Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pecana Show
Speaker 1: after a little bit of a break. Thomas is back.
Speaker 1: Are you doing, Thomas, I'm very well.
Speaker 2: Thanks for giving me the opportunity to collaborate on some
Speaker 2: stuff before the big Portland basket weaving event. And this
Speaker 2: is an important subject area. I mean, for just on
Speaker 2: its own terms, but it dovetails rather splendidly and kind
Speaker 2: of like indexes with the long form stuff I'm working on,
Speaker 2: and it's especially timely with kind of the trajectory I've
Speaker 2: been trying to steer things, at least in our kind
Speaker 2: of intellectual circles, like not I don't like vanity or
Speaker 2: just because I've got a hobbyist interest in this stuff,
Speaker 2: but it's it's fundamentally important and I'll get into that
Speaker 2: as we roll out this subject.
Speaker 1: Yeah, are our buddy, uh mister Rimbo, who was on
Speaker 1: the episode where you were you guys were talking about
Speaker 1: being on the ground of the d n C. He's
Speaker 1: the one who recommended this, so shout out to him
Speaker 1: and everything.
Speaker 2: So he's an essential He's an essential part of homeland fiction,
Speaker 2: even though he's even though he's not truly local, and
Speaker 2: he's like an essential part of like my entourage. Like
Speaker 2: he's he's uh, he's going to be hitting Portland with me,
Speaker 2: which is awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what when you said how much you guys hung
Speaker 1: out and everything, I figured he was local to And
Speaker 1: then when he told me where he was from, I
Speaker 1: was like, holy shit.
Speaker 2: No, he's a good dude, and he he's builting fairm
Speaker 2: in a vacation time, so he traveled a fair amount
Speaker 2: and I'm lucky he's he likes Chicago and like a
Speaker 2: lot of like Wallbanger and Hunger that Die Merchant. They
Speaker 2: were in town last week and we had a great time.
Speaker 2: But you know, they hadn't been to Shytown before. And
Speaker 2: I think people think it's either really grimy because of
Speaker 2: what they see on the news and all that kind
Speaker 2: of cap about how awful it is here, or they
Speaker 2: think it's just kind of like other things, just kind
Speaker 2: of like New York City was smaller, Like they they
Speaker 2: really impressed it how cool it is, and so Rimbau. I, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we we have a lot of fun here man, and
Speaker 2: he's he's a really good dude. I owe him a lot,
Speaker 2: and I mean I will have that fellas a lot.
Speaker 2: But he he especially he's he sends a huge amount.
Speaker 2: He's like a research machine. And I mean, i'd like
Speaker 2: to think guy him too, But I'm not as young
Speaker 2: as I once was, and I'm surely not as young
Speaker 2: as he is. And he he's always finding like really
Speaker 2: really great sources that I've never I've never come across.
Speaker 1: Cool. Well, the wife and I talked about this this
Speaker 1: past year and it didn't happen. But we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to drive up and hang out with you like when
Speaker 1: the when the weather breaks, once winter breaks, come up
Speaker 1: for like the spring or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that'd be great, man, You'll have a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: And so well, uh, missus Q. There's a there's a
Speaker 2: lot of there's a lot of stuff I can show you,
Speaker 2: guys that you'll really dig. Man. Everybody has fun when
Speaker 2: they come here, and i'd like to think I'd like
Speaker 2: to think I'm a pretty decent tour guide.
Speaker 1: Mean, all right, let's get into it. Uh, mister Eric Hobsbaum,
Speaker 1: A lot of people probably have never heard of him,
Speaker 1: but you mentioned him all the time, usually in passing,
Speaker 1: usually just quoting him something like that. So let's do
Speaker 1: the deep dive.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm he was a true left Heglien. People invoked
Speaker 2: that signifier or designation rather to talk about any any
Speaker 2: Marxist aconemic because in the public mind and kind of
Speaker 2: in academic culture, you know, any any Marxist historian or
Speaker 2: a historical writer is you know, exiomatically a left hag Alien.
Speaker 2: I I think exception to that descriptor for a few reasons.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can't, like, in its own terms, dialectical materialism,
Speaker 2: it can't be Hegelian because it removes you know, providential
Speaker 2: causation from it's h from from from its historicism, and
Speaker 2: you know, there's a arguably it abolishes metaphysics, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean obviously, So I mean that's it's it's
Speaker 2: something of as our Marxist friends themselves would say, a
Speaker 2: fatal contradiction. But HOBSBAUGHM. Hobsbam really was like a left
Speaker 2: he Gaelian in the purest sense. And I think his
Speaker 2: take on things, I mean, obviously we don't know, and
Speaker 2: I've read Imperialism by Lenin many times, but I mean
Speaker 2: Lenin wasn't Lenin was kind of the consummate political soldier.
Speaker 2: You know, It's not like he was something prolific. I
Speaker 2: mean it was. He was prolific for the roly and
Speaker 2: in terms of his academic output. But you know, it's
Speaker 2: not like he was. It's not like he was like
Speaker 2: Angles or something and putting out you know, endless, endless
Speaker 2: manuscripts or something. But I see hobbs one On probably
Speaker 2: was like the most like Lenin himself, you know, in
Speaker 2: terms of his kind of political ontology as well as
Speaker 2: in terms of how he characterize historical processes and you know,
Speaker 2: how outcomes they're in should be judged, you know, whether
Speaker 2: they are whether they advance the revolutionary imperative and in
Speaker 2: a progressive sense, or whether they are self defeating, you know.
Speaker 2: And so Hobsbam he was I think of him too,
Speaker 2: is he was really much kind of like a counterweight
Speaker 2: to arn SOINOLDI. They had a lot of similarities, Like
Speaker 2: their backgrounds very different. You know, Hobsbaum was a Polish
Speaker 2: Jew whose father was an English subject. But there's there's
Speaker 2: commonalities to their I mean, they're very they're very much
Speaker 2: opposites or were opposites, but there's seat of a common
Speaker 2: frame of reference in terms of what they would have
Speaker 2: viewed as authoritative and you know, what they considered to
Speaker 2: be sort of the essential canon of political philosophy and
Speaker 2: Hasbom Also, he got this reputation people haven't really read him,
Speaker 2: so they veeve him as like this unreconstructed quote unquote Stalinist.
Speaker 2: That's not really true. But he did refuse he had
Speaker 2: contempt for the New Left, and he refused to abandon
Speaker 2: allegiance to the Soviet Union in fifty six and in
Speaker 2: sixty eight. You know, he was he was an orthodox
Speaker 2: in Culdmart terms in orthodox Marxist Leninists, which meant he
Speaker 2: was in the Soviet camp and in the sun of
Speaker 2: Soviet split. He had great disdain for China for various reasons.
Speaker 2: So these like schismatic tendencies, the fact he opposed all
Speaker 2: these schismatic tendencies and the fact he was somewhat critical
Speaker 2: a cruse chief like that didn't make him some hardline Stalinists,
Speaker 2: you know, Like he wasn't the kind of guy who
Speaker 2: would say sit there and say like Eric Honnecker was
Speaker 2: like a great general secretary or that like the DDR
Speaker 2: had like a perfect system, and there were guys who
Speaker 2: thought that way, you know. But so the key to
Speaker 2: the key to this does kind of require like a
Speaker 2: deep dive and I find myself. You know what, so
Speaker 2: people might ask themselves, you know, what does this have
Speaker 2: to do with the present? I mean a couple of things.
Speaker 2: You know, if you want to understand the twentieth century,
Speaker 2: you've got to understand marcsist Leninism. You understand Marsus Leninism,
Speaker 2: that you got to understand the body of theory and
Speaker 2: his theory of history that you know, kind of frame
Speaker 2: the conceptual horizon that you know, nourish the it's it's
Speaker 2: revolutionary imperatives, you know. And if if you understand the
Speaker 2: twenty first century, you got to understand the twentieth century
Speaker 2: and that entire dialectical process bus today, this kind of thought,
Speaker 2: this kind of true left to Gaian thoughts made a comeback.
Speaker 2: Like guys think that guy Jackson Hinkel and a lot
Speaker 2: of people need he's a crank. He's really not, you know,
Speaker 2: and like he's I think he's partly funded by the
Speaker 2: same kinds of elements that fund like Zuganov's like reconstituted
Speaker 2: Communist Party. I'm not saying that, sinister, you know, I
Speaker 2: shouted out about this on social media, but you know,
Speaker 2: these guys aren't woke you know. That's why when Hank
Speaker 2: goldenfines himself as like a social conservative, that's not inconsistent,
Speaker 2: you know. And that's one of the reasons when people
Speaker 2: drop this bullshit calling everything they don't like Marxist. It's
Speaker 2: like that's it's not like Kamala Harris isn't a Marxist,
Speaker 2: you know, Obama is not a Marxist like American uh,
Speaker 2: American style social engineering and all the kind of bizarre
Speaker 2: stuff that goes into that isn't isn't Marxism, you know.
Speaker 2: So I think I think this stuff is more timely
Speaker 2: than a lot of people willing to acknowledge, you know,
Speaker 2: even if even if political theory is not really you know,
Speaker 2: in your proverbial wheelhouse or something. But I'm gonna jump
Speaker 2: around a bit if it's too scatter shot or if
Speaker 2: or or if something is not clear, like please stop
Speaker 2: me and I'll.
Speaker 1: I'll kind of adjust. Uh, no problem, go ahead, no problem,
Speaker 1: I'll uh, I'll interrupt if I have something.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, no for sure. In nineteen ninety four, Hobsbam.
Speaker 2: Hobsbam had a certain degree of prominence, especially in the UK,
Speaker 2: you know, throughout his kind of academic career, even though
Speaker 2: he didn't really involve himself in public policy debates, with
Speaker 2: the exception of the Thatcher era, and we'll get into
Speaker 2: that in a minute. But in nineteen ninety four, when
Speaker 2: a lot of kind of retrospective stuff on the Cold
Speaker 2: War was popping up in media, you know, that's when
Speaker 2: like Nixon was I mean, Nixon died I think in
Speaker 2: ninety four, like ninety four, ninety five, but you know,
Speaker 2: Nixon have been making the rounds in nineteen ninety nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety two, there there was a lot of a lot
Speaker 2: of a lot of colder academics who were being asked,
Speaker 2: you know, for their to render kind of their their
Speaker 2: their diagnosis of the events the preceding half decade and stuff. Hosbam, Uh,
Speaker 2: he's being interviewed by Michael Ignattu, you know, an Ignocatave
Speaker 2: was very much try to put him in the hot
Speaker 2: seat and asking him loaded questions. And Hosmum famously said
Speaker 2: that had the Soviet Union succeeded in realizing a communist
Speaker 2: society and had it been able to fulfill its ambition
Speaker 2: of you know, facilitating a world historical revolutionary imperative, Hobsam
Speaker 2: said that the deaths of twenty million people or however
Speaker 2: many perished in Stalin's death camps, would have been worth it.
Speaker 2: So ignoctave, you know, famously like being clutching at his
Speaker 2: pearls verbially speaking. And Hobswom's rebuttal was, you know, Marx
Speaker 2: himself said that no rate movement has been born without,
Speaker 2: you know, the shedding of blood. And you know, Haze
Speaker 2: fought it up by saying, you know, self sacrifice isn't
Speaker 2: the only kind of sacrifice that was in the contemplation
Speaker 2: of Marx or Lenin or anybody else. You know, but
Speaker 2: this wasn't the standard maya culpa or whatever. Like a
Speaker 2: lot of like a lot of kind of like normany
Speaker 2: cohns think, as well as a lot of kind of
Speaker 2: new left types. This this wasn't just Hobbswaen being deliberately
Speaker 2: callous or something. But you got to understand the vantage
Speaker 2: point from where he's speaking, Like historical processes aren't. They're
Speaker 2: not the result of conspiratorial designs by like criminal actors.
Speaker 2: You know, they're not. Even even if you're a true vanguardist,
Speaker 2: even if you kind of accept Rousseau's if you with
Speaker 2: a general will and Hobswell very much. Did you know,
Speaker 2: of course the General Will doesn't speaks, he's not. Rousseau
Speaker 2: wasn't referring to like the body politic as a whole,
Speaker 2: like it could be just like narrow discrete elements within
Speaker 2: the political organism who's uh, whose commitments and whose conceptual
Speaker 2: horizon like indexes very strongly, you know, with a revolutionary
Speaker 2: leadership element, you know, But uh, that does. But these
Speaker 2: people are still what they're doing is they're they're engaging
Speaker 2: very intimately in psychological and political terms, with historical processes.
Speaker 2: They're not creating these conditions. So if you ask, you know,
Speaker 2: so so trying to trying to put Nolty on the
Speaker 2: hot seat like this, we're trying to put on the
Speaker 2: hot seat like this. It's similar to what haramaz and
Speaker 2: his his acolytes and allies we'll try to do to Nolty,
Speaker 2: you know, like, oh, you're you're justifying these monstrous crimes.
Speaker 2: You know, and always said, no, nobody's justifying anything. But
Speaker 2: if you're talking about the historical process, and you're talking
Speaker 2: about warfare at massive scale, at literally planetary scale, where
Speaker 2: we're not talking about decisions made by discrete individual actors.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about people committing crimes, you know, we're
Speaker 2: we're talking about events that are truly providential or you know,
Speaker 2: if you're an atheist like Cosbomb, truly providential, okay. And
Speaker 2: even if you assign a purely material the conslation of
Speaker 2: purely material causes, you know, to these things. It's a
Speaker 2: constellation of variables, so myriad, so complex at such scale,
Speaker 2: nobody can be said to be like responsible as a
Speaker 2: as a as a causative agent in approximate terms. So
Speaker 2: who was who was? Who was Eric Hosbom? I thought
Speaker 2: it was actually born in Egypt? You know, his father
Speaker 2: was Leopold Percy Hobsbamb. It's believed that the original surname
Speaker 2: was a ups Bomb, but uh, a combination of deliberate
Speaker 2: anglicization of the surname and clerical error led to it
Speaker 2: becoming Hobsbamb. His father had been some kind of merchant
Speaker 2: who was originally from the East End of London. But
Speaker 2: he but he was a Polish jew. His mother, uh
Speaker 2: was a Jewish woman named Nellie Gruen who had come
Speaker 2: from a middle class family. And then then you know,
Speaker 2: and then had what was then you know, the Hapster
Speaker 2: Empire in Austria. Howamerlaye that like he was self consciously
Speaker 2: Jewish because his parents conveyed to him, you know, the
Speaker 2: like like to take his though seriously. But he said
Speaker 2: he was raised in basically like an atheist household. He's like,
Speaker 2: it was a very Jewish household, but it wasn't religious,
Speaker 2: you know, And that that wasn't really strange for a
Speaker 2: hob Thom was born in nineteen seventeen. I mean, that
Speaker 2: was that's very much a twentieth century thing. You know.
Speaker 2: I everatize the people again and again, like nobody thinks
Speaker 2: this way anymore, Like the remaining the remaining self declared
Speaker 2: atheists who have any kind of public profile, like nobody
Speaker 2: nobody takes them seriously anymore, you know. And I mean
Speaker 2: really that kind of thing was dead by you know,
Speaker 2: by the end of the nineteen nineties, but there was
Speaker 2: some there's some peculiar holdouts, and it had something of
Speaker 2: it had something of a media profile, particularly in new
Speaker 2: media right before it's kind of final death as a
Speaker 2: culturally relevant quantity. But you know, so hot One had
Speaker 2: a fairly cause of pol and upbring. You know, he
Speaker 2: wasn't he wasn't some ghetto wise Jew who was sitting
Speaker 2: around reading Marx and Engels and kind of like nursing
Speaker 2: these grudges and stuff. I mean, like, don't get me wrong,
Speaker 2: I'm sure that his ethnos and the you know they
Speaker 2: kind of conceptual biases and intrinsic to that sort of
Speaker 2: household like absolutely informed his perspective. But you know, he wasn't.
Speaker 2: He wasn't some guy from you know, the Pale Settlement
Speaker 2: or something, or from or from some impoverished the you
Speaker 2: know tenement in Poland. And I've heard people speculate that
Speaker 2: the effect who want to throw shade out of him
Speaker 2: like that, that's just like not accurate. But he, uh,
Speaker 2: he was a teenage he ultimately his father died when
Speaker 2: he was when he was quite young. I think when
Speaker 2: he was twelve or thirteen years old, he was sent
Speaker 2: to Uh he was sent to live with his aunt.
Speaker 2: A couple of years later and his sister, and when
Speaker 2: his mother died as well, his maternal aunt and uh,
Speaker 2: they settled in Berlin. And then when ah, when the
Speaker 2: National Socialist revolution kicked off or whatever, remember when the
Speaker 2: National Socialists got their uh parliamentary plurality, which may you know,
Speaker 2: became a problematic majority after the KPD was was outlawed
Speaker 2: owing to the attack on the Reichs the Reichstag fire.
Speaker 2: You know, they they they had an absolute majority. But
Speaker 2: Hobswam returned to the United Kingdom. When I say returned,
Speaker 2: his father was an English subject, so young Hoswallm wasn't
Speaker 2: considered like he was considered. He was also considered to
Speaker 2: be a subject of the Empire, you know, and not
Speaker 2: subject to laws regarding alienage and things like that. He
Speaker 2: attended King's College at Cambridge. You know, he became UH.
Speaker 2: He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain basically as
Speaker 2: like as soon as he was of age. You know,
Speaker 2: I think when he was nineteen years old. I think
Speaker 2: you had to be eighteen to join in those days.
Speaker 2: But you know, he got He took his doctorate from
Speaker 2: a from Cambridge, and I believe his thesis, his PhD
Speaker 2: thesis is on the history of the Fabian society and
Speaker 2: Fabian socialism, you know, and Hobsbaum's commitments as well as
Speaker 2: his his particular kind of brand of UH of Marxist thoughts.
Speaker 2: It was very much it was ver much derivative of
Speaker 2: that of the of the English Communist Party, the Communist
Speaker 2: Party in Great Britain. Okay, Like when I say derivative,
Speaker 2: I don't mean that in punitive terms. But what I
Speaker 2: mean is hobs Bom quite literally identified himself as a
Speaker 2: quote Red Tory, you know. And we'll get into what
Speaker 2: they had means the implications that add. But guys like
Speaker 2: Kim Philby and the Cambridge they they were cut from
Speaker 2: the same kind of cloth, you know. The the commun
Speaker 2: is probably a Great Britain. They were very much a
Speaker 2: fifth column during the Cold War in a way that
Speaker 2: other similar elements weren't on the continent because they were
Speaker 2: they they they were Orthodox marcus a lot in this
Speaker 2: They unconditionally supported the Soviet Union, you know, they so
Speaker 2: they they were very much in the Cold War. You know,
Speaker 2: there's more of a bunch of Trotskyists, you know, trying
Speaker 2: to trying to cultivate electoral respectability. No were they uh
Speaker 2: you know, no were they were they like active as liberals,
Speaker 2: the kinds who find themselves in and n geosynecures who
Speaker 2: who were kind of Communists in name only, like they're
Speaker 2: they're the genuine article. They're pro Soviet. They were loyal
Speaker 2: to Stalin. Subsequently, they were loyal to his memory. But
Speaker 2: they were not uncritical, you know. They they they very
Speaker 2: much viewed the situation as you know, for all of
Speaker 2: its frailties and for all of it's less than ideal
Speaker 2: characteristics and situatedness. You know, the Soviet Union is what
Speaker 2: we have in this world, and this world is all
Speaker 2: there is, you know, So it's suicidally short sighted, you know,
Speaker 2: and and in political terms, to divorce oneself from the
Speaker 2: ambitions and the destinies of of the Soviet system. But
Speaker 2: and interestingly, Hobsbaum he served as a comet engineer during
Speaker 2: World War Two, and he caught some flak at the
Speaker 2: time and in decades subsequent because when the Molotov Ribbon
Speaker 2: Trot Pact was signed, Hobsbaum and and his ideological fellows
Speaker 2: and comrades, they they'd shout down people who are critical
Speaker 2: of the Third Reich because he said, you know, alliance
Speaker 2: of convenience this may be, or you know, whatever however
Speaker 2: contrived this non aggression pact may be. You know, this
Speaker 2: is uh, this is the way things must be, you know,
Speaker 2: in order for the revolution to be consolidated in situ.
