TRASHFUTURE - Bonus: How Trotsky Got Sp!ked (TRASH-A-FADA Crossover)

Episode Date: April 26, 2020

It's TRASH-A-FADA AGAIN. Riley and Alice teamed up with Jamie, Andy, and Sean to bring you a history of Sp!ked - we answer the question: how did everyone's favourite Koch-funded contrarian take machines grow out of an obscure British Trotskyist sect from the 1970s, and the corollary to that question, why are Trotskyists so weird? This bonus episode is in addition to all this week's TF episodes, so enjoy! Check it out, then go subscribe to their feed (this is the apple link, but they can be found wherever you get podcasts), and more importantly... buy Andy's book about the strange history of Posadism, entitled: I Want To Believe.

Hey, Riley here, and because I'm saying my name and that I'm here, I'm sure you can guess that I'm about to tell you a little bit of context for the audio file that's about to follow this little introduction. This is part two of our two-part crossover series with our friends at the Antifada, Sean, Andy, and Jamie, and we figured we'd publish it on our RSS feed as well as theirs, so just as you could find part one of our Antifada TF crossover on both RSS feeds, so too, can you find part two. This episode was released, I think, last week by them, so I do encourage you to check this

out. If you like this show, go subscribe to the Antifada as well. They're a great bunch of people. And also know that this file, it's not in lieu of anything. All releases will stay normal for the previous week and the coming week. This is just a little bit of extra bonus, bonus content for you. So go check out the Antifada. Enjoy this little bit of history in the meantime about how the Revolutionary Communist Party

of Great Britain became spiked somehow. Check it out later. No. Yeah, he was in a band with, I think, his sister called The Dow. Yeah. Oh, my God. Anyway, now that he can't be totally on board with Bernie anymore, The Dow's going to reform. Yeah, didn't they have a Pitchfork review?

That was pretty good. Yeah. They got like an eye on it. No, it's not bad music is the weird thing. That guy has all the surprises. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I have no idea what he's going to be like in six months' time.

There's a hidden arc of political operators being silently proficient at musical styles that we could pick up on. But I think Peter Dow's life story might be one of the most fascinating ones, like starting as a child soldier in Lebanon and then progressing to, like, what was he in a new wave band? And then he became a child soldier for Hillary. But we don't have to speculate. We can just get him on the show. Yeah.

Oh, that's true. He would totally come on. Let's do that. Yeah, let's do it. People are always saying we need more guests of color. In syncopation, I think it's time for us to start like a left, I was going to say start like a left duop group. I was going to go with like 50 street gang.

We can all like pull switch blades simultaneously. No, come on. We can we can become the dapper dance and start going around Disneyland and then the movie Bob will have to become a leftist. Didn't you hear Maggie made fish, Andy singing day with musical blackface? Oh, my God. Beetlejuice problematic by Biden, Biden, all but securing the Democratic nomination has really empowered just some of the most tiresome people in your country.

Welcome to our fucking reality time line. You guys are just three or four months ahead of us in like the disaster of world politics. Well, listen, we were talking about the really cringe and shitty takes on the mob haired psychopath named Boris Johnson, the prime minister of England. You know, another publication. Just England only. I'm looking at the web page of a organization called spiked online. I've been waiting for a while.

They have a headline, a PM in hospital, a nation rattled. Oh, my God. Of course, spiked online is part of this course of voices. Very concerned about the health of the prime minister. And I think that this is a good time to introduce our episode and our topic because we are going to be talking about spiked online, a very, very bizarre phenomenon as you're going to see one with a lot of twists and a lot of plot turns. And an all around interesting case study in what not to do if you have a Trotskyist revolutionary

party in the 1970s. Well, I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think you kind of answered the question with the premise there. What not to do if you have a Trotskyist split group in the 70s. Don't have that. Don't do it. They did the one thing you shouldn't do. Stalinists hate this one weird trick.

On that note, hello and welcome to the Antifada. I'm Sean K. B. I'm Jamie Peck. I'm AP Andy. And we are here, of course, with good friends of the pod back in a big way. Two guests from Trash Future podcast, Riley Quinn and Alice Caldwell Kelly. What's up guys? How's it going?

Excited to talk about this extremely normal magazine. I think about spiked all the time. And I think about the history of spiked all the time because spiked is, as you said, Sean, this morality tale of how you can start as an, well, we'll get to this allegedly leftist group in the 1970s. And then end up through a bunch of twists and turns of history and imbecility, wishing the, like just fawning over a prime minister that promises to like cut taxes and like smash the remains of the trade union movement in the UK.

Because somehow he's a worker. Right. Right. I think that the topic of spiked online is going to resonate a bit more with British listeners because in the United States, I think the only time people have really heard of them was six months ago when a couple of leftists from the dirtbag tendency here did an interview with spiked online about the dangers of wokeness and id-pull. But besides that, I don't think that spiked...

They do have that channel. Yeah. With the cops reruns? Honestly, again, just Andrew wouldn't be too different from the blog, I don't think. The channel doesn't get up on its political high horse at least. It's supposed to be a channel for men, right? It's supposed to be like a 30-something, you know, guys doing construction and gross stunts channel.

I'd be a dude. Dude's Rock. I don't know if it still exists. Dude's Rock the channel. Yeah. Thesis spiked online is the jackass of online media. No, they're not that funny. Jackass is way funnier.

Jackass is so joyful. What is that? Are you guys... Are you saying... Spike does. He's just sort of tinged in miserableism. Yeah. That's true.

I remember this one article they did with Joni Knoxville and I think it was like Steve or something. But like the two of the jackass guys and they said, people say that the jackass is kind of gay and they're like, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it is. We're gay with each other all the time. Yeah, that's a better use of both irony and sincerity than spiked or anyone who talks to them has ever managed.

Well, I'm glad that my joke thesis, like self-important thesis about spiked being jackass, got you guys to all come on the podcast and defend the uvra of the jackass world. Well, I will always defend the uvra of the jackass world. That is in my opinion funnier than any sort of serious like prestigious university comedian has ever been, ever. Well, according to... Me and Riley, we're like the Japanese island holdouts, right? We're still fighting the battles for jackass 30 years later.

According to Amanda Marcotte, I'm only pretending to think it's funny so that guys will like me much in the same way I pretend to like Bernie Sanders. So there you go. Yeah. I mean, of course, no. Yeah, it's like, who else could find the high five skit where they just hold a gigantic like foam hand and then whack people who come through a door with it? They're not funny.

Yeah, I mean, that is misogyny. That is structural misogyny and we can't support hitting people with a giant foam hand. Especially with a carrying soup. I mean, I believe Aaron was. Why do you have an encyclopedic memory of jackass bits? This is my cross to bear. In anticipation of this episode, Jamie was asking me, what should I do to prepare? I don't really know much about spiked.

I said, think of any topic that you even care remotely about and search the archives of spiked online and you will find probably the worst fucking take part. I thought you were going to say you will find zero results because what they write about is all culture war bullshit. Oh, there you go. That's true. But they write. They write about culture war bullshit in a way that like is so aggressively contrarian

that I feel like the idea is that you're not even able to be like, I don't care about this. It's just spiked at it again. You have to like stop and look and be like, oh, they just said that being trans is actually a form of racism. Here's the thing also, Jamie, that's mostly right but not entirely right. For example, do you know the title of the article they wrote in summer 2007 as the financial crisis was just kicking off? Oh boy, give it to me.

