The Thought of Eric Hobsbawm - Complete w/ Thomas777

is an important subject area. I mean, for just on its own terms, but it dovetails rather splendidly and kind of like indexes with the long form stuff I'm working on, and it's especially timely with kind of the trajectory I've been trying to steer things, at least in our kind of intellectual circles, like not I don't like vanity or just because I've got a hobbyist interest in this stuff, but it's it's fundamentally important and I'll get into that as we roll out this subject.

But you know, they hadn't been to Shytown before. And I think people think it's either really grimy because of what they see on the news and all that kind of cap about how awful it is here, or they think it's just kind of like other things, just kind of like New York City was smaller, Like they they really impressed it how cool it is, and so Rimbau. I, Yeah, we we have a lot of fun here man, and he's he's a really good dude. I owe him a lot, and I mean I will have fells a lot, but

he he especially he's he sends a huge amount. He's like a research machine. And I mean, i'd like to think guy him too, But I'm not as young as I once was, and I'm surely not as young as he is. And he he's always finding like really really great sources that I've never I've never come across. Cool.

causation from it's uh from from from its historicism. And you know, there's a arguably it abolishes metaphysics, you know what I mean obviously, So I mean that's it's it's something of as our Marxist friends themselves would say, a fatal contradiction. But HOBSBAUGHM. Hobsbam really was like a left

he Gaelian in the purest sense. And I think his take on things, I mean, obviously we don't know, and I've read Imperialism by Lenin many times, but I mean Lenin wasn't Lenin was kind of the consummate political soldier, you know, It's not like he was something prolific.

putting out you know, endless, endless manuscripts or something. But I see hobbs one On probably was like the most like Lenin himself, you know, in terms of his kind of political ontology as well as in terms of how he characterized historical processes and you know how outcomes they're in should be judged, you know, whether they are whether whether they advance the revolutionary imperative and in a progressive sense,

or whether they are self defeating, you know. And so Hobsbam he was I think of him too, is he was really much kind of like a counterweight to arn soin NOLDI they had a lot of similarities, like their backgrounds very different. You know, Hobsbaum was a Polish Jew

whose father was an English subject. But there's there's commonalities to their I mean they're very they're very much opposites or were opposites, but there's seat of a common frame of reference in terms of what they would have viewed as authoritative and you know what they considered to be sort of the essential canon of political philosophy and Hasbom. Also, he got this reputation people haven't really read him, so they veeve him as like this unreconstructed quote unquote Stalinist.

That's not really true. But he did refuse. He had contempt for the New Left, and he refused to abandon allegiance to the Soviet Union in fifty six and in sixty eight. You know, he was he was an orthodox in Culdmart terms in orthodox Marxist Leninists, which meant he was in the Soviet camp and in the sun of Soviet split. He had great disdain for China for various reasons.

So these like schismatic tendencies. The fact he opposed all these schismatic tendencies, and the fact he was somewhat critical a cruse chief like that didn't make him some hardline Stalinists, you know, Like he wasn't the kind of guy who would say sit there and say like Eric Honnecker was like a great general secretary or that like the DDR had like a perfect system, and there were guys who thought that way, you know. But so the key to the key to this does kind of require like a

deep dive and I find myself. You know what, So people might ask themselves, you know, what does this have to do with the present? I mean a couple of things. You know, if you want to understand the twentieth century, you've got to understand marcsist Leninism. You understand Marsus Leninism. That you got to understand the body of theory and its theory of history that you know, kind of frame the conceptual horizon that you know, nourish the it's it's

revolutionary imperatives, you know. And if if you understand the twenty first century, you got to understand the twentieth century and that entire dialectical process bus today, this kind of thought, this kind of true left to Gaian thoughts made a comeback. Like guys think that guy Jackson Hinkel and a lot of people need he's a crank. He's really not, you know, and like he's I think he's partly funded by the same kinds of elements that fund like Zuganov's, like reconstituted

Communist Party. I'm not saying that, sinister, you know, I shouted out about this on social media, but you know, these guys aren't woke.

you know. So I think I think this stuff is more timely than a lot of people willing to acknowledge, you know, even if even if political theory is not really you know, in your proverbial wheelhouse or something. But I'm gonna jump around a bit if it's too scatter shot or if or or if something is not clear, like please stop me and I'll.

that in a minute. But in nineteen ninety four, when a lot of kind of retrospective stuff on the Cold War was popping up in media, you know, that's when like Nixon was I mean, Nixon died I think in ninety four, like ninety four, ninety five, but you know, Nixon have been making the rounds in nineteen ninety nineteen

ninety two. There there was a lot of a lot of a lot of colder academics who were being asked, you know, for their to render kind of their their their diagnosis of the events the preceding half decade and stuff. Hosbam uh, He's being interviewed by Michael Ignattu, you know, an Ignoctave was very much try to put him in

the hot seat and asking him loaded questions. And Hosmum famously said that had the Soviet Union succeeded in realizing a communist society and had it been able to fulfill its ambition of you know, facilitating a world historical revolutionary imperative hobsam said that the deaths of twenty million people or however many perished in Stalin's death camps, would have been worth it, so ignoctave, you know, famously like being clutching at his pearls verbially speaking, And Hobswom's rebuttal was,

you know, Marx himself said that no rate movement has been born without, you know, the shedding of blood. And you know, Haze fought it up by saying, you know, self sacrifice isn't the only kind of sacrifice that was in the contemplation of Marx or Lenin or anybody else, you know, but this wasn't the standard maya culpa or whatever. Like a lot of like a lot of kind of like normany cohns think, as well as a lot of kind of new left types. This this wasn't just Hobbswaen

being deliberately callous or something. But you got to understand the vantage point from where he's speaking, Like historical processes aren't. They're not the result of conspiratorial designs by like criminal actors, you know, they're not. Even even if you're a true vanguardist, even if you kind of accept Rousseau's if you with a general Will and hobswell very much. Did you know,

of course the General Will doesn't speaks, he's not. Rousseau wasn't referring to like the body politic as a whole, like it could be just like narrow discrete elements within the political organism who's uh, whose commitments and whose conceptual horizon like indexes very strongly, you know, with a revolutionary

leadership element, you know, But uh, that does. But these people are still what they're doing is they're they're engaging very intimately in psychological and political terms, with historical processes. They're not creating these conditions. So if you ask, you know, so so trying to trying to put Nolty on the hot seat like this, we're trying to put on the

hot seat like this. It's similar to what haramaz and his his acolytes and allies we'll try to do to Nolty, you know, like, oh, you're you're justifying these monstrous crimes. You know, and always said, no, nobody's justifying anything. But if you're talking about the historical process and you're talking about warfare at massive scale, at literally planitary scale, where we're not talking about decisions made by discrete individual actors.

We're not talking about people committing crimes, you know, We're we're talking about events that are truly providential or you know, if you're an atheist like Cosbomb, truly providential, okay. And even if you assign a purely material the conslation of purely material causes, you know, to these things. It's a constellation of variables, so myriad, so complex, at such scale, nobody can be said to be like responsible as a as a as a causative agent in approximate terms. So

who was who was? Who was Eric Hosbom? I thought it was actually born in Egypt? You know. His father was Leopold Percy Hobsbamb. It's believed that the original surname was a ups Bomb, but uh, a combination of deliberate anglicization of the surname and clerical error led to it becoming Hobsbamb. His father had been some kind of merchant who was originally from the East End of London, but he but he was a Polish jew His mother, uh was a Jewish woman named Nellie Gruen who had come

from a middle class family. And then then you know, and then had what was then you know, the Hapster Empire in Austria. Hodamerlaye that like he was seb consciously Jewish because his parents conveyed to him, you know, the like like to take his though seriously. But he said he was raised in basically like an atheist household. He's like, it was a very Jewish household, but it wasn't religious, you know, and that that wasn't really strange for a

howdam was born in nineteen seventeen. I mean, that was that's very much a twentieth century thing. You know. I everatize the people again and again, like nobody thinks this way anymore, Like the remaining the remaining self declared atheists who have any kind of public profile, like nobody nobody

takes them seriously anymore, you know. And I mean really that kind of thing was dead by you know, by the end of the nineteen nineties, but there was some there's some peculiar holdouts, and it had something of it had something of a media profile, particularly in new media, right before it's kind of final death as a culturally relevant quantity. But you know, so hot One had a

fairly cause of pol upbring. You know, he wasn't he wasn't some ghetto wise Jew who was sitting around reading Marx and Engels and kind of like nursing these grudges and stuff. I mean, like, don't get me wrong, I'm sure that his ethnos and the you know they kind of conceptual biases and intrinsic to that sort of household like absolutely informed his perspective. But you know, he wasn't. He wasn't some guy from you know, the Pale Settlement or something, or from or from some impoverished the you

know tenement in Poland. And I've heard people speculate that the effect who want to throw shade out of him like that, that's just like not accurate. But he, uh, he was a teenage he ultimately his father died when he was when he was quite young. I think when he was twelve or thirteen years old, he was sent to Uh he was sent to live with his aunt. A couple of years later and his sister, and when his mother died as well, his maternal aunt and uh,

they settled in Berlin. And then when ah, when the National Socialist revolution kicked off or whatever, remember when the National Socialists got their uh parliamentary plurality, which may you know, became a problematic majority after the KPD was was outlawed owing to the attack on the Reichs the Reichstag fire. You know, they they they had an absolute majority. But Hobswam returned to the United Kingdom. When I say returned, his father was an English subject, so young Hoswallm wasn't

considered like he was considered. He was also considered to be a subject of the Empire, you know, and not subject to laws regarding alienage and things like that. He attended King's College at Cambridge. You know, he became UH. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain basically as like as soon as he was of age. You know, I think when he was nineteen years old. I think you had to be eighteen to join in those days,

but you know, you got. He took his doctorate from a from Cambridge, and I believe his thesis, his PhD thesis is on the history of the Fabian society and Fabian socialism, you know, and Hobsbaum's commitments as well as his his particular kind of brand of UH of Marxist thoughts. It was very much, it was ver much derivative of that of the of the English Communist Party, the Communist Party in Great Britain. Okay, Like when I say derivative,

I don't mean that in punitive terms. But what I mean is hobs Bom quite literally identified himself as a quote Red Tory, you know. And we'll get into what they had means the implications that add. But guys like Kim Philby and the Cambridge they they were cut from the same kind of cloth, you know, the the commun is probably a Great Britain. They were very much a fifth column during the Cold War in a way that other similar elements weren't on the continent because they were

they they they were Orthodox Marcus alone in this. They unconditionally supported the Soviet Union, you know, they so they they were very much in the Cold War. You know, there's more of a bunch of Trotskyists, you know, trying to trying to cultivate electoral respectability. No were they uh you know, no were they were they like active as liberals, the kinds who find themselves in and n geosynecures who were kind of Communists in name only, like they're they're

the genuine article. They're pro Soviet. They were loyal to Stalin subsequently, they were loyal to his memory. But they were not uncritical, you know. They they they very much viewed the situation as you know, for all of its trailties and for all of it's less than ideal characteristics

and situatedness. You know, the Soviet Union is what we have in this world, and this world is all there is, you know, So it's suicidally short sighted, you know, and and in political terms, to divorce oneself from the ambitions

and the destinies of of the Soviet system. But and interestingly, Hobsbaum he served as a comet engineer during World War Two, and he caught some flak at the time and in decades subsequent because when the Molotov Ribbon Trot Pact was signed, Hobsbaum and and his ideological fellows and comrades, they they'd shout down people who are critical of the Third Reich because he said, you know, alliance of convenience this may be, or you know, whatever however contrived this non aggression pact

may be. You know, this is uh, this is the way things must be, you know, in order for the revolution to be consolidated in situ. So anybody opposing the Reich or calling for its destruction or calling for Moscow to preemptively assault it, which Moscow is absolutely planning on doing. But people didn't know this outside of you know, Cadres approximate to the reds are Stalin, you know. But he considered this to be like a kind of revolutionary tendency,

which was the orthodox perspective, the rotherdox Marc's perspective. But other than that, Hosbaum was very much like a doctrinal anti fascist, like not not in Nuremberg terms. But and we'll get into this probably in the second episode. Hobsmam's take on fascism and national socialism is interesting. It's not it's by no means, you know, dismissed, totally dismissive and some punitive capacity. He says that the strength of fascism

was that it mastered technics and technology. It uh, it was able to imbue people with like a fervent kind of energy to realize its objectives. But he considered it to be quote phyllis impoverished, and he didn't really seem to understand, uh, he didn't really understand the the kind of trajectory of uh, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, you know, to national socialism. Now that some people who have like a punitive like thunderbag like take on Germany and the Germanis

and people in the German state. That's not That's not what Osbon was. That's not what I'm saying, and that's not you know. And Hosbom wasn't prone to that kind of moultive thought either, But like a lot of doctair and Marxists, he couldn't really see the forest of the trees. I don't think he understood the enduring power of continental philosophy outside of Marxist a jacent thinkers, you know, and

informing what what? What was going on in Italy, what was going on in Germany, you know, in the inner Warriors. I don't think he understood this. I think it was one of his blind spots, owing to adherence to you know, uh An ideology and Marxism that that that that quite literally inundates people with like a missionary zeal that sometimes

uh these were kind of tunnel vision. But you know at uh and again, like I said, I believe like the Red Tory uh Moniker, you know, they became kind of bandied about in the UK about even a lot of these like labor types. You know, back of the Labor Party was a real party. You know, there were there were these guys who were basically like we consider them in America to be like you know, we get sided to be like like like right wing type type

of figures. But for the fact that you know, they uh, they were very much uh socialists in there in their orientation. You know, they believe in state socialism both as like an ethical postulate as well as a a kind of inevitability if if if the modern state was to survive, you know, with any kind of with any kind of legitimacy. So yeah, how long is you're going to like Tory communists?

