes on I'm almost finished here he says and finally these mighty and easily extended forces of production have so far outgrown private property and the bourgeoisie that they threaten at any moment to unleash the most violent disturbances of the social order. Now, under these conditions, the abolition of private property has become not only possible, but absolutely necessary. And that's how he ends the quote. And one of the most violent disturbances of the social order that I can think of that's based on private property and the accumulation of profit is, of course, climate change, is the ecological crisis. This is something that was not really present in angles this time, although certainly pollution and stuff was a problem in industrial.

England, but this entire system has given rise, not only to the problem of climate change, but also is now acting as an active barrier to solve that problem, to solve that problem, not only by the covert and overt funding of denialism and the ideological superstructure, but just in the way that capitalism works and the weakness of governments under capitalism, which are owned by capitalists, cannot reign in these monsters. And so we're living with now an environmental catastrophe based in large part on the private ownership of the means of production. And if it doesn't cause the problem, right, because some would say, well, human societies need energy. And fossil fuel, regardless of what system you're under, fossil fuel for a time, you can't beat it as far as energy goes.

But even if that's true, capitalism and private property are now acting as the primary obstacle to actually solving the problem. At most, it vomits up half measures, half solutions. And at the least, I mean, we see this all over. It's just outright denied or that's accepted but said, trying to do anything about it will be much more detrimental to society than otherwise. So we should just accept that it's happening, bust out the tank tops and flip-flops and get used to it. That's literally now the new denialist sort of argument coming from certain quarters of the

reactionary elite. And then another one, let me see here, 16, 17, and 18, I think, These are very short, but it talks about the abolition of private property and the socialist revolution. So one question is, will the peaceful abolition of private property be possible? You know, can you communists do a revolution in a peaceful way? And Engel says it would be desirable if this could happen, and the communists would certainly be the last to oppose it. Communists know only too well that all conspiracies are not only useless, but harmful. They know all too well that revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily, but that everywhere and always.

they have been the necessary consequence of conditions which were wholly independent of the will and direction of individual parties and entire classes. But they also see that the development of the proletariat in nearly all civilized countries has been violently suppressed and that in this way the opponents of communism have been working toward a revolution with all their strength.

He's saying by oppressing and preventing this genuine bottom-up urge of working class people you actually aggravate and create the conditions for more revolutionary struggle. He finishes it off by saying, if the oppressed proletariat is finally driven to revolution, then we communists will defend the interests of the proletariat with deeds as we now defend them with words. And then he goes on to say, it's not possible to abolish it at one stroke. He gets into this idea that it's a transition. And so in these ideas about how will private property be abolished, will it be peaceful?

He's like, we would love for it to be peaceful. They're not going to allow it to be peaceful, so it's going to have to be a little messy. And is it possible for it to happen all at once? absolutely not. This is a transition. So he's kind of laying the foundations to this idea that we have, and maybe we'll talk about it a little bit later, about socialist transition being fundamentally different from the end state of communism. But those are just some points that I pulled out from this text that we don't touch on in other questions that I thought were at least worth touching on here. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that. So for folks who may not have as much

background in kind of the rationale behind the centrality of the proletariat in communist theory. Can you talk a little bit about Engels's remarks on the proletariat here in the text? He spends some time laying out what is meant by the term, explaining why it is central to the communist program, and then comparing the proletariat to various other groups or, you know, classes, stratas of people, you know, workers. He talks about artisans, serfs, slaves, and so on. Um, obviously today, you know, with the proliferation of, you know, kind of the gig economy and all of these other things, we could talk about whether there are more, you know, categories that we could add to this document. And, um, you know, many focus, there's also this tendency. I feel like nowadays that I see a lot, um, of, well, I see it a lot on Twitter, which is not necessarily a great place to see things. But, um, of folks who get very focused on the idea of like who is and who is not the actual proliferation. Um, And then many folks probably, you know, don't spend that time, much time thinking about that at all, which is a different sort of problem. So what do you think was the importance of what angles is kind of doing in this text? And how useful do you think this exercise is for folks today? Yeah. I think it's really important. I think it's, we need to be clear about what we mean by these terms. And the proletariat is a central term. So if you're a Marxist or just on the socialist left in any sort of camp, you're going to

to use this term and it has to mean something and anybody out there mystifying or obscuring what it means or trying to exclude actual workers from the definition or include people who are absolutely not a part of the proletariat into that right we see it from both sides um this thing can be harmful if for no other reason then it can cause confusion and because it's a central concept of um marxist theory and of socialist theory in general it serves us as hopefully educators um to to be very clear about this. And Engels, as another educators, vary, as I said, about the text as a whole, but particularly at this point, succinct, accessible, and very clear. He applies historical materialism to talk about how the proletariat emerged from the industrial revolution in England in particular,

showing this dialectical relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. They arise simultaneously, right? They pop onto the historical stage as a package deal. You can't separate the two. So that's very helpful. And, and, Then here's just a really quick quote where he sums it up, I think, very, very well. He says, the proletariat is that class in society, which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital. So that right there is very interesting. So if you're going to say a barista is not a member of the proletariat, well, does a barista live entirely from the sale of their labor? And do they draw profit from any kind of capital?

Yes, they live from the sale of their labor. No, they do not draw profit from capital. They are a member of the motherfucking proletariat, period. Discussion's over. You know, the proletariat is not just a white guy somewhere in a hard hat. The proletariat is a relationship to the means of production. And are you employing capital to bring in more capital? Or are you selling your labor to those who own capital in order to pay your goddamn bills?

And that right there is the easiest, most simple way that you can do it. He goes on, and I'll just finish the quote because it's a little, it's kind of cool how he says it. He says, who's wheel and woe. whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor, hence on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.

The proletariat or the class of proletarians is in a word, the working class. But here he says something very interesting. The existence whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor and hence the changing state of business. This is something we see all the time. For example, on my Patreon, I just

talked about this asshole, millionaire who came out and said, you know, that we need to, the workers are getting too uppity. They're unionizing. The tight labor market after COVID has given labor way too much of a step up. And so what we need to do is we need to bump up that unemployment number, 40 to 50% and bring some pain into the economy to put these motherfuckers in their place, right? That's what this guy got up and said, this slick-haired little worm gets up there and says that.

Now, what does 40 to 50% jump in unemployment mean for working class families? That means devastation. You know, that means I could lose my job. could lose my benefits. I won't be able to put food on my table for my family. And this guy's just talking about it like dogs who need to be trained to behave. And that's an insight into the capitalist mindset with the mask pulled down, not even pretending to be anything but a brutal capitalist. But it also shows that, yeah, the changing state of business, right, a stricter or looser labor market will, is sort of what you depend on, right? Like, if you're a working person,

you could do everything right. You know, you're a good worker, you got the right education, you go above and beyond it's your job and then inflation hits and you just can't survive or that company fucks up because their owners made a poor decision now they have to do a 20% layoff and now through no fault of your own you're tossed out right and of course capitalists also need an army of reserve labor to discipline workers that are in a job because if there's a mass of unemployed people you could join that ocean at any time and we could pull from that ocean at any time and replace you when there's a tight market not a lot of unemployment that's bad for capitalists, because then they have to raise wages. Workers are more valuable. They're more

easily able to organize and form unions and fight back. And so you want to bring some pain into the economy. But of course, you know, one capitalist doesn't control the entire economic system. So the main point is that these workers are dependent on, and we already talked about the crisis of capitalism and how cyclical in every five to seven years it throws up its organs. So now your entire life, your ability to provide for yourself and your family is tied to an intrinsically unstable economic order. And it has nothing to do ultimately with how hard you work or what you do or what you control about your own life. It has everything to do with the system that operates so far and above and beyond you that as an individual, you have no impact on it

whatsoever. And that's not how people should live, you know, period. And we'll get into that a little bit more. But he also talks very interestingly. And he says, you know, do proletarians differ from slaves? How do they differ from serfs? How do they differ from old handicraftsmen in the guild system before capitalism? And I'm not going to read all of these, but I think they are interesting because you can clarify a concept by comparing it to other things and finding out where the differences exist. So I'll just read the slave one. So in what ways do proletarians differ from slaves? Engel says, the slave is sold once and for all. The proletariatia must sell himself daily and even hourly. The individual slave, property of one master,

is assured in existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master's interest. The individual proletarian property, as it were, of the entire bourgeois class, which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole, meaning the existence of the working class is assured. The capitalists are always going to need workers, but an individual member of the working class, utterly disposable, toss them in the garbage when it's convenient. You know, these capitalists would kill off you and your entire family if it meant a 0.1% increase in their profit margins. The class is secure, but individuals within that class are even less secure. And this is not saying that being a worker

and under capitalism is worse than being a slave. By no means is he's saying that. He's just clarifying some of these differences. And he goes on, the slave is outside competition, right? He's not in the free market. A slave is owned by their master and is forced to do work for that master in perpetuity. But the proletarian is in competition. and experiences all its vagaries. Competition with other workers to get a job. Competition once you get a job with other workers to get a promotion or not get laid off, right? We're constantly thrown to the wolves of competition, which makes our lives incredibly unstable.

