The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1257: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 12 - Marx Pt. 1 w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: August 24, 2025

71 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series on the subject of Continental Philosophy, which focuses on history, culture, and society. In this episode Thomas talks about Karl Marx.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dunebeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunebiog, Cush Farage. If you want to get the show early and ad-free, head on over to the piquinez Show.com. There you can choose from where you wish to support me. Now listen very carefully. I've had some people ask me about this, even though I think on the last ad I stated it pretty clearly. If you want an RSS feed, you're going to have to subscribe through substack or through Patreon. You can also subscribe on my website, which is right there, Gumroad, and what's the other one? Subscribe Star. And if you do that, you will get access to the audio file. So head on over to the piccunioness show.com. You'll see all the ways that you can support me there. And I just want to

thank everyone. It's because of you that I can put out the amount of material that I do. I can do what I'm doing with Dr. Johnson on 200 years together and everything else. The things that Thomas and I are doing together on continental philosophy. It's all because of you. And yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank you enough. So thank you. The Pekingona Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano Show. Thomas is back. And we're We are going to, Thomas is going to talk about one of everybody's favorite people in history in the last couple hundred years. So, go ahead, Thomas.

I want to talk about Karl Marx and Marxism. You know, the 20th century, there was a conceptual dialogue with Marxist feminism that really can't be overstated. And virtually nobody understands Marx. Okay. Marxisms invoked as this polemical device to describe the ideology of the managerial state which is this kind of post-1968 secular humanism

and you know this this kind of ad hoc ideological pastiche that's invoked for expediency to kind of play populations off against each other it's really kind of a hollow core but what it's not is it's not Marxist like people have this idea that Marxism is a more extreme version of liberalism or that it's some sort of egalitarian ethos it's none of those

things and this isn't just trivia or some sort of pedantic interest I curated because I deal a lot and political theory in my research, it's essential to understanding the 20th century, and it's essential to understanding the configuration of globalism and why the sort of dialogue around nascent globalism and, you know, was characterized by the sort of ideological pulse stars that it was. You know, I can tell, I'm not just saying things. I can tell by talking. to people even fairly intelligent people you know not not just polemicists who say ridiculous things like mark levin or whatever i can tell they've never read karl marx because of the way they describe marxism or communism when it existed or some of these

people they'll say with a straight face that somebody like kamala harris is a communist or that oh you know university professors are all marks that betrays a fundamental ignorance of what the intellectual culture is of the establishment. Okay. One of the only people who's written specifically on this is Paul Gottfried. I think, I mean, obviously, apart ways with Godfrey on a lot of subjects and positions. But he's got a very deep knowledge of political theory and especially of practice. as it developed in the 20th century.

And he's written extensively on the fact that the Cold War was basically, it was left-wingers and liberals who were, it was left-winger's and Marxist schismatics against Stalinists. That's what it was. They came, both of whom came to view Orthodox Marxist Leninism as this kind of quasi-fascistic reactionary tendency. There was also an aspect of viewing it as a kind of oriental despotism. I mean, that was more on the conservative side, or what passes for conservatism in America.

But, you know, there's a provincialism to American liberals as well that IDAR is even more pronounced than their nominal opponents on the right. And especially in the later phase of the Cold War, that was a subtext of their objection to, you know, the governments of the East Block and things, although they didn't come out and say it. That's not just me reading into, you know, what the proponents of this position said without cause.

it's very much there. So it's as misguided to call American liberals Marxists as it would be to say that somebody like George W. Bush is a fascist. It's at odds with reality. And more than that, you know, it's conceptually illiterate on, you know, the way that globalism developed. You know, and I'm always making the point. And I'm not sure people fully grasp this.

there's only one mode of government these days that there's not competing modes of statecraft there's only globalism and the resistance and within globalism obviously locally there in constellations of power de jure and de facto they'll hold different cultural values and things but that's not what the color was about we were talking about two radically different ways of configuring what was to be the planetary order okay that's done pretty much every state and wespalian states are ceasing to exist to make no mistake but such that they do still exist and there'll always be some kind of devolved localism just by necessity no matter how much you know information technology integrates processes and structures but there's only with the

exception to outliers like North Korea which is this unfortunate garrison state that happens to border China and the Russian Federation or these kinds of one-off kingdoms or emirates there's only one form of government you know the Russian Federation obviously is very much on enemy footing with America and vice versa but the Redmond Federation is not that's a radically different kind of government

it's not run by a party state there's not a political bureau that enforces ideology from the top down there's not some centrally planned there's not some central planning authority that you know stands in for private ownership of productive mechanisms

You know, and the fact that people don't seem to fully understand this is a testament to there being a basic, you know, kind of kind of, just lack of understanding in total. And, you know, to bring it home, what was based, one of the many things that was basically unprecedented in the 20th century, I can't think. think of another historical paradigm wherein there's a singular ideology that at planetary scale is essentially dictating all political activity either in the service of its praxis or in opposition to it people can invoke things like the roman empire but that wasn't remotely planetary And the idea of Rome was more sort of an acceptance of this configuration of power. There wasn't some theory of human life that underlay the Roman Empire. You know, and you can take the ascendancy of Islam was remarkable.