Speaker 2: So anybody opposing the Reich or calling for its destruction
Speaker 2: or calling for Moscow to preemptively assault it, which Moscow
Speaker 2: is absolutely planning on doing. But people didn't know this
Speaker 2: outside of you know, Cadres approximate to the reds are Stalin,
Speaker 2: you know. But he considered this to be like a
Speaker 2: kind of revolutionary tendency, which was the orthodox perspective, the
Speaker 2: orthodox Merci's perspective. But other than that, Hosbaum was very
Speaker 2: much like a doctrinal anti fascist, like not not in
Speaker 2: Nuremberg terms. But and we'll get into this probably in
Speaker 2: the second episode. Hobsmam's take on fascism and national socialism
Speaker 2: is interesting. It's not it's by no means, you know, dismissed,
Speaker 2: totally dismissive and some punitive capacity. He says that the
Speaker 2: strength of fascism was that it mastered technics and technology.
Speaker 2: It uh, it was able to imbue people with like
Speaker 2: a fervent kind of energy to realize its objectives. But
Speaker 2: he considered it to be quote phyllis impoverished. And he
Speaker 2: didn't really seem to understand, uh, he didn't really understand
Speaker 2: the kind of trajectory of uh, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, you know,
Speaker 2: to national socialism. Now that some people who have like
Speaker 2: a punitive like thunderbag like take on Germany and the
Speaker 2: Germanis and people in the German state. That's not That's
Speaker 2: not what Osbon was. That's not what I'm saying, and
Speaker 2: that's not you know. And Hosbom wasn't prone to that
Speaker 2: kind of moultive thought either, But like a lot of
Speaker 2: doctair and Marxists, he couldn't really see the forest of
Speaker 2: the trees. I don't think he understood the enduring power
Speaker 2: of continental philosophy outside of Marxist a jacent thinkers, you know,
Speaker 2: and informing what what what? What was going on in Italy,
Speaker 2: what was going on in Germany, you know, in the
Speaker 2: inner Warriors. I don't think he understood this. I think
Speaker 2: it was one of his blind spots, owing to adherence
Speaker 2: to you know, uh An ideology and Marxism that that
Speaker 2: that that quite literally inundates people with like a missionary
Speaker 2: zeal that sometimes uh these were kind of tunnel vision.
Speaker 2: But you know at uh and again, like I said,
Speaker 2: I believe like the Red Tory uh Moniker, you know,
Speaker 2: they became kind of bandied about in the UK about
Speaker 2: even a lot of these like labor types. You know,
Speaker 2: back of the Labor Party was a real party. You know,
Speaker 2: there were there were these guys who were basically like
Speaker 2: we consider them in America to be like you know,
Speaker 2: we get sided to be like like like right wing
Speaker 2: type type of figures. But for the fact that you know,
Speaker 2: they uh, they were very much uh socialists in there
Speaker 2: in their orientation. You know, they believe in state socialism
Speaker 2: both as like an ethical postulate as well as a
Speaker 2: kind of inevitability if if if the modern state was
Speaker 2: to survive, you know, with any kind of with any
Speaker 2: kind of legitimacy. So yeah, how long you're going to
Speaker 2: like Tory communists? Uh, not a red Tory, but uh
Speaker 2: that uh And again that seems paradoxical to people, but
Speaker 2: again it's I I refer to you know, Zugonov's Communist Party,
Speaker 2: you know, to Jackson Hinkle. But even you know, in
Speaker 2: historical capacities, this this resonated with people who had a
Speaker 2: developed understanding of political theory, the Marxism of the Frankfurt School,
Speaker 2: people like oswohand contempt for that. You know, they were like,
Speaker 2: this is degenerate garbage, This is this is uh, this
Speaker 2: is therapy for people who uh want to strike some
Speaker 2: kind of protest pose, you know, but are basically imbibing uh,
Speaker 2: you know, the kind of alienation uh that's deliberately engineered
Speaker 2: by by capitalist societies and saying like, oh, but this
Speaker 2: can be mitigated if you know, we have unrestricted access
Speaker 2: to the sexual hedonism, or if we can you know,
Speaker 2: partake of these uh material rewards, or you know, if
Speaker 2: we can if the state becomes a kind of if
Speaker 2: the state becomes kind of kind of ersos like aristote
Speaker 2: like therapeutic mechanism or or or a kind of rabbinic
Speaker 2: panel or or or like a like a or like
Speaker 2: an Aristot's like church, whereby like the declaratory judgments, that's
Speaker 2: not how like validate these these like contrived like postmodern identities,
Speaker 2: you know. And I mean that's that that's anybody who's
Speaker 2: the true communist partisan. What you know is it was
Speaker 2: disgusted by this, you know. I mean, I'm not I'm
Speaker 2: not saying Marxism is good. I'm not saying it's like
Speaker 2: good qualities because it doesn't. But they were and they
Speaker 2: are serious guys. And if you understand, and we'll get
Speaker 2: into this in a minute, if you understand that kind
Speaker 2: of like marcist Lenin is like view of the historical process,
Speaker 2: you know, basically basically they view like a lot of
Speaker 2: liberalizing tendencies to have resulted in a kind of reactionary
Speaker 2: ethos among people and to then their estimates that's where
Speaker 2: nationalism comes from. Like nationalism, isn't this really organic thing?
Speaker 2: And I'm not talking about nationalism meaning like caring about
Speaker 2: your race or your ethnos. I mean like nationalism in
Speaker 2: the form of, yeah, this is the country of Poland.
Speaker 2: So like you know, according to this raitrary criteria, like
Speaker 2: whoever speaks Polish is like part of the body politic
Speaker 2: and anybody outside of that, you know, is not. And uh,
Speaker 2: you know, despite the fact that you know the existence
Speaker 2: of this government is deleterious to you know, the kind
Speaker 2: of organic uh, the variables that constantly like an organic
Speaker 2: communitarian life. You know, if we like fly the flag
Speaker 2: and you know, make make this language the state language.
Speaker 2: You know, we're we're somehow you know, guarding tradition or
Speaker 2: something like. That's what they're talking about. And in their view,
Speaker 2: it's an effort by people whose lives are totally disrupted
Speaker 2: by future shock based we you know, and by the
Speaker 2: advanced and a productive processes such that you know, labor
Speaker 2: is no longer a complete process that people partake of
Speaker 2: in order to see through you know, the creative development
Speaker 2: of of a of an object or a thing, or
Speaker 2: a necessary activity from start to finish, you know, and
Speaker 2: it just becomes an artifact of a mechanization, you know,
Speaker 2: the discrete aspects of which you know, humans are still
Speaker 2: required or needed to perform. But I mean, you're performing
Speaker 2: these activities in endless repetition without any meaningful experience of
Speaker 2: the totality of its fruitfulness. You know, in the company
Speaker 2: of total strangers. You know, who's only who's only the
Speaker 2: only affinity between you and them is it's kind of
Speaker 2: accident of locale or whatever. You know, that that's what
Speaker 2: they're talking about. But you know, and so people like Cosbon,
Speaker 2: even if they didn't do things like religious observances as
Speaker 2: particularly positive or laudable, you know, they viewed it as
Speaker 2: a you know, an anthropological feature of the historical process,
Speaker 2: you know, whose time arrives and then passes. But they
Speaker 2: but they did view you know, communitarian bonds of whatever
Speaker 2: they may be. You know whether they're like you know,
Speaker 2: promised on culture or sectarian affinity or what have you.
Speaker 2: You know, like in the historical moment in which those
Speaker 2: things are relevant, they consider those things valuable, you know,
Speaker 2: because at the end of the day, to a Marcus
Speaker 2: Lenin and it's like the individual doesn't matter, you know,
Speaker 2: So whatever facilitates, like the dignity of you know, the
Speaker 2: laboring class or classes, you know, is basically like a
Speaker 2: social good. Okay, so somebody like Cosbomavi, you know, seeing
Speaker 2: a bunch of people saying like, uh, you know, marriage
Speaker 2: or like pair bonding isn't important. All that matters is
Speaker 2: like sterile sex and you know the catharsis you get
Speaker 2: from from engaging that kind of stuff, or you know,
Speaker 2: all that matters is you know, people being liberated from
Speaker 2: obligations to others or obligations to history. You know, you know,
Speaker 2: the highest good is being free, like you know, spill
Speaker 2: out wealth on yourself and and cultivate these these kinds
Speaker 2: of distractions that that that facilitate ledgend gratification like he
Speaker 2: had contempt for that. And basically any orthodox Marxist does,
Speaker 2: you know, they're like again, they're not woke at all
Speaker 2: if you want to race and if you want race too,
Speaker 2: like it's not I'm just pointing again again too like
Speaker 2: Marxists don't think race is important, but they're not anti racist,
Speaker 2: Like there's no reason they don't think there's anything wrong
Speaker 2: with a bunch of immigrants like swamped like a formerly
Speaker 2: Western country, but they don't think that should be a
Speaker 2: priority either, you know. And this idea that this idea
Speaker 2: that they're you know, this idea that racial identity needs
Speaker 2: to be like socially engineered out of existence, like they
Speaker 2: have no like truck with it, you know. Like Stalin
Speaker 2: did try to like, uh, what do you called the
Speaker 2: nationalities problem? That definitely tracks you know with like ethnic
Speaker 2: cleansing under us because the civil rights in America. But
Speaker 2: that's because the quote nationalities were causing problems for the
Speaker 2: party and for the Central Committee, you know, and if
Speaker 2: they weren't causing problems, like it wasn't so much a priority,
Speaker 2: wasn't it.
Speaker 1: Because the like, the the nationalities that he had a
Speaker 1: problem with he considered to be the aspara person nationalities
Speaker 1: that could possibly collude with their home countries.
Speaker 2: That was part of it. Yeah, definitely, that's part of it, definitely,
Speaker 2: and that's why that's one of the reasons why, uh,
Speaker 2: one of the reasons the Soviets assaulted Poland. I mean
Speaker 2: it was it was obviously because you know, there was
Speaker 2: a geostrategic imperative to be able to deploy in depth
Speaker 2: and things like that. But also there was like an
Speaker 2: active like Ruthenian minority there that Stalin was convinced we're
Speaker 2: gonna try and like reinforce the Ukrainians like an event
Speaker 2: of open war. Yeah, it was all that stuff. And
Speaker 2: don't get me wrong. Also, like I'm not I'm not
Speaker 2: I'm not sitting here defending the concept of like new
Speaker 2: Soviet man like eventually like identitarian characteristics relating to historical memory,
Speaker 2: like weren't we're slad for annihilation under like a communist system.
Speaker 2: And Hoswam would have absolutely agreed with that. But my
Speaker 2: point is guys like Hobbam weren't sitting around saying, like,
Speaker 2: you know, we need to settle like African people in
Speaker 2: Ireland because it's not right that it's one hundred percent Irish,
Speaker 2: Like they view that as like it's nonsensical, you know,
Speaker 2: just like people like Hobsbamb when Nuremberg kicked off the proceedings.
Speaker 2: You know, the view from Moscow wash, why are we
Speaker 2: gonna why are we gonna like declared Jews? Maybe this
Speaker 2: like murdered population. You know, we lost twenty five million
Speaker 2: people fighting the fascists. You know, like you're not there.
Speaker 2: And plus there are no Jews in the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: You know, there's like Soviet citizens. You know, there's the
Speaker 2: body politic, and there's like our ops, and there's the
Speaker 2: most people outside of that, you know, and then there's
Speaker 2: and then there's like the Zionists and other like other
Speaker 2: vanguard tendencies trying to exploit you know, grieven since the
Speaker 2: nationality used to undermine socialism, like that was their view
Speaker 2: of it, you know, and even today, like that's why
Speaker 2: this carries over into today, like the way the Russian
Speaker 2: Federation views things, like the Russians are always he's always
Speaker 2: gonna view their enemies as Nazis and fascists. How would
Speaker 2: they not? Okay, But when they talk about that, they're not.
Speaker 2: They're not they're not saying it like the way like
Speaker 2: like like the way Chuck Schumer uses you're not or
Speaker 2: they're not saying that. You know, these people are like
Speaker 2: anti gay or they're or these people don't respect, you know,
Speaker 2: the heerent dignity of all people. And they're not into diversity.
Speaker 2: That's not what they're saying at all. Like they mean
Speaker 2: something very specific by it, and you know that's that.
Speaker 2: It's it's uh, it's both uh a uh it both
Speaker 2: alos you know, the Ancestral Memory and the Great Patriotic
Speaker 2: War as well as there's still like a lot of
Speaker 2: there's still a lot of like leftag alien thought like
Speaker 2: in Russia. You know, even somebody like Dugan, and I
Speaker 2: like Dugan, I I mean a lot of Russian academic
Speaker 2: culture I find kind of alien just because I'm like
Speaker 2: very much an Anglophone person. And that's not I'm not
Speaker 2: putting shade on like the Eastern Slavic people's or something.
Speaker 2: But uh, I don't find it. I mean they're very
Speaker 2: much like a different people. Okay, But even a guy
Speaker 2: like Dugan, there's very much like left to Gaelian strains
Speaker 2: of like letting his thought like and stuff that he postulates.
Speaker 2: And he's like very much like a I mean, he's
Speaker 2: he's very much a committed Christian, you know, like Eastern Christian,
Speaker 2: you know, that's a bit of a tangent. Forgive me
Speaker 2: if that was a kind of outside the scope. But
Speaker 2: but I mean this sust important, uh you know, not
Speaker 2: just to clarify what we're talking about and my my
Speaker 2: kind of primary wheel outs this political theory, but you know,
Speaker 2: just structuring the kind of conceptual landscape and which were
Speaker 2: remired just declaring anybody on the left be a Marxist
Speaker 2: like that, that doesn't make any sense. It's like that
Speaker 2: that says that's just that's just fucking retarded as saying
Speaker 2: that like Donald Trump is a fascist or like the
Speaker 2: p there were like people who avidly like follow his
Speaker 2: you know, media and political career and and and support him,
Speaker 2: you know, are like fascists. Like it's it's just as
Speaker 2: ridiculous and and at odds and the reality is is
Speaker 2: saying that. But yeah, I'll try to I'll try to
Speaker 2: pick it up a little bit worse the tangents, but uh,
Speaker 2: it's kind of magnum opus. There's a four volume uh
Speaker 2: study called the Age Revolution Age Revolution seventeen eighty nine
Speaker 2: to eighteen forty eight, and the first volume dropped in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty two. This is a seminal work of historicism.
Speaker 2: In my opinion, you can find the abridged uh, this
Speaker 2: version of it in a series of PDF files if
Speaker 2: you dig around, if there, if people are really interested,
Speaker 2: I'll i'll, I'll throw it up on my on my
Speaker 2: sub stack. But you know, basically it uh the cosbomb,
Speaker 2: like modernity really arrived with the French Revolution, Okay, and
Speaker 2: what do he what I mean by that? And like
Speaker 2: what he conveys in the first volume of this Age
Speaker 2: of Age of Revolution is that you know, the overlong
Speaker 2: majority of people in Europe in seventeen eighty nine, they
Speaker 2: still they still lived like people did in the medieval period.
Speaker 2: You know, there was you had this kind of very
Speaker 2: very slim I already of dedicated urbanites, you know, and
Speaker 2: people who were close to technology and productive processes facilitated
Speaker 2: by technology. But almost everybody they were living, you know,
Speaker 2: basically as subsistence farmers or as people you know, laboring
Speaker 2: with the household as the local production, you know, and
Speaker 2: essentially bartering and trading on things they could make, you know,
Speaker 2: within the household. You know, this wasn't I think people
Speaker 2: this idea that you know, after like upon the ansen
Speaker 2: of the Age of Discovery or whatever, like suddenly things
Speaker 2: became moderate and everybody lived in a city or like
Speaker 2: a town, but just things were low tech compared to today,
Speaker 2: Like that wasn't Most people in seventeen eighty nine lived
Speaker 2: not much different than they did in thirteen eighty nine. Okay,
Speaker 2: And this is fundamentally important, And that's kind of where
Speaker 2: hobsbamb It's subtle, but it's very much there, and I
Speaker 2: consider it's a set. I consider it essential to understanding
Speaker 2: something of his political of something of his ontological claims
Speaker 2: about politics. As I said a minute ago in a
Speaker 2: slightly liment context, you know, when Rousseau talks about the
Speaker 2: General Will, and I highly recommend Rousseau to anybody on
Speaker 2: the right. He's very important. I first read him when
Speaker 2: I was about sixteen, and that completely changed my perspective
Speaker 2: on political theory. But you know, part of it's uh,
Speaker 2: part of it's because things are lost in translation, particularly
Speaker 2: French to English. There's a lot of cot there's a
Speaker 2: lot of subtle concepts intrinsic to the French language, particularly
Speaker 2: if you're talking about metaphysics or politics or anything conceptual
Speaker 2: that really that really doesn't translate. But the General Will,
Speaker 2: like Russell Again, Rousseau's not talking about some majoritarian consensus
Speaker 2: of like the whole body politic describing it as general.
Speaker 2: The way to understand that is to mean something bigger
Speaker 2: than like a discrete individual actor or actors. You've got
Speaker 2: to think about it as inextricably bound up to Zeitgeist,
Speaker 2: like as a concept. Okay, so the general will it
Speaker 2: might only be like one hundred guys out of a
Speaker 2: population of like five million people, but for whatever reason
Speaker 2: they astride to Zeitgeist. They've got like the gumption sort
Speaker 2: of the intelligence and politic mobile terms, and the motivation
Speaker 2: and the balls to see through purely historical and irrevolutionary imperatives,
Speaker 2: you know, in a way that has a formative effect,
Speaker 2: you know, either as like a reformist tendency or alternatively,
Speaker 2: it can be a tendency towards creative destruction and oblivion.
Speaker 2: But basically, the general will describes this like intangible tendency
Speaker 2: or sensibility that animates this this cadre at in deeply
Speaker 2: psychological terms and animates and motivates them to realize a
Speaker 2: revolutionary imperative. Okay, often too, this dovetails and peculiar ways
Speaker 2: with whoever the leadership element is of the state as
Speaker 2: it exists, you know, in situ okay. But that's so
Speaker 2: Habma makes a lot of that in Age of Revolution, okay,
Speaker 2: because a lot of court history that is now and
Speaker 2: for that's the jaguin revolution. It's a combination of like
Speaker 2: goofy stuff. I think people filled from stuff like like
Speaker 2: like late news or something where it's like, oh, everybody
Speaker 2: who was living in poverty and the crushing misery of
Speaker 2: these slums. So there was like this uprising, like that's
Speaker 2: not what happened. And again, you know, the material conditions
Speaker 2: of seventeen eighty nine, the purely material conditions weren't radically
Speaker 2: than centuries past. Okay, conceptually they were totally different. And
Speaker 2: that's that's what I mean when I point out that
Speaker 2: Hosbaum was a was a true left to Galien. Psychological
Speaker 2: variables stand in for providential ones. Okay. But people are
Speaker 2: familiar with the subject area in general terms understand exactly
Speaker 2: what I'm talking about and why that's important. The succeeding
Speaker 2: valume in this four volume study was was Age of Capital,
Speaker 2: you know, and Age of Capital I think it's kind
Speaker 2: of it's kind of a counterpart the Shupiter's business cycles. Okay,
Speaker 2: and it's interesting to me that this kind of Simpleton's
Speaker 2: off like Keenes, even people who are pretty outside the
Speaker 2: mainstream and pretty far left, they still cite that kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. You know, I would think that Age of
Speaker 2: Capital would be their kind of go to, you know.
Speaker 2: And it's highly it was. It was a highly respected,
Speaker 2: uh treatise because it it showcased a genuine understanding of economics,
Speaker 2: you know, and I I generally agree with Burnham. There's
Speaker 2: not a quote Marxist economics because Marxism isn't a science.