Let's bash the rich bashers for a change. Oh, wow. What's the Marxism? Marxism, a mortal, a mortal critique. Marxism is when you bash the rich bashers. The more you do that, the more Marxist it is. Yeah, exactly. So look, the thing is like they're wrong about everything.

It's just they're always wrong in reaction to what the liberal media is doing. So if what the liberal media is doing is like 2% materialist and 98% culture war horseshit, it's going to be 98% culture war horseshit and spiked, but they're 2% of materialism. That's where the absolute chef kiss shit is, where they find a way to claim to be Marxist, but then say that if you punish the bankers for causing the financial crisis, then what you're doing is you're attacking a working class desire to succeed. Yes, yes. Thank you for that, Riley, because I think some folks out there might be a little,

I don't know, confused about why we keep tying Marxism to this culturally reactionary group. So let's get into the history of where spiked online came from and what their connection, alleged connection to Marxism is. Who wants to make a start at it? I could, I mean, I could do it. Yeah, we've got to start in Britain in the 70s, the most dismal place on earth in human history. All right, so let's start in Britain in the 70s and the most dismal place in time in history. See, I was saying, I was going to tarantino it.

I was going to start with what happened in the 90s and then be like, how did we get here? You're going to do like a fractured narrative where I was just going to do like a straight chronological one. Yeah. What are we starting? Antifada? What do you guys want? Well, I was thinking about starting with the formation of the fourth international in England in the 1940s with the club. Shall we start with the first enclosure movement in England?

But as I started typing it out, I was like, I'm going to spare everybody this. You know, it's really good that we have, you know, Andy's, of course, a Posada scholar. We have a scholar of Trotskyist insanity on the podcast who can really kind of, you know, give us, give us some context for all this show. Constant handy. What are the questions? Most normal least. Yeah. It's like it's the least insane, but also most wrong Trotskyist movement.

Like Posada is some more correct than this, even as they're more insane. Absolutely. One question I'd like to answer. Oh, I have you guys actually all answer for me by the time we're done this is can we connect this to a general theory of why Trotskyists are so weird? Oh, yeah. I'm already there. Okay, so do I have everyone's permission to do the Tarantino and start in media res? Do it.

All right. So the magazine entitled Living Marxism in the late 1990s publishes an article that contains the following sentence. There was no barbed wire fence surrounding the Ternopoli, I'm sorry if I pronounced that incorrectly, camp. It's not a prison and certainly not a concentration camp, but a collection center for refugees. The barbed wire in the picture is not around the Bosnian Muslims. It is around the cameraman of the journalists, the British news team from ITN filmed from inside this compound shooting pictures of the refugees in the camp through the compound fence. This sentence is the precipitating event that led to the formation of spiked as we know it today. Interesting.

Remember the Balkan Wars. Too many people forget. Yeah. Well, that's kind of true, actually, because if we all remember, and I hope we feel a certain amount of associated appropriate shame with this, there were plenty of people on the left who actually did live down to the right wing critiques that you're just reflexively anti-American or whatever, because they saw the thoroughly genocidal Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic doing some genocide in Bosnia and thought, well, this has to be fake because America is on the other side of it. So I'm most notably Nohem Chomsky was the biggest figure to associate himself with this. He flubbed that and Cambodia, but you know, it happens. You can't win them all, but in this case, one of the big losers, very unfair.

It's Graydon Carter somehow. Yeah, Graydon Carter's Oscar after party in Belgrade, no longer hot. If you think the Balkan Wars were bad, you should have seen a Vanity Fair dinner party back in 1987. I interrupted you with some nonsense. No, no, the nonsense is fine. This helps break up what is quite a bleak story. Plenty of these people later realized, oh, wait, actually, even the neoliberals, even the fucking things were so bad in Bosnia that they made the U.S. Department of Defense the good guys by default. And that's the worst possible endorsement, right?

And so like, but in the meantime, there were plenty of like leftists and various like good graces who decided that the genocide that was happening in Bosnia was fake. There was American interventionism, which is true, that America had ulterior motives, which is true. And therefore, none of this bad stuff was actually happening. And I want to give slobber down the loss of which a great big wet kiss on the lips. And this magazine Living Marxism, the start of which we'll get back to you later, published a great deal of this. And this was the really central part was where they claimed that a British news crew had been faking a photo and some footage that it published of one of these camps. And they got sued and they got thoroughly owned by just like an overwhelming weight of evidence. But they took it to court and ICN, this news channel, won, I think, a pretty vast amount of money off of them for defamation.

And that was the inciting incident that leads us to Spike Online. Living Marxism and its editors were completely liable for all these damages. The editors personally liable and then the group that owned Living Marxism, this magazine, were liable. It shut down. And then what do you know? They formed a new company and all of our old favorite friends who were going to meet over the course of the next 40 or so minutes. We're like, hey, let's get the band back together two days after we were forcibly broken up for lying about a genocide. And it really threw everybody. Nobody realized what happened when they changed Living Marxism into LM. Like KFC, you know, it doesn't stand for chicken anymore.

One of the key events here that's very interesting was, and put this in the back of your mind, they managed to spin the story such that they turned themselves into a David against a Goliath. And so there was a lot of goodwill, bizarrely, because Britain's a stupid place, towards the formerly Living Marxism now spiked crew in the late 1990s. And so they were able to form dozens of front organizations and all get into positions of authority in sort of respectable British media and society. So the alumni. I think the thing is, right, like we have to talk about who their enemies were, because that's a large part of this. I don't want to come across two interventionists or two neoliberal here. The people who sued them into oblivion were doing so on the basis of facts that Living Marxism had misrepresented and lied about, but they were also just massive Clinton America world police guys. They were the most repulsive people imaginable.

And so, of course, people were going to be contemptuous of that, even then. And so that that bought them that goodwill. So now that we know what this big inciting incident was, shall we travel back to the 70s? Everything is brown. I don't think that was the sound of of England in the 1970s. I think it was more sustained moan. Yeah, it's the sound of like sticking your entire face over like a big smokestack and just taking a big breath in. And that's your only job.

And pretty soon that smokestacks can be shut down and you're just going to be left devastated. Yeah. Yeah, Sean, that's carbon capture technology. See, Spiked would argue that that, you know, coal's good, actually, and all we need is a bunch of working class people to get jobs sucking the smoke out of stacks. Oh, you just you're telling the working class people they can't even suck a smoke out of the smokestacks because you're just a liberal elite who doesn't want them to make a living. Spiked is the result of, I think, four or five that Living Marxism, rather, was the magazine of the red evolutionary Communist Party of Great Britain. This is a trotsky. Not to be confused, by the way, I should say for, again, American listeners out there, not to be confused with Bob Avakian's revolutionary Communist Party, who are Maoists, completely different group.

No. These are trotskits. So they split from and also not to be confused with the workers revolutionary party. Don't get it twisted. Sorry, go on. Britain, Britain, the British left has always been like this, I'm afraid. We are we are like inveterate splitters and especially trotskits love to like have a group that splits from a group that splits from a party that splits from a faction that splits from a tendency that splits from another party that was trying to do entryism into a larger party. That's why trotskism is so tasty.

