Decoding Marx: A Journey Through the Modern Revolution with Jared Baxter

I haven't read any text by you , actually , but I like your syllabus because I find the interpretive tradition of this period both rich and infuriating , because the secondary literature tends to overinterpret our , make consistent the primary literature in ways that , if you know , if you face the primary literature , it actually kind of often isn't , and you see where these

distinctions really kind of emerge . And in the case of revolutionary history , did to add a third component . Not just you have the reception of these revolutionary texts versus how they would have been conceived when they were written .

You also have the what did these people actually do versus what they said they did , which for me has been an interpretive rubric for understanding Marx and Ingalls .

That has been maddening , actually , just trying to Like , reconcile the different positions over time , particularly as we have more and more of their work readily available and decent translations , and then also their , their private letters and correspondences about what they expected , or the , the s payday , or the international studio , and then all of a sudden it's very

hard to actually even talk about something like a , in my opinion , like an Orthodox Marxism or an Orthodox Marxist Linenism , because it's quite literally all over the place trying to reconcile this with that and this debate with that debate .

And the secondary literature does this , and there's some quite good secondary literature and I think how drapers five book series on Marx and revolution is actually quite good . I think in zoetra does in . So traversal recent book is decent .

I mentioned to you Neil Davidson but each one of these has something that you know like a polemic that they're trying to argue , basically by making the history a little bit more consistent than if you just deal with the raw text and try to compare it with what actually happened . You are , you are left with my .

My first encounter with your classes was a reading to session reading series you did on the black Jackabins and contrasting the kind of historiography that CLR James constructs versus you know what , what he doesn't deal with , which is both he is kind of for lack of a better word whitewashing of the French Revolutionary Tradition position on race , which I think you

and I both agree is a lot more all over the map . But then then CLR James presents it , and also his just skipping of things like this . So you know , just , you know desolines like a tragic figure in that book , but we're not really going to talk about it very deeply . So that was very interesting to me .

So I knew that you came to these texts with a certain amount of historical skepticism about what they were trying to do . So let's start off , though , with with Marx's conception of like what what early social democracy was attempting to do , and their understanding of what booze rod revolutions were , before dipping into , you know , the nitty gritty . So what ?

What do you think ? How do you think Marxist thoughts on the booze rod revolution ? What do you think they actually were and and are they ? Are they cohesive throughout his life or are they ? Are they kind of a moving target ?

Right , in Marxist terms , this maps pretty neatly on to what he thinks of the booze rod revolution versus proletarian revolution . Right , and for Marx , this kind of all centers on the question of how to interpret the French Revolution . Right , there's an outline , you know , within the early writings .

He's got this outline for a book on the state that doesn't seem to have gotten too much further than that , but he talks about the French Revolution as the genesis of the modern state . The French Revolution is this origin point .

You can also find , you know , elsewhere in the early writings , the critique of Hegel in 1843 on the Jewish question and the introduction of the critique of Hegel , 1844 . What it boils down to is basically this right , the , the political revolution is what gives us political equality . Right , it makes us all equal in an abstract way , as citizens .

Right , we're each of us a citizen . We each have equal rights . We are each subject to the same laws . Right , we can vote , we can make our opinions known , we can run for office , equally , right .

It's all very well and good , until you turn to the side of civil society , where you can see very clearly that people , in spite of this abstract equalization , remain very unequal , especially if we are talking about questions of money and ownership of property , right . So that is the political revolution . It is basically in Marx's terms .

He says , civil society emancipates itself from the state . It sets up the political state , ie the government , as the realm of the political civil society becomes the realm of the unpolitical right , your , your unpolitical , your private life , you know , of course , these distinctions are not set in stone . There's this dynamic of well , you can politicize things , right .

You can make it a question whether is this , this is a matter of concern for the state or not . But basically it sets up these two antagonistic spheres right , civil society in the state , with the political state in some ways taking important things over from the role that religion used to play .

Right , these days , in so far as we have these , these sorts of collective aspirations , in so far as we want to relate to , you know , the people as a whole , as we , in so far as we want to see ourselves as part of this kind of organic totality . I mean , that's that happens through the state .

Basically , right , the state is supposed to be the embodiment of the will of the people . Right , it's supposed to be this embodiment of popular sovereignty ? Right . But pretty quickly marks realizes that that is not actually the case .

The state is just pretending to be that , right , and in fact it constitutes a sphere of its own which can have certain issues which are can even be antagonistic to those of civil society . But the important point is that politics can become a kind of trap .

Just as you know , religion misdirects people from looking at changing the material world as they live in it . So to can say politics , and you know , it's , it's the stuff . Like , well , you know , you can get people all hopped up over these certain issues , these certain principles , like , oh , you know , it's about liberty , it's about this and that .

So you can have these situations where people are enthusiastically voting for a party that does not represent their economic interests , as marks would understand them , right , which is in fact at base Nothing more than a project of preserving the reign of private property , preserving the nation of the bourgeois over the working class , so on and so forth , right .

So this is sort of the critique of politics that comes up in the early writings . Basically , politics is not able to abolish its condition of possibility for marks that can be considered as a private property .

So the idea is , if we organize the social revolution , the proletarian revolution , right , we're starting with the class that owns nothing , that has nothing , that is nothing . I mean , this is sort of what he says in the 19th century , of Hegel in 1844 , because it's nothing . It is the class that really can become everything , right ?

So he's , of course , paraphrasing CSS famous phrase about the third estate . The third estate is nothing , it wants to become everything . Well , the third estate cannot really do that because at bottom , it ends up being a bourgeois political project , it ends up being about ownership of private property , private enterprise , right .

But the proletarians , those are the ones who can really carry out the true social revolution , where we aren't just changing the form of the state , we're not just changing who's running the state . What we're going to do is we're going to change the economic structure of society itself by abolishing private property .

And once we do that and carry it through , and after , you know , a certain transitional phase , which you know , of course , marks has various things to say , and his thinking on that is one of the main axes along which you can kind of trace the evolution of his thought over his own .

But after that transitional phase , basically , we will no longer have politics , right , there's no longer going to be political relations because , according to marks , political relations derive in the final analysis from property relations , and so once we get rid of the state , we're actually going to have the state , as the , you know , realize totality of the individual

and the collective , this great unity that it's supposed to be but clearly isn't in this present day , and so on and so forth .

So I think that is a pretty consistent understanding that operates , that this whole body of work , this distinction between political and social revolution right , of course it's not a black and white distinction Every social revolution necessarily has to take a political form .

This is where he differs , for instance , from the Prudhonists who will talk about we'll talk more about them later on . But the whole point is you have to take political power , right , you need to organize a political movement that will take political power . That's a necessary condition for pushing through the social revolution .

But as Mark says in his marginal notes on the oppression , that's another early article from 1844 . Once the social movement succeeds in a taining this political power , then the political whole falls away right and and you see this time and again in the , in the body of writings that we're looking at .

We're mainly going to be drawing from the Verso edition of the political writings .

That is a compilation of three books that were put together by David Fernbach , which cover political writings of Marx and also angles from revolutions of 1848 period to the end of their lives , and we're going to see time and time again this distinction between political and social revolution coming up . That part is , I think , pretty , pretty consistent , right .

Even as much as maybe things evolve over his life , he still thinks that this remains the operative and valid distinction for describing what he thinks ought to happen , what he's trying to bring about , namely the social revolution versus political revolutions that basically can't go much further than achieving an abstract equality in relation to a state that merely pretends

to be the unity of the individual and collective and that keeps us in this sort of trap that we're in , where we have these terrible problems of inequality and , of course , the exploitation of the working class .

But there's a whole lot of new , more formalized schemas of revolution that emerge after that . I mean , like the difference between political and social gets broken down even further between political , social , cultural levels of political , the kind of vague schemas introduced by Marx .

Whether and then , it's unclear to me , even from reading historical context , whether those schemas are because of an imminent critique of positions taken within the , the first international , or whether or not they are in later and also within debates within the all German workers you league , or if there is an actual hardening of a schema that emerges only in the

critique of the girth of program that it that runs through Marx , because it's really not , it's not articulated as a schema until linen , and then and then its interpretations become more and more rigid through the Soviet and Chinese kind of state craft .

But one of the things that that I find interesting that you mentioned is the tension in the state as you need the political power to to basically undo the political power .

The debate where weirdly Marx is kind of triangulating with the like chartist and reformist in England and like partially the blankiest in in France against the pro donist in France , but he's also not really granting , like one of the lot of the lot of the chartist and reformist want a kind and like the Los Allianz one which is a kind of permanent state bureaucracy

to mediate between the classes , to keep the boos wedgie down , etc . Because increasingly I think from his letters that Marx becomes more and more concerned about class collaborationism over time , like this become , and so he's in a harder and harder position as to what he's actually advocating in my mind .

Because on one hand he's advocating that you need to create a new state , crush it but also also create a new one . But your goal in creating a new one is also to immediately dismantle the conditions that would make a nation state possible , so that you would eventually get out of the need for a nation state and society could just administer itself .

And I think that's an interesting . I think that's an interesting contradiction and like like one of the few things where I'm somewhat sympathetic to like the book to like the Bacoon and critique that like . Well , how do you think you're going to do that ? Like ?

Because in strengthening the state to crush elements of the state you're going to create all these incentives is going to make it harder and harder for you to turn this away .

And you know what Marx's response to that is yeah , but what you want to do , bacoon , and basically , is have a very small portion of society lord over everything and by getting rid of the state , you get rid of the ability of a society to push back on them and you're going to use it like violence .

And I find this this kind of problematic and as you go into 20th century revolutions , I think people just kind of want to make it go away , like , because what you increasingly see the focus on is state power . And this is one of these areas where I think going back and looking at the beginning actually helps us see the focus towards the end .

So what do we make of ? You know , yes , marx was involved in the revolutions of 1848 , although famously he did not fight in them , as both Bacoon and and Wagner would like point out , you know , although Ingalls did . But where do we feel like Marx got his understanding of Jacobinism , as he states in the .

Well , let me rephrase that when do we think Marx gets his understanding of Jacobinism , as stated by Ingalls in the introduction to the class struggles in France , because Ingalls is actually a person who states this more clearly ? Where do we think that Marx ? What tradition of understanding is he pulling from ?

I mean other than Hagels , which I do think he is pulling from that .

It doesn't seem like Marx gets much further with this plan than some preparatory notes which are like in the fourth division of the mega right , his notebooks and such like that , but it is a continuing preoccupation of his right .

I mean , I think that the convention , the radical Jacobin convention of 1793 to 1794 , sometimes more popularly known as the Reign of Terror , is a crucial reference point for Marx for a very long period of time , because he needs to find a political form through which his ideas of social revolution could be realized .

Right , he is not like Prudone saying that we can just completely do this on our own in society . We'll set up our cooperatives and eventually there'll be a bank and we can just do all this stuff . We don't need to touch political power or get involved with changing laws or voting for representatives or any of that .

Marx consistently stresses the necessity to take political power right , and the radical Jacobin convention is the crucial example for a number of reasons . I mean , in the first place , you have what the Jacobin convention actually did , right . I mean , on the one hand , you have the famous maximum right , the price control law , price and wage control law .

You have this role of requisitioning in the context of the war economy , where the state basically takes over a lot of the functions that would normally be done by private markets . Right , you have this intensification of seizures of land of the emigres , right . A lot of that latter part , a lot of the really interesting stuff , remains a decree , like .

One particular moment I like is Sanjus has this decree where he says that the property of enemies of the state will be confiscated and it will be redistributed to indigents . Right , so that's a very interesting idea that introduces a redistributive paradigm which is very different from the ideas of indemnities which we've seen many times during this period .

Right , there's the idea that , well , we'll take your property but we'll give you an indemnity . You see that with so , for instance with slave owners , they get paid an indemnity to compensate them for the loss of the slave that's been freed . This idea of redistribution is very different because it's not compensation for a financial loss .

It's this broader idea that something in society is unjust , and we're going to solve this by taking from those who have and giving to the have-nots .

Of course , this decree of Sanjus does not really get put into practice before he and the rest of the radical leaders of the Committee of Public Safety get put in the guillotine with the Thermodorean reaction , but it does some stuff that remains extremely radical to the present day , right , I mean here we are , however , many centuries later , and the stuff that the

Jacobin Convention was able to do , I mean it puts a lot of what we've seen I mean pretty much everything that we've seen in American politics to shame .

Right , I mean sometimes people talk about oh , we're going to use eminent domain for this , and that I mean in LA , there's a campaign that's been going on for a very long time to get the city to basically eminent domain this building that used to be affordable housing , and now the guy who owns it he's not bound by the covenants anymore , he wants to jack up

the rent and kick out the people , and they've been trying for a very long time to get the city to purchase the property through eminent domain , ie force the sale and then set it up as affordable housing and perpetuity , right .

I mean , this is one of the really cutting edge radical ideas to this day , and it was kind of what the Jacobin Convention would do just for breakfast . Right . And the especially important aspect of this I think this gets into some of the broader themes that I already raised with regards to the will of the people , the sovereignty of the people .