The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and himself stands on a higher social level than the slave. So he's saying the workers obviously better off than the slave when it comes to like basic ability of your daily life to have basic freedom and whatnot, right? You can leave work, go to your family, go out to the bar, do whatever you want. The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and becomes a proletarian. So then here he says, the slave is free from being a slave, not by abolishing private property, but by abolishing

the relationship of slave and master. And then what happens when the slaves are freed in the American South? They're then put on the labor market and become workers. With all the racism implied in the Jim Crow era, what jobs you can get, you can't join a union, but the fact remains that being liberated from slavery puts you only now in the position of becoming a proletarian. And he ends this thing by saying the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general. So, you know, the slave frees himself, not by overturning private property, but by fighting against and overturning the master's slave relationship, as we saw with the civil war in the United States, only to then become a proletarian. And now the proletarian can only free

himself by abolishing private property in general, and I think we'll get more into that. But he goes on to compare him to serfs and handicrafts him and et cetera. It's very worthwhile for anybody that wants to sort of hone in on their understanding of what the proletariat is and how it emerges. Yeah, right on. I mean, obviously he's dealing at a kind of general level there. I mean, I might point out that like the life expectancy of slaves in Barbados was 20 years with high infant mortality. So it's not necessarily much of an insurance of an existence. in some settings where, you know, they were so kind of brutal and just trying to, you know, see enslaved people as interchangeable parts. But I think that gets to also his idea of slavery, you know, that slaves are a thing, essentially, in that kind of system, you know.

And quickly, and quickly that something that emerges from this picture is that different modes of, like certain leftovers from certain modes of, like certain leftovers from certain modes. modes of production can still exist. So during the Civil War, before the Civil War, you had the agrarian slave South, literally a form of a mode of production that was prior to feudalism still existing, not only through feudalism, but existing now on the epoch of the capitalist dawn, right? And then also feudal systems, he talks about Poland and Hungary and Russia at that time. I mean, Russia before the Russian Revolution is a serf, largely a serf society, still has serfdom, right? And so that's a feudal systems. holdover, they didn't even fully go through capitalism, is actually the Bolsheviks and the Communist Party of Russia that were pushing them through the development of capitalism, right? And then that gets called state capitalism. Well, it's like you've got to go, there's some sense in which you have to go through these stages. You can't just hop, you know, entire epochs of human evolution, but that's perhaps a different conversation. The only point here is that remnants of these previous forms of modes of production do continue to live on in these furthering, ones. And maybe since what feudalism, slavery, and capitalism have in common is that they're all class societies, when we overcome class societies, then all of those remnants from slavery, feudal, and capitalism will eventually completely, you know, exit stage left to the historical stage. Yeah, right on. So obviously, as we've already alluded to in this discussion, and hopefully as folks understand clearly, the abolition of private property is central to communism and that

such, it makes sense that it would be central here in this text. What stood out to you in this discussion of private property? You know, kind of the rationale behind that, that horizon, the method that angles lays out for achieving that in the text. Obviously, you know, he can't lay out everything in terms of what a communist society would entail or a transition to communism would entail. but he does lay out some key principles here he does kind of lay out a vision so you know kind of what stood out to you the discussion of the abolition of private property in this text yeah first thing this is very well understood by many veterans in the marxist movement but it could be helpful for somebody that's sort of new to this is the difference between personal and private property often

a source of confusion by critics of Marxism also new people getting into it basics is private property in this sense. Whenever you hear Marx is talking about private property, they're not talking about your home that you actually use or the bed that you sleep in or, God forbid, your toothbrush. They're talking about capital producing property. So you own a mine, you own a factory, you own a McDonald's, and you employ labor, that's your private property, you own it as an individual, then you employ social labor, a bunch of different people come in to actually work and generate profit, and then you extract that profit and put it in your pocket. That's private property. So just understand that. And then another point that is worth understanding a little more advanced is the enclosure

period during feudalism where the public lands had to be privatized, right? For a long time under feudalism, peasants surfs, they could at the very least go out into the open woods, they could gather firewood for their family, they could hunt, they could gather, they could get, you know, whatever, food for their family. If everything else in society was sunk, if there was a war or whatever, you could always go out and get your own food and that gave them a certain level of autonomy right and the enclosure acts starting in england but then spreading everywhere um where it was an attempt to close off those common areas and privatize them as a precursor to capitalism right as a sort of as a period of of enclosing the commons so that you could privatize that and then set it to productive labor maybe build a factory on it or just own the land and thus the trees so you could log the trees or whatever But the point is, the peasants had to be pushed off of common land first as a prerequisite for the development of capitalism. All interesting points, all worth knowing. But private property is the beating heart of capitalism in modern class society, whether it's a young Marx putting private property at the center of alienation, which he does in his, I think, 1848 manuscripts, of philosophy, whatever, I forget the title, where he talks about alienation.

And he really puts private property at the center of alienation and then logically goes through. how private property leads to these various forms of alienation that he covers, or whether it's Engels putting it at the center of the development of patriarchy in his origins of the family private property in the state, right? Engels makes it very clear that there was a pre-patriarchal human societies, right? Sometimes we call him primitive communism before the rise of private property, before the rise of class society. And with the creation of class society and thus of private property,

you had the development of patriarchy in a lot in a simplified way because you are then concerned with the development of inheritance right and so you need to know the man needs to know who his actual children are and that means you put women at a subordinated position you restrict and curtail their freedom and in this way private property and the handing down of inheritance or under feudalism nobility titles these things can sort of be secured so patriarchy literally a right is it's not inborn to human nature it literally arises with the rising of private property and class society or marks and angles together putting it at the center of the capitalist system as well as it's overthrow marks and angles make it clear throughout their text that private property is the sort of center of gravity of capitalism and in a communist socialist revolution means the challenging confronting and overturning of that of that entire sort of institution but whatever all throughout these texts private property is the individual appropriation of social production. It is the cornerstone of the individual being able to say, I own this, I'll pay you a wage, you work, and I'm taking that money from you because this is my factory, and you're using my machines that I own. So, you know, I get the money that this generates. I'll give you enough to come back tomorrow, but that's it. So, so it's at the center of everything. And thus, it really is the sort of, the throne that capital sits on. And only by dismantling that throne, can we actually dismantle capitalism? And anybody who claims to be a socialist

or claims to want revolution or claims to be an egalitarian in the communist sense that doesn't think that we should go after private property has lost the plot. There is no socialist or communist revolution without an attack on this institution, period. So that's why it's so important, it's why it's so essential, and it's really worth understanding. But Engel says, and I'll just quote him here, moreover, since the management of industry by individuals, necessarily implies private property. And since competition is, in reality, merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry. Private property must therefore be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement, in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods. So you're saying private property must be abolished, and in its place, we have collective ownership of the means of production. And the seeds for this are already there because of the social nature of production, right?

If you go into a factory, you go into a business, you go into a McDonald's, any workplace. There's many, many, many people working, right? But it's one guy or a group of guys at the top that get all the profit. And that right there is a contradiction. That leads to a whole bunch of problems, including cyclical crisis of capitalism. And so it's only logical that if these are socially produced, produced goods, if it takes an army of workers to make this business profitable, why not have the army of workers actually own the thing that they're doing and making, you know, produce?

