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Douglas Lain on Marxism, violent revolution vs non-violent, and Christianity
July 25, 2020
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How was that for you? Is that all right? Was that different? It was okay. Yeah, it was a little more antagonistic than I expected. I'm sorry. That's not so much that you were mean or, you know, it was just what I didn't realize that you would have an arsenal of information and anecdotes to answer, not always directly, what the things that I put forward in a kind of refutation.
I'm here with Douglas Lane of Zero Books. How's it going, man? Going pretty well. In fact, I should say, I always say it's doing very well when you ask that kind of question because it's a kind of question that people don't literally mean most of the time. It's like saying hello. But I should point out that at Zero Books, we recently lost a major voice, the author and podcaster or YouTube
Can you tell us, and our audience, a little bit as to who Michael Brooks was, what he meant to you?
What do you meant to Zero Books? Yeah, Michael Brooks was the co-host of The Majority Report with Sam Seder, although probably he would hate that I started with that because he was also the host of his own show called TMBS, which stood for The Michael Brooks Show. He was the author of a book for us called Against the Web. He had written for newspapers and magazines like Jacobin,
It just started a new series with Anna Kasperian, I think it's her name, over at the Young Turks, but this time for Jacobin Magazine's new YouTube channel. And he was a democratic socialist, he said, with a more of a Marxist bent than most. He did a show called TMBS, which really focused on the international political scene, as well as just US politics.
Uh, he was a really funny guy. Uh, he was a lot more charming than most people on the left. Um, uh, he was not, uh, he was 37 years old and he died from, uh, I guess some sort of blood clot or just with a sudden freak kind of medical accident that took him from us on, um, Monday. And, uh, I mean,
really, he was just would be the last person I expected to die. And he was someone who so clearly had a long, fruitful career ahead of him. He was ambitious, he was politically ambitious for the left and he was personally ambitious. And he was just hungry to go, he was ready to go. He had so many things that he was planning and so many things he'd already done. So it was a real tragedy that he died on
I mean, I'm still trying to take it in. It's a shock. I'm sorry to hear that, man. Yeah. Well, I just wanted to let, you know, I guess I feel obligated to mention him at the start because he was so important to so many people. And he was an important author for us. His book, Against the Web, was already heading to be a bestseller. Perversely, now it will certainly be a bestseller.
But he had a lot more books in him and ideas in him, and so it's very sad to see him go. But we don't have to continue on talking about Michael Brooks, but I thought I should mention that. Okay. Let's talk about you. So what would you classify yourself as for the people who are watching if you want to put yourself into the label? Well, I'm some kind of Marxist. It depends on which Marxist you ask.
to what I am. I'm some slur or another from some other sectarian group, so like I'm a Marxist humanist by those who
Are maybe a more politically minded Marxist or I'm a left-com by people who have more focus on taking state power But I you know, whereas otherwise people might call me like people who are so democratic socialists are a little bit to what I consider to be my right might think of me as like a tanky and You know out of this world
I became interested in trying to understand the economic situation because of the economic crisis, and I started podcasting shortly after that.
and interviewing Marxist economists and Marxist thinkers slowly but surely along the way. I mean, I interviewed a lot of different people on the left and a lot of different people, including like mystics and artists and so on. But I more and more became interested in a Marxist analysis of the economic crisis of 2008.
and that led me to read Marx and to kind of believe the explanations that I found in books like Capital or the critique of the Gotha program or, you know, even in the Congress manifesto to some degree. I want to, or the German ideology, I want to like prove my bona fides here and name enough the Marxist texts. Is this when you started Zero Books or did that come before?
It came before. I was a podcaster for about five years before I started at Zero Books, and I didn't start Zero Books. Zero Books started around the same time as I started podcasting. A guy named Tariq Ghadard, well, really a guy named Tariq Ghadard, started the imprint in the UK. It was under a company called John Hunt Publishing, or GHP, and
He started the imprint, and it was mostly filled with people who were left-wing and or philosophical or theoretical bloggers. And so they were getting, they were academics, but they weren't only publishing in academic journals. They were trying out this new blogosphere. And those people started writing books for Zero Books eventually. People like Graham Harmon and Mark Fisher.
became big names for Xero Books. And then around 2014, there was a falling out between the management of John Hunt Publishing and the old crew at Xero Books. They left, and one of their authors recommended to me, a guy named David Blacker, who had written a book for them called The Falling Rate of Learning, I believe. He recommended that I apply for the job, and I was hired based on the writing I had already submitted to them.
had a book accepted by Zero Books and based on my track record as a podcaster. And frankly, I think that in that political moment, in terms of like John Hub publishing, they were glad to take anybody who would do the job because there had been such a fallout. So I was the guy who stepped up to the plate after Tariq left.
You mentioned that in the crash of 2008, you started reading Marx and you're trying to understand what happened. I'm curious, where were you coming from before that? How would you describe your ideological persuasion before 2008? I was, you know, in the 90s, I had become interested in the situation. It's international. I was a science fiction writer and I still am. My last novel came out in 2018. So I,
was interested in, you know, as a young man and the ideas of Situationist International, but also like people like Noam Chomsky, maybe some Terrence McKenna thrown in. I was sort of like an Adbusters anarchist. That's me, you know, insulting my younger self. What's an Adbusters? Well, Adbusters is a magazine in the United States that
takes a kind of anti-consumerist line. It was started by a new left 60s radical in the 80s or 90s and it's very glossy and slick and they run these parody ads in the magazines trying to critique society and the culture of consumerism.
I see, I see. So you were a rebellious, anti-capitalist type before 2008, but you wouldn't call it Marxist before then, and then you started to get into the philosophy of Karl, good old Karl. Yeah, that's right. I mean, and it was because I realized that the kind of more utopian politics I had up until that point where I was most concerned about changing people's consciousness and attacking hierarchies and
and let's face it also just was somewhat using the radical chic of the left as a way to distinguish myself as a writer or at least that's what I hoped. I realized none of that was going to do when there was actual material crisis and I was looking at at the time I was working at Comcast as a sales rep and I was thinking I might not last on the job and there weren't a lot of other prospects
and that was at actually the same time that my first novel was accepted by Macmillan back in 2007 is when that novel was accepted. It took until 2013 for it to actually come out. So that was another reason why I was looking to Marx was because I looked at the publishing world which was in crisis and like New York editors are being fired in droves and they were going into business for themselves as book editors and
um you know for for self-published authors and uh my own editor at tour was let go shortly after my book came out so i was thinking like oh this whole career idea of being a kind of uh middle-range novelist along with you know whatever other kind of work i had to pick up to support myself doesn't look like it's going to be working out even though i did get a book contract um i've written some short stories before that point uh
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Coca-Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you. Well, you know, there's a there's an old connection there, right, between science fiction, science fiction writers and Marxists, right? Like Borkanov with the Red Star. Yeah, yeah. Have you read that one? I haven't. Yeah, I haven't read that particular book, although I know it should. But yes, I do think of science fiction
as the literature of ideas, and I was a philosophy major in college back in the early 90s. So I came to science fiction out of, for the same reasons I came to the left, I think, which was a feeling of displacement, of wanting to figure out what life was, not thinking that the kinds of answers that were readily available to me were very useful. I think a lot of, you know, young people go through that no matter where they end up politically, but I ended up on the left.
Okay, now people who listened might have tuned out as soon as you said you're a Marxist, so let's get this straight. Oh really? Well, I'm in a different room than I'm used to because everyone in the, you know, kind of circles I run and it's like, oh yeah, he's not Marxist enough, but anyway, go ahead. Right, what I mean is that they're just waiting for the question that I'm about to say, which is given that the countries who have said that they're motivated by Marxism failed, now you may disagree with that premise and we can... No, I don't. Okay, given that they failed,
And it seems invariably so. How can you call yourself, how do you, why do you still call yourself a Marxist without also calling yourself someone who's worthy of odious, despicable, despicableness? Well, I have a, you know, I may be worthy of odious, despicableness or whatever, but it's not because I'm a Marxist, you know, I have all sorts of flaws. But here's my,
Quick answer to that is that I don't see Marxism as separate from the project of modernity or the enlightenment project. And I think that that whole project of turning away from traditional society, becoming more scientific, trying to be more self-directed as not just individually, but as a society, taking hold of our social relations, questing after freedom,
all of it has an uneven record. So that'd be my first thing. It's like, if you want to condemn Marxism, you should probably condemn the American Revolution as well. You should probably condemn modernity. You should probably try to turn back towards a more traditional society. And then you'll find there's plenty of things to condemn there. But the more specific answer would be that I don't look at the Russian Revolution or revolutions in China,
or many of the other attempts at socialism has having been complete or successful. And if you look at the Soviet Union, neither did the Soviet officials. Even Stalin admitted that they were still operating under basically a capitalist logic. There was never a moment where they broke free from
what they would say was called bourgeois society. I mean, after 1917, their goal was to actually develop the capitalist relations that hadn't really even been developed yet in the Soviet Union or in Russia, so that they could then quickly become socialist and transcend capitalist relations, but they never did. Go ahead.
When does Stalin say that? Because there's that net period, right? New economic policy under Lenin. He was not down with that. At least he was kind of two-faced on the matter. And afterwards, when he was in power, did he say that? I don't remember exactly when he really admitted that the Soviet Union was still operating under the law of value.
It was in the, it was towards the end of his time in power. It was in the, I think, early 50s is what I would, if I'm remembering correctly. But even Lenin didn't think that, like they believed in transitional program, they believed in developing capitalist relations, that capitalism was a stage on the way towards socialism. And so Lenin would never have said that he achieved even socialism.
or the dictatorship of the proletariat. And so, I mean, that's my understanding, that there was still revolution to be done after they took power. And go ahead. London's thesis, right, was that was the big debate between Bolsheviks and Mentionists. They were both, as you said, and it really demonstrates your knowledge, right?
Marxists did believe that capitalism was a transitional stage. So you would find Marxists who were like, hey, what's the best way to get Marxists? More capitalists. So let's support the industry, you know? Hey, how do you get angry workers? Exploitative CEOs. Keep them coming. Capitalism, keep them coming. Right. This is like, that goes back to the late 19th century.
and the Social Democratic Party in Germany and the debates between Rosa Luxemburg and Edward Bernstein, or Edward Bernstein or whatever, how you ever pronounce that. But he was, he felt, especially after the long depression of the 19th century, didn't produce a workers revolution that really the best way to get to socialism was through the evolution of capitalism. But he was a Marxist, right?
And Rosa Luxemburg thought that capitalism would go into crisis and that the Workers' Party had to be prepared for that crisis in order to help the working class achieve socialism when the opportunity was there through a revolutionary struggle. I side with Rosa in that debate, but it's far away from
Where we are right now, although maybe who knows where we'll be in two months. But we're certainly not prepared for anything like that. But yeah, working out what went wrong in the Soviet Union isn't something that's been fully done, at least not in my head. I don't think anyone quite on the Marxist left
Just to interject, some people would say, well, you know, the
the process of going through history and then analyzing why has Marxism failed has not been complete. Well, but to those on the left or the extreme left or whatever we want to call it the Marxist side, it seems like the diagnosis of the West's failures due to capitalism is a complete project. And they're, they're willing to make that.
Well, first of all, I don't believe that if you look carefully that there's even a lot of agreement on the critique of capitalism on the Marxist left. I happen to know the right critique because I have my own
I have a theory that everyone thinks they're right. Even people who are humble, they think they're right in their humbleness. So if they say, I don't know, then you believe that you don't know. So no matter what. That's true. That is true. But I think that's, I'll grant people that amount of hubris. But the, what I would say is, okay, so the question was, why are Marxists so quick to say they know,
what's wrong with capitalism, but are slow to say they understand why the revolution failed. And look, there's a real kernel of truth to the skepticism in that question, because the operations of capitalist society are very complex and require serious study. And most of what calls itself the Marxist left has not only
hasn't fully worked out its critique or really has a solid critique of capitalist relations to back it up. But even more doesn't even really have much of a definition of capitalism at all or think that doesn't think about capitalism as a set of social relations around production or an economic set of relations. And that's it. Say again.
So what I'll say is that's due largely to the failures that we're talking about and failures after. The fact that the Marxist project has been set back time and time again has meant that what calls itself the left of the United States has mostly put Marxist analysis to the side, even when it calls itself Marxist.
I happen to think that the strongest part of the Marxist literature is his critique of capitalist relations, that is his turn towards materialism as a form of basically a materialistic social relation. In other words, the kinds of relations we have with each other when we're cooperating to create the things we need in the world. So the hierarchical relations are the structures of relations and the social aims
that we take up as we produce ourselves and reproduce ourselves and reproduce the world. And that just means, you know, we go to work every day, we make things that we are going to consume, we make things for the market, all of that. I happen to think that his critique of those relations are the best around and that if you start from there, there's the potential for achieving the kinds of society that, you know,
People like Thomas Locke or John Stuart Mills or others were after a society where people as individuals are free and they're free to the extent that they can also influence the social collective. So just to go off of that subject for the individualism, communism's relation to liberalism, right?
You know, there's a line in Dostoevsky's Inns, where a story about some Marxists who take over a small town in Russia, and one of them is a Marxist by the name of Piotr, and he's trying to convert people to Marxism, and he's building these little clubs. Another character asks him, you know, why do they turn? Why do they become Marxists?
I want to press on that claim. Marxists and liberals didn't necessarily get along. Capitalism was a transitional
Why do you believe that Marxism is the realization of liberalism? Well, I mean, listen, I get a lot of heat from other Marxists. Other Marxists hate it when I say that kind of thing, because they think I'm granting way too much to, I don't know, what's the white, cisgendered, patriarchal, Western
It's what Marxists traditionally believe, so I'm shocked that they would find a problem with that view, right? Well, as I say, Marxism is mostly dead. But why do I think that there's been conflict between liberals and Marxists in the past?
Well, what I'm saying is, why is it that Marxism is the successor? So we're talking about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, right? Mensheviks, they... Well, I'm not really talking about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. I'm talking about, like, Marx and Engels, and maybe Rosa Luxemburg and some of the 19th century people. I mean, to be honest, my understanding of the debates, the specific debates between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks,
beyond, you know, the need for revolutionary struggle or the degree of parliamentarianism that can be your cooperation with bourgeois parties. You know, that's about as much as I could say that that was about. The debates, right, like Marxists love history, right? They're the scientists of history, self-proclaimed at the time. So to go to history, to understand Marxism, I think would be truthful. There's a debate between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks,
which is, okay, we start with, and this is said in the Communist Manifesto, right? We start with tribal societies, we go to feudal societies, we go to capitalism, and then the revolution, we go to Marxism. But the debate between Menshviks and Bolsheviks, one of them, was, okay, where are we now? And for Russia, specifically, they couldn't decide whether or not they were feudal or in the capitalist era.
Lenin comes out with his great paper. Look at how much land the peasants have. You can see it's unequal. We are in the era of capitalism. The time is now. And it puts them to the Bolsheviks. So what I'm curious of is, when you look at our society now, let alone what we achieve through Marxism, have we achieved through capitalism, is my question.
have we okay so because if it's dedicated on that what would be true capitalism well okay i think we should distinguish between the bourgeois values of freedom and equality and paternity and and the breaking of of fetters uh from traditional society those kinds of liberal values and um the value and capitalism as a set of social relations because capitalism
is the very thing that makes liberal values unachievable in so much as it sets up material relations that require inequality, competition, and even the slowdown of development of technological advances.
So that's what the difference is between like bourgeois values and capitalism. Capitalism is a questing after basically the increase of labor time as embodied in commodities. And that's what's directing our social life really is the buying and selling of commodities and chasing after this abstract value. That's a measure of the amount of time that people are working.
also requires like a working class that doesn't own its own means of production or doesn't have control over the things that it produces. Doug, I couldn't agree more on that regard, Rick. There's a line in the Marxist Catechism from the London Society of Marxists. And in this catechism, it was what they would tell the new recruits, the new comrades in order to train to be Marxists. They said, what is
Capitalism and they they see very clearly it's we think it's written by very clearly says oh well Listen, there was a time in history where we didn't have industrial machines Then we got industrial machines two types of people You either own the machines or you work with the machine, right? Yeah, it's one or the other and there's a huge divide that happens and
Right, which is why Marxists want to get rid of the division of labor to some degree or another. How? What do you think is the way to do it? How do we get rid of it? Get my laptop, cocktail? What's the solution? Maybe sometimes. I don't think you can say that there's only one path towards a Marxist revolution. And Marx himself had different ideas based on the different conditions.
What if we paint some specifics for our time in our context? Yeah, well, give four or three or two, if you don't want, if you don't want, if you're, okay, well, I, look, the first thing you have to do is understand that the left's project is to expand the power of working people, primarily, and how that can be done is, you know, a question, but you, you, you, you're,
Your aim should be first and foremost right now to support the struggles of working class people, especially during an economic crisis when so many will be unemployed. And this goes back to sort of a very traditional kind of orthodox Marxist stance that Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, would embrace. Or someone like Heinrich Grossman, who was more of an EE. I think I agree with him on his economic analysis more.
But he was also in the same kind of Bolshevik tradition as Rosa Luxemburg. And that would be to say, look, the workers have to emancipate themselves, and they will do that by organizing together in moments of
economic crisis when their interests and the interests of the capitalist order are clearly at odds. And so at the moment we're going to be, as profitability goes down, as the ability to create a social surplus that can actually meet everyone's needs declines, as many people are forced into starvation wages or actual starvation. And when you say profitability goes down, you mean for the working class, because clearly- No, I mean for the capitalist class.
Not for the war class.
Right. Well, there's something called the tendency for rate of profit to decline that Marx talks about in capitalizing volume three and in somewhat in volume one. And what happens is as we get more efficient in producing commodities, the amount of value, because it's based on labor time, declines. So slowly the rate of profit declines.
which means, which leads to all sorts of economic problems. So when companies aren't profitable, they go out of business. When they go out of business, there's unemployment. Okay. When there's unemployment- We're getting to the specifics of what should be done by the working class. Yeah, the working class needs to prepare for the fact that we're, that the COVID crisis right now has
We're going to get back to the specifics because
I have a question. You said something and I want to talk about that before it goes away. You said that the supporting of the working class people is a project of the left. Now the right would also say actually we're the ones that are supporting the working class. We care about those who are farmers and agriculturalists. Is that what you would define as the difference between left and right is those who want to support the working class or is that what you would define as
As the Marxist project is supporting the working class, in other words, what's the definition of the left and the right and perhaps even Marxism if you have enough time? Okay, so the right-wing attempts to support the working class are almost always nationalist and they're almost always defined in terms of correcting
Getting the capitalist class back on the street so we can then employ more workers. You know, so for instance, the questions about immigrations like, you know, the right wing approach to understanding the calamitous impacts of the economic crisis after 2008 on working people is to point to the
problems that arise from immigration and say if we fix those problems, we close that border, then the system will right itself and you'll have job security and you'll have better wages and you'll have that lifestyle from the 50s that if you're white you might even remember or think that you shared in.
whereas the left would say look and look a little deeper and say look first of all the reason why there's so much rush for people to come into this country is because the uneven development between the nations that the capitalists capitalism is not at all immune from crises and it isn't working in a simple linear progression towards a better and better world it it goes into crises it
creates inequalities, not just between people, but between nations. And you're never going to... When you say crises, sorry, just to interject, when you say crises, do you mean depression or do you mean... Yeah, sure. Recession and depression would be a big part of what I'm talking about. So the major, the major, when you're referring to crisis, you're referring to recession? Yeah, yeah, I am. I'm referring to the inability of capital to reproduce itself, the going out of business, creating massive unemployment, not providing the material needs in a rational way to people.
So the weird thing about it is that you can sit on massive amounts of wealth, because you've been so efficient at production, and still have an economic crisis that makes people starve, because of the irrationality of the capitalist system. Okay, so the definition of the left is? The definition of the left would be those who want to expand the power and understanding of working-class people, not just in one country, but around the world, because they're tasked with
changing the foundation of their own work and their own activity, which after all is the foundation of the society. The big realization for the left is that the people who are really responsible for the failures of the left are the workers. Because without the workers, none of this would be able to happen. The people with the figureheads in power, the capitalist class, they're a problem. But the main problem is taking up the responsibility of transformation and of working in your own interests.
So the left's goal is to empower workers to organize themselves to take the power to fight for their own interest and that will mean transforming society. But the one big flaw is that, in the leftist discourse around that, is that understanding what socialism would be after such a rupture, what the actual relations of a new socialist economy would be like,
is something that most Marxists are very- Lavoie's problem, right? That he talks about. What do you do the day after- I think he says in his perfect fashion in that way, I would sell my own mother into slavery if someone could tell me what happens after Be Forbidden Dead. It's a wonderful question. Well, and that's- I've interviewed so many- I think what Kurt's trying to ask, what would happen? In your conception, what is the Marxist speech?
And if so, what is if you can't tell me what that would look like I can tell you I can tell you a bit about it, but but the pro I want to say something about slow voices you brought him up I've interviewed him and by the way, I don't think that in reality he should be I mean he'll calm stuff the Marxist from time to time but really he's a hegelian right he's a left-wing hegelian of some kind and
and what Slovak is best at is taking that kind of Hegelian approach to understanding society and poking holes in conventional wisdom on the left. And also he's, I think, a deep philosopher of Hegel. And he also praises Christianity too, right? That's kind of harmonic with other Marxists.
Yeah, but I mean, you know, not in any profound way, because he points to ideas in Christianity that, you know, can be understood through a Hegelian perspective, and that then you can also see informing Marx. So, like the dialectical thinking, you know, the way that you have to consider things, not in a fragmented way, but in their totality. That sounds pretty Christian.
Yeah, don't you think? Yeah. So you know that you see everything as a oneness as opposed to separate, right? But not like a oneness that's monolithic and uniform, but like a totality that's ribboned with problems, it's self-conflict, self-divided kind of totality, right?
Just a second here. So Peter is this voice of a historian and then you're the voice of a science fiction writer who's well-read, excuse the pun, in Marxism. And I'll be the voice of the quotidian. What is the definition of Marxism in your definition, in your estimation?