Uh not a red Tory, but uh that uh And again that seems paradoxical to people, but again it's I I refer to you know, Zugonov's Communist Party, you know, to Jackson Hinkle. But even you know, in historical capacities, this this resonated with people who had a developed understanding of political theory, the Marxism of the Frankfurt School, people like Oslohmand contempt for that. You know, they were like,

this is degenerate garbage. This is this is uh, this is therapy for people who uh want to strike some kind of protest pose, you know, but are basically imbibing uh, you know, the kind of alienation uh that's deliberately engineered by by capitalist societies and saying like, oh, but this can be mitigated if you know, we have unrestricted access to the sexual hedonism, or if we can you know, partake of these uh material rewards, or you know, if we can if the state becomes a kind of if the

state becomes kind of kind of ersos like aristote like therapeutic mechanism or or or a kind of rabbinic panel or or or like a like a or like an Aristot's like church, whereby like the declaratory judgments, that's not how like validate these these like contrived like postmodern identities, you know. And I mean that's that that's anybody who's the true communist partisan. What you know is it was disgusted by this, you know. I mean, I'm not I'm not saying Marxism is good. I'm not saying it's like

good qualities, because it doesn't. But they were and they are serious guys. And if you understand and we'll get into this in a minute if you understand that kind of like marcist Lenin is like view of the historical process, you know, basically basically they view like a lot of liberalizing tendencies to have resulted in a kind of reactionary ethos among people and to then their estimates that's where nationalism comes from. Like nationalism, isn't this really organic thing?

And I'm not talking about nationalism meaning like caring about your race or your ethnos. I mean like nationalism in the form of, yeah, this is the country of Poland. So like you know, according to this raitrary criteria, like whoever speaks Polish is like part of the body politic

and anybody outside of that, you know, is not. And uh, you know, despite the fact that you know the existence of this government is deleterious to you know, the kind of organic uh, the variables that constantly like an organic communitarian life. You know, if we like fly the flag and you know, make make this language the state language. You know, we're we're somehow, you know, guarding tradition or

something like. That's what they're talking about. And in their view, it's an effort by people whose lies are totally disrupted by future shock based we you know, and by the advanced and a productive processes such that you know, labor is no longer a complete process that people partake of in order to see through you know, the creative development of of a of an object or a thing, or a necessary activity from start to finish, you know, and it just becomes an artifact of a mechanization, you know,

the discrete aspects of which you know, humans are still required or needed to perform. But I mean, you're performing these activities in endless repetition without any meaningful experience of the totality of its fruitfulness. You know, in the company of total strangers, you know, who's only who's only The only affinity between you and them is it's kind of accident of locale or whatever. You know that that's what

they're talking about. But you know, and so people like Cosbon, even if they didn't do things like religious observances as particularly positive or laudable, you know, they viewed it as you know, an anthropological feature of the historical process, you know, whose time arrives and then passes. But they but they did view you know, communitarian bonds of whatever they may be you know, whether they're like you know, promised on

culture or sectarian affinity or what have you. You know, like in the historical moment in which those things are relevant, they consider those things valuable, you know, because at the end of the day, to a Marcus Lenin and it's like the individual doesn't matter, you know, So whatever facilitates, like the dignity of you know, the laboring class or classes,

you know, is basically like a social good. Okay, so somebody like Cosbomavie, you know, seeing a bunch of people saying like, uh, you know, marriage or like pair bonding isn't important. All that matters is like sterile sex and you know the catharsis you get from from engaging that kind of stuff, or you know, all that matters is you know, people being liberated from obligations to others or

obligations to history. You know, you know, the highest good is being free, like you know, spill out wealth on yourself and and cultivate these these kinds of distractions that that that facilitate ledgend gratification like he had contempt for that.

And basically any orthodox Marxist does, you know, they're like again, they're not woke at all if you want to race and if you want race too, like it's not I'm just pointing again again too like Marxists don't think race is important, but they're not anti racist, Like there's no reason they don't think there's anything wrong with a bunch of immigrants like swamped like a formerly Western country, but they don't think that should be a priority either, you know.

And this idea that this idea that they're you know, this idea that racial identity needs to be like socially engineered out of existence, like they have no like truck with it, you know. Like Stalin did try to like, uh, what do you called the nationalities problem? That definitely tracks you know with like ethnic cleansing under US because the

civil rights in America. But that's because the quote nationalities were causing problems for the party and for the Central Committee, you know, and if they weren't causing problems, like it wasn't so much a priority.

of open war. Yeah, it was all that stuff. And don't get me wrong. Also, like I'm not I'm not I'm not sitting here defending the concept of like new Soviet man like eventually like identitarian characteristics relating to historical memory, like weren't we're slad for annihilation under like a communist

system And Hoswam would have absolutely agreed with that. But my point is guys like Hobbam weren't sitting around saying, like, you know, we need to settle like African people in Ireland because it's not right that it's one hundred percent Irish, Like they view that as like it's nonsensical, you know, just like people like hobsbamb when Nuremberg kicked off the proceedings. You know, the view from Moscow wash, why are we gonna why are we gonna like declared Jews? Maybe this

like murdered population. You know, we lost twenty five million people fighting the fascists, you know, like you're not there. And plus there are no Jews in the Soviet Union.

You know, there's like Soviet citizens. You know, there's the body politic, and there's like our ops, and there's the most people outside of that, you know, and then there's and then there's like the Zionists and other like other vanguard tendencies trying to exploit you know, grieven since the nationality used to undermine socialism, like that was their view of it, you know, and even today, like that's why this carries over into today, Like the way the Russian

Federation views things, like the Russians are always he's always gonna view their enemies as Nazis and fascists. How would they not? Okay, But when they talk about that, they're not. They're not. They're not saying it like the way like like like the way Chuck Schumer uses you're not or they're not saying that you know, these people are like anti gay or there or these people don't respect, you know, theherent dignity of all people. And they're not into diversity.

That's not what they're saying at all, Like they mean something very specific by it, and you know that's that it's it's uh, it's both uh a uh it both alos you know, the Ancestral Memory and the Great Patriotic War as well as there's still like a lot of there's still a lot of like leftag alien thought like in Russia. You know, even somebody like Dugan, and I like Dugan, I I mean a lot of Russian academic culture I find kind of alien just because I'm like

very much an Anglophone person. And that's not I'm not putting shade on like the Eastern Slavic people's or something, but uh, I don't find it. I mean, they're very much like a different people. Okay, But even a guy like Dugan, there's very much like left to Gaelian strains of like letting his thought like and stuff that he postulates. And he's like very much like a I mean, he's he's very much a committed Christian, you know, like Eastern Christian.

You know, that's a bit of a tangent. Forgive me if that was a kind of outside the scope. But but I mean this stuffs important, uh you know, not just to clarify what we're talking about and my my kind of primary wheel outs this political theory, but you know, just structuring the kind of conceptual landscape and which were remired just declaring anybody on the left be a Marxist

like that, that doesn't make any sense. It's like that that says that's just that's just fucking retarded as saying that like Donald Trump is a fascist or like the p there were like people who avidly like follow his you know, media and political career and and and support him, you know, are like fascists. Like it's it's just as ridiculous and and at odds and the reality is is saying that. But yeah, I'll try to I'll try to pick it up a little bit worse the tangents, but uh,

it's kind of magnum opus. There's a four volume uh study called the Age Revolution Age Revolution seventeen eighty nine to eighteen forty eight, and the first volume dropped in nineteen sixty two. This is a seminal work of historicism. In my opinion, you can find the abridged uh this version of it in a series of PDF files if you dig around, if there, if people are really interested, I'll i'll, I'll throw it up on my on my

sub stack. But you know, basically it uh the cosbomb, like modernity really arrived with the French Revolution, Okay, and what do he what I mean by that, and like what he conveys in the first volume of this Age of Age of Revolution is that you know, the overwelming majority of people in Europe in seventeen eighty nine, they still they still lived like people did in the medieval period.

You know, there was you had this kind of very very slim I already of dedicated urbanites, you know, and people who were close to technology and productive processes facilitated by technology. But almost everybody they were living, you know, basically as subsistence farmers or as people you know, laboring with the household as the local production, you know, and essentially bartering and trading on things they could make, you know,

within the household. You know, this wasn't I think people this idea that you know, after like upon the Ansen of the Age of Discovery or whatever, like suddenly things became moderate and everybody lived in a city or like a town, but just things were low tech compared to today, Like that wasn't most people in seventeen eighty nine lived not much different than they did in thirteen eighty nine. Okay,

And this is fundamentally important. And that's kind of where hobsbamb It's subtle, but it's very much there, and I consider it's a set. I consider it essential to understanding something of his political of something of his ontological claims about politics. As I said a minute ago in a slightly liment context, you know, when Rousseau talks about the general will and I highly recommend Rousseau to anybody on

the right. He's very important. I first read him when I was about sixteen, and that completely changed my perspective on political theory. But you know, part of it's uh, part of it's because things are lost in translation, particularly

French and English. There's a lot of cot there's a lot of subtle concepts intrinsic to the French language, particularly if you're talking about metaphysics or politics or anything conceptual that really that really doesn't translate but the general will, like Russell again, Rousseau's not talking about some majoritarian consensus of like the whole body politic describing it as general. The way to understand that is to mean something bigger

than like a discrete individual actor or actors. You've got to think about it as inextricably bound up to Zeitgeist, like as a concept. Okay, so the general will. It might only be like one hundred guys out of a population of like five million people, but for whatever reason

they astride to Zeitgeist. They've got like the gumption sort of the intelligence and politic mobile terms, and the motivation and the balls to see through purely historical and irrevolutionary imperatives, you know, in a way that has a formative effect, you know, either as like a reformist tendency or alternatively, it can be a tendency towards creative destruction and oblivion.

But basically, the general Will describes this like intangible tendency or sensibility that animates this this cadre at in deeply psychological terms, and animates and motivates them to realize a revolutionary imperative. Okay, often too, this dovetails and peculiar ways with whoever. The leadership element is of the state as it exists, you know, in situ okay. But that's so Habma makes a lot of that in Age of Revolution, okay, because a lot of court history that is now and

for that's the jaguin revolution. It's a combination of like goofy stuff. I think people filled from stuff like like like late miuse or something where it's like, oh, everybody who was living in poverty and the crushing misery of these slums. So there was like this uprising, like that's not what happened. And again, you know, the material conditions of seventeen eighty nine, the purely material conditions weren't radically

than centuries past. Okay, conceptually they were totally different. And that's that's what I mean when I point out that Hosbaum was a was a true left to Galien. Psychological variables stand in for providential ones. Okay. But people are familiar with the subject area in general terms understand exactly what I'm talking about and why that's important. The succeeding valume in this four volume study was was Age of Capital, you know, and Age of Capital. I think it's kind

of it's kind of a counterpart the Shupiter's business cycles. Okay, and it's interesting to me that this kind of Simpleton's off like Keenes, even people who are pretty outside the mainstream and pretty far left, they still cite that kind of stuff. You know, I would think that Age of Capital would be their kind of go to, you know. And it's highly it was. It was a highly respected, uh treatise because it it showcased a genuine understanding of economics,

you know, and I I generally agree with Burnham. There's not a quote Marxist economics because Marxism isn't a science. It's not a theory of economics, you know, it's uh, it's a series of sociological postulates and claims about the historical process, you know. But there's not quote Marxist economics.