Unionism is a sort of kernel of this idea. Unionism only exists under capitalism because you have to fight the bosses, right? Under socialism and certainly under communism, not in the early stages of socialism, but ultimately in the later stages of socialism and communism, unions become superfluous because there's no capitalist you need to compete with. And it's the kernel of democratic ownership with the means of production. Unions are workers coming together, talking, coordinating, cooperating, engaging in class struggle there by building up their consciousness of themselves as workers. And that is the kernel to a possible future, wherein workers democratically and freely run their own businesses that they actually work. And then the profit

is divvied up between all the workers, not usurped by an individual at the top. And the decisions are made by all the people, so it's in all the people's interest. Whereas often, you'll have companies and capitalists making decisions that is good for their bottom line and long-term growth but it's devastating to the people that actually make the profits work right a 30% layoff or whatever reduction of wages a taking out of a certain benefit whatever it may be if workers controlled that shit they would not impose policies that hurt their fellow workers and themselves so now it's just logical now there's sort of a you can start to see the irrationality of the way capitalism is set up not only the injustice of it, but the irrationality of it. And obviously he's pointing towards a planned economy

because we don't need 137 different types of deodorant. We don't need entire stores filled up with plastic toys. You know, we don't need so much nonsense that is generated and then marketed to us to create a false demand where there otherwise would be no demand. And then it creates huge pollution and fast fashion. And now we have a plastic sort of chunk of the size of Texas in the Pacific ocean and in a, I think, a Mexican desert or a Peruvian desert somewhere, there's miles of fast fashion that's been discarded, strewn all over the desert, right? This overproduction of unnecessary goods is irrational. And rational planning with the technology we now have today making it possible would obviously help all these issues as well as the ecological crisis that we're

dealing with. But he goes on in only two more sentences or so, and I'll wrap this up. He says, in fact, the abolition of private property is doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order, which has been made necessary by the development of industry. And for this reason, it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand, the abolition of private property. Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange, have been brought together in the hands of the nation, the people, collectively, private property will disappear of its own accord. Money will even become superfluous. And production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough

off whatever of its old economic habits may remain. So there he's gesturing towards long-term overcoming of it and its replacement, small at first, and then gaining speed and momentum by collective ownership. And so, yes, private property is at the heart of this discussion, is at the heart of capitalism, and it's at the heart of a communist strategy for revolution. Yeah, I appreciate that. So I did want to read one quote here. He writes, just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry in the same way, communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development will require an entirely different kind of human material, end quote.

So I love that passage. It's a passage that I think we ended up calling our discussion with China-Mieville an entirely different kind of human material. It's something he talks about in his book on the Communist Manifesto, which, as we said, we both have discussions. We'll make sure to link that in the show notes. You know, and Engels goes on to talk a little bit more about what he means here. You know, what do you see within this text and within your broader engagement with communist? thought as the implications for humanity and the type of evolution or revolution in human development that could be enabled by communism. First thing is to kind of start off very simply with the sort of base superstructural analysis, right? The core idea here is that our ideas, our assumptions, our belief systems, even our very sense of self, are sort of constructed or shaped ultimately by the material reality and the hierarchies of the society that we are raised in. So under capitalism, people are going to be shaped to be under capitalism, workers under capitalism to incorporate and internalize capitalist values.

The entire education system is structured ultimately to produce a worker of a certain degree. You don't want to be too smart. You don't want to educate the workers too much because then they get up and they start talking about Marx and stuff. But you don't want them to have to be absolutely stupid and can't read and write because then they're not good workers and they don't. they don't produce enough profit they're not efficient producers right so you kind of want to find that middle ground and it's not that education systems are constantly consciously constructed this way and it's not that teachers are trying to put a cap on how smart people get of course not but it permeates the entire society and becomes unquestioned assumptions that you know people just internalize as fact

and even just the structure of the school day right is obviously a mere image of the structure of the work day um and and it comes with a whole bunch of problems there's a sort of of Henry Ford uniformity that is sort of imposed on people. So you might have certain capacities as a child, but if they don't fit in to the way that school is structured, you'll often be seen as a behavioral problem or maybe an intellectual, a disability, or maybe you have ADHD, right? You can't sit in your chair long enough. So all these things sort of permeate the entire society.

That's one point. But under capitalism in particular, you know, vapidity, self-centeredness, competition, greed, bigotry. They're all in human nature, right? Human nature is the full spectrum of what's possible of a human being. Those things are certainly in us, right? But they're fostered under capitalism. Those are the, those rather dark elements of our nature are actually brought up to the forefront and glorified and are made necessary, really, in order to succeed under capitalism. And so you see an entire society where you know even working people are chasing fame chasing wealth chasing status this is what capital this is a little carrot the capitalism dangles you can be one of us too you know don't

hate the system join us work really hard the fact that 99.9% of you will never make it we don't bring that part up but you know be cutthroat everybody's an obstacle to your own success you know it fosters a sort of individualism a sort of narcissism out of necessity right it fosters sort of base elements of our nature that come out in really ugly and grotesque ways. It's not to say that those elements wouldn't be there if it wasn't for capitalism, but it is to say that certain systems incentivize certain behaviors within the spectrum of human nature to come to the forefront and other ones to be suppressed. But I would also argue that whether you're talking about big capitalists or lowly proletariots

were actually all made small by this organization of society, right? We're all stunted. You look at an Elon Musk, right? you don't see a paragon of happiness and the pinnacle of being content with your life you have all the money in the fucking world but he still wants to be liked he wants to be seen as funny by 15 year olds on reddit or whatever the fuck and it makes him small it makes us small because our capacities are stunted and limited you know most of our waking life has to be handed over to somebody else for their profit just so we can get by just so we can have food we're born on this earth just like anybody else we come out of it just like the biggest kings and the biggest capitalist This earth is just as much ours as it is theirs, but they take everything and then sell it back to us, as if it's theirs to begin with, you know, in the first place. And that's grotesque. Moreover, most people are unable under capitalism to even get to know themselves to pursue their own self-actualization or to develop their inborn proclivities and capacities under a system which condemns a vast majority of us to a life of largely meaningless toil, right? it's not even that like people have interest that they don't have time to pursue that's certainly the case in some instances but i also want to point out that some people don't even have the

ability to find out what they're interested in much less pursued i see this with like the generation or like my parents generation where there's like they're they're like they're in a real sense they don't know themselves you know they haven't had time to even think about what it means to get to know yourself and so you know they have been sort of limited and stunted by having to work jobs their entire life from the moment they were able to do so. So, you know, we do not make new men and women and then make a new social order, which sometimes you hear, right? I talk about spirituality sometimes, and in spiritual circles, this is a big idea.

Oh, you can't go out and change the world. What you do is you sit down, you change yourself, and through changing yourself and other people changing themselves, then we reach a certain sort of, you know, threshold where society becomes better. You know, that obviously doesn't work because people, are shaped under capitalism and even spiritual communities are shaped and mere capitalist incentive structures, etc. You know, you'll have some guru at the top who's just trying to get status and wealth and money pretending to be some enlightened guy handing down truths to help other people

when he's trying to help himself in his own pocketbook. Very common, right? So what really happens is that we want to struggle to make a new social order under which a new type of humanity, a fuller humanity, a richer humanity, can emerge and develop. Class society, and this is a point I really want to stress, whether it's feudal or slave or capitalist, class society brutalizes and stunts us all. It incentivizes our most base behaviors and modes of thought in order to serve an economic order that does not serve us. It glorifies wealth and status and fame as ends in themselves, and then makes us fight to the death to obtain what is unattainable by definition for the vast majority of us. a democratic egalitarian society which incentivizes our higher natures of solidarity of altruism of cooperation of free association of real human maturity and responsibility and love would simply craft new types of people it would incentivize a different part of that spectrum of human nature to come to the foreground a better part so i truly believe that it's only by transcending class society and its brutal and stupid divisions of human beings into higher and less

