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 of 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 fells a lot, but
Speaker 2: he he especially he's he sends a huge amount. He's
Speaker 2: like a research machine. And I mean, i'd like to
Speaker 2: think guy him too, But I'm not as young as
Speaker 2: I once was, and I'm surely not as young as
Speaker 2: he is. And he he's always finding like really really
Speaker 2: great sources that I've never I've never come across. Cool.
Speaker 1: Well, the wife and I talked about this this past
Speaker 1: year and it didn't happen. But we're gonna have to
Speaker 1: drive up and hang out with you like when the
Speaker 1: when the weather breaks, once winter breaks, come up for
Speaker 1: 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.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 2: Everybody has fun when they come here, and i'd like
Speaker 2: to think, I'd like to think I'm I'm a pretty
Speaker 2: 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 uh 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.
Speaker 3: I mean it was.
Speaker 2: He was prolific for the roly and in terms of
Speaker 2: his academic output. But you know, it's not like he was.
Speaker 2: It's not like he was like angles or something and
Speaker 2: putting out you know, endless, endless manuscripts or something. But
Speaker 2: I see hobbs one On probably was like the most
Speaker 2: like Lenin himself, you know, in terms of his kind
Speaker 2: of political ontology as well as in terms of how
Speaker 2: he characterized historical processes and you know how outcomes they're
Speaker 2: in should be judged, you know, whether they are whether
Speaker 2: whether they advance the revolutionary imperative and in a progressive sense,
Speaker 2: or whether they are self defeating, you know. And so
Speaker 2: Hobsbam he was I think of him too, is he
Speaker 2: was really much kind of like a counterweight to arn
Speaker 2: soin NOLDI they had a lot of similarities, like their
Speaker 2: backgrounds very different. You know, Hobsbaum was a Polish Jew
Speaker 2: whose father was an English subject. But there's there's commonalities
Speaker 2: to their I mean they're very they're very much opposites
Speaker 2: or were opposites, but there's seat of a common frame
Speaker 2: of reference in terms of what they would have viewed
Speaker 2: as authoritative and you know what they considered to be
Speaker 2: sort of the essential canon of political philosophy and Hasbom. Also,
Speaker 2: he got this reputation people haven't really read him, so
Speaker 2: 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: its 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.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: That's why when Hank goldenfines himself as like a social conservative,
Speaker 2: that's not inconsistent, you know. And that's one of the
Speaker 2: reasons when people drop this bullshit calling everything they don't
Speaker 2: like Marxist. It's like that's it's not like Kamala Harris
Speaker 2: isn't a Marxist, you know, Obama is not a Marxist
Speaker 2: like American uh, American style social engineering and all the
Speaker 2: kind of bizarre stuff that goes into that isn't isn't Marxism,
Speaker 2: you know. So I think I think this stuff is
Speaker 2: more timely than a lot of people willing to acknowledge,
Speaker 2: you know, even if even if political theory is not
Speaker 2: really you know, in your proverbial wheelhouse or something. But
Speaker 2: I'm gonna jump around a bit if it's too scatter
Speaker 2: shot or if or or if something is not clear,
Speaker 2: like please stop 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.
Speaker 2: Hosbam uh, He's being interviewed by Michael Ignattu, you know,
Speaker 2: an Ignoctave was very much try to put him in
Speaker 2: the hot seat and asking him loaded questions. And Hosmum
Speaker 2: famously said that had the Soviet Union succeeded in realizing
Speaker 2: a communist society and had it been able to fulfill
Speaker 2: its ambition of you know, facilitating a world historical revolutionary
Speaker 2: imperative hobsam said that the deaths of twenty million people
Speaker 2: or however many perished in Stalin's death camps, would have
Speaker 2: been worth it, so ignoctave, you know, famously like being
Speaker 2: clutching at his pearls verbially speaking, And Hobswom's rebuttal was,
Speaker 2: you know, Marx himself said that no rate movement has
Speaker 2: been born without, you know, the shedding of blood. And
Speaker 2: you know, Haze fought it up by saying, you know,
Speaker 2: self sacrifice isn't the only kind of sacrifice that was
Speaker 2: in the contemplation of Marx or Lenin or anybody else,
Speaker 2: you know, but this wasn't the standard maya culpa or whatever.
Speaker 2: Like a lot of like a lot of kind of
Speaker 2: like normany cohns think, as well as a lot of
Speaker 2: kind of new left types. This this wasn't just Hobbswaen
Speaker 2: being deliberately callous or something. But you got to understand
Speaker 2: the vantage point from where he's speaking, Like historical processes aren't.
Speaker 2: They're 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 planitary 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. Hodamerlaye that like he was seb 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: howdam was born in nineteen seventeen. I mean, that was
Speaker 2: that's very much a twentieth century thing. You know. I
Speaker 2: everatize the people again and again, like nobody thinks this
Speaker 2: way anymore, Like the remaining the remaining self declared atheists
Speaker 2: who have any kind of public profile, like nobody nobody
Speaker 2: takes them seriously anymore, you know. And I mean really
Speaker 2: that kind of thing was dead by you know, by
Speaker 2: the end of the nineteen nineties, but there was some
Speaker 2: there's some peculiar holdouts, and it had something of it
Speaker 2: had something of a media profile, particularly in new media,
Speaker 2: right before it's kind of final death as a culturally
Speaker 2: relevant quantity. But you know, so hot One had a
Speaker 2: fairly cause of pol upbring. You know, he wasn't he
Speaker 2: wasn't some ghetto wise Jew who was sitting around reading
Speaker 2: Marx and Engels and kind of like nursing these grudges
Speaker 2: and stuff. I mean, like, don't get me wrong, I'm
Speaker 2: sure that his ethnos and the you know they kind
Speaker 2: of conceptual biases and intrinsic to that sort of household
Speaker 2: 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, you 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 alone in this. They
Speaker 2: unconditionally supported the Soviet Union, you know, they so they
Speaker 2: 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: were kind of Communists in name only, like they're they're
Speaker 2: the genuine article. They're pro Soviet. They were loyal to
Speaker 2: Stalin subsequently, they were loyal to his memory. But they
Speaker 2: were not uncritical, you know. They they they very much
Speaker 2: viewed the situation as you know, for all of its
Speaker 2: trailties and for all of it's less than ideal characteristics
Speaker 2: and situatedness. You know, the Soviet Union is what we
Speaker 2: have in this world, and this world is all there is,
Speaker 2: you know, So it's suicidally short sighted, you know, and
Speaker 2: and in political terms, to divorce oneself from the ambitions
Speaker 2: and the destinies of of the Soviet system. But and interestingly,
Speaker 2: Hobsbaum he served as a comet engineer during World War Two,
Speaker 2: and he caught some flak at the time and in
Speaker 2: decades subsequent because when the Molotov Ribbon Trot Pact was signed,
Speaker 2: Hobsbaum and and his ideological fellows and comrades, they they'd
Speaker 2: shout down people who are critical of the Third Reich
Speaker 2: because he said, you know, alliance of convenience this may be,
Speaker 2: or you know, whatever however contrived this non aggression pact
Speaker 2: may be. You know, this is uh, this is the
Speaker 2: way things must be, you know, in order for the
Speaker 2: revolution to be consolidated in situ. So anybody opposing the
Speaker 2: Reich or calling for its destruction or calling for Moscow
Speaker 2: to preemptively assault it, which Moscow is absolutely planning on doing.
Speaker 2: But people didn't know this outside of you know, Cadres
Speaker 2: approximate to the reds are Stalin, you know. But he
Speaker 2: considered this to be like a kind of revolutionary tendency,
Speaker 2: which was the orthodox perspective, the rotherdox Marc's perspective. But
Speaker 2: other than that, Hosbaum was very much like a doctrinal
Speaker 2: anti fascist, like not not in Nuremberg terms. But and
Speaker 2: we'll get into this probably in the second episode. Hobsmam's
Speaker 2: take on fascism and national socialism is interesting. It's not
Speaker 2: it's by no means, you know, dismissed, totally dismissive and
Speaker 2: some punitive capacity. He says that the strength of fascism
Speaker 2: was that it mastered technics and technology. It uh, it
Speaker 2: was able to imbue people with like a fervent kind
Speaker 2: of energy to realize its objectives. But he considered it
Speaker 2: to be quote phyllis impoverished, and he didn't really seem
Speaker 2: to understand, uh, he didn't really understand the the kind
Speaker 2: of trajectory of uh, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, you know, to
Speaker 2: national socialism. Now that some people who have like a
Speaker 2: punitive like thunderbag like take on Germany and the Germanis
Speaker 2: and people in the German state. That's not That's not
Speaker 2: what Osbon was. That's not what I'm saying, and that's
Speaker 2: not you know. And Hosbom wasn't prone to that kind
Speaker 2: of moultive thought either, But like a lot of doctair
Speaker 2: and Marxists, he couldn't really see the forest of the trees.
Speaker 2: I don't think he understood the enduring power of continental
Speaker 2: philosophy outside of Marxist a jacent thinkers, you know, and
Speaker 2: informing what what? What was going on in Italy, what
Speaker 2: was going on in Germany, you know, in the inner Warriors.