The scale and scope of its success, which was attained rapidly. But again, that was not planetary scale and, you know, sectarian wars are kind of their own thing the entire the entire planet wasn't in dialogue with islam you know there was darrell islam and there was its enemies you know so i don't really there's anything comparable you catch them in the corner of your eye distinctive by design they move you even before you drive the new cooper plug-in hybrid range for mentor leon and Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Coopera and discover our latest offers.

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savour sumptuous farm-fresh dining. Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the Wild Atlantic Surounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dunebeg. Search Trump Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Farage. And the Jacob and Revolution, it was so violent and so disruptive.

that purely ideological cycle of violence in the source of revolutionary cause, it was essentially done after a decade. And what followed was, uh, you know, this Napoleonic crusade, but that, uh, that was something entirely different. You know, the revolutionary fervor that had animated the receding revolutionary form a lot of those energies were sublimated into the napoleonic cause but it was something categorically different you know so the way to understand this is what what is Marxism it's not merely a political ideology it presented itself as a comprehensive account of human life and not only human beings and way they lived their lives and their psychological makeup, but of all of nature.

And the Marxist theory of history, it's not just the theory of the modern age, or it's not just the history of capitalism. It literally claims to be providing an account of man's entire existence. from the time when humans truly became human and anatomical and behavioral terms to the present and it claims to be able to discern in categorical terms what the future will look like

based upon a science of socialism and a science of history whereby I, you know, through rational means and through a consistent methodology, all uncertainties about, you know, human political and social life and even biological phenomena can be identified and largely predicted. okay and it it's proponents marks himself and it's later and and subsequent accolades of his ideology they acknowledge that it wasn't possible to achieve this sort of predictive augury yet but they fully believe that this is going to become possible you know and people generally don't understand that that's a totality of it. Secondly, Marx wasn't really issuing a moral condemnation of capitalism. There is a value-centric discussion of the then-present paradigm and why it's, you know, wrong-headed and a social ill to perpetuate those state institutions in the Marxist view because this is violated with the dignity of workers and in the Marxist paradigm labor is really the end-all-be-old human life but like another

misnomer is this idea that Marxists were moralists who are who are mad about capitalism because supposedly it's racist or it's it's harmful to women or it's you know it promotes inequalities Marxists didn't care about any of that Marxist didn't care about racism now mind you they might have looked at certain paradigms locally or at wider scale and said, okay, these people are being uniquely pressured by capitalism because within the sociology of that failing system, they're being targeted for hostility. They will probably be the logical population to target as our cadre, but Marxists didn't sit around saying,

saying the gravest evil ever is racism and capitalism is bad because it's racist. Their take was that these identitarian characteristics that people think are so important aren't actually important and it's this artificial contrivance. So we need to get to the point where people realize that these things don't matter. They're the last people, Marxists, who are going to say we need a black human History Month because black people are uniquely oppressed in history. That's that that's bourgeois morality. That's a way of dividing the body politic or trying to shore up a sort of moral credibility within a failing system.

You know, so when people look at BLM or something, say, well, that's Marxist or when they say that affirmative action, that's Marxist, it's not at all. You know, not mind you, Marxist don't object to these things. things for legitimate reasons or for accurate reasons, but that's not, that's not something they promulgate, you know, which is why the Soviet Union and the DDR and communist Poland, they refused to acknowledge the purported victim, quote, a European jury. They said, why, why is Jewish identity matter? They said, we lost 30 million people, fighting the fascists. You know, we're not, we're not, we're not going to single out some, some contrived sectarian identity and say these people are the victims of fascism. Why,

why do we care about that? You know, and I mean, that speaks for itself, okay? It wasn't because everybody's anti-Semitic or whatever the current rationale is for why the Warsaw Pact proceeded that way. It's because in a lot of ways the Soviet Union and its satellites were in fact very orthodox Marxists. I know that there's those who would object to that, particularly in left revisionist academic, but that's a discussion for another day. But this is important because, again, these kinds of curated moral paradigms about the alleged victimization of discrete populations that's such an essential characteristic of therapeutic liberalism you know that they must be acknowledged that's not remotely a Marxist priority

they view it as nonsense um now the Marxist treatment of capitalism the reason why it's capitalist features are emphasized and make no mistake capitalism and the marst's paradigm it's it describes a discrete phase of historical development where there's very specific sociological tendencies extant as well as labor and production a schema that are historically contingent they're not talking about capitalism in the way like a neoliberal economist does or in the way they describe it to people in high school civics class. You know, and they're not, Marxists aren't really talking about doing business.

