The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1258: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 13 - Marx Pt. 2 w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: August 26, 2025

65 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 continues talking 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 Pekingona Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignano Show. We're here with Thomas for Karl Marx Part 2, and I think people are excited about this, considering the response we got on the first episode. The response we got in the first episode was absolutely amazing, Thomas. Yeah, that's great. That makes me very happy and relieved.

I speculated that this would be a subject of strong interest to people. It's essential in any discussion of modern political theory, obviously. Like I said, Marx and Marxism characterized, the entire dialectical process and psychological environment of the 20th century but also

I think a lot of people find it timely because there's so much misunderstanding about the subject matter the feedback I got a lot of people were asking me they wanted to they wanted me to speak on

the schism or the schisms, plural between Orthodox Marxist Leninism, you know, the exemplar which obviously was the Soviet Union, and, you know, these Frankfurt School type radicals who really found, or whose ideas really developed momentum in 1968. I don't want to talk about that yet, though. I'm going to touch on it, but I want to complete our discussion of Marx, qua Marx, before we get into any of these collateral issues.

I think, too, the Sino-Soviet split, I don't think Maoism is a particularly coherent ideology, but it was an animating principle, at least in symbolic or abstract terms, and there was a praxis to it. And people identified as Maoists were taking direct action and doing, you know, profoundly violent actions. acts, as well as there were armed elements under the Maoist banner who were proxies of

the Peking government who were actively engaged against the Soviet Union, you know, in Southeast Asia, in Afghanistan, other places. That's important. And I'd argue that the most effective. revolutionary cadres though the Cold War remained those who were abiding a fairly orthodox praxis you know the Roth Army fraction they were very much a Stalinist outfit you know obviously they were the they were a proxy of the East German government

And the first generation of that cadre was drawn from university radical types. And a lot of these young people were very much a product of that culture. But as they matured as partisans, they shed most of those pretensions. You know, and that's one of the reasons why people like Horstomauer gravitated towards them. you know but the way to understand these schisms everything was framed that this you know is to myrish over the point i was making everything in the epoch was in dialogue with marxist leninism so any in all potentialities function within the cold war psychological environment so you had people like horace de mauler who were at base

national socialists who found common cause with you know stalinists in the d ddr you had these profoundly kind of a socially anarchic leftist whose primary interest was identity in things and a perverse and obsessively narcissistic sexuality they gravitated towards marcuser and Marcoso was very much writing in dialogue with Marx. However much, he may have not fully understood the subject matter. That's not the point. The point is that every tenancy was bounded by these parameters. You know, and even writers who I think were pretty insightful,

there was still a thoroughly active community of public intellectuals in the 70s and 80s and a lot of people on the right like Christopher Lasch he's kind of seen as a foil to Alan Bloom who whatever else's problems I always thought

was a real mediocrity but Lash's first book The Culture of Narcissism this Freudian and Marxist concepts shot throughout that book and these weren't just fixations of Lash or this wasn't just

because he'd come out of social science, academia. So this is the kind of thing that he was familiar with. It was just taken for granted that any sort of writing about culture war concepts or sociological concepts or anybody writing about the psychological environment of states would be talking about Freud and Marx, which seems very strange to people today. But that was just the norm.

You know, in terms of praxis, you can't ever escape what characterizes the psychological environment of the epoch on which you're situated. I mean, obviously, it's not to say that you're one somewhat precluded from writing about, you know, concepts in the abstract. But if you're talking about praxis or applied principles of political theory, you know, you're, not engaged with the relevant variables if you're not abiding, you know, the zeitian.

geist. And that's essential understanding Marx. It's essential understanding the 20th century, the Cold War. And because the world we live in today and the zeitgeist that we're immersed in today is 100% the derivative of all of those things. you know so if people require um a contemporary relevance that's uh what it is