or exploiter and exploited into rich and poor that we can in some real meaningful sense become fully human and i think that's what angles and and china and marks and chay all these people talking about a new man or new human that's what they're getting at is that most people are brutalized by class society are kept low a lid is placed on their development and um you take that lid off uh you know humans can finally become more fully human you are somehow less human, not only when you're being exploited, but particularly when you're being exploited, but also the exploiters. You know, the Elon Musk's of the world, they're not more human than us. In some ways, they're less human than us. It brutalizes everybody. I'm not trying to compare

the struggles of like a poor person to the struggles of a dumbass like Elon Musk, but I am saying that the system itself sort of brutalizes and dehumanizes everybody on that spectrum. And the rich are not safe from that either. And you see that. The rich are often very small people. They're very concerned about protecting their wealth, keeping the rabble at an arm's distance, they live their whole lives in sort of this insecurity, because deep down, on some subconscious level, they know they don't deserve this shit. They know that they're not somehow better. It's kind of like a holdover from feudalism, where, you know, you were born to a certain family, and that means that you're better than everybody else. But under capitalism, it's not that

you're born to a certain family. It's how much money do you have? And if you have a lot of money, this system will allow you very easily to convince yourself, not only that you got it all they're by your own hard work and nobody else had anything to do with it, but that you're genuinely better than people who don't have what you have. And they don't admit that. That's a gross thing to admit and even look at in your own mind. But it's there and it boils under the surface and it comes out at certain times like that guy I was talking about earlier, you know, telling us that we need to make pain into the economy to put these workers back in their place. So it's a grotesque system. It fucks everybody up on the entire spectrum. It makes us all smaller. And yeah, to become fully

human, we need to ultimately transcend class society and become like a species worthy of going into the cosmos, right? A species worthy of taking the name intelligent species in the cosmos. And I guarantee if we saw aliens, if aliens came down today, they would not have their society stratified into capitalist and workers. I can promise you that. Right on. Yeah, I did see that video. It was definitely making the rounds of that guy. I don't know what he was at, but some, it's like, reminds me of like DeVos or whatever, or DeVos, whatever they call those things, like when, you know, the capitalists get together and start to strategize on, you know, what do we need to do? And yeah, um, uh, I think it was,

uh, actually Ola Femme Taiwo on, on social media, who said, you know, I always look for good, you know, communist theory, social theory that can help people understand, you know, the, it's like, and then guys like this just come out and say it clearer than any of us could articulate, right? Absolutely. And it also points that the capitalist class is very class conscious. They're engaged in class war consciously. There's no confusion about it. It's among the working classes that some of us are like, well, maybe I can be rich. Maybe if I just hustle, grind set. I can get up there, you know, building wealth, a guy that makes 30K a day becoming a YouTube influencer telling people how to get rich, right? It's like it distorts and dehumanizes it. That's gross to me. If I see somebody like that thinking in those patterns, I'm repulsed by it, right? So, yeah, I think it's funny. The working class need to become class conscious and as conscious of the fact that they're in class struggle as the ruling class. That would be a great improvement. Absolutely. So there's not a lot of discussion here about the implications of familial relations and patriarchy,

but there are some important comments made in the text, which do have significant implications. So you kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier. I know you've also done episodes along with your co-host Allison on the Red Menace on Engels' this text, the origin of family, private property in the state. And, you know, I wondered in this text, like, what seeds you saw here and perhaps, you know, some important comments that Ingalls makes that you think are better elaborated there or, you know, in other texts. Yeah, well, as you said, on Red Menace, we did a three-part series on that text where we really dive into it and try to explain it. And it's a very helpful text to understand. And it's the actual, the beginning of

Marxist feminism, where, you know, the historical and dialectical materialist analysis that Angles and Marx really pioneered is first, first put to you, not perfectly, but first put to use to try to understand patriarchy. And of course, Marxist feminists have taken up that attempt and made it better and developed it further, right? Same with like colonial Marxist, anti-colonial Marxist. There's the seeds of the methodology in Marx and Engels, but of course it needs to be stretched, as Fanon would say. It needs to be taken and applied more vociferously by people who live under those conditions who understand them better and made sense of right so marxism is like with marks and angles this core this kernel that is then taken in all these different directions eco-socialists feminist socialists right

anti-colonial decolonial socialists etc it's a beautiful thing and it's a beautiful part of our tradition it's not a dogmatic you know set of doctrine handed down from one generation to the next right it is a methodology it is a way of thinking and and that can be picked up by anybody and carried into new realms which you need in a vastly and quickly changing society so the origin of the family private property in the state's really interesting text it can get kind of dry as i said marks is a much more fun person to read than angles but angles at some points is a much easier person to read i don't know it could be a debate but as i said earlier one of the big things in that text is that angles roots patriarchy in the development of class society but in this

text. He does make some references obliquely because of the limitations of a text like this to reproductive labor, right, this idea that the unpaid work largely of women historically to create and recreate the people that would eventually become workers, right? And thus go on to make profits for the capitalists. This is a essential job, the domestic and child-rearing labor, an essential job that is utterly and completely unpaid and pushed onto women, right? So then, and then you have the introduction of women in the workforce. It doesn't mean they also don't have to do the domestic stuff. They got to do both now, you know, and some liberal feminists will call this a great advancement

for all women. And in some ways it is, there's a certain individual autonomy that you get by making your own money and not being subject to your husband's finances or whatever, but in other ways it's more burden on women. And so the solution that comes out of Angles' origin of the family. family that comes out of Marxist feminism more broadly is the socialization of domestic care of of of you know at the beginning of socialism it could just be something like universal child care for everyone right communal raising of children not that you wouldn't have parents or

whatever not that you would be taken and thrown into some orphanage and raised by a bunch of strangers but it's just like you would extend through socially sanctioned and funded mechanisms the the responsibility of raising the next generation in an economy of solidarity and cooperation where we all have a vested interest in taking care of our kids, not turning them into workers, but to raising them, to teaching them how to think, teaching them how to be good people, integrating them into a better cooperative egalitarian society. And it's that socialization of domestic and reproductive labor that is a hallmark of like sort of Marxist feminism in the first steps of socialization. But the thing where he gets explicitly

into the question of the family is 21. The question comes up and I'll read this entire it's very quick the question is what will be the influence of communist society on the family and me and Allison

really make this clear in the episode that we did especially the third one we hear this term abolish the family and it's not a clarion call of the communists

to abolish the family Engels is pointing out the family's already being abolished under the conditions of capitalism right so I think right there it already

switches it up it's not like communists are saying you know kill the family death to moms and dads. Angles is applying historical material to say, hey, the family's already being torn asunder and destroyed in all these ways.

Rich people have, and we see this in our own time, have the ability to buy extended family, right? You could buy a chef and you could buy a team of nannies, you could buy even a surrogate, right, or whatever. These are things that are open to the upper classes to kind of recreate a communal family situation, but that's only because you have money. For poor people, we don't have that

or we desperately rely on other. working people in our family that you know i'm a father of three we would be we would not exist without our extended family to help us right when we need help etc so lots of these questions pop up but i'll read this uh angles's response to the question what will be the influence of communist society and the family angles says quote it will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene It can do this since it does a way with private property and educates children on a communal basis and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage, the dependence rooted in private property,

of the woman on the man, and of the children on the parents. And here's the answer to the outcry of the highly moral Philistines against the so-called community of women. So just as an aside, you know, and he's responding to this argument by like basically dumbasses who say, oh you're communist you think everybody should own everything so you just think that women should be collective property and that of the men and the men can go and take whatever woman they want like this absolutely absurd fucking idea that communism means that we hold women in a community of ownership it's just it shows the lack of understanding but and we see this in our own time most critics of marxism have no fucking clue what they're talking about so angles is like rolling his eyes and responding to this he says community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society in which to Today finds its complete expression in prostitution, right? When human beings are commodified, when even human beings can be turned into a thing to be bought and sold for an exchange rate for a profit, right? Then this gives rise to something like prostitution.