Right , so the convention , of course , is elected by universal suffrage . Right , but these elections take place in a time where things are already starting to get very tense in France , right , where having the wrong political opinions could get you in real trouble up to you know , maybe being guillotined .

There's another element of it , too , where you have these people , the French people , who were not previously accustomed to vote for much of anything , and now basically every office , down to like even the priests they would vote on the priests right .

Now they're voting for basically everything judges , not just the representatives , all this stuff , right , so it was a little overwhelming , right , they weren't really used to that , but the result being that you have this election where everyone can participate but basically very few people do .

I think the turnout is something like 10% or less of eligible voters actually showed up to cast a ballot for their representatives in the convention and what you end up with is a small group of activists taking control of the power .

Right , this is important because you know what , when it comes down to very radical changes I mean , you can talk about whatever you want to talk about abolishing property , abolishing prisons .

You know so many things that are floated on the radical left they just aren't things where you're going to get a huge majority of people saying , oh yes , you know , we want to do that Pretty much . You have to find a way to get a small group in power that's very motivated to push through these things , even in the face of these not being terribly popular .

Right , that is a problem that I think Marx was very conscious of . I mean , this is where the theory of the Vanguard Party basically comes from , right , I mean ? You see , I mean the earliest example of it that comes up in the course is in Engels peasant war in Germany . Right , he's talking about Thomas Munzer , who was this ?

He was a much more radical theologian than Luther . Right , luther basically wants to compromise with the bourgeoisie and Munzer takes the sides of the peasants and says let's violently overthrow these aristocrats and these bourgeoisie and we'll liberate ourselves and establish the kingdom of God on earth right .

And so the difference between the two , luther and Munzer , is that Luther represents a kind of majoritarian , he's kind of a middle of the road sort of person who's following the winds of where popular opinion blows .

And Munzer and his party , they represent sort of this radical fringe that's in advance of many of even their own coalition , and they lead it in the direction that it's going to go . If we're talking about a communist revolution , if we're talking about putting through those kinds of changes in society and in politics , that is what it comes down to , right .

You aren't really going to get hordes of people turning out the ballot box to vote for this stuff . You've got to find a way to seize the political power to push through changes that aren't going to be broadly popular , and that's what the convention is a model for , right . So the convention has its limitations , right .

Basically , the class basis of the convention for Marx is bourgeois , right . So this comes up in . On the Jewish question , there is an interesting passage , which I think is the first time , to my knowledge , that Marx discusses this idea of permanent revolution , which becomes very important later on with , for instance , the March 1850 address .

But he says , okay , so the state tries to do this stuff . It tries to do the maximum , it tries to do these confiscations and these redistributions and stuff like this . It basically tries to declare the revolution to be permanent . But it's not able to do that .

Right , it's going to collapse because the bourgeois political state is not capable of abolishing its conditions of possibility , it's not capable of doing away with private property altogether , right . So of course the convention fails , right . That's one point that we're going to be looking at in the course . Right , you have 1789 , you have 1793 .

What's the relationship of the two ? Marx thinks that 1793 is basically subordinate to 1789 , right , it wasn't ever going to be something that would , you know , truly leapfrog what a bourgeois revolution can do and go straight into the proletarian revolution .

But it provides basically the political model that he has to work with up until the Paris Commune of 1871 , right . So with the Parisian Commune now he has a new structure to work with , which doesn't quite have the limitations that the convention had . Right , but of course it fails .

But it gives him a new political form through which he can argue that we're going to put these changes through right , and so I mean that's some of the reasons why the French Revolution is so important , why the Jacobins are so important to Marx .

He's not an enthusiastic Jacobin per se , I mean from his perspective the Jacobins were basically a bourgeois party right , they weren't trying to do away with private property or anything like that .

But they find a mode of political organization that allows them to drive through very radical changes in a very short period of time and that becomes sort of starting point and a crucial reference for Marx's theory of political change . Ie , how are we going to make the political change happen ?

Then you have to understand beyond that how he read what happened with the communards and what they both provided him as a model , but also what they could not do . And then you need to understand his debates with the blankiest about democratic legitimacy

. But this paradox in Marx and Engels about democratic legitimacy I don't think ever gets resolved . I know people try to force it to be resolved in their interpretations , but on one hand Marx does completely see that if you just turn it over even to the proletariat , much less to the general oppressed masses , that it's not going to do what you want it to do .

His hope in the manifesto is that the advanced section of the proletariat asterisk . We're never going to define what that means un-astrous In correlation with socialist asterisk . We realize that they were not all workers , but we're also not going to talk a lot about that asterisk .

They'll lead the proletariat in a vanguard fashion but they will eventually attain popular legitimacy because they are historically inevitably right from Marx's view . So it's sort of the you will be granted democratic legitimacy after the fact , in the realization , which is you know the way Marx argues a lot of things .

I was looking at his debates about productive and unproductive labor and you literally can't know if labor is productive until it's valorized . So there's a whole lot of stuff that you only know what category it's in . In the whole Hegel , the Al-Obnurah flies at Don problem that everything you realize it after has already happened . But this does set up a tension .

I mean pretty strongly about democratic legitimacy and democratic norms and yet also ideological legitimacy , ideological norms and a kind of maximalist program .

And while Marx doesn't take the most maximalist view , he actually I think I know a lot of Marxists are going to be mad that I say this I think he actually deflects from himself by using both the utopians and the anarchists to deflect that some of his own positions would not actually pass democratic muster .

And , as people have pointed out , if you actually apply the critiques of the utopian socialist and the anarchist to Marx himself , he's actually guilty of some of the things that he , the him and Ingalls are accusing them of , which is like no , they're not trying to do workshops of the future , but they do kind of think there's a wide way to do stuff and it's

regardless of how democratic it is .

And I think , even when you look at , like ultra Marxist tendencies , like you know , the left communist traditions , this , this plays out that there's two spears of left , of left communism there's the hyper egalitarian ones , democratic ones , the councilists , and there's the Bardigas to utterly and completely reject the concept of the democ , of democracy , not just under

bourgeois conditions but under any conditions . Nor do they want to replace it with a singular leader . They want to replace it with a nebulous party form that's basically run by technocrats , like they wouldn't call them technocrats .

But you know , the organic centralism model that Bardiga actually posits is a is a model of expertise as decided upon by the party , because the party is the brain of the proletariat , according to Bardiga .

And one of the things that I've been that I have sort of wrestled with in reading Marx is , I think , both the councilist and the Bardigas reading actually is justified and Marx fairly legitimate , and see , as are all the ones in between , including the , you know the Marxist , leninist , stalinist , the Marxist , leninist , maoist , the Marxist .

You know the Leninist , the Trotskyist , et cetera . They all have actually things from Marxist writings that you pointed out , permanent revolution . You know the only , basically only two schools picked it up , which is like the the most aggressive cultural revolutionist ends of Maoist and Trotskyist pick up on permanent revolution in a real way .

Everybody else kind of just like backs away from that to some degree . So I find that I find that interesting because to me it indicates that there is an unresolved problem that Marx is trying to resolve because he is . He's not .

I do not think he's doing what we would see in later Marxist , where they're just impugning to work in class popular legitimacy things that there's no evidence that has broad popular support .

But there is a sort of like well , we have the Hegelian in itself for itself category and basically the proletariat will have come of age when it's acts in it for itself and we know it acts for itself because it does what we want , which is which gets really articulated .

And again , this is after the subject of your stuff and Lukash , where this is almost circular , like there's no way to know or judge , even in the moment , when something is actually , you know , really embodying the methodology of Marx and the spirit of the proletariat .

Because you can't know , until there's an alignment between for itself and in itself , and only when communism exists can you assume that's happened . So there's no way to know , even in the moment of a revolution , if something is actually of a revolutionary moment . He goes way farther than even linen does .

But one thing I was going to ask you about , and then we can go back to Marx .

But you know , when I was going through your , your readings of this in your and I think you do an interesting thing , and we'll come back to this towards the end of our interview where you put the Marxist tradition in in line with kind of the French , I would say , like bourgeois , reactionary , as opposed to say like the , the blood and soil , like the Mestre

reactionary reading of the French Revolution , because I don't know that that's helpful , but like the Francois Theré reading of , you know , the kind of the burnt ex-communist , turned , turned conservative , bourgeois , liberal , almost reactionary reading of Marx .

You use that as a backdrop because it , because there's a reading of of Jules , of , like Jules Michelet and that which I think is , you know , we haven't talked about this , but I think you think this is you know kind of where the Marxist under . I say Marxist , we're not imputing Marx of pulling mostly from Michelet .

The Marxist understanding of the French Revolution really kind of comes from its Mr Le , and then later on , what's his name ? I just blanked the who's . The who's the French Marxist who wrote about the .

But he's really pulling from some very strange Historic graphics , like I mean , he's very influence , influenced by , like gambitist , gambitist of Vico , which is not normally somebody I don't associate Vico with the left , for example , like at all .

So in fact most of the people I associate with Vico or tend to be on the on the anti Enlightenment German spectrum of things , you know that the post German idealism , romantic reaction , end of of of historiography , not the revolutionary one . So I was going to ask you what do you think Michelet's contribution to this understanding really is ?

I chose for a number of reasons with the first session of this course .

So one of the biggest regrets I have in trying to put this course together I got through like four drafts of the syllabus before I realized there wouldn't be a way to work in a blow by blow narrative history of the French Revolution and still have enough space to give to 1848 and the Parisian commune and so on and so forth .

Right , I tried to find a lot of ways to do that . In the end I settled on giving a conceptual history of the French Revolution , which is a term I derived from Furet , right . So Furet has this book this might be his most famous book interpreting the French Revolution from 1978 , right .

And in it he lays out a distinction between two types of history , one he calls conceptual and the other is commemorative . And pretty much all of the histories of the French Revolution , except for very few exceptions that he talks about , are commemorative histories . What does that mean ? The goal of a commemorative history ?

Well , let me put it another way you are starting from the perspective that what the revolutionaries thought they were doing was exactly what they're doing , right , and the goal is to understand what it was they thought they were doing , to figure out where it fits into your personal political position , right ?

So if you're on the left , right then you're looking at , you know , examples from the radical convention of 1793 to 94 , what went wrong ? Well , you have the Thermadorian reaction got in the way and prevented some of the more radical things that might have developed had Robespierre not gone to the guillotine or what have you right ?

But basically , what you're doing in a commemorative history is you've got your own political commitments and you take the object of your study and you read it through that lens , right ? I mean ?

And that's something that's very easy to do , with the French Revolution in particular , because so many things happen which kind of evolve a lot of the crucial debates that exist to this day .

I mean , you know , in a basic way , this whole distinction between right and left comes from the French Revolution , right , where people would sit in this hall , where the National Assembly would meet and so on . So the conceptual history , the conceptual approach , it involves a certain critical distance .

Perhaps what the revolutionaries thought they were doing wasn't exactly what they were doing , maybe they were doing something else . What might that be right ? So there Furet draws from two thinkers , tocqueville and Augustine Coshon . We'll get to that in a minute .

The reason why Michelet is there is because Michelet is Furet's favorite example and certainly a very great and classic example of the commemorative approach to the French Revolution , right ? So we're reading just a little bit of his book . You know it's 21 volumes .

We're reading a little bit of the preface and the first sort of chapter , but in it he lays out this theory which I mean , if you've ever read Michelet , he's very soggy , his prose is very purple . I mean , he's just kind of at this constant pitch of emotional excitement which apparently was the pinnacle of academic historiography in its day .

You no longer write like that as an academic historian , but it certainly is pretty gripping and exciting and also very strange and weird and at times ridiculous . There's a moment early on in his history of the French Revolution where he sees a mountain and he starts crying because the mountain reminds him of the Middle Ages .

Right , I mean , this is kind of what Michelet is like and the portrait he paints of the French Revolution is that there was once a bad time . Right , there was the Ancien regime when things were bad and these heroic revolutionaries came along and they ended the bad times and they kicked off the good times .

And if the times are obviously not entirely good , that's just because there's certain obstacles in the way that prevent the universalization of the good . But in either case , there's a clear line to be drawn in the sand between the old and the new . For Michelet , this is an old world typified by theology .

Right , which depended on a notion of grace that was basically arbitrary . And in this new world we've got justice underpinned by the principle of equality . Right , so we're no longer going to have arbitrary grace dispensed by God . We're going to have true justice , true human justice .

Right , which looks at humans from the standpoint of human equality and sets the foundation for a world where things are no longer going to be arbitrary . Maybe there's still some arbitrariness , but we're going to overcome it .

Right , it's this powerful struggle between theology and justice which still goes on to some extent , but justice gains the upper hand pretty decisively with the French Revolution and kicks off a new era . Right , so this is a great example of a commemorative approach to history . Right , because that is pretty much what revolutionaries think they are doing .

Right , the first conceptual historian that Furecites Tocqueville . He has a very different thesis . Basically , his idea is that the French Revolution wasn't this profound , radical break between the old and the new .