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Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump-Dunbeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunbiog, Kush Farage. And to bring it back or bring it home to our subject matter, I think where I left off the other day, we were talking about the psychic violence that alienation from various power processes and most significantly and first and foremost alienation from the ability to contemplate the finished product of one's labor and see through that process as well as you know to be a fully realized human

who is engaged in various aspects of productive processes. And equally significant is that there's a natural or spontaneous, I guess maybe it would be the better way to characterize it, communalism to productive processes, you know, that aren't manipulated by technological apparatus and man-made situations that in turn give rise to increasingly complicated

permutations of labor specialization and division aside in the fact that in a hyper-specialized manufacturing-driven economy you know you're alienated from your own labor but you're also you're kind of discreetly isolated within your own life life. There's contradictions here because on the one hand life is increasingly homogenized

and the way that political life is communicated to you by elites and public authorities is in terms of identitarian things within a collective. You know, you're expected to be patriotic and a good citizen and for you know most of the 20th century if you were male you know you were availed to the military draft but this is all very hollow and really kind of formal you know you didn't really share any communal experience with the man beside you at the factory or on the construction yard like you might become friends in personal terms or have affection for these people, you know, but you were really only kind of bound by your common situatedness in this alienated environment of, you know, hyper-specialized labor. And that also puts people

artificially at odds with one another. You know, it means that, say, like, a shop or like seamstress's work will be at odds with. a factory where, you know, that's phasing out the labor that they do with their hands, you know, it'll put certain sorts of factory laborers at odds with other ones owing the vagaries of the market or, you know, a curated competition between firms, you know, and even people who resist this in ethical terms, their ability to earn a living unless their survival, you know, depends on participation in these things.

You know, so you'll find yourself corralled, sometimes even into life and death situations against men who are situated exactly like you, but in, you know, different sectors of the economy whereby a zero-sum paradigm has emerged between, you know, the respective structures in which you labor. You know, and Marx calls this unnatural. Not in the, you know, he's not talking about a state of nature and like the Habeasian

or Lachian sense. What he means is, when he's by natural is things that are man-made. You know, and to be clear, Marx doesn't have a problem with inequality. He made the point that the first division of labor is, in fact, totally natural because men and women are different. And Marks fully acknowledges that. And they're good at different kinds of things. And they've got to fulfill different kinds of roles for the species to survive. You know, and some men are stronger than others.

Some are more intelligent than others. Some have peculiar skill sets. So the natural division of labor is going to be stuff that emerges between the sexes based on biological and social realities or stuff that develops between men who were strong in body but not particularly and actually inclined and those in contrasts who are essentially

brain workers you know and there's nothing wrong with this going to Marx. You know obviously people have different talents and some people are substancing more capable than others you know there's not like again the Marxian paradigm it aims at a class with society. It doesn't aim to make everyone equal. Nobody does that except, you know,

um, utopian liberals and, uh, you know, people who take of these kinds of enlightenment conceits that incorporate that and their, this kind of secular humanist morality. You know, so this is an important point. Um, you know, and so essentially, Mark said that in the modern state, even if you're reasonably well provided for in terms of your material conditions, there's these inherent contradiction. It's like on the one hand,

on the one hand, the individual and his personality is diminished and political life is kind of reduced to this collective but not communal existence, but there's not real fellow feeling there because capitalist production and labor scheme force every man into a kind of war of all against all

and sometimes by design sometimes just owing to the sociological reality these things even when people are given more and more of a stake in the franchise at least in the formal terms by getting the vote and stuff social divisions

will be even further institutionalized and formalized because that's intrinsic to the parliamentary structure and also the only way to really appeal to people to get them motivated to engage in direct political activity is to appeal to their individual self-interest you know contra everybody else so this creates a circumstance

where the center really cannot hold and this is why you know in Marx's estimation and interestingly this did basically come true if you look at the final

phase of the Great War this is why mass armies under conditions of capitalism have a tendency to mutiny you know in the Marxian analysis it's not just because

there's no heroism or any patriotic impulse that drives men to just kind of march into an enemy field of fire and be cut to pieces by machine guns before the enemies even within visual range that's part of it but it's also it becomes meaningless to be an Englishman or to be a subject of the Heapsburg Empire or to be a German. Like I don't accept these things, but this isn't totally wrong. Okay. So not only does this kind of absence of communal potentiality and fellow feeling, not only does it psychologically oppress man, but over time this system becomes unsustainable. because people just aren't going to sacrifice for it anymore.

