Rev Left Radio - Turn Leftist Collab: On Democratic Socialism

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Turn Leftist Podcast Episode 47: We're joined by none other than Breht of RevLeft Radio! In this episode we discuss, analyze, and critique democratic socialism.  ------------------------------- JUST RESTOCKED ALL SIZES of our "Reagan is Satan" official Turn Leftist Podcast shirts! Available at: turn-leftist-podcast.myshopify.com patreon.com/turnleftist Listen now and follow us on social media! Linktree (with links to shirts & Discord): linktree.com/turnleftist Twitter: @turnleftistpod Instagram: @turnleftist / Backup: @turnleftist1312 Facebook: @turnleftistpod (facebook.com/turnleftistpodcast)

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Turn Leftist podcast. I'm Mike, He Him. And tonight I'm here with Sterling, He Him, Ward, He Him, Crosper, Day Them. And tonight we have a very special guest, Brett O'Shea, from the Rev Left podcast. How you doing, Brett? Hey, I'm doing great. It's an honor to be here. I'm excited to talk with all of you about Democratic socialism, the failures of electoralism, and whatever else comes across the conversation. Absolutely, man. We're honored to have you. I can't tell you how excited I am to do this. Thank you so much for joining us. So, yeah, the topic tonight will be Democratic. Socialism. And so I thought a good place to start would be just to define what is Democratic socialism. You know, this being kind of a podcast for baby leftists and newbies and everything, I figured I would just define what it is to begin with. So let me just get to my notes here. Good life. I know, right? So Democratic Socialism, and this is literally just a quick overview I took from Wikipedia, so Democratic Socialism is a left-wing political philosophy that supports political democracy within a socially

owned economy, with a particular emphasis on economic democracy, workplace democracy, and worker self-management within a market socialist economy, or an alternative form of a decentralized planned socialist economy. Democratic socialists argue that capitalism is inherently incompatible with the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity, and that these ideals can only be achieved through the realization of a socialist society. Although most democratic socialists seek a gradual reformist transition to socialism, democratic socialism can support revolutionary politics as means to establish socialism, which I'm a little skeptical of, but as a term... Yeah, bullshit.

As a term, democratic socialism was popularized by socialists who were opposed to the authoritarian backsliding in the Soviet Union and other nations during the 20th century. Democratic socialism is contrasted with Marxism-Leninism, which is often perceived as being authoritarian and undemocratic in practice. Democratic socialists... Democratic socialists oppose the Stalinist political system and the Soviet-topian. economic system, rejecting the authoritarian form of governance and the centralized administrative command system that formed in the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Lenin estates during the 20th century.

Democratic socialism is also distinguished from social democracy on the basis that democratic socialists are committed to a systemic transformation of the economy from capitalism to socialism, whereas social Democrats are concerned with reforming and humanizing capitalism through the framework of a welfare state. This has resulted in analysts and democratic socialist critics alike, arguing that in effect, social democracy has endorsed capitalism. Many commentators have stated that this was the result of their type of reformism that calls them to administer the system according to capital's logic. So, sort of just a little primer on it.

But I guess that's like a good way to explain that the difference between Marxist Leninism and democratic socialism would be reformism versus full-on revolutionary mentality of socialism. What's up, Stone? And obviously the difference between democratic socialism as it's just, described in that. And Democratic Socialism, as Bernie Sanders and AOC put it, I mean, they obviously believe in mixed economy. They are not trying to do away with capitalism. Like, I guess Social Democrat, which I'm not as familiar on, but I think that's a little bit more of a

watered down version. I mean, maybe they can earn that title. But my thing is, like, in the U.S., a Democratic Socialist is already completely tied to like the squad and Bernie and stuff. So, I mean, Can we really call it anything but what it's either made itself or been co-opted to? Yeah. Well, I mean, so I do have a section here. The next thing I wanted to get to was defining the difference between Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats. But I saw that Brett has something. What did you have, Brett?

Yeah, I was going to speak to that. So there is this theoretical difference between the two, right? And I think that the basic definition would be very simple about it is that Democratic socialists seek to achieve socialism through the already existing democratic mechanism. that exist in bourgeois society. And there's theoretical differences between Sokedoms and Democratic Socialists, and that Democratic Socialists want this broader sort of transition and transformation of society, whereas Social Democrats are more or less okay with keeping capitalism as it is and just reforming its roughest edges, regulating it, et cetera.

But in the real world, particularly in the Imperial Corps, they amount to the same thing. And I think that's where a lot of the confusion comes. these on-paper differences. Theoretically, democratic socialists want to go further than social democrats, but in practice, in the imperial core, that's just not the case. They become functionally the same exact thing. And then, this is always worth saying, and maybe we can deepen this point later, but the moment that social or democratic socialists get close to achieving anything like socialism through the democratic bourgeois mechanisms that exist in a society like Americas is the precise moment in which the facade of democracy will slip and the forces of reaction and the

ruling class will, you know, jettison democratic sort of the facade and attack the movement all out. And so at that moment, you have a choice. Do you crumble in the face of reaction? Or do you pick up, quote, unquote, authoritarian means and fight for socialism? Either way, we're at the same exact, you know, sort of juncture point that revolutionary Marxists already take into account in our theory. So I think that's something we can investigate further, but I don't want to talk too much. No, please do it, man. It was great. Cosper, would you have? No, I was just going to piggyback off of what Brett said there. I think that at the core and at the heart of what Democratic Socialists people basically mean is keeping in the way of things as they are. People who are so

satiated with the current way that things are, they can't even recognize the proper tools to use to dismantle it, which results in the repetition of the current system as is. And I think by doing such, ultimately, you just lead to a regurgitation of the same form of it, because I don't think capitalism has a specific identity. It basically shifts to whatever the social democrats or democratic socialists have reconfigured it as such as, I mean, you used to look at capitalism with a lot of propaganda against, like, gay people and stuff. And now because of the framework that's been vended, it can shift into whatever form it wants.

So when we talk about reformation versus revolution, revolution is more so of a destruction of the current state and present state of things, whereas reformation is a continuation of it into a different time. Yeah, let me take a second and just welcome Jaron. Jaron, he has jumped on. How's it going, Jaron? What's up, y'all?

Hello. So, yeah, let's get into the difference that I have here between Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats. Like you said, it's mostly a theoretical thing. When I was writing this up, all I could think of was that clip from Monty Python's Life of Brian when it was the People's Front of Judea and the Judean people's front. And they got, like, extremely offended when they were confused. Like, it's very funny to me, but, so let's see. This is an excerpt from an article by Zach Heridge's titled Democratic Socialism versus Social Democracy. So he says first off, social democracy is not socialism at all. It has little to do with the idea of social ownership. Social democracy is a capitalist system because it does not focus on needs, but instead continues to focus on profit motive. It does not completely do away with the private industry like socialism, but makes some industries public. Social Democrats also look to work within liberal democratic capitalist parties to bring about reforms. Social democracy is often seen as a compromise between socialism and capitalism. Social democracy looks to create and expand a welfare state.

Social Democrats support the ideas of a living wage, free college, regulating banks, regulating industry, union rights, free health care, free child care, free care for the elderly, and workers' compensation. It can sometimes include federal jobs programs and higher infrastructure spending. They also support higher taxation on the wealthy. Famous social Democrats include Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jeremy Corbyn. Democratic socialism is entirely different from social democracy. Democratic socialism focuses on everyone.

revolutionary change to oppose capitalist society. Democratic socialists look to bring the power into the hands of normal working people over the vast resources of society. Democratic socialism can be defined as democracy alongside the social ownership of the means of production. The reason the phrase democratic is added to the word socialism is that many Democratic socialists saw the USSR, Cuba, DPRK, and China's forms of socialism as fundamentally undemocratic. Therefore, to distinguish themselves from these countries, go ahead, Brett, sorry. Yeah, I mean, just to jump in on that point, because I think it's important.

Is the idea that these places weren't democratic, but that somehow these Western European and American countries are as democratic or more democratic is absolutely absurd. The Soviets were workplace democracy on a level that Americans have never seen. The power that the average Chinese person had during the cultural revolution or during this radical transformation period is more democracy, more direct engagement with politics at a communal level than any American has ever experienced in their entire life. When they speak in these terms about authoritarianism versus democracy, they're inherently already playing into like sort of Western chauvinist imperialist tropes that basically says if you're not a capitalist country, you fundamentally can't be democratic. And if you are a capitalist country, you're not an authoritarian state. Whereas, I mean, America, how is it not an authoritarian state, particularly if you're indigenous or you're black or you're an immigrant or you're poor? So that entire dichotomy

and that premise is utterly false from the get-go. So we should keep that in mind. Yeah. Would you have, Jaron? I mean, you already know that I have plenty of things to say about the USSR and China in terms of democracy. But, yeah, comparing it to the United States. Oh, yeah, Jaron is the resident anarchist on the podcast. I should let you know, Brett.

Yeah, but all the same. Yeah, comparing it to the United States, yeah, like the Soviet system of democracy was far more effective. Like, point-blank, it was. Despite the shortcomings it had, it was more effective. But at the same time, I think that one of the, the big pitfalls of the idea that you can harness the quote unquote U.S. democracy for good is that a lot of these people are still standing on the sidelines of their own fear of looking it in the face and understanding that no, democracy doesn't exist here.

It's not a thing. This is oligarchical. This is a country run by aristocrats. And I think a lot of people that get into sort of the, what is it, social Democrats or Democratic Socialists. I'm totally sort of my mind. The point is, is if you do believe that you can use the mechanisms of United States politics to enact effective change, my guess is you probably are just afraid of looking it in the face and understanding that, no, that's not possible. I mean, even just point blank, there's an aristocratic pedigree just to even run for office. That's why incumbents always win. That's why someone like Ocasio-Cortez, whether or not you like her, was monumental. But at the same time, she's in such a shallow position that she is still in a.

effective. So like, you know, the idea that you can take ideas from the bottom level grassroots and actually get them to work is just not possible in this country. I think a lot of people are held back by their own inhibitions of looking at that realistically. Yeah, I mean, writing this all up, it seems to me like democratic socialism, social democracy, whatever you want to call it, you know, whatever differences you want to say are between the two. It seems like all of it is just a very Western capitalist framing of socialism that makes it totally acceptable because, it is non-threatening. Would you have, Koppel?

I think to play into what Jared just said there, I think the Democratic socialism is just in a very sad way, radical optimism and the unwillingness of people to even abandon the current state that they operate in and disconnect from the logic that's inherent

within the capitalist structure. I mean, the way that your brain functions and what you can even see as a possibility is shaped by your everyday life. And your everyday life is shaped by capital. So, When you can't escape that, you fundamentally succumb to the vice of that in itself. And you get to the point where you almost submit to social democracy or you submit to democratic socialism.

But at that same point, you submit to the system itself. Yeah. And I just say real quick how much I've missed, Kaspur. Yeah. Miss you. So would you have, Sterling? I was going to say, I think it's also fair. to say that capitalism is basically the exact opposite of democracy.

I mean, you're trying to compare the exact opposite to something that's trying to harness it. Like, capitalism has proven that capital is what makes the decisions under a capitalist nation. So it's the exact opposite of what a democracy is. Like, even that little banana island, the game that we made up and played last week, it was hilarious. We basically, the game puts two socialists and ones. one side of the island and then two capitalists on one side and what we found out with even that

little role playing game is in a short period of time one of the capitalists even though they start off on completely equal positions one of them quickly gets a lead and that lead never stops and by the end of the game the other guy was basically his slave that's just what happens under capitalists in two hours yeah in two hours he was a slave that's all it took did you have something brett Yeah, I mean, I think that's 100% correct. And it gets back to this idea of what capitalism really is because it presents itself as if freedom, democracy, and capitalism were synonyms. And anything that's not capitalist by definition can't be about freedom and democracy, even though, as we're alluding to, capitalism crushes freedom and democracy for most of its inhabitants most of the time and lets us choose between a handful of aristocratic, rich millionaires that have connections. that we'll never have and wealth that will never have every few years and calls that democracy as if we have any control over our lives. But I do want to make the point that capitalism arose historically out of feudalism.

And there was a period of time in which liberals and capitalists were the progressive force in the face of the old world of feudalism and monarchism. But reading the works of historians like Gerald Horn and Sylvia Federici really shows you, and their sort of thesis, sort of if you can combine the two, is that capitalism wasn't this holy revolutionary action that moved out of feudalism, but was in part a counter-revolution against many of the peasant and slave uprisings that were happening at that crucial juncture of transition. And what it really was was, like the enclosures, for example, which is part of primitive

accumulation in capitalism, was this attempt to decommunalize the peasants, kick them off public land in order to privatize it, make them go into factories and work to pay rent, to live on that same little patch of land. And so in that way, we can think of capitalism, not as a break from feudalism, although in some ways it was, but as a continuity with many, at least of the hierarchical structures that existed.

Instead of kings and queens and dukes and lords, we just have, like, rich people and millionaires and mansions and limos with their kids who they hand their wealth down to, et cetera. So, you know, that rupture is there, but that continuity is often under-emphasized, and it's just as much, if not more so there. Yeah, would you have, Jared?

All right, I know we're trying to get through this medium article. No, no, Rushby. That's such a good point, though, and that's a lot of the reason why, like, even when we look at the French Revolution and all the ideological shifts that came out of that, that from the leftist perspective, that was still a bourgeoisie revolution, because there was not a massive upheaval in any way, shape, or form of specifically property rights, which is something that has to be called into question. And I think that that's the biggest thing that scares a lot of Americans that are trying to go left is they're in fear of their property rights. but, you know, namely like the fourth estate during the French Revolution, which was what the peasantry actually held, was I think it was something like 90% of the population only held like 2% of the property. And even post-revolution, those figures didn't really change.