Speaker 2: I don't think he understood this. I think it was
Speaker 2: one of his blind spots, owing to adherence to you know,
Speaker 2: uh An ideology and Marxism that that that that quite
Speaker 2: literally inundates people with like a missionary zeal that sometimes
Speaker 2: uh these were kind of tunnel vision. But you know
Speaker 2: at uh and again, like I said, I believe like
Speaker 2: the Red Tory uh Moniker, you know, they became kind
Speaker 2: of bandied about in the UK about even a lot
Speaker 2: of these like labor types. You know, back of the
Speaker 2: Labor Party was a real party. You know, there were
Speaker 2: there were these guys who were basically like we consider
Speaker 2: them in America to be like you know, we get
Speaker 2: sided to be like like like right wing type type
Speaker 2: of figures. But for the fact that you know, they uh,
Speaker 2: they were very much uh socialists in there in their orientation.
Speaker 2: You know, they believe in state socialism both as like
Speaker 2: an ethical postulate as well as a a kind of
Speaker 2: inevitability if if if the modern state was to survive,
Speaker 2: you know, with any kind of with any kind of legitimacy.
Speaker 2: So yeah, how long is you're going to like Tory communists?
Speaker 2: Uh not a red Tory, but uh that uh And
Speaker 2: again that seems paradoxical to people, but again it's I
Speaker 2: I refer to you know, Zugonov's Communist Party, you know,
Speaker 2: to Jackson Hinkle. But even you know, in historical capacities,
Speaker 2: this this resonated with people who had a developed understanding
Speaker 2: of political theory, the Marxism of the Frankfurt School, people
Speaker 2: like Oslohmand 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, partake
Speaker 2: of these uh material rewards, or you know, if we
Speaker 2: can if the state becomes a kind of if the
Speaker 2: state becomes kind of kind of ersos like aristote like
Speaker 2: therapeutic mechanism or or or a kind of rabbinic panel
Speaker 2: or or or like a like a or like an
Speaker 2: Aristot's like church, whereby like the declaratory judgments, that's not
Speaker 2: 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 lies 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: you know, an anthropological feature of the historical process, you know,
Speaker 2: whose time arrives and then passes. But they but they
Speaker 2: did view you know, communitarian bonds of whatever they may
Speaker 2: be you know, whether they're like you know, promised on
Speaker 2: culture or sectarian affinity or what have you. You know,
Speaker 2: like in the historical moment in which those things are relevant,
Speaker 2: they consider those things valuable, you know, because at the
Speaker 2: end of the day, to a Marcus Lenin and it's
Speaker 2: like the individual doesn't matter, you know, So whatever facilitates,
Speaker 2: like the dignity of you know, the laboring class or classes,
Speaker 2: you know, is basically like a social good. Okay, so
Speaker 2: somebody like Cosbomavie, you know, seeing a bunch of people
Speaker 2: saying like, uh, you know, marriage or like pair bonding
Speaker 2: isn't important. All that matters is like sterile sex and
Speaker 2: you know the catharsis you get from from engaging that
Speaker 2: kind of stuff, or you know, all that matters is
Speaker 2: you know, people being liberated from obligations to others or
Speaker 2: obligations to history. You know, you know, the highest good
Speaker 2: is being free, like you know, spill out wealth on
Speaker 2: yourself and and cultivate these these kinds of distractions that
Speaker 2: that that facilitate ledgend gratification like he had contempt for that.
Speaker 2: And basically any orthodox Marxist does, you know, they're like again,
Speaker 2: they're not woke at all if you want to race
Speaker 2: and if you want race too, like it's not I'm
Speaker 2: just pointing again again too like Marxists don't think race
Speaker 2: is important, but they're not anti racist, Like there's no
Speaker 2: reason they don't think there's anything wrong with a bunch
Speaker 2: of immigrants like swamped like a formerly Western country, but
Speaker 2: they don't think that should be a priority either, you know.
Speaker 2: And this idea that this idea that they're you know,
Speaker 2: this idea that racial identity needs to be like socially
Speaker 2: engineered out of existence, like they have no like truck
Speaker 2: with it, you know. Like Stalin did try to like, uh,
Speaker 2: what do you called the nationalities problem? That definitely tracks
Speaker 2: you know with like ethnic cleansing under US because the
Speaker 2: civil rights in America. But that's because the quote nationalities
Speaker 2: were causing problems for the party and for the Central Committee,
Speaker 2: you know, and if they weren't causing problems, like it
Speaker 2: wasn't so much a priority.
Speaker 3: 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
Speaker 2: system And Hoswam would have absolutely agreed with that. But
Speaker 2: my 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 there or these people don't respect, you know,
Speaker 2: theherent 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 stuffs 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 overwelming
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 and 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 miuse 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 is in terms you know, and there's some
Speaker 2: of that and a lot of Hosmon's writing, but he
Speaker 2: but again he understands puer economics of such a thing
Speaker 2: that we said to exist better than most people. I mean,
Speaker 2: including uh. I don't think academics are any great shakes,
Speaker 2: but I mean including people who were you know, were
Speaker 2: in you know, his his peer group as a as
Speaker 2: a as a political uh partisan, and as a as
Speaker 2: a political theorist, and you know what can and this
Speaker 2: is also is what explains hosmons like lifelong dedication to communism,
Speaker 2: because it's a total theory of history. You know, it's
Speaker 2: not something you take on for because you're alienated and
Speaker 2: and like want some protest identity. I mean, yeah, I'm
Speaker 2: sure some people do that, but they they're not serious
Speaker 2: people and they're certainly not they're certainly not writing stuff,
Speaker 2: you know, like on a par with the Age Revolution,
Speaker 2: of the Age of Capital and Hosmon've never hid that,
Speaker 2: you know it. But he also one of one of
Speaker 2: Hobswe's collaborators on a on a lot of scholarship and
Speaker 2: a lot of his work product was this guy Eric
Speaker 2: Forearner Foreigner was was known. He became like firebrand who
Speaker 2: was like constantly bashing garbage off and you know, and
Speaker 2: and and issuing these these these punitive declarations about a
Speaker 2: garbage off is is forsaking the revolution. And he's a
Speaker 2: trader the the Sovietism and you know, into and of
Speaker 2: the socialist Communitian nations as well as the UH. It's
Speaker 2: most of the political parties that are you know behind
Speaker 2: you know who exists in in in the capitalist world
Speaker 2: as well. Like Hoswon ever did that. And it's not
Speaker 2: because he was worried about his public image. I mean,
Speaker 2: he would defend Snalin publicly. It's because if you are
Speaker 2: a true Mercus Leninist like he was, like the failure
Speaker 2: of the Soviet Union was ordained by that same process,
Speaker 2: you know, in Hosbom's his unconditional loyalty to the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union contrary its enemies, that didn't entail some like slavish
Speaker 2: like uncritical view of it, you know, when when Kruse
Speaker 2: Chef was assailing Stalin's memory and you know by name,
Speaker 2: attempting to impeach the personality cult. You know, obviously after
Speaker 2: a after nineteen sixty, after after nineteen fifty four, fifty
Speaker 2: four to fifty six there, and you know how Hosmom
Speaker 2: said to his comrades, you know, at cadre level, you know,
Speaker 2: we we we we need to we need to take
Speaker 2: a hard look at at at Stalin's tenure. And you
Speaker 2: know what what what was laudable and what went wrong
Speaker 2: and what you know was in fact a kind of
Speaker 2: revolutionary tendency, because otherwise, you know, the the revolution won't survive.
Speaker 2: And and has I was honest too. Osmon obviously had
Speaker 2: a lot of respect for the Russians of people, but
Speaker 2: he you know, he was always he was a Soviet partisan,
Speaker 2: but with with with reservations, because he was the first
Speaker 2: to make the point, you know, uh, the revolutionary imperative
Speaker 2: didn't spark in the most hyper advanced capitalist country. It
Speaker 2: didn't happen in Germany, it didn't happen in the UK.
Speaker 2: It happened in Russia, where the capitalist class was on
Speaker 2: very tenuous ground. You know, and were they the opponent's
Speaker 2: revolution were really the Tsarist elements. So we're incredibly hard guys.
Speaker 2: They were god hearing people, they were patriots, but they
Speaker 2: were thrown in altered reactionaries. I don't mean that putatively
Speaker 2: at all, but that's what they were. You know, they
Speaker 2: weren't there weren't some capitalist element that you know, could
Speaker 2: draw upon this great power available to them by you know,
Speaker 2: the productive processes that can literally extract wealth out of
Speaker 2: the dirt. You know. That's not uh, that's none of
Speaker 2: the Bolsheviks were facing down and murdering, you know. So
Speaker 2: they they they kind of knocked down a house of
Speaker 2: cards in what became the Soviet Union, you know. And
Speaker 2: Hoswell never lost sight of that. So yeah, on the
Speaker 2: one hand, you know, you must stand with the Soviet Union.
Speaker 2: The Soviet Union is the it is the beating heart
Speaker 2: of the socialist community of nations and of the revolution,
Speaker 2: you know, but that doesn't mean that, you know, one
Speaker 2: must uncritically accept every feature of of the Soviet state.
Speaker 2: And uh, hoswellm was critical of state socialism from day one,
Speaker 2: like he considered it a necessary stage. But he wasn't
Speaker 2: That's what the reasons. I object to people saying, oh,
Speaker 2: he was like the Stalinist, like a true Stalinist was
Speaker 2: uh was or is uh you know somebody who looks
Speaker 2: at the Soviet state as like the zenith of stay
Speaker 2: craft and then and and they view that as like
Speaker 2: a positive thing, you know, basically uh, you know, based
Speaker 2: basically uh basically this this this, this mighty empire of
Speaker 2: uh you know that like leaves the world in in
Speaker 2: in in terms of how like you know, the industrial
Speaker 2: proletariat is valued. You know, it's a superpower because of
Speaker 2: its military might and it's mastery of technics, including nuclear
Speaker 2: weapons and the ability to deploy into orbital space and
Speaker 2: things like that. You know, like these and these guys
Speaker 2: do exist, you know, I mean like that is now
Speaker 2: like Hosman was not at all one of those guys. Okay,
Speaker 2: to be clear, let me see, I'm in my outline,
Speaker 2: like I'm not uh, I'm not an F A G,
Speaker 2: G O T who like you know, I gotta stick
Speaker 2: to the outline. But I but it doesn't like a
Speaker 2: like a conceptual map, so I know where we're at.