And we communists are against the commodification of human beings in any realm. And, you know, you might get accused today if you go on Twitter and quote this, you might get accused of being anti-sex worker. But I always say it's like, it's like if I were. to critique Jeff Bezos and Amazon's corporate power. And then somebody came along and said, you're an Amazon worker exclusive socialist. It'd be like, that would make no sense. My critique of Jeff Bezos and of Amazon is in favor of the workers of Amazon. And my critique of prostitution and of the sex trade industry globally is a defense and it comes out of a love of the people who are

forced to do that work. And in the meantime, in so far as it exists, we completely want their ability to unionize, their ability to fight back, their ability to keep themselves. safe and everything that they do, right? But it is saying that ultimately our goal is to transcend the commodification of human beings, where nobody would have to engage in sex because they need to get by economically. And outside of that economic coercion, sex work becomes just sex. If you don't need it for money, if all your needs are taken care of, you can fuck whoever you want, right?

But it doesn't, it's not going to dictate whether or not you can afford rent. And that's the difference. So he says, you know, this community of women, right, prostitution is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society. But prostitution is based on private property and it will fall with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing a community of women, in fact abolishes it. And I think that is beautiful. It's clear cut. It's completely in line with everything else we know about Marxism and communism.

It is feminist to the core, you know, and it is a beautiful statement of our position. And I think it goes a long way in demystifying some of the either purposeful or accidental confusion around that topic when it comes to this very hot topic in recent years where people get very worked up and get very angry about even talking in terms like this. But I think once you understand it and you're on the left, there's very little to disagree with here. Yeah, right on. And that there's a, you know, I always find fascinating to those tendencies within bourgeois, you know, bourgeois thought. right, to like, to, to push the critique on to communism of the thing that is actually inherent within the capitalist order, right? Projection. Of, like, yeah, projection, exactly, right?

You know, it happens, it happens all the time, you know, in, in so many ways. But that's a great example of it, of this idea of the community of women where, you know, the problem there, inherent there is this, like, kind of proprietary understanding. You think women are property. And so, therefore, you think we would want to communalize that property of women. It's like, no, women are not properties, right? Like, you are the ones who have that understanding of women. That is a capitalist idea, right? And I think that, you know, that's a great expression of that, too.

And, yeah, and when they say, you know, other workers sell their bodies as well, that's completely in line with this analysis. Because, yes, on the labor market, humans are turning into commodities. Every worker who sells your labor, you are now a commodity as well. So it's not a division between workers and then sex workers, right? No, we're all in it. This is just one form that the commodification of human beings take. Thus, it is one form that will be abolished under, you know, a communist revolution. And another, to your point about projection, I just came across this mean recently.

Many of you might have seen it. It kind of pops up time and time again. But it's a picture of like just tents and obviously tent cities in the middle of a major American metropolis. And it's just like you look at the homelessness crisis. The first comment. underneath is like this is the housing plan under communism and somebody responds this is literally the housing plan under capitalism so perfect example of projection where communism doesn't exist at all in america by any fucking stretch of the imagination and capitalism's failures are still somehow

because of the ideological anti-communism blamed on communism which doesn't exist doesn't even have political representation in congress is the furthest thing from our actual society in any way But yes, the failures of capitalism are then projected on to some specter of communism, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's like the common, you know, reactionary, right-wing critique of the Democrats as communists, right? Which is total bullshit, of course. But, like, that is, like, where we see it. Like, every election cycle, you know, get stuff like this.

I'm in Pennsylvania and, you know, the Democratic governors are always communists that. It's just like. It's hilarious. It would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad. Yeah, it's right. Exactly. So, you know, there is a section here. I'm kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier where he delineates between socialists and communists. And, you know, kind of from my understanding of this, there's some distinction here that's a little bit specific to the period because socialists in that period, at least as, you know, kind of I understand it, that that term was used a little bit differently. and maybe more broadly in some ways than it's used today, although I realize it's also a pretty broad concept today as well. But, you know, the way I take it, the socialist,

and you can kind of clarify some of this, the socialist he's describing here, it seems to me, or not, you know, scientific socialist, but kind of a range of groups who had certain idealistic notions of socialism or in some cases kind of reactionary, like, or regressive, I should say, like kind of trying to go back to the past to some, you know, kind of feudal idea or even pre-feudal idea of what, you know, might be a socialistic society. And in other senses, it's like a bourgeois idea, right? Like kind of like social democracy, I guess you could say or something like that. Now, even though distinguishing between these groups as socialists on the one hand and communists on the other may no longer be as common, you know, because we might say to sort of, of use another angle's idea, you know, comparison of utopian versus scientific socialism or something

like that. I do think that there are critiques here of these groups that do still apply to many different groups on the left today. So I'm just curious, like, what did you think of this section if you had any pieces you wanted to draw out from it? Totally. Yeah, this is actually really fun section because, as you said, there's so many corollaries to today. There is some differences. It's a little obscure. When you go back and even read Lenin, he's talking about, you know, social democracy as being synonymous with the communist movement, these words kind of shift and change over time. And so you kind of have to read some context to understand what they're saying. But I still think that they're applicable. And the first thing I'd say is just to completely clarify the

Marxist understanding of socialism is the transition to communism, right? Anybody that says, I'm a socialist, but I'm not a communist, and I think we'll get to that here in like the third example or maybe the second one, should be looked at with suspicion from a Marxist perspective, because socialism is just that transition toward communism. And And anybody that wants to be a socialist but doesn't want to go to communism is like, you want to be stuck in this liminal space forever? It's anti-scientific, right? And so, yeah, so that's just the first thing to say. And so let's go ahead and take these one by one.

There's only three. And I won't read it all, but I'll read some points that I think are interesting. He talks about reactionary socialists. And I think there is 110% a corollary to these assholes to this day. So Engel says the first category consists of adherence of a feudal and patriarchalist. society, which has already been destroyed and is still daily being destroyed by big industry and world trade and their creation, bourgeois society. This category concludes from the evils of existing society that feudal and patriarchal society must be restored because it was

free of such evils. In one way or another, all their proposals are directed to this end. This category of reactionary socialist for all their seeming partisanship and their scalding tears for the misery of the proletariat is nevertheless energetically opposed by the communists for the following reasons. One, it strives for something which is impossible, going back to some golden era. Two, it seeks to establish the rule of the aristocracy, the guild masters, the labor producers. We might say the labor aristocracy today, right? A society which was, to be sure, free of the evils of present-day society, but which brought it at least as many evils without even offering to the oppressed workers, the prospect of liberation through a communist

revolution. So, you know, these old societies, yeah, they had some positives that were better than today. They had many things that were worse than them. In any case, it's impossible to go back to them. And anybody that's insistent that we go back is a problem. And the third one is as soon as the proletariat becomes revolutionary and communists, these reactionary socialists show their true colors by immediately making common cause with the bourgeoisie against the proletarians. And what jumps to mind is maga communism, right? Maga communism is the modern day example of precisely this. What is make America great again, if not looking back to some previous era and wanting to go back. They'll often talk about getting away from financial capitalism

and going back to industrial capitalism, right? They're often chauvinists. They often oppose LGBTQ rights on the ground that it's some liberal sciop by the elites, right, to destabilize traditional communities. These people will, unlike these reactionary socialists of Engels time, perhaps call themselves communist, but the Maga part gives it away. And these reactionaries show their true colors by making common cause with our enemies when we actually come up and promote ourselves. And that's exactly what they do. When you go on, you know, you read these mega communists, sometimes they'll be talking about like capitalists and imperialists. A lot of times they're attacking people on the left, right? They're attacking gay people. They're attacking

trans people. They're basically saying that we have to tail the chauvinistic and reactionary politics of like, again, that mystical white guy in a hard hat somewhere. And that's real working class shit. When we know the working class is every race, every gender, right? Every back ground, every nation of origin, it's a global proletariat, and the moment you start cutting some people off, oh, gay workers, fuck you, right? Oh, this sort of worker, fuck you. You're reactionary. Because you're dividing up the working class. You're doing the job of the bourgeoisie, even while you pretend to be communist and socialist. To a lesser degree, I think you could also put patriotic socialist in this category, as they aren't as absurd and silly as the

mega-communist, but a lot of the chauvinistic elements are absolutely still there. And they bristle at the the real breadth of the working class, right? The elements of the working class that they don't aesthetically like and so much of this shit is aesthetics. And so, you know, that in of itself should be an alarm bell that it's

problematic. So, okay, reactionary socialist, they were in his time, they're in our time. The second one is bourgeois socialist. The second category consists of adherence to present day society who have been frightened for its future by the evils to which it necessarily gives rise to. What they want, therefore, is to maintain

in this society while getting rid of the evils, which are an inherent part of it. These are the, I would say, the AOCs, the Bernie Sanders. You could even say rad libs more broadly. They definitely see problems with capitalism. They understand there's certain issues here that need to be solved. They care about issues. They're certainly better in some ways than the reactionary socialist, right? But it's this half measure.

