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Everything's there. Want to welcome everyone back to the Peking
Yona's show. Thomas's back and I pick up where we
left off last time. So are you doing today, Thomas? I.
Speaker 2: Well, thanks for hosting me, of course, I I don't
remember exactly where I left off last time. The key
iss just a significance. Though, with respect to the Frankfurt School,
are two things. Like I said, even though there's some errors,
I think in the way he described this phenomenon, and
by this phenomenon I mean the impact of Frankfurt School
ideology on the American political system and cultural life from
a you know, the the Second World War and beyond.
Speaker 3: But also.
Speaker 2: You know, I think people wants understand that this isn't
This isn't some theory of history or some attempt to correct,
you know, some sort of ethically impoverished system in America
has perceived and make things better. It's purely punitive. It's
a doctrine of destruction, but not even creative destruction. And
the idea is to tear down what exists. Because the
people who ascribe to the cityology approach the American system
or what traditionally was, you know, the the normative values
and cultural practices the American system. They approach it in
purely adversarial terms. And something also that irks me, these
people like Pete Headseth and all these mega people, they
talk about critical race theory. There is no critical race theory.
There's critical theory, and there's an ontological account of what
the significance of race is within that. But saying critical
race theory, it's like it's like saying Marxist socialist theory,
like it's a malaprophism. There's no such thing, you know,
So that's important too. And also they're generally describing what
amounts to it kind of random derivatives of this overall praxis,
you know, like with some school board in Texas or something,
is isn't documenting kids with in terms of false history
and stuff. And I mean, don't get me wrong that
that kind of stuff is insidious, but it's not. You know,
people who don't really understand political philosophy, you don't really
understand the source of ideological practice. They shouldn't just mouth
off on it because they sound stupid, and it's it's
just a fuse cakes the issue.
Speaker 3: The uh, you know, now more or less.
Speaker 2: Systemic psychological paradigm is what came out of the Frankfurt school.
It wasn't some elaborated form of neo Marxism, you know,
like I said last session, it these people basically broke
with Merks completely, you know, the uh like, don't get
me wrong, people like Max Horkheimer, Gaeorg Luke Gosh, Herbert,
Mrkruseth or Adurnal they saw capitalist organizational models and the
sociological aspects of those models as a profound source of
psychological scarring.
Speaker 3: But they didn't they didn't view it as some problem
in and of itself.
Speaker 2: And they didn't and they didn't view capitalist organizational modalities as.
Speaker 3: Some primary.
Speaker 2: Target that, once eradicated, would usher in some sort of
perfect paradigm of social justice or something. They viewed it
as very secondary. I mean, they weren't Merxist, cultural or otherwise,
you know, they basically they basically viewed capitalist productive modalities
as the kind of instrumentalization of an anti human system
masquerading as a as a as the zenith of a
rational human organization. And don't get me wrong, it's this
important consider and Hidiger used to make this point in
a different contests. These people were humanists. They just have
a totally debased view of a human being. They basically
view man as this sort of semi semi sapient animal.
That's why they emphasize totally debased aspects of the human being,
like you know, like and and they take something like
sexual gratification and positive that is absolutely central to the
human identity.
Speaker 3: You know. So there's a.
Speaker 2: You know, and the and the post modern right, and
we'll get to this way in a nietzsch and Heidegger
and schopenhowerd To some degree, the post modern right is
in a lot of way as a humanist tendency, but
it aims to elevate the human being, you know. And
the humanist left is a very debased account of you know,
the human condition, but that doesn't make it not a
humanist tendency or something. And I realized in recent years
that causes a lot of confusion with people.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: So the in other words, the Frankfurt Schools account of
the capitalist system was that labor modalities being one aspect
of systemic alienation, owes to you know, the philosophical turn
towards scientism, which is another way that they deviated from
the Marxian paradigm. Because Marxis held out their historical paradigm
and the you know, and and the dialectical materialist process.