Well, Marxism is a political movement that, you know, started in the 19th century and which was a way to struggle for socialism and which has gone through many many different iterations and changes and that was probably finally put aside in the West
uh you know somewhere around the late 70s or and certainly after 1989 that everyone became a post-marxist thinker but there so that's marxism marxism is can be anything from actual revolutionary struggle to uh after the world war two sort of a an attempt to hold on to some key concepts and perfect them um marxist decaf yeah
Yeah, Marxism is quite, I don't know, their theory is pretty thick, but yeah, Marxism without politics maybe is what slowly emerged and then it was, and I think that's what we have now that calls itself Marxist for the most part is social democratic movements for redistribution of the wealth.
um in society uh so things like the Bernie Sanders campaign the most radical parts of that might call themselves Marxist and be interested in Marx and you know look when I was supporting Bernie Sanders which I did I wasn't above that uh either um but Marx is different than Marxism but Marxism keeps returning to Marx so whenever you you start trying to define what Marx said and like let's go back to Marx you're you're acting like
Definitely you're acting like a Marxist. To talk about the people who are listening, and I mentioned that before. Well, you mentioned that your audience is usually people whose ears would perk up as soon as you would mention Marxism. The people who are listening to this will likely be center, center left, center right. And they're thinking, well, so far I haven't heard what's radical come out of Doug's mouth. Doug is saying he wants the working class people to have some more power.
Even libertarians would agree with that, right? I don't think they would ultimately, but go ahead. But inequality is a problem that we can both agree on, at least extreme inequality. Then the question is, well, how to solve the inequality? You're saying that Marxism could be so many different definitions. What do you mean when you say Marxism? Well,
What I mean when I say Marxism also, I mean, here's the thing, I'm being, I think, maybe a little bit like Sloboj Žižek. What do I mean when I say Marxism? It depends on who I'm talking to and what the context is, right? So I don't think it's a good idea to try to nail down what Marxism is. I think the better idea is to try to nail down what Marx's understanding of socialism was and to try to understand what capitalism is.
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Right. What separates Marx and makes him radical from most everyone else is that the terrain in which we, the part of the society that we just take for granted, that we produce things for exchange in the market and that certain kinds of proper relationships support that, he didn't take for granted. So he would be aiming at cooperative work done with the aim of
providing for some sort of social whole, for some sort of community. That's what makes him a communist. It's like, will there be a common store of the goods that we produce in the world? And what we'll compete over isn't access to the common store of goods, but for power over the creative work that produces those goods. So production would be the highest want, or productive work would be what people struggled
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You know, there's this, there's this sense, you mentioned communists, right? Like, if you look at the etymology of the term, he loved the Paris Commies.
There's no doubt about that. Marxists still kind of idealized that time. There's a historian by the name of Will Mont who writes a book called Living the Revolution. And it's about the early early Marxists in Russia who, like other Marxists around Europe, were living in communes. They were trying it out. They were like, well, enough talking about the experiment. Let's make it happen. Let's go in the woods, share everything and we'll
Let's see how it goes. And this is really where there's like this rooting of Marxism. It gives them the space to discuss these ideas and try it out. I'm not going to say that it worked per se. We see this commune idea happen over and over again. The only guys who I can think of or folks who ever kind of successfully pull it off are like monks. Have you ever thought about that? Like why is that when the secular
Thinkers, if you would, or secular youth, try it. These hippie communes, these anarcho communes, there's varying success. But meanwhile, the guys who are following the code of St. Benedict, who have renounced wealth, who do not see wealth as the primary engine of history, who have denounced personal property, who have taken vows of poverty, man, they're still making wine, bread, and cheese up in the mountains. Why did they succeed? And these guys flunked.
Well, I mean, what do they do? What are they doing with their wine, bread and cheese? Giving it for free sometimes. And what's the source of their, you know, wealth to be able to continue to produce that way? I mean, are they living strictly, are they subsistence farmers or are they in some way or another cooperating within
There's a pretty wide variety of monastic traditions, right? So like you get everything from a single guy, like St. Abba John the Dwarf, this dwarf who goes out into the desert with a stick, plants it, lives in a cave, waters the stick every day until it becomes a tree, and next thing you know there's like a garden.
to, you know, I think my buddy of mine is working with some nuns in India who run a co-op that makes fabrics and sells them to the poor for like a bare minimal cheap price just to continue so they could keep, so they could eat and give. Right. You know, it's very, it's almost like an inversion of the Marxist model that works. Why? I mean, if you go down, look, if you go down to a small enough group, it gets a lot easier, right?
But on the other hand, one of the wonders about capitalism is that it has managed to collectivize the world, for the most part. That is, it's brought everyone into a big collective project of creating commodities. Most all of the world is capitalist now, and most of the things that exist in the world were created by workers, as we understand that category, under capitalism.
Do you mean industrialized or do you mean capitalist? Because didn't we say within the Marxist catechism that to be capitalist was you have the machines, the separation. Not everyone has those. What do you mean by brought everyone together? I'm not saying that they're not brought together. The level of industrialization is different in different parts of the world, but for the most part, every part of the world is industrializing. Every part of the world is influenced by
capital's relations. Is there a country in the world that doesn't have any relationship to the foreign market that isn't in any way bringing in goods from other parts of the world or putting other parts of the world goods out to the other parts of the world? I don't think so.
I mean there's an island of doing that before capitalism right like sir but but not on the scale that's being done now in the in the past what supported most people was subsistence farming of various kinds and what supports most people now is interaction in the in the market certainly in the industrial in what's called the industrialized world that's almost completely universal but more and more that's the case for larger and larger parts of the world
And when that has happened, when that's, I'm going to be a big advocate for capitalism here. The fact that capitalism could break a true Menshevik. Don't say that I'll get canceled.
I'm not I'm sincerely scared of many of my comments. So well, that's also not unique So, but yeah, so capitalism brings all these people into into Collective endeavors makes it brings people together out of their private interest into a collective interest into a community
But it does show in a particular way where it's mediated by the expansion of an abstract value based on the exploitation of workers. And so the goal for Marxists is to not to give up the powers of industry, not to give up the power of our collective creativity, but to unfetter it, to change the terms of it, to mediate those relationships in a better way. So you think the uniting goal, like uniting values, the highest values,
of capitalism is exploitation. Like that's their, that's what wakes them up in the morning. Like, man, no, no, no, I don't think I don't think the individual capitalist is sitting around going, Oh, how many workers can I exploit today? How is that the value that unites? Or is it like, well, because it's the actual it's not an ideological value. It's an economic value. It's a material value. It's the fetishized value that says so like, look, what determines a price?
What determines the price ultimately is the amount of time that it took to create the commodity.
So the labor theory of value says that the amount of time that it takes to create, what makes things exchange as equal things in the market is this value that they share in common, this abstraction or substance that the two commodities that may be completely different share in common, which is the amount of time spent working to create the object. So when you go and you trade,
a pile of bagels for a book. Well, or better than put intellectual work into this, which complicates it. But, you know, a pile of bagels for a hoe, you're saying, okay, the amount of time it took me to take these bagels and the amount of time it took you to create that hoe are roughly the same, so we're exchanging equal values.
That logic though, you could spend years on a bagel and it would be worth the world. I don't know if that's exactly the principle. It's not a matter of individual time. It's a matter of socially necessary time. If you create a bagel and it takes you 10 years, the overhead costs and the amount of money it takes for you to feed yourself as you do this work will require you to price that bagel way outside the range of what's normal in the market.
You're competing with other producers, which creates socially necessary amount of labor time that's acceptable for the creation of a bagel. The fact that you're competing with other capitalists is what brings that price down. And then beyond that, you innovate.
To try to produce the same bagel faster and for a little while you can make a lot of profit because it takes you less time and money to make a bagel than it does your competition. Right. And you can still charge the same because the socially that standard time the amount of time that it takes for most people is higher. So you're
you slip by speeding up production, you cannot compete your competition, but then eventually they kept catch up with you and that and that lowers your prices. And that's, that's, that's how we're walking through that last week. Well, I mean, okay. Um, your competitor, uh, is producing bagels faster than you are. And then taking on, uh, you know, more of the getting more of the market share. Now, either that competitor is going to monopolize or you're going to figure out
how to catch up and produce your bagels at the same rate or faster so that you can compete with and stay in business, right? So that pressure for individual capitalists to innovate, stay up with what's current in the industrial realm, get the better machinery, or if they can't do that, discipline the workers to go faster.
is a big part of it right like innovate i said either innovate or discipline yeah i didn't say just one okay so i mean these none and none of these things by the way are moral judgments right okay okay and when i talk about exploitation i'm not saying oppression necessarily it could be exploitation in this definition could be good
It can be in a way, yeah, because it, well, it's, I wouldn't say it's good or bad. It has a negative consequence, unintended consequences. It certainly does have a negative connotation, and that's because, you know, Marx is a good leftist. But no, the problem with exploitation is twofold. One is that it requires that there be workers who are paid the value of what they need in a set of commodities,
to survive or live, which I think is probably a better way to, you know, whatever, to whatever level is acceptable standard in your society. So you get paid enough to live, but you then produce more value than the set of commodities you need to live. So you are exploited because you're producing more than what you're compensated for. But if you weren't, if you were compensated for exactly what you produced,
Then the company would go under and there would be no production and so the system can't operate that way Well, I mean companies are so it's kind of like what David Sloan Wilson Talks about me when he talks about multivariant selection evolution, right? You have different populations and within those populations. You can have slackers You can never like but slacker Populations do not do well and faced with populations that actually help each other out those guys out compete them and right kind of
Yeah, but that whole thing is you got to divide between the use value of things and actual wealth and the amount of time it takes to do things and the value that comes out of that of the capitalist process where you're setting things up to be sold in the market. So like, you know, what happens to slackers in a capitalist relation is they probably try to just, you know, hide themselves for as long as possible. And it's they're just one variable amongst many that slows down production.
Or they all talk about philosophy like us. We're working hard here. As a former slacker, born into that generation of slackers, or Gen X, I think slackers are just part of the equation.
And, um, you can see this in, but, and nonetheless, capitalism overcomes the problem of the slacker because it has, you know, even when it, even if it doesn't overcome it totally, it doesn't make everyone perfectly efficient, but it has all these tools to bring to bear to innovate production and discipline workers and really produce a lot of wealth. The difficulty is that wealth is distributed irrationally and, um,
And periodically, it's distributed in ways that are truly irrational, where you've got things going on, like people dumping milk down the drain, because to keep to bring the price down. Oh, in Ontario, we have government milk quotas, which are our own problem. But really quick on the end that I actually have to use the restroom. Okay, yeah, but something maybe to explore is when you have freedom, when you have liberty,
You have those who choose rightly and those who choose kind of falsely, those who abuse freedom, those who succeed in utilizing those, there's a mass variance of outcomes that you get, evolutionarily, when you just let freedom reign. And to your point, this kind of does create a split. How do we reign in the split? How do we reconcile the prodigal sons with the ones who did the right thing?
and something maybe to talk about i'll be right back okay sure okay okay so say to me okay so well my view my view in this is that um the level of competition um that we expect probably wouldn't that we're used to in society now and the kind of rewards and punishment or and the incentives uh
that we rely on now to direct people to make the right kinds of decisions that are socially useful. When you work hard, you're helping more than yourself. You're helping the people around you. You're producing more. You're contributing more. So we want to incentivize that.
But the idea under socialism is that the rewards and punishments wouldn't take place on the level of survival or subsistence, but would take place probably more on the level of like social recognition, creative fulfillment, and that's when you turn away from competing for access to the store of the goods and instead
What people would be competing for is the ability to have some sort of elite position within the realm of production, like, you know, are you going to be playing in the back row on your violin or are you going to be the conductor? Those are the kinds of things that would incentivize people to work hard and to think hard and to continue to innovate. This is maybe where I'm a little bit utopian is that I think that we can
bring the level of conflict in our society down. So it's not a matter, it's not always a struggle or most of the time isn't a struggle for survival. And that we could even see, you know, the expansion of human health and, and technological development to support that under socialism. Like one of the people I interviewed because I'm a socialist was Aubrey de Grey. Do you know who he is? No.
he's a longevity researcher who was working on medicine to repair the bodies, the damage the body does to itself due to aging. And I think that, you know, overcoming, like extending the health span for as long as we can would be a good thing for society and for individuals in society and that that would be worth supporting.
Well, one of the questions I've always wondered, I asked many people this, but Marxist in particular, what is the goal of Marxism or whatever it is you're pursuing? Is it a longer lifespan? Is it happier people? That is the metric of life satisfaction subjectively reported. Is it child mortality rates to go down, to plummet? Is it wealth to increase? What is it in particular that the Marxist project
Expansion. The first and biggest thing is the expansion of human freedom. And I think along with that, a lot of the things you've mentioned would be improved. Concomitant. Yeah, concomitant to that. I think that you would probably see, definitely see, if things are working out at all well, even further decline in infant mortality
than we've already seen with the rest of modernity. You would definitely see an expansion of the lifespan for most people. Okay, so to simplify, and excuse me if I keep using the word simplify and be specific, I'm a mathematician. I'm a foolish mathematician. Think of me as extremely ignorant when it comes to these topics, and I'm just trying to understand them. You and Peter can talk at a certain level, but to me, I'm always listening, almost always listening to conversations
of Marxist as if they're speaking another language or not getting to the issues that I actually care about. Like, what are you specifically advocating for when you say redistribute wealth? How are you specifically going to redistribute it? I'm going to be asking you a couple of questions. I'm not a redistributionist, ultimately. I mean, I supported Bernie Sanders, but like one of the things about Marxism, you have to understand what I would want to emphasize the most is that it is not the project where the state takes up
All the things we produce and distribute it rationally. That is not the aim of Marxism.
The goal is to change the way we work together to produce the things we need, to change the aim of our collective work, so that the aim would be actually the expansion of human power and creativity rather than the aim of profit-making in the market. Let me be socratic here. Yeah. Okay. Why are we
Why do you care so much about freedom? I know this sounds like it's so self-explanatory, but just let's be clear. Well, I care a lot about freedom because I feel as though life is short at the moment and that the way to bring meaning to life for human beings is to try to explore the
Meaning in life.
You also mentioned that people tend you don't like people starving obviously like right now that's that's the work that is not a free condition right right when you're starving to get
Uh, you know if you're if you're eight months old, however, the capitalist societies not this not the communist societies for sure There are less people starving and that and that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty. I'm sure you've heard this I'm sure you have some yeah, so i'd like to hear this Okay, so my rebuttal would be back to kind of my original point about the soviet union, which is like, you know, if you're going to compare the failures of the soviet union to anything you might compare it to
the way that capitalist and bourgeois relations started in England in the 17th century and after. You have to look at all the famines. You can't just look at the ones that were nearby. I think that what we're looking at when we look at things like the Russian Revolution even and the revolution in China is an attempt for these traditional societies to modernize much more than it is any fully worked out or successful attempt
to transcend capitalism. I mean, that was their aim, but that is how they modernized, and ultimately, in the case of China and the Soviet Union, that is how they entered into the capitalist world that we know today. You would describe the Soviet Union as capitalist? Yeah, state capitalist, because the, look, we are now, like in Canada, well,
More so than we are now. But there was, especially then, around the time that the Soviet Union came into being, and especially after World War II, there was a tendency for the state to intervene in capitalist relations and to direct capitalist relations more and more across the industrialized world. So you'd see it in the Soviet Union for sure, but you also saw it in FDR's America.
And the role of the state to direct capitalism hasn't gone away, it's just changed. So it used to be that there was more of an emphasis on redistribution when there was a threat of unruly workers, and also when there was a boom going on and there was a lot of economic growth. And then after the 70s, when after the profitability crisis of the 70s and
and all the other economic crisis of the 70s there's been these neoliberal turns to try to prop up capitalist relations through state spending and so but yeah i would say overall the soviet union in china were state capitalist organizations with socialist ambitions like us like this so here's my question for you because like i mean i don't think i don't think america is is aiming at
I don't think politicians in America are socialists. I don't think that even Bernie Sanders has like the same vision of transcending capitalism that someone like Lenin had or that even Mao... Well, Lenin didn't like the state, right? Yeah, he wanted it to wither away, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know, I don't think we could call him state anything in that way. But when it comes to, I mean, he says in the state revolution,
when i didn't have status ambitions but he ended up creating state capitalism in the soviet union what you intend to do and what happened that way 100 the new economic policy and the people were down for it right people were naming their kids nep like they were naming their yeah well because it was because the other approach was creating massive famines and that was a uh in a way you know absolutely necessary kind of a necessary retreat um and uh and you know
It was a disaster. But like the Irish famine is how you should consider, you know, the way that with the robbing of the commons that's taking the peasant workers' land away from them, that happened as capitalism developed and that happened as so-called communism developed as well. Did you notice the thread between all your examples is not that people call themselves socialists, it's not that people call themselves capitalists, it's the fact that the government, in the case of the Irish people too, like you look at the British government, the British
imperial government was like a federal government of federal governments. It was insanely regimented. You can go to the Supreme Court here in Canada, and there's a black inside that just says, yeah, this court is the highest court in this land, except for one in English. We answer to that. It's the federal government saying, listen, buddy, just like you, we have a federal government. You know, all of these things have massive centralized state power.
Yeah, absolutely. So is it bad that you have a problem because there's another position that says that the rich guys ally with the government guys and there's a revolving door. These people, of course, who negate that revolving door by desiring decentralization in different forms, they call themselves anarchists.
I was basically an anarchist before, right? You still are! A lot of people might say that. So where's the Marxism? It's like what I'm trying to figure out. Where's the government in this? What's their role? Alright, so Marx thought that there should be something called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolsheviks thought they were going to create the dictatorship of the proletariat.
There's a moment, I think, in the Stalinist regime where they're like, yeah, we've achieved socialism. We just have traitors, right?
Well, yeah, we got to purge them out. Yeah, but they but they would even then admit that, you know, the law of value still applied and that they were still going to have to balance, you know, think about profits, basically, and, and, you know, they never implemented something like the what Marx talked about in the critique of the Gotham program, labor voucher system that would
The way it was described in the critique of the gotha program, it wouldn't have been possible to hold on to and then invest in production. It would only be good to redeem one hour of work.
The whole point, if you read the critique of the Gotham program, is that the labor voucher system contradicts itself and it makes the value in labor kind of obvious to the workers and no longer necessary to worry about. When the Soviets took over and you had the early Soviet Union, they didn't print money, the early government, because they were like, great job, GG, we don't need the money.
and then they realized that they need they need money and it was almost dead it was like a stillborn unfortunately that idea it died from its infancy before it had a chance for life maybe that says that might reflect something in the ideology but when it comes to what we were originally talking about what's the role of the government why wouldn't you just call yourself an animal okay so the role of the government after a revolutionary break
the dictatorship of the proletariat. It would be there to administer or administrate relations between workers, maybe workers councils, maybe Soviets, but the workers process of transforming the way production goes. It would be like a technical job.
They'd be more like clerks or communications officers or something like that. And they wouldn't be dictating policy. They would be implementing the workers' demands. But the moment the government takes on the role of arbiter, you need policy. That's arguably all they do. That's why Lenin... They wouldn't be dictating to the workers what the workers should do to transform their relations. They would maybe set up policy about
How the different sectors would communicate with each other or through them, but they wouldn't be they would be administrators truly be administrators rather than lawmakers or seats of political authority. That's the idea. But if you're an administrator you administrate someone right like you tell them
It wouldn't be setting the aims of the workers. It would be advising and maybe setting some policies around how to implement the changes they want. It would be like if I hired someone and said I want to build a backyard patio.
And I hired this guy on who knew how to do it and he gave me technical directions. I wouldn't call him my boss. It's almost like we're building a church here. It's not going to force you, but it's going to advise you what the right thing to do is. And it's going to get involved with carpet. You can use the metaphor of a carpenter. Maybe what we're looking at here is something that we've done. Just go back to the monks.
They pulled it off, by the way. They're long-lasting, successful communists. Why didn't they do it? Why couldn't we? The key thing for Marx is breaking with the value of labor. Breaking with this idea that what sets up our relations when we distribute the things we make is the amount of time we spend making them. When you say key, that's like unique to Marx?
I think he does have a, I think he has a really interesting and key and unique critique of the bourgeois economists that does indicate like it's a transformation of Adam Smith and Ricardo and others to make it critical, more deeply critical. You know, not the bash of Adam Smith, but the yes.
the aim of Marx was to transform those relations and break with commodity production. Because at the moment, despite the fact that the state seems to be so powerful, it itself is always managing the aims of this form of production. It's like, the way I think of it is like capitalism is like the rules of chess.
And you can change the players all you want, but those rules remain the same until you change the game. What are the rules? The rules right now is we make things aimed at exchange on the market as equivalents. The value of those commodities are based on the amount of time it takes, socially necessary time it takes to create them. You have a class of people who only real role is to provide the labor to produce the things that then get exchanged.
Whereas you could have a classless society where people came together to create things for a common store and competed over how and what they were going to do to create and transform the world, rather than competing through the marketplace and around exchange. What's going to drive that? So we're all one team, right? Yeah, it would be a world effort.
Wouldn't it sacrifice competition, though? No, it just would shift where that competition was. You missed the answer. What's the pressure for competition? Social status, social status, social status and power. So like, you know, are you going to be sitting, I said before, you're going to be sitting in the back row playing one or two notes on the violin, or are you going to be the conductor? Yeah, in Kotkin, the historian, right?
Soviet historian in his book Magnetogorsk or Magnetic Mountain, he looks at that Soviet constructed city and he remarks how the factory in the morning, right, they would put up the productivity numbers, which comrade was the fastest comrade, which comrade... Yeah, that would all be gone under socialism because you don't... Why? Because that's the prestige. Don't you want to know... No, the prestige would not be based on
speeding up production in order to bring down the price of the commodity and compete more efficiently in the market, which is what all of that productivity number stuff is about. It's not about a point system rewarding people. What are they competing for? They're competing for profitability in either in the world market or in the local market because the faster you produce things, the more productive you are on the floor, the more value you produce
Okay, but if we're competing to be the most productive, how's that not profitability? I'm not saying anything about being the most productive. Well, you wouldn't be measuring in quantities of work time. What are we measuring quality? It would be measured in the quality of the output.
and the ability to meet needs and also to meet new needs and new social ambitions, not in the amount of time or how quickly it was done or how slowly it was done. It would not be a time based production. It would be based on the qualities. So when you talked about productivity numbers, no, you didn't. You still had the productivity numbers. You still had, look, they were looking to Taylorism to try to run their economy. They love Taylor. Right.
because he was still dictated to by the law of value and the production of this abstract value through labor time through making sure that you know the amount of value in a commodity uh you know was socially necessary meeting what was socially necessary or even beating what was socially necessary right the same engine of profitability was driving production in the soviet union because why say it was state capitalists so and under socialism that
aim, that fundamental aim, would be different. That's what makes this radical... Socialism would be uncoercive. It would be what? Uncoercive. It would not, well it might be coercive, but it just wouldn't be coercive that way. It would be coercive to a different value. Yeah, to a different value. One that everyone kind of would be aware of having set. And it would be, you're arguing that... We would be setting our own value, our own primary value.