Speaker 2: It's not a theory of economics, you know. It's uh,
Speaker 2: it's a series of sociological postulates and claims about the
Speaker 2: historical process, you know. But there's not quote Marxist economics.
Speaker 2: You know, like like a Marxist economist, you know, he
Speaker 2: arbitrarily way inputs, you know, based on his own conceptual
Speaker 2: biases about what, in particular concrete terms, is like driving this,
Speaker 2: you know, the stage of the historical process you know
Speaker 2: that he finds himself in or that was the you
Speaker 2: know at Bock in which the the data being coded
Speaker 2: and interpreted occurred. You know, it's uh, it begins with
Speaker 2: the conclusion about the human condition as it relates to
Speaker 2: historical and political phenomena, and then and and then and
Speaker 2: then seeks out variables that that can substantiate it and uh,
Speaker 2: in part in terms you know, and there's some of
Speaker 2: that and a lot of Hosmon's writing, but he but again,
Speaker 2: he understands puer economics of such a thing that he
Speaker 2: said to exist better than most people, I mean, including uh.
Speaker 2: I don't think academics are any great shakes, but I
Speaker 2: mean including people who were you know, were in you know,
Speaker 2: his his peer group as a as a as a
Speaker 2: political uh partisan, and as a as a political theorist,
Speaker 2: and you know what can and this is also is
Speaker 2: what explains hosmons like lifelong dedication to communism, because it's
Speaker 2: a total theory of history. You know, it's not something
Speaker 2: you take on for because you're alienated and and like
Speaker 2: want some protest identity. I mean, yeah, I'm sure some
Speaker 2: people do that, but they they're not serious people and
Speaker 2: they're certainly not they're certainly not writing stuff, you know,
Speaker 2: like on a par with the Age Revolution of the
Speaker 2: age of capital. And Hosmon've never hid that, you know it.
Speaker 2: But he also one of one of Hobswe's collaborators on
Speaker 2: a on a lot of scholarship and a lot of
Speaker 2: his work product was this guy Eric Forearner Foreigner was
Speaker 2: was known. He became like firebrand who was like constantly
Speaker 2: bashing garbage off and you know, and and and issuing
Speaker 2: these these these punitive declarations about a garbage off is
Speaker 2: is forsaking the revolution. And he's a trader the the
Speaker 2: Sovietism and you know, into and of the socialist Communitian
Speaker 2: nations as well as the UH. It's most of the
Speaker 2: political parties that are you know, behind you know who
Speaker 2: exists in in in the capitalist world as well. Like
Speaker 2: Hoson ever did that. And it's not because he was
Speaker 2: worried about his public image. I mean he would defend
Speaker 2: Shnalin publicly. It's because if you are a true Mercus
Speaker 2: Leninist like he was, like the failure of the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union was ordained by that same process, you know, in
Speaker 2: Hosbom's his unconditional loyalty to the Soviet Union contrary its enemies,
Speaker 2: that didn't entail some like slavish like uncritical view of it.
Speaker 2: You know, when when Kruse Chef was assailing Stalin's memory
Speaker 2: and you know by name, attempting to impeach the personality cult.
Speaker 2: You know, obviously after a after nineteen sixty, after after
Speaker 2: nineteen fifty four, four fifty six there, and you know
Speaker 2: how Hosmom said to his comrades, you know, at cadre level,
Speaker 2: you know, we we we we need to we we
Speaker 2: need to take a hard look at at at Stalin's tenure.
Speaker 2: And you know what what what was laudable and what
Speaker 2: went wrong and what you know was in fact a
Speaker 2: kind of revolutionary tendency, because otherwise, you know, the the
Speaker 2: revolution won't survive. And and has I was honest too.
Speaker 2: Osmon obviously had a lot of respect for the Russians
Speaker 2: of people, but he you know, he was always he
Speaker 2: was a Soviet partisan, but with with with reservations, because
Speaker 2: he was the first to make the point, you know, uh,
Speaker 2: the revolutionary imperative didn't spark in the most hyper advanced
Speaker 2: capitalist country. It didn't happen in Germany, it didn't happen
Speaker 2: in the UK. It happened in Russia, where the capitalist
Speaker 2: class was on very tenuous ground, you know, And were
Speaker 2: they the opponent's revolution were really the Tsarist elements. So
Speaker 2: we're incredibly hard guys. They were god hearing people, they
Speaker 2: were patriots, but they were thrown in altered reactionaries. I
Speaker 2: don't mean that putatively at all, but that's what they were.
Speaker 2: You know, they weren't there weren't some capitalist element that
Speaker 2: you know, could draw upon this great power available to
Speaker 2: them by you know, the productive processes that can literally
Speaker 2: extract wealth out of the dirt. You know. That's not uh,
Speaker 2: that's none of the Bolsheviks were facing down and murdering,
Speaker 2: you know. So they they they kind of knocked down
Speaker 2: a house of cards in what became the Soviet Union,
Speaker 2: you know. And Hoswell never lost sight of that. So yeah,
Speaker 2: on the one hand, you know, you must stand with
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is the it is
Speaker 2: the beating heart of the socialist community of nations and
Speaker 2: of the revolution, you know, but that doesn't mean that,
Speaker 2: you know, one must uncritically accept every feature of of
Speaker 2: the Soviet state. And uh, Hoswell was critical of state
Speaker 2: socialism from day one, like he considered it a necessary stage.
Speaker 2: But he wasn't. That's what the reasons I object to
Speaker 2: people saying, oh he was like the Stalinist, like a
Speaker 2: true Stalinist was uh was or is uh you know
Speaker 2: somebody who looks at the Soviet state as like the
Speaker 2: zenith of stay craft and then and and they view
Speaker 2: that as like a positive thing, you know, basically uh,
Speaker 2: you know, based basically uh basically this this this this
Speaker 2: mighty empire of uh you know that like leads the
Speaker 2: world in in in in terms of how like you know,
Speaker 2: the industrial proletariat is valued. You know, it's a superpower
Speaker 2: because of its military might and it's mastery of technics,
Speaker 2: including nuclear weapons and the ability to deploy into orbital
Speaker 2: space and things like that. You know, like these and
Speaker 2: these guys do exist, you know, I mean like that
Speaker 2: is now like Hosman was not at all one of
Speaker 2: those guys. Okay, to be clear, let me see, I'm
Speaker 2: in my outline, like I'm not uh, I'm not an
Speaker 2: F A G, G O T who like you know,
Speaker 2: I gotta stick to the outline. But I but it
Speaker 2: doesn't like a like a conceptual map so I know
Speaker 2: where we're at. They don't want to. Yeah, let's uh
Speaker 2: hoss problem. Well, I want to get this biographical sort
Speaker 2: of info out of the way to the lay foundation.
Speaker 2: We'll get into the substance of Hobsbaum's you know, intellectual
Speaker 2: canon in episode two. But I want to I want
Speaker 2: to get and we need to get into the dual Revolution,
Speaker 2: which is a it's it's a it's a political theoretical
Speaker 2: and a sociological postulated concept that was coined, uh that
Speaker 2: quite by Hosbam and now in scholarship on the French Revolution,
Speaker 2: it's it's just kind of taken, it's just kind of accepted.
Speaker 2: It's accepted as like an essential aspect of of that
Speaker 2: body of scholarship. But if I, but if I, that's
Speaker 2: going to take an hour to dive into. So let's
Speaker 2: let's hold off on that. And I think we're coming
Speaker 2: on about an hour anyway. So yeah, I think this
Speaker 2: would be a natural stopping point if that's acceptable, perfect.
Speaker 1: All right, do plugs and we'll talk about the next episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Man, I strongly advise, or I mean not advise,
Speaker 2: I suggest. It would make me happy if people would
Speaker 2: check out my substack. And it's in addition to there
Speaker 2: being like my podcast there and like some longer form
Speaker 2: stuff and a pretty active like chat platform that's where
Speaker 2: when I shout out stuff like you know events and
Speaker 2: inactivities were up on it. It shows up there. It's
Speaker 2: a real Thomas seven seven seven dot substack dot com.
Speaker 2: This Saturday, we're meeting at Rosewood Cemetery for our Halloween
Speaker 2: Cemetery Walk and we're gonna lay some flowers at Confederate
Speaker 2: Mound to like honor our forebears and their sacrifice and
Speaker 2: for the Orthodox guys and girls. Mercia Eliadi is buried
Speaker 2: at the same uh cemetery and we're gonna pay respects
Speaker 2: to him. And Eliatti has had a huge effect on
Speaker 2: impact on my intellectual development. So we're uh, it's it's
Speaker 2: it's gonna be a very positive day, you know, uh
Speaker 2: if somber. But last last year we went to Graceland
Speaker 2: Cemetery up on the North Side and it was it
Speaker 2: was fantastic and a lot of people showed up. But uh,
Speaker 2: you'll find me on social media. I meant capital r
Speaker 2: e A L underscore number seven hl mes seven seven
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Speaker 1: I got it all ready to go. I just copy
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Speaker 1: gum Roads. So yep, that's it until the next time.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Thomas.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, buddy.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pecanana Show.
Speaker 1: Thomas is here. We're going to go into part two
Speaker 1: of Eric Hobsbamb. Are you doing Thomas, I know it
Speaker 1: pretty well. Thanks for hosting me, of course. So what
Speaker 1: are we going to look into today When it comes
Speaker 1: to mister Hobsbam.
Speaker 2: I was going to expand upon his historical perspective and
Speaker 2: why in substance terms he opposed the schismatics, the schismatic
Speaker 2: tendency is and the standard bearers of those things after
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight, and people have every superficial understanding of
Speaker 2: Mersus Leninism and of what Sovietism was generally. You know,
Speaker 2: That's why I object a lot of people banning the
Speaker 2: phrase cultural Marxism, like there's an appropriate context to apply
Speaker 2: that phraseology I'm not going to say there's not, but
Speaker 2: generally people don't apply it in those contexts, and they
Speaker 2: seem to discern anything or identify anything that's at all
Speaker 2: like radic goal or you know, progressive and orientation, or
Speaker 2: that's related to the ongoing social engineering regime and like
Speaker 2: the paradigm that he gives rise to in like discursive terms.
Speaker 2: That's identify that as Marxism. I mean, that's that's grossly incorrect,
Speaker 2: you know. And it's not I'm not just playing word
Speaker 2: games or being like a pedant or something. You know.
Speaker 2: It's important to be clear about what we're talking about.
Speaker 2: Particularly we're dealing with something as kind of abstract and
Speaker 2: conceptual as political theory, you know, and a guy like
Speaker 2: Hobbs will almost a real Marxist, you know, and he
Speaker 2: actively disdained the standard bearers of the sorts of tendencies
Speaker 2: I just mentioned, you know, not because he was like
Speaker 2: a good guy, you're because he was correct in his
Speaker 2: assessment of historical phenomenon and the approximate causes of you know,
Speaker 2: these punctuated developments in the twentieth century. But he did
Speaker 2: have certain insights into history processes. You know, he's the
Speaker 2: one who coined the phrase the quote quote the short
Speaker 2: century to refer to the twentieth century. I mean, Nolty
Speaker 2: agreed with it. You know, the short century being the
Speaker 2: cycle of events that were emerged in nineteen fourteen and
Speaker 2: that ended on November ninth, nineteen eighty nine, you know,
Speaker 2: contra the long century, you know of after water after
Speaker 2: Waterloo until nineteen fourteen, I mean after Waterloo, other than
Speaker 2: the Crimean War and the Franco Prussian War, both of
Speaker 2: which were very localized conflicts and both of which were
Speaker 2: brief and neither of which really had some destructive impactfulness
Speaker 2: at scale on the continent. One of the reasons why
Speaker 2: so many mercenaries from Europe fought in the war between
Speaker 2: the States and even you know Henry Henry Werez, the
Speaker 2: commandant of Andersonville, who was unceremoniously hanged. So that's a
Speaker 2: that's a really grim and macabre story, everything about Andersonville
Speaker 2: and his demise. But he was a Swiss national who
Speaker 2: found his way in the United States, you know, because
Speaker 2: that's where the action was. You know, don't get me wrong,
Speaker 2: Like all kinds of punctuated things were happening in Europe
Speaker 2: of a technological nature of a developmental nature. But like
Speaker 2: power political affairs weren't really happening there, you know. I mean,
Speaker 2: and and if you take a long view, yes, okay,
Speaker 2: that kind of thing is always underway. But in Warren
Speaker 2: peace terms, they were not punctuated crises. There were not
Speaker 2: you know, crisis modalities that were emerging that you know,
Speaker 2: generated a need for men under arms and men with
Speaker 2: adjacent sorts of skill sets, you know, to participate in
Speaker 2: in those sorts of those sorts of uh happenings. But
Speaker 2: in America, obviously you better believe that was underway. And
Speaker 2: it's some this is a tangent. I'll make it brief,
Speaker 2: but you know McLellan who was famously sex by Lincoln,
Speaker 2: you know, and he you know Lincoln, I'm paraphrasing, but
Speaker 2: you know, Lincoln family said, you know, I've got I've
Speaker 2: got a commanding general who refuses to assault, you know.
Speaker 2: And uh so his detractors and not just among not
Speaker 2: just among radical reformers and abolitionist but even pretty moderate
Speaker 2: people either band they branded him some kind of coward
Speaker 2: who was like afraid of being under fire or this,
Speaker 2: or he was some kind of like secret Copperhead. He
Speaker 2: was in neither of those things. He'd been on the
Speaker 2: ground in prime me because before the war in the
Speaker 2: States kicked off, other than the Indian Wars, which were
Speaker 2: utterly savage, but we're not. But in scope and scale,
Speaker 2: we're very limited, you know, other than that, like conventional
Speaker 2: combined ours what was then emerging combined arms, you know,
Speaker 2: indirect fire, like the only way you really I mean
Speaker 2: liaising with foreign militaries was like something that was done
Speaker 2: in the Western world anyway. But it's also like if
Speaker 2: you wanted to, you know, if you wanted to, if
Speaker 2: you wanted to cut your teeth in a combat zone.
Speaker 2: You know McClellan's generation, Well, you went to Europe, you know,
Speaker 2: you drilled with the Prussians, or you know, you you
Speaker 2: were a liaison to the French or the British. And
Speaker 2: McClelland saw what was happening on the ground in Crimea,
Speaker 2: and you saw the Master artillery and what it was
Speaker 2: doing to the human body, and he's like, this is horrific.
Speaker 2: So he's like, if we if we we started it,
Speaker 2: if we start if we start cavalry charging like masks,
Speaker 2: Confederate artillery, like this is gonna be a slaughter, and
Speaker 2: that's what happened, you know. But uh, this is sort
Speaker 2: of an aside when any event, you know, uh, to
Speaker 2: bring it back to where we should be at. I
Speaker 2: I did it right up years back of Paul Godfrey's
Speaker 2: talk and his paper. You know how the left won
Speaker 2: the Cold War? Because the Left did win the Cold War.
Speaker 2: The people like Hobsbaum lost the Cold War, you know,
Speaker 2: the standard bearers of Sovietism and of uh. I don't
Speaker 2: think Hosmam was a stalinist in the sense that somebody
Speaker 2: like Dougan kind of is, or in the way more
Speaker 2: and more properly. He's not a stalinist in the way
Speaker 2: that guys like Jackson Hinkle are. But I mean he wasn't.
Speaker 2: He wasn't opposed to that tendency either, you know. And
Speaker 2: like we got into he stated and know un certain terms,
Speaker 2: you know, after after the energym and border came down
Speaker 2: that you know, whatever happened in the Soviet Union, but
Speaker 2: it had the had the Communist revolution been realized, it
Speaker 2: would have been worth it in his opinion, you know.
Speaker 2: And that's so he was. He was honest about, you know,
Speaker 2: about that perspective. And I mean, that's the way every
Speaker 2: that's the way every Marcist Leninists thought, you know, and
Speaker 2: and such that they still exist today. I don't think
Speaker 2: guys like Hankle when like the kind of reconstituted American
Speaker 2: Communist Party, they've also got a presence on the East
Speaker 2: Coast these days. They're distinct from like whatever this vestigial
Speaker 2: Communist Party USA, which are just like a bunch of
Speaker 2: liberals who don't know what the fuck they're talking about.
Speaker 2: But kind of like the reconstituted American Communist Party, I mean,
Speaker 2: they believe that too, but they're kind of they're they're
Speaker 2: kind of like a dialectical offshoot of what was the
Speaker 2: Marcus Lennon's perspective. I think that they uh, I think
Speaker 2: they're big on guys like Emmanuel Wallerstein and like they
Speaker 2: they subscribed like global systems theory, which is serious stuff.
Speaker 2: But but they are like stylinists, like they don't you know,
Speaker 2: they're they tolerate religious people these days, they're not. They're
Speaker 2: not these like doctrinal atheists who view themselves as being
Speaker 2: at war with established churches and things like. They're tolerant
Speaker 2: to that, but they're they remain like atheistic, Like what
Speaker 2: was it matter if you killed twenty million people to advance, uh,
Speaker 2: you know the realization of true communism, Like it doesn't
Speaker 2: matter because well you know that that that's that's just
Speaker 2: creative destruction and and human if humans are just so
Speaker 2: much mentioned material and mentally more valuable than you know,
Speaker 2: animal livestock or material things that may be as they
Speaker 2: may be, there there's still just like so much you know, material,
Speaker 2: you know, and that uh, that's important to keep in mind.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm not not just I'm not being you know, not,
Speaker 2: I'm not like moralizing here saying like and this is
Speaker 2: why the communists are a bunch of slavery bees. I
Speaker 2: think that their worldview in addition to being kind of
Speaker 2: laughably up to and it's there, Yeah, I believe it's
Speaker 2: like highly corrupt morally, But that's that's not at base.
Speaker 2: It's not really why people like me like object to
Speaker 2: their perspective, you know. But at the same time, you know,
Speaker 2: I uh, for some reason the kinds of people people
Speaker 2: looks like Chompsky all the time. And don't get me wrong,
Speaker 2: like I think Chomsky wrote some pretty good stuff on
Speaker 2: linguistics and he he he uh. He'd be pretty handily
Speaker 2: treated people like Fuco, who considered to be kind of
Speaker 2: unserious degenerates. But I mean Chompsky, Chomsky's basically like a
Speaker 2: moralizer and a polemicist, and I don't think he's got
Speaker 2: to really develop view of political theory. But I mean,
Speaker 2: I mean guys on the right, or at least guys
Speaker 2: kind of adjacent they don't have data, say Chomsky, but
Speaker 2: then they act like I'm some weirdo where like it's
Speaker 2: being like dev and I said, hobbsbamb you know, like
Speaker 2: Howsong was a serious historian man like unlike Chomsky, he
Speaker 2: like drops polemic about like you know, America is doing
Speaker 2: mean things but the electonomy wrong, like America is there
Speaker 2: to be savage. But the day Chompsky, you know, he's
Speaker 2: he comes off like some handwringing old woman. And I don't,
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't think he's a real political theorist,
Speaker 2: you know, like it's I don't it's not just me
Speaker 2: kind of guarding my own proverbial wheelhouse. I you know,
Speaker 2: at the level of deep analysis like Nolt and Hosbom
Speaker 2: and like economy political economs, like Joseph Schumpeter, the suits
Speaker 2: of insights they were capable of, like in the moment.
Speaker 2: Most people can't do that, you know. And I meet
Speaker 2: a lot of guys whoever this idea that you know,
Speaker 2: oh you're like a mathematician or like you sell insurance
Speaker 2: or like you're, you know, some kind of molecular biologists.
Speaker 2: But oh, anybody you can have a take on putical theory.
Speaker 2: It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know.
Speaker 2: And that's these guys that would no insight. It's not
Speaker 2: even made like IQ man, Like these guys are like
Speaker 2: way smarter than I am, you know, and but they
Speaker 2: they're but they're like conceptually illiterate. It's because they can't
Speaker 2: discern the relevant patterns and things, you know, Like it's
Speaker 2: it's not like an intelligence thing. Yeah I don't you can.