And it won't even have a context anymore. You know, and that's an important point about Marxism. What's peculiar about Marxist-Leninist practice is that the Soviet Union is an odd case. I mean, on the one hand, it makes sense that the Soviet Union became a superpower, or that, you know, whatever succeeded the Russian. empire became a superpower just to want to the fact that a goodly proportion of this planet's remaining natural resources exist in Russia and Central Asia but you know it's not like there was an industrial proletariat in Moscow that was you know that was a large enough

that most people would, if you would as a natural revolutionary cadre, that would facilitate these revolutionary ambitions that shook the planet. One of the odd things about Leninism is that it basically became a developmental mechanism and a catalyst for mobilization whereby primitive but high potential societies entered the modern age rapidly in very punctuated in brutal ways.

You know, it's odd. And obviously that's not really congruous with the predictive elements of Marxist storyography. Like I said, I said I wasn't going to talk about this until later, and here I go talking about it, but I think it's important as an illustrative example. But, you know, the Marxian viewpoint, Marx's notion was that, and his successors, his acolytes, who succeeded them, they believed that communism would first be realized probably in the United Kingdom and Germany. you know, which makes some kind of sense within the bound of rationality of, you know, the body of a theory in question. But to be clear, yes, you know, Marx acknowledged that there would need to be revolutionary cadres to facilitate, you know, to wipe away the old order. But communism would essentially be realized by historical process,

precisely because these structural contradictions within the psychological environment and these structural features of capitalist societies at scale just would no longer be sustainable. You know, and that's important. If you look especially, or if you read cruise speech speeches, Khrushchev was very much a peasant he literally was like a barefoot peasant to grow up in the Ukraine with nothing You know and In the West he was perceived of this very dangerous man. You know this this kind of crude and crass and very rough proletarian who really frightened people with the way that he talked and some of the gambles he took, you know, with strategic deployments and things, obviously.

But in fact, he was very much a reformer. You know, that's why he implemented the... I mean, he's really the only man, too, who could have implemented the de-Stalinization paradigm because he was Stalin's right-hand man. You know, and he was the commissar of Stalingrad, too. Like, he was a hard guy. you know um no doubt about it but he his claim uh his vision kind of what he wanted to characterize

his tenure as you know general secretary was he was saying communism by the year in 1980 so people would look at that and be like what does he mean the soviet units are a communist state that's not the way merce just look at things You know, they look at themselves as abiding, you know, a zeitgeist that comports with the progress of history, you know, in a way that is shepherding and stewarding it. You know, so even though it was clear that this intention wasn't present because, you know, the states become resistant to reform. because men are greedy and they not only do they not want to give up the privileges they enjoy but people are comfortable with stasis there it's rare that you have a truly revolutionary cadre leading a

a state that that is truly dynamic okay because the human preference is for stasis with very rare exception and the people who are those exceptions, they constitute outliers in psychology and personality. But the Soviets themselves claimed that as progress was made towards communism and after the United States was defeated and the world was communized, the Red Army would cease to exist because military power, other than as a revolutionary instrumentality and a defense, apparatus against capitalist aggression only serves as a means of resolving contradictions emerging within capitalism by violence. So the Soviet always claimed, like, after the communist version of NSIG is realized, you know, that there won't be a Red Army, and there won't be a Soviet state.

And there will be no need for this massive internal security apparatus because there there won't be, you know, this competing globalism that is threatening to annihilate us. You know, so the, like, their rationale was the only reason that the state exists right now is the one of the exigencies of war and peace, you know, which is emergent based, you know, on capitalist aggression towards us. And the fact that, you know, the party is the vanquist. the vanguard of the proletariat and during this critical phase of historical development and during this critical period where we're under threat, you know, it's essential that we defend ourselves in the most, you know, in the deepest and most thorough capacity possible. You know, and that can only come from having a mighty state and a powerful party and by suppressing, you know, vagaries of thought and behavior that could compromise the advance towards communism but uh no communist

claim like the states and ending itself even if that's in practice in practice like what you know Leninist practice represents and that's important you know um but anyway um and at some point I know and the subs we did a series on the Cold War but it might be worthwhile at some point

to discuss the various general secretaries and Soviet leadership element and you know how they what their relationship was to you know Marxist-Lern's Orthodoxy

and how to what degree they reflected those imperatives but I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. But, yeah, the, yeah, so basically, life under advanced capitalism is a fractured social existence. There's a contradiction between civil society, which is collectivist, but not all communal,