Actually , what it accomplished in the end was to complete the work of administrative centralization that had begun under the Bourbons but that ran into certain obstacles , such as you have the existence of these privileged classes where they don't pay taxes to the state , and so on and so forth . Right , the revolution gets rid of that .

It creates a uniform surface for governing , in the form of these abstract citizens where everyone's equal and principal . Right , and it completes this work of building the centralized government leviathan . Right ?

So obviously , that wasn't necessarily what the revolutionaries at the time thought they were doing , but if they had thought of it in those terms , why would they have done anything at all ?

Right , if you're going to go to the lengths of getting a revolution off the ground and all that fighting and conflict and war , you have to believe that you're doing something really important , right ?

You have to believe that you're bringing about profound changes that are going to make the world a better place , right , and you're doing away with things that are making the world not such a great place in a pretty decisive way , right .

I mean , you sort of need that mentality to get anything off the ground , and that is pretty much what we'll be looking to , michel A , for this explanation on an emotional level , too . Right , an emotional level . Why is revolution so important that people are willing to die for it ? Well , you need to have some compelling ideas about what you're doing .

And there was another point that I wanted to touch on too . You brought up Blanqui , right . So , with a lot of his political thinking , marx is often taking a middle path , right ?

So he has this critique of politics which , if you read , you know the critique of Hegel 1843 on the Jewish question , 1844 , is really , I mean , it's a pretty tremendous black pill of sorts , even to this day .

If you think that you're going to make changes by going and organizing and voting for people and so on and so forth , well , you know , marx just has a giant bucket of cold water to throw on you with some of these early writings . And yet he is not a political indifferentist .

That's what he calls the prudonists who say , well , sure , politics sucks , it's not engaged with politics at all . That's not Marx's perspective . He threads a line in some ways that are , well , it can be pretty tough to talk about , because you have to make some important qualifications , right ?

So , of course , with this I mean any idea of the kind of changes we're going to accomplish with the communist revolution . We're going to abolish private property .

Those aren't necessarily things that instinctively appeal to the working person in the street , right , they might say well , actually I was hoping to save up to buy a house and then I've got something to pass on to my kids , and I don't like all this stuff about how there's no property and there's going to be no inheritance , and that doesn't appeal to me at all

. Right , but Blanqui , he's like . I mean , he's pretty much the leading revolutionary of his day . I mean , compared to Blanqui , marx was pretty much nothing in his day , right ? Blanqui is like this decisive figure . He spends most of his life in prison , except for he gets out , you know , for little little periods of time when there's a revolution .

But what is his basic philosophy of revolution ? He is , he's a conspiracist . Basically he says well , you know , you and I and maybe a few other people are going to get together and we're going to come up with the plan , right ? So you know , we know that the leader of the country is going to be , you know , on such a route at such a time .

And so you'll spring out of the bushes and you'll take him prisoner or assassinate him , and then we'll take over . And then , once we do that , well then the people will spontaneously rise up and say , oh , thank God , somebody finally doing all this stuff that we had secretly wanted this whole time . Right , marx rejects that theory of revolution .

Right , you need some sort of a popular base , but you also need a vanguard to lead it . Right . So that's a little bit tricky , right , like with a lot of his political tactics and strategies , a little bit tricky , but what it comes down to is pretty much what you can see with his work with the first international .

Right , you read some of these very fiery texts from the 1850s and then you read the inaugural address of the working men's association , it's pretty clear that the rhetoric is very

different . Right , he's no longer preaching fire and brimstone as much as he once was . He's trying to build a coalition . Right , he's trying to work with these coalition partners that he has through the trade unions . A lot of these trade union people are what's sometimes called a labor aristocracy . Right , they're not necessarily your destitute factory worker .

They're your worker with some kind of skills , where they're making a decent living for themselves and so on and so forth , right , they're not necessarily going to go all in for this talk of overthrowing the government and dictatorship of the proletariat and all that stuff , right .

But you identify the common points of interest and you can lead them along very gently , step by step , until you get them to a point where they're ready for the full download . Right , you don't give them the whole plan right away , but you lead them .

You know , for instance , with England , there's this question of realizing the universal suffrage , the voting right , and you lead them on this path where eventually they come around to see oh well , yes , we actually do need to set up this dictatorship for the purpose of abolishing private property and so forth , but you are not doing it completely on your own , with

a small band of conspirators , and then the popular support comes out of nowhere , right ? That's a pretty fundamental distinction that I think is pretty crucial when we're talking about what was his actual plan for how to carry out this revolution .

One is he , I think , uses Hegelian terms of art , so you don't quite always know what he's really saying , like when he's talking about it Vance , this or you know , or that what he really means is like , well , you've adopted our program and you really know what it is , and like the most well read and educated will be able to pick it up .

And then they , you know , even though they're workers , and they'll be able to spread it through .

And it's interesting to me because this actually is also a centerline in a debate and the bourgeois revolutions that we forget , between the democratic legitimatist and the enlightened despotist , absolutist , who we don't think about them so much in the English tradition , because Hobbes is associated with the conservative tradition for reasons that in some ways baffle me ,

because he , I don't think Hobbes fits either paradigm , even in the English , but that Hobbes is a whole , another kind of words and I can get stuck in that .

That could be several hours that you with , like the French , there's a very like the philisops are very pro monarchist because they think well , you know , we want to liberate the masses , but they're too stupid to do it .

So we need a king who has absolute power to push back on the parliament , who's going to slow us down , and because the parliament's going to be an oligarchy .

So if we have this enlightened , you know , king , that we invest even more power than was historically invested I mean way more power than was historically invested into the monarch then we'll be able to establish this and then we'll be able to raise up the , the peasantry and the workers , and then I'm really talking about the workers , but basically the labor in

classes , and then we'll have an enlightened society and we can maybe have full enfranchisement that we're not going to talk about it before that .

And then there's the kind of I guess to like English Republican , you know enlightened majority approach , although none of them really thought that universal suffrage was on the immediate docket , which I think people miss and read . You know they read back into history .

But you know , what's interesting to me is this debate between the kind of socialist and proto-socialist revolutionaries actually does mirror in a lot of ways that debate between the , the , the , what , the enlightened despotists versus , like , the natural aristocratic republicans in the bourgeois , the bourgeois and yeoman revolutions .

And in some ways I think people don't think of Marx as a centrist , but in in he's not .

But In almost all these debates between these radical parties I am constantly like , okay , marx's position is actually I'm taking the middle position between the anarchists and the charters , I'm taking middle position between the bonus and the blankiest and taking the middle position between the nationalist and , again , the anarchist Well , sometimes the anarchists , although

sometimes the anarchists are nationalists , which is also very confusing and I guess between the liberal universalists actually let me phrase that not so much the anarchist .

And when people read Marx since they often do not read him in the context of his debates unless they're reading his letters , they don't always pick that up . Because even in his polemics , usually you're only seeing him polemicize against one side or the other .

You're not actually seeing them both simultaneously to be able to like triangulate what Marx is actually doing .

And in that sense , when we talk about the Marxist center , there is a real way in which both the second international and the early third international and so much that they are trying to triangulate between different , more extreme positions even within their own movement , are in the same vein , where they're taking a position between this and this and adjusting

accordingly , but it's often hard to understand because we don't think about the local or international context of this , particularly from the United States , because we don't contribute that much honestly to this debate , even though a whole lot of Marxist writing was written for US newspapers .

So it's like it's something that our socialist tradition just was not as much in dialogue with this . Yes , they were . I mean Henry George , for example , which interestingly now gets picked up by libertarians in America but funnily enough , but was kind of his own kind of brand of land socialist . He was adamantly opposed to Marx but praise Marx at his death , etc .

And so forth . So it's not like the Americans weren't in it , but we don't know that part of our own history for the most part , and we weren't as crucial to these debates as the French , the Germans and the English were , and then later on the Russians and the Chinese , etc . So , yeah , I think that's really interesting .

This brings me , though , to another problem that you get in Marxism and the center position in regards to the revolutions , and that's the national question , which is a massive headache for for Marxist and basically isn't answered until there's , basically in the base between the Bauer , stalin and Lenin , there's kind of a center position which is carved out by Lenin ,

which Stalin upholst for most of his early career , but really plagues the situation and it really plagues the understanding of various things , like when you read Marx talk about the slobs , or why we should side with Poland and not Serbia are , which is also very strange , considering like later debates in the international and the second international go in the opposite

direction . Or you know why Germanization is necessary , how we should relate to the colonization of India , where Marx is , where early Marx and late Marx are wildly inconsistent with each other .

It is one of the few times in Marx where reversal is explicit as opposed to , you know , with a lot of times you remark that it's like he's not admitting his chains position like so you know .

But we , when we talk about like the historic peoples are his readings of , like , say , the blacks in the America , black slaves and chattel slavery in America , it's actually kind of hard to figure out what exactly Marx thinks .

And one of the examples that we can bring up and this is even printed out by a Marxist , leninist like Dominic Lerserdo that like Marxist writings on black slavery in America , is , on one hand he very much is on the side of the Norfin on abolitionism .

On the other hand , that he says stuff like the Irish have it worse than the black slaves , which is which is just hard to reconcile . On that you know that that's dropping any interpersonal bigotry that's used in and privately in Marx's letters or what he said about LaSalle or whatever .

Because , frankly , since he didn't say must have stuff publicly , he's , he's actually a little bit more progressive than a lot of the other people he's writing with .

But his opinions on it , I think , are hard to square because on one hand he seems pretty like he seems like he's siding with the right side of history , but on the other hand he's like down the right side of history also . I'm going to just quotation that I don't know that actually .

But on the other hand there are things that he says that even a couple of generations later not just from our own contemporary standpoint would have been so much shocking . So we can talk about that in relationship to black African slaves in the Americas and we can talk about that about . You know what , martin , you will say about the slobs .

I mean we're going to see this , especially with Engels writings on the slobs in their role in the Hungarian revolutions of 1848 to nine . Right , where he says some stuff that is pretty unpalatable , to put it mildly . There's also another article as revolution and counterrevolution

in Germany . This is technically Karl Marx's debut in the New York Tribune , which is the newspaper he would write for for , I think , a little bit more than a decade . Right , sometimes people have this idea about Marx that he was just this lazy guy . You went to the library and didn't do all that much .

But you know he , he was a newspaper man right during the 1848 to nine period he runs this newspaper , is the chief editor . He's putting all this stuff together , right , it's a pretty influential paper if you look at the circulation numbers .

It was getting up there with the leading mainstream dailies of its day and it was obviously a paper trying to put forward the most radical position it possibly could . So it was a remarkable success right , and then he goes and writes for the New York Tribune .

This is more so during the long years of the reaction in the 1850s , where he has to take a job that he has certain reservations about . But anyway , his debut is this article , revolution and counterrevolution in Germany , which I mean every one of these articles in the series is signed by him .

We learned only much later , I think in the 1930s , when the letters between him and Engels started to be published , that actually Marx did not write that piece at all . It was , it was really written by Engels .

Engels , draft this part and then I'll . Sometimes it's all Engels and sometimes , like Marx , does the interpretive gloss at the end but , that's why it's so hard to distinguish them , because a lot of the journalism is really co written .

He does a lot of the foreign policy does especially the military stuff and certain other things throughout Marx's writing career for the New York Tribune Right , I mean it goes a little bit in the other direction to Marx has stuff that he farms out to other people . That's something that's pretty interesting in the mega as well .

Like , for instance , he's got these 1844 manuscripts which are very famous now but we're not published until many years after his death . But he would actually go and approach people and say you know , I've got this thing . It's really not ready for publication .

But let me give you , you know , some paragraphs from it and you can just take those and put it in an article and say it's written by you , it's fine , don't worry , you know . And and so you know . For instance , you see some of these passages being put forward . There's one article he's working with a doctor .

I forget his name exactly , but there's a doctor who has this article . I should look up the title , but it's something like black slaves and European slaves or working slaves or something like that . But it's making exactly the point that you mentioned , which comes up again and again in Marx and Engels is writing .

I mean , for them , wage labor is literally slavery . Okay , it's a disguised form of slavery . Right in capital volume one , you have this argument that With wage labor , all of the labor appears paid even though in fact there's an unpaid portion . And with slavery , all of the labor appears unpaid though in fact there is a paid portion .

Right , the slave gets food and housing and certain other things , right . Well , that argument has not aged .

Therefore they're like a machine , and thus our constant capital , whereas the you can kind of fudge around free labor and put in pressure and pressure productivity up and down so that so the rate of the rate of pay for that is variable , which allows for exploitation . That's what they think the distinction is and that's the only real distinction for them .

Like that I just want to like .

It is weird because it recently , because of all the debates about whether or not machines create value , I've had to point out that like well , according to Marx and Engels , slaves don't create value either Because the constant capital and you know I'm laughing because you know not that they think the slaves are machines , but they think , as far as , like capital

production goes , that that's effectively what they are .

