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back to the Peak and Yona show. Thomas is back
and we are going to uh Thomas is going to
talk about one of everybody's favorite people in history in
the last couple hundred years. So ahead, Thomas.
Speaker 2: I want to talk about Carl Marx and Marxism. You know,
the twentieth century it was a conceptual dialogue with Marxist
Leninism that really can't be overstated, and virtually nobody understands
marx Okay, Marxisms invoked as this polemical device to describe
the ideology of the managerial state, which is this kind
of post nineteen sixty eight secular humanism, and you know,
this kind of ad hoc ideological pastiche that's invoked for
expediency to kind of play populations off against each other.
It's really kind of a hollow core. But what it's
not is not Marxist. Like people have this idea that
Marxism is a more extreme version of liberalism, or that
it's some sort of egalitarian ethos. It's none of those things.
And this isn't just trivia or some sort of pedantic
interest that curated because ideal a lot in political theory.
In my research, it's a central understanding the twentieth century,
and it's a central understanding the configuration of globalism and
why the sort of dialogue around nascent globalism and you know,
was characterized by the sort of ideological pulse stars that
it was. You know, I can tell I'm not just
saying things. I can tell by talking to people, even
fairly intelligent people, you know, not just polemicists say ridiculous
things like Mark Levin or whatever. I can tell they've
never read Carl Marx because of the way they describe
Marxism or Communism when it existed, or some of these
people they'll say this straight face that somebody like Kamala
Harris as a communist, or that, oh, you know, university
professors are all Marxists. That betrays a fundamental ignorance of
what the intellectual culture is of the establishment. Okay. One
of the only people who's written specifically on this is
Paul Gotfreed. I think, I mean obviously part ways with
Godfreed on a lot of subjects and for positions, but
he's got a very deep knowledge of political theory and
especially of praxis as it developed in the twentieth century,
and he's written extensively on the fact that the Cold
War was basically it was left wingers and liberals who
were It was left wingers and Marxist schismatics against Stalinists.
That's what it was. They came, both of whom came
to view orthodox Mercist Leninism as this kind of quasi fascistic,
reactionary tendency. There was also an aspect of viewing it
as a kind of oriental despotism. I mean that was
more on the conservative side, or what passes for conservatism
in America. But you know, the provincialism to American liberals
as well, that IDR is even more pronounced than their
nominal opponents on the right, and especially in the later
phases of the Cold War, that was a subtext of
their objection to you know, the governments of the East
Block and things. Although they didn't come out and say it.
That's not just me reading into you know, what the
proponents of this position said without cause. It's very much there. Okay.
So it's as misguided to call American liberals Marxist as
it would be to say that somebody like George W.
Bush is a fascist. It's just it's at odds with reality.
And more than that, you know, it's conceptually illiterate on
you know, the way that globalism developed, you know, and
I'm always making the point, and I'm not sure people
fully grasp this. There's only one mode of government these
days that there's not competing modes of statecraft. There's only
globalism in the resistance, and within globalism obviously locally different
constellations of power the jury in defect. Oh, they'll hold
different cultural values and things, But that's not what the
color was about. We were talking about two radically different
ways of configuring what was to be the planetary order. Okay,
that's done pretty much. Every state and Westphalian states are
seasonal exists to make no mistas, but such that they
do still exist, and there will always be some kind
of devolved localism just by necessity, no matter how much
you know. Information technology integrates processes and structures. But there's
only with the exception of outliers like North Korea, which
is this unfortunate garrison state that happens to border China,
and the Russian Federation, where these kinds of one off
kingdoms or emirates, there's only one form of government, you know.
The Russian Federation obviously is very much on an enemy
footing with America and vice versa. But the Russian Federation
it's not that radically different kind of government. It's not
run by a party state. There's not a political bureau
that you know, enforces ideology from the top down. There's
not some centrally planned there's not some central planning authority
that you know, stands in for private ownership of productive mechanisms,
you know. And the fact that people don't seem to
fully understand this is a testament to there being a
basic you know, kind of kind of just lack of
understanding in total, and you know, to bring it home,
what was based one of the many things that was
basically unprecedented in the twentieth century. I can't think of
another historical paradigm wherein there's a singular ideology that that
planetary scale is essentially dictating all political activity, either the
service of its praxis or in opposition to it. People
can invoke things like the Roman Empire, but that wasn't
remotely planetary, and the idea of Rome was more sort
of an acceptance of this configuration of power. There wasn't
some theory of human life that underlay the Roman empire,
you know, and you can take the ascendency of Islam
was remarkable, the scale and scope of its success, which
was attained rapidly. But again that that was not planetary
and scale. And you know, sectarian wars are kind of
their own thing. The entire the entire planet wasn't in
dialogue with Islam. You know. There was dar al Islam
and there was its enemies, you know, so I don't
really think there's anything comparable. And the jacob and Revolution,
it was so violent and so disruptive, that purely ideological
cycle of violence in this Sartius the revolutionary cause, it
was essentially done after a decade, and what followed was,
you know, this Napoleonic crusade, But that that was something
entirely different, you know, the revolutionary fervor that animated the
preceding revolutionary form, A lot of those energies were somated
into the Napoleonic cause, but it was something categorically different,
you know. So the way to understand this is what
is Marxism. It's not merely a political ideology. It presented
itself as a comprehensive account of human life, and not
only human beings, and the way they live their lives
and their psychological makeup. But of all of nature and
the Marxist theory of history, it's not as that the
theory of the modern age, or it's not just the
history of capitalism. It literally claims to be providing an
account of man's entire existence from the time when humans
truly became human and anatomical and behavioral terms the present.