They held this out as a scientific process. There's something
that could be interpreted scientifically according to rational criteria. Horkimer
in particular rejected that. He said that any total theory
of society, you know, had to account for the basic
irrationality of human desires and things, and as much as
it's possible, these desires had to be sated, and social
organization had to connect with them on some level that
allowed them to flourish. And in his view and that
of his comrades, in this revolution enterprise, you know, the
the increasing rationalization of the then present situation and what
he called the narrowing of rationality is one of the
things that precluded not just human beings from accomplishing catharsis
through their true desires, but it also precluded the possibility
of meaningful social criticism because it winnowed away the potential
avenues and criticism in conceptual terms, and all that remained
was what was referred to as quote mere positivist descriptions
of what was underway in social, economic, psychological spheres. Adorno
himself and like I said, Grahams and Adorno were more
sophisticated in terms of what they identified as correct evolutionary practice.
In my opinion, and I don't think that's I don't
think that's a particularly controversial take. But they suggested they
were waging a lifelong battle against what they called quote
administrative sociology, which what they meant by that was that
the state and these structure is adjacent to the state,
you know, whether you're talking about you know, public administration
at scale, or whether you're talking about capitalists tutions that
facilitate labor and production modalities. They were tailored to avoid
allowing people to come to terms with inherent contradictions between
human psychic needs and the satisfaction of those needs and
what society had to offer by way of these rigid
and oppressive social structures and administrative sociology. In their view,
it was the entirety of the system that was tailored
to preclude addressing these things in a constructively critical manner,
you know. And again, this entire paradigm has nothing at
all to do with marx you know, cultural or otherwise.
It's something very different. And the fact that some aspects
were informed by the reality the Cold War and the
dialectical process and the centrality of Marxist to that entire paradigm. Well,
that odu the Zeitgeist, because everybody was in dialogue with
that reality to some degree or another. You know, that
doesn't mean that being vastly situated in historical capacity makes
the participant a Marxist of some heterodox sort. Gramsey's interesting,
Antonio Gramsey, He's largely view as the leanand of the
Frankfurt school. I think, more properly as the Mussolini of
post Marxist revolutionary practice after Mussolini's March on Rome. I
can't remember if I got any of this last time.
Gramsey fled to Russia, and he actually got the attention
of the of the Bolsheviks there because they viewed him
as different than you know, they useful idiots of the
schismatic left, and they viewed him as fundamentally different than
some of these American journalists who, although not truly in
line with the Bolshevik enterprise, they viewed themselves as being
superficially adjacent, you know. And they they'd proffer this kind
of copy uh that, and and propaganda in the English
language media that that Lavizel is kind of praise on
the Soviet Union as as uh the of centrally planned
society that was remedying the potential for crisis modalities.
Speaker 3: You know that that the.
Speaker 2: That that that capitalism as it became increasingly relying on
high finance was two. You know, Grahams he was writing
far more serious stuff than that. And obviously he was
choosing his subject matter carefully as he was in exile
in the Soviet Union, because you could very easily end
up dead if you were branded some sort of counter
revolutionary element or disruptive personage. But the kind of stuff
that he was he was writing his own kind of
sam is that that was being smuggled out to Italy
and other places where there was friendly cadres. And his
big criticism was that the Soviet Union was only such
that it was effective and such that this restructuring was useful.
And mind you, Gramsey, unlike people like Trotsky, who, in
their own right, you know, at odds as they may
have been with Stalinism, were the orthodox Marxist. Unlike unlike Trotsky,
Grams he didn't care about the fact that there wasn't
a properly developed revolutionary class paradigm in Russia. His notion
was that well, the only reason why this system is
working in supervisial terms is because of this terror state,
that is, you know, compulsory owing to the threat of
violence and the ever present.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Panopticon that you know, case people terrified of finding themselves
within this punitive apparatus or being disappeared in the middle
of the night, you know, which means to Gramsey, you know,
any to Gramsey, any any kind of revolutionary praxis. I
had to truly conquer psychological spaces, you know. You essentially
had to not just indoctrinate people into the revolutionary enterprise
by winning their sympathies, it went far beyond that. You
essentially had to preclude the possibility of them entertaining any
other potential modality, you know, and you can't do that
through coercion alone. You know, the manner in which the
psychological environments both you know, the inner life of the
human being as well as the sort of collective psychological
space wherein conceptual life occurs. It was essential for any
revolutionary movement to appropriate and dominate those spaces. And there's
got to be an entire constellation of incentives and disincentives
to facilitate that and simply making people afraid or compelling
obedience to terror, you know. And I believe in Gramsey
believed too that there was a natural susceptibility of the
Russian peasantry to this kind of coersion, you know. And
Sultan needs to me that same point, you know, so
that that further sort of corrupted the the system that
was extant in the Soviet Union, and people who didn't
understand these sociological nuances developed a very skewed perspective, you know.