It's like, no, we can still maintain private property. The small business owners should still be able to own their business. We're not stepping on that. well we're not communist let's not get crazy you know we're against venezuela too but you know we're uh we're socialist and they'll call themselves democratic socialist or whatever but they fit into this category of bourgeois socialist and angle says communists must unremittantly struggle against these bourgeois socialists because they work for the enemies of communists and they protect the society which communists aim to overthrow we are not interested in making capitalism merely nicer and softer right it would be

that's part of the program we certainly want these reforms everybody should should have health care. Everybody should have housing. Insofar as we can get those under capitalism, we're going to lead the charge and fight our asses off to get those things. But our aim is to overthrow class society. Society's human civilization should not be divided into those who live lives of luxury and opulence and comfort on the backs of those who have to throw their lives away to toil. That's the basic premise of a communist argument. And anybody who wants to stop halfway or is against communism or shits on communist attempts around the world because they have some fantasy of socialism in their head or they merely want to reform and make nicer the system that exists.

They're not only doomed to failure, right, but they actually are, whether they know it or not, and in their hearts, they're sometimes very good people, right? They're not always terrible people, but they're just not there. And when they're in positions of power, they act against our interests ultimately. And so what we should do is challenge them, confront them, point out the ways in which they're flawed, irrational and illogical and actually create situations that we don't want created, etc. Okay, so that's the bourgeois socialist. They're still with us today. The third one is the democratic socialist. These terms are a little weird because today a lot of bourgeois socialists

will call themselves democratic socialist. They're really social democrats. Right? Social Democrats are not interested in toppling capitalism. They're interested in making it nicer with a more human face, which in and of itself, fine. I would rather live in a social democracy than fucking America, that's for damn sure, as a working class person. But we just don't stop there, right? So finally, he says these democratic socialists, this third category consists of these socialists who favor some of the same measures that the communist advocate, not as part of the transition to communism as ever, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society. These are like bourgeois socialists, but a little bit

better, right? They're not merely trying to make capitalism nicer. They kind of are interested in building socialism, right? But they're not interested in building capitalism. And again, you kind of get stuck in this liminal space. If we understand socialism as a transition to something else, then how can you make that transitionary phase your endpoint? And so, you know, these are the people with really good hearts. They're smart. They understand that the working class is being fucked. They want to do things better, right? They want a socialist party. But they would be happy, ultimately, with a Democratic Party, a Republican Party, and a socialist party. right like okay we'll still we'll still do the we'll do parliamentarianism we'll do electoralism we definitely

don't want a bloody revolution we're not even asking for workers to own the means of production that's too crazy we're not like those guys but we definitely want you know much more socialism we want a socialist party we want to use the mechanisms of of you know liberal democracy to assert our interest as a constituency among many others and then he says right here we should work with them right we should work with them there are allies on many fronts they're not bad people but um that that cooperation does not exclude the discussion of differences what he's saying here is we can we can get a long way with these folks they're good people um they're mostly right much better than most other fucking political groups in our society right we can work with them on things but this does not mean that

we get subsumed into them we're still challenging them as a friend would challenge another friend walking down the street right we're challenging them and this is also true within communist like sex and organizations right leninists and Maoists there is no reason that you need to hate each other there's you know there's no reason why you need to see the other as as an as an enemy that needs to be defeated for the clearing of the way to communism we can have discussions as friends as brothers and sisters as comrades we have disagreements but no one person knows everything right we're knowledge is constituted communally collectively we work with each other We critique each other.

I know my politics have developed in the face of critique, of overturning something I thought to be true and found out later it was not true, deepening my analysis, being corrected by good comrades. This is how I've developed and I've helped other hopefully develop in this way. It's also, I think, the approach that both of our shows take, right, is not this hypersectarian, hostile to everybody-ass approach. We know who our enemies are. We know who our friends and allies can be. we're not interested in pitting against other people sectarian hyper division we're like opening up our hearts and our minds and inviting people in for these conversations you might not agree with me i'm not claiming to be right about everything i'm thinking through these issues along with you i'm not putting myself as superior to you um and i think that is the approach and of course social media algorithmically incentivizes you in the opposite direction but i think really principled communists need to keep in your mind very clearly who the actual enemies are and think, is your sectarian bickering good or bad for the cause? Sometimes it's necessary, for sure. But when we don't even have a party, especially if you're not even in an organization,

and you're just online shitting on some other sect of Marxists for 18 hours a day, you need therapy, my friend. It's not a good look. And so, yeah, I think it's very, these, this breakdown of different types of socialists are different in one way because he's talking about certain things in the 1800s. And there's these minor differences and these confusions, especially semantically. But I do think the corollaries of all three of these types of socialists still exist today. And in this text, Engels kind of points out the basic approach and posture that we communists should have towards these different groups. Yeah, right on. And it reminded me as you were just talking about the discussion of differences and things like that of like the, you know,

Mao's distinction between, you know, antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions, right? it's like who's the enemy okay obviously you know we're not talking about that we're talking about people who you know share common cause you know common beliefs largely so and yeah we're going to have differences like people have differences you have differences within your party and organization that you discuss internally you have differences with other groups who want you know are struggling towards the same goals that you are but and yeah those differences need to be expressed, but how do we express them in a way where it is not, it does not pit us against each other as, you know, kind of forces that are, are fighting against each other, but rather, no, like,

we have, we have principled disagreements on certain issues. We still struggle together on, you know, general, you know, program on a lot of things, right? So, absolutely. Um, yeah. Mao is great for that. Yeah. And his, um, his articulation of dialectical materialism and his emphasis on contradiction and then the non-antagonistic versus antagonistic distinction, incredibly incredibly helpful. And of course, if you're interested in that, on Red Menace, we've covered Mao's texts many, many times, so you could dive deeper over there. Yeah, right on. And I don't know if it'll be out before this, but we have an episode coming out with Stephen O'Suna on on addressing, what is it, addressing contradictions among the people, I believe is the term. Yeah. Nice.

Um, so anyways, obviously, you know, this is a text that's written almost 180 years ago. Um, it is a text that's written primarily through consideration of capitalist development in England and Germany. Um, you know, I say that because he references those a couple times in the text. Um, are there parts of this document that you think, um, you know, I mean, this is kind of a setup question because anything that's read dogmatically could, could lead to bad practice. But were there things that stood out to you? Um, are there things that stood out to you? Um, um, you know, I mean, this is this is kind of a set up question. Um, um, you know, that way. In other words, you know, are there any formulations by Ingalls here that you took issue with in this reading or text or, you know, think, well, maybe, you know, this applied well to the concrete situation he was analyzing, but it might need to be supplemented or reformulated in another context. And you've kind of already alluded to this, but yeah, just curious if you have anything you wanted to share on that. Sure. Yeah, I mean, that point I made that we were talking about earlier about feminists and anti-colonial thinkers, taking the Marxist methodology and putting it into new directions that's a beautiful part of the tradition that's exactly what you're supposed to do and

that's going to update a lot of this stuff there are certainly things that are just of its time right that that might not be particularly relevant or even very clear as far as what he even means by something and this is something you wrestle with when you read any text from lenin backwards right 1800s the 1900s it's far removed from us and so the references are different the semantics are different there's translations involved as well which is always going to add another complication so these things are just part and parcel of like reading theory but given the nature of the text like it is purposefully shorthand so i can't you know get too like critical of it given what it's supposed to be it's not supposed to be anything more than a catechism right then the question and answer format

trying to be as succinct as possible to guide the writing of the of the later communist manifesto but there is nothing here or in any of these texts that anyone can just dogmatically copy and paste and make work it's an outline it's an approach it's a methodology. It's not a set of answers. It's not a religious faith. Right. And this is why Lenin and Mao are so damn important, right? Whether you're a Maoist, a Leninist, some other sort of Marxists, you got to study these people because precisely because they integrated these ideas into actually existing, not to mention incredibly different context, conditions, and societies. Not by simply applying already formed ideas, the dogmatic writings of Marx and angles and saying, you know, In this point, in this text, Mark says precisely this point, and that's why we have to do this right here, right? That's too dogmatic. You're being too restrictive. So not by applying already formed ideas, but Lennon and Mao took the mode of analysis offered by the full works of Marx and Angles, and then creatively applied it in their own societies after deep study and through relentless organizing and educating.

