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Head on over to free man beyond the wall dot com forward slash support and do it there.Thank you. I would assume that you would drink to, you're talking about drinking to study?
Yeah, last night I crushed an entire bottle of Robert Mondavi Kabsov and read The Entirety of State and Revolution a second time over to clarify my notes.
Nice hundred pages of distilling angles, basically.
That's really what it is.And I like a second time around, I was like, Jesus Christ, half of this book is just angles.Why am I reading?
And what's funny is I didn't even read the whole thing because there's a the first now the last part of it is like commentaries on other people at the time and I don't give a shit.I don't care.Nobody cares about what he thought about.
Bukharin and I don't care.I did a little research on the anarchist part, but other than like it's it's really only 60 70 pages Yeah, easy been through.
It's probably I don't really remember how long the Communist Manifesto was but it's like There's a good audio of it on YouTube.
There's a good audio of it on YouTube.Yeah
Check it out.It's not terrible, State of Revolution.It's really not.It's super, like, damn.Since I know what happened.
Extremely dialectic and very quote-heavy, both Marx and Engels.He was Engels's… I think I tweeted this last night because I was re-perusing my tweets.He was simply Engels's bitch.That's what I believe.
He was the simp for Engels.
He was 100% an Engels simp. 100%.
What else is I going to say about that?Yeah, I like probably.The part that stuck out to me the most, obviously, was when he starts talking about the anarchists and how you can really see how you see how much he hates the anarchists.
And once you understand why, yes, you're sort of like, yeah, you know. It's kind of hard to argue with the dude.
He, yeah, he, I didn't focus too much on his individual criticisms because I looked into the history of it and Lenin, probably more than anyone who comes after him, has a better relationship with the anarchists than any other, like, like, really it's.
It's Stalin who comes around when he has to administer the second phase of the socialist state.When he goes, when he really realizes, okay, these anarchists are just, they're simply not gonna, we can't have this.
So Lenin, obviously, he defeats the black army.I think they're called the black army. Whatever, was it Nabokov?Whatever the famous anarcho-communist who took over the Ukraine was named.
When Trotsky goes in to fight them, there starts to be some tearing apart.But really it seems like it was Stalin who, and we'll get to Stalin because I don't know if we introduced this to the listeners, but I'll do it.
We're going to go through the, as Gonzalo Guzman, I don't really know what his, I don't remember what his, Abimael Guzman, who's the final person we're going to be talking about in this series, terms Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.
and then himself as the four swords of Marxism.So we are going to be studying Lenin, then we're going to get to Stalin, then we're going to go to Mao, then we're going to go to Guzman.Four very, very different people.
And then before I release you to go back to your Timeline Earth individual podcast, we're going to do one last episode.
I do. That's going to be a really good one, because it's finally somebody who the listeners might be like, oh, okay, great.But not for the reasons that they think.
I would hope that the listener would want to hear about Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Guzman.They should be listening.Yes.Yeah.I mean, this is how do you have to study your enemy?
I mean, this is the the complete opposite of what most of the people who are listening believe in.And if you understand, and people always throw around the term communism, like, oh, social security is communism.Well, sure.
I mean, technically, I mean, maybe socialism.I mean, it's just really a welfare government program.And it's very easy to throw these terms around and apply them to everything.And I do it too, so I'm not really yelling at anybody.But
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I grew a lot.I mean, I honestly feel like I grew a lot because I started to understand we're not that far away from these people when it comes to it.No, not at all.
Which is why the last person will be quite interesting for us to talk about, and I think listeners will figure it out why.Yeah, we're not as far from the revolutionaries as people nowadays like to say because of the crimes of Stalin.
All right, so, before we can talk about Lenin, I'm going to be very brutal with your listeners right now, because they're also probably my listeners, and so I feel in some sense, guys, I love you guys, but the next person I see on the timeline, I go, have you read Marx?
And they go, yeah, I read the Communist Manifesto.I'm virtually slapping you right in the face. because that doesn't mean anything.You didn't read Marx.You read a treatise where Marx was ass-mad about what was happening in 1848.
You did not read his treatise.You don't know anything about dialectical materialism.But I'm here today to give you 3,000 words about dialectical materialism before we actually talk about Lenin.
So let's get into that very quickly so that we can get through this.I need to explain what Marxism actually is. because many people sort of think it vaguely means communism, which it doesn't in any sense.
Where are you distilling this from?I mean, to me, the German ideology was the one who really made me understand that Marx was not an idiot.
So this is from the book, What is Marxism?Or it's the chapter, What is Marxism?And the book is called, let me Google it right now, because I can't find the name of it. Ah yes, Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism by Jose Sison.
This is where this is going to come from.It is a fantastic distillation of what Marxism is before Lenin shows up.It was written right around the time when the Great Proletarian Revolution in China was concluding.
And this guy who was in jail, wrote this in jail, is a communist, self-professed communist, gives a really fantastic explanation of the whole ideology of Marxism and very specifically what Marxism actually is.
Like if you were to say, if you were to go into a dictionary and go, what is Marxism?It should be, confer dialectical materialism.And then you can go and read about dialectics.It's the same exact thing to him.
And in his explanation, I kind of agree with him.So let me, let me, do a little dialectical materialism explanation here.So, Marxism is a comprehensive ideology, and it ranges from philosophy to strategy to tactics.
It seeks not only to interpret the world, but also to change it.It is acclaimed as universal, and it serves as a guide and a general method of cognition and practice in both natural and social sciences.
It's a system of ideas, or ideology, that guides the organized conduct of a worker's class and the people, as well as the proletarian parties and states in building socialism, and carrying out an anti-imperialist movement.
This ideology has inspired and impelled the rapid social, economic, scientific, and cultural progress of socialist countries in a matter of a few decades.Its adherence
It has adherence of no mean magnitude or significance in the third world and in capitalist countries.Lenin describes Marxism as the development of revolutionary theory and the practice on the high road of civilization.
In pointing to political economy and specifically Das Kapital as the core of Marxism, Lenin recognizes the significance of it as the most profound explanation for an historical epoch. In this case, capitalism.
So Marx presents three stages of development. Well, Marxism presents three stages of development.
The first stage is the stage that covers the period when Marx and Engels clarify the laws of motion in a free-competition capitalist economy, which lead to ever-increasing concentration of capital.
And when revolutionary activities ranged from 1848 revolutions to Marx's ideological leadership of the Working Men's Association, which is called the First International, to the successful armed revolution of the proletariat in the Paris Commune.
Anytime you hear me say Commune in this entire thing, think Paris Commune very specifically because that was seen as a huge victory to Marx and to Lenin. Stage 2.
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Third stage is the stage which this piece was written during, which is when socialism exists in several countries.And what's interesting here is it's called Mao Zedong Thought, he calls it.
And Mao Zedong Thought conforms and clarifies the problem of revisionism and the restoration of capitalism in some socialist countries.
Even as imperialism and the world capitalist system are in rapid decline, the problem of revisionism has also arisen in socialist countries.And Mao puts forth the theory and practice of continuing the revolution under the proletarian dictatorship.
So, as you can see, those are what we're going to more or less be talking about.This was written before Gonzalo or Abel Guzman comes into the picture.That will be how we conclude this.Perhaps there's a completely different expression of this thing.
So it may be observed that Marxism or Marxism-Leninism is a theory based on the fundamental teachings of Marx and Engels.
It is continuously developing, though, and in stride with the ever-changing world and the particularities of every country, Marxism today is the acclaimed guide to the world transition of capitalism to socialism, and in semi-colonial and semi-feudal societies particularly, the completion of the democratic revolution
and the transition to socialism.That is the full definition of Marxism, the stages of Marxism, what Marxism has looked like up to the point of Mao.
I will give a summary of what Guzman proposes and what he does, which is very different from the other three.And that's that.Now, what I thought was interesting here is he basically starts a chapter called dialectical materialism with this statement.
Marxist philosophy is otherwise known as dialectical materialism. It assumes that reality, this is gonna get a little heady, so you're probably gonna have to do this one over, because I had to do this about three times.
It assumes that reality is material, meaning it's constituted of particles, and that consciousness arises and proceeds from matter, and accounts for the development or change in terms of the laws inherent to matter, as well as the interaction of matter with consciousness, which is peculiar to man.
It may sound redundant or trite to speak of reality as material or as consisting of matter, but we must recall that for long periods, Platonic and Augustinian kinds of objective idealism hold sway and dictate that reality is actually ideal, meaning it consists of ideas and the material that proceeds from them.
At the outset, however, I need to make a quick clarification.Materialism is not what your average priest or preacher would be speaking about.It's not what reactionary politicians would be speaking about.
It's not what landlords or consumerists or any bourgeoisie would be speaking about or indulge in.
To Marxists, materialism is an outlook and a methodology, meaning when you approach a subject you use this thing, which correctly understands that nature and composition of the universe and the relationship of matter and human consciousness.
Matter, in a general term that embraces things constituted of particles which exist in certain modes and measurable in space and time, it is the physical object of human perception and cognition.
Consciousness ranges from senses to thoughts and ideas. Matter is the source and basis of consciousness.Consciousness is the product and reflection of matter.
It is in this sense that you can begin to speak of matter as being the primary thing, while consciousness is the secondary thing.But, while thought is secondary to matter, it is the highest possible product of matter.
Insofar as it correctly reflects the laws of motion in matter, it is capable of interacting and transforming things faster than nature can on its own.
Unlike mechanical materialism, which simply reduces all things to processes, Marxist materialism stresses the comprehensive capability of mankind to transform nature and society.
We can therefore easily assert that matter can exist independently of consciousness, Which is, this is not what I believe, by the way, but just so everybody knows, this is not what you have to believe either.
We can assert matter is existent independently of consciousness, while the latter cannot exist independently from the former meaning.Consciousness cannot exist separate from matter.Matter can exist separate from consciousness.
When Marxists refer to objective reality, they speak of things as existing independently of whatever a person might think about their existence.
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while they were perpetuated as suffocating ideology of feudal societies.
While Marxism philosophically opposes religion, it politically tolerates it in the recognition that superior scientific ideas will ultimately prevail in the long run through persuasion, social practice, and the benefits of science and technology.
And Marxism carries over from a liberal democracy the principle of upholding freedom of thought and belief.This is Marx.This is not necessarily Lenin.But what does a dialectic look like? Before Hegel, a dialectic just meant to argue in the abstract.
Think Socrates.This is what- I mean, this is Socrates' big innovation, is the dialectic itself.
So, those dialectics which are written down by Plato and similarly other metaphysical forms of coordination and disputation of fixed ideas, which we'll remember that term, in all theological circles occurs as well.
Marxist, rather materialist, dialectics are the achievement of Marxism.They set Hegelian dialectics completely on their heads, and they put materialist basices to
the universe with a little bit of influence from Ludwig Feuerbach, which don't worry about that.That's a whole other episode which we don't need to do.
Hegelian dialectics assert that development is first of all the self-development of thought before it is realized into history or into the material world.And what makes Hegel so outstanding as an idealist philosopher is that he dynamizes
a very static and lifeless dialectic. Hegel's the first one who takes that, well, in his mind, is the first one who takes the idea of the dialectic and brings it down from where Socrates put it, where Aquinas tries to bring it back up.
You know, if you've ever read the Summa Theologia, it's just argument, argument, argument, response, response, response.It's a very early form of auto-criticism, which is a Marxist principle.It's very interesting.
But Hegel is the first one who says that self-development of thought realizes itself in history. Feuerbach correctly points out that ideas are sensuous reflections of material in human perception.
So together, you take those two things and you get Marx.
So while it may be said that Marx and Engels put Hegelian dialectics on a materialist basis, they don't simply adopt his formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which is basically where the synthesis ends up as the final perfected thing.
Rather, they assert that change is endless, because anything at any stage always consists of contradictory aspects.
And the most fundamental meaning of Marxist materialist dialectics is that things by their very essence are in the process of constant change.So Marxists say nothing is permanent except for change.
The materialism of Feuerbach one-sidedly looks at an account of a one-way reflection of human perception of materiality, meaning the influence does not come back from the other side.
In the philosophical writings of Marx and Engels, they draw three laws of dialectics, which you can consider on your own.I'll give you an example of each one of them.So the first law is the law of negation of the negation.
The second law is the interpenetration or unity of opposites.And the third law is the quantitative to qualitative change.I'll explain all of those.The first one, the law of negation of negation.
The first law means that things run into their opposite in the full course of their development.For instance, capitalism starts off as free competition.In contradiction with mercantilism, it eventually becomes monopoly capitalism.
The second law is the law of interpenetration or the unity of opposites.So what this means is that in everything there are two opposite aspects. One is the principal aspect that determines the basic character of a thing.
The other is the secondary aspect, which is needed by the principal one, but which is continuously struggling against the principal one to assume the position of principal.
For instance, the capitalist class and the proletariat are one in the same thing.Underneath it, the capitalist system. They need each other, and at the same time, they struggle against each other in the course of both of their developments.
Insofar as everything, including capitalism, comes to pass, the structure, or rather the struggle, of two classes... Hey folks, I'm John Rich.
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It's called True Social, a free speech social media platform that hosts breaking news, TV streaming channels, and powerful commentary on all the issues facing our great nation.Break free of big tech and make your voice heard.
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The third law is the law of quantitative to qualitative change, which basically and simply means that change may at first be conspicuously qualitative or incremental, but a point is reached
at which the rise in quantity results in what is called a qualitative leap.In other words, evolution precedes revolution.Reforms precede revolution.So those three laws of dialectics from Marx are all interrelated and inseparable.
They can be summed up more simply by considering one law which Hegel comes up with.It's called the Law of Contradiction or the Unity of Opposites.That's basically Hegel's major contribution to Continental Theory.
The Law of Contradiction is universal.It embraces all things and processes at every stage and phase of development.It's also particular in that there are specific laws of motion peculiar to different things.
such as knowledge, which leads laws to lead us to create the appropriate means of handling certain situations.Everything has its principal and secondary aspects within Marxism.
In complex things and processes, there's always only one principal aspect, but among them several other aspects, which is always one next in importance, which could be identified as the secondary aspect.So for instance,
In capitalist society, the capitalist class is the principal aspect, and they contend it is most directly contradicted by the working class and the secondary aspect.
even as there are intermediary classes and strata which make up the whole situation.So there's obviously more than just the capitalist and the proletariat in the Marxist system.
But because the capitalist is the principal aspect, that which directly opposes the capitalist is the secondary aspect.
Several kinds of contradictions may be at work at the same time or in the same process, but to determine the basic operation of the thing or process is to determine the principal contradiction and the secondary contradiction.
Thus, contradiction can be solved one after the other, and the solution of the principal contradiction or problem leads to the solution of the next.
Contradictory aspects constitute identities in the sense that they are bound either in cooperation or in struggle, given certain circumstances, and also that the secondary aspect replaces the principal one from the ruling position.
Strength merely passes from the former to the latter. That's dialectical materialism.Your head's probably going, what the fuck did I just hear?You'll probably have to go back and do that one again.It's also all theoretical.
I mean, Marx tries to contend that this happens in history, but let's go a little further and actually see what Marx says about history.This is historical materialism.
So we can briefly sum up historical materialism as the application of dialectical materialism on the study of various forms of society and their development from one to the other.
It focuses on that part of nature or material reality where the consciousness, social activity, and the development of man is involved.And it delves into the social sciences rather than the natural sciences.
Historical materialism studies and deals with the fundamental terms of the existence of societies and their social development.
What historical materialism seeks to do is to comprehend the material base and the superstructure of any society and the interaction between the two.
While a certain form of society exists and carries the potential or is actual in its process of changing or being changed into another form.
So it links dialectical materialism to the political and to the political economy, as well as to various other aspects of social study.
Historical materialism uncovers and shows us the most essential laws of motion that operate in all and each and every human society and that govern their development, from their initial growth through maturation to decline, and either to replacement by a newer higher form or to a retrogression to a lower one.
Marx gives us a chronology of society.This is, and I don't like to step in too much, but this is perhaps the most erroneous thing from Marx.But don't let me let that influence you.
In the entire life of mankind so far, there have been several forms of societies in a generally ascending order.Marx follows a historical experience found in Western Europe, because that... Hey folks, I'm John Rich.
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Download the TruthSocial app or visit TruthSocial.com What is the chronology of society for Marx?Number one, primitive society.I think everybody's probably heard this.Primitive society goes to two.Slave society goes to three.
Feudal society goes to four.Capitalist society goes to five.Socialist society goes to six.Communist society.That is what Marx lays out.What are those societies?
The material base for any society Marx contends is its mode of production or economic system. This consists of both forces and relations of production.Forces of production include the means of production and the people within production.
The means of production include the tools of production and the available natural resources which are the object of human labor.The people in production include the actual producers of wealth with a certain level of skill.
The relations of production refer to the organization of production, which is also known as the division of labor, the common or private ownership of the means of production, and the distribution of the products of labor.
In general, the mode of production as a whole determines the form of the society, including the character of non-economic activities in the superstructure.
However, such non-economic activities interact with and have a powerful influence on material or economic activities.
No society whatsoever is possible without a mode of production that satisfies the material base needs of the people, and such higher things
as philosophy, politics, science, the arts, letters, lifestyle, and the like, cannot exist without the necessary material base which supports them. The forces of production in a primitive communal society were at an extremely low level.
The Paleolithic savage society had for the most part potent tools of production such as crude stones and was dependent entirely on hunting and fishing and picking fruit.
The Neolithic or barbaric society had for its most potent tools of production polished stones and the bow and arrow, and subsequently it develops husbandry, tillage, basketry, pottery, and the use of the cartwheel and the smelting of soft metals like tin and copper.
Typically, this kind of society consisted of a tribe. Although society was not yet exploited by division, or rather divided by exploitation and exploited classes, it is certainly no paradise as man was forced to contend with the harshness of nature.
There may only have been father figures, matriarchs, or leaders in clans and tribes, aside from the priests and medicine men.However, these individuals did not comprise an exploitative class because they themselves had to partake in labor.
It takes some 50 or 60,000 years before civilization begins to emerge.He says in the Mesopotamian, we're amazingly finding out it didn't actually start there.
Bronze and iron tools become the most potent tools of the slave society, especially for agriculture and production.They could not yet be produced abundantly and thus easily lent themselves to private ownership within a definite class.
The private ownership of the means of production was also extended to the ownership of men and women as slaves, or beasts of burden.
At first, this was considered a progressive development from the old barbaric practice of simply killing off offenders in society and captives of war.But eventually, the ruling class in society made it a systemic and sustained practice
to turn more men into slaves until they became major means of production.
So in a slave society, there were also non-basic and intermediary classes which first start to develop, like artisans, free-holding peasants, plebeians, merchants, intelligentsia.
And upon the breakup of the Roman Empire, under the onslaughts of revolutions by slaves and subjected nations of people, feudal societies emerged in Europe.
with land as the principal means of production, the relations of production between the slave master and slaves transformed into the landlord and serf, with the former in control.
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he was obliged to pay rent to his lord.
Agriculture and husbandry greatly expand in the feudal society, and metal tools for clearing the forest and tilling the soil become much more available, and therefore deep plowing, intercropping, fallowing, more efficient uses of draft animals and irrigation begin to be adopted.
Subsequently, land ownership slips away from the serf through various devices.The distinction between land owned by serf and lord was erased, and the serf was obliged to pay rent in the form of a crop share.
In later periods of feudal society, land rent in the form of cash was increasingly adopted by the bourgeoisie, increasingly to solidify its role and influence within the relations of production.
Remember, the bourgeoisie at this time is not the ruling class, okay?Just so everybody knows, bourgeoisie does not become the ruling class, I will tell you when that happens.The growth of agriculture...
encourages the distinct growth of handicrafts, which includes the production of agricultural implements, cloth, and the like.
The handicraft stage of bourgeois development, characterized by guilds as a form of organization, gives way to manufacturing.
So no longer was a complete product made by a few men in the same small shop, but a large group of men that would be devoted only to making a single part of the complete product day in and day out.
The advance of manufacturing, though, was still based on handicrafts which made the bourgeoisie a wealthy class, influential as the moneybags in the royal court. The French Revolution brought the bourgeoisie to power for the first time in history.
And by the 19th century, the bourgeoisie had already come into full control of the relations of production in several countries in Europe.
The Industrial Revolution gives rise to large-scale machine production, or mass production, which becomes the dominant characteristic of economic society in a number of European countries.
The new powerful means of production were owned by the capitalist class, and the mass of industrial workers, or proletariat, increased in order to build them up.
The Communist Manifesto of 1848, and we'll remember from our episode on Stirner, 1848 is a very important year for revolution, noted that the material achievements of capitalism outstripped in a very short period all those previous civilizations by so many times.
It also pointed out that a world economy had arisen, and with the capitalist countries capable of bombarding all backwards countries with commodities of capitalist production.
But the fundamental message of the manifesto was that the capitalist class had also summoned to life its own gravedigger, the proletariat.Capitalist society was increasingly being divided into two camps, that of capital and labor.
For the first time in the history of mankind, an exploited class had arisen with the capability not only of overthrowing the class that dominates it, but also of linking up with other exploited classes in the struggle for emancipation in order to build a new society, a socialist society.
That's Marx.That's Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto.Thoughts, questions, comments?
I think that most people just don't think that there's that much background to it, that there is actually a philosophy to it.And, you know, it it gets pretty deep.I think it's very interesting that the communism gets this.
There's this whole atheism that's associated with it.And then when you start listening to the basis for it, it tends to get what one might call spiritual.Yeah.Yes.Talking about consciousness and everything.
I mean, there is no even to this day, the greatest minds, the greatest doctors in the world have no can't explain consciousness.So, you know, to try to do that is
to try to bring that in and then to promote atheism, there seems to be a little bit of a disconnect there.
What I think is very interesting about the historical stages, well, first of all, I completely disagree with it.Marx refers to the Roman Empire as like slave society, which I just think is ridiculous, not at all.
In the sense that, and we'll go into this- Pretty much like our society.It's very close.People don't realize how close it is to our society.
I will tell you why it's not a slave society, because.
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If we go by dialectical materialism, I hate that I'm doing this because I'm not supposed to be, but I don't want to undermine the guy I'm about to talk about, but I kind of have to.
If we talk, because I know enough about Rome where I can safely say this, and I now know enough about dialectical materialism where I know, oh wait, so you're saying that a piece of history, a historical epoch, is defined by a primary and a secondary.
Well clearly, the primary group of people within the Roman Empire were the patricians.Very clear, obvious, fine, good.He's not arguing that.However, the idea that the direct opposite of the patricians was the slave class, is ridiculous.It's not true.
It's obviously the plebeian class always has been.Yes, there were servile wars.Absolutely.The slaves did rise up at least three times and a bunch of others.
But the idea that the direct opposition to the patrician class is the slave class is absolutely ahistorical.
And I don't know if that's Marx's fault, because when you consider that this was being written in the mid-1800s, we didn't know anything about Rome. in the mid-1800s.
Roman history really begins to develop in the early 1900s with the discovery of everything from Troy to all of the findings in Sicily.So, just in one example where I actually quite literally know that that is not the case, that is not the case.
Now, I don't know if that undermines the general idea of what's going on, but to me that's just a ridiculous thing to say to contrast that period of time with the slaves.The slaves were nobody.Nothing.Not even considered people.
There was no chance that they had oppositionary force, none.And they certainly didn't bring about the next stage in the way that conflict between classes is believed to bring about the next stage in socialism.
But anyway, that was the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital.I didn't read those books.This is a good, fantastic summary of them.I will never read Das Kapital, I promise.There's no way.
I've made it sure I will never read Das Kapital or Human Action, just to kind of keep a good balance.Summaries, I will read. Let's talk about Lenin, where Lenin comes on the scene.
So just before the end of the 19th century, capitalism grows into a monopoly form of capitalism in certain countries.
Increasingly in the 20th century, it found in the export of capital, aside from commodities, the solution to the over-concentration of capital.
And it was Lenin's turn to study and explain this new phenomenon, which he calls modern imperialism, the highest and final stage of capitalist development.So, when you hear people say late-stage capitalism, modern imperialism, same thing.
Lenin, therefore, moves on a turn to modern imperialism, and therefore capitalism, he states, has temporarily postponed its demise on its home grounds, and has made possible not only worldwide anti-capitalist sentiment, but also the rise of socialism.
So before we continue, and I actually get on to what State and Revolution talks about, just a few things.Lenin is, by some, not all, considered the direct Distiller of Marx at the end.
I try and give some contrast to where I think he really diverges from Marx But in general it appears to me that historically he is viewed as the direct predecessor to Marx You can go in the Rosa Luxemburg direction in the other direction haven't studied her I don't know, but I know that's the other side people say Lenin is no dummy Anybody who thinks Lenin was like what Stalin was who kind of Stalin really wasn't a dummy either, but he was more brutish
Lenin is no idiot.Lenin is not a fool.Lenin is, uh, I mean this, what I read in State and Revolution is highly cited.It references scientific discoveries of the time.It's very interesting.
I didn't picture it to be that way when I read it the first time around.Like, I didn't think it was going to be so academic, but it is.
Anyway, State and Revolution is the book we're going to be talking about, or rather the findings in the book we're going to be talking about. is the seminal text of Marxism-Leninism.
And it was written by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, in 1917, and expands upon the Marxist conception of the state and its role in the revolution. So he uses a bunch of excerpts from Marx, Engels.
