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Everything's there. Want to welcome everyone back to the Peking
Yona's show. We're here with Thomas for a call Marks
Part two, and I think people are excited about this,
considering the respet we got on the first episode. The
response we got in the first episode was absolutely amazing.
Speaker 2: Thomas, Yeah, that's great. That makes me very happy and relieved.
I speculated that this would be a subject a strong
interest of people. It's essential in any discussion of modern
potical theory. Obviously, like I said, marx and Marxism characterized
the entire dialectical process and psychological environment of the twentieth 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, this the exemplar of which obviously was the
Soviet Union, and you know these Frankfurt School type of
radicals who really found or whose ideas really developed momentum
in nineteen sixty eight. I don't want to talk about
that yet, though, well 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 this sign of Soviet split. I don't
think Malwais was a particularly coherent ideology, but it was
an animating principle, at least in symbolic or abstract terms,
and there was a practice to it, and people identified
as Maoist who were taking direct action and doing, you know,
profoundly violent acts, as well as there were armed elements
under the Mahwist 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 throughout the
Cold War remained those who were abiding a fairly orthodox praxis.
You know, the Rohte Army fraction. They were very much
a Stalinist outfit, you know, obviously they were 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 proud 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 that corse them all
are gravitated towards them, you know. But the way the
way I understand these schisms, everything was frank that this,
you know, it's Tomnosy of the point I was making.
Everything in the epoch was a dialogue with Marxist Leninism.
So and you know, all potentialities functioned within the Cold
War psychological environment. So you had people at Corsetmahler who
were at base National Socialists who found common cause with
you know, Stalinists. In the DDR, you had these profoundly
kind of a socially anarchic leftists whose primary interest was
identitarian things and a perverse and obsessively narcissistic sexuality. They
gravitated towards Marcusa and Marcuza 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 tendency was bounded by these parameters, you know,
and even even writers I think were pretty insightful. There
was still a fairly active community of public intellectuals in
the seventies and eighties, you know, and a lot of
people on the right, like Christopher Lash, 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 fixed stations of
lash Or. This wasn't just because he'd come out of
social science academ so this is the kind of thing
that he was familiar with. It was just taken for
granted that any instead 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, and in terms of practice, you
you can't ever escape the what characterizes the psychological environment
or the epoch on which you're situated. I mean, obviously
it's not to say that you're some one somehow precluded
from writing about, you know, concepts and the abstract, but
if you're talking about practice or applied principles of political theory,
you know, you're you're not engaged with the relevant variables
if you're not abiding you know, the zeitgeist, and that's
essential understanding Marx, is essential understanding the twentieth century, the
Cold War, and because the world we live in today
and the zeitgeist that we're immersed in today is one
hundred percent the you know, derivative of all of the
things you know. So if people require a contemporary relevance,
that's what it is. And to bring it back and
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, in 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 and increasingly complicated permutations of
labor specialization and division, aside from 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. 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
twentieth century, if you were a 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 in any communal experience with the man
beside you, with 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 situatedness in this alienated
environment of you know, hyper specialized labor. And that also
that puts people artificially at odds with one another. You know.
It means that say, like a shop or like seamtress'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 they're survival, you know,
depends on participation 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
is 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 Habizi or a Lockeyan sense,
what he means is when when's by natural is these
things that are man made, you know. And to be clear,
Marx doesn't have a problem with an equality. He made
the point that the first division of labor is in
fact totally natural because men and women are different. And
marphs 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 are you know, strong in body
but not particularly actually inclined, you know, and those in
contrasts are essentially brain workers, you know. And there's nothing
wrong with this learning the marks. You know. Obviously people
have different talents and some people are substantially more capable
than others. You know, there's not like again, the Marxian paradigm,
it aims at a classless society. It doesn't aim to
make everyone equal, like nobody does that except you know,
utopian liberals and uh, you know, people who hear take
of these kinds of enlightenment conceits then incorporate that, and
there this kind of secular humanist morality. You know, this
is an important point, you know, And so essentially Mark
said that in the modern state, even if you're reasonably
well provided for, you know, in terms of your material conditions,
there's these inherent contradictions, like on the one hand, on
the one hand, the individual and his personality is diminished
and putical life is kind of reduced to this collective
but not communal existence. But there's not real fellow feeling
there because capitalists production and labor schema for us 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
formal terms, by you know, 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 with the center really cannot hold
and this is why you know, it marks its estimation.
