Why Tim Walz Called in the National Guard in 2020

gonna get more into him next week. But the thing that I wanted to sort of start our discussion about the vice presidential candidates with is attempting to reconcile something that I've seen a lot of discussion about sort of I don't know, kind of confusion to some extent about about how do you actually make sense of the sort of two halves of Tim Walls's record, right which, on the one hand, he's signing a bunch of distrively progressive,

sort of welfared legislation being the governor of Minnesota, including things like universal free school lunch. I said it was lunch of breakfast. I don't remember. It was both. It was both, yeah, yeah, And you know the on the one hand, you have this sort of sparkling record, and then on the other hand, you have you know, him puling in the National Guard and deploying it to suppress the uprising in twenty twenty, which, lest we forget, started

in Minnesota. Yeah, that's where the third Precinct burned, and also using the police to sort of like horribly brutalize protesters against Line three, which is an oil pipeline through a bunch of indigenous land that probably I don't know, we're probably two years out from like an unbelievably horrific oil spill coming out of it that everyone's gonna go,

how can we possibly have predicted this? It only had spilled a million times before, et cetera, et cetera, and that walls like rammed through and had people who were resisting it like horribly beaten by a cop. So how do you sort of reconcile these two halves of this

guy's record? And there's like a local politics explanation which I see bandied about a lot, which is true to some extent, And that explanation is that he's not really a progressive and he's mostly kind of a moderate who she's going along with a pro fairly progressive Minnesota legislature as getting credit for just like signing bills. And that's kind of true. But it's also I think ultimately a cop out because we are on year about one hundred and forty of the welfare state, and this shit keeps

happening every single time. And what's really sort of at stake here analytically is that the relationship between the welfare state and violence is significantly deeper than the record of one guy. And so today what we're going to be

doing is not really talking about Tim Willson much. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be going back through some of the history of social democracy and trying to understand how it became entangled with the sort of use of force with police violence, because I think there's a story there that's been completely buried by the tidal wave of just like I don't know whatever walls takes, and you know, I think presidential elections are

something that has a tendency to just destroy everyone's analytical capacity for like two years. So yes, let's resist that and go do something interesting. Yeah, okay, Yeah, So I think the place to start with this is this is a place that we start, I think not infrequent amount

on this show, or at least I do. And that's the sort of original debates from you know, about the eighteen thirties through roughly the eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties when it changes about what socialism was going to be. There's always been to some extent, like a bunch of different kind of understandings of it, but something that you know, what you'd call the sort of left wing of the Democrats, which is like everyone at that point, right, and the

anarchists kind of agree about. And basicthing that Marx agrees about with sort of the anarchists at the time is that socialism is you know, it's the free association of producers, right, you know, it is the work class abolishing itself, but then also like being the people who directly run the new society that's sort of brought about by this thing without sort of the stage or sort of political mediation,

et cetera, et cetera. And even you know, people like Angles who are like arch statists, right, like Angles, you know, uses the theoretical justification for like every time a socialist picks up a machine gun to shoot someone, and that works for the state, Like that's Angles's justification for But even he's talking about how like one day the state will be like put on a shelf in a museum and people will walk past and look at it and then like walk by it because it's like it's a

tool of a bybegone era that nobody needs anymore. And in this period, it's very clear that socialism is we're just directly controlling the mesa production and it's directly democratically managing their lives. But this becomes less clear as the eighteen hundreds go on. Something that David Grayer points out, and I think I've quoted this on the show before, but it's important here. While this is sort of going on, right, there's two kinds of breds in the development of the

state and the development of sort of socialist idiology. One is a move in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. Socialists start watching states build railroads and this drives them completely nuts. It just obliterates their brains. It's like this and the Post Office just like absolutely nuke their brains. And they start going, Okay, hold on, but what if instead of workers directly managing in their affairs and having you know, workers coordinating like the production of society, what

if instead the state did that? And socialism was literally when the state did things, and this is something that like even Angles is like pretty hostile to in the sense that like he's a status to some extent, but he also is very wary of doing things like calling state on enterprises socialism, right because like, well, no, obviously that's not necessarily true, because like you could just have capitalists state owned enterprises like lots of places US and

includingly importantly sort of Bismarck's Germany in this period, which we will come back to in a second.

you don't need a revolution. You can sort of just like you can vote your way into the state owning property and that will somehow achieve socialism, or you can sort of like stabilize capitalism and make it not bad anymore. Now, that's what's happening on the socialist side. So there's this sort of project of like autonomous workers control over everything, right that that had been the original socialist project is being eaten away on one hand from its own parties.

But then on the other hand, as sort of David Gerrer points out, the capitalist class realizes that all of these sort of autonomous institutions that the working class is building, like your unions and your giant political parties have their own sort of welfare system. The state realizes that you can replicate these and use it as like a direct buy off to stop these people from revolting. I'm going to read a passage from David Graeber's Utopia of Rules ottovon.