Speaker 1: I mean, I accuse of religion. Now on the right,
Speaker 1: on some parts of the right. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: mentioned IQ and you do anything to like take one
Speaker 1: step to say, well, you know, it really doesn't matter
Speaker 1: with this, they just oh, that's cope, that's cope, Bro,
Speaker 1: that's cope.
Speaker 2: Well, no, they're retards and that's like outmoded thinking. You know,
Speaker 2: like I was making the point like Bill Gates, I
Speaker 2: guarantee you has a higher IQ than Muhammad, Promo, Napoleon
Speaker 2: or Hitler. He's also like a total shithead. He's totally
Speaker 2: devoid of any creativity and in somebody's the fucking idiots,
Speaker 2: and like nobody is gonna die for Bill Gates. Okay,
Speaker 2: I mean it's like, okay, great, Like there's some there's
Speaker 2: some Chinese guy who'd like faint. Have you ever saw
Speaker 2: like a girl naked and lives with his mommy And
Speaker 2: he's got an IQ of like two hundred. Okay, that's awesome.
Speaker 2: If I need somebody to do like math problems nobody
Speaker 2: can do, I'll hire him to do that. But I
Speaker 2: don't understand why I should give a fuck, you know,
Speaker 2: like it's basically, you know what IQ is, man, IQ
Speaker 2: is a it's like it's it's cold or managerialism, whereby
Speaker 2: it's like, look, we basically like like we need like
Speaker 2: widget makers, and we need guys who manage the widget factory,
Speaker 2: and we need some criteria where can identify people who
Speaker 2: below a certain threshold are basically subnormal and useless. That's
Speaker 2: what IQ is. It's not like you know, oh, if
Speaker 2: you're like Q was this high, you know, you're you're
Speaker 2: you're gonna like lead like a revolution and conquer the
Speaker 2: Arabian Peninsula. Or if like your iqes like within these parameters,
Speaker 2: like you're Adolf Hitler, or I mean it's fucking retarded,
Speaker 2: like it doesn't and I mean for people I've been
Speaker 2: meaning someone vod Measy and sort of like that, and
Speaker 2: it's like you're basically taking you're basically taking, uh, this
Speaker 2: kind of ridiculous sort of like bureaucrats fetish from the
Speaker 2: public school system and like deciding it's like some like
Speaker 2: holy criteria, like and they don't even realize that's what
Speaker 2: they're doing. So but yeah, we'll get into the substance
Speaker 2: of what we need to talk about today. I uh,
Speaker 2: I didn't mean to uh whip off about about tangents,
Speaker 2: but I made the point before you know, Hobsbam, he
Speaker 2: talked a lot about the origins of nationalism, and to
Speaker 2: clarify because I don't want people jumping over my shit.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about believing in one's knows. We're not
Speaker 2: talking about caring about your race, We're not talking about
Speaker 2: any of that. We're talking about this kind of like
Speaker 2: progressive modernist like political modality, like organizing modality called nationalism,
Speaker 2: which is the base of liberal idea. And it basically
Speaker 2: arbitrarily says, you know, kind of the classical view of sovereignty,
Speaker 2: whether it invests in like a royal dynasty, or whether
Speaker 2: it invests in you know, you know, men who are
Speaker 2: kind of like you know, for all parate parsons, an
Speaker 2: elected king by the police in lieu with that, it says,
Speaker 2: like all these people in this geographic area who happen
Speaker 2: to have linguistic fluency, and like we've declared the national dialect.
Speaker 2: You're part of this nation now, you know, it doesn't
Speaker 2: matter what religion you are, It doesn't matter where your
Speaker 2: loyalties lie in terms of things that supersede you know,
Speaker 2: administrative politics. This is just like the French nation, or
Speaker 2: this is the polar nation. And famously Hitler said that
Speaker 2: was about the biggest obstacle to Germany being able to
Speaker 2: project power on the world stage. As people internalize this
Speaker 2: nonsense and it became this kind of like self defeating imperative,
Speaker 2: like whereby people mired in this kind of alienated circumstance
Speaker 2: wrought by industrial urban modernity. They kind of like clung
Speaker 2: to this idea of like a nationalist like political model.
Speaker 2: And again we're not talking about real like belief and
Speaker 2: what's ethnos, We're talking about a contrivance, you know, and
Speaker 2: the and it's also Habswam made the point and we're
Speaker 2: so made the same point. Nationalism it based as individualistic.
Speaker 2: It emerged as a liberal idea and entailed the notion
Speaker 2: of Okay, here's this nation based on these arbitrary criteria.
Speaker 2: They generally have to do with the ability to communicate
Speaker 2: and mutual intelligibility. But it's made up in the estimation
Speaker 2: of people who contrived the cityology of individual citizens, and
Speaker 2: every individual is recognized by the nation, you know, as
Speaker 2: as some kind of like sovereign decision maker unto himself,
Speaker 2: like obviously the rubber meets the road, and nobody abides
Speaker 2: that who's actually in power. But that's the theory, and
Speaker 2: that's kind of like the moral mythology of it. You know,
Speaker 2: this is extremely at odds with the past, you know,
Speaker 2: where your responsibility was to your monarch or to the
Speaker 2: local lord and above him and ultimately like to you know,
Speaker 2: your your faith and the representatives of your confessional heritage
Speaker 2: and your rights and privileges accrued from your profession or
Speaker 2: from you know, the social and collective or corporate corporative
Speaker 2: groups that you belong to. You know, the whole point
Speaker 2: of nationalism is it tears all that you know, these
Speaker 2: kind of natural ancient communitarian bonds. No, no, no, that's
Speaker 2: the illegitimate. Now you're just an individual, but you're part
Speaker 2: of this body politic because you happen to speak French,
Speaker 2: or you happen to speak Polish, or like, you know,
Speaker 2: you happen to be somebody who speaks like High German,
Speaker 2: but you live in Belgium. Like that's that's what we're
Speaker 2: talking about. That's what he was talking about, you know.
Speaker 2: And that's Cobsbohmb's take, which was well placed, was that
Speaker 2: conservatism is just it's just like it's just like liberal individualism.
Speaker 2: That's basically a kind of class war against aristocracy by
Speaker 2: like a thirsty and kind of covetist like capitalist class
Speaker 2: go on to like discredit everything that came before, say no, no, no,
Speaker 2: all these things that are important, you know, relating to
Speaker 2: national identity, Like we're the ones who are the managers
Speaker 2: those things. And you know, everybody's an individual, but you
Speaker 2: need us to like guard these individual rights. Like that's
Speaker 2: what nationalism is in the capital end sense. It's not
Speaker 2: saying I don't live in multiculturalism. It's not saying I'm
Speaker 2: proud to be white. It's not saying, you know, I
Speaker 2: want my country to be owners and Catholic. There has
Speaker 2: nothing to do with it. Nothing. And that's one of
Speaker 2: the reasons why these quote unquote nationalist governments they like
Speaker 2: never lead anything, you know, and the moment they go away,
Speaker 2: you know what little kind of concessions there were, the
Speaker 2: kind of preserving normalcy, just like evamplites, because it's a
Speaker 2: it's a house, it's a paper house, you know. And
Speaker 2: Hobsbaum was very big on what he called the Dual Revolution.
Speaker 2: I mean, my stay was big on it. I mean
Speaker 2: he identified he identified the dual Revolution as a historical
Speaker 2: phenomenon that came to shape governmental imperatives and came to
Speaker 2: kind of frame everything related to do you know the
Speaker 2: political sphere of activity, both you know, in theoretical capacities
Speaker 2: as well as in terms of praxis and what actually developed,
Speaker 2: Like what do you mean by the dual revolution specifically?
Speaker 2: And as we got into before last time, and we're
Speaker 2: talking about Hobbsbom's kind of like four value magnum opus,
Speaker 2: you know, dealing with the age of the Age of
Speaker 2: Revolution between seventeen eighty nine eighteen forty eight. House Slamp's
Speaker 2: take is that, okay, you know, the jacob and Revolution
Speaker 2: and all this kind of radicalism and all this all
Speaker 2: this abchieval. You know, He's like that was inextricably bound
Speaker 2: up with like technological and economic changes that they constituted
Speaker 2: this kind of grand future shock, you know, really like
Speaker 2: the first industry revolution. So is that you can't extricate
Speaker 2: these things. You know that they're very Marxist len in
Speaker 2: this view of it, but they're not wrong. You can't
Speaker 2: really you can't really identify like what came first or
Speaker 2: what was the Pride move on. It was both of
Speaker 2: these things, you know, kind of like inextriguably tethered doing
Speaker 2: another a combination of like dialectical process and conceptual activity
Speaker 2: as well as you know, kind of the the binding
Speaker 2: up of of economic imperatives with political life in a
Speaker 2: way that hadn't happened before. So, you know, these Enlightenment ideas,
Speaker 2: which on the one hand are kind of hollow ideological phraseology,
Speaker 2: these kinds of you know, democracy like but not real
Speaker 2: democracy like you know, procedural procedural democracy like nationalism and liberalism.
Speaker 2: This kind of stuff gained traction because people were getting
Speaker 2: crushed by these new economic modalities that nobody knew how
Speaker 2: to manage, you know, and old wealth was being wiped
Speaker 2: out handover fists, you know, So there was charistrotic effects
Speaker 2: to this. So like people looking for remedies, you know,
Speaker 2: they were uniquely susceptible to this kind of thought. But
Speaker 2: they also people develop these kinds of ideas based on
Speaker 2: these disruptions, you know, because they were kind of ripped
Speaker 2: out of environs where they had meaningful reference points beyond
Speaker 2: their own lives, you know, and uh, people's lives are
Speaker 2: comparatively short then, you know. And so this this this
Speaker 2: kind of taken together, this developed its own momentum. It
Speaker 2: was like both a process and an animating principle as
Speaker 2: well as uh, you know, like a key like framing
Speaker 2: a key framing device of of of the zeitgeist, you know. Now,
Speaker 2: when the French Revolution was defeated, you know, and and
Speaker 2: particularly after you know, Waterloo, I mean, because Napoleon. Uh,
Speaker 2: Napoleon was a lot like Cromwell and a lot like Hitler.
Speaker 2: I agree with Russell Stoffley. I think Hitler was more
Speaker 2: like Mohammad than he was anybody. But and Napoleon didn't
Speaker 2: have that messianic uh sensibility. I'm talking in political terms,
Speaker 2: not in like theological ones. But what happened in the
Speaker 2: I mean, what happened in the Reign of Terror and
Speaker 2: what happened in the aftermath when Napoleon literally trying to
Speaker 2: conquer the continent and you know, become Emperor of Europa.
Speaker 2: The view from what remained, like the royal courts in Europe,
Speaker 2: and the view from kind of like the nas and
Speaker 2: political managerial class was this can never ever happen again. Okay,
Speaker 2: So the Congress of Vienna Metternich kind of first and
Speaker 2: foremost among this type, you know, kind of like the
Speaker 2: whole raison deetra of state craft became like balance of power,
Speaker 2: you know. E. Michael Jones makes the point that all
Speaker 2: rationalist perspectives partake in some way of like Newtonian physics,
Speaker 2: you know, this kind of like perfect balance of like
Speaker 2: dynamic but totally controlled motion. It's more complicated than that,
Speaker 2: and Jones is its own as a very like punitive
Speaker 2: view of like Newton. I don't want to get into that,
Speaker 2: but he's right about what I just indicated, okay, And
Speaker 2: balance of power politics, that's where it comes from, okay,
Speaker 2: And that's why it's misguided when a lot of these
Speaker 2: people it's kind of like the mantra of the Midwidth that, oh,
Speaker 2: Churchill wasn't crazy, and Churchill wasn't totally corrupted, you know,
Speaker 2: by alien interests. He was just trying to maintain the
Speaker 2: balance of power and no European power can become too strong.
Speaker 2: That's not at all what he was doing. And that
Speaker 2: was obsolete anyway by the twentieth century. That got shot
Speaker 2: to pieces in nineteen fourteen, and nobody thought that way anymore, okay.
Speaker 2: And that's why the reasons why it was apocalyptic thinking
Speaker 2: came about in the twentieth century, because what had been
Speaker 2: the return to like rationalist normalcy that died in the
Speaker 2: trenches along with millions of guys who got blown to bits.
Speaker 2: It died like buried beneath like the mud and shit
Speaker 2: and all of their body parts. Nobody thought that way,
Speaker 2: and that's not what Churchill was doing. And even if
Speaker 2: it was, that's that that be a ridiculous mission to
Speaker 2: take on in nineteen thirty nine, It would make no sense.
Speaker 2: But that's the uh, that's the source of this kind
Speaker 2: of like reactionary stance. And Hoswam calls it reactionary equals
Speaker 2: the Matrinage perspective reactionary because it's not truly conservative. It's
Speaker 2: literally a reaction. It's saying, how do we deal with
Speaker 2: future shock? How do we deal with the disruption of
Speaker 2: this kind of like rational balancing of furies? How do
Speaker 2: we restore something manageable and something that is primarily governed
Speaker 2: by reason? You know, here is how we do it.
Speaker 2: We do it by like managing power, you know, like
Speaker 2: it's some kind of like it like it's some kind
Speaker 2: of quantity of energy you know that can be like
Speaker 2: redirected and or kind of purpose towards this or you know,
Speaker 2: almost like an engineering problem. Okay, that's that's what is
Speaker 2: meant by reactionary. Because it wasn't nobody, not Metterniche, not
Speaker 2: the people in the Congress at Vienna, not not you know,
Speaker 2: not the people who later opposed the eighteen forty eight revolutions.
Speaker 2: Nobody was saying we're gonna go back to having you know,
Speaker 2: like a king holds absolute sovereignty. Nobody was saying, we're
Speaker 2: gonna go back to you know, the pope being the
Speaker 2: true like Emperor of Europe is God's emissary. Nobody was
Speaker 2: saying that. It wasn't even they would have like scoffed
Speaker 2: at that prospect, but it wasn't even within their contemplation.
Speaker 2: You know. It was a reaction, okay, and the fact
Speaker 2: that it had some trappings of what came before that
Speaker 2: really had more to do with an interest in stability
Speaker 2: moving forward and like Enlightenment ideology, conceptual biases than it
Speaker 2: did with any like, oh, we gotta guard tradition and
Speaker 2: we got to guard like the organic basis of national
Speaker 2: life or so this is really important. Okay. This is
Speaker 2: one of the reasons I cite Hosba because conservative are
Speaker 2: not traditionalists. They're not trying to like preserve like the
Speaker 2: integrity of your race, if that's important to you or whatever.
Speaker 2: They're not trying to that. They're not they're not trying
Speaker 2: to undo modernity. They're not trying to I mean, I'm
Speaker 2: not even saying that's good, but that they're not doing that.
Speaker 2: You know, they're they're they're they're arch modernists. They're arch
Speaker 2: modernist liberals who are trying to manage revolutionary imperatives and
Speaker 2: stop them from happening. Whether they're from the left or
Speaker 2: whether they're from the right, you know, no matter where
Speaker 2: they come from, that is their notion. That's why conservatism
Speaker 2: is bullshit, you know. And this is uh you know again,
Speaker 2: that's if people, I know, not everybody wants to sit
Speaker 2: around reading politable theory like I do. But it's like, okay,
Speaker 2: this is why you should beat Hobsbaum just as like
Speaker 2: an educated partisan, Okay, because he's right about those things,
Speaker 2: like his conclusions in terms of like applied UH efforts
Speaker 2: and his conclusions in terms of what's desirable are wrong,
Speaker 2: but his diagnostic process isn't wrong, and his observations aren't wrong.
Speaker 2: They're generally correct, you know. And again the Marxist over
Speaker 2: emphasize this. But you know, the degree and the degree
Speaker 2: to which suddenly production got taken out of like a
Speaker 2: communitarian shop or like your household, to go from being
Speaker 2: like I'm a farmer, and you know, I'm a subsistence farmer,
Speaker 2: but I have enough surplus to trade with other farmers,
Speaker 2: or going from being like a blacksmith where you're part
Speaker 2: of some collective with like three other guys and you
Speaker 2: like make stuff people need, getting ripped out of that
Speaker 2: and going to work in a factory where you're literally
Speaker 2: pulling a lever or like manhandling some dangerous machine for
Speaker 2: ten hours a day. That's probably that's about the most
Speaker 2: disrupted thing that's ever happened to people at scale, you know.
Speaker 2: And it's and on top of that too, the introduction
Speaker 2: of money at scale, like anything, all all indicators of
Speaker 2: wealth that for forty thousand years quite literally, like people
Speaker 2: were habituated to. No no, no, no no. Now you
Speaker 2: get a paper certificate and it's fungible, and you can
Speaker 2: find somebody who like has stuff you need, they'll accept
Speaker 2: that this is this is insane. This is totally insane,
Speaker 2: you know. And it took decades for people to adapt
Speaker 2: to that, you know, And it really wasn't until people
Speaker 2: born in the nineteen twenties and thirties were totally habituated
Speaker 2: to that. But it took that long, you know. So
Speaker 2: the degree to which this disrupted everything that everybody had
Speaker 2: taken for granted, and you know, just created unmanageable conditions.
Speaker 2: You know, I mean think about too, like trying to
Speaker 2: manage economic imperatives. I'm not even talking about a planned economy.
Speaker 2: I'm saying just being able to balance the proverbial like
Speaker 2: a Ledger books, there's a factory that employs twenty thousand people.
Speaker 2: I'm using a pencil and paper and an advocates to
Speaker 2: try and figure out, like what our outlays are, like
Speaker 2: what we need to produce to be profitable, like what
Speaker 2: we need, how much we need to earn to like
Speaker 2: stay afloat, like what debts we owe to who? At
Speaker 2: some point that's going to collapse on itself and people
Speaker 2: are gonna starve. And then happened over and over and
Speaker 2: over again, and most punctuatedly, it happened in a great depression.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't because of like bankers or whatever like
Speaker 2: von Meesian's think. It was because of what I just said.
Speaker 2: That could never happen now because it's been rubberized, because
Speaker 2: data management. Now it's as simple as turning on a machine.
Speaker 2: Now that's an incredibly corrupt people make half with that
Speaker 2: wealth is wiped out owing to malfeasans in greed. But
Speaker 2: there's not gonna be like the stock market is not
Speaker 2: going to plummet five thousand points because of some like
Speaker 2: air because of like some accounting error at scale, or
Speaker 2: because of like a lack of situational awareness that has
Speaker 2: like a catastrophic impact that could never happen again. Okay,
Speaker 2: so when people talk about that, that's stupid. But this
Speaker 2: was like an everyday reality really from like the close
Speaker 2: of the eighteenth century until like like really until like
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies, you know what I mean. It's uh
Speaker 2: so basically people were like costing on the precipice of
Speaker 2: some kind of like disaster, you know. And that's why
Speaker 2: people became communists, like the man in the street, and
Speaker 2: that's why guys like Ernst Tollman, who's kind of the
Speaker 2: consummate like like uh like aryan German like Burger type
Speaker 2: Like that's why though those guys like fact like like
Speaker 2: like factory floridais being communists like communist I theology and
Speaker 2: it's it's foundation and like a Jewish revolutionary spirit or
Speaker 2: like sectarian antipathy or like ethnosectarian hostility like yes, that
Speaker 2: at at scale of at dialectical scale and process like, yes,
Speaker 2: that is where it comes from. But where the rubber
Speaker 2: meets to the road. What I just said is why
Speaker 2: it became this. There's there's animating imperative that swept up
Speaker 2: millions and millions of people. Like that's why you know,
Speaker 2: now it's a bit different. There's other reasons why. I mean,
Speaker 2: it would never become a mass movement again, you know,
Speaker 2: even though when I say that like Marxist Leninism or
Speaker 2: like it's it's dialectically altered in variant. When I say
Speaker 2: that it's like enjoyed something of resurgence, I mean like
Speaker 2: in terms of like fringe elements, okay, And there's like
Speaker 2: a small, very small and absolute terms like vanguard of
Speaker 2: those guys who are somewhat impressive and kind of had
Speaker 2: their shit together and moving forward like this century. They
Speaker 2: were probably able to carve out some semi sovereign space
Speaker 2: as locally, but were small and scale. But that's what
Speaker 2: I mean. I don't mean that like, oh, this is resurgent,
Speaker 2: and there'd be like some sort of highly scaled variant
Speaker 2: of this again but one a second, but hosbo, I'm
Speaker 2: also like moving on a bit. You know, all these
Speaker 2: things this basic a storicism. This is kind of what
Speaker 2: this is kind of what separated Hoswoon from the schismatics,
Speaker 2: like initially, okay, because there were always schismatics. I mean
Speaker 2: the sixty eight ers were basically the ideological descendants of Trotsky.