I mean , like I said , one of the aspects of their thought that has not aged very well , and I think we can tie this back to some of the questions you raised earlier about the national question and also the early Marx versus later Marx , right ?

So I mean , with the political writings that we are looking at , I mean their attitude is pretty clear , right angles , has this great .

I mean , it's really like a miniature book on the peasant wars in Germany which we're going to read and one of the big things that kills this uprising of the peasants , aside from the peasants just being very easy to fool , right , there's time and time again where the nobility , even though their armies are so much less in number and they're in so much of a

worse position , they're able to trick the peasant armies into agreeing to a ceasefire , during which the nobility secretly prepares and the peasant army obviously demobilizes and disperses , and so they lose the upper hand time and time again by falling for this same trick . Right ?

But another problem is that Germany is divided into all these little provinces , and so the peasants have a hard time seeing that they have a common interest with the peasants over there . And the next kingdom , or duchy , or whatever it is right .

That is , of course , a problem that is of crucial relevance to the Germany of 1848 , which is , of course , before the unification . You have , I think , more than 30 different states that make up the whole thing . Right , some of them are more dominant than others .

You've got Prussia , and Austria is being the main players , but Austria a lot of it is not German . Right , there's a German part of Austria which there's a big controversies in the day about what role that needs to play .

Do we need to take the German part of Austria and have the big Germany , or can we just leave the Austrian part of it and we'll have the small Germany is one of the big debates at the time . Right , but in any case , you need the nation in order to really bring the working class together . Right , you need a nation . You need to create a national market .

You need to create the conditions of possibility for the nationalization of labor , right , I mean , there's a piece . This is another example of something Marx farmed out . This is more . I think this is in the 1850s , early 1850s , one of these chartless guys . He has this article that he's written about these ideas of labor collectives , right .

Ok , so it's a good impulse , but there's certain problems . Right , you have your little labor collective that you set up and eventually just ends up reproducing the same stuff . Is the you know , non collective , regular capitalist companies . Right , I mean , in the first place , your collectives are going to start to get together .

Right , and you have these same dynamics that are going to come up , which is why the real answer is you've got to nationalize this stuff . Right , you can't just have your own , your one little collective in one part of the country and another little collective and the other . It's crucial that you nationalize it .

In order to be able to nationalize it , you of course need a nation , right ? Nation building project is on the forefront of the concerns that come up in the revolution of 1848 to nine in Germany and Italy and a lot of places . You need to build this structure as a necessary precursor for the things that Marx thinks is going to come after that .

Right , you can't have an internationally solid , heuristic working class until you've got things developed up to the level of nations . Right , it's not going to have until you hit that benchmark . Hit that benchmark , go through that stage , right , and this is this is where we can get back to the early versus the later mark . So this is a .

This is something I've been particularly nursing . Is that work through this course ? Got the introduction to the critique of Hegel , right , this is 1844 . It's one of the pieces he publishes in the Deutsche Francis is a Yard Bocher and it's basically where you have the first explanation of this idea of proletarian revolution in March .

Right , this is the sort of ground zero for that strain of his thoughts , right , so it's a very important piece in looking at his intellectual trajectory , development of his thought .

But In this whole body of writings for this , you know , it's kind of like a magazine , the Deutsche Francis , a she are Bocher there is this thread going on where he's trying to grapple with the backwardness of Germany compared to France , right .

So there's an exchange of letters in this thing where he's got this initial letter where he's like , well , sure , you know , things seem bad . The least , I think he's in Holland , like the least Dutch person is still a citizen compared with the greatest German . Blah , blah , blah . But nonetheless I'm optimistic that you know we're still going to get a revolution .

He has this analogy about the ship of fools being blown in the wind . And well , it's going to meet its fate , even if it doesn't realize that's what it's doing . Basically kind of gives this idea that maybe the German leadership will prove so incompetent that it will bring the revolution upon itself Entirely on its own .

He gets torn apart by Arnold Ruga in a very funny response where it was basically like you're ridiculously over optimistic , there's no way that's going to happen . Have you met any of these Germans ? There's no way that this revolution that you're talking about is going to be brought about by them .

And later on , in this exchange of letters , marks basically develops this idea where he tries to turn things on his head and say well , it's because Germany is so backwards that I'm so optimistic . Right , yeah ?

Where he's like well , things are going to get so bad under these economic crisis that they have to do what like I want them to do , because it's the only way to solve the situation .

And in some ways , I mean one of my , one of my theories that I've never been able to completely pin out in the mega research , but that like that not happening as part of what really prompts the development of the volumes of capital , like that's why why the economic and this Chris become so important to him is like , well , you know my thesis that the workers

are going to have to do what I want them to do , because otherwise they'll starve just apparently doesn't hold out , and this leads to all sorts of problems later .

I mean , like I do think that when people bring Bernstein like Bernstein for revisionism and I'm always like , well , but Bernstein's actually doing something he saw Marx do like this , like a , like this historical factor is not doing what we predicted it would do how do we adjust ?

Like so , yeah , but I just wanted to point that , because there's a lot of that , and particularly in the 1850s , there's just tons of these kinds of predictions where , where you're basically seeing a theory that's being worked out to kind of flip it on its head , but you know , no matter what happens , this will happen , like it is inevitable , that there will be

this , this revolution , and there's and that's something I've been hitting , even up until the 1940s that basically Marxist did not drop the inevitability languages until the 40 , until the 1940s and 1950s , where they seemingly had to , and Most of you like cultural Marxist critique is Judea Bolshevik conspiracy shit picked up from fascist , absolutely true .

But the one thing that they're right about is that around the time that you see the , what people call the cultural Marxist , is when you start seeing everybody give up on inevitability of the revolution , for from either social progress or economic conditions for stemming the and upon us and only recently has anyone tried to pick that back up the whole economic

conditions will make , will make this inevitable , which is a debate , but to me it's not a debate

. That's what Marx thinks like . That's absolutely clearly stated over and over and over again , even though the , the mechanism that happens by , is completely different from time to time .

You're actually supposed to get out there and do some political organizing and agitate among the working glass and do some stuff . That pretty much looks a lot like bringing something about that wouldn't necessarily happen otherwise . Right , there's that tension there .

That's why it's uniquely suited to bring about the social revolution . I think there's some tensions there with that being a proletarian revolution . They get worked out later on pretty quickly , like obviously you have to have a certain critical , massive proletarians . This won't happen if you just got like a few hundred and a few cities right .

But what's interesting is that this naive theory in the 1844 introduction to the critique of Hagel Ends up being much closer to what actually ends up happening then .

The more mature theory that he develops , starting with about the German ideology , right , well , we'll see this pretty clearly once we get to 1848 , but by that time marks has settled on this notion that there are going to be stages and the bourgeois revolution is the necessary precondition of the proletarian revolution .

There's this article from his Neuer Rheinischer Zeitung , montesquieu 56 , where he says basically , you know , he addresses the working class and he says well , look , I know all this stuff about the constitution and whatnot is not very appealing to you , but you need to support it because this bourgeois revolution is going to set the stage for the better world that's

going to really emancipate you . Above all , don't get fooled by these people who say , oh , we're going to take things back to some earlier time when things are better . We got to go through this bourgeois revolution , even if it's , you know , concerns and demands don't seem particularly relevant to you , the working person .

You need to support pushing this thing through because it's what leads to the thing that's really going to realize it right . And that is also , I mean , underpinning a lot of the very unfortunate things he says about , for instance , colonialism in India and so forth .

You know well , you know , of course it's bad , but they're setting the stage for this so much better thing that will eventually happen . They're setting the material basis right for something that's going to totally blow away all the stuff that they had in their prior history . Blah , blah , blah .

But what really ends up happening is that the communist revolutions that we see end up taking off precisely in the backwards countries right , it's not in the most developed , you know , sort of the leading nations of capitalist development like England and so forth , that this thing takes off and sits in places like Russia and China which are at nowhere near the level

of development as these western countries . So I mean that's an interesting thought . I've been noticing like in the end the early Marx was a little bit closer to what happened in the later one .

going to get these people to do this ? And I guess it goes a little better in China than it does in Russia , but depending on who you read and how you read them . But I mean that is a fundamental problem .

And what I find another thing that I find interesting about the 50s and the 60s , that there's like kind of an admission of this problem as a problem in and like , say early , like late Marxist Leninism up to Khrushchev , where it stops , or like early , early to middle Maoism from like the 50s , from like the 50s into the mid 60s in China , and then when it's

picked up in France , it's picked up explicitly with this variant of it where there's like well , you know , we have to do a new synthesis , because there's some stuff Marx was just wrong about . And what I find interesting is , later people in those traditions will not admit that they are actually disagreeing with Marx's schemas .

They're like well , that's just the second international revisionism , or whatever . But in earlier stuff that you read they admit openly that like no , this doesn't follow the pattern , that this was predicted and we have to figure out why and that's going to require a new synthesis or whatever .

And you know , I find it funny because it decided that it meant that it meant you need to revise Marx as the anti revisionist , because they pick up the name from the first revisionist controversy but it really has nothing to do with the content .

It's just like well , the last battle was revisionist controversy , so our opinions about Stalin are a revisionist controversy , even though it really isn't that at all . But anyway , back to the time period .

I just find it so interesting that when you look at the 1840s , the Marxist historiography around both colonialism and the French Revolution and also their inability to deal with French colonialism after the revolution , which we haven't even talked about , like they just don't know how to handle that , that you are kind of , you can start to see where these fracture

lines are going to appear much , much , much later in , like world historic conflicts . It leads to stuff like inter-communist wars , like it does have an effect Like . So I think that's very crucial . I know we've gotten off the pathway on the national questions to get back to this and colonialism .

I think people know more about the Indian stuff because Marx kind of recants it late in life . But what they don't really know that much about is the Slav stuff .

So let's go into , like the Marx-Singles opinions on Slavs as non-historic peoples and what counts as a historic person and a non-historic person , because they also kind of don't think the indigenous are historic peoples either .

That's why they don't really factor into like Black shadow slaves do , but like indigenous peoples of the Americas are like barely even mentioned at all . So let's go there because I think maybe that's instructive .

But 1848 to nine is a very interesting phenomenon because it is the pretty much the one time I think it is the one time in European history where pretty much all of Europe rises up more or less spontaneously at one time . I mean , there's a period of a few weeks where there's almost no government in Germany excuse me , in Europe that's left standing .

Right , there's these massive revolutions that overthrows the government in France and Germany and all these places right . And yet within about as rapid a period of time , all the old governments come back and the reaction sets in . And what , ultimately , is the issue of all of this confusion and back and forth ? Well , you get across some certain reforms , right ?

So one of the books I relied on the most for my understanding of the history of this period is Priscilla Robertson's Revolutions of 1848 . With respect to the German context , for example , she brings up that even though these revolutionaries they totally failed in their attempts to set up a sort of political power that might be stable .

They got crushed pretty quickly . All the reactionaries came back . Nonetheless , they did set the agenda for basically the reforms that took place over the next half century or so .

Stuff like unemployment insurance , stuff like free public schools with free books , all this sort of thing actually ends up happening pretty much , and this is one of the arguments that Habsbaum makes in his book on the period of the age of capital .

Governments find out a way where they can kind of give people what they want in a gradualistic , incremental way that avoids the violence and upheaval of revolutions and keeps them in power right . That ends up being kind of the takeaway from this whole period , which is , of course , pretty disappointing to your marks and angles as types .

But with respect to Hungary at this point in time , hungary is a part of the Austrian Empire . It's also a place that has had an unusually progressive constitution for quite some time . Right Within Hungary itself , everybody is a noble right , everybody has the right to vote .

There is this longstanding culture of getting involved in political discussion , political debates that you don't really see nearly as much to the same degree in other European countries . And this all sounds very progressive and exciting , until you realize that within this country of Hungary there's an even bigger population of Slavs who have no rights to vote .

And with this Hungarian revolution that comes about where the basic idea is we're going to set up our own nation , we're not going to be a part of the Austrian Empire anymore , which was sticking them with all these expenses that they thought they really shouldn't be having to pay , so on and so forth .

At no point was there any thought to giving any rights to the Slavs . Right , that was never part of the idea . And well , marx and Engels are pretty much with , for instance , the leader of the revolution in Hungary , this guy Kosuth Louis Kosuth , if I'm pronouncing that right , probably not , but they sort of agree with that standpoint .

No , the Slavs shouldn't be getting anything , they're just standing in the way of this project that needs to happen . And what it comes down to for Engels , he's got the only good Slavs are the Poles , for some reason , the Poles are a little bit better right .

The Poles get kind of a pass because of course this whole question they had a republic at one time or something .

Yeah , they have the Polish Lithuanian Republic , where everybody had veto power , and they get divided up with this third partition especially , and so they become this kind of big cause that everybody in Europe really is passionate about , sort of the political left side .

Yeah , liberate the Poles , give them back their country , especially take it away from the awful Russians and the Holy Alliance with Austria and Germany . I mean , russia is basically the big bad guy in this period from the perspective of Marx and Engels .