It's got 57 flavors, you know. What I find very amusing about this is about about this as well, right, is that like this is we are we are looking at splits from splits from splits from splits, but they're always along the lines. I think it's always like one in like figureheads down line, if you like. So it's all it's just, it's just groups of friends breaking up and reforming on the basis of who wants to get become a higher rank in that friend group. And maybe that gets a little bit of like mountain blades. Yeah, yeah. So basically we let some we have to start as ever with the Socialist Workers Party. I mean, look, we could go back all the way to Trotsky himself, but I think we should start with the Socialist Workers Party.

Andy salivated at that idea. A pretty big trot group. And they were something else. I think they were the International Socialist Group before or International Socialist Party or something like this. So there's the Cliffite International tendency that was memorable. That's the international. And then the British faction became the SWP in 77. You really love acronyms to be in this game.

My book. That's by Andy's book. Yeah, so basically there are several splits over a disagreement in one formula for calculating the precise decline of the rate of profit in capital volume three. I'm not joking. It is absolutely some name of the rose shit. And so that resulted in a massive splintering of the UK Trotskyist movement as it always would because Trotskyists are weird. And then we get several splits later. We have a group that coalesces around this.

This guy, Frank Ferretti, who, Beth, you are. The protagonist of our episode today. Indeed. Now he was a Hungarian dissident. What? And his politics were largely considered unserious, but he was a scholar of the Soviet political economy. And he was a professor at the University of Kent. And what happened was he had this tendency and people coalesced around it.

It was called the Revolutionary Communist Party, which split from the Revolutionary Communist tendency. So Alice wasn't joking. Yeah. And most of this information, by the way, comes from Jenny Turner's fantastic article in the London Review of Books called Who Are They? About the Institute of Ideas, which is one of the many front groups. They love front groups. Yeah. Trots love front groups.

Well, let's get into this later as to why this might be. This is the red thread that runs through this entire thing is like, how can you use Trotskyist methods to have the worst politics? Again, answers in the question. Yeah. So essentially what we have is we have this guy whose politics were kind of, you know, a little bit all over the place who eventually gathers this group of sort of four to 500 people at its height around him to be the Revolutionary Communist Party. And second only to the SWP and membership, I understand. It wasn't a huge group, but it was, you know, relatively weighty on the British left at the time. And it was big.

It was well funded. And it also had like extremely modish and stylish and cool members. Yeah, it was fashionable, which is insane to think about a Trotskyist party of 500 people being fashionable now. But yeah, it was the cool place to be was to be at the Revolutionary Communist Party. Flat caps are out, beetle boots are in. And so, yeah, I mean, personally, why a Trotskyist group is still maintaining a well funded and slick publication with a large membership base in the 1970s and more importantly, 80s? Question mark, question mark, question mark. Add that to the column of question marks under why do they keep forming front groups that are very difficult to keep track of.

But yeah, but like to bear in mind, right, the alternative to this, if you're on the left and you weren't in labor and you wanted to go further left than that, your alternative to that was like the Communist Party of Great Britain, which was four guys who were all getting a pension from Moscow in a room full of pipe smoke talking about how the Czechoslovakians really had it coming. Hey, look, that's great work if you can get it. Yeah, I mean, I'm all for universal basic income for loyal Stalinists, but it wasn't cool was the thing. Yeah, definitely not cool. But a big part of why it was cool in the 80s to be part of SWP or the RCP was that they had these big concerts because they both had anti-racist front groups. Yeah, was it rock against racism? Yes.

And the RCP had their own version called workers against racism war. And they threw these, I think they're probably just like the biggest fests in the country with like ska bands and punk bands and rock bands clash and stuff like that. Imagine a time when being in a Trotskyist group and going to a ska band was the height of cool. And so while we're on the subject, the SWP had a ska band called the Redskins, sort of skinheads playing like reggae stuff. Very clever, yeah. And the RCP had their own version called Easter House named after a housing project in Glasgow. Oh, in your hometown. And they looked like a more preppy, kind of like more put together version of Joy Division and they played sort of a modest new wave.

And so like they have to understand that these were like in the left, everyone was very well dressed and good looking and cool and edgy and also weirdly aggressive. So this is a quote that I pulled from the Jenny Turner article. No evidence has ever turned up in support of the hypothesis popular among 1980s lefties, can't guess why, that the RCP were a genre provocateur. But it's easy to see how the rumors took hold. There was something strange about them. They're near mechanical discipline and efficiency, the sheaves of expensive looking leaflets in magazines, and their arrogance and aggressiveness. Someone I spoke to remembers selling Socialist Worker in London on Saturday mornings as a 15 year old with women RCPers edging up to him, making remarks about his fancy ability and the crapness of his organization. RCP members, he says, seem to have been briefed to systematically wind up any other left groups in any way possible at all times.

Huh, question mark, question mark, question mark. That's just normal trust leadership though. There's nothing suspicious about that to me in the slightest. I wasn't sure about the agents provocateur thing, but then I was reading up and whereas Redskins just had like a normal 45, it turns out that Easter House came out on Pink Translucent Vinyl. And where does the money come for that kind of seven inch? Jesus, that's a good point. That seems like something that should be like an aesthetic thing, but that's serious money. That's real money in that.

Yeah. So like they were getting funded from somewhere, and I mean... And it wasn't fucking Frank Faredi. Yeah, it wasn't him. Like it wasn't lecture, it wasn't lecture as wages from the University of Kent that buys that. No, I mean, I mean, look, if I was to, let's say, this is a separate conversation, by the way, let's say if I was MI five or six or, you know, the CIA or whatever. And I wanted, and I was a little bit worried about the growth of the left in Britain in 1970s and 80s and stuff. Well, how, if I was to fund a socialist group, how would they act and what would they do?

Hmm. Interesting thought experiment there. Anyway, enough about that. Let's go back to what we're talking about. We can also like do a little thought experiment here and be like, if you were a like strangely well funded Trotskyist group in Britain in the 1970s and 80s, who could be funding you? Right. No, it's not going to be billionaires, right? Because why?

It's not going to be the people who are funding already the CPGB and their pipe smoking. It's not going to be the Soviets because they don't want to give money to Trotskyists and also they have guys. And it's really not going to be the trade unions. I mean, they're all in the militant tendency. Exactly. They're all still trying to be in the Labour Party, which is, which has its own like Trotskyist spin and like entryism and so on and so on. But that's completely different. This is who else is left that could be funding this?

And there's not a lot of answers. Yeah. One clue, of course, is the fact that as time comes out, as I'm sorry, as time goes on, we figure out that the CIA in particular had its hands in many, many, many surprising cultural and political institutions across the world. Just saying. Rock and roll was a capitalist op, according to the show, Ian Finonius. Exactly. I just, I just, I want to see, I want to get into the like files that are still classified and I want to read like a type written thing from one shirt and time Mormon CIA guy to another, explaining what a scar band is and why they need to be vinyl. Is this like abstract expressionism?