And it claims to be able to discern in categorical
terms what the future will look like based upon a
science of socialism and a science of history, whereby, you know,
through rational means and through a consistent methodology, all uncertainties
about you know, human political and social life and even
biological phenomena, it can be identified and largely predicted. Okay,
and it's it's proponents Marks himself and it's later and
it's and subsequent accolytes of his ideology. They acknowledge that
it wasn't possible to achieve this sort of predictive augery yet,
but they fully believe that this is going to become possible,
you know, and people generally don't understand that the totality
of it. Secondly, Marx wasn't really issuing a moral condemnation
of capitalism. There is a value centric discussion of the
then present paradigm and why it's you know, wrongheaded and
a social ill two perpetuate those state institutions in the
Marxist view, because this is violated of the dignity of workers,
and in the Marxist paradigm, labor is really the end
all be able to human life. But like another misnomer,
is this idea that Marxists were moralists who were who
were mad about capitalism. It's racist, or it's harmful to
women nerve, it's you know, it promotes inequalities. Marxists didn't
care about any of that. Marxists didn't care about racism. Now,
mind you. They might have looked at certain paradigms locally
or at wider scale and said, okay, these people are
being uniquely pressured by capitalism because within the sociology of
that failing system, they're being targeted for hostility. They are
probably be the logical population at target as our cadre.
But Marxist didn't sit around saying the gravest evil ever
is racism, and capitalism is bad because it's racist. Their
take was that these identitarian characteristics that people think are
so important, aren't they important? And it's this artificial contrivance.
So we need to get to the point where people
realize that these things don't matter. They're the last people
Marxists were who we're gonna say, we need a Black
History Month because black people are uniquely oppressed in history.
That's that, that's bourgeois morality. That's a way of dividing
the body. Politic or are trying to shore up a
sort of moral credibility within a failing system. You know,
So when people look at BLM or something they say, oh,
that's Marxist, or when they say that affirmative action, that's Marxist,
it's not at all, you know, now, mind you, Marxists
don't object to these things for legitimate reasons or for
accurate reasons. But that's not that's not something they promptly,
you know, which is why the Soviet Union and the
DEDO are and communists Poland they refuse to acknowledge the
reported victim quoted European Jewry. They said, why does Jewish
identity matter? They said, we lost thirty million people fighting
the fascists. You know, we're not we're not we're not
going to single out some contrived sectarian identity and say,
these people are the victims of fascism. Why do we
care about that? You know, and I mean that speaks
for itself. Okay, it wasn't because everybody's anti Semitic or
whatever the current rationaleist or why the Warsaw pack proceeded
that way, it's because in a lot of ways, the
Soviet Uni United Satellites were in fact very orthodox Marxist.
You know, I know that there's those who have up
to that particularly and left for vision. It's academ but
that's I mean, that's a discussion for another day. But
this is important because again these kinds of curated moral
paradigms about the alleged victimization of discrete populations, that's such
an essential characteristic of therapeutic liberalism. You know that they
must be acknowledged. That's not remotely a Marxist priority. They
view it as nonsense. Now, the Marxist treatment of capitalism,
the reason why it's capitalist features are emphasized, and make
no mistake capitalism and the Marsist paradigms, It describes a
discrete phase of historical development where there's very specific sociological
tendencies extant, as well as labor and production schema that
are historically contingent. They're not talking about capitalism and the
way like a neoliberal economist does, or in the way
they describe it to people in high school Civics class,
you know, and they're not Marxists aren't really talking about
doing business. Okay. The Marxian contention is that the economy
in any get An era, it's basically the kind of
distill the organic essence of the society that created it,
and therefore to grasp the essential features of the economy
and any give an epoch in that way you understand
the most relevant and the most potent facts about that society. Okay.
