Rev Left Radio - This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists: Marxism as Science

Episode Date: February 3, 2019

J. Moufawad-Paul is a Marxist philosopher, the author of "Continuity and Rupture", "The Communist Necessity", and "Austerity Apparatus", and co-author with Benjanun Sriduangkaew of "Methods Devour Themselves". He joins Breht to discuss his most recent essay "This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists: Marxism as Science". You can find JMP's essay here: http://www.abstraktdergi.net/this-ruthless-criticism-of-all-that-exists-marxism-as-science/ You can find his essay on the Enlightenment here: http://www.abstraktdergi.net/radiating-disaster-triumphant-modernity-and-its-discontents/ You can find JMP on twitter @MLM_Mayhem and you can find his blog/website as well as more of his work and writings under the same name here: http://moufawad-paul.blogspot.com  You can find two of his books at Zero Books here: http://www.zero-books.net/authors/joshua-r-moufawad-paul Outro Music: Magician (Suture) by milo You can find and support his music here: https://miloraps.bandcamp.com Get Rev Left Radio Merch (and genuinely support the show by doing so) here: https://www.teezily.com/stores/revleftradio -------------- Our logo was made by BARB, a communist graphic design collective! You can find them on twitter or insta @Barbaradical. Please reach out to them if you are in need of any graphic design work for your leftist projects!  Intro music by Captain Planet. You can find and support his wonderful music here:  https://djcaptainplanet.bandcamp.com Rev Left Spin-Off Shows: Red Menace (hosted by Breht and Alyson Escalante; explaining and analyzing essential works of revolutionary theory and applying their lessons to our current conditions): https://www.patreon.com/TheRedMenace Black Banner Magic (exploring the Weird Left and the Occult from an Anarchist perspective): https://www.patreon.com/blackbannermagic Hammer and Camera (The communist Siskel and Ebert): https://www.patreon.com/hammercamera ---- Please Rate and Review Revolutionary Left Radio on iTunes. This dramatically helps increase our reach. Support the Show and get access to bonus content on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Follow us on Twitter @RevLeftRadio This podcast is officially affiliated with The Nebraska Left Coalition, the Nebraska IWW, Socialist Rifle Association (SRA), Feed The People - Omaha, and the Marxist Center. Join the SRA here: https://www.socialistra.org/

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. Today on the show I have Jay Malflead Paul returning for a third time, I believe, to talk about his new essay, This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists, Marxism as a Science. This is a very important topic around a very confusing subject. So throughout this episode, we'll be talking about what makes Marxism a science and why it's worth defending. The links to Jay Malfaude Paul's essay on science and his essay, which we mentioned in the episode on the Enlightenment and Marxism's relationship to it, will be in the show notes. I also want to remind people that our brand new spin-off show, Red Menace, with me and my comrade Allison Escalante, who was on our gender abolition and Michelle Foucault episode, as well as our state and revolution episode. The first episode of that new podcast, Red Menace, has already been recorded.

It's on Angles, Socialism, Utopian, and Scientific. It'll be out in podcast form and on YouTube in video format in February this month. So it'll be on the lookout. If you want to find it on Twitter, it's at red underscore menace underscore pod. And on Patreon, it's patreon.com forward slash the red menace. And also, I want to say in no uncertain terms, that Rev. Left Radio stands in unapologetic and unwavering support for the Venezuelan proletariat in the continuation of the Bolivarian Revolution. I'm working on trying to get an episode on this topic up and running,

but in the meantime, suffice it to say that we are 100% in support of the Venezuelan poor and working class and the Maduro government whom it democratically elected in fair and open elections. And the CIA-backed reactionary coup is the latest installment in a long list of U.S. imperial violence, aggression, and bloodshed in Latin America. We've talked to you about Chile on this show, We've talked to you about Vietnam on the show. We've talked to you about a whole plethora of instances where U.S. imperial aggression against left-wing governments resulted in chaos and bloodshed and the toppling of democratically elected leaders and the slaughter of innocent human beings.

And here it is in real time, 2019, attempting to happen again. We want to voice our unwavering support of the Bolivarian Revolution and say our hearts and our minds are in Venezuela until this disgusting display of violent, U.S. imperialism ends. Now, having said all of that, let's get to this wonderful episode about an essential topic with one of my favorite comrades and mentors, J. Malfawad Paul. Hello, I am Joshua Mufalad Paul. My background is in philosophy. I have a PhD in philosophy.

My work is primarily in political and social philosophy, and I'm long-time organizer and a communist, and I've written a number of books that some people seem to like. Absolutely. I know we here at Rev Left are a big fan of your work. We've had you on before for our continuity and rupture episode, as well as that dual episode we did with Polytrex on methods devour themselves. So this will be technically your third return to the show. We're very happy to have you. I really love your work around the concept of...

science, your other essay about the Enlightenment and how Marxist should think about it, and obviously your books, The Communist Necessity, Continuity, and Rupure. And we'll get to the new one coming out later this year at the end of this episode. But this episode is going to be about your most recent essay entitled, This Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists, Marxism as Science. This is a topic that I think there's a lot of confusion around. It's often mocked in mainstream discourse. and so your work that you're doing

sort of clarifying what it means to have Marxism as a science I think is really important and I know you've defended and explained Marxism as a science brilliantly in both the communist necessity and continuity and rupture. So what were you aiming to convey and accomplish with this essay?

Well, this essay was this essay was kind of aimed at trying to discuss why understanding the scientific aspect of Marxism and we can call that historical materialism, why that's crucial. It comes from a long-standing issue I've had within like kind of academic Marxism and even people that organize as Marxist as well with this idea of whenever this, this claim

that Marx and Engels had, that historical materialism as a science is brought up, it's kind of dismissed by a number of people are seen as kind of an old-timey notion. But for me, it was always a weird dismissal because they always claimed it was, right? They always had this claim that historical materialism was a science. They claimed that they were doing something that was scientific. They referred to, you know, scientific socialism as opposed to utopian socialism. And it felt like to me it was such a core issue. And so aside from trying to reclaim what that meant, this essay specifically was just about discussing why we need to talk about that. And specifically in light of other non-Marxist social theories, I wanted to ask the question,

why hold on to Marxism, right? There's all these other theories. that claim to be able to speak to talk about the social, why do we say that Marxism is more important than them? If it is just one philosophy amongst others, what makes it important, right? What gives it its theoretical depth? And, you know, my claim is that when we reject its scientific aspect that Marx and Engels emphasized was critical,

we actually lose its strength, right? And so I was asking a question in the essay, what do we lose when we reject that? Yeah, definitely. And, you know, just reflecting on my own political development, There was certainly a time when I was developing politically where I was very attracted to Marxism. I was even calling myself a Marxist, but I still, for reasons really unknown to me, right, I rejected this claim that it was science. I say, well, it's a scientific approach or it has a scientific posture or whatever, but I always wanted to back away from this claim.

And it wasn't because I independently researched the topic and came to that conclusion my own. It was just because I had some ambient background assumption that there's no way that Marxism could be science. And I think in academia, my experience in academia in both science and philosophy labs sort of, you know, drove that home. I mean, that was sort of the background assumption of the entirety of the science department in academia, if you would ever bring this conversation up. And it's only after really reading your work and investigating it deeply that I've really said, oh, actually, this is something worth defending and really being clear about what it means. And so, again, that's why I really appreciate your work and why I had you on, because I think even a lot of Marxists still have trouble with this topic. oh yeah i mean it's it's something of course i at one point had a problem with as well but i remember when i when i wrote the communist necessity and i pointed out this notion of of

science right i've one of my um old i guess mentors in academia someone that had been my advisor in the past uh had like sent me some email saying like why do you want to why do you want to hold on to this and it it was just kind of strange like he was you know claiming was this old-fashioned idea And that kind of knee-jerk reaction always struck me is very weird because on the one hand, Marxists always want to say that Marxist theory is superior to everything else. And they try to say, they use all these other terms. But what they're really talking about is that it's more scientific than everything else. And they don't want to say that for some reason, right? And there's some kind of strange notion.