So with these Slavs , they start getting these ideas oh , we're going to have our own republics , we're going to have a Croatian Republic and we're going to have a Slavonian Republic . And Engels just thinks this is totally ridiculous . These people haven't had their own independent history for hundreds of years .

He sees it basically as an effort to try and go back to the status quo of the year 800 , which is , of course , impossible . He gets very worked up . He even calls them national trash . Right , that's the phrase that he uses Fokraabfela in German , which you could also translate in some other ways that are pretty nasty .

I mean , marx and Engels are very into this idea that Germany needs to fight a war with Russia .

Right , there needs to be a war with Russia , and this is going to be the thing that brings about this big mobilization that's really going to cement the radical project that they hope to see get off the ground , russia , of course , being the sort of mortar of Europe .

Right , it's this hotbed of all the terrible reactionary things that exist in the world , and so there has to be this war with Russia , right . But in order for that to happen , certain things need to happen . Things need to coalesce in the form of nations .

They want to have a German nation and a Hungarian nation , and that's going to be sort of the geopolitical setup that is capable of leading the direction that they want to see , and the Slavs are getting in the way of that , and they advance .

I mean , this is mostly Engels , right , but he also makes these arguments in revolution and counter-revolution in Germany , which Marx signed his name to right . It wasn't even known that it was actually written by Engels until decades after his death .

So I mean , you sign your name to the arguments , you don't let anybody know over decades that it wasn't really you that said those things . It's hard to argue that you really could have disagreed with the arguments . All that much right . And so that's where you start getting these very interesting notions , where all of a sudden we're back to Aristotle .

So in one part of his tirade against the Slavs he brings up this process of Germanization . You know , the Slavs are getting Germanized . What should really happen is that process should be completed .

And he makes some comments which harken back to this notion of justice that you find in Aristotle's politics , where Aristotle says if you think that it's unjust that you're enslaved ie , it's not really the case that you're inferior and the people enslaving you are superior , well , how did it happen that they managed to enslave you , right ?

If you really aren't there inferior , then seemingly they wouldn't have been able to do that right . So that's a pretty nasty , pretty brutal notion , and Engels is bringing up pretty much that in his arguments . For why this process of Germanization of the Slavs needs to continue .

They shouldn't get their own nations , they should just assimilate into whatever the power is and shut up and let the Revolution take its proper course , instead of gumming up the works with their counter-revolutionary nonsense . Right , I mean , he's got many colorful things in those essays .

And it's also hard to reconcile with later writings where Marx is less sanguine about bourgeoisification , where he's definitely less sanguine about colonial imperialism .

And this idea that Napoleon is the Revolution on horseback , like for Marx , is both true , but it has a regressive character by the time you get to the middle 1800s , in a way that he did not feel earlier on , pretty clearly .

And so this , you know , I do think this is hard to reconcile and I think it's interesting actually that this leads to a couple of interesting things later on . But you pointed out with Fouret , but it also , I think it's also interesting that it's a problem , without to say or two , where they're like I can't reconcile this .

You know , 1879 Marx with this 1848 Marx , and it's not just the Romanticism there's , there's a lot of other stuff that has seemingly shifted , and you know , althusserabenegood Marx's Leninist has to come up with a weird ass way to make all that work .

And you know and he does it with I'm not going to my like how tortured I think Althusserabenegood's notion of science has to be for this stuff to be true Are like his readings of epistemology are the fact that he clearly had not read that much Marx when he came up with the theory in the first place . But there is a real . You know .

I think Marx's enemies , like Fouret , actually understand this a little better where they're like only you look at this and there is a pretty significant change . So and I think that we can we can see that in two places when we talk about for a or we can talk about how weird Marxist are about taxes . So actually we maybe do both .

So what does for a say about this ? You know ?

to me . He ended up being so important to the things that we read for this course for a couple of reasons , so I should have mentioned this earlier . On this course that's coming up . It's starting actually in two days , september the 2nd Still time to join if you want to join for anybody out there .

But it is a part 2 of a 3 part introduction to Marx that I'm teaching . Part 1 happened last year . It was on the early writings up to ending with the Communist manifesto . Part 3 , which is going to happen next year , fall 2024 , is going to be on Marx's capital Right .

So with this one we're looking at the political writings from 1848 post Communist manifesto to the end of Marx's life . With the early Marx we had . That was a much simpler course to do , right . We I mean I had basically one book . We had this Hackett edition , the young Marx on philosophy and society , something like that .

It's like the most comprehensive English language anthology that you can find of the early Marxist writings .

And our secondary source was this book by a scholar named Gary Teeple , who's a Canadian academic who has this book Marxist critique of politics , and Teeple is very concerned to demonstrate the continuity of Marx's body of work , right , so he's arguing against , on the one hand , althusser's notion of there being an epistemological break .

He's also arguing against sort of a naive notion of continuity where , like , oh , you look at some of the Reines-Schutz-Eitung stuff and you say , oh , look , marx's talking about alienation . He talks about alienation and later stuff , and so , wow , you know , it's all just the same .

Right , he's concerned to show the course of the development of the thought that takes place , right , which which occurs in certain stages , and he shows pretty well how you get to certain questions that lead him on to the next thing and stuff like that . Right , but he's very adamant about it being basically continuous .

Right , that has , I mean , it goes pretty far in my book . I mean it shows you why he ends up becoming so focused on political economy . Right , but with Furey this is someone who is also very influenced by the early critique of politics . But he is arguing for somewhat of a break , right , what that argument boils down to .

Once you get to the German ideology he kind of throws this idea of alienation away . Right , I mean , in the stuff like the 1844 manuscripts he is still working with these sort of Foyerbachian concepts of there being an essence of man , right , there being this thing called species being or what have you that we are alienated from right .

And in response to sort of Störner's challenge , störner kind of has this challenge that well , this is just an abstraction too . You say , ok , well , you know , we've done away with God . It turns out it's actually man at the root of it , but man itself , this idea of man that you have , that's just another abstraction .

You just replace an abstraction with a different one . Right , marx is at pains to respond to that critique . He kind of throws out well , he basically breaks with all of philosophy in the German ideology . He throws that idea out and he replaces it with this idea , basically , of history is class struggle .

Right , you can take this materialist approach in history and you can look at the class relations in a given society and you can see how things are going to develop and so on and so forth . By these material dynamics there's no longer a question of being alienated from some sort of essence of man .

Instead , what's going on , as we see , with industrialization , with urbanization , with these things that are going on , that we're moving towards this new stage of human society . What's going to be ? You know , the collective is going to really come to the fore , the family is going to break down , and so on and so forth .

So if you're a says , once you get to this conception , the critique of politics is actually weakened , right ?

Basically , the idea is that all political phenomena and for Marx and Engels it's not just all political phenomena One of the things we'll see in the peasant war in Germany is they think that they can reduce religious phenomena to an explanation based on class relations in a given society .

Right , and one of the things that happens is that politics loses a certain autonomy , right . I mean , there's no longer this notion that people could really move by an idea like liberty or equality in a way that moves them to take actions dramatically opposed to their class interests .

Right , these all ultimately reduce to their class interests in some way or another . There's certainly not this possibility of politics operating autonomously in the way that religion can operate autonomously , in a way that sort of Makes things happen .

That wouldn't necessarily happen if the real motivating force were simply and only these class relations and the economic structure of society and stuff like that . Right .

So for Furet , this is what this means is that the break that happens in the German ideology renders the later Marx less capable than the former of explaining what happens during the French Revolution .

Right , I mean , if the French Revolution is what the Marxist analysis says , it is in the final picture , in the big analysis , right , which is the sort of announcement of the class dominance of the bourgeoisie , which had been already prepared through these economic developments , but now they really take the reins and overthrow the king and the nobility .

If that was all it was , why does France go through all of these changes that it goes through over this whole period ? Why was there the radical convention , followed by the directory , followed by the consulate , followed by the First Empire ? Why was that then followed by the bourbon restoration and the July monarchy and the second Republic of 1848 ?

Why would all of that happen . A Furets argument is that this is something Marx is less able to deal with in his later work than in his early work , where you still had some idea of the autonomy of politics and it amounts to a critique of the whole of Marxian class analysis . Right ?

So he ended up being Furets , ended up being so important because , like Tiple , he understands the early critique of politics and he explains it pretty well . Right , I mean he explains it well enough that I felt I could assign just that first chapter of his book and that , would you know , for students who weren't able to take the early Marx course .

That catches them up enough on what is really core in that whole aspect of Marx's thought . But he also extends the through line through the writings of the 1848 period , the 1850s , all the way to the end of his life , which Tiple does not do right .

He kind of shows that there is a continuity and certain of the ideas and the early writings appear again in various passages of Capital , volume 1 that he quotes . But he doesn't deal with the revolutions of 1848 period , the 50s , any of that . So that's one reason why Furets is so important for this course

. He draws this line between the early writings , the sort of middle period , and the later stuff , and he's very influenced by the critique of politics . But he's trying to argue that Marx sort of moves away from certain elements of the critique of politics as his thought develops .

And you know also he is a useful kind of villain , a useful kind of antagonist to have right . I mean the point of this course you know we're not doing , I'm not trying to didactically turn people into Marxists .

There's supposed to be some controversy and debate , and Furet is a great foil for that , because I mean , as you mentioned , he's also a little bit of a reactionary , right .

I mean , he's also an example of what happens if you really kind of throw the idea of the importance of class analysis out the window , right , I mean , for Marx , it becomes this thing that can be used to put politics on an objective footing , right . That can be used to set politics in the right direction .

That's going to take us to the post-political society where we no longer have politics as such , right ?

Well , what if class is actually more so , just something like , you know , race or religion , where you can construct a political ideology around it and it's pretty effective , but it doesn't necessarily lead us to a world beyond politics , where we no longer have political relations , where we really are the state , really is this realized , unity of the individual and

the collective , and so forth , right ? Well , what does that leave you with ? You know , it seems like it's hard to make much out of that . So that's another aspect of it .

I've just heard it asserted so I'm like no longer comfortable saying it , because he started his own liberal party in the 1910s . But it also reminds me of the Italian elite school .

What makes Furet interesting unlike , say , any of these people other than , say , werner Sombart , who we don't read because he's a Nazi , is well , he's a Marxist turned German historical school , turned Nazi , and that's why it's so complicated to talk about Sombart .

But he's interesting in that since he was a communist for a period of his life and he's one of the few of the ex communists that I've read who actually seem to have read and kind of understood Marx , because most of them seem like you got the cliff notes and clearly you didn't understand any of it in the first place , and for right .

No , he does kind of get it . He just he just takes the almost Italian elite cynicism about what class is like . It's like well , classes , there's always class , like it just shifts around and that's how you order politics . And this is kind of inevitable . And what you don't realize is you're doing it too .

And the thing about the Marxist that makes them so dangerous is they lighted themselves about it .

It's not because they're any different , it's because they're self dishonest , like that's their critique , you know , and I think that's of the critiques of Marxism from reactionaries , I do think that's the one that's hardest to fight Like , because in some ways you're like OK , well , have there been classes in actually existing socialist society ?

Yes , have anyone actually achieved ? You know , because one of the things we haven't talked about that much , you talk about why nationalization was important .

But that's also attention , because later on Ingalls , particularly Particularly in the critique of the Erfurt program , like , points out that nationalization and socialization aren't the same thing , although he's not consistent on it either .

So he it's like a minor point that he makes in the in the effort critique and he still signs on to the program , but he's like you know well , nationalization isn't ultimately the goal , the goal of socialization , although nationalization is how you get to it .

And you took a modern scholar like Harounia Mez , who points out well , yeah , that's why the communists had this nation building theory .

Once they dropped the historic and nonhistoric people's distinction and the Aristotle stuff , they're like OK , we got to give everybody a nation , we got to make them a nation , we got to create a nation for them if they don't have one , which means we got to have that in national language , got to encourage them to have government assemblies , and what ?

The irony of this is that what they expect to happen is for them to join the international and then give up their nationalism , which they created , which puts the Bolsheviks in some very weird positions like OK , now , what do we do with this anti Russian response that we've actually ourselves fermented and trying to , you know , coalesce these people who were , who

were various tribes , into a coherent national identity . That looks something like Western Europe's conception of a nation . And I think that that that you know , that's another tension that you see here . And it gets even weirder when you look at like , well , late marks on nationalism and whether or not he thinks bourgeois development is inevitable .

You know some people . I had the guy from what is politics who has more anarchist leanings and he was like , well , mark , totally gave that up . I went back and reread all the letters and I know he doesn't totally give it up . He actually speaks out of both ends of his mouth towards the end of the like and keeps revising the letter , like you know .

First it's like , well , maybe they can do it and it can be done , or maybe it has to be done because they can piggyback off the capitalism in Western Europe and then kind of skip it , or which I guess is what people kind of say Lennon tried to do , although he never justifies it that way and then you get kind of like he eventually just kind of sends this

mamby-pamby form of the letter that doesn't include anything really . And it's just like you can tell in his late writings . You know that he's not able to think himself out of the cul-de-sac season . I also think this is part of why we don't have completed versions of Capital .