Okay. The Marxian contention is that the economy, in any given era, it's basically the kind of distilled organic essence of the society that created it. And therefore, to grasp the essential features of the economy in any given epoch

in that way you understand the most relevant and the most potent facts about that society. Okay, so Marx's analysis of the then-present and what Marx is considered to be late modernity, you know, the 19th, and 21st centuries, is essentially organizing production and productive means and sociological structures around a certain theory of value, which is at odds in the Marxian view with what's instinctive to human beings and what can entail something approaching equity.

Okay. His account of the way that history transitions from past to future, it's wholly dependent on dialectical materialism. And the depth to which this is existentially significant is something I think is understating. even in a lot of contemporary texts that otherwise grasped the theory in praxis pretty well. Ready for huge savings? We'll mark your calendars from November 28 to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back.

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economic conditions in the Marxian worldview or body of theory are quite literally the still the essence of every relevant aspect of that society to human life, not just to political affairs. You know, and Marx's claim, the way he fleshed this out was he said, look, the study of man and must reflect mankind as he really is, you know, not based on an ideal conception of him or of his presumed potentialities or what constitutes the good in some abstract sense um you know and he also considered destructive to contemplate some pristine natural man even as a thought experiment you know he said at base what empirical man is he's primarily like a living organism that's essentially a biological machine right he consumes food he needs clothing, he needs shelter, he needs fuel. So at base, human life is, is exclusively oriented around

and towards the compulsion to find or to produce these things. You know, man before history or before man truly became man, which demarc to the course as a biological accident. You know, there's God didn't create these things. Once upon a time, you know anatomically if not behaviorally modern humans they might have survived simply by using things they could find

or kill or gather but at some point increase in population or shortages or pressures from predatory animals or predatory hominids

it forced them to produce their own necessities and find a way to make things. And this is what distinguishes man from the beasts. The singular defining characteristic of humans and what separates them from animals in the Marxist paradigm is to get the capacity for conscious production,

not rationality, not political order, not the capacity to love, not the ability to produce art. It's simply the capacity for conscious production. Now, to be sure, you can find animals who produce primitive tools or insects who devise structures, but that's purely instinctive. It's not consciously productive. Okay. And man, by way of the same psychological mechanism that facilitates conscious production,

he can contemplate the object of his labor. okay so where man you know and again because all there is is human life and the Marxist paradigm the only thing that gives life value is man's ability to contemplate the value of his labor and of itself and say I can build this house or I can take these mammoth bones and make a weapon or you know I can uh or a woman saying you know I can I can make clothes out of this animal hide. You know, and that's essential not just the human psychic health and social stability, but that's literally the essence of what life is.

You know, it's not feeling good about yourself as a black person. It's not feeling fulfilled in your relationships. It's not like being the best Frenchman or white person or Muslim or or or or, Catholic that you can be. It's literally this ability to contemplate the finished product of your labor and

to live as a man is for some acknowledgement to be rendered to that process. So once you remove that from people, you're turning people into animals essentially. And that's also the reason why slavery is

insidious in the Marxist paradigm. Now mind you, Marxist would say slavery was an essential aspect of economic development and the historical process, but they'd also say it's not evil to enslave people because then they're not free to supposedly carry out this agency that they all have or whatever. It's because you're turning man into an animal by removing from him the power to consciously produce and more significantly contemplate the future product of his labor and take pride and state of in that. Okay. Now, especially to younger people, this probably sounds very strange,

and it is objectively reductionist, but the degree to which during the second industrial age, life was dominated by this kind of rote and dangerous and difficult labor, that really can't be overstated. And not only was it out of welfare state but there wasn't plenty like here in 2025 despite what people say and don't get me wrong a homeless people most of whom are addicted and are mentally ill admittedly being homeless sucks and i can attest to that because i've been homeless but you can basically find free stuff in any big american city or metro area like you're not you're not going to die a starvation You might die from violence or from drugs or from illness.