Bismarck's reaction to socialist electoral success in eighteen seventy eight was twofold on the one hand, banned the Socialist party, trade unions, and leftist newspapers on the other, while when this proved ineffective, socialist candidates continued to run and win as independents to create a top down alternative to the free schools, workers associations, friendly societies, libraries, theaters, and the

large process of building socialism from below. This took the form of a program of social insurance for unemployment, health and disability, etc.

loyalties day as conservative nationalist project. When le regimes later did take power, the template had already been established, and almost invariably they took the same top down approach, incorporating locally organized clinics, libraries, mutual banking initiatives, workers education centers, and the like into the administrative structure of the state. So there's two interesting things here. One is that the developments of the things that are going to become the

body welfare state. This is implemented not by you know, all these sort of policies that we're talking about Walls doing. Now, these were originally implemented not by the left, but very deliberately by Auto von Bismarck. Like the arched late nineteen th early twenty century conservative the guy who was literally responsible for the foundation of Germany. Right, Like, that's that's his project. He is the guy who creates the nation of Germany and thus will forever live in infamy. Is

one of the most evil people in human history. The line directly from him to Hitler is incredibly straight. But the second part of this is what social democratic politics turns into, right, which is the this effort to sort of centralize all of the sort of autonomous institutions that the working classic constructure and to centralize all of that

activity into the state. Right. You know, this is like having your sort of clinics be state run, having your libraries be state run, having your like mutual banking things, like, all of these things that had been independent institutions are folded into the state.

was folded into social democracy in the eighteen hundreds. And this is something I think is kind of well known among the extremely nerd left, but I don't know if it's very well known outside of that. But in the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, everyone who is like a Marxist in any stripe is a social Democrat.

And this is true equally of reformists like Burnstein and also people like Lenin right, like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, both are splits from like the Social Democratic Labor Party is it social Labor Party was I forget the actual name of the Party of the Swift, but it was

a social democratic party of like Russia. Right. This is the thing that all of the communists and all the socialists like split from these sort of social democracy things, which means that inherently, and this is something that you can see reflected in the ways that they come to power and in the ways that they sort of govern len It is communism and social democracy are both just two variants of the same thing, and you can see this most clearly either ways they come to power the

way they embark on this project of centralizing power, violence, production, and the organization of society into the state. Both of them take power by machine gunning their enemies and the left with the newfound power of the state. Alongside this sort of Russian revolution, there is the German Revolution, and the German Revolution is defeated when the Social Democratic Party of Germany, which had been the party of angles right like Marx like write stuff about their platform like this

is the premier social democratic party in the world. They take power by stopping the revolution, slaughtering the communists and using the sort of proto fascist freikorps to like just kill them all. This is how Rose Luxembourg is killed. So the first social democratic government to come to power in Europe, since I guess technically there was about two months in eighteen forty eight when there were also Democrats in France, but that lasted very very brief amount of time.

We see, So the first time they come to power is in Germany. And in Germany they come to power in this blood bath that you know, sort of destroys like the rest of this like armed left and attempting to centralize politics and military power in the hands of the state. This is how they defeat the revolutionary movements

in Russia. Basically the same process happens. Right, There's the first Revolution, which is the February Revolution nine seventeen, and then the Bolsheviks take power in the Second Revolution, and the moment the Bolsheviks take power, they spend basically the entire rest of the Russian Revolution in the Russian Civil War just straight up slaughtering every single other left wing faction in the entirety of Russia, which ends in sort

of the Massacre. And oh yeah, oh yeah, they tell a lot of Ukrainian leftists they are killing anarchists from like Azerbaijan to like fucking Spain, like.

autonomous working class. Right. For the Bolsheviks, the working class is going to be directly subordinated to the Bolshevik Party and to that platform, and any dvashu or any attempt to sort of like manage yourself like autonomously is just going to be stamped out, right, And Lenin's attempt to do this is going to be sort of like followed

by Stalin doing this even more. Yeah. And so what you have here, right, what collective ownership is in social democracy, And this is true of both the German social Democrats, who are what we think of social democrats today, right, they're sort of like electoralists, they're like capitalists, and also the Bolsheviks. What collective ownership is is the state owns things, and if you try to do anything about this, they shoot you. So this is sort of the origin of

like these two forms of social democracy. There's also sort of more liberal forms of this. Right. FDR does not conceive of himself as a social democrat like he thinks of himself as a liberal when the American liberal tradition is a bizarre one. But you know, we actually talked about this in my episode about the time that Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic the Gathering deployed the Pikertons against the guy for revealing what was in a magic product too early.

a thing there. But when Lenin is talking about trade union consciousness, the thing that Lenin believes is that they need like middle class petite bourgeois, like fucking theorists to

come in and teach them what socialism is. And this is an explicit part of their theory, right, And this is that same sort of paternalism that they have to be like led, even the sort of vanguard working class needs to be led by these like theorists who I don't know, emerge from like Lenin's friend group in exile in Switzerland do whatever, and FDR's sort of policy works.