You know, like like a Marxist economist, you know, he arbitrarily way inputs, you know, based on his own conceptual biases about what, in particular concrete terms, is like driving this, you know, the stage of the historical process, you know that he finds himself in or that was the you know at Bock in which the the data being coded

and interpreted occurred. You know, it's uh, it begins with the conclusion about the human condition as it relates to historical and political phenomena, and then and and then and then seeks out variables that that can substantiate it. And uh, in part is in terms you know, and there's some of that and a lot of Hosmon's writing, but he but again he understands puer economics of such a thing that we said to exist better than most people. I mean,

including uh. I don't think academics are any great shakes, but I mean including people who were you know, were in you know, his his peer group as a as a as a political uh partisan, and as a as a political theorist, and you know what can and this is also is what explains hosmons like lifelong dedication to communism, because it's a total theory of history. You know, it's not something you take on for because you're alienated and

and like want some protest identity. I mean, yeah, I'm sure some people do that, but they they're not serious people and they're certainly not they're certainly not writing stuff, you know, like on a par with the Age Revolution, of the Age of Capital and Hosmon've never hid that, you know it. But he also one of one of Hobswe's collaborators on a on a lot of scholarship and a lot of his work product was this guy Eric

Forearner Foreigner was was known. He became like firebrand who was like constantly bashing garbage off and you know, and and and issuing these these these punitive declarations about a garbage off is is forsaking the revolution. And he's a trader the the Sovietism and you know, into and of the socialist Communitian nations as well as the UH. It's most of the political parties that are you know behind you know who exists in in in the capitalist world

as well. Like Hoswon ever did that. And it's not because he was worried about his public image. I mean,

he would defend Snalin publicly. It's because if you are a true Mercus Leninist like he was, like the failure of the Soviet Union was ordained by that same process, you know, in Hosbom's his unconditional loyalty to the Soviet Union contrary its enemies, that didn't entail some like slavish like uncritical view of it, you know, when when Kruse Chef was assailing Stalin's memory and you know by name,

attempting to impeach the personality cult. You know, obviously after a after nineteen sixty, after after nineteen fifty four, fifty four to fifty six there, and you know how Hosmom said to his comrades, you know, at cadre level, you know, we we we we need to we need to take

a hard look at at at Stalin's tenure. And you know what what what was laudable and what went wrong and what you know was in fact a kind of revolutionary tendency, because otherwise, you know, the the revolution won't survive. And and has I was honest too. Osmon obviously had a lot of respect for the Russians of people, but he you know, he was always he was a Soviet partisan, but with with with reservations, because he was the first to make the point, you know, uh, the revolutionary imperative

didn't spark in the most hyper advanced capitalist country. It didn't happen in Germany, it didn't happen in the UK. It happened in Russia, where the capitalist class was on very tenuous ground. You know, and were they the opponent's revolution were really the Tsarist elements. So we're incredibly hard guys. They were god hearing people, they were patriots, but they were thrown in altered reactionaries. I don't mean that putatively

at all, but that's what they were. You know, they weren't there weren't some capitalist element that you know, could draw upon this great power available to them by you know, the productive processes that can literally extract wealth out of the dirt. You know. That's not uh, that's none of the Bolsheviks were facing down and murdering, you know. So they they they kind of knocked down a house of cards in what became the Soviet Union, you know. And

Hoswell never lost sight of that. So yeah, on the one hand, you know, you must stand with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is the it is the beating heart of the socialist community of nations and of the revolution, you know, but that doesn't mean that, you know, one must uncritically accept every feature of of the Soviet state. And uh, hoswellm was critical of state socialism from day one, like he considered it a necessary stage. But he wasn't

That's what the reasons. I object to people saying, oh, he was like the Stalinist, like a true Stalinist was uh was or is uh you know somebody who looks at the Soviet state as like the zenith of stay craft and then and and they view that as like a positive thing, you know, basically uh, you know, based basically uh basically this this this, this mighty empire of uh you know that like leaves the world in in in in terms of how like you know, the industrial

proletariat is valued. You know, it's a superpower because of its military might and it's mastery of technics, including nuclear weapons and the ability to deploy into orbital space and things like that. You know, like these and these guys do exist, you know, I mean like that is now like Hosman was not at all one of those guys. Okay, to be clear, let me see, I'm in my outline, like I'm not uh, I'm not an F A G, G O T who like you know, I gotta stick

to the outline. But I but it doesn't like a like a conceptual map, so I know where we're at. They don't want to Yeah, let's uh hoss problem. Well, I want to get this biographical sort of info out of the way to the lay foundation. We'll get into the substance of Hobsbam's you know, intellectual canon in episode two.

But I want to I want to get and we need to get into the dual Revolution, which is a it's it's a it's a political theoretical and a sociological postulating concept that was coined, uh that quite by Hosbam and now in scholarship on the French Revolution. It's it's just kind of taken, it's just kind of accepted. It's accepted as like an essential aspect of of that body of scholarship. But if I, but if I, that's going to take an hour to dive into. So let's let's

hold off on that. And I think we're coming on about an hour anyway, So yeah, I think this would be a natural stopping point if that's acceptable.

This Saturday, we're meeting at Rosewood Cemetery for our Halloween Cemetery Walk and we're gonna lay some flowers at Confederate Mound to like honor our forebears and their sacrifice and for the Orthodox guys and girls. Mercia Eliotti is buried at the same uh cemetery and we're gonna pay respects to him. And Eliatti has had a huge effect on impact on my intellectual development. So we're uh, it's it's it's gonna be a very positive day, you know, uh

if somber. But last last year we went to Graceland Cemetery up on the North Side and it was it was fantastic and a lot of people showed up. But uh, you'll find me on social media. I meant capital r e A L underscore number seven hl mes seven seven seven and I'm there just like check the pinned uh like post I you can find like merge that like my dear friend here Kreig produces you can find a links my Instagram, my t gram, the my website, like

all kinds of stuff. So just uh and if you if you include some of this stuff in the description, man, that would be a great help.

that phraseology. I'm not going to say there's not, but generally people don't apply it in those contexts, and they seem to discern anything or identify anything that's at all like radic goal or you know, progressive and orientation, or that's related to the ongoing social engineering regime and like the paradigm that he gives rise to in like discursive terms. That's identify that as Marxism. I mean, that's that's grossly incorrect, you know. And it's not I'm not just playing word

games or being like a pedant or something. You know, it's important to be clear about what we're talking about.

Particularly we're dealing with something as kind of abstract and conceptual as political theory, you know, and a guy like Hobbs will almost a real Marxist, you know, and he actively disdained the standard bearers of the sorts of tendencies I just mentioned, you know, not because he was like a good guy, you're because he was correct in his assessment of historical phenomenon and the approximate causes of you know, these punctuated developments in the twentieth century. But he did

have certain insights into history processes. You know, he's the one who coined the phrase the quote quote the short

century to refer to the twentieth century. I mean, Nolty agreed with it, you know, the short century being the cycle of events that were emerged in nineteen fourteen and that ended on November ninth, nineteen eighty nine, you know, contra the long century, you know of after water after Waterloo until nineteen fourteen, I mean after Waterloo, other than the Crimean War and the Franco Prussian War, both of which were very localized conflicts and both of which were

brief and neither of which really had some destructive impactfulness at scale on the continent. One of the reasons why so many mercenaries from Europe fought in the War between the States and even you know Henry Henry Werez, the commandant of Andersonville, who was unceremoniously hanged. So that's a that's a really grim and macabre story everything about Andersonville and his demise. But he was a Swiss national who found his way in the United States, you know, because

that's where the action was. You know, don't get me wrong, Like all kinds of punctuated things were happening in Europe of a technological nature, of a developmental nature, but like power, political affairs weren't really happening there, you know, I mean, and and if you take a long view, yes, okay, that kind of thing is always underway. But in Warren

peace terms, they were not punctuated crises. There were not you know, crisis modalities that were emerging that you know, generated a need for men under arms and men with adjacent sorts of skill sets, you know, to participate in in those sorts of those sorts of uh happenings. But in America, obviously you better believe that was underway, and

it's some this is a tangent. I'll make it brief, but you know McLellan who was famously sex by Lincoln, you know, and he you know Lincoln I'm paraphrasing, but you know, Lincoln family said, you know, I've got I've got a commanding general who refuses to assault, you know. And uh so his detractors and not just among not just among radical reformers and abolitionist but even pretty moderate people either band they branded him some kind of coward who was like afraid of being under fire or this,

or he was some kind of like secret copperhead. He was in neither of those things. He'd been on the ground in prime me because before the war in the States kicked off, other than the Indian wars, which were

utterly savage, but we're not. But in scope and scale, we're very limited, you know, other than that, like conventional combined ours what was then emerging combined arms, you know, indirect fire, like the only way you really I mean liaising with foreign militaries was like something that was done in the Western world anyway. But it's also like if you wanted to, you know, if you wanted to, if you wanted to cut your teeth in a combat zone.

You know McClellan's generation, Well, you went to Europe, you know, you drilled with the Prussians or you know, you you were a liaison to the French or the British. And McClelland saw what was happening on the ground in Crimea, and you saw the Master artillery and what it was doing to the human body, and he's like, this is horrific. So he's like, if we if we we started it, if we start if we start cavalry charging like masks Confederate artillery, like this is gonna be a slaughter, and

that's what happened, you know. But uh, this is sort of an aside. But any event, you know, Uh, to bring it back to where we should be at, I I did it right up years back of Paul Godfrey's talk and his paper. You know how the left won the Cold War, because the left did win the Cold War. The people like Hobsbaum lost the Cold War, you know,

the standard bearers of Sovietism and of uh. I don't think Hosmam was a Stalinist in the sense that somebody like Dougan kind of is, or in the way more and more properly, He's not a stalinist in the way that guys like Jackson Hinkle are.

And that's so he was he was honest about, you know, about that perspective, and I mean that's the way every that's the way every Marcist Leninist thought, you know, and and such that they still exist today. I don't think guys like Hankle when like the kind of reconstituted American Communist Party, they've also got a presence on the East

Coast these days. They're distinct from like whatever, this vestigial Communist Party USA, which are just like a bunch of liberals who don't know what the fuck they're talking about. But kind of like the reconstituted American Communist Party, I mean they believe that too, but they're kind of they're they're kind of like a dialectical offshoot of what was

the Marcus Lennon's perspective. I think that they uh, I think they're big on guys like Emmanuel Wallerstein and like they they subscribed like global systems theory, which is serious stuff. But but they are like stylinists, like they don't, you know, they're they tolerate religious people these days, they're not. They're not these like doctrinal atheists who view themselves as being

at war with established churches. And things like they're tolerant to that, but they're they remain like atheistic, like what was it matter if you killed twenty million people to advance, uh, you know the realization of true communism, Like it doesn't matter because well you know that that that's that's just creative destruction and and human if humans are just so much mentioned material and mentally more valuable than you know, animal livestock or material things that may be as they

may be, there there's still just like so much you know, material, you know, and that uh, that's important to keep in mind. I mean, I'm not not just I'm not being you know not, I'm not like moralizing here saying like and this is why the communists are a bunch of slavery beast. I think that their worldview, in addition to being kind of laughably up to and it's there. Yeah, I I believe it's like highly corrupt morally. But that's that's not at base. It's not really why people like me like

object to their perspective, you know. But at the same time, you know, I uh, for some reason, the kinds of people people looks like chompsky all the time. And don't get me wrong. Like I think Chomsky wrote some pretty good stuff on linguistics and he he he uh, he'd be pretty handily treated people like Fuco who considered to

be kind of unserious degenerates. But I mean Chompsky, Chomsky's basically like a moralizer and a polemicist, and I don't think he's got to really develop view of political theory.