You're not going to literally starve to death. Well, that's a recent innovation. You know, in 1840, if you lived in some London slum, there's a good chance you lived in a shanty where literally it was a floor made of dirt. if your wife managed to survive childbirth she probably wasn't going to live much beyond 40 in part because the error was poisonous your kids were at constant risk of death

until they reached about seven or eight years old you would be working 13 or 15 hours a day in some factory setting doing a rote task over and over and over and over and over again. And if your body failed you, or if you got too old, or if you broke a limb, or if you, like, hit your fingers chopped off, you were going to starve to death. Nobody's going to hire a cripple or a broken down old man or a guy who's, you know,

got a tubercular cough or whose liver's failing because it was alcoholism. You're just going to die. You know, maybe there'll be some poorhouse charity that'll have mercy on. you and feed you once every two days or maybe some churchman will you know occasionally um you know feed your children a slice of bread or something but your life and your death literally orbited around your ability to labor and sell your labor to a producer you know so looking at it's hard to see outside of the historical moment for anybody but in the case of Marx and Engels and we'll get into

Engels next episode this wasn't speculative really I mean what they extrapolated from it was a sweeping conclusion that that couldn't be substantiated to start what they said by a scientific methodology but But what they were describing, the aspects of the human condition and political and social life, that they considered to be absolutely paramount, these things were dictating the terms of human existence, day-a-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute. And that has got to be acknowledged. you know um so in other words to bring it back the marxist doctrine of productive force determinism and the primacy of production it rests in the belief that it was the pressure of material needs you know the need for food the need for fuel the need for things to consume the need for shelter clothing

the production of these things that's what forced man upward and made him human. Okay. It wasn't his mind. You know, this, these intellectual capacities were curated by this material need to produce. Okay. And that's what continues to press man onward and upward. And this is why, again, Marxists don't condemn the historical process or say see slavery is evil, in some terms, it's evil. Or industrial. labor and his era was evil because man is transcending his limitations in this admittedly brutal historical process whereby he develops knowledge of technology and technological processes which in turn produce more plenty which in turn extend human life which in turn facilitate

greater and greater um you know horizon of production and activity. It's actually a very, very, very brutal view of the world. There's nothing soft about it or liberal about it or humanizing. One of the things that's sinister about it is it's incredibly dehumanizing. It basically causes, it basically says that, you know, the things that most people in a capitalist society would value are a weakness. Ready for huge savings, we'll mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back.

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Volkswagen Financial Services Ireland Limited Trading as Cooper Financial Services is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland And now this is over the nation hamshare. It's leargoal to goa and not the Gereena in Oandun, and leander Gala to give the

father to Gawl to Deirin. In Ergird, we're dig tour in one-in-voin-ha with funnive-in-voin-va. There's oatho electracus, on as to fide with

Gatch Talach, Gnall, Gnall and Pobble tariffa in Tashdie. There's era of Coochduagin, full of Nismole in Ergaret Pongaii. You know, I mean, it should be clear to anybody who reads about life in the DDR or the Soviet Union or Communist Poland.

I mean, that's one of the things that's corny is like Kamala Huris is a Marxist, or like this pink-eared HR lady used 400 pounds as a Marxist. It's like these people would be eaten alive in a Marxist society. you know or they'd be viewed as degenerates who uh were useless eaters and they'd be condemned basically by everybody you know like don't get make no mistake there's nothing cool or laudable about some policemen and some Stalinist state thinking that you know owing to his revolutionary credentials the fact he dropped

bodies in the revolution entitles him to decide who lives and who dies because that's fucked up But what that's not is some soft liberal perspective or personality that's being curated. You know, and of course, the conditions of production in any given epoch, that's what determines prevailing property relations. You know, we're not talking, and Marxists weren't talking about the abstract difference of property. they're not talking about personal things you own or you know individual people in some you know individuated way being able to accrue more stores of things than other people we're talking about who has actual access to productive means and who is prevented from acquiring it so for example under a feudal system which endured for a really long time and Marx actually had a

fairly interesting account of why this is which people like Werner Sombard actually shared but under feudalism for example you have lords who possess land and they have rights to other properties such as the commodities produced by that land and the people who work that land are serfs who are tied to that parcel and serfs they're they're legally precluded from owning property like even a serf who got manumitted and somehow i mean maybe he was a hero with some religious war or something let's say however unlikely this is this former serf he got some you know military title of lesser nobility or something okay he still wouldn't be able to go back and buy that parcel

no matter how much gold he could come up with, okay? But the thing about the feudal arrangement, and one of the reasons why it endorsed for so long, and why there weren't catastrophic pressures that destroyed it, it's because there's a natural interdependence in that

system. There's far, far less alienation. You know, you're almost related to the Lord who owns the land that you till if you're a surf, you know, and odds are your families lived on that land for generations. And the Lord, unless he had no progeny or something, odds are it's the same thing with him. And in time of war, he's going to need able-bodied men to fill out the ranks

of his army. You know, if we come under attack, we're going to have to work together to offend off those who would slaughter us if I need justice because another man either of my class and station or of a higher cast and station does violence to near my family I've got to approach you know the Lord of the Manor and appeal him for justice you know and there's always some kind of accountability we were you talking about the sort of direct relationships between people, even if they're grossly unequal and even if they're not born of warm and spontaneous intentional relationships. You know, you can't have people under these conditions being totally at odds of one another, otherwise the system doesn't work.