And Grams he made the point again again that you know,
even the Czar, even at his lowest deb when you know,
the the Russian army in the field was near mutiny.
You know, even the Czar commanded more instinctive loyalty than
the Bolsheviks, you know, and were he to re emerge
somehow counterfactually in magic, we there there's there's every reason
to believe that he probably could sweep away, you know,
the the Bolshevik cadre which had taken charge of the country,
and uh, that didn't speak well of the integrity and
future posterity the revolution. There is an innoting question as
to what degree the Great Patriotic War as the Russians.
This they call it prolonged a lifespan of the Communist Party.
It's that's hard to say. You can't really extricate political
systems from the historical situations in which they exist. So
it made be a kind of question begging that doesn't
yield any.
Speaker 3: Meaningful data.
Speaker 2: But I I think that that's a fair point. I
think there is something to be gleaned from that and
entertaining counterfactuals where the Second World War did happened, or
at least didn't develop the way that it did in
actual history. But Gramsey Gramsey's conclusion, as far as the
general postulates about the human condition and specifically about revolutionary
potentialities and data relating the potentialities could be extrapolated from
the Soviet example, he concluded that it was two thousand
years of Christian culturization and the normative sort of moral
paradigm they're in, and the sort of behavioral modalities and
roles assign they're in. You know, that that was what
accounted for the civilized world's resistance to a revolutionary imperative.
You know, whatever whatever that imperative may be, whatever the
substance aspects of it may be, so in terms of
revolutionary practis, grahamsy said, and he quite literally wrote this
in his private journals, was that Christian beliefs and values
had to be overthrown and eradicated, and the roots of
Western civilization had to be torn out if anybody wanted
to devise an alternative to capitalist productive modalities, which in
his view is really just sort of a shield or
a prophylactic overlay or of the Western culture. He didn't
view he didn't view productive forces and economic paradigms as
representing the distilled essence of cultural activity and you know,
the sociological expression of you know, the combined energies or
the aggregate energies of a culture. Like Marst did, he
viewed his things as not incidental.
Speaker 3: We viewed them as intrinsic to.
Speaker 2: The sociological situation and question. But again he viewed them
more as a kind of overlay, you know, the core
of behavioral modalities and psychological symbolic structures and conceptual horizons.
You know, he viewed these things as basically derived from
moral narratives and ethical postulates that were given life, as
it were, within you know, cultural spaces and psychological horizons.
You know, by way of you know again normative moral paradigms.
So the really the only way to facilitated revolutionary praxis
was to deculturate people, annihilate their religious belief structures, alienate
them from what had come before, so that these things
are no longer accessible in a linear way. And you know,
attack basically the means by which people become habituated to
these things, you know, emotionally, psychologically, conceptually and intellectual Italy
and otherwise, you know. And Gramsey spent some time in
uh prison. When he finally uh returned to Italy, he
took up with the Communist Party, which had very much
been driven underground Mussolini and the the internal security epparatus.
The Kingdom of Italy was actually quite adept. People this
idea that Italy, other than you know, the Cellar Republic
and the final year and some months of access Europe's existence,
has idea that well, you know, the Seller Republic was
this police state in a state of emergency that was
every bit as oppressive as they perceived the German Reich being.
But they've got this idea, I think of the Kingdom
of Italy otherwise being a relatively open society to employ
the favorite nomenclatch or a contra the Third Reich. This
really wasn't true, and I'm not saying it's punitively obviously,
but Mussolini was very aware of the need to guard
the revolution, and Mussolini had very he viewed the Fascist
mandate is driving very much from a revolutionary imperative and
sort of conventional terms in a way that the national
Socialists didn't. National socialism is a very different thing. But
the internal security apparatus in the Kingdom of Italy was
constantly on the lookout for partisan actors and subversives who
are looking to, you know, undermine the Fascist mandate or
otherwise find a way to undermine the party state. And
Musolini wasn't taking any chances, so he had he had
Gramsey locked up. Gramsey was finally freed, but he died
shortly before the onset of hostilities in World War Two.