But I mean, I mean guys on the right, or at least guys kind of adjacent they don't have data, say Chomsky, but then they act like I'm some weirdo where like it's being like dev and I said, hobbsbamb you know, like Howsong was a serious historian man like unlike Chomsky, he like drops polemic about like you know, America is doing mean things, but the electonomy wrong, like America is there to be savage. But the day Chompsky, you know, he's he comes off like some hand ringing

old woman. And I don't, I don't. I don't think he's a real political theorist, you know, like it's I don't it's not just me kind of guarding my own proverbial wheelhouse. I you know, at the level of deep analysis, like Nolt and Hosbom and like economy, political economs like Joseph Schumpeter, the suits of insights they were capable of, like in the moment, most people can't do that, you know.

And I meet a lot of guys whoever this idea that you know, oh, you're like a mathematician or like you sell insurance or like you're, you know, some kind of molecular biologists. But oh, anybody you can have a take on putical theory. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?

some Chinese guy who'd like faint. Have you ever saw like a girl naked and lives with his mommy and he's got an IQ of like two hundred. Okay, that's awesome. If I need somebody to do like math problems nobody

can do, I'll hire him to do that. But I don't understand why I should give a fuck, you know, Like it's basically you know what IQ is, man IQ is a It's like it's it's cold war managerialism, whereby it's like, look, we basically like like we need like widget makers, and we need guys who manage the widget factory, and we need some criteria where can identify people who below a certain threshold are basically subnormal and useless. That's

what IQ is. It's not like, you know, oh, if you're like Q was this high, you know, you're you're you're gonna like lead like a revolution and conquer the

Arabian Peninsula. Or if like your iqes like within these parameters, like you're Adolf Hitler or I mean, it's fucking retarded, like it doesn't And I mean for people I've been meaning someone vod Measy and sort of like that, and it's like you're basically taking you're basically taking, uh, this kind of ridiculous sort of like bureaucrats fetish from the public school system and like deciding it's like some like holy criteria, like and they don't even realize that's what

they're doing. So but yeah, we'll get into the substance of what we need to talk about today. I uh, I didn't mean to uh whip off about about tangents, but I made the point before. You know, Hobsbam, he talked a lot about the origins of nationalism, and to clarify, because I don't want people jumping over my shit. We're not talking about believing in one's knows. We're not talking about caring about your race. We're not talking about any

of that. We're talking about this kind of like progressive modernist like political modality, like organizing modality called nationalism, which

is the base of liberal idea. And it basically arbitrarily says, you know, kind of the classical view of sovereignty, whether it invests in like a royal dynasty, or whether it invests in you know, you know, men who are kind of like you know, for all parate parsons, an elected king by the police in lieu with that, it says, like all these people in this geographic area who happen to have linguistic fluency, and like we've declared the national dialect.

You're part of this nation now, you know, it doesn't matter what religion you are, It doesn't matter where your loyalties lie in terms of things that supersede you know, administrative politics. This is just like the French nation, or this is the polar nation. And famously Hitler said that was about the biggest obstacle to Germany being able to

project power on the world stage. As people internalize this nonsense and it became this kind of like self defeating imperative, like whereby people mired in this kind of alienated circumstance wrought by industrial urban modernity. They kind of like clung to this idea of like a nationalist like political model. And again we're not talking about real like belief and what's ethnos, We're talking about a contrivance, you know, and the and it's also Habswam made the point and we're

so made the same point. Nationalism it based as individualistic. It emerged as a liberal idea and entailed the notion of Okay, here's this nation based on these arbitrary criteria. They generally have to do with the ability to communicate

and mutual intelligibility. But it's made up in the estimation of people who contrived the cityology of individual citizens, and every individual is recognized by the nation, you know, as as some kind of like sovereign decision maker unto himself, like obviously the rubber meets the road, and nobody abides that who's actually in power. But that's the theory, and

that's kind of like the moral mythology of it. You know, this is extremely at odds with the past, you know, where your responsibility was to your monarch or to the local lord and above him and ultimately like to you know, your your faith and the representatives of your confessional heritage and your rights and privileges accrued from your profession or from you know, the social and collective or corporate corporative

groups that you belong to. You know, the whole point of nationalism is it tears all that you know, these kind of natural ancient communitarian bonds. No no, no, that's the illegitimate. Now you're just an individual, but you're part of this body politic because you happen to speak French, or you happen to speak Polish or like, you know, you happen to be somebody who speaks like High German, but you live in Belgium. Like that's that's what we're

talking about. That's what he was talking about, you know, And that's Cobsbohmb's take, which was well placed, was that conservatism is just it's just like it's just like liberal individualism. That's basically a kind of class war against aristocracy by like a thirsty and kind of covetist like capitalist class go on to like discredit everything that came before, say no, no, no, all these things that are important, you know, relating to national identity, Like we're the ones who are the managers

those things. And you know, everybody's an individual, but you need us to like guard these individual rights. Like that's what nationalism is in the capital end sense. It's not saying I don't live in multiculturalism. It's not saying I'm proud to be white. It's not saying, you know, I want my country to be owners and Catholic. There has

nothing to do with it. Nothing, And that's one of the reasons why these quote unquote nationalist governments they like never lead anything, you know, and the moment they go away, you know what little kind of concessions there were. They kind of preserving normalcy, just like evamplites because it's a it's a house, it's a paper house, you know. And Hobsbam was very big on what he called the Dual Revolution.

I mean, my fame was big on it. I mean he identified he identified the dual Revolution as a historical phenomenon that came to shape governmental imperatives and came to kind of frame everything related to do you know, the political sphere of activity, both you know, in theoretical capacities as well as in terms of praxis and what actually developed, Like what do you mean by the dual revolution specifically?

And as we got into before last time, and we're talking about Hobbsbom's kind of like four value magnum opus, you know, dealing with the age of the age of revolution between seventeen eighty nine eighteen forty eight. How Slump's take is that, Okay, you know, the jacob and Revolution and all this kind of radicalism and all this all

this abchieval. You know, He's like that was inextricably bound up with like technological and economic changes that they constituted this kind of grand future shock, you know, really like the first industry revolution. So is that you can't extricate these things. You know that they're very Marxist len in this view of it, but they're not wrong. You can't really you can't really identify like what came first or

what was the Pride move on. It was both of these things, you know, kind of like inextriguably tethered doing another a combination of like dialectical process and conceptual activity as well as you know, kind of the the binding up of of economic imperatives with political life in a

way that hadn't happened before. So you know, these enlightenment ideas, which on the one hand, are kind of hollow ideological phraseology, these kinds of you know, democracy like but not real democracy like you know, procedural procedural democracy like nationalism and liberalism.

This kind of stuff gained traction because people were getting crushed by these new economic modalities that nobody knew how to manage, you know, and old wealth was being wiped out handover fists, you know, So there was charastrotic effects to this. So like people looking for remedies, you know,

they were uniquely susceptible to this kind of thought. But they also people develop these kinds of ideas based on these disruptions, you know, because they were kind of ripped out of environs where they had meaningful reference points beyond their own lives, you know, and uh, people's lives are comparatively short then, you know. And so this this this

kind of taken together, this developed its own momentum. It was like both a process and an animating principle as well as uh, you know, like a key like framing a key framing device of of of the zeitgeist. You know, now, when the French Revolution was defeated, you know, and and particularly after you know, Waterloo, I mean because Napoleon, Uh, Napoleon was a lot like Cromwell and a lot like Hitler. I agree with Russell Stoffley. I think Hitler was more

like Mohammad than he was anybody. But and Napoleon didn't have that messianic uh sensibility. I'm talking in political terms, not in like theological ones. But what happened in the I mean, what happened in the Reign of Terror and what happened in the aftermath when Napoleon literally trying to conquer the continent and you know, become Emperor of Europa. The view from what remained, like the royal courts in Europe, and the view from kind of like the nas and

political managerial class was this can never ever happen again. Okay, So the Congress of Vienna Metternich kind of first and foremost among this type, you know, kind of like the whole raison deetra of state craft became like balance of power, you know e. Michael Jones makes the point that all rationalist perspectives partake in some way of like Newtonian physics, you know, this kind of like perfect balance of like dynamic but totally controlled motion. It's more complicated than that.

And Jones is its own as a very like punitive view of like Newton. I don't want to get into that, but he's right about what I just indicated, okay. And balance of power politics, that's where it comes from, okay, And that's why it's misguided when a lot of these people it's kind of like the mantra of the Midwidth that oh, Churchill wasn't crazy, and Churchill wasn't totally corrupted, you know, by alien interests. He was just trying to maintain the balance of power and no European power can

become too strong. That's not at all what he was doing. And that was obsolete anyway by the twentieth century. That got shot to pieces in nineteen fourteen, and nobody thought that way anymore, okay. And that's why the reasons why it was apocalyptic thinking came about in the twentieth century because what had been the return to like rationalist normalcy that died in the trenches along with millions of guys

who got blown to bits. It died like buried beneath like the mud and shit and all of their body parts. Nobody thought that way, and that's not what Churchill was doing. And even if it was, that's that that be a ridiculous mission to take on in nineteen thirty nine. It would make no sense. But that's the uh, that's the source of this kind of like reactionary stance. And Hoswam calls it reactionary equals the Matrinage perspective reactionary because it's

not truly conservative. It's literally a reaction. It's saying, how do we deal with future shock? How do we deal with the disruption of this kind of like rational balancing of furies? How do we restore something manageable and something that is primarily governed by reason? You know, here is how we do it. We do it by like managing power, you know, like it's some kind of like it like it's some kind of quantity of energy you know that can be like redirected and or kind of purpose towards

this or you know, almost like an engineering problem. Okay, that's that's what is meant by reactionary, because it wasn't nobody, not Metterniche, not the people in the Congress at Vienna, not not you know, not the people who later opposed the eighteen forty eight revolutions. Nobody was saying, we're gonna go back to having you know, like a king holds absolute sovereignty. Nobody was saying, we're gonna go back to you know, the pope being the true like Emperor of

Europe is God's emissary. Nobody was saying that. It wasn't even they would have like scoffed at that prospect, but it wasn't even within their contemplation.

They're not trying to like preserve like the integrity of your race, if that's important to you or whatever. They're not trying to that. They're not they're not trying to undo modernity. They're not trying to I mean, I'm not even saying that's good, but that they're not doing that. You know, they're they're they're they're arch modernists. They're arch modernist liberals who are trying to manage revolutionary imperatives and

stop them from happening. Whether they're from the left or whether they're from the right, you know, no matter where they come from, that is their notion. That's why conservatism is bullshit, you know. And this is uh, you know again, that's if people, I know, not everybody wants to sit

around reading politable theory like I do. But it's like, okay, this is why you should beat Hobsbaum just as like an educated partisan, Okay, because he's right about those things, like his conclusions in terms of like applied UH efforts and his conclusions in terms of what's desirable are wrong, but his diagnostic process isn't wrong, and his observations aren't wrong. They're generally correct, you know. And again the Marxist over emphasize this.

dangerous machine for ten hours a day. That's probably that's about the most disrupted thing that's ever happened to people at scale, you know. And it's and on top of that too, the introduction of money at scale, like anything, all all indicators of wealth that for forty thousand years quite literally like people were habituated to no no, no, no no. Now you get a paper certificate and it's fungible and you can find somebody who like has stuff you need, they'll accept that this is this is insane.