Okay, there's got to be a basic give and take, even if it arrives from a position a totally unequal footing with respect to station. you know um and marfs also makes the point too that you know the primacy of money really didn't exist until later modernity because yeah in a feudal system you basically only use money as a you know a a symbolic indicator of uh of uh of a of a of a of a of a of a of a of a of a of a of a of a a fungible commodity, you know, it's because it's not possible, you know, to convey, you know, to pick up, attract a land and convey it to representative of somebody purchasing it, for example, you know. Well, would that, can I interrupt for a second?

Yeah, go ahead. Would that be why competition was so looked down upon? Because competition, competition would raise prices. It would make profit. Now you're putting profit above everything. yeah that's big part of it and that's also too why i mean bernher somber gets into that like the when uh i mean sombert generally agrees of spangler the advent of double-entry bookkeeping and the abstraction of profits from the loci of production you know that changed everything and it created

this it created this catastrophic tension between this between the town and the country yeah that's definitely a big part of it but it's also like we're talking about how to rent the other day as a statecraft became more and more scaled money became more and more important you know and that meant that there was perverse incentives that kind of prioritized money over what there before had been the metric of wealth which was inexplicably tied to production so yeah it's all of those things but um marks is the key takeaway from marks is that like marks acts and we'll get to this this gets a bit complicated but the marx's viewpoint is that Marx refers to the science of economics

the purported science of economics is ideology because he said that all it is is that he said what it is is people viewing capitalist relationships of production and labor and the preeminence of money and declaring that these are perennial things. And even if the paradigm changes a bit, he said people like Adam Smith or like Edmund Burke, what they were saying is that these variables are constant for all time. It's just that the way they're symbolized and the scale and complexity of the way they interact with one another and the relative significance, of each variable might change, but these things are constant. And Marx's all point is no, none of these things are constant.

And even money is a recent innovation. Because again, Marx's theory, it essentially spans 40,000 years. Okay. So it's like, okay, well, for 33,000 years, there wasn't money. You know, say you're telling me this is a permanent feature of human life. And again, to him, human life isn't politics or the ability to live. love your children or, you know, the impulse to glorify God. It's the ability to contemplate production and the finished result of that production

and to remove objects from one sensory environment and convert them into utile objects. You know, so yeah, and we'll get more into that as we go on. probably not today though but uh you know so the marx's big assertion and das capitol is a really difficult value like i said das capitol though along with business cycles by shumpeter those are key if you want to have political economy you got to read both of those i think and they're it's a it's a it's a it's a it's a substantial undertaking but to still down one of the major aspects of dust capital is that it's it's a it's a grave error as any kind of analyst or historian

or political theorist it's a grave error to treat consumption distribution money itself the way in which exchange is conducted you know um of commodity these and labor, treating these things as eternal categories that have some permanent context or relevance. That's a grave error because he said none of those things are true. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these plans. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November. Have your say, online or in person. So together we can create a more reliable, sustainable electricity supply for your community.

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Book now at Guinness Storehouse.com. Get the facts. Be drinkaware. Visit drinkaware.com. You know, which is why the primary defect in his view of political economy or economics, he calls it bourgeois ideology you know and the margist's view is that this isn't even intentional like yeah there's people who have a vested incentive in manipulating historical data to suggest that you know what they view as being essential to their personal prosperity hosts an outsized significance you know But he said a lot of it, even people who weren't directly insinuated into, you know, capitalist processes or ownership and people who play no role in their professional life in terms of the financing of these things.

You know, they, their conceptual horizon is colored by what, by existential and ontological variables. They can't think outside of this paradigm, you know, and the rare men who can are the ones who, you know, are possess the foresight to predict outcomes in basic terms, you know. So, you know, this raises an interesting problem, though, with. Marxism and this isn't it's not just Marx this is a problem of the empiricists and if you read Hume this is obviously the question that will emerge as well as the later critics of idealism that's why like I said when we complete this Marx discussion I want to get into Husserl and Husserl is a hugely important thinker and he was the primary um Ficta and Hustral were the primary influences on Heidegger in my opinion.

But the problem of idealism, specifically as in discussion of Marx, relates to Marx's relationship to Hegel. Obviously, Marx's take on the dependence of political and economic theory on historic conditions of production. this entails far more than just economic theory. You know, and like I said at the outset, what I don't understand Marx is he's talking about the human condition in its entirety from the dawn of man to the then present and into the distant future. That's a theory of...