Lenin explains the nature of the state and argues that a state, as controlled by the working class, will wither away over time.And wither away is probably used about 200 times, that phrase.
And ruthlessly criticizes his opponents, which he frequently refers to as opportunists. A quick outline of the main points of the book.Number one, this state is a means of... Tell me if you disagree with any of these before I continue, by the way.
I'm just curious.Okay. We'll go piece by piece, tell me yes or no, and if you want to explain, maybe after.Sure.Here we go.Number one.
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Download the Truth Social app or visit TruthSocial.com.The state is a means of class rule.
The state is a special body of armed men.
Yes. I just really, our documentary just went up on Amazon Prime today, guess what it's called?
Right.The state cannot be abolished, it must wither away.That one... Okay, we'll say no for now.
It can't, yeah, yeah, let's say no for now, yeah.
For the state to begin to wither away, the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced with the workers' state.
Okay.The workers' state is less of a state than the bourgeois state in that the workers' state, through more democracy because of the integration of legislation into the power of the working hands, represents a more representative form of state.
Oh God. This guy, so you're not a Leninist.There you go, you're not a Leninist.So here's a quote from Lenin.
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressed classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, and the most inscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander.
After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the consolation of the oppressed classes, and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance and blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Kinda sounds like what they do with Lenin.Anyway, according to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another.
It is the creation of order, in quotes, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes.Now that's Marx, not Lenin.Nodding your head to it, I'm sure.Like, oh yeah, okay, fine, makes more sense.
Lenin will start to, You'll see.As Lenin attempts to establish himself as the leading interpreter of Marx, and as an attempt to present a coherent Marxist theory of the state, State and Revolution is a difficult work for several reasons.
Many of Marx's most significant writings were not published until after Lenin's death.And therefore, Lenin's working with pure raw materials, and in his ability to reconstitute Marxist theory of the state, he's not working with much.
Lenin's conception of the state thus coincides with Marx's conception.He believes that the state exists when and to the extent that class conflict cannot be resolved.
In other words, the existence of the state proves that class conflict is irresolvable.Quote, according to Marx, argues Lenin, quote, the state could neither arise nor continue to exist if it were possible to conciliate classes.
It is thus incoherent to think of the state in a Hegelian sense, which is as an instrument of the universalization of spirit, because it is the foremost instrument of class control and as an organ for the oppression of one class by another.
It creates order, which legalizes and perpetuates the oppression by moderating the collisions between classes. It's funny how Lenin writes exactly the same thing as Marx writes, not quoting him, just separately.
Like Marx, and remember, that document was not available, like Marx, Lenin characterizes the state as being composed of a special body of armed men, which constitutes public power and which are not identical to an armed population, i.e., the self-acting armed organization of a population.
Contrary to popular belief, both Marx and Lenin agree that claims made about the security state, that the police and military work towards the interest of the general population, are in fact complete lies.
And that those entities actually work for state power.So both of them agree with that.It's well stated, Lenin agrees with that.But some contradictions begin to arise.
According to Lenin, these bodies which are said to exist for the purpose of social order would be totally unnecessary if they were not made up by various antagonistic classes.
And so Lenin goes further in suggesting that the state does not arise from any administrative need in a complex society, therefore going away from Hobbes, but rather the state arises via class conflict alone.
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Lenin, like Marx, rejects the idea that the vote, that is, universal suffrage, is capable of expressing any kind of universal will.
In fact, Lenin says to act within democratic institutions is to do worse than to simply resign oneself to imperfect representation.For Lenin, the vote is one example of consenting to the very social antagonisms from which the state arises.
And it is for that reason that Lenin suggests that the reconsideration of the state entity as a whole is necessary.There is no mending of social deficiency within the state, rather.This conclusion calls for the total dissolution of the state.
Lenin attempts to construct a vision of a new social order, something we've seen many times before. One which has liberated itself from any form of class conflict and from the institutions of the state.
But the contradiction arises very quickly to me and I'm not sure what to make of it.At some point, Lenin claims, as I said, that the state exists solely as a reflection of the antagonisms within civil society.
And yet, that same thing can be an instrument of proletarian emancipation.And that's the biggest difference that can be seen between Marx and Lenin.
Marx believes that the dissolution of the state is absolutely and always related to the growth of the self-government of individuals.
Lenin, however, does not believe the state can wither away unless it is utilized for the purposes of destroying itself. In a sense, Marx is far more libertarian than Lenin, though that should come as no surprise.
Lenin does not believe the state will simply wither away on its own, but that it must involve the abolition of the bourgeois state by the proletarian revolution.
The proletarian revolution must be decisive, it has to smash, crush, eliminate the bourgeois state, which maintains oppressive class relations. When state loses primary apparatus of power and action, state overall withers away.
It loses its overall purpose in mediating class conflict.The dictatorship of the proletariat is what is to replace the bourgeois state, whereas the bourgeoisie, as Lenin writes, quote, need political rule in order to maintain exploitation.
The dictatorship of the proletariat uses the state apparatus strictly, quote, in order to completely abolish all forms of exploitation.
The purpose of the dictatorship of the proletariat is to destroy, smash, eliminate any form of bourgeois manipulation.And again, it has to be pointed out that there's a contradiction.
Goes back to Engels and Marx and states that fundamentally and in its entirety, the indicator class conflict is the state.
And yet Lenin continues to assert that the state can be used as an instrument to bring about the collapse of itself and the domination of the proletariat.
So despite the fact that Lenin defines the state as an instrument of bourgeois oppression inherently, he nonetheless gives the most important role in the proletarian revolution and in the elimination of the state to the state.
And this concept is absolutely essential to Leninism.
Ask me that question again about the withering away of the state.
The workers' state is less of a state than the bourgeois democracy, and the workers' state is more of a thorough democracy because of the integration of legislation and executive power in the hands of the workers.
No, you had asked me a bunch of questions, right?
That's the question, I just phrased it a different way.
Do you think that the workers' state is less of a state than the bourgeois state?
Well, no, I was talking about the question about the state withering away.
OK, so for the state to begin to wither away, the bourgeois state must be smashed and replaced with the worker state.It cannot be abolished.It must wither away.
The problem I have with that is it's not going to wither away. That's it has to be replaced with something that is sustainable and.
When it comes down to it, once you get to the end of state and revolution, you realize he's you're going to Utopia Fantasyland.And I mean, that's where you end up.Whereas my idea is you you have to get rid of the state.
And probably the best way that that's going to happen is you're going to have to always have technology that's replacing better technology.So it's like, you know, no one's on MySpace anymore.Everybody's on Twitter and Facebook.Well, not everybody.
One guy in particular is not on Twitter anymore.
Yeah, yeah, that's true.But then you have, well, then you talk about cell phones, you know, the brick cell phones and everything.
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You're basically just going to have to replace it with something better.And that's why I can't get behind that statement of it withers away.I mean, it's not.
What is it wither away to once you realize what he's talking about it withering away to you're just like, I mean, you're literal you're into literal mob rule and.
Well, absolutely.Marx himself does not say what comes after the withering of the state.Lenin is the one who actually presents this idea that actually communist society is not just a self-regulating thing.No, no, no.
There has to be a transitional dictatorship that pushes it forward.Both of them ultimately believe in a very weird way.
Well, and let me add something there, too.Because I don't think we've gotten to it yet. Well, I guess I'll comment on it when we come to his critiques of the anarchists.
OK, good.Both of them believe in a very interesting way.And again, Marx, I believe, especially early Marx, is far more of a libertarian than Lenin ever was in his entire lifetime.
But both of them believe that ultimately, at the end, self-governance is the only government.I don't know how to phrase that sentence, but everybody probably understands what I'm saying there.
They both ultimately lead to this conclusion that the individual is free from coercion, class conflict, that they are ultimately free.They all believe this.I mean, I guess it's nice words to use.But just to say, both of them believe that.
They both state that they believe that.Marx does not give a way as to how that will occur.He talks about the dictatorship of the proletariat a lot when he
Talks about the Paris Commune, but there's no sense that that's what leads to communism for him.For Lenin, the transition from the late socialist society to the early communist society is precisely done by the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Early socialist society is the revolutionary one.Stalin, we can see as being the late socialist society.But Stalin, we'll get into this, of course, later, but Stalin gets close to achieving socialism. But therefore he was not in a socialist society.
So even Stalin doesn't really get to do the communist thing.But we'll get to that when we talk about Stalin.
There is an attempt that is made to clarify the contradiction of the idea of utilizing the state to destroy itself even though the state is the primary result of class conflict.He does attempt.Lenin says, I'm going to let the listeners judge.
You can judge. Lenin says that the bourgeois state must be smashed and destroyed and replaced with the proletarian state, and that this is the state that will simply wither away.That's his attempt.I kind of understand what he means, but I don't know.
As we get to the anarchists, you and I are both going to be agreeing with, you know, Bukharin and everybody else that, well, you look around and you go, I'm not so sure about that.You know, I'm not really quite sure.
There is an attempt, or rather, unlike Marx, who believes that the state is always a reflection of bourgeois civil society, which I find myself more in agreement with, Lenin believes that the socialist revolution must be achieved from above, and those are his words.
The state must work to destroy itself.Further, Marx leaves a huge amount of ambiguity as to how that will occur, and in many areas suggests that there is a likelihood of a peaceful withering of the state.
Though I don't think that's Marx's ultimate conclusion, and I'll get to that later.
Unlike Marx, who is much more in a libertarian sense, believes that the state under natural conditions is to wither away, usually through technology and the organization of class consciousness, Lenin is a firm believer that the state must first be seized, and then it will begin to wither away.
Whereas Hegel, we'll go back before Marx, main influence, whereas Hegel believed that the state was the result of the universal spirit of the world.
Marx understood that the state is merely a reflection of civil society, as I said, which includes institutions of mediation, discourse, and performance such as advocacy groups, fraternal orders, political parties, banks, media outlets, social movements.
So for Marx, the state would exist so long as individuals retain egoistic self-interest and that that self-interest is directed towards the functioning of civil society. Very interesting there.I want to read that specific sentence again.
For Marx, the state would exist so long as individuals retain egoistic self-interest and that that self-interest directed the functions of civil society.
Only when self-interest was abandoned and coercive functions were disabled would the state finally wither away.Lenin departs from Marx in his definition of the state.
For him, the state is a self-sustaining entity, and therefore, as an entity separate from any notion of civil society or any other kind of thing within society, it could be utilized as a tool for the purposes of revolution.
This kind of revolution Lenin sought would utilize the state.
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For what was the production of a societal consciousness. With that, the state would begin to contradict and destroy itself as its main purpose in being dismantled.
Lenin is not entirely unsympathetic to the anarchist position, but it becomes very clear and evident throughout State and Revolution that Lenin's vision of Marxism is utterly incompatible with anarchism.
The letters exchanged between Lenin and several anarchist thinkers prove this.
Both advocated for a civil society, or rather, both anarchists and Lenin advocate for a society which is based on the working class, but the sharpest distinction occurs in the utilization or destruction of the state.
Think Lenin's state and revolution versus the anarchist position of state or revolution.Lenin concocts strong alliances with many anarcho-syndicalist groups, who started to abandon their ideas when their attempts at a communist revolution began.
Lenin scoffs at the anti-authoritarianism of Marxists and their lack of clarity in regards to a post-capitalist world.Anarchists never offered an idea of what would actually come after the dissolution of the state, he says.
That's all I got on it, because I'll tell you why.As much as Lenin spars, Lenin is nowhere near as definitive as Stalin on anarchism.So I want to hear your thoughts.
My thoughts when I was reading State and Revolution was that Engels really hated the anarchists because, yes, he saw them as wanting to just destroy the state and not go through the whole proletarian revolution.
And he he said that if the state was just destroyed and this is, I guess the word that kept the term that kept coming into my mind when I was reading that was collapsitarian. Yeah.
Yeah.Accelerationists is that Engels felt that if the state just fell, the capitalists who pretty much owned it and ran it anyway, would just step right back in and they would be back in charge right away.And that's pretty much what would happen in a
If this society had like a crash and everything, I mean, I'm sure I've been saying this for 10 years, but the dollar is going to crash.People say the dollar is going to crash.The dollar is going to crash.They have something already in place.
They have something in place to replace it, and people will be begging for it.Okay, so yeah.
don't the dollar crash if you want to concentrate on the dollar crash concentrate on having something else that if the dollar crashes is going to be make you wealthy that will be an alternative that will make you wealthy but the whole idea of angles whole idea of
anarchism of the state just falling, you know, we just destroy the state.And then, you know, we'll have we'll have anarchism.Well, it's not going to happen.So there has to be a process, not that not a dictatorship of the proletariat.
That's not going to work.I mean, for the same reasons that I say, we're not going to have anarchism like anarcho capitalism until
There is a shift in evolution of some sort or some great Machiavellian prince comes along and institutes a. Takes over, destroys his enemies and then gives everybody freedom.
you're not going to have people being able to basically self-govern in the kind of ways that people want to until there is a real shift.
And, you know, I've had somebody say to me recently, well, you're saying that anarchism can never happen in your lifetime.
But in 1840, if somebody would have said slavery wouldn't be abolished in the next 25 years, and I know people don't like when I say this, but slavery was a government program.No doubt.Abolishing a government program is a big difference.
I mean, you're talking about abolishing the government. OK, there's a big difference between abolishing a government program and getting rid of the government completely.
So the whole slavery thing, the whole, you know, I don't think that that even that's even a very apt comparison when you're talking about abolishing the government.Well, we didn't think of it.Well, I mean, I understand the comparison.
I just I think it's way far off.It's it's it's not even close because, you know, Yeah, people's ideas change.I mean, you can look at 2008, a minority of the country thought that gay marriage was a good idea.By 2012, a majority of the country felt.
But once again, we're talking about a government program.We're talking about a cultural shift within the system.We are not talking about getting rid of the system altogether and people going, what am I going to do?
I mean, people literally flipping out.
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So here we go, quote, to prevent the true meaning of his struggle against anarchism from being distorted, Marx expressly emphasized that the revolution and the transient form of the state, which the proletariat requires.
The proletariat needs the state only temporarily.We do not, after all, differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim.We maintain that to achieve this aim.
We must temporarily make use of instruments, resources, and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of the class.
Marx chooses the sharpest and clearest way of stating this case against the anarchists.Now this is Marx.
After overthrowing the yoke of the capitalists, should the workers lay down their arms or use them against the capitalists in order to crush their resistance?
But what is the systemic use of arms by one class against another if not a transient form of the state? So that's his quote, Mark.
So you can see exactly as you were saying, and I didn't intend on holding that quote, but exactly as you were saying it, that's what Mark says as well.
That whole section in State and Revolution I have highlighted because it just made sense to me.Because, okay, using as a metaphor the dictatorship of the proletariat.
He's talking about something that if I read it properly, he's talking about something that could take you know Could maybe a decade maybe a couple decades.
I think Stalin thought he could achieve it in like 20 years.
Yeah.Yeah What when I look at that I use it as a metaphor for all the technology that will replace all of this and it could take that Yeah, a hundred years two hundred years not gonna be in my lifetime.No, I just have to work on
You know, I have to work to make, hopefully have a little more liberty in my lifetime, but hopefully what you're doing now is, and especially in supporting people who are coming up with great technological advances that you hope will not be used by the state against you.
The only valid working form of anarchism is agorist accelerationism. That's my axiom now.That's what I've come up with.We can only work to- Agorist accelerationism.That's right.
So we can be agorists, but we also have to try really hard to accelerate the state so that hopefully our grandkids or great grandkids might have a different form of thing they're living under that might be better.Who knows?
But I like what Aaron has to say is, you know, what Lenin talks about, what Marx talks about is using the state to destroy the state.And I think Aaron, you know,
When I started talking to him recently about, you know, the Libertarian Party and how to use the Libertarian Party, if you can really get the reins of it, especially if you can get control, the social media aspect of it is to indict the state is to only use it to indict the state.
That's something. We're recording this on Saturday the 9th, and on the 6th, they had that whole, the Renaissance Fair attacked the Capitol building.
I forgot what I called them, but yeah, you call it the... Oh God, I think I called it the... Oh man, go ahead.I had a good one too.Yeah, the Renaissance Fair.There you go.
They attacked the Basilica of Statism.Yeah.
Um, yeah, so, I'm looking at that, and you're seeing that, and people are like, I hear libertarians go, well, first of all, you have the libertarian party, the people who are in charge of it right now, who are going, this is a disgrace.
And it's like- I was thinking about a few months before this, when they were very, very approving of another kind of thing.
Yeah.And so it's yeah, they were and they supported the BLM riots.But this riot, no, this isn't good because this is done by right wingers and left wingers when they're committing violence, they're just misguided.
And when right wingers are doing it, they're evil and they want to install a dictator because all these fucking people have Trump derangement syndrome.And I mean, I hope
The great thing about Trump basically conceding in his speech, was it yesterday or on the 7th or the 8th, is that all these people who've been living off of Trump derangement syndrome as like a fuel for the last five years, he's going to be gone.
So what are you losers going to do?
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My whole point is that what they should have been doing is they should have been indicting the state right there.They should have been talking about how, you know, the reason this is happening is because because there's a secret ballot.
Who knows who voted for what?You know, how many people how many people voted by mail?And, you know, you're talking about so, say, 40 million people voted by mail. So there were 40 million signature comparisons.I mean, come on, give me a break.
This is ridiculous.You should be indicting the system.That's really the only that's why I agree with Aaron on the only reason to get the reins of of a political party to destroy itself is to use it to to indict the state.
And I that and that I was oddly pleasantly surprised
That lennon comes out against the vote which i didn't think he would because as you know semblance of democracy and because he is a. Democrat you know what i mean and it's true sense lennon tries and thinks he is or tries to be so i thought that was quite interesting.
Pete this was what i had for it i called it the reichstag fort.And that only got 14 likes and that's a damn shame. Yeah, I had a lot of- and that was at 4pm too, it was prime time.I mean, you're not- yeah.
People aren't – even people who we associate with, they're just not educated enough on stuff.They've stopped reading.
I mean – Yeah, you really got to read.I mean like I don't know what to say other than I have felt more comfortable in exactly what I know I'm going to be doing and what everyone else is doing by reading.Which is kind of why we do this, right?
Save the reading a little bit hopefully so that you can –
You know, I mean anyway if people listen to this they will get a good education in it Hopefully it will drive a lot of people to want to start reading, you know, let me hope the revolutions what 60 70 pages you can read any pages I read it at least of all this thing was 30 pages.
The Communist Manifesto is really short And yet I have people telling me I've read I go you read you read marks They go I've read the Communist Manifesto and it's like 40 or so pages and they haven't even read that Yeah, come on You go through it in the evening
I've said this and you know as somebody who became popular Sharing, you know sharing memes.I think most people are get most of their education from memes and I think that's sad Perhaps we can utilize that but yeah, yeah.
So, the anarchists stand firmly that any seizure of state power, even temporary, rather than the immediate abolition of it, would create a new ground for tyranny and oppression, undoing everything that the revolution set out to do.
I think there is a naivete on part of, and I'm not surprised about this, because remember, this is a divergence, so let me get back to that.
Rather than the immediate abolition of the state, where new grounds of tyranny and oppression would rise, undoing everything had to be done immediately.You had to destroy it.This is what the anarchists believe.
Now remember, the anarchists of the time, they're prudonists, most of them, which means they're autonomists, which they exist still today, autonomists.And I like autonomists.And post-anarchism incorporates autonomism into it.
But I think there is a great naivete on the part of the anarchists of that period of time, including the Prudonists.Because they don't seem to present anything to come after either.To me, autonomism is a revolutionary vehicle.It's not a goal.Right?
CHAZ and things like that.These are grounds of experimentation.These are not goals.My God, if that's your goal, No thanks.No thank you.
As areas where you can practice new ideas, meet new people, make networking things, especially now in the internet age, amazing!But if that's what you want to live like, I'm sorry, I'm not with you.
In particular, Russian anarchists begin to see that the communist revolution smacked of the same kind of statism that the bourgeois government did.
It was only after Lenin's death and the growth of Stalinism, the Soviet Union, Soviet bureaucracy, when Russian anarchism was forced to go international and actively oppose communism and capitalism, both.
Lenin constantly invokes, by the way, anybody who tells you that anarcho-communism is an accurate expression of communism, maybe it was before the year 1930.Not anymore, friend.There are some sharp differences.
Well, let me explain why I'm saying this.Lenin, as you said earlier, constantly invokes the names of Marx and Engels, and in doing so, he does his damnedest to connect his theories with the founders of dialectical materialism.
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But there are some sharp differences and some striking similarities.
Marx believes that state power would eventually need to be centralized underneath a proletarian dictatorship which would guide the transition of a capitalist society into a communist one.
But as I explain that, you should immediately hear a distinction.For Marx, the state is not equal to success.
The state is merely an instrument along the way in achieving a communist society after which it would simply render itself useless and dissolve.
Marx did not believe that the state was capable of bringing about a universal consciousness, and that runs strictly against Lenin, who believes firmly in the idea that the state must play the leading role in engendering a new consciousness.
That is where you begin to see the difference between Luxembourg and Lenin, is that idea, which I think on Lenin's part is, there is no other word to use than religious.
For him, the state is capable of being used as an instrument rather than what it was for Marx, which was merely a condition which had to be transcended.One area where Marx and Lenin agree is perhaps the most difficult to swallow, true or untrue.
Rest his quotes and then I will leave you with an end finally and then we're done. The bourgeois revolution can only be overthrown with violence.This is what's hard to stomach.
For the Communist Manifesto, Marx writes, quote, in depicting the most general phases of development of the proletariat, we traced more or less veiled civil war.
raging within existing society up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.
The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest by degree all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e.of the proletarian organized as the ruling class,
and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.Now, from Lenin, quote, The state is a special organization of force.It is an organization of violence for the suppression of some class.What class must the proletariat suppress?
Naturally, only the exploiting class, i.e.the bourgeoisie. The working people need the state only to suppress the resistance of the exploiters, and for the proletariat can direct that suppression and carry it out.
For the proletariat, it is the only class that is constantly and consistently revolutionary, the only class that can unite all the working and exploited people in the struggle against the bourgeoisie in completely removing it.
The exploited classes need political rule in order to completely abolish all exploitation, i.e.
the interests of the vast majority of the people and against the insignificant minority consisting of modern slave owners, the landowners, and capitalists.
The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead enormous mass of populations, peasants, petit-bourgeoisie, and the semi-proletarians, in the work of organizing a socialist economy.
Back to Marx. But the revolution is thorough going.It is still journeying through purgatory.It does its work methodically.By December 2nd, 1851, the day of Louis Bonaparte's coup d'etat, it had completed one half of its preparatory work.
It is now completing the other half.First, it perfected parliamentary power in order to be able to overthrow it.
Now, it has attained this, and it's perfecting the executive power, reducing it to its purest expression, isolating it, setting itself up against itself as the sole object in order to concentrate all forces of destruction against it.
And when it has done this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exultantly explain, well, old mole?I'm not sure what that means, but I think it's like, oh yeah, there you go, back into the ground.
And finally, to Lenin. A Marxist is solely someone who extends the recognition of class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The essence of Marxist theory of the state has to be mastered only by those who realize the dictatorship of a single class is necessary, not only for every class in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie,
but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from classless society from communism.
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Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism and political struggle that the state was bound to disappear.
and that the transitional form of its disappearance, the transition from state to non-state, would be the proletariat organized as a ruling class.Marx, however, did not set out to discover the political forms of this future stage.
He limited himself to carefully observing French history, to analyzing it, and to drawing the conclusion to which the year 1851 had led. Namely, that matters were moving towards destruction of the bourgeois state machine.
And when the mass revolutionary movement of proletariats burst forth, Marx, in spite its failure, in spite its short life and patent weakness, began to study the forms it had discovered.
The Commune, that is the Paris Commune, is the form at last discovered by the proletarian revolution. under which the economic emancipation of labor can take place.
The Commune is the first attempt by the proletarian revolution to smash the bourgeois state machine, and it is a political form at last discovered, by which the smashed state machine can and must be replaced.
From the moment all members of society, or at least the vast majority, have learned to administer the state themselves, have taken this work into their own hands, have organized control over the insignificant capitalist minority, over the gentry who wish to preserve their capitalist habits, and over the workers who have been thoroughly corrupted by capitalism, from this moment, the need for government of any kind begins to disappear altogether.
The more complete the democracy, the nearer the moment when it comes to be unnecessary.
The more democracy that the state has, which consists of the armed workers, and which is, quote, no longer a state in the proper sense of the word, the more rapidly every form of state begins to wither away.
For when all have learned to administer and actually independently administer social production, independently keep accounts and exercise control over the parasites, the sons of the wealthy, the swindlers, and other guardians of capitalist traditions,
The escape from this popular accounting and control will inevitably become so difficult besides a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by a swift and severe punishment.
For the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental intellectuals, and they scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them.That the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community will very soon become a habit.
Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it, the complete withering of the state. There you go.
That is what I remember studying.
That's Lenin.Basically, in conclusion, that whole thing was to say Marx did what he did to study the commune, but the commune eventually failed.
What we need now is to really seize power, because we know once it gets into the hands of the working man, he's not someone to be fucked with.And that simple thing alone is precisely what will make community will a habit.