So Marx's analysis of the then present and what Marx
is considered to be late modernity, you know, the nineteenth,
twentieth and twenty Firth centuries is a you know, essentially
organizing production and productive means and sociological structures around its
certain theory of value okay, which is at odds and
the Marxian view with what's instinctive to human beings and
what can entail something approaching equity okay, trans is account
of the way that history transitions from past to future,
it's wholly dependent on dialectical materialism. And the depth to
which this is existentially significant is something I think is
understated even in a lot of contemporary texts that otherwise
grasp the the theory in practice is pretty well, you know,
it goes beyond a priority of economic conditions. Again, economic
conditions in the Marxian worldview or body of theory are
quite literally the skilled essence of every relevant aspect of
that society to human life life, not just the political affairs,
you know. And Marx's claim, what the way he fleshes
out was he said, look, the study of man and
must reflect mankind as he really is, you know, not
based on an ideal conception of him or of his
presumed potentialities or what constitutes the good in some abstract sense,
you know. And he also considered it destruct David to
contemplate some pristine natural man even as a thought experiment,
you know. He said, at base, what empirical man is.
He's primarily like a living organism, that's essentially a biological machine. Right.
He consumes food, he needs clothing, he needs shelter, he
needs fuel. So at base, human life is is exclusively
oriented around and towards the pulsion to find or to
produce these things. You know, man before history, or before
man truly became man, which demarks as the chorus, as
a biological accident. You know, there's God didn't create these
things once upon a time. You know, anatomically, if not
behaviorally modern humans, they might have survived simply by using
things they can find or kill or gather, but at
some point increase in population or shortages or pressures from
predatory animals or predatory hominids, it forced them to produce
their own necessities and find a way to make things.
And this is what distinguishes man from the beasts. The
singular defining characteristic of humans and what separates them from
animals in the Marxist paradigm is to get the cap
the capacity for conscious production. Not rationality, not political order,
not the capacity the love, not not not the ability
to his art. It's simply the capacity for conscious production. Now,
to be sure, you can find animals who produce primitive
tools or insects to devise structures, but that's purely instinctive.
It's not consciously productive. Okay, And man by way of
the same psychological mechanism. The facility is conscious production. He
can contemplate the object of his labor. Okay, so where man?
You know? And again, because all there is is human
life and the Marxist paradigm, the only thing that gives
life value is man's ability to contemplate the value of
his labor in and of itself and say, I can
build this house, or I can take these mammoth bones
and make a weapon, or you know, I can, or
a woman saying you know, I can, I can make
clothes out of this animal hide, you know. And that's
essential not just the human psychic health and social stability,
but that's literally the essence of what life is. You know.
It's not feeling good about yourself as a black person.
It's not feeling fulfilled in your relationships. It's not like
being the best Frenchman or white person or Moslem or
Catholic that you can be. It's literally his ability to
contemplate the finished product of your labor and to live
as a man is for some acknowledgment to be rendered
to that process. So once you remove that from people,
you're turning people into animals essentially, you know, And that's
that's also the reason why slavery is instidious in the
Marxist paradigm. Now, mind you, Marxist would say slavery was
an essential aspect of economic development and historical process. But
they'd also say it's not evil to enslave people because
then they're not free to supposedly, you know, carry out
this agency that they all have or whatever. It's because
you're turning man into an animal by removing from him
the power to consciously produce and more significantly, contemplate the
future product of his labor and take pride and satisfaction
in that. Okay, Now, especially to younger people, this probably
sounds very strange and it is abjectly reductionist. But the
degree to which during the Second Industrial Age life was
dominated by this kind of rote and dangerous and difficult
labor that really can't be overstated. And not only was
there not a welfare state, but there wasn't plenty like
here in twenty twenty five. This is by what people say,
and don't get me wrong, homeless people, most of whom
are addicted and or mentally ill. Admittedly being homeless sucks,
and I can attest to that. X. I've been homeless.
But you can basically find free stuff in any big
American city or metro area. You're not gonna die of starvation.
You might die from violence, or from drugs or from illness.
You're not gonna literally starve to death. Well, that's a
recent innovation. You know. In eighteen forty, if you lived
in some London slum, there's a good chance you lived
in a shanty were there. Literally it was a floor
made of dirt. If your wife managed to survive childbirth,
she probably wasn't gonna live much beyond forty, in part
because the error was poisonous. You know, your kids were
at constant risk of death until they reached about seven
or eight years old. You would be working thirteen or
fifteen hours a day in some factory setting, doing a
rope task over and over and over and over and
over again. And if your body failed you, or if
you got too old, or if you broke a limb,
or if you like hit your fingers chopped off, you
were going to starve to death. Nobody's gonna hire a
cripple or a broken down old man, or a guy
who's you know, got a tubercular cough, for whose livers
failing because of his alcoholism. You're just going to die,
you know. Maybe there'll be some poorhouse charity that'll have
mercy on you and feed you once every two days,
or maybe some church man will you know, occasionally, you know,
feed your children a slice of bread or something. But
your life and your death literally orbited around your ability
to labor and sell your labor to a producer, you know.