We would be setting the aims of our own production. So that means that, you know, if we set up terms of production that have drastically terrible unintended consequences, we would know that this was our primary aim that we'd set. We wouldn't think of it as a natural fact of the world. We'd be able to alter it more easily. We should definitely explore that. You were talking about assessment there. Just a shift from the value, right? Like in terms of achieving value.
The idea of assessing value is also fascinating, right? Who assesses the value in a Soviet state? Is it just, we vote, this is what we think is valuable, and we go for it? Do you know what I mean? Who assesses what's valuable? What's the agenda? Right now, the power of the state is based on the ability to tax corporations and people, and to manage the
you know, the money value in the world, and then also to build up armies and have a mandate on violence. And that gives it the ability to be the final judge or assessor of the success, or at least try to be the final judge of the access and accessor of social success. And, you know, we have democracy in place here for the people to weigh in on how well the politicians are doing, right?
so under socialism the power of individual workers would be more direct because they would be like direct democracy or like would we um yeah i think probably uh the you know this is where marxists start to say well no blueprints um because before we can say like what would be the best political form or what would be the best way to organize our communication and assessment of our success
we probably should know something about the political or the economic and social aims of our production. We need to know what that axiomatic first value is going to be before we can kind of know how we want to manage ourselves. But I would say that something along the lines of local communities of control of production would be able to, you know, would also
You know, like councils or something like that. I'm just kind of reaching to what's ready at hand and my lexicon here would be the people who would also be responsible for informing Each other about the success rate that they're having. In other words, I mean, look, it would be pretty obvious if the common store of goods was empty.
Or in certain areas, people weren't getting what they just needed to survive. I mean, the base level success would have to be meeting just subsistence needs. And if that wasn't working, go ahead. I was going to say, I don't mean to touch you off, please. Yeah, no, go ahead. OK, sorry. You know, that idea of the common store and understanding value, I think is really interesting, right? Because one man might look at the common store
Man, we did it. This is valuable. We need all this stuff. It's great stuff. And someone else might look at it and look at the future and the potential in the material they're looking at and think it's garbage, like the eyes of a prophet in the Old Testament, looking at the wealth in their society, all garbage. You know, like I think- And so I would say that second guy is- He's a minority, right? Yeah, but he's a better communist. But he's a minority.
So would the democracy favor that guy? Like this is another thing too. What if we just let the people organize their own common stores and then those common stores competed with each other and they own the equity of those common stores and we call that capitals? No, no, yeah, but you're like, you're, we're not talking about a common store. You're still talking about access to commodities as a primary thing. The question would be how do we organize? Look, let me tell you about my novel. This would clarify it because I tried to work this out.
in theory and I wrote a novel and it ended up being dystopian which I kind of like. So this was my attempt to... Was it supposed to be utopian? It was neither really but it was a matter of everyone read it as dystopian which I kind of perversely liked because the way I implemented socialism was in a very coercive way so of course it would seem dystopian. I had an AI novel, I wrote an AI novel
where rather than so where Donald Trump was president and the people in government who created the AI were convinced that he was about to destroy the world through nuclear war and the AI was giving them reports like here's my projected timeline before everything goes up in flames and so they were trying to use the artificial intelligence to come up with a plan to save humanity from its own self-destruction right and and the computer programmer
was the dad of the protagonist. The guy who created the IAI and was taking information from the AI. This was the dad of the protagonist. And so the whole story is told from the teenage point of view. And what the dad of the protagonist did was thought was we just need to perfect humanity. We just need to get everyone to be smarter. We need everyone to be faster. We need everyone to be more agile, healthier. And then if we raise everyone up,
If we can come up with a program with the power of this AI to raise everyone up in their consciousness and their abilities, we will be able to overcome this problem. And so what he did was he took himself on as a test subject. And his first task was to try to beat his son at Super Smash Brothers, because he always lost. Great game. Yeah, but I call it... You play? Yeah, I play and I always lose to my freaking teenage son. What's your name? I'm sorry, we'll go right back to the novel. What do you name?
Well, it's been a while. Marth was one I would play for a while. Sometimes I would take perverse choices, like I would play Pokemon, Pikachu. No, no. Anyway, it says a lot about
Please continue. What does it say about me that... Oh my, like, you know, the deep psychology of who you mean as Smash Bros. Brawl, or Melee, rather, Brawl for the cancer of our society. Right, Melee, Melee is what I played, yeah. So I changed the name to Bash, Bash Revolution in the novel. So it's not Smash Brothers, it's Bash, Bash Revolution, and that's the game that he wants to be able to beat his son at, and he can. The computer helps him
uh improves his game he can beat not only his son but he goes to a championship uh for the state and he almost beats he almost wins he doesn't win though and he gets very depressed but then he finds out from the computer that look even if his plan had worked all that would have done was speed up the apocalypse it would have gotten here like three weeks earlier if everyone was smarter and so so the problem is not
that in individual humanity, it's not a matter of our genetic code. It's not a matter of us not being smart enough. There's something else going on that's causing the problem. And of course that pro what is it? It's the form of campus capitalism. It's, it's, I was expecting a different problem. Yeah, but it's capitalism ultimately. And so how do we, how do we save humanity? Well, the AI has a solution. We have to break from the commodity form and has a way to do it.
Rather than produce things based on their ability to exchange in the market, all production will be directed by video games. I thought that the way out was commodification of video games. Replacing commodities with commodity production with the popular basing production based on what kind of games are popular.
Games will be designed to augment in reality. The games you're playing are actually producing the things that you need for other games. And so the kinds of games that are popular would be dictated by what people want to play, but also by what things are most productive to produce the things that people want to play. And the AI has it all worked out in a gigantic, huge brain. But it also is clearly manipulating humanity to do its will.
Once AI takes over and puts you in a video game, you're no longer in reality, you're not really making decisions based on your own ideas, you're making decisions based on what the computer is giving you to play. I mean, it's a very common psychological theme in Marxist literature, right? Like, we don't do the thinking, someone else does the thinking, we don't make the commodity exchange, the government makes the commodity exchange, we don't do that. Do you think that that reliance on the vanguard or the vanguard
not even as an institution, but as an abstract. Don't worry, the expert told me, I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing, but I know it's right because I've gotten it from above. Permanent as celestial knowledge. Do you think that might be the undoing of Marxism? Like why it fails? There's this externalization of responsibility and thinking.
Yeah, I think it's part of the reason why Marxism had such difficulty. There was two reasons why Marxism had such difficulty, and there's two. This is broken into a two-sided problem in Marxism, and on one hand it's determinism, and the other is volunteerism. Strangely enough, volunteerism is the vanguardist position. Right, just to inform our audience, that's the one Mr. Lenin
Yeah, right. And Rosa Luxemburg was, I mean, neither of them were only volunteers and only determinists, but... Right. One of them was volunteers. No coercion there. Anyway, sorry. Right, right. So, if you think that the vanguard is necessary, what you think is that a certain set of ideas have to be developed in order to direct people towards their own liberation. And if you think that
that doesn't need to be done than what you think is something like maybe what Bernstein thought, but in a slightly different way. You think that the market relations themselves or the society of capitalism itself will bring people into conflict and into revolutionary struggle to create and will also give them the ability to create a new world. The three tenets of Marxism, according to Rosa Luxemburg, were first, capitalism cannot last, it's a temporary,
society because it's riven with contradictions and it defeats itself. Second, capitalism brings people together in a social collective to make massive amounts of wealth and socialize people to be more interdependent and less independent. So to understand their need for one another to be more cooperative, capitalism does that. And the third thing is capitalism brings a consciousness of this situation to the working class.
How horrible. Just to go to the volunteerism, I think it is very important to specify that when we talk about volunteerism for the Marxists, we're not talking that everyone does everything out of their own free will and accord and they voluntarily give
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I'm just saying, when we talk about volunteerism, it's not that. When we say volunteerism in Marxism, we mean we have people volunteer to get guns and coerce people to share. So it's a whole other kind of volunteering. You know, when here's the word volunteer, you think, you know, they're giving a free life. But really, volunteerism in Marxism is more like the freedom to tell other people what to do.
Yeah, well, it's a yeah, the volunteerism is event you you Yeah, you yeah, right. You're led by the best and the brightest To develop your ideas and put them into action Voluntarily rather than being determined by your circumstances. It's your own people are so bright. They have guns to persuade us Yeah, you know right right now this look
this the the capitalism is a violent business too i mean you can't just hold state capital 100 yeah 100 i'm not trying to defend it's like you know they they they and it wasn't even a matter of voluntarily taking up arms it was more like you need to have the full understanding of um of marxist ideas in order to know what to do and how to transform society um otherwise
Yeah, otherwise you'd be stuck in what's called trade union consciousness and only be keep struggling for better wages, only keep struggling within the logic of capitalism rather than come to understand you need to be political and transform. I'm not saying capitalism is not, at least state capitalism is about choruses, right? Like we have the picketing men in the United States, you have a strike, don't worry, hire picketing men, these guys with guns, they'll come over and break your strikes. You know,
It'd be a shame if your laborers had something like rights, so you can hire out. It was horrible. And the government, when they first intervene, they are on the side of the picker-diggies men. They're like, good job, boys. Thank you for your service. Be ashamed that the Union Town stopped, or not the Union Town, be ashamed that the company Town stopped. So they're, no, 100% capitalism as a history of coercion, in part. So I agree with you there.
Yeah, so the only thing I'd add is that this problem of determinism and volunteerism is a problem when you're thinking about any radical social change that depends upon the masses or depends upon it coming from
the less powerful parts of society. If you have an elitist understanding of how social change is created, that you don't have this split about determinism or volunteerism, you simply have these ideas and try to put them into actions, right, direct. Whereas right now, what we're talking about is the Marxist struggle to understand how to get people who don't have, don't perceive themselves to be responsible for the world or to have the power to come to an understanding.
of their own position and their own responsibility for transforming society. You know, that's some powerful words that you said there. This idea that in that volunteerist model, there's a descentivization for those on the fringes to participate. Because because you externalize responsibility, when you're asked, hey, is it your job to perpetuate the revolution? Is it your job to give? They say, no, some apartheid.
is doing that for me, right? We go to Zizac with the Buddhist in the wheel, right? Like someone else is taking care of it, I'm good here, and then that occurs. Maybe one of the greatest, I don't even want to say successes, but one of the greatest instruments capitalism has used to succeed is its ability to take everyone, anyone on the fringes of society to an extent,
to get them to participate in the game. If you talk to Americans, they either see themselves as millionaires or soon to be millionaires. And that's why socialism is so important. Not because it's flawed, but because even the lowest guy is playing the game.
I'm not sure I quite understand the turn to talk about people on the fringes so much here, but because of the concern when we're talking about volunteerism and determinism was not about having a few people not agree, but not having the working class as a big totality come together with a political project beyond the logic of capitalism. So it was, okay, so I'm going to put that aside for a second. The second thing you said there,
was about how capitalism forces people to cooperate in its own logic, right? It at least gets them to, right? People play the game, and that's arguably true. I remember what it was I wanted to address. You said people in the United States think of themselves as millionaires in waiting or millionaires.
Or haves and have-nots, or soon-to-haves, or something like that. Like there was this was said by a Republican Steinbeck said the other point. Yeah, well I would say is that in the after World War II for a while that kind of assessment of let's say working-class mentality was accurate enough or had some truth to it because there was such a big boom going on and the expansion of wealth through very very productive capitalism
really did change people's living standards and conditions for the most part. There were people who were excluded and those people, you know, usually along ethnic lines, and that has been a deep problem for America. But I would say that even since the 70s, this notion that everyone is going to be, could be a millionaire or that the working class are just millionaires and waiting, I think that's given way. And I worked in, you know,
As just an irregular jobs for most of my adult life like 20 years and the people who had come from families because I come from a professionalized family. My father was a doctor so but people came from families that were just workers themselves. They had no ambitions to be millionaires. They had ambitions to have like some security.
I mean it was a scaled down version, right? Like they themselves would be business owners and then they would tell people they could tell people what to do. I mean that's what in the Marxist conception means to be an owner. I knew someone at Comcast who was very very much from the working class. She would talk to me about her life and like all the bitches she'd beaten up at bars the night before because they were eyeing her boyfriend and stuff like that. She was tough and
But she had aspirations. She wanted to be a mortician because she saw that as a job with some security behind it. This was not somebody who was looking to... I mean, she wanted to have a great life for herself, but she didn't look to her work or to her future income as the way she was going to satisfy herself in the world. It was just what she needed to get by. I don't think that
material here is actually maybe where we differ with marxist right i i don't think material is the satisfaction of life like i don't think that's where the meaning comes from right and this is something that you know marxist historians have uh trouble with especially the retro projecting on history like how how would a marxist explain let's say tertullian or the christian martyrdom
these guys who give up, let alone their material, their lives. Where does that fit in in the Marxist history? It's almost like it's a deviation away from what they consider the engine of history material. Well, I don't think the Marxist idea is that everyone's working only for their own strictly material interests. It's more that the way that you build social relationships to meet everyone, or as many people as possible,
material interest is what's going to determine the framework in which these other subjective attitudes arise. So, you know, if you want to understand the church, you have to understand the feudal society in which it arose. That doesn't mean that everyone was just dictated by love of corn. Pre-feudal society. Right, right, right, right, right. Well, Christianity
arose and took power and became a real force didn't it in in the middle ages when and before isn't that when i mean yeah dates further back but didn't i guess you know it depends upon what kind of christianity you're talking about because it was you know like it doesn't matter don't say ask you what if that's you wrote with the grand inquisitor christ came back you saw the church or it knows what do you think so uh you know i think it's the grand inquisitor says something i'm like
Get out of here, we're not ready for you yet. The church had some role to play and Christianity played some role in the formation of, it was part of the political power that shaped relations in the feudal world.
Papa means son of the priest.
What Marx would want to emphasize is how Christianity related to the relationships between paths that had some role to play in the way material needs were met in a society and what kinds of things were built and what set up those needs rather than
only on the level of like theological debates or only on the level of the cast of characters who took authority in the church or, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, who is it? The great Greek communist, but he was also a prolific writer, he's like there are Dostoevsky and Sartre, Nikos Kasantzakis, right, who is the, if you would, the Marxist Christian, and he really
emphasizes this idea that, you know, if you need some wealth redistribution, you need the word they had, they carried us, right, for Christian door. This idea of... The early socialists, the early socialists were Christians. I mean, to one Europe and in the 19th century Europe, like, you know, the utopian socialists were mostly Christians and they were
Lutherans are, you know, radical anti... they were on the side of the Lutheran tradition where you wanted to bring the Word of God down to the people and away from the priestly class. And so... They figured out the Communisms, man. I'm just saying. What distinguished Marx from them was that he didn't... he was not utopian in so much as he didn't want to
Wrap out like write down a blueprint for exactly what moral values should be at play and what relations should exist and how people should set up a stable, godly, harmonious world. But rather, he wanted to free the relations so they could be more and more creative and create new means, new needs and the key was much more on the side of
bourgeois humanism than the usual socialists were because he was excited about the freedom that was potentially there and the development that could come out of a socialist society much more than he was about the perfect moral values or the balance or harmony of a
Oh yeah, for sure. Marxists are not concerned with morality. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But no, there's, they are too, right? It's just a question of what it is you value, right? And the way you, if you would, the way you would set up an institution to ensure that those values are met, I think is where Christians and Marxists differ.
If you were talking about like the early church, but you know when it comes to this idea that You need in order to be a Christian to give all you have to You know avoid if you would being a rich man, I think it's like James 5 they talk about You know the blood are the wages that you would held from the laborers Will come like your It's like your clothes if he's talking to the rich man. He's like, oh we've been how you rich and
Your clothes are moth-eaten. The wages you withheld from the laborers are recently going to come and get you. They cry out. And this is the really splitting point, though. James writes for those guys, for these laborers who've been exploited, that the just man says, he does not oppose you. Something that no Marxist, I think, would ever say. Oh, here's the proletariat, man. He does not oppose you.
What do you think the Christian thing to do would be if in a society, in a situation where in order for the bourgeois class, in other words, in order for capitalism to right itself,
you knew that you had to go through another world war and that you know millions would have to die either from disease or starvation or that because you have to do that yeah in order for capitalism that relationship between the owning class and the working class to maintain its its
In order for there to be a new boom, you knew that there would have to be a massive amount of human sacrifice, basically. Oh, human sacrifice, I think early Christians are all about. They're going the nine yards. But I thought that Christ was what he made it so there would never need to be an actual human sacrifice again. That the blood of Christ was replacing the need for us to pay penance for our own sins.
in this world. You're talking about that idea that he's been a ransom for our sins, right? Right. Basically, this is a religion of forgiveness of one another in a community rather than primarily a religion of appeasement of a wrathful god. Two things. One, I'll tackle the second thing you mentioned. It's because it's a religion of forgiveness, there's no need for that war you were talking
The first one is when it comes to the idea of, you know, his sins were, how do I say this, his death was a ransom for our sins. It's interesting, that verse, if you follow it out, and it's Paul who's talking. I'm going to cut you off on the ransom because that's a distraction, the history of Christianity and that. I want to address what you just said first, so about... I'm just kidding. Snap. Oh, you got me. Paul puts away Tolstoy.
The idea that a Christian would say, oh, because we believe in forgiveness, there's no need for that human sacrifice that I was talking about. But what I was saying was, the Marxist says, well, you as an individual Christian may forgive and be just in your heart, but the problem is that these relations that really determine what happened
are not just yours alone, but they're objectified out in the world, and they're also... 100%, yeah. Christians would say that, too. Jews, the word shtema? Hold on, hold on, let me get to the end of that. I'll write it down. So the point is that if we know that
capitalism's going into crisis, that there's going to be a massive shortfall in profitability, there's going to be massive unemployment, there's going to be inequalities between nations and competition between nations to try to figure out which nations are going to suffer the most and that that competition is likely to erupt into violence or in war or at least has that potential and that not only that but through that process
enough capital will be destroyed and devalued so that new investors can come along and invest in what comes at the end of it and find a new boom. Would we be willing to say it's good Christians? Yes, as long as that, no, not just that we forgive them, but yes, that relation between the worker and the boss, that relationship between the bourgeois class and the proletariat,
can continue and we forgive that not just one side but both sides of that relation for their sins of continuing on you know in this pattern. Okay let's do this so there's this idea I love this it's been a pleasure by the way just speaking with you I don't know how many hours sorry I should go pretty soon it's been two I think but you know on the subject of one I just want to say
Basically what we're talking about here is comparing Marxism to Christianity, and particularly something like Christian anarchism. I'm not going to say that Christians are homogenous. Obviously, maybe we all have our own interpretations of what the gospel means or what Christ meant. Take that for what it's worth. Who's responsible for determining that in heresies, but we can talk about that hours on end.
Ironically something Marxist struggle with too. What's heretical Marxist doctrines? It's common in all ideologies. How do you define false teachings? But anyway, to give a steel man and answer your question. I would say for Christians, there's this understanding that systems collapse in their inequities
Even if everyone believes that it's a good system. I'll give an example. The crazy thing about the nature of sin where you miss the mark from what should be and what is, that's an archer's term, is that when you miss the way,
You might not even realize you're sinning. The society might not even realize you're sinning. In fact, in the Christian cosmology, they don't. They idolize things they shouldn't care about. But the beauty of sin, if there is any beauty in it, is that it goes away. It collapses by its own iniquity. It falls not because you and I want it to, but because there's something inherently wrong with that system. I'll give you an example.
Let's say we lived in a society that believed that you should eat this poison that lowered our health, we call it capitalism, and ruined our lives. But we all believed it would work. Well, regardless of the fact that we all believe that it's the right system, and regardless of the fact that we believe it's the most efficient, it isn't. And that its inequities, its very inequities, would choke itself out.
The difference is that what I'm saying is that at the end of that process of it collapsing, it would also be able to reconstitute itself and come up in the same relation and do it all over again. So wouldn't the Christian thing to do would be this, to change the set of relations
So that they were less likely to collapse and there would be less calamity. 100%. I think you and I would just probably disagree about the wage.
Well, Dan, that's where all that technical conversation about value and the market and the exchanges and all that was important because if you don't believe the foundational kind of material economic political analysis of Marx, then you can be perfectly moral of trying to in a conservative way prop up this system as the best of all possible worlds. No, I don't think I don't think crisis is okay with money lenders, right?
Okay, so you want to get rid of i mean look i'm just saying like i i would yeah you want to live in a society equals capitalism right right right i'm not saying christianity i don't see christianity equals capitalism either my point is to say if i'm just saying to anyone if you don't believe that the marxist critique of political economy is true then you ought not to be a marxist and you ought not to struggle to overcome capitalism
but that you know there are other reasons why you could struggle over okay okay let's hear it let's hear one okay so the thing is is what will be its undoing right so in what you tell me why i should try to overthrow capitalism
You just said there are other reasons to do it. I just want to hear what you have to say. You should tell me. You're the Marxist, or you're the socialist. You convinced me. Why should I overthrow capitalism? I'm not saying you should. So here's, if I may offer another kind of solution. I'm just trying to describe something more akin to maybe the monasticism of early Christianity that comes around like 300. There's a sense that the world is fallen.
and that the way that you, they have no utopian ideals about people, right? Like Christianity 101 is everyone you meet is a horrible, like, sinner. They, you know, they would kill a good man and crucify him and torture him. There's no optimism in like you, and then worse, you chant every Sunday, Mia Maxalva, or, you know, of the greatest sinners of whom I am, or of the sinners of whom I am chief. There's this understanding you are one of them.
You change yourself first, and you lead by example. And you're not the only one in this game.
I'm not saying you're going to be feared. Hear me out. Hear me out. No, no, no, no, no, no. I got to interject. That might be a perfectly good tactic. I mean, not what you're talking about. What kind of tactic do we deploy to create social change? Lead by example. Change yourself first, lead by example. That's not non-Martius. That's not non-Martius. What's sort of non-Martius is the recognition that you're not the only player in the game.
I don't see how that's non-Marxist, because the Marxists are always... I'm not done. I'm not done. I'm not done. I'm kind of running it, because what seemed to be happening up to now is like, I'll pose you a question in response to the question, at the end of my explanation, you don't address it, and you tell me this long story about your ideas that are not related. I'll be curt. I promise. I don't... Okay, let's see with them, and then I'll be curt in my responses, if you'd like. Like, I'm talking three-sentence responses.