I think it's not really understood how similar FDR's stuff is to like how the New Deal is seen at the time, even by people like outside of the country, as compared to like the others from massive social people say he places as opposed to sort of Soviet communism or even like fascism like Nehru. The guy who is going to become like the founding Prime Minister of India has this whole thing in like nineteen forty one, where's look at the New Deal and he's going this is

either going to produce communism or fascism. So, like the New Deal is a fundamental rewriting of the American social contract. And a big part of it is he's doing the same thing that the social democrats are trying to do, which is that he's trying to centralize everything into the state. He's trying to centralize partially this is welfare benefits, right, He's trying to centralize like unions very specifically into the state. And he's also trying to centralize violence into this state.

Because before this, the US, I mean we've talked about sort of Blair Mountain on behind the Bachelor's before, right, Like there are just open wars between the like literally capitalist armies and sort of union armies, armies formed by labor unions, not like the union army. Like you need to clarify this.

and unfortunately for sort of the rest of us. Right, if you're going to maintain like a capitalist system, somebody has to be pulling the triggers, and that's now the police instead of these sort of like private armies. And the other part about this bargain is that the unions also have to basically disband their armies. Right, because the miners are Blurbountain, right, they have like seventeen thousand guys, like all of them have rifles. They will go out

and they will fight. They have machine guns, like they have cannons.

the roots of an autonomous society. The reason the state is doing that is so that you don't fucking revolt and you don't do twenty twenty again.

You know, he's doing the Vietnam War at the same time, so you know, those are the sort of domestic kind of returns. The stuff in the central station of state violence is now being projected out and in the US it's always happening, right. The US fundamentally is a project of colonial expansion, going from fucking one coast to the other,

killing everyone in your path and seizing their land. And the contradiction of this right the fact that like the people who nominally want sort of welfare state also normally are like revolted at the fact that they're burning millions of people alive, and like Vietnam, Cabodia and Laos, Like, this contradiction is kind of what terrors a part of social democractic politics and what replaces it is. You know, like if social democracy is a carrot and a stick, right,

neoliberalism is just the stick. It's just more prisons and hit you with the thing instead of this sort of like more genteel process of while we're still hitting you with the stick. But also here are these handouts if you don't like oppose us. Yeah, so we've talked about these examples. I want to kind of move into some more modern examples of this because I think everything I've been saying is old, right, but this stuff is still

happening today in the social democracies that exist, right. Like one of the biggest examples of this is there's two kinds of social democracies that people point to, depending on where in the political spectrum they are. One is like

the Nordic countries, right. And this never worked on me because one of my foundational experiences, like as an activist, when I was like a little baby at fifteen year old in twenty thirteen was talking to someone who had a mounted cavalry charge done against them by the Swedish police because they were doing an anti fascist action and they got trampled by fucking horses because that's what the

state is. And you know, so like that's like kind of on the one hand, but the thing that we're seeing right now is, you know, the remains of the welfare state being paired with this incredible, like rabid anti immigrant violence, right, and this is the thing you see in place like France too, right, where you still sort of have the welfare state. It's also this unbelievable violence against sort of non white people and anyone who's trying

to like enter the country. Yeah, I think it's was it Sweden or was it Denmark that had these laws were like they would like seize the property if any immigrant who came into the country.

its borders. Yeah, in order to sort of like create underclasses of incredibly dispossessed and incredibly battered and brutalized people who can be splitted for labor.

the Brazil episodes. Right, Brazilian social democracy Lula's like first term, right, has simultaneously this massive sort of push and social spending and then also enormous like a budget increases for the military. There's this incredible unbelievable spike in police violence, like rate

of police killings is way worse than the US. Yeah, and this is true, and like fucking all of these places, right Like, this is truly how the crew worked in twenty twenty was because the Bolivian government kept just like handing money to the police over and over again, and the police like did a cue against them.

of like moderate abolitionists. So these are the people who are, you know, whose thing is like, Okay, we're going to defund the police and we're going to like reallocate their resources to like funding welfare programs. And this is like, obviously this would be good. But if you know anything about what happened after twenty twenty, none of this stuff ever happened, right, No one ever defunded the police, right, Like there was no sort of movement.

destroy you if you attempt to do anything different. And

this is what twenty twenty was, right. Twenty twenty was was the most serious uprising in the US, like the most serious like challenge the authority of the sort of drychnically anti black like settler American state, right, and it was something that promised something different and even in you know, and that meant that everyone, whether you were a fucking like hardline fascist or you know, you were Tim Walls, Right, your one goal was to smash it and was to

deploy state violent. The state violence you had in your hands, which in this case was a National Guard, was to send them in to make sure that these people never fucking burden their police station again. And that's what happens.

cannot allow this to happen. And I think we've seen that domestically to a degree in the US.