So looking at it, it's hard to see outside of
the historical moment for anybody. But in the in the
case of marks and angles, and we'll get into angles
next episode. This wasn't speculative really, I mean, what they
extrapolated from it was a sweet thing conclusion that couldn't
be substantiated despite what they said by a scientific methodology.
But what they were describing the aspects of the human
condition and putting on social life that they considered to
be absolutely paramount. These things were dictating the terms of
human existence day to day, hour to hour, minutes a minute,
and uh, that has got to be acknowledged, you know. So,
in other words, to bring it back, the Marxist doctrine
of productive force determinism and the primacy of production. The
rest of the belief that it was the pressure of
material needs. You know, they need for food, the need
for fuel, the need for things to consume, the need
for shelter, clothing, the production of these things. That's what
forced man upward and made him human. Okay, It wasn't
his mind, you know this, These intellectual capacities were curated
by this material need to produce, okay, And that's what
continues to press man onward and upward. And this is
why again Marxists don't condemn the historical process or say,
see slavery's evil in some terms, it's evil, or industrial
labor in its era was evil because man is transcending
his limitations in this admittedly brutal historical process whereby he
develops knowledge of technology, the technological processes, which in turn
produce more plenty, which in turn extent human life, which
in turn facilitate greater and greater, you know, horizons of
production and activity. It's actually a very, very very brutal
view of the world. There's nothing soft about it or
liberal about it or humanizing. One of the things that's
sinister about it is it's incredibly dehumanizing. It. It basically
causes it basically says that, you know, the things that
most people in a capitalist society would value our weakness,
you know. I mean it should be clear to anybody
who reads about life in the DDR or the Soviet
Union or communist Poland. I mean that that's one of
the things that Corny is, Like Komola Herris is a Marxist,
or like this this pink heired hr lady used forwarde
pounds as a Marxist. It's like these people, these people
would be eaten a lie of marksist society, you know,
or they'd be viewed as degenerates who were useless eaters,
and they'd be condemned basically by everybody. You know, Like,
don't get make a mistake. There's nothing cool or laudable
about some policemen in some styleisted state thinking that, you know,
owing to his revolutionary credential is the fact he dropped
bodies and the revolution and entitles him to decide who
lives new dies, because that's fucked up. But what that's
not is some soft liberal perspective or personality that's being curated,
you know it, you know, and of course, the conditions
of production in any given epoch, that's what determines prevailing
property relations. You know, we're not talking and Marxist weren't
talking about the abstract deftitors no property. They're not talking
about personal things you own, or you know, individual people
in some you know, individuated way being able to accrue
more stores of things than other people. We're talking about
who has actual access to productive means and who is
prevented from acquiring it. So, for example, under a feudal
system which endured for a really long time, and Marx
actually had a fairly interesting account of why this is,
which people like Runner Sombard actually shared. But under feudalism,
for example, you have lords who possess land, and they
have rights to other properties, such as the commodities produced
by that land and the people who work that land,
or serfs who are tied to that parcel, and serfs
they're legally precluded from owning property. Like even a surf
who got manumitted and somehow, I mean maybe he was
a hero of some religious war or something. Let's say,
however unlikely this is this former serf. He got some
you know, military title of lesser nobility or something. Okay,
he still wouldn't be able to go back and buy
that parcel, no matter how much gold he could come
up with. Okay, But the thing about the feudal arrangement,
and one of the reasons why it endured for so
long and why they weren't catastrophic pressures that destroyed it,
is because there's a natural interdependence in that system. There's
far far less alienation. You know, you're almost related to
the lord who owns the land that you till if
you're a serf, you know, and odds are, your families
lived on that land for generations, and the lord, unless
he had no progeny or something, odds are, it's the
same thing with him. And in time of war, he's
gonna need able bodied men to fill out the ranks
of his army. You know, if we come under attack,
we're gonna have to work together to defend off those
who would slaughter us. If I need justice because another man,
either of my class and station or of a higher
caste and station, does violence to my family, I've got
to approach, you know, the lord of the manor and
appealed in for justice. You know, And there's always some
kind of accountability where you're talking about this a direct
relationships between people, even if they're grossly and unequal, and
even if they're not born of warm and spontaneous intentional relationships.
You know, you can't have people in these under these
conditions being totally at odds of one another. Otherwise the
system doesn't work. Okay, there's there's got to be a
basic give and take, even if it arrives from the
position that totally unequal footing, as we respect the station,
you know. And Marx also makes the point too that
you know the primacy of money really didn't exist until
later modernity, because yeah, in a feudal system, you basically
only use money as a you know, a symbol, a
like indicator of uh, of a of a of a
fungible commodity, you know it uh because it's not possible
you know, to convey you know, to pick up an
attract a land, to convey a two representative of somebody
purchasing it for example, you know that can I enter
up for a second.