Speaker 2: They don't want to Yeah, let's uh hoss problem. Well,
Speaker 2: I want to get this biographical sort of info out
Speaker 2: of the way to the lay foundation. We'll get into
Speaker 2: the substance of Hobsbam's you know, intellectual canon in episode two.
Speaker 2: But I want to I want to get and we
Speaker 2: need to get into the dual Revolution, which is a
Speaker 2: it's it's a it's a political theoretical and a sociological
Speaker 2: postulating concept that was coined, uh that quite by Hosbam
Speaker 2: and now in scholarship on the French Revolution. It's it's
Speaker 2: just kind of taken, it's just kind of accepted. It's
Speaker 2: accepted as like an essential aspect of of that body
Speaker 2: of scholarship. But if I, but if I, that's going
Speaker 2: to take an hour to dive into. So let's let's
Speaker 2: hold off on that. And I think we're coming on
Speaker 2: about an hour anyway, So yeah, I think this would
Speaker 2: be a natural stopping point if that's acceptable.
Speaker 1: Perfect, All right, do plugs and we'll talk about the
Speaker 1: 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 Eliotti 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
Speaker 2: seven and I'm there just like check the pinned uh
Speaker 2: like post I you can find like merge that like
Speaker 2: my dear friend here Kreig produces you can find a
Speaker 2: links my Instagram, my t gram, the my website, like
Speaker 2: all kinds of stuff. So just uh and if you
Speaker 2: if you include some of this stuff in the description, man,
Speaker 2: that would be a great help.
Speaker 3: I got it all ready to go.
Speaker 1: I just copy and paste from the last episode and
Speaker 1: uh put it right over so your merch and uh
Speaker 1: links to the Gum Roads. So yep, that's it until
Speaker 1: the next time. 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.
Speaker 2: Thanks for hosting me.
Speaker 1: Of course. So what are we going to look into
Speaker 1: today when it comes 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 power,
Speaker 2: 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. But 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.
Speaker 3: 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 Leninist 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
Speaker 2: mean they believe that too, but they're kind of they're
Speaker 2: they're kind of like a dialectical offshoot of what was
Speaker 2: the Marcus Lennon's perspective. I think that they uh, I
Speaker 2: think they're big on guys like Emmanuel Wallerstein and like
Speaker 2: they 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
Speaker 2: know not, I'm not like moralizing here saying like and
Speaker 2: this is why the communists are a bunch of slavery beast.
Speaker 2: I think that their worldview, in addition to being kind
Speaker 2: of laughably up to and it's there. Yeah, I I
Speaker 2: believe it's like highly corrupt morally. But that's that's not
Speaker 2: at base. It's not really why people like me like
Speaker 2: object to their perspective, you know. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: you know, I uh, for some reason, the kinds of
Speaker 2: people people looks like chompsky all the time. And don't
Speaker 2: get me wrong. Like I think Chomsky wrote some pretty
Speaker 2: good stuff on linguistics and he he he uh, he'd
Speaker 2: be pretty handily treated people like Fuco who considered to
Speaker 2: be kind of unserious degenerates. But I mean Chompsky, Chomsky's
Speaker 2: basically like a moralizer and a polemicist, and I don't
Speaker 2: think he's got to really develop view of political theory.
Speaker 2: But I mean, I mean guys on the right, or
Speaker 2: at least guys kind of adjacent they don't have data,
Speaker 2: say Chomsky, but then they act like I'm some weirdo
Speaker 2: where like it's being like dev and I said, hobbsbamb
Speaker 2: you know, like Howsong was a serious historian man like
Speaker 2: unlike Chomsky, he like drops polemic about like you know,
Speaker 2: America is doing mean things, but the electonomy wrong, like
Speaker 2: America is there to be savage. But the day Chompsky,
Speaker 2: you know, he's he comes off like some hand ringing
Speaker 2: old woman. And I don't, I don't. I don't think
Speaker 2: he's a real political theorist, you know, like it's I
Speaker 2: don't it's not just me kind of guarding my own
Speaker 2: proverbial wheelhouse. I you know, at the level of deep analysis,
Speaker 2: like Nolt and Hosbom and like economy, political economs like
Speaker 2: Joseph Schumpeter, the suits of insights they were capable of,
Speaker 2: like in the moment, most people can't do that, you know.
Speaker 2: And I meet a lot of guys whoever this idea
Speaker 2: that you know, oh, you're like a mathematician or like
Speaker 2: you sell insurance or like you're, you know, some kind
Speaker 2: of molecular biologists. But oh, anybody you can have a
Speaker 2: take on putical theory. It's like, what the fuck are
Speaker 2: you talking about?
Speaker 3: 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 war 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 clarify,
Speaker 2: because I don't want people jumping over my shit. We're
Speaker 2: not talking about believing in one's knows. We're not talking
Speaker 2: about caring about your race. We're not talking about any
Speaker 2: of that. We're talking about this kind of like progressive
Speaker 2: modernist like political modality, like organizing modality called nationalism, which
Speaker 2: is the base of liberal idea. And it basically arbitrarily says,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of the classical view of sovereignty, whether
Speaker 2: it invests in like a royal dynasty, or whether it
Speaker 2: invests in you know, you know, men who are kind
Speaker 2: of like you know, for all parate parsons, an elected
Speaker 2: 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. They
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: Hobsbam was very big on what he called the Dual Revolution.
Speaker 2: I mean, my fame 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. How Slump'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 charastrotic 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
Speaker 2: that oh, Churchill wasn't crazy, and Churchill wasn't totally corrupted,
Speaker 2: you know, by alien interests. He was just trying to
Speaker 2: maintain the balance of power and no European power can
Speaker 2: become too strong. That's not at all what he was doing.
Speaker 2: And that was obsolete anyway by the twentieth century. That
Speaker 2: got shot to pieces in nineteen fourteen, and nobody thought
Speaker 2: that way anymore, okay. And that's why the reasons why
Speaker 2: it was apocalyptic thinking came about in the twentieth century
Speaker 2: because what had been the return to like rationalist normalcy
Speaker 2: that died in the trenches along with millions of guys
Speaker 2: who got blown to bits. It died like buried beneath
Speaker 2: like the mud and shit and all of their body parts.
Speaker 2: Nobody thought that way, and that's not what Churchill was doing.
Speaker 2: And even if it was, that's that that be a
Speaker 2: ridiculous mission to take on in nineteen thirty nine. It
Speaker 2: would make no sense. But that's the uh, that's the
Speaker 2: source of this kind of like reactionary stance. And Hoswam
Speaker 2: calls it reactionary equals the Matrinage perspective reactionary because it's
Speaker 2: not truly conservative. It's literally a reaction. It's saying, how
Speaker 2: do we deal with future shock? How do we deal
Speaker 2: with the disruption of this kind of like rational balancing
Speaker 2: of furies? How do we restore something manageable and something
Speaker 2: that is primarily governed by reason? You know, here is
Speaker 2: how we do it. We do it by like managing power,
Speaker 2: you know, like it's some kind of like it like
Speaker 2: it's some kind of quantity of energy you know that
Speaker 2: can be like redirected and or kind of purpose towards
Speaker 2: this or you know, almost like an engineering problem. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's that's what is meant by reactionary, because it wasn't nobody,
Speaker 2: not Metterniche, not the people in the Congress at Vienna,
Speaker 2: not not you know, not the people who later opposed
Speaker 2: the eighteen forty eight revolutions. Nobody was saying, we're gonna
Speaker 2: go back to having you know, like a king holds
Speaker 2: absolute sovereignty. Nobody was saying, we're gonna go back to
Speaker 2: you know, the pope being the true like Emperor of
Speaker 2: Europe is God's emissary. Nobody was saying that. It wasn't
Speaker 2: even they would have like scoffed at that prospect, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't even within their contemplation.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It was a reaction, okay, and the fact that it
Speaker 2: had some trappings of what came before that really had
Speaker 2: more to do with an interest in stability moving forward
Speaker 2: and like Enlightenment ideology, conceptual biases than it did with
Speaker 2: any like, oh, we gotta guard tradition and we got
Speaker 2: to guard like the organic basis of national life or
Speaker 2: so this is really important. Okay. This is one of
Speaker 2: the reasons I cite Hosba because conservative are not traditionalists.
Speaker 2: They're not trying to like preserve like the integrity of
Speaker 2: your race, if that's important to you or whatever. They're
Speaker 2: not trying to that. They're not they're not trying to
Speaker 2: undo modernity. They're not trying to I mean, I'm not
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: But you know, the degree and.
Speaker 2: The degree to which suddenly production got taken out of
Speaker 2: like a communitarian shop or like your household, to go
Speaker 2: from being like I'm a farmer and you know, I'm
Speaker 2: a subsistence farmer, but I have enough surplus to trade
Speaker 2: with other farmers. Or going from being like a blacksmith
Speaker 2: where you're part of some collective with like three other
Speaker 2: guys and you like make stuff people need, getting ripped
Speaker 2: out of that and going to work in a factory
Speaker 2: where you're literally pulling a lever or like manhandling some
Speaker 2: dangerous machine for ten hours a day. That's probably that's
Speaker 2: about the most disrupted thing that's ever happened to people
Speaker 2: at scale, you know. And it's and on top of
Speaker 2: that too, the introduction of money at scale, like anything,
Speaker 2: all all indicators of wealth that for forty thousand years
Speaker 2: quite literally like people were habituated to no no, no,
Speaker 2: no no. Now you get a paper certificate and it's
Speaker 2: fungible and you can find somebody who like has stuff
Speaker 2: you need, they'll accept that this is this is insane.