Like, yes, the monarchy was gone, but at the same time, the same people that had the most money in their region maintained that property and maintained that aristocratic hold over those lands. And I think that while we're moving forward, like trying to get the American population to understand what needs to happen, they're afraid that if we were to say nationalize Amazon and take everything that Amazon holds privately and just give it to the people, that suddenly we're going to have to give up our personal homes at the same time. And that's just not true. You don't want to give me your toothbrush? I mean, we can share if you want, but like, you know, I think people really just don't realize how many social structures and how much of their life has been created by that revolution.

And what it has done to all of our society, like this was a big eye-opening moment for me. And I think, Brett, you probably listened to the, it's not just in your head podcast with Harriet Fraud. And they did an episode on the creation of the nuclear family after the end of feudalism and the creation of liberalism and capitalism. And that was purely a product of the changing of the mode of production then, which before, I guess everyone was like an individual. You would just work as a surf on the land. And they didn't really have like these nuclear families like we think about it. And then because of the way that they changed the relations of property and work,

people needed to like basically farm out their kids. Like they needed to have more kids because that was the only way they could survive. And it was the creation of the nuclear family as we know it and so-called traditional gender roles with the wife being subservient to the husband and everything. And it's like that all is a result of this that we are just, we're so, custom to because we've lived in it for so many generations. And it's just, again, it's just a fiction that was created out of that revolution. Go ahead, Cosper. Yeah, capitalism's functions to make things seem natural to you. They just are the way they are because it's, I mean,

I guess your dad experienced it or some shit like that, but it doesn't mean that's the way it has to be. Your ideology. Yeah, pure ideology. Would you have, Brett? One thing about Marxism and perhaps leftism more broadly is by studying history and and the materialist conception of history, you start to see how capitalism is this historically contingent thing. And people that don't have that understanding of how capitalism emerged out of feudalism can easily fall into this sort of delusion that this is more or less, quote unquote, the end of history,

or that capitalism is the end-all be-all of systems. And there's sort of this dehistoricizing of our psychologies that happens under capitalism that I think is really interesting. And you see it when you talk to the lay people who aren't super-indom politics. They really expect a certain consistency and a certain upward trajectory that capitalism was only able to give for a brief period of time in the post-war period and has clearly ended. And that psychological attachment to that idea, though, is living longer than the actual reality of the thing itself. And I think that is unsettling for people

ideologically. And it probably accounts at least to some extent why significant portions of the American population are turning more and more to conspiracy theories to make sense of what's going on around them because they just aren't used to their whole paradigm being broken down like that and seeing how much of their social and economic systems are ultimately contingent. Yeah, I mean, when you're confronted with the reality of capitalism, destroying life on earth as we know it with climate change, but you've also been told all your life that any other alternative system is totally unrealistic and leads to mass death and starvation and killed millions or whatever, you have to go towards conspiracy theories, because what else can you do?

Like, there's no, that's the only third option that you have. Unless you have a critique of capital, which the right ideologically prevents. You even started seeing the emergence lately of, like, Marjorie Taylor Green and Candace Owens blaming the failures of capitalism on corporate communism. You know, so their inability to have a critique of capital and their rabid anti-communism makes them lay the abject failures of capitalism itself at the feet of communism. And there's enough to Americans that have been plugged full of anti-communism their whole life to just slop it up. No, that's my favorite thing now.

Like, we have totally switched. Like, in the 90s, everyone who said anything that was, like, anti-capitalist, even a little bit, like, in the direction of, like, a Bernie Sanders at the time, you were called unrealistic, and, you know, people would say, oh, let me guess, not real socialism. Like, or real socialism hasn't been tried yet because they would criticize the Soviet Union or whatever. And now we completely flip the table. And now everyone is saying this is not real capitalism. they're calling it corporatism or whatever they call it because they can't confront the reality this is a result of capitalism

and this is how it actually works in practice yeah which I find funny because that's always their argument oh the left just says oh that wasn't real socialism that wasn't real communism I'm like hey no that all was real and it all succeeded but then they go to this oh it's not really capitalism it's corporatism

and it's like you know Fox News that one time when Warren Buffett like supported wealth acts they called him a socialist. They called wooden vulgarious. That's who we're dealing with. That's on par with on Fox News. They just said that Karl Marx wrote Mindcom. Yeah, dude.

I think it's, I heard that. I think it's really funny how they're so hysteric about calling everything socialism. So a whole generation of people have grown up that their whole lives they've heard the right say, oh, you want universal health care? That's socialism. You want to address climate change? change, that's socialism. You want a living wage? That's socialism. And all of a sudden, half of America's like, fuck, then give me socialism. So their own hyperbolic, their hyperbolic anti-socialism,

everything I don't like is socialism, actually, you know, sort of debases itself ultimately. It's funny. Let me get back into this article a little bit here. So I left off saying the Democratic socialists were rejecting the type of socialism seen in USSR, Cuba, DPRK, and China. So therefore, to distinguish themselves from these countries, they call themselves, quote, Socialists. Many Democratic Socialists take the radical positions on the abolition of prisons and the abolition of the police, as they see these two as cruel and inhumane elements of capitalist society that must be abolished. Democratic Socialists would be further to the left than Social Democrats. Democratic Socialists would support all of the things that Social Democrats support,

but that would be where they start. They would look to go further than that. They look to legislate the control of the means of production and hand it over to the workers. They would look to bring all resources under social and common ownership to be used to satisfy the needs of society rather than the profit of a few. Democratic socialists would be against centralized planning because they see it as, quote, undemocratic. Democratic socialists would favor a democratically planned society, not just planned by the party bureaucrats, but by the majority of the workers themselves. Famous Democratic socialists include Bertrand Russell, Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, Daniel Deleone, kinda, Cornell West, Michael Harrington, Edward

Bernstein and Charlie Chaplin. Democratic socialism and Social Democrats are similar in the aspect that most prefer to bring about change in non-violent ways. So, not at all. Mostly through elementary or electoral reforms. However, Democratic socialism is a post-capitalist ideology based on the social and democratic ownership of the means of production alongside a democratic political system. Both social democracy and democratic socialism limit themselves with what is possible by working

within institutions that are controlled by the ruling class through various ways and are institutions designed to represent ruling class's ideology and worldview. And I think that last sentence is particularly important. I probably could have just read only that, and it would have been the best summation of that whole paragraph. So that's all I have for at least the difference between Democratic Socialists and Social Democrats. And if that seems like it doesn't really outline any kind of major difference between the two, yeah, you'd be right to think that.

Because in practice, again, it just comes back to what do they actually do in reality. And in reality, if you talk to a Social Democrat or a Democratic socialist, they're going to urge you to vote for Joe Biden after, you know, the Democrat Party, Chief Bernie, out of the nomination. So it's like in practice, they're the same thing. Yeah, I also want to make a claim, which I think I made a little bit earlier in one form or another, which is that socialism is already inherently democratic. The transformations that all socialists seek, anarchist, Marxists, democratic socialist is ultimately a democratic state of affairs where people have control over their own lives and have some say in the workplace, in their communities, etc. But then the

question becomes how do we get there and reaction is always going to be the big obstacle in the way to that achievement and so states that set out you know like in the past the russian revolution chinese revolution cuban revolution who sought out to buck off imperialism to transform their society to industrialize to democratize um to give more power to the working class they were also immediately and and viciously attacked and sustained you know embargoes and assassination attempts and invasion attempts over and over and over again. And I think that that does limit what you're able to do as far as opening up your society as much as we would want to open it up.

So I think that is part of it. The other thing I wanted to say is I think there's a difference between quote-unquote democratic socialism in the Imperial Corps and democratic socialism in the global south because we have seen Latin American countries pursue a pretty much democratic socialist route, use the mechanisms that exist in your country to build up a movement and take power through those mechanisms we've seen it in venezuela we've seen it in bolivia we've seen it all over

and so that's a different context though right those those are not imperialist countries they're not bases of capitalism and imperialism the the people themselves are in the global south therefore they are victimized more so by imperialism than the average white westerner is etc. So I think context does matter and I think we've seen democratic socialism be effective in certain contexts, particularly in the global south, but we've also seen revolutionary Marxism be more effective in the global south, in decolonial movements all throughout the world. And so even on that level, even if you exclude the global north, it is not clear by any means that democratic socialists are more effective at getting and reaching the goal that they want to reach,

which I think should at least give us pause. But at that the end of the day, I'm not like rabidly anti-democratic socialist because I think with a rising left, those formations are inevitable. With the left finding itself for the first time after decades of neoliberalism and hardcore anti-communism, you're going to have that left manifest all along the spectrum of the left from social, from well-intentioned progressives all the way to hardcore revolutionary anarchists and Marxists and everything in between. So the relative rise of democratic socialism and genuine popularity of the term, even if people don't fully understand what it means, does bode well for an overall left movement, trying to find its feet, and

deconstructing a lot of the anti-communist propaganda. So at the end of the day, they do serve their role, but it's important to critique and show the limitations of certain ideas and to analyze it properly. Yeah, absolutely. Would you have stolen? Yeah, I want to kind of piggyback off one of his points right there. And that's, even though the U.S. Democratic socialists are really just cosplaying and using the term, they are also making the term socialist normal. Like that's a word that if you use like during Obama's presidency, like you would have got a lot of weird looks. And now you can kind of just use socialism very normally in regular conversations.

So I agree. I think it's by making those even just the terms more accessible or more okay to say in a regular the conversation is a big step forward because then people will say, well, what is actual socialism and look into it? Yeah, I want to go with what you have, Jaron, but I just want to say real quick to Sterling's point. You could definitely make the case that you could slowly but surely, I guess, normalize the term socialism and normalize the ideas of socialism to the point that we could actually see some meaningful reforms. It's just the problem is we don't have that much time. Like the amount of time it would take to do that would be generation after generation, and we just don't have that long to. end capitalism before it literally ends humanity. But would you have, Jaron?

So, I mean, I'm going to try and make this concise as much as possible. But like, so I agree. Like, it's really cool to see these terms and and ideologies and anti-capitalism come into the public mainstream and, you know, actually not only have traction, but they're not as demonized as they used to be. At the same time, though, one of the things that like when we see like the Bernie bros and shit like that, just as an example, the Bernie Sanders wants to expand social security. Point blank, okay, sure, that'd be cool. But social security is being levied from by the federal government, put into interest-bearing

assets and return to social security. But here's the thing, is the interest that came from your money taken out of your paycheck and put into that account goes into government slush funds. And those government slush funds, the majority of which probably fund imperialism abroad. Because the Pentagon is the single largest expense in the United States. So your social security, if Bernie were to expand it, which we should be taking care of and we're fucking old, but if we were to expand it, it is expanding an already corrupted imperialist model. Even the social programs in this country are used to manufacture war and death and poverty. That's how far deep we are.

So even when we see someone supporting a progressive like Bernie who calls himself a socialist and is about as close as we're going to fucking get, Um, he's still not, he's still missing the forest for the trees. He's not attacking the rot where it began. And I don't think that we should expand social security if they can still borrow from it and levy that interest to do shit like have a 20 year long war in Afghanistan and then just bail. Like, you know, that's, that's the point that the revision or, you know, reformationists kind of miss for me is like, you can't fix this. It needs to be erased. it's like it's fun from the outset and that's the contradiction at play that makes the Latin American attempts different from the global North attempts at least in part is that imperialist dimension and it's crucial to have an anti-imperialist politic and that we firmly plan our feet in an anti-perialist analysis and not let other socialists you know that are claiming the mantle of socialism dismiss it or discount it because it is so crucial and it's a huge limiting factor on what democratic socialists can even

envision or what their goals are and we see that bad analysis and that blind spot pop up in their media outlets and their magazines and their political analyses they're missing anti-imperialism and it is kneecapping their entire ability to make any real progress or make the real transformations that even they ostensibly say they ultimately want to make what did you have cosper oh no i was just going to say yeah reclaimed socialism how about you ward uh yeah so i felt like this was uh i saw a A quote from an article by Jones Manuel, titled Western Marxism, The Fetish for Defeet and Christian Culture. And there's this great quote that I had in here. Since it has never been able to produce a revolution, Western Marxism is unaware of the difficulties inherent in the revolutionary process.

That is, it has never had to deal with the problems, the flaws, or the contradictions of a revolution. The consequence of this is the reinforcement of ideological purism. From a pedestal of ethical moral superiority, Western Marxism congratulates itself for never having needed to misrepresent Marxism or to get his hands dirty in the exercise of political power, ignoring the obvious fact that such purism only exists because it was never put into practice. After all, the only victorious socialist revolution in the West, the Cuban one, was entirely influenced by Eastern and Soviet Marxism. But, think in itself the guardian of purity of doctrine, Western Marxism points the finger

at everyone. It condemns Chinese revisionism. It criticizes Korean totalitarianism. It curses Soviet state ideology and it disowns Cuban authoritarianism. Yeah, it's based as fuck. It's really good, yeah. So yeah, I mean, touching on that same point, the next section I have here is social fascism. So, yeah, it's really just getting to the point of social democratic countries like the Scandinavian model and everything and how they build that social democratic model on imperialism and on the exploitation of the global south. So this is an article on hamptonthink.org called Delize Social Democrats Tell, FDR, the New Deal, and Social Fascism.

And it's by Zach Madero. Social fascism is a phrase that's unfamiliar to most people in the United States, who typically have better or more pressing things to do than study the internal debates of the Communist International in the 1930s. In imperialist countries like the U.S., Canada, Australia, and much of Europe, social democracy, a mixed capitalist economy with more or less robust welfare state, originally designed to take the sting out of the revolutionary socialist movements, takes the form of a, quote, gentler fascism, at least for citizens.