This is totally insane, you know. And it took decades for people to adapt to that, you know. And it really wasn't until people born in the nineteen twenties and thirties were totally habituated to that. But it took that long, you know. So the degree to which this disrupted everything that everybody had taken for granted, and you know, just created unmanageable conditions. You know, I mean think about too, like trying to manage economic imperatives. I'm not even talking

about a planned economy. I'm saying just being able to balance the proverbial like a Ledger books, there's a factory that employs twenty thousand people. I'm using a pencil and paper and an advocates to try and figure out, like what our outlays are, like what we need to produce to be profitable, like what we need, how much we need to earn to like stay afloat, like what debts we owe to who? At some point that's going to

collapse on itself and people are gonna starve. And then happened over and over and over again, and most punctuatedly, it happened in a great depression. And it wasn't because of like bankers or whatever like von Meesian's think. It was because of what I just said. That could never happen now because it's been rubberized, because data management now it's as simple as turning on a machine. Now that's an incredibly corrupt people make half with that wealth is

wiped out owing to malfeasans in greed. But there's not gonna be like the stock market is not going to plummet five thousand points because of some like air because of like some accounting error at scale, or because of like a lack of situational awareness that has like a catastrophic impact that could never happen again. Okay, so when

people talk about that, that's stupid. But this was like an everyday reality really from like the close of the eighteenth century until like like really until like the nineteen seventies, you know what I mean. It's uh so basically people were like costing on the precipice of some kind of

like disaster, you know. And that's why people became communists, like the man in the street, and that's why guys like Ernst Tollman, who's kind of the consummate like like uh like aryan German like Burger type, Like that's why though those guys like fact like like like factory floridais being communists like communist I theology and it's it's foundation and like a Jewish revolutionary spirit or like sectarian antipathy or like ethnosectarian hostility, like yes, that at at scale

of at dialectical scale and process, like yes, that is where it comes from. But where the rubber meets to the road. What I just said is why it became this. There's there's animating imperative that swept up millions and millions of people. Like that's why. You know, now it's a bit different. There's other reasons why. I mean, it would never become a mass movement again, you know, even though when I say that like Marxist Leninism or like it's

it's dialectically altered variant. When I say that it like enjoyed something of resurgence, I mean like in terms of like fringe elements, okay, and there's like a small, very small and absolute terms like vanguard of those guys or somewhat impressive and kind of had their shit together and moving forward like this century. They were probably able to carve out some semi sovereign space as locally, but were

small and scale. But that's what I mean. I don't mean that like, oh, this is resurgent and there'd be like some sort of highly scaled variant of this again. But one second, but Hosbo. I'm also like moving on a bit. You know, all these things this basic a storicism. This is kind of what this is kind of what separated Hoswoon from the schismatics, Like initially, okay, because there

were always schismatics. I mean, the sixty eight ers were basically the ideological descendants of Trotsky, even if a lot of them were just kind of bandwagoning, I didn't realize that's what they were, you know, at the cadre level of of the leadership element. That's what they were about, you know. And uh, this is important, and you Hosbom his later his later output especially, and you know, after people are about forty or fifty, they don't like really

radically change their viewpoint. That's what I mean in a moment in condext But Hosbom uh his later output in like especially in the nineteen nineties, it dealt a lot with what he perceived is like cultural decadence, like the kind of corruption of social democracy, the intellectual and moral poverty of the new left. You know, the ability of capitalism as he perceived it, to resist historical processes and endoor beyond. In his estimation, it's what should have been,

it's kind of viable. It's sort of viable life as a conceptual model. So people kind of said, like, oh, Haw's w again, the second bittered old guy after the Cold War. It'saying, No, I don't. I don't believe that he always thought this, But it would have been pointless to kind of bandy that, like during the Cold War, there was just there just wouldn't have been a context

and it would have gone without saying. And also even much as uh like the orthodox left, you know, the pro Soviet Left, much as they kind of despised the schismatics, I mean they they were they were literally at war with America and NATO, and it's a Jason Elements. They weren't. They weren't gonna pick like some sectarian fight with a bunch of sixty eight ers who were like voting in

like the sweetest Green Party. When you know there's there's a good possibility at some point there's gonna be a nuclear war with their ops.

as nineteen eighty nine. Hobbs what nineteen ninety one with the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, So over clarity, that's what he meant. But he kind of on popular culture a lot, you know, and he said, look, he's like in the sixties popular culture totally changed. He was

like before that. He's like the kind of pop culture icons, whether they were talking about like pet Boone, or they were talking about John Wayne, or whether they were talking about somebody like even even somebody like Steve McQueen or or some of these guys. You know, they they might have represented kind of adalized vision of Americana, but he's like just and he's and those very deliberate and there's

something very corporate about that. But at the same time, these kinds of figures and these motifs, they basically mirrored the way that like people had always kind of thought, you know, like simple minds that maybe to some people.

You know, in the nineteen sixties, the kind of like rock star identity, which don't get me wrong, had always you know, uh, there is a lot of like old rock and blues guys would always talk about selling your soul to the devil because guys in that life did die young and they ended up and totally fucked up circumstances. But kind of like the mass murdering of this to like Bougie's and like and Lanes. You know, he had tonified like Janis Joppelin, Brian Jones, Bob Marley, you know,

and all and all this kind of hippie garbage. You know, He's like, Okay, these people weren't just viewed as pop culture figures. Like people decided these these people stood in for like literal cultural icon. You know. Thus you have like the kind of like stereotypical like boomer idiot or things like the Beatles are like uttering like like sacred truths or something. You know, like and this idea that being old is bad. You know, life is horrible after

you're like twenty eight or thirty. You know, uh, there's something glorious about not getting beyond that stage and like dying from partying, you know, Cosmon view was like, Okay, first of all, this is a way of kind of like dumbing people down, and it's it's a way of kind of like capitalism artificially sustaining itself by selling this kind of like lifestyle image that's pretending to be radical or pretending to be like at odds of what came before, and it is, but not in you know, the post

seventeen eighty nine sense.

think Osmon did either. But he's saying this kind of caricature a youth that was presented, you know, by like capitalist media. In his estimation. You know, he's like, basically, you're saying that anyone who has lived long enough, they're gonna develop like an evolved in view of what of the system we live under and scale they're bad or they're like the police, or they're trying to tell you

to do things you don't want to do. So it's kind of just like deliberate dumbing down under auspices of rebellion. And that's insightful because that really is true. And this kind of weird preaching. You know, he's like Rocketbelly guys like Eddie Cochrane, like Elvis, like Buddy Holly, like uh you know, like like like like Richie Valens. These guys weren't trying to sell people on some lifestyle. You know,

they were like poor. They were poor redneck guys in balance case, you know, you're poor, like East La Spanish guys, you know, and there was a real like energy there. They had kind of a dark side that was exemplified by people like stark Weather, I mean unfortunately, but these guys were never going out like preaching some weird sociology of people that wouldn't even occurred to them because that's

not what musicians do. Like the fact that this became part of the package in Hobswam's view, that was totally ideological. You know, that was not some accident that wasn't just people nitting with the zeitgeist. It wasn't just some kind of weird feedback loop owing to sort of like the

integration and narratives because of TV. No, this was very deliberate, you know, And so in his view, in his view, like basically American pop culture from about nineteen sixty four sixty five to like the then president, which was like nineteen ninety three when he wrote this, he's like, this is basically capitalist propaganda, you know, and you obviously in our view it's social engineering, and hobbs on Baby pictually

care about that on its own terms. But again he opposed that stuff because he's like, this is basically trying to get you drunk on sex or taking drugs or like cloud chasing, so that you basically never mature in like a rational adult and you never contemplate like why you're in the condition you're in, and you never contemplate like why there's not like any economic justice in his view, you know, and again it's these conclusions really have nothing

to do with our perspective. But the process he describes and what these what this sort of like pop cultural uh product represents, Like he is right about that or he wasn't right about that, you know, and he and he said this stuff had like real he said, he said that the true like he said that was truly different about this, this sort of this sort of propaganda's

pop culture is threefold. You know, He's like, first, he's like, youth was always seen, even even in cultures that like revered youth are you're talking about like classical Greece or the Third Reich or even like going Soviet Union, it was still views like a preparatory stage for adulthood in some sense. As you know, youth is important. The youth are vigorous. We need them to protect us, to fight our wars, to you know, develop passionate ideas that they

can later build upon and innovate. But you know, this is important because it's a critical stage for it's the final phase of full human development that that all was like done away with. It's like, no, youth is some end in itself being old as shit, you know, being a young being a teenager or a young person, that is the zenith of life, and your life is miserable after that. So you've got to try and hang on to those aspects as much as you can, whether it's

through taking drugs or like you know, including hormones. Whether it's like refusing to get married so you can like have sex a lot of girls, whether it's you know, refusing to behave in a responsible way, whether it's you know, refusing to take on a real political perspective because that's like, oh, that's like you know, that's that square stuff. This all is very deliberate, and this is very this is an odds basy with every human culture that ever existed. Secondly,

it became dominant in market economy. It's like every single one of them. It's not just like in America or in the UK there's this weird kind of youth obsessed tendency owing to kind of the population boom at World War two. No, this happened like everywhere that America like

was able to like plant its footprint. You know, they're talking about Japan with you know, India, whether you're talking about you know, France, whether you're talking about you know the then you know East Block formerly his Block that was like opening up. But you're talking about Finland, where they talk about you know, Latin America that they can't

just be like some spontaneous homogenization. Okay, like uh, pop colog doesn't just developed this kind of like homogeneous ideological imperative just by complete accidents, especially like pre internet that was that was laughable. And the third thing you identified was that it became truly international in a way that

didn't really make sense. You know. He's like if you take stuff like the Beatles, or if you take stuff uh you know, like some of these movies that like pop so much on the production code got done away with, like the graduate. A lot of times the stuff wasn't even translated, Like people don't even understand like what they were hearing because it was you know, and it wasn't. It's not there was some program where you could upload

subtitles to release a movie in India or China. But nevertheless, there was this constant stream of mostly radio then but also TV and like the richer developing world that said like this is cool, this is how you should be. So people kind of like ate up the visual aspect and you know kind of in congress with you know, the the overly ideological kind of like radio media stuff.

There's all model in radio for Europe of course. You know, it's like this became this international kind of it became this uniform, ideologically motivated international subculture without even being linguistically diverse, you know, and it was, uh, it's not like it's not like this was happening at gunpoint, you know, like it's not like, uh, it's not like American soldiers were going into like Angola and like blowing away and a guy who ran like the local radio state and saying,

you're gonna listen to this, You're gonna play this, you know, it ability to like insinuate itself kind of along with, you know, the the illusion of wealth. He's like, that's rare in terms of trying to insinuate a social sensibility within people or try to get them to develop sort of like a Covenist sense of self and how they want their life to be. You know. He's like, that's kind of the strength of capitalism. Capitalism is really, really,

really good. And again I don't use terms of capitalism to describe what he's describing, but we're talking about Hobsbaum, so I'm using his vernacular. In his view, he said, other ideology is whether you're talking about state socialism, you know, whether you're talking about some kind of a you know, some kind of anti modernist, but at the same time, like futurist fascism, nothing is as effective as this, and like insinuating itself globally now is a buddle of that. Obviously.

It's like, well, you know, if you're dealing with like poor mentioned material, or you know, if the rest of the world's laying in ruins and all that exists is America in the Soviet Union as producers of you know, mass culture, you're gonna have perverse outcomes. Yeah, that's true, but that's not really what he's talking about. He's saying, like, in absolute terms, you wouldn't think that this stuff would have like gone what we consider it by the face terms,

like viral, but he did. And in Hobswong's view, that's what keeps capitalism alive because it's not like it's not like just like great outcomes from people like yeah, if you're in America, you're basically rubberized. If you're like if you're rich comparatively you're middle class or amazing middle class, you're basically rubberized against like true catastrophes. Now, there are people in America who really struggle, and they are not

but they're not the majority. Hobswam is talking more in terms of like planetary scale, most people in the world, they're not really there's anything to offer you for I'm like what he called the capitalist system. I mean, yeah, you can. You know, shortages as you may have known in your lifetime have been largely mitigated. But that probably

would happen in any way. That doesn't explain like why in like in brass Tacks terms, like white people in Africa, white people in Latin America, white people in Asia have just like internalized this perspective. It doesn't explain why some like Jackass in Liberia like decided in nineteen ninety five he wants to be a gangster rapper like that. That doesn't make any sense in terms of kind of most

precedented sociology. I think it makes a lot of sense according to certain criteria that we're not present before that are a bit outside the scope. But that's kind of hobs On's point, Okay. And there were not many true sociologists on the left. There was Seawright. Mills wasn't really a leftist. I mean he he was viewed as like a progressive by like by you know, by like eyes. Now we are standards, but he was an He was more kind of like an economic sociologist who was like hostled, uh,

like what was consideredly a cabalist perspective. He but Hoswaon was a genuine you know again it's I this is not an absolute signifier that incapsulate twenty was. But he was like a Stalinist of its height, and very few of those guys were like real sociologists. He was Christopher Lash ironically hime in a lot of the conclusions hoswa did, and his final book it was called Progress That true only heaven it' dropped in like nineteen ninety four, so

over last died now. Of course, Lash had been some kind of peculiar freto Marxist in his younger days, like the kind of guy who'd been on a gism drawn mark. He'd been very much influenced by marcusa in that school I thought. And then Lash gradually became like one more kind of conservative in his thought, like literally conservative. So