Let me ask you a question. When you look at the.American landscape, political landscape, and you look at all these factions that are going on.If somebody started with a voice that somebody who was influential decided that they wanted to start
talking about class theory again.Maybe they'll devise their own, come up with a variation of some sort, not something that's as complicated.
I mean, I don't know if Marx's class theory is complicated, but not something that detailed, but also something not as simplistic as Konkin's. I think Conkins is probably more on the ball as far as from what I see now.
I mean, I could change my mind in 10 years or 10 minutes, but do you think that somebody could, if they started talking about class theory, could cause a movement?
No, no way.Not any chance.I don't, well, you can literally, so, okay. So there are people who are monarchists, right?And I mean in the old sense, not the sort of like new... Hey folks, I'm John Rich.
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Corporate sense.In old sense, there are people who are like, we should just restore royalty.And I don't think those people would ever succeed either, right?What I'm saying is... Tread lightly, okay?Sorry, okay, sorry.
No, what I mean is ideas become old hat because usually technology renders them useless or state legislation renders them useless. There's absolutely no chance that class theory holds any sway anymore in this country.It's over.Class theory is done.
For me, there's two things in operation right now.There's power theory.Those are the postmodernists.It's a little like a class theory in a sense where there's power holders and power, you know, people being exploited by power.
Right.It's simple though.It's not.
It's simple.It's simple.And then on the other end, There's intersectional theory, where there's ultimately various small groups of oppressed minority groups and one power class.They both have to do with power, they always have.
So you're either talking about one versus the self, the postmodern, or you're talking about one versus your group. Those are the only two that I think have any sway anymore, and they are not primarily economic.
They may be fundamentally economic, but they are not primarily economic anymore.
So I would say there is zero chance that anybody talking about class theory has a single ability to push a movement because race theory, critical race theory on the one hand, has either divided or brought people together in such a way that they have no use or would find no utility for class theory.
And then on the other end, the postmodernists are kind of buzzing around in the clouds, you know, doing their own thing, trying to figure out individual ways of separating themselves from the monster.That's where I fall into myself.
That movement itself at this point is redundant.That insurrection is far more useful. than a movement of some kind.Individual insurrection, that is.Sterner's form of insurrection, that is.That is far more useful to encourage that.
Self-sufficiency, the technology that we have pushes us towards this.That's where I'm at.And so I, class theory? First of all, it's going to be inherently complex, because you have to explain how all the classes come about, right?
Whereas, either of these things just are, just look at the brief history of America and you'll find out where all the oppressed minority groups came from and why.Much more simple.Or, on the postmodern end, I don't like that. You know, much easier.
Poststructuralism is, I don't like that.It oppresses me.It represses me.So I don't want it.So you have either, you have two very simple ways of approaching it now, because I think people have now fundamentally figured out what's actually going on.
That you're either with your little group, and the whole world is against you, or at least not helping you, or you are with yourself, and the same thing goes follows.
So no, I would say absolutely not, there is not a chance that class theory has any sway in America right now.Any more in history, I can't say, I don't know that well, but right now and for the foreseeable future, not a chance.
Anything else you want to hit?Any questions you have for me?Try to get my opinion on something that we talked about, or what?
Yeah, I do actually.Leninism, where's the utility?What can we use out of it?Gotta be something, right?I mean, this is, everything has some utility, right?It's not all jumbled garbage.
I mean, if your goal is to be post-state, Then I mean, it's I think it's like I said when it came to when he's talking about the dictatorship of the proletariat.
And you can use that as a, you know, just throw that away because that's not going to work.It's not going to work.
Well, and history, you know, maybe, maybe in with guns, who knows when?Yeah.Sounds rad when you put it like that.Wait, no, no, no, no, no.Well, luckily we now, well, I don't say luckily because the crimes of Stalin are absolutely monstrous.
We now have evidence that that approach simply does not work.
So I think that when you read a lot of the Marxist Leninists and especially state and revolution, you can when you read it on your own, you'll notice that they're identifying a problem. they're coming to a different solution.
And I think I've said this before, when you read State Revolution, I mean, there are the way you structure his arguments is very much the way Rothbard's structured arguments coming to a different.
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Different ends.And I think he's far more intelligent than anyone is willing to give him credit for, especially his enemies.
Yeah, I think I agree.I was kind of stunned.
I really thought Lenin was just like a rock because I've been doing my thing with Dutch where we just kind of go through the Russian Revolution and we've arrived at Lenin.And from the historical perspective, Lenin is kind of a brutish
You know, like he's kind of like he's an asshole, like he's a gigantic asshole as well to everybody.And then you want to believe that he's also not smart because of that.
But it's it was scary how well he distills Marxist theory, which I kind of like, because then you go, yeah, all Marxist theory eventually distills into you killing a bunch of people.
Oh, when you read when you read reports of like the conversation, his conversations with Trotsky, I mean, he hated that guy.
I mean, he hated him.But after he took power, Trotsky became one of his closest advisors.
And he started listening to Trotsky.Yeah, for a little while.Yeah.I mean, as soon as Lenin died, though, and Stalin was out.
Yeah, Stalin hated Trotsky.But Stalin was smarter than Trotsky.He stayed within the circle.
I guess we'll be talking about that next episode, the just how how much of a better tactician, you know, Trotsky was so worried about a worldwide workers revolution.And that was just pie in the sky.I mean, that's right.
Even worse pie in the sky than what they were, what would eventually fail in Russia.But the.Oh, the benefits of reading Lenin is, I mean, knowing your enemy, knowing how they think, What can you use?
Well, understand that if you do want to get to that post state, you're going to have to have some, there's going to have to be an intermediary, a kind of. um, length of time, there's going to be a period, a violent one, a violent one.
Well, for, yeah, for them.
For, for Lennon, the, you know, it's like I said before, what we need to look at, if you were going to try to apply that to what we're looking at and what we want, then it would be a tech technological breakthroughs building, um,
maybe preaching localism.I think I think that works too.And, you know, I think it's, it's actually kind of ripe for it right now.
It's actually kind of Oh, yeah, the funny thing is, we just keep taking dubs.Like we like every time.I mean, Ivan What a dub Ivan is.Somebody who's the amount of advancement in the year 2020 for 3D printable weaponry.Just one little thing.
I mean, everybody technically wins from that, but that's our stuff.We've been talking about that forever.Autonomy, self-sufficiency, being able to create your own shit.I mean, cryptocurrency.Another perfect example is, this is us first.
I remember talking to anarcho-communists on the internet, and I was like, what do you guys think about cryptocurrency?And they were just like, I don't really know much about it.Really? Really?Like you don't know much about it?
Like it's either going to debunk your entire belief system or it might help you.So there's a total ignorance on the part of other groups to move into these areas so far.So I, I, I'm very confident we're ahead, way ahead.
I don't see how any of those things fail.At the very least they become redundant.You know what I mean?
Yeah.We just have to figure out a way to, um, get past this tech stuff, the big tech stuff.
Yeah.And that is our biggest problem, especially if you referenced what day it is. A lot of people being removed, a lot of people being silenced.This is going to be a good thing, I think.
It's laying the ground for a new kind of revolution in social spaces online.I think it's a good thing.I hope.But we'll see.
I saw Dave and Thomas Massey saying they lost like 1,000 followers each.I lost like 200.I lost like 250.Yeah, currently I lost 100 followers.Yeah, currently I lost 100.
Rip to all those hundred domestic terrorists.
I don't think a lot of Trump people would follow me because, you know, it's like, there I am shitting on the left and shitting on the left.And then it's like, oh, here you go.Here's one for you guys.You think I forgot about you?Here you go.
Yeah, and then you know, but you do so Lennon we've laid him to bed where he sits currently embalmed in the Kremlin Creepy shit if you go look up those pictures if you're on your good.
I have seen great shit Yes, dude And I it was so funny as I know for a fact Lennon would have absolutely hated that that they that they that they prop him up like a god because I literally read you the quote
Where he's like, don't do this to people, please.And they do that with them and they do that with Stalin because maybe it's a commentary on religion.
It's human nature, too.It's what people do.They look for people to idolize and worship and they look for structures and there's the Kremlin.
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Stalin will represent what you do after the revolution And I'm saying that with a grin on my face because I hate all of these people but at the time They thought it was a great opportunity You wouldn't think that way if you were, you know, if you owned an apple tree in your backyard you have 20 people hanging you from it.
Anyway Pete thank you.You wanna you want to talk about the the goings-on of Timeline Earth?
Um, yeah, sure.Um, so I think I explained this on the last episode for, for any of those who didn't.Oh no.And technically not the last episode.Um, so yeah, we have transitioned.
I switched up episodes.I'm sorry.
I got a lot of really positive comments on Eliotta, which is great.I also, uh, listener of mine was like, it's you pronounce the first name wrong, but the last name you nailed, I was like, okay, fine.You got the left his first name.
Ah, he's right here.Shout out to, uh, well he's locked, so maybe I won't shout him out.Uh, You got the last name correct, but the first name is pronounced Mercea, Mercea Eliada.Well, anyway.
So what's going on at the Timeline Earthcrack Association is we transitioned out of the Friends Against Government podcast.We are in TLE now, episodes still every Wednesday.
But now that we're in the new year, the beautiful new year, we are also releasing every Friday except for Fifth Fridays where we're still toying with a certain idea.Pete, maybe you'll be a part of that, maybe not, but we'll see.
I am.I'm up for it.I've already decided what I would want to talk about.Like, the first episode would be on Hinduism or something.
Oh, well, so how it's going to work is every Friday, there is an alternating set of four episodes, unless there's a fifth Friday in a month, in which case it will be a fifth episode.I come first my show into the cave.
And then in an order we have sort of hammer now, but I don't want to give a specific order yet.Just in case someone's not ready or something like that.We've got cars show the signal.We've got Aaron's show boys town, which I, Just hate him, dude.
I really do.I hate that guy, but he's so good for views.And we have my man Paz with the Scarlet Thread Society.So we got all new kinds of shit coming out.It's just basically going to be expressions of all of our individual tastes.
My episode came out on, whenever this releases, I don't know, but on the 8th, Friday, where I did a different strain of Marxism, which descends from Trotskyism. And it is called Posadism.And it is about...
Well, it's kind of amazing because it is taking the universal, immortal, beautiful, wonderful science of Marxism and extending it to its fullest possible logical conclusion, which would be if there are other societies in space, well, they've probably already become communists.
So let's just talk about them, which I think is so great.It's a shame that they got kicked out of Argentina because both the communists and the fascists didn't like them.Sorry, Juan.I like you. And so that's what we've been up to.
Expanding, expanding and expressing ourselves in new ways.Hopefully everybody likes the new content. Everybody needs to check out that episode that I put out for one reason, and it's not me.
It's because Aaron joins in and blows out people's eardrums and cracks me up.
Dude, I was listening to that.I was listening to that on a plane.So obviously I was listening to my earbuds every time.Every time he did it, I'm like you.I hate you.Yes.Yes.Yes.
It's amazing.There are people who DM me like, dude, that was a great episode.My ears, though.
And it was great.I had somebody like I had to predict when you were going to end a paragraph so I could pull the earbuds out so that when Aaron snorted, it's the best.It's the best.
But that's what we got going on.
I knew I shouldn't have sent him that microphone.
Yes.Yes, exactly.He's going to really abuse it.And I can't even wait to see what he does on his show.
All right, man.Till the next time.Till we do.Mr. Joseph.
A lot of times when you start reading Stalin, it helps to be- I have just, I'm telling you, somebody messaged me on Twitter and they were like, you know, I took your advice and I got really drunk and I read Lenin and it made sense.
And I was like, there you go.That's what you do.I read Lenin's Stone Cold Sober and it made sense to me.Well, you gotta get drunk to really, you know, you gotta get, you know, that would be like watching a 3D movie without the glasses.
You know, it'll still make sense, but you're missing a significant element of the fact that all these guys were, popping pills and drunk all the time.And being financed by capitalists, but...
All right, so I went a little nutso for this one, the note-taking.There's 10,000 words for this one.That's great.The reason why is because, first of all, I had a couple of great books to use.
The main book that I used, if anybody's curious, is The Political Thought of Joe Stalin by Eric Van Rie.And I end with a quote from Eric Van Rie, his conclusion, because I think his conclusion is really good.Is Rie?
Yeah, it is Rie.It is Rie.It's an R and then an EE.It is Rie. Eric Van Re and then I also used some speeches from Stephen Kotkin.I think I call him Joe Kotkin in this but his name is Stephen Kotkin so let me see if I can fix that.
I think Stalin is the first guy. who we're going to look at who had political power.Lenin, you could maybe say some political power, but this guy had actual political power, which will come out in the reading.
You'll start to be like, oh yeah, this is what happens when these people get political power.
I'm not going to argue with Stalin as much as I possibly can, but Stalin so far, not unsurprisingly, is the most objectionable person who I've had to read for you. But yeah, so let's let's get into this.
But of course, before we do, we're going to have to touch on some more principles of Marxism.I heard everybody liked us going into the dialectic last time, but I got a lot of I had to listen to that like four times.So I tried to.
The principles we're going to talk about first of all relate more to Stalin and hopefully they're more easy to digest.So anything you're about to hear until I switch over to talking about Stalin, these are all quotes from the Communist Manifesto.
We discussed the materialist dialectic last time, so if you're lost as far as the foundational beliefs of the communists, you need to pause this, come back to it later, and go and listen to that one.
And as I just said, listen to it about four or five times.So Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed a doctrine of modern communism, which was partly a critical digestion of the work of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
They had regarded society, well, Hegel had regarded society, which was the collective of individual citizens, as a mere sum of particulars.In contrast, the state and the class of bureaucratic officials were the universal for Hegel.
Marx and Engels flipped that and they declared that civil society is the universal and it is degraded into state bureaucracy as a mere particular.
But civil society was yet fractured, they said, because of private property and therefore was not a real universal.
So in order to turn society into a universal, particulars need to be abolished, two in particular, private property and the bureaucratic state.
And the resulting communist society would then be a self-governing one, which was based on collective ownership of the means of production, which was a radical democratic community in the spirit of Rousseau, but with a few additional characteristics, including a nationalized economy.
Communist Manifesto defines communism as the abolition of private property.
Communism was the condition where the land and the factories were in the hands of the community, and in order to achieve that goal, the Communist Manifesto called for the workers to have a violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie.
After the violent overthrow, a newly achieved democratic constitution, which the workers' representatives would write, would give the workers an upper hand.
And they would use their majority to wrest by degrees any capital and all capital from the bourgeoisie and to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state.
That's a quote, which they defined as, another quote, the proletariat organized as ruling class.
After the complete expropriation of capital by the proletariat, the communists believed that several goals would be achieved, quote, as public power loses its political character.
Number one, the whole economy would form one nationalized unit and be run like a gigantic enterprise according to a single integrated plan.Number two, there would be no commodities, no production for the purpose of exchange, and no money.
Number three, the division of labor would be overcome.Number four, the cities would fuse into the countryside and create a new type of human settlement and result in homogenous distribution of mankind over the globe.
Number five, industry and agriculture would merge into a synthetic activity.
Number six, mental and physical labor would also be fully integrated and people would no longer be tied to a single profession, but could hop back and forth between activities.
Number seven, the family as a separate unit would disappear and be replaced by a new collective life. 8.People would no longer be renumerated according to their productive achievements, but instead would be able to take according to their needs.
Eventually, Marx and Engels concluded that after the expropriation of the capitalists, communism would not automatically acquire any or all of these traits at once.
The transitional period leading up to communism, the period when the victorious proletariat was expropriating the capitalists, would be known as the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The dictatorship to the rule of the elected legislative assembly in which the proletariat would have the majority. They were elected by universal suffrage, and the Commune was not a parliamentary body, but a working body.
It was executive and legislative at the same time.Police and other officials were to work for workers' wages and be eligible and recallable at all times.Thus, for Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat really meant nothing but democracy.
So Marx and Engels did not want their pleas for dictatorship to be understood as sympathetic to the project of educational minority rule.They always insisted on the democratic basis of the revolutionary state.
However, this does not automatically imply that their dictatorship was simply synonymous with majority rule. Marx noted that every provisional state after a revolution demanded an energetic dictatorship.
The new rulers should not be lulled by constitutional dreams but should smash and remove the old institutions.Otherwise, the defeated party would strengthen its positions and the bureaucracy and the army would return.
Dictatorship, let's think about that.In a classical sense, it refers to a form of unlimited government in which the rights are not abolished but suspended.
So someone could declare a dictatorship in ancient Rome, such as Caesar did, for either one or ten years.It would suspend the civil rights of all people.It would also suspend the legislative power of the Senate.
You could think about another, perhaps a person in American history who declared a dictatorship based on those qualities, Abraham Lincoln.
It is not intended to abolish democracy, of course, but to prevent it from being indefinitely undone except under certain circumstances.If we assume that Marx had the classical meaning in mind, which we do,
The term proletarian dictatorship would refer to a dual system.On the one hand, it would rest on the authority of a democratic assembly and remain temporary in nature.
And on the other hand, it would have to call for emergency measures temporarily in force only until the demise of classes, but still a real dictatorship.So if we then consider
The responsibility of Marx for the Soviet dictatorship we find several interesting things.
Marx predicted the need for a policy of emergency measures to break resistance against the communist regime, which would also serve as an instrument to make possible the complete expropriation of capital.And that was the real dictatorship.
It's well known that in 1848 Marx spoke powerfully for revolutionary terrorism as the only way to speed up the dying process of an old society, and in 1850 he urged workers in bloodthirsty terms to force the Democrats to, quote, carry out their present terror phases.
Engels calls the Terror of 1739, that is the terror that happens after the French Revolution, a policy for, quote, the greatest part useless cruelties committed to frightening politicians.
And Marx, too, acknowledged that the terror had been the plebeian way to deal with absolutism and feudalism.
With their, quote, powerful hammer blows, he writes, the French masses cleared away the feudal mess in a more effective way than the frightened bourgeoisie had ever dared to do.
Neither man condemns the terror in totality, only its lack of efficiency and incoherence.Marx leaves no misunderstanding.
Far from opposing the so-called excesses, the case of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings, one must not only tolerate such cases, but must take charge of them oneself.
Marx did not change his opinion later, to the point that he and Engels were convinced that the bourgeoisie would take up arms in resistance to the democratic state once it began to expropriate them, so only firm terror could frighten the old owners into submission.
In his own view, Marx's revolutionary dictatorship was only the expression of democracy, but for all that, it was not any less of a dictatorship.
The dictatorship would be carried out by a legislative assembly elected from universal suffrage and operating as the apex of a pyramid of directly democratic commune-like councils, but
Although Marx did not explicitly argue for the suspension of rights and freedoms, this legislative power would be compelled to place the executive power and property owners underneath dictatorship.
Only ruthless action, if necessary, not shrinking from terror, could force the bureaucrats to accept the total dismantling of their institutions and the rich to accept their losses.
Only the weapon of terror could be used to force the powers of the old world to accept the decisions of the new democracy.Marx's hate for bureaucracy does not really survive long after his death.The idea
of a totally planned economy, which made a wide extension of bureaucracy instead of its limitation, which was a practical inevitability.
Marx didn't want to acknowledge this, and the conclusion probably would have disgusted him, but it's difficult to imagine a society running its own economy without a huge apparatus. So, especially at this time.
So, in the years around the turn of the century, the Marxist principles were subject to a process of gradual erosion.
In Marx's view, there would be, in Marx's view, there would be, in general, be a need for violent revolution to establish a democracy, but gradually, many European countries were giving suffrage extensions and parliaments to much more power and power to the people without any preceding revolutions.
So understandably, the aim of bringing about catastrophic and bloody upheavals recedes from the minds of the foremost social democratic leaders of the Second International, which is the first international democratic and socialist conference to be held after Marx's death, which was six years after Marx's death, whose purpose was to modernize, update, formalize the principles of Marxism after his death.
All the big names are at that one.Lenin, Trotsky, everybody in Russia.All the big names show up to this.What year is this?That is six years after Marx's death.Marx dies.Let me look this up.
The Second International takes place in – well, it's founded in 1889 and it dissolves officially in 1916.Founded in 1889, six years after the death of Marx, so that would be 1883 when he dies.Was it in Geneva or was it Vienna?
It was – well, it was held in multiple places because it was multiple years. The International Bureau, the Socialist Bureau that organizes it, was based in Brussels, but it's kind of held in many different places.
It's a correspondence of sorts, like it's people like sending letters back and forth to one another.And there are delegations that meet in Paris, but it lasts a lot longer than that, obviously.
And I also wanted to go back.You had mentioned the French Revolution, and I believe you said 1739.Yeah, 83, 999.
Yeah, something like that.If I said that wrong.Yeah, and we're like, oh, so here we go.Engels calls the terror of 1793.Yeah, yeah, yeah.There you go.
So anyway, for many Marxists at the second international establishments, like the railways, simply could not operate without bureaucratic organization, more roads.
The apparatus could at best be democratically controlled, and some even argued that socialism did not aim for the abolition of officialdom at all, but only for making its highest positions available to everybody.
There was involved here a parallel process of increasing acceptance of state bureaucracy and decreasing willingness to consider dictatorial forms of government among Marxist socialists. Which makes sense.
As for Marx, the only appropriate use of dictatorialism was the rooting out and destruction of bureaucracy.So once you start to accept the bureaucracy, you don't need the dictatorialism.
But by the end of the 19th century, the Marxist movement, which becomes embodied in the Second International, had worked out a doctrine of the state with various contradictory elements.
Lenin's centralistic concept of the state was inspired by Marx and Engels, who were again indebted to Robespierre and his fellow revolutionaries from the French Revolution.
In State and Revolution, Lenin further expounds a concept of the state that was at once democratic, directly, and centralist.The new democracy rested on workers' councils, Soviets, and old bureaucratic machinery.Those things were to be smashed.
The state would then be a unitary instead of holding a division of powers.
The result of all this smashing and concentrating of power in the hands of armed workers would be a totally centralized state, with all citizens transformed into, quote, workers and officials in one huge syndicate, and a whole economy organized like a, God, can you imagine this, quote, post office.
Lenin did his very best to prove the idea that smashing the state apparatus instead of capturing it represented the right interpretation of the original Marxism, and in that regard, I believe he was right.
But, surprisingly, he retracts that thesis within a few months.
In September of 1917, Lenin writes that the existing economic apparatus of the state, that is the banks and the syndicates, should not be smashed, but instead should be captured intact and subjected to the Soviets.
After the Bolshevik takeover, he continued to value forms of popular participation through Soviets, trade unions, and other bodies.But, as a practical man, he did not hesitate to preserve the czarist administrative apparatus.
Specialists, administrators, technicians, and army officers were welcomed aboard.
Eventually, Lenin's enthusiasm for state bureaucracy does diminish, but he never returned to the consistent anti-bureaucratism that he had laid out in State and Revolution, and there was definitely no return to Marx's complete hostility for executive power, so the state bureaucracy was basically there to stay.
It was only on the point of the dictatorial aspect of the state that Lenin removed himself from an important element of Marxist political doctrine.
Quoting angles with approval to the effect that the Democratic Republic was a specific form of dictatorship of the proletariat,
Lenin comments that the Democratic Republic formed the quote, nearest approach to that dictatorship, which obviously means something quite different.
Lenin was of the opinion that the degradation of the people under capitalism made them unfit to rule for the time being.Lenin's dictatorialism was also more extreme than Marx's in another respect, as he created a party dictatorship.
And that was definitely alien from the Marxist tradition, as he wrote.
In 1906, Lenin also writes that people were so crushed morally by false pacifist theories, you can imagine he's talking about Christianity there, and by prejudice, that habit and routine
and habit and routine that the revolutionary dictatorship could not be, quote, realized by the whole people, but only by revolutionary people.The people as a mass should only be made to participate in state activities.
Thus, the people would lose their sovereign power to the revolutionaries.Democratic organs would function as institutions not of self-government, but of the participation in this larger process.
Can I interrupt for a second?
Yes. He's describing real communism.Well, he's describing vanguardism.Very specifically, he's moving himself into a position where he can then say, actually, we make the rules, not the workers.This is where he's moving to.And this is what?
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The eventual outcome was going to be Stalin.
We'll talk about communism later.It does sound a lot like that.We'll see. The people should help the revolutionary minority to carry out its dictatorship and be educated in the process.
Lenin believes that, if left to themselves, the people would never be able to bring about a revolution because the broad masses were so blinded by private interests.
As a result of centuries of miseducation, they would always lose sight of the general interest.
Only a revolutionary minority, a dictatorship, could temporarily fill the gap until the masses were regenerated enough to recognize where their, quote, and it's a quote, true needs lay.
In summary, Lenin's concept of dictatorship went beyond what Marx had envisioned in its measures as well as its form of organization.
We could get into how Lenin's revolutionary dictatorship and bureaucratic centralism was more of a reflection of his proud Russian heritage than anything else that would have been understood by Marx.
A terrorist minority dictatorship was influenced among 19th century Russian revolutionaries and bureaucratic centralism was the model of the Russian state apparatus.
However, he was able to adopt many ideas of the minority rule and of the bureaucratic centralism as much from his Russian tradition as he could from the spirit of the Second International.
The point being, by the time of the Second International, Marx's already kind of You can't say distilled, because that would mean it was concentrated.He's dissipated in a lot of ways.