You can look at how Europe and its children treat refugees to understand what social democracy means for non-citizens. The wealth and privileges of Western social democracy, of course, are impossible without the looting of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and third world diasporers within Western countries, in other words, imperialism. Whereas socialists believe in class conflict and class struggle, social democrats or social fascists believe in class collaboration. This is the dangerous notion that classes with completely inherently contradictory interests, capitalists and workers, can unite and work towards a mutually beneficial goal. As an ideology and practice, class collaboration produces and rationalizes

such phenomena as millionaires and billionaires in supposed communist parties, toothless unions led by labor aristocrats who like to golf with the boss on weekends, and the total suppression of workers' power in the name of national unity or the 99%. It is intellectual and material quicksand. As George Jackson wrote, quote, the only way we can destroy fascism is to refuse to compromise with the enemy state and its ruling class. Just as social imperialism is nothing but the same old imperialist gore and exploitation hiding behind socialist trappings, social fascism is essentially fascism wearing a socialist mask. The social fascist is the one whose heart bleeds for the struggling worker while sending the cops or the troops to break up an

unauthorized strike or the modern-day Gestapo to deport workers who dared to cross colonial borders without permission. The social fascist is the one who calls not for an end to the mass robbery of the third world, but a fairer distribution of the stolen goods. The social fascist is the one who preaches revolution and revolt just so long as it ends right before the power of the capitalist class begins. So yeah, I just thought that was a really good explanation of the failure of the social democratic model, at least is what we see in the Scandinavian countries. And it always is just funny to me when you see people, you know, just like Western leftists, the Bernie Bros, like we were talking about, who praised the Scandinavian model

and just are totally ignorant of the exploitation that is built on. Real quick, especially since we're talking about Western leftists and everything, plug AOC in her interview with Anderson Cooper when he asked, when people hear the word socialism, they think Soviet Union, Cuba,

Venezuela, is that what you have in mind? Yes. She answers laughingly. Of course not. What we have in mind and of what my policies are closely resemble is what we see in the UK, in Norway, in Finland and in Sweden. In the fucking U.K. lame.

Yeah, that's like being asked. Like, oh, when you think of socialism, do you think of socialism? I mean, I think of notorious. I don't know about you guys, but. It's like being asked that and in responding, no, no, no, no. I think of like really nice, hegemenic, white people capitalism and imperialism. Like, then I like to call it socialism. Socialism.

That gave me another thought we were just talking about how normalizing the word socialism can be a good thing. And I started thinking about it. And really, there's no benefit whatsoever. I mean, take the U.S., for example, we have obviously normalized the word democracy. Everyone here likes that word, but we are inherently undemocratic here. So, yeah, maybe just normalizing a word doesn't do a goddamn thing. Yeah, I mean, I certainly there's problems with it. and with the normalization of words, that's where our principled critique of those forces have to come into play. You know, you're maybe popularizing the term, but you're also muddying the water around it. So we have to do sort of, you know, ideological combat with you to clarify those terms and show you what they actually mean. But the fact that, like, Americans don't have

democracy, but really love it, I think is interesting. It actually could be to our rhetorical and ideological advantage, especially when we frame socialism as being an expansion of democracy into the workplace or something like that. So even if they're confused about terms, the fact that those latent concepts are bouncing around in their head is sort of putty for us to play with to our own ideological advantage, which is just something to keep in mind.

I have something to say about social fascism, but, Jaron, you can go because you raised your hand. Oh, no, by all means. Carry on with your thought. Yeah, just quickly going to what you were reading. Another important point is that capitalism produces fascism, right? The famous quote is, fascism is capitalism in decay. When capitalism enters a period of crisis, which by definition it does routinely and increasingly,

fascism is, as I phrased it, capitalism with its teeth and nails out, you know, ready to fight. And it serves to protect and defend the hierarchies of race and class and gender that are fostered under capitalism. So by being a social Democrat, which is just another way of saying being a liberal, you are inherently, by definition, invested in maintaining capitalism and therefore maintaining the very conditions out of which fascism routinely and increasingly develops and grows. So in that sense also, calling social Democrats the left wing of fascism is pointing and gesturing towards that reality. Go ahead, Jaron. Well, he just gave me something different to say. But I would argue even beyond fascism being capital.

capitalism in decay, which I know is supposedly a Lenin quote, but I would argue that capitalism always is fascism, and fascism is only called fascism when the oppression becomes more overt. From a strictly economic perspective, fascism is when private industry colludes with public works. So, you know, if we do look at it through that lens, that has happened through the entire history of capitalism. That's what it is literally built on. And as far as the captive populace that has the holy shit beaten out of them all the time, we've always had that. We only start calling it fascism when we start seeing cops happen to hit a white person on the news.

You know, so then we're starting to worry about fascism. When Trump comes around, we're starting to worry about fascism. Not when, you know, we're interning the Japanese in camps or when we have 200 years of slavery or even when we have 20% of our population in jail cells, you know, we don't call it that until we happen to have Trump. And that brings me to the other point that I was going to make is I think that the more people, I think a lot of people have started becoming more open to leftism because they have seen the mask come off in the past couple years, especially the post Obama, you know, years.

And the longer this goes on, the more people are going to start looking at. at other options, and I'm not saying that they'll go, you know, full commie or anarchist or anything, but I have to wonder how many people were radicalized because Trump got elected and they're like, wow, this is all broken. Yeah. I mean, I did. Definitely. It was like in the last four years without a doubt.

Would you have cost us? It's not even slightly a symptom of being broken if you have someone like Trump in there. I think that's as a business as usual like you're getting at. John. I think the break in between the recognition of that does leave people to ultimately just like very horrible conclusions in the sense of Q&on, even the social democracy stuff that we're talking about. And at least people helpless when they can't recognize what's happening around them. And when you don't have it like Brett said earlier, functioning critique of capital, you can't necessarily understand the reality that you're existing within ultimately. Because reality and capital and the way that we exist right now are synonymous. Yeah, exactly. And we saw, we're talking about the radicalization of people in the Trump years. We saw the liberals, right, broadly conceived, left-of-center people, take two tracks. If you, you know, there's the people that radicalized. I've seen a lot of people that were otherwise as well-meaning liberals, you know, move further left, even if it's not all the way as far left as I am. Still, they were radicalized in a direction. They picked up critiques of white supremacy, of imperialism, of capitalism, even if they were sort of vague. But the other reaction, especially by corporate, center. liberals was to spiral into their own form of conspiracy theory, which was Russia did it, you know, which is Russiagate, which is hyperbolicly overstating the impact that Russia had on

the elections as if Trump is truly an anomaly and not a clear indication of something deep in the American colonialist, imperialist, white chauvinist psychology. And so I thought that that divide was interesting overall. But going back to Jaron's point about fascism always being here. I think that is important because fascism is an ongoing parallel process that is inexorably bound up with capitalism. And so saying that it's only fascist when it becomes particularly acute or that it's only fascist when it affects white people, I think does get out a weakness in that analysis. And in fact, George Jackson, who wrote blood in my eye, talks about America as an already fully fascist state. Certainly for black people, for indigenous people,

for anybody other than white men for most of America's history, it could reason. reasonably be called fascist. And Amy Sasser, who's like a decolonial Caribbean, you know, thinker, made the point that colonialism and fascism are deeply tied. You know, when the imperial core states go out to the to the global South and colonize and imperialize those societies, that is fascism in action, but Westerners only call it fascism when it comes back home. And so Sasserer made this point. It's like, Naziism is European colonialism turned inward on itself. You know, the way that they treated the Jews and the minorities and whatever, anybody that the Nazis hated is part and parcel with how European colonialists have treated the global South all through capitalist and liberal history. And so I think that's really, really helpful and expands our conception of just how closely tied capitalism is with fascism.

Would you have, Jared? Big shout out to Candace Owens for that quote that Nazis would have been fine if they had just stayed in Germany. I feel like that's wrong. Jesus Christ. I forgot about that. The whole time you guys were saying that, it was making me think that fascism is literally just when capitalism

hits home to reference Harry Afro's other podcasts. I hate it here. I have some questions. Go ahead, Stirling, sorry. I was just going to say, before you get into those questions, can we segue just for a moment for Casper to explain why

he was at a Majorie Taylor Greene? rally the other day? Yeah, for sure. I can explain that. Day, sorry. Yeah, thank you for the day. I was at a Marjorie Taylor Green rally the other day because some of the sidework that I'm trying to do is a documentary-based journalism that is like in person and enacting with the people that are actually these like almost phantoms that we create

in our head of the Republican or the liberal or the communist, etc. get what they're trying to say and materialize that into a real thing instead of just a phantom that's haunting your head to hear what that ghost actually has to say the reason I was at the Marjorie Taylor Green Rally specifically is because I wanted to know how much backpedaling has been done

since Marjorie has denounced you and shit like that and what I would say is it not much if anything that ghost is still in her and it still is fucking radical and is still as powerful and throbbing as ever more than anything. She's a fucking sicko, but I love

her. Oh, no. Let me wait till John gets back, because I want him to hear the questions too, because I think this will be the meat of what we talk about tonight because, I mean, I was taking a page out of Jaron's book when we were doing our Patreon episodes and he just, like, brings these questions that are really thought-provoking and just,

you know, spur a lot of discussion. And so I wanted to take that kind of same approach tonight. Cool. I do want to say really quick, though, because I wanted to make this point earlier, the dichotomy between, like, democratic socialism and authoritarian socialism we've already kind of dealt with. But the dichotomy between reform and revolution is important. Certainly that's a true dichotomy, their whole different approaches and orientations

to the political realities that you live in. But it is also crucial to understand that revolutionaries have always spearheaded and led movements of deep reform. For example, universal health care, that's a policy that 10 years ago it was only the radical left fringe in America that was calling for it. Now it's taken for granted on any part of the center left, I mean, at least rhetorically paid service to. So even though that our ultimate goal is a radical transformation of all of society, I think it is important and it forms connections with regular people if we're active in and help lead the struggles for meaningful reforms that make material impacts

on people's lives. Ours. Yeah. Yeah, that makes me think of that tweet that was going around on leftist polyigram the other day, which was somebody was saying like Social Democrats and Democrats Socialists or whatever. They criticize the DPRK in Cuba and China or whatever, and then they spend the rest of their lives trying to get reforms that those countries have had for decades.

That's great. Okay, so I have a couple questions that I want to ask everybody, just to spur some discussion here. So the first one is I feel like we've already addressed a lot of these, but we'll just get into some proper discussion. about them, but can capitalism be reformed into socialism? And if so, why hasn't it happened already? We've been doing capitalism for hundreds of years. So how long would it possibly

take to reform capitalism into the next stage that actually takes care of everyone in the working classes, which would have to be some form of socialism, whether you called it like a capitalist socialist hybrid or whatever. You know, when liberals say, oh, we need a mix of capitalism and socialism or whatever bullshit that they think. Why haven't we gotten there already? And, or I mean, is it just not possible that capitalism can be reformed into socialism. Go ahead, Casper. The analogy I'd like to draw of this would be, have you ever

made a piece of Plato a certain thing, and then not liked it and then molded into a different thing? Probably have. Hopefully, if you've played a Plato. But I think that ultimately it's still Plato. In order to get something new, you have to destroy what has previously came before.

So when we talk about creation, we can't go through this in electoralism or reformation. We have to destroy the entire present state of things. And obviously, that's not in ignorance of, like, the things that Brett's talking about when we talk about pushing for, like, Medicare for all, what have you, stuff like that. You can do that. But it's with the acknowledgement that that's not enough and that that's still playing with

the same Play-Doh. Yeah. I just wanted to say that in my younger years, I have certainly made some Plato dinosaurs that I feel like you're being very disrespectful to right now because I made beautiful creations with them. the best I ever got was a Plato worm I called them snakes

you had bread yeah so I just eat plato what tasty what did you said that make it edible he said that what you said that

it definitely is salty no I wish it was not a little pack yeah yeah so I just wanted to say to that question um

the question we should ask as you know thinking historically is did capitalism just naturally reform feudalism towards capitalism? Or did it take a repeated succession of ground-shaking revolutions to rupture from the feudal system and move to a new system? I think it's very clear that, you know, dialectically speaking, ruptures are crucial to changes. We can talk about like, you know, and like dialectical jargon like quantity turning into quality or, you know,

one into two, et cetera. But the basic point, I think, behind it is that you have to rupture from the system, although the seeds of the new are present in the old. So there are elements of socialism in a capitalist society, universal health care in some countries, trade unions. These are little seeds that are planted in the previous system, much like mercantilism existed under feudalism for a long time before it broke out and ruptured and turned into something wholly new. Those things are there. Even our socialist class consciousness and the fact that it's spreading and growing globally, one would hope, is a seed that's sort of busting through the dirt of capitalism. But to ultimately make the break from capitalism, you have to confront it and rupture from it

as a system, as a global system overall. And that cannot be done from within it, and it cannot be done in this linear, gradualist, incremental way, where you just reform it enough to eventually you wake up one day and you realize you've reformed it so much that now it's something totally new. That's not how it works. You have to do ruptures from the system. And that means, in political terms, something like revolution. Yeah, I mean, one of the best defenses I've ever heard of socialism, I think I got from your podcast, Brett, but it's like, as leftists, we're always confronted with having to explain the quote-unquote failures of socialism because, you know, you always get the same arguments thrown at you, you know, starvation, kill billions, whatever. And one of my favorite

responses to that was when you said that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was not a seamless, you know, non-violent, uh, transition. Like, lots of people die. Lots of things happen. Like, lots of atrocities happen. But they were kind of necessary in a way to transition from one political economy to another. But I mean, I also just like to say that they deserved it. You know, I just like to just say the cool acts and the fascist and capitalists, like, they fucking deserved it. Well, even liberals see them as heroes. You know, liberals see the founding fathers and to some extent French revolutionaries and stuff and these revolutions of that period. As heroes,

and stuff, but then they're like, okay, now that we have our system, no more of that. Right, exactly. And I was just going to say, kind of piggybacking off what Brett was saying, you know, I hate to keep using our little game, Banana Island, as like this perfect scientific experiment. It's so much fun. But, you know, like we were saying, when we took the two capitalists and put them on one side, they almost, even starting off at perfect equals, by the end of the game, one of them had such an advantage over the other.

they'd never overcome it without literally murdering him. And you think about that in terms of these Democratic socialists existing within the Democratic Party that are already make up such a fucking minority. Like the power difference is insane. They can't overcome that. If they were, if they had an even number of Democratic socialists in the party right now, they probably couldn't overcome that power discrepancy, let alone this tiny minority. I mean, if anything, it just watered.

the whole idea of socialism down. Like you said, like the fucking DSA pushing everyone to vote for Biden. That's crazy. He represents the antithesis of what you're about. Yeah. And even if you're sympathetic with democratic socialism, you have to get rid of the illusion that the Democratic Party is the vehicle through which you're going to pursue that goal.