But his his prison notebooks were voluminous, and that Gramsey's
prison notebooks kind of came to con that that's kind
of like the Gramsey and equivalent of dos capital or
you know, the equivalent of francis jaque is imperium. It's
that it's it's not just his seminardeological statement, but it's
really something of a blueprint for successful revolution in cultural terms.
When you look at the American situation and the Frankfurt
School partisans who ultimately came to America and these people
who devised the social engineering regime that was implemented and
continues to be and occupied in the bundest Republic, it
it's clear that in aggregate terms that this was based
on Graham's these revolutionary musings and his roadmap for cultural revolution.
You know, and Gramsey wrote extensively on the Russian situation
and what both what was unique about it and what
was universal about the Russian Revolution that could be extrapolated,
but and he accounts for the fact that in Russia
the body politic had something of a perverse relationship with
the state. Going back a millennia, you know, Russia was
very authoritarian. It was very much oriented towards what occidental
people would view as or and you know, oriental and
oriental despotism depending on the epoch, you know, to the
harder softer degrees. But you know, at even that said,
you know, it was civil society that was paramount, even
in a society like Russia, where the state had this outsized,
corporeal and conceptual power over the body politic. You know,
even under those conditions, according to Gramsey, you've got to
capture civil society and you've got to dominate the psychological environment,
you know. And of course he contrasted that with Western
Europe and the UK and America because you know, although
he stipulated America was the nuances there were distinguishable. But
he said, throughout the occidental West, there's a proper relationship
between the state and civil society. It wasn't skewed, It
didn't tend to actualomatically towards despotism. There was this nuanced
give and take that on the one hand, meant that
the body politic was generally gonna be more sophisticated than
we would find in Russia or in other Eastern domains.
But at the same time, you know, there wasn't this
obstacle of a leviathan state that was sort of acting
as a shield against any possible revolutionary ingress. You know,
in this this is very insightful, I think. So Gramsy
argued that any revolutionary cadre in the West would be
setting itself up for failure if it aimed to seize
power first, you know, either by the rifle or by
way of the ballot box. Then impose some sort of
cultural revolution from the top down, as the Soviets were doing,
you know, he said first, you know, anybody intending to
dictate outcomes and a revolutionary capacity in the West would
have to change the culture. And once these cultural conventions
and these normative, conceptual and behavioral modalities were eradicated within
a generation or two, power would fall into the hands
the revolutionary cadre because nature abores a vacuum, if for
no other reason, and they would be the only people
who are actively creating a new modality of political existence,
you know. And all revolutionary practice is characterized in Wholer
in part by attention strategy and a crisis actor modality.
So that's something needs to be accounted for too. Like
Gramsy wasn't talking about these things occurring amiss some sort
of splendid stability, you know, He's talking about these things
being advanced within a paradigm of curated political warfare. So
that's essential too, But even that is secondary, because the
the entire purpose of a revolutionary praxis the entire purpose
the enterprise is to appropriate any of all conceptual and
cultural spaces, whether you're talking about the arts, you know,
and the cinema and transforming those things into propaganda platforms
to you know, then nascent electronic media, which you know
was radio and and the movie screen where most people
in those days got their visual news schools and universities,
including seminaries, you know, newspapers and magazines and print media.
You know, every aspect of cultural and intellectual life had
to be conquered and appropriated and such that again there
is this winnowing of discursive activity in conceptual terms to
the point where it simply people came to lack the
intellectual tools and the reference points they're in to discuss
or consider any alternative modalities to those presented by the
revolutionary cadre. And this is what was attempted and largely
succeeded in America. You know, there was not a Marxist
revolution in America, and the institutions weren't appropriated by Marxists,
you know, and these Frankfurt School ideologues weren't Marxist schismatics. Again,
they parted the ways with Marxism. Really, in my opinion,
in nineteen twenty. You know, So this continued insistence on
speaking in these terms as yet another reason why the
official opposition in America, you know, which is the mainstream right,
they're they're just not they're not part of the conversation
because they're describing things that don't actually exist, you know.