I'm not sure if you really count. So Hoswem kind of stands not quite alone, but it's a it was a very small fraternity of revolutionary Marxist Leninists who who had, you know, like a sociologist that that was both methodologically as well as intellectually rigorous in terms of you know, in terms of output. So that's another reason why UH people should take him seriously if I haven't convinced the

subs and other people who like what we do. Hosbon did say, though, with a big shortcoming of of capitalism or the capitalist perspective is He says that owing to this inherently conservative tendency. Now again we're talking about conservatism and post seventeen eighty nine cents. We're not talking about belief and tradition. We're not talking about you know, reverence for for for customs. We're not talking about people want to preserve old ways or preserve Harriot. We're not talking

to that at all. We're talking about ideological conservatism, which again is U is a product of enlightenment liberalism one

hundred percent. Ozom says that the thing that these that these capitalists ideologues are really, really, really bad at is predicting the future, not putting the future like a gypsy of the crystal ball, but kind of diagnosing the trajectory of politics and UH an economic phenomenon you know, that's why he said that, Like he said that, like people like Fukiyama are laughable, you know what they're like theories of everything, like, oh, you know they'll be they'll be

no more armed conflict because you know, they'll be prosperity, and you know, people will will naturally like reject religion because they'll they'll have all these like hedonistic outlets that no longer force them to sublimate. Like Hobzhm's like, that's ridiculous, that's nonsense, you know, and he's like, basically, nobody has a worst track record speaking in the nineteen nineties. He's like, nobody had the worst nobody has the worst track record

of the preceding forty years. So basically probably a post war era in like the nineties than like, you know, the capitalists. You know, He's like, they're spectacularly bad at predicting what's going to happen, and that's also why they got utterly blindsided by like the implosion of the Soviet Union. You know. Hobbs Arm reserve a particular contempt for Calvin Coolidge. He did Coolie is kind of like a Reagan figure, which isn't I mean Reagan himself like lionized the Coolidge,

but I think Reagan is more like Eisenhower. Frankly, but interestingly, George Kennan had a similar contempt for Reagan. He thought he was an idiots. I mean, I got love for Kennan old day, but I think he had some blind spots in his own right. But what what Osbom said in one of his later books Coolidge in nineteen twenty eight, I think it was his is like a holiday message.

You know, there's nothing even a great depression. They had not the kind of terrors in ainety twenty nine, obviously had not sit in yet, but there was there was there was an ominous air about things. So Coolidge's message, like in Holiday Season ninety twenty eight, was quote, the country can regard the present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism. That's fucking meaningless. That's like saying like

things are great because my McDonald's lunch today. You know, cheeseburgers taste good and it's Friday, and you know, I like pussy like. It's I think a crancer version of what Coolidge dropped. Okay, I mean that's that's like almost Clintonian and it's superficial, supervisionally moronic, you know, uh essence, you know. So like that's why Hobswom says that like capitalism, it's got a permanent alibi for its failures because it

creates this climate. It basically just this dumb down climate of cloud chasers and people thirsty and desperate for youth and the kind of pleasures that supposedly attend youth. And they're told that the experts. And you're always supposed to trust experts, you know, like no Ball's Wall says, we trust doctors. You're always supposed to trust the experts, whether they're an economists, whether they're you know, some Pentagon whiz kid.

I'm beating myself with that phraseology, I realize, or whether they're you know, some medical doctor like doctor Fauci. And the experts always say, you know something in the same thing as what Coolidge said, there's just nothing but progress ahead.

There's nothing press, spirity, aad so oh, when there's natural when there's natural hiccups so to speak, you know, in markets, or when there's problems, or when a combination of malfeasance and badly coded inputs leads to something like a two thousand and eight crisis where billions of dollars are wiped out, like, oh, the alibi the capitalists and who in a hoplit view is like, oh, this was an unforeseen crisis, almost like a terrorist attack, you know, but darn it, like we

got the gumption to get through it. And these things just can't be predicted, you know. It's a hosba on this nonsense. This is absolutely foreseeable, you know, Like, granted, there's always something of a there's always something of a mystics belief in augury to Marxist lenin Is, it's like dressed up as like, oh, no, we're just diagnosing, you know, through a scientific method, the world historical process. But they do they are right when they say, like, no, history

does not peat itself. That's something morons say. But there are patterns too advanced, particularly crises of like an economic or military nature, and this idea like we're just being blindsided because this this can't be predicted, you know. Like that he's right about that, and that that is the ongoing alibi of capitalism. Again, this is his phraseology he calls capitalism.

was down for a few days. I'm gonna retool some stuff, or rather my guy is gonna retool it. I've no idea how to do that, but there's some things I want to change. I'm not gonna I can't do that until I get back from this trip. I'm going to Portland tomorrow tomorrow being Halloween, a happy Halloween. I'll be back on November seventh. I'm gonna need a few days to recover, so realistically, it's probably gonna be like November tenth before, like I'm I'll be, I'll be streaming and

stuff from the road. But I this stuff's not gonna get done other than that, so there's good. It's gonna be about three weeks before a new pot of as ode is is is uploaded. But speaking of the pod, you can and I'm gonna retool the website around mid month of so they'll it'll be a lot easier to use and navigate. They'll be I want that to be like an archival library where everybody can find everything for free,

of course, and that's that. But you can find the pod at real Thomas seven seven seven at subsec dot com. It's the mind Phaser podcast. We've also got a pretty active forum. There's also like there's a combination like short and medium forum stuff, and that's the best way to keep up with me, like hit me up there or hit me up. On t Gram, I got a t gram channel. I don't fuck with dms on Twitter and stuff. I had too many bad experiences and I I cannot

keep up with like capitals and DM systems. But I'm on social media at Capital r e A l underscore number seven him as seven seven seven on Instagram. On t Gram, I got a merse shop and yeah, man, if you plug like the Merse shop and the description, that would be tremendous. I'd appreciate it.

in Hobsball. I mean, obviously it's his twentieth century historiography, but especially World War One because it's so ill understood and it's such a critical event, you know, Like I this is something of a tangent like the other week. I'm not gonna name names because I don't have people to think I'm being mean or I'm not even trying

to like suggest something humitive. But I've done this panel with if you guys, and I was talking about how people, especially in America, but also basically like across anglophone countries and like their academic culture and stuff, they have this idea they reject historicism of the continental type, but they fall back in this kind of like midwid idea of oh, history repeats itself, or alternatively they like a show that.

But then they claim that, you know, well, there's not really press it into extrapolate, so you can't make a search an xyz. So like I was making the point of the twentieth century, basically, there's nothing you can glean from that moving forward ether in terms of the strategic landscape or power political development. And this guy's like, well you can't say that. I'm like, actually, I can you

tell me World War one is gonna happen again? That never ever happens, you know, like that's that's the equipment of like a meteor strike, you know. I mean so, but this side Hobsbaum was interesting, especially the way he characterized the Great War. I mean, obviously because he was at base a doctor and near Marxist Leninists, he overstated material and economic causes. But there is nuance there that

I think warrants attention, you know. But first, I mean a little bit of background in terms of like what laid the foundation for his sort of breakdown of the Great War. Housbun was very much he very much proposed the theory of what's now called the general crisis. Okay,

what the what? What? What the general crisis refers to is this is this odd period in the nineteenth century whereby on the one hand, there's this kind of running stability in terms of power, political activity, and interstate warring. You know, after Waterloo. After Waterloo, not much happened in Europe. I mean, I mean a lot happened, but I mean

the in terms of war and peace developments. You know, there was the Crimean War, which is very much restricted to the theater, to the primary battle space, you know, uh, which you know, very much spared the continent. And there's the Franco Prussian War, which really that's kind of what started to knock France out of the game as like a true like bourgoning superpower in my opinion. But that also, I mean that was that was kind of the the most that was one of the greatest like Prussian victories

of all time. But that also, I mean that was kind of the first blitzkrieg in some ways, you know, and there there wasn't large scale civilian nutrition in it,

you know. But other than that, I mean, some of the reasons I think, like I mentioned before, so many European mercenaries like streamed into the United States like to take up to take up arms for pay for you know, the Union or the Confederacy, because there just wasn't there wasn't a lot going on, you know, if you were if war fighting was your hustle, you know, either because that's just what you like to do, you know, you were an action junkie, or like that's how you made

a living. Like well, you've kind of had to look abroad if you wanted to apply your trade, you know. But there was a lot of social instability, and there was a lot of there was a lot of sociological there's a lot of punctuated disturbances, you know, like in the social structure of the main European countries. And like this started really after the Thirty Years of War. You know, a huge Trevor Roper is another guy. He was very, very different than a Hobsball, but he basically abided this

as well. Okay, like basically in the middle of the seventeenth century, there's this total breakdown in politics and in social order and economics and everything else, and this need in you know, the Thirty Years War. You know, then there's the English civil war. Then in France what they call like the Frond, which was basically like this running civil unrest, you know, and in some cases just like violent criminality that didn't even really have a political raizon detro.

It was just like guys kind of like clicking up and like robbing, raping and killing people under some like loose auspices of economic justice by violence, you know. The the Holy Roman Empire, which uh, which was actually a really important political structure. You know, I know that there's a lot of Anglophone historians. They they're kind of like, ohioly declared like it was a neither Holy nor Roman

nor an empire. It's like, okay, that's great, but it the reason why like it took on that Moniker was suggest that, you know, this is a transfer of sovereignty to Europe central like from what was like the just public on Romanum. You know, I mean it does track. Okay, there was revolts against the Spanish crown in Portugal. There was there there were secessionist movements in Naples and Catalonia, like and this also just like jumping off like at

the same time. You know, it wasn't coincidental that something was happening, you know, and when when the dust kind of settled, you had this increasing centralization at governments. Okay, Like we talked about last session, there was this kind of like nationalism that kind of took rude, but it was like very much something an Enlightenment phenomenon. Like again we say like nationalism, We're not talking about some return to sort of like tradition or or some kind adamistic tribalism.

We're saying that like kind of the court in these country is consolidated. And it's like, okay, look, you know, like within these sovereign parameters, like we are the only sovereign we have the power to tax you, you and you, you know, the only the only legitimate men under arms the ones weach are you know, stuff like that, Okay, And it's kind this kind of like central bureaucracy like developed to kind of prevent this chaos that have been happening.

And this is like one hundred and fifty year cycle from like the end of like the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia until like the start of the nineteenth century, you know. But throughout the nineteenth century, despite these this this kind of basic stability in terms

of like power political activity. There was this increasing tension because you like a lot of these, a lot of these like you know, otherwise progressive states that its centralized, you know, despite that they were they were most of them were like run by absolute monarchs, or they were run by a court that was essentially staffed by you know,

like an upper house of landed aristocrats. Okay, and obviously, you know, clergy people still had a lot of cloud you know, the Roman Church couldn't assert itself in an absolute way over sovereign governments anymore, but it still had

great power. So there's this weird disconnects. On the one hand, like structurally, you had the structure of the modern state like as we know it today, but it was populated basically by these aristocrats and and clerical types and people who derived their mandate from sort of traditional modalities that were ceasing to exist. Okay, I want to Hosbal's big points. And a lot of people don't understand this about Marxists. Marxists don't look at aristocrats and the bourgeoisie is the

same thing. They look at them as opposing classes, which they are. And the First Revolution before the proletarian revolution can happen, like basically, the bourgeoisie have to annihilate the aristocracy, and when that doesn't or can't happen, there's this kind of stagnation and like the Marxist Leninist worldview, like nothing is progressing, you know, there's not like innovation. Government kind of it has this monopoly on power, but there's something

dynamic about it. And this is critically important because I've heard people talk about and especially because I understand why people develop that impression based on the rhetoric as well as the experience historically of the Russian Revolution. They view like Bolsheviks's guys who like want to kill kings or who like view like them as guys who just want to burn down the churches because they view the church

as the repressor. That's not the way they look at it. Yeah, they want to do those things, but their whole notion is that the bourgeoisie is a revolutionary element too. It's got to annihilate like the thrown an altar and like the European court as it's existed for you know, millennia, and it's now consolidated under the trap things of the

modern state. And then like when the bourgeoisie is able to consolidate control of this modern means of production, you know, that can be applied to, you know, basically resolving shortages and poverty. Like that's like when the proletariat rises up and then like takes over those means and that's like the final revolution. Then there's like no more class, there's no more cast, you know, and like life can be like socially homogenized, like in circumstances of plenty, and there's

not material need anymore. And because there's not contradictions anymore, and there's not there's not material deprivation, like there's not war anymore, and like all the superstructural features that cause those things, you know, like like like racial problems and things like those are all like annihilated because they can no longer be exploited, either deliberately by design or or or just by you know, or just you're just owing to intrinsic tensions that that that that caused us stillity

owing to the internal contradictions of of a non vorestic paradigm.