That is not to absolve Marx from what we're about to read about in the Soviets, but certainly to say if Marx was still alive, he would have gone the way of Trotsky, I imagine. So, Stalin and the Russian nation.Yosef Dzhugashvili, the later Stalin.
Stalin, by the way, Stal in Georgian means steel, so he took the nickname Steel Man, which is pretty badass. Stalin was born in 1878 in the small Georgian town of Gori.He was the son of a leather worker and a washerwoman.
He grew up in a very poor circumstance, but as a bright child, he managed to enter the local church school.During his days at seminary, the future Stalin was first involved with the Georgian nationalist movement.
When he was 17 years old, he had six poems published to the Iveria, which was a Georgian nationalist journal. The journal and its editors clearly resented industrialism, but they were not conservatives.
The journal was a typical representation of 19th century cultural nationalism.Its overriding aim was the rebirth of Georgia as a cultural nation, which in the long run was supposed to create a condition for Georgian independence.
culture provided a focus of broad national unity and epitomized the country's spiritual and material development.
The whole Georgian people, from the elite down to the popular masses, should be molded into a homogenous community, structured around an axis of shared cultural values, but Georgia should also be made to be a modern political community where there was no room for feudal privilege.
So young Joseph becomes acquainted with the milieu of Georgian revival even before he moves to Tbilisi, which is where the publication is.
And this could be deduced from the fact that he was a frequent visitor to a bookshop in Gori, his hometown, which was owned by a member of the Iveria editing community.So in the work
of young Joseph and of other writers, there are many themes of patriotism and of the struggle of the peasant masses against Russian rulers and their own cruel landlords playing important parts in that role.
Whereas many early Marxists were expressly against nationalism, most Georgian Marxists believed that Russian oppression of their native lands made some forms of class collaboration unavoidable.
Capitalism not only divided countries into opposing classes, but also promoted the economic integration of those classes.Thereby, it creates the basis for a modern nation.That modern nation knew what was called a community of consciousness.
So for Stalin, it was even essential that any characteristic of the nation, whether the people felt it or not, was that they felt a consciousness of the nation.Whether or not they participated in the nation is another thing altogether.
In the words of the Georgian Marxist Noy Zordanya, Quote, nationality and culture formed a country's eye.Correspondingly, Zordania's patriotism was a program not only of common action against Russian oppression, but also of its cultural affirmation.
A country should not lose its cultural identity.Zordania even insisted that there was a psychological bond between Georges that preceded the capitalist era.Stalin, however,
as he matures, begins to refuse to see positive significance of national cultures.All peoples had the right to stick to their, and he quotes this, harmful habits and institutions, but the party never supports those things.
The Georgian Bolshevik did support regional autonomy for the Caucasus, but that it should serve as a form of integration and undermine rather than develop the separate nations living in the region.
Stalin appreciates Russian culture more highly than that of the Caucasian nations, but in a somewhat paradoxical way. It's not because he liked things that were Russian, but because Russia embodied modernity.
This will be very important in the conclusion.In June of 1906, he explains that those who demanded trans-Caucasian autonomy separated, quote, the fate of our country from Russian culture and link it to Asian barbarism.Another quote.
In comparison to the Turks and their nationalities in the Transcaucasus, Russia is indeed a civilized country.
That is the reason why we consider such farsighted politicians like you, he's writing in an email to a couple of Transcaucasian nationalists, who demand Transcaucasian autonomy to be reactionaries.
Today, young Russia stands at the head of a struggling mankind, while Turkey did not yet emerge from its barbarian state.
Stalin supported Russian culture against Transcaucasian culture basically because it was further evolved and higher up the ladder of modernity.
The national question in the caucuses, he explained, can be solved only by the spirit of drawing in the backwards nations and nationalities in the general bed of higher culture.One nation in particular, he singles out, are the Jews.
From Stalin's point of view, their culture was uniquely reactionary because it was constructed around a religious pillar. Moreover, whatever it was, the Jewish nation was ceasing to exist.Quote, the Jews are assimilating.
Stalin believed that all nations were assimilating in his time, and the process of dilution of nations into a new rational universality was a general one, which was rooted in the trend of development of capitalism.
But the Jews were assimilating even more than others, because they had not been a real nation in the first place.
The basis for Stalin's, and you'll hear this now, cosmopolitan argument, lay in the thesis that, while capitalism had at first produced nations and national identities, further capitalist economic development was now inexorably undermining those phenomena.
Capitalism first, as it were, nationalized, and thereupon denationalizing the whole world. He writes, quote, National autonomy contradicts the whole course of the development of nations.
Can one artificially weld them together when life, when the economic developments, tears off from them whole groups and scatters the latter over various regions?Undoubtedly, nations draw themselves together at the first stages of capitalism.
But at the higher stages of capitalism, there begins to be a process of scattering of nations.
At the first stages of capitalism, one can still speak of a cultural community of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but with the development of large-scale industry and the sharpening of class struggle, the community begins to fade away.
So Stalin rejects the whole idea of national identity in the name of cosmopolitan modernity, but he did expect other nations to assimilate into the Russian body.
As a result, only a small minority of nations were to disappear and the Russian nation would be preserved and most likely strengthened.
So as stated earlier, Stalin believes that Russian culture was more universalist than other nations of the empire and therefore entitled to more respect.
In the period of transition from feudalism to modernity, the Russians had served, like the Germans and Magyars, as unifiers of nationalities.They had proven to be, quote, the most suited to organize the state.
Strong progressive nations like Russians, Germans, and Magyars operated as historical avant-garde.They were the ones who integrated the scattered feudal world into viable modern states.
In the next historical stage, they continued to be the vanguard, for they pointed even further progress towards a cosmopolitan future. From the early years of the century until the revolution, Joe Stalin was a Russian patriot.
But his patriotism, as we said, remains strictly of the revolutionary type and consists of a proud awareness that Russia was on point to becoming a new vanguard for the world revolution.
A country on the verge of overtaking France and Germany and pushing the world forward, Russia was the detonator to set off an explosion that would destroy the old world.
the first country to set course towards socialism through a strategy of proletarian coalition with peasantry.And in adopting that line, there would be a quick transition from socialism in a predominantly peasant country.
Stalin joins Lenin in his return to Marx and Engels' original radicalism.You can remember The State of the Russian People, which is, I believe, Marx writes that.
So Stalin was indeed a Russian Red Patriot if we were used that term to refer specifically to his insistence on Russian leadership as the most advanced of the time in a multinational state.
He used a purely Marxist argument proceeding from the progressive socioeconomics and state development of Russia compared with the borderlands, which at the time was harmonized perfectly with the traditional centralism of the Russian state.
So the real point of interest in Stalin's views in the year 1917 to 1923 is not that he favored the centralized authority of Russian dominance.That was the spirit of what he'd written before the revolution, but the new thing
was that despite this, he agreed to federalism and cultural autonomy of non-Russian nations.
He and Lenin apparently concluded that from the point of view of power, the most stable solution was to combine Russian central leadership with local autonomy.I'm going to go on to Stalin ascending to power.Any questions?No, no, keep going.
So, after Lenin's death in January of 1924, it took Stalin five years to become the uncontested leader of the Soviet Union.The main doctrine for which Stalin became known was that of socialism in one country.
It was Lenin who had first concluded that Soviet Russia would be able to defend itself, very important, against military threats of imperialists and that there was no longer a clash between the vanguard and the peasantry because the peasants were easily convinced to adopt new agricultural arrangements such as cooperative farms, which is the basis of the entire economic policy of Stalin.
Stalin arrives at his thesis that socialism could be constructed in a single backwards country simply because of the fact that Soviet Russia had survived that way for so many years, and he saw no reason why it could not indefinitely survive that way, and he was confident that the peasantry could be made to accept collective agriculture.
In the late 1930s, Stalin sharpens some of his aspects of his doctrine.
In an unpublished speech to a conference of propagandists in 1938, he complains that not only was the idea of socialism in one country possible, but also that the simultaneous victory of socialism in all countries was impossible.
So at this time, he takes Engels by name and he says, This was formerly impossible, and it so is today.Thereby he admits that even in Engels' time, the hope for a simultaneous world revolution had been unreal.
Eventually, all of the old Bolsheviks, from Stalin to Bukharin to Zinoviev, they all follow in Lenin's lead to recognize the possibility of socialism in one country, and it's only Trotsky that holds out the idea of capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union being inevitable unless there was a world revolution to stop it.
So, he prefers a situation where Russia need not be an independent economic unit, but form one socialist economic space with a revolutionary Germany and France.
The autarkic element was forced upon Russia by imperialists, however, after the war, autarky was to be preserved.
Stalin, who had the opportunity to transform Eastern Europe into an integrated economic zone, chose instead to promote autarky incomprehensibly with other economic policies since develops in the Soviet Union.
So in other words, socialism in one country turned from a necessity to an ideal of self-reliant economic development and an inefficient one at that.
A good example being how ideological determination may result from counterproductive policies in terms of efficiency and power. What are his economics?So, quote, we are 100 years behind advanced countries.We must make good this lag in 10 years.
Either we do it or they crush us.That's in a speech that he writes for the fourth plenum of industrial managers. Lenin had decided to abandon the socialization of agriculture and the communization of property under the new economic policy of 1921.
He would allow for private ownership of the rural sector and private production.The result of this was that Soviet agriculture soon returned to its pre-war levels. So it's very interesting there, by the way.
So when you let people privatize, things start to go back to where they were.Interesting.According to Marxist dogma under socialism, i.e.in a system without private ownership of the means of production, products were no longer made for the market.
They were distributed over the producers according to their respective achievements, but the distribution took place without the intervention of money under a form of direct regulation of the community or of the state.
That form of exchange was referred to by the term direct product exchange.
In the early period of Soviet systems, the establishment of such a form of distribution was attempted, but this was at a time when agricultural production was still in private hands, and so in other words, a socialist form of distribution was superimposed over a partly capitalist system of production.
The new economic policy, the NEP from here on, puts an end to that anomaly, later dubbed as war communism.
And the NAP was not the only place where the market was between state and private agriculture, but also it introduced various monies and market forms in the sphere of state industries themselves.
But it remained dogma that once the private ownership of the means of production had been overcome, money in the market would be replaced by direct product exchange.
During the early years of the NEP, it was accepted that the state enterprises operated on a commercial basis, and that policy went relatively unchallenged, but it did cause a lot of theoretical confusion.
For instance, the socialist leader Zinoviev makes the point to claim that, in a sense, the Soviet state sector was still state capitalist because money wages were paid and it produced for a market.
Against them, Stalin argued that the state sector was socialist for the simple reason that the proletarian state was its owner.He writes, The point is not that all trade and money systems are methods of a capitalist economy.
The socialist elements of our economy capture these methods and arms of the bourgeoisie in order to overcome the capitalist elements.
The point is, consequently, that, thanks to the dialectic of our development, the functions and significance of these instruments of the bourgeoisie change fundamentally.
So in February of 1930, Stalin writes that the NEP would only be discarded when, quote, we have the possibility of arranging economic links between town and countryside via product exchange without trade to its private turnover.
So his tune does eventually change a few months later when he notes that the country was apparently still in a stage of NEP for, quote, commodity turnover and the money economy still remain.
Apparently, according to Stalin, socialism would be a system without trade and money.
To abolish money would have meant to lead the country to complete economic breakdown in the immediate future, and Stalin was too much of a realist to consider that option.
At the 17th Party Congress in 1934, Stalin made the conclusion official when he criticized, quote, leftist petite bourgeois communists holding that money would soon be replaced by direct product exchange, and he concludes that money was there to stay, quote, until the completion of the first stage of communism, the socialist stage of development.
So that is the biggest difference you will hear so far for most non-Stalinists and Stalinists is no money has to stay until communism rather than until socialism.
Even Lenin, basically by the time you get to socialism for Lenin it was a voucher system.So even for Lenin he doesn't agree with that.So that's the biggest departure so far.He writes, quote, Well, hold on.
A few months after he says that, he strengthens his position even further and states, quote, commodity circulation and the money economy should be strengthened by all means.He describes money as a very flexible system.
He writes, the money economy is one of those few bourgeois apparatuses of the economy that we socialists must use until the end. and we'll set it to work in our way, to make it serve our cause rather than the capitalists.
Under our circumstances, it is unthinkable to organize the exchange between city and countryside without commodity circulation and without buying and selling.
And therefore, for Stalin, money would only disappear at the higher stage of complete communism.
Stalin not only accepted money because of the plain impossibility of abolishing it, but as we'll see, he actually positively appreciates it as an instrument for increasing economic efficiency.
And that had been recognized by him during the 1920s, and so he saw no good reason to reconsider that after the victory of socialist ownership in the 1930s.First, after the horrors of the famine of 1933, these are some reasons perhaps I
we can go to why he also considered money being a good idea.
After the horrors of the famine of 1933, some improvement of the standard of living of the population would have to have been implemented if his regime was not going to run into serious trouble, and second, by now the party elite lived in extreme privilege compared to those of the ordinary population.
A theoretical justification for different living standards was urgently demanded.As a result, in 1934, Stalin expounds a new consumerist interpretation of socialism.
Stalin rejects any, quote, neglect of the demands of assortment and of the demands of the consumer. Moreover, incomes for qualified and unqualified work should be differentiated.
One should not expect everyone to dress in identical costumes and eat the same kind of food.He writes, quote, �Leveling the field of needs and individual life is a reactionary petite bourgeois absurdity.
worthy of some primitive sect of ascetics but not of a socialist society, organized in a Marxist way, for one cannot demand that all people would have identical needs and tastes, that all people would live their personal life according to one model.
Marxism assumes that the tastes and needs of people are not and cannot be identical and equal in quality and quantity either in the period of socialism or in the period of communism.
So, although that should not be taken completely at face value, the new consumerism was not a sham either.
To provide the citizens with a more comfortable life and opportunity for better individual improvement was a way of seducing them to work harder for society.And even Stalin admits this. It was a form of material stimulus.
Quote, Engels confused our people.He incorrectly believed that under socialism everyone, qualified and unqualified, leaders and those in executive jobs, must receive an average wage.
And now we have people who want to jump directly through socialism into communism when we'll have such equality.We have to stop being pigs and we have to be cultured, clean things up, then we'll arrive at communism.
In early 1936 he formulated the socialist principle of distribution as being one in accordance with the quantity and quality of contributed labor, therefore there still exists a wage which is unequal and differentiated.
In late 1936 Stalin had proclaimed that socialism had been fundamentally achieved in Russia and in the same speech Stalin also writes that while Trotsky, he probably says gritting his teeth, had believed that under socialism money was only a means of calculation, it should be recognized that even under socialism people work, quote, not only because they are with us in power but also because we give them an interest in it.
We have to hook people on their personal interests. Stalin gives two further arguments for why money was to continue into the first stage of communism.
First, as long as output was not so plentiful that people could receive according to their needs, they had to receive according to their achievements.
And, with the differences between qualified and unqualified labor being as wide as they were, a fair distribution was so complex that it could not be done without the flexible instrument of money.
Secondly, money could serve as a productive stimulus for individual producers.The second function could be compared to the use of money as an instrument of control and accounting for enterprises as a whole.
So, Stalin rejects the dogma of socialism as a moneyless economy for equally pragmatic reasons.
Without the flexible instrument of money to stimulate production by individuals and enterprises and to regulate trade of consumption goods, it was impossible to guarantee a minimum of economic efficiency.
Thus, the motives of power and efficiency were Stalin's overriding concern in preserving his as well as reformulating the Marxist economic dogma.
The main point was that what he reformulated concerned his introducing a commercial element into socialism.No longer was socialism considered to be irreconcilable with money, but money and markets were part of the principle.
That is the sharpest departure from Lenin who demanded that under socialism money and markets would no longer exist.
Stalin has to pragmatically abandon that idea, but it's not so bold of him to do so, as this was simply a return to the original message and thinking of the Second International that Lenin originally sets out to depart from.
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So, class struggle.This is where we get to the scary stuff.So Lenin and Leninism— Or the good stuff.Well, it depends.Leninism, as we know, is a whole ideology of class struggle. For Leninists, the class enemy comprised a wide variety of people.
The category covers not only foreign imperialists and defeated Russian bourgeoisie, but also parts of the intelligentsia, priests, former policemen, conservatives, liberals, progressives, moderate socialists, oppositionists within the Bolshevik party,
One of the main theses that Stalin becomes notorious for was that of the inevitable sharpening of class struggle as socialism approached.
In 1928 he notes, �It had never been seen and never will be seen that obsolete classes surrender their positions voluntarily without attempting to organize resistance.�
The movement towards socialism must lead resistance by exploiting elements against this movement, and the resistance of the exploiters must lead to an inevitable sharpening of class struggle.
Class struggle was to become more violent, to the degree that Soviet power becomes consolidated.
The next year, Stalin observes that, "...precisely because of the relative weight of the capitalist elements decreases, the capitalist elements sense a mortal danger and strengthen their resistance.They fought harder as they became weaker."
That was, for him, "...the mechanics of the sharpening of class struggle." Capitalism resisted the more furiously and the closer it came to its death.Precisely their defeat would enormously increase the energy of resistance of the exploiters.
As collectivization draws nearer, Stalin often quotes Lenin to the effect that the individual peasant economy spontaneously generated capitalism.As long as the individual economy predominated, capitalism had
a sounder basis in economics than communism. Stalin was careful to call publicly for the liquidating of the kulaks only as a class.
He did not aim for their destruction as individual people, but merely for, quote, depriving them of the productive sources of existence and development.So, for example, for their expropriation.
But he also did speak of dying classes and called his own policy towards them one of terrorization. Within a few years, the Kulaks had been expropriated and collectively deported, if they had not been shot or starved.
In 1933, in a Central Committee plenum during the famine, Stalin insisted that, quote, the people from the past did not take their defeat easily.The leader attributed the problems to the resistance of the last rudiments of dying classes.
They had become too weak to act openly, but in their dying agony they put up a terrible fight.The former Kulaks and reactionary intellectuals had put up a mask and engaged in large-scale sabotage.
They set storage buildings on fire, broke machines, stole property, injected cattle with the plague, and spread meningitis among the horses.The Central Committee should take seriously the need to
kill off the rudiments of the dying classes, and organize the defense against a capitalist encirclement which had not yet been destroyed at all and will not be destroyed any time soon.
And once again, Stalin formulates his celebrated principle, quote, The destruction of the classes is not achieved by an extinguishing of the class struggle, but by its strengthening.
In Stalin's opinion, one of the reasons for the persistence of class struggle was that, quote, the consciousness of the people lags behind its development in comparison to their actual situation.
The class struggle was stretched almost indefinitely after the destruction of the class of private owners.The momentum of bourgeois ideology and the presence of capitalist states guaranteed that the struggle continued under socialism.
In 1936, the leader proclaimed that with the completion of expropriation, all exploiting classes had been liquidated.But this changed nothing as far as struggle was concerned.
Stalin repeated that the idea of a fading class struggle was a rotten theory.The class struggle could only become more desperate as a result of communism succeeds.
The bourgeois states were still plotting to attack the USSR, and he blamed the Trotskyites and the Zinovievs, claiming that they had agreed to undermine the Soviet state via espionage, terror, and sabotage, and in return, the bourgeois states provided these desperate oppositionalists with an opportunity to come to power.
And he concludes bluntly that, quote, As long as there exists the capitalist encirclement, we'll have wreckers, spies, saboteurs, and murderers sent into our hinterland by foreign states.
So soon, the so-called Great Terror breaks loose, and in a bloodbath of astonishing proportions, according to official figures, Almost 700,000 people were executed between 1937 and 1938.
In those two years, Stalin had signed lists with names of almost 40,000 people, party members, state cadres, and other dignitaries that they should be shot. The main target of the terror was not the Soviet party apparatus.
In terms of numbers, the victims of the murder of the allegedly oppositionist elements in the Soviet elite was a minor affair compared to two other operations.
In the summer of 1937, a campaign of mass arrests and executions started against former kulaks, active anti-Soviet elements, and criminals.
The operation was in part directed against common criminals and socially marginal people as well as priests and non-communist party political members, who were seen as enemies of the state.
But another part was a final mopping up of those people of the past who remained, a crackdown of the former classes and on those whom Stalin thought were their political representatives.
Altogether, that one campaign in the summer of 1937 resulted in recorded executions of 350,000 people.Simultaneously, a second mass operation started against so-called
counter-revolutionary national contingents among certain minority communities, Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Chinese, Romanians, and others.
They were arrested and accused of criminal activities in service of the respective foreign governments for which they were ethnically linked.This operation led to around a quarter of a million people being executed.
In 1938, with the pressing of Molotov, Stalin signs a decision to finally end the Great Terror.The great work to, quote, destroy the enemies of the people and to clean up the USSR had been accomplished.
The method of mass repression need not be used again.And indeed, mass executions on that scale were never repeated.
notice how i'm not talking about the ukrainian famine either i don't mention that because it was not a political thing it's part of this whole situation which gets revealed a lot later but do not forget he also perpetuated a massive famine in the ukraine in nineteen fifty two he writes that if the collective farms were allowed to own their own tractors they would become so independent from the state uh... that a rebirth of capitalism would be inevitable so even in nineteen fifty two he still uh...
extremely not relaxed about the whole situation.The doctrine of class struggle, which Stalin inherits from Lenin, was not empty rhetoric.It fed his suspicions and thereby provided a starting point for the Great Terror.
The doctrine predicted that the defeated enemy would in desperation strengthen his resistance and turn to the imperialists. This expectation set Stalin off on a fatal course towards mass murder.
The doctrine served, as it were, as a powerful hypothesis, and that the dictator had the power to produce proof of that hypothesis.
Whether he was ideologically blind enough to realize that, or that he was producing the proof rather than discovering it, we don't know.
All of this is not to deny that power was the real issue, of course, that it was and is recognizable that Stalin's own understanding of the events suggests that.
goes ahead and accuses all of the people that he murdered of wanting to take power, right?So, it's hard to say.In his own goal, he states he wanted to prevent that.
He wanted to prevent them taking power and therefore had to make his own power more absolute.
For Stalin's part, the Great Terror in the party was obviously a power struggle, but the form it took was determined by the Leninist system of ideas he adhered to.
Let's depart from politics and talk about media.Stalin's cult of personality One of the main characteristics that Stalinism becomes known for, obviously, is his particular cult of personality.
Stalin was represented in books, journals, newspapers, in prose, poetry, in song, painting, sculpture as a flawless genius and hero, on par with similarly extraordinary historical personalities like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
The cult reflected the dictatorial power that its object established in real life.
Stalin established his personal dictatorship by crusading against all informal centers of power with a degree of autonomy in the party, in the regions, and in state institutions.
During the Great Terror, the themes of struggle against familism and bureaucracy begin to merge.
So even in 1929 when Bukharin, who's still at the time friends with Stalin, mentions his personal friendship with him as a matter of alleviating mutual problems, Stalin slams his hand on the table and answers,
Stalin's organizational ideal was the fully integrated bureaucracy.Directives should be swiftly transmitted downwards and carried out without failure.
Conversely, new cadres should be promoted to be able to rise quickly to the top those who were most deserving. something you don't often think of in Marxism, very meritocratic.
This ideal could only be achieved by destroying entrenched cliques, the autonomous families, as he calls them, closing themselves off in both directions to protect their own positions.
They would not agree to promote capable people, and they would also try to defend themselves against the directives of the center. Familism, as he calls it, prevents the party from functioning as an unbroken whole.
It blocks the vertical flow up and downwards in directives and cadres. Stalin's organization of cliques of his own suggests that his abhorrence to familism was less than sincere.
However, Stalin's own cliques were not families in which one was to be protected and whatever mistakes one made could be wiped away and where one was sure not to be replaced by a newcomer. His cliques were not really circles of mutual protection.
Instead, one's position in them was conditional upon the fulfillment of a job.Indeed, even one's life was at stake, but not Stalin's.
Next to improving the functioning of the party and state bureaucracy, the purpose of Stalin's campaigns against autonomous circles was to make his personal circle the most powerful in total.
Many years earlier, it had been predicted by many Marxists that Bolshevism contained an internal logic leading to personal rule.
In 1904, Trotsky warns that once Leninist principle becomes accepted, the process of substitutionalism, as I just mentioned in Stalin's format, might continue until the Central Committee handed over its power to one dictator.
Once one takes power in concentration as the most effective organizational model, there's no reason why they would have to stop that process of concentration.Bolshevism suffered from a paradox, as Trotsky says.
On the one hand, it propagates the concentration of power as a healthy principle, the stronger and more united the better, but on the other hand,
There was a dogma that for an unexplained reason, that concentration should just stop short of the leader.Not surprisingly, that didn't happen.
An officially established personal dictatorship would not per se have violated the fundamentals of Marxist doctrine.
Stalin could have referred to the extraordinary threats which demanded extraordinary unity of leadership as Long as the leader was elected by the Congress It would not have been contrary to democratic centralism to raise him up to move up dictatorial power to one level From a board from the Central Committee to a single leader But the leader did not take that step Stalin never really formalized his position as a dictator and to call Stalin a dictator is
A colloquialism.In what Marx understood as a dictatorship, Stalin really doesn't classify as a dictator.The Great Terror gave Stalin the power of life and death over his colleagues.