Yes, absolutely. In 60 years, people will find this transcendent. I mean, it's like, well, God is playing different kinds of horns. Folks, listen. I love to work for this CIA and move between the department that like smears nerve gases on black church's door handles and the department that like funds vinyl. And I will, I will argue on this podcast that if a fourth wave of ska ever arises, let's be careful. It's probably not. We should have known because all ska artists embraced the like black and white tartan thing that cops here use.

It was, it was right before our eyes. Real big fish was an inside job. Actually, wait, isn't one of the guys from real big fish like a fan of ours? Yeah. We should be careful. Don't know his name. Apologies to all ska fans out there. These are jokes parody redacted.

Anyway, I'm sure. But look, all the, I mean, there is no hard evidence to say that. That ska is an opposite. No, there's hard evidence for that. There's no hard evidence to say that the revolutionary communist party and all of these people were either knowingly or unknowingly working for the security services of the U.S. or the UK. And that's all. It would be libelous of us to even say that.

So we won't say. That's true. You don't want to like lose the libel suit. And then two days later, come back as the anti-fadant. Oh boy. Just be the AF or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, look, I mean, I also like, you know, it's even if some other organization was to have been an op.

I mean, they wouldn't have been an op the whole time. And again, they probably might not even have known. Right. Let's let's go back though, because one of the things we're talking about isn't just this party and it's sort of seeming absence of politics because like they were and they, for example, this was one of the only leftist groups in the UK to be against the minor strike in in the late 70s. Very, very spicy position. Yeah. And also, it's one of the only one of these sort of leftist groups that was always extremely anti any any kind of environmental protection at all at all. And they were always very, very, but basically what they said was we are all about freedom.

But because they're all positivists, their version of freedom is how you define it. If you were sort of just born or, I don't know, just had like a drag massive head injury. Yeah, you just if you you'd gotten up too quickly after lying down and they were asked to define freedom really fast. Yeah. So basically, well, this is going good. Let me jump in real quick, because I think we're about to touch on another thing that's going to run through this, which is how much of this is like truly held beliefs that these people worked out through a, you know, pretty dedicated study of Marx and Marxism, and how much of it is just pure mercenary opportunism and careerism. Well, I think power grabbing kind of psychopath.

It's some of that. And I think there's also some trolling like to quote the current big web president. We do a little trolling. And like, I think some of this is I think the sum of this explains still spikes like reflexive contrarianism is that there is some of this stuff that whatever else was going on. I think it was quite fun for a lot of people involved to be like, Oh, no, actually, I'm the only pure leftist because you fucking idiots want to like, I don't know, not do nuclear weapons. Do nuclear weapons or do a minus strike? Right. Well, and this is sorry, this real quick, this is tied into their kind of hipster aesthetic, right? Because what's more hipster than saying like, you know, I'm correct on everything. I have the right line. I was doing this before you were doing it, blah, blah, blah. Go on, Jamie. Sorry. I was just going to say, you know, according to our Marxist friend, Camille Paglia, climate change being concerned about it is the bourgeois conspiracy theory. So there you go.

I think this is actually the roots of their political shift from what I can tell. I found another article in addition to the London Review piece in a blog called Hat Full of History or New Historical Express that has, I think, the best explanation of what happened to them politically in the 80s. And it seems to be around campus politics, specifically no platforming the British National Party and anti-abortion activists. So initially they believed in this like militant, like, get a working class organization to physically fight the BNP. But throughout the 80s they came into conflict with the SWP doing the same thing, also going after anti-abortion activists, and started saying this is the wrong approach because racism and misogyny comes from the state. It doesn't come from these small groups of fascists. So we need to organize to confront the state. And what do we do about these reactionaries? Well, we debate them. So they began to like really double down on this concept of we need to actually go give a platform for debate because our ideas are so strong that they'll win. And so this is not like a crazy idea. You see a lot of leftists having this critique of Antifa and saying that we do need some kind of discourse at times.

But I think there's an X factor here that I'm not finding in the LRB piece or anything else I've read, is that I think there's some like parapsychology stuff going on with Ferretti that you need to be like initiated into the group to understand what the ideology is at the bottom of it. Because his obsession with therapy and child rearing, usually that has, there tends to be this kind of alternative cultish view of how to, basically I think they have their own concept of freedom that comes from that place and not from Marx or not from any kind of political strategy. It's making me think of just suddenly remembered something from Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge where the way that they governed Cambodia was that the existence of the Communist Party was not publicly acknowledged. There was a ruling organization that was acknowledged, but the existence of the Communist Party itself was secret because there was this instinctive secrecy and this hierarchical series of mysteries to penetrate. And I don't know why that reminds me of that so closely, but that just came into my brain. Alice, I slightly disagree with you here. I think it's less shadowy and I think it's more personal. I think that, and I think this is something I've talked about before. You think it's some cult shit. I don't think it's cult shit. I think it's purely that the group of the revolutionary Communist Party, living Marxism spiked, the whole extended Ferediverse, you want to call it that, the Brendan O'Neilliverse, all these things.

I do want to call it that. We will be calling it that a lot, but I think really they just have this shared understanding of politics and power as affect only as something where they are very sensitive and they feel very superior, but that feeling of superiority is quite brittle. And I think that the way that, especially since the 1980s, we have been able to have some progressive social politics, some limited, mind you, combined with regressive economics and stuff where we created the quote-unquote metropolitan elite that's largely an imaginary character. But still, they were able to say, I resent that the fact that a lot of the gay rights movement or whatever, because they came out against gay marriage before it happened, even though they're all for freedom or whatever, spiked in 2012 I think. They were able to say, well, I hate the people who are for it because they think they're better than me, so I'm going to find a way to come out against it. And they had humiliated them too. The Libs had destroyed living Marxism as an organ merely for doing a bit of a tasty genocide. But they were full of this kind of resentment, and they've always couched it in a positive way.

They always said, well, we think humanity is underrated. We think that the technological domination of man over nature, the ultimate freedom of man, and so on, is what society is all about. And so any curb on anyone doing anything that requires some kind of intentional political action, they see as illegitimate reflexively, because I think it makes them feel inferior. And this is sort of a tick in the either not an op or not intentionally an op column. It's the fact that a lot of the people who joined this thing, probably in the 1970s and 80s, also you see how they acted, how they were leftists, how they would be sort of quite cool, but very quick to anger, all this stuff. It could just purely be the politics of aesthetics driven by resentment, and resentment in every direction of everyone. I'm going to argue back here, and I'm going to say that I'm getting, as you get more and more sort of parapsychological and more personal and more into reasonable explanations why this might not be an op. I am just altering my brain chemistry. I've got a big chalkboard. I'm like pinning things to other things.

I have a big red string going from that just sending the S.A.S. to train the Khmer Rouge through to the fucking... Yeah, I don't know, man, but like... It just seems like they're doing class as identity, right? They've completely transposed all of these material struggles into the cultural sphere in which class is not a social relation, but an identity that seems extremely malleable based on what point they're trying to make and everyone they dislike must be a bougie asshole even if they are actually poorer than them or do not own the means of production or whatever. Jamie, you're right. You're totally right, but they only started that in the 90s, which is weird. Yeah, I'm jumping ahead a little bit because I mostly looked at the spiked website and I watched the interview that Dave Rubin did with Brandon O'Neill, but we could save that for later. Yeah, we're going to get into the interview about Marxist libertarianism. Not libertarian Marxism, but Marxist libertarianism.