Speaker 1: Would that be why competition was so looked down upon
because competition, competition would raise prices, it would make profit.
Now now you're putting profit above everything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's big part of it. And that's also too
what I mean, Somber gets into that, like the when uh,
I mean Sombart generally agrees with Spangler, the adminent double
entry book keeping and the abstraction of profits from the
local production. You know, that changed everything and it created this,
It creates did this catastrophic tension between this between the
town and the country. Yeah, that's definitely a big part
of it. But it's also like we're talking about Hana
Rent the other day. As a staycraft became more and
more scaled, money became more and more important, you know,
and uh that meant that, uh, there was perverse incentives
that kind of prioritize money over what there before had
been the metric of wealth, which was inextricably tied to production.
So yeah, it's all of those things. But Marx is
the key takeaway from Marx is that, like Marx actually,
and we'll get to this, it's good to be complicated.
But the Marxist viewpoint is that Marx refers to the
science of econom the purported science of economics is ideology,
because he said that all it is is that he said,
it's what it is that's people viewing capitalist relationships of
production and labor and the preminence of money, and declaring
that these are perennial things. And even if the paradigm
changes a bit, he said, people like Adam Smith or
like Edmund Burke, what they were saying is that these
variables are constant for all time. It's just that the
way they're symbolized, and the scale and complexity of the
way they interact with one another, and the relative significance
of each variable might change. But these things are constant.
And Marx's whole point is, no, none of these things
are constant. And even money is a recent innovation because
again Marx's theory, it essentially spans forty thousand years. Okay,
so it's like, okay, well for thirty three thousand years,
there wasn't money. You know, you're telling me this is
a permanent feature of human life. And again, to him,
human life isn't politics, or the ability to love your children,
or you know, the the the the impulse to glorify God.
It's the ability to contemplate production and the finished results
of that production, and to remove objects from one sensory
environment and convert them into utile objects. You know. So yeah,
and we'll we'll get more into that as we go on.
Probably not today though, but uh, you.
Speaker 1: Know, so.
Speaker 2: Marks big assertion and dosc capital is a really difficult value.
And like I said, dos capital though, along with business
cycles by Stimpeter, those are key if you want to
do in political economy, you got to read both of those,
I think, and there it's it's a it's a it's
a it's a substantial undertaking. But to still down one
of the major aspects of dust capital is that it's
it's a it's a grave error as any kind of
analyst or historian or political theorist. It's a grave error
to treat consumption, distribution, money itself, the way in which
exchange is conducted, you know, of commodities and labor. Treating
these things that's eternal categories that have some permanent context
or relevance. That's a grave error. Because he said there's
they none of those things are true, you know, which
is why the primary defect in his view of political
economy or economics. You know, he calls it bougeois ideology,
you know, and the Margins view is that this isn't
even intentional, like, yeah, there's people who have invested incentive
and manipulating historical data to suggest that you know, what
they view as being essential to their personal prosperity hosts
an outside significance, you know. But he said a lot
of it, even people who aren't directly insinuated and do
you know capitalist processes or ownership, and people who played
a role in their professional life in terms of the
financing of these things. You know, they their conceptual horizon
is colored by what by existential nontological variables. They can't
think outside of this paradigm, you know. And the rare
men who can are the ones who you know, possess
the foresight to predict outcomes in basic terms, you know.
So you know, this raises an interesting problem though with Marxism,
and this isn't It's not just March. This is the
problem of the empiricists, and if you read Hume, this
is obviously the question that will emerge as well as
the later critics of idealism. That's why, like I said,
when we complete this marx discussion, I want to get
in a hustle and hust role is a hugely important
thinker and he was the primary Ficta and hust or
where the primary influence is a Heidiger in my opinion.
But the problem of ideal is specifically, as in discussion
of Marx, relates to Marx's relationship to Hegel. Obviously, Marx's
take on the dependence of political and economic theory on
historic conditions of production, this entails far more than just
economic theory, you know. And like I said at the outset,
what I understand Marx is he's talking about the human
condition and its entirety from the dawn of man to
the then present and into the distant future. That's a theory,
uh that that's that's that's a theory of deepest storicism, okay,
And that they can't be that that's not up for debate.
Marx's claims again, is that all morality, all philosophy, all religion,
all cultural belief systems are the results to conditioning by
men of their environments and the man made aspects of
that environment, which, increasingly as scale increases, shape and determine
the natural environment. These things are exclusively the expression of
modalities of production. Okay. The opposite view is the pure
Hegelian view that man has an independent mind, you know,
and the intelligence contained within that mind man devises institutions.