you know, a political existence, which, while couch and a law, language of communalism and patriotism is basically oriented almost exclusively to entrenched divisions that are curated purposefully and as well as a you know psychic appeals to naked self-interest because that's the axiomatic situation that results from advanced capitalism. You know, so at some point, aside the fact that this isn't workable, based on, you know, again, you know, an absence of fellow feeling and an absence of genuine patriotism that moves people to sacrifice and laid on their lives if necessary,

it also there's just not any kind of animating principle to substantiate the state's claim to legitimacy so eventually it just loses that legitimacy you know

and what's left in its stead is a vacuum and this is such that there's such that there was a Marxist

veld politic in kind of brass tax terms Marx alluded to the fact that states such as I described

that refuse to abide the advance and progress of history they'll become essentially failed states so in the communized planet

of the future there'll be outliers that are that are kind of like Mogadishu at its most dysfunctional, you know, but that's, you know, eventually, presumably those people will

die out or be dealt with just as the lumpen criminal element or unmanageable element or in educational element within, you know, the nascent Marxist fully realized communist society will be but it's it's an interesting thought experiment I think the but it also too once Marx came back again and again to the claim that bourgeois ideology it had within it the seeds of its own undoing you know so you look at the Marx you of the Enlightenment, this obsession with individual rights and with devising these thought experiments where the state of nature are these discrete individuals who essentially contract with one another for the sake of self-interest. Marks believed not even entirely

consciously these thinkers like Hobbs like a life. like Hume, like Thomas Payne. They conceptualize things that way because in their mind, you know, based on technological progress and other things and the creation of wealth in a way that was unprecedented, they believed that things were proceeding towards utopia, but socially things were falling apart. and the alienation intrinsic to the psychological environment carried by capitalism was becoming so critical that these things became an irreconcilable, you know, contradiction in its own right. So this kind of ontology that's totally at odds with what Marx viewed as kind of the natural communal state

of production relations developed. You know, which is one of the reasons why, again, what he called the bourgeois ideology of economics was so poor at predicting outcomes. You know, and it's interesting because a lot of Marxist economists, I don't I think that's a contrary I think that's a contradiction because Marxists are there it's a body of sociological theory and anthropological postulates and psychological paradigms and claims about the state of human life and the human condition but it's not it's not economics

but for the sake of clarity these people who do refer to them to as Marxist economists. They're obsessed with this idea of crisis modalities characterizing advanced capitalism. You know, they almost sound like Vinesians in that regard. You know, but there's, there's a confirmation bias in the way they talk about this stuff. You know, I spent a lot of time with economic data

and owing in a large measure to, you know, the Fed, I read Shumpeter a young age and that kind of colored my perspective. You know, you've got to look at increments of, you know, two or three centuries to really understand long-term trends. You know, if your sample, if your temporal sample size is arbitrarily arbitrarily, decided upon, I mean, yeah, you can make the case for boom and bust being the norm, you know, but I don't accept that. But it's an interesting, like I'm not saying that Marx has everything in common with these Von Miesie and Offering School types, but it's interesting because, albeit for very different reasons, you know, they kind of cherry-pick their data sets to make a similar claim about, you know, frailties within the regulated economy. You're going to look at that way.

But again, for very reasons. I saw that the other day. I was studying real estate cycles. And your typical von Meezy and will talk about how everything fell apart once we went off a hard money. But even if you go back to the 19th century, you can track real estate cycles going up and down and you can. and it has nothing to do with hard money. It doesn't have to do with Lincoln printing greenbacks during the Civil War. This is, this goes far beyond the Federal Reserve and Fractional Reserve banking.

Yeah, and it's also, I, well, it's almost too. I mean, I don't want to hijack a conversation. And again, I'm not, I'm not just trying to, like, trash the Austrian school people, but they almost have their fixation on sound, what they, what they call sound money. It's almost like the Marxian obsession with like the labor theory of value. It's like marginal utility is some sort of, you know, that's a lot of smoke and mirrors or something. Like it's, um, and this idea that, I mean, don't get me wrong, you know, I'm a shumperer guy.