Here's what I'll do. I'm going to say just a couple of quotes from Ferretti about the philosophical underpinnings of this and then I think we jump ahead, as you say. So Ferretti says in an interview in Spiked that the stance of both LM and Spiked springs from a stance that he sees as anti-Stalinist, anti-state, a progressive in terms of human progress, rationality and freedom. And he says it infuriates many social democrats and sort of status leftists who see these things possible only through the state. He says, much of the left in the 20th century tended to be influenced by Stalinist and Sokdem traditions, which means they could not imagine that you could be left wing and anti-state. So they were confused by us, but it was their fault, not ours. It was a product of their own abandonment of liberty in favor of ideas about state control. But the problem is the only answer Spiked could ever come up with was to oppose the mutualization, nationalization, trade union movement or anything because it was like, well, that's wrong. Well, that's wrong. Well, that's wrong. Well, that's wrong. And what they end up doing is just endlessly, endlessly, endlessly supporting whatever seems quote-unquote natural in the economy because it's what happens when you don't interfere using the state. And so that's what ends up with them having, as Spiked, having received over $300,000 in Koch brother donations.

I mean, this is, I feel like you're still not being paranoid enough that this anti-state thing, like, it doesn't come from, like, even Ferretti doesn't identify with any kind of pre-existing left tendency or like anarchist tendency or anything of that nature. It doesn't come from anywhere. It doesn't owe anything to anyone. And it arrives de novo at the same time that sort of more conservative political forces have decided that the state is this machine that needs to be, like, shrunk down dramatically and prevented from doing anything. Well, and this is, sorry, this is also, when we talk about an op, right? I think it's fair to say that an op can be both a, say, CIA, MI5, MI6 front group, you know, that's secretly funded or run by a government intelligent agency of some sort or another, or an op could be a front group for Koch brother's money that takes private funding from individuals, gets a platform for that reason and pushes ideas that are quote-unquote left about liberty and freedom when, in fact, you know, they're operating under the osmosis and not quite the direction but at least the patronage of the capitalist class. So whether it's public with an intelligence agency or it's private, there's still something very nefarious happening at the heart of it. It would be the most on the ops. Damn. That's exactly it. That would be the most on-brand thing would be to outsource your ops. But I think it's, I don't, I wish it wouldn't dwell on this too much because, like, if you look at the most extreme example of, like, a record group, the Leruchites, you know, they, yeah, they were working with, I forgot if they worked with the government directly, but they were working with, like, the KKK.

And they, I think they had some connection with the government and they were, you know, they were just, like, going to the U.S. SWP meetings and, like, other left groups in the U.S. and just fight people just because they were that much of an insane parapsychology cult by the 70s with their originally Trotskyists. And they didn't need anyone's funding to do that. That's just what they believed in. So I think it's totally irrelevant if they're an op or not. They might not be an op, but give you an op work. That's true. But the Leruchites also had their own organic weirdness that Spikes never did. Like, beyond its own, like, reflexive contrarianism, they would never come up with anything as inventive as every orchestra in the world is tuning to the wrong pitch and that's making everyone praise. The Verity Pitch Tendency. The Leruchites politics are clearly much more enlightened. It's a synthesis of Queen of England as a reptile and Rosa Luxemburg was right about crisis theory. Yeah.

There's nothing that interesting in anything that LM or the RCP or Spike has ever produced. That's me, but Marxism, baby. Riley, I want to I want to dish on Brendan O'Neill, because I have a take on him and his Marxist libertarianism, but do you want to bring us from the 1980s up till today? So throughout the 1980s, we had this party, this, yeah, the Frank Ferretti extended universe that got its own sort of, again, larger cast of characters, people like Claire Fox, who now is a Brexit party MEP, I believe. And Brendan O'Neill, who we parody all the time on Trash Future, Mick Hume, is people who keep popping up in British politics, people also whose families and siblings and friends keep popping up in British politics and media and organizations. And yet weirdly, they always pretend not to know each other when they're there in panels or in meetings or whatever. Weird. Yeah, weird.

Question mark, question mark, question mark. So what we get, then, is we have this movement into the 1990s of this trot group now staying pretty much solid. There are no more splits, and its ideology is pretty well-formed. Which also, question mark, question mark, question mark. That's what I was going to say. That's the most spacious thing I've heard about that yet. Yeah, that's the thing. Once they become this sort of gang of stylish jackasses who keep seemingly undermining the left and every turn, no more splits after that. Weird. Anyway, no more questions about that.

So what we end up with in the 1990s is they're not really much of a party anymore. They're more of a publishing organization. And they publish living Marxism, which then gets shortened to LM after the Berlin Wall falls. And then, in 1997, they publish that sentence about the ITN coverage of the intervention in the Balkans. Because one thing they are is, like Alice said earlier, just reflexively anti-liberal, even when the liberals are sort of right by accident occasionally. As much as I hate to. Hillary Clinton, yeah. Hillary Clinton is at this point receiving sniper fire on the tarmac. And one of the things also to note is that Frank Ferretti's main academic concern at this point becomes risk and the risk society.

And how we are always trying to avoid risk. But he sees this, as you mentioned earlier, Sean, about child rearing and stuff. And so he becomes like a big campaigner for kids to be put in more dangerous situations. He's against like vetting teachers. Question mark, question mark, question mark, Elm Guest House. Don't ever let Ferretti design a playground, okay? It's gonna have snake pits in it. It's gonna have saw blades that inexplicably just fly all over the place.

You joke, but he was a major campaigner against what he saw as an overly nanny state of health and safety for children. And somehow he got from Marxism to there. That's the most libertarian development yet. So we have this reflexive anti-liberalism that culminates in them getting shut down by a libel suit from ITN. And then they immediately, as we said earlier, LM folds and then everyone involved in it from Ferretti to Mick Hume. Mick Hume was the editor at the time and stayed the editor of Spike until 2007 when it was taken over by Brendan O'Neill. It stays largely the same. Now has finally shed its sort of political party.

And now is just a media organization with an agenda to counterbalance the woke left at every turn. And then picking anything that anyone on the left or just lives in a city likes, they will find a reason to hate it. And I think it has driven them all mad. So I'll hand back over to Sean. Nobody got my pedo joke earlier. That's okay. There'll be more opportunity for that. Don't worry. We should check the flight box though, seriously. Ferretti's on the flight box now.

These people are not, but they're both not on the flight logs of Epstein and also the flight logs that they are on are all going to be like shell companies within shell companies. Well, another big question that looms large in this, right, is to what extent can they still claim to be Marxists? Because until, I think today, until recently, but certainly all the way through the last decade and a half, Brendan O'Neill has claimed to still be a Marxist, right? He had this Dave Rubin report interview where he extolled Marxist libertarianism. Jamie, you watched that. Yeah, I did. Oh, it was so cringe. I mean, he's facing the entire Marxist part of his identity on Marxist to be sure paragraph, right?

Right. Yeah, the communist manifesto. Grantic capitalism has given us some good things and he stops there. He's like, that's right. That's what Marx said. That's me, classical liberal Marx. Alice, we were talking about this a while ago in relation to someone else, but yeah, it really is like someone who just wrote, who saw the sentence. There was a tendency in the rate of profit and it was just like, well, they said profit seems like a good thing. No need to finish that sentence.