And this isn't just academic. This is important, you know.
And another another key pointed divergence, like I emphasized in
our discussion of Marx Marxist Leninists, and they're ideological airs,
you know, people like Jackson Hinkle, like World systems theorists,
they viewed and viewed themselves as engaging in a scientific enterprise.
This is essential, Okay. Frankfurt School theorists totally broke with that.
One of their part of their whole practice is a
radical critique of what they've viewed as over rationality because
again they viewed the capitalist productive and conceptual schema and
the Marxist Leninist revolutionary paradigm. They viewed both these things
as arbitrarily rationalists and scientific. And again they view this
as anti human because human desires are not fundamentally rational,
you know, Man, in their opinion, is basically a sum
total of these of these primitive drives and desires, some
of which are grounded in reason, most of which aren't.
But the way to prevent the scarring of the human
being and to preclude destructive and injurious sublimation of these
core drives that demand catharsists and satisfaction, you know, the
the forcing of human beings to abide these overly rational
behavioral and normative moral schema is one of their big things.
That that's bad, okay, And that this all the organizational
modalities and cultural pressures and social compliance and enforcement mechanisms
that derive from rationalist organization. You know that that's an
enduring source of oppression and anguish to human beings. So
no matter how no matter how many benefits of a
material nature it can be afforded to the individual or
the collective body politic within a capitalist or within a
Marcist Leninist schema, this injurious process is not mitigated.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: The only way for the human consciousness to be fulfilled
is to liberation from these entire paradigms that preclude the
meeting of desire desires with outlets for orgiastic catharsis, you know,
and the only way to do that is to rip
out the root of a reason driven culture that instrumentalizes
capital and human potential to serve capital, you know, the
only way that's got to be ripped out in total.
And again that represents a fundamental digression from Marcus Lenin.
Is not just Marcus Leninis practice, but Marxian ontology and Horkheimer,
who is very significant in terms of how he aimed
at to pathologize the uh familial structure in the white
Christian occident. He basically, uh turned the Aristotelian model on
its head. He basically said that, yeah, the family unit
is a sort of a school of culture and normative
behavioral paradigms. But it's it's it's this abomination that is uh,
that that that inculcates people into fascist tendencies and things,
you know, and and breeds patriarchal and authoritarian personalities. And
this is the original source of alienation in modern Western societies.
So the only possible means of remedyating this curated process
of alienation is the destruction of the family, you know,
like ripping it out by its root, you know. And uh,
this underly Horricimer's entire theory of society. There wasn't really
any concern with the material conditions of people within these
within this paradigm, and uh, there wasn't any essential connection
of an ethical nature drawn between productive force dialectic and
economic considerations or political economy and the and the social dialectic.
You know, it was largely the former was largely incidental,
you know. And you know, economics really did take a
back see in the American situation for this reason. And
part of this os to there is a connection. I mean,
this was people like at Dorno, Gramsey, Horkheimer, Lucash. They
weren't particularly concerned with economic discourse anyway. But obviously after
the war, the American situation became paramount, and you know,
economic socialism or trade unionism in America is a non
starter anyway, you know, like Werner Sombart explicated. So I
mean that was part of it too. I think some
confusion arises because on the one hand, okay, the Frankfurt
School when it was literally situated in Frankfurt in the
Weimar era, Yes, there was a fundamental concern with Marxist
lenin Marxist Leninist dialectics, but that's because I mean that's
everybody was concerned with that subject matter, because that was
the prime animating catalyst more than any other single political
or social tendency in Europe at the time, and that
really endured for most of the remainder of the twentieth century.
But at the same time, this wasn't any intrinsic matter
of emphasis or significance to the man who ultimately became
the revolutionary cadre that informed the radicals who brought the
revolution to America. But even were that not the case,
you know, again, socialist politics are just a non starter
in America, and even they weren't even a hundred years
ago outside of comparatively narrow pockets of you know, of
the country where there's unique pressures that sort of indoctrinated
people into a labor centric radical perspective. You know, and
guys like el Smith and Upton Sinclair very much for
the product of some of these discrete environments, and they
were universally respected by people on the left. But you know,
they they weren't leading the proverbial march as it were,
you know, quite quite the contrary. You know, Upton Sinclair
was viewed in his day not much different than he
differently than he is now.