Okay, go. Just for you, Doug. Systems of power are predicated not just by the people who are within them. The inequities of this system bring them down and instead a larger, let's say, reconfiguration occurs around truth, which Christians call the law.
Okay, third sentence. I'm trying real hard. Repeat that second sentence for me. There's a sense that these systems will collapse in their own inequities and reconfigure around a larger locus around the weight, which transcends individual actors. It's not money or power that determines what is good,
You can take two, take two or three sentences, but what's the next piece to this puzzle here? Cause I'm getting, I'm getting you now.
Yeah, so the idea is that you purify yourself first and need by example and carve out a place, a paradise, a garden, which what paradise means. You know, apart from the world that's collapsing, so that when the world collapses, and this is the ancient trick of monasticism, when the world collapses, they will gravitate around the garden you've created in the desert, like St. John who waters the stick, so it becomes a tree and garden.
Okay.
So now I'm hearing you. But you don't need the volunteerism, if you know what I mean, with the guns. Well, you do. You have volunteerism when you're own. You have your own volunteerism. Volunteerism is not a matter of a gun. Volunteerism is a matter of a gun. The Vanguard is not all about the gun. It's about the ideas. The Vanguard Party. Look, in Marxism, let's put that aside. I'll come back to it. I'm listening.
So first of all, the idea that you, what you pointed out was that, let's just map this on the capitalism. You're saying capitalism as a world system will fall into, will collapse due to its own inequities, due to its own contradictions, is how a Marxist would put it. I didn't say capitalism, but any- I know, I'm transforming this into capitalism. You're saying any system.
The transformation of Christianity into politics, man, that's Marxist as it gets, right? Right. Well, okay, let's say feudal society will collapse due to its own internal contradictions, and it collapsed into capitalism, right, roughly, or bourgeois society, or modern society. Modern society will collapse due to its own contradictions, and it will become something else. This is dialectical, like Hegelian thinking, and
Our task within this dialectical of history is to understand and lead by example and to be there with the new world ready once the old world collapses. You do what happens at the end of V for Vendetta before V for Vendetta's revolution, right?
You give your money away and help the poor before the revolution comes and takes your money and gives it to the poor. That's the ultimate volunteeristic version of revolution. People will be led by the ideas and their understanding to do what's right. That's not immediately in their self-interest with the understanding of a better tomorrow. That's what you're putting forward.
I mean, not what myself is putting forward. I'm just a guy. That's a strain of the tradition. So, right, the strain of tradition that sees human existence as a progressive process of history rather than... Not necessarily progress of history.
Because that idea comes about in the French Revolution with the goal. All right. Well, then then then then what you're going to then we have to reject this idea that after collapse, a new and better version, a more equitable version of life on Earth will exist. You're not you're not really promising that you're promising pie in the sky when you die. You're not promising. No, not necessarily. There's this understanding that you if you would be kingdom of God is within you and that you yourself will be corrupted.
And that's pretty good. And that's something you can live here. Right? So, like, just because everyone's exploiting around you doesn't mean you should exploit. You can live the... I think it was, it might have been Athanasius, was asked, you know, Abba, what will it be like in the Kingdom of Heaven? He said, why do I concern myself with that Kingdom when I'm living in the Kingdom of Heaven now? Right? Like, what do I concern myself with? Like, what happens when I die when I'm living in the Kingdom of Heaven? I see this as like a beautiful soul syndrome.
way you're describing it now is where okay sure I allow all the people around me to suffer. I do nothing to change the social relations around me. I don't contribute to them and I even allow myself to perish in the face of them but I don't struggle to bring people together to change those relations. I accept the world it's given
Christians accepting the world as given, have you read the Gospels? Do they want to change the world? Do they want to change this world? For the better? Ideally. Would that not be a form of progress?
They don't know if you'll ever complete the mission. Now they're the socialists, right? This is something that's debated though, but if you're interested, you're actually asking. What I'm interested in pointing out here is that we may not be in such drastic disagreement in terms of if we believe that we can come together and change social relations for the better,
but not be perfect. And not through a violent revolution or any violence. That's where we did it. Do you, so you would never, so I'm not an absolute pacifist. I was for a long time, but I'm not an absolute pacifist. Yeah. Is that in the anarchist days?
Yeah. I was, I was a, but now I think, look, there's such a thing as violence and self defense. I did. So I don't that that's justifiable. Um, and
that I would say that when millions of people are being led to, you know, let's say the gas chambers or pushed out into the desert to starve or unemployed in such numbers that they can't live. Can we talk about the gas chambers one? Yeah. Okay, so there's this crazy story between these guys, I don't know if you know them, and they're hardly in a way, at least according to most persons, Christian, Jehovah's Witnesses, but they're an interesting case then. I think we all agree about that, right?
Wonderful. There's this really funny scene between the Nazis and the Jehovah's Witnesses. The Nazis, the Jehovah's Witnesses were like by the Weimar, they're not like by the liberals, they don't vote, they don't believe in it. So, they're not very popular. Anyway, so Jehovah's Witnesses write the Nazis, if you would, a little text message, I know I'm retro-projecting, a little text message that's like, hey, Mr. Hitler, we don't like Judea as a minor.
and uh you know it was like lol cool uh swear your allegiance to me in the state so like sorry we think the state is uh of this world we answer to a king higher than all kings
our Lord Jesus Christ, right? And they respond back. And Hitler's like, lol, JK. And then he sends a message to the lead. I sense people are like, lol, kill these people. And so the chase begins. You know, they kneel them down, they refuse military service, they're pacifists, god bless them. And they refuse to do the Nazi salute, god bless me, because in Hitler's Germany. And all these taboos finally break in.
for the Jehovah's Witnesses. Next thing you know, you've got, just like the Jews, you have guys, Gestapo, coming after these guys, putting them in the camps. You know what's crazy? These Jehovah's Witnesses, they go to Buchenwald. They're pacifists. One, the Nazis can't get them all because, believe it or not, tyranny is not that efficient. And these pamphlets spreading, you know, freedom fighters in a way, they go to Buchenwald. The ones they do capture, they capture about four of them. There's only 20,000.
If you open the door and you said, you know, they really believe in Romans 13 you respect worldly authority
So the best thing you can do is just not have yourself be destroyed and be good to everyone. Friends, sinners, everyone. Okay. So they write that the concentration camp guards find the Jehovah's Witnesses
This is my favorite part. They see them with purple triangles. And they're like, man. So like, talk about anti-fans. These guys are the fascists. And they're like, man, what are you doing? You're German. We're Nazis. This is your moment. Like, what are you? Why are you here? All you have to do is go with the flow. Why are you here? And the Jehovah's say,
Oh, well, we think the government and the state is capable of great evils and violence, and we're just trying to be good and not kill anyone or harm anyone. Of course, that's a problem for governments. But these tyrannical governments will be struck down. And that's, by the way, arguing that the state's capable of great violence, easy argument to win.
And the guards, a lot of them, convert. The Jehovah's Witnesses make a printing press for the watchtower of their pamphlet system underground in Buchenwald and not only convert a number of the guards and the Jews, but lo and behold, the Nazis are struck down. There's always a bigger fish. Corruption eats itself. Violence eats itself. They are free. And those who are died, the blood of those who died become the seeds for a new and expanding church in the post-Nazi regime.
they won by their own standards. So I'm not a Jehovah's witness, but man, isn't that a case study? Uh, sure. I mean, I, I look, I'm not, I'm not going to knock, uh, Jehovah's witnesses, especially not in the historical context, but I, um, I, um, I had friends, I used to have Jehovah's witnesses come to my house. Um,
like every week or so, because I was one of those people who would say, Oh, hi, come on in. Let's sit down and have a cup of coffee. Let's talk. They're having your coffee. They're like, Oh, we think the world's going to end tomorrow. Spits out. We ought to tell the neighbors. No, no, no, no. They never said that, but they would talk theology with me. They, and yeah, and then for years. So like I have no trouble with religious people. And I think some of them are quite moral and interesting.
The question for me as someone who wants to intervene in the world, rather than simply abstain from cooperating in what I see to be evil, is, you know, what are my obligations in this moment? And, you know, I see a world in which we're headed into a massive recession, possible depression. We are going to see many, many people unemployed here and around the world.
It's the contradiction between the need to reinvest in capital production and the need to pay workers enough to survive. It's going to intensify and intensify. The state's attempts to try to correct that will weaken the state, which in between states will be more pressure. So I see a very
dismal picture objectively ahead of me and I think oh but there's the possibility that the people who are most responsible for creating these conditions that is the working class could intervene and say we have a different better sort of
mode of production, a better way to relate to each other that would put all this off. This would no longer be necessary. And they do it by example, right? Yes, actually they would have to do it by example or else it wouldn't work. In other words, there would have to be a new way of working together. They could not simply take political power
Right. That's not going to do the trick on its own. And worse, it might corrupt them. Well, yeah. But I mean, right. Hashtag Marxism in the Soviet Union. Right. Right. I mean, we don't have to. We don't have to. But it will probably be a political conflict. It will probably run you afoul of authorities. There may be moments where you need to be attacked in self-defense, but the aim is not violence. The aim is not literal violence. The aim is the violence of, like,
The strategic talked about violence as the most like how Gandhi was more violent than Hitler where basically when you undermine that that's G Jack for you Yeah, yeah ideas in in society when you really go when you strip away the supporting ideology That's a more radical and violent move than to murder someone which leaves all the background ideology in place I think it was price who said it
Fear not those who can destroy the body, but the spirit. Right? Right. So I don't know if you would call spiritual conversion violence. Right. But you might if you're, you know, look, you might if you're someone who is a devout Catholic and you, you know, really believe in Catholicism and someone's trying to convert you to become a Jehovah's Witness, that may seem barely violent to you.
Yeah, I don't know. Not to me. I don't know when it comes to violence. I wouldn't necessarily... Well, if you would, peaceful conversion. And another thing, in the Orthodox tradition, to your point, that's why even this idea of forced conversion, where you seek people out, is so anti-monastic. The idea behind their conversion is very much in Buddhism in a way. You run into the wilderness,
You know, you tell them goodbye, and then you build a garden. People say, what's that crazy guy doing? And they visit you. And then next thing you know, they're wearing monk's robes and the world starts, the fallen world starts turning around your axis. You actually never try to save them. You try to fix yourself.
I want to give you a practical example of the kinds of things I think Marxists should be investing in right now, okay? Will you tell me what you think of this from your perspective? I don't know if you're telling me about Christianity because you're deeply Christian or because you're just a scholar of it. So from your perspective, right now in America, Amazon workers
have been put in a position where they're not safe from COVID-19. Their conditions aren't good. Their conditions before the crisis, the pandemic, weren't good. They had very short breaks. They worked very, very hard. The pay wasn't high enough. Turnover was really fast. It was not sweatshop conditions, but it was not humane conditions to work in. They're now struggling for better working conditions.
Someone's cat is struggling for better working conditions too, is that right? No, just a cat on a diet. Who wants to get fat again when you shouldn't be? So the teachers, they're facing a reopening of schools and many places. Oh man, in Ontario too, the Conservative government here. Yeah.
They're going to force teachers back into the classroom without the safest conditions for a variety of social reasons that aren't all, you know, completely, you know, it's not like these are bad reasons in some ways. For instance, the schools have, when both parents work, the schools are daycare. So you have, and if you don't reopen the schools,
People can go back to work, they may end up being evicted or so severely impoverished. But if you do open schools and the virus spreads, so it's a real contradiction, but they're forcing teachers back into the classrooms.
And even this is the saddest, right? Some of those teachers want to go back. Isn't that tragic? Some of them want to and some of them don't. Right, right. Some of them want to, some of them don't. But nonetheless, the conditions are such that it's really uncertain as to how safe it's going to be. And many students and many teachers are wanting to come together to organize for their own interest and try to change their situation. Right. They're going to have millions of unemployed.
Right now, I think the unemployment rate is 11, 10 to 11%. Oh, it's like astronomical, it went astronomically up in the United States, right? Right. But we're not really going to be sure what the real final floor is until we see how the reopening goes.
And you add in something I believe, which is that there's a long-term tendency for the economy to go into crisis. This isn't just caused by the pandemic, but that there was an underlying instability in the economy and that the problems that were already there are just being exacerbated. So we're going to see a very long-term kind of deep, we could be seeing something that makes the Great Depression look small. Okay? This is Slavoj. We have to circulate capital even if we all die. This is capitalism, right? So right.
It's not the rapture, because in the rapture, you know, there's massive death, but the souls are taken up.
Right? There's no guarantee of any souls being taken up here. All we know for sure is that many, many people are going to suffer, even while we have all the ideas and technology and real wealth to feed the world, many times over. Right, yeah. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Peter, Peter, Peter. Just let Douglas finish.
I'm sorry. Wouldn't you say that at this moment, the need for the working class to intervene, to be supported in struggles for their own demands is paramount. And that's what I want Marxists to do. I want Marxists to come together and say, we support the Amazon workers, we support the teachers, we support the unemployed, we support
suffering immigrants who don't get, you know, are being oppressed and maybe are unemployed too right now and also live on subsistence wages. Right. We want them to come together and organize to demand their own interests. Yeah. The poor, right? Who's going to save the poor? Well, no, the workers. You think it's going to be the government? Do you think it's going to be the elites? No. Do you think they're going to save them? The elites job is to... The guys who are in charge of redistribution? No, they're not going to save them. No, not at all. They have to save themselves.
It's very Marxist thought that the working class had to emancipate themselves.
They'll have to take charge of the mode of production and change the way we create the world so that these contradictions stop happening. And that will mean that they'll run up against the property relations and some of the laws of the existing order. They will be set before kings who will call themselves under the name of Christ, they will be tortured, they will experience the end of the world, the judgment day,
It's going to be awful.
Well, I wouldn't put it in that religious language, but you know, I would say they will be thrown from their homes, they will be conflict in the streets with the police, they will possibly be beaten.
When they're not eating, they'll struggle to just get the food that they need. And when they do get the food, the people making it will sometimes die for being put in the position of having to make their food. Totally. So they will be pressed upon them to say, no more. We have a better view of society. We have a better way of creating the world, not just a better view. How do they initiate it?
Do they do it violently? I don't know. I don't know if it's going to be a general strike. It may not happen at all. They may just allow for another World War to occur. They may just allow themselves to be sacrificed out of this economy. There's no guarantees here at all. Well, you know that's very anti-Marxist of you in a way, right? Because this is what differentiated Marx in his deterministic aspects of Marxism.
from the anarchists who argued that, you know, unlike this idea of progress where the world follows these patterns and these patterns are almost guaranteed regardless of individuals that no one's going to stop. Listen, the anarchists thought the world was on chain. It depends upon how you interpret the holy doctrine of Marx as to whether you think he was a determinist and thought there would necessarily be a revolution or whether or not, you know,
But then again, it comes down to that determinism, volunteers and kind of debate. Do we think that we have to come together with the ideas necessary to transform the world and therefore come up with a new mode of production and think and create? Or do we think that the world itself will lead us to the promised land through some determined action, which could be include? I thought it was organic, right? Like if you look at, if you read the
Why did he advocate for anything? Why did he bother to write? Because he thought he was still a part of that history, right? It's this idea that, and really it was also Lenin's contribution, you should still volunteer. Again, the shape of volunteerism and Marxism is a bit different, but you should still be part of the consurgency. Regardless, to not to avoid it, to be conservative,
is to delay the inevitable. And it's a beautiful argument, by the way. I'm not trying to knock it. I'm just saying the anarchists, theirs is more unchanged. You know, this is something like, arguably like Nietzsche, a Greek conservative thinker, how do you know that the progress isn't darker than the world we have now?
but then Pinker came along and slapped Nietzsche across the face and said, read my book. This idea that, you know, the angels of our nature, we're doing great. I don't think there's any guarantees that the changes that we try to make won't fail. We, except for what we can reason in advance. Right. But if they fail to be inevitable, this is why in the, just to go back to the concentration camps for the Nazis,
There were the psychological studies to see who would be the less likely to break down. For Jews, they were one of the most likely to break down psychologically in the concentration camps because in their cosmology, when you're the chosen people, it means
I would say popularly in Judaism in the common stream that, you know, the covenant between you and God is one of your people will continue. And we mean like, you know, Abraham the Covenant, your offspring, your seed will become like the grains of sand on the beaches and the stars. So they were losing their minds with the Holocaust. But when it comes to the two groups that were least likely to break down,
our boys, those Jehovah's Witness guys, and then also the Marxists, because the Marxists were like, man, you know, all this, this is just trying to get in the way of the inevitable, man. You think it's killing me? I don't care. Individuals don't matter. It's about the, it's progress, man. Uh, okay. Well, I would, I would break down in the concentration camp. I, you know, I, I'm not the kind of Marxist who thinks that what happens in the here and now, uh, and you know, next week,
We'll end it there. If anyone's watching, this interview turned into more of a moderation on my part where I found it extremely entertaining and enlightening to watch Doug and Peter have it out. If you want a part two, please comment about it. Have a good one, Doug. Thanks. Yeah, thank you very much.
Bye-bye.