Ii and III are a lot of the late manuscripts and we're working off of , you know , notes on notes on notes and some of those inconsistencies . I've been reading Koh-Hey-Sato's stuff on Marx and Prometheanism and Marx's Ecosocialism and you know Sato's reading Marxist notes in his revisions and tried to say , well , marx rejects his Prometheanism .

And I'm like , funnily enough , I'm reading the same stuff and he does everything you say except that last bit . I don't see where he rejects Prometheanism at all . He seems to like kind of want to have his cake and eat it too . I see this in a lot of places in this time period . I mean , do you see this too ?

Am I over-reading , am I over-interpreting you here ? Because that's my frustration with late Marx is , I feel like there's a whole lot of like almost aperias that he's not able to reconcile and just sort of like kind of tries to have it both ways and walks away .

You know Nationalism's one , developmentalism's another , taxes even , like do we have to pay for the state .

And it seems provisional in one sense because , like Marx makes a big deal about I mean a huge deal in the 1860s , 1870s , about , like the proto-SP Day and the SP Day , like funding anything Bismarck wants to do by ever voting for taxes , not just taxes on the poor , like even tariffs and shit . He doesn't want any of it .

And when you read , like the demands of the Communist Party in 1848 , that doesn't make sense because all of their they're like demanding a progressive income tax , like or a progressive wealth tax . excuse me , but yeah .

Right , I mean there's the speech that he gives . Right , he gets put on trial in Germany . So there's a thing that happens where one of the assembly bodies that they try to set up in the efforts to turn Germany into some kind of constitutional monarchy , things go south and this body declares the abolition of taxes . Right , and Marx is .

He immediately jumps on this , push right , he publishes this article no more taxes , all taxes are abolished , don't pay your taxes . That's what he gets in trouble for . He gets put on trial for this . He gives a speech where he's talking about how , yeah , you know these , these taxes . They often seem to be the proximate cause of a lot of the big revolutions .

Right , you have the English Revolution . You have Charles I's ship money . Right , you have the French Revolution . Obviously , the whole taxation question is the precipitating question of the estates general being called and so on . But what's really an issue is not the taxes per se . It is the class struggles underneath that are really driving things forward .

So you have this newly developed bourgeois , and this state form is no longer the appropriate state form to the present social conditions , and that's really what's at issue with the struggle , right .

So I mean , it is interesting that Marx makes these fairly anti-tax statements , but what really clarifies this is , I think I think this is in the class struggles in France , right . So the big demand of revolutionary France in 1848 is the right to work , right , and this is a slogan that persists to this day . It's taken on a different meaning these days .

Right to work is like an anti-union thing , right , but in 1848 .

Like , we'll be the employer of last resort . And that's still that comes up at . Mmt uses it . It's even part of , honestly , even the fascist used it as part of the social stabilization program , but it's , broadly speaking , was a popular demand and I just find it funny in America that it's come to we have to use another .

We have to use a jobs gear in here or something like that , because we can't use right to work anymore because it got rebranded in the 40s .

You have your food stamp programs , you have your subsidized health insurance , all of this stuff . It doesn't undermine the power of capital the way that the right to work would , the way that guaranteeing anyone who wants a job a job would undermine the power of private employers , the private sector right , this right to assistance .

It instead fills in the gaps and buys off some of the potential anti-capitalist antagonists and advise them off , according to Marx , pretty cheaply , right . So , with this whole question of taxes , the important point , I think , is what are the taxes being used for ? Right , you can use taxes in a way that makes the possibility of a revolution less likely .

I mean , this is in fact , basically CS's whole program with respect to the question of the French national debt . Cs is like the big theoretical leader of the French Revolution . He comes up with the idea of there being a constituent power , which basically is the structure of these French revolutionary governments . You have the constituent assembly .

It constitutes the power , and then you have a constituted power , legislative assembly . He also has some very important ideas about the debt . Right , there was a debate I mean the whole estates general getting called . That is because the French state is in big trouble financially . It's teetering on the precipice of bankruptcy .

It's clear that taxes need to be raised , but nobody can agree on whom and by how much . Right ? So looks like we need to call an assembly for the first time since , like the 17th century , right , and there was some discussion at that time that we are well , maybe we could just declare bankruptcy . Maybe the king could just say well , you know what ?

I'm not going to pay this , I'm sorry , I don't have the money . Tough luck , creditors , but you're not getting your money back and let's move on . Right , that was certainly an option that the king could do , but CS said absolutely not . The whole reason that the king has called us into this assembly is because of the debt .

If we get rid of the debt , then we lose the only leverage that we have over the king to push through this constitution that we want to see and these other changes . Right ? So actually , one of the first actions , the very first actions undertaken by the National Assembly after the famous tennis court oath and so forth , is they guarantee the national debt .

They say , yes , there's no way we're ever going to repeat this debt , it's permanent . We're committing forever that we're going to be bound to this debt .

Right , and this has a number of advantages for CS , right ? I mean , once you have this permanent debt , you're paying interest on it . The interest keeps growing . That means taxes keep growing . That means people keep having to pay more taxes and that means they take a greater interest in what these taxes are being spent on .

Right , it also means that businesses are going to look for ways to reduce their tax exposure , which you know I mean you could do by making your processes more productive , right , making things a little bit cheaper you pay a little bit less tax on , and so forth . So that is basically how we get this whole bureaucratic apparatus that we have .

And you know , the stuff like social welfare stuff , it comes a little bit later . The free education , the unemployment insurance , social security , all comes a little bit later .

But it follows from this general idea that we're going to have this ever expanding bureaucracy , which you know is basically cemented in place by this permanent debt that we constantly have to pay more and more towards .

And what it's going to do is it's going to raise the price of political risk , right , it's going to raise the price of the risk of massive political change .

You know , like you can see pretty easily , I think you know , if you're a person in the early 19th century France and you lose your job and there's no safety net and so immediately get thrown out of your apartment , you've got no money for food , and this happens to lots of people Well , you very quickly get a lot of people who are in the streets who are

very angry . You have nothing to lose , right , and with the social welfare you diminish that quite a lot . You give them a little lose .

Like Marx doesn't like public education , for example , as long as it's provided by the state , like he's like . Well , the state , you know what does he say ? The state can ensure that teachers know what they're talking about , and that's it Like , like . And you wrote the program which I think most people are kind of like . What Marxist against public schools ?

Yeah , kind of . I mean , not , he's not against social public schools , but he actually is against state public schools , the . The . I think the other thing that's a hint about Marxist feelings about taxes is that he doesn't call them taxes .

But when you talk about the provision of social surplus and Trudeca , the garth of program , that's effectively a form of taxation . It's not a taxation on profits or income or anything like that , it's .

It's , it's a setting aside of general surplus to take care of reinvestment , the people who absolutely can't work , because Marx I don't think he wants the elderly and the poor just to die and he doesn't want to become lumped in , right ?

So those are the two things he's thinking about and so , like , those are the people you're allowed to make social provisions for , but everyone else it's . It is a yeah , you know you work and we'll make sure you work , because we don't want these . You know , quote dangerous classes .

But what I find interesting in this , in the CS argument and it's picked up in the United States after the Civil War too , I mean , when we say we're not going to repudiate the national debt that's part of what's going on here is is it leads to an administrative state .

I think , interestingly , that Marxist don't see how strong and stable it's going to become , particularly in the light of World Wars , so much so that , like by the 1950s , you have Marxist arguing .

I don't even know how we'd have an insurrectionary revolution anymore because of , like , the strength of the state , the social welfare net , the nuclear bomb , I don't know .

Like you know , I think that we I think that's actually part of what the whole monopoly capital stuff is about , which is an attempt to economically work out what they're politically realizing that's be again , that's beyond the scope of your class .

But it's something I think a lot about , because that's when we see both the inevitability language dropped and Marxist categories about economics largely get abandoned , are redefined . So you know you have monopoly capital , which means something very different for Baran and Swayze than it does for anyone who used the term before .

Then you have basically the idea of class warfare as abandoned and people like they talk about it with a Frankfurt school but it's kind of abandoned across the board . And but I think that there's two . I think we have to get to this problem because this leads to the creation of the lump and proletariat , the nonclass class .

That really fucks up all the categories . But also does I mean , you know my stance of this it actually does describe something real and it's just it's hard to talk about because it , when you look at like how Marx defines it . One , it's the refuse of all classes to its decay , parts of prior classes that that are just left behind .

Three , sometimes it's service workers and menial labors who aren't productive , but sometimes they aren't . In it he can't really decide , particularly when you look at the letters .

Four , then there's all these other hybrid classes that kind of have a similar character to it but Marx doesn't want want to put in there because he doesn't think they're engaged in the same kind of things , although , like there's this distinction in Marx between intellectual and literati .

That's kind of funny , it's like okay , so what's the difference between intellectual and literati ? I don't really know . I guess one works for the state and the other doesn't . That's really the only distinction you can come up with . So it seems to be . I mean , it's kind of for Marxist .

It becomes a real problem and this is where you introduce two modern secondary scholars to people who are influential on me . You mentioned how Draper's volume two of his works on Marxist Revolution , and I just want to tell people , if you can , if you can find the time , to read all five volumes of that .

Some of that scholarship is outdated and it's definitely mega work , but it's a pretty useful book .

Well books , it's a lot of pages , but two I would also say I think Claude Borow's book on the dangerous class and the lumpen proletariat actually does get into the problems of the concept fairly honestly , even though he wants to hold on to the concept and use it to explain some things .

But I mean , one of the things that I think you have to kind of look at when you look at the lumpen proletariat is . Marx actually has a couple of different definitions that aren't actually the same .

They seem the same if you're not reading closely , but when you think about them they're not the same , because I think the refuse of all classes versus the decayed social classes of prior forms aren't really the same thing . But what's your take on that ? What do you think the lumpen does with my long introduction to the concept ?

I mean , we're in a period of time that I think could be loosely , but not meaninglessly , compared to , like pre-1848 Germany that Marx experienced . We have this situation where we have these ossified political institutions that no longer have all that much in the way of legitimacy in the eyes of the people , and yet it seems like they're not going anywhere .

There's no alternative , nothing is really going to be able to strike a blow , and so we're stuck in this weird situation and it doesn't seem like there's even all that much to really do . So the lumpen proletariat that's an interesting concept , I mean . You could even look at it .

I mean , if you wanted to be cynical about it , you could just say well , eventually Marx and Engels realized that the proletariat doesn't actually behave in the way that they think it ought to behave according to their theory , and so they just invent a bad proletariat . That's the reason why all of these things are happening that contradict their theories .

But it's more than that , right ? I mean the 18th Brumair . One of the most striking statements in that whole text is , I think , where he says that Louis Napoleon , as well as his entire administration and so forth , their lumpen proles . Well , that seems pretty crazy , right . I mean , this guy is he's the emperor of France , right ?

He's famous for these very garish like buildings that he builds , these theaters and stuff with all the gold leaf and these elaborate frescoes and so forth . I mean , that doesn't really seem to have very much to do with this idea of proletarians which is in the word lumpen proletariat .

Oh , but they come from all classes , right , it's the refuse , it's whatever isn't playing a productive role , it's like thieves , like so Louis Napoleon is kind of a scammer , right , he's kind of scamming the state and directing money from the state to his own pockets and running this grift , basically , to use a popular word .

It's also people like you know , beggars , and I think prostitutes are also put in there at some point and stuff like that . What is interesting about the Clyde Barrow book to me and this is a guy who has a really bad case of Trump derangement syndrome , which is pretty unfortunate , right , I mean the conclusion of his book .

Like the last paragraph , he invents this term Trump and terriot , which is constantly swelling and growing , and blah , blah , blah .

one way or the other . The way you've constructed this argument . Like so , and I also cannot tell who you actually think is a lumpen prole , because there's an expansion of the category in some ways in that book and I do . I start to play with it , just like some other people .

I literally just did a video on making it a verb about the foreclosure of organization and future orientation and like the things that we associate with criminality but again , not all kinds of criminality refer like .

I remember arguing with someone who's like well , you know , organizing strippers is organizing lumpen proles , and I'm like well , but not all unproductive labor , even according to Marx's lumpen proletariat . Like in fact , what productive and unproductive labor has to do with the proletariat is actually , frankly , never stated one way or the other . It's hinted at .

I will say it is hinted at , but like Marx doesn't definitively define proletariat with a hard definition anywhere , like actually that's another , that's a dialectical , like methodology problem , but it is a real one because you know , famously , when you get to the part of Capital Volume Three , where you're supposed to finally get the fucking definition , it stops Like

it's just like , it's like no , the whole thing we're dividing about . And yet there's tons of ink , I mean theories , it's their plus value , large sections of the economic manuscripts of 1861 , 1864 .

A little bit of capital volume one , most of capital volume two , get devoted to this problem and the problem of also valorization versus creation , which isn't helpful in German because the word that they use means both things , like valorization . Yes , there's a technical difference with valorization .