Speaker 2: Even if a lot of them were just kind of bandwagoning,
Speaker 2: I didn't realize that's what they were, you know, at
Speaker 2: the cadre level of of the leadership element, that's what
Speaker 2: they were about, you know, And uh, this is important,
Speaker 2: and you hosbom his later his later output especially, and
Speaker 2: you know, after people are about forty or fifty, they
Speaker 2: don't like really radically change their viewpoint. That's what I
Speaker 2: mean in a moment in condext But hosbom Uh his
Speaker 2: later output in like especially in the nineteen nineties, it
Speaker 2: dealt a lot with what he perceived is like cultural decadence,
Speaker 2: like the kind of corruption is social democracy, the intellectual
Speaker 2: and moral poverty of the new left, you know, the
Speaker 2: ability of capitalism as he perceived it to resist historical
Speaker 2: processes and endoor beyond. In his estimation, it's what should
Speaker 2: have been. It's kind of viable, it's sort of viable
Speaker 2: life as a conceptual model, so people kind of said, like, oh,
Speaker 2: haw's w again this second bittered old guy after the
Speaker 2: Cold War it saying No, I don't. I don't believe
Speaker 2: that he always thought this, but it would have been
Speaker 2: pointless to kind of bandy that like during the Cold War,
Speaker 2: there was just there just wouldn't have been a context
Speaker 2: and it would have gone without saying. And also even
Speaker 2: much as uh like the orthodox left, you know, the
Speaker 2: pro Soviet left, much as they kind of despised the schismatics,
Speaker 2: I mean they they were they were literally at war
Speaker 2: with America and NATO, and it's a Jason elements. They weren't.
Speaker 2: They weren't gonna pick like some sectarian fight with a
Speaker 2: bunch of sixty eight ers who were like voting in
Speaker 2: like the sweetest Green Party. When you know there's there's
Speaker 2: a good possibility at some point there's gonna be a
Speaker 2: nuclear war with their ops. They're not. That was just
Speaker 2: was not even within their contemplation. But in uh, in
Speaker 2: the early nineties, Hosbon dropped a book that's I think
Speaker 2: this might have been as I should know this. I
Speaker 2: think this was his last. He wrote essays something only,
Speaker 2: but I think this is his last, Like like published book.
Speaker 2: It was called the Age of Extremes, The Short Century,
Speaker 2: The Short Century nineteen fourteen to nineteen ninety one identify
Speaker 2: at the end of the Short Century as nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 2: Hobbs what nineteen ninety one with the formal dissolution of
Speaker 2: the Soviet Union, So over clarity, that's what he meant.
Speaker 2: But he kind of on popular culture a lot, you know,
Speaker 2: and he said, look, he's like in the sixties, popular
Speaker 2: culture totally changed. He was like before that. He's like
Speaker 2: the kind of pop culture icons, whether they were talking
Speaker 2: about like pet Boone, or they were talking about John Wayne,
Speaker 2: or whether they were talking about somebody like even even
Speaker 2: somebody like Steve McQueen or or some of these guys.
Speaker 2: You know, they they might have represented kind of adalized
Speaker 2: vision of Americana. But he's like just and he's and
Speaker 2: those very deliberate and there's something very corporate about that.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, these kinds of figures and
Speaker 2: these motifs, they basically mirrored the way that like people
Speaker 2: had always kind of thought, you know, like simple minds
Speaker 2: that maybe to some people, you know, in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 2: the kind of like rock star identity which, don't get
Speaker 2: me wrong, had always you know, uh, there is a
Speaker 2: lot of like old rock and blues guys would always
Speaker 2: talk about selling your soul to the devil because guys
Speaker 2: in that life did die young and they ended up
Speaker 2: and totally fucked up circumstances. But kind of like the
Speaker 2: mass murdering of this to like Bougie's and like and lanes.
Speaker 2: You know, he had tonified like Janis Joppelin, Brian Jones,
Speaker 2: Bob Marley, you know, and all and all this kind
Speaker 2: of hippie garbage. You know, He's like, Okay, these people
Speaker 2: weren't just viewed as pop culture figures. Like people decided
Speaker 2: these these people stood in for like literal cultural icon.
Speaker 2: You know. Thus you have like the kind of like
Speaker 2: stereotypical like boomer idiot or things like the Beatles are
Speaker 2: like uttering like like sacred truths or something. You know,
Speaker 2: like and this idea that being old is bad. You know,
Speaker 2: life is horrible after you're like twenty eight or thirty.
Speaker 2: You know, uh, there's something glorious about not getting beyond
Speaker 2: that stage and like dying from partying. You know. Cosmon
Speaker 2: Via was like, Okay, first of all, this is a
Speaker 2: way of kind of like dumbing people down. And it's
Speaker 2: it's a way of kind of like capitalism artificially sustaining
Speaker 2: itself by selling this kind of like lifestyle image that's
Speaker 2: pretending to be radical or pretending to be like at
Speaker 2: odds of what came before, and it is but not
Speaker 2: in you know, the post seventeen eighty nine sense, you know.
Speaker 2: And he said that like this basically, this kind of
Speaker 2: passive nihilism turns any turns everybody you know basically into
Speaker 2: sort of like a comatose like consumer, you know, And
Speaker 2: it's kind of contempt for older people. He's like, you know,
Speaker 2: if you're gonna say that like everything is shit basically
Speaker 2: after not ruled by your hormones, and I don't. I
Speaker 2: don't have content for young people, and I don't think
Speaker 2: Osmon did either. But he's saying this kind of caricature
Speaker 2: a youth that was presented, you know, by like capitalist media.
Speaker 2: In his estimation, you know, he's like, basically you're saying
Speaker 2: that anyone who has lived long enough, they're gonna develop
Speaker 2: like an evolved in view of what of the system
Speaker 2: we live under and scale they're bad or they're like
Speaker 2: the police, or they're trying to tell you to do
Speaker 2: things you don't want to do. So it's kind of
Speaker 2: just like deliberate dumbing down under auspices of rebellion. And
Speaker 2: that's insightful because that really is true. And this kind
Speaker 2: of weird preaching, you know, he's like rocketbelly guys like
Speaker 2: Eddie Cochrane, like Elvis, like Buddy Holly, like uh you know,
Speaker 2: like like like like Richie Valens. These guys weren't trying
Speaker 2: to sell people on some lifestyle. You know. They were
Speaker 2: like poor. They were poor redneck guys in balance case
Speaker 2: you know, you're poor, like East La Spanish guys, you know,
Speaker 2: and there was a real like energy there. They had
Speaker 2: kind of a dark side that was exemplified by people
Speaker 2: like stark Weather. I mean unfortunately, but these guys were
Speaker 2: never going out like preaching some weird sociology of people
Speaker 2: that wouldn't even occurred to them because that's not what
Speaker 2: musicians do. Like the fact that this became part of
Speaker 2: the package in Hobswam's view, that was totally ideological. You know,
Speaker 2: that was not some accident, that wasn't just people nitting
Speaker 2: with the zeitgeist. It wasn't just some kind of weird
Speaker 2: feedback loop owing to sort of like the integration and
Speaker 2: narratives because of TV. No, this was very deliberate, you know,
Speaker 2: and so in his view, in his view like basically
Speaker 2: American pop culture from about nineteen sixty four sixty five
Speaker 2: to like the then president, which was like nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: three when he wrote this, he's like, this is basically
Speaker 2: capitalist propaganda, you know. And you obviously in our view
Speaker 2: it's social engineering at hobbs I baby pictually care about
Speaker 2: that on its own terms. But again he opposed that
Speaker 2: stuff because he's like, this is basically trying to get
Speaker 2: you drunk on sex or taking drugs or like cloud chasing,
Speaker 2: so that you basically never mature in like a rational
Speaker 2: adult and you never contemplate like why you're in the
Speaker 2: condition you're in, and you never contemplate like why there's
Speaker 2: not like any economic justice in his view, you know.
Speaker 2: And again it's these conclusions really have nothing to do
Speaker 2: with our perspective. But the process he describes and what
Speaker 2: these what this sort of like pop cultural uh product represents,
Speaker 2: like he is right about that or he wasn't right
Speaker 2: about that, you know, and he and he said this
Speaker 2: stuff had like real he said, he said that the
Speaker 2: true like he said that was truly different about this,
Speaker 2: this sort of this sort of propagandas pop culture is threefold.
Speaker 2: You know, he's like, first, he's like, youth was always seen,
Speaker 2: even even in cultures that like revered youth are you're
Speaker 2: talking about like classical Greece or the Third Reich or
Speaker 2: even like going Soviet Union, it was still views like
Speaker 2: a preparatory stage for adulthood in some sense. As you know,
Speaker 2: youth is important. The youth are vigorous. We need them
Speaker 2: to protect us, to fight our wars, to you know,
Speaker 2: develop passionate ideas that they can later build upon and innovate.
Speaker 2: But you know, this is important because it's a critical
Speaker 2: stage for it's the final phase of full human development.
Speaker 2: That that all was like done away with. It's like, no,
Speaker 2: youth is some end in itself being old as shit,
Speaker 2: you know, being a young being a teenager or a
Speaker 2: young person, that is the zenith of life, and your
Speaker 2: life is miserable after that. So you've got to try
Speaker 2: and hang on to those aspects as much as you can,
Speaker 2: whether it's through taking drugs or like you know, including hormones,
Speaker 2: whether it's like refusing to get married so you can
Speaker 2: like have sex a lot of girls. Whether it's you know,
Speaker 2: refusing to behave in a responsible way, whether it's you know,
Speaker 2: refusing to take on a real political perspective because that's like, oh,
Speaker 2: that's like you know, that's that square stuff. This all
Speaker 2: is very deliberate, and this is very This is an
Speaker 2: odds basy with every human culture that ever existed. Secondly,
Speaker 2: it became dominant in market economy. It's like every single
Speaker 2: one of them. It's not just like in America or
Speaker 2: in the UK there's this weird kind of youth obsessed
Speaker 2: tendency owing to kind of the population boom at World
Speaker 2: War two. No, this happened like everywhere that America like
Speaker 2: was able to like plan its footprint. You know, they're
Speaker 2: talking about Japan with you know India, whether you're talking
Speaker 2: about you know, France, whether you're talking about you know
Speaker 2: the then you know East Block formerly his Block that
Speaker 2: was like opening up. But you're talking about Finland where
Speaker 2: they talk about you know, Latin America. That they can't
Speaker 2: just be like some spontaneous homogenization. Okay, like uh, pop
Speaker 2: college doesn't just developed this kind of like homogeneous ideological
Speaker 2: imperative just by complete accidents, especially like pre internet that
Speaker 2: was that was laughable. And the third thing you identified
Speaker 2: was that it became truly international in a way that
Speaker 2: didn't really make sense. You know. He's like if you
Speaker 2: take stuff like the Beatles, or if you take stuff uh,
Speaker 2: you know, like some of these movies that like pop
Speaker 2: so much on the production code got done away with,
Speaker 2: like the graduate. A lot of times the stuff wasn't
Speaker 2: even translated, like people don't even understand like what they
Speaker 2: were hearing because it was you know, and it wasn't.
Speaker 2: It's not there was some program where you could upload
Speaker 2: subtitles to release a movie in India or China. But nevertheless,
Speaker 2: there was this constant stream of mostly radio then but
Speaker 2: also TV and like the richer developing world that said
Speaker 2: like this is cool, this is how you should be.
Speaker 2: So people kind of like ate up the visual aspect
Speaker 2: and you know kind of in congress with you know,
Speaker 2: the the overly ideological kind of like radio media stuff.
Speaker 2: There's all model in radio for Europe of course. You know,
Speaker 2: it's like this became this international kind of it became
Speaker 2: this uniform, ideologically motivated international subculture without even being linguistically diverse,
Speaker 2: you know, and it was, uh, it's not like it's
Speaker 2: not like this was happening at gunpoint, you know, like
Speaker 2: it's not like, uh, it's not like American soldiers were
Speaker 2: going into like Angola and like blowing away and a
Speaker 2: guy who ran like the local radio state and saying,
Speaker 2: you're gonna listen to this, You're gonna play this. You know,
Speaker 2: it ability to like insinuate itself kind of along with
Speaker 2: you know, the the illusion of wealth. He's like, that's
Speaker 2: rare in terms of trying to insinuate a social sensibility
Speaker 2: within people or try to get them to develop sort
Speaker 2: of like a covetist sense of self and how they
Speaker 2: want their life to be. You know. He's like, that's
Speaker 2: kind of the strength of capitalism. Capitalism is really, really,
Speaker 2: really good. And again I don't use terms of capitalism
Speaker 2: to describe what he's describing, but we're talking about Hobsbaum,
Speaker 2: so I'm using his vernacular. In his view, he said,
Speaker 2: other ideologies, whether you're talking about state socialism, you know,
Speaker 2: whether you're talking about some kind of a you know,
Speaker 2: some kind of anti modernist but at the same time,
Speaker 2: like futurist fascism, nothing is as effective as this and
Speaker 2: like insinuating itself globally now is a buddle of that. Obviously,
Speaker 2: it's like, well, you know, if you're dealing with like
Speaker 2: poor mentioned material, or you know, if the rest of
Speaker 2: the world's laying in ruins and all that exists is
Speaker 2: America in the Soviet Union as producers of you know,
Speaker 2: mass culture, you're gonna have perverse outcomes. Yeah, that's true,
Speaker 2: but that's not really what he's talking about. He's saying, like,
Speaker 2: in absolute terms, you wouldn't think that this stuff would
Speaker 2: have like gone what we consider it by the face
Speaker 2: terms like viral, but he did. And in Hobswong's view,
Speaker 2: that's what keeps capitalism alive because it's not like it's
Speaker 2: not like just like great outcomes from people like yeah,
Speaker 2: if you're in America, you're basically rubberized. If you're like
Speaker 2: if you're rich comparatively you're middle class or amazing middle class,
Speaker 2: you're basically rubberized against like true catastrophes. Now, there are
Speaker 2: people in America who really struggle, and they are not
Speaker 2: but they're not the majority. Hobswam is talking more in
Speaker 2: terms of like planetary scale. Most people in the world.
Speaker 2: They're not really there's anything to offer you for I'm
Speaker 2: like what he called the capitalist system. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: you can. You know, shortages as you may have known
Speaker 2: in your lifetime have been largely mitigated. But that probably
Speaker 2: would happen in any way. That doesn't explain like why
Speaker 2: in like in brass Tacks terms, like white people in Africa,
Speaker 2: white people in Latin America, white people in Asia have
Speaker 2: just like internalized this perspective. It doesn't explain why some
Speaker 2: like Jackass in Liberia like decided in nineteen ninety fives
Speaker 2: he wants to be a gangster rapper like that. That
Speaker 2: doesn't make any sense in terms of kind of most
Speaker 2: precedented sociology. I think it makes a lot of sense
Speaker 2: according to certain criteria that we're not present before that
Speaker 2: are a bit outside the scope. But that's kind of
Speaker 2: hobs On's point, okay. And there were not many true
Speaker 2: sociologists on the left. There was Seawright. Mills wasn't really
Speaker 2: a leftist. I mean he he was viewed as like
Speaker 2: a progressive by like by you know, by like eyes
Speaker 2: now we are standards, but he was an he was
Speaker 2: more kind of like an economic sociologist who was like
Speaker 2: hostled uh, like what was consideredly a cabalist perspective. He
Speaker 2: but Hoswaon was a genuine you know again it's I
Speaker 2: this is not an absolute signifier that in Capsulate twenty was.
Speaker 2: But he was like a Stalinist of its height, and
Speaker 2: very few of those guys were like real sociologists. He
Speaker 2: was Christopher Lash, ironically hime in a lot of the
Speaker 2: conclusions hoswa did, and his final book it was called
Speaker 2: progress That true only heaven It' dropped in like nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety four, so over last died now. Of course, Lash
Speaker 2: had been some kind of peculiar freto Marxist in his
Speaker 2: younger days, like the kind of guy who'd been on
Speaker 2: a gism drawn mark. He'd been very much influenced by
Speaker 2: marcusa in that school, I thought. And then Lash gradually
Speaker 2: became like one more kind of conservative in his thought,
Speaker 2: like literally conservative. So I'm not sure if you really count.
Speaker 2: So Hoswem kind of stands not quite alone, but it's
Speaker 2: a it was a very small fraternity of revolutionary Marxist
Speaker 2: Leninists who who had, you know, like a sociologist that
Speaker 2: that was both methodologically as well as intellectually rigorous in
Speaker 2: terms of you know, in terms of output. So that's
Speaker 2: another reason why UH people should take him seriously if
Speaker 2: I haven't convinced the subs and other people who like
Speaker 2: what we do. Hosbon did say, though, with a big
Speaker 2: shortcoming of of capitalism or the capitalist perspective is he
Speaker 2: says that owing to this inherently conservative tendency. Now again
Speaker 2: we're talking about conservatism and post seventeen eighty nine cents.
Speaker 2: We're not talking about belief and tradition. We're not talking
Speaker 2: about you know, reverence for for for customs. We're not
Speaker 2: talking about people want to preserve old ways or preserve Harriot.
Speaker 2: We're not talking that at all. We're talking about ideological conservatism,
Speaker 2: which again is U is a product of enlightenment liberalism
Speaker 2: one hundred percent. Hosom says that the thing that these
Speaker 2: that these capitalists ideologues are really, really, really bad at
Speaker 2: is predicting the future, not putting the future like a
Speaker 2: gypsy of the crystal ball, but kind of diagnosing the
Speaker 2: trajectory of politics and UH an economic phenomenon. You know,
Speaker 2: That's why he said that, Like he said that, like
Speaker 2: people like Fukiyama are laughable, you know what they're like
Speaker 2: theories of everything, like, oh, you know they'll be they'll
Speaker 2: be no more armed conflict because you know, they'll be prosperity.
Speaker 2: And you know, people will will naturally like reject religion
Speaker 2: because they'll they'll have all these like hedonistic outlets that
Speaker 2: no longer force them to sublimate. Like Hobson's like, that's ridiculous,
Speaker 2: that's nonsense, you know, and he's like, basically, nobody has
Speaker 2: a worst track record speaking in the nineteen nineties. He's like,
Speaker 2: nobody had the worst Nobody has the worst track record
Speaker 2: of the preceding forty years. So basically probably a post
Speaker 2: war era in like the nineties than like, you know,
Speaker 2: the capitalists. You know, He's like, they're spectacularly bad at
Speaker 2: predicting what's going to happen, and that's also why they
Speaker 2: got utterly blindsided by like the implosion of the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: You know. Hobbs arm reserve a particular contempt for Calvin Coolidge.
Speaker 2: He did. Coolie is kind of like a Reagan figure,
Speaker 2: which isn't I mean, Reagan himself like lionized the Coolidge,
Speaker 2: but I think Reagan is more like Eisenhower frankly, but interestingly,
Speaker 2: George Kennan had a similar contempt for Reagan. He thought
Speaker 2: he was an idiots. I mean, I got love for
Speaker 2: Kennan old day, but I think he had some blind
Speaker 2: spots in his own right. But what what Osbom said
Speaker 2: in one of his later books Coolidge in nineteen twenty eight,
Speaker 2: I think it was his is like a holiday message.