He became a personal dictator for all practical purposes, but again, he does not formalize his position and change party rules accordingly.
What is more, there is no indication that he ever contemplated taking such a step or regretted being unable to take such a step.
The simplest explanation for Stalin's holding back his dictatorship is simply because he was satisfied with the real power he had and that he believed that the formal structure of the party should remain as was.
This conclusion gains a little more perspective if we broaden our horizon and compare Stalin with later communist rulers, one of which we will speak of, who demanded unlimited power.
In his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong not only decimates party leadership, he also takes the steps that Stalin refrained from, namely, destroying much of the underlying structure of the leading party organs.
Him and Ceausescu, for example, brought their wives into the Politburo, while Kim Il-sung prepared his son as the successor.
So, to return to Mao, the Chinese leader not only demanded much of the internal party structure be destroyed, he actually partly dismantled party control over the state.This was something that even Stalin was less prepared to do.
Stalin remained only a quote, dictator on behalf of the party. In contrast to Mao, Stalin did not use his dictatorial powers over the party to undermine party rule over the Soviet state and society, but to stabilize it.
The hereditary principle epitomized in obscurantist forms of administration, meaning things like familism that Stalin battles against his whole life, were always part of his fight.
Stalin was not out to become a czar, the father of a new dynasty, again, as the Kim regime was.Czarism appealed to him, but only in one of its aspects, namely that it was a form of one-man rule.
For the rest, he remained content to be a dictator over an intact party. The cult of socialist leaders was not Russian, but a Western European invention.
To idolize their leaders was common enough among European social democratic parties, as we understand.From the perspective of the history of Marxism, the reverence for revolutionary leaders
can be understood in a different way, as an unexpected corollary of the doctrine of scientific socialism.
For Marxists, the discovery that history answered to laws did not show the futility of individual heroism, but on the contrary, provided real scope for it for the first time.
The fact that society could be mastered through a knowledge of its laws made the person armed with that knowledge capable of extraordinary feats.He or she could push history forward to its certain fulfillment.
A cult of genius and heroism is presently what one would expect in a movement that combined violent struggles for socialism with scientific insights into the processes leading to that goal.
The main new thing about the cult of the Bolshevik leaders after October was that, for the first time, such a cult was backed up by a state and could therefore be systematically organized and forced upon the whole citizenry.
Furthermore, the cultic implications of Marxism were strengthened by Lenin's concept of the revolutionary vanguard, which implied that there was a body of men and women who were divided from the ordinary population by unusual insight and bravery.
They were therefore entitled to the greatest form of respect."After 1917, a monumental cult of revolutionary heroes was immediately started up.Even in his lifetime, Lenin's own cult took to extraordinary proportions.
Although not yet dominating public life, many of the speeches, poems, and other writings about him were as extravagant as those later produced in honor of Stalin.
Quote, Marxism does not deny at all, this is Stalin, the role of eminent personalities or the fact that history is made by such people.But, of course, people make history not in such a way as to contain the kind of fantasy inspired to them.
Every new generation finds new, certain circumstances.In great people, there are things worth anything only insofar as they are able to understand the conditions correctly, to understand how to change them.
Marxism has never denied the role of heroes.On the contrary, it recognizes this role as considerable, but with those reservations about which I just spoke. Stalin never stopped calling himself a pupil of Lenin.
As late as October of 1952, in a plenum to the Central Committee, Stalin interrupted someone who had said that he was, quote, dedicated as a pupil of the comrade Stalin, and with the words, he stops him and says, hold on, we are all pupils of Lenin.
This is the perspective from which you can make sense of Stalin's occasional objections to his own cult of personality. In a 1930 letter to the comrades pleading his dedication to him,
He actually rejects it as, quote, principles of dedication to individuals should only serve the working class, the party, and the state.In 1933, he refuses permission to organize an exhibition of materials relating to him.
You know, they wanted to put a book together, statues together, quote, because such enterprises lead to a strengthening of cults of personality, which is harmful and not in accordance with the spirit of our party.
The clearest example of this is his 1938 objection to a publication of a book with stories about his youth.
Quote, The little book has the tendency to introduce cults of personality, of leaders, of infallible heroes into the consciousness of Soviet children and people in general.That's dangerous and harmful.
The theory that heroes and the crowd is not a Bolshevik but Soviet revolutionary theory.Heroes create the people.
transforming it from a crowd into the people say the socialist revolutionaries, the people actually create these heroes, the Bolsheviks answer to the Soviet revolutionaries.
Ironically, Stalin, in fact, confirms that he is a hero, but that all heroes need to be presented in a different kind of light. A hero of Marxism is a person who knew how to act as a willing instrument of the laws of history.
These laws were embodied by the working class and the Communist Party, and therefore, Stalin demanded to be portrayed as a hero and a genius with the strict provision that the toiling masses and the party were recognized as his sources of inspiration and legitimacy.
As a child, he had not been a hero in that sense, which is why he rejects the publication of the book.
Take the most orthodox element of Stalinist ritualism, that Stalin proposes that the leader be buried rather than cremated in the usual style of Russia, the leader being, of course, Lenin.
Moreover, his body might be preserved long enough to get used to the idea of Lenin's absence.
After the leader's death, decisions were taken to embalm the body until its funeral, but in March, it was decided to be preserved indefinitely, and it was Stalin who insisted on that.
But Lenin's bodily remains were not relics with alleged miraculous powers as they would be in the Orthodox sense.The body was a statue without intrinsic value.The enormous respect shown to it expressed only the respect for the deceased leader.
The Orthodox believer addresses icons and relics in order to reach the respective saint through prayer.This form of communication is completely lacking in Stalinism, even in its most excessive forms.
For the Stalinists, statues and posters served only to publicly underscore the loyalty of those depicted, so it would be meaningless for a Stalinist to perform a private ritual in relation to a statue. or even to Lenin's body.
In essence, the parallel between the two cults consisted only in the fact that they were simply cults.One way to look at the rise of the Stalinist cult is to understand it and its background against the czarist and orthodox traditions of the country.
The cult was furthermore a conscious instrument of Stalin's power strategies, but observed from a point of view of his own understanding of it, the Marxist component remained overriding.Stalin was convinced that he was a true historical hero.
He had not hoped to be venerated to underscore his power, though.He wanted to be venerated because he had an extraordinary understanding of Marxist laws of history and the courage to act ruthlessly upon them.
Nothing in what he said or wrote indicates that he had any doubts about his legitimacy in the cult.In fact, it would be contrary to his whole understanding to refuse the proletarian leaders the veneration that they deserved.
One last thing I thought was interesting, for art and society.Stalin turns to his views on art, and Lenin had been distinguished by artistic experimentation.
Under his inspiration, the Central Committee condemned the decadence for injecting twisted tastes into the working class.Stalin rejected a completely new, exclusively proletarian culture as too sectarian.
Although the political partisanship of art should never be in doubt, he says, artists should be collected on a wider Soviet scale.Stalin supported the creation of proletarian art, realistic in form and proletarian in content.
He demanded a truthfulness and objectivity which serve some particular class.Literature should love and hate, but this did not require that, quote, the works show us the enemy only in his main negative aspect.He wrote, and this is quite interesting,
I'd prefer another way of writing, the way of Chekhov, with whom there are no outstanding heroes, but grey people who express a fundamental stream of life.
I'd prefer that our literature show our enemies not as monsters, but as enemies hostile to our way of life, to our society, not without human traits. Why shouldn't we show that Bokaran, however horrible he was, had some human traits too?
Trotsky was an enemy, but he was a capable man.In conclusion, Stalinism contains scarcely anything new to distinguish it from Leninism.
There are exceptions, of course, with the socialism in one country, the notion of increasing fierceness of class struggle as socialism approached, and the idea that before withering away, the state had to develop to its maximum strength.
What Stalin essentially did was drive Leninism to its radical conclusions. Socialism in one country is a good example.It was implicit in Lenin's writings, but together with Bukharin, Stalin turned it into a principle.
Likewise, the policy of allowing non-Russians peoples to preserve their own cultures, socialist in content, national in form, was not a departure compared to Lenin's policy of cultural autonomy.
Rather, Stalin hardened it and captured it by a solemn formula.The cult of personality had this kind of ideological pedigree too. It was Plakhanov who gave Marxism a formulation of the great man theory, heroically accelerating history.
You can see this not only in Marx, but of course, where does the great man theory come from?Hegel.You can also see the fascists use the great man theory, but of course the difference being the focus on the party versus the individual.
His whole idea, this is Plakhanov and later Lenin, that the vanguard party embodied the phenomenon of the historical hero.Stalin drives the cult of personality of the historical hero to its heights that Lenin probably would not have found acceptable.
Speaking on Stalin's economic model, collectivization was also implicit in Lenin's writings.Only cooperatives operating with a means of production owned by the state deserved the name Completely socialist.
One way or another, collectivization of production had to take place, otherwise there would be no socialist Russia.But nevertheless, Stalin, not Lenin, was the one who realized that plan, ruthlessly forcing the peasantry to go along.
Lenin had been no less hostile towards the kulaks than his successor, considering them to be spiders and vampires, but it was Stalin who, quote, liquidated them as a class.
Whereas Lenin too favored the priority development of the production of capital goods, Stalin reformulated the primacy of heavy industry as a principle.
Stalin enhanced not only the violent components of Leninism, but also rid it of much of its utopianism.
Lenin accepted the state bureaucracy and wide income diversification, as well as new economic policies with money and market elements, and Stalin agreed.His contribution was to formulate
it so that elements were to be preserved not only in the stage transition known as socialism, but after socialism as well.The socialist state bureaucracy was by nature colossal.
Under socialism, the toilers received according to, quote, quantity and quality of their work.
Furthermore, Stalin concluded that the great social divisions of the labor movement would have to be preserved, and as a result, the Marxist utopia was utterly stripped to its skeleton of a planned, nationalized form of production.
Early Stalinism develops Leninism in a very paradoxical way.Its radical as well as its moderate elements were both accentuated.Stalin turns up the class struggle.Millions are starved or shot.
By abandoning utopian elements from original Marxism, he creates a socioeconomic system which is unburdened by costly experiments that would severely harm its efficiency.
And by turning up the terror, Stalin's power and the state power dramatically increases. The population was impressed by the hopelessness of resistance against the new order.
To make sense of Stalinist doctrine is not only to have to consider a complex intellectual exercise, but it also provides us with a psychological problem of identity.
Stalinism is about our own origins, for instance, and that goes not only for those who have a sympathy for revolutionary Marxism, those in the latter category, of course, have a particular hard time coming to terms with what Stalin did, but it's also not too happy and not very possible to follow the idea that Trotsky said that Stalin betrayed the revolutions.
Well, believers in Marx's good intentions always will find it hard to acknowledge that Stalin, Lenin, Marx's hatred of capitalist exploitation was so intense for dictatorship and terrorism to have to root it out.
His teachings are reinterpreted again and again to take aggressive stings out of them so as to link Marxist doctrine and Stalinist practice as far away as possible, but there's no way to argue
In essence, Stalin carries out Marx's dictum of the expropriators.
The uncomfortable fact remains that the reason why Stalin waded knee-deep through rivers of blood was that he intended to abolish capitalist property and keep the world safe from it forever.
Those that accuse Stalin of having betrayed the revolution are simply wrong.Until his death, Stalin hated the capitalists and their whole order. I will leave you with a conclusionary quote.
from Eric Van Rie, from the book, The Political Thought of Joe Stalin, which is the most thorough and contemporary study of the political thought of Stalin that I found, although you will want to also look into Stephen Kotkin.
I did call him Joe here, but I fixed it.And Timothy Snyder, again, guy who writes The Blood Lance, tells you all about what happened during the war.Van Rie leaves us with an uncomfortable and fascinating conclusion.Quote,
For the enlightened citizens of Western society in general, Stalinism represents an uncomfortable reality.It confronts us with our own roots in a way which we would like to avoid.Whose demon was Stalin, we wonder?
After the final disclosure of the magnitude of Stalinist crimes, Nazism still remains psychologically more detestable to most citizens of Western society than Stalinism.
We know that the ideal of equality may lead to Stalinism, that the higher than average are decapitated and put on some rack.Nevertheless, we do recognize that ideal as our own.In inequality, as an ideal, we recognize nothing, only an ominous void.
Many will deny that they make this difference, but there are few people around who find it equally problematic to be friends with someone who was ever a communist as with someone who was a Nazi.
The bottom line is that, while Hitler is the gangster next door, Stalin is our own flesh and blood. our own son turned serial killer.We know full well that he is no better than the killer next door, but can we ever completely disavow him?
There is a solution to prove that this serial killer is in fact not our own son. He was a traitor to our cause.
We hope that it will one day be proved that he had nothing to do with the Western tradition and that his corpse can safely be placed in a Russian or Asian cupboard to rot.Unfortunately, this is impossible to prove.
Stalinism was not the end of Enlightenment Utopia of Reason, but its fulfillment. The Soviet dictator did mankind one great service.
By his practical example, he showed us that rationalism, for all its immense value, may never be set in isolation from other enlightened values that the Western tradition has also produced.
If it is, in particular, not balanced by individual liberty, then this liberating doctrine turns to madness.
Probably something that's going to stick out with people is the fact that, excuse me.Not calling him a dictator.
Yeah, it's and after I first I was like, well.
He kind of is a dictator, but this book is very large, and it goes into all the wheeling and dealing Stalin has to do, the fact that he keeps the committee together, the fact that the committee keeps some level of power.
He is quite literally not a dictator.That doesn't make him not a mass-murdering scumbag, but to call him a dictator would simply be a misapplication of the term.
So when he's doing his terror, if he's not a dictator, he has the backing of his
Oh, absolutely.Oh, absolutely.Yes.What he has is the backing of the Marxist-Leninists and the Bolsheviks, 100%.
Remember, he's sending letters and orders to other Bolsheviks, telling them what the plan is, what has to be done, because he set up for himself the sharpening of class struggle theory.
Which is this really dark, self-fulfilling prophecy, as is noted earlier.Was he killing them because they were revolutionaries, or were they revolutionaries because he was killing them?We don't know.
But he manages to set up this relationship, which only a dialectical person can do, which is, the more power we take from you, the more power you want back.
I mean, essentially, it's a doctrine of – it's funny because it is – it reminds me of General Westmoreland and what he said about Vietnam at the start of the Vietnam War, which was, we're going to have to kill every single one of them if we actually want to win, because the fewer there are, the easier they'll be able to organize.
This is more or less a conclusion that was drawn in a neoliberal society.So it's a –
Self-fulfilling prophecy that he sets up that most of the Bolsheviks end up going along with Yeah, the um, hmm I will tell you what what it to that end When we get to Mao You will see a sharp difference between the way Stalin treats his party members and the way Mao treats his party members people I think sometimes confuse the the the red the great terror with what Mao does so for Stalin
If you were Stalin's boy, he wouldn't kill you.If you agreed with Stalin, he wouldn't kill you.Mao was trying to clean house basically everybody that he could who was not an absolute devotee to him.Stalin was willing to have disagreements.
Now, again, none of this makes him better, but we have to put him in historical perspective.
You really have to wonder sometimes how everything would have went if Stalin was like Trotsky, like an internationalist. If an internationalist would have taken over for Lenin, what would have happened?
Well, Stalin would have thought that if that was the case, Russia would likely have just become puppetized to the capitalist states that encircled him, which I don't know if that's true, because no Trotskyist ever took power, as far as I know.
Yeah, there you go.How many people know that?
Yeah, we're not going to do Trotsky in this, but that's all you need to take away is that most of the neocons who came from Trotskyist ways of thinking, and eventually they sort of abandoned those ways of thinking, but not really, not really.
I guess by saying, what if Stalin was an internationalist, an easier way of saying that is, what if Trotsky would have became premier?
Because then you would have had an internationalist at the head, but we know Trotsky could have never led Russia because of his background.
Well, that's true, too.Yeah, that's true.From the very beginning, Trotsky wasn't able to.I think Trotsky tried to work as best he could into Lenin. And then that fell apart when Lenin died.
Because there's a lot more agreement between Trotsky and Lenin, even though they hated one another on and off, there's a lot more agreement between the two of them than there is between Stalin and Trotsky, which is odd because Stalin holds up himself as a pupil of Lenin, but there are significant differences between the two of them.
But they aren't contrasting differences.I agree with the conclusion of the author here.
When he lays it out, the differences between Lenin and Stalin are a matter of degree, not a matter of difference, you know, whereas with Trotsky and Stalin, there is a tremendous amount of just straight up, no, you're doing the dialectic wrong.
This is a total difference.
One of the I saw a documentary, not a documentary, but more like a docudrama on Trotsky that was actually made by a Russian company.
And they seem to imply that one of the problems that Stalin had with Trotsky from the start was personal, was like they were at a conference together and Trotsky snubbed them or something like that.
And Stalin being who he is and basically being a petty criminal was just insulted by that to the point where he would never forget it.
Which, that's a good, by the way, one thing that I'm now remembering I did not even talk about is the fact that Stalin was a petty criminal.Unlike, like after he gets out of seminary, he, during the Russian Revolution,
He's basically, well, no, sorry, before the Russian Revolution, he goes to, not Gulag, what do they call it before it becomes Gulag?
I don't remember right now, shit.Yeah, so they had, basically the Gulags existed long before the Bolsheviks took over, but the purpose of the Gulag is different than whatever the exile process was.
They basically send you to Siberia, and you would just be there for a few years, so you couldn't influence people. Stalin had gone there like four or five times because he was a bank robber more or less And he wasn't even a bank robber of big banks.
He was like a small-time bank robber in Georgia and in the caucuses So he was always a petty criminal and a thug and I don't know if that influences his approach later on because
A lot of – he justifies everything he does under Lenin and Marx, not Engels.He didn't like Engels particularly.
But that always sticks in my mind is that unlike everyone else who we've spoken about, he was a petty criminal and also the only one who had full-time political power, which I think are two unique qualities for any other theorist who we've spoken about.
You know, Lenin wasn't, Lenin didn't survive long enough to actually centralize power.
Only like four years or something like that after.
Yeah.And he, and while he was doing, while he was in charge, Stalin was actually behind the scenes, centralizing power to himself.
Yes, he was.I should have mentioned that too.Stalin was smart in that he knew how to make friends and then very quickly, when he took power, was like, hold on.We can't just be influencing one another as friends.We have a job to do.
There's a lot of that.If you ever read this book, and again, it's a fantastic book if you want to understand Stalinism and why it is perhaps the most repugnant form of Marxism-Leninism that you can find, is because
Stalin is the kind of guy who'll shake your hand and then stab you in the back in a way that very few other principled Marxists are willing to do.
There's many times in this book where Stalin says one thing and then a few years later says the exact opposite, all so that he can centralize power to himself, which I still don't believe makes him a classical dictator in the classical sense, because he didn't suspend people's rights.
But he was a thug and a gangster, which is probably the best way that you can describe him.
Oh, we're going to let people chew on this one, because that was a lot.And yeah, it was a lot.Yeah.So plug what you got to plug.I mean, you guys are doing insanity over there.
Yeah, we are.So Timeline Earth.Check us out.Any podcatcher you can find.Follow me at T.L.E.Birdarchist.You can follow all my co-hosts at various different T.L.E.T.L.E.underscore car T.L.E.Aaron
And, well, Jesus, I don't even know where Aaron is at these days.He could have ten different accounts.And T.L.E.Paz.Paz just released his first episode of his subshow, Scarlet Thread Society.Great episode.Go check that out.That's it.
All right, man, appreciate it.Until the next time when we talk about, oh boy, that guy with the really high voice.
He really did.I should have, I'm gonna play, remind me to play that guy's voice next time.He ridiculously high voice.Maybe that's why he was so angry all the time.Anyway, squaw.
All right, man, just let's do it.
Okay, let's get into it.So I didn't get his voice up.We all go look up mouse voice so that you can get an idea of the stature of the guy who we're talking about.So we did.Here's the thing I noticed before we get into it.
The themes have been unintentionally that we look at one Marxist thinker, but I spent half the time talking about Karl Marx, and I'm going to continue to do that today.So let's get into the Marxism of Mao.
Mao more than anybody else that we're probably going to talk about, have talked about, provokes the most controversy from other Marxists.Let's see if we can figure out why.
One prominent theme within the field of Mao studies, which is a whole thing, is the lack of conformity between Mao's thought and orthodox Marxism.
So people claim Mao is heterodox and that he demonstrate this, it's argued, through a failure to conform to a number of fundamental principles that are self-evident to the core of Marxism.What are they?Economic determinism is a big one.So...
Mao, unlike Stalin and Lenin, is not an economic determinist.He doesn't believe that the economic base is what creates historical change.Rather, it is the superstructure.And because of this, he has been branded as a voluntourist or an idealist.
The second is that orthodox Marxism supposedly views the peasantry as a conservative class with little to no revolutionary potential, and it's the industrial proletariat that leads the modernizing socialist revolution, but also is going to constitute its main force.
So he doesn't share this opinion.We'll get into it.Another deviation that they claim is
Marxism has a particular understanding of philosophy, and Mao's understanding of philosophy is quite unorthodox, as he incorporates many traditional Chinese themes and concepts into his thinking.
And finally, his handling of philosophical laws raises serious problems about the conformity of his whole thinking to basic Marxism.Underpinning judgments like this, of course, are
the fact that Mao's Marxism is incompatible with other interpretations of Marxism, and the search for difference, while it's not invalid in itself, is questionable in the absence of any countervailing willingness to seek out similarities between concepts and concerns of the Marxist tradition and those evident in Mao's thought.
But Both projects demand a benchmark for evaluation, so we need to figure out what orthodox Marxism actually is.So the question becomes, is there such a thing?
The Renaissance of Marxist theory in Europe in the 1960s and 70s was occasioned by a rejection by many neo-Marxists of the orthodox form of Marxism, which was enforced by Joe Stalin.
I think it takes until 1956 for Jean-Paul Sartre to condemn the Soviet Union, so it takes a long time for a lot of the supposed Marxists in Europe to get this through.The form of Marxism that becomes dominant during the Stalinist era
was perceived as a caricature of Marx's thought after, of course, all of his crimes are revealed.And the theoretical integrity of Marxism could only be restored by a return to Marx.
And so for some theorists, epistemological arguments, which were grounded in rationalism or empiricism, reinforced the suggestion that Marx's real intention could be gleaned from a reading of Marx unhindered by dogmas.
So, in this theoretical political climate, it becomes difficult to conceive of an orthodox Marxism that could insist with any degree of acceptance on the validity of a unified and all-embracing worldview which could deny any possible legitimacy to rival interpretations.
But the sheer multiplicity of Marxism, some of which have dogmas that reject one another, don't necessarily preclude the possibility of a version of Marxism achieving widespread acceptance, either by claims of fidelity to Marx's intentions, or by enforcement and persuasion, politically and ideologically, which is what happens during Stalin's era when Leninist parties were disciplined and regulated.
Within this context, then, A form of Marxism endorsed by Stalin was disseminated and propagated as orthodox, and very widely accepted as the only valid interpretation of Marxism.
Virtually all communist parties consequently accept this against all other forms of Marxism and claim that it is orthodox and could be tested as such.
Rightly or wrongly, there was an orthodox Marxism, and to deny the possibility of an orthodox Marxism is thus to ignore not only the very unequal power relationships that existed in the international communist movement, but also the psychological need on the part of individual communists to believe in the truth of Marxism as defined as a science.
So we can dispel the notion of no true communism right here and right now.We need to get that out of the gate.There certainly was a true form of Marxism, an orthodox form of Marxism.Maybe true is the wrong word.Orthodox is what we should say.
So whenever someone goes, that wasn't real blank, it sure was.
Too often, theorists on the left will rush to repudiate Stalinist Marxism, insisting that there are a multiplicity of readings of Marx, which is correct, and there cannot be a notional orthodox Marxism, which is incorrect.
So to abandon the concept of orthodoxy makes it difficult, if not impossible, to comprehend and evaluate how and why a particular form of Marxism could take form in many
countries, including China, Soviet Union, South America, various countries there, and how and why individuals and party leaders and theorists, rank-and-file members, could accept without any question a Marxism that had originated from beyond their national boundaries.
Even less convincing is the short-form argument, which goes basically, quote, there's no such thing as orthodox Marxism.
While some Marxist theorists in the West may not have accepted in the late 1970s the possibility of an orthodox Marxism, very many Marxists, including those in China, indeed premised their beliefs and actions on appeals to an orthodox Marxism.
They continue to do so, and it's the orthodoxy alone that guarantees that the policies and strategies are correct and ideologically coherent.
What's lacking in a flat rejection of orthodox Marxism, of course, is the recognition of political and psychological significances to the claims of orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy requires acceptance, and to achieve that, it has to be capable of enforcing adherence of its basic tenets through a combination of political force, social pressure, ideological persuasion, and demonstration.
The concept of an orthodoxy is thus extremely useful in understanding why particular bodies of ideas achieve dominance, and to suggest this is not the case is to suggest more or less that the language of orthodoxy is incorrect, and it is only necessary to recognize the claims to orthodoxy that may serve to enhance the legitimacy of the eyes of the party and its members.
So final reason then for retaining the notion of orthodoxy is that an attempt to trace and evaluate the genealogy of concepts within the Marxist tradition is facilitated by a recognition that certain concepts within it have, for the reasons that I just referred to, achieved dominance.