I think it comes from the way that positivism has carved up the meaning of science, even as much as these people say they're against positivism. It's like they've retained that notion. And it's this whole thing, I think I wrote in Contoon Ruptures, is that the way they described it just becomes a semantic ploy. They're like, well, it's not really a science, but it's scientific, right? It's, it's, it's not, it's subsumes science. But then that seems like they're reasserting this notion that philosophy, like, is like primary in this kind of platonic way,

which is something I also think in this other work I have coming out is a wrong way to approach philosophy. I mean, it's an old mystic approach to seeing philosophy. is the queen of the sciences, which I think Marx and Engels were walking away from. Yeah, absolutely. And so I think, you know, when we're going through this topic, not only do I want people to reflect on sort of, if they're very, like, sort of suspicious about this claim, reflect on why you're suspicious about it. And then also realize all the other things that you were, you know, sort of culturally inculcated to be suspicious of within Marxism and how you've overcome that through

actually independent investigation of the topic itself. And I hope people sort of start seeing this as in that field of things that we should reclaim it and learn more about it and research it before we dismiss it. So I know this is a really big question, and people who want the full argument should definitely go check out your books. But in brief summary, how is Marxism, or more precisely, as you say, historical materialism a science? So I'm just going to give some basic things.

And as you said, if people want to check out my work where I look at this in more detail they can. Also, I mean, just the classics, right? And there's a number of this whole claim. It's the science that goes all the way back to Marx and Engel. and we can look at people who have tried to, like philosophers in the classical tradition who've tried to think through that as well. So, I mean, the first thing I should emphasize is that, you know, Marxism as a whole is not

only a science, right, but its theoretical basis is scientific, right? It has this kind of a theoretical terrain. The claims it makes about truth has a scientific aspect, I call it, right? We have this old formula that, you know, doctrinaire Marxist-Leninists used to have, which was the division between historical materialism and dialectical materialism. And the formula was meant to indicate that historical materialism is the science, right? And dialectical materialism is the philosophy. It is a useful way to think through how we divide Marxism as being kind of this total system.

But it is still a formula, and all formulas have their limitations. And a lot of what I've been interested in is thinking through that formula, or beyond that formula, in the way that philosophy relates to science in Marxism, which means. Maybe we can get too later when I talk about my upcoming book. But back to the notion of science or historical materialism as a science. So I seem to recall that back in when we did continuity and rupture and we talked about my old essay on the Enlightenment, we talked a bit about this as well, so it might just be repeating what I said there. But if we want to think about like definitions of science or the definition of science that Marx and Engels were working under,

is to go back to kind of the idea where the emergence of that term in the, the Enlightenment, as the new sciences, as this modern notion of science where it comes from, because that's what they were working with, right? This notion of a concept of a science is that which demystifies like a nature, right? It provides natural explanations for natural phenomena, as opposed to supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. So for historical materialism as a discrete terrain of science, what it's intended to do is provide social historical explanations for social historical phenomena and therefore demystify its object of research, which is history and society. And that's what it does. It's the first kind of

approach, or it's the only approach in my view, because all other approaches that do this either share with it and they get it right in so far as they share with the basis of historical materialism. It's the approach that comes and breaks with these kind of really bad ways of understanding history and society and tries to put it on this rugged, sign, founding. That is a foundation that provides social historical explanations for social historical phenomena rather than any other supernatural explanations for social historical phenomena, completely ideological explanations for social historical phenomena, that kind of thing. And another thing that makes it science is when we talk in philosophy of science,

we kind of talk about science being that which generates truth procedures, right? Because, you know, you can look at like what are called the hard sciences, and you can see that obviously, you know, in medical science, you create like a vaccine, right? And there's a, and it works, right? It has an instrumental work or something like that. And the theories behind it are kind of these theories that are open to the future because, you know, scientists are always revising. They kind of establish this kind of, this notion of truth with a small tea, not some absolutist notion of truth, but truth is a process, as a procedure that's open to the future. And that's why sciences are always developing historically with, with new theories, revealing

more from the previous ones. And I talked about this underneath the concept of continuity and rupture in continuity and rupture. So I'm not going to go too far than there. But also the old interview you did with me talks about that too, I seem to recall. Anyhow, when it goes back to historical materialism, historical materialism establishes a general law of motion for its object of study, just like other scientific terrains do. And that general law of motion for its objective study is class struggle, right? History moves according to class struggles. Societies rise and fall according to class struggle. And from this general law of motion, Marx and, you know, angles as well, and other people working with that tradition, but specifically the foundation

that marks and angles produce. From that general law of motion, they draw other concepts. You can think about all these concepts like mode of production, forces of production, relations of production. We can go on and on. But these are like, they provide this kind of idea of like the concept is a model. sciences have. They provide these abstract models drawn from the concrete investigation of their objective study that can be used in order to further study that object of study. In any case, the working out of these concepts from Marxism's particular practice, see, like all sciences have a particular practice, and Marxism has a particular practice too, which is associated with

its general law of motion, which has to do with class struggle. And so the working out of these concepts from this particular practice is its development as a science. And so, you know, all sciences have like a laboratory and instruments and the laboratory of Marxism is class struggle and its scientists are the militants engage in this laboratory when they actually have that theoretical scientific mindset but these militants don't develop the science just as they please but in circumstances directly encountered from the past as all scientists do in every other scientific terrain so just as scientists working in other disciplines do not function to reinvent their scientific train as they see fit but in fact work according to

if the truth procedure is already established, like if they didn't do that, they'd be pseudoscientists. The best Marxist scientist works within the constraints developed by the science as a whole. Every science possesses historical constraints, that is the axioms established by previous scientific labor and struggle. And we can say, I guess maybe just to wrap up this brief definition for Marxism, as it has developed to date, and as I did argue, I do argue much more detail elsewhere. these constraints are determined by the following instruments and we can you know the vanguard party the mass line cultural revolution

and you know in my and protracted people's war I mean those are what I say are the instruments according to my position as a Maoist this is what people can debate but I think these are the instruments that have been developed through the practice of Marxism as a science yes and for people that are still sort of you know confused about some of this we're going to go deeper into this we're going to talk about different aspects of this throughout this conversation but again you can also go to JMP previous books, and that's where I learned a lot of this from. And then also, we're starting

a brand new show, me and a co-host of mine, Alison Escalante, called Red Menace. And the first episode is us analyzing the text by Engels, socialism, utopian, and scientific. And we also flesh out a lot of these ideas, talk about the falsification problem, et cetera. So if people are really interested in this topic, there are more resources that we're generating for people to check out. But moving on, and this is sort of how you open your essay, which I think is an important part to talk about here. Can you explain the criticism from anti-Marxists with which you opened your essay of Marxism being inherently Eurocentric, suffering from the fatal flaws of all Enlightenment projects, and therefore irredeemable? Yeah, I mean, this is just something that an entire kind of

post-Marxist radical theory has claimed over and over in different ways. Maybe not as crude as that, though sometimes it takes that crude version. And it's, it's like you find it from anything from like kind of post-structuralist to post, you know, post-colonial. A lot of this kind of more recently post-colonial post-Hydegarian stuff that's coming out makes this claim about Marxism all the time. There's people just use it. It's just become a pretty common pejorative, right? You can just say that normally. It's like, oh, yeah, Marx. Well, he was in Europe during the Enlightenment. It's all flawed because of the Enlightenment. He's this European guy.

But the thing is, I find, I began the essay talking about that also just to talk about how it's such a red herring, right? And it's a red herring mainly because the people bringing this up all the time, their

theoretical basis is intensely Eurocentric as well. And they never, ever critique it. In fact, it's even worse than then the Eurocentric basis of Marx and angles. I mean, we can, we're going to, I know that we're going to probably talk later about Marxism and Eurocentrism. So I'm going to bracket that right now.