Speaker 2: This is totally insane, you know. And it took decades
Speaker 2: for people to adapt to that, you know. And it
Speaker 2: really wasn't until people born in the nineteen twenties and
Speaker 2: thirties were totally habituated to that. But it took that long,
Speaker 2: you know. So the degree to which this disrupted everything
Speaker 2: that everybody had taken for granted, and you know, just
Speaker 2: created unmanageable conditions. You know, I mean think about too,
Speaker 2: like trying to manage economic imperatives. I'm not even talking
Speaker 2: about a planned economy. I'm saying just being able to
Speaker 2: balance the proverbial like a Ledger books, there's a factory
Speaker 2: that employs twenty thousand people. I'm using a pencil and
Speaker 2: paper and an advocates to try and figure out, like
Speaker 2: what our outlays are, like what we need to produce
Speaker 2: to be profitable, like what we need, how much we
Speaker 2: need to earn to like stay afloat, like what debts
Speaker 2: we owe to who? At some point that's going to
Speaker 2: collapse on itself and people are gonna starve. And then
Speaker 2: happened over and over and over again, and most punctuatedly,
Speaker 2: it happened in a great depression. And it wasn't because
Speaker 2: of like bankers or whatever like von Meesian's think. It
Speaker 2: was because of what I just said. That could never
Speaker 2: happen now because it's been rubberized, because data management now
Speaker 2: it's as simple as turning on a machine. Now that's
Speaker 2: an incredibly corrupt people make half with that wealth is
Speaker 2: wiped out owing to malfeasans in greed. But there's not
Speaker 2: gonna be like the stock market is not going to
Speaker 2: plummet five thousand points because of some like air because
Speaker 2: of like some accounting error at scale, or because of
Speaker 2: like a lack of situational awareness that has like a
Speaker 2: catastrophic impact that could never happen again. Okay, so when
Speaker 2: people talk about that, that's stupid. But this was like
Speaker 2: an everyday reality really from like the close of the
Speaker 2: eighteenth century until like like really until like the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. It's uh so basically people
Speaker 2: were like costing on the precipice of some kind of
Speaker 2: like disaster, you know. And that's why people became communists,
Speaker 2: like the man in the street, and that's why guys
Speaker 2: like Ernst Tollman, who's kind of the consummate like like
Speaker 2: uh like aryan German like Burger type, Like that's why
Speaker 2: though those guys like fact like like like factory floridais
Speaker 2: being communists like communist I theology and it's it's foundation
Speaker 2: and like a Jewish revolutionary spirit or like sectarian antipathy
Speaker 2: or like ethnosectarian hostility, like yes, that at at scale
Speaker 2: of at dialectical scale and process, like yes, that is
Speaker 2: where it comes from. But where the rubber meets to
Speaker 2: the road. What I just said is why it became this.
Speaker 2: There's there's animating imperative that swept up millions and millions
Speaker 2: of people. Like that's why. You know, now it's a
Speaker 2: bit different. There's other reasons why. I mean, it would
Speaker 2: never become a mass movement again, you know, even though
Speaker 2: when I say that like Marxist Leninism or like it's
Speaker 2: it's dialectically altered variant. When I say that it like
Speaker 2: enjoyed something of resurgence, I mean like in terms of
Speaker 2: like fringe elements, okay, and there's like a small, very
Speaker 2: small and absolute terms like vanguard of those guys or
Speaker 2: somewhat impressive and kind of had their shit together and
Speaker 2: moving forward like this century. They were probably able to
Speaker 2: carve out some semi sovereign space as locally, but were
Speaker 2: small and scale. But that's what I mean. I don't
Speaker 2: mean that like, oh, this is resurgent and there'd be
Speaker 2: like some sort of highly scaled variant of this again.
Speaker 2: But one second, but Hosbo. I'm also like moving on
Speaker 2: a bit. You know, all these things this basic a storicism.
Speaker 2: This is kind of what this is kind of what
Speaker 2: separated Hoswoon from the schismatics, Like initially, okay, because there
Speaker 2: were always schismatics. I mean, the sixty eight ers were
Speaker 2: basically the ideological descendants of Trotsky, even if a lot
Speaker 2: of them were just kind of bandwagoning, I didn't realize
Speaker 2: that's what they were, you know, at the cadre level
Speaker 2: of of the leadership element. That's what they were about,
Speaker 2: you know. And uh, this is important, and you Hosbom
Speaker 2: his later his later output especially, and you know, after
Speaker 2: people are about forty or fifty, they don't like really
Speaker 2: radically change their viewpoint. That's what I mean in a
Speaker 2: moment in condext But Hosbom uh his later output in
Speaker 2: like especially in the nineteen nineties, it dealt a lot
Speaker 2: with what he perceived is like cultural decadence, like the
Speaker 2: kind of corruption of social democracy, the intellectual and moral
Speaker 2: poverty of the new left. You know, the ability of
Speaker 2: capitalism as he perceived it, to resist historical processes and
Speaker 2: endoor beyond. In his estimation, it's what should have been,
Speaker 2: it's kind of viable. It's sort of viable life as
Speaker 2: a conceptual model. So people kind of said, like, oh,
Speaker 2: Haw's w again, the second bittered old guy after the
Speaker 2: Cold War. It'saying, No, I don't. I don't believe that
Speaker 2: he always thought this, But it would have been pointless
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: They're not.
Speaker 2: That was just was not even within their contemplation. But
Speaker 2: in uh, in the early nineties, Hosbon dropped a book
Speaker 2: that's I think this might have been as I should
Speaker 2: know this, I think this was his last. He wrote
Speaker 2: essays something only, but I think this is his last,
Speaker 2: like like published book. It was called The Age of Extremes,
Speaker 2: The Short Century, The Short Century nineteen fourteen to nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety one identify at the end of the Short Century
Speaker 2: as nineteen eighty nine. Hobbs what nineteen ninety one with
Speaker 2: the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, So over clarity,
Speaker 2: that's what he meant. But he kind of on popular
Speaker 2: culture a lot, you know, and he said, look, he's
Speaker 2: like in the sixties popular culture totally changed. He was
Speaker 2: like before that. He's like the kind of pop culture icons,
Speaker 2: whether they were talking about like pet Boone, or they
Speaker 2: were talking about John Wayne, or whether they were talking
Speaker 2: about somebody like even even somebody like Steve McQueen or
Speaker 2: or some of these guys. You know, they they might
Speaker 2: have represented kind of adalized vision of Americana, but he's
Speaker 2: like just and he's and those very deliberate and there's
Speaker 2: something very corporate about that. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: these kinds of figures and these motifs, they basically mirrored
Speaker 2: the way that like people had always kind of thought,
Speaker 2: you know, like simple minds that maybe to some people.
Speaker 2: You know, in the nineteen sixties, the kind of like
Speaker 2: rock star identity, which don't get me wrong, had always
Speaker 2: you know, uh, there is a lot of like old
Speaker 2: rock and blues guys would always talk about selling your
Speaker 2: soul to the devil because guys in that life did
Speaker 2: die young and they ended up and totally fucked up circumstances.
Speaker 2: But kind of like the mass murdering of this to
Speaker 2: like Bougie's and like and Lanes. You know, he had
Speaker 2: tonified like Janis Joppelin, Brian Jones, Bob Marley, you know,
Speaker 2: and all and all this kind of hippie garbage. You know,
Speaker 2: He's like, Okay, these people weren't just viewed as pop
Speaker 2: culture figures. Like people decided these these people stood in
Speaker 2: for like literal cultural icon. You know. Thus you have
Speaker 2: like the kind of like stereotypical like boomer idiot or
Speaker 2: things like the Beatles are like uttering like like sacred
Speaker 2: truths or something. You know, like and this idea that
Speaker 2: being old is bad. You know, life is horrible after
Speaker 2: you're like twenty eight or thirty. You know, uh, there's
Speaker 2: something glorious about not getting beyond that stage and like
Speaker 2: dying from partying, you know, Cosmon view was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: first of all, this is a way of kind of
Speaker 2: like dumbing people down, and it's it's a way of
Speaker 2: kind of like capitalism artificially sustaining itself by selling this
Speaker 2: kind of like lifestyle image that's pretending to be radical
Speaker 2: or pretending to be like at odds of what came before,
Speaker 2: and it is, but not in you know, the post
Speaker 2: seventeen eighty nine sense.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: He said that like this basically, this kind of passive
Speaker 2: nihilism turns any turns everybody you know, basically into sort
Speaker 2: of like a comatose like consumer, you know, and it's
Speaker 2: 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 you're not ruled by your hormones, and I don't
Speaker 2: I don't have content for young people, and I don't
Speaker 2: think Osmon did either. But he's saying this kind of
Speaker 2: caricature a youth that was presented, you know, by like
Speaker 2: capitalist media. In his estimation. You know, he's like, basically,
Speaker 2: you're saying that anyone who has lived long enough, they're
Speaker 2: gonna develop like an evolved in view of what of
Speaker 2: the system we live under and scale they're bad or
Speaker 2: they're like the police, or they're trying to tell you
Speaker 2: to do things you don't want to do. So it's
Speaker 2: kind of just like deliberate dumbing down under auspices of rebellion.