The Democratic Party has a class base, and that class base is in the bourgeoisie. And if it has workers under it, umbrella, which it does, it doesn't mean that that party and its class character subordinated to the working class. It still ultimately serves the bourgeois class, the bourgeoisie. So if we want to pursue electoral means whatsoever, and this goes to Lenin's revolutionary parliamentarianism, right, he made it very clear, you don't join a capitalist party and try to change it from within. If you're going to do that at all, you build a workers party, a revolutionary party that treats the electoral realm

as one arena in which it operates. And Marx and Engels would talk about primarily using electoralism in that context with the Workers' Party to get a good sense of your numbers, how much support you have, what parts of the country that support is in, and to get your message out to people. Because still, in many countries, and specifically in America, if you want to get a political message out, campaigns, electoral campaigns every four years, is the way to do it. And so there is some room for, like, maybe running candidates run sometimes on a single issue, Like the governor of Washington ran as a Democrat in 2020 just to talk about climate change in every debate.

That's fine. But a workers' party could use that to get out a more revolutionary message. But what is never the case and has never worked and will never work is trying to enter into a capitalist party, i.e. the Democratic Party, with the hopes of turning it towards the class interest of the proletariat. It's not its class base. That's not its donor base. That's not its ideological orientation. You're confusing that as a mechanism to get to where you want, as opposed to an obstacle that. prevents you from getting to where you want. Yeah. That actually leads really well into the next

question that I had, which is how do you change the relations of production between workers and capitalists? I mean, I know what we would say is Marxist-Leninist. Like, it's very obvious. But I would love to hear from a democratic socialist, like what they think is the way to do that. I mean, I think that's what's at the core of why we think reformism doesn't work. It's because you will always fall backwards into reaction. It's like even if Bernie was elected and was able to implement Medicare for all, like day one, it would just be a matter of time before the next person came into office, like the next Trump or the smarter Trump or the Tom Cotton, whoever everyone is afraid of getting elected next, it's going to be worse than Trump. It would just be a matter of time

before that next person got elected and undid all over the reforms because there's always that model that conservatives have in America where they defund a social program, point to the failure of it once they defund it, and then use as an excuse to defund it even more or to privatize it or something like that. So I want to get into that question a little bit. bit, but I just also wanted to see if anybody had any other things to say about can capitalism be reformed or whatever before we get into it. Let me go with you, Ward, and then so. Yeah. Simply put, it cannot be reformed. If capitalism could be reformed, it wouldn't be fucking capitalism. It'd be something else. Exactly. A system that is inherently exploitative

inputs, profits over people cannot be used in a reformative matter to increase the material conditions of every for everyone like especially when we're talking about the Scandinavian model earlier all it does is just ends up exporting the exploitation to an area where the people in that area that are benefiting from that exploitation don't no longer see it and so they live in this ideological insulated realm where they think that it is working when it's actually not would you have so I actually had a question for Brett it's kind of off topic but I do have 80 so I apologize.

But since we are kind of talking about some revolutionary ideas and that's kind of the basis of his podcast in a lot of ways, in the theory of revolution, like if we were to actually have a revolution in this country, hopefully it's a win, not an if. But how do you think that the conservative, right, libertarian, gun owners would do that? Because I've had a few people talk about what would really go down as far as how they would react. I've heard a lot of compelling arguments that they may surprise you and actually end up siding with the left in a lot of ways because the capitalist likely will not distinguish between them as much as they think they will. Like when a revolution takes place, that they will be surprised that they are put in a lot of equal stances with leftists and that the police are more or killing them and basically pushing them into areas they don't want to be in. that they kind of would assume that they're going to be treated a whole lot different. And the theory is that that wouldn't be the case. And they may ultimately become part of a proletariat movement.

It's just an idea I've heard of before that thought was interesting. I was wondering what your take was. I think it would depend entirely on what sparked the quote unquote revolution in part, right? If it was like the uprising of Black Lives Matter, like there was a moment last summer when like they were burning down police stations and Trump had to turn off all the lights in the white. white house and go to his bunker and the fences almost fell and you're like okay what the hell is going to happen now in that context for racial justice the reaction would be absolutely fucking brutal the police would team up with the fascist we saw that all throughout last summer and continuing beyond that so that's definitely true now is the revolution sparked by objectively and explicitly class matters

like you know capitalism in a desperate attempt to maintain control and climate collapse squeezing the workers for more and more, trying to get as much out of them as they can, pushing more and more old-time middle-class people into the working class and the working-class people into abject poverty of the lump and proletariat. And it's strictly on that level that people are starting to revolt. Maybe there's a higher chance. But again, so many variables come into it and so many other cultural sort of aesthetics will play a role in what side the right takes.

They still are law and order people. So a sort of revolutionary uprising that they would be sympathetic with against the government would have to be a very specific kind of uprising. And then the other point is with any revolution, there's the uprising part, there's the energy, there's that you've oppressed us for so long. We're burning down the fucking town, right? But that quickly can get co-opted or fizzle out. And so without leadership, which Lenin and Marx would stress over and over again, without revolutionary leadership that can give that sort of inco-operative, energy and rage a direction and sharpen into a spear that can organize and pursue specific goals, that energy is just going to peter out. And you can likely see it in that petering out,

fracturing and infighting and attacking, et cetera, and fascists taking advantage of that. So I think ultimately what would most likely happen in any sort of uprising or revolution, quote unquote, would be a three-way fight intensifying. So it's not that the fascists would side with the left, right? Or in some situations that the fascists would side with the state, but that it would become a three-way battle where there are those trying to maintain capitalism and the status quo, the fascist who want a white ethno state or militarize our borders or kill all the commies, and then the broad left who wants to like, I don't know, take care of people and make sure we have each other's back and build international solidarity.

Gotcha. Yeah, exactly. And especially in climate chaos, when you have mass migrations and, you know, borders being swamped by increasingly desperate people from the equatorial band. The left take is solidarity, internationalism, let's find a way to take care of people. The right's response, turn harder into fascism, militarize the border, build seven walls, and kill anybody who crosses this line in the dirt. So at that level, we have very little things in common. So I think in most cases, it won't be a situation where the right and the left broadly conceived team up in any reasonable or consistent way. I want to go with you, Jaron, but I want to say real quick. quick. I think the blue last matter crowd, all the people who are like very law and order

types, would be very surprised once the robot cops don't care about their stickers and their police. But go ahead, Jaron. That's kind of the theory. These two questions between the two Mike and Sterling's question, they're related. So the question of how can we get the workers and the capitalists to get along or whatever and, you know, will the far right side with the far left, both of these things can be related back to the greatest heist in U.S. history, which was convincing the working class to be right wing. Which, I mean, it's a hell of a hell of a heist.

And the thing is, it's like, I think at its root, no, you're not going to be able to get better working relationships between the working class and the capitalist because the capitalists shouldn't fucking exist, straight up. And part of the heist was convincing the working class that they are a capitalist. If you go to Red Town USA and go in a factory and ask if someone's a capitalist or a socialist, they're going to say a capitalist, even though they're a worker.

By definition, they're not a capitalist. You're a cog. When we actually define capitalism, when we talk about what capital is, it is an investment that is not a necessity that you expect to return from. And most people like Milton fucking Friedman want to say that that can only be related to excess money. or, you know, financial investments. But in my mind, capital is also when you pay your worker and expect them to come and to work the next day.

That's still a utilization of capital. So unless you have an absurd amount of money where you are just making money while you sleep off of assets to an egregious amount, or you are in charge of trying to bait people into coming to work every single day to an egregious amount, you are not a capitalist. So the idea that we could get the working class to get along with capitalists

is contradictory to me, because first they would have to understand how badly they're getting screwed. And then they wouldn't want the capitalist around. Which, I mean, if you look at the mid-century welfare state, when unions were actually a thing in the U.S. or even beyond that, like the 1860s, when unions would just go in and beat their boss with a bat,

which is far preferable you know we've gone I mean you get what's coming to you it's self-defense and anarchy does support self-defense so you know

how we've gotten from that to the working class wearing blue Lives Matter shirts for the police who protect bosses property before their family's lives there's no way that you can reconcile this. Yeah.

It's one of those things where you're trying to make sense of something that didn't even make sense for the beginning, so I guess that answers that. Go ahead, Brett, and then we'll go with Cosper. Yeah, I was just going to say this is where concepts like

the labor aristocracy come in with siphoning wealth from the global south up to the global north to create an extra strata within the working class that identifies more with the ruling class or the petty bourgeois strata than with the lower class,

the lumpen and certainly the poor. And then you have racism, anti-blackness, anti-communism, beaten to the heads of white working class people. So it's not just the dichotomy of the worker versus boss, but there's these other hierarchies that people psychologically subscribe to that make it very hard to collapse them into alliances. And whiteness has historically, all through America's history, been a defense of the ruling class

in that when the working class is being emiserated, they can still pit white workers. against non-white workers and give those white workers a sense of superiority on a hierarchy of race they have in their head. So all of those things continually come into play. We've seen it all through the last four years. We saw it last

summer and we'll continue to see it. And so that makes it very hard to build class solidarity because of the racism, of the nationalism and of the sort of super profits extracted from the global south and then used to pay off certain strata of the technically

working class. And then there's the whole petty bourgeois strata, which I think is really important and it's probably the class base of fascism. I think with like the January 6 riots and like these big pro-Trump turnouts over the last several years and fist fighting in the street. You do see some workers, reactionary workers, but like the base, the class thrust of those movements, especially if you look at the people who were at like January 6th, sure, there's like some welders and some like hot dog vendors. There's also like real estate moguls and at Navy admirals who are, retired and lots and lots of small business owners and that class especially in capitalist crisis

is more invested in staying where it is or identifying with the big bourgeoisie which it sees itself as having more an interest with than it is aligning with or siding with the lower strata of the working class or the racialized lump and proletariat or whatever so very very complicated what I have to say is more of a cap towards this revolution thing I think I think it could serve as a good one so if anyone has anything else to say yeah I'd say especially what Brett was just saying a good example of that remember the Trump boat parades yeah beautiful boaters yeah the motherfuckers that had the real nice boats just speeding around and just not giving a shit and

capsizing the small Trump supporters that had the fucking small boats and they kept sinking and like rescue efforts are trying to pull these people out of the water but like the large boat owners aren't giving a fuck they're just speeding by even faster this is a prime example yeah no the perfect metaphor those in Tifa what the fuck love it so I don't I don't want to cut Kaspur off but I will say it's like a small business owner personally, that thing that Ward just said is exactly what's happening.

Like, my marginal tax rate is ridiculously high and I get fucked because Jeff Bezos pays nothing. And even if we did work within the ostensible framework of capitalism and things just had to stay this way, which they don't, but even if it did, if he would pay something fair, even remotely fair. Not even the 90% that I want him taxed at. Maybe I wouldn't be in like a damn near 40% tax bracket. You know, I pay when they don't. They're the guys in the big boats just like trashing us. So yeah, when I see small business owners trending right wing or much less doing whatever Trump was, you know, you are actively screwing yourself. It's mind boggling. But anyway, I didn't want to cut Casper off.

It'll trickle down. Don't work. Ronald's like trickled on. Yeah, Cosper. No, like I said, okay, yeah. If everyone's done, I feel comfortable. Yeah?

Awesome. Okay. All I have to say really is that a lot of this talk, and when we start talking about revolution versus reformation can lead people to a large sense of capitalist realism

and thinking that they have to accept the things the way they are and stuff like that and people submit and people can't see a way out. And I guess what I would say is that the revolution is always here, is always already under your nose, and that it is enacted through every action that you take within the system. And once you start seeing yourself as an agent of change and not just the multiplicity of, you know, a commune or an organization, you can see the power that's within an individual actually. And that's important. You're not powerless. Every action you have has some effect based.

It's also important to remember A lot of us think Oh well revolution is not going to happen In my lifetime or you know That there is something that's been going around for a long time Revolution has been happening since the Soviets And it has not stopped Right now Cuba is still having a revolution

Nicaragua is still having a revolution There are so many revolutions happening Right in front of us We live during revolutionary times But we have to learn to look outside of our own borders Yeah and something that Brett's touched on in his podcast like with the impending climate chaos like we're going to see something in our lifetime here you know uh western leftists love to pretend that it's not going to happen

here anytime soon and so oh it's on it's up to us to educate the next generation but we're on the precipice of climate collapse and we have water wars coming like this is something we will see in our lifet times it's no longer a figment that's foregone in the future Yo, new war just dropped. What's up? I should rewatch Waterworld. That movie fucking ruled. I have to, too.

Is it good? It's so bad. It's terrible, but I like it. Everybody was shit on it when it was out. I never even saw it. You just watch it. It's good. Next movie, mate?

Yeah, buddy. Yeah. So it's almost cliche on the Marxist left to bring this quote up, but speaking about what everybody just was mentioning, you know, that Lenin quote of like, there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen. I really think you've got to take that to heart because things can turn around so quickly, even just looking at the Russian revolution, the speed of events towards the end was mind-boggling even to Lenin, and he was sort of on top of everything the whole time. And we see this happen over and over and over again.