Whether such concepts represent true interpretations is not the point.
Acknowledgement of dominance of a particular theoretical current of Marxism allows for a point of reference, one that permits comparisons and evaluations to certain concepts prominent within otherwise unmanageably large masters of concepts found in a huge corpus of texts in the Marxist tradition.
So it would seem logical to suggest the identification of heterodoxy requires a concept and the nature of orthodoxy.
The influential Mao scholar Stuart Schramm suggests, however, in an essay on Mao's Marxism, that we could probably do without the idea of orthodoxy.He says, This amounts to saying that he was thinking wrongly and that his policy was misguided.
As a general proposition, this has never been my view, but since the term orthodoxy appears to have created on occasion the impression that it was, the term had best be abandoned.
But the irony of this statement, and the disingenuousness of it, is that as he proceeds, in the very same essay to make major judgments about the relationship between Mao's thought and, as he says, quote, the basic logic of Marxism and of Leninism.
So his concept of abandoning the term orthodoxy is entirely rhetorical.It has little impact on his subsequent analysis and is full of judgments about the compatibility of Mao's thought to Marxism-Leninism.
So the concept of orthodoxy cannot be dispensed with such a cavalier manner and therefore has a significant role in analyzing Mao's thought. So the question we have to ask, of course, is, is Mao a Marxist at all?
In a speech in Moscow in 1957, Mao suggested that there are, quote, some Marxists of all degrees.Those who are 100%, 90%, 80%, 70%, 60% or 50% Marxist.Some are who only, some who are only 10 or 20% Marxist.
Some two years later, Mao throws doubt on the possibility that he could be regarded as 100% Marxist, in quotes, by conceding that he had, quote, not mastered all of the domains of Marxist learning.
Of course, this has led to charges of heresy, quite literally, which is a quote from the political scientist Benjamin Schwartz.
It's also been stated that the emergence of Maoism was a reflection of the general tendency of Marxism to disintegrate or decompose. as it was applied to social contexts very different from those Marx was considering himself, i.e.Western Europe.
Underpinning the whole debate, though, is a significant difference of assumptions regarding the nature of Marxism.
So to Maoists seeking the claim of orthodoxy, orthodox Marxism does not attribute to the industrial, proletariat, and exclusive role in the process of revolution, and that even in the context of the 19th century in Europe regards the peasantry as having a significant contribution to make.
The counter to this highlights an interpretation of Marxism that presumes emphasis on the historical role of the proletariat and the social and economic condition of capitalist industrialization as precursors to modernizing revolutions.
Necessarily, then, the counterargument suggests that Marxism logically precludes a modernizing socialist revolution in a rural and largely feudal context.
And it's that impasse that largely creates a stalemate in most discussions on whether or not Mao was a Marxist in the orthodox sense. but we can explore that as we continue this.Two questions now need to be answered.
Number one, was Mao a peasant revolutionary as has been suggested?And then number two, was his reliance on the peasantry a departure from the essential logic of Marxism?So for the first question, was he a peasant revolutionary?
The answer is clearly yes.Was Mao a peasant revolutionary, one with romantic attachments to the peasants and their virtues? That's a different question.
Was he rather a pragmatic Marxist who discerned the utility of the peasants to the Chinese Revolution, but recognized that they required leadership from outside ranks from a modernizing revolution?That's a different question also.
Mao relies heavily on Chinese peasants in the formation of his strategy, his revolutionary strategy, and the prosecution of the Chinese Revolution in general. This is not a contentious thing to say.
What is contentious is to suggest that Mao was predominantly, if not exclusively, a peasant revolutionary.
And this suggests that his belief in Marxism does not extend to respect for the leadership qualities and revolutionary potential of the industrial proletariat.
Without a doubt, Mao heavily emphasizes the role of the peasantry and had a great admiration for the, quote, innate wisdom of the peasantry and, because of this, he held the revolutionary capacities of the urban proletariat in very low esteem.
Or did he?Mao himself said that, quote, the sources of revolutionary creativity and social progress reside in the countryside, and the peasantry was the true revolutionary class.
In this conception of Maoism, there is a deeply entrenched sense of anti-modernism and utopian socialism underpinning the entire project.
And the same description of Mao has him turning his back on the industrial working class and willing to forsake the struggles within the cities.
It paints him as having a contemptuous relationship with the industrial working class and perceives him to have only thought about revolutionary potential from the peasantry, and that that would be the entire hope
and success of the Chinese Revolution.This was heresy in action, of course, often given as a label to Maoism by other Marxists.
Mao was relatively comfortable disregarding the theoretical structure of Marxism through his reliance on the peasantry in the formation of his revolutionary strategy.
Mao diverges sharply from orthodoxy and from the essential logic of Marxism, but not the sheer importance that he accords to the countryside.
more so in his attributing to the peasants both the capacity to organize themselves and a clear consciousness of their historical role.Is that the case?
This whole view, as I've just built up, creates a Mao who came to believe that the fate of the Chinese Revolution depended ultimately on what happens in the countryside.
And this conviction was accompanied by an indifference to the workers and the cities far beyond anything that was previously found in Marxism.
Even Nikita Khrushchev in recalling Mao's deviation states, quote, Mao Zedong always relied on the peasants and not on the working class.That's why he didn't take Shanghai in 1949.He didn't want to take responsibility for the welfare of the workers.
Stalin properly criticized Mao for this deviation from true Marxism, but the fact remains that Mao, relying on the peasants and ignoring the working class, achieved victory.
Not that the victory was some sort of miracle, but it was certainly a new twist to Marxist philosophy since it was achieved without the proletariat.
In short, Mao Zedong is a petty bourgeois whose interests are alien and have been alien all along to the working class. Of course, everything that I just said is not the only view of Mao.
The previous view expresses a kind of romanticism for the rural peasant revolutionary, but Mao never asserted, ever, that the peasants altogether were somehow good and simple, and that industrial urbanized civilization was somehow corruptive intrinsically, and that therefore,
return to the rustic was a good.Mao departs from Chen Duxiu who is another Chinese Marxist who suggests that the peasants were themselves petty bourgeois.This goes all the way back to the French Revolution where the peasantry would often side on the
royalists side and so on and so forth.
This refers to a conception, a Marxist conception of the social class which aggregates semi-autonomous peasantries and small-scale merchants identifying with and accepting the culture and the socio-economic conditions given to them by the haute bourgeoisie, the high bourgeoisie class which includes landlords, factory owners, etc.
Mao recognized the enormous potential for mass peasant action, as well as significant variations among the peasantry in terms of their class conditions of existence and their willingness to support the revolution.
Mao recognized that a petite bourgeois ideology did characterize the thinking of some peasants, the peasantry was not
unreservedly supportive of the revolution, Mao's generally positive view of the peasantry was consequently qualified by a pragmatic estimation of distinctions, socioeconomic, political, and ideological, within the peasantry, and the limitations of the revolutionary action that these distinctions imposed on some of the segments of the peasantry.
Even historically, this romanticism about the peasantry doesn't actually reflect Mao's viewpoints, dispel everything I read before.
Other scholars have similarly rejected the view that Mao's reliance on the peasantry in his revolutionary strategy grew out of a romantic attachment to the peasantry rather than from the force of historical circumstances, namely the brutal suppression of the CCP during the Kuomintang era and the labor movement in urban areas in 1927.
Mao and the CCP never ceased to stress working class leadership over the peasantry after 1927, and as soon as conditions permitted, quote, the party again reasserted the primacy of urban work over that of the countryside.
In reality, Mao does derive his identification of the peasantry from Marx, and attempts to place them within the traditional Marxist-Leninist class antithesis.
In identifying the positive role which a class, in this case the peasantry, can play in the workers' revolution, Mao is essentially operating within a Marxist-Leninist paradigm.
And while Mao did not attribute to the peasants the capacity to organize themselves, that capacity Mao believed was limited, the peasants required, obviously then, a form of leadership of the working class and the Communist Party.
whose ideology designated the working class as the universal class, whose historic mission was to lead other oppressed classes in the revolutionary struggle, to establish a society in which all class distinctions would ultimately be eliminated.
Thus, while the Chinese Revolution was destined to be fought on China's countryside where the overwhelming bulk of the population was inevitably peasantry, Mao remained convinced that the working class was the leading class of the Chinese Revolution.
and he strove, despite the historical circumstances which separated him and his movement from the cities in the working class areas, to strengthen, wherever possible, the working class component of the revolutionary movement, and in particular, its leadership positions and roles.
The second part of the question then is whether or not Mao turned his back on the working class.I partially answered this already, but I'll give you more of an explanation here.So we answered our first question, was he a peasant revolutionary?
Yes, in a sense.Here's the second question, did he depart from the essential logic of Marxism by turning his back on the working class?Let's see. The question now turns to a more concrete one.
If Mao ultimately believed that there had to be leadership of the working class in the revolution, then why did Mao turn his back on the working class?The simple answer is that he did not.
There is thus ample evidence in the documents that Mao writes between 27 and 30 to demonstrate that Mao had not turned his back on the working class and neither was his thinking motivated by a powerful anti-urban bias.If anything, the reverse holds.
Between 1927 and 1930, Mao developed a distinctive revolutionary strategy as he became familiar with the challenges and opportunities presented by an armed struggle in an agrarian context in which the overwhelming mass of the population was peasants.
In particular, a form of guerrilla warfare perfected by Mao relied heavily on the support provided to his armed forces by local peasants.
It was they who provided sustenance and intelligence, and it was they who enlisted to fight for the confiscation and redistribution and the cancellation of debts to landlords, as well as lowering their crippling burdens in the form of taxes.
Mao's willingness to exploit the anger and resentment of the peasants in this foray into armed conflict and the establishment of rural Soviets was not an opportunistic exercise necessarily, one that cast round for any support at a time when friends were needed.
Rather, Mao genuinely did perceive the peasants and their problems as totally core to the Chinese revolution at that stage.
He identified with their anger at their crushing exploitation and was genuinely committed at this stage to meeting their demands.
It was in his longer-term vision of the revolution that he departed from the desires of the peasants, for he was opposed to the view that a return to the imagined virtues of a bygone era of private ownership of small peasant landholdings overseen by a traditional political class of honest officials and a good emperor was not in China's long-term interest.
Mao's faith in the peasants and his focus on the revolution in the countryside thus neither blinded him to the peasants' failings, nor deflected him from commitment to a modernizing revolution which would move beyond the peasants when it needed to.
Mao did not have a romantic picture of the peasants.
In late 1920, he commented on the clear lack of organization and ideological problems that were afflicting the Chinese Communist Party and its military wing as deriving directly from the large number of peasants that it recruited.
He repeatedly commented on the extremely negative aspects and serious organizational errors that the parties had.
In commenting on the recent past and the non-committal nature of various local communist parties, Mao specifically states, quote, in the past, the party in every county had strongly marked characteristics of peasant parties and therefore showed little tendencies to evolve towards non-proletarian leaderships.
These parties paid little attention to the work in urban areas and the workers' movements.Workers, however, are the leaders of all the toiling masses.
In the past, we no longer paid attention to worker movements, let alone leadership of the workers, and as a result, the tendency towards peasant parties have emerged.And this is a serious crisis for the party.This was a crisis for Mao.
The Communist Party could not tolerate peasant control, which worked towards non-proletarian ends, and so he recommends a series of strategies to overcome the crisis.Tell me if this doesn't sound worker-friendly.
Do your utmost to promote as many working comrades as possible to leading organs.Executive committees and standing committees at every level should have more than half worker and peasant comrades participating.
In the course of transforming the party, we must adopt a completely proletarian worldview."These are all quotes.
Number three, at the same time, special attention should be paid to branch work in urban areas and excellent worker comrades should be promoted to become branch party secretaries and committee members in rural areas, so as to increase the leadership capacity of the workers and be strictly on guard against the tendency towards a peasant party.
Number four, Party headquarters and Soviets at every level should make a great effort to promote workers, so that they will be able to assume leadership positions and lead the struggle.
At present, basic training work should strive to eliminate the opportunistic, feudalistic, and petite-bourgeois thought of the ordinary comrades, and establish among them a revolutionary outlook on the life of the proletariat.
Did that sound anti-proletariat to you?Doesn't to me.Only in pursuing these strategies, he says, can we, quote, prevent the party from taking a non-proletarian road.Only thus can we enhance the leadership capacity of the proletariat.
So, in plain language, while Mao did genuinely believe in the ability of the peasantry to be a historical driver of
revolution, he flatly used the utility of the peasant class with the full knowledge that he was ultimately disregarding its particular inclinations.
This certainly retains Mao's Marxism, but at a particular cost that now in hindsight tarnishes it as a tactic and strategy to ever be used again.
It's clear that while Mao emphasized the importance of the peasant struggle, he emphasized even more the importance of the working class leadership of that struggle and, as he pointed out, the revolution would fail only if the peasants are deprived from the leadership of the workers.
During the crucial years of Mao's formulation of a strategy for revolution based on the countryside, he remained convinced that the importance of the working class leadership of the peasants and of the significance of the struggle in the cities was the key to the victory of the revolution.
And in the years that followed, often referred to as the period of the Jiangxi Soviet, about between the 1930s and 1940s when there's still a war with the Kuomintang,
He was provided the opportunity to create the institutions of an embryonic socialist state that would translate into practice the belief that there was a necessity of working class leadership.
We're going to do class power and state formation, which is where he'll probably run up against Lenin.Any questions yet?
I can see people listening to this and immediately thinking feudalism.And that's one of the first things that commies and Marxists throw at anyone who talks about a libertarian society, is, oh, you just want to return to feudalism.
And I'm thinking, hmm, I don't know, this sounds awfully familiar to me.
If by feudalism you mean he specifically exploits the power of the peasantry for his own ends, we'll argue about that maybe later.I'm not allowed to insert my personal opinions into these.Keep going, we'll talk more.
So, working class power and state formation.Mao's revolutionary struggle is usually depicted in a very limited fashion, of course, which emphasizes a very narrowly focused view of the peasantry, their struggle, and their role in the revolution.
And so, very little focuses on the process of state formation, i.e.an integration of communism into the state as Mao approaches the revolution.
Mao was committed to the idea that the capture of state power was only a preliminary stage on the road to revolution.The institutions themselves would become critical to the successful achievement of long-term goals of the revolution.
In order to understand what exactly the huge role the peasantry supposedly had was going to look like, we have to understand first the dimension of his thought on state formation.
So we've already observed that while Mao respected the peasants' capacity for revolution and designated this class as the main force of the revolution, he was not prepared to cede its leadership to the peasantry.
Rather, he would keep that role reserved for the working class.
So, during the years in which he was preoccupied with the government of the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao makes his convictions of the working class's need to be leaders in the new state absolutely clear.
He says, For the first time in Chinese history, the workers and the peasants are in control of their own state.The workers and the peasants have become the ruling class, and the working class leads the force.
Mao made it abundantly clear across a range of institutional and policy measures that the poor peasants, while the most of them remained reliable allies to the working class, would not be the preeminent class in control of institutions of the state, and again, that that role was reserved for the working class.
Of particular importance was the Poor Peasant League, and despite its title, the Poor Peasant League was not limited to the class whose name it bore.
As Mao pointed out in 1933, quote, the Poor Peasant League is not an organization made up just purely of one class, but a mass organization of poor peasants with a jurisdiction of the Jiangxi government.
Importantly, leadership of this organization, and by extension, the poor peasants themselves, was not in the hands of the poor peasant, but was reserved for the working class.
And where this had not occurred, Mao stressed, steps had to be taken to ensure that it did. One of the most important functions of the peasants came during the Jiangxi government in the form of the Land Investigation Movement.Go look that up.
I'm noticing something about the trend of Chinese Marxism, to take an aside here, is everything that is named is named in a very milquetoast and gentle way, even though thousands of people are killed in the process of doing it.
So one of these things is the Land Investigation Movement. which is an institution that was established in order to reorganize and reform government structures and mass organizations to facilitate the mobilization of the masses.
And it was thus extremely important and broadly based, and therefore had both socioeconomic and organizational objectives.
The Poor Peasant League was crucial for the success of the land investigation movement, and Mao moved to ensure that it pursued an appropriate line by strengthening the representation of the working class and labor unions.Only, quote,
a constant leading role for the proletariat in the poor peasant league, he says, could ensure that the league avoided being, quote, dominated by all sorts of backward peasant consciousness.Sounds a lot like Stalin in a lot of ways.
It is clear that Mao's insistence on the working class leadership of Soviet institutions in the Jiangshi Soviet in particular, was built on a belief of the superior organizational and ideological ability of the workers.
Importantly, it was based on a perception of the failings of the peasant class.He identified many of the organizational problems experienced by the Soviet governments as originating with the peasants.
Bureaucratism, he says, infested Soviet governments, as he complained, and he linked it specifically to, quote, scattered nature of the peasantry and their lack of proletarian organization and discipline.
Mao argued that only with the leadership of the Communist Party and the working class could the poor peasant league avoid being, quote, again, dominated by all sorts of backward peasant consciousness, such as the ideas of absolute egalitarianism and localism, which impedes their ability to mount an effective class analysis.
Mao was thus not content to lead a purely rural revolution,
and he strove wherever possible to alter the sociological components of the party and military in favor of the working class, and during the period of the Jiangxi Soviet to construct its embryonic state institutions in ways that express the power of the working class.
While he put a great deal of effort and while he put great stock into the peasants as the main force of the Chinese revolution, he was adamant that it would not be their consciousness which would dictate the long-term directions of the revolution, for this could only serve to reinforce economic, political, cultural impediments to the modernist transformation of Chinese society.
Let's look at his view of time and future.One of the issues that is most exercised by interpreters of Mao Zedong is the problem of the origins of his thought.Three identifiable responses can be discerned.
Number one, Mao's thought is perceived as a synthesis of Chinese thought and Marxism, the two major intellectual traditions to which he was exposed.
In the second, different, Mao is regarded as a Marxist, and that his thought is therefore to be understood in reference to concepts which derive from the Marxist tradition.
And in the third, the determinants of Mao's thought are sought in the Chinese historical and philosophical tradition and its political culture through which this tradition is then transmitted via the powerful agency of socialization.
Most Mao scholars have adopted the first explanation of Mao's thought, that is to say, a creative synthesis.
Mao's thought represents a creative novelty that clearly reveals it to be something more than Marxism transplanted on Chinese soil, or traditional Chinese thought revised by putting it in Marxist containers.On the other hand,
It's clearly had its roots in both of those ideological traditions, and in fact, its uniqueness results from a creative synthesis of both traditional Chinese thought and Marxist-Leninist ideology.
Contrasting this view is that which claims that while both Chinese and Marxist traditions were drawn upon in Mao's thought, the Chinese element was predominant in its influence.
Mao's deepest emotional tie was to the Chinese nation, and Mao, who was bent on transforming society and economy in as short a time as possible, in order to quickly make China a more powerful modern nation, emphasizes the importance, above all, of China's rank in the world.
So to give more context to understanding the influences of Mao's thought, we have to briefly reconstruct the concept of historical time and the future in both Chinese and Marxist traditions.So this involves us having to understand a few things.
Number one, where does history come from?Number two, where is history going?And number three, how does it get there?Both Marxist and Chinese traditional concepts of thought stress the overriding importance of the past to the present and future.
Let's look at it from the Chinese tradition. Historical consciousness necessitates a sensitivity to time, for temporality is the dimension which permits emergence, development, and decay of consciousness.
Historical consciousness necessitates a sensitivity to time, as I said.Paradoxically, however, the concept of time itself is contingent upon the definition which human beings give to it.Not to get too inside baseball, but for time,
It's not a physical entity immediately perceptible to the senses.
The criteria for comprehending the manner and direction in which time flows across vast temporal reaches and for dividing that flow into historical discrete periods has thus been varied widely.
The Chinese tradition, and its concept of time, takes the basis of the cycle of natural change through the seasons and the regular motions of celestial bodies.
When applied to human history, the cyclical conception of time appears reinforced by the Chinese dynastic cycle, passing as it did through periods of growth, maturity, and decay, like any other life cycle, as one ruling dynasty replaces another in apparently unending sequences.
Some Chinese historical writing suggests a minimum of two predominant ways of looking at the circular concept of time.
Sun Shi, I'm going to butcher that name, perceived history as a series of circles that pass repeatedly through the same or similar points.And Sima Qian,
different person, different theory, much later in time, perceives patterns of history as being constantly repeated, but not necessarily returning to the temporal point of origin.
One consequence of such cyclical concepts of history was the market tendency of the Chinese historiographer towards temporal transcendency, meaning the inclination to regard historical lessons not as limited temporally, that is, to time, or circumscribed by particular conditions of the era in which they occurred.
The praise and blame characteristic of Chinese historical writing could seek out and employ salutary examples of proper and improper conduct with no regard for specific and differentiating characteristics of the period therefore concerned.
Another very significant consequence to such cyclical conceptions of time was that a radically diminished perception of cosmic progress occurs.
Until the introduction of Buddhism into China, traditional Chinese conceptions of time did not by and large incorporate the assumption that the cosmos and humankind's position were necessarily heading in any given direction, and very specifically, that they would be improving.
The relative lack of any sense of progress was also a function of the Chinese belief in the existence of a legendary Golden Age in the distant past to which all dynasties that succeeded were necessarily inferior.
Indeed, there is a pronounced tendency in Chinese historical writing to regard history as a decline from moral excellence. from an earlier time.
And these tendencies are in turn related to the comparative absence of utopian thought in Chinese historical writing.
If there was no reason to limit the world's extension into the future, the formulation of an ideal society, therefore, as an end product, is much less likely to emerge than it would in Judaic, Christian, Islamic traditions, which have strongly eschatological themes.
However, while it may be true that utopian thought appears to have constituted a very little, very minor theme within Chinese historical writing, it is more than a passing interest in the context of Mao's thought.
And during the Yan'an period, which is the basically the period at the end of the war against the Kuomintang, such utopian ideals, themes, exert themselves with considerable influence on Mao's thought of historical time and of the future.
During this period, Mao's utopianism, which is Marxist utopianism for the most part, consisted buttressed by an invocation of traditional Chinese utopian concepts, which did exist, although they were again much less common.
Three of these themes that you can find repeatedly in his writing originate from the Li Ji, which is the Book of Rites, which is A book that basically gives a more utopian view of the Chinese traditional histories.
There are three themes that you can find in it that are repeated by Mao.Universal peace, great harmony, and the three ages.When the great doctrine, this is what the Li Ji writes, tell me this doesn't sound smacks of communism in one sense or another.
When the great doctrine prevails, all under heaven will work for the common good.The virtuous will be held elected to office, and the able will be given responsibility.Faithfulness will be in constant practice, and harmony will rule.
Consequently, mankind will not only love their own parents and give care to their own children, but all the aged will be provided for, and all the young will be employed.
Infants will be fathered, widows and widowers, the fatherless and the unmarried, the disabled and the sick will all be cared for.The men will have their rights and the women their home.
No goods will go to waste, nor need to be stocked for private possession. No energy should be retained in one's body, nor used for personal gain.Self-interest ceases, and thieving and disorders are not known.
Therefore, the gates of the houses are never closed.This state is called the Great Commonwealth.That's from the Book of Rites.
The passage that I just read suggests a realization of society based on great harmony, which is contingent not necessarily with the general passage of time, but specifically on the manifestation and development to a maximum degree of Ren.
If you remember going way back to our Uyghur episode, this is still a very powerful concept in Chinese society.I can't remember specifically what it's called, but the concept of Beijing Ren,
Chinese ren, fellowship, must be cultivated within each individual.It's an absolutely essential concept to how Chinese modernization occurs.Such a society was therefore imminently realizable given the condition of a sufficient amount of ren.
Other influential Chinese interpretations of such a passage have generally connected the realization of such a society with a conception of history in which time flows across three periods with very different characteristics and in which a society where great harmony, otherwise known as Datong, constitutes the final period.
In the Li Ji itself, history is portrayed as constituting three ages.The first is the world of disorder, the second is the world of small tranquility, and the third is the world of great unity.
The concept of the three ages later emerges in the writing of Wang Fuji, who is a Hunanese philosopher and a historian whom Mao Zedong cites pretty regularly in his early works.
The concept of universal peace, great harmony, and the three ages all appear in Mao's writing and are important to his perspective on historical time.
The appearance of a tripartite historical periodization in Mao's thought, I could go into that, but it would take way longer than we need to, links the concept of great harmony and suggests that therefore he did draw during the Yan'an period on utopian themes within traditional Chinese writing to express the eschatological sentiments that fueled him
by contemporary war-induced contexts of violence and chaos.In the Western intellectual tradition, the notion of historical time is frequently and from early times incorporated utopian or eschatological views of the future.
Indeed, the prophets of the Old Testament can be attributed with introducing a dimension of the future into human thought.
This being related, of course, to an eschatological belief in which the perceived future brings about more radical participation by God in human affairs.
In general, however, Western conceptions of historical time have tended to cluster around two basic viewpoints.Number one, that time moves in cycles, going all the way back to the Indo-European religions.
And two, a linear flow providing for unrepeatable historical occurrences.
The pre-Christian Greeks were by and large exponents of the former view, perceiving history as moving in cyclical patterns in which the society passes continually through a process of degradation and then regeneration.