That's a theory of deep historicism, okay? and that they can't be that that's not up for debate Marx's claim is again is that all morality all philosophy all religion all cultural belief systems are there resolved to conditioning by men of their environments and the man-made aspects of that environment which increasingly as scale increases shape and determine the natural environment. These things are exclusively the expression of modalities of production. The opposite view is the pure Higalian view that man has an independent mind. And the intelligence contained within that mind,

man devises institutions he formulates conceptual structures relating to ethics um you know he developed aesthetical conventions Marx rejects all of these things as ideology once again

and to Marx any doctrine that is purported to have an independent status or origin point independent of productive of schema, which is the progeny of man's need to provide for necessities of life. You know, but the problem, of course, here is that that in and of itself, that's an artifact of an idealist schema.

You know, so what you're saying is that Marx is devising this entire theory of human existence. I mean, that itself is derivative of mind. Okay? And what a man is basically an automaton who is essentially a beast, but the instinctive behaviors that he implements individually and as part of a collective are just part of some conscious programming. But Mark specifically disavows that. So there's a contradiction here.

and from what I can glean and there's not much directly related to this subject matter believe it or not what I can glean is that Marx would say would have said or contained kind of within the more sociological essays he wrote was that well you know

I don't purport nobody reports to fully understand processes of mind but it's clear that there's a it's clear that there's an exponential aspect to learning and man's also evolved

you know to once he divides as you know relatively complex objects you know from that process of devising those things and

from the process of learning new uses for those things you know thoughts take on their own kind of momentum related to this instinctive necessity to produce you know and that seems tautological but as far as I can tell that would basically be the Merckian answer you know but like I said it's this precious little written directly on this subject matter and I have looked you know But moving on, and this brings us to, you know, I said at the outset, the Marx was not primarily an ethical theorist, and that's a big misunderstanding, even among people who are fairly learned in political theory.

But what is an ethical imperative is, you know, to resist the advance of history. and the end of history within the Marxist paradigm and the achievement of, you know, a classless society, not an egalitarian society, they're two different things, you know, by the fulfillment of, you know, historical processes that allow socialism to flourish. You know, it is, in fact, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, ill to try and sabotage these things.

Now, why is that? Well, we already established that within the Marxist paradigm, all historic modes of production and labor had one feature in common. And that was that control of production means was not shared in by everybody. there's always been a narrow coterie of producers or owners or possessors who had more not just to the material product that was being rendered, but their capacity for work largely belonged to themselves. So they could live fulfilling lives even if, you know, Marks of the original acknowledged managing a massive conglomers, englomerate is incredibly difficult and time consuming.

But what it also entails is many, many different types of labor and many types of power processes that have to be imagined, devised, brought into reality, and then fulfilled. Okay, so somebody like Henry Ford, for example, he's living as a fully realized man. even if his life's not particularly happy, and even if all he ever does is work. As opposed to say, a man who works in a factory for a low wage, who performs one road activity over and over and over and over again for 15 or 18 hours a day, that man's not only been totally alienated from his labor, his labor has been bifurcated into a fractured, aspect of a total process, but he also has no capacity for other labor. He can't build a house. He can't invent a better hunting rifle. You know, he can't perfect a better kind of robo.

You know, he is in a position that a slave was, but even worse, because even a slave basically only had to work till sundown. And then if you wanted to go play his banjo or carp scrimshaw, he could do that. Okay. If you're the proletarian laborer, you're being quite literally worked to death. And when you do die, probably well before your time,

you will have nothing in your life that could be said to belong to you. And the only, again, the raison daintry of human life in the Marxist paradigm is the productive process and the ability to imagine the completed artifact of that productive process. And that doesn't exist to the exploited proletarian.

You know, he's been reduced to the level of an animal. And then he will die. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid, is powering up the Northwest. We're planning to upgrade the electricity grid in your area and your input and local knowledge are vital in shaping these places. Our consultation closes on the 25th of November.

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House. Enjoy seven floors of interactive exhibitions and finish your visit with brett taken views of Dublin City from the home of Guinness. Live entertainment, great memories and the gravity bar. My goodness is Christmas at the Guinness Storehouse. Book now at ginnestorehouse.com. Get the facts, be drinkaware, visit drinkaware.aware.com. And again, too, when I say that this is Marx's moral ontology, it's not just pontific eating on how awful is it. And it's not just pontific eating on how awful this is for its own sake or that this shouldn't have happened. He's saying this was an essential aspect of the historical process, but to try and sabotage progress beyond that, you're trying to keep people at the level of animals. You are oppressing them, and you are trying to sabotage

the advance of history, which, because Marxists are atheists, history is God, the end-all of human life is labor. You're essentially revolting against God to try and start. stop history and you're doing it for the sake of your own piggish greed. Okay. That's why capitalists are pigs, by the way. Okay. Because that's the the pig stands in as a symbol for gluttony.