But when you're, when you're dealing with people like, you know, like, and we can still get good work. I don't want to, like, have foster this anti-intellectualism says you shouldn't read these people. We can't get good stuff out of them. Because I do, and I do enjoy reading them. But this really drives me, you know, into like a state of extreme annoyance when they make these claims about Marxism or they just dismiss it or they put together their eclectic theories that aren't even necessary in my opinion sometimes.

Well, you have people like Jasperpour or Achille Mbembe and all. Folks like that, you know, their theoretical frameworks, they come from, you know, you can trace it back to Foucault and Derr, Haidgger, all this kind of stuff. And, I mean, recently I was reading the book habeas viscous. And, I mean, he's not, in that book, he's not trying to, like, say Marxism is great or anything. But one of the things he points out in the book is that all this, all this, all this post-Marxist theory is, and I point this out in my essay, it actually is completely connected to Eurocentric understandings of things. Like, so people refer to Gembin a lot.

And what Halea points out is that, you know, a Gmbin only looks at Europe in his, like, discussion of sovereignty, and he completely ignores, like, slavery and settler colonialism. And then, and then also what Halea points out that, like, everyone's like, oh, yeah, Foucault. And the reality is Foucault actually never talked about real world colonialism, ever. He uses the term colonialism as a metaphor, but never, ever talks about real world colonialism. And people lift this stuff up and they're not even critical of it. So in many ways, my point is if you're going to go for that kind of charge of Marxism being Eurocentric, you have to do that to your own theoretical frameworks as well. And then, you know, from that, as I said, though, is that there is something about Marxism

that means that whatever Eurocentrism it has, that is secondary to what it is, right? If Marxism is a science, which we claim, then the charge of Eurocentrism is useful to understand maybe this ideological distortions that happen once in a while, but it doesn't undermine it, right? Like, you know, the law of gravity holds regardless of where, you know, regardless of what you think about Newton's views about things. And this is what I say about, like, you know, Marxism. as well um and so maybe that is that answer the question as a whole or yeah i mean that that was that

was definitely explaining that a lot of the criticism and i'm sure many marxists are at least familiar on some level with that critique of marxism and you know have probably had some arguments against it but and you touched on it a little bit in the answer to your last question but let's maybe drill down here why is this criticism of marxism ultimately false and how does this critique actually and ironically apply as you were suggesting much more successfully to the thinkers who employ this criticism, especially regarding Eurocentrism. Well, I think, yeah, I was saying at the end, because Marxism is a science, right? And because it's scientific basis means that what it's establishing about society is a

truth procedure and is correct and can be developed on and can demystify society and actually gives us the tools to understand society better than these other theories that have, you know, different theoretical commitments. In fact, as I pointed out in that essay, it's like these other theories are right insofar as only when they intersect with Marxism. And a lot of the things that they're saying is correct only insofar as it can be subsumed by Marxism or understood according to like the concrete things

Marxism is talking about. And I was struck with this, again, really recently, because I was in this course that I'm teaching, I recently reread State and Revolution. I reread it like every other year. So that's a great bow back to the classics. And I, but this time I was struck because I was, when I was teaching it in class,

the last semester I taught agamben in one of his concepts of sovereignty and I had a student that was in both classes so and in this class she pointed out how she thought Lenin was a clear thinker which I'm all glad when students first encounter Lenin and think good things about him but it might maybe reminded the other class where I was teaching sovereignty and I was like you know what all this againbin stuff about sovereignty it's just this mystified way of talking about the state stuff Lenin talks about I mean I always knew this at the back of my head which is why I never take agamben's theory of sovereignty seriously except when other people i like are using it but um but it's this thing where these these notions that these other kind of non-Marxists is sometimes quite anti-Marxist theorists have they've they've already had clearer expressions um in marxist terminology or if not they could be made clear by linking them to Marxist terminology and and this is what i've always found in order to like anything that speaks about the world and talks about moving things towards revolution, where does that come from? That comes from the Marxist tradition primarily, right? In terms of the modern era, I mean, there's always been revolution. I'm talking

about the ways that we kind of demystify the world, think about it. These are all insights that are made within the Marxist tradition. And here's the thing, right? Like, I mean, Marxism can be accused of Eurocentrism and all this kind of stuff, but we know that Marx and Engels, based on the data they had, may have been Eurocentric because of their limits, but they weren't racists, right? I mean, these were people that, like, were opposed to settler colonialism, were opposed to racism, were opposed to the institution of slavery at their time, and actually spoke quite strongly against it. And, yeah, may have made serious errors in the way they understood it and had these other issues of Eurocentrism, which the science itself can critique, right? The

science itself possess the tools to critique that. Whereas in these other theories, these kind of, I like to say post-Marxist not to associate them with LaClau and Moff, but post-Marxicism they were written in the shadow of Marxism and like post-structuralist, post-colonialist, post-whatever. These other theories, what they rely on

are things that never ever really critiqued Eurocentrism or the European domination, right? I mean, Foucault, I already mentioned Foucault doesn't ever critique colonialism. Marx and Engels did, and he comes later on. I mean, he uses colonialism as a metaphor for to talk about totalizing narratives, but never actually to critique like European colonialism.

And then, of course, but then if you go back further, his theoretical foundations come from, you know, come from Nietzsche. And Nietzsche is like, you know, is the most kind of like European chauvinist that you can get. And I know Nietzscheans will hate me for saying that, but it's true. I mean, the guy celebrated like the grossest version of bourgeois subjectivity. And then, you know, Derrida, of course, who has never did. People use him to, more radicals use him, but it's not like he ever did anything about Euro. Like, he was quite Eurocentric in his concerns and his interests.

And his foundation is people like Heidegger, right? Heidegger was a Nazi. So, I mean, it's, and I'm not like at this, and, you know, it's interesting, these people are all the people that are also really suspicious of, don't go looking for origins, don't search for origins, but it's like kind of the originary basis of their work is is extremely problematic so when it when a charge from them is thrown out against Marxism being Eurocentric I think Marxism can easily easily survive that because it has so much going forward in the revolutions that's been associated with in the fact that like the

oppressed people the majority of the press people of the world who are rising up in revolution still look to Marxism as one of the primary kind of instruments for making revolution yeah exactly so like in sort of in summary although Marx and angles themselves you know, had certain Eurocentric biases, perhaps, you know, biases of their time and that they are, you know, of European ancestry. Marxism has an internal mechanism within it as a science by which to correct, you know, previous failures from Marxist theorists, including Marx and angles themselves, in a way that many of the theories that critique Marxism don't have, right? There's this internal mechanism by which we can correct errors in the Marxist tradition by this use of

science. And, you know, science is not culturally confined. There's no Chinese science or German science. There's just science. And if science works on one part of the globe, it works on another part of the globe. And that's why you see Marxist movements over and over again on virtually every habitable or inhabited continent work for oppressed people fighting against their oppressors. Yeah. And I mean, and to be fair, we should add, too, that it's not that ideology doesn't have, you know, a role in distorting science or affecting science in a certain kind of way. But this was always understood even by like this goes back

because like Engels talked about this too like a long, long time ago with this kind of like you know Angles kind of had this claim that it's just as you know Marxism is capable of explaining ideological aspects of science and philosophy it can explain how Marxism itself

can be distorted ideologically right I mean Engels didn't say that but Engels was kind of talking about how all scientists adopt a philosophy and ideology regarding their scientific practice. And let got into that with his critique of mock. But yeah, we can apply that recursiveness. Yeah, so even

Marxists, there's dominant ideologies that kind of function the way Marxism is understood and given social contexts. And a lot of what Lennon and Rosa, like Luxembourg, for example, were doing in their time was exactly combating other people who claimed to be Marxist

and carrying forward that tradition using the Marxist methodology to differing degrees of successes to prove that the person that was claiming to be Marxist actually wasn't. an opportunist or a revisionist or whatever. So that internal tension within Marxism has always been a part of that tradition. Definitely. So you touched on it a little bit and I think it leads well into this next question because

we're talking about science and the Enlightenment and it's important that we talk that there are legitimate criticisms of these things. So what are some legitimate criticisms of the Enlightenment and of science broadly? And how do you think Marxists should understand the Enlightenment and our own relationship to it? I think this brings us back to the essay I wrote on the Enlightenment, which The one that we're talking about today, the one of Marxism as science, is a companion piece of the previous one I wrote on The Enlightenment, which the last time, the time that you interviewed me for continuity in rupture, which was about a year ago, was when that essay came out. So it's funny that we're going back to that again.