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"text": " How was that for you? Is that all right? Was that different? It was okay. Yeah, it was a little more antagonistic than I expected. I'm sorry. That's not so much that you were mean or, you know, it was just what I didn't realize that you would have an arsenal of information and anecdotes to answer, not always directly, what the things that I put forward in a kind of refutation.",
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"text": " I'm here with Douglas Lane of Zero Books. How's it going, man? Going pretty well. In fact, I should say, I always say it's doing very well when you ask that kind of question because it's a kind of question that people don't literally mean most of the time. It's like saying hello. But I should point out that at Zero Books, we recently lost a major voice, the author and podcaster or YouTube",
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"text": " I see, I see. So you were a rebellious, anti-capitalist type before 2008, but you wouldn't call it Marxist before then, and then you started to get into the philosophy of Karl, good old Karl. Yeah, that's right. I mean, and it was because I realized that the kind of more utopian politics I had up until that point where I was most concerned about changing people's consciousness and attacking hierarchies and",
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"text": " Coca-Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca-Cola at a store near you. Well, you know, there's a there's an old connection there, right, between science fiction, science fiction writers and Marxists, right? Like Borkanov with the Red Star. Yeah, yeah. Have you read that one? I haven't. Yeah, I haven't read that particular book, although I know it should. But yes, I do think of science fiction",
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"text": " Okay, now people who listened might have tuned out as soon as you said you're a Marxist, so let's get this straight. Oh really? Well, I'm in a different room than I'm used to because everyone in the, you know, kind of circles I run and it's like, oh yeah, he's not Marxist enough, but anyway, go ahead. Right, what I mean is that they're just waiting for the question that I'm about to say, which is given that the countries who have said that they're motivated by Marxism failed, now you may disagree with that premise and we can... No, I don't. Okay, given that they failed,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 937.705,
"end": 965.009,
"text": " And it seems invariably so. How can you call yourself, how do you, why do you still call yourself a Marxist without also calling yourself someone who's worthy of odious, despicable, despicableness? Well, I have a, you know, I may be worthy of odious, despicableness or whatever, but it's not because I'm a Marxist, you know, I have all sorts of flaws. But here's my,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 965.896,
"end": 994.974,
"text": " Quick answer to that is that I don't see Marxism as separate from the project of modernity or the enlightenment project. And I think that that whole project of turning away from traditional society, becoming more scientific, trying to be more self-directed as not just individually, but as a society, taking hold of our social relations, questing after freedom,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 995.179,
"end": 1024.44,
"text": " all of it has an uneven record. So that'd be my first thing. It's like, if you want to condemn Marxism, you should probably condemn the American Revolution as well. You should probably condemn modernity. You should probably try to turn back towards a more traditional society. And then you'll find there's plenty of things to condemn there. But the more specific answer would be that I don't look at the Russian Revolution or revolutions in China,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1024.91,
"end": 1051.8,
"text": " or many of the other attempts at socialism has having been complete or successful. And if you look at the Soviet Union, neither did the Soviet officials. Even Stalin admitted that they were still operating under basically a capitalist logic. There was never a moment where they broke free from",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1052.38,
"end": 1078.06,
"text": " what they would say was called bourgeois society. I mean, after 1917, their goal was to actually develop the capitalist relations that hadn't really even been developed yet in the Soviet Union or in Russia, so that they could then quickly become socialist and transcend capitalist relations, but they never did. Go ahead.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1078.34,
"end": 1108.29,
"text": " When does Stalin say that? Because there's that net period, right? New economic policy under Lenin. He was not down with that. At least he was kind of two-faced on the matter. And afterwards, when he was in power, did he say that? I don't remember exactly when he really admitted that the Soviet Union was still operating under the law of value.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1108.59,
"end": 1138.06,
"text": " It was in the, it was towards the end of his time in power. It was in the, I think, early 50s is what I would, if I'm remembering correctly. But even Lenin didn't think that, like they believed in transitional program, they believed in developing capitalist relations, that capitalism was a stage on the way towards socialism. And so Lenin would never have said that he achieved even socialism.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1138.54,
"end": 1161.29,
"text": " or the dictatorship of the proletariat. And so, I mean, that's my understanding, that there was still revolution to be done after they took power. And go ahead. London's thesis, right, was that was the big debate between Bolsheviks and Mentionists. They were both, as you said, and it really demonstrates your knowledge, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1161.61,
"end": 1187.88,
"text": " Marxists did believe that capitalism was a transitional stage. So you would find Marxists who were like, hey, what's the best way to get Marxists? More capitalists. So let's support the industry, you know? Hey, how do you get angry workers? Exploitative CEOs. Keep them coming. Capitalism, keep them coming. Right. This is like, that goes back to the late 19th century.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1188.34,
"end": 1217.26,
"text": " and the Social Democratic Party in Germany and the debates between Rosa Luxemburg and Edward Bernstein, or Edward Bernstein or whatever, how you ever pronounce that. But he was, he felt, especially after the long depression of the 19th century, didn't produce a workers revolution that really the best way to get to socialism was through the evolution of capitalism. But he was a Marxist, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1217.5,
"end": 1238.03,
"text": " And Rosa Luxemburg thought that capitalism would go into crisis and that the Workers' Party had to be prepared for that crisis in order to help the working class achieve socialism when the opportunity was there through a revolutionary struggle. I side with Rosa in that debate, but it's far away from",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1238.85,
"end": 1257.53,
"text": " Where we are right now, although maybe who knows where we'll be in two months. But we're certainly not prepared for anything like that. But yeah, working out what went wrong in the Soviet Union isn't something that's been fully done, at least not in my head. I don't think anyone quite on the Marxist left",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1258.17,
"end": 1281.65,
"text": " Just to interject, some people would say, well, you know, the",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1281.99,
"end": 1302.64,
"text": " the process of going through history and then analyzing why has Marxism failed has not been complete. Well, but to those on the left or the extreme left or whatever we want to call it the Marxist side, it seems like the diagnosis of the West's failures due to capitalism is a complete project. And they're, they're willing to make that.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1303.13,
"end": 1328.13,
"text": " Well, first of all, I don't believe that if you look carefully that there's even a lot of agreement on the critique of capitalism on the Marxist left. I happen to know the right critique because I have my own",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1328.34,
"end": 1357.82,
"text": " I have a theory that everyone thinks they're right. Even people who are humble, they think they're right in their humbleness. So if they say, I don't know, then you believe that you don't know. So no matter what. That's true. That is true. But I think that's, I'll grant people that amount of hubris. But the, what I would say is, okay, so the question was, why are Marxists so quick to say they know,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1358.23,
"end": 1387.48,
"text": " what's wrong with capitalism, but are slow to say they understand why the revolution failed. And look, there's a real kernel of truth to the skepticism in that question, because the operations of capitalist society are very complex and require serious study. And most of what calls itself the Marxist left has not only",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1388.3,
"end": 1414.34,
"text": " hasn't fully worked out its critique or really has a solid critique of capitalist relations to back it up. But even more doesn't even really have much of a definition of capitalism at all or think that doesn't think about capitalism as a set of social relations around production or an economic set of relations. And that's it. Say again.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1414.55,
"end": 1443.83,
"text": " So what I'll say is that's due largely to the failures that we're talking about and failures after. The fact that the Marxist project has been set back time and time again has meant that what calls itself the left of the United States has mostly put Marxist analysis to the side, even when it calls itself Marxist.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1444.17,
"end": 1473.61,
"text": " I happen to think that the strongest part of the Marxist literature is his critique of capitalist relations, that is his turn towards materialism as a form of basically a materialistic social relation. In other words, the kinds of relations we have with each other when we're cooperating to create the things we need in the world. So the hierarchical relations are the structures of relations and the social aims",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1474.05,
"end": 1502.99,
"text": " that we take up as we produce ourselves and reproduce ourselves and reproduce the world. And that just means, you know, we go to work every day, we make things that we are going to consume, we make things for the market, all of that. I happen to think that his critique of those relations are the best around and that if you start from there, there's the potential for achieving the kinds of society that, you know,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1504.22,
"end": 1533.56,
"text": " People like Thomas Locke or John Stuart Mills or others were after a society where people as individuals are free and they're free to the extent that they can also influence the social collective. So just to go off of that subject for the individualism, communism's relation to liberalism, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1534,
"end": 1562.31,
"text": " You know, there's a line in Dostoevsky's Inns, where a story about some Marxists who take over a small town in Russia, and one of them is a Marxist by the name of Piotr, and he's trying to convert people to Marxism, and he's building these little clubs. Another character asks him, you know, why do they turn? Why do they become Marxists?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1562.76,
"end": 1592.58,
"text": " I want to press on that claim. Marxists and liberals didn't necessarily get along. Capitalism was a transitional",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1593.71,
"end": 1621.17,
"text": " Why do you believe that Marxism is the realization of liberalism? Well, I mean, listen, I get a lot of heat from other Marxists. Other Marxists hate it when I say that kind of thing, because they think I'm granting way too much to, I don't know, what's the white, cisgendered, patriarchal, Western",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1621.7,
"end": 1643.4,
"text": " It's what Marxists traditionally believe, so I'm shocked that they would find a problem with that view, right? Well, as I say, Marxism is mostly dead. But why do I think that there's been conflict between liberals and Marxists in the past?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1644.72,
"end": 1673.73,
"text": " Well, what I'm saying is, why is it that Marxism is the successor? So we're talking about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, right? Mensheviks, they... Well, I'm not really talking about Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. I'm talking about, like, Marx and Engels, and maybe Rosa Luxemburg and some of the 19th century people. I mean, to be honest, my understanding of the debates, the specific debates between the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1674.07,
"end": 1700.98,
"text": " beyond, you know, the need for revolutionary struggle or the degree of parliamentarianism that can be your cooperation with bourgeois parties. You know, that's about as much as I could say that that was about. The debates, right, like Marxists love history, right? They're the scientists of history, self-proclaimed at the time. So to go to history, to understand Marxism, I think would be truthful. There's a debate between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1701.29,
"end": 1729.04,
"text": " which is, okay, we start with, and this is said in the Communist Manifesto, right? We start with tribal societies, we go to feudal societies, we go to capitalism, and then the revolution, we go to Marxism. But the debate between Menshviks and Bolsheviks, one of them, was, okay, where are we now? And for Russia, specifically, they couldn't decide whether or not they were feudal or in the capitalist era.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1729.55,
"end": 1755.2,
"text": " Lenin comes out with his great paper. Look at how much land the peasants have. You can see it's unequal. We are in the era of capitalism. The time is now. And it puts them to the Bolsheviks. So what I'm curious of is, when you look at our society now, let alone what we achieve through Marxism, have we achieved through capitalism, is my question.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1756.49,
"end": 1786.32,
"text": " have we okay so because if it's dedicated on that what would be true capitalism well okay i think we should distinguish between the bourgeois values of freedom and equality and paternity and and the breaking of of fetters uh from traditional society those kinds of liberal values and um the value and capitalism as a set of social relations because capitalism",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1786.89,
"end": 1806.95,
"text": " is the very thing that makes liberal values unachievable in so much as it sets up material relations that require inequality, competition, and even the slowdown of development of technological advances.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1807.33,
"end": 1836.24,
"text": " So that's what the difference is between like bourgeois values and capitalism. Capitalism is a questing after basically the increase of labor time as embodied in commodities. And that's what's directing our social life really is the buying and selling of commodities and chasing after this abstract value. That's a measure of the amount of time that people are working.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1836.71,
"end": 1863.46,
"text": " also requires like a working class that doesn't own its own means of production or doesn't have control over the things that it produces. Doug, I couldn't agree more on that regard, Rick. There's a line in the Marxist Catechism from the London Society of Marxists. And in this catechism, it was what they would tell the new recruits, the new comrades in order to train to be Marxists. They said, what is",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1863.78,
"end": 1887.72,
"text": " Capitalism and they they see very clearly it's we think it's written by very clearly says oh well Listen, there was a time in history where we didn't have industrial machines Then we got industrial machines two types of people You either own the machines or you work with the machine, right? Yeah, it's one or the other and there's a huge divide that happens and",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1887.94,
"end": 1914.34,
"text": " Right, which is why Marxists want to get rid of the division of labor to some degree or another. How? What do you think is the way to do it? How do we get rid of it? Get my laptop, cocktail? What's the solution? Maybe sometimes. I don't think you can say that there's only one path towards a Marxist revolution. And Marx himself had different ideas based on the different conditions.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1914.58,
"end": 1943.49,
"text": " What if we paint some specifics for our time in our context? Yeah, well, give four or three or two, if you don't want, if you don't want, if you're, okay, well, I, look, the first thing you have to do is understand that the left's project is to expand the power of working people, primarily, and how that can be done is, you know, a question, but you, you, you, you're,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1943.78,
"end": 1971.36,
"text": " Your aim should be first and foremost right now to support the struggles of working class people, especially during an economic crisis when so many will be unemployed. And this goes back to sort of a very traditional kind of orthodox Marxist stance that Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, would embrace. Or someone like Heinrich Grossman, who was more of an EE. I think I agree with him on his economic analysis more.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1971.78,
"end": 1990.4,
"text": " But he was also in the same kind of Bolshevik tradition as Rosa Luxemburg. And that would be to say, look, the workers have to emancipate themselves, and they will do that by organizing together in moments of",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 1990.79,
"end": 2019.72,
"text": " economic crisis when their interests and the interests of the capitalist order are clearly at odds. And so at the moment we're going to be, as profitability goes down, as the ability to create a social surplus that can actually meet everyone's needs declines, as many people are forced into starvation wages or actual starvation. And when you say profitability goes down, you mean for the working class, because clearly- No, I mean for the capitalist class.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2020.08,
"end": 2049.34,
"text": " Not for the war class.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2049.84,
"end": 2079.62,
"text": " Right. Well, there's something called the tendency for rate of profit to decline that Marx talks about in capitalizing volume three and in somewhat in volume one. And what happens is as we get more efficient in producing commodities, the amount of value, because it's based on labor time, declines. So slowly the rate of profit declines.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2080.3,
"end": 2102.18,
"text": " which means, which leads to all sorts of economic problems. So when companies aren't profitable, they go out of business. When they go out of business, there's unemployment. Okay. When there's unemployment- We're getting to the specifics of what should be done by the working class. Yeah, the working class needs to prepare for the fact that we're, that the COVID crisis right now has",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2102.86,
"end": 2132.47,
"text": " We're going to get back to the specifics because",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2132.71,
"end": 2156.61,
"text": " I have a question. You said something and I want to talk about that before it goes away. You said that the supporting of the working class people is a project of the left. Now the right would also say actually we're the ones that are supporting the working class. We care about those who are farmers and agriculturalists. Is that what you would define as the difference between left and right is those who want to support the working class or is that what you would define as",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2157.16,
"end": 2179.1,
"text": " As the Marxist project is supporting the working class, in other words, what's the definition of the left and the right and perhaps even Marxism if you have enough time? Okay, so the right-wing attempts to support the working class are almost always nationalist and they're almost always defined in terms of correcting",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2181.43,
"end": 2200.3,
"text": " Getting the capitalist class back on the street so we can then employ more workers. You know, so for instance, the questions about immigrations like, you know, the right wing approach to understanding the calamitous impacts of the economic crisis after 2008 on working people is to point to the",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2200.74,
"end": 2220.49,
"text": " problems that arise from immigration and say if we fix those problems, we close that border, then the system will right itself and you'll have job security and you'll have better wages and you'll have that lifestyle from the 50s that if you're white you might even remember or think that you shared in.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2220.49,
"end": 2249.92,
"text": " whereas the left would say look and look a little deeper and say look first of all the reason why there's so much rush for people to come into this country is because the uneven development between the nations that the capitalists capitalism is not at all immune from crises and it isn't working in a simple linear progression towards a better and better world it it goes into crises it",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2250.44,
"end": 2279.92,
"text": " creates inequalities, not just between people, but between nations. And you're never going to... When you say crises, sorry, just to interject, when you say crises, do you mean depression or do you mean... Yeah, sure. Recession and depression would be a big part of what I'm talking about. So the major, the major, when you're referring to crisis, you're referring to recession? Yeah, yeah, I am. I'm referring to the inability of capital to reproduce itself, the going out of business, creating massive unemployment, not providing the material needs in a rational way to people.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2280.71,
"end": 2310.54,
"text": " So the weird thing about it is that you can sit on massive amounts of wealth, because you've been so efficient at production, and still have an economic crisis that makes people starve, because of the irrationality of the capitalist system. Okay, so the definition of the left is? The definition of the left would be those who want to expand the power and understanding of working-class people, not just in one country, but around the world, because they're tasked with",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2311.14,
"end": 2340.86,
"text": " changing the foundation of their own work and their own activity, which after all is the foundation of the society. The big realization for the left is that the people who are really responsible for the failures of the left are the workers. Because without the workers, none of this would be able to happen. The people with the figureheads in power, the capitalist class, they're a problem. But the main problem is taking up the responsibility of transformation and of working in your own interests.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2341.65,
"end": 2369.74,
"text": " So the left's goal is to empower workers to organize themselves to take the power to fight for their own interest and that will mean transforming society. But the one big flaw is that, in the leftist discourse around that, is that understanding what socialism would be after such a rupture, what the actual relations of a new socialist economy would be like,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2370.38,
"end": 2400.33,
"text": " is something that most Marxists are very- Lavoie's problem, right? That he talks about. What do you do the day after- I think he says in his perfect fashion in that way, I would sell my own mother into slavery if someone could tell me what happens after Be Forbidden Dead. It's a wonderful question. Well, and that's- I've interviewed so many- I think what Kurt's trying to ask, what would happen? In your conception, what is the Marxist speech?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2401.03,
"end": 2424.91,
"text": " And if so, what is if you can't tell me what that would look like I can tell you I can tell you a bit about it, but but the pro I want to say something about slow voices you brought him up I've interviewed him and by the way, I don't think that in reality he should be I mean he'll calm stuff the Marxist from time to time but really he's a hegelian right he's a left-wing hegelian of some kind and",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2425.33,
"end": 2448.8,
"text": " and what Slovak is best at is taking that kind of Hegelian approach to understanding society and poking holes in conventional wisdom on the left. And also he's, I think, a deep philosopher of Hegel. And he also praises Christianity too, right? That's kind of harmonic with other Marxists.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2449.34,
"end": 2476.24,
"text": " Yeah, but I mean, you know, not in any profound way, because he points to ideas in Christianity that, you know, can be understood through a Hegelian perspective, and that then you can also see informing Marx. So, like the dialectical thinking, you know, the way that you have to consider things, not in a fragmented way, but in their totality. That sounds pretty Christian.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2476.68,
"end": 2497,
"text": " Yeah, don't you think? Yeah. So you know that you see everything as a oneness as opposed to separate, right? But not like a oneness that's monolithic and uniform, but like a totality that's ribboned with problems, it's self-conflict, self-divided kind of totality, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2497.33,
"end": 2521.25,
"text": " Just a second here. So Peter is this voice of a historian and then you're the voice of a science fiction writer who's well-read, excuse the pun, in Marxism. And I'll be the voice of the quotidian. What is the definition of Marxism in your definition, in your estimation?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2522.33,
"end": 2547.19,
"text": " Well, Marxism is a political movement that, you know, started in the 19th century and which was a way to struggle for socialism and which has gone through many many different iterations and changes and that was probably finally put aside in the West",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2547.69,
"end": 2574.1,
"text": " uh you know somewhere around the late 70s or and certainly after 1989 that everyone became a post-marxist thinker but there so that's marxism marxism is can be anything from actual revolutionary struggle to uh after the world war two sort of a an attempt to hold on to some key concepts and perfect them um marxist decaf yeah",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2574.99,
"end": 2597.16,
"text": " Yeah, Marxism is quite, I don't know, their theory is pretty thick, but yeah, Marxism without politics maybe is what slowly emerged and then it was, and I think that's what we have now that calls itself Marxist for the most part is social democratic movements for redistribution of the wealth.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2597.55,
"end": 2626.03,
"text": " um in society uh so things like the Bernie Sanders campaign the most radical parts of that might call themselves Marxist and be interested in Marx and you know look when I was supporting Bernie Sanders which I did I wasn't above that uh either um but Marx is different than Marxism but Marxism keeps returning to Marx so whenever you you start trying to define what Marx said and like let's go back to Marx you're you're acting like",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2627.19,
"end": 2656.54,
"text": " Definitely you're acting like a Marxist. To talk about the people who are listening, and I mentioned that before. Well, you mentioned that your audience is usually people whose ears would perk up as soon as you would mention Marxism. The people who are listening to this will likely be center, center left, center right. And they're thinking, well, so far I haven't heard what's radical come out of Doug's mouth. Doug is saying he wants the working class people to have some more power.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2656.99,
"end": 2679.72,
"text": " Even libertarians would agree with that, right? I don't think they would ultimately, but go ahead. But inequality is a problem that we can both agree on, at least extreme inequality. Then the question is, well, how to solve the inequality? You're saying that Marxism could be so many different definitions. What do you mean when you say Marxism? Well,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2680.95,
"end": 2708.76,
"text": " What I mean when I say Marxism also, I mean, here's the thing, I'm being, I think, maybe a little bit like Sloboj Žižek. What do I mean when I say Marxism? It depends on who I'm talking to and what the context is, right? So I don't think it's a good idea to try to nail down what Marxism is. I think the better idea is to try to nail down what Marx's understanding of socialism was and to try to understand what capitalism is.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2709.17,
"end": 2725.37,
"text": " Hear that sound?",
"speaker": null
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{
"start": 2726.36,
"end": 2752.47,
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"start": 2752.47,
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"text": " Go to shopify.com.",
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"text": " This is Marshawn Lynch aka Beast Mode checking in this holiday season. Everybody out here stressing, shopping, rapping, cooking, but me trying to kick back on some sports and go green on my ProzPix lineups. Right now ProzPix is getting into the festive spirit where new users get $50 instant in lineups. When you play your first $5",
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"text": " real simple to play pick two or more players pick more or less on their stat projections and you can win big real simple real quick i'm talking two minute tops faster than heating up leftovers mix and match players from any sport all season long on prize picks available in 45 states including california texas",
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{
"start": 2851.46,
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"text": " Florida and Georgia. Download the prize picks app today and use code Spotify and get $50 instantly in lineups when you play $5. That's code Spotify on prize picks to get $50 instantly in lineups when you play $5. Win or lose, you'll get 50 bucks in lineups for just playing. Guaranteed. Prize picks. It's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit prizepicks.com for restrictions and details. Relations that we need to survive as being outside of our control.",
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"start": 2881,
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"text": " Right. What separates Marx and makes him radical from most everyone else is that the terrain in which we, the part of the society that we just take for granted, that we produce things for exchange in the market and that certain kinds of proper relationships support that, he didn't take for granted. So he would be aiming at cooperative work done with the aim of",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 2911.36,
"end": 2938.28,
"text": " providing for some sort of social whole, for some sort of community. That's what makes him a communist. It's like, will there be a common store of the goods that we produce in the world? And what we'll compete over isn't access to the common store of goods, but for power over the creative work that produces those goods. So production would be the highest want, or productive work would be what people struggled",
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"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover.",
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"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business,",
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"text": " So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime.",
"speaker": null
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{
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"text": " You know, there's this, there's this sense, you mentioned communists, right? Like, if you look at the etymology of the term, he loved the Paris Commies.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3026.43,
"end": 3054.87,