Okay. So the capitalized to hoof and nail wants to fight the proletarian revolution. He's only thinking about himself and his own belly. know um and uh that's why such people also there's an intrinsically homicidal aspect to marxas praxis i maintain i don't think they're going to be denied that's not some cheap polemical point you know like comrades kill people i mean they do but it i i am not just saying stupid things I mean, there's a there's a there's an intrinsic need to

categorically annihilate people who aren't educable in in, you know, the Marxist praxis. And beyond that, I'm getting ahead of myself, but you know,

you've got to wipe out the ability of people to consider alternative modalities because if you allow them to do that or if you allow that potentiality you know an inherently counter-revolutionary sociology will develop you know and that's part of the double-edged sort of literacy you know but we'll get into that but I'm gonna stop there because I'm about to change gears it but and I need another hour for that. Not a problem. Not a problem. I think that's a good place to wrap up and yeah,

this is good stuff. It's amazing to me that you have no idea how many people I've engaged, like especially on social media who say they're Marxists and then you start talking to them and you're like, this person has never read Marx by like except like past like the, never gone past like the communist manifesto. Jackson Hinkle is a serious guy, and I consider him for limited purposes to be, I don't know the dude, but him and people like him, I consider them for limited purposes to be allies. He's a serious Marxist. I mean, don't get me wrong, he's not one of these guys who has some retrograde view of

things. You know, he's more of a world systems theorist, which anybody who abides Marxist political economy is I mean that if they're not in the game if they're not a you know kind of abiding a lot of Emmanuel Wallerstein's ideas so I mean that Jackson Hinkle was one of those kinds of guys but he and obviously don't agree with that paradigm but yeah he's a serious guy but there's there's not and what I mean his whole as far as I understand it from what I've read of his content his work product his whole notion is that the

there's a real intellectual poverty on the radical left it's it's just degenerate liberals and you know bourgeois morons and like sexual deviance and he's not wrong i mean there's the the death of the intellectual left is one of the weirder things in my lifetime you know um because they were such that's arguably such an outsized impact on kind of intellectual life and and even you know did that trill down in like day-to-day discourse but yeah I hope uh I'll the subs get something positive out of this man like I'm I'm trying to do the best I can to convey these things in an accurate way that that's also listenable and not torturous to subject oneself to so feedback's been very positive like lean so

that makes me happy. Yeah, well, I look forward to part two of this because that's when, the thing is, it's just not a simple subject. And people try to make it really simple because all they see, they either concentrate on the death or they concentrate on the economics of it, and they don't see exactly what it was and that it, no one's ever read marks. No.

What I saw the other day? People, in lieu of edging themselves, they just look at memes. Apollo's the Fed. I'm like, what does that mean? Why? Why is the Fed just evil?

Oh, because it's the Fed. It's regulation. No, no, no, no. That doesn't mean anything. You know, and so, I mean, I'm a shump butter guy. I think you've gleaned.

you know and a lot of people mistakenly put shumpeter with the austrians he literally was from austria and the bannesans for limited purposes will invoke him because he's too important not to i mean i think he's the rothbart involved shumpeter a lot yeah yeah but it's these these like internet guys will try and push it back on me and i'm like you've never read any of this stuff you know you're you look at memes it's like you don't know what you're talking about it's you know, you don't have any understanding of political economy. You've never read a single book on it. You know, like stupid movies don't convey anything.

I don't know. Am I thinking wrong here? It seems like to me, when you run into somebody who is well read on subjects that are important, they have a tendency to be able to argue from both sides. They have nuanced thinking. And they're not, they don't have to argue from their ideology. It seems like the people who you run into who are the most like, you know, we got to smash the Jews and stuff like that.

These aren't people who actually like have read, like historical accounts of the history of like the Jewish people for the last 2000 years. Well, that's why I don't understand what they think they're getting out of this. You know, I guess to them it's like a video game or I don't even know. it's uh well social media is a playground where people it's a playground where people try to outsmart each other and they do things like you know they they see somebody who you know has 10,000 followers and they're like oh i got to follow this guy and make him look like a make him look like

a try to if if i can make him look like a retard if i can get someone to you know to laugh at him or if I can spot him saying something wrong because I mean, what, you and I speak, what, 100,000, you know, how many words a week do we speak? We're going to misspeak on something. You know, it's like, and that's like their whole life, you know, so it's like, okay, so go argue about the Texas Longhorns and how they're going to do this season. Like, why pretend you understand political economy? That's so fucking random. You know, it would be like some hobo deciding he's an expert on nuclear physics. You know, it's like, I don't know.

I don't know anything about home building. I don't go find where carpenters hang out and be like, you're wrong, man. Who's that you build a house? Why would I do that? That's fucking retarded. I guess that's my point. People do this thing where it's like, you know, it's like, oh, why do you talk about, you know, why do you talk about the history of the Jews? Why are you reading a book like 200 years together?