Speaker 2: And that's insightful because that really is true. And this
Speaker 2: kind of weird preaching. You know, he's like Rocketbelly guys
Speaker 2: like Eddie Cochrane, like Elvis, like Buddy Holly, like uh
Speaker 2: you know, like like like like Richie Valens. These guys
Speaker 2: weren't trying to sell people on some lifestyle. You know,
Speaker 2: they were like poor. They were poor redneck guys in
Speaker 2: balance case, you know, you're poor, like East La Spanish guys,
Speaker 2: you know, and there was a real like energy there.
Speaker 2: They had kind of a dark side that was exemplified
Speaker 2: by people like stark Weather, I mean unfortunately, but these
Speaker 2: guys were never going out like preaching some weird sociology
Speaker 2: of people that wouldn't even occurred to them because that's
Speaker 2: not what musicians do. Like the fact that this became
Speaker 2: part of the package in Hobswam's view, that was totally ideological.
Speaker 2: You know, that was not some accident that wasn't just
Speaker 2: people nitting with the zeitgeist. It wasn't just some kind
Speaker 2: of weird feedback loop owing to sort of like the
Speaker 2: integration and narratives because of TV. No, this was very deliberate,
Speaker 2: you know, And so in his view, in his view,
Speaker 2: like basically American pop culture from about nineteen sixty four
Speaker 2: sixty five to like the then president, which was like
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety three when he wrote this, he's like, this
Speaker 2: is basically capitalist propaganda, you know, and you obviously in
Speaker 2: our view it's social engineering, and hobbs on Baby pictually
Speaker 2: care about that on its own terms. But again he
Speaker 2: opposed that stuff because he's like, this is basically trying
Speaker 2: to get you drunk on sex or taking drugs or
Speaker 2: like cloud chasing, so that you basically never mature in
Speaker 2: like a rational adult and you never contemplate like why
Speaker 2: you're in the condition you're in, and you never contemplate
Speaker 2: like why there's not like any economic justice in his view,
Speaker 2: you know, and again it's these conclusions really have nothing
Speaker 2: to do with our perspective. But the process he describes
Speaker 2: and what these what this sort of like pop cultural
Speaker 2: uh product represents, Like he is right about that or
Speaker 2: he wasn't right about that, you know, and he and
Speaker 2: he said this stuff had like real he said, he
Speaker 2: said that the true like he said that was truly
Speaker 2: different about this, this sort of this sort of propaganda's
Speaker 2: pop culture is threefold. You know, He's like, first, he's like,
Speaker 2: youth was always seen, even even in cultures that like
Speaker 2: revered youth are you're talking about like classical Greece or
Speaker 2: the Third Reich or even like going Soviet Union, it
Speaker 2: was still views like a preparatory stage for adulthood in
Speaker 2: some sense. As you know, youth is important. The youth
Speaker 2: are vigorous. We need them to protect us, to fight
Speaker 2: our wars, to you know, develop passionate ideas that they
Speaker 2: can later build upon and innovate. But you know, this
Speaker 2: is important because it's a critical stage for it's the
Speaker 2: final phase of full human development that that all was
Speaker 2: like done away with. It's like, no, youth is some
Speaker 2: end in itself being old as shit, you know, being
Speaker 2: a young being a teenager or a young person, that
Speaker 2: is the zenith of life, and your life is miserable
Speaker 2: after that. So you've got to try and hang on
Speaker 2: to those aspects as much as you can, whether it's
Speaker 2: through taking drugs or like you know, including hormones. Whether
Speaker 2: it's like refusing to get married so you can like
Speaker 2: 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 plant 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: colog 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
Speaker 2: uh you know, like some of these movies that like
Speaker 2: pop 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 Covenist 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 ideology is 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 terms,
Speaker 2: like viral, but he did. And in Hobswong's view, that's
Speaker 2: what keeps capitalism alive because it's not like it's not
Speaker 2: like just like great outcomes from people like yeah, if
Speaker 2: you're in America, you're basically rubberized. If you're like if
Speaker 2: 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 five
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 hostled, uh,
Speaker 2: like what was consideredly a cabalist perspective. He but Hoswaon
Speaker 2: was a genuine you know again it's I this is
Speaker 2: not an absolute signifier that incapsulate twenty was. But he
Speaker 2: was like a Stalinist of its height, and very few
Speaker 2: of those guys were like real sociologists. He was Christopher
Speaker 2: Lash ironically hime in a lot of the conclusions hoswa did,
Speaker 2: and his final book it was called Progress That true
Speaker 2: only heaven it' dropped in like nineteen ninety four, so
Speaker 2: over last died now. Of course, Lash had been some
Speaker 2: kind of peculiar freto Marxist in his younger days, like
Speaker 2: the kind of guy who'd been on a gism drawn mark.
Speaker 2: He'd been very much influenced by marcusa in that school
Speaker 2: I thought. And then Lash gradually became like one more
Speaker 2: kind of conservative in his thought, like literally conservative. So
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if you really count. So Hoswem kind
Speaker 2: of stands not quite alone, but it's a it was
Speaker 2: a very small fraternity of revolutionary Marxist Leninists who who had,
Speaker 2: you know, like a sociologist that that was both methodologically
Speaker 2: as well as intellectually rigorous in terms of you know,
Speaker 2: in terms of output. So that's another reason why UH
Speaker 2: people should take him seriously if I haven't convinced the
Speaker 2: subs and other people who like what we do. Hosbon
Speaker 2: did say, though, with a big shortcoming of of capitalism
Speaker 2: or the capitalist perspective is He says that owing to
Speaker 2: this inherently conservative tendency. Now again we're talking about conservatism
Speaker 2: and post seventeen eighty nine cents. We're not talking about
Speaker 2: belief and tradition. We're not talking about you know, reverence
Speaker 2: for for for customs. We're not talking about people want
Speaker 2: to preserve old ways or preserve Harriot. We're not talking
Speaker 2: to that at all. We're talking about ideological conservatism, which
Speaker 2: again is U is a product of enlightenment liberalism one
Speaker 2: hundred percent. Ozom says that the thing that these that
Speaker 2: these capitalists ideologues are really, really, really bad at is
Speaker 2: predicting the future, not putting the future like a gypsy
Speaker 2: of the crystal ball, but kind of diagnosing the trajectory
Speaker 2: of politics and UH an economic phenomenon you know, that's
Speaker 2: why he said that, Like he said that, like people
Speaker 2: like Fukiyama are laughable, you know what they're like theories
Speaker 2: of everything, like, oh, you know they'll be they'll be
Speaker 2: 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 Hobzhm'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
Speaker 2: Clintonian and it's superficial, supervisionally moronic, you know, uh essence,
Speaker 2: you know. So like that's why Hobswom says that like capitalism,
Speaker 2: it's got a permanent alibi for its failures because it
Speaker 2: creates this climate. It basically just this dumb down climate
Speaker 2: of cloud chasers and people thirsty and desperate for youth
Speaker 2: and the kind of pleasures that supposedly attend youth. And
Speaker 2: they're told that the experts. And you're always supposed to
Speaker 2: trust experts, you know, like no Ball's Wall says, we
Speaker 2: trust doctors. You're always supposed to trust the experts, whether
Speaker 2: they're an economists, whether they're you know, some Pentagon whiz kid.
Speaker 2: I'm beating myself with that phraseology, I realize, or whether
Speaker 2: they're you know, some medical doctor like doctor Fauci. And
Speaker 2: the experts always say, you know something in the same
Speaker 2: thing as what Coolidge said, there's just nothing but progress ahead.
Speaker 2: There's nothing press, spirity, aad so oh, when there's natural
Speaker 2: when there's natural hiccups so to speak, you know, in markets,
Speaker 2: or when there's problems, or when a combination of malfeasance
Speaker 2: and badly coded inputs leads to something like a two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight crisis where billions of dollars are wiped out, like, oh,
Speaker 2: the alibi the capitalists and who in a hoplit view
Speaker 2: is like, oh, this was an unforeseen crisis, almost like
Speaker 2: a terrorist attack, you know, but darn it, like we
Speaker 2: got the gumption to get through it. And these things
Speaker 2: just can't be predicted, you know. It's a hosba on
Speaker 2: this nonsense. This is absolutely foreseeable, you know, Like, granted,
Speaker 2: there's always something of a there's always something of a
Speaker 2: mystics belief in augury to Marxist lenin Is, it's like
Speaker 2: dressed up as like, oh, no, we're just diagnosing, you know,
Speaker 2: through a scientific method, the world historical process. But they
Speaker 2: do they are right when they say, like, no, history
Speaker 2: does not peat itself. That's something morons say. But there
Speaker 2: are patterns too advanced, particularly crises of like an economic
Speaker 2: or military nature, and this idea like we're just being
Speaker 2: blindsided because this this can't be predicted, you know. Like
Speaker 2: that he's right about that, and that that is the
Speaker 2: ongoing alibi of capitalism. Again, this is his phraseology he
Speaker 2: calls capitalism.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 2: I'm want to take part three in it's some of
Speaker 2: a different direction, and I think we're coming up in
Speaker 2: the hour, so I'm gonna cease if that's okay, because
Speaker 2: if I, if I start in on what I want
Speaker 2: to start in on it, we're just gonna have to
Speaker 2: abrogate it. 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.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Anyboddy, I want to welcome everyone back to the
Speaker 1: Pekanana Show. Thomas seven seven seven is back. And do
Speaker 1: you think this will be the last Hobbs Bomb episode
Speaker 1: or do 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 3: Mean, let's do it that way, and then it gives
Speaker 3: us 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 Hobsball. 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. Housbun was very much he very much proposed
Speaker 2: the theory of what's now called the general crisis. Okay,
Speaker 2: what 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 like to
Speaker 2: take up to take up arms for pay for you know,
Speaker 2: the Union or the Confederacy, because there just wasn't there
Speaker 2: wasn't a lot going on, you know, if you were
Speaker 2: if war fighting was your hustle, you know, either because
Speaker 2: that's just what you like to do, you know, you
Speaker 2: were an action junkie, or like that's how you made
Speaker 2: a living. Like well, you've kind of had to look
Speaker 2: 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 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 much something an Enlightenment phenomenon. Like again
Speaker 2: we say like nationalism, We're not talking about some return
Speaker 2: to sort of like tradition or or some kind adamistic tribalism.