And through that process of taking these ideas and applying them, it generates more theory. Right? More theory can only be built through practice. It can't be some guy, some academic sitting in an armchair somewhere being like Marx and Engels wrote this. I'm going to be the next Lenin. Let me write political theory here. Lenin and Mao are so fascinating because they did the damn thing. They did the thing. And in the process of doing the thing, they generated theories. They generated, okay, this thing that Marx and Engels said didn't turn out to be true here. One thing that Marks and Engels always says and Engels alludes to it in this text. revolution is going to start in the first world, right? Revolution is going to come from the most developed capitalist societies. He's talking about France and England, maybe German, not Germany, because it's lagging a little behind, they still haven't killed their king yet. You know, but he's really convinced that this is going to happen here. And of course, it's not how it went.

And for a bunch of different reasons that theory has been generated to try to explain since then, this is just wrong. You know, two confined in their time and period, and they just were wrong on this one issue. Does it throw out the entire thing? Absolutely not. but it is an example of like these are these are fallible people they're not meant to be taken as religious leaders or as prophets now that should be obvious to everybody you know but it's worth saying but we can see in this text the rough outline of of what capitalism is where it came from what his main contradictions are how a socialist revolution might begin to guide itself because at one point in the text he lays out like you know 13 or so demands um for this movement in the right direction these are not like

communist society is going to have these you know like the ten commandments or whatever he's like in a socialist transition working out of the concrete situation we're actually in in the 1800s when angles was right and here are some steps we can take um to push in this direction so that that's incredibly helpful um but as communists in america which i assume most people are listening i think both of us have a global audience people around the world listen but most of our stuff is in the u.s because that's where we're from that's where we're operating we need to do the extra work of understanding our own history and our own culture as deeply as possible and then applying the methodology of Marxism creatively in our concrete conditions. Just as Lenin couldn't take

Marx and angles and dogmatically apply it to Tsarist Russia, Americans in the 21st century can't take everything Lenin wrote and dogmatically apply it. We take the methodology and we creatively apply it to our situation and our conditions. And that is absolutely essential. and it hedges against dogmatism when you realize this is not doctrine, this is not faith, this is a methodology, this is a way of thinking

and approaching revolutionary change in society, starting, of course, with a deep understanding of the system that we're opposing. Still unbeaten, you know, there's nobody in the world that has done a better analysis and critique of capitalism

to this day than our boy Marx. You know, nobody. Even anarchists use Marx. I mean, they're starting point for political economic critique is Marx. And almost any good faith anarchist with any sort of competence will absolutely admit that.

So Marx is not just the Marxist sort of, you know, the starter of the tradition, but the entire non-liberal radical left of any stripe sort has eventually whether they distort it or not, whether they fully get it or not, whether they pick and choose what they want from them, they have to go back to Marx. And that

is a power of Marxist analysis and what I mean by that is historical and dialectical materialism. And another thing to remember, and as My last point here is just that knowledge is, and I said this earlier, communal, and it comes largely through our engagement with the concrete material world around us, right? Mao makes this, I think he talks about biting into a peach, and he's making this point about knowledge is generated through experience.

You know, you can't just be an armchair theorist. You have to get out in struggle, and through struggle is actually how you form knowledge, and through communal, collective struggle. It's not just like one guy goes out and throws a rocket a cop and then writes theory. it's you're struggling with others and your knowledge is constituted with others and knowledge is thus in a dialectical relationship with practice these things are in intertwined and interconnected in deep and profound ways and you can go a long way just by studying the theory intellectually right and you might be able to do some good things with just doing practice just organizing your community and fighting back against concrete needs but when you marry these two things together that's when you actually become a threat to the system and when a figure like like, let's say, Fred Hampton, you know, merged these two things together. The system put him down. They killed him in his bed, right?

The PD, the Chicago PD and the FBI worked together to kill this man because not only was he incredibly charismatic, but he understood theory and was interested in putting it into practice. Our rulers don't give a fuck if we sit on Twitter all day and talk about historical and dialectical materialists. They love it. Yeah, go ahead. Talk up. Yeah, Marxists hate Maoists and Maoists hate these guys.

You know, they're all fighting all the time and they're just sitting on their computers, typing away. Good. Stay there. You know? It's when you get out and start doing stuff with the power of Marxist methodology in particular. But theory more broadly, that you become a real threat and a menace to this society. And they really show their true face, which has happened with Fred Hampton and many, many, many others. MLK, right? He's had these racial grievances, absolutely correct. It's when he starts thinking about multiracial poor people's campaign. He gets put down. Malcolm X comes back from his trip to Mecca, right? Has a sort of revolutionized understanding of like the multiracial nature of people starts getting up on, you know, socialist and communist theory, meets with Fidel Castro, all this stuff, right? Okay, now he's not just like a guy that's saying whitey is bad. We can use that. You know, we can use Malcolm in his early phase where he's just like, you know, fuck all white people, right? We can use that because it scares white people. Put him up on every TV. The moment he starts saying, I went over there, I saw some, you know, some white brothers who were engaged in Islam,

and it really made me rethink my ideas, right? He's like, I was born in America, and so the white people I've experienced here have been absolutely devilish. You know, you can't blame me for having those ideas, but after I get out and I have some experience in the rest of the world, I start to see, this isn't always true, right?

And that becomes dangerous. So it's that connection between practice and theory, particularly through a charismatic person or organization, that really can become a threat. And so I think all these things are, are worth considering as we sort of wrap up this discussion and wrap up this text. Right on. Yeah, there's just a couple other things I wanted to bring up that kind of came up in the discussion,

and I thought I'd pull out some comments on them. So one was, you know, in a footnote on this, and I'll link this text to. You can find it on Marxist.org. But this is to the introduction, you know, talking a little bit about what we talked about earlier, about kind of the development of this text that, You know, this is a quote, and I don't know who wrote this part because it's an introduction, but, or it's a footnote, and I don't think it's actually angles as footnote. I think it's written by somebody in addition. But you said, considering principles of communism as a preliminary draft, Marx expressed the view in the letter to Marx stated November 23rd to 24th, 1847, that it would be best to drop the old catechistic form and draw up a program in the form of a manifest. And then this is a quote from that letter. So this is angles here. Think about the confession of faith a bit. I believe we had better drop the catechism form and call the thing communist manifesto. As more or less history has got to be related in it, the form it has hitherto, it has been in hitherto is quite unsuitable. I am bringing what I have done here with me. It is in simple narrative form, but miserably worded in terrible haste. And then, you know, trails off. I'm sure that the letter is in there, so, you know, folks can read that, too,

if they want to read the full letter. But I think this speaks to a little bit of what we said up front of, yeah, Marx is a better writer in a lot of ways than Ingalls is. But I actually do think that there's, there is a lot of value in these kind of texts, in this kind of format, because in many ways, part of what he's doing is, is trying to clarify things, trying to, address specific questions that people have, specific concerns and, you know, and kind of have a text that can move towards a program for a party or an organization that can outline, you know, what are we really about? What are we against? You know, what is our relationship to these other forces in the movement, et cetera, you know, and I think that there is value in that.