"text": " There's no doubt about that. Marxists still kind of idealized that time. There's a historian by the name of Will Mont who writes a book called Living the Revolution. And it's about the early early Marxists in Russia who, like other Marxists around Europe, were living in communes. They were trying it out. They were like, well, enough talking about the experiment. Let's make it happen. Let's go in the woods, share everything and we'll",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3055.11,
"end": 3083.54,
"text": " Let's see how it goes. And this is really where there's like this rooting of Marxism. It gives them the space to discuss these ideas and try it out. I'm not going to say that it worked per se. We see this commune idea happen over and over again. The only guys who I can think of or folks who ever kind of successfully pull it off are like monks. Have you ever thought about that? Like why is that when the secular",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3084.14,
"end": 3111.53,
"text": " Thinkers, if you would, or secular youth, try it. These hippie communes, these anarcho communes, there's varying success. But meanwhile, the guys who are following the code of St. Benedict, who have renounced wealth, who do not see wealth as the primary engine of history, who have denounced personal property, who have taken vows of poverty, man, they're still making wine, bread, and cheese up in the mountains. Why did they succeed? And these guys flunked.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3111.75,
"end": 3138.54,
"text": " Well, I mean, what do they do? What are they doing with their wine, bread and cheese? Giving it for free sometimes. And what's the source of their, you know, wealth to be able to continue to produce that way? I mean, are they living strictly, are they subsistence farmers or are they in some way or another cooperating within",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3138.92,
"end": 3163.59,
"text": " There's a pretty wide variety of monastic traditions, right? So like you get everything from a single guy, like St. Abba John the Dwarf, this dwarf who goes out into the desert with a stick, plants it, lives in a cave, waters the stick every day until it becomes a tree, and next thing you know there's like a garden.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3163.99,
"end": 3192.64,
"text": " to, you know, I think my buddy of mine is working with some nuns in India who run a co-op that makes fabrics and sells them to the poor for like a bare minimal cheap price just to continue so they could keep, so they could eat and give. Right. You know, it's very, it's almost like an inversion of the Marxist model that works. Why? I mean, if you go down, look, if you go down to a small enough group, it gets a lot easier, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3193.03,
"end": 3218.97,
"text": " But on the other hand, one of the wonders about capitalism is that it has managed to collectivize the world, for the most part. That is, it's brought everyone into a big collective project of creating commodities. Most all of the world is capitalist now, and most of the things that exist in the world were created by workers, as we understand that category, under capitalism.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3219.65,
"end": 3246.08,
"text": " Do you mean industrialized or do you mean capitalist? Because didn't we say within the Marxist catechism that to be capitalist was you have the machines, the separation. Not everyone has those. What do you mean by brought everyone together? I'm not saying that they're not brought together. The level of industrialization is different in different parts of the world, but for the most part, every part of the world is industrializing. Every part of the world is influenced by",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3246.37,
"end": 3262.6,
"text": " capital's relations. Is there a country in the world that doesn't have any relationship to the foreign market that isn't in any way bringing in goods from other parts of the world or putting other parts of the world goods out to the other parts of the world? I don't think so.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3262.96,
"end": 3290.59,
"text": " I mean there's an island of doing that before capitalism right like sir but but not on the scale that's being done now in the in the past what supported most people was subsistence farming of various kinds and what supports most people now is interaction in the in the market certainly in the industrial in what's called the industrialized world that's almost completely universal but more and more that's the case for larger and larger parts of the world",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3291.12,
"end": 3306.46,
"text": " And when that has happened, when that's, I'm going to be a big advocate for capitalism here. The fact that capitalism could break a true Menshevik. Don't say that I'll get canceled.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3306.97,
"end": 3335.5,
"text": " I'm not I'm sincerely scared of many of my comments. So well, that's also not unique So, but yeah, so capitalism brings all these people into into Collective endeavors makes it brings people together out of their private interest into a collective interest into a community",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3336.22,
"end": 3365.52,
"text": " But it does show in a particular way where it's mediated by the expansion of an abstract value based on the exploitation of workers. And so the goal for Marxists is to not to give up the powers of industry, not to give up the power of our collective creativity, but to unfetter it, to change the terms of it, to mediate those relationships in a better way. So you think the uniting goal, like uniting values, the highest values,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3365.9,
"end": 3392.18,
"text": " of capitalism is exploitation. Like that's their, that's what wakes them up in the morning. Like, man, no, no, no, I don't think I don't think the individual capitalist is sitting around going, Oh, how many workers can I exploit today? How is that the value that unites? Or is it like, well, because it's the actual it's not an ideological value. It's an economic value. It's a material value. It's the fetishized value that says so like, look, what determines a price?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3393.18,
"end": 3406.56,
"text": " What determines the price ultimately is the amount of time that it took to create the commodity.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3407.14,
"end": 3436.43,
"text": " So the labor theory of value says that the amount of time that it takes to create, what makes things exchange as equal things in the market is this value that they share in common, this abstraction or substance that the two commodities that may be completely different share in common, which is the amount of time spent working to create the object. So when you go and you trade,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3436.85,
"end": 3461.99,
"text": " a pile of bagels for a book. Well, or better than put intellectual work into this, which complicates it. But, you know, a pile of bagels for a hoe, you're saying, okay, the amount of time it took me to take these bagels and the amount of time it took you to create that hoe are roughly the same, so we're exchanging equal values.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3462.28,
"end": 3490.93,
"text": " That logic though, you could spend years on a bagel and it would be worth the world. I don't know if that's exactly the principle. It's not a matter of individual time. It's a matter of socially necessary time. If you create a bagel and it takes you 10 years, the overhead costs and the amount of money it takes for you to feed yourself as you do this work will require you to price that bagel way outside the range of what's normal in the market.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3491.43,
"end": 3507.67,
"text": " You're competing with other producers, which creates socially necessary amount of labor time that's acceptable for the creation of a bagel. The fact that you're competing with other capitalists is what brings that price down. And then beyond that, you innovate.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3508.06,
"end": 3527.62,
"text": " To try to produce the same bagel faster and for a little while you can make a lot of profit because it takes you less time and money to make a bagel than it does your competition. Right. And you can still charge the same because the socially that standard time the amount of time that it takes for most people is higher. So you're",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3528,
"end": 3556.39,
"text": " you slip by speeding up production, you cannot compete your competition, but then eventually they kept catch up with you and that and that lowers your prices. And that's, that's, that's how we're walking through that last week. Well, I mean, okay. Um, your competitor, uh, is producing bagels faster than you are. And then taking on, uh, you know, more of the getting more of the market share. Now, either that competitor is going to monopolize or you're going to figure out",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3556.75,
"end": 3580.61,
"text": " how to catch up and produce your bagels at the same rate or faster so that you can compete with and stay in business, right? So that pressure for individual capitalists to innovate, stay up with what's current in the industrial realm, get the better machinery, or if they can't do that, discipline the workers to go faster.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3581.01,
"end": 3601.27,
"text": " is a big part of it right like innovate i said either innovate or discipline yeah i didn't say just one okay so i mean these none and none of these things by the way are moral judgments right okay okay and when i talk about exploitation i'm not saying oppression necessarily it could be exploitation in this definition could be good",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3601.8,
"end": 3631.34,
"text": " It can be in a way, yeah, because it, well, it's, I wouldn't say it's good or bad. It has a negative consequence, unintended consequences. It certainly does have a negative connotation, and that's because, you know, Marx is a good leftist. But no, the problem with exploitation is twofold. One is that it requires that there be workers who are paid the value of what they need in a set of commodities,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3631.66,
"end": 3656.03,
"text": " to survive or live, which I think is probably a better way to, you know, whatever, to whatever level is acceptable standard in your society. So you get paid enough to live, but you then produce more value than the set of commodities you need to live. So you are exploited because you're producing more than what you're compensated for. But if you weren't, if you were compensated for exactly what you produced,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3656.48,
"end": 3685.13,
"text": " Then the company would go under and there would be no production and so the system can't operate that way Well, I mean companies are so it's kind of like what David Sloan Wilson Talks about me when he talks about multivariant selection evolution, right? You have different populations and within those populations. You can have slackers You can never like but slacker Populations do not do well and faced with populations that actually help each other out those guys out compete them and right kind of",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3685.38,
"end": 3714.89,
"text": " Yeah, but that whole thing is you got to divide between the use value of things and actual wealth and the amount of time it takes to do things and the value that comes out of that of the capitalist process where you're setting things up to be sold in the market. So like, you know, what happens to slackers in a capitalist relation is they probably try to just, you know, hide themselves for as long as possible. And it's they're just one variable amongst many that slows down production.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3715.23,
"end": 3731.75,
"text": " Or they all talk about philosophy like us. We're working hard here. As a former slacker, born into that generation of slackers, or Gen X, I think slackers are just part of the equation.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3732.29,
"end": 3757.12,
"text": " And, um, you can see this in, but, and nonetheless, capitalism overcomes the problem of the slacker because it has, you know, even when it, even if it doesn't overcome it totally, it doesn't make everyone perfectly efficient, but it has all these tools to bring to bear to innovate production and discipline workers and really produce a lot of wealth. The difficulty is that wealth is distributed irrationally and, um,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3757.55,
"end": 3783.95,
"text": " And periodically, it's distributed in ways that are truly irrational, where you've got things going on, like people dumping milk down the drain, because to keep to bring the price down. Oh, in Ontario, we have government milk quotas, which are our own problem. But really quick on the end that I actually have to use the restroom. Okay, yeah, but something maybe to explore is when you have freedom, when you have liberty,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3784.77,
"end": 3812.58,
"text": " You have those who choose rightly and those who choose kind of falsely, those who abuse freedom, those who succeed in utilizing those, there's a mass variance of outcomes that you get, evolutionarily, when you just let freedom reign. And to your point, this kind of does create a split. How do we reign in the split? How do we reconcile the prodigal sons with the ones who did the right thing?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3813.05,
"end": 3836.99,
"text": " and something maybe to talk about i'll be right back okay sure okay okay so say to me okay so well my view my view in this is that um the level of competition um that we expect probably wouldn't that we're used to in society now and the kind of rewards and punishment or and the incentives uh",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3837.36,
"end": 3853.92,
"text": " that we rely on now to direct people to make the right kinds of decisions that are socially useful. When you work hard, you're helping more than yourself. You're helping the people around you. You're producing more. You're contributing more. So we want to incentivize that.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3854.31,
"end": 3881.87,
"text": " But the idea under socialism is that the rewards and punishments wouldn't take place on the level of survival or subsistence, but would take place probably more on the level of like social recognition, creative fulfillment, and that's when you turn away from competing for access to the store of the goods and instead",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3882.14,
"end": 3910.79,
"text": " What people would be competing for is the ability to have some sort of elite position within the realm of production, like, you know, are you going to be playing in the back row on your violin or are you going to be the conductor? Those are the kinds of things that would incentivize people to work hard and to think hard and to continue to innovate. This is maybe where I'm a little bit utopian is that I think that we can",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3911.34,
"end": 3937.57,
"text": " bring the level of conflict in our society down. So it's not a matter, it's not always a struggle or most of the time isn't a struggle for survival. And that we could even see, you know, the expansion of human health and, and technological development to support that under socialism. Like one of the people I interviewed because I'm a socialist was Aubrey de Grey. Do you know who he is? No.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3937.88,
"end": 3963.73,
"text": " he's a longevity researcher who was working on medicine to repair the bodies, the damage the body does to itself due to aging. And I think that, you know, overcoming, like extending the health span for as long as we can would be a good thing for society and for individuals in society and that that would be worth supporting.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3964.27,
"end": 3990.61,
"text": " Well, one of the questions I've always wondered, I asked many people this, but Marxist in particular, what is the goal of Marxism or whatever it is you're pursuing? Is it a longer lifespan? Is it happier people? That is the metric of life satisfaction subjectively reported. Is it child mortality rates to go down, to plummet? Is it wealth to increase? What is it in particular that the Marxist project",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 3992.02,
"end": 4020.38,
"text": " Expansion. The first and biggest thing is the expansion of human freedom. And I think along with that, a lot of the things you've mentioned would be improved. Concomitant. Yeah, concomitant to that. I think that you would probably see, definitely see, if things are working out at all well, even further decline in infant mortality",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4020.83,
"end": 4050.3,
"text": " than we've already seen with the rest of modernity. You would definitely see an expansion of the lifespan for most people. Okay, so to simplify, and excuse me if I keep using the word simplify and be specific, I'm a mathematician. I'm a foolish mathematician. Think of me as extremely ignorant when it comes to these topics, and I'm just trying to understand them. You and Peter can talk at a certain level, but to me, I'm always listening, almost always listening to conversations",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4051.15,
"end": 4080.35,
"text": " of Marxist as if they're speaking another language or not getting to the issues that I actually care about. Like, what are you specifically advocating for when you say redistribute wealth? How are you specifically going to redistribute it? I'm going to be asking you a couple of questions. I'm not a redistributionist, ultimately. I mean, I supported Bernie Sanders, but like one of the things about Marxism, you have to understand what I would want to emphasize the most is that it is not the project where the state takes up",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4080.64,
"end": 4088.46,
"text": " All the things we produce and distribute it rationally. That is not the aim of Marxism.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4089.04,
"end": 4116.53,
"text": " The goal is to change the way we work together to produce the things we need, to change the aim of our collective work, so that the aim would be actually the expansion of human power and creativity rather than the aim of profit-making in the market. Let me be socratic here. Yeah. Okay. Why are we",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4117.72,
"end": 4143.61,
"text": " Why do you care so much about freedom? I know this sounds like it's so self-explanatory, but just let's be clear. Well, I care a lot about freedom because I feel as though life is short at the moment and that the way to bring meaning to life for human beings is to try to explore the",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4143.97,
"end": 4164.63,
"text": " Meaning in life.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4165.91,
"end": 4175.42,
"text": " You also mentioned that people tend you don't like people starving obviously like right now that's that's the work that is not a free condition right right when you're starving to get",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4175.91,
"end": 4203.63,
"text": " Uh, you know if you're if you're eight months old, however, the capitalist societies not this not the communist societies for sure There are less people starving and that and that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty. I'm sure you've heard this I'm sure you have some yeah, so i'd like to hear this Okay, so my rebuttal would be back to kind of my original point about the soviet union, which is like, you know, if you're going to compare the failures of the soviet union to anything you might compare it to",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4203.98,
"end": 4230.9,
"text": " the way that capitalist and bourgeois relations started in England in the 17th century and after. You have to look at all the famines. You can't just look at the ones that were nearby. I think that what we're looking at when we look at things like the Russian Revolution even and the revolution in China is an attempt for these traditional societies to modernize much more than it is any fully worked out or successful attempt",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4231.29,
"end": 4255.69,
"text": " to transcend capitalism. I mean, that was their aim, but that is how they modernized, and ultimately, in the case of China and the Soviet Union, that is how they entered into the capitalist world that we know today. You would describe the Soviet Union as capitalist? Yeah, state capitalist, because the, look, we are now, like in Canada, well,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4255.91,
"end": 4285.5,
"text": " More so than we are now. But there was, especially then, around the time that the Soviet Union came into being, and especially after World War II, there was a tendency for the state to intervene in capitalist relations and to direct capitalist relations more and more across the industrialized world. So you'd see it in the Soviet Union for sure, but you also saw it in FDR's America.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4285.91,
"end": 4308.87,
"text": " And the role of the state to direct capitalism hasn't gone away, it's just changed. So it used to be that there was more of an emphasis on redistribution when there was a threat of unruly workers, and also when there was a boom going on and there was a lot of economic growth. And then after the 70s, when after the profitability crisis of the 70s and",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4309.27,
"end": 4335.59,
"text": " and all the other economic crisis of the 70s there's been these neoliberal turns to try to prop up capitalist relations through state spending and so but yeah i would say overall the soviet union in china were state capitalist organizations with socialist ambitions like us like this so here's my question for you because like i mean i don't think i don't think america is is aiming at",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4335.76,
"end": 4361.05,
"text": " I don't think politicians in America are socialists. I don't think that even Bernie Sanders has like the same vision of transcending capitalism that someone like Lenin had or that even Mao... Well, Lenin didn't like the state, right? Yeah, he wanted it to wither away, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know, I don't think we could call him state anything in that way. But when it comes to, I mean, he says in the state revolution,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4361.51,
"end": 4390.78,
"text": " when i didn't have status ambitions but he ended up creating state capitalism in the soviet union what you intend to do and what happened that way 100 the new economic policy and the people were down for it right people were naming their kids nep like they were naming their yeah well because it was because the other approach was creating massive famines and that was a uh in a way you know absolutely necessary kind of a necessary retreat um and uh and you know",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4391.15,
"end": 4420.61,
"text": " It was a disaster. But like the Irish famine is how you should consider, you know, the way that with the robbing of the commons that's taking the peasant workers' land away from them, that happened as capitalism developed and that happened as so-called communism developed as well. Did you notice the thread between all your examples is not that people call themselves socialists, it's not that people call themselves capitalists, it's the fact that the government, in the case of the Irish people too, like you look at the British government, the British",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4421,
"end": 4448.61,
"text": " imperial government was like a federal government of federal governments. It was insanely regimented. You can go to the Supreme Court here in Canada, and there's a black inside that just says, yeah, this court is the highest court in this land, except for one in English. We answer to that. It's the federal government saying, listen, buddy, just like you, we have a federal government. You know, all of these things have massive centralized state power.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4448.97,
"end": 4466.31,
"text": " Yeah, absolutely. So is it bad that you have a problem because there's another position that says that the rich guys ally with the government guys and there's a revolving door. These people, of course, who negate that revolving door by desiring decentralization in different forms, they call themselves anarchists.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4467.6,
"end": 4496.49,
"text": " I was basically an anarchist before, right? You still are! A lot of people might say that. So where's the Marxism? It's like what I'm trying to figure out. Where's the government in this? What's their role? Alright, so Marx thought that there should be something called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Bolsheviks thought they were going to create the dictatorship of the proletariat.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4496.83,
"end": 4515.56,
"text": " There's a moment, I think, in the Stalinist regime where they're like, yeah, we've achieved socialism. We just have traitors, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4516.1,
"end": 4535.09,
"text": " Well, yeah, we got to purge them out. Yeah, but they but they would even then admit that, you know, the law of value still applied and that they were still going to have to balance, you know, think about profits, basically, and, and, you know, they never implemented something like the what Marx talked about in the critique of the Gotham program, labor voucher system that would",
"speaker": null
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"start": 4535.61,
"end": 4564.84,
"text": " The way it was described in the critique of the gotha program, it wouldn't have been possible to hold on to and then invest in production. It would only be good to redeem one hour of work.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4565.42,
"end": 4593.78,
"text": " The whole point, if you read the critique of the Gotham program, is that the labor voucher system contradicts itself and it makes the value in labor kind of obvious to the workers and no longer necessary to worry about. When the Soviets took over and you had the early Soviet Union, they didn't print money, the early government, because they were like, great job, GG, we don't need the money.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4594.14,
"end": 4619.39,
"text": " and then they realized that they need they need money and it was almost dead it was like a stillborn unfortunately that idea it died from its infancy before it had a chance for life maybe that says that might reflect something in the ideology but when it comes to what we were originally talking about what's the role of the government why wouldn't you just call yourself an animal okay so the role of the government after a revolutionary break",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4620.15,
"end": 4639.77,
"text": " the dictatorship of the proletariat. It would be there to administer or administrate relations between workers, maybe workers councils, maybe Soviets, but the workers process of transforming the way production goes. It would be like a technical job.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4640.2,
"end": 4669.63,
"text": " They'd be more like clerks or communications officers or something like that. And they wouldn't be dictating policy. They would be implementing the workers' demands. But the moment the government takes on the role of arbiter, you need policy. That's arguably all they do. That's why Lenin... They wouldn't be dictating to the workers what the workers should do to transform their relations. They would maybe set up policy about",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4669.89,
"end": 4690.28,
"text": " How the different sectors would communicate with each other or through them, but they wouldn't be they would be administrators truly be administrators rather than lawmakers or seats of political authority. That's the idea. But if you're an administrator you administrate someone right like you tell them",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4690.69,
"end": 4714.48,
"text": " It wouldn't be setting the aims of the workers. It would be advising and maybe setting some policies around how to implement the changes they want. It would be like if I hired someone and said I want to build a backyard patio.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4714.96,
"end": 4740.73,
"text": " And I hired this guy on who knew how to do it and he gave me technical directions. I wouldn't call him my boss. It's almost like we're building a church here. It's not going to force you, but it's going to advise you what the right thing to do is. And it's going to get involved with carpet. You can use the metaphor of a carpenter. Maybe what we're looking at here is something that we've done. Just go back to the monks.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4741.31,
"end": 4766.95,
"text": " They pulled it off, by the way. They're long-lasting, successful communists. Why didn't they do it? Why couldn't we? The key thing for Marx is breaking with the value of labor. Breaking with this idea that what sets up our relations when we distribute the things we make is the amount of time we spend making them. When you say key, that's like unique to Marx?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4767.4,
"end": 4792.53,
"text": " I think he does have a, I think he has a really interesting and key and unique critique of the bourgeois economists that does indicate like it's a transformation of Adam Smith and Ricardo and others to make it critical, more deeply critical. You know, not the bash of Adam Smith, but the yes.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4793.42,
"end": 4818.3,
"text": " the aim of Marx was to transform those relations and break with commodity production. Because at the moment, despite the fact that the state seems to be so powerful, it itself is always managing the aims of this form of production. It's like, the way I think of it is like capitalism is like the rules of chess.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4819.73,
"end": 4848.66,
"text": " And you can change the players all you want, but those rules remain the same until you change the game. What are the rules? The rules right now is we make things aimed at exchange on the market as equivalents. The value of those commodities are based on the amount of time it takes, socially necessary time it takes to create them. You have a class of people who only real role is to provide the labor to produce the things that then get exchanged.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4849.17,
"end": 4878.27,
"text": " Whereas you could have a classless society where people came together to create things for a common store and competed over how and what they were going to do to create and transform the world, rather than competing through the marketplace and around exchange. What's going to drive that? So we're all one team, right? Yeah, it would be a world effort.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4878.64,
"end": 4907,
"text": " Wouldn't it sacrifice competition, though? No, it just would shift where that competition was. You missed the answer. What's the pressure for competition? Social status, social status, social status and power. So like, you know, are you going to be sitting, I said before, you're going to be sitting in the back row playing one or two notes on the violin, or are you going to be the conductor? Yeah, in Kotkin, the historian, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4908.03,
"end": 4933.78,
"text": " Soviet historian in his book Magnetogorsk or Magnetic Mountain, he looks at that Soviet constructed city and he remarks how the factory in the morning, right, they would put up the productivity numbers, which comrade was the fastest comrade, which comrade... Yeah, that would all be gone under socialism because you don't... Why? Because that's the prestige. Don't you want to know... No, the prestige would not be based on",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4934.22,
"end": 4958.34,
"text": " speeding up production in order to bring down the price of the commodity and compete more efficiently in the market, which is what all of that productivity number stuff is about. It's not about a point system rewarding people. What are they competing for? They're competing for profitability in either in the world market or in the local market because the faster you produce things, the more productive you are on the floor, the more value you produce",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4958.71,
"end": 4987.06,
"text": " Okay, but if we're competing to be the most productive, how's that not profitability? I'm not saying anything about being the most productive. Well, you wouldn't be measuring in quantities of work time. What are we measuring quality? It would be measured in the quality of the output.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 4987.58,
"end": 5014.51,