Speaker 2: We're saying that like kind of the court in these
Speaker 2: country is consolidated. And it's like, okay, look, you know,
Speaker 2: like within these sovereign parameters, like we are the only
Speaker 2: sovereign 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
Speaker 2: these like you know, otherwise progressive states that its centralized,
Speaker 2: you know, despite that they were they were most of
Speaker 2: them were like run by absolute monarchs, or they were
Speaker 2: run by a court that was essentially staffed by you know,
Speaker 2: like an upper house of landed aristocrats. Okay, and obviously,
Speaker 2: you know, clergy people still had a lot of cloud
Speaker 2: you know, the Roman Church couldn't assert itself in an
Speaker 2: absolute way over sovereign governments anymore, but it still had
Speaker 2: great power. So there's this weird disconnects. On the one hand,
Speaker 2: like structurally, you had the structure of the modern state
Speaker 2: like as we know it today, but it was populated
Speaker 2: basically by these aristocrats and and clerical types and people
Speaker 2: who derived their mandate from sort of traditional modalities that
Speaker 2: were ceasing to exist. Okay, I want to Hosbal's 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, but 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
Speaker 2: wide like that was over with. But the but the
Speaker 2: newly consolidated like German state like it was cash poor,
Speaker 2: you know. And then he had the French, who, like
Speaker 2: I said, they'd been kind of like knocked off of
Speaker 2: their pedestal, you know, by the Franco Prussian War and
Speaker 2: never really recovered, you know, frankly from like Waterloo and stuff.
Speaker 3: 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 defe 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 was the really sympathetic figure in the Great War,
Speaker 2: and that that perfect exemplifies like what Howl was talking about,
Speaker 2: the kind of the dynamic between like a wholeveg the
Speaker 2: counselor 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
Speaker 2: how I mean, yeah, people definitely find ways to profit
Speaker 2: from war, but you can profit from literally anything, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's that doesn't tell us anything, you know,
Speaker 2: but that's this is fundamentally important. And this not not
Speaker 2: just the catach to feel the Great War and you
Speaker 2: know the fact that it kind of deformed the entire generation,
Speaker 2: I mean and put an entire generation in the grave
Speaker 2: as well. But it these these these tensions and these uncertainties,
Speaker 2: this is what uh, this is what facility. This is
Speaker 2: what 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 that.
Speaker 3: Go into that.
Speaker 2: But the kind of key takeaway is, uh, you know
Speaker 2: what Osbon called the age of capitalism like facilitated this
Speaker 2: and like that's he actually he wrote an essay that
Speaker 2: became a book called The Age of capital teen forty
Speaker 2: eight to eighteen seventy five, and he makes the point
Speaker 2: the word capitalism it first entered like the let the
Speaker 2: academic lexicon in the eighteen sixties, you know, from eighteen
Speaker 2: forty eight, like after the revolutions in Europe were quashed
Speaker 2: in both Europe and America, there was this there's this
Speaker 2: kind of like massive economic boom okay. And that's one
Speaker 2: of the things that meant that there wasn't another like
Speaker 2: eighteen forty eight like revolutionary sentiment, because like there's a
Speaker 2: lot of wealth being produced, you know. But again there
Speaker 2: was these kinds of like obsolete social structures that were
Speaker 2: sort of organizing people's lives. Nonetheless, yet these societies were
Speaker 2: flooded with capital but it was it wasn't. It was
Speaker 2: it was much like funnel into specific channels, you know,
Speaker 2: not by conspiracy of design or something. But uh, there
Speaker 2: just was not like a free like like individual people
Speaker 2: and not a lot of person power, and this created
Speaker 2: like weird disparities, you know, like there wasn't there's a
Speaker 2: lot of like if you're if you're a neoliberal economic economist,
Speaker 2: you look at this as like basic marketing efficiencies. You know,
Speaker 2: this is why like banking is so important to like
Speaker 2: the monitorist view. And then they're right about that. You know,
Speaker 2: the the availability of capital and you know, uh competence
Speaker 2: and financial instruments like that. That's that's the regulatory mechanism
Speaker 2: that's essential. But beyond that, you basically need like capital
Speaker 2: flow like where it's going to be most efficiently allocated
Speaker 2: in order to produce produce wealth. And that that wasn't
Speaker 2: really happening, despite the fact that you had you know,
Speaker 2: you had kind of at the top and also kind
Speaker 2: of like unevenly distributed like sort of throughout the sociological spectrum.
Speaker 2: You know, you had some like some incredible innovations that
Speaker 2: were like aldering people's lives, and there was like government
Speaker 2: could simply do things that it couldn't before. I mean,
Speaker 2: like lot World War One, Like that's totally insane. Like
Speaker 2: the ability to mobilize like five million men, arm them,
Speaker 2: equip them, feed them, then like turn them loose to
Speaker 2: like assault your ops like that that would be like
Speaker 2: unthinkable even in like the Napoleonic era, you know. And
Speaker 2: it's not just modern command and control. It was like transportation,
Speaker 2: it was you know, it was more efficient fuel sources.
Speaker 2: It was like more efficient killing technology, and it was
Speaker 2: like it was all these things. But the uh, something
Speaker 2: else that's important too, is Hoblom said. And he was
Speaker 2: writing this in the fifties. See first rod As I say,
Speaker 2: like in the fifties, but this age of capital this
Speaker 2: was like the first This was like the NACA early
Speaker 2: stage of global globalization. Okay, because if you were a
Speaker 2: major capitalist power, you know, and again I involved in
Speaker 2: our capitalists and within the terms Hoswam doesn't, I don't
Speaker 2: use those kinds of terms, but you know, you the
Speaker 2: British Empire held equity basically at every continent, you know,
Speaker 2: and America was not yet a superpower, but you'd find
Speaker 2: American goods basically all over the world, okay, And there
Speaker 2: wasn't a there wasn't a unified banking structure, but lending
Speaker 2: across national frontiers at scale, with governments guaranteeing financial instruments
Speaker 2: that started blowing up, you know, and that that would
Speaker 2: have been unthinkable before. You know, in a lot of
Speaker 2: countries it was literally illegal for uh, national banks to
Speaker 2: you know, to trade across the national frontiers or to
Speaker 2: or to issue financial instruments in foreign markets. But a
Speaker 2: lot of countries simply wouldn't deal in your currency, like
Speaker 2: even if it was even even if it was viewed
Speaker 2: as you know, a desirable currency and speculators would invest
Speaker 2: in it. Oh and and and purising foreign currencies at
Speaker 2: this time was also largely illegal. It was quote unquote
Speaker 2: currency speculation. It was like literally a crime, which is crazy,
Speaker 2: but that that that that was the norm, you know.
Speaker 3: But this uh.
Speaker 2: But because of that, like in the early stages of
Speaker 2: any economic system or any paradigm, not system, but like paradigm,
Speaker 2: there's gonna be like really really uneven growth, okay, and
Speaker 2: that's gonna lead to certain disparities. I'm not talking like
Speaker 2: social justice disparities. I mean like between enterprises, a lot
Speaker 2: of capital is being created, but a lot is being
Speaker 2: wiped out, like we just mentioned across national frontiers. This
Speaker 2: kind of development is uneven. But also certain industries develop
Speaker 2: a kind of outside cloud. Okay, and not the arms
Speaker 2: industry per se, but the the kind of a terrestrial
Speaker 2: manufacturing enterprises that facilitate the arms industry. They developed outside
Speaker 2: power like as did again you know, uh, financial institutions.
Speaker 2: This wasn't some conspiracy and that's not why World War
Speaker 2: went happened, but it was a but it facilitated resorting
Speaker 2: to military he measures to remedy power, political imbalances, uh
Speaker 2: 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 house 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.
Speaker 3: I mean, the.
Speaker 2: The extrapolation of you know, the household being the center
Speaker 2: of production to people being forced to sell their lab
Speaker 2: as some sort of factory worker. Like, yeah, that was
Speaker 2: tremendously disruptive, and you know it also, I mean how
Speaker 2: mom was insightful in his sociological takedown because unlike a
Speaker 2: lot of people, you know, show Schumpeter's big critique of
Speaker 2: the Marcus paradigm and I'm gonna bring this back, I'm
Speaker 2: going somewhere with this was like, look like Marcus aren't
Speaker 2: really talking about class, like the job you do isn't
Speaker 2: your class, you know, like your class is what you're
Speaker 2: born into, and it's defined by how you relate to
Speaker 2: other people similarly born to this kind of like social
Speaker 2: stratum that isn't really mobile, you know. So in Schumpeter's view,
Speaker 2: which is the traditional view, it doesn't matter what job
Speaker 2: you're doing around which money you have, Like, that's not
Speaker 2: what we're talking about. We're talking about a class, and
Speaker 2: class isn't something you can just like jump up from
Speaker 2: or down from, like within a generation. And Osbom accepted
Speaker 2: some of those premises. He's like, yeah, you know, one
Speaker 2: of the reasons why the working class exists is because
Speaker 2: the social capital, the kind of facilitated no blessedge oblige
Speaker 2: as well as you know, kind of the communitarian impulse
Speaker 2: that you know, stood in for the welfare state and
Speaker 2: antiquity and things. He's like, capitalism like rips all that apart,
Speaker 2: and it makes every man like a stranger, and it
Speaker 2: enshrines the war of all against all not only as
Speaker 2: like an an implacable reality, but as like a positive good.
