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