I'm glad that it was eventually recovered and published. But I also thought that was kind of cute to see Engels as sort of self-critical remarks to Marx as he had developed this to say, hey, we need to do something different. And it also does speak a little bit maybe interestingly to this, you know, this idea of the language of confession of faith and catechism of them maybe trying to kind of move out of those forms that they were in, you know, early on because that's kind of. But the socialist movement and communist movement in that era was very informed by these kind of, you know, religious groups and sex that were kind of thinking about communism and socialism in Europe. I don't know if you had anything you wanted to say about that. Yeah, no, I love that. The manifesto is the sort of the example of modernity compared to the catechism and the confession of faith, right? So it's like, it's no wonder that there are these historical analysts are pushing this, this literary form, the manifesto, which is more modern than the things that came before. But of course, starting in these earlier historical literary forms and then working its

way up to the more modern form, it's kind of like a little consolidation of like this idea of the evolution of history overall. But it also points out the wonderful balance that angles and marks were to one another. There's, of course, the rich and poor thing, right? Angles, of course, fund in Marks and allowed his work to be possible. But there's also that different approach where, you know, Marks punches this stuff up. He makes it hit you in the gut. He makes your heart start beating faster.

And, you know, you start pumping your fist a little bit. You know, Marks has that capacity for that literary flourish. But what Engels does so well is become incredibly clear. So if you just want to get like very clear and succinct with things, angles can be very useful. Not to say Marx can't do that. but angles is very good for that and i see that in like mao mao for example writes in incredibly clear succinct ways but it's very accessible to anybody and that's translated work from a language that is very foreign to an english speaker compared to like you know german or or british english

and lenin i think even had a little bit more of that punchiness you know lenin will make you laugh sometimes in the way that marks would make you laugh sometimes so it's kind of funny to see that that sort of legacy of both of them manifesting in these further down the road figures, these leaders of revolutionary theory and struggle. So yeah, I think that's interesting. But yeah, what just jumps out at me is like they're modest, right? Angles is not like some narcissistic asshole who thinks he knows better. He's always willing to defer to Marx.

Marx is a little bit more arrogant for sure, but that's another one of these ways in which they balance each other quite well. So yeah, it's just a beautiful thing. And, you know, sometimes the historical, and I don't think Angles would have a problem with this, but the historical injustice of calling it Marxism. I mean, if you started calling it Marxism, I mean, if you started calling it Marxism, Angolism, then you have to say things like, I'm a Marxist, Angolist, Leninist, Malist, and it gets too complicated. But it's so many ways. And, you know, of course, Engels

wouldn't care about this. He was very much looked up to Marx and saw him as helping facilitate the genius of Marx. But we should never forget that Engels is just as much a contributor, not only in theory, but in practice himself. He struggled. He was in the streets. He robbed armories on horseback, you know, to arm the workers in uprisings during 1848, I believe. So, and Marx himself, right, chased out of multiple countries, organized with Engels, organizations like the Working Man's Association, be hounded by police spies at all times. There's this wonderful story where I think the Prussian police come to his door in the middle of the night to try to harass him, and he opens up the door in his little pajamas, and he opens up, Marks, opens up his

pajamas and shows his gun, right? He's like, don't fuck with me, sort of shit. So these guys were badasses, and they were wonderful, brilliant theorists, and they're a huge inspiration for us today. They're not saints. They're not prophets. They're not perfect. They're flawed. They're human. Very, very, all too human, right?

Mark's having boils on his asses and wrestling around on the ground with his kids and, you know, having a rendezvous with his mistress and him and Jenny and their domestic disputes and stuff. They're so human. And I think reading them and about their human experience is very enlightening and kind of adds a counterbalance to these sort of stone-faced figures of intellectual history, right? They're human beings. they struggled and they lived and they loved and they dreamed. And when one of Marx's sons died early in childhood, there's this heartbreaking story of, you know, his son being lowered into his grave. And, you know, Mark's just breaking down in like this desperate, weeping tears, trying to dive into the grave to be with his dead son and having to be held back by his

friends. And that makes my heart bleed and it just makes me connect with these guys as human beings, and whenever I can stress the human dimension of angles and Marx, I always take that opportunity. Right on, yeah. The other comment I wanted to make was, you know, earlier on in the discussion you talked about how, you know, capitalism, you know, degrades and places limits on, you know, all of humanity, obviously the oppressed and the exploited, but also the exploiters and the oppressors in certain ways, and you use the example of Elon Musk. And, you know, just another text for folks out there. I don't know if you've done episodes on it.

We actually haven't and definitely should. But, you know, Paulo Ferreirae's pedagogy of the oppressed, he definitely talks about that relationship, that dialectic between the oppressor and the oppressed and how it actually, you know, through capitalist relations, through colonial relations, which is a lot of what he's looking at there, that, yeah, the oppressor is actually absolutely degraded by these relationships as well. and absolutely, you know, has limits placed on their humanity. And I think that that is always an important thing for us to remember as well because, yeah, you know, we can hate these people, you know, we can look at them as evil and, you know, thinking back to even, you know, China-Mievil's conversation, he talks about kind of the value in sort of class hatred and understanding these things.

And yeah, I mean, I think we all can sort of agree on that on some level and also understanding. that, you know, a, you know, the elimination of a class society, the abolition of private property, that this opens up completely new human relations and allows people to fulfill their lives, you know, well beyond, as you said earlier, like, we can't imagine it really, you know, because it would be like people in the, you know, 13th or 14th century trying to imagine today because there would be such a change in the. social relations that that would take place that we can kind of theorize it and model it out and think about certain aspects of it but you know we really can't fully understand that so yeah but yeah the the master slave dynamic also goes back to hagel where he talks about this way in which that relationship is is complicated on both ends it's not just merely you know the master having everything in the dominion of his world there's a projection going on there's a mirroring going on it's a degradation of both which absolutely true and then on

red menace we do have a full episode on a free air is a pedagogy of the oppressed for those that are interested in diving deeper into into that we want to liberate even the rich ultimately right they're going to resist it and you know a few of them are going to be bitter ugly enemies of humanity as encapsulated in proletariat revolution and they're going to have to be dealt with if you know but as as angle says like we would prefer to do this peacefully we we want we want even you to be liberated from the shackles of being an exploiter, right? And that is that there's a basis there for like a universal love and compassion. We're trying to liberate all of humanity, you know, it takes the form of the proletarian class struggle because it necessitates that dialectically given the

contradiction between the bourgeois and the proletariat and the broader context of class society. But we would love to do it peacefully. We would love to liberate Elon Musk from having to, you know, be dissatisfied with being a billionaire and wanting so bad to be liked, right? You can spend more time with his kids under communism for God's sake and maybe they wouldn't hate him. So we want to liberate everybody ultimately. And I think that's a good thing to keep in mind, but also balance with the reality of these people don't give up wealth and power. Nobody just hands you over their wealth and power without a fight. And so if they insist on it, we're ready for that too. But we would prefer to do this peacefully. And we ultimately want all of humanity to benefit

from this process. Awesome. Brett, I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you. you for collaborating with us on it. As always, we really appreciate the work. You do over at Revolutionary Left Radio, guerrilla history, Red Menace, and I'm sure there's other that I'm leaving out or forgetting. But, you know, if there's anything else you want to point folks towards or talk about, well, we're in discussion, you know, feel free. Yeah, no, I just wanted to echo that, you know, I'm a huge fan of your stuff. Keep doing amazing work. I find what you guys do and what a few other podcasts, like, you know, the is a podcast for example and a few others do it very inspiring and it keeps me motivated to keep doing

my best and just playing my role and that's how i see it right we're just playing our role nobody's the next lenin we're not trying to be better than this guy i'm not competing with you or you're competing with me we're just playing our role reaching who we can reach and we all have the shared goal of building a better more equal more just society and i think that's in the ultimate final analysis our shared spirit ultimately comes from so yeah probably to everything that you comrades do. And then as for me, yeah, you can find everything I do at Revolutionary Left Radio. Gorilla History, Red Menace, and Rev. Left, that's the big political project.

That's what anybody interested in this sort of stuff would find the most useful. So definitely go check that out if you're so inclined. Absolutely. Thank you. Appreciate it a lot. Bitch, I got my own. I don't need security in the club. All they wolfing on a n-nick, I thought you was a thud.

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