Like that's what they're talking about. Okay, So Hobsbaum's view and Roper's view, albeit for ay different reasons and a lot of like Aanglo historians was that this phenomenon I'm talking about it basically kind of it created this like weird stagnation and these tensions kept on developed this sort of unsustainable momentum, and then by the time of the Great War, what it essentially happened was you had this kind of like hyper competitive capitalist paradigm between the major

European powers, but it was kind of inconsistent across national frontiers and uneven. Okay, So you had the Germans that were absolutely killing it, and they were eclipsed in the UK, which had previously been you know kind of like the like like like like the like the factory of Europe, you know, and and and and British products that they had been like flooding the planet and markets far and wide like that was over with. But the but the newly consolidated like German state like it was cash poor,

you know. And then he had the French, who, like I said, they'd been kind of like knocked off of their pedestal, you know, by the Franco Prussian War and never really recovered, you know, frankly from like Waterloo and stuff.

Europe becomes a superpower, Okay. And hobbs On view is like, look, with the great equalizer raises and military power, and he's right, and if you don't believe that, I mean I'll relieve this, Okay, Like at peak, I'm talking in the era of like undeniable strategy parody, like after nineteen seventy seven, the Soviet Union at peak, it it's GDP was like one fifth

out of the United States. Okay, its annual growth was like one point two percent or like something that would be like viewed as pathetic by you know, by the UH, by the Buddhist Republic or by the United States. But they were probably like the strongest UH military power that's

ever existed on this planet. Okay. So in a Hosbo his view, like, look, if you're being if you're if you're basically being merked like in the game of UH, in the great game of of of capitalist commerce, and you know, the kind of zero sum competition before European integration was a reality. Your trump card is essentially that you can defe your enemies on the battlefield, you know. And there was a certain conveinence here because again, you know,

the Crimean War resolved pretty rapidly. Okay, the Franco Prussian War resolved pretty rapidly. The war between the states here in America was a blood bath. But that, oh, just peculiar conditions. Okay. So going into World War One, the combatant states like, yeah, I mean there was there's complex historical factors that conspired to make it happen. But the major combatants figured that, well, you know, this is going to resolve pretty rapidly, you know, and the British especially

thought that. And you know, I this is a discussion for another series, but I said during the World War One series that a whole Vegg think was, I mean, here was the really sympathetic figure in the Great War, and that that perfect exemplifies like what Howl was talking about, the kind of the dynamic between like a wholeveg the

counselor and and and the Kaiser. You know, Wilhelm was not a good man, and he he did not have good command aptitude, but even if he had, there was like this bizarre kind of tango where you had you had like, you know, the leader of government in a Wholveg. Then you had literally the Kaiser who was the king.

Then you had these industrialists and both Holeveg and the Kaiser they had to organize like purchasing you know, arms, munitions, figuring out some way to appropriate manufacturing and means to sustain battlefield demands, but also compensating these price actors or

like you know, their outlays and things. So it's like you got kind of like three bases of sovereignty that are that are basically at odds and have competing interests, but they're all profiting or at least you know, surviving by virtue of this war enterprise, you know, and it

leaves us conditions where like nobody's really in charge. And like hod made that point too, you know, and that's why I put him kind of head and showers above most most Marxists who just say, like, oh, well, world war want to happen because you know, of overproduction, you know, like and that that's that's ridiculous, Like, well, Wan didn't happen because there was some conspiracy of capitalists, like well, we got to kill off you know, our workers because

there's you know, we can't employ them and and well, you know we we don't, we don't we don't have a destination for these or produced goods, So we're just gonna blow them up on the battlefield. Like nobody thinks that way, and that's all and not why wars happened.

And if that was the case, like if that was true, like basically anytime there was a major recession, like the president would just like devise a war like that, That's not how things happen, you know, like if if there's a huge financial crisis next year and America and the Chinese would be like, let's like let's pretend to have a war and sink each other's navies, Like well, what

would that accomplish? You know? That's I mean, I'm being up too deliberately, but this is an important point because they're refrain even a guys should know better, like, well, war's about big business or it's about money. It's like, no, it's not, man Like, how is it about money? Like how I mean, yeah, people definitely find ways to profit from war, but you can profit from literally anything, you know. I mean, that's that doesn't tell us anything, you know,

but that's this is fundamentally important. And this not not just the catach to feel the Great War and you know the fact that it kind of deformed the entire generation, I mean and put an entire generation in the grave as well. But it these these these tensions and these uncertainties, this is what uh, this is what facility. This is what expedited the Bolshevik Revolution, which very easily, by the way,

could have prevailed europe wide. You know, I mean, it's uh, I'm the first to acknowledge, as any serious student in the twentieth century, is it's strange that, uh, the the literal heart of the of the Communist International was was Russia. That's that's weird. But people conveniently forget or they just don't know because they they're subjected to bad history, you know. I mean, there was a communist revolution in Germany, there was a communist revolution in Hungary, there almost was in

the UK. You know, this stuff was stopped by forrest arms. It didn't just fizzle out or something. You know. But this is the way to understand the twentieth century and the degree to which you know, the twentieth century was basically a reaction to communism. I mean, they can't be overstated, you know, in power political terms. I mean, like obviously if we're talking about human life at scale in any book, there's an entire myriad of factors across a broad spectrum that.

in both Europe and America, there was this there's this kind of like massive economic boom okay. And that's one of the things that meant that there wasn't another like eighteen forty eight like revolutionary sentiment, because like there's a lot of wealth being produced, you know. But again there was these kinds of like obsolete social structures that were sort of organizing people's lives. Nonetheless, yet these societies were

flooded with capital but it was it wasn't. It was it was much like funnel into specific channels, you know, not by conspiracy of design or something. But uh, there just was not like a free like like individual people and not a lot of person power, and this created like weird disparities, you know, like there wasn't there's a lot of like if you're if you're a neoliberal economic economist,

you look at this as like basic marketing efficiencies. You know, this is why like banking is so important to like the monitorist view. And then they're right about that. You know, the the availability of capital and you know, uh competence and financial instruments like that. That's that's the regulatory mechanism that's essential. But beyond that, you basically need like capital flow like where it's going to be most efficiently allocated

in order to produce produce wealth. And that that wasn't really happening, despite the fact that you had you know, you had kind of at the top and also kind of like unevenly distributed like sort of throughout the sociological spectrum. You know, you had some like some incredible innovations that were like aldering people's lives, and there was like government could simply do things that it couldn't before. I mean,

like lot World War One, Like that's totally insane. Like the ability to mobilize like five million men, arm them, equip them, feed them, then like turn them loose to like assault your ops like that that would be like unthinkable even in like the Napoleonic era, you know. And it's not just modern command and control. It was like transportation, it was you know, it was more efficient fuel sources. It was like more efficient killing technology, and it was

like it was all these things. But the uh, something else that's important too, is Hoblom said. And he was writing this in the fifties. See first rod As I say, like in the fifties, but this age of capital this was like the first This was like the NACA early

stage of global globalization. Okay, because if you were a major capitalist power, you know, and again I involved in our capitalists and within the terms Hoswam doesn't, I don't use those kinds of terms, but you know, you the British Empire held equity basically at every continent, you know, and America was not yet a superpower, but you'd find American goods basically all over the world, okay, And there wasn't a there wasn't a unified banking structure, but lending

across national frontiers at scale, with governments guaranteeing financial instruments that started blowing up, you know, and that that would have been unthinkable before. You know, in a lot of countries it was literally illegal for uh, national banks to you know, to trade across the national frontiers or to

or to issue financial instruments in foreign markets. But a lot of countries simply wouldn't deal in your currency, like even if it was even even if it was viewed as you know, a desirable currency and speculators would invest in it. Oh and and and purising foreign currencies at this time was also largely illegal. It was quote unquote currency speculation. It was like literally a crime, which is crazy, but that that that that was the norm, you know.

a kind of outside cloud. Okay, and not the arms industry per se, but the the kind of a terrestrial manufacturing enterprises that facilitate the arms industry. They developed outside power like as did again you know, uh, financial institutions. This wasn't some conspiracy and that's not why World War went happened, but it was a but it facilitated resorting to military he measures to remedy power, political imbalances, uh at scale, Okay, there was a perfect storm at things.

And again that's that's really important, you know. And in my own like manuscript to try and emphasize this point and has well, I don't. It's not like my primary authority on it, but I do cite. But uh yeah, moving on. It's also too domestically, whether you're talking about

the United States, the UK, France, or Germany. The way such things I've got to mention were characterized kind of differed along the you know, local custom and cultural differences and convention, but kind of like the link the Lingua franc of government became you know this like there's like this resurgence sort of like enlightenment shivelus. So whether you're in Berlin, London, Washington, Paris, all your heart from government is oh see, like this is like an age of

unprecedented plenty. You know, it's the age of reason and science and progress. But people were getting like ground into dust, you know, and like working in a factory or a slaughterhouse. That was like hell, you know, it's not I tell a lot of guys in the right who they you know, they throw shade on stuff like Upton Sinclair's the Jungle and I'm like, okay, I'm like, yeah, I don't agree with those kinds of conclusions either. But what he describes,

that's that's that's one hundred percent accurate. You know, there'd be guys, uh, there was no welfare state. You couldn't just get like a link card. So if you were out of work, like you weren't eating, and basically your ability to make a living depended on your ability to physically like perform, you know, and guys would die on

the job. Like there's like ten percent like attrition and like a steel mill or like a slaughterhouse, you know, and if God for bidding, get injured or like you lose three fingers on your hand in some machine, you know, they're the big the biggest surplus in any major city at this time was like that of like evil bodied men who want to work.

as some sort of factory worker. Like, yeah, that was tremendously disruptive, and you know it also, I mean how mom was insightful in his sociological takedown because unlike a lot of people, you know, show Schumpeter's big critique of the Marcus paradigm and I'm gonna bring this back, I'm going somewhere with this was like, look like Marcus aren't really talking about class, like the job you do isn't your class, you know, like your class is what you're

born into, and it's defined by how you relate to other people similarly born to this kind of like social stratum that isn't really mobile, you know. So in Schumpeter's view, which is the traditional view, it doesn't matter what job you're doing around which money you have, Like, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a class, and class isn't something you can just like jump up from or down from, like within a generation. And Osbom accepted

some of those premises. He's like, yeah, you know, one of the reasons why the working class exists is because the social capital, the kind of facilitated no blessedge oblige as well as you know, kind of the communitarian impulse that you know, stood in for the welfare state and

antiquity and things. He's like, capitalism like rips all that apart, and it makes every man like a stranger, and it enshrines the war of all against all not only as like an an implacable reality, but as like a positive good. Almost so the only thing you have in common with like your neighbors figuratively and literally is that you're all being crushed like in these in this like industrial labor environment, and you know you've got to stand together or all die.

And that's like what the working claim is. You know, it's not it's not a class in like the traditional sense, or there's not some like basic affinity between between people, like they're your comrades because you're you're like in the same way you are like with the guys you're like unjustly locked in prison with. You know, it's it's circumstances

that like drive you together. So and that and that that actually tracks with like what marsh was talking about in dos Capital, Like if when you talk about alienation, he's not just talking about the process of whereby labor is not personal anymore. You don't create things. You're not a producer. You're just doing this like pointless process like over and over and over again. It's dangerous and dirty

and painful. But it's alienation from your fellow man. And even if you haven't to be married, like you never see your wife. She she's stuck with some dangerous, dirty job like you have. You know, at the end of the day, like maybe you like get to sleep by saying betisar and occasionally you collide in intimacy and have children. But he's like that that alienation touchs and concerns every aspect of the workers existence. It's not it's not. It doesn't just like remove his labor from his own domain

and creative power. It alienates him from like what should be his community. It alienates him from his Ethnos, it alienates him from his wife, It alienates him from you know, he doesn't have neighbors anymore. You know that this all tracks and yeah, so he makes a lot out of that, and that's one of the reasons why this process whereby the Vestigel aristocracy, he's able to like hang on to power because people were people like bonded in pee andage.