There was an inopportune line break or page break and they just stopped reading there. There is a tendency of the rate of profit. That's right. Anyway, time for politics. So Riley touched on this before when you were talking about positive versus negative critique, right? So how can Brendan O'Neill and Spiked still claim to be Marxists? They do this by essentially excising the entire negative side of Marxist critique of political economy, right? So Brendan O'Neill is able to cite passages in the manifesto that extoll the historical role of the bourgeoisie and battering down Chinese walls and melting solid things into air and into increasing the scope of human freedom, you know, within the bound of commodity society. You know, O'Neill could even cite the Grunrissa, which he does in that interview. He actually mispronounces the Grunrissa, but he could cite where Marx says... Oh shit, we just did go class condescension. Damn.

Fuck! Fuck! Yeah, Brendan O'Neill is prolier than us. But yeah, like this part of the Grunrissa where Marx talks about this progressive tendency of capitalism to create wants and needs and desires, right? O'Neill can cite that. It's this sort of enlightenment Marx, this kind of like based classical liberal Marx and also this historian Marx, who saw like this unique and powerful social system of capitalism as it was rising and saw the progressive aspect of it. But that's it, right? So like Brendan O'Neill's... He's also like a weirdly classical neo-liberal, right? Because he talks in that interview with our friend Dave Rubin about how the anti-capitalist left hates free trade, but Marx liked free trade. He saw it as like it was a good development. Like, again, he didn't read to the part where it was just a way to get the global proletariat aligned against the global bourgeoisie. Like, they read less of the Communist Manifesto than Jordan Peterson did.

So like, this goes back to what, talking about how everyone at Spiked just overdosed on positivism, where they just look at whatever's there, whatever's around them, and they just assume that that's natural. And then whatever their assumption of natural is, resets every second that they then observe the world around them. And so all of the forces that are at play are natural, and anyone working against those forces is being unnatural. And so this is what I mean when I say positivist, but carry on. Yeah. And it's weird to me too, because like, I know Angela Nagel comes out of that milieu, right? Not to open a whole other can of worms, and she's very much an economic nationalist who is against free trade. So I think maybe their, their ideology is less coherent than hers. That's all I'm going for. That's fair. I mean, what they, you know, by taking out the negative critique, which is what they do, it's still like some sort of vulgar to based form of Marxism, I suppose, in its own way, right?

They conveniently, conveniently leave out these bits where like these real advances of freedom on which actually exist under capitalism are by their very nature incomplete and rest on this foundation of exploitation and domination. So they're happy to cite like cringy early Marx, where he makes statements about the progressivism of Indian colonization and the destruction of backward cultures, but never the mature Marx, who called for immigrants rights on the Irish question. And discovered like the communist potential in the, in the Russian mirror, you know, so it's this sort of wiggish ideology that that collapses into this politics of envy. That's basically indistinguishable from an affectation of projected working class grievance towards familiar enemies such as immigrants, the European Union and of course trans people. So there's a real, I'd say like a Prometheanism, right, which is this, this, this, it's where human concerns and human agencies are at the center of this project for self directed emancipation. Right. But it's been turned away from the Prometheanism of the proletariat rising up in a revolution and towards the defense of say the fossil fuel industry, Vapors rights and child pornography. They really love vaping too. They have a whole vaping vertical. And the last thing I'll say on this, this might be the thing that gets me to quit vaping. I'm serious. The last thing I'll say on this, it is only to the extent that they are dogmatic and shitty readers of Marx that they can plausibly said to have anything in common with contemporary Marxism.

It's weird, right? Because he's talking about his critique of right wing libertarians, right, where he says, you know, opposing the state, he goes over like Marx's classical liberal values, like freedom of the press, freedom of expression, whatever, whatever. He says, opposing the state is not only enough, you know, the state's not the only thing they can do tyranny. And from there, you think he's going to go in a materialist way and like, yes, and that's why we also need to limit the private tyranny of your boss or whatever. But no, he's talking about. The private tyranny of big trends. He's talking about social media mobs. It seems like the other side of the coin to this kind of neoliberal identity politics, which we all know is bad because it brings struggles totally into the cultural realm and does not involve things like class struggle, right? It's the other side of the coin. It's it's engaging in that struggle on purely cultural terrain. Only it's like it's the negation of what am I saying? You know what I mean? No, I got it. All they do is talk about identity politics. And yet the only way they talk about it is there's too much identity politics. This identity politics is bad because the only good identity politics is when you are a flat cap and hit a girdle with a hammer.

Vulgar workerism is the only acceptable. Like his critique of neoliberal identity politics is the opposite one from the one that we have, which is that it needs class politics to. Yeah, so you'll never remember. I mean, there is I hate to be that guy, but it's always sunny in Philadelphia kind of made this point very well, which is where Dennis and Frank are just deciding to defraud the bar. And so just distract Mac and Charlie by making them argue over Limes. Like that's what that's what Spike is doing. That's what the Koch brothers are paying for. They're paying for it because you know why? Spike always says we're not against trans rights or whatever. We just don't want to shut down the debate. But really what they want to do is they want to keep the debate going for fucking ever and ever so it's never settled ever. And so like not only are sort of material like material issues for everyone not addressed, it also puts people who are like not cisgender in direct danger.

Love to love to be a contentious issue. It's really funny though because you're so right. And if you go back in time to when like before identity politics either way had caught up to it, you get headlines from the fifties that was like local GI stacked now. And it's just like, yeah, cool. You just Christine Jorgensen is just like, oh yeah, he used to be used to be in the army. Now he's got tits. Amazing. Like most isn't science magical. Most normal people don't really care about this stuff. Like I remember that I think it was was it turning points? Was it liver you like one of those motherfuckers?

Oh, yeah. She was like trying to introduce Caitlin Bennett. Yeah, she was trying to interview people on campus like, um, they're trying to put tampons in men's bathrooms. What do you think about that? It's just this bro and he's like, uh, I don't know if dude needs tampon like that's cool. I don't care. The thing is most most trans people also do not care very much. It's just it's not that interesting a thing to be, but Brendan O'Neill will hammer out the column any day of the week about. And if you can when you have a ping pong paddle, everything's a ping pong.

If you can make normal people angry about that like they're trying to do, it's going to distract them from struggling with their material needs. And hey, guess what? When people were interviewed about why they like switch from voting labor to voting conservative in the 2019 general election, a lot of them cited the fact that like labor was too woke and too like too many genders in the manifesto. And that's like they don't care about it. There's no natural tendency of the working class to care about trans people. I mean, the other things I always cite is like Dennis Skinner, one of like the most badass of the old guard like labor MPs. He was called the beast of Bolsover was like that this guy was came from through the union was elected by the union was one of the most viciously left, like just ferociously left wing MPs in parliament would always get forcibly removed for the Queen's speech because he couldn't stop heckling her. And and and he was like Alexeteer, all this stuff. And then but in the 1980s when it was still illegal to say being gay was a thing in British schools,

he and the miners union in Bolsover were coming out as one of the most pro LGBT organizations in the country. Right, like while LGBT groups were like breaking the stereotype literally working class like gay and lesbian organizations were doing solidarity on the picket lines with the British miners, because they saw this as a working class struggle, you know, and they saw themselves having to be part of that and created kind of a mutual solidarity between minors and working class activists fighting for gay rights. What does spiked do spiked says that that it's a basically a bourgeois affectation to want an extension of gay rights. That's literally what they said when their gay marriage debate was happening before 2012. And so you're like, huh, these people fucking suck. See, parenthetically, the other RCP, Bob Avakians was also calling gay rights a bourgeois affectation. Most of the old lefts have that position.