So now we have a climate crisis imposing on us this incredible time constraint, but also emphasizing and intensifying every contradiction that already exists within capitalism. We saw that with the Great Recession, we saw it with the pandemic, but they were but preludes of the sort of pressure that climate change is going to exert on the contradictions that already exist in our capitalist society. So things are going, they're already happening faster. It feels like crises happen more often at quicker intervals, a couple climate crises piling up on one another, you know, in a single year is going to put a lot of stress on local

governments, it's going to make a lot of people angry. There's already this downward pressure on workers. The post-World War II boom that Western Europe and the U.S. specifically enjoyed was a very contingent situation that happened due to a very remarkable set of circumstances that no longer hold. Capitalism will never be able to achieve for the American worker, even with brutal exploitation imperialism, what it was able to from the 50s through the 90s. That era is dead and over. And more and more people are going to be scraping for less and less. And that is the manure out of which revolutions or at least uprisings grow. But here's the thing that I mentioned earlier and here's the threat.

We saw it last summer. Without leadership, without organization, you have the anger, you have the rage, you have the street action, the direct action, the burning down and the confrontation of police, fighting, burning down police stations, but you don't have any leadership. That energy doesn't go anywhere meaningful. And in fact, as we saw with Black Lives Matter, quickly, in lieu of any revolutionary leadership and in lieu of close connections with the labor movement, which has been consciously decimated by neoliberalism, it was co-opted by the Democratic Party very quickly. And even the demand for defund the police, which is ostensibly a very radical demand, is still a reorientation of the revolutionary energy

toward the policy-making apparatus. It is still a shift towards looking at the system that already exists and say, here's a policy proposal. Can we defund the police? Right? And so that in of itself, I think, at least in some segments of the corporate media and the Democratic Party,

was like a willful co-option. And then once they rode that wave to get into office at the national level, what did they do? They doubly funded the policy. police. They increased the amount of capital police and increased the funding to the police overall. So that was a co-option of

a seemingly radical demand and then a reversal of it under the pretense that what we were getting is actually something inherently progressive. And that's the real danger and they will continue to play that card because it's worked all the time historically. And so that really demands of us

to get our shit together organizationally. Little cadres, local organizations, even ostensibly national left-wing organizations, They're great, and they're all we can do right now. So join one, support them, donate to them, whatever. But we have to get our shit together on a national level and be able to team up with organized labor

and give real leadership to this revolutionary energy that's only going to increase in the coming decades. Without it, we're heading straight towards barbarism. What flavor of barbarism? I'm not sure, but straight towards barbarism and straight away from anything like socialism. Yeah, real quick, I saw a TikTok video the other day and somebody said something like Republicans are like the abusive boyfriend

and then the Democrats are the quote unquote nice guy who thinks he deserves sex because he's willing to take it away from the abusive boyfriend. But go ahead, Jaron. That's actually a pretty good comparison. And then he abuses you. What was I going to say? Oh, yeah, I mean, especially in regards to BLM, because just from a national standpoint, that was a very interesting thing to watch.

but I think relating it to like DSA and the new American white left wing, as I will call it, which some of these people are new to politics and activism and stuff like that. So there is a degree of novice here, which I recognize is at play. But the thing is, is America, especially with the amount of liberals that we have in this country, a lot of people like to play activist tourism, and that prevents a lot of meaningful organization. So, you know, when there's a bunch of shit going on in the news, when it's trendy to go to a protest or, you know, whatever and get it on your insta snaps, or, you know, if there's, if you hashtag BLM on your artist profile so you can get more song plays. And then, you know, you're not willing to carry that on consistently. And the idea that we don't have leaders is not entirely true.

There are some great fucking leaders here in the United States. but their message is detracted from primarily and I'm going to be very pointed here by white liberals who are being tourists in that world and I've heard it from a lot

of very prominent BIPAC activists is like look if you can't be there consistently and you want to be a tourist here's how you do it and you can still be effective stay in your own bubble fix the racism in your own bubble radicalize people in your own bubble

people that you see every day. Don't come into a poor neighborhood and try and like rough up the police with us. Because we're not trying to do that. We're trying to make some actual effective change here. We have organization. We understand our material conditions. You do not. So when you come in here and yell,

fuck the police at a cop's face, two blocks from where I live, what do you think is going to happen to me? Yeah. And that's one of those things that like, I think new leftists really need to understand DSA or not but I have seen it prominently in DSA is if you are interested in activism

look to people who understand their material conditions better than you and to people who have been involved longer and just shut your mouth and do the work it's a real thing it's the last thing I'll say about it though is like it is so hard for white people to not center themselves in every single event that happens. And that's part of why BLM seemed so unorganized. It's not that it wasn't organized.

It's that people went in there with good intentions, centered themselves, and made it unorganized. You saw that with Occupy, with Chaz, that sort of radical tourism and that hyper-individualism 100%. Yeah, I think that was extremely important. I also wanted to talk about, since he talked about the defund the police I'm sure everyone saw

this little non-binding bill that came across the was it the Senate of the House was it the one that called the Lord of Anarchist? No, maybe I didn't see that but they so Cory Booker said quote this is a gift talking about the animated speech

from Tommy Tuberville it's a non-binding amendment to punish local communities that would defund the police. So basically I think I think they could like stop funding communities that tried to cut the funding of their police station. And it passed 99 to zero every single Democrat voted on it. And Cory Booker said, I'm sure I will see no political ads attacking anyone here over defunding the police. And then he went on to talk about how he, you know, this was a great opportunity to, them so they could show that the Democrats are completely against the defund the police movement. And it's just like they were so with that until they got Biden in office.

Like it's insane what they do right in your face. And I mean, I think that's also a good segue into like really talking even more about the DSA, which I'm sure Cosper could help us a lot with. But like what the actual objective of the DSA is, which is not to turn people into revolutionaries or turn them into socialist but it's to grab those who are interested in those ideologies and pull them back before they go too far.

Would you have for what? I'd say especially touch on those last couple points that Sterling and Brett had like a prime example of just how ridiculous like these liberals and these activists tourists are is those same people that were out marching and protesting and saying

fuck the police and all cops or bastards last year. They're the same one's like watching the fucking Capitol Hill trials going like, oh, these cops are heroes. Like this should be praised and worshipped. That's what's so disappointing. Like as much as I rail on Democrats chasing after the mythical moderate Republican all the time, what's so frustrating about that whole defund the police situation is that it didn't even happen and Republicans are already acting like it did and then blaming all kinds of problems on it.

And the reaction has happened without the good thing even happening to begin with. And it's so fucking sickening. Yeah. They did the same thing with the, Green New Deal when Texas's private, shitty power grid collapsed under a little bit of snow and they said this is because of the

Green New Deal's like, never even passed anything close. We didn't have to, no climate legislation at all, but this is the Green New Deal's fault. Insanity. And also like Corey Booker saying I hope no, you know, we all vote, we all showed how much we love the police, 99 to zero, you know, we're punishing even

the thought of defunding the police. Republicans will still run the ads and their base will still 100% believe it. It means nothing to them. Yeah, they won zero Republicans with that bullshit. Exactly. I want to get into, we will definitely talk about the DSA, but I wanted to get into

this one of the little thing I had here, just to go back to addressing the changing the relations of production between workers and capitalists. So I have this paragraph I took from this piece, Why Socialism? By a guy named Albert Einstein. And that means name, Albert Einstein. Who?

Who? I haven't heard of him. He says, the owner of the means of production, is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. Private capital tends to become concentrated in a few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalism, partly because technological development and increasing division of labor encouraged a formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments

is an oligarchy of private capital, the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not, in fact, sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control directly or indirectly the main sources of information, press, radio, education.

It is thus extremely difficult and indeed, in most cases, quite impossible for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his plight. political rights. And I think that that's obviously like a great breakdown of like the inherent contradiction to capital and why you cannot reform it. But I also kind of wanted to pose a question. Like what does this say about the conservative claim that democracy leads to quote mob rule? Because it's like obviously not the case. Like democracy as we have it in a capital society can never lead to mob because the mob, aka the working classes, never actually have control of the system to begin with. Like it's just never actually possible for the working classes to control the direction

of their government, even in this so-called democratic system, because I guess it was Lenin who said, like, bourgeois democracy is a sham in so many words, but... Yeah, it's closer to mafia rule currently, where the rich at the top are using the police as their own fucking thugs and gangs to enforce their policies. If anything, it's the exact opposite. I mean, democracy, the lack of democracy leads to mob rule, because a mob just in itself insinuates that you're talking about a minority of, like, armed and authoritarian figures

that are trying to impose what they want. If you're referring to mob rule, that's not what you say when you're like the majority of the country wants this. You don't think of the majority of anything as a mob. That's not a mob. Mob is a small collective. Like, the lack of democracy is mob rule.

Have you talked to right wingers? They call that a cabal. Well, no, I think that when hiring were to say mob rule, they mean that it would be like the majority of people and they're using that to like feign sympathy or concern for minorities of some kind and they're thinking about themselves like they're thinking one that like if you had a democratic system that would lead to the majority ruling over the minority and you would think if you are gullible and believe right wingers you take them at their word that they're concerned about what would happen to whatever minorities are marginalized now

but in reality what they're worried about is being the victim of that and they think that they are the minority and they think they're like they think that they're going to be trampled on if there was ever like a real democracy. Well, you're describing exactly their problem with removing the electoral college system. Yeah, that's usually when it comes up. Quite literally that is, yeah, you don't actually want numbers to reflect public will. You want it to be sort of articulated through a lens of each state, which is an effort to keep all the states federated, which is eventually going to be a losing battle.

I'd be surprised that the U.S. didn't balkanize, to be honest. I just don't know when. I actually think balkanization is a very likely overall trajectory. But the idea of mob rule, it's really this aristocratic and fascist fear that left over from feudalism but still certainly in play under capitalism of regular people who these people genuinely see as less than them. They see us, us rabble, us working class people, especially non-white, poor people as like disgusting, like disgust. like disgust is a big sort of affect that reactionaries have and there's been studies that show that it's more pronounced in political reactionaries the the emotion of disgust than it is in other political stripes which i think is interesting but that's always been the fear of the far right

of aristocracies from the change from feudalism toward capitalism and from fascist ever since they genuinely believe themselves to be superior and they don't think that we are qualified or deserve to have control over our own lives you know our system are best placed in their hand. And talking about mob rule and using, you know, sort of Sterling's definition of a small, you know, cartel of people that exert power and violence to maintain rule, mob rule is what we have right now.

We have a handful of transnational corporations owning a handful of brutally violent imperialist governments headed by the U.S., dictating the political, economic, and social structures of the entire world and driving us all off an ecological cliff for their short-term profiteering. That's mob rule. That's criminal rule.

Democracy and regular people having control over their own lives is much more rational than this aristocratic, oligarchic rule from above and mixed with the utter irrationality of fascism and the utter unsustainability of capitalism. I think you just hit it on the head like when you're talking about the mob rule from the feudal times

that's exactly where it comes from. It's the feudal lords seeing the swaths of people coming to take control of their possessions and their castles and kingdoms and that's exactly what the capitalist think are going to happen like I'm going to show up to some redneck's fucking trailer

and you know half an acre of land and we're just going to show up and kick him off that like that they're picturing that that's where it comes from that's funny it just connected Hey look I've seen enough Fox News to know that Antifa wants to come to my cracker barrel and make it non-bionary

okay Cracker barrel is such a good name for that place, dude Imagine a non-binary cracker barrel Where you sat down and you're served by a boy and a catgirl suit Like that, that's what I want That is my goal I am co-opting Antifa for that Faced

Okay, so we can talk about the DSA now I know it seems like we've kind of like Push me a non-binary barrel I know it seems like we've totally gotten off track from talking about Democratic Socialism, but I think that all was generally to the point of why capitalism cannot be reformed and why Democratic Socialism is kind of

a failed endeavor from the outset. But before we get started, I got to bounce real quick. Sorry, guys. No problem. Well, thank you for joining this, man. Good to talk with you. It's good to see. See all soon. Have a good one. Later. See it.

Go ahead, Casper. I was just going to say, at least from the analysis that I'm doing, or like, let me rephrase that because that's just a philosophy jargon again. At least from the way that I see, the majority of the way that we interact with the world today is because of a hauntology of the things that have came prior to us. I mean, we see all of our interactions reciprocated in a different articulation

from feudalism like Brett is continuously hammering home. The majority of the way that our power structures are systemed, I mean, we have the divine right of kings re-articulating the capital accumulation. it just continually regurgitates itself. I think that's something capitalism is really good at is being a non-identity-bearing wielder of power. And when you attack capitalism,

it's not like attacking the king. You're attacking everything. And that's why it's kind of hard. Yeah, it's been able to put on this perverted mask of, it's not a single person, like a king or royalty, like attacking the Tsars. It's this ambiguous, like when you talk about the bourgeoisie or billionaires, people are like, well, who are you talking about exactly? And yeah, you can list a few, but it still doesn't encompass the entirety of the bourgeoisie class. You know, it's much more distorted now. And it makes it much more difficult to explain these views, especially to a politically uneducated country such as the United States, like trying to explain these. that we need to overthrow this class when you can't even thoroughly identify the entirety of that class

because it's been able to separate itself so much from the public knowledge. No, that's a really good point. I'll take this opportunity again to plug Matt Christman's growth stream because I listen to that podcast all the time. And he makes so many good points. And one of the things he's talking about a lot lately is exactly that board. and he's saying that, like, the genius, the evil genius of capitalism is to alienate people from who is exploiting them. Like, he always compares it to slavery and the founding of America and how the people that you were exploiting were right there in front of you. And they could see that you were exploiting them.