It wasn't your main question. It was a side one there, too. So it's good to talk about it because I think the reason why those two essays were companion essays. the Enlightenment one and the science one is because they're so bound up in um because you know the scientific break of the Enlightenment is still something we're living in the rubble of today so those they're very they're bound up together so I think the legitimate criticisms of enlightenment that we need to make and what I made in that essay is the way that in which the kind of modernity and sciences arose in the connection to um the emergence of colonialism colonialism colonialism I mean

the Enlightenment thinking was so bound up with the rising bourgeois class and so it was bound up with that ideology and this is why part of Enlightenment thought the way that you know the importance of demystifying the world is in the one hand but it was always put in this language of mastery right this mastery and control and this is what drew it very strongly to its connection to colonialism and capitalism and so a lot of the ways in which like populations were were thought of as populations to be controlled, land to be grabbed. It had this kind of enlightenment language. It would use this kind of like new scientific, modern language when it wasn't using religious

language. So you had the old religious form, but this emergence to this enlightenment language of mastery around things like slavery and settler colonialism. This is why, like recently I've been reading, you know, Fred Moten's trilogy, Consent Not to Be a Single Being, which is, you know, a three giant theory trilogy So you try in books. And, you know, there's in, one of the things that he's interested in talking about in that trilogy is how slavery and settler colonialism are kind of the conditions of modernity of enlightenment or the underbelly of the enlightenment and modernity. And his book is not like really, it's not like, oh, modernity bad, oh, enlightenment bad, but more about this aspect of it, that actually the foundation of modernity is so intrinsically bound up.

up to this foundation of violence, right? And you can go two ways of that, kind of that post, the postmodernist view is just to suddenly go, oh, all, we learn nothing from there, it's all garbage. Let's like do some kind of post-enlightment thing or post-modernity thing, right? And the more critical way that we get into it is that, okay, so what emerged in the enlightenment that is useful for demystifying existence and for human liberation and what were the limits that it reached because of like the,

this violent aspect of it, this violent predatory aspect of it that goes under the term of mastery and colonialism and capitalism. And I think what you get, when we think about that, you end up getting Marxism, right? Which is, as Samirman claimed, and I quote him in that essay, is a modernity critical of modernity or enlightenment thought critical of enlightenment, right? And I think that should maybe answer the question. Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah.

So there's this underbelly, as you're saying, of the enlightenment and of the science that came out of it. which really does involve this brutal colonialism and this domination of not only the natural environment but other people. And that comes with the whole set of racial connotations and the invention of whiteness to justify the savagery of colonialism, et cetera. And so Marxism, although it comes out of this Enlightenment project, is critical of the Enlightenment, right? Like, the Enlightenment, would it be fair to say, I guess, that the Enlightenment or the promises of the Enlightenment haven't come to pass and that Marxism is like looking for, I don't know, to take the project further in the best way possible and sort of transcend the underbelly side of it.

Is that a fair way to think about how Marxists relate to the Enlightenment? I think that would be a good way to put it. It definitely puts it in line with kind of the notion of new Enlightenment and that Phelon talks about at the end of Wretched of the Earth, right? I mean, he has that kind of view of like kind of pushing the Enlightenment project to its limits, from the view, from the position and from the strength of those that are the victims of the European Enlightenment. Definitely. And if a crucial part of the Enlightenment was a demystification of the natural world, right,

a rejection of supernatural explanations for natural phenomena, Marxism continues that demystifying tradition when it comes to social relations, when it comes to how history and societies move in progress. And so that's very much, you know, a core part of the Marxist project as well. Yeah. Now, a lot of the critique of Marxism as a science, especially in my experience in academia, often comes from the work of Carl Popper, who claim to demonstrate how Marxism was not a science, hinging his argument on the claim that Marxism just wasn't falsifiable. Can you talk about why Carl Popper and falsification has so much influence in this debate and why his argument that Marxism is not a science ultimately fails? Okay, yeah, I think maybe it's best to talk about what that theory is, because I think, uh, a lot of people who say, oh, Carl Popper said this, they don't even actually read Carl Popper or nobody's saying. And also, and when you start thinking about Marxism critically and not in kind of the straw person way Marxism is drawn, you realize that Carl Popper also didn't know what he

was talking about when he was talking about Marxism. So it's, you know, it's important. So I think maybe we should just begin, right? You get this concept of falsifiability, also referred to sometimes as falsification in in the logic of scientific discovery right that's that's the kind of that's the key text of paupers that talks about it so you know um you can just quote him right now uh is that you know in that text he writes that in order for a theory to be scientific and this is the quote it must be possible for its empirical scientific system to be refuted by experience so what does this mean right it's kind of the other side of testability you have this notion in the scientific method called testability that it's like a theory has to be testable right this is why it's it's you can't

have conspiracy theories because you can't really test that you know that there's lizard men running the universe you always there's always a reason that they're like you know that they can hide from you right right can't and so that means it can't be falsified right you can't ever prove that false so in other words what popper's trying to get at is that the most significant test for a theory's scientific status is whether or not it can be submitted to a an actual test where it can be possible where it can possibly be proved false um and so we look at this in simple material facts like just look at how this this notion of falsifiability really does apply to simple material facts like i want i want people to understand his strength because i also feel

people dismiss it who are who here raised against uh marxism and actually don't even get it i think like about a year and a half ago i was on an argument with twitter with some with some uh marxist leninists who actually are no longer friends with me because they decided they didn't like Maoism. And they, and I was, they were just trashing and I was like, okay,

you got to understand what it means, right, before you do this. So it's, you know, okay, so let's, let's apply to simple material facts,

as I said earlier. So if I tell you, the door is locked, right, in this kind of way, you have the ability to prove my truth claim incorrect by trying to open the door,

right? That's just kind of, that's basic empirical veracity, right? It can be proved right or wrong. So what I, what I claim about the door being, locked, it can be submitted to empirical examination because it could be tested and judged either

true or false. I mean, in the other hand, if I said, there is this door that exists on the other side of the world underground that leads to, you know, the Illuminati and it's locked, right? That's an unscientific claim because there's no way for you to prove it true or false, right? So it can't be falsified. So you get ideas, theories that can never possibly be proven false also can never be proven true and this is why for Popper religious claims such as God exists they concern faith rather than science

and those who employ the argument from ignorance fallacy know that very well you know the argument ignorance fallacy is like oh well you can't prove that God does not exist right that's not a scientific claim right it's not falsifiable okay so this also goes for like astrology haunted houses

all this kind of thing right right okay so but then we get this notion that you know Popper says well, Marxism doesn't count it because it can't be falsified. It's some kind of cargo cult conspiracy theory. It can always account for everything and can never be proven wrong. And yeah, there are ways to make Marxism do that. There's ways to make other things do that.

And, you know, to give the devil as due, if we're going to give Popper, you know, popper is that straw version of Marxism he used. It is, there is versions of that Marxism. Like we know, it's kind of like this, you know, this haunted house historical materialism I like to call it. It's always like, oh, it's, you know, The way they try to do stuff, and it leads to some really weird shit, like, you know, people in the IMT claiming that, like, Marxism proves the Big Bang theory wrong. Right, right.

Like, like, because dialectical materialism, which is, that kind of weird shit, right? I mean, that kind of, like, makes Popper look like he's correct. However, you know, this is not how we should understand it, right? I think, you know, the way Marxism has developed as a science and the way that I claim it's developed as a science and the way we can think of it as a science, it really has, you know, developed and the greatest theorists have developed and thought of it according to this notion of falsifiability. So, you know, we like, you know, Popper always talked to this thing about, you know, Einstein waiting for the total solar eclipse to either prove his theory right or wrong, right? Well, we do that with Marxism, too. We have a history of waiting on those. circumstances that do the exact same as a solar eclipse, right? Revolutionary moments when they happen.