He formulates conceptual structures waiting to ethics. You know, he
developed esthetical conventions. Marx rejects all of these things as
ideology once again. And the Marx any doctrine that is
purported to have an independent status or origin point, independent
of productive schema, which is the progeny of man's need
to provide for necessities of life. You know. But the
problem of course here is that that in and of itself,
that's an artifact of an idealist schema, you know. It's
what you're saying is that Marx is devising this entire
theory of human existence. I mean that itself is derivative
of mind. Okay, and what's a man's basically an automaton
who is essentially a beast. But the instinctive behaviors that
he implements individually and as part of a collective are
just the part of sub conscious programming. But Mark specifically
disavows that. So there's a contradiction here and from what
I can glean, and there's not much directly related to
the subject matter, believe it or not. What I can
glean is that Marx would say, would have said, or
contained kind of within the more sociological essays he wrote
was that well, you know, I don't purport and nobody
reports to fully understand processes of mind. But it's clear
that there's a h It's clear that there's an exponential
aspect to learning. And man's also evolved, you know, to
once he devises, you know, relatively complex objects. You know,
from that process of devising those things, and from the
process of learning new uses for those things. You know,
thoughts take on their own kind of momentum related to
this instinctive necessity to produce, you know, and that seems tautological,
but as far as I can tell, that would basically
be the mercy and answer. You know. Well, like I said,
it's this preciss little written directly on this subject matter,
and I have looked, you know. But moving on, and
this brings us to you know, I said at the
outset Marx was not primarily an ethical theorist, and that
that's a big misunderstanding even among people who are fairly
learned in political theory. But what is an ethical imperative is, uh,
you know, to resist the advance of history and the
end of history within the Marxist paradigm and the achievement
of you know, a a classless society, not an egalitarian society.
There are two different things, you know, by the fulfillment
of a of a you know, historical processes that allows
socialism to flourish. You know, it's it is, in fact
a moral ill to try and sabotage these things. Now
why is that, Well, we already stayblished that within the
Marxist paradigm, all historic modes of production and labor had
one feature in common, and that was that control of
production means was not shared in by everybody. There's always
been a narrow coterie of producers or owners or possessors
who had more not just to the material product that
was being rendered, but their capacity for work largely belong
to themselves, so they could live fulfilling lives. Even if
you know marc vers who acknowledge managing a massive conglomerate
is incredibly difficult and time consuming. But what it also
entails is many many different types of labor and many
types of power processes that have to be imagined, devised,
brought into reality and then fulfilled. Okay, so somebody like
Henry Ford, for example, he's living as a fully realized man,
even if his life is not particularly happy. And even
if Oliver does its work, as opposed to say, a
man who works in a factory for a low wage,
who performs one wrote activity over and over and over
and over again for fifteen or eighteen hours a day,
that man's not only been totally alienated from his labor,
his labor has been bifurcated into a fractured aspect of
a total process. But he also has no capacity for
other labor. He can't build a house, you know. He
can't invent a better hunting rifle. You know, he can't
perfect a better kind of rowboat. You know. He is
in the position that a slave was, but even worse
because even a slave basically only had to work till sundown,
and then if you wanted to go play his banjo
or carve scrimshaw, he could do that. Okay, if you're
the proletarian labor, you're being quite literally worked to death,
and when you do die, probably well before your time,
you will have nothing in your life that could be
said to belong to you. And the only again, the
raison debtre human life in the Marxist paradigm is the
productive process and the ability to imagine the completed artifact
of that productive process, and that doesn't exist to the
exploited proletarian. You know, he's been reduced to the level
of an animal, and then he will die and again too.
When I say that this is Marx's moral ontology, it's
not just pontificating on how awful this is for his
own sake or that they shouldn't have happened. He's saying
this was an essential aspect of the historical process. But
you try and stabotage progress beyond that, you're trying to
keep people at the level of animals. You are oppressing them,
and you are trying to stabotage the advance of history, which,
because Marxist are atheists, history is God, the the end
all be human life is labor. You're essentially revolting against
God to try and stop history, and you're doing it
for the sake of your own piggage greed. Okay, that's
why capitalists are pigs, by the way, Okay, because that's
the uh the pig is. This stands in as a
symbol for gluttony. Okay. So the capitalist to hoooth and
nail wants to fight the proletarian revolution. He's only thinking
about himself and his own belly, you know, and uh,
that's why such people. Also, there's an intrinsically homicidal aspect
to Marxist praxis. I maintain, I don't think they could
be denied. That's not some cheap polemical point, you know,
like comedy kill people. I mean they do, but it
I'm not just saying stupid thing a. I mean there's
a there's a there's an intrinsic need to categorically annihilate
people who aren't educable in in you know, the Marxist
praxis and beyond that. I'm getting ahead of myself, but
you know, you've you've got to wipe out the ability
of people to consider alternative modalities because if you allow
them to do that, or if you allow that potentiality,
you know, an inherently counter revolutionary sociology will develop, you know,
And that's part of the double edged sort of literacy,
you know. But we'll get into that. But I'm going
to stop there because I'm about to change gears of
it and I need another hour for that.