Speaker 2: You know, there's nothing even a great depression. They had
Speaker 2: not the kind of terrors in ainety twenty nine, obviously
Speaker 2: had not sit in yet, but there was there was,
Speaker 2: there was an ominous air about things. So Coolidge's message,
Speaker 2: like in Holiday Season ninety twenty eight was quote, the
Speaker 2: country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the
Speaker 2: future with optimism. That's fucking meaningless. That's like saying like
Speaker 2: things are great because my McDonald's lunch today, you know,
Speaker 2: cheeseburgers taste good and it's Friday, and you know, I
Speaker 2: like pussy like. It's I think a crancer version of
Speaker 2: what Coolidge dropped. Okay, I mean that's that's like almost Clintonian,
Speaker 2: and it's superficial, supervisionally moronic, you know, uh essence. You know,
Speaker 2: so like That's why Hobswom says that like capitalism, it's
Speaker 2: got a permanent alibi for its failures because it creates
Speaker 2: this climate. It basically just this dumb down climate of
Speaker 2: cloud chasers and people thirsty and desperate for youth and
Speaker 2: the kind of pleasures that supposedly attend youth. And they're
Speaker 2: told that the experts. And you're always supposed to trust experts,
Speaker 2: you know, like no Ball's Wall says, we trust doctors.
Speaker 2: You're always supposed to trust the experts, whether they're an economists,
Speaker 2: whether they're you know, some Pentagon whiz kid. I'm beating
Speaker 2: myself with that phraseology, I realize, or whether they're you know,
Speaker 2: some medical doctor like doctor Fauci. And the experts always say,
Speaker 2: you know something in the same thing as what Coolidge said,
Speaker 2: there's just nothing but progress ahead. There's nothing press spirity head.
Speaker 2: So oh, when there's natural when there's natural hiccups so
Speaker 2: to speak, you know, in markets, or when there's problems,
Speaker 2: or when a combination of malfeasance and badly coded inputs
Speaker 2: lead to something like a two thousand and eight crisis
Speaker 2: where billions of dollars are wiped out, Like oh, the
Speaker 2: alibi the capitalists, and who in a hoplit view is like, oh,
Speaker 2: this was an unforeseen crisis, almost like a terrorist attack,
Speaker 2: you know, but darn it, like we got the gumption
Speaker 2: to get through it. And these things just can't be predicted.
Speaker 2: You know. It's a hosba on this nonsense. This is
Speaker 2: absolutely foreseeable, you know, Like, granted, there's always something of
Speaker 2: a there's always something of a mystics belief in augury
Speaker 2: to Marxist Lenin is, it's like dressed up as like, oh, no,
Speaker 2: we're just diagnosing, you know, through a scientific method, the
Speaker 2: world historical process. But they do they are right when
Speaker 2: they say, like, no, history does not peat itself. That's
Speaker 2: something morons say. But there are patterns too advance, particularly
Speaker 2: crises of like an economic or military nature, and this
Speaker 2: idea like we're just being blindsided because this this can't
Speaker 2: be predicted, you know. Like that he's right about that,
Speaker 2: and that that is the ongoing alibi of capitalism. Again,
Speaker 2: this is his phraseology he calls capitalism. I think I'm
Speaker 2: want to take part three in it's some of a
Speaker 2: different direction, and I think we're coming up in the hour,
Speaker 2: so I'm gonna cease if that's okay, because if I,
Speaker 2: if I start in on what I want to start
Speaker 2: in on it, we're just gonna have to abrogate it.
Speaker 2: And I don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: No problem at all, No problem at all. And getting
Speaker 1: ready for a trip and everything. So yeah, yeah, you
Speaker 1: don't want to don't want to keep you here forever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: two plugs, we'll get out of here.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, my my, my good buddy. I don't want
Speaker 2: to name check him because he's a very private person.
Speaker 2: But like my homie and my erstwhile, like tech Frog,
Speaker 2: who maintains my website, it's back up and running time
Speaker 2: at seven seven seven dot com number seven h seven
Speaker 2: seven seven dot com. It's up to date, it's current.
Speaker 2: You can find the archives of everything I do, and
Speaker 2: like the alerts automatically kick on, Like when this gets uploaded,
Speaker 2: it'll automatically pop up. So it's current. I know it
Speaker 2: was down for a few days. I'm gonna retool some stuff,
Speaker 2: or rather my guy is gonna retool it. I've no
Speaker 2: idea how to do that, but there's some things I
Speaker 2: want to change. I'm not gonna I can't do that
Speaker 2: until I get back from this trip. I'm going to
Speaker 2: Portland tomorrow tomorrow being Halloween, a happy Halloween. I'll be
Speaker 2: back on November seventh. I'm gonna need a few days
Speaker 2: to recover, so realistically, it's probably gonna be like November
Speaker 2: tenth before, like I'm I'll be, I'll be streaming and
Speaker 2: stuff from the road. But I this stuff's not gonna
Speaker 2: get done other than that, so there's good. It's gonna
Speaker 2: be about three weeks before a new pot of as
Speaker 2: ode is is is uploaded. But speaking of the pod,
Speaker 2: you can and I'm gonna retool the website around mid
Speaker 2: month of so they'll it'll be a lot easier to
Speaker 2: use and navigate. They'll be I want that to be
Speaker 2: like an archival library where everybody can find everything for free,
Speaker 2: of course, and that's that. But you can find the
Speaker 2: pod at real Thomas seven seven seven at subsec dot com.
Speaker 2: It's the mind Phaser podcast. We've also got a pretty
Speaker 2: active forum. There's also like there's a combination like short
Speaker 2: and medium forum stuff, and that's the best way to
Speaker 2: keep up with me, Like hit me up there or
Speaker 2: hit me up on t Gram. I got a t
Speaker 2: gram channel. I don't fuck with dms on Twitter and stuff.
Speaker 2: I had too many bad experiences and I I cannot
Speaker 2: keep up with like capitals and DM systems. But I'm
Speaker 2: on social media at Capital r e a l underscore
Speaker 2: number seven him as seven seven seven on Instagram, on
Speaker 2: t Gram, I got a merse shop and yeah, man,
Speaker 2: if you plug like the merse shop and the description,
Speaker 2: that would be tremendous. I'd appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Bringlind absolutely, it's all set up and just copy and
Speaker 1: paste it over safe travels man. Thank you. Yeah, an Ayboddy,
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana Show.
Speaker 1: Thomas seven seven seven is back end. Do you think
Speaker 1: this will be the last Hobbs Bomb episode or do
Speaker 1: you think there's another one in.
Speaker 2: This I mean, it's up to you because it's I mean,
Speaker 2: it's your platform and we can go as long as
Speaker 2: you want on it. I think that I think three
Speaker 2: part series are are a good it's sort of I
Speaker 2: think it's a good model to this kind of content.
Speaker 2: But I'll go as long as you want on whatever topic.
Speaker 2: I I was basically going to conclude what I have
Speaker 2: to say on the subject today, but we.
Speaker 1: Let's do it that way and then it gives us
Speaker 1: a chance to start something new.
Speaker 2: Yeah, indeed, yeah, no before if that's informant, why I
Speaker 2: don't if you want were today? So I started repeating
Speaker 2: myself for whatever, please advise me of that. And we're
Speaker 2: hopping around it. But in terms of the timeline, and
Speaker 2: but I think people have been okay with following it.
Speaker 2: The what's important to me, especially in terms of at
Speaker 2: least what I the kind of real value I find
Speaker 2: in Hobbsball. I mean, obviously it's his twentieth century historiography,
Speaker 2: but especially World War One because it's so ill understood
Speaker 2: and it's such a critical event, you know, Like I
Speaker 2: this is something of a tangent like the other week.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna name names because I don't have people
Speaker 2: to think I'm being mean or I'm not even trying
Speaker 2: to like suggest something humitive. But I've done this panel
Speaker 2: with if you guys, and I was talking about how people,
Speaker 2: especially in America, but also basically like across anglophone countries
Speaker 2: and like their academic culture and stuff, they have this
Speaker 2: idea they reject historicism of the continental type, but they
Speaker 2: fall back in this kind of like midwid idea of oh,
Speaker 2: history repeats itself or alternatively they like a show that,
Speaker 2: but then they claim that you know, well there's not
Speaker 2: really press it into extrapolate, so you can't make a
Speaker 2: search an xyz. So like I was making the point
Speaker 2: of the twentieth century, basically, there's nothing you can glean
Speaker 2: from that moving forward ether in terms of the strategic
Speaker 2: landscape or power political development. And this guy's like, well
Speaker 2: you can't say that. I'm like, actually, I can you
Speaker 2: tell me World War one is gonna happen again? That
Speaker 2: never ever happens, you know, like that's that's the equipment
Speaker 2: of like a meteor strike, you know. I mean so,
Speaker 2: but this side Hobsbaum was interesting, especially the way he
Speaker 2: characterized the Great War. I mean, obviously because he was
Speaker 2: at base a doctor and near Marxist Leninists, he overstated
Speaker 2: material and economic causes. But there is nuance there that
Speaker 2: I think warrants attention, you know. But first, I mean
Speaker 2: a little bit of background in terms of like what
Speaker 2: laid the foundation for his sort of breakdown of the
Speaker 2: Great War. Hasboum was very much he very much proposed
Speaker 2: the theory of what's now called the general crisis. Okay,
Speaker 2: with the what what what? The general crisis refers to
Speaker 2: is this is this odd period in the nineteenth century
Speaker 2: whereby on the one hand, there's this kind of running
Speaker 2: stability in terms of power, political activity, and interstate warring.
Speaker 2: You know, after Waterloo. After Waterloo, not much happened in Europe.
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean a lot happened, but I mean
Speaker 2: the in terms of war and peace developments. You know,
Speaker 2: there was the Crimean War, which is very much restricted
Speaker 2: to the theater, to the primary battle space, you know, uh,
Speaker 2: which you know, very much spared the continent. And there's
Speaker 2: the Franco Prussian War, which really that's kind of what
Speaker 2: started to knock France out of the game as like
Speaker 2: a true like bourgoning superpower in my opinion. But that also,
Speaker 2: I mean that was that was kind of the the
Speaker 2: most that was one of the greatest like Prussian victories
Speaker 2: of all time. But that also, I mean that was
Speaker 2: kind of the first blitzkrieg in some ways, you know,
Speaker 2: and there there wasn't large scale civilian nutrition in it,
Speaker 2: you know. But other than that, I mean, some of
Speaker 2: the reasons I think, like I mentioned before, so many
Speaker 2: European mercenaries like streamed into the United States so like
Speaker 2: to take up to take up arms for pay for
Speaker 2: you know, the Union or the Confederacy, because there just
Speaker 2: wasn't there wasn't a lot going on. You know, if
Speaker 2: you were if war fighting was your hustle, you know,
Speaker 2: either because that's just what you like to do, you know,
Speaker 2: you were an action junkie, or like that's how you
Speaker 2: made a living. Like well, you've kind of had to
Speaker 2: look abroad if you wanted to apply your trade, you know.
Speaker 2: But there was a lot of social instability, and there
Speaker 2: was a lot of there was a lot of sociological
Speaker 2: there's a lot of punctuated disturbances, you know, like in
Speaker 2: the social structure of the main European countries. And like
Speaker 2: this started really after the Thirty Years of War. You know,
Speaker 2: a huge Trevor Roper is another guy. He was very
Speaker 2: very different than a Hobsball, but he basically abided this
Speaker 2: as well. Okay, Like basically in the middle of the
Speaker 2: seventeenth century, there's this total breakdown in politics and in
Speaker 2: social order and economics and everything else, and this need
Speaker 2: in you know, the Thirty Years War, you know, then
Speaker 2: there's the English Civil War. Then in France what they
Speaker 2: call like the Frond, which was basically like this running
Speaker 2: civil unrest, you know, and in some cases just like
Speaker 2: violent criminality that didn't even really have a political raizon detro.
Speaker 2: It was just like guys kind of like clicking up
Speaker 2: and like robbing, raping and killing people under some like
Speaker 2: loose auspices of economic justice by violence, you know. The
Speaker 2: the Holy Roman Empire, which uh, which was actually a
Speaker 2: really important political structure. You know. I know that there's
Speaker 2: a lot of Anglophone historians. They they're kind of like,
Speaker 2: ohioly declared like it was a neither Holy nor Roman
Speaker 2: nor an empire. It's like, okay, that's great, but it
Speaker 2: the reason why like it took on that Moniker was
Speaker 2: suggest that, you know, this is a transfer of sovereignty
Speaker 2: to Europe central like from what was like the just
Speaker 2: public on a romanum you know, I mean it does track. Okay,
Speaker 2: there was revolts against the Spanish crown in Portugal, there
Speaker 2: was there there were secessionist movements in Naples and Catalonia,
Speaker 2: like and this also just like jumping off like at
Speaker 2: the same time. You know, it wasn't coincidental that something
Speaker 2: was happening, you know, and when when the dust kind
Speaker 2: of settled, you had this increasing centralization at governments. Okay,
Speaker 2: Like we talked about last session, there was this kind
Speaker 2: of like nationalism that kind of took rude, but it
Speaker 2: was like very March something Enlightenment phenomenon. Like again we
Speaker 2: say like nationalism, We're not talking about some return to
Speaker 2: sort of like tradition or or some adamistic tribalism. We're
Speaker 2: saying that like kind of the court in these country
Speaker 2: is consolidated. And it's like, okay, look, you know, like
Speaker 2: within these sovereign parameters, like we are the only sovereign
Speaker 2: we have the power to tax you, you and you
Speaker 2: you know, the only the only legitimate men under arms
Speaker 2: the ones weach are you know, stuff like that, Okay,
Speaker 2: And it's kind this kind of like central bureaucracy like
Speaker 2: developed to kind of prevent this chaos that have been happening.
Speaker 2: And this is like one hundred and fifty year cycle
Speaker 2: from like the end of like the Thirty Years War
Speaker 2: and the Peace of Westphalia until like the start of
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century. You know. But throughout the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: despite these this this kind of basic stability in terms
Speaker 2: of like power political activity, there was this increasing tension
Speaker 2: because you like a lot of these, A lot of these,
Speaker 2: like you know, otherwise progressive states that its centralized, you know,
Speaker 2: despite that they were they were most of them were
Speaker 2: like run by absolute monarchs, or they were run by
Speaker 2: a court that was essentially staffed by you know, like
Speaker 2: an upper house of landed aristocrats. Okay, and obviously, you know,
Speaker 2: clergy people still had a lot of cloud. You know,
Speaker 2: the Roman Church couldn't assert itself in an absolute way
Speaker 2: over sovereign governments anymore, but it still had great power.
Speaker 2: So there's this weird disconnects. On the one hand, like
Speaker 2: structurally you had the structure of the modern state like
Speaker 2: as we know it today, but it was populated basically
Speaker 2: by these aristocrats and and clerical types and people who
Speaker 2: derived their mandate from sort of traditional modalities that were
Speaker 2: ceasing to exist. Okay, I want to hosbal the big points.
Speaker 2: And a lot of people don't understand this about Marxists.
Speaker 2: Marxists don't look at aristocrats and the bourgeoisie is the
Speaker 2: same thing. They look at them as opposing classes, which
Speaker 2: they are, and the first revolution before the proletarian revolution
Speaker 2: can happen, like basically the bourgeoisie have to annihilate the aristocracy,
Speaker 2: and when that doesn't or can't happen, there's this kind
Speaker 2: of stagnation and like the Marxist Leninist worldview, like nothing
Speaker 2: is progressing, you know, there's not like innovation. Government kind
Speaker 2: of it has this monopoly on power off there's something
Speaker 2: dynamic about it. And this is critically important because I've
Speaker 2: heard people talk about and especially because I understand why
Speaker 2: people develop that impression based on the rhetoric as well
Speaker 2: as the experience historically of the Russian Revolution. They view
Speaker 2: like Bolsheviks's guys who like want to kill kings or
Speaker 2: who like view like them as guys who just want
Speaker 2: to burn down the churches because they view the church
Speaker 2: as the repressor. That's not the way they look at it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they want to do those things, but their whole notion
Speaker 2: is that the bourgeoisie is a revolutionary element too. It's
Speaker 2: got to annihilate like the thrown an altar and like
Speaker 2: the European court as it's existed for you know, millennia,
Speaker 2: and it's now consolidated under the trap things of the
Speaker 2: modern state. And then like when the bourgeoisie is able
Speaker 2: to consolidate control of this modern means of production you know,
Speaker 2: that can be applied to you know, basically resolving shortages
Speaker 2: and poverty. Like that's like when the proletariat rises up
Speaker 2: and then like takes over those means, and that's like
Speaker 2: the final revolution. Then there's like no more class, there's
Speaker 2: no more cast, you know, and like life can be
Speaker 2: like socially homogenized, like in circumstances of plenty, and there's
Speaker 2: not material need anymore. And because there's not contradictions anymore,
Speaker 2: and there's not there's not material deprivation, like there's not
Speaker 2: war anymore, and like all the superstructural features that cause
Speaker 2: those things, you know, like like like racial problems and
Speaker 2: things like those are all like annihilated because they can
Speaker 2: no longer be exploited, either deliberately by design or or
Speaker 2: or just by you know, or just you're just owing
Speaker 2: to intrinsic tensions that that that that caused us stillity
Speaker 2: owing to the internal contradictions of of a non vorestic paradigm.
Speaker 2: Like that's what they're talking about. Okay, So Hobsbaum's view
Speaker 2: and Roper's view, albeit for ay different reasons and a
Speaker 2: lot of like Aanglo historians, was that this phenomenon I'm
Speaker 2: talking about it basically kind of it created this like
Speaker 2: weird stagnation, and these tensions kept on developed this sort
Speaker 2: of unsustainable momentum, and then by the time of the
Speaker 2: Great War, what it essentially happened was you had this
Speaker 2: kind of like hyper competitive capitalist paradigm between the major
Speaker 2: European powers, but it was kind of inconsistent across national
Speaker 2: frontiers and uneven. Okay, so you had the Germans that
Speaker 2: were absolutely killing it, and they were eclipsed in the UK,
Speaker 2: which had previously been you know kind of like the
Speaker 2: like like like like the like the factory of Europe,
Speaker 2: you know, and and and and British products that they
Speaker 2: had been like flooding the planet and markets far and wide,
Speaker 2: like that was over with. But the but the newly
Speaker 2: consolidated like German state like it was cash poor, you know.
Speaker 2: And then he had the French, who, like I said,
Speaker 2: they'd been kind of like knocked off of their pedestal,
Speaker 2: you know, by the Franco Prussian War and never really recovered,
Speaker 2: you know, frankly from like Waterloo and stuff. You know.
Speaker 2: So they were like realizing that like they were gonna
Speaker 2: like the future basically was them being like a junior
Speaker 2: partner kind of in this like German dominated continent as
Speaker 2: Europe becomes a superpower. Okay. And hobbs On view is like, look,
Speaker 2: with the great equalizer raises and military power, and he's right,
Speaker 2: and if you don't believe that, I mean, I'll relieve this, okay.
Speaker 2: Like at peak, I'm talking in the era of like
Speaker 2: undeniable strategy parody, like after nineteen seventy seven, the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union at peak, it it's GDP was like one fifth
Speaker 2: out of the United States. Okay, its annual growth was
Speaker 2: like one point two percent or like something that would
Speaker 2: be like viewed as pathetic by you know, by the UH,
Speaker 2: by the Buddhist Republic or by the United States, but
Speaker 2: they were probably like the strongest UH military power that's
Speaker 2: ever existed on this planet. Okay. So in a Hosbo
Speaker 2: his view like, look, if you're being if you're if
Speaker 2: you're basically being merked, like in the game of UH,
Speaker 2: in the great game of of of capitalist commerce, and
Speaker 2: you know, the kind of zero sum competition before European
Speaker 2: integration was a reality. Your trump card is essentially that
Speaker 2: you can defer your enemies on the battlefield, you know,
Speaker 2: and there was a certain conveinence here because again, you know,
Speaker 2: the Crimean War resolved pretty rapidly. Okay, the Franco Prussian
Speaker 2: War resolved pretty rapidly. The war between the states here
Speaker 2: in America was a blood bath. But that, oh, just
Speaker 2: peculiar conditions. Okay, So going into World War One, the
Speaker 2: combatant states like, yeah, I mean there was there's complex
Speaker 2: historical factors that conspired to make it happen. But the
Speaker 2: major combatants figured that, well, you know, this is going
Speaker 2: to resolve pretty rapidly, you know, and the British especially
Speaker 2: thought that. And you know, I this is a discussion
Speaker 2: for another series, but I said during the World War
Speaker 2: One series that a whole Vegg think was, I mean,
Speaker 2: here's the really sympathetic figure in the Great War, and
Speaker 2: that that perfect exemplifies like what Howl was talking about,
Speaker 2: the kind of the dynamic between like a wholeveg the
Speaker 2: conseler and and and the Kaiser. You know, Wilhelm was
Speaker 2: not a good man, and he he did not have
Speaker 2: good command aptitude, but even if he had, there was
Speaker 2: like this bizarre kind of tango where you had you
Speaker 2: had like you know, the leader of government in a Wholveg.