And we can say, oh, this proves a specific way that Marxism is theorizing itself or this general science of history is theorizing itself. It proves it wrong, right? There are certain theories that we should discard because they are proved wrong, but some people still cling to them in Marx. And that, that for me, would be unscientific, right? So, you know, the whole theory of how to make revolution that the second international really endorsed, right, that Bernstein and then later Kautsky, you know, fell to this

revisionism. That's been proved wrong. You cannot get, you cannot, you cannot, you can't vote communism into being, right? It could be tested. It was proved wrong. It fell. We saw that it failed. It was falsified. It was falsified with the rise of fascism. And then, and similar in the other kind of like very simple kind of insurrectionist ones, um, like the Spartist uprising, that notion of how to do things. I think that was proved wrong too. Like the Spartist's uprising failed. And then you have, instead, you have like, what was proved right for getting to socialism? What could have fallen but did not? Well, you have what we see in the Russian Revolution. And then you have repeatability, which is a scientific thing that has to, you know,

always be connected to falsifyability. You've repeatability of that method, the revolutions happen according to that method. And then you also have other failures you hit where they try things and it's falsified again. And so I think it's important to see that. That's the scientific aspect of Marxism. We see Marxism's development. It has moved according to this notion of falsifiability. When we look at it and we do want to say,

will this tendency, will this theorization that we have about things, will these concepts, will they be proved right? Will they be proved wrong? And it has established itself as a truth procedure in this way as well. And this is not to say that I think Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability is the be-all and end-all for a definition of science. Not at all. I already gave you earlier what I thought my definition of science was,

which is older than Popper and is a much more stronger and robust one. But that doesn't mean that what he's saying about falsifiability doesn't have a point, right? And I always think it's useful sometimes to kind of talk about some things about Marxism that, you know, have been falsified or can never be falsified and holding them up to suspicion, right? So if you look at, and I know this is, I'm not trying to be sectarian, but I, you know, This is just, I think, a reality of falsifiability is a lot of the claims of Trotskyism, they cannot, they cannot, they cannot pass this test. They cannot.

This idea that you have to have, like, the whole idea of like this kind of the revolution that has to happen altogether, and you can't have socialism in one country, but you have to have this, that whole thing that permanent revolution is about, like, do it all together in the world, and that's why they spread with their international Trotsky's parties. So far, that is, like, impossible to prove unless it actually happens. but for them asserting it as like a scientific truth it's not falsifiable currently it's not tethered to any empirical evidence

yeah nothing like that so anyhow that's where I'll end with the falsification thing and you know but not not to make you know some Trotskyists that don't like to show more angry than they that's okay that's okay I'll take it so I was thinking of other ways that Marxism could possibly be falsified

and I talked about this a little bit on Red Menace podcast which hasn't been released yet I just wanted to bounce a couple ideas off you. These are things that if they happened, right, if we're playing Carl Popper's game of falsification, here are some things that if they successfully happened would at least cast Marxism and historical materialism into some level of falsifiable doubt.

And one of the ideas I came up with is that if a successful anarcho-capitalist society blossomed, right? Because a core tenet of the materialist understanding of the state is that it's a manifestation of class society and, you know, a state will organically rise in the context of a class society. Anarcho-capitalists claim idealistically that you could have a class society, i.e. capitalism without a state. And so if that were to blossom and flourish over a period of time, that would weaken Marxism. Another thing that would hurt Marxism is if liberal democracy, bourgeois democracy, successfully mediated class conflict out of existence with its own institutions, right?

It didn't take a revolution. It didn't take a confrontation with the bourgeoisie to transcend class, but liberal democracy actually over time was able to reform it away. That would hurt Marxism. And then the last thing I would say is another, the last idea I would have is if a non-Marxist theoretical tendency, right, one that is really not rooted in Marxist analysis at all successfully builds and defends a global proletarian movement and gets us toward a global socialist, you know, sort of civilization without really. reference to or being rooted in theoretically Marxism. Do you think, do any of those things

ring true as possible ways to, if not outright falsify, at least severely weaken a mini core Marxist claims? Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that's a perfect example. And I think if we're, if we're going to be serious as people that take like the science of history as something that's very important and historical materialism is very important, then we should, you know, look at all of these things that happen because these these things happen all the time right or attempts to do this happen all the time and it's not like saying those people be oh it's we should just ignore them because they aren't marxist and all this stuff it's like will they prove Marxism wrong we should and you know what if they if they do prove it wrong and they make the world better well then yeah

they made the world better and that's successful and that's you know great and that shows that some core tenets of Marxism are wrong but we know every time those attempts happen they actually they they don't falsify exactly right they don't do that You know, I would love it. I would love it if we reach a classless society in any way we would get there. Right, exactly. It's like my devotion to Marxism is not dogma. It is not that it's, or some moralism, as, you know, Engels said, is like, you know,

the strength of scientific socialism is not the moralism behind. It's not the ethics. It's not because we like it morally better than other things, right, or other theories. It's because of it's scientific strength. That's why we uphold it. That's why we say it's important. And so, therefore, for sure, if something proves that it's wrong, other people are doing somewhere, then we'll see. Sure, it's been falsified.

But so far, all those attempts to prove it wrong have failed and failed. Some of them have failed badly, right? And so that has made it stronger as a science. Like, we see that, okay, it still stands the test of what it can do. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, centuries of capitalism. and none of the falsifiable options have ever been accomplished anywhere in the world. And so, you know, we can't definitively prove that they will never be falsified,

but we can say, based on all the evidence we have over centuries of capitalism actually existing, none of these things has actually happened. And so the Marxist historical materialist analysis still stands without being falsified on those grounds. So, I don't know, I think it's interesting. I'd love to hear other people's ideas of ways to falsify Marxism. I just want to add on to that, too, that I think it's important. This is where I think the theory of falsifiability. is something that we should not see as essential to the science,

but as the side point, is because if you go too far down that road, then you're doing bad science. And what do I mean by that is like, if you're always trying to falsify your science over and over, you're not going to get anywhere. Like a theoretical physicist does not sit down every day and say, you know what,

I need to keep going back and seeing if I can prove the special and general theory of relativity wrong. I have to do that all time. I have to do that all time, right? It's not like you're not going to get anywhere with that. I think what you can say is that when other rebellions happen, we'll see if they falsify it, but we shouldn't be rushing out to embrace trying to falsify our own science. No scientist does that.

Otherwise, they wouldn't do establish any truth of the science. We should be like trying to, you know, make revolution with that kind of scientific aspect because we've already seen its strength. Yep. Well said. So in your essay, you argue that, quote, the targeting of Marxism as a monstrous outgrowth of the Enlightenment functions to quarantine the only theoretical tendency that can generate a revolutionary critique of business

as usual, the predatory business inherited by the bourgeois containment of modernity, end quote. So how does excluding Marxism from the realm of science ultimately serve bourgeois interests? Well, I mean, if we want to be serious about making revolution, then Marxism is the science of revolution. And if it is removed from any kind of like rebel movement or radical movement, both and radical theory, then it actually, you don't have a movement that is useful in, you know, challenging bourgeois interests

for the reasons we've given before. I mean, in many ways it seems like it could almost be a tautology because it's going around. But, I mean, let's look at it like this. Maybe go sideways as we were talking about, you know, as I talked about that essay and we talked about before, there's that, you know, Gabriel Rockhill's essay

about, you know, where he, you know, was discussing how, look, the CIA literally funded the translation industry behind Foucault and Derrida in order to make that theory more positive, like more positively received in Western academia to get rid of like Marxism. So I mean, the bourgeois understands the threat of kind of Marxist ideology, right? And if you look at, if you read even like counterinsurgency propaganda, they understand the threat of a lot of like theories of resistance that Marxism has produced. they understand it very well in the same way that you know big oil companies understand

that climate change is happening and use that to make a buck so um so a lot of this theory that actually does function to it it does quarantine Marxism and in you know tries to tell people people that are you know resistance to capitalism oh don't look at this old stuff you know communism failed whatever it's totalizing it's murderous here's some you know, snappy new theory to follow. And what does that produce?