And interestingly, this did, this did basically come true. If
you get 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 any patriotic
impulse that drives them in to just kind of march
into an enemy field of fire and be cut to
pieces by machine guns before you know, 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 Habsburg 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 the system becomes unsustainable because people just
aren't going to sacrifice for it anymore, you know. And
there's and I won't even have a context anymore, you know.
And that's an important point about Marxism. What's peculiar about
Marxist lenon is praxis 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 ing to the fact that a goodly proportion
of this planet's remaining natural resources they 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 that was large enough that most people would if
you would, as a natural revolutionary cadre, that would, you know,
facilitate this these revolutionary ambitions that shook the planet. You know,
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 societes 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 historiography. Like I said, I said, I wasn't
gonna 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, in the Marxian viewpoint, Marx's
notion was that and his successors, his accolytes who succeeded them.
They believe that communism would first be realized, probably in
the United Kingdom and Germany, you know, which makes some
kind of sense within the bounty rationality of you know,
the body of 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
the 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 Chief's speeches.
Kruse Chief was very much a peasant. He literally was
like a barefoot hesitant. He grew up in the Ukraine
with nothing, you know, and in the 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
he was the Commissar of Stalingrad too, like he was.
He was a hard guy, you know, no doubt about it.
But he his claim, his vision kind of what he
wanted to characterize his tenure, as you know, General Secretary
was he was saying communism by the year nineteen eighty.
So people would look at that and be like, what
does he mean? The Soviet Union's already a communist state.
That's not the way Marcists look at things, you know,
they look at themselves as abiding, you know, as zeitgeist
that comports with the progress of history, you know, in
a way that is shepherding and storting 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 people are comfortable with stasis. There it's rare that
you have a truly revolutionary cadre leading a state that
that is truly dynamic, okay, because the human preferences for
stasis with very rare exceptions, and the people who are
those exceptions, they constitute outliers and 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, you know, the right army would cease to
exist because military power, other than as a revolutionary instrumentality
and a defensive apparatus against capitalist aggression, only serves as
a means of resolving contradictions emergent within capitalism by violence.
So the Soviets always claimed, like, after the communist version
of n SIG is realized, you know that there won't
be a Red Army, and there won't there won't be
a Soviet state, and there there will be no need
for this massive internal security apparatus because there there won't
be you know, this 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 so long that 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 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 and the most and you know, in in
the deepest, then and most thorough capacity possible, you know,
and that that can only come from having a mighty
state and in a powerful party, and by suppressing you know,
vagaries of thought and behavior that could compromise the advance
forwards communism. But no communists claim, like the states an
end in itself, even if that's in practice, in practice
like what you know Lehenin's practice represents. And that's important,
you know. But anyway, and at some point I know,
uh and the subs and that we did a series
in the Cold War, but it might be worthwhile at
some point discuss the various general secretaries and Soviet leadership
element and you know, how they what their relationship was
to you know, Marxist Lenin is orthodoxy, and to what
degree they reflected those imperatives. But uh, I don't want
to get ahead of ourselves. But yeah, the uh yeah,
So basically life under advance capitalism is a fractured social
existence does a contradiction between civil society, which is collectivist
but not all communal, you know, a political existence which,
while couching the language of communalism and patriotism, is basically
a is basically oriented almost exclusively to uh, entrenched divisions
that are curated purposefully and as well as uh you know,
psychic appeals to naked self interest, because that's the exiomatic
situation that results from advanced capitalism. You know. So at
some point, aside from the fact that this isn't work
of based only you know, again, there 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
a such that there's a such that there was a
Marxist velt politique in a kind of brass tax terms.
Marks alluded to the fact that states such as I
described that refuse to abide the advance in progress of history,
they'll become essentially failed states. So in the communized plant
or the future, they'll be outliers that are that are
kind of like mogadissue at its most dysfunctional, you know.