They are dependent upon like the lord of the manner. And this is a deeply psychological process and it's enduring. It's in a Hosmon view, Okay, this alien this, this this alienation that is a matter of life and death. In a lot of cases, it sounds a matter of clodial life, like it stands to kill you. He's like, really, the only remedy these people have is like appeal to the church or to like appeal to traditional social elements. That are kind of like the guardians of the culture,

if you want to think about it that way. So they appeal to aristocrats and stuff, you know, for justice. And that's one of the things that keeps these guys like if not relevant, like able to remain like in situ.

as well as insight into sociological questions. He's like, we've got to educate people to break them of these things, of these tendencies. We've basically got to like break them on their short term self interest or their attachment to it, because we've got to literally kill the aristocracy we've got to allow the bourgeoisie to conquer everything. We've got to let them consolidate. We've got to let them create conditions

of plenty before we kill them figuratively and literally. You know, it's a very brutal view of a struggle processes, but within the bounded rationality of Marxist Leninism that tracks, you know, and there is like a kernel of truth to it, not in terms of its ethical conclusions, but I mean, like today this is a bit of a tangent, but I'm was making the point to guys, this has died somewhat, but it's it won't die completely. This is a favorite

refrain of of dissident people as well. There's gonna be a massive financial collapse and a great depression. That's never going to happen again, Okay, because it can't happen in the state of information awareness. Like to the second information awareness, that kind of stuff only happens long to uncertainties. There's not uncertainties anymore. Like that doesn't mean the dollar can't like bottom out, but even if it did, that doesn't mean like you're not gonna be able to buy food. Okay, Now,

there could absolutely be shortages. I don't believe in climate change in the sense of these crazy people who think who are stand in like apocalypse cult for them. But I'm certain that there's all kinds of environmental factors that just owing to God's will or the nuances of.

stock market. That would never happen again. That's retarded, you know. And guys like how One predicted that he said, stuff's gonna largely be rubberized moving forward. There's not gonna be like food shortages, you know, there's not gonna it's gonna be very easy to produce things that today him talking

in like nineteen fifties are hard to produce. You know, you're gonna like a lot of these problems are gonna go away, you know, and that and that happened, you know, And that's one of the reasons why this is I mean, this is probably not the scope, but one of the ways you can tell, like our government is like full of like crackheads and insane people is because if they didn't overreach and remotely smart, they could basically hold on

to power indefinitely. Because this isn't the nineteen twenties, because because people aren't going hungry, because there's not a military draft or we're respected to like sacrifice your son in a meat grinder. You know, there's not a Soviet Union whereby you know, at any at any time basically you know, some enemy society that's like mobile lies a massive scale could decide to like sue for war to remedy the

kind of uneven power paradigm, you know. Like so so it's it's you can tell these people are insane because like they're they're basically burning the house down when there's no reason to do that. But you know that the degree to which, uh that that's also why too. I mean, like I said, I I it's it's it's dumb for people to claim that people like Missus Harris are Marxists anyway, But it's Marxism, isn't just Marxism, isn't wokeism, it's not

it's not it's not liberalism. It's it's it's it's a very discreete uh like claim and series of claims about historical processes. And in the short term, Marxists absolutely want capitalists to succeed. They don't want it to fail, they want it to fully succeed. They wanted to conquer every thing, and then they want to kill the people at the

helms of the apparatus. Like that's whole point. You know what what's strange about how it developed in terms of actual practice is that it did it did again like the like like the the quite literally like the heart of the of the Bolshevik Revolution in the real world was a place that really had no like industrial working class. You know, it was just like basically backwards monarchy that ruled over this this this this is this massive territory.

You know, like the Russian Empire had more in common with the Ottomans than it did with Europe. Okay, I'm not saying like racially or whatever. Like I'm not taking a position on that, so I don't know, people get mad, But in terms of the way it was structured, and in terms of it being like an anachronism in the twentieth century when it finally got brought down, it's really really strange that this is where the bullshrep Revolution was

consolidated and truly succeeded. You know. That's why. That's one of the reasons why when I talk a lot to these guys. I'm not Jackson Hinkle himself. I don't know him, but I know guys in his orbit and guys who describe to that kind of worldview. So like, there are a lot of there. Like rebuttals to people like me are like, well, you can't extrapolate a lot from the Soviet Union. It's like, well, I can, but even if I accept that postulate, well, I can't extrapolate a lot,

even by your own criteria, from East Germany. Okay, you know, and it's well there you go, Okay, you tell you tell me, like East Germany wasn't an industrial state like it. I I mean, if you want to perfectly realize, like marcis Alana state. It was the DDR. I mean that

they can't be argued. I mean I suppose like they're I suppose they're like rebuttal of that would be like, well, that was an artificial state that emerged out of like military exigencies, and you know the fact that it was beliguered and threatened, you know, owing to conditions imposed by capitalists like is somehow like takes off at table as as a pure example of practice, but because it may you know, the to bring it back again, I forgive

m from ramblings. I don't feel good, but the uh, the degree of which, again like marked actual Marxists viewed these things as necessary processes like can't be denied. Like Marxist will not be in the street saying like we need we need, we need Acne Widget Company to hire more women because it's bad not to And they wouldn't be saying like we need to text these people more like none of that would be like in their horizon. They'd be like, we want Acne Widget Company to become

like as massive as possible. We wanted to insinuate itself into everything. We wanted to be able to produce everything we needed, you know, almost like magic, and then we want to kill the people who own it, and we want to take it and we want to make it the public domain of the workers. That's what they want or want it. Like I said, I I white guy like Jackson Hinkel. I think they're playing an important role right now if you're any kind of dissident or in any kind of actual resistance actor.

guy's a big shot. I don't like him. It's like that basic, you know, and it's like it doesn't and like you can only that too is a symptom of prosperity as well, because even yeah, you read Ernest Younger was a fascinating guy in all kinds of ways, but he lived through this stuff, and you know, he kind of he was kind of a strass arrist man, you know, like he he was very much a socialist. And if you read something like The Glass Bees, the character of

Zapperoni likes he's obviously like kind of a matchup. But like Howard Hughes and Andrew Carnegie and and like Walt Disney. But uh, you know, and like that, guys like Zapperoni are real type. But you know, guys like Younger thought these guys were historical giants. They're like, these guys are gonna change the world. They're gonna change everything, and they're playing an essential role in this historical process. You know. That's it's not I mean, I'm I'm as anti communist

as it's possible to be. I don't think that should be in dispute. But communists, they're they're not dummies, or they weren't dummies who were just like I'm I don't like that guy because he has more stuff than me. It has nothing to do with that, you know, Like, it's not it's not just like dumb a lumping bullshit or like guys who think like gangster rappers or something like.

That's not like that, that's fucking retarded, you know. And this, uh, the these it's it's these like internet guys who have never read a book in their life like calling people. It's like goofy as fuck. But but no, I think, you know, and today I REALI wasn't going aside the scope. Don't forgive me for that if it's boring people. But guys like Emmanuel Wallerstein, guys who uh, these kinds of post Marxist types who do like talk about you know,

social justice within globalism. I mean, yeah, obviously I don't like have common cause with those guys, but they're really the only like intelligent aspect of the left. And I think those guys are making a comeback because everybody hates the fucking regime and like literally everybody hates liberals, like everybody fucking hates liberals and things. They're like awful pieces

of shit, you know. That's why, like I said, like people, I mean, he'll throw shit on me all the time, and I don't care, Like I'm not here to make friends and I'm used to it. But you know, the uh they get mad at me, whether it's because you know, I got respect for Moslims and view them as like an essential part of the new resistance, or they get mad at me for like retweeting like Jackson Hinkle or something.

But it's like they don't understand part of bringing down the regime and discrediting it is like pointing out not just how morally bankrupt it is, but how like staggering like ignorant it is. And it's acolytes are you know? And if there's if there's a serious left wing with revolutionary ambitions, that's not a bunch of degenerate natural slaves, Like that's that's a good thing, man, Like how is that bad? You know, like you got people can't like

take their like personal feelings out of stuff. It's pathetic. It's like talking to a bunch of like it's like talking to about a little kids or like modeling old women or something.

You know, it's not gonna happen again in a thousand years, you know, like that that the end of the uh the uh the changing like like everything these days is changing, like I you know, like I mean the point before about like just today, I was talking to some of the fellas about like public education is dying and nobody believes anymore. Like those law enforcement like a couple of months back, they're like I see in Chicago now, like I said, even you know, like like policing is gonna

be privatized. It's you know in the South, Like I mean you're in I'm sure you see this, you know how like they're still trying to fight the run drugs like it's nineteen eighty two or something. And like there was this ridiculous press conference and they like the Tennessee Threau of Investigation they held this like press conference. It

was them Homeland Security atf FBI. There's this whole mass investigation to literally bust these like two like outlaw bikers like sligging meth and they're like we've were taking drugs off the street. And the comments were like you people are idiots, you know, they're like what what do you think this is? You know, it's like like there wasn't like a single positive comment, man, And it's like this is like a time war. It's like what the fuck

are these people doing? You know, like nobody believes in that garbage anymore. Now now you got homeland security like shaken down, like trailer park meth heads. Really, you know, like that's like that's pathetic, man. You know, this whole apparatus, the people sustaining it, they're these like increasingly aged parasites who can't like adapt to the twenty first century, you know, And that's one of the things that swept Trump into power.

It's the kind of stuff hobsbamb and Franklin, the Marxist we're talking about, Like like they the way they would have viewed Trump is like you know this, They wouldn't viewed him a some like arch reaction areya. They would have been like, well that this guy is basically a con man. But he's saying he's gonna like sweep away these obsolescent aspects of of of state that people like don't think serves their interests anymore. And that and that's

why a lot of people voted for Trump. It's not I mean, yeah, there's like people who just like love Trump. There's people who you know, like uh, who would have voted for RFK Junior, who are just like protest voters, but like your average like man or lady, like it's not particularly politically sophisticated or inclined. Like they voted for Trump because their instincts are basically sound and they're like

what what what the hell is going on here? Like we they'll put together that's a regime they live under. It's like this twentieth century obsolete structure. They don't take a out on those turns, and they realize, like this is like a zombie regime, like it doesn't make sense anymore, like why you know, like it's it's and then you know, it's uh, it's really interesting to see this develop in real time, man, you know. And that's why one of the things like part of my vetting process, the people

who I kind of take on as allies. I mean, that's a complicated process. I can't really break it down into like criteria, but one thing that's essential was like if like we do not want reaction areas, we do not want people who think the good old days were dope, or that we need to like turn back time or that, or people who think that like n Segue is like making things like where we take over the government and can like manage its puireaucers. It's like people like that

are not with the program. And I mean now that not only is that like not at all what we're about, but that's that's got nothing to do with the trajectory of history and stuff like that. I don't mean to be I don't mean to like abrogate this, but I really don't feel good. So if we could, like if we could, if we could wrap it up, that'd be And if you want to, if you want to do another episode because this wasn't up to snuff, we can absolutely do that. No.

You know, like it's yeah, yeah, but it's also too like they it's probat of internalizing like enemy conceptual vocabulary, like people who they they just like mirror like that they use terms like racist or like they think like, oh, I'm a capitalist, because that's who my ops like say, I am. It's like, so you define yourself, I will like somebody like Missus Harris or Joe Biden says, or like what some like idiot whet professor says like, I

I mean, how basic are you? You know? I don't use that kind of terms because they again we're talking about people like Osbam. I kind of have to use a shorthand.

that was that was pretty insightful. And like I said, the term industrial society, that that there's a lot more meaningful than capitalism, you know, and it's and obviously too like a terms inherently reduction. It's like like the capitalist is everything he does it's just like stack up capital and like assets. Like that's not that's not the way people think. Like even some guy in Wall Street who's like, you know, kind of a stereotypical walk her Huster, that's

not like the way he thinks. Like he's you know, he and a bay. It's the reason he, Like, the reason a guy like that his world is defined by money is because that's like power activity in his world. And that's like a way, that's a way he can like engage in power activity congruous like his discrete capabilities and and like psychology. It's not like it's not like money is like this ending itself to everybody like in the capitalist system. But I mean that's these these things

are important. But yeah, like again, man, like I said, sorry if this was not the par but I this it's been. I'm not trying to be a martyr. But just because like I do have responsibility to people, I thinks this week has not been great in terms of.

you like the stuff I do. I'm on social media at Capital r e A L Underscore number seven h O A S seven seven seven. The best place to find me is substack. That's from my pod is and stuff. It's uh real Thomas seven seven seven at subsec dot com. And yeah, if in the description, if you could include uh the Merse wings too. You know, I'm like a big like T shirt and clothes and merse guy, and uh that's actually been selling pretty well, which makes me

very happy. But yeah, that's that's what I've got.