It's not produced the legitimate resistance movement anywhere. Exactly. Yeah, no anti or post-Marxist theory has generated a successful

proletarian revolution, let alone been able to defend it over a long period of time. And even the most successful, and this is by no means to diss to anarchism, I think it's a strength

of anarchism, is that the most successful attempts at anarchist or proto-anarchist or pseudo-anarchist revolutions, like you see, or movements that you might see in Rojava or Chiapas or wherever, they're still rooted fundamentally in a Marxist critique of capitalism

and some level of a Marxist understanding of revolution and how to how to wage it, right? It might not get everything right, but the best traditions on the anarchist side of things are still very much interrelated, intertwined with Marxist analysis. Do you agree with that? Yeah. Do you think that, you know, the division between the hard and the soft sciences,

which is something that people hear a lot and, you know, and like I think you talk about it as a reactionary claim that sets aside biology and chemistry and physics as the real science and everything else is just a matter of the humanities department. Do you think that the thing being studied, right? Like there's an arbitrary division between the thing being studied. The physics and biology and chemistry, the thing that you're studying is actually isolatable and you could operate inside of a laboratory with it. The thing that Marxism is attempting to study and make sense of is much more dispersed and diffuse and over centuries and across. space and time. I mean, it's human history and society and how it moves. So do you think that the thing being studied props up or this arbitrary division line between hard and soft sciences?

Yeah, it probably does. It's, but the language, and of course, it's every, every science has a different object. But even if we look at the so-called hard sciences, the things that are being studied are very different, are very different phenomena as well. I mean, there is a difference if you go to astrophysics or you're looking at how much time and space you're dealing with. That's like dealing with human history, right, in terms of like its expansiveness versus like, you know, just simple, like basically like biochemistry and you're just looking at kind of biochemical compounds. There's a massive difference in that.

Just in the same way if you're doing like kind of evolutionary biology, you're looking at stuff that has emerged over like, you know, millions of years. right so um so in that level it's it's just because the laboratories are different i think and and um and this desire to have everything look like positivism um or the positivist understanding of science um but then again like mathematics is considered like crucial to the sciences and if you don't need a laboratory for that as well in some ways the practice is similar to what you do in the humanities like mathematicians will be like you know working in their office with complex especially pure math right

and you won't see anyone in the sciences I hope wouldn't suddenly say like math has pure math has nothing to do with science that would be a lunatic claim to make so yeah there's these differences but I think yeah there have no problem with saying sciences are different but this definition of hard

and soft is such a weird way to like explain things right and so every time I use when I talk about the hard scientist I always scare quote hard or I scare quote or I say so-called hard sciences because what is what is trying to say is that this knowledge is more meaningful than this other knowledge and I disagree with that hierarchical division yeah absolutely so in your article you also argued that quote accepting that Marxism is scientific does not by the very condition of science mean that we are unable to criticize the erroneous positions of Marx angles and other theorists within this terrain

in fact according to the very concept the opposite is the case a science stands above and beyond its theoretical contributors i think this is a certain uh i think this is a very important point here so can you give us some examples of how marxism as a science results in rejecting specific claims made by other marxists including marks himself yeah well i mean if you look at like some of the claims that were made by marx uh about india earlier on and the way that you know colonialism would pave the way for a bourgeois revolution and things like that. You always see that the Indian Marxist, well, Indian Maoist movement, I think there are things about the revisionist Indian movement that actually might follow and agree with that a little bit, but the Indian Maoist movement rejects that notion. Certain ideas about like, you know, having this kind of developed proletarian first and things like that that you find in kind of a certain way of reading Marx is rejected by a lot of the third, by, you know, every meaningful third world Marxist movement and I think there's like other things again like there's there's some great great texts that like you know Marxist text that criticize the things that were wrong because of

Eurocentrism and has worked to correct them by using that method of historical materialism so I mean if you think back to like so there's a great book that's you know I think I mentioned in the essay but I mentioned a lot of time is Robert Beals Eurocentrism in the communist movement where a lot of that book is just going and saying, here's how Eurocentrism comes in, here's how it's been critiqued, and here's how we can critique it further using historical materialism. And, you know, the theory itself

explains why this happens, because people are going to be limited by their history and society, right? Social being, determined social consciousness, and this idea that we're always going to be able to answer the questions that our historical social context provides us, right? We can't

think always beyond that. We don't have the facts, so we're going to be stuck. with the dominant ideology and as much as we can like push through that using the method there's always going to be something in every moment that's going to hold us back ideologically and you know Marx was quite aware of this

and one of the things you know in Marx's time that's that I find quite interesting is that you know he embarked at the end of his life also on a project of like world history that a lot of that has not been translated and you can see not that he gets everything right but people who work on it talk about how his views of things

change over time in terms of world history because he starts studying more and he's able to critique and throw out old ideas. Not that he ever fully gets them right because of the limitations of that period of time. We see that in Angles' work and, you know, stuff on the family and the state. Some of things he says about, you know, indigenous culture in North America is just dead wrong. But what was his, where was he getting that information? He was getting it from like colonial historiographers. Those are the only people producing the stuff that he could read at that time. It's not like he was there having access to like the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the and that allows us to challenge those theories as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, our, our subjectivity is, is, is historically

confined, and so, you know, marks and angles could only see a certain distance in front of them in the thick fog of their own epoch, and, but the historical material is, the science of historical materialism allows for Marxists, you know, after Marx and Engels, to update or expand or criticize Marx and angles themselves. And I think that is really what makes Marxism unique among, you know, theoretical tendencies, especially on the left that have a lot of claims about how the world is or what the right path is. But there really is this internal mechanism inside Marxism that doesn't really exist in other tendencies to constantly be updating it and even disproving earlier Marxists themselves. and the other thing I would say is I kind of I like using Darwin as a as an analogy here not only because I mean because Darwin was such a huge force at the time and in socialism utopian scientific angles talks about how you know Marx and angles saw themselves as doing with history and society what Darwin did for biology but Darwin as you mentioned in your essay had racist views wasn't right about everything couldn't possibly have been right about everything because of the later development of genetics which you know

expanded on his theories, et cetera. So Darwin sets forth this idea, and then the Darwinian tradition then quickly supersedes and transcends the limitations of Darwin himself. And I think in the same exact way, that's how Marxism operates. Yeah. Yeah, the Darwin example is really good because, I mean, people, some people, people that are like critical historians on this, but some people just forget that, like, you know, Darwin was, you know,

just like, you know, people like Tauntmore. He was racist. I mean, the dissent of man is a racist text. And there's this tendency, I think, amongst some kind of like liberal, liberal sciencey kind of people to like pretend that didn't exist or to make this division, that division between, and I talk about this between Darwinism and social Darwinism, as if there wasn't ideological aspects to his work all the way through it. He wasn't doing the kind of social Darwinism that gets, you know, called later social Darwinism already in things like the dissent of man. No, that ideological stuff is in there as well, right? All scientists, as Angles said, have an ideology. They have a class ideology. They have a class position. They are seeped in the dominant ideas of their time. But what makes, you know, Darwin's work scientific is that the scientific aspect of his work that we pull out of that,

we see that it actually has a truth and a truth procedure and has generated true things about the world right down to instrumentalizations of vaccines, right? You know, come out of the theory of natural selection. Now, at the end of the essay, you argue that unlike other sciences, Marxism is a revolutionary science. Can you explain what it is about Marxism that makes it a truly revolutionary science, and especially how theory and practice are intrinsically and dialectically connected and must function together in the Marxist tradition? Well, that's a really big question. I think that's a book-sized question.