Do you think the Jews run everything? And I think to myself, look, when you look at academia and you look at, you look at, you look at, very important plate important um subjects important industries important yeah there are jews there are jews at the top of it insinuated at the top of it in most cases if that was chinese if they were chinese i'd be reading chinese history 24-7 well yeah i'd be yeah so it's like it's like oh you're obsessed it's like how could you not be you know it's like you see You see a ruling class. Like where my research takes me.

Like I am I trying to, I'm not trying to like impress randos by what I research. I go where it takes me. You know, if I, if I think that's deviant or weird, okay, I mean, they're, that means nothing to me, but also these people aren't in my league. You know, I'm not good at a lot of things, man. I'm probably fine with it. You know, most people for some reason in this culture aren't. They want to pretend they're good at everything.

I'm good at very, very, very, very few things. I understand political economy and political theory better than the overwhelming majority of people. And I will die on that hill because I know it's fucking true. So when some like internet rando with an IQ of 89, like tries to tell me he knows things, it's fucking embarrassing. You know? Yeah. There was a guy on Twitter today who, I mean, probably a really nice guy.

He wasn't mean at all. I mean, you know, he was, but he genuinely thinks that this system can be like rehabilitated. Like if your people take over this system, it can be rehabilitated. It's like you don't understand that it doesn't have the system's an anachronism. Well, yeah, also, I mean, history, the history is, I mean, one of the things Marx wasn't wrong about. And admittedly, I mean, a lot of this was what he owes to his Higalianism. especially when he was a young man. There's nothing constant about history.

It doesn't repeat itself. There's not perennial institutions. Okay, now that doesn't mean there is no truth. That doesn't mean there is no morals. What that means is that pretending that the 20th century state is this perennial thing that's as constant as a mountain range, you don't understand history. I don't mean don't understand like the meaningless factories that give you in high school civics class. I mean, you don't understand that it's a process and even now it's everything is changing.

You know, and that's why there's so few political theorists worth reading because very, very, very, very, very few men can identify these changes and the kind of configuration of what's developing as it happens. It's the metaphor I like is this, okay? If you're in the desert and there's an obelisk, you know, like in 2000 or a monolith, okay? And you're smacked up against it like this. You can't discern its dimensions. And you can probably tell its color, maybe what it's made out of. That's it. You know, only at distance, possibly even miles distance.

can you establish its actual configuration and dimensions. That's kind of the role or the situatedness of, you know, a revisionist or any kind of historical analyst. You're smacked up against the obelisk that is not just the historical record, but the present and probable and possible futures, you know. Do you think that when people say that history repeats itself, they're just seeing human behavior, here that very rarely changes, especially among certain cultures, things like that, you know, human, you know, just human need, human action. They don't know what they're saying, is that some guy said that to them in high school, who was their teacher, or it's some cliche that they read in some midwit book by somebody like venereal disease Hansen, but, well, there's wars and stuff. You know, history repeats itself. We're the Roman Empire. You know, history repeats itself. Is it, yeah, I mean, it's that basic, I think, I don't know.

Yeah, the Roman Empire that is, that wasn't, that never even approached the scale of which the American Empire is because the American Empire is global. What's up before people are doing is they're saying, I mean, it's like, okay, if, if your, if your inputs are, are the most basic universal things, you know, like, it's like, it's like, it's like saying, okay, you. Leonardo da Vinci wore pants and Tom Brady wears pants. So Tom Brady is a great artist. You know, I mean, you know, if the metric is, yeah, the Roman Empire was powerful and it was a lot of territory and it was a hegemon. And oh, America's a hegemon and spans a lot of territory. Okay, but that's not what we're talking about.

All right, Thomas. I'm looking forward to part two. Tell everybody where they can find you right now. Yeah, the best place is my website. It's Thomas 777.com, but that's number 7, HMAS 777. For Substack. Substack is what I favor, and that's my podcast is, and all kinds of other stuff. It's real Thomas 777.7.7.com.

Social media is fucking garbage, and I swear, since I set up this new account a few weeks ago, Zitter has gotten like exponentially fucking dumber. Like I like I shit you not. It's like literal retar. You have no idea. You have no idea. You are you are spot on. Like uh, yeah.

So I mean, I don't know how much longer I'm going to waste my time with that. I only set up the new timeline because people I actually like and care about, you kept on asking me to. But it's at Thomas Sear. That's my government name. T-H-O-M-A-S-C-Y-R-77- But I'm not just talking some shit. I may shut down that account because it's it's not really worth my time anymore.

But yeah, that's pretty fine. I notice you hardly ever look at the comments people make to you either. No, there's a week my time. You don't even pay it attention, yeah. Yeah. All right, man. Talk to you in a couple days. Look forward to part two.