"text": " and the ability to meet needs and also to meet new needs and new social ambitions, not in the amount of time or how quickly it was done or how slowly it was done. It would not be a time based production. It would be based on the qualities. So when you talked about productivity numbers, no, you didn't. You still had the productivity numbers. You still had, look, they were looking to Taylorism to try to run their economy. They love Taylor. Right.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5014.97,
"end": 5043.23,
"text": " because he was still dictated to by the law of value and the production of this abstract value through labor time through making sure that you know the amount of value in a commodity uh you know was socially necessary meeting what was socially necessary or even beating what was socially necessary right the same engine of profitability was driving production in the soviet union because why say it was state capitalists so and under socialism that",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5043.63,
"end": 5072.48,
"text": " aim, that fundamental aim, would be different. That's what makes this radical... Socialism would be uncoercive. It would be what? Uncoercive. It would not, well it might be coercive, but it just wouldn't be coercive that way. It would be coercive to a different value. Yeah, to a different value. One that everyone kind of would be aware of having set. And it would be, you're arguing that... We would be setting our own value, our own primary value.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5073,
"end": 5100.73,
"text": " We would be setting the aims of our own production. So that means that, you know, if we set up terms of production that have drastically terrible unintended consequences, we would know that this was our primary aim that we'd set. We wouldn't think of it as a natural fact of the world. We'd be able to alter it more easily. We should definitely explore that. You were talking about assessment there. Just a shift from the value, right? Like in terms of achieving value.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5101.08,
"end": 5130.27,
"text": " The idea of assessing value is also fascinating, right? Who assesses the value in a Soviet state? Is it just, we vote, this is what we think is valuable, and we go for it? Do you know what I mean? Who assesses what's valuable? What's the agenda? Right now, the power of the state is based on the ability to tax corporations and people, and to manage the",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5131.1,
"end": 5156.61,
"text": " you know, the money value in the world, and then also to build up armies and have a mandate on violence. And that gives it the ability to be the final judge or assessor of the success, or at least try to be the final judge of the access and accessor of social success. And, you know, we have democracy in place here for the people to weigh in on how well the politicians are doing, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5157.4,
"end": 5185.98,
"text": " so under socialism the power of individual workers would be more direct because they would be like direct democracy or like would we um yeah i think probably uh the you know this is where marxists start to say well no blueprints um because before we can say like what would be the best political form or what would be the best way to organize our communication and assessment of our success",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5186.44,
"end": 5212.07,
"text": " we probably should know something about the political or the economic and social aims of our production. We need to know what that axiomatic first value is going to be before we can kind of know how we want to manage ourselves. But I would say that something along the lines of local communities of control of production would be able to, you know, would also",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5213.01,
"end": 5233.15,
"text": " You know, like councils or something like that. I'm just kind of reaching to what's ready at hand and my lexicon here would be the people who would also be responsible for informing Each other about the success rate that they're having. In other words, I mean, look, it would be pretty obvious if the common store of goods was empty.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5233.8,
"end": 5261.27,
"text": " Or in certain areas, people weren't getting what they just needed to survive. I mean, the base level success would have to be meeting just subsistence needs. And if that wasn't working, go ahead. I was going to say, I don't mean to touch you off, please. Yeah, no, go ahead. OK, sorry. You know, that idea of the common store and understanding value, I think is really interesting, right? Because one man might look at the common store",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5261.71,
"end": 5290.93,
"text": " Man, we did it. This is valuable. We need all this stuff. It's great stuff. And someone else might look at it and look at the future and the potential in the material they're looking at and think it's garbage, like the eyes of a prophet in the Old Testament, looking at the wealth in their society, all garbage. You know, like I think- And so I would say that second guy is- He's a minority, right? Yeah, but he's a better communist. But he's a minority.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5291.27,
"end": 5319.73,
"text": " So would the democracy favor that guy? Like this is another thing too. What if we just let the people organize their own common stores and then those common stores competed with each other and they own the equity of those common stores and we call that capitals? No, no, yeah, but you're like, you're, we're not talking about a common store. You're still talking about access to commodities as a primary thing. The question would be how do we organize? Look, let me tell you about my novel. This would clarify it because I tried to work this out.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5320.11,
"end": 5347.72,
"text": " in theory and I wrote a novel and it ended up being dystopian which I kind of like. So this was my attempt to... Was it supposed to be utopian? It was neither really but it was a matter of everyone read it as dystopian which I kind of perversely liked because the way I implemented socialism was in a very coercive way so of course it would seem dystopian. I had an AI novel, I wrote an AI novel",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5348.23,
"end": 5377.93,
"text": " where rather than so where Donald Trump was president and the people in government who created the AI were convinced that he was about to destroy the world through nuclear war and the AI was giving them reports like here's my projected timeline before everything goes up in flames and so they were trying to use the artificial intelligence to come up with a plan to save humanity from its own self-destruction right and and the computer programmer",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5378.2,
"end": 5402.86,
"text": " was the dad of the protagonist. The guy who created the IAI and was taking information from the AI. This was the dad of the protagonist. And so the whole story is told from the teenage point of view. And what the dad of the protagonist did was thought was we just need to perfect humanity. We just need to get everyone to be smarter. We need everyone to be faster. We need everyone to be more agile, healthier. And then if we raise everyone up,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5403.52,
"end": 5432.79,
"text": " If we can come up with a program with the power of this AI to raise everyone up in their consciousness and their abilities, we will be able to overcome this problem. And so what he did was he took himself on as a test subject. And his first task was to try to beat his son at Super Smash Brothers, because he always lost. Great game. Yeah, but I call it... You play? Yeah, I play and I always lose to my freaking teenage son. What's your name? I'm sorry, we'll go right back to the novel. What do you name?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5433.59,
"end": 5449.73,
"text": " Well, it's been a while. Marth was one I would play for a while. Sometimes I would take perverse choices, like I would play Pokemon, Pikachu. No, no. Anyway, it says a lot about",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5450.11,
"end": 5478.8,
"text": " Please continue. What does it say about me that... Oh my, like, you know, the deep psychology of who you mean as Smash Bros. Brawl, or Melee, rather, Brawl for the cancer of our society. Right, Melee, Melee is what I played, yeah. So I changed the name to Bash, Bash Revolution in the novel. So it's not Smash Brothers, it's Bash, Bash Revolution, and that's the game that he wants to be able to beat his son at, and he can. The computer helps him",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5479.31,
"end": 5502.94,
"text": " uh improves his game he can beat not only his son but he goes to a championship uh for the state and he almost beats he almost wins he doesn't win though and he gets very depressed but then he finds out from the computer that look even if his plan had worked all that would have done was speed up the apocalypse it would have gotten here like three weeks earlier if everyone was smarter and so so the problem is not",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5503.22,
"end": 5532.16,
"text": " that in individual humanity, it's not a matter of our genetic code. It's not a matter of us not being smart enough. There's something else going on that's causing the problem. And of course that pro what is it? It's the form of campus capitalism. It's, it's, I was expecting a different problem. Yeah, but it's capitalism ultimately. And so how do we, how do we save humanity? Well, the AI has a solution. We have to break from the commodity form and has a way to do it.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5532.58,
"end": 5558.01,
"text": " Rather than produce things based on their ability to exchange in the market, all production will be directed by video games. I thought that the way out was commodification of video games. Replacing commodities with commodity production with the popular basing production based on what kind of games are popular.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5558.42,
"end": 5586.2,
"text": " Games will be designed to augment in reality. The games you're playing are actually producing the things that you need for other games. And so the kinds of games that are popular would be dictated by what people want to play, but also by what things are most productive to produce the things that people want to play. And the AI has it all worked out in a gigantic, huge brain. But it also is clearly manipulating humanity to do its will.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5586.73,
"end": 5614.8,
"text": " Once AI takes over and puts you in a video game, you're no longer in reality, you're not really making decisions based on your own ideas, you're making decisions based on what the computer is giving you to play. I mean, it's a very common psychological theme in Marxist literature, right? Like, we don't do the thinking, someone else does the thinking, we don't make the commodity exchange, the government makes the commodity exchange, we don't do that. Do you think that that reliance on the vanguard or the vanguard",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5615.32,
"end": 5634.77,
"text": " not even as an institution, but as an abstract. Don't worry, the expert told me, I don't know why I'm doing what I'm doing, but I know it's right because I've gotten it from above. Permanent as celestial knowledge. Do you think that might be the undoing of Marxism? Like why it fails? There's this externalization of responsibility and thinking.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5635.78,
"end": 5659.97,
"text": " Yeah, I think it's part of the reason why Marxism had such difficulty. There was two reasons why Marxism had such difficulty, and there's two. This is broken into a two-sided problem in Marxism, and on one hand it's determinism, and the other is volunteerism. Strangely enough, volunteerism is the vanguardist position. Right, just to inform our audience, that's the one Mr. Lenin",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5660.62,
"end": 5685.23,
"text": " Yeah, right. And Rosa Luxemburg was, I mean, neither of them were only volunteers and only determinists, but... Right. One of them was volunteers. No coercion there. Anyway, sorry. Right, right. So, if you think that the vanguard is necessary, what you think is that a certain set of ideas have to be developed in order to direct people towards their own liberation. And if you think that",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5685.35,
"end": 5713.35,
"text": " that doesn't need to be done than what you think is something like maybe what Bernstein thought, but in a slightly different way. You think that the market relations themselves or the society of capitalism itself will bring people into conflict and into revolutionary struggle to create and will also give them the ability to create a new world. The three tenets of Marxism, according to Rosa Luxemburg, were first, capitalism cannot last, it's a temporary,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5713.78,
"end": 5743.05,
"text": " society because it's riven with contradictions and it defeats itself. Second, capitalism brings people together in a social collective to make massive amounts of wealth and socialize people to be more interdependent and less independent. So to understand their need for one another to be more cooperative, capitalism does that. And the third thing is capitalism brings a consciousness of this situation to the working class.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5743.4,
"end": 5766.68,
"text": " How horrible. Just to go to the volunteerism, I think it is very important to specify that when we talk about volunteerism for the Marxists, we're not talking that everyone does everything out of their own free will and accord and they voluntarily give",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5766.85,
"end": 5792.14,
"text": " Hear that sound?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5793.08,
"end": 5819.17,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms.",
"speaker": null
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{
"start": 5819.17,
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"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone.",
"speaker": null
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{
"start": 5845.33,
"end": 5871.05,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash theories, all lowercase.",
"speaker": null
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{
"start": 5871.05,
"end": 5884.7,
"text": " go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories because people don't do that",
"speaker": null
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{
"start": 5885.06,
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"text": " I'm just saying, when we talk about volunteerism, it's not that. When we say volunteerism in Marxism, we mean we have people volunteer to get guns and coerce people to share. So it's a whole other kind of volunteering. You know, when here's the word volunteer, you think, you know, they're giving a free life. But really, volunteerism in Marxism is more like the freedom to tell other people what to do.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5915.81,
"end": 5942.55,
"text": " Yeah, well, it's a yeah, the volunteerism is event you you Yeah, you yeah, right. You're led by the best and the brightest To develop your ideas and put them into action Voluntarily rather than being determined by your circumstances. It's your own people are so bright. They have guns to persuade us Yeah, you know right right now this look",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5942.98,
"end": 5968.11,
"text": " this the the capitalism is a violent business too i mean you can't just hold state capital 100 yeah 100 i'm not trying to defend it's like you know they they they and it wasn't even a matter of voluntarily taking up arms it was more like you need to have the full understanding of um of marxist ideas in order to know what to do and how to transform society um otherwise",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5968.52,
"end": 5995.5,
"text": " Yeah, otherwise you'd be stuck in what's called trade union consciousness and only be keep struggling for better wages, only keep struggling within the logic of capitalism rather than come to understand you need to be political and transform. I'm not saying capitalism is not, at least state capitalism is about choruses, right? Like we have the picketing men in the United States, you have a strike, don't worry, hire picketing men, these guys with guns, they'll come over and break your strikes. You know,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 5996.27,
"end": 6026.1,
"text": " It'd be a shame if your laborers had something like rights, so you can hire out. It was horrible. And the government, when they first intervene, they are on the side of the picker-diggies men. They're like, good job, boys. Thank you for your service. Be ashamed that the Union Town stopped, or not the Union Town, be ashamed that the company Town stopped. So they're, no, 100% capitalism as a history of coercion, in part. So I agree with you there.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6026.6,
"end": 6048.03,
"text": " Yeah, so the only thing I'd add is that this problem of determinism and volunteerism is a problem when you're thinking about any radical social change that depends upon the masses or depends upon it coming from",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6048.32,
"end": 6075.88,
"text": " the less powerful parts of society. If you have an elitist understanding of how social change is created, that you don't have this split about determinism or volunteerism, you simply have these ideas and try to put them into actions, right, direct. Whereas right now, what we're talking about is the Marxist struggle to understand how to get people who don't have, don't perceive themselves to be responsible for the world or to have the power to come to an understanding.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6076.39,
"end": 6102.48,
"text": " of their own position and their own responsibility for transforming society. You know, that's some powerful words that you said there. This idea that in that volunteerist model, there's a descentivization for those on the fringes to participate. Because because you externalize responsibility, when you're asked, hey, is it your job to perpetuate the revolution? Is it your job to give? They say, no, some apartheid.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6103.08,
"end": 6127.33,
"text": " is doing that for me, right? We go to Zizac with the Buddhist in the wheel, right? Like someone else is taking care of it, I'm good here, and then that occurs. Maybe one of the greatest, I don't even want to say successes, but one of the greatest instruments capitalism has used to succeed is its ability to take everyone, anyone on the fringes of society to an extent,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6127.53,
"end": 6146.07,
"text": " to get them to participate in the game. If you talk to Americans, they either see themselves as millionaires or soon to be millionaires. And that's why socialism is so important. Not because it's flawed, but because even the lowest guy is playing the game.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6147.09,
"end": 6174.85,
"text": " I'm not sure I quite understand the turn to talk about people on the fringes so much here, but because of the concern when we're talking about volunteerism and determinism was not about having a few people not agree, but not having the working class as a big totality come together with a political project beyond the logic of capitalism. So it was, okay, so I'm going to put that aside for a second. The second thing you said there,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6175.27,
"end": 6198.51,
"text": " was about how capitalism forces people to cooperate in its own logic, right? It at least gets them to, right? People play the game, and that's arguably true. I remember what it was I wanted to address. You said people in the United States think of themselves as millionaires in waiting or millionaires.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6198.95,
"end": 6227.77,
"text": " Or haves and have-nots, or soon-to-haves, or something like that. Like there was this was said by a Republican Steinbeck said the other point. Yeah, well I would say is that in the after World War II for a while that kind of assessment of let's say working-class mentality was accurate enough or had some truth to it because there was such a big boom going on and the expansion of wealth through very very productive capitalism",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6228.25,
"end": 6257.04,
"text": " really did change people's living standards and conditions for the most part. There were people who were excluded and those people, you know, usually along ethnic lines, and that has been a deep problem for America. But I would say that even since the 70s, this notion that everyone is going to be, could be a millionaire or that the working class are just millionaires and waiting, I think that's given way. And I worked in, you know,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6258.3,
"end": 6280.18,
"text": " As just an irregular jobs for most of my adult life like 20 years and the people who had come from families because I come from a professionalized family. My father was a doctor so but people came from families that were just workers themselves. They had no ambitions to be millionaires. They had ambitions to have like some security.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6280.56,
"end": 6307.21,
"text": " I mean it was a scaled down version, right? Like they themselves would be business owners and then they would tell people they could tell people what to do. I mean that's what in the Marxist conception means to be an owner. I knew someone at Comcast who was very very much from the working class. She would talk to me about her life and like all the bitches she'd beaten up at bars the night before because they were eyeing her boyfriend and stuff like that. She was tough and",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6307.88,
"end": 6334.27,
"text": " But she had aspirations. She wanted to be a mortician because she saw that as a job with some security behind it. This was not somebody who was looking to... I mean, she wanted to have a great life for herself, but she didn't look to her work or to her future income as the way she was going to satisfy herself in the world. It was just what she needed to get by. I don't think that",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6334.44,
"end": 6359.36,
"text": " material here is actually maybe where we differ with marxist right i i don't think material is the satisfaction of life like i don't think that's where the meaning comes from right and this is something that you know marxist historians have uh trouble with especially the retro projecting on history like how how would a marxist explain let's say tertullian or the christian martyrdom",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6360.15,
"end": 6388.11,
"text": " these guys who give up, let alone their material, their lives. Where does that fit in in the Marxist history? It's almost like it's a deviation away from what they consider the engine of history material. Well, I don't think the Marxist idea is that everyone's working only for their own strictly material interests. It's more that the way that you build social relationships to meet everyone, or as many people as possible,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6388.68,
"end": 6414.85,
"text": " material interest is what's going to determine the framework in which these other subjective attitudes arise. So, you know, if you want to understand the church, you have to understand the feudal society in which it arose. That doesn't mean that everyone was just dictated by love of corn. Pre-feudal society. Right, right, right, right, right. Well, Christianity",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6415.32,
"end": 6442.67,
"text": " arose and took power and became a real force didn't it in in the middle ages when and before isn't that when i mean yeah dates further back but didn't i guess you know it depends upon what kind of christianity you're talking about because it was you know like it doesn't matter don't say ask you what if that's you wrote with the grand inquisitor christ came back you saw the church or it knows what do you think so uh you know i think it's the grand inquisitor says something i'm like",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6443.42,
"end": 6459.41,
"text": " Get out of here, we're not ready for you yet. The church had some role to play and Christianity played some role in the formation of, it was part of the political power that shaped relations in the feudal world.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6459.85,
"end": 6489.73,
"text": " Papa means son of the priest.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6490.01,
"end": 6514.48,
"text": " What Marx would want to emphasize is how Christianity related to the relationships between paths that had some role to play in the way material needs were met in a society and what kinds of things were built and what set up those needs rather than",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6514.96,
"end": 6540.96,
"text": " only on the level of like theological debates or only on the level of the cast of characters who took authority in the church or, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, who is it? The great Greek communist, but he was also a prolific writer, he's like there are Dostoevsky and Sartre, Nikos Kasantzakis, right, who is the, if you would, the Marxist Christian, and he really",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6541.32,
"end": 6570.81,
"text": " emphasizes this idea that, you know, if you need some wealth redistribution, you need the word they had, they carried us, right, for Christian door. This idea of... The early socialists, the early socialists were Christians. I mean, to one Europe and in the 19th century Europe, like, you know, the utopian socialists were mostly Christians and they were",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6571.05,
"end": 6598.44,
"text": " Lutherans are, you know, radical anti... they were on the side of the Lutheran tradition where you wanted to bring the Word of God down to the people and away from the priestly class. And so... They figured out the Communisms, man. I'm just saying. What distinguished Marx from them was that he didn't... he was not utopian in so much as he didn't want to",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6598.69,
"end": 6625.76,
"text": " Wrap out like write down a blueprint for exactly what moral values should be at play and what relations should exist and how people should set up a stable, godly, harmonious world. But rather, he wanted to free the relations so they could be more and more creative and create new means, new needs and the key was much more on the side of",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6625.98,
"end": 6645.81,
"text": " bourgeois humanism than the usual socialists were because he was excited about the freedom that was potentially there and the development that could come out of a socialist society much more than he was about the perfect moral values or the balance or harmony of a",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6646.2,
"end": 6669.38,
"text": " Oh yeah, for sure. Marxists are not concerned with morality. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. But no, there's, they are too, right? It's just a question of what it is you value, right? And the way you, if you would, the way you would set up an institution to ensure that those values are met, I think is where Christians and Marxists differ.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6669.73,
"end": 6699.39,
"text": " If you were talking about like the early church, but you know when it comes to this idea that You need in order to be a Christian to give all you have to You know avoid if you would being a rich man, I think it's like James 5 they talk about You know the blood are the wages that you would held from the laborers Will come like your It's like your clothes if he's talking to the rich man. He's like, oh we've been how you rich and",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6699.7,
"end": 6728.66,
"text": " Your clothes are moth-eaten. The wages you withheld from the laborers are recently going to come and get you. They cry out. And this is the really splitting point, though. James writes for those guys, for these laborers who've been exploited, that the just man says, he does not oppose you. Something that no Marxist, I think, would ever say. Oh, here's the proletariat, man. He does not oppose you.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6729.26,
"end": 6757.04,
"text": " What do you think the Christian thing to do would be if in a society, in a situation where in order for the bourgeois class, in other words, in order for capitalism to right itself,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6757.79,
"end": 6778.71,
"text": " you knew that you had to go through another world war and that you know millions would have to die either from disease or starvation or that because you have to do that yeah in order for capitalism that relationship between the owning class and the working class to maintain its its",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6779.05,
"end": 6808.69,
"text": " In order for there to be a new boom, you knew that there would have to be a massive amount of human sacrifice, basically. Oh, human sacrifice, I think early Christians are all about. They're going the nine yards. But I thought that Christ was what he made it so there would never need to be an actual human sacrifice again. That the blood of Christ was replacing the need for us to pay penance for our own sins.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6809.04,
"end": 6837.23,
"text": " in this world. You're talking about that idea that he's been a ransom for our sins, right? Right. Basically, this is a religion of forgiveness of one another in a community rather than primarily a religion of appeasement of a wrathful god. Two things. One, I'll tackle the second thing you mentioned. It's because it's a religion of forgiveness, there's no need for that war you were talking",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6837.82,
"end": 6865.28,
"text": " The first one is when it comes to the idea of, you know, his sins were, how do I say this, his death was a ransom for our sins. It's interesting, that verse, if you follow it out, and it's Paul who's talking. I'm going to cut you off on the ransom because that's a distraction, the history of Christianity and that. I want to address what you just said first, so about... I'm just kidding. Snap. Oh, you got me. Paul puts away Tolstoy.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6866.13,
"end": 6890.76,
"text": " The idea that a Christian would say, oh, because we believe in forgiveness, there's no need for that human sacrifice that I was talking about. But what I was saying was, the Marxist says, well, you as an individual Christian may forgive and be just in your heart, but the problem is that these relations that really determine what happened",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6891.29,
"end": 6911.66,
"text": " are not just yours alone, but they're objectified out in the world, and they're also... 100%, yeah. Christians would say that, too. Jews, the word shtema? Hold on, hold on, let me get to the end of that. I'll write it down. So the point is that if we know that",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6911.9,
"end": 6940.54,
"text": " capitalism's going into crisis, that there's going to be a massive shortfall in profitability, there's going to be massive unemployment, there's going to be inequalities between nations and competition between nations to try to figure out which nations are going to suffer the most and that that competition is likely to erupt into violence or in war or at least has that potential and that not only that but through that process",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6941.71,
"end": 6967.28,
"text": " enough capital will be destroyed and devalued so that new investors can come along and invest in what comes at the end of it and find a new boom. Would we be willing to say it's good Christians? Yes, as long as that, no, not just that we forgive them, but yes, that relation between the worker and the boss, that relationship between the bourgeois class and the proletariat,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6967.67,
"end": 6993.54,
"text": " can continue and we forgive that not just one side but both sides of that relation for their sins of continuing on you know in this pattern. Okay let's do this so there's this idea I love this it's been a pleasure by the way just speaking with you I don't know how many hours sorry I should go pretty soon it's been two I think but you know on the subject of one I just want to say",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 6994.02,
"end": 7020.2,
"text": " Basically what we're talking about here is comparing Marxism to Christianity, and particularly something like Christian anarchism. I'm not going to say that Christians are homogenous. Obviously, maybe we all have our own interpretations of what the gospel means or what Christ meant. Take that for what it's worth. Who's responsible for determining that in heresies, but we can talk about that hours on end.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7020.79,