Speaker 3: Primarily is this kind of like literary figure, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, obviously people took people looked at Jungle way
more seriously when it was released, because I mean, it
was a reality. It wasn't you know, obviously it wasn't
due as a period piece when it was contemporaneous. But
at the same time, you know, these guys were national
political figures because that didn't have any percentage at at
the time. The personage to hear you long is important
and I mean that's that's a subject matter for another day,
but you know, and it becomes something of a note
true Scotsman exercise to argue over who was a real
socialist or not. But you know, again, like I said,
we were discussing the case of James Burnham. Everybody was
a socialist of one type or another in the nineteen
twenties and thirties. That doesn't really tell us anything, but
it's clear that you know, here you along was no
dialectical materialist, nor was he some orthodox lib socialist. You
know that anybody who suggests otherwise doesn't really understand the
conceptual environment of the era.
Speaker 3: But you know, it was.
Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty three is when the Frankfort School was
a kind of formally incorporated. It's lucatch and some schismatic
elements of the KPD the set of shop at Frankfort University,
and originally they branded themselves under the banner of quote
the Institute for Marxism, which was directly modeled in the
Merse Engels Institute in Moscow. I believe, at least in part,
this branding was a way to attract funding and support,
you know. I think that goes up saying after a
while they rebranded as the Institute for Social Research. It
wasn't so much to be less provocative, I don't think,
but as they distinguished themselves as not just another sort
of academic satellite office of the common tern. But it
really sort of found its identity around nineteen thirty and
that's when Horkheimer became the director of the Antigue for
Social Research and hoarchimer As I think I got into
last session, he was a huge in mind or the
Marquis de Sade, and he was open about this, you know,
and he was open about his belief that there wasn't
really any future in Marxism in terms of liberating the
human being from these psychically injurious institutions. You know, horck
Geimer had a sort of haughty contempt for the working class.
He didn't think they had potential as a revolutionary elements,
certainly not as a vanguard. So there, I mean that
he was passing mortlogitement on them. But also Horkeimer wasn't
a stupid man. I mean he was, he was evil
when he was a pervert, but he wasn't stupid. And
he made one of the same points that Sombart did.
He said, you know, America being the model, and eventually,
unless there's some sort of total collapse of capitalist social
and economic scheme in Europe, you know, Europe's gonna come
to look like America in terms of it's capitalist infrastructure,
material and sociologically. And you know, he's like, workers are
going to consistently enjoy a middle class life, if not
in terms of their status. You know, they're going to
have you know, the disposable income and a level of
material wealth you know sight unseen. You know, ever, and
this is you know, basically the system is productive enough
and lucrative enough, and via that even if it's already
passed zenith, you know, there's just not the requisite pressures
on the working class to facilitate molding them into a
revolutionary cadre. And there was something to that. In my opinion,
it's more complicated than that. That wasn't the sole approximate
cause by any means, but he wasn't wrong, you know, And.
Speaker 3: It was it was Harkimer who.
Speaker 2: Really directed the social research to dispense with the Marxist playbook,
you know, from that point onward, from nineteen thirty onward,
the Frankfurt School and it's subsequent iterations, it treated Marxism,
as you know, as a slightly less insidious version of
the American system, you know, just another productive modality that
was unsuited.
Speaker 3: The fulfillment of.
Speaker 2: The essential and hedonic needs ake of the human being.
Speaker 3: And yeah, to be.
Speaker 2: Clear, such that there was I mean, I guess in
dialectical terms, hork Iiver didn't emphasize this as much, but
Grams he definitely did. In his prison writings, Grams he
identified as a quote absolute historicist, or he said that
what he advocated was a quote absolute historicism, meaning that morals,
values of an ethical nature, and otherwise what people view
as true in both factual and ethical terms. All of
these things are the product of conceptual horizons that are
historically contingent. They're derived entirely from historical epochs.
Speaker 3: Okay. So that's why.
Speaker 2: In the Frankfurt school of view, which is in Grahamsy's view,
if we're talking about storicism, you know it synonymous. He
invented Frankfort school with storicism or radical purposes and conceptual terms.