I remember when I was looking at that, it's like, I'm not going to be able to answer it here, but I think very simply, right, when we go back to what I was saying about what is the scientific practice, what are the scientific instruments of Marxist's scientific aspects? of a theoretical aspect, as a theoretical terrain. These are all tantamount to the notion of class struggle. So, like, the way that it sees history's development and historical change and historical transformation is already through this lens of revolution, right? And the way that is charted out how historical change happens.

And also the very strong intemone it puts forward of socialism or barbarism. And that choice, right? The choice is like either you have to go further and develop, use the scientific method to know how to make revolution with its instruments in order to get beyond capitalism or we all die is what Engel says in anti-juring. He says that's the core of scientific socialism, not moralistic appeals to communism, but this assessment that historical materialism makes about the necessity of revolution, right?

that language of necessity is very clear which I think is very scientific language as I argued in the communist necessity now when it comes to developing this theory which is a revolutionary theory it's related to its practice because

as laboratory is the laboratory of one of class struggle and class revolution and you're not going to be able to develop the theory further unless you're in conflict in that class confrontation, right? The theory moves and learns new things as it meets its limits. And those limits are always within, you know, the theoretical bounds of the previous

notions of Marxism that are tested in moments of revolution. And then you meet new problems you have to solve and you have to figure out the tools to solve those as well. But you meet them through revolution, through changing society. Yeah. And so I think this is something that you talk about in your work a lot. And I think it's incredibly important is that when, When theory becomes uninformed and untethered from practice, it can result in a bunch of eclecticism.

A lot of eclectic theories on the left come not out of serious concrete analysis of actual proletarian movements, but out of ideas about how to be revolutionary or how to accomplish a revolution. And if Marxism is a science, then it has to be tethered to the objective empirical world in some way. And when you try to formulate political theory outside of the material, realities and conditions in which that theory must operate, it's like, you know, an armchair biologist who never wants to go into the lab, right? You might have ideas about the world, but there has to be a way to actually test those ideas and then analyze the data that comes out of those tests and carry that theory forward, discard what doesn't work, and try to repeat

what has work in the past. And so I think a lot of revolutionary theory, you know, is this sort of eclectic armchair theorizing. And what pushed me in a more Marxist direction over time is precisely that Marxism is the one theoretical tendency that is so dedicated to tethering itself to actual real-world proletarian movements, and it rejects in its entirety the attempt to theorize political philosophy and theory just from an armchair disconnected from those actual struggles. Yeah, definitely, and this might be a good segue for me to talk about my upcoming book, my book that comes out at the end of November, because one of the things I try to do when I'm talking

about Marxism is make a distinction between its scientific aspect and its philosophical aspect. This, of course, is, I mean, my whole book is also just about philosophy in general, but this is, it's particularly about this issue, right? The distinction between theory and philosophy. So when we look at, you know, Marxism's theoretical aspect, it's a science, right? This theoretical terrain is scientific, it creates these truth procedures. And so when we talk about that theory, Marxist theory, historical materialist theory, revolutionary theory developing, then, yes, it happens in the context of practice,

of that scientific practice of making revolution. But when we talk about kind of philosophical interventions, philosophical interventions aren't things that push the theory forward, right? There are explorations of what the theory has already presented to us, right? What the theory has already presented to us. And actually the best philosophical ones are looking at the ones that are like, What makes this claim of theory more accurate than this claim of theory? And usually because you say, well, one has the practice behind it.

The other one doesn't. And I think one of the problems with kind of like academic Marxism is they tend to mix up philosophy and theory where what they should be doing is investigating what has been presented by the tradition of revolutionary Marxism, right? And assessing it according to its core claims of science and scientific practice. and they start trying instead to invent kind of new theoretical developments that should, you know, they see the same universalization as something else, right?

And, you know, when you're working with trying to elaborate and explain and work out what makes Marxist theory, Marxist theory, it could be, you can accidentally move into saying, well, I'm just going to like eclectically make up my own new Marxism with this as well. Yep. And we see that all the time.

And so one thing I really like about your work is that, you know, you are a philosopher and you don't try to generate new theory. Your work is about clarifying concepts and taking that philosophical approach. You want to talk more about that difference between you as a philosopher and your relation to analyzing the scientific side of Marxism a little bit more? Yeah. So like as I said, and I made this argument in continuity and rupture and I make it even stronger and, my upcoming book which is called demystification and demarcation or maybe it's demarcation and demystification

I can't remember the order I think one of the two comes out November D&D it's got a nerdy acronym there like one of the things that I make there is that you know this this notion that

that these truth procedures which are generated by Marxists Marxism's theoretical aspect are things that happen in movements with like you know parties and you know like mass movements that you know like the party leads or like revolutionary things and you find them in programs and the way that that theory engages with things with the principal theorists emerging to talk about who represent of course the people in the movement and so like that's that's something that is a collective process right that I can be part of

as an organizer and I hope to be part of and things like that but I'm not like that's not my role as a philosopher that's not what a philosopher does and so the work that I see as a philosopher does is a kind of almost, you know, excavation or, you know, elaboration or comparison, intervention upon kind of the theoretical terrain and the problems that exist on that terrain, trying to clarify concepts, make things clear, bring, you know, competing. Maybe there's contradictions that need to be revealed and discussed. Maybe there are, you know, competing claims on a terrain and they need to be thought through for clarity and of course that means you side with one you have this kind of philosophical practice you may get it wrong but I'm not you know trying

to do that a lot of times it seems like I I like using in different work kind of a language where I try to produce synonyms for you know Marxist core Marxist theory claims so you know in in austerity apparatus I was I was using a number it seems like I was creating theory if you weren't reading it carefully, but it was a thing, but, you know, I wasn't, because everything I was talking about it was just, you know, and I was clear when I would link it to Lenin. They were just new ways of thinking of actual theoretical concepts, because I think that's important also as a philosopher. Sometimes the language that we use in the classical language will be used, which I always think should be struggled for and kept

as well. I think it should be struggled for and kept. But I also think for new people or for people that have heard it so many times it gets stale that it stands in the way of them understanding the meaning and so trying to like find synonyms which explain the core concept um in different ways like different names for the same concept but always linking them back is is a very useful philosophical thing to do and you know i realized this when i this this problem when i was you know teaching lenin um last week uh or why was it last week already no it was monday so it was wasn't that long show on Monday. When we were talking about the concept

of the Vanguard party, like people immediately you see their eyes glaze over, their backs, not all of them, but, you know, their hackles rise or that concept because of the way it has been so horribly represented by bourgeois ideology and by a whole bunch of little tiny sectarian groups like

the Spartacists claiming they're the Vanguard. You know, it's like people just don't like that. So it's like, okay, let's think it through in this way. With someone, let's think it through in the way as I've used before with the concept of the avant-garde,

party of the avant-garde. Let's think of it as an avant-garde partisan project. What does that mean? And then, you know, connecting it to what Lenin was saying,

most of the people that were opposed to an original was like, oh, this makes complete sense. So, I mean, it's good to do that, too, as a philosopher. Yeah, that's where

creativity comes in. And I think for people that want to understand the relationship between Marxist philosophy and Marxist science, as you just said, the obvious analogy

is just to talk about the philosophy of science, right? In philosophy, There's a whole subfield of philosophy called the philosophy of science, and you can be a philosopher of physics, for example. You don't actually go out and do the science of physics. You stand back, almost like a meta-prospective on the operations of physics itself to clarify concepts and talk about assumptions and talk about what the implications of certain findings are, et cetera. So I think that's what a Marxist philosopher does in relation to Marxist's science, but instead of a physicist in the lab, it's actual mass proletarian movements, which, you know, is the core of the science itself.