Speaker 1: Not a problem, not a problem. I think that's a
good place to wrap up. And uh, yeah, this is
good stuff. It's amazing to me that you have no
idea how many people I've engaged, like especially on social media,
who say they're Marxists, and then you start talking to
him and you're like, this person has never read marx
by like except like past, like the never Gotten Past,
like the Communist Manifesto.
Speaker 2: Jackson Hankle is a serious guy, and I consider him
for limited PURBs is to be. I don't know the dude,
but him and people like him, I consider them for
limited purposes. The allies. He's a serious Marxist. I mean,
don't get me wrong. He's not one of these guys
who has some retrograde view of things. You know. He's
more of a world system theorists, which an anybody who
abides Marxist political economy is. I mean that if they're
not in a game, if they're not you know, kind
of abiding a lot of Emmanuel Vollerstein's ideas. So I
mean that Jackson Hinkel was one of those kinds of guys.
But he and obviously don't agree with that paradigm. But yeah,
he's a serious guy. But there's there's not and what
I mean, his whole as far as I understand it,
from what I've read of his content, his work product,
his whole notion is that the the real intellectual poverty
on the radical left, it's it's just degenerate liberals and
you know, bourgeois morons and like sexual deviance. And he's
not wrong. I mean, there's the The death of the
intellectual left is one of the weirder things in my lifetime,
you know, because they were such that that's argue with
such an outside impact on that intellectual life and even
you know, did that trickle down into like datty discourse.
But yeah, I hope the subs get something positive out
of this man, Like I'm trying to do the best
I can to convey these things in an accurate way
that that's also listenable and not torturous to subject oneself
to positive like lean So that makes me happy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I look forward to part two of this
because that's when Yep, the thing is, it's just not
a simple subject, and people try to make it really
simple because all they see they either concentrate on the
death or they concentrate on the economics of it, and
they don't see exactly what it was, and that it
no one's ever read marks.
Speaker 2: The web song the other day, like people uh in
lieu of edging themselves, they just they just look at
memes a bullish the Fed, and I'm like, what does
that mean? Why? Why? Why is the Fed just evil?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 2: Just the food? It's regulation. No, no, no, that doesn't
mean anything, you know. And so I mean, I'm a
I'm a Trumpeter guys, I think he leaned, you know,
and a lot of people mistakenly put Trumpeter with the
Austrians because he literally was from Austria and the reasons
for limited purposes will invoke him because he's too important
not to. I mean, I think he's the twentieth century. Yeah. Yeah,
But it's these these like internet guys will try and
push it back on me, and I'm like, you've never
read any of this stuff, you know, You're you look
at means it's like you don't know what you're talking about.
You know, you don't have any understanding of political economy.
You've never read a single book on it. You know.
It's like like stupid, and he don't convene anything.
Speaker 1: I don't know, am I thinking wrong here? It seems
like to me, when you run into somebody who is
well read on subjects that are important. They have a
tendency to be able to argue from both sides. They
have nuanced thinking, and they're not they don't have to
argue from their ideology. It seems like the people who
you run into who are the most like we got
to smash the Jews and stuff like that, these aren't
people who actually, like have read historical accounts of the
history of like the Jewish people for the last years.
Speaker 2: Well, that's why don't understand what I think they're getting
out of this. You know, I guess to them, it's
just like a video game, or I don't even know
it's a well.
Speaker 1: Social media is a playground where people can It's a
playground where people try to outsmart each other and they
do things like, you know, they see somebody who you know,
has ten thousand followers, and they're like, oh, I got
to follow this guy and make him look like a
make him look like a trying to if I can
make him look like a retard, if I can get
someone to, you know, to laugh at him, or if
I can spot him saying something wrong, because I mean
what you and I speak what one hundred thousand? You know,
how many words a week do we speak, We're going
to miss speak on something. You know, it's like and
that's like their whole life, you know, so.
Speaker 2: It's okay to go argue about the Texas Longhorns and
how they're gonna do this season. Like why pretend you
understand political economy? That's so fucking random. You know. If
you like to a hobo deciding he's an expert on
nuclear physics, you know, it's like, yeah, I don't know
about building. I don't go find where carpenters hang out
and be like, you're wrong, man, who's that you build
a house? Like why would I do that? That's retarding.
Speaker 1: There's my point, like, yeah, people have people do this
thing where it's like, you know, it's like why do
you talk about you know, why do you talk about
the history of the Jews? Why are you reading a
book like two hundred years together? Do you think the
Jews run everything? And I'm like, and I think to myself,
look when you look at academia and you look at
very important plate, important subjects, important industries, important, yep, there
are Jews. There are Jews at the top of it,
insinuated at the top of it. In most cases. If
that was Chinese. If they were Chinese, I'd be reading
Chinese History twenty four to seven. Well yeah, yeah, So
it's like it's like, oh, you're obsessed. It's like, how
could you not be? You know, it's like you see,
you see.