It was all very close together. Whereas now you don't ever see, like, no one is doing it to you. There's no particular person that is making your life miserable. It's just everything. And then even if you were to replace the person that is your boss or your landlord or whoever, is exploiting you, somebody else would just take that place. Like, that's the genius of it, is that you couldn't even have, like, it's very difficult to have a violent

rebel because the system is just on rails. It's just not going anywhere. Go ahead, Kaufman. And precisely because of that abstraction that's done, reformation is futile. Yeah. And it is this more abstract flow of,

it's the flow of capital. You know, if in feudal times you killed all the Romanovs, the line ended, and there's no more king, and then there's a crisis of legitimacy and then there's new space to open up for change. With capitalism, if you murdered all the billionaires in the United States, well, their kids would probably just become them or somebody else would pop up and it's a whack-a-mole. They would just fill that position because it's not really about individual capitalists. It's about the flow of

capital. And as long as that is flowing and being accumulated by somebody somewhere, the system itself is more or less safe and intact. It makes it much, much harder to overthrow than feudalism was, which was hard to overthrow. Yeah. So, Cosby, let's talk about the DSA if we could. I don't know if you have anything prepared, but I really didn't write much at all about the DSA. I know that that is like the foremost Democratic Socialist Party in America, obviously, and we definitely should talk about it if we're going to do an episode on Democratic Socialism.

The only thing I did even note here about the DSA was just a little fun fact that I found. The DSA was a big supporter of Israel up until fairly recently. See, yeah, this little excerpt I found. the DSA is opposed to Zionism and the current form of the state of Israel. Members view them as imperialist and a form of ethno state. The DSA formally supported Israel throughout much of its history, including socialist and progressive individuals and movements inside the state. And in 2018, Joanne Mort, former vice chair of the DSA, described the group as formerly having been, quote, the place to go on the left if you were a socialist and you were pro-Israel, which is pretty gross. What's up, Ward?

Yeah, I don't know too much about the DSA as well, but I did pull up a, Fun fact, from the 2019 Socialism Conference in Chicago, sponsored by the American leftist juggernauts, the DSA, Jacobin magazine, and Haymarket Books, included a anti-China panel that features speakers from two different organizations that are both bankrolled by the U.S. government's soft power arm, the National Endowment of Democracy, Ned, a group founded out of the Reagan CIA in the 1980s to grease the wheels of right-wing regime change and promote free markets across the planet. A bunch of fucking Reaganite.

Yeah, so if we want to see what actual internal mechanisms and what policies they are pushing for, that's a prime example. What did you say, Staling? I didn't hear you. I just said they're a bunch of fucking Reaganites. I mean, I got another fun

fact. They suck. It's a lot. It's like a lot. But yeah, Cosper, I need the T. Break it down. Give us a Kossper's corner if you have anything, please. Yeah, come on, come on. Asper's corner starts like this.

I was a young college student looking for a place to make friends of people who might have thought similar to me. And then it divulged into me being a part of the DSA in an attempt to restratify what that even means. And to try to break away from what the DSA actually is, which is just a reformist bend the knee to Democratic Party kind of articulation. And try to make it a really, you know, on its face like, a credit, join the DSA. And then it's actually like, okay, get in here and like do a fucking revolution. It's like just lying about what this is and then actually giving you a meet once you've got someone's attention. Because typically people who are interested in socialism in America do lean towards the DSA, at least at first. They think

that's safe. And from there, it was about pushing them onto the next step, you know, go in the right direction and not just like die here. As far as like connection to nationals and stuff like that. I've always hated nationals. My DSA operator without any connection through them on purpose because they are horrible in the connections that they have. Like Ward just mentioned with CIA speakers, I mean, any attempt to bend the need of a Democratic Party and kind of force your way through there is the one that the DSA is going to ask you to do. It's going to beg you to both provide once Bernie gets kicked out. We want health care. We want to defund the police. But anyway, let's vote for the guy who wrote the Obamacare bill.

and the fucking cop. Yeah, the 1994 crime bill. The one thing I did write about the DSA in here was that while the DSA may be a good introduction to socialism for liberals, it's not an organization that focuses on class consciousness and their actions can only extract concessions from the bourgeoisie at best, prolonging the exploitation of the working class. That's what I was going to say is that if anything you can view, if you just want it, very overarching. Look at the DSA is another arm of the Democratic Party meant to appease those who have

socialist elements and values within them basically blockading any actual change because they're trying. Yeah. And trying in quotes, of course. You can't see my fingers. Yeah. Functionally, it's co-optive. Yeah. Just on Obamacare, and I know

I've brought this up many times, and this is something I try to explain to liberals fucking constantly, we think, you know, we just have to keep moving in that direction. Like, Obamacare was better than the private market was before. Let me explain. Obamacare is a step to the right and a far step to the right. And the reason being is insurance in itself is kind of a leftist concept

in the sense of pulling risk so that everyone can kind of share an equal burden. It's kind of a leftist and socialist concept, you know, even though the way insurance companies carried or out is very different from what... It's very brutally capitalist. Yeah, but the problem with Obamacare and the reason it's to the right of the insurance industry, even the private market, is because the whole purpose of a risk pool, which is what insurance is. it's a risk pool. It's taking the most expensive citizens and the least expensive citizens and putting them in a pool together and then balancing that cost among them. So if you take Obamacare, which takes the most expensive out of the U.S. market and you put them into a government

subsidy, what happens is now you only have the most expensive. So the median of the most expensive is insane. The prices are crazy compared to what they should be. And then now you take the private market, which is now removed the most expensive. So if you think of what the risk pool should be now, it should have lowered the median cost because now it's only operating on the lower expensive citizens, but then the market didn't. It's only raised since then. So we've literally got the worst case scenario on both sides.

It's the exact opposite of moving to the left. Yeah. Yeah, because fundamentally it didn't challenge and in fact bolstered the role that insurance companies play in health care, which is fundamentally the role of profiteering middlemen who don't need to exist and who extract billions of dollars out of our health care system every year and put it in their pockets, which is why the U.S. has the most expensive health care system in the world, but the results are somewhere near 28th or 29th as far as outcomes in actual health because it's like everything in America has nothing to do with actually helping people

and making sure they get health care. It's about extracting as much profit for your shareholders as is economically possible. And so that will always result in a more expensive system and a less effective one, throwing millions of people to the curb. But Obamacare, instead of challenging that entire rotten structure, bolstered it in the early days because there was a tax if you didn't. So you actually had to sign up for private insurance, you know, through the marketplace ideally.

And if you didn't, you would be punished financially on your taxes. So it was just a born-to-fail system all around. And again, that whole setup just gives more ammunition to the right for pointing at the failure of government and giving an excuse to defund it to take money out of it and then privatize everything. I just wanted to follow Brett, you know, being someone who's very familiar with the insurance industry myself, you always hear people say things like, oh, well, you know, we hear that the insurance company and the healthcare industry is a racket and they have these secret deals going on behind closed doors and, you know, but is that really just a conspiracy? Is that really happening? and I say, yeah, for two reasons, that is a reality, and it's not behind closed doors. One, because most of your biggest insurance companies now, State Farm, Allstate, Progressive, you name it, even State Farm, which I don't know if most people know the difference between a regular insurance company and a mutual insurance company.

State Farm is a mutual insurance company. That means they don't necessarily have shareholders in the same sense other insurance companies do, so they're theoretically slightly more left than like Allstate. But the problem is, they do have. owners within the companies, they're just not publicly traded is all a mutual company is. And what they do is like, take State Farm, for example, they have a very large in-house... I don't know so much about State Farm, so I don't even give a fuck if they come at me now. But yes, I was trying to doxon.

I had a long career with State Farm. Anyway, they have a very large in-house finance team that what they do is they go out and look for large corporations that they think they can make a big profit on buying their shares. So even if State Farm doesn't sell shares, they buy shares. And them, as well as every other insurance company, has huge share ownerships in the healthcare industry. So they are quite literally eating off the profits of the healthcare industry. But that's the small piece of the pie. Because where they really make money off the racket is the fact that they make money on profit. So if they let the health care industry go insane, and I think we all know if you go into a

doctor and you broke your arm and you say, I don't have health insurance, he's like, okay, that's $10,000, $15,000. But if you do have health insurance, that's $38,000 to $50,000. Why does that actually matter? Why do the health, are the insurance companies not fight that? That's because your 10, 20% of profit off of that now $50,000 bill is huge for the insurance company's margins. They quite literally, the higher that the health care industry inflates the insurance market, the more profit. They're working on a percentage based. It's not a fixed profit. So the inflation then feeds into them exorbitant increases in profit.

So those are the two ways they directly profit in plain sight. Interesting. Nice. That was the insurance industry minute. Cosper, would you have? Let Ward go. Sterling got very much to insurance and I had a general

statement. All right. I know there's one thing I know a decent amount about. Yeah, no, that was awesome. All right. So I wanted to touch on something Brett mentioned, just real quick snippet that might have gone under the table of

the DSA being co-opted. A lot of us, especially Marces Lennon, we've probably seen the clips online of the DSA meetings where they get hyper-focused on pronouns and identity politics and like noise levels and we like to laugh and think that the DSA is being ridiculous and they're focusing on the wrong things but this is going to be probably my hot take of the night this is the definition of being co-opted the CIA made public a few years

ago their own fucking manual that was published in 1944 how to disrupt your workplace and how to disrupt union meetings and part of that was was diverting the talking points to things that didn't matter and things that weren't on topic and weren't on agenda. It would prevent progress. Exactly. And so they bring up these things. Like, it's almost textbook how they bring up these identity politics instead of actual

policy. And they derail the conversation. It becomes a whole laughing stock. And so I just wanted to bring that up. I was going to say, like, I don't think anybody could name an accomplishment of the DSA if you asked them. Like even like us on the left, like if you asked left, it's like, what's a major accomplishment of the DSA? But everyone has seen that viral video that I think you're talking about word where they're like everybody one after another was springing up points

of privilege and saying don't clap like snap or whatever. And it was because it became a meme. It was like exactly what the right makes fun of the left for. And it was just so stereotypical that that went viral. Whereas again, the DSA definitely does do stuff. They definitely do like accomplish something, but like nobody knows about those because that's the kind of stuff that went viral. But sorry, go ahead, Brett. Yeah, a couple points. One. is that there's, I think what Kaspur was alluding to, or just outright saying, is that there's this difference between the national DSA and, like, chapters. Chapters can be fairly autonomous. And so, especially for people trying to get into organizing, sometimes the DSA chapter

is all you have and they're doing good work in their community, you know, mutual aid, you know, tenant strikes, whatever it may be. And so we should make that delineation. It's like if you're trying to get into organizing and you just want to get your feet in the world of organizing and you live in a town or city where that's all that you have, it's not. It's not. necessarily a bad thing. It's kind of a chapter-by-chapter basis on some level. But getting back to your point about the, you know, the pronoun thing and the noise, see, now that could have been somebody planted, but more than likely, it could have just been something sincere that just happened and happened to be caught up and easily goes viral. In any case, it does serve the

same function, which is playing into the, you know, as Casper said earlier, the phantom people have in their heads about like blue-haired college student socialist who never really lived a real life and they're trying to like change everything because they're entitled and their millennials are in j w's man exactly it does play into that so whether it was accident or not it still played the final role and um there's nothing wrong with being inclusive for sure but it is a complete diversion from the actual tasks of an ostensibly socialist organization and i have a comedy podcast i i listen to quite a bit it's called your mom's house there's the stand-up comedian tom sigur and his wife i don't know it's just like when you

just want to sit back and listen to like stupid dick jokes it's funny um so i i like them and i listen to him for many years um especially when i'm like high in the shower you just want to like laugh yeah but recently this week um they brought that clip up because they do this clip show that play crazy clips from the internet and like comment on it and they just use it as a i mean these are like not really political people they don't talk about politics ever but then they played that exact thing that clip from that dsa meeting and just went in on socialist and sort of you know in this Joe Rogan ignorant-ass way. Like, this is what socialist want.

Like, this is so fucking silly. To a largely apolitical audience who doesn't really have conscious political commitments, you know, it just further dehumanizes and demonizes and makes a mockery of the entire socialist program. There's no attempt to, like, what is socialism? What do these people actually want? It gets reduced to green-haired college kids screaming about pronouns, thinking they know more than they do. They've never lived a real life or worked a real job. fuck them.

And that fucking, that does kneecap the broader, the broader movement. How do you, how do you deal with that? I'm not exactly sure, but we should be aware of it at least. Yeah, I mean, that's the big dilemma on the left, right? It's like you want to be inclusive. You want to care about marginalized people because that's what we're, that's why we're here. That's literally why we're here is because we care about marginalized people. And so you want to be inclusive to everybody.

But at the same time, like, if you spend all your time just debating whether or not you can clap or you have to snap at meetings, it's like you're never going to really get anything done. but yeah so it definitely and that and that has identity politics the weaponization of identity politics against those advocating anti-imperialist and class politics has been the innovation of capitalist ideology over the last decade they have taken progressive rhetoric and turned it into a battering ram against progressive policies so now the idf can be vegan and the you know under elizabeth warren's ideal situation the military and imperial apparatus

can be green and as long as Kamala Harris slash hashtag girl boss is elected it's a win for all girls and women of color this is ingenious it's ingenious what they've done back in you know the 30s and 40s they would just use racism to split people up and now they're using the language of anti-racism to serve the same functions of capitalist accumulation it is bonkers how they do it's it's it's I have to I have to sit back and applaud they're damn good at what they do let's go Sterling in the board I think Brett just condensed the entire point of this

whole episode which is the DSA and therefore the Democratic Socialist movement in this country really is just a tool that the capitalists have either created or co-opted so far you can't do anything about it they

are not doing anything as far as bringing socialism they are literally turned into a weapon against socialism. They have become such an identity politics over class consciousness that if you actually set down with most DSA members

and say you want to talk about class consciousness, they wouldn't even know where to start the fucking conversation. I just love that Brett was saying like how it's the co-opting of like identity politics where like especially us on the left like we had the meme for the

longest time where it was like the bomb with the pride flag painted on it and then this year we had like the first all gay like bomber crew you know holding the pride flag

and it's like it's so on the nose of just how they co-op this thing just for their own means and like even the the IDF soldier who's like the anime cat girl posts in TikToks

like or the the recent CIA commercial where it was like, you know, I have ADHD and I have an anxiety disorder, but still, I can be a gangster for the American ruling class. My favorite part about that was when she said, I do not have imposter syndrome, speaking from a fucking CIA agent, you know, that shit was so fucking whack. That's amazing. Somebody send me that. I haven't seen that. It's good. Look at how quick in the last couple of days the American media went from being very concerned about African women to the minerals underneath Afghanistan.