Speaker 2: Almost so the only thing you have in common with
Speaker 2: like your neighbors figuratively and literally is that you're all
Speaker 2: being crushed like in these in this like industrial labor environment,
Speaker 2: and you know you've got to stand together or all die.
Speaker 2: And that's like what the working claim is. You know,
Speaker 2: it's not it's not a class in like the traditional sense,
Speaker 2: or there's not some like basic affinity between between people,
Speaker 2: like they're your comrades because you're you're like in the
Speaker 2: same way you are like with the guys you're like
Speaker 2: unjustly locked in prison with. You know, it's it's circumstances
Speaker 2: that like drive you together. So and that and that
Speaker 2: that actually tracks with like what marsh was talking about
Speaker 2: in dos Capital, Like if when you talk about alienation,
Speaker 2: he's not just talking about the process of whereby labor
Speaker 2: is not personal anymore. You don't create things. You're not
Speaker 2: a producer. You're just doing this like pointless process like
Speaker 2: over and over and over again. It's dangerous and dirty
Speaker 2: and painful. But it's alienation from your fellow man. And
Speaker 2: even if you haven't to be married, like you never
Speaker 2: see your wife. She she's stuck with some dangerous, dirty
Speaker 2: job like you have. You know, at the end of
Speaker 2: the day, like maybe you like get to sleep by
Speaker 2: saying betisar and occasionally you collide in intimacy and have children.
Speaker 2: But he's like that that alienation touchs and concerns every
Speaker 2: aspect of the workers existence. It's not it's not. It
Speaker 2: doesn't just like remove his labor from his own domain
Speaker 2: and creative power. It alienates him from like what should
Speaker 2: be his community. It alienates him from his Ethnos, it
Speaker 2: alienates him from his wife, It alienates him from you know,
Speaker 2: he doesn't have neighbors anymore. You know that this all
Speaker 2: tracks and yeah, so he makes a lot out of that,
Speaker 2: and that's one of the reasons why this process whereby
Speaker 2: the Vestigel aristocracy, he's able to like hang on to
Speaker 2: power because people were people like bonded in pee andage.
Speaker 2: They are dependent upon like the lord of the manner.
Speaker 2: And this is a deeply psychological process and it's enduring.
Speaker 2: It's in a Hosmon view, Okay, this alien this, this
Speaker 2: this alienation that is a matter of life and death.
Speaker 2: In a lot of cases, it sounds a matter of
Speaker 2: clodial life, like it stands to kill you. He's like, really,
Speaker 2: the only remedy these people have is like appeal to
Speaker 2: the church or to like appeal to traditional social elements.
Speaker 2: That are kind of like the guardians of the culture,
Speaker 2: if you want to think about it that way. So
Speaker 2: they appeal to aristocrats and stuff, you know, for justice.
Speaker 2: And that's one of the things that keeps these guys
Speaker 2: like if not relevant, like able to remain like in situ.
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 3: Of of this planet.
Speaker 2: I I could easily see famines coming back. I mean, uh,
Speaker 2: and you know, I mean it's if they're if it
Speaker 2: suddenly became impossible to grow certain kinds of crops, that
Speaker 2: would fool oar everything. I mean, so I absolutely do
Speaker 2: not say like crises can't happen. But this idea that
Speaker 2: you know, like owing to miscalculation or owing to like
Speaker 2: a gap in you know, information awareness, you know of
Speaker 2: hours or days, like you know, like like billions of
Speaker 2: dollars is gonna be like wiped out overnight in the
Speaker 2: stock market. That would never happen again. That's retarded, you know.
Speaker 2: And guys like how One predicted that he said, stuff's
Speaker 2: gonna largely be rubberized moving forward. There's not gonna be
Speaker 2: like food shortages, you know, there's not gonna it's gonna
Speaker 2: be very easy to produce things that today him talking
Speaker 2: in like nineteen fifties are hard to produce. You know,
Speaker 2: you're gonna like a lot of these problems are gonna
Speaker 2: go away, you know, and that and that happened, you know,
Speaker 2: And that's one of the reasons why this is I mean,
Speaker 2: this is probably not the scope, but one of the
Speaker 2: ways you can tell, like our government is like full
Speaker 2: of like crackheads and insane people is because if they
Speaker 2: didn't overreach and remotely smart, they could basically hold on
Speaker 2: to power indefinitely. Because this isn't the nineteen twenties, because
Speaker 2: because people aren't going hungry, because there's not a military
Speaker 2: draft or we're respected to like sacrifice your son in
Speaker 2: a meat grinder. You know, there's not a Soviet Union
Speaker 2: whereby you know, at any at any time basically you know,
Speaker 2: some enemy society that's like mobile lies a massive scale
Speaker 2: could decide to like sue for war to remedy the
Speaker 2: kind of uneven power paradigm, you know. Like so so
Speaker 2: it's it's you can tell these people are insane because
Speaker 2: like they're they're basically burning the house down when there's
Speaker 2: no reason to do that. But you know that the
Speaker 2: degree to which, uh that that's also why too. I mean,
Speaker 2: like I said, I I it's it's it's dumb for
Speaker 2: people to claim that people like Missus Harris are Marxists anyway,
Speaker 2: But it's Marxism, isn't just Marxism, isn't wokeism, it's not
Speaker 2: it's not it's not liberalism. It's it's it's it's a
Speaker 2: very discreete uh like claim and series of claims about
Speaker 2: historical processes. And in the short term, Marxists absolutely want
Speaker 2: capitalists to succeed. They don't want it to fail, they
Speaker 2: want it to fully succeed. They wanted to conquer every thing,
Speaker 2: and then they want to kill the people at the
Speaker 2: helms of the apparatus. Like that's whole point. You know
Speaker 2: what what's strange about how it developed in terms of
Speaker 2: actual practice is that it did it did again like
Speaker 2: the like like the the quite literally like the heart
Speaker 2: of the of the Bolshevik Revolution in the real world
Speaker 2: was a place that really had no like industrial working class.
Speaker 2: You know, it was just like basically backwards monarchy that
Speaker 2: ruled over this this this this is this massive territory.
Speaker 2: You know, like the Russian Empire had more in common
Speaker 2: with the Ottomans than it did with Europe. Okay, I'm
Speaker 2: not saying like racially or whatever. Like I'm not taking
Speaker 2: a position on that, so I don't know, people get mad,
Speaker 2: But in terms of the way it was structured, and
Speaker 2: in terms of it being like an anachronism in the
Speaker 2: twentieth century when it finally got brought down, it's really
Speaker 2: really strange that this is where the bullshrep Revolution was
Speaker 2: consolidated and truly succeeded. You know. That's why. That's one
Speaker 2: of the reasons why when I talk a lot to
Speaker 2: these guys. I'm not Jackson Hinkle himself. I don't know him,
Speaker 2: but I know guys in his orbit and guys who
Speaker 2: describe to that kind of worldview. So like, there are
Speaker 2: a lot of there. Like rebuttals to people like me
Speaker 2: are like, well, you can't extrapolate a lot from the
Speaker 2: Soviet Union. It's like, well, I can, but even if
Speaker 2: I accept that postulate, well, I can't extrapolate a lot,
Speaker 2: even by your own criteria, from East Germany. Okay, you know,
Speaker 2: and it's well there you go, Okay, you tell you
Speaker 2: tell me, like East Germany wasn't an industrial state like it.
Speaker 2: I I mean, if you want to perfectly realize, like
Speaker 2: marcis Alana state. It was the DDR. I mean that
Speaker 2: they can't be argued. I mean I suppose like they're
Speaker 2: I suppose they're like rebuttal of that would be like, well,
Speaker 2: that was an artificial state that emerged out of like
Speaker 2: military exigencies, and you know the fact that it was
Speaker 2: beliguered and threatened, you know, owing to conditions imposed by
Speaker 2: capitalists like is somehow like takes off at table as
Speaker 2: as a pure example of practice, but because it may
Speaker 2: you know, the to bring it back again, I forgive
Speaker 2: m from ramblings. I don't feel good, but the uh,
Speaker 2: the degree of which, again like marked actual Marxists viewed
Speaker 2: these things as necessary processes like can't be denied. Like
Speaker 2: Marxist will not be in the street saying like we
Speaker 2: need we need, we need Acne Widget Company to hire
Speaker 2: more women because it's bad not to And they wouldn't
Speaker 2: be saying like we need to text these people more
Speaker 2: like none of that would be like in their horizon.
Speaker 2: They'd be like, we want Acne Widget Company to become
Speaker 2: like as massive as possible. We wanted to insinuate itself
Speaker 2: into everything. We wanted to be able to produce everything
Speaker 2: we needed, you know, almost like magic, and then we
Speaker 2: want to kill the people who own it, and we
Speaker 2: want to take it and we want to make it
Speaker 2: the public domain of the workers. That's what they want
Speaker 2: or want it. Like I said, I I white guy
Speaker 2: like Jackson Hinkel. I think they're playing an important role
Speaker 2: right now if you're any kind of dissident or in
Speaker 2: any kind of actual 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
Speaker 1: him and oh you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, the point that the degree in which these people
Speaker 2: today there 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 like.