I'm not into conventional economic modeling in the way Chicago school and neoliberal type. are but this idea that any economic modeling is a fool's errand and you know it the only people who claim that it's a viable research tool you know are people who are shills for the banking system that's a ridiculous way to approach it and this isn't just in economics there's this bias for empirical modeling of a certain sort because everybody became obsessed in the 20th century and academe were trying to pass off their research as scientific and I mean that you know economics isn't really a science there's scientific aspects to it but there's

not a science of economics like there's a science of physics you know and There's aspects that are mysterious because anytime you're talking about human decision-making and aggregate, you're dealing with all sorts of complex permutations. And for something that's so basic, the human existence is kind of ill-understood. So I get it. I get where these Austrian school guys are coming from because there's something there. But there are conclusions. and there's almost it's almost cult-like too in the way they in the way they talk to people

who don't share their viewpoints like I'm a heterodox I buy heterodox views too I mean I'm I'm a shumperter and Frederick List and Werner Sombard guy okay I'm not sitting here saying you know you need to read Milton Friedman you know that doesn't matter and you know the you can you know you can You can mitigate inflation with quantitative easing. I'm not some regime show. Anybody who thinks that is an idiot. But I've had these Von Meezynian guys get very abusive to me. They're almost like Scientologists or something.

Like I imagine. You nailed it. It's a cult. Yeah. And it's like if they identify. One told me, why are you talking about Friedrich List? he's been debunked. And I said, by who?

Yeah, by who's some, like, random guy who, like, he talked at some, like, conference that seven people went to. That, um, well, yeah, and it doesn't, uh, let's also, too, like, Peter, I remember for a while, they, they probably moved on to different gurus or whatever, but, you know, Peter Schiff, who's actually got some fairly interesting ideas on stocks, like some of his stock tips, I, I thought were pretty sound. Not that I'm some stock guru, but I know something about investing.

But Schiff was their big, like the internet Vietnamese guys for a minute, he was their big guru. This was, I think, probably like 15, 20 years ago. And literally every six months, he was claiming, like, there was going to be some, like,

punctuated crisis and markets were going to take a dive. He was like, it's going to be worse in the crash of 87. Then, like, this never happened. He was wrong, basically 100% of the time. But he still had this audience.

And if you didn't abide his predictions, like, people told you were an idiot. You know, it's like, I want this guy's craft. He's, I mean, I think he was pretty wealthy anyway, obviously, because, I mean, he knows investing. But it's, it's like this guy's got, this guy's got like half a million subs, which at that time was.

a pretty big deal especially for a niche finance guy you know and he's and he's literally wrong 100% of the time you know that's that's not a bad kick yeah there's a bunch of people who um like his son his son's like 20 years old 20 I don't know he had a son okay yeah his son has outperformed all of his funds just investing in crypto that's that that's interesting isn't it yeah yeah now i figured too he was also he was one of these guys who in the aftermath of 2008 it was a weird environment as regards to demand for financial services because on the one hand a lot of people were hanging out of their money because they were afraid i totally get that but they didn't trust

they like grifters actually were doing well then because people didn't trust these universal banks anymore obviously I'm not saying Schiff was like stealing from people I think he believes in the investment paradigms that he promotes but it's it's weird you know and it's not I'm not qualified to talk about this is anything other than a layman but I'd advise people when they'd ask me, like, what my take was on Schiff. I'm like, look, man, like, some of his stock picks are definitely good, but definitely do not, like, pull everything out of your 401K to, like, invest with Peter Schiff.

Because, yeah, like, that, you know, that would be a mistake. But, yeah, it was a weird time. There's other, there's other odd guys who have clout these days. in investing circles and stuff, but I, they're different than Schiff. I, for some reason, I get why. I mean, it was because, you know, there was a real crisis of confidence in what was conventional wisdom. But yeah, Von Mises and some of their fellow travelers after O.8, they had, they had a moment where they were very clout heavy. but um yeah forgive that uh digression man um the uh and also too um and we'll move on from this

uh kind of subtopic marks me the point that this process of whereby you know communitarian fellow feeling is totally diminished and individual hostility and self-interest is magnified and kind of institutionalized in ways both formal and and subtly psychological in the advanced capitalist state

you know people's economic self-interest takes on an outside significance obviously so people become overly concerned about money and the state of money you know and again to Marx you know labor and production and productive processes and power processes they're in are the essence human life but money is not and money is ephemeral and

you know it's it's uh something that uh really only took on a significance into itself in late modernity, you know, so that people becoming existentially fixated and concerned, how it amounts to this man-made artifact of advanced capitalism and crisis, you know, leads to all kinds of pathologies. And, you know, obviously people at the top, they're not immune to