I mean it's almost synonymous with creation , sometimes in Marx and not in others . So to me it's like the lump and proletariat's interesting . But the problem that you have is it's not as a category . I mean the one point borough has , I think , is legitimate . You can't make it a class the way everything else it's a class because there's no consistent .

If you look at the list that he gives , like clear relationship to productivity or even legality . It's basically you know . So on one hand I'm totally with you . I think the end notes people try to make it where it's just okay . Well , marx had to invent a subproletariat .

I think one of the problems that you have now , though , and that borough doesn't really deal with , is how much of the traits and tendencies we ascribe to the lump and proletariat are totally common in the working poor who are still employed full-time Like you can't get around that and not just service workers either , like it's , like you know , logistic workers ,

certain kinds of factory workers . I mean the participation in things like the drug trade and whatnot , which Marx would have abhorred , is totally common . It's just a sociological fact in those classes now . So it's a category that I find interesting , because you know you're right .

In some ways you're right we are in a picture that does feel a lot like Germany in 1848 , but in some ways also like okay , where you have the universalization of the wage relation , but now it seems like the conditions of the lump and proletariat are way more common , and if you get out of the developed world it's even more true , like so you know , a lot

of the third world's and third worldists answer this oh well , you know , it's a real proletariat in the developing world and the developed world's all laboreristic rats or whatever you get into the problem . Well , how do you explain how much of this lumpenization and precaritization is endemic to the developing world if productivity is a defining factor ?

And so I find it interesting because you know I've been reading a lot of this work and you mentioned Fourier again in this section , so we'll come back to Fourier's interpretation of this but I find the lump and proletariat both absolutely necessary and utterly baffling to how like it fixes the problem , that what Mark sees , because it also seems to create tons of

problems , like you know , for example , like the Reserve Army of Labor . Well , most of the Reserve Army and Labor would be lump and proletariat for Marx , and yet in capital they're good and in the political writings they're bad . I don't know how you like reconcile that . So anyway , the long run .

There's the party that represents landed property , there's the party that represents , you know , the industrial capitalists , and they have this sort of well , you know he's , he's deriving all these things from the events as they play out . When he tries to predict things , which I mean with a scientific theory , you're supposed to have some ability to predict outcomes .

Right , for whatever your objective study is . It doesn't work out too well , right , and the thesis about the Barrow book that I think is is interesting , I mean , aside from he gives a very great historical overview of this lump and proletariat concept and its evolution over time . He says he finds there's a certain tension in Marx .

Right , this whole idea of the proletarian revolution is Marx conceived of it . It had a lot to do with the factory labor scenario specifically , like it had a lot to do with getting so many people under the same roof at one time , right , that you really kind of heighten these contradictions . Everybody is physically in the same social space with each other .

They can see , well , you know , there's all of us and there's just such a tiny group of people who really own and drive all the profits and blah , blah , blah .

So you know , for instance , in Capital , volume 1 , he says this is not the case with the industrialized agriculture , where actually the tendency is to spread fewer and fewer workers over a larger area , and so you're not going to get a revolution from there .

You need to have the people coming together , you need to have this critical mass , you need them to see that they could really seize control of the means of production , and they don't need the capitalist telling them what to do and so on and so forth . So there's that .

But Barrow says you know there's a sort of tension as Marx works through his theory in Capital where he kind of starts to see that maybe this isn't inevitable and something else that could happen as things develop is you could just end up with more and more people being pushed into the surplus population and becoming lumpenized and becoming this sort of dead weight

as far as getting any sort of revolutionary project off the ground Right .

I mean , I know it's before he really comes up with that as a major category , but it does seem like okay , well , if you're forcing everyone into the Reserve Army of Labor , then what is the difference between them and the lumpen proletariat ? The only thing I can see at that point is morality , that is it .

Like and we're explaining morality by class position , sometimes like , but not consistently . I mean , because the other thing about Marx on class positions and politics is there's also an admission yes , we can't predict an individual's politics by their class .

We can only predict the grand movements , because history is made in aggregates , et cetera , et cetera , et cetera . Also that's a special pleading for me in Ingalls because we clearly don't belong to the class that we're supposed to belong to , not as anyone who's the leadership of these parties . Have a nice day .

Goodbye , like you know , and that's something the anarchists throw throughout them now . But they threw at it that threw them at the time . Like you're not of the class , you were saying that you were , you were representing , and that was not lost on people even contemporaneously .

So you know , that's one of the things I find very frustrating when you talk about lumpenization , because in this case Marx thinks it's predictive of individual morality and individual action . Maybe , but in other cases he doesn't seem to think that really at all .

Because also , if that , if he was right , that class determination was politically determinative in a one-to-one way , you don't need a Vanguard party , you don't need any of those political apparatus Like that seems to be completely unnecessary . Then you know , and I have you know , I've thought about this for 20 years .

I do not have a way to reconcile those two positions , anyway , you know . So I guess for those of you who are listening , like , is this Barnes' long , dark night of the Marxist soul ? It's like , yes , it actually is . Like this , these concepts of revolution do bring this stuff out .

And I think one of the things about taking a class like this to , to , to , you know , pivot and let Jerry talk about we're gonna get the linen in a second , but about this is , I think if you really follow this concept of revolution , crowsley , you can see why there's problems later and you can also see , like , why this is a particular problem for Marxist .

One of the things I was reading Alvin Goudner's book on the two Marxisms that he pointed out , that I was like he's like , yeah , nobody else actually relies on theory and scientific predictability for their politics the way Marxists do .

Like it is unique to Marxist that they claim to you know , both have an epistemic solution and an ideological solution and a politics Like nobody else makes that kind of grand claim . It operates with that kind of grand claim . So you know , it is . It is a hard thing to deal with .

But yeah , and I'm with you on the on the lumpen , because it's a tension , like if you take the emissary thesis , what you're saying , and I think , like the Black Panthers actually picked this up , you're saying that by that thesis the lumpen should be the most revolutionary class , right , because they're the most shut out of society and that's even kind of implied

in the whole proletarian thesis . Why does the proletarian have nothing to lose about their chains ? Because there they . There's no way that they can benefit in the class structure , no matter what . Therefore , because of that , they are a universal subject , because because the only thing they could possibly do is abolish the current situation .

But then if you follow this stuff out with the lumpen proletariat , that's not the argument , it can't be . Like the arguments actually know , working actually teaches , teaches the workers in a noble , then they're still shut out . They're basically , you know , all but slaves .

They're not quite slaves , they have free labor , but it's more of a technicality and through their cooperative efforts and working in the factory you know , they've become a cohesive unit and they're skilled and they can shut everything down . But those two thesis actually aren't really the same .

They're a little bit in tension with each other and because they're hidden in the same concept , we don't tease those tensions out .

I mean , you know , and a friend of mine well , a former friend of mine , they're in enemy now used to point out that this is , this is a real problem with like dialectical thinking , because a lot of times you can just pause it to oppose things and hope the thing that you want emerges out of that opposition , like in the same people in the same time , when

I do think we can see some of these problems being like you know , how do we get rid of capitalism ? We spread it . How do we get rid of nationalism ? We encourage nations . Like it does seem in each case the kind of center path that Marxist Haitians also paradoxical , but anyway , I'll let you pick back up . So what's your conclusion ?

Like how satisfying do you personally find this lump in thesis are ?

You know , I mean , this is one point where I think for Ray is actually kind of , I think for a does kind of have a point where it does seem like , well , lump in ism does seem like a post hoc justification for your problems more than it actually is an explanation are predictive , although I guess we can kind of say people try to use it as predictive in

regards to fascism and other forms of Bonapartism , but then again , what Bonapartism is starts to move around to in the 20th century . So anyway .

It has an intuitive appeal just because I feel like , on a moral and spiritual level , you have a lot of people who feel like they are superfluous , right , right , you know people who feel like they're not needed in this world and they have nothing to do , there's nothing for them to gain or accomplish , they're not going to make any difference , right ?

I mean you get lumpenized in a way , just with this kind of institution of need them that develops where it's like , well , okay , I guess I'm going to be sitting on my parents couch and playing video games into my 40s , and well , you know people , people's lives need to mean something to them , right ?

But we kind of have a void of that sort of meaning for a lot of people and really the question is what do we do ? Are we really just here to ? You know we'll enjoy a nice cup of tea and you know we'll have some good friends and we'll try to be good people to them and to our families , and meanwhile we watch the whole world fall apart around us ?

Is that all that we really have to do in this life , right ? Or do we have a chance to actually change things in some way . I mean , I'm somebody who used to be very active in political organizing on the left and I got very disillusioned with it for various reasons . And that's where I got into the critique of politics , right , the early marks .

You kind of see how these things really just feed into strengthening the state , which is never going to really abolish its own conditions of possibility . Right , it's never really going to solve the problems , it's just going to find ways to administer them a little better .

And within that framework , well , you can maybe get a position at a nonprofit or you can get a position in the government and you can make a nice life for yourself . But what if we really want to change things ? You know , is that still possible ? If so , what do we do as far as this course goes ?

I mean , I don't think the conclusions that we're going to draw from that are going to be that positive , but they're also not wholly negative either , right , I mean , Marx does have some fairly specific answers to some of the problems that you raised , like with 1850 .

There's something that happens in 1850 , early 1850 , which is very interesting , which I set up the syllabus in such a way that it's going to highlight this aspect of it where there is elections in France that deliver these tremendous big gains for the you know the radical , the socialist party in France , right , and so , initially , marx and Engels are very excited .

They see this as being the starting point of a new phase of the revolution . Right , things are going to get moving again and things are going to start moving forward , and this is where you have this idea of economic crisis come to the fore right . So I mean emissoration on its own .

Basically , people get used to stuff , right , they used to living in a certain way . You don't really have a chance to get a claw in , to make revolutionary change , unless there's a crisis and suddenly what little people had gets taken away , or maybe they had a decent living and now they don't anymore .

And that's where people really get upset and that's where you need somebody who's got a plan , who steps in , who explains . Well , you know angry people .

Here's what we're going to do , and they capitalize on all the anger and resentment that came from the crisis and they lead it in a specific direction to realize a specific goal , namely the communist revolution , right . So there's a lot of different factors in play With the first text that we're going to be looking at in two days .

We start the course off with Engels' introduction to the class struggles in France . I mean , he talks about how do you make a revolution happen , right ? I mean , that's a pretty important question , right ? I think people like you and me and people who are listening to this , probably we don't need to be too much persuaded that a revolution might be desirable .

We probably already have some ideas about where we would want to see it go . But the big question is how would you make something like that happen , right ? So there's a little bit of a story that Engels tells about technology . Of course , weapons technology got quite a bit more advanced over the course of his lifetime .

He no longer had a situation where the people in the streets and the soldiers of the government would have basically comparable arms Right . Nowadays , of course , they've got things like tanks and helicopters and planes that no regular person is going to have . But even then , Engels says you would very rarely defeat the army militarily . Right ?

It's not like you fight a battle with them and win . What more often happens is you get the army to come over to your side , right , the army gets out in the streets and the people are there and the army sees these people and they say wait a minute , these are my family members , these are my people , not this king or this Tsar . You know what ?

I'm not going to listen to that guy's orders , I'm going to switch . That's of course what happens , for instance , in the February Revolution in Russia . Right , I mean pretty directly , you have the military defecting from the Tsar . That's kind of what turns the tables and dooms the Tsarist regime to its end .

Well , I mean , how far have we come , the contemporary American left , how far have we really come to make those kinds of inroads with the military ? It doesn't seem like too much right .

But even if this older idea of revolution , this whole taking to the barricades and getting people in the streets , even if for a lot of reasons that's not necessarily all that viable as a path to making significant political change in the present , neither do I think we're in a totally post-revolutionary age .

I think , on the contrary , to kind of develop this comparison between our present day and 1848 Germany , to develop that a little further , engels has a distinction between revolutions from below and revolutions from above .

Right , I think we have just lived through one of the greatest revolutions of above of all time , and that is the 2020 COVID crisis and the pandemic response where , just as in 1848 , all of Europe rises up simultaneously .

In 2020 , world governments pretty much all of them with very few exceptions within a very short period of time , adopted a series of totally unprecedented , very sweeping measures that , just a month or two before , not many people would have considered possible . Right , you have this .

I mean to get back to the early critique of politics this antagonism between the political state and civil society . I mean , this is one of the most amazing examples of that we've ever seen .

You have the political state basically saying civil society needs to shut down , stop seeing your friends , stop seeing your family , don't go to work , we need to lock things down to reduce the transmission . And I mean I think it also did turn out to be more of an 1848 than a 1789 and that it pretty quickly failed .

Right , you have the counterrevolution of reopening and eventually , all of these restrictions and such go away , but we saw such a profound transformation of even the most basic social norms in such a short period of time , right , that I don't think that we can say that we are totally done with revolutionary changes in our lifetime .

On the contrary , we're likely to see some pretty dramatic and transformative events .