But that's you know, Eventually, presumably those people will they'll
they'll they'll die out or be dealt with, just as
the lumping criminal element or unmanageable element or ineggable element
within you know, the uh, the nascent Marxist fully realized
communist society will be. But it's it's an interesting thought experiment,
I think. The But it also to once Mars came
back again and again to the claim that Bougeoil ideology
it had within it the seeds of its own undoing.
You know. So you look at the Marxian view 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. Mars believed not even entirely consciously.
These thinkers like Hobbes, like Locke, like Hume, like Thomas Paine,
they can set virtualized 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 believe that things were proceeding towards utopia, but socially
things were falling apart, and the alienation intrinsic to the
psychological environment cured 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 Mark's viewed as kind of the natural
communal state of production relations developed, you know, which is
one of the reasons why well again what he called,
you know, the bourgeois ideology of economics was so poor
at predicting outcomes, you know. And it's interesting because a
lot of I don't, a lot of Marxist economists like
I don't. I think that's a contrast. I think that's
a contradiction because Marxists are there. It's 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 Sega clarity,
these people who do refer to themselves 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 biased in the
way they talk about this stuff. You know, I spent
I spend a lot of time with economic data and
uh owing in a large measure to you know, the
fact that read trumpet or a young age, and that
kind of colored my perspective. You know. You you've got
to look at increments of sent you know, two or
three centuries too really understand long term trends, you know,
if you're sample, if your temporal sample size is arbitry
arbitrarily decided upon, I mean, yeah, you can. 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 Mars is everything in
common with these von Meesian Offing school types. But it's
interesting because albeit for very different reasons, you know, they
they kind of cherry pick their data sets to make
a similar claim about, you know, trailties within the regulated economy.
You can't look at that way. But again, for very.
Speaker 1: I saw that the other day. I was studying real
estate cycles, and you know, your typical von Misian will
talk about how everything fell apart once we went off
a hard money. But even if you go back to
the to the nineteenth 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, this goes far beyond the federal reserve
and fractional reserve banking.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's also I well, it's almost too I mean,
I don't want to hydrig a conversation. And again I'm
not I'm not trying to like transh the Austrian school people,
but they almost have their fixation on sound what they
what they call sound money. It's almost like the Marx
scene obsession with like the labor theory of value. It's
like marginal utility is some sort of you know that's
that that's a lot of smoke and mirrors or something
like it's and this idea that I mean, don't you know,
I'm a Strumpeter guy. I'm not into conventional economic modeling
in the way Chicago School and neoliberal types 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, our people who
are shills for the banking system. That's it's a ridiculous
way to approach it. And this isn't just an economics
there's this bias for empirical modeling of a certain sort
because everybody became obsessed in the twentieth century and academ
we're trying to pass off their research is scientific. And
I mean that, you know, economics isn't really a science.
There's scientist aspects to it, but there's not a science
of economics like there's a science of physics, you know,
And there's 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 their conclusions and
there's almost it's almost cult like too, and the way
they in the way they talk to people who don't
share their viewpoints, like I'm a heterodox, I buy he
Rodox used to, I mean, I'm I'm a trumpeter and
Frederick List and Berner somber 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, uh, you can mitigate inflation
with quantitative easing. And the way I'm not some some
regime shill. Anybody thinks that as an idiot, But I've
had these non Mesian guys get very abusive to me
because you know, they're almost like scientologists or something like,
I imagine you nailed it. It's a cult. Yeah, it's
And it's like, uh, if they.
Speaker 1: One told me, one told me, why are you talking
about Friedrich List? He's been debunked And I said by who?
Speaker 2: Yeah, by Who's some like random guy who like he's
he talked at some like conference that seven people went to.
It's well, yeah, and it doesn't. Let's also too like
pet I remember for a while, 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 thought were pretty sound.
Not that I'm some like stock guru, but I know
something about investing. But Scheff was there big, like the
internet vnsing guys for a minute, he was their big guru.
This was I think probably like fifteen twenty years ago,
and literally every six months he was claiming like there's
gonna be some like punctuated crisis and markets were gonna
take a dive. He's like it's gonna be worse than
the Cruise of eighty seven. Then like this never happened.