Speaker 2: That's not like that, that's fucking retarded, you know. And this, uh,
Speaker 2: the these it's it's these like internet guys who have
Speaker 2: never read a book in their life like calling people.
Speaker 2: It's like goofy as fuck. But but no, I think,
Speaker 2: you know, and today I REALI wasn't going aside the scope.
Speaker 2: Don't forgive me for that if it's boring people. But
Speaker 2: guys like Emmanuel Wallerstein, guys who uh, these kinds of
Speaker 2: post Marxist types who do like talk about you know,
Speaker 2: social justice within globalism. I mean, yeah, obviously I don't
Speaker 2: like have common cause with those guys, but they're really
Speaker 2: the only like intelligent aspect of the left. And I
Speaker 2: think those guys are making a comeback because everybody hates
Speaker 2: the fucking regime and like literally everybody hates liberals, like
Speaker 2: everybody fucking hates liberals and things. They're like awful pieces
Speaker 2: of shit, you know. That's why, like I said, like people,
Speaker 2: I mean, he'll throw shit on me all the time,
Speaker 2: and I don't care, Like I'm not here to make
Speaker 2: friends and I'm used to it. But you know, the
Speaker 2: uh they get mad at me, whether it's because you know,
Speaker 2: I got respect for Moslims and view them as like
Speaker 2: an essential part of the new resistance, or they get
Speaker 2: mad at me for like retweeting like Jackson Hinkle or something.
Speaker 2: But it's like they don't understand part of bringing down
Speaker 2: the regime and discrediting it is like pointing out not
Speaker 2: just how morally bankrupt it is, but how like staggering
Speaker 2: like ignorant it is. And it's acolytes are you know?
Speaker 2: And if there's if there's a serious left wing with
Speaker 2: revolutionary ambitions, that's not a bunch of degenerate natural slaves,
Speaker 2: Like that's that's a good thing, man, Like how is
Speaker 2: that bad? You know, like you got people can't like
Speaker 2: take their like personal feelings out of stuff. It's pathetic.
Speaker 2: It's like talking to a bunch of like it's like
Speaker 2: talking to about a little kids or like modeling old
Speaker 2: women or something.
Speaker 3: But the.
Speaker 2: But that's you know, and that's also why you know
Speaker 2: again the like I said, we started out like that
Speaker 2: that dude I'm not gonna name, you know, acting like
Speaker 2: uh I was dropping cap when I was saying, like,
Speaker 2: you know, the it's as nine you know, to arrange
Speaker 2: force structure or to conceptualize grant strategy in like twentieth
Speaker 2: century terms, you know, like the like like twentieth century
Speaker 2: wars can never happen again. That's never going to happen again.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not gonna happen again in a thousand years,
Speaker 2: you know, like that that the end of the uh
Speaker 2: the uh the changing like like everything these days is changing,
Speaker 2: like I you know, like I mean the point before
Speaker 2: about like just today, I was talking to some of
Speaker 2: the fellas about like public education is dying and nobody
Speaker 2: believes anymore. Like those law enforcement like a couple of
Speaker 2: months back, they're like I see in Chicago now, like
Speaker 2: I said, even you know, like like policing is gonna
Speaker 2: be privatized. It's you know in the South, Like I
Speaker 2: mean you're in I'm sure you see this, you know
Speaker 2: how like they're still trying to fight the run drugs
Speaker 2: like it's nineteen eighty two or something. And like there
Speaker 2: was this ridiculous press conference and they like the Tennessee
Speaker 2: Threau of Investigation they held this like press conference. It
Speaker 2: was them Homeland Security atf FBI. There's this whole mass
Speaker 2: investigation to literally bust these like two like outlaw bikers
Speaker 2: like sligging meth and they're like we've were taking drugs
Speaker 2: off the street. And the comments were like you people
Speaker 2: are idiots, you know, they're like what what do you
Speaker 2: think this is? You know, it's like like there wasn't
Speaker 2: like a single positive comment, man, And it's like this
Speaker 2: is like a time war. It's like what the fuck
Speaker 2: are these people doing? You know, like nobody believes in
Speaker 2: that garbage anymore. Now now you got homeland security like
Speaker 2: shaken down, like trailer park meth heads. Really, you know,
Speaker 2: like that's like that's pathetic, man. You know, this whole apparatus,
Speaker 2: the people sustaining it, they're these like increasingly aged parasites
Speaker 2: who can't like adapt to the twenty first century, you know,
Speaker 2: And that's one of the things that swept Trump into power.
Speaker 2: It's the kind of stuff hobsbamb and Franklin, the Marxist
Speaker 2: we're talking about, Like like they the way they would
Speaker 2: have viewed Trump is like you know this, They wouldn't
Speaker 2: viewed him a some like arch reaction areya. They would
Speaker 2: have been like, well that this guy is basically a
Speaker 2: con man. But he's saying he's gonna like sweep away
Speaker 2: these obsolescent aspects of of of state that people like
Speaker 2: don't think serves their interests anymore. And that and that's
Speaker 2: why a lot of people voted for Trump. It's not
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, there's like people who just like love Trump.
Speaker 2: There's people who you know, like uh, who would have
Speaker 2: voted for RFK Junior, who are just like protest voters,
Speaker 2: but like your average like man or lady, like it's
Speaker 2: not particularly politically sophisticated or inclined. Like they voted for
Speaker 2: Trump because their instincts are basically sound and they're like
Speaker 2: what what what the hell is going on here? Like
Speaker 2: we they'll put together that's a regime they live under.
Speaker 2: It's like this twentieth century obsolete structure. They don't take
Speaker 2: a out on those turns, and they realize, like this
Speaker 2: is like a zombie regime, like it doesn't make sense anymore,
Speaker 2: like why you know, like it's it's and then you know,
Speaker 2: it's uh, it's really interesting to see this develop in
Speaker 2: real time, man, you know. And that's why one of
Speaker 2: the things like part of my vetting process, the people
Speaker 2: who I kind of take on as allies. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's a complicated process. I can't really break it down
Speaker 2: into like criteria, but one thing that's essential was like
Speaker 2: if like we do not want reaction areas, we do
Speaker 2: not want people who think the good old days were dope,
Speaker 2: or that we need to like turn back time or that,
Speaker 2: or people who think that like n Segue is like
Speaker 2: making things like where we take over the government and
Speaker 2: can like manage its puireaucers. It's like people like that
Speaker 2: are not with the program. And I mean now that
Speaker 2: not only is that like not at all what we're about,
Speaker 2: but that's that's got nothing to do with the trajectory
Speaker 2: of history and stuff like that. I don't mean to
Speaker 2: be I don't mean to like abrogate this, but I
Speaker 2: really don't feel good. So if we could, like if
Speaker 2: we could, if we could wrap it up, that'd be
Speaker 2: And if you want to, if you want to do
Speaker 2: another episode because this wasn't up to snuff, we can
Speaker 2: 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.
Speaker 3: Just how damaging the.
Speaker 1: Especially the overseas, the globalism, just what it does to
Speaker 1: you know, the vult and oh yeah.
Speaker 2: What's also why it's crazy these people with like think
Speaker 2: they hate Maslims for no reason because some like Zionists
Speaker 2: on TV told them to, or because they think that
Speaker 2: because they think that like some like shitbig immigrants who
Speaker 2: did something to do to them.
Speaker 3: Is like Islam.
Speaker 2: It's like, man, you want to know, like Daryl, 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 that 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.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It's like, but I don't. There's not there's not really
Speaker 2: I'm not like a Kazinski guy. I like a lot
Speaker 2: of like you know, a lot of like disient type
Speaker 2: dudes really like head k. I mean, there's nothing wrong
Speaker 2: 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 3: And industrial people think that that book.
Speaker 1: People think that book is like I have a friend
Speaker 1: who says, oh, you can take an al Gore book
Speaker 1: and hold it right up next to it and it's
Speaker 1: the same exact thing. It's like, No, he's writing about
Speaker 1: the human condition. He's right, what you know, what the
Speaker 1: what the industrial revolution did or the human condition is?
Speaker 2: And I read outdoor. No, that's fucking retarded. Well, I
Speaker 2: mean these guys are just like say things like they
Speaker 2: don't I guarantee these guys like never read a book
Speaker 2: except maybe like some fucking airport paperback. But I no,
Speaker 2: I remember when the Manifesto dropped in ninety ninety six.
Speaker 3: I think it was.
Speaker 2: I think it was like late summer ninety five, but
Speaker 2: 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 a 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 3: I think people. I think people like this episode more
Speaker 3: than you think.
Speaker 2: Okay, that makes me happy.
Speaker 3: Uh do do plugs real quick? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Man? As always, Uh try and direct people to my website.
Speaker 2: It's Thomas seven seven seven dot com. It's number seven
Speaker 2: and h O A S seven seven seven dot com.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna tweak that some man. I was gonna try
Speaker 2: and get on top of it that this week, but
Speaker 2: it but what it's it's Dope, the kid who put
Speaker 2: it together. He's great. And anytime I drop anything new,
Speaker 2: it pops up there on like the feed. So that's
Speaker 2: like a good way to keep up with stuff if
Speaker 2: you like the stuff I do. I'm on social media
Speaker 2: at Capital r e A L Underscore number seven h
Speaker 2: O A S seven seven seven. The best place to
Speaker 2: find me is substack. That's from my pod is and stuff.
Speaker 2: It's 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,