Yeah, it's coming from a different. Yeah, it's coming from like Stalin right stamping a big letter from like very heartfelt Scottish gay communist who was like, why do you have to like persecute gay people in the Soviet Union when, you know, we're workers and it and the Stalin in that way that he does just wrote deviant file this and then just send it back. You do not. You don't want to be on the wrong side of Stalin's marginal notes. No, no, that's right. The thing is that they they're their whole thing and their whole thing forever was that it's all about debate and you can never silence debate because if you silence debate you silence progress. But yeah, and that's the difference. That's the difference. You don't get anything as declarative as deviant file this letter.

You get endless, endless, endless debate columns after columns after columns, which leads to, I think, a very important question. And this, you know, I'm not sure which side of the op column we check this in, but very similar to Turning Points USA run by Charlie Kirk. You have to wonder who the audience really is for spiked online, how they maintain enough of an audience to be relevant. Because we all know that TP USA builds itself as a millennial, you know, right wing group that's spreading ideas very much talking about wokeness and identity politics critiquing liberals and shit. They build themselves as having this mass base in the colleges and universities across this country. When, in fact, if you look at who actually consumes TP USA, it's fucking boomers, conservatives who already agree with the principles at work. And spiked online, like where are where are the social forces out there that are logging on to spiked online every single day to see the the wonderful correct takes that they're having on any particular issue? Yeah, it's like four think tank guys, and the rest of it is like farms of like iPhone somewhere.

Let me see the viewing figures, Brandon. Well, it's that but also the other thing, right, is that the like British, the British media is it all works with credentialism. Much like so what spiked does is it generates these people, it'll, you know, commission them commission them commission them and then give them some post and then all of us because there has to be debates on every political topic like for five different debate and they'll say yes to everything is the other thing. They will be a reliable call for a producer who wants an extra slot filled on news night or question time and they have the little byline ready to go with spiked online. So if you're saying if you're saying that global warming is a problem, you can call any university sort of climate science department and get someone on. But where are you going to find a climate science denier spiked? And where are they getting their money from the same private individuals who fund all climate science denial across the entire world.

I skimmed a few issues of the archive if you issues of living Marxism and the best charitable case I could make of what they're trying to do is so I read a the editorial from a 1990 issue where mckume is talking about poll tax riots. I don't know a lot about the backstory of this, but he's basically he's critiquing the Labour Party and the SWP for sending marshals to stop kids from rioting. And he's saying like, look, if proletarian youth are mad and they want to riot, you know, maybe they're doing so in a reactionary way or as antisocial. But you have to let them do that because like, you know, they're they're trying to express their rage against the system, and ultimately we want to take down the system. So I read that I was like, okay, I kind of agree with this. And then I read more and more as LM progresses more towards being like purely cultural like they really they, you know, year by year they get rid of more of the their political stances on international issues and what have you. And that's when Brendan O'Neill starts writing as far as I can tell.

And his articles are almost purely cultural and really not too different from what he writes in Spike today stuff about like there's an article about how the royal family isn't acting royal enough. They're acting too, too common. It's a disgrace. That is a Marxist concern. Yes, go on. Wow. There's an article called Our Leading Lad's The New Sad's. Well, are they?

Andy, Andy, are they? Well, don't bury the lead. Apparently, lads are being told to express their feelings and that's implying that there's something wrong with hardened masculinity. So that's devaluing somebody's innate ability to be positively masculine in some way. And then there's a one article I'll read a paragraph from it is called. Here it is. Brendan O'Neill, Prisons of the Mind. Brendan O'Neill would rather be banged up than screwed by jail therapy.

And this is an article from, let's see, 2000s, I think. Like an insurrectionary anarchist. He's calling his teacher a mind jailer. Yeah. Like an insurrectionary anarchist or a 14 year old. Kill the SJW in your head. He's talking about literal jails and he's saying that there's this tendency to try to give prisoners therapy and to rehabilitate them in some way. And he's totally disgusted by this.

Again, I don't know what was going on in British prisons at the time. But the last paragraph, he says, prison reformers once argued that denying an offender his liberty was punishment enough. Beyond that, prison should be comfortable and constructive. Today is not enough to deny an offender his liberty. We also have to strip him of his independence and self confidence and ensure that whatever he was like when he entered prison, he will leave as a feeble minded loser who can be expected to take responsibility for his actions. Hard labor would be better. Hard labor would be better. Hard labor would be better.

So I think what they're trying to do is I don't I don't think they're Foucaulting at all, but there is this kind of biopolitical critique of like technocratic neoliberalism. And I think maybe if you combine that with some sort of secret idea they have in crisis theory that like eventually the you know the EU and like neoliberalism will centralize to extent that it falls apart and they can enter power. Because they hate the Labour Party. They've always hated the Labour Party. That's like a consistent position they've had for the wrong reason. If they can enter power through a reaction to the Labour Party, then they can have positions of media and political influence as the neoliberal order breaks apart, which they have. But now what are they doing with it? They're just doing the same stuff.

But it's still like intensely individualistic and atomizing, right? Like he's all about personal responsibility. He says in the Dave Rubin interview that he dislikes any government efforts to like track people's happiness or well-being, which I don't think is actually happening very much. I mean, we have this death on deaths of despair, but like he thinks that by doing that any like efforts at public mental health, you're shifting the responsibility for one's own happiness off of the individual and onto society. And that's bad. Oh, you should see their corona takes. Yeah. Oh, we could actually let me go ahead.

I have a thesis, but I'll let Jamie finish. I read some corona takes and it's like just maybe they do it more skillfully in other articles. I haven't read any every article on the site, but like it really is naked and it's efforts to drag these very clearly material things into the realm of the culture wars. Like just a few things that they reference and say that they're like illegitimate cultural bullshit. They reference an article about how racist white Trump voters are responsible for, you know, the terrible job that Trump's doing with the coronavirus, which is, you know, partially true. Reference is an article about transgender people's difficulties in accessing gender affirming health care, transition related care at this point in time and says, yeah, that's culture war bullshit. An article about how COVID has led to an uptick in white nationalism, which cites actual incidents of hate crimes against Asian Americans. They're like, yeah, that's a bunch of nonsense.

And AOC, they say AOC, you know, she claims that deaths are disproportionately higher in minority communities, which is absolutely fucking true. Like it's taking all of these interlocking struggles against oppression, which do include identity politics in a good way in that they're connected to capitalism and just tries to completely delegitimize them and make them seem like liberal bullshit, you know. Which really puts their anti climate science agenda into perspective, right? Because if you have this only progressive view of capitalism, right, only its positive parts, you can't have climate change and still hold that position without dooming humanity. So they have to be climate deniers, right? They have to be in order to hold these positions. So in that case, right, their politics are contrarian, irrespective of what the science, what the materials, objective conditions say. Oh, and they try to both dice it.