He was wrong basically one hundred percent of the time,
but he still had this audience. And if you didn't
abide his predictions, like people told you you were an idiot.
You know, it's it's like I want this guy's graft.
He's I mean, I think he was pretty wealthy anyway, obviously,
I mean, he 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 he's literally wrong one of the time. You know,
that's not a bad kick.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a bunch of there's a bunch of people
who like his son. His son's like twenty years old.
Speaker 2: Twenty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his son has outperformed all of his funds just
investing in crypto.
Speaker 2: That's that's that's 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 two thousand and eight,
it was a weird environment his regards to demand for
financial serviss because on the one hand, a lot of
people were hanging out of their money because they were afraid,
and 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, And I'm not saying
shift was like stealing from people. I think he believes
in the investment paradigms that he promotes, but it's it's
it's it's weird, you know, and uh, 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 Shift, I'm like, look, man,
like some of his stock picks are definitely good, but
definitely do not like pull everything out of your furling
k like invest with Peter Schiff because yeah, like that
you know that that would be a mistake. But but yeah,
it was. It was a weird time. I there there's
other there's other odd guys who have cloud these days
and in investing circles and stuff. But I they're different
than Shift. I Uh for some reason. I mean I
get why. I mean I it was because you know,
there was a real crisis of confidence and what was
conventional wisdom. But yeah, but on MESI and then some
other fellow travelers after Await, they they had they had
a moment where they were very cloud heavy. But yeah,
forgive that digression, man. The uh and also too and
we'll move on from this uh kind of subtopic. My
works made 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. You know, in the
advanced capitalist state, you know, people's like economic uh, 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 Mars, 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
when you know, it's it's something that 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 this, 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 Marks is anti money or something. You know, eventually,
when communism is realized, there won't be money because there'll
be no need for it, but such that it is
utile at discrete junctures in the historical process. There's 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 that's
capital gets into this. Not enough people write about the
interview of money, and I think that's important, but uh,
maybe it's because on the 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. I don't think. It's just that
I think I'm onto something, you know. And again I'm
not an Economists'm a political theory. I think I know
something about econ but I, uh, there's not enough. There's
not enough written on the subject matter of Marx and
and money and the role of the role of money
itself as well as the money supply in advanced capitalism,
but the h and also too obviously according to marx
as these contradictions, you know, cause the nation to basically
fall apart and fragment from within and unsustainable ways, you know.
The only thing preventing this fragmentation from causing a total
collapse is you know, the course of 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 in an enemy footing. That
creates other pathologies, you know it, And this is I mean,
I guess people Robert Conquest made the point that this
irony of Stalinist states is that that that that was
exactly the fate that befell them. But you 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 Erner, Sombart and Sorell 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 Marx. It's not just for the
obvious reason that, you know, like I said, to understand
the twentieth century, you've got to understand Marx's theory. But
you know it's not Marx 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
if Marx had been less ambitious or let's possessed of
you know, Hubris maybe, or I think if he'd lived
one hundred years before one hundred years after and he
can tell himself to be a sociologist and a political
theorist who focused heavily on the psychological aspects of political life,
or if he, you know, was a was an anthropologist
or an evolutionary psyche guy, he'd probably be almost universally
praised as this man with tremendous insights. I mean, I think,
you know, and the 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 you Michael Jones on
that I don't think Marx particularly cared about his own
ethnosectarian background, but he was the product of that culture,
and there is a Jewish revolutionary spirit, that is. It's
just kind of think that. I don't think Marks is
a writing as a self conscious Jew like, here's the
wrong with capitalism? You know, it's because as the state
developed at scale, my people became, you know, despised, and
you know, we lost the privileged position we had at court,
and you know, it was it was nothing like that,
but there. I don't even think there was an inherent
antipathy to European political forms. I think he just viewed
it as something I think, to him there was no
reason he'd 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, you know. I
mean that's the way I read it. And uh, I think, uh,
that's the case. That's the case with a lot of
atheist Jewish political theorists. Not all of them, I do,
but a lot of them, you know, And that's the
whole that's the whole issue with politics and the political
is a discreet spirit human activity. A lot of the
stuff is ontological and somewhat instinctive. You know. People don't
sit around and decide to like devise their their identity
and consciously adopt their cultural psychology, you know. And to me,
Marks is a case in point of that. But uh, yeah,
I realize, I gotta wrap this up in a second.