It was not necessarily exclusive to pre-Christians and does appear at later times in Christian and secular thinking.The Christian mystic Joachim de Fjord, for example, talks about three ages
in the sense of those being those of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.Joachim's philosophy, however, was predicated on the flow of time being rectilinear, great word, rather than cyclical.
The linear conception of history and historic time, characteristic of much of Western religious thought today, finds its protagonist in the form of Saint Augustine.
who explicitly repudiates cyclical conceptions of time and history because for Augustine the cyclical view precludes any real novelty of history or historical occurrence, and yet certain events in human history and within historical occurrence, particularly the birth of Christ, were by their very nature unique and unrepeatable.
And so therefore he argues against a rectilinear view of history and develops a straight line from the creation of man, to the fall of grace, to the final judgment that would occur upon the ultimate consummation of God's purpose on earth.
Marx's conception of historical time and future bears something similar to the Augustinian teleology that it is rooted in.However, of course, Marx's position cannot be readily characterized as either linear or cyclical.
Because for Marx, historical time derives its direction, periodization, and goals from the developments internal to society.The temporal dimension of historical development was necessarily socially contingent.
Society progresses through certain historical epochs characterized by different and successive technological superior modes of production and distinct patterns of social relations.
Temporal progress thus involves a periodization founded on both the degree of complexity of the instruments of labor and the nature of social relations and practices.
However, while it is widely accepted that Marx's philosophy of history incorporates the belief that there is necessarily a progression of society through different modes of production, it is not universally accepted that he insisted on a fixed order of those stages.
Marx's analysis, of course, of Russian society is a case in point, for he did not insist that Russia would necessarily follow the same pattern of historical development as the already industrialized capitalist societies of Western Europe.
To the contrary, his analysis reveals a dualism within the form of land ownership of the Russian village communities, which were held in common but formed separately, that suggested a possibility that the collective element might actually prevail over private forms of ownership entirely, and thus Russia might have been able to avoid a capitalist future.
Marx specifically says, very prescient, especially for the time, quote, everything depends on the historical environment in which it occurs.This is in 1881, long before his writings on Russia, as far as I remember.Could be incorrect, but I think so.
Similarly, Marx insists on a universal application of his scheme for Western Europe and the historical development.In fact, a journal entry addresses one of his critics where he dispels that notion.It's not true.
He says, the chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace a path by which in Western Europe the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of feudal order of economy. But that is too little for my critic.
He feels he must absolutely metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe to a historico-philosophical theory of the general path of every people fated to trend, whatever the historical circumstances in which it may find, in order that it may greatly arrive at a form of economy which it ensures, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labor, the most complete development of man.
But I beg his pardon. He is both honoring and shaming me too much.Events strikingly analogous, but taking place in different historical situations, have led totally to different results.
By studying each of these forms of evolution separately, and then comparing them, one might easily find the clue of this phenomenon.
But one will never arrive there by using one's master key, such as a general historical philosophical theory, the supreme virtue which consists of being super-historical.
The Bolsheviks under Lenin, for example, employed a perception of historical development which incorporates a largely unilinear progression of all societies through five stages.You can thank Lenin for that, not Marx.
Lenin had come to the conclusion very early that his revolutionary career in Russia was not, as some of the Mensheviks claimed, an Asiatic mode of production.
such as an admission that would have threatened the possibility that Russia might give rise to a socialist revolution in the near future, meaning it would have to pass from feudal into socialist, that would have given too much credence to the Mensheviks' theories.
We discussed the five stages in Lenin's view specifically on the first episode of this particular part of the series, the Lenin episode, so check that out if you don't remember it.
This orthodox Marxist periodization of historical developments was by and large the interpretation that was adapted by Mao Zedong. He writes this, the conception of the future, well he doesn't write this, this is written about him.
The conception of the future which Mao drew from the Marxist tradition also tended towards orthodoxy.
In this orthodox teleological conception, humankind's temporal progression through historical goals is accomplished through dialectical social processes in which prevailing patterns of production and social relations are challenged by the emergence of new forces of production,
and that their accompanying class structures arrive with them.This confrontation which is often revolutionary in character, leads to the eventual supercession of the mode of production to a more advanced form.
This view of society progressing through various modes of production in an ascending dialectical and goal-directed manner perceives in the future a final historical stage built on a highly developed force of production generated by industrialization in which the conflict generates multiple inherent impulses to historical progress
and that conflict would have to be extinguished.This negation of the dialectic would result from a disappearance of class antagonism.
For this final stage in historical development, the highest stage of communism, would witness the emergence of a society free of class divisions and in which need, rather than work or ownership, would be the criterion governing the distribution of society's now abundant resources.
On the basis of this principle, conflict would largely disappear.Marx himself, however, was reticent about making sweeping claims about the future.However, Lenin saw predictive aspects of Marxism and therefore found no such reticence.
Lenin argues boldly that the inevitable achievement of the highest phase of communism would witness the withering away of the state.
and the state was a political instrument of class oppression, only with the disappearance of classes could freedom truly be realized.
The inevitable historical future predicted by the orthodox Marxist tradition of material abundance, equality, freedom from oppression and exploitation, and peace was a powerful influence on Mao's political thought and behavior, as it was on many of Mao's generation.
The historical goals of Marxism, founded on a supposedly scientific reading of history, provided direction and coherence to political attempts to overthrow and eventually abolish class societies.
From this perspective, the past, present, and future are inextricably linked, the future serving to structure the various forms of political alternatives of the present.
It is significant that both the intellectual traditions to influence Mao's thought during the Yan'an period incorporated a vision of the future of society, of peace and harmony, although the Marxist and Chinese traditions clearly commenced from very different historical perspectives.
It is quite clear that contrary to the detractors who view Chinese tradition as having predominant influence on Marxist thought, Mao was instead working with a synthesized version of Marxism that incorporated various traditional Chinese concepts into it.
Let's talk about Mao's thoughts on culture.According to Mao, it is a combination of, quote, economics and politics as society's basis that represents a causal matrix from which culture emerges.
Quote, the old politics and economics of the Chinese nation form the basis of its old culture, just as the new politics and economics will form the basis of its new culture. Mao declared culture to be a reflection of society's politics and economics.
Yet if culture is a reflection, how could it exert influence on the basis that it had produced?The concept of reflection suggests an insubstantial image, one capable of acting independently.
However, there is no doubt that Mao believed culture did possess a capacity to influence the progress of social change. He writes on the influence of culture and class,
Party work in literature and art occupies a definite and assigned position in the party, revolutionary work as a whole, and is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set out by the party in the given revolutionary period.
We do not favor overstressing the importance of literature and art, but neither do we favor underestimating their importance.Literature and art are subordinate to politics, but in their turn exert a great influence on politics.
Revolutionary literature and art are part of a whole revolutionary cause.There are cogs and wheels in it.
And though in comparison with other certain and more important parts, they may be less significant and less urgent and may occupy a secondary position.Nevertheless, they are indispensable cogs and wheels in the whole machine.
When we say that literature and art are subordinate to politics, we mean class politics.Several interesting points emerge from that passage, including bearing something on the concept of reflection.
Firstly, it's instructive that Mao repeatedly emphasizes that culture is subordinate to politics, and moreover, that politics is class politics.
Secondly, by insisting that all culture belongs to definite classes, Mao is asserting that the limits and variability of a culture are established by the nature of the class from which it had emerged.
This would be inconceivable, for example, than for a culture of the landlord to portray the peasant in a favorable light.
The role of culture can also be elaborated through analysis of Mao's conception of social change in a social formation within which there are a number of different modes of production.
Mao does not perceive the basis as an undifferentiated category, meaning it's not just economics. as we said before, he puts politics into this too, and therefore culture.
Not only was it differentiated horizontally, that is, in a division of those two realms, politics and economics, it could also be characterized by vertical cleavages that separate competing modes of production occurring in a complex, economically heterogeneous society.
Mao recognized that the fragmented nature of China's economy made it, quote, colonial, semi-colonial, and semi-feudal, and was untypical of any one mode of production, its basis being a differentiated mixture of several coexisting and competing politico-economic formations.
On his piece on New Democracy, he writes, a national culture which is a socialist content will necessarily be the reflection of a socialist politics and economy.
There are socialist elements in our politics and our economy, and hence these socialist elements are reflected in our national culture, but taking our society as a whole, we do not have a socialist politics or a socialist economy yet.
and so then we cannot be wholly socialist in our national culture.The emergence of a culture is thus governed by the developments within the basis, including the role of politics in organizing culture.
Changes within China's basis had been responsible for an appearance and growth in new culture.Quote from Mao, without the capitalist economy, without the political forces of these classes, the new ideology or new culture could not have emerged.
Although Mao believed culture was a reflection of its basis, he also referred to the possibility that a new cultural emergent could develop from a previously established culture, there being a seeming continuity in cultural development.
To this extent, therefore, the continuity of culture was a function of political action.
the manner in which the old culture could influence the new, and the way in which new could develop out of the old, was amenable to politics, political direction, and organization.Now on to his thought of politics.
For Mao, the centrality of politics in systematizing the culture of a class was due to the scattered and unsystematic way in which the ideology emerged from the class in an unmediated form.
Although a broadly similar socioeconomic environment might serve to establish class modality of thought and action, the range of unmediated class ideology could be extensive.
For example, how does Marx explain the variability in class ideology and can his explanation be considered a materialist one on the question of whether or not he is a Marxist?Exploration of Mao's usage of the concepts of stratum
can provide an answer to these questions.
Mao's preoccupation with discovering the particular characteristics of specific historical contexts led him to conclude that class may not be a sufficiently explanatory concept for the comprehension of a variety of modes of thought and attitude within society.
It can be observed that Mao has made several particular uses of the concept of stratum.Mao clearly believed
that the concept of class was not sufficient or precise enough for the definition and elaboration of particularities within societies such as that of China's, with stratified economic relationships.
The same could hold true for the concept of strata itself, which might require further subdivisions into occupational categories or categories of scale, for example, small traders who are large enough to exploit labor of others.
who would normally be classed as petite bourgeois.
The strata that constitutes a class derived from their distinguishing characteristics of economic factors, for example, craftsmen and small tradespersons while belonging to the petite bourgeois class were distinguished from each other by the conditions of work and economic activity that characterized their separate economic niches.
The various strata within the class possessed sufficiently unique characteristics, or rather, common characteristics to constitute identifiable classes, and such shared characteristics, according to Mao, were things like family origin, conditions of life, and political outlook.
In suggesting that society's politics were the basis of that society, Mao allows for a degree of theoretical and practical flexibility that mechanical Marxism would have had to preclude.
By the same token, it is clear that Mao was operating on the theoretical terrain whose boundary and concepts were well established.
His rearrangement and refinement of inherited Marxist concepts cannot be interpreted as an abandonment of the essential reference of Marxism.They rather signify, or rather, demonstrate a new attempt to enhance the relevance of that theory itself.
Even the position adopted in On New Democracy, without a doubt containing the most flexible materialist view, specifies the limits to the capacity of politics to social change.
Politics had pre-forced to operate within a social context constructed by major structures and institutions, and forces engendered by economic realms.
But Mao recognized that politics could not eliminate classes, and therefore he did believe that it could play a very significant role in concentrating the ability of classes, or classes to engage in class struggles.
And it was this that Mao was most interested in, for his various incursions into theory had a very practical objective, very specifically, winning the revolution.
In short, it is apparent that Mao's thought underpinned by a materialist view of social change, although in each there was a causal dominance of economics as explained and qualified in different ways.
At the very least, crude stereotypes of Mao as a renegade Marxist who invariably stressed the superstructure in his reading of social change are rendered misleading to a close reading of Mao's texts.
And in light of theoretical developments within European neo-Marxist tradition,
in which the base and superstructure metaphor had been subjected to critical scrutiny and substantial reformulation, it is possible to perceive Mao's theoretical formulations as limited yet still significant attempts to renegotiate certain aspects of inflexible Marxism, mechanical Marxism, and that it would be misguided to claim that these attempts perceived him as heterodox.
He's still orthodox. The Chinese Road to Socialism For many Western interpreters of Chinese Marxism, the Yan'an period between 36 and 47 constitutes a high point in Mao Zedong's career as a Marxist intellectual.
It was during this period that Mao penned some of his most important theoretical works.
It was during this period, too, that he grappled with some of the problems of producing a Sinified Marxism, that is a Chinese Marxism, that in theory, at least, retained the universal dimension of Marxism while integrating it into the particular characteristics and needs of the Chinese Revolution, a process one scholar described as Mao's greatest theoretical and practical achievement.
Let's quickly talk about Sinified Marxism. It is clear that Mao regarded a Sinified Marxism as a union between Marx's universal laws and the particular laws that describe the characterizing regularities of Chinese contexts.
It must be stressed that Mao did not regard it as incorporating the formulae for automatic or necessarily correct policy responses to various political, economic, and military contingencies that might arise from the course of revolution, but the function of Sinified Marxism was to facilitate as accurate as possible an interpretation
of the Chinese context.Having a clear and hopefully accurate picture of the historical situation would act as a guide to action by ruling out inappropriate policy responses and presenting certain strategies and tactics as preferable or even obvious.
Here again, the influence of the inductive method is revealed in Mao's method of formulating policies.Under no circumstances could one arbitrarily formulate strategies or tactics a priori, but only via careful analysis of characteristics
in a historically specific situation.It is in this context that Mao's theory of practice finds relevance.A Sinified Marxism could only serve as a guide to action by presenting an accurate assessment of a historical situation.
It was up to the political leader or cadre which utilized direct and indirect experiences and take into full account cognizance of regularities and laws of the situation to draw the necessary inferences and formulate an appropriate policy response.
The only method of ascertaining whether a seemingly appropriate policy was correct was by implementing it and evaluating its results.
Therefore, Mao believed that Marxism was a complex theoretical situation that could only find complete definition within a historically specific setting.
Mao's sinification of Marxism, therefore, was not a question of subordinating Marxism to Chinese reality, history, or culture, nor is it merely a tactical move in the power struggle.
It was rather a function of his belief that universal laws of Marxism did not in themselves represent the complete theoretical system of Marxism.
For Marxism to become complete in the Chinese context, its universal laws had to be united, he uses the word integrated, with a particular law that could be found in Chinese identifying characteristics.
Mao believed that this union of the universal in particular allowed for a completion of the Marxist system and created a genuinely Chinese Marxism that nevertheless did not detract from universal status of Marxism as a theory of history.
Let's get back to his road to socialism now that we know that.As we approach a discussion of the 50s and 60s and specifically the year of the Great Leap Forward, the goal is not to bring a negative assessment to Mao's strategy.
This is commonplace and well-researched.Instead, as the nature goes for this series, I just want to formulate an understanding of the strategy behind the Great Leap Forward.
While now largely dismissed as a failure, the Chinese road to socialism was, from the 1950s to the 1980s, regarded by many in both the developed and developing worlds as a possible alternative to authoritarianism within the Soviet state socialism on the one hand, and the inequities of Western capitalism on the other.
The theory of permanent revolution, therefore, emerges at a time of the Great Leap Forward to rationalize its impatient economic and political objectives.
However, when talking about the road to Chinese socialism, one must be cautious in ascribing to Mao a carefully pre-considered and folly-coherent perspective on the socialist tradition, for his views in the 1950s and 60s frequently emerged in responses to unfolding events in the international arena and domestic context.
That is to say, Mao did not go into this with a solid plan, he was experimenting.
Nevertheless, while Mao's perspective was in part reactive and in part an application of pre-existing themes in his thought, one can catch sight of the mix of concepts and ideas that come together under the rubric of the Chinese Road to Socialism, a broad strategy for socialist transitions that departs in significant detail from its Soviet counterpart.
During the 1950s, Mao develops his thinking on the socialist transition.
What informs his view was the successful outcome of the campaign to co-operatize Chinese agriculture, which was met by a relatively positive response by the peasantry, or at least so the CCP claimed.
The speed with which the campaign's objectives were achieved represented, in Mao's thought, a fundamental change, one that suggested the possibility of accelerating the tempo of Chinese progress towards socialism and communism.
The success of agricultural cooperatization suggests to Mao that the CCP's program for change had now been demonstrated to be excessively cautious, and he referred scornfully to the rightist conservatism of those whose thinking was unable to, quote, keep pace with the development of the objective situation.
The weakening of Soviet authority within the international communist world occasioned Khrushchev's attack on Stalin, and therefore prompted Mao to formulate more clearly the theoretical premise for his belief that contradictions would remain an important characteristic of socialist society.
So you remember, Stalin's whole big idea is that as contradictions begin to eliminate themselves, it approaches a point where violence not only becomes inevitable, but more violent than violent.This is not the case for Mao.
Mao has declared, instead, quote, there is a difference between workers and peasants, and this difference is a contradiction, though unlike the difference in contradiction between labor and capital, which will not become intensified into antagonism or assume the form of class struggle, meaning
The difference between the workers and peasants will not assume an antagonism.The difference between contradiction of labor and capital always will.
Mao's divergence from Stalin's positions was made quite explicit when he declares, quote, the question is one kind of different contradictions and not the presence of or absence of contradictions.Contradiction is universal and absolute.
It is present in the progress of development of all things and permeates every process from beginning to end.
In solving the contradictory relationship between heavy industry on the one hand and light industry and agriculture on the other, it was necessary to increase investment in light industry and agriculture in order to develop heavy industry.
This in itself constituted a significant departure from Soviet strategy, which had consistently and one-sidedly stressed the role of heavy industry at the expense of light industry and agriculture.In similar veins, Mao challenges those
who wanted greater industrial development in China's hinterland to concentrate on making use and further development of industry in the coastal regions.
For those who wanted an expansion of China's military capacity, the correct method was to decrease the level of military expenditure and increase investment in economic construction.
Mao thus believed that a socialist society continued to be characterized by contradictions and that their existence was a positive factor, for it was contradictions, their ceaseless emergence, development and resolution that pushed society forward.
Without contradictions, change and development would not be possible, and without change and development, socialism and communism would be impossible goals.
If contradictions existed, then they had to be recognized, brought out into the open, and resolved.Ignoring or repressing contradiction could lead these contradictions into developing into antagonisms, which would damage the socialist cause.
In order to avoid contradictions developing to a more dangerous point of antagonism, Mao deemed it necessary to allow for a more open atmosphere in where differing opinions could emerge and contend.
This would have, in effect, brought about contradictions into the open, and so that they could be evaluated and resolved without damage being done to the socialist construction as a whole.
Mao's belief in contradictions would persist in the socialist society, and beyond that was important in his theory of permanent revolution.His theory of permanent revolution goes like this.
We must think about permanent revolution and not Trotsky's permanent revolution.In making revolution, one must strike while the iron is hot.One revolution must follow after another.The revolution must continually advance.
The Hunanese often say, quote, straw sandals have no pattern, they shape themselves in the making.Trotsky believed that the socialist revolution should be launched even before the democratic revolution is complete.We are not like that.
For example, after the liberation of 1949 came the land reform.As this was completed, there followed the mutual aid teams, then the low-level cooperatives, then the high-level cooperatives.
After seven years of cooperatization was complete and productive relationships were transformed, then came the rectification. After the rectification was finished, before things had cooled down, then came the technical revolution.
Our revolutions come one after another, starting from the seizure of power in the whole country in 1949.
There followed, in quick succession, the anti-feudal land reform, the agricultural cooperatization, the socialist reconstruction of private industries, commerce, and handicrafts.Our revolutions are like battles.
After every victory, we must at once put forward a new task. In this way, cadres and masses will forever be filled with revolutionary fervor instead of conceit.Let's now talk about the Great Leap Forward, because that is where this all leads to.
The theory of permanent revolution emerges at the beginning of 1958, just as China was about to embark on the Great Leap Forward.For Mao, the Great Leap Forward represented another of the revolutions which constituted the permanent revolution.
Through this campaign, Mao hoped to propel China from its state of underdevelopment to a state of modernization and industrial development in the space of a few years.
More concretely, Mao perceived the Great Leap Forward as achieving its goals through the deployment of alternative approaches to economic and industrial management.
The over-reliance of the Soviet model on very large industrial enterprises had to be discarded in favor of a more balanced medium and small-scale set of enterprises. he believed that this would have several benefits.
Firstly, it would allow for more rationalized use of human resources and enable people in a decentralized way to locate where their labor was most needed.
Number two would be a policy like this ensures to educate a broader range of China's workforces in technical skills associated with modern industry as that grew.Third, the decentralization of industry was
was rather subject to a great amount of enthusiasm by the Chinese people and could be more readily harnessed.
And fourth, the establishment of small and medium-sized enterprises was a less capital-intensive operation than development of large enterprises.
The success of the Great Leap Forward was there predicated on Mao's theoretical belief that changes in the relations of production and superstructure, combined with an alternative strategy for economic development, would bring about a rapid advance in the Chinese economy.
But it failed.The failure of the Great Leap Forward in economic terms and its calamitous human consequences suggested that the perspective on the political economy that it was inspired by was deeply flawed.
Mao's belief in the full development of the forces of production is not a prerequisite for a major economic advance, as one might legitimately think, as is viewed by many particular Marxist perspectives.
Mao recognized that the economic transformation and consolidation of the early 1950s and 60s, which laid the particular foundations for a modernized and industrialized economy, did not constitute the foil development of the forces of production.
Nevertheless, there were, in his mind, extensive enough to suggest a rapid pace of economic development could be achieved through a campaign to remove social and ideological impediments to the growth of the country.
Mao's response to this was to make an attempt and see what transpired, and in this event the failure of the Great Leap Forward confirmed that China was not ready for such a bold experiment, and it suggests that Mao had indeed overestimated the extent to which China's previous economics had succeeded and readied China economically for a politically driven rapid expansion.
In conclusion, The 6th Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the CCP, which happens in 1981, which is about 5 years after Mao's death, roundly condemns Mao's thought and action during the Cultural Revolution.
Mao had ignored his own injunctions to quote, seek truth from facts, and had overemphasized the acuteness of class struggle within socialist society, therefore leading China into 10 years of turmoil and chaos.
A similarly harsh judgment was made of Mao's attempt to forge a Chinese road to socialism during the late 1950s.
He was guilty of overlooking, quote, objective economic laws and had become, quote, impatient for quick results and estimated the role of man's subjective will and efforts.
Even today, this judgment remains in place in the Party's authoritative view of Mao's Chinese road to socialism.
The Party and its leaders have not backed down from that view, in virtually all respects, that the ideas underpinning Mao's policies in the late 1950s and 60s were fundamentally mistaken.
They have retreated from the socialist initiatives in those decades to a more open economy with domestic and global capitalist influence.
Mao undoubtedly would have welcomed some of the reforms brought about by his predecessors, or rather his successors, such as the surge of economic development and the increased sophistication of the economy, the growth of China's military capacity, and China's very much enhanced influence in regional and international politics.
Mao certainly desired for the industrialization and modernization of China, as with the Chinese reformers of yesteryear, he sought wealth and power for his nation.
However, Mao would have been horrified at the social and political impact of these reforms, which create, for him, massive inequality, widespread corruption, the widening of urban-rural divides, and the deepening of influence of capitalism in all spheres of Chinese society, including the entry of capitalist entrepreneurs into the ranks of the CCP.
But in the long run, the chaos and violence of the Cultural Revolution and its attendant economic losses created not support for the socialist project, but widespread antipathy and indifference and fatigue.There's your Mao.
Yeah, man, it just seems that there's so much more to Mao than there was actually to Stalin and Lenin.
This, I didn't read either in full of the books that I chose for this, but altogether it's like 900 pages of different stuff.I had to skip a lot because a lot of it is very China-specific rather than Marxist-specific.
He's probably the deepest and most pragmatic thinker of the Marxists, and he diverges the most heavily from all previously experimented Marxism.But he's also the most influential from this point forward.
I mean, after Mao, think about all the communist regimes that rise up. And they're all Maoist.Every single one of them is Maoist.They're not Stalinist.
Stalin was, after a certain period when Khrushchev starts to turn on him, everybody turns on Stalin.And they all go, ah, Stalin sucks.
The only people who don't think Stalin sucks at this point are, like, the Soviet satellite countries that were doing a lot better under Stalin than they are now.
But everyone else pretty much goes, yeah, Stalin was an authoritarian, he fucked this all up.It's really Mao who has a tremendous amount of influence on what comes in the future. Except in China, they basically, what do you call that?
They basically erase him and his influences and basically go, by the end, he kind of screwed up.We thank him for getting us to this point, but near the end, he kind of screwed up.
It's funny that you say that everybody ignores Stalin now and considers him an authoritarian when in our episode on Stalin, you go out of your way to prove that he wasn't an authoritarian.
No, a dictator, he's definitely an authoritarian.He's 1000% an authoritarian, he just wasn't a dictator.Which now people, if you don't listen to that last episode, people are going, what?No, I promise, there's a difference.
And by the way, Mao is much less of an authoritarian than Stalin by far. Everybody, you know, the Black Book of Communism gives him 50 million dead.I think that's a high estimate.I think it's probably 30, which is still ridiculous.
And even at the time, Mao is still alive, when his prime minister says, it was probably about 30% natural disaster and about 70% man-made.So even at the time, They knew it was a failure.
And you can see after the failure of the Cultural Revolution up until 1976 when he dies, Mao basically sinks into the background.It was his big failure.