this kind of clouded thinking you know so this leads to decisions based on incorrect inputs and you know unscientific evaluation in the Marxian

paradigm like it's not to say that Marx is anti-money or something you know eventually when communism has realized there won't be money because there'll be no need for it but such that it is util at discrete junctures in the historical process is not something evil about money but it taking on an outside significance and particularly being of paramount concern in political life you know represents

an irrational pathology at scale and uh... da capital gets into this not enough people write about the Marxian view of money and I think that's important but uh... maybe it's because I'm a son of an economist or something I you know and political economists deal a lot with the psychological environment and

confidence in national currencies and things. But I don't think it's just that. I think I'm on to something. You know, and again, I'm not an economist. I'm a political theory guy. I think I know something about econ. But there's not enough

there's not enough written on the subject matter of Marx and money and the role of money itself, as well as the money supply and advanced capitalism. But the... And also too, obviously, according to Marx, as these contradictions, you know, cause the nation to basically fall apart and fragment from within in unsustainable ways, you know, the only thing preventing this fragmentation from causing a total collapse is a, uh, you know the coercive power of the state so state power becomes more oppressive violence and negative reinforcement becomes normative the men in this role of needing to coerce the body politic.

They develop a contempt for their charges because obviously they're now on an enemy footing that creates other pathologies. You know, it, and this is, I mean,

I guess people, you know, Robert Conk was made the point that that's an irony of Stalinist states is that that that was exactly the fate that befell them. But you know, know that I've made the point that a lot of Marxist sociological observations I don't agree with his

ontology and like what the sources are these things in the Marxist estimation but he's not wrong about a lot of them the way he describes conditions under what he called late capitalism that's a very real thing you know one of the reasons like Werner Sombart and Sorrell is because they took from Marx was valuable you know in sociological and psychological terms and discarded the rest you know one of the reasons I say that

to be truly educated in political theory you need to read marks it's not just for the obvious reason that you know like I said to understand the 20th century you've got to understand Marx's theory, but you know, it's not, marks wasn't wrong about everything. You know, there are worthwhile things in

his body of work. And I think that's lost on a lot of people. If Marx had been less ambitious or less possess of, you know, hubris maybe, or I think if he

lived a hundred years before or a hundred years after, and he contended himself to be a sociologist, and a political theorist who focused heavily on the psychological aspects of political life. Or if you, you know, was an anthropologist or an evolutionary psych guy, he'd probably be almost universally praised as this man who had tremendous insights. I mean, I think. You know, and kind of the elephant in the room, I'm sure,

with some of the subs and listeners is, you know, the, Jewishness of Marx. That's something I actually agree with... I agree with E. Michael Jones on that. I don't think Marx particularly cared about his own ethno-sectarian background, but he was the product of that culture,

and there is a Jewish revolutionary spirit that is just kind of distinctive. I don't think Marx is writing as a self-conscious Jew. Like, here's a wrong thing. capitalism, you know, it's because as the state developed at scale, my people became, you know, despised and, you know, we lost a privileged position. We had a court and, you know, it was nothing like that. But there, I don't even think there was an inherent antipathy to European political forums. I think you just viewed it as something, I think to him

there was no reason to be attached to these things or relate to Indo-European forms of political and economic life as anything but an outsider based on existential reasons. That's the way I read it.

I think that's the case that's a case of a lot of atheist Jewish political theorists. Not all of them, mind you, but a lot of them. You know, and that's the whole issue with

politics and the political is a discrete sphere of human activity. A lot of this stuff is ontological and somewhat instinctive. You know, people don't sit around and decide to devise their identity and consciously adopt their cultural psychology

you know and to me Marx is a case and point of that but yeah I realize I got to wrap this up in a second let me see what else I wrote down oh and just

would it be a would you object if next episode we got into the kind of schismatic aspect of communism, like the

Sino-Soviet split in the 1968, post-1968 varies of leftism. I mean, do you want to do that or no? I think the subs definitely want to hear that.