Let me see what else I wrote. Oh and just
would it be a what would you object if next
episode we got into the kind of schismatic aspects of
uh of communism like the sound of Soviets split in
the nineteen sixty eight post in sixty eight vaguerees of leftism?
I mean, do you want to do that or no?
Speaker 1: I think that I think the subs definitely want want
to hear.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, well we'll do that next time then, and
I'll get one of the things I find really compelling
about that subject to very Paul Gottfried and Ernst noy
Nolty wrote about the it's kind of obliquely, but I
think I think Godfred borrowed from nol Or, was a
ward of this phenomenon by virtue of what Noulti wrote
during the Historians controversy. But Marx's early stuff is fairly
conventionally Hegelian. You know, obviously as conclusions are you know,
are profoundly at odds with those are the right Hegelians.
But this kind of pure dialectical materialism, whereby he rejects
properties of mind as the discrete kind of causal engine
onto itself of political life and the conceptual horizons they
could rise of political life. That's something he took on later.
And a lot of the post sixty eight 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 eighteen forty eight revolutionary culture. A lot of these
radical reformers 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 for anybody myself, but I you know, Horse
Tomler 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 hardline Stalinist cadres. Somebody, if you were
some radical leftist but not at all like communists, it
didn't matter. Your starting point would still have to be
Carl Marx. And I think that the true at least
in America and Europe. It's a bit different, but the
true radical left in America. I'm just talking about the
typical simples and liberals who support the regime. I mean,
these true kind of extreme leftists. I think that they're
I think they abide Marcus more than do the Frankfurt school.
I don't think these guys and ladies are sitting around
reading Ramsey and Adorno. I think they do read Marcruza
and stuff like that. And it's obvious and that's one
of the reasons why they're fixated on sexual identities and things.
Speaker 1: You know, was that my buddy Aaron and I read
I think we did in two episodes Repressive Tolerance by Marcuse,
and it's it's amazing how much you know, as as
a right wing you're reading through there and you're like, well,
that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense. That's in the
American situation and stuff like the authoritarian personality. But you know,
I agree with god Freid 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
primarily Frankfurt School stuff. Like I know, a lot of
people read Buchanan's Death of the West when it came
out in Jesus like twenty four 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 overemphasized 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 Gramsey 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 superstructural 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, Grahamsy said, this is significant to itself.
This is paramount like life. Isn't you know, a labor
in production schema? Like man, is it 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 Gramsey's
political values. But yeah, yeah, no, that's add little, odd
little fact.
Speaker 1: Do you know who was the first person to translate
grahams sheeet into English in the United States? Pete Boodha
Judge's dad.
Speaker 2: Weird. Yeah, Now, I figured that guy that guys such
a weirdo. I mean, it's that's time in the fact
that he's, uh, you got these weird sexual habits. I
I figured he was the progeny of some disturbed ideologues
or you know, sixties fossils who lived some bizarre lifestyle.
I mean, frankly, people like that usually are like like
some weird guy who it's got kind of delusional ideas
about his own viability as a politician and who has
never had a real job, has always been involved in
a political life, and his old kink is, you know,
putting on display his bizarre sex paraphilias. Like people like
that don't just devise that identity in college or something.
They they come out of a certain coterie of dysfunction,
I think. But yeah, we'll we'll get into the post
sixty eight schismatics and the Sun of Soviets 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 Stalinists direct action elements.
Speaker 1: Awesome, all right. For people who are just tuning in
for this one, tell them where they can find you.
Speaker 2: The best place is substick It's real Thomas seven to
seven seven that substack dot com on social media. I'm
at Thomas seir t h o E s c y
R seven seven seven. The best one stop place to
find my content is my sub stack on my website.
My website is number seven h o E S seven
seven seven dot com.
Speaker 1: Awesome until part three.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Thomas, Yeah, thank you Man sh