Speaker 2: Then you had literally the Kaiser who was the king.
Speaker 2: Then you had these industrialists, and both Holeveg and the
Speaker 2: Kaiser they had to organize like purchasing you know, arms, munitions,
Speaker 2: figuring out some way to appropriate manufacturing and means to
Speaker 2: sustain battlefield demands, but also compensating these price actors or
Speaker 2: like you know, their outlays and things. So it's like
Speaker 2: you got kind of like three bases of sovereignty that
Speaker 2: are that are basically at odds and have competing interests,
Speaker 2: but they're all profiting or at least you know, surviving
Speaker 2: by virtue of this war enterprise, you know, and it
Speaker 2: leaves us conditions where like nobody's really in charge. And
Speaker 2: like hod made that point too, you know, and that's
Speaker 2: why I put him kind of head and showers above
Speaker 2: most most Marxists who just say, like, oh, well, world
Speaker 2: War want to happen because you know, of overproduction, you know,
Speaker 2: like and that that's that's ridiculous, Like, well, WAN didn't
Speaker 2: happen because there was some conspiracy of capitalists like well,
Speaker 2: we got to kill off, you know, our workers because
Speaker 2: there's you know, we can't employ them, and and well,
Speaker 2: you know we we don't. We don't we don't have
Speaker 2: a destination for these or produced goods, so we're just
Speaker 2: gonna blow them up on the battlefield. Like nobody thinks
Speaker 2: that way, and that's all and not why wars happened.
Speaker 2: And if that was the case, like if that was true,
Speaker 2: like basically anytime there was a major recession, like the
Speaker 2: president would just like devise a war like that, That's
Speaker 2: not how things happen, you know, like if if there's
Speaker 2: a huge financial crisis next year and America and the
Speaker 2: Chinese would be like, let's like let's pretend to have
Speaker 2: a war and sink each other's navies, Like well, what
Speaker 2: would that accomplish? You know? That's I mean, I'm being
Speaker 2: up too deliberately, But this is an important point because
Speaker 2: they're refrain even a guys should know better, like well,
Speaker 2: war's about big business or it's about money. It's like, no,
Speaker 2: it's not, man Like, how is it about money? Like how?
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, people definitely find ways to profit from war,
Speaker 2: but you can profit from literally anything, you know. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's that doesn't tell us anything, you know, but that's
Speaker 2: this is fundamentally important, and this not not just the
Speaker 2: catach to feel the Great War, and you know the
Speaker 2: fact that it kind of deformed the entire generation, I mean,
Speaker 2: and put an entire generation in the grave as well.
Speaker 2: But it these these these tensions and these uncertainties, this
Speaker 2: is what uh, this is what facility. This is what
Speaker 2: expedited the Bolshevik Revolution, which very easily, by the way,
Speaker 2: could have prevailed europe wide. You know, I mean it's uh.
Speaker 2: I'm the first to acknowledge, as any serious student in
Speaker 2: the twentieth century, is it's strange that, uh, the the
Speaker 2: literal heart of the of the Communist International was was Russia.
Speaker 2: That's that's weird. But people conveniently forget or they just
Speaker 2: don't know because they they're subjected to bad history, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, there was a communist revolution in Germany, there
Speaker 2: was a communist revolution in Hungary, there almost was in
Speaker 2: the UK. You know, this stuff was stopped by forrest arms.
Speaker 2: It didn't just fizzle out or something, you know. But
Speaker 2: this is the way to understand the twentieth century and
Speaker 2: the degree to which you know, the twentieth century was
Speaker 2: basically a reaction to communism. I mean, they can't be overstated,
Speaker 2: you know, in power political terms, I mean, like, obviously,
Speaker 2: if we're talking about human life at scale, in any book,
Speaker 2: there's an entire myriad of factors across a broad spectrum
Speaker 2: that go into that. But the kind of key takeaway is, uh,
Speaker 2: you know what Osbon called the age of capitalism like
Speaker 2: facilitated this and like that's he actually he wrote an
Speaker 2: essay that became a book called The Age of Capital
Speaker 2: eighteen forty eight to eighteen seventy five, and he makes
Speaker 2: the point the word capitalism it first entered like the
Speaker 2: let the academic lexicon in the eighteen sixties, you know,
Speaker 2: from eighteen forty eight, like after the revolutions in Europe
Speaker 2: were quashed in both Europe and America, there was this
Speaker 2: there's this kind of like massive economic boom okay, And
Speaker 2: that's one of the things that meant that there wasn't
Speaker 2: another like eighteen forty eight like revolutionary sentiment because like
Speaker 2: there's a lot of wealth being produced, you know. But
Speaker 2: again there was these kinds of like obsolete social structures
Speaker 2: that were sort of organizing people's lives. Nonetheless, yet these
Speaker 2: societies were flooded with capital. But it was it wasn't
Speaker 2: it was it was much like funnel into specific channels,
Speaker 2: you know, not by conspiracy of design or something, but uh,
Speaker 2: there just was not like a free like like individual
Speaker 2: people and not a lot of person power, and this
Speaker 2: created like weird disparities, you know, like there wasn't there's
Speaker 2: a lot of like if you're a if you're a
Speaker 2: neoliberal economic economist, you look at this as like basic
Speaker 2: marketing efficiencies. You know, this is why like banking is
Speaker 2: so important to like the monitorist view. And then they're
Speaker 2: right about that. You know, the the availability of capital
Speaker 2: and you know, uh competence and financial instruments like that.
Speaker 2: That's that's the regulatory mechanism that's essential. But beyond that,
Speaker 2: you basically need like capital flow like where it's going
Speaker 2: to be most efficiently allocated in order to produce produce wealth.
Speaker 2: And that that wasn't really happening, despite the fact that
Speaker 2: you had you know, you had kind of at the
Speaker 2: top and also kind of like unevenly distributed like sort
Speaker 2: of throughout the sociological spectrum. You know, you had some
Speaker 2: like some incredible innovations that were like aldering people's lives,
Speaker 2: and there was like government could simply do things that
Speaker 2: it couldn't before. I mean like lot World War One,
Speaker 2: Like that's totally insane. Like the ability to mobilize like
Speaker 2: five million men, arm them, equip them, feed them, then
Speaker 2: like turn them loose to like assault your ops like
Speaker 2: that that would be like unthinkable even in like the
Speaker 2: Napoleonic era, you know. And it's not just modern command
Speaker 2: and control. It was like transportation, it was you know,
Speaker 2: it was more efficient fuel sources. It was like more
Speaker 2: efficient killing technology, and it was like it was all
Speaker 2: these things. But the uh, something else that's important too,
Speaker 2: is Hoblom said. And he was writing this in the fifties.
Speaker 2: See first rod As I say, like in the fifties,
Speaker 2: but this age of capital this was like the first
Speaker 2: This was like the NACA early stage of global globalization. Okay,
Speaker 2: because if you were a major capitalist power, you know,
Speaker 2: and again I involved in our capitalists and within the
Speaker 2: terms Hoswam doesn't, I don't use those kinds of terms,
Speaker 2: but you know, you the British Empire held equity basically
Speaker 2: at every continent, you know, and America was not yet
Speaker 2: a superpower, but you'd find American goods basically all over
Speaker 2: the world, okay. And there wasn't a there wasn't a
Speaker 2: unified banking structure, but lending across national frontiers at scale
Speaker 2: with governments guaranteeing financial instruments, that started blowing up, you know,
Speaker 2: and that that would have been unthinkable before. You know,
Speaker 2: in a lot of countries, it was literally illegal for uh,
Speaker 2: national banks to you know, to trade across the national
Speaker 2: frontiers or to or to issue financial instruments in foreign markets.
Speaker 2: But a lot of countries simply wouldn't deal in your currency,
Speaker 2: like even if it was uh, even even if it
Speaker 2: was viewed as you know, a desirable currency and speculators
Speaker 2: would invest in it. Oh and and and purising foreign
Speaker 2: currencies at this time was also largely illegal. It was
Speaker 2: quote unquote currency speculation. It was like literally a crime,
Speaker 2: which is crazy, but that that that that was the norm,
Speaker 2: you know. But this uh but because of that, like
Speaker 2: in the early stages of any economic system or any paradigm,
Speaker 2: not system, but like paradigm, there's gonna be like really
Speaker 2: really uneven growth, okay, and that's gonna lead to certain disparities.
Speaker 2: I'm not talking like social justice disparities. I mean like
Speaker 2: between enterprises, a lot of capital is being created, but
Speaker 2: a lot is being wiped out like we just mentioned
Speaker 2: across national frontiers, this kind of development is uneven. But
Speaker 2: also certain industries develop a kind of outside cloud. Okay,
Speaker 2: and not the arms industry per se, but the the
Speaker 2: kind of a terrestrial manufacturing enterprises that facilitate the arms industry.
Speaker 2: They developed outside power like as did again you know, uh,
Speaker 2: financial institutions. This wasn't some conspiracy and that's not why
Speaker 2: World War went happened, but it was a but it
Speaker 2: facilitated resorting to military he measures to remedy power political imbalances.
Speaker 2: Uh at scale. Okay, there was a perfect storm at things.
Speaker 2: And again that's that's really important, you know. And in
Speaker 2: my own like manuscript to try and emphasize this point
Speaker 2: and has well, I don't. It's not like my primary
Speaker 2: authority on it, but I do cite. But uh yeah,
Speaker 2: moving on, it's also too domestically, whether you're talking about
Speaker 2: the United States, the UK, France, or Germany, the way
Speaker 2: such things I've got to mention were characterized kind of
Speaker 2: differed along the you know, local custom and cultural differences
Speaker 2: and convention, but kind of like the link the lingua
Speaker 2: franc of government became you know this like there's like
Speaker 2: this resurgence sort of like Enlightenment shivelus. So whether you're
Speaker 2: in Berlin, London, Washington, Paris, all your heart from government
Speaker 2: is oh see, like this is like an age of
Speaker 2: unprecedented plenty, you know, it's the age of reason and
Speaker 2: science and progress. But people were getting like ground into dust,
Speaker 2: you know, and like working in a factory or a slaughterhouse.
Speaker 2: That was like hell, you know, it's not I tell
Speaker 2: a lot of guys in the right who they you know,
Speaker 2: they throw shade on stuff like Upton Sinclair's the Jungle
Speaker 2: and I'm like, okay, I'm like, yeah, I don't agree
Speaker 2: with those kinds of conclusions either. But what he describes,
Speaker 2: that's that's that's one hundred percent accurate. You know. There'd
Speaker 2: be guys, uh, there was no welfare state. You couldn't
Speaker 2: just get like a link card. So if you were
Speaker 2: out of work, like you weren't eating, and basically your
Speaker 2: ability to make a living depended on your ability to
Speaker 2: physically like perform, you know, and guys would die on
Speaker 2: the job like there's like ten percent like attrition and
Speaker 2: like a steel mill or like a slaughterhouse, you know,
Speaker 2: and if God for bidding, get injured or like you
Speaker 2: lose three fingers on your hand in some machine. You know,
Speaker 2: they're the big the biggest surplus in any major city
Speaker 2: at this time was like that of like evil bodied
Speaker 2: men who want to work.
Speaker 1: So did did hobs Im have anything to say about
Speaker 1: the move from agrarianism to basically employment where you're providing
Speaker 1: for yourself with your own with your own hands. And
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden, it seems in the span
Speaker 1: of a decade, people are moving to cities to get jobs.
Speaker 2: Yeah he uh yeah, yeah, he got he got a
Speaker 2: lot into that. I mean, the the extrapolation of you know,
Speaker 2: the household being the center of production to people being
Speaker 2: forced to sell their lab as some sort of factory worker. Like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that was tremendously disruptive, and you know it also, I
Speaker 2: mean how mom was insightful in his sociological takedown because
Speaker 2: unlike a lot of people, you know, show Schumpeter's big
Speaker 2: critique of the Marcus paradigm and I'm gonna bring this back,
Speaker 2: I'm going somewhere with this was like, look like Marcus
Speaker 2: aren't really talking about class, Like the job you do
Speaker 2: isn't your class, you know, like your class is what
Speaker 2: you're born into and it's defined by how you relate
Speaker 2: to other people similarly born to this kind of like
Speaker 2: social stratum that isn't really mobile, you know. So in
Speaker 2: Schumpeter's view, which is the traditional view, it doesn't matter
Speaker 2: what job you're doing around which money you have, Like,
Speaker 2: that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a class,
Speaker 2: and class isn't something you can just like jump up
Speaker 2: from or down from, like within a generation. And Osbom
Speaker 2: accepted some of those premises. He's like, yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: one of the reasons why the working class exists is
Speaker 2: because the social capital, the kind of facilitated no blessedge
Speaker 2: oblige as well as you know, kind of the communitarian
Speaker 2: impulse that you know, stood in for the welfare state
Speaker 2: and antiquity and things. He's like, capitalism like rips all
Speaker 2: that apart, and it makes every man like a stranger,
Speaker 2: and it enshrines the war of all against all not
Speaker 2: only as like an an implacable reality, but as like
Speaker 2: a positive good. Almost so the only thing you have
Speaker 2: in common with like your neighbors figuratively and literally is
Speaker 2: that you're all being crushed like in these in this
Speaker 2: like industrial labor environment, and you know, you've got to
Speaker 2: stand together or all die. And that's like what the
Speaker 2: working claim is. You know, it's not it's not a
Speaker 2: class in like the traditional sense, or there's not some
Speaker 2: like basic affinity between between people, like they're your comrades
Speaker 2: because you're you're like in the same way you are
Speaker 2: like with the guys you're like unjustly locked in prison
Speaker 2: with you know, it's it's circumstances that like drive you together,
Speaker 2: so and that and that that actually tracks with like
Speaker 2: what marsh was talking about in dos Capital, Like if
Speaker 2: when you talk about alienation, he's not just talking about
Speaker 2: the process of whereby labor is not personal anymore. You
Speaker 2: don't create things. You're not a producer. You're just doing
Speaker 2: this like pointless process, like over and over and over again.
Speaker 2: It's dangerous and dirty and painful, but it's alienation from
Speaker 2: your fellow man. And even if you haven't to be married,
Speaker 2: like you never see your wife. She she's stuck with
Speaker 2: some dangerous, dirty job like you have. You know at
Speaker 2: the end of the day, like maybe you like get
Speaker 2: to sleep by saying betisar And occasionally you collide in
Speaker 2: intimacy and have children but he's like that that alienation
Speaker 2: touchs and concerns every aspect of the workers existence. It's
Speaker 2: not it's not. It doesn't just like remove his labor
Speaker 2: from his own domain and creative power. It alienates him
Speaker 2: from like what should be his community. It alienates him
Speaker 2: from his ethnos, it alienates him from his wife, It
Speaker 2: alienates him from you know, he doesn't have neighbors anymore.
Speaker 2: You know that this all tracks and yeah, so he
Speaker 2: makes a lot out of that, and that's one of
Speaker 2: the reasons why this process whereby the Vestigel aristocracy, he's
Speaker 2: able to like hang on to power because people were
Speaker 2: people like bonded in pee andage. They are dependent upon
Speaker 2: like the lord of the manner. And this is a
Speaker 2: deeply psychological process and it's enduring. It's in a Hosmon view, Okay,
Speaker 2: this alien this this this alienation that is a matter
Speaker 2: of life and death. In a lot of cases, it
Speaker 2: sounds a matter of clodial life, like it stands to
Speaker 2: kill you. He's like, really, the only remedy these people
Speaker 2: have is like appeal to the church or to like
Speaker 2: appeal to traditional social elements that are kind of like
Speaker 2: the guardians of the culture. If you want to think
Speaker 2: about it that way. So they appeal to aristocrats and stuff,
Speaker 2: you know, for justice. And that's one of the things
Speaker 2: that keeps these guys like if not relevant, like able
Speaker 2: to remain like in situ.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: That's why hosbal it.
Speaker 1: Keeps it keeps the revolution in stasis. There's no there's
Speaker 1: no chance of having a revolution.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And so guys like a Hosball. And he
Speaker 2: said this was the big problem in during like this
Speaker 2: the long crisis he talked about, because uh, there was
Speaker 2: always like technological innovation in this kind of future shock
Speaker 2: and disturbance, but political cultures were like frozen, you know,
Speaker 2: and that was I mean, that's that's the point of
Speaker 2: like any revolutionary Marxist in the twentieth century, but Cosmon
Speaker 2: especially because I think that he had a particular emphasis
Speaker 2: as well as insight into sociological questions. He's like, we've
Speaker 2: got to educate people to break them of these things,
Speaker 2: of these tendencies. We've basically got to like break them
Speaker 2: on their short term self interest or their attachment to it,
Speaker 2: because we've got to literally kill the aristocracy. We've got
Speaker 2: to allow the bourgeoisie to conquer everything. We've got to
Speaker 2: let them consolidate, We've got to let them create conditions
Speaker 2: of plenty before we kill them figuratively and literally. You know,
Speaker 2: it's a very brutal view of a struggle processes, but
Speaker 2: within the bounded rationality of Marxist Leninism that tracks, you know,
Speaker 2: and there is like a kernel of truth to it,
Speaker 2: not in terms of its ethical conclusions, but I mean,
Speaker 2: like today this is a bit of a tangent, but
Speaker 2: I'm was making the point to guys, this has died somewhat,
Speaker 2: but it's it won't die completely. This is a favorite
Speaker 2: refrain of of dissident people as well. There's gonna be
Speaker 2: a massive financial collapse and a great depression. That's never
Speaker 2: going to happen again, Okay, because it can't happen in
Speaker 2: the state of information awareness. Like to the second information awareness,
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff only happens long to uncertainties. There's
Speaker 2: not uncertainties anymore. Like that doesn't mean the dollar can't
Speaker 2: like bottom out, But even if it did, that doesn't
Speaker 2: mean like you're not gonna be able to buy food. Okay, Now,
Speaker 2: there could absolutely be shortages. I don't believe in climate
Speaker 2: change in the sense of these crazy people who think
Speaker 2: who are stand in like apocalypse cult for them. But
Speaker 2: I'm certain that there's all kinds of environmental factors that
Speaker 2: just owing to God's will or the nuances of of
Speaker 2: of this planet, I I could easily see famines coming back.
Speaker 2: I mean, uh, and you know, I mean it's if
Speaker 2: they're if it suddenly became impossible to grow certain kinds
Speaker 2: of crops, that would fool oar everything. I mean, so
Speaker 2: I absolutely do not say like crises can't happen. But
Speaker 2: this idea that you know, like owing to miscalculation or
Speaker 2: owing to like a gap in you know, information awareness,
Speaker 2: you know of hours or days, like you know, like
Speaker 2: like billions of dollars is gonna be like wiped out
Speaker 2: overnight in the stock market. That would never happen again.
Speaker 2: That's retarded, you know. And guys like how One predicted
Speaker 2: that he said, stuff's gonna largely be rubberized moving forward.