Like that narrative has shifted really quick. But go ahead, Sterling. Two points. One, how short was that was the window for Afghanistan? Because now, do you know what the media has moved on to by a much bigger scale that only fans is canceling porn on their service? That is the entire media ever. is right now is that only fans is removing all pornography

but just the way the liberals have responded to Afghanistan blows my fucking mind like they talk about moving Biden left they've all been moved to like fucking fascism overnight and let me read I want to read a comment from one of my friends

who was a progressive liberal who was like you know huge Bernie maybe even a little left of Bernie before Biden went into office and Biden posted that thing that said We went to Afghanistan almost 20 years ago with clear goals. Get those who attacked us on September 11th, which weren't there. But anyway, make sure Al-Qaeda could not use Afghanistan as a base to attack us again,

which they didn't do in the first place. Anyway, and then a Afghan woman who, you know, Facebook has a little translate thing. So if they type in Arabic, you can press the translate and get a loose idea what they were saying. So someone commented on it. It's an Afghan woman. And she says, all Americans comment with, I agree. And half of them don't know a country called Afghanistan in the first place.

Wherever I go, God is in the land of God. He is wearing blue, which I thought was beautiful and even poetic. To keep your head up like that, like no matter what's happening, this is the land of God. And we are with God, no matter what we're going through. And then my goddamn friend says this. And holy shit, we are not your babysitters. And he's replying to this woman. We are not your babysitters.

you should have fought them with the weapons we left behind and a decade of training. We are not your bodyguards. Go ahead and give you a thought. We can't even protect them from themselves. Why are you friends with this, dude? Oh, man. I feel like I need to fucking block him.

I go whoop his ass. All right, so we're getting pretty close to like our time frame that we set aside. Go ahead, Brett, sorry. Yeah, I could talk about Afghanistan all day. It's probably a different episode. But let me just get to like quick three. boom boom boom critiques as much time

as you want like we're just trying to like get you out of here in a reasonable amount of time like I'll do this all night which is fair because I got to get home to the kids and put my son to bed

but DSA I think three weaknesses and there's probably more but you know the ones that I just want to make sure I get out there there is no real ideological commitment

to a Marxist analysis of the situation and in a context in which you don't have coherent ideological focus that orientes your entire organization, fully equipped with political education, which is utterly necessary for any socialist or communist organization, you have an ideological default to liberalism.

If you make your tent so big and your ideological sort of demands so few, in a liberal capitalist society, it's just going to default to liberalism. And so you see that in the DSA. So that's one point. Two, their complete lack of analysis of an imperialism, it limits their ability to have a correct analysis of the situation. As we mentioned multiple times throughout this show, it limits what they're actually able to achieve, you know, even in the best case scenario, because they're still using the stolen wealth from the Global South, and they continue to shit on Global South movements that are trying their best to build socialism under the crushing weight of U.S.-led Western imperialism.

So you'll often see them shit on China, shit on Venezuela, even shit on Cuba. And it's like, that is not the role of a socialist organization. organization. The socialist organization's goal in America is to overthrow your own bourgeoisie or at least confront them so they can't keep their fucking boot on the neck of the global fucking south. Not to sit back in your little armchair and critique these other movements and these other countries where you've never been. You don't speak their language. Don't know jack shit about the conditions or the history of these countries, but they don't fit your a priori idea of what socialism should be. That's the definition of chauvinism. And then finally, and you know, this is my belief as a Marxist, if a revolution happens in the United States, it's going to be largely led by those who are most invested in real revolutionary transformation, which in the American context is going to be black and indigenous people, particularly black and indigenous women. That's not like the whole organization doesn't need to be black and indigenous women, but the leadership of a real socialist movement, a multiracial socialist movement, it needs to be spearheaded by those most invested

in real transformation. And when you have a political organization in the United States led or dominated primarily by white people, it's only the furthest it's going to be able to go. The best it's going to be able to achieve is something like the Bernie campaign, is progressive social democracy. Because a lot of those people are materially invested, not in radically transforming the society, but in just maybe softening it up and being more comfortable and more consistent in their place in the broader hierarchy, which is, of course,

dependent on imperialism as well. So black and indigenous leadership for a revolutionary organization, a legitimate coherent analysis of imperialism, and an ideological coherency that can focus and through political education inform a cadre or an organization, these are all things that I think the DSA lacks and it weakens what they're able to accomplish. That was entirely too many bars.

Like, I got goosebumps in the middle. That was so dope, so based. Brett, I wanted to ask you, would you agree with this take from our friend Jamie Penn, and she said this, and it blew my mind when she said, I was like pissed I'd never thought about myself. But would you agree that Black Last Matter is the closest thing we have to a Vanguard party in the U.S.? Yeah, I think the raw energy of Black Lives Matter and on the ground, if you look at who the leaders of the early Black Lives Matter movement, like in the streets, leading these organizations, not just like we created it, but like in the streets, it is often black women, which I was like, you know, it was very obvious. to me last summer that the revolutionary potential is in the black community in the poor communities in the indigenous communities but like black women and indigenous women specifically from standing rock to black lives matter they're the fucking vanguard we don't have the

organizational structures to to fully create what we would call technically a vanguard party right you have to organize into a party structure etc but as far as like the pre-party formations and the leaders of a future technical vanguard I think absolutely and I I think that is, that's fucking crucial. It's crucial. And we see what happens when we don't have it and we see the energy that when we do have it. And I think that there's mounting, you know, undeniable evidence that that just is the case. And we have to take that into consideration organizationally.

Oh, yeah. All right. So I did have, I had two last sections here that I feel like I could blow through in another five to ten minutes at the most. But I wanted to ask you, Brett, do you have that kind of time or you'd have to go? I got about, I got about ten more minutes. All right. Let me just blow through these real quick. Unless, hopefully nobody has anything else they need to say about the DSA, right?

We're good? They suck. We just both are there. I think we're good there. All right. So this was from an article on Jacobin by Adam J. Sacks, and it was called Why the Early German Socialists opposed the world's first modern welfare state. And this was news to me.

I just found out of this today. So Otto von Bismarck built a world's first welfare state, but his intent was to kill the rising workers movement. It's a reminder that socialists don't just want to use the welfare state to keep starvation at bay. We want to build a foundation for working. class emancipation. In 1871, a fishmonger from the seaside German town of Straussend renamed his pickled product, Bismarck Herrings, after the autocratic chancellor of the day, Audubon Bismarck. Crescently fitting, the name summed up the pioneering social welfare

legislation that Bismarck would push the following decade. Like Herring, the major staple of the German poor, the Chancellor's programs might have kept starvation at bay, but they fostered mere survival rather than empowerment for the country's vast working class. Bismarck's hand was forced by a rising German socialist Democratic Party, the SPD, the largest mass socialist party on the continent. Acting less out of benevolence than calculated malevolence, he constructed the world's first modern welfare state in a bid to steal the thunder from the workers' movement. The goal was to pair the iron fist of repression, mass bans on the party,

violent crackdowns on strikers, severe limits on voting rights, with the allure of ameliorating reform, accident, old age, and health insurance. This was the first of many, quote, white revolutions, a model of top-down caesaristic paternalism soon copied throughout the world. But the SPD didn't bite, voting time and again against Bismar's welfare legislation, the SPD provided an early reminder that socialists must not be tempted to surrender the vision of a free and democratic society and that bread is no trade for freedom. So I thought that was really cool. And you know, it made me think of like here in America,

like I'm actually surprised after reading that that the ruling class didn't allow us to have somebody like Bernie and some Medicare for all in order to stem the rising radicalization of people into leftism. But I guess that's just like we're so far gone and they are so greedy and they have so much of the institutions and the police and the military at their control that they didn't even feel the need to do that. Like they don't even feel threatened at all to do that. But go ahead, Brett. Yeah, so there's a lot to say here.

It's really, really important. And I always think about the exact same thing you just said, which is like, it makes them, if you are invested in capitalism and you have a high place in the bourgeoisie and you want to maintain that, the most rational thing you could possibly do is support social democracy that alleviates the tension, takes care of the worst off, it dissipates the rage, shows that the system can work, make some material difference in people's lives, and then you can continue to dominate and ravage the planet in the name of profits. But here's the thing, unlike after World War II, it's economically not viable. So even though they should do it, if they could do

it, the whole introduction of neoliberalism was in large part of reaction to the falling rates of profit throughout the 70s. The post-war World War II boom that Americans enjoyed, you know, After the Great Depression, there was FDR and the New Deal, but then in LBJ's great society, you know, that was in the midst of decolonial movements and civil rights movements. You have to alleviate that tension, so you do the great society. In FDR's time, you had the Bolshevik revolution, you had communists on the march across the world. The New Deal was an attempt to save capitalism and not to foster a Bolshevik-style revolution in the U.S. And there's this story about FDR on his deathbed.

I don't know if it's true, but even if it's false, it speaks to the same truth, which is asked on his death better, close to it, what was your greatest achievement? FDR said saving capitalism. Through the New Deal, through the institution of a social democracy, although blacks were excluded from that, which is important and later came out in the great society and the civil rights movement, but it was attempt to patch together the contradictions and there was enough sort of surplus, capital, and the ability to do so on behalf of the ruling class that they made it happen. Now, there was still a fascist coup that was planned by the business leaders that did not go through, like it could have taken multiple trajectories.

It went down the New Deal path. But they just don't have the capacity to do that anymore. They've now colonized the entire world. They've globalized the capitalist market. They've went to all the new frontiers. And unless you go into Mars or start mining asteroids for minerals, you don't have any more place to expand to. And so you can't pad the global north with social democracy like you could in the 50s and 60s.

And so they just can't do it. So I'm sure there's some elements of that. the bourgeoisie, which are always split and have their own political lines within the ruling class itself. But there's some probably people in the ruling class that see the rationale of like a Bernie Sanders style social democracy that still keeps their power and domination ultimately intact. But they just, I just don't think it's possible anymore. And I think that's the crucial point that I try to make in multiple ways throughout this episode. They can't do it anymore. And so now what do they have in lieu of being able to

create a real social democracy? What do they have to patch it up with state violence? So we're going to see more militarization of police, we're going to see robot dogs and drones, and we're going to see the physical presence of state violence and force to maintain order rather than tweaking the release valve of pressure

with social democracy and letting some of the steam blow off. I just don't think they can do it anymore. Yeah. All right, let me blow through this last section real quick. Just to, oh, sorry, it was going to say real quick, just because Brett said it, is that even the whole use of the

term robot dog is framing for the structure to be like, hey, these are cute and cuddly things. They, to try to abstract it from the actual situation that these are fucking robots being used by law enforcement instead of the whole nice, cuttely familiarization of what we have associated with dogs. Yeah, they're going to have a robot kindergartner's fucking mowing you down at riot protest. Yeah, it would make them. look like kids too they would do that yeah for sure right did did you vote in this last election just out of curiosity i did but the the way that i vote with my kids is that i always do on

election day to try to teach them civic responsibility and shit so it's kind of like this tradition that i have with my daughter where i take her to the polls every election and sort to do that and voted against trump or whatever but i'm at the point now and i was even at this point beforehand we're like as always say voting doesn't matter so like getting really working up about somebody who went in and tossed a vote into the ocean is illogical if you're arguing that voting doesn't really matter in the first place but i have increasingly been brought over and just on principle i'm going to never vote for a democrat again just on the principle that if enough of the left you know withholds their vote like we don't support either party that at least

they'll have to try to at least cater to left wing ship but if they're always going to be able to point at the republican who's always going to be a fucking loony tune fascist and say it's us or them and then all the left is like, well, I'm just voting for the lesser of two evil. Then now you've eliminated any reason why the Democrats need to take any of your concerns or policy proposals seriously. And we see them not doing it. We see them paying lip service and doing symbolic things, but never anything material because they take the quote unquote radical left for granted in the voting booth. And that's all they care about. So it's the mythical suburban moderate that they go after because those people actually sometimes vote Republican.

you know and so yeah what 100% agree absolutely talking to you online on Instagram Brett was the only reason I voted for Biden

my vote didn't get counted yeah it got like tossed out but like it was the only reason I was even convinced to do it because I was just going to vote for Gloria Larva you're still so proud

that your vote didn't get counted I'm so fucking happy that I'm actually a Biden voter but at the same time though and I do have to just gesture towards this is I understand people's sort of insanity

of four years of Trump people were driven I mean, we're coming off the summer of BLM protests and the country burning down and the pandemic. I do not blame any person who in that insane context is like anybody but this fucking piece of shit fascist, anybody at all. I can't really blame them. But looking forward, we can't keep playing that game. And ultimately, as I always- Trump runs in 2024.

Will you vote against him again? I don't think I will, to be honest. I think I'll just sit it out even still. Yeah. I'd rather Trump had won than Biden. I think Biden is a worst trajectory for the country. But, you know, I'm also accelerationist to art, but, you know, I see a much more viable path that way.

But I will say this. Obviously, I didn't vote for Biden. I voted for Howie Hawkins, which was as much of throwing my vote away as anything else. But I was proud to vote for Ossoff. And what was our other senator that took both? Warnock and Ossoff. That was pretty dope to see like them.

And then in the runoff, like actually went and take two Senate seats from the Republicans when they shouldn't have even got one of them. That was pretty dope. That felt cool. That felt like somewhat of an accomplishment, even though it's completely nothing like in the real world. But I did kind of have that feeling of like, oh, we did something. And I think that's kind of a lot of problem that liberals and progressive Democrats have is, you know, they go and do something that's honestly insignificant. and they feel like I did something. Cosper?