The question is , well , what can we really do to shape them in a direction that might lead to something better , that isn't just this sort of general decline and collapse into some kind of Blade Runner scenario ?

Well , I'm not sure that Marx or this course on Marx and modern revolutions really answers that , but we can learn something from the clarity with which they address these questions and tactics and strategy to try to solve the problems of their own day .

We've seen a bunch and I don't just think they're a left-wing character either , I think they're all over the place ideologically . And we've also seen from the standpoint of classical Marxism . We've seen a bunch of Bonapartist figures emerge on left and right too , and not just in the United States .

In fact , I would argue that the United States got them late , that they started in other places , actually around 2006 , 2007 . And we don't really get them in the United States until Trump , although I guess you see the hint of it in the Obama campaign .

But there's such continuity between what Obama actually does in prior politics that it's hard to say , whereas there is something interesting about the nature of Trumpism that I think none of the left really wants to talk about in a very real sense . We talked about the Trump . Derangement syndrome is like .

Well , how much has not changed under Biden and how many of Biden's programs that the left defense actually began under Trump during during the COVID crisis , and I think quite clearly actually , it seems like well , a bunch of them and we're just kind of not talking about it Because we we've been kind of blindsided by the actual implications of these massive changes .

And , yeah , I agree with you that 2020 was one of them . I kind of think it started in 2007 . I think there really was a Real change in our fundamental economic structure that was hidden .

That change like it that I think Just as big as neoliberalism and just like we didn't realize what neoliberalism was well into the 80s , even though it probably started in the early 70s .

I don't think people I think people are just now realizing that , like neoliberalism , as we understood it and as we've been naming it and using it , probably started to end around 2008 . We actually just don't know what we're living in right now . And so you know , in so much of these names mean anything .

I mean , you know one of the things about I think there's some people in member school who probably would deny that any of these periodizations mean anything at all . But and but . I have had this . I agree with you . I found , I found thinking about marks In in the .

In all these figures I mean blanky , bakunin , the second international , the crisis of the second international , linen , even Stalin , to be very helpful in this time period . But also I keep on hitting some of the same you know , like hold the sacks in a four . Is that that that I mentioned earlier ?

Like marks has some answers to some of these , but others , if you read closely , it seems like he's kind of Frankly throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping you don't notice , like Because he's and it's not . I don't think it's because he's anti scientific or trying to fool anyone . I think he's .

He's trying to work it out in real time and it's unsettled and he doesn't finish the project , like if it even could be finished , and that I guess that becomes the the thing to ask it , because to me one of the biggest questions is why has everyone been talking about the crisis of Marxist since ? Like 1965 ?

Are like the are like really the late 50s that , like we've been in Marxism , has been in a perpetual crisis of Marxism since then , even when , if you look at the 60s , it was on the March , his like as far as like territories that claim some allegiance to it , it was like a third of the planet at that point .

And yet and it's definitely not that today I mean China basically is the big , the big holder Of population . But other than that , you've seen a massive fallback . But even during the time of growth , like really serious growth in the 60s and 70s , for Marxist there was already a feeling of intellectual malaise and that there was a major problem .

And it wasn't just in the Soviet Union , like it was pretty , it was pretty generalized and it showed up in multiple tendencies . You know , I think about like , the . You know the great debate between Altecer and Lukash , between , you know , the Hegelian Marxist and the and the and the structural Marxist , or the critical Marxist and the structural Marxist .

And they're both saying by like in 1970s , like there's a crisis and Marxism that none of us have solved Intellectually . And it's also not just true between like people will pretend today oh , it's just the Western Marxist that have the problem . No , go and read the stuff in the hungry .

And in the Soviet Union and even China , there's there's an intellectual crisis in the 70s . You know , and again , it's all beyond the scope of your course .

But what I find interesting is , the more I study this time period , in these shifts between between Marxist writing in 1848 and Marxist writings in 1879 , the more I do see where , okay , these problems were there for a moment one and we kind of knew it , like Now , that the larger Marxist political movement did not know it because so much of this was not

published . But you know , marxist and a lot of critters , including leaders of the parties , knew it because it was going back and forth from letters . We see it when letters between Marx and Babel mark , you know , marks and Ingalls , ingalls and and all kinds of people I mean who wasn't he talking to ?

You know they're , they're , they're the number of times they threaten to not represent the SP Day and then like but also endorse what they do . It's , it's , it's , it's kind of , it's kind of wild to try to figure this out . So I'd like to thank you . I'm gonna run this . I normally I'm not gonna run this . I normally don't run these immediately .

I'm gonna run this tomorrow . So those of you listening , when you watch this , you have 24 hours to sign up for Jared's course . But I'm gonna do a Friday special because a this is my favorite topic to talk about , which is the history of Marxism and how we kind of got in this weird State that we are in today and be .

I will endorse everything you say but also leave you on the the Christopher lash question . When Christopher lash asks is Marxism obsolete or is revolution obsolete , to meet and ask Marxism obsolete although the question of is revolution and obsolete is about as Marxism obsolete and lashes answer seems to be no , but I can't really tell you the answer to how .

It's not Right like it seems to be , like his answer to it is like I still think revolution has meaning , but obviously Some kind of understanding that we've had either become too metaphorical on one end , are too locked in the 19th century and another and we can't think our way out of it for whatever reason and I ironically that that was written in the late 60s

.

you get the social security and so on , so forth , do you ever really see a revolution along the lines of what you see in 1917 Russia , or 1848 France ? And there are some counter examples , right . So there's this scholar , asif Bayat , who writes a lot about the Arab world , right . And of course , you have the , the Iranian Revolution of the 70s ,

right . The Shah who was overthrown was was trying to build a modern , westernized state along a lot of these lines . You have the free education , you had other stuff , but what seems to have made the difference there was , you had kind of this idea of a national identity , right .

There was the sense that the Iranians Were just kind of , just kind of condemned to be imitators of western you know political and cultural life , and they pushed back on that and they said no , we're neither east nor west , were our own thing .

You had these Thinkers who are bridging Marxism with Islam in interesting ways , right , so there's a religious component too .

So I mean you can get a revolution off the ground if you have a compelling idea , in spite of , you know , the , the apparatus of the bureaucratic state making that , you know , giving people something to lose , basically to where the bar gets higher for getting some like like that off the ground . But you can still do it , right .

Maybe it's not the most relevant topic for how we're going to make sort of political change that we would want to see in the near future , right , but but if we've moved on from it , we sure do see a lot of things that look a lot like revolutions in terms of mobilization but then seem like reforms in terms of their actual effects . That's one of them .

As a Byats point , he's applying it to the Arab Spring , but we had an even better example of this recently with , you know , the BLM movement , the George Floyd protests and stuff like that . I mean that was like the biggest public protests In terms of numbers that the country has ever seen and what were really the impacts ? What really got off the ground ?

You know , we certainly didn't defund the police . We definitely didn't abolish them , right , even some of the more sensible policy ideas like oh , maybe we'll have these like little social worker strike forces that handle the mental health calls instead of the police is barely getting off the ground at all .

The main impact of it seems to have been maybe it helped Joe Biden get elected a little bit right . So that's sort of the interesting contradiction that we're in . I mean , we have these things that seem revolutionary in terms of the level of mobilization , but it seems like Seems like we kind of just need better ideas .

You know , maybe that's it right , like you get the people out in the streets , but you need somebody with an idea . Here's what we're going to do , such that you know we're not just registering our disapproval of the way things are , but we have some sort of actual plan for turning them into something different . That would be better .

Seems like , maybe we need something like that . But well then , why don't we have these revolutionaries ? You know why ? Why aren't there the people who step forward like you ? Can look at Sri Lanka , for instance . I mean , that state collapsed pretty recently , the government and Haiti collapsed pretty recently .

You know , there were , there were times in the past where somebody might have stepped forward and said , all right , now we're going to do a Marxist , you know social republic or something like that , and then you don't seem to have those people anymore . So this is where we kind of get into anti politics .

Right , seems like social base for the political class , if you want to call them that . The social base of political parties in the United States has been declining for a long time . Right , you used to have these unions that were big , strong supporters of the Democrats .

Used to have these evangelical churches that were big , strong supporters of the Republicans , and all of that is they're losing their numbers , they're getting eroded to varying degrees and it it's it's becoming increasingly antagonistic , right , I mean , trump and Brexit is a big , pretty clear example of antagonism on the part of civil society against the political

establishment as a whole . Oh , you think this is a bad idea ? Well , we're going to do it for just that reason . You know we're sick of you and we're going to stick a middle finger in your face just to show you that we're not going to fall into into lockstep with all the stupid . Probably do you want to do anymore , so maybe that's somewhere to start .

Is it going to lead anywhere ?

What is the difference between Biden and Trump ? It's largely style in how antagonistic they are with the administrative state , although if Trump was reelected I don't know that that would be true like , like every , the conditions are so different post post 2020 that it was .

I don't think you could predict Trump round two off of Trump from one either , and so , like , the whole thing is a very hard question to answer . Plus , I mean , you know this hasn't come up in our conversation , but we have some serious crisis , these coming down . We got obvious decoupling , we have climate change .

We have we have what looks to be an economy that can either grow nor go into true recession because there's not enough people to have an unemployment crisis , and I literally can't think of a capitalist society where that's ever been true , like what you know . But that also means like , well , how do you like ?

How would you like , how would you encourage your normal levers , both through the welfare state are through jobs , don't seem to be a way to be a way to re stimulate economic growth .

Also , it's not like economic growth has been super low , it's been about 3% , which is , which is , you know , I guess , kind of a late capitalist norm , but people are experiencing that pretty negatively Like . So , yeah , I just I'm in agreement with you .

It's going to be really interesting to and knock on wood , that interesting doesn't mean we all die Pretty interesting to see what , what happens in the in the near future , because it does feel like a whole lot like COVID seems to have reset a whole lot of status quo politics , but it's not taking so .

So , for example , you know , a year ago , I thought that , like Trudeau could like literally kill five babies on the street and probably still get reelected in Canada because there was no real opposition . I no longer think that's true and while conservatism is very unpopular amongst the young and the Republicans did a lot worse and you would have predicted , in 2022 .

Progressivism is also complete , is becoming more and more unpopular , so it's hard to see where that goes either . It's just , you know , I've been looking at these polls that have been saying that both capitalism and socialism are unpopular in the United States right now .

Like well , okay , the historical other options that emerge from here have not generally been good , so I want to know what you guys mean like . So anyway , thank you so much , jared .

I'm glad you came on , as you know , as I've been excited about this , this is one of my favorite topics and I'm glad to talk to you about it because you've read enough of this to get .

Why have where people don't understand , why have like heart palpitations , discussion , this stuff sometimes where I'm like I don't understand the answer to this and the answer does matter , like it is actually of importance to have an answer to this question and I do not have it , and I would love people to just admit to me what the tech say so we can talk about

whether or not we can build an answer from this , as opposed to pretending the text as something it doesn't say and maybe the answer isn't found in a text also . I mean , that's another thing about Marxist where we are , we both oppose book worship and do it , so it's it is a difficult thing . Thank you so much .

People should definitely check out your class over there at member school . Check out member school . I think there's a lot of people think member school is a lot more and scholarly and ideological off step than it is . Colin drum is brought together a bunch of fairly diverse and somewhat contentious scholars and there are debates in there .

I watch them and the in the members discord all the time . So I would definitely tell people to check it out and , and if you can't afford to take a full course , definitely audit .

That's not expensive at all and I think they're changing the way they're going to allow the auditing , but it's it's something you can definitely do If you want to example of past courses and at least get access to the material once it's completed .

Yeah , and you guys sometimes do like like book study groups that are semi open to you , so people want to want to pop into one of those before you join . There's usually just I guess it's go to the website and find that out , right , like that . I know that .

I know that Jules was telling me she was going to do one that was going to be open to the public as a kind of like well , if you want to , if you want to see what we do , here's what it is here's . You know we're going to do a reading group and you can get a feeling for what's going on . So I do think those happen right .

You can also find us on Twitter at member school if you're interested , you know , let us know we'll . We'll get you on to the discord . We do charge money for the courses , right .

We find that it's important that people have some sort of a stake in it that kind of keeps them motivated to stick with the whole course , right , but you know we don't turn anyone away for lack of funds . If you're interested in participating but can't make the tuition , let us know we can work something out .

And yeah , you know , we're at a stage where we've been growing quite nicely and we want to keep that going and bring on more people . So we would love to hear from you , meet you if you're interested in the sort of stuff that Varna and I talked about today .

There's classes on the political role of horses , which I found I thought was going to not be as fascinating as it ended up being . I became I to make a joke related to the most recent Barbie movie . Horses in patriarchy are a lot more related than you think . Just just like that joke was accidentally insightful . So you know , check it out .

And yeah , I would tell people to check it out and participate . And also the courses are . I think they're what they're , usually around $250 , which were the kind of course they are is a pretty good deal .

Thank you so much for having me . Varna , it's a . I really enjoyed talking to you today .