Speaker 2: There's not gonna be like food shortages. You know, there's
Speaker 2: not gonna it's gonna be very easy to produce things
Speaker 2: that today him talking in like nineteen fifties are hard
Speaker 2: to produce. You know, you're gonna like a lot of
Speaker 2: these problems are gonna go away, you know, and that
Speaker 2: and that happened, you know, and that's one of the
Speaker 2: reasons why this is I mean, this is probably not
Speaker 2: the scope, but one of the ways you can tell,
Speaker 2: like our government is like full of like crackheads and
Speaker 2: insane people is because if they didn't overreach and remotely smart,
Speaker 2: they could basically hold on to power indefinitely. Because this
Speaker 2: isn't the nineteen twenties, because because people aren't going hungry,
Speaker 2: because there's not a military draft or we're respected to
Speaker 2: like sacrifice your son in a meat grinder. You know,
Speaker 2: there's not a Soviet Union whereby you know, at any
Speaker 2: at any time basically, you know, some enemy society that's
Speaker 2: like mobile lies a massive scale could decide to like
Speaker 2: sue for war to remedy the kind of uneven power paradigm,
Speaker 2: you know. Like so so it's it's you can tell
Speaker 2: these people are insane because like they're they're basically burning
Speaker 2: the house down when there's no reason to do that.
Speaker 2: But you know that the degree to which, uh that
Speaker 2: that's also why too. I mean, like I said, I
Speaker 2: I it's it's it's dumb for people to claim that
Speaker 2: people like Missus Harris are Marxists anyway, But it's Marxism,
Speaker 2: isn't just Marxism, isn't wokeism, it's not it's not it's
Speaker 2: not liberalism. It's it's it's it's a very discreete uh
Speaker 2: like claim and series of claims about historical processes. And
Speaker 2: in the short term, Marxists absolutely want capitalists to succeed.
Speaker 2: They don't want it to fail, they want it to
Speaker 2: fully succeed. They wanted to conquer every thing, and then
Speaker 2: they want to kill the people at the helms of
Speaker 2: the apparatus. Like that's whole point. You know what, what's
Speaker 2: strange about how it developed in terms of actual practice
Speaker 2: is that it did it did again like the like
Speaker 2: like the the quite literally like the heart of the
Speaker 2: of the Bolshevik Revolution in the real world was a
Speaker 2: place that really had no like industrial working class. You know.
Speaker 2: It was just like basically backwards monarchy that ruled over
Speaker 2: this this this this is this massive territory you know,
Speaker 2: like the Russian Empire had more in common with the
Speaker 2: Ottomans than it did with Europe. Okay, I'm not saying
Speaker 2: like racially or whatever, Like I'm not taking a position
Speaker 2: on that. So I don't know, people get mad, but
Speaker 2: in terms of the way it was structured, and in
Speaker 2: terms of it being like an anachronism in the twentieth
Speaker 2: century when it finally got brought down, it's really really
Speaker 2: strange that this is where the bullshrep Revolution was consolidated
Speaker 2: and truly succeeded. You know. That's why. That's one of
Speaker 2: the reasons why when I talk a lot to these guys.
Speaker 2: I'm not Jackson Hinkle himself. I don't know him, but
Speaker 2: I know guys in his orbit and guys who describe
Speaker 2: to that kind of worldview. So like, there are a
Speaker 2: lot of there. Like rebuttals to people like me are like, well,
Speaker 2: you can't extrapolate a lot from the Soviet Union. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: I can, but even if I accept that postulate, well,
Speaker 2: I can't extrapolate a lot, even by your own criteria,
Speaker 2: from East Germany. Okay, you know, and it's well there
Speaker 2: you go, Okay, you tell you tell me, like East
Speaker 2: Germany wasn't an industrial state like it. I I mean,
Speaker 2: if you want to perfectly realize, like marcis Alana state,
Speaker 2: it was the DDR, I mean that they can't be argued,
Speaker 2: I mean, I suppose like they're I suppose they're like
Speaker 2: rebuttal of that would be like, well, that was an
Speaker 2: artificial state that emerged out of like military exigencies, and
Speaker 2: you know the fact that it was beliguered and threatened,
Speaker 2: you know, owing to conditions imposed by capitalists, like is
Speaker 2: somehow like takes off at table as as a pure
Speaker 2: example of practice, but because it may you know, the
Speaker 2: to bring it back again, I forgive m from ramblings.
Speaker 2: I don't feel good, but the uh, the degree of
Speaker 2: which again like marked actual Marxists viewed these things as
Speaker 2: necessary processes like can't be denied. Like Marxist will not
Speaker 2: be in the street saying like we need we need,
Speaker 2: we need Acne Widget Company to hire more women because
Speaker 2: it's bad not to And they wouldn't be saying like
Speaker 2: we need to text these people more like none of
Speaker 2: that would be like in their horizon. They'd be like,
Speaker 2: we want Acne Widget Company to become like as massive
Speaker 2: as possible. We wanted to insinuate itself into everything. We
Speaker 2: wanted to be able to produce everything we needed, you know,
Speaker 2: almost like magic, and then we want to kill the
Speaker 2: people who own it and we want to take it
Speaker 2: and we want to make it the public domain of
Speaker 2: the workers. That's what they want or want it. Like
Speaker 2: I said, I I white guy like Jackson Hinkel. I
Speaker 2: think they're playing an important role right now if you're
Speaker 2: any kind of dissident or in any kind of actual
Speaker 2: resistance actor.
Speaker 1: But the really interesting, the interesting thing about that is
Speaker 1: it's the way, you know that these people who call
Speaker 1: themselves Marxists or call themselves communists nowadays aren't because they
Speaker 1: would want Elon to succeed and take over and become
Speaker 1: you know, like my friend Matt says his own hensiatic league.
Speaker 1: They want him to do that so then they could
Speaker 1: take it over by force. But they shit all over him,
Speaker 1: and oh you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, the point that the degree in which these people
Speaker 2: today they're just like goofy envy crats who are like
Speaker 2: it's just they're just like people who are like that
Speaker 2: guy's a big shot. I don't like him. It's like
Speaker 2: that basic, you know, and it's like it doesn't and
Speaker 2: like you can only that too is a symptom of
Speaker 2: prosperity as well, because even yeah, you read, Ernest Younger
Speaker 2: was a fascinating guy in all kinds of ways, but
Speaker 2: he lived through this stuff, and you know, he kind
Speaker 2: of he was kind of a strass arrist man, you know,
Speaker 2: like he he was very much a socialist. And if
Speaker 2: you read something like The Glass Bees, the character of
Speaker 2: Zapperoni likes he's obviously like kind of a matchup. But
Speaker 2: like Howard Hughes and Andrew Carnegie and and like Walt Disney.
Speaker 2: But uh, you know, and like that, guys like Zapperoni
Speaker 2: are real type. But you know, guys like Younger thought
Speaker 2: these guys were historical giants. They're like, these guys are
Speaker 2: gonna change the world. They're gonna change everything, and they're
Speaker 2: playing an essential role in this historical process. You know.
Speaker 2: That's it's not I mean, I'm I'm as anti communist
Speaker 2: as it's possible to be. I don't think that should
Speaker 2: be in dispute. But communists, they're they're not dummies, or
Speaker 2: they weren't dummies who were just like I'm I don't
Speaker 2: like that guy because he has more stuff than me.
Speaker 2: It has nothing to do with that, you know, Like,
Speaker 2: it's not it's not just like dumb a lumping bullshit
Speaker 2: or like guys who think like gangster rappers, or something
Speaker 2: like that's not like that, that's fucking retarded, you know,
Speaker 2: and this, uh, the these it's it's these like internet
Speaker 2: guys who have never read a book in their life
Speaker 2: like calling people. It's like goofy as fuck. But but no,
Speaker 2: I think, you know, and today I REALI wasn't going
Speaker 2: aside the scope. Don't forgive me for that if it's
Speaker 2: boring people. But guys like Emmanuel Wallerstein, guys who uh,
Speaker 2: these kinds of post Marxist types who do like talk
Speaker 2: about you know, social justice within globalism. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: obviously I don't like have common cause with those guys,
Speaker 2: but they're really the only like intelligent aspect of the left.
Speaker 2: And I think those guys are making a comeback because
Speaker 2: everybody hates the fucking regime and like literally everybody hates liberals,
Speaker 2: like everybody fucking hates liberals and things. They're like awful
Speaker 2: pieces of shit, you know. That's why, like I said,
Speaker 2: like people, I mean, he'll throw shite on me all
Speaker 2: the time, and I don't care, like I'm not here
Speaker 2: to make friends and I'm used to it. But you know,
Speaker 2: the uh they get mad at me, whether it's because
Speaker 2: you know, I got respect for Moslims and view them
Speaker 2: as like an essential part of the new resistance. Or
Speaker 2: they get mad at me for like retweeting like Jackson
Speaker 2: Hinkle or something. But it's like they don't understand part
Speaker 2: of bringing down the regime and discrediting it is like
Speaker 2: pointing out not just how morally bankrupt it is, but
Speaker 2: how like staggering like ignorant it is. And it's acolytes
Speaker 2: are you know? And if there's if there's a serious
Speaker 2: left wing with revolutionary ambitions, that's not a bunch of
Speaker 2: degenerate natural slaves, Like that's that's a good thing, man,
Speaker 2: Like how is that bad? You know, like you got
Speaker 2: people can't like take their like personal feelings out of stuff.
Speaker 2: It's pathetic. It's like talking to a bunch of like
Speaker 2: it's like talking to about a little kids or like
Speaker 2: modeling old women or something. But the but that's you know,
Speaker 2: and that's also why you know again the like I said,
Speaker 2: we started out like that that dude I'm not gonna name,
Speaker 2: you know, acting like uh, I was dropping cap when
Speaker 2: I was saying, like, you know, the it's as nine,
Speaker 2: you know, to arrange force structure or to conceptualize grant
Speaker 2: strategy in like twentieth century terms, you know, like the
Speaker 2: like like twentieth century wars can never happen again. That's
Speaker 2: never going to happen again. You know, it's not gonna
Speaker 2: happen again in a thousand years, you know, like that
Speaker 2: that the end of the uh the uh the changing
Speaker 2: like like everything these days is changing, like I you know,
Speaker 2: like I mean the point before about like just today
Speaker 2: I was talking to some of the fellas about like
Speaker 2: public education is dying and nobody believes anymore. Like those
Speaker 2: law enforcement like a couple of months back, they're like
Speaker 2: I see in Chicago now, like I said, even you know,
Speaker 2: like like policing is gonna be privatized. It's you know
Speaker 2: in the South, Like I mean you're in I'm sure
Speaker 2: you see this, you know how Like they're still trying
Speaker 2: to fight the run drugs like it's nineteen eighty two
Speaker 2: or something. And like there was this ridiculous press conference
Speaker 2: and they like the Tennessee Threau of Investigation they held
Speaker 2: this like press conference. It was them Homeland Security atf FBI.
Speaker 2: There's this whole mass investigation to literally bust these like
Speaker 2: two like outlaw bikers like sligging meth and they're like
Speaker 2: we've were taking drugs off the street. And the comments
Speaker 2: were like you people are idiots, you know, they're like
Speaker 2: what what do you think this is? You know, it's
Speaker 2: like like there wasn't like a single positive comment, man,
Speaker 2: And it's like this is like a time warf. It's
Speaker 2: like what the fuck are these people doing? You know,
Speaker 2: like nobody believes in that garbage anymore. Now now you
Speaker 2: got homeland security like shaken down, like trailer park meth heads. Really,
Speaker 2: you know, like that's like that's pathetic, man. You know,
Speaker 2: this whole apparatus, the people sustaining it, they're these like
Speaker 2: increasingly aged parasites who can't like adapt to the twenty
Speaker 2: first century, you know. And that's one of the things
Speaker 2: that swept Trump into power. It's the kind of stuff
Speaker 2: hobsbamb and Franklin, the Marxist we're talking about, Like like
Speaker 2: they the way they would have viewed Trump is like
Speaker 2: you know this, They wouldn't viewed him a some like
Speaker 2: arch reaction area. They would have been like, well that
Speaker 2: this guy is basically a con man. But he's saying
Speaker 2: he's gonna like sweep away these obsolescent aspects of of
Speaker 2: of state that people like don't think serves their interests anymore.
Speaker 2: And that and that's why a lot of people voted
Speaker 2: for Trump. It's not I mean, yeah, there's like people
Speaker 2: who just like love Trump. There's people who you know,
Speaker 2: like uh, who would have voted for RFK Junior, who
Speaker 2: are just like protest voters, but like your average like
Speaker 2: man or lady, like it's not particularly politically sophisticated or inclined.
Speaker 2: Like they voted for Trump because their instincts are basically
Speaker 2: sound and they're like what what what the hell is
Speaker 2: going on here? Like we they'll put together that's a
Speaker 2: regime they live under. It's like this twentieth century obsolete structure.
Speaker 2: They don't tink a out on those turns, and they realize,
Speaker 2: like this is like a zombie regime, like it doesn't
Speaker 2: make sense anymore, like why you know, like it's it's
Speaker 2: and then you know, it's, uh, it's really interesting to
Speaker 2: see this develop in real time, man, you know. And
Speaker 2: that's why one of the things like part of my
Speaker 2: vetting process, the people who I kind of take on
Speaker 2: as allies. I mean, that's a complicated process. I can't
Speaker 2: really break it down into like criteria. But one thing
Speaker 2: that's essential was like if like we do not want
Speaker 2: reaction areas, we do not want people who think the
Speaker 2: good old days were dope, or that we need to
Speaker 2: like turn back time or that, or people who think
Speaker 2: that like n Segue is like making things like where
Speaker 2: we take over the government and can like manage its puireaucers.
Speaker 2: It's like people like that are not with the program.
Speaker 2: And I mean now that not only is that like
Speaker 2: not at all what we're about, but that's that's got
Speaker 2: nothing to do with the trajectory of history and stuff
Speaker 2: like that. I don't mean to be I don't mean
Speaker 2: to like abrogate this, but I really don't feel good.
Speaker 2: So if we could, like if we could, if we
Speaker 2: could wrap it up, that'd be And if you want to,
Speaker 2: if you want to do another episode because this wasn't
Speaker 2: up to snuff, we can absolutely do that. No.
Speaker 1: I appreciated the conversation at the ending because I think
Speaker 1: that's a conversation that people on the right need to hear.
Speaker 2: That.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's too much of a jump towards
Speaker 1: capitalism solves everything, you know, And I've been reading some
Speaker 1: of List's letters lately, and it's really opening up my
Speaker 1: eyes to just how damaging the especially the overseas, the globalism,
Speaker 1: just what it does to you know, the vult and oh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what's also why it's crazy these people with like
Speaker 2: think they hate Maslims for no reason because some like
Speaker 2: Zionists on TV told them to, or because they think
Speaker 2: that because they think that like some like shitbig immigrants
Speaker 2: who did something to do to them is like Islam.
Speaker 2: It's like, man, you want to know, like darl Islam
Speaker 2: has been getting crushed man by globalism for decades. I mean,
Speaker 2: like they're on the front lines of this shit. Like
Speaker 2: what's happening to them is as bad as what was
Speaker 2: done to Europe. Like you're you think that's cool, Like
Speaker 2: these guys you're ops because they're like fighting back against
Speaker 2: that shit. It's like, get the fuck out of here.
Speaker 2: I mean people actually think that way, are my ops?
Speaker 2: You know, Like it's yeah, yeah, but it's also too
Speaker 2: like they it's probat of internalizing like enemy conceptual vocabulary,
Speaker 2: like people who they they just like mirror like that
Speaker 2: they use terms like racist or like they think like, oh,
Speaker 2: I'm a capitalist because that's who my ops like say
Speaker 2: I am. It's like, so you define yourself, I will
Speaker 2: like somebody like Missus Harris or Joe Biden says, or
Speaker 2: like what some like idiot whet professor says like, I
Speaker 2: I mean, how basic are you? You know? I don't
Speaker 2: use the kind of terms because they again we're talking
Speaker 2: about people like Osbam. I kind of have to use
Speaker 2: a shorthand you know, it's like, but I don't, there's
Speaker 2: not there's not really I'm not like a Kazinski guy.
Speaker 2: I like a lot of like I know, a lot
Speaker 2: of like disient type dudes really like head k. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's nothing wrong with like being into him.
Speaker 1: I've cited him extensively.
Speaker 2: I've read about Yeah, but what you called industrial society,
Speaker 2: that's a lot more accurate, you know, like.
Speaker 1: And industrial people think that that book. People think that
Speaker 1: book is like I have a friend who says, oh,
Speaker 1: you can take an al Gore book and hold it
Speaker 1: right up next to it and it's the same exact thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, No, he's writing about the human condition. He's right,
Speaker 1: what you know, what the what the industrial revolution did
Speaker 1: to the human condition.
Speaker 2: Is And I read outdoor, No, that's fucking retarded. Well,
Speaker 2: I mean, these guys are just like say things like
Speaker 2: they don't I guarantee these guys like never read a
Speaker 2: book except maybe like some fucking airport paperback. But I no,
Speaker 2: I remember when the Manifesto dropped in ninety ninety six.
Speaker 2: I think it was. I think it was like late
Speaker 2: summer ninety five, but like when.
Speaker 1: It ran in that page summer late summer ninety Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, when I ran in the papers, like I made
Speaker 2: sure like I I read it, you know, and it
Speaker 2: was it was, Uh, it was insightful stuff. I mean,
Speaker 2: he's got some blind spots, like especially a lot of
Speaker 2: like Mas Samon types do like a lot of those
Speaker 2: guys don't really fully grasp like politics. But uh, the
Speaker 2: stuff when when he was talking about technological development and
Speaker 2: the impact of production and labor and like how man
Speaker 2: like individually and collectively interfaces with that, that was pretty
Speaker 2: That was that was pretty insightful. And like I said,
Speaker 2: the term industrial society, that that there's a lot more
Speaker 2: meaningful than capitalism, you know, and it's and obviously too
Speaker 2: like a terms inherently reduction. It's like like the capitalist
Speaker 2: is everything he does. It's just like stack up capital
Speaker 2: and like assets like that's not that's not the way
Speaker 2: people think. Like even some guy in Wall Street who's like,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of a stereotypical walk her Huster, that's
Speaker 2: not like the way he thinks. Like he's you know,
Speaker 2: he and and Bay. It's the reason he, Like the
Speaker 2: reason a guy like that his world is defined by
Speaker 2: money is because that's like power activity in his world.
Speaker 2: And that's like a way, that's a way he can
Speaker 2: like engage in power activity congruous like his discrete capabilities
Speaker 2: and and like psychology. It's not like it's not like
Speaker 2: money is like this ending itself to everybody like in
Speaker 2: the capitalist system. But I mean that's these these things
Speaker 2: are important. But yeah, like again, man, like I said,
Speaker 2: sorry if this was not the par but I this
Speaker 2: it's been. I'm not trying to be a martyr. But
Speaker 2: just because like I do have responsibility to people, I
Speaker 2: thinks this week has not been great in terms of.
Speaker 1: I think people. I think people like this episode more
Speaker 1: than you think.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes me happy.
Speaker 1: Uh do do plugs real quick?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Man? As always, Uh, try and direct people to
Speaker 2: my website. It's Thomas seven seven seven dot com. It's
Speaker 2: number seven and h O a s seven seven seven
Speaker 2: dot com. I'm gonna tweak that some man. I was
Speaker 2: gonna trying on top of it this week, but it
Speaker 2: but what it's it's dope, the kid who put it together.
Speaker 2: He's great. And anytime I drop anything new, it pops
Speaker 2: up there on like the feed. So that's like a
Speaker 2: good way to keep up with stuff if you like
Speaker 2: the stuff I do. I'm on social media at Capital
Speaker 2: r e A L underscore number seven h o A
Speaker 2: s seven seven seven. The best place to find me
Speaker 2: is substack. That's from my pod is and stuff. It's
Speaker 2: uh real Thomas seven seven seven at subsec dot com.
Speaker 2: And yeah, if in the description, if you could include
Speaker 2: uh the Merse wings too. You know, I'm like a
Speaker 2: big like T shirt and clothes and merse guy, and
Speaker 2: uh that's actually been selling pretty well, which makes me
Speaker 2: very happy. But yeah, that's that's what I've got.
Speaker 1: I'll take care of that for you, all right, Thank
Speaker 1: you appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, likewise, man,