Speaker 2: A like go where my research takes me? Like I
am I trying to I'm not trying to like impress
Rando's by what I research. They go where it takes me.
You know, if I feeling that deviant, you're weird. Okay,
I mean they're That means nothing to me. But also,
these people aren't in my league. You know, I'm not
good at a lot of things. Man, I'm probably fine
with it. You know, most people. If somebodys in this
culture aren't, they can't. They want to pretend to like
good at everything. I'm good at very, very, very very
few things. I understand political economy and political theory better
than the overwhelming majority of people. And I will die
on that hill because I know it's fucking true. So
when some like Internet Rando with an IQ of eighty
nine like tries to tell me he knows things, it's
fucking embarrassing. You know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is a guy on Twitter today who I
mean probably a really nice guy. He wasn't mean at all.
I mean, you know he was, but he genuinely thinks
that this system can be like rehabilitated, Like if your
people take over this system, it can be rehabilitated. It's like,
you don't understand that it doesn't have the systems and anachronism.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they well also, I mean history. The history is
I mean one of the things Marx wasn't wrong about,
and admittedly, I mean a lot of this was what
he owes to his Hegelianism, especially when he was a
young man. There's nothing content about history. It doesn't repeat itself.
There's not perennial institutions. Okay, Now that doesn't mean there
is no truth. That doesn't mean there is no morals.
What that means is that pretending that the twentieth century
state is this perennial thing that's his constant as a
mountain range. You don't understand history. I don't mean you
don't understand in like the meaningless factorys they give you
in high school Civics class. I mean you don't understand
that it's a process. And even now it's it's it's
everything is changing. You know. And that's that's whether there's
so few playable theorists worth reading, because very very very
very very few men can I identify these changes and
the kind of configuration of what's developing as it happens.
It's the metaphor, I like, is this okay? If you're
in the desert and there's an obelisk, you know, like
in two thousand, or a monolith, okay, and you're smacked
up against it like this. You can't discern its dimensions,
and you can probably tell its color, maybe what it's
made out of. That's it. You know, only at distance,
possibly even miles distance, can you establish it's actual configuration
and dimensions. That's kind of the role or the situatedness
of you know, or a visionist or any kind of
historical analysts. You're smacked up against the obelisk. That is
not just the historical record, but the present and probable
and possible futures. You know.
Speaker 1: But do you think that when people say that history
repeats itself, they're just seeing human behavior that very rarely changes,
especially among certain cultures. Things like that, you know, human
you know, just human needs, human action.
Speaker 2: They don't they don't know what they're saying, is that
some guys said that to them in high school? Who
was their teacher? Or it's some cliche that they read
in some Midwi book by somebody like venereial disease Hansen.
But well there's wars and stuff. You know, history repeats itself.
Were the Roman Empire? You know, history repeats itself.
Speaker 1: M is it's I don't know, yeah, the Roman Empire
that is, uh that that wasn't that never even approached
the scale of which the American Empire is. Because the
American Empire is global.
Speaker 2: A lot of people are doing is they're saying, I mean,
it's like, okay, if if you're if your inputs are
the most basic universal things, you know, like it's like
it's like saying, okay, leon you know, Leonard da Vinci
wore pants and Tom Brady wears pants. So Tom Brady's
a great artist, you know, I mean, you know if
the metric is, yeah, the Roman Empire was was powerful,
and it spanned a lot of territory, and it was
a hedgemon. And oh, America is a hedgemon and spans
a lot of territory. Okay, but that's not what we're
talking about.
Speaker 1: All right, Thomas, let's uh, I'm looking forward to part two.
Tell everybody where they can find you right now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the best place is my website. It's Thomas seven
seven seven dot com. But that's number seven each on
mes seven seven seven for substick, substicks what I favor
and that's my podcast is and all kinds of other stuff.
It's real Thomas seven seven seven at substick dot com.
Social media is fucking garbage, and I swear since I
set up this new account a few weeks ago, is
Zitter has gotten like exponentially fucking dummer like like, I
shit you not.
Speaker 1: It's like literal rea, no idea, no idea, you are
you are spot on.
Speaker 2: Like uh yeah, So I mean, I don't know how
much longer I'm gonna waste my time with that. I
only set up a new timeline because people I actually
like and care about you kept on asking me to.
But it's at tom A Seer that's my government name.
T h O M A s c y R seven
seven seven. But I'm not just talking some ship. I
I I may shut down that account because it's it's
it's it's not really worth my time anymore. But yeah,
that's really fine.
Speaker 1: I notice you don't even you hardly ever look at
the comments people make to you either.
Speaker 2: So yeah, all.
Speaker 1: Right man, so's a couple days look forward to part two.
Speaker 2: Mm hm
Speaker 1: H