And if you're not engaged in an actual, you know, class conflict, proletarian revolutionary moment, then you're not actually engaging in creating new theoretical terrain for the science of Marxism to develop on. Definitely. So the last question I'll ask you, and I think this is important to talk about, too, because it's sort of the other side of the coin. that we've been talking about this entire conversation. We talked about the failings of various anti-Marxist critiques of Marxism, but on the other end of that spectrum of confusion are, as you say in your essay, Marxists who treat historical materialism as a kind of religious dogma. Can you explain and summarize this misinterpretation of Marxist science

and why it's also dangerous and must be combated? Yeah, I mean, I think it's what I, like that essay, I end with that addendum talking about that as well. And it's because one of the reasons that, like, the claim Marxism as a science is dismissed, one, I mean, another one is just virtual ideology, but one reason, and it provides, you know, significant ammunition for virtual ideology, are those people that, like, repeat this claim that Marxism is a science, but then they just act like it's a religion, right? And what do I mean by that? all of their ability to think Marxism is not in a scientific sense. It's they quote texts like their religious texts, right? They quote them like their religious text. They don't show any evidence of thinking through it.

And they can't even define what makes Marxism a science just because it says it is. Well, just because it says it is is not a good answer. It's a dogmatic answer. It's a religion. It's like these are not, you know, these are not the importance of, of, you know, kind of the importance of the core theorists of Marxism is not because they were prophets that had some kind of like, you know, like religious epiphany into the future. Like, they aren't saints, right?

We don't see them as that. And the willingness to, like, treat what has previously been said and not go into what Malco's book worship is so important to actually do concrete analysis of a concrete situation. I mean, like, if you look at kind of that this is. that kind of dogma, even when it goes by the name of science, but like saying that, that has held back so many Marxist movements, right? I mean, it's a good one, talking about the Chinese revolution in Mao, where he's talking about book worship.

And, you know, I was recently rereading on contradiction because I'm teaching it this upcoming Monday and just reminded the facts we keep talking about the dogmatists in the way that they just apply this, you know, the universality of a proletarian revolution to China and seeing that that's the scientific aspect. We have to instead focus on the proletariat, not the peasants, right? That kind of thing.

Ended up just completely undermining struggle there. It wasn't a concrete analysis of the social formation of China in any kind of way, which is what historical materialism scientifically demands you have to do, is you have to do a concrete analysis of your concrete circumstances like any science should. So this kind of like dogmatic attitude that likes to name itself science, is something that is like stood in the way of us actually being able to as you know to use a kind of to think our thought like to think our thought and we look back at like the great um theorists of of Marxism they were not held back they their understanding was scientific it wasn't this oh

I'm just going to like quote at you what Marx and Engels said like when Lenin quotes Marx and Engels he does it for specific tactical and strategic purposes and he does it to show the ways that like certain people are using Marx and angles and a different in the interest of doing this kind of reading he doesn't do it because I'm just going to quote and that's my argument outside of that he provides very very clear arguments

that go beyond those kinds of limits in the way that Marxism is understood and so does every great kind of Marxist theorist and we need to start thinking like that and not falling back on this like quote mongering. Yeah I totally agree and I think you know if we're taking

this idea that Marxism is a science seriously and we're defending Marxism against anti-Marxist or quote-unquote post-Marxist critiques of Marxism, then an essential component of that is also combating the dogmatism in our own ranks that often gives rise to characterization a straw man version of what Marxism is. So if you see one of your comrades, you know, sort of mindlessly regurgitating this idea that it's science without actually doing the investigation and applying the methodology itself, but just referring to, you know, past authority. and just saying it's a science as an end of the conversation thing, we should combat that in our own ranks because it's part of the problem

that leads to so much confusion around what Marxism actually is and why Marxism as a science is a real thing and is worth defending. So I don't know. I think it's worth pointing it out, and I'm glad that you did that in your essay because it's an essential component of this broader project. Yeah. So again, your new book coming out in November is called demarcation and demystification.

I can't wait for it. I'm sure you'll be back on talking about that within the here. Before I let you go, if you want to say anything about that book or otherwise, let listeners know where they can find you and your work, I'd really appreciate it. Well, I've already mentioned a few things about that book, but, you know, just because I like shameless self-promotion because, you know, I write and I teach, and that's pretty much my job. Hell yeah. I don't know my career so I can survive. That book, it was, just say a bit about it. It's kind of a book that I've been working on for a bit longer than even continuity and rupture.

And I was writing continuity and rupture around the same time. time is it so it really affected the way some of the categories appear in continuity and rupture and some of the language I use. It's kind of my, the scaffolding behind things. It's kind of like me talking about like what my method of philosophy is, but bigger questions, right? It's like kind of asking what is philosophy in the shadow of the 11th thesis on Forebock, to put it generally, and in a way to understand that and understand what philosophical practice is. It's kind of funny how old it is because it comes out, like, I know you recently, had me on here with, well, Barry interviewed me and you interviewed B, but like our book, Methodist

devour themselves. What's funny about that is that, you know, I wrote when I was writing, you know, this deep, what would become demarcation and demystification, there's a point where it's like, you know, I need in the introduction, the prologue I have, the prologue is really boring, and I need a cool, like, you know, sci-fi analogy. So I actually use an analogy for one of her stories, and that's what like got me and then her thinking about the project of methods devour themselves so it's it came first but it's being published later so it's going to seem kind of funny like after methods devour ourselves we do that as an entire project i begin with this extended analogy for one of her short stories but actually that was what um you know kind of was the platform for thinking methods devour themselves so in many ways this book is kind of a DNA that runs through a lot of my other books that is finally you know completed and is going to be out in November. That's awesome. And so where can listeners find you in your work?

Well, they can find my work at the normal bookstores, I guess, if they can order them in. But my, well, I have a blog, which is MLM Mayhem, which is, you know, I need to keep up a little bit more. I used to post frequently on that, but just I just, as a dad with a bunch of other projects on the way and political work and my job, I can't post the same frequency. as i did before i had a child so it's a little bit less uh less posting there um my my books uh three two two and a half of my books i say half because methods devour themselves was uh co-written with with benjamin sevoin cow um the the those three books so uh was it continuity rupture methods

devour themselves and the upcoming demarcation demystification uh are published by zero books uh so they can be And I guess all of the online places are just go to zero books to see where they say it can be found. And then my other two books, The Communist Necessity and Austerity Apparatus, are published by Kersplebadeb. And you can find them at that press site too. Awesome. Well, JMP, as always, it's an absolute honor to have you on. I really mean this when I say this. Over the past year or two years, diving into your work has been incredibly challenging for me.

And it's really spurred on a huge development in my politics. I think you, more than any writer in the last year, have really sort of helped develop my politics and have a clear understanding a lot of these really difficult issues that in my earlier Marxist days, I would really struggle with. So I appreciate every time you come on. It means the world to me, and I can't wait to have you back on to talk about demarcation and demystification later this year. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I love your show, and it's encouraging to hear that my work is actually, you know, useful.

Oh, yes. Beyond useful. Thank you. My transmissions began when Diamond said to Cole, why so we yielding. A journey. The valley of quest. The valley of love. The valley of understanding. The valley of independence. The valley of unity.

The valley of astonishment. The valley of deprivation. Quest You leave home The important part is you leave home Left home in search of where the orchid grows found a lotus pond and echo parking got confused Met in Aristotelian and got depressing about his awkward views Why you so quick to divide so hasty devise and cutting two knowing it's impolite to Terry I went about my way

And I don't like scary niggas so I ain't been around the way picking spinach out my teeth from the flooring Ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, old is notebook like an advanced new camera. The panorama makes me some kind of past master. Gawking at the pastor as I pennies it hails. The howitzer in the garden of my mom. It isn't always so reliable. Earthworm Nimrod preaching about survival and the orchestral nature of chaos,

lurking in the numbers, burping to number, how gracefully he fidgets with the ephemeral. A peon wrote. this with a stalk of a peony and a collar of primitive thud posing by a bust of pericles eating fudge sun officiating de gooby fashion seen his hands fastened round the ruby hill to that old rusty scimitar speaking time test Dakota who the other rhythm wizards are god bless the soul of whoever you think you are god bless the soul of whoever you think you are god bless the solo whoever you thought you us cause it because it might not be no next time

Because it might not be no next time.