Grahamsy would have said that, take for example, the Aztec Empire,
which endured for a really long time. They practice ritual cannibalism,
They cut people's hearts out to appease, you know, the
terror gods and things. They were this entire and like
Spangler said, the Meso Americans, they accomplished genuine civilization. These
people weren't savages, but they did horrifying things, and they
were homicidal pagans, and they killed huge numbers of people
for reasons of ritual practice and spectacle and things. So,
according to Gramsey, the only reason why, say, you know,
twentieth century white men would claim to consider that a
borent is because it's expedient according to the demands of
you know, social and productive forces. And the schema built
up around those realities within the culture that these modern
weite men come from, that they'd use some like that
as being evil or deviant. You know, there's not any
sort of absolute moral standard that renders such things objectionable.
You know, it's entirely relative to the demands of the
epoch and the determinative aspects they're in, and the discrete
course of the cultures that you know, inculcate people an
idea that what came before or is morally wrong, or
that alternative modalities are you know, somehow.
Speaker 3: Deviant.
Speaker 2: And I don't think that that's a convincing argument, but
it is internally illogical, and that is one thing that
separates these true kind of Frankfurt School vanguardists and their
descendants in the present day from your kind of running
the middle dummy liberal because the ladder like I have
no understanding of of matters of ethics and comparative analysis
they're in. You know, people like Gramsey and again is
the serious individuals among the current among the current crop
of ideologues. You know, they they do present a fairly
sophisticated argument. But yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna end here.
Some run out for me in a lane it's just
my symtom pricking up today. Not to be an old bitch,
but that's just the reality.
Speaker 3: Well, let me ask you this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you talk about how back then everybody was some
form of socialism, because that's what is it today, that
everyone is some not everyone obviously we aren't, but that
the norm is that everyone is some sort of globalist.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but today it's more that's the structural reality today.
Back then, the degree to which all kinds of things
underway in terms of economics at scale, like high finance
was developing in ways that telecom and calculative technology couldn't
keep up with. So there was always uncertainty because tools
of analysis and situational awareness moment to moment, hour to hour,
even day to day couldn't keep up with the of
money in capital.
Speaker 3: So it seemed as if.
Speaker 2: Economic maicro organomics had become too complicated, too nuanced, and
uh there there was too many variables for this to
be left a chance, because otherwise there'd just be one
crisis after another. So the idea was, well, you know,
and especially ot the ninety twenty nine, the idea was,
is obviously got to be some sort of regulatory mechanism
to eradicate uncertainty as much as possible. But then as
technology mitigated these uncertainties, you know, the stuff as simple
as advanced telecom went a long way towards that, and uh,
you know, computing technology and things and people learning to
view capital and as as a fluid variable more and more.
You know, that gradually changed things. And really that's what
the deregulation trend was in the eighties, because you know
that that was I mean, I think that kind of
overregulation always slays the golden goose. I think that's an
arguable but that's not It was just absolutely it was
obsolescent to think in terms of imposing regulatory schema to
mitigate uncertainty.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, it's related, but it's distinguishable. There just didn't
seem to be an alternative modality to state intervention in
those days. Globalism is a lot more of a spontaneous reality.
I mean, that's just the way things are organized inevitably,
and that doesn't mean that it's permanent. Globalism may totally
fall apart. I don't think that's gonna happen for a
few centuries. If it does happen. But really, from the
era of you know, nineteen ninety to today. That's really
that's the trajectory of where political organization and social organization
at scale has been moving in that direction since the
seventeenth century, and we live like under its culmination. So
it's more spontaneous and historically driven than the conceptual aspects
of socialism in the mid twentieth century. It's a short answer.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, I won't ask you for your plugs.
I'll tell people where to go. Go to Thomas with substack.
It's real Thomas seven seven seven. I have the links
to everything every way. You can support Thomas. He hasn't
new buy me a coffee thing. I have a link there.
It'll be in the show notes and uh yeah, please
go support Thomas and uh we'll be back for to
continue the series.
Speaker 3: In a few days.
Speaker 1: Thank you, yeah, thank you man, appreciate you.
Speaker 3: Likewise st