This is the other thesis here, which is you can't understand that kind and level of contrarianism without understanding the fact that they're built specifically for the British media environment, which is, which has the BBC, which is statutorily obligated to always show both sides of an issue. And so the spiked basically exists as one of the 10 people who will be on the wrong side of anything. And I want to broaden it out a little bit because somebody, I think it was Andy, used the name Foucault and we're talking about this sense of a cultural turn, right? If we zoom way out from this, going from the 1970s, you know, with the rise of this really powerful workers movement into its defeats in Britain in the 1980s, you know, with the minor strike and with thatchrism, and then continuing into the neoliberal 90s and the crisis ridden 2000s, and then up until today, you have massive shifts in global capitalist production and just the political economy of the world. And because this workers movement gets destroyed, large parts of the left do take an identitarian and cultural turn into liberal identity politics. You know, the correct side of critiquing this sort of like empty white feminist wokeism, right?

Like that arises because of defeats and failures of the workers movement. So I would argue that spiked by taking this cultural turn does exactly what the libs they hate had done at the same time, which is go from material concerns into identity ones because there was no longer a class movement that they could last themselves onto because the working class had been destroyed. They're doing the same fucking thing that everybody else did with the cultural turn to postmodernism and all that shit through the 80s, 90s and up until today. The only question that's left for us then is to what extent. But that is still an open question. It's enshrining this defeat of class politics. Like we're always talking about it on the show.

Not always, but we've said before the bad thing about these like Tumblr liberals isn't that they care too much about trans rights. That's a good thing trans people do deserve rights. It's that they are liberals with no class politics. Yeah, it's like we want to have my favorite example of this is I keep a little treasury in my head of these headlines. My favorite is coming out as transgender made me a more effective CIA officer. Maybe it would. Great. Yeah, I'm sure it would.

Fantastic. I just I want to there's one thing here that in the notes that I want to go back to because we've kind of agreed and I am in agreement with you on this that it doesn't matter whether or not L.M. Spiked the R.C.P. were or are an op right. It doesn't matter. They're doing this kind of identity politics in a way that it functionally has the same effect whether they're sincere or not. But there is one thing that somebody has found from it. It's actually a wartime thing from the Office of Strategic Services. They they leaf littered these over occupied Europe for like ways to do resistance covertly.

And it was like if you were in an organization, it has a list of little tips to give you to how to like degrade that organization's productivity and it's in bullet points. And the first one is make speeches. Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your points by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. When possible, refer all matters to committees for further study and consideration. Attempt to make the committee as large as possible, never less than five. Third, bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Four, haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes and resolutions.

And lastly, refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to reopen the question of the advice of that decision. Oh my God, the entire left of the last 70 years has been an op. I think that might actually be true. I still think about the it was from the McLeibor trial, which was like another one of these weird sort of peripheral struggles. But one thing I remember deeply from this was that there was a Greenpeace meeting that was held in which undercover police officers, it was later revealed, outnumbered the actual attendees. I keep thinking about that and I keep thinking about the man who was Thursday and I keep thinking about all of these people who have nothing to do but debate and debate and debate and debate and never say anything materialist. And it's making me insane and paranoid and I'm full Christmas brain at this point. And then and then you take that and you put it alongside these accounts we have of these battle of ideas festivals put on secretly by the spiked people where their conferences.

It sounds like the audience is majority like secret spiked people. The same same concept. It's all it tends to be and this is from the Jenny Turner article which we really should link in the description of this episode because it's really good. Well done. Which is like everyone's a volunteer or organizer or a speaker there are very few attendees. It just seems like just a lot of noise being made for the purposes of making noise. And in fact if I may if I if I may do one more little bit of some up. I'm reminded of one of my favorite science fiction novels is a book called Blindsight by a guy called Peter Watts.

And in it is an alien species where because they're not fully sentient they don't they don't have sentience the way that we do. They're like just the very very concept of just casual conversation to them is just trains their resources. And so they see the statement we come in peace as an attack because it's not useful information for them. And so it's almost the same thing where I feel like spike just exists to make a bunch of noise that drains the energy of the rest of the world of the ability to like just keep going on because we have to keep. Relitigating all this shit and we can never decide anything we can never move on with anything. And while we're doing that the coax of fracked the country. Okay but this so this is I'll try to like sum up my my Trotsky's argument here. What Leninism is based on this concept of democratic centralism so you shouldn't have these like large committees endlessly word splicing and debating it should be efficient.

That's the concept of having this this leadership nucleus. And it's pretty clear that LM has that around Freddie. They have a leadership group that anymore if I'm honest. I think well if anyone they so they they had it. But that's that's irrelevant to the way Trotsky is interact with other groups when they're doing entryism. So entryism was initially suggested by Trotsky before World War Two in order to enter anti fascist fronts and push them towards anti capitalism so they weren't merely defending liberalism again this is something the RCP takes up in the 80s. But then it continues after the war in the Pabloist International which is where Pasadas got his start where they would join the like the Labor Party or the Communist Party or like any major social democratic socialist group. And they would enter it and they would try to push people towards their line and the line would you know the anti capitalist but always all these individual Trotsky's groups have their all these weird idiosyncratic lines because they believe themselves to be part of the leadership group.

And the new international that was supposed to lead world revolution so they all have these intense delusions of grandeur and everything that they believed had to be correct because they were supposed to be the leaders so there's this kind of cultishness cultishness going on necessarily because they all thought that they were Lenin and you know Lenin outmaneuvered all of the other people around him that was wrong and that's how he was able to do the revolution. So that justifies them going into groups breaking them up trying to find the best people in those groups and bringing them to their side this is what the RCP was doing in the 80s. But you can also do that stuff not for communism but you could you could for example enter like the Nixon administration as like ex Trotsky's converted to neo conservatism and steer American conservatism towards neo conservatism and that's what ex Trotsky's did using the same methods of centralized disciplined influence peddling. So I just don't think that what they're doing is conspiratorial because Leninism is a conspiratorial movement. The concept of Bolshevism was a conspiracy to take down the czar and then to take down the provisional government and they won. So of course that's conspiratorial aspects but as but it's supposed to be internally consistent and I it might be.

I don't know. That's I haven't seen a good article about like how it works internally. That would be really interesting. I feel like Andy's next book is going to be an inside look at the at spiked on leadership cadre. It turns out that the fifth international was actually the Koch brothers international. I feel like we've just switched on Berto Echo novels. We've gone from name of the rose to Foucault's pendulum and we've just gone to like nests of conspiracy within conspiracy. We got through the whole thing about Trotsky's and we didn't do a single ice axe joke.

There's still time because we should do a little conclusion. Let me ask you a question. After he got the ice pick in the brain. It's Trotskyism as conceived of by someone with a shutting down cerebellum. In that respect that they are the purest Trotskyist because they kept his last vision. I won't come out fighting. I won't step out fighting. When they march into the street.

When they're voting with their feet. I'm gonna come out fighting. I won't come out fighting. When they're voting with their feet. I won't step out fighting. When they're voting with their feet. I won't step out fighting. I won't come out fighting.

I won't come out fighting. I won't come out fighting.