"end": 7046.25,
"text": " Ironically something Marxist struggle with too. What's heretical Marxist doctrines? It's common in all ideologies. How do you define false teachings? But anyway, to give a steel man and answer your question. I would say for Christians, there's this understanding that systems collapse in their inequities",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7046.61,
"end": 7063.75,
"text": " Even if everyone believes that it's a good system. I'll give an example. The crazy thing about the nature of sin where you miss the mark from what should be and what is, that's an archer's term, is that when you miss the way,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7064.26,
"end": 7092.24,
"text": " You might not even realize you're sinning. The society might not even realize you're sinning. In fact, in the Christian cosmology, they don't. They idolize things they shouldn't care about. But the beauty of sin, if there is any beauty in it, is that it goes away. It collapses by its own iniquity. It falls not because you and I want it to, but because there's something inherently wrong with that system. I'll give you an example.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7093.51,
"end": 7119.07,
"text": " Let's say we lived in a society that believed that you should eat this poison that lowered our health, we call it capitalism, and ruined our lives. But we all believed it would work. Well, regardless of the fact that we all believe that it's the right system, and regardless of the fact that we believe it's the most efficient, it isn't. And that its inequities, its very inequities, would choke itself out.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7119.62,
"end": 7144.34,
"text": " The difference is that what I'm saying is that at the end of that process of it collapsing, it would also be able to reconstitute itself and come up in the same relation and do it all over again. So wouldn't the Christian thing to do would be this, to change the set of relations",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7144.73,
"end": 7151.56,
"text": " So that they were less likely to collapse and there would be less calamity. 100%. I think you and I would just probably disagree about the wage.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7152.35,
"end": 7179.6,
"text": " Well, Dan, that's where all that technical conversation about value and the market and the exchanges and all that was important because if you don't believe the foundational kind of material economic political analysis of Marx, then you can be perfectly moral of trying to in a conservative way prop up this system as the best of all possible worlds. No, I don't think I don't think crisis is okay with money lenders, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7180.42,
"end": 7209.14,
"text": " Okay, so you want to get rid of i mean look i'm just saying like i i would yeah you want to live in a society equals capitalism right right right i'm not saying christianity i don't see christianity equals capitalism either my point is to say if i'm just saying to anyone if you don't believe that the marxist critique of political economy is true then you ought not to be a marxist and you ought not to struggle to overcome capitalism",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7209.63,
"end": 7224.7,
"text": " but that you know there are other reasons why you could struggle over okay okay let's hear it let's hear one okay so the thing is is what will be its undoing right so in what you tell me why i should try to overthrow capitalism",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7225.33,
"end": 7253.85,
"text": " You just said there are other reasons to do it. I just want to hear what you have to say. You should tell me. You're the Marxist, or you're the socialist. You convinced me. Why should I overthrow capitalism? I'm not saying you should. So here's, if I may offer another kind of solution. I'm just trying to describe something more akin to maybe the monasticism of early Christianity that comes around like 300. There's a sense that the world is fallen.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7254.44,
"end": 7284.21,
"text": " and that the way that you, they have no utopian ideals about people, right? Like Christianity 101 is everyone you meet is a horrible, like, sinner. They, you know, they would kill a good man and crucify him and torture him. There's no optimism in like you, and then worse, you chant every Sunday, Mia Maxalva, or, you know, of the greatest sinners of whom I am, or of the sinners of whom I am chief. There's this understanding you are one of them.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7284.46,
"end": 7300.08,
"text": " You change yourself first, and you lead by example. And you're not the only one in this game.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7300.49,
"end": 7328.52,
"text": " I'm not saying you're going to be feared. Hear me out. Hear me out. No, no, no, no, no, no. I got to interject. That might be a perfectly good tactic. I mean, not what you're talking about. What kind of tactic do we deploy to create social change? Lead by example. Change yourself first, lead by example. That's not non-Martius. That's not non-Martius. What's sort of non-Martius is the recognition that you're not the only player in the game.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7329.55,
"end": 7358.01,
"text": " I don't see how that's non-Marxist, because the Marxists are always... I'm not done. I'm not done. I'm not done. I'm kind of running it, because what seemed to be happening up to now is like, I'll pose you a question in response to the question, at the end of my explanation, you don't address it, and you tell me this long story about your ideas that are not related. I'll be curt. I promise. I don't... Okay, let's see with them, and then I'll be curt in my responses, if you'd like. Like, I'm talking three-sentence responses.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7358.2,
"end": 7382.89,
"text": " Okay, go. Just for you, Doug. Systems of power are predicated not just by the people who are within them. The inequities of this system bring them down and instead a larger, let's say, reconfiguration occurs around truth, which Christians call the law.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7383.66,
"end": 7411.78,
"text": " Okay, third sentence. I'm trying real hard. Repeat that second sentence for me. There's a sense that these systems will collapse in their own inequities and reconfigure around a larger locus around the weight, which transcends individual actors. It's not money or power that determines what is good,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7412.47,
"end": 7440.54,
"text": " You can take two, take two or three sentences, but what's the next piece to this puzzle here? Cause I'm getting, I'm getting you now.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7441.37,
"end": 7469.58,
"text": " Yeah, so the idea is that you purify yourself first and need by example and carve out a place, a paradise, a garden, which what paradise means. You know, apart from the world that's collapsing, so that when the world collapses, and this is the ancient trick of monasticism, when the world collapses, they will gravitate around the garden you've created in the desert, like St. John who waters the stick, so it becomes a tree and garden.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7470.38,
"end": 7489.36,
"text": " Okay.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7489.8,
"end": 7518.06,
"text": " So now I'm hearing you. But you don't need the volunteerism, if you know what I mean, with the guns. Well, you do. You have volunteerism when you're own. You have your own volunteerism. Volunteerism is not a matter of a gun. Volunteerism is a matter of a gun. The Vanguard is not all about the gun. It's about the ideas. The Vanguard Party. Look, in Marxism, let's put that aside. I'll come back to it. I'm listening.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7518.49,
"end": 7543.3,
"text": " So first of all, the idea that you, what you pointed out was that, let's just map this on the capitalism. You're saying capitalism as a world system will fall into, will collapse due to its own inequities, due to its own contradictions, is how a Marxist would put it. I didn't say capitalism, but any- I know, I'm transforming this into capitalism. You're saying any system.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7543.64,
"end": 7572.31,
"text": " The transformation of Christianity into politics, man, that's Marxist as it gets, right? Right. Well, okay, let's say feudal society will collapse due to its own internal contradictions, and it collapsed into capitalism, right, roughly, or bourgeois society, or modern society. Modern society will collapse due to its own contradictions, and it will become something else. This is dialectical, like Hegelian thinking, and",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7572.72,
"end": 7598.61,
"text": " Our task within this dialectical of history is to understand and lead by example and to be there with the new world ready once the old world collapses. You do what happens at the end of V for Vendetta before V for Vendetta's revolution, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7599.33,
"end": 7626.32,
"text": " You give your money away and help the poor before the revolution comes and takes your money and gives it to the poor. That's the ultimate volunteeristic version of revolution. People will be led by the ideas and their understanding to do what's right. That's not immediately in their self-interest with the understanding of a better tomorrow. That's what you're putting forward.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7626.73,
"end": 7645.73,
"text": " I mean, not what myself is putting forward. I'm just a guy. That's a strain of the tradition. So, right, the strain of tradition that sees human existence as a progressive process of history rather than... Not necessarily progress of history.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7645.96,
"end": 7674.68,
"text": " Because that idea comes about in the French Revolution with the goal. All right. Well, then then then then what you're going to then we have to reject this idea that after collapse, a new and better version, a more equitable version of life on Earth will exist. You're not you're not really promising that you're promising pie in the sky when you die. You're not promising. No, not necessarily. There's this understanding that you if you would be kingdom of God is within you and that you yourself will be corrupted.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7675.23,
"end": 7702.71,
"text": " And that's pretty good. And that's something you can live here. Right? So, like, just because everyone's exploiting around you doesn't mean you should exploit. You can live the... I think it was, it might have been Athanasius, was asked, you know, Abba, what will it be like in the Kingdom of Heaven? He said, why do I concern myself with that Kingdom when I'm living in the Kingdom of Heaven now? Right? Like, what do I concern myself with? Like, what happens when I die when I'm living in the Kingdom of Heaven? I see this as like a beautiful soul syndrome.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7703.1,
"end": 7726.36,
"text": " way you're describing it now is where okay sure I allow all the people around me to suffer. I do nothing to change the social relations around me. I don't contribute to them and I even allow myself to perish in the face of them but I don't struggle to bring people together to change those relations. I accept the world it's given",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7726.36,
"end": 7742.72,
"text": " Christians accepting the world as given, have you read the Gospels? Do they want to change the world? Do they want to change this world? For the better? Ideally. Would that not be a form of progress?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7743.37,
"end": 7772.02,
"text": " They don't know if you'll ever complete the mission. Now they're the socialists, right? This is something that's debated though, but if you're interested, you're actually asking. What I'm interested in pointing out here is that we may not be in such drastic disagreement in terms of if we believe that we can come together and change social relations for the better,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7772.26,
"end": 7789.5,
"text": " but not be perfect. And not through a violent revolution or any violence. That's where we did it. Do you, so you would never, so I'm not an absolute pacifist. I was for a long time, but I'm not an absolute pacifist. Yeah. Is that in the anarchist days?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7789.82,
"end": 7808.56,
"text": " Yeah. I was, I was a, but now I think, look, there's such a thing as violence and self defense. I did. So I don't that that's justifiable. Um, and",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7808.78,
"end": 7838.47,
"text": " that I would say that when millions of people are being led to, you know, let's say the gas chambers or pushed out into the desert to starve or unemployed in such numbers that they can't live. Can we talk about the gas chambers one? Yeah. Okay, so there's this crazy story between these guys, I don't know if you know them, and they're hardly in a way, at least according to most persons, Christian, Jehovah's Witnesses, but they're an interesting case then. I think we all agree about that, right?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7838.95,
"end": 7866.22,
"text": " Wonderful. There's this really funny scene between the Nazis and the Jehovah's Witnesses. The Nazis, the Jehovah's Witnesses were like by the Weimar, they're not like by the liberals, they don't vote, they don't believe in it. So, they're not very popular. Anyway, so Jehovah's Witnesses write the Nazis, if you would, a little text message, I know I'm retro-projecting, a little text message that's like, hey, Mr. Hitler, we don't like Judea as a minor.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7866.83,
"end": 7882.76,
"text": " and uh you know it was like lol cool uh swear your allegiance to me in the state so like sorry we think the state is uh of this world we answer to a king higher than all kings",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7883.1,
"end": 7908.78,
"text": " our Lord Jesus Christ, right? And they respond back. And Hitler's like, lol, JK. And then he sends a message to the lead. I sense people are like, lol, kill these people. And so the chase begins. You know, they kneel them down, they refuse military service, they're pacifists, god bless them. And they refuse to do the Nazi salute, god bless me, because in Hitler's Germany. And all these taboos finally break in.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7908.78,
"end": 7938.23,
"text": " for the Jehovah's Witnesses. Next thing you know, you've got, just like the Jews, you have guys, Gestapo, coming after these guys, putting them in the camps. You know what's crazy? These Jehovah's Witnesses, they go to Buchenwald. They're pacifists. One, the Nazis can't get them all because, believe it or not, tyranny is not that efficient. And these pamphlets spreading, you know, freedom fighters in a way, they go to Buchenwald. The ones they do capture, they capture about four of them. There's only 20,000.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7938.47,
"end": 7960.4,
"text": " If you open the door and you said, you know, they really believe in Romans 13 you respect worldly authority",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7960.96,
"end": 7988.68,
"text": " So the best thing you can do is just not have yourself be destroyed and be good to everyone. Friends, sinners, everyone. Okay. So they write that the concentration camp guards find the Jehovah's Witnesses",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 7988.87,
"end": 8011.24,
"text": " This is my favorite part. They see them with purple triangles. And they're like, man. So like, talk about anti-fans. These guys are the fascists. And they're like, man, what are you doing? You're German. We're Nazis. This is your moment. Like, what are you? Why are you here? All you have to do is go with the flow. Why are you here? And the Jehovah's say,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8011.95,
"end": 8030.71,
"text": " Oh, well, we think the government and the state is capable of great evils and violence, and we're just trying to be good and not kill anyone or harm anyone. Of course, that's a problem for governments. But these tyrannical governments will be struck down. And that's, by the way, arguing that the state's capable of great violence, easy argument to win.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8032.43,
"end": 8060.79,
"text": " And the guards, a lot of them, convert. The Jehovah's Witnesses make a printing press for the watchtower of their pamphlet system underground in Buchenwald and not only convert a number of the guards and the Jews, but lo and behold, the Nazis are struck down. There's always a bigger fish. Corruption eats itself. Violence eats itself. They are free. And those who are died, the blood of those who died become the seeds for a new and expanding church in the post-Nazi regime.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8061.71,
"end": 8091,
"text": " they won by their own standards. So I'm not a Jehovah's witness, but man, isn't that a case study? Uh, sure. I mean, I, I look, I'm not, I'm not going to knock, uh, Jehovah's witnesses, especially not in the historical context, but I, um, I, um, I had friends, I used to have Jehovah's witnesses come to my house. Um,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8091.51,
"end": 8118.71,
"text": " like every week or so, because I was one of those people who would say, Oh, hi, come on in. Let's sit down and have a cup of coffee. Let's talk. They're having your coffee. They're like, Oh, we think the world's going to end tomorrow. Spits out. We ought to tell the neighbors. No, no, no, no. They never said that, but they would talk theology with me. They, and yeah, and then for years. So like I have no trouble with religious people. And I think some of them are quite moral and interesting.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8119.38,
"end": 8146.77,
"text": " The question for me as someone who wants to intervene in the world, rather than simply abstain from cooperating in what I see to be evil, is, you know, what are my obligations in this moment? And, you know, I see a world in which we're headed into a massive recession, possible depression. We are going to see many, many people unemployed here and around the world.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8147.16,
"end": 8169.92,
"text": " It's the contradiction between the need to reinvest in capital production and the need to pay workers enough to survive. It's going to intensify and intensify. The state's attempts to try to correct that will weaken the state, which in between states will be more pressure. So I see a very",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8170.33,
"end": 8185.15,
"text": " dismal picture objectively ahead of me and I think oh but there's the possibility that the people who are most responsible for creating these conditions that is the working class could intervene and say we have a different better sort of",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8185.66,
"end": 8211.49,
"text": " mode of production, a better way to relate to each other that would put all this off. This would no longer be necessary. And they do it by example, right? Yes, actually they would have to do it by example or else it wouldn't work. In other words, there would have to be a new way of working together. They could not simply take political power",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8211.99,
"end": 8241.44,
"text": " Right. That's not going to do the trick on its own. And worse, it might corrupt them. Well, yeah. But I mean, right. Hashtag Marxism in the Soviet Union. Right. Right. I mean, we don't have to. We don't have to. But it will probably be a political conflict. It will probably run you afoul of authorities. There may be moments where you need to be attacked in self-defense, but the aim is not violence. The aim is not literal violence. The aim is the violence of, like,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8242.04,
"end": 8271.97,
"text": " The strategic talked about violence as the most like how Gandhi was more violent than Hitler where basically when you undermine that that's G Jack for you Yeah, yeah ideas in in society when you really go when you strip away the supporting ideology That's a more radical and violent move than to murder someone which leaves all the background ideology in place I think it was price who said it",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8272.16,
"end": 8297.5,
"text": " Fear not those who can destroy the body, but the spirit. Right? Right. So I don't know if you would call spiritual conversion violence. Right. But you might if you're, you know, look, you might if you're someone who is a devout Catholic and you, you know, really believe in Catholicism and someone's trying to convert you to become a Jehovah's Witness, that may seem barely violent to you.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8297.93,
"end": 8326.54,
"text": " Yeah, I don't know. Not to me. I don't know when it comes to violence. I wouldn't necessarily... Well, if you would, peaceful conversion. And another thing, in the Orthodox tradition, to your point, that's why even this idea of forced conversion, where you seek people out, is so anti-monastic. The idea behind their conversion is very much in Buddhism in a way. You run into the wilderness,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8327.28,
"end": 8347.11,
"text": " You know, you tell them goodbye, and then you build a garden. People say, what's that crazy guy doing? And they visit you. And then next thing you know, they're wearing monk's robes and the world starts, the fallen world starts turning around your axis. You actually never try to save them. You try to fix yourself.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8348.01,
"end": 8375.59,
"text": " I want to give you a practical example of the kinds of things I think Marxists should be investing in right now, okay? Will you tell me what you think of this from your perspective? I don't know if you're telling me about Christianity because you're deeply Christian or because you're just a scholar of it. So from your perspective, right now in America, Amazon workers",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8376.12,
"end": 8404.1,
"text": " have been put in a position where they're not safe from COVID-19. Their conditions aren't good. Their conditions before the crisis, the pandemic, weren't good. They had very short breaks. They worked very, very hard. The pay wasn't high enough. Turnover was really fast. It was not sweatshop conditions, but it was not humane conditions to work in. They're now struggling for better working conditions.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8404.33,
"end": 8429.75,
"text": " Someone's cat is struggling for better working conditions too, is that right? No, just a cat on a diet. Who wants to get fat again when you shouldn't be? So the teachers, they're facing a reopening of schools and many places. Oh man, in Ontario too, the Conservative government here. Yeah.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8430.3,
"end": 8457.02,
"text": " They're going to force teachers back into the classroom without the safest conditions for a variety of social reasons that aren't all, you know, completely, you know, it's not like these are bad reasons in some ways. For instance, the schools have, when both parents work, the schools are daycare. So you have, and if you don't reopen the schools,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8457.29,
"end": 8471.75,
"text": " People can go back to work, they may end up being evicted or so severely impoverished. But if you do open schools and the virus spreads, so it's a real contradiction, but they're forcing teachers back into the classrooms.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8472.57,
"end": 8499.67,
"text": " And even this is the saddest, right? Some of those teachers want to go back. Isn't that tragic? Some of them want to and some of them don't. Right, right. Some of them want to, some of them don't. But nonetheless, the conditions are such that it's really uncertain as to how safe it's going to be. And many students and many teachers are wanting to come together to organize for their own interest and try to change their situation. Right. They're going to have millions of unemployed.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8499.99,
"end": 8519.6,
"text": " Right now, I think the unemployment rate is 11, 10 to 11%. Oh, it's like astronomical, it went astronomically up in the United States, right? Right. But we're not really going to be sure what the real final floor is until we see how the reopening goes.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8519.91,
"end": 8549.82,
"text": " And you add in something I believe, which is that there's a long-term tendency for the economy to go into crisis. This isn't just caused by the pandemic, but that there was an underlying instability in the economy and that the problems that were already there are just being exacerbated. So we're going to see a very long-term kind of deep, we could be seeing something that makes the Great Depression look small. Okay? This is Slavoj. We have to circulate capital even if we all die. This is capitalism, right? So right.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8550.23,
"end": 8579.87,
"text": " It's not the rapture, because in the rapture, you know, there's massive death, but the souls are taken up.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8580.84,
"end": 8604.65,
"text": " Right? There's no guarantee of any souls being taken up here. All we know for sure is that many, many people are going to suffer, even while we have all the ideas and technology and real wealth to feed the world, many times over. Right, yeah. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Peter, Peter, Peter. Just let Douglas finish.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8605.13,
"end": 8627.55,
"text": " I'm sorry. Wouldn't you say that at this moment, the need for the working class to intervene, to be supported in struggles for their own demands is paramount. And that's what I want Marxists to do. I want Marxists to come together and say, we support the Amazon workers, we support the teachers, we support the unemployed, we support",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8627.86,
"end": 8655.57,
"text": " suffering immigrants who don't get, you know, are being oppressed and maybe are unemployed too right now and also live on subsistence wages. Right. We want them to come together and organize to demand their own interests. Yeah. The poor, right? Who's going to save the poor? Well, no, the workers. You think it's going to be the government? Do you think it's going to be the elites? No. Do you think they're going to save them? The elites job is to... The guys who are in charge of redistribution? No, they're not going to save them. No, not at all. They have to save themselves.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8656.1,
"end": 8671.29,
"text": " It's very Marxist thought that the working class had to emancipate themselves.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8671.71,
"end": 8698,
"text": " They'll have to take charge of the mode of production and change the way we create the world so that these contradictions stop happening. And that will mean that they'll run up against the property relations and some of the laws of the existing order. They will be set before kings who will call themselves under the name of Christ, they will be tortured, they will experience the end of the world, the judgment day,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8698.27,
"end": 8712.35,
"text": " It's going to be awful.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8713.23,
"end": 8730.28,
"text": " Well, I wouldn't put it in that religious language, but you know, I would say they will be thrown from their homes, they will be conflict in the streets with the police, they will possibly be beaten.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8730.72,
"end": 8759.62,
"text": " When they're not eating, they'll struggle to just get the food that they need. And when they do get the food, the people making it will sometimes die for being put in the position of having to make their food. Totally. So they will be pressed upon them to say, no more. We have a better view of society. We have a better way of creating the world, not just a better view. How do they initiate it?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8760.52,
"end": 8787.84,
"text": " Do they do it violently? I don't know. I don't know if it's going to be a general strike. It may not happen at all. They may just allow for another World War to occur. They may just allow themselves to be sacrificed out of this economy. There's no guarantees here at all. Well, you know that's very anti-Marxist of you in a way, right? Because this is what differentiated Marx in his deterministic aspects of Marxism.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8788.4,
"end": 8816.19,
"text": " from the anarchists who argued that, you know, unlike this idea of progress where the world follows these patterns and these patterns are almost guaranteed regardless of individuals that no one's going to stop. Listen, the anarchists thought the world was on chain. It depends upon how you interpret the holy doctrine of Marx as to whether you think he was a determinist and thought there would necessarily be a revolution or whether or not, you know,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8816.46,
"end": 8841.12,
"text": " But then again, it comes down to that determinism, volunteers and kind of debate. Do we think that we have to come together with the ideas necessary to transform the world and therefore come up with a new mode of production and think and create? Or do we think that the world itself will lead us to the promised land through some determined action, which could be include? I thought it was organic, right? Like if you look at, if you read the",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8841.83,
"end": 8869.75,
"text": " Why did he advocate for anything? Why did he bother to write? Because he thought he was still a part of that history, right? It's this idea that, and really it was also Lenin's contribution, you should still volunteer. Again, the shape of volunteerism and Marxism is a bit different, but you should still be part of the consurgency. Regardless, to not to avoid it, to be conservative,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8870.32,
"end": 8890.43,
"text": " is to delay the inevitable. And it's a beautiful argument, by the way. I'm not trying to knock it. I'm just saying the anarchists, theirs is more unchanged. You know, this is something like, arguably like Nietzsche, a Greek conservative thinker, how do you know that the progress isn't darker than the world we have now?",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8891.13,
"end": 8919.33,
"text": " but then Pinker came along and slapped Nietzsche across the face and said, read my book. This idea that, you know, the angels of our nature, we're doing great. I don't think there's any guarantees that the changes that we try to make won't fail. We, except for what we can reason in advance. Right. But if they fail to be inevitable, this is why in the, just to go back to the concentration camps for the Nazis,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8920.33,
"end": 8937.84,
"text": " There were the psychological studies to see who would be the less likely to break down. For Jews, they were one of the most likely to break down psychologically in the concentration camps because in their cosmology, when you're the chosen people, it means",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8938.01,
"end": 8966.58,
"text": " I would say popularly in Judaism in the common stream that, you know, the covenant between you and God is one of your people will continue. And we mean like, you know, Abraham the Covenant, your offspring, your seed will become like the grains of sand on the beaches and the stars. So they were losing their minds with the Holocaust. But when it comes to the two groups that were least likely to break down,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8967.5,
"end": 8994.92,
"text": " our boys, those Jehovah's Witness guys, and then also the Marxists, because the Marxists were like, man, you know, all this, this is just trying to get in the way of the inevitable, man. You think it's killing me? I don't care. Individuals don't matter. It's about the, it's progress, man. Uh, okay. Well, I would, I would break down in the concentration camp. I, you know, I, I'm not the kind of Marxist who thinks that what happens in the here and now, uh, and you know, next week,",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 8995.38,
"end": 9024.89,
"text": " We'll end it there. If anyone's watching, this interview turned into more of a moderation on my part where I found it extremely entertaining and enlightening to watch Doug and Peter have it out. If you want a part two, please comment about it. Have a good one, Doug. Thanks. Yeah, thank you very much.",
"speaker": null
},
{
"start": 9025.43,
"end": 9026.32,
"text": " Bye-bye.",
"speaker": null
}
]
}No transcript available.