Yeah, I just think it's really weird that like 17 year old self-Cosper voted for Trump in opposition of Hillary, but then like I think it was 21 last year or something and I just, I caved and voted for Biden, which I think because of the circumstances that Brett just brought up, it kind of makes sense.

It like disabled me from even using like an appropriate view of being like, is this actually change or something like that? And it just becomes like just fucking something else, you know? and there is the argument which they're always going to use about climate change like Biden fucking sucks at climate change but I mean Trump only two policy things he really did was a huge tax cut for the rich and opening up millions of acres of public land for fossil fuel corporate extraction and so like there's a there's a part of me this like obsessive climate change part

of my brain that is like you know we got to do anything we can to not make things fucking worse because we're already, even the best case scenario is fucking terrible. And four more years of like climate denialism in the most historically responsible country for emissions, I think is like a suicidal death drive. And so it puts you at a weird position. But voting is never going to be the mechanism by which we really ultimately solve that problem. It's going to come through mass action. All right. Let me do this real quick. If you still have time, Brad, you got like two more minutes? Sure. All right,

cool. So just to make everybody angry for the last bit of the podcast. So When I was reading the Wikipedia page on Democratic Socialism, they had two sections, they had a section titled Views on Compatibility of Democracy and Socialism, and Socialism, and Socialism, and Socialism, and Socialism, and Socialism, and Socialism, and Socialist states that at one point were committed to the values of personal liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of association, but then found themselves clamping down such freedoms as they end up being viewed. as inconvenient or contrary toward their political or economic goals. The Chicago school economist Milton Friedman argued that, quote, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom. Sociologist Robert Nisbet, a philosophical conservative who began his career as a leftist, argued in 1978 that there is, quote, not a single free socialism to be found anywhere in the world. Neo-conservative Irving Crystal argued, quote, democratic socialism turns out to be an inherently

unstable compound, a contradiction in terms. Every social democratic party, once in power, soon finds itself changed. choosing at one point after another between the socialist society it aspires to and the liberal society that lathered it. Crystal added that, quote, socialist movements end up in a society where liberty is property of the state and is or is not doled out to its citizens along with other contingent benefits. Similarly, anti-communist academic Richard Pipes argued, quote, the merger of political and economic power implicit socialism greatly strengthens the ability of the state and its bureaucracy to control the population. Theoretically, this capacity need not be

exercise and need not lead to growing domination of the population by the state. In practice, such a tendency is virtually inevitable. For one thing, the socialization of the economy must lead to numerical growth of the bureaucracy required to administer it, and this process cannot fail to augment the power of the state. For another, socialism leads to a tug of war between the state, bent on enforcing its economic monopoly and the ordinary citizen equally determined to evade it. The result is repression and the creation of specialized repressive organs. And the last one was Italian left communist and Marxist Amadeo Bordeca. proudly defined himself as anti-democratic, believing himself to be following the tradition of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

That's not the right one. It's Trotsky. Bordeca's hostility to a democracy was unrelated to the Stalinist narrative of the single-party state. Indeed, he saw fascism and Stalinism as the culmination of bourgeois democracy. To Bordiga, democracy meant above all the manipulation of society as a formless mass. To this, he counterposed the dictatorship of the proletariat to be implemented by the communist. Party based on the principles and program enunciated in the Communist Manifesto. He often referred to the Spirit of Engels remark that, quote, On the eve of the revolution, all the forces of reaction will be against us under the banner of

pure democracy. Portiga opposed the idea of revolutionary theory being the product of a democratic process of pluralist views, believing that the Marxist perspective has the merit of underscoring the fact that, like all social formations, communism is above all about the expression of programmatic content. This enforces the fact that for Marxist, communism is not an ideal to be achieved, but a real movement born from the old society with a set of programmatic tasks. He also criticized

socialists that emphasize workplace democracy believing that quote, the hell of capitalism is the firm, not the fact that the firm has a boss. So I just wanted to piss everybody off real quick at the end there. Sorry. Two things. One, fucking ultras.

Isn't it interesting that the conservative whole theory of freedom is basically the theory of anarchism? Like everything they're like, oh, you should be free to do whatever the fuck you want. It's basically the anarchist ideology. Like, I've just always fun.

You're so lucky, Jaron's not here right now, buddy. You would tell you a new one. Basically, conservatives are basically anarchists that are just completely co-opted. And I'd argue that, according to Gramsci, that anarchy is a liberal theory. Oh. Now, that would have pissed off, Jared. Oh, yeah, absolutely. But no, like, when you're saying that, I just going to help but think of Parenti when he was quoting, like, Noam Chomsky saying, oh, the communist thugs that ride in on the back of the masses.

And it's like, no, no, what are you talking about? You're not neutral. It's like, and just the dissolution and the straw manning of communists where it's like, oh, we're hungry for power versus wanting the power to end hunger. you know, it's such a straw man and so undiolatical and so unmaterialist. Yeah. Yeah, Casper. I mean, as far as that goes,

why stop at people like Milton Friedman, Hayek, and, I mean, Shib Ortega at that point, why not go on to, like, McCarthy and Nixon and Goldwater, what have you? Why not look for, like, the real educated sources on these fucking value judgments and stuff? Yeah, I mean, if you're going to go with the criticism, government bad of socialism, then, you know, you could take anybody's, any random libertarian online.

All right. That's all I have. Brett, do you have any final takes on that last passage? I mean, yeah, there's just, there's so much to say. I mean, the whole definitions of democracy as being like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of markets. You know, you're loading your definition already to be sort of synonymous with capitalism and antisocialism. but at the end of the day also this ability to liberalize in the sense of freedom of speech

freedom of the press on behalf of like socialist states was fundamentally undermined by imperialist aggression and reaction from within and without so when you're talking about the formations that the socialist experiments took but you're completely excluding

the sort of reactionary and imperialist backlash that they had to face the entire time which radically distorts what you're able to do I mean, you're just, it's just pure ideology. You're just playing an ideological game. You're not being a serious scholar. But for Americans pumped full of anti-communism for decades and decades and generations,

this stuff just rolls in and out of the ear so easily and so smoothly and just taken on board so passively that it doesn't really matter. You can be, like I always say, like, if you want to defend capitalism and you want to be an anti-communist, you have no standards. The bar is below the ground. You can just say anything. at all. And enough people will be like, that's a respectable take. But if you're a Marxist, heaven forbid, you have to be an economist, a philosopher, a historian, an ecologist, you know, and you have to explain everything on every level just to be taken seriously, not even to be agreed with. And I think that's the ideological victory of anti-communism. And it infects even

and especially the left. Very well put. Yeah, I can't think of a better place to wrap it up than that. So with that being said, Brett, we'll let you go. We're going to do all our plugs in our normal wrap-up, but we'll let you go because I know you got, you know, to take care of your family and everything. But anything that you want to plug, I know your podcast are pretty small time, so we might want to, like, direct some of our listeners

to you. You want to plug your stuff there? Yeah, we have a little outlet called Rev. Left Radio. You can just Google it. No, everything I do is Revolutionary Left Radio.com. It has our flagship Rev. Left Radio, and then it has guerrilla history and red menace as well red menace focuses on political philosophy and theory

guerrilla history focuses on proletarian history rev left focuses whenever the fuck i'm interested in that week so uh definitely check that out and hey this has been an awesome time the time absolutely flew by i really appreciate being asked on it's an honor to speak with all of you um and let's do it again sometime this was honestly super super fun and i can't believe it took us this long to make happen we honestly cannot thank you enough thank you so much man this is fantastic thank you Yeah, I had so much fun hanging out. I said one thing, right before you go. Sure.

I was just going to say, I heard a lot about you, and, yeah, you're pretty damn good. I'm definitely checking out the podcast. Thanks, Kossper. I appreciate that. I thought I made Kossper happy. Yeah, that's an objective. It's so cool hanging out with you. Literally, thank you so goddamn much.

Like, this was so fun. I hope you really did have fun, too, and we can actually do this again. Because, I mean, you're just such a cool dude to hang out with and chop it up. I truly, like, even beyond, like, the podcast and getting, you know, a little bit of extra streams out of this, I just had so much fun hanging out. I just wanted to say that. I appreciate it. The love is mutual, and I'll come back on any time for any reason. You have my email.

Ward, did you have something real quick before he was going to go? I just wanted to say, like I said before, that this is absolutely surreal. Like, I know we've been on here for over two hours now, and it's, it still doesn't feel real to me sitting here with you. talking. You know, I've been such a fan for such a long time. I just never thought this moment would come. And here we are and I still can't believe it. Deeply humbling and disorienting. I appreciate it

in the best way. That's our fan one minute there. All right. Thanks again, Brett. Thanks, yeah. Thanks, everybody. Solidarity. Ward, I didn't mean to kill you with my joke about Brett being small time. I'm thinking about to die. I fucking lost it. I fucking lost it completely.

I did my best not to fucking cackle into the mic. Oh my fucking God I just think I can let Brett go And I'm making some kind of joke As it is expense, come on Perfect You guys want to do the plugs then?

Yeah All right, cool Stillie, you want to plug the Twitter? It's at turn leftist pod. How do you like that? Hell yeah. Get him. Crosper?

The shit I guess I can plug it right now is I can direct everyone over to my Patreon which is just Cosper It isn't necessarily charging for content but if you want to support me and doing the endeavors that I'm involving myself in, which is like thinking and going out and interviewing people and trying to do stuff like that, I would appreciate it. The majority of the posts, if not all of them that I'm going to post,

are going to be public. So even a follow would be beneficial. And I'm going to be posting stuff like articles. And right now I'm working on a piece on human rights is getting about 20 pages long that I've been putting a lot of effort into. So if I could receive any support in that field, I'd appreciate it greatly. And I love you all. I'm happy to be back. It's so good to have you back.

That's patreon.com slash C-O-S-P-E-R underscore. If you want to find them on Patreon. Sorry, if you want to find them on Patreon. Speaking of misdrendering Cosper, I wanted to mention how, Ward, you did a fantastic job being the host last week, with the one exception of just, you know, using the wrong pronouns for Cosper,

but I also wanted to use that as a good example of how cool Cosper is about it and to counter the right-wing narrative that you're going to get, like, canceled or anything bad is going to happen to you if you accidentally misgender somebody. It's like, no. As long as you're doing it in good faith, like you just make a mistake, nobody usually

fucking cares. It's when you are an asshole and you start bringing out the Apache attack helicopter bullshit, like that fucking tired-ass joke where you intentionally misgender people to try and trigger them because you're a fucking dickhead. That's when you run into a problem. So as long as you just be a decent person, you don't be a fucking asshole, you don't have to worry about cancel culture. That just drives me nuts.

But yeah, that's another rant I could go on, definitely. That being said, I generally do feel fucking terrible about it. I didn't even realize that I did it. We were so drunk by that point. You were saying they, at the beginning of the episode, and then by the end, we were fucking tanked. Yeah, I will. I mean, that's the idea.

Like, you definitely know better. It's not like you were trying to be a dick or anything. I will say that even our fans that were present for the Banana Island episode commented in the Discord afterwards how much I was drinking. Because if any of the listeners here do not understand, I drink heavily every episode. And we applaud you for it. I'm 10 beers deep on this one.

Sorry, Casper, go ahead. Damn. No, all I was going to say was it a... Don't worry about it. I've already assassinated Ward's children and stuff like that. So, you know, we handled it. No, I'm fucking with you. Lovely Ward.

Obviously, I know the person you are and who, like, just I know who you are. There's no offense taken at all. And plus, it's like a tip of the hab to me being imperceptible. Thank you. I love you too. All right. I'll go ahead and plug my Instagram at millennial leftists, common spelling, no underscore. And if you do want to follow me on Twitter, it's at Ward Lolly on Twitter. You can see me just trying to get attention from people that I appreciate.

That's all I really do on there. Yeah, it's W-A-R-D-L-A-W-L-E-Y. And then for Jaron, I'll plug his website. That's J-A-R-O-N-P-A-M-M-A-N dot com, Jaron-P-R-R-M-M-A-N-R-R-R-M. And if you want to subscribe to our Patreon, we've been reading through his book, The Politics of Fear, and having not only reading episodes where we read the book out loud, but then also discussions after each chapter. And they've been going really well. I've been really having a good time doing that with him. Go ahead, Ward.

I also feel like for our listeners, Mike, that you need to address why you were missing last week since you went into hiding. But now you are back. I really, like, when you guys did that episode, I was, okay, so I'll say, I was very excited to see. see what you guys did if I wasn't on an episode because I wanted to see what you guys came up with. And when you told me that I was going to have some major backpedaling to do, I was legit afraid that you said something really controversial about like China and I was really going to have to explain myself about some kind of like hot take that I have somewhere. But no, the Bay Area 415 joke is, it's just hilarious.

Yeah, I definitely, I tried to go after Bay Area 415 for some reason, sure. Whatever. The whole thing was that he was receiving death threats that you felt that you need to go into hiding as well. Oh, I thought you were trying to say that like I was the one sending him death threats and that's why I needed to go into hiding. I didn't really even get the joke then. Sorry. My bad. No worries. No, but in all reality, I went on vacation with my family and I went to an amusement park and I got to meet up with one of our Patreon subscribers, Blackwater janitor. I got to meet up with him and we had a good old time kicking it and we had a couple beers together and we shot the shit about politics and yeah, he was super cool. Really nice guy. I was so glad to meet him and he's actually going to be starting a podcast with another conversation. right in their discord. And so when they get that roll in, we will definitely promote that. Gentlemen, I got to, and Casper, I got a roll. Gentlemen, and

Cosper, I'll peace out. I'll see you. All right. All right. All right. Well, see you guys. Thanks very much. Peace. See you.