Okay, yeah, we'll do that next time then, and all good. One of the things I find really compelling about that subject to very Paul Godfrey and Ernst Nolte

Nulte wrote about this kind of obliquely, but I think Godfried borrowed from Nold, or was aware of this phenomenon by virtue of what Nolte wrote during the historian's controversy. But Marx's early stuff is fairly conventionally Higalian. You know, obviously his conclusions are, you know, are, you know, are, profoundly at odds with those of the right Higalians. But this kind of pure dialectical materialism whereby he rejects properties of mind as the discrete kind of causal engine unto itself of political life and the conceptual,

horizons that give rise of political life, that's something he took on later. And a lot of the post-68 schismatics, particularly the ones, and there was more than you might think, who came out of Lutheran confessional churches as well as Catholic student communes. And there's some precedent for that in the 1848 revolutionary culture. a lot of these radical reformers were were Catholic guys but those guys when they invoke Marx

it was always early Marx and it was always very much with a fairly orthodox Hegelian flavor to it and I think there's something to that and also I'll say this for the dedicated episode but I you know the way to look at a lot of these I don't speak from anybody myself but I you know Horstamaller was somebody like myself and

situated in the zeitgeist as he was one had to work within those parameters so a right winger or national socialist again he find his way towards a hardline Stalinist cadres. If you were some radical leftist but not at all a communist, it didn't matter. Your starting point would still have to be Karl Marx. And

I think that the true, at least in America in Europe, it's a bit different, but the true radical left in America I'm not just talking about typical simpleton liberals who support the regime. I mean, these true

kind of extreme leftists I think that they're I think they abide Marcosa more than to do the Frankfurt School I don't think these guys and ladies are sitting around reading Ramsey and Adorno I think they do read Maracruza and stuff like that

and it's obvious and that's one of the reasons why they're fixated on sexual identities and things you know my buddy Aaron and I read I think we did in two episodes, repressive tolerance by Marcuse. Yeah. And it's amazing how much, you know, as a right-winger, you're reading through there,

and you're like, well, that makes sense. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. Well, that makes sense. That's in the American situation and stuff like the authoritarian personality. But, you know, I agree with Godfreyed again on this point, too, like anti-fascism is an ideology into itself. and that's a huge component of American leftism

is anti-fascism you know so it's this weird pastiche but it's not it's not it's not primarily Frankfurt school stuff like I know a lot of people read Buchanan's Death of the West when it came out

oh Jesus like 24 years ago now and that's a good book don't get me wrong I'm not saying it's a bad book or people shouldn't read it but Buchanan over-emphasized the Frankfurt School so it kind of became this boogeyman in people's minds and

it's a mixed bag like one of the reasons I liked Sam Francis he made the point that Gramsie was somebody you should read if you're a right-wing culture warrior because he

identified the cultural environment and the psychological environment as being important to do itself, not just some super structural feature of, you know, labor and productive relations and schema, but nonetheless, you know, which is the setting of human lives. So we should prioritize that first. Now, Gramsie said this is significant to itself. This is paramount. Life isn't, you know, a laboration.

production schema. Like man isn't just a worker. You know, people aren't, people aren't insects with the ability to tell time. You know, at least that's my, I'm sure it's a heterodox take. And I'm not saying for clarity. I'm not saying I agree with the substance of of Gramsies's political values but yeah but yeah odd little odd little fact

you know who was the first person to translate Gramsci into English in the United States Pete Buttigieg's dad weird yeah no I figured that guy said

that guy's such a weirdo I mean it's time in the fact that he's a got these weird sexual habits I figured he was the progeny of some disturbed ideologues or, you know, 60s fossils who lived some bizarre lifestyle. I mean, frankly, people like they usually are, like some weird guy who has got kind of delusional ideas about his own viability as a politician and who has never had a real job, just always been involved in a political life. and his old kink is you know

putting on display his bizarre sex parapherias like people like that don't just devise that identity in college or something they come out of a certain

coterie of dysfunction I think but yeah we'll we'll get into the post 68 schismatics

and the South Soviet split, which had a real practice behind it, and maybe touch a bit on people like Mahler and the National Socialist Resistance and their relationship to Stalinist direct action elements. Awesome. All right, for people who are just tuned in for this one,

tell them where they can find you. Best place is substack. It's Real Thomas 777.7.com on social media. I'm at Thomas Sear, T-H-M-A-S-C-Y-R-7777. The best one-to-stop place to find my content is my substack or my website. My website is number 7-H-M-A-S-777.com. Awesome.

Until part three. Thank you, Thomas. Yeah, thank you, man.