Once he tried the Great Leap Forward specifically, and 30,000 people starved to death, and not intentionally the way that Stalin intentionally starved the Ukrainians, just by pure inefficiency, 50, 30 million people starved to death.
That was the nail in the coffin for him.
Well, this was a long one.And you know that I have a, um, an interview coming up right after this, as a matter of fact, in 10 minutes.So, um, we'll cut this one off.Um, so go ahead, man, um, plug away on timeline earth because Okay.Timeline Earth.
Timeline Earth.All right.
So that last episode where you're just going over Trump tweets.What a genius.I missed that guy already.
Yeah.What a genius.Now Nasty.That's one of my favorite ones where he talked about Lindsey Graham.Now Nasty.So on Timeline Earth, we're chugging along as usual, searching the timeline for ridiculous things.You can find us on every podcatcher possible.
All of my co-hosts have similar but varying, slightly different ats, so if I f*** this up, excuse me guys, but I'm pretty sure you can find me at tlebirdarchist, my co-hosts at tle underscore car, and tleboystown, I said tlearon last time, that doesn't work, and you can also find tlepaws.
on there.Check out every one of our podcasts.Car is now embarking on a Bitcoin excursion to teach people a little bit about Bitcoin in Car's way, which Car is the best teacher for Bitcoin that I have ever talked to.So it's going to be a real treat.
Beyond that, chugging along, just doing our thing.Come check us out.
All right, brother.Until the next time when we talk about who?
Abimael Guzman of The Shining Path.That's going to be our last sword of Marxism.
Would you say that they were the most successful?
Least successful, definitely.
Yes, also most violent.Well, not in terms of numbers, but definitely in terms of how much violence they tried to commit, yeah.
Should be fun.All right, brother, take care of yourself, all right?
So who are we talking about today?
A couple people today.We are going all right.
We're gonna be talking about a guy named Abimael Guzman He also goes by the nom-de-guerre Chairman Gonzalo, so I will be using those names interchangeably But before we talk about that guy who's the subject and the final Marxist Probably who we will be speaking about maybe maybe
Perhaps we will have to talk, of course, about the man who influenced this Guzman guy who goes by the name Jose Carlos Maria Tagui.So let's let's before we do anything, let's place ourselves in Peru, in Lima.
And we're going to talk about a document firstly called Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. This is a six essay magnum opus by this guy, Carlos Maria Tegui.The first three are the ones that I want to talk about and delve into.
This guy was a socialist, born 1890s, dies 1930s, and he's considered one of the preeminent Latin American socialist thinkers of the 20th century.And so this is his diagnosis of the problems with Peru as he saw them in the very early 1900s.
So we're going to talk about three of the essays.The first essay I want to talk about very quickly is called Framework of the Economic Development of Peru.
In this document, he explains how the Incan Empire resembled a socialist-type government and how it was taken over by the Spaniards, who imposed a feudal-type government. and a feudal economic structure on top of them.
The capitalist class, he explains, emerges out of this and strengthens itself while supplanting the traditional landowning class, the semi-feudal class that the Spaniards bring in.
So there are, in his mind, three different economies coexisting at the same time in Peru, a feudal one, a bourgeois one, and the indigenous socialist one. So that's how he views Peru at the time.
The second essay I want to talk about is called The Problem of the Indian.And in this document, Maria Tegui does not look at the Indian as a racial or legal problem, but he calls them a substantial problem in economic arrangements.
So for him, the Spanish imposed a regime of land tenure on the indigenous who were subject to systems of forced labor and mass taxation.
And the revolutionary independence movement of Peru was mostly led by non-indigenous Peruvians, many Spaniards, who were taking advantage of the support of the Indian.
And this agenda, which he calls a liberal agenda, basically maintained the landed aristocracy and gave nothing to the Indians.And this old landowning class recreates itself in the form of the Republican bourgeoisie.
The third essay that I want to talk about is called The Problem of the Land, and this is his biggest, most detailed essay.It's probably the largest essay.I didn't read all of them.
It goes into depth about land tenure and ultimately tries to establish colonialism as amounting to a kind of feudalism, and he proposes five problems with Peruvian land and the issues of semi-feudalism, and they include the clash between agrarian feudalism and capitalism,
and the difficulty in maintaining an agrarian property on the coastlines of Peru, and the concentration of the fiefdoms that exist, and how miserably low their production is.
Finally, he talks about the landowner, who controls a vast majority of power over the landless rural peasants.And the kind of power that the landowner possesses in this case is...
First of all, the landowner could issue whatever form of currency he wanted to the worker.And in this amounted to, in most cases, company store situations where you were basically being paid to pay the landowner back.
So let's take that as the mindset of the Peruvian Marxist at the time, those three problems, and we'll go into Guzman, who is a relatively uninteresting individual, a white
I think he was of Spanish origin, but he might have been of Portuguese origin, but I'm pretty sure he was of Spanish origin.
Abelmael Guzman was born in a village near a place called Moyendo on the port town in the province of Ile, south of Lima, but way south of Lima.He was the illegitimate son of a well-off merchant.
who won the national lottery and had five siblings between three different mothers.His mother, Berenice Reynoso, died when he was only five years old.
He's got an uninteresting upbringing, probably would describe himself as having a bourgeois upbringing.He eventually meets his wife,
Adriana El Toro, I believe her name was, not 100% sure about that, who is a wealthy heiress, definitely from the bourgeois class, marries her, and the two of them have a socialist awakening.He's increasingly attracted to Marxism.
His political thinking is, of course, influenced by the interpretive essays on Peruvian reality by Maria Tegui, which I already talked about. And he enters academia.
In 1962, he gets recruited as a professor of philosophy in San Cristobal Huamanga, a university in the state of Ayacucho.
It was around the same time that he joins the Peruvian Communist Party, which I'm going to refer to as the PCP from here on out, which is an organization that Maria Tegui is said to have founded.
Between 1965 and 1967, Guzman also visits China several times during the period of the Cultural Revolution, and he returns to Peru having seen the potential of Mao's theories, convinced of Maoist theory, especially the application of an armed peasant revolution being necessary in order to seize control of the Peruvian government and institute a dictatorship of the proletariat.
While in Beijing, Guzman gets to see Chairman Mao, but only from far away.
Guzman was greatly inspired by a rally at Tiananmen Square where the masses waved red flags, they sang communist songs, they chanted, we support Vietnam, down with Yankee imperialism, all that stuff.
Guzman was impressed by Chinese factories, schools, universities, hospitals, communes, all of it, teeming with socialist energy.
He attends classes on revolution, politics, party organization, and in Beijing, he also receives military training, including how to make explosives pretty much out of anything.
And around the same time in the 1960s, the Peruvian Communist Party had splintered over ideological and personal disputes.
Guzman ends up taking the pro-Chinese side rather than the pro-Soviet side and emerges as the leader of a faction that comes to be known as the Shining Path.Maria Tegui once writes, Marxism-Leninism is the shining path of the future.
So that's why they get that name.I will continue to refer to this group, the Shining Path, as the PCP because eventually they take over the PCP from the pro-Soviet line.
As a professor, Guzman studies Quechua, which is the language spoken by the majority of the indigenous population of Peru.
It was the language of the Incan Empire, or rather it was a derivative language of the Incan Empire, and he becomes increasingly active in left-wing political circles.
He also takes to studying Incan civilization and the system of collective agriculture that had developed. He gets arrested two separate times in the 1970s because of his participation in violent riots against two government presidents separately.
And after serving as the head of personnel in San Cristóbal, he leaves the institution in the mid-1970s and goes underground.
Before his final move underground, Guzmán collects a large base of dedicated followers who were dedicated to revolutionary work. His nom de guerre that he adopts is Presidente or Comrade Gonzalo.
Gonzalo, I think he adopts from a German word, I can't remember what the German word is, but it means strong, and he begins to advocate for a peasant-led revolution on the Maoist model.
His followers declare Guzman the fourth sword of communism, in fact, after presumably Marx, Lenin, and Mao.So we can talk about now why they did this.
Let's talk about Gonzalo thought, which I'll get more into even later, but we can dissect it here now.
So first of all, we've done Leninism, we've done Stalinism, we've done Maoism, Marxism, but we've also done, I think I've said a few times, Stalin thought.And certainly we've heard Mao Zedong thought.
So there's a difference between thought and ism, which I'll get to later, but let's talk about thought. Quote, this is from Guzman, the rightest error is rooted in a one-sided understanding of the dialectic of continuity rupture.
This, in the most simple terms, refers to a process by which new developments in revolutionary praxis are simultaneously an outgrowth of previous revolutionary practice and thus intimately tied into it, but also by necessity must be a radical break from the old.
The rightest error is in seeing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as Marxism-Leninism with a simple addition of Mao stemming from an overemphasis on continuity, while simultaneously ignoring the important ruptures from orthodox Marxism-Leninism.
Of course, ignoring the ruptures within Marxism-Leninism leaves one with no justification that Maoism is an ism of any kind. This is because what makes an ism is that it is a qualitative development of quantitative historical practice.
This is in contrast to what makes something a thought, which is a quantitative accumulation of historical and practical experience.
A thought requires no rupture from the old, as it is merely a perfection of orthodoxy standing at the threshold of something new.An ism is that something new.
It has crossed the threshold of established orthodoxy to carve out a new revolutionary praxis.So in short, what he's saying is the difference between Maoism
and Mao's thought is that Maoism has already proven successful and has universalized, which Gonzalo is actually mostly responsible for universalizing.Now thought, on the other hand, is that which is at the very edge of praxis.
It's what you're doing right now.It hasn't been established as anything unique To or rather it hasn't been accepted as anything universal.It's unique to the situation for example.
You could say that what Lennon did was Lennon thought Marxism Lennon thought because his contributions to Marxism were put into practice in
Within the social conditions of Russia, but then you could say something like Marxism Leninism is the universality of what Lenin did those things which can be applied to all situations Similarly Mao Zedong thought is simply Marxism Leninism in Chinese conditions.
So Mao Zedong was not a Maoist he had Mao Zedong thought and was a Marxist-Leninist.We should think about Gonzalo as not a Gonzalist or a Senderist or anything like that, but as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist in Peruvian conditions.
But we might be able to find a kind of shining path-ism as we go through this.
This is from the Red Sun website, which is, you gotta Google at some point, after we finish this, you gotta Google Gonzalo thought and Abimael Guzman thought, and just go to some of the websites that you find.
Marxism and Marxists, not that this is gonna surprise anyone, have a very religious way of talking that is kind of stunning.Just all these websites that you unlock.So this is a quote.
Chairman Gonzalo has generated Gonzalo Thought, theoretical foundation for the practice of the communists of today in Peru and the world for the people's war when we have entered the development of a great new wave of world proletarian revolution.
It is the theoretical foundation of the world revolution today. So in Gonzalo Thought, Guzman praises Mao's development of Lenin's thesis regarding the role of imperialism in propping up the bourgeois capitalist system.
And he ultimately claims that imperialism creates disruption and is unsuccessful and will end up in ruins in the next 50 to 100 years.
So Guzman applies that criticism not only to US imperialism, but also to Soviet imperialism in what he termed social imperialism.So he was against the Soviets.So he alienates them there.
Gonzalo and the PCP didn't found Maoism, but it served as the primary source of synthesizing Maoism into the higher stage of ideological development that it has become.Just like how Marx didn't found Marxism, as I said before.
Chairman Gonzalo maintains that there is a qualitative leap from Mao Zedong thought to Maoism, and this is expressed particularly in the recognition of the universal applicability of Mao and the Chinese communists' contributions to a communist theory and practice.
Here's a quote from an interview with Chairman Gonzalo, which is in the late 90s, after his arrest.Spoiler alert.For us, Marxism is a process of development and this great process has given us a new third and higher stage.
Why do we say that there is a new third and higher stage?Maoism.We say this because in examining the three component parts of Marxism, it is evidently clear that Chairman Mao Zedong had developed each one of these three parts.
and let's enumerate them.In Marx's philosophy, no one can deny his great contribution to the development of dialectics, focusing on the law of contradiction, establishing that it is the only fundamental law.
On political economy, it will suffice to highlight two things.
The first, and immediate and concrete of importance for us, is bureaucratic capitalism, and the second is the development of the political economy of socialism, since the synthesis, we can say, is what Mao really established and developed in the political economy of socialism.
With regard to scientific socialism, it is clear enough to point to the People's War, since Chairman Mao Zedong thought that international proletariats had attained a fully developed military theory.
We believe that these three questions demonstrate a development of universal character, a higher stage, because Maoism is the ideology of worldwide proletariat, attaining the highest development up to now, its lofty peak,
but with the understanding that Marxism is, if you'll excuse the reiteration, a dialectical unity that allows through great leaps, and the great leaps are what give rise to stages, for us, the world today, existing as Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and principally Maoism.
We think that to be Marxists today, to be communists, necessarily demands that we be Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, and principally Maoists.Otherwise, we would not genuinely be communists.
I would like to emphasize a situation that is rarely taken into account and definitely deserves to be studied closely today.I am referring to Mao Zedong's development of Lenin's great thesis on imperialism.
This is of great importance today and in the historical stage that is presently unfolding.Again, simply listing his contributions, we could point out the following.
He discovered the law of imperialism when he said that imperialism makes trouble and fails, and makes trouble again and fails again, until its final doom.
He also specified a period of the process of development of imperialism, which he called the next 50 to 100 years.
as he said, unparalleled on earth, during which, as we understand it, we will sweep imperialism and reactionism from the face of the earth.
That was all Chairman Gonzalo about where he stands, about what he thinks real communism is, and about what he intends on doing about imperialism and reaction.
There is a misunderstanding that people have with Maoism that I tried to get through in the last episode, and I will reiterate again. The agrarian or peasant class was capable of achieving the communist revolution all on its own.
This is not what Mao believes.In reality, Mao believes that the proletariat class is still the leading class, he says it many times, but he gives special emphasis to the executive role of the peasants within such a regime.
And he says, this is Gonzalo, not Mao, in accordance with these criteria of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, our goal is a front of classes with the proletariat as the leading class, the peasantry as the main force.
the petite bourgeoisie as an ally which we must pay attention to, and in particular, the intellectuals, because they are necessary to the revolution, as Chairman Mao has also taught us.
And in this front, under certain circumstances and condition, even the national bourgeoisie can and does participate.This is what we understand as a united front.This front has a foundation with the worker-peasant alliance forged in the countryside.
So before we talk about the specifics of Gonzalo thought, let's talk about the insurgency that it serves as the ideological spearhead for.Insurgency begins in the late 1970s.
The Shining Path movement is largely confined to academic circles at first, but in the late 1970s, the military juntas are starting to collapse.The anti-communist military regimes in Latin America are starting to dwindle.
Operation Condor is finally at an end, or dwindling at least, and a movement develops out of the PCP. which is a guerrilla militia front within Ayacucho.In university, he gathers a large following, Gonzalo, most of whom belong to the PCP already.
But he also found a number of willing soldiers amongst Peru's indigenous Amerindian community.
Making up about half of the population, they live mostly in the rural areas and had been exploited since the 16th century when the conqueror Pizarro destroys the Incan Empire and scatters them.
The modern Peruvian government has done very little to help these people, very little to develop agriculture, infrastructure, wealth and power remain concentrated in the hands of the Spanish descended elite, who mostly live on the coast in the cities, and they largely ignore the interior, those living in the mountains and jungles of Peru.
And they're all disaffected by a system that Guzman defines as a semi-colonial system.And they were ripe for recruitment to his revolutionary cause as well.
By the mid-1980s, as I said, most of these regimes, anti-communist military regimes, are dwindling.And this allows for nations to enter into a state of remission.And the Peruvian military junta hands over control to an elected government.
The majority, however... Alright, so the government that gets elected is a right-wing government.But the problem with this is that a majority of people voting belong to left-wing parties.
And a majority of left-wing parties participated in the elections, and yet the left-wing lost. We don't know why, nobody knows why, whether it was legitimate or not, but this inspires very little confidence in the left wing and the peasants.
The PCP was one of the first, well it was one of the few groups that declined to participate in the elections because they had a suspicion that something was going to go wrong and instead they responded in May of 1980 by launching their war against the government
burning ballot boxes in small villages in order to disrupt this election.So they didn't participate at all.In fact, they tried to disrupt it.So Gonzalo's version of this war was going to go to a five-point program.
culminating in the overthrow of the Peruvian government.The five points go like this.Number one, agitation and armed propaganda.Number two, sabotage against Peru's socioeconomic system.Number three, the generalization of guerrilla struggle.
Number four, the conquest and expansion of the revolution's support bases and the strengthening of the guerrilla army.And finally, five, a general civil war leading to the siege of cities and the final collapse of state power.
The number of senderistas, by the way, I didn't say this, but Shining Path is Sendero Luminoso in Spanish, and so if you want to talk about somebody who's in that group, you call them senderistas.
The number of senderistas was estimated to be around 5,000 at this time, at the peak of the war, but it's important to note
that Guzman favors quality of personnel over quantity, and recruits are required to pass through a series of rigorous vetting processes in order to test their devotion to the group.
And ultimately this culminates in difficult tasks, increasingly so until eventually you have to kill a police officer, steal their weapon.And that's how you get in.
The Shining Path targets not only army and police, though, but also government employees at all levels and other leftist militants, who a few years later, there's this group called Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, the MRTA.
They are workers who decide a different Marxist path.They're much more pragmatic, even though they are Marxist. They attack the Shining Path attacks workers who don't participate in the strikes organized by the group.
They attack peasants who cooperate with the government in any way, shape, or form, including attacking people who are voting in Democratic elections. and attack ordinary middle classers in Peru's major cities.
The purpose of the Shining Paths campaign was to demoralize and undermine the government of Peru in order to create a situation conducive to a violent coup that would put its leaders in power.
The government response to the PCP, of course, was to declare a state of emergency, suspend constitutional rights, and impose military law.
And in combination with this, the military uses increasingly brutal counterinsurgency tactics, leading to several civilian massacres.The PCP's reaction to the Peruvian government's use of military force was
conflict in an increasingly more violent way in the countryside.
The Shining Path attacks police officers, soldiers, civilians, anyone who it considers to be class enemies to an even greater degree, ultimately culminating at the end of this thing to about 70,000 to 80,000 people killed.
Again, in 1982, the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement launches.Whole other thing.This group used uniforms as opposed to Sendero, which did not use uniforms.
Sendero explicitly denounces human rights, whereas this group explicitly supports human rights and democracy, which Sendero does not support.Initially,
Guzman attempts to win over the support of civilians by punishing people that they view as corrupt government officials and other unpopular leaders, but this leads to increasingly brutal methods together with strictly imposed curfews, the prohibition of alcohol, and an overall sense of insecurity and fear that leads to an increased popular reaction against the Communist Party.
In an effort to increase rank-and-file membership, the Shining Path begins to use front groups that are called Generated Organisms.
The decision to create these groups came in 1986 and marked a distinct shift in strategy, but before that, the Shining Path eschewed all tactics used as a means to further itself as a kind of legal left.
However, in an effort to mobilize and unify the broadest level of anti-government sentiment, and that's a quote from Gonzalo, several organisms were formed.
And these groups allow the Shining Path to operate freely within Peru's democratic society, and thus, they attempted to undermine the government's legitimacy by attempting to provoke a crackdown.
So these groups were largely rural youth who felt Peruvian state officials, opportunities, little was going to be offered to them anyway, so why not just join these groups?
So these are all kinds of civil society groups, along with more militant groups.
The movement promotes the writings of Guzman, which it calls Gonzalo thought, and he reiterates as Gonzalo thought, which they call a new theoretical understanding built on Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, whereby it is declared that Maoism is a third and higher stage of Marxism, and that Maoism is people's war.
So this is where we finally get into what the guy actually thinks.
So ultimately when you're talking about Chairman Gonzalo, you're talking about three instruments of revolution and principally one innovation that he makes that I'll talk more about in depth later.
His principal innovation is the idea of militarizing the Communist Party.We'll get to that though.Gonzalo establishes a tripartite theory of the construction of revolution. This is all about constructing.He develops Mao's thesis as constructed on
in the book On New Democracy.And he does this after connecting himself to both Mao and Lenin as he writes, as a result, the party is the highest form of organization.The party is the principal form of organization.
No, sorry, this is very important and I fucked that up.As a result, the party is the highest form of organization.The army is the principal form of organization.And the front is the third form of organization.
And these three instruments are to seize power. So the three instruments we have to remember.
It's Lenin who comes up with the idea of creating new clandestine organizations, since the step to revolutionary actions usually signifies a dissolution of the legal organizations of the police.
And that step was only possible if you were going to take out old leaders and you were going to take over an old party and destroy it.
So furthermore, it's Mao who understands that the, that classes inherently know that they need to build three instruments in order to go about construction of their way of the world, their revolutions.The party, the army, and the united front.
All of these are interrelated to the particular class trying to build them.Mao resolves the issue of building these instruments in a backward and semi-feudalistic society by affirming that the party must be built around the gun.
We've heard that statement about you know, the barrel of the gun.Chairman Gonzalo expounds the militarization of communist parties and the concentric construction of the three instruments.
The militarization of the communist parties is the political directive with a strategic content.
Since it is, and this is his quote, the set of transformations, changes, and readjustments it needs to lead the people's war as the principal form of struggle that will generate the new state.
Therefore, the militarization of the communist parties is key for the democratic revolution and the socialist revolution and the cultural revolution.
And he links the entire process of construction with the fluidity of the people's war, which he starts by using Chairman Mao's thesis that there's a mobility of military operations and a variability of our territory of all works of construction.
Hence, to construct the line of, sorry, to understand the line of construction, we must first start from the form of struggle and the forms of organization and from the principle of construction and construction linked to the fluidity of the people's war, which is the main form of struggle today.
So remember that statement, organized principally around Gonzalo thought.
This is how the Peruvian Communist Party platform dissects the political lines and analyzes the potential construction of tools of revolution that Chairman Gonzalo establishes for the party.
So Gonzalo doesn't write anything down himself, but because of the weird cult of personality that forms around him, the Peruvian Communist Party almost 100% reflects his beliefs specifically.So there are three things to build as far as I recorded.
Let me make sure. Yes, there are three things that he says you have to construct for the party.And they all go pretty deep in depth.The first is the construction of the party.The second is the construction of the guerrilla army.
And the third is the construction of the new state. So, firstly, let's talk about the construction of the party.So, Gonzalo first establishes the party line and thereby creates the character of the party.
The party is organized around five key elements.The international line, the democratic revolution, the military line, the line of the construction of three instruments of revolution, the mass line, all of those.
The second thing is that the party's quality is internationalist, conceiving of itself as one party within a world proletarian revolution, very different from Stalinism.
Gonzalo's PCP is unique in that it is a militarized party, something which Lenin expressly disagrees with the creation of.Gonzalo argues for the militarization of all communist parties for three reasons.Number one, firstly, because being caught
Peru's caught in the midst of a strategic offensive within a world revolution.
He says, we see how the reaction is militarizing itself more and more, militarizing the old states, their economies, developing wars of aggression, trafficking with the struggles of the peoples and aiming towards a world war.
The second reason for militarization is because capitalist restoration must be prevented.
He says, when the bourgeois lose power, they introduce themselves inside of the communist party, and they use the army, and seek to usurp power and destroy the dictatorship of the proletariat to restore capitalism.
Therefore, the communist parties must militarize themselves.
and exercise the all-round dictatorship of the three instruments, forging themselves in people's war and empowering the armed organization of the masses, the people's militia, so as to engulf the army.
Thirdly, because the ultimate goal is the militarization of society.
And by militarizing the party, the highest form of organization, a major step is completed in the overall goal which guarantees the dictatorship of the proletariat, the armed population.
A militarized society is a sea of armed masses, which Marx and Engels speak about, that guards the conquest of power and defends it once it is conquered.Thus,
taking the party as the axis of everything, build the army around it, and with these instruments, the mass parties can conduct a people's war and build the new state around both.
The militarization of the party can only be carried forward by the concrete actions of the class struggle, such as guerrilla actions, sabotages, selective annihilation, armed propaganda, and agitation.
He says, this doesn't mean this is all we do, but that we have to carry out mainly these forms so as to provide incentive and development to the class struggle, teaching with deeds and with these types of actions, the principal form of struggle in the people's war.
Gonzalo credits the militarization of the party with quote, enabling us to initiate and develop the people's war. The concentric construction of the three instruments is the organic fulfillment of the militarization of the party and the synthesis.
It is summarized in what Chairman Gonzalo teaches.The party is the axis of everything.It leads the instruments in an all round way, its own construction.
It absolutely leads the army and the new state as a joint dictatorship aiming towards the dictatorship of the proletariat. In short, Gonzalo says when you militarize the party, you necessarily build all of these things.
You necessarily prevent the capitalist reconquest.Finally, on the matter of building the party,
He lists six quick aspects, ideological construction, meaning Peru's revolution as generated by Gonzalo thought is the highest expression and fusion of universal ideology with concrete practice of the Peruvian revolution specifically.
And so you can say Marxism, Leninism, Maoism. is the universal ideology of the proletariat.So that has to be constructed.
Secondly, political construction, which would be constructed in order to create militants who are forged by the program of the party and the statutes of the party.The general political line and the military line are the specific lines to follow.
The third thing you have to construct is an organic form of construction. The line alone is not enough.You can't just have a party line and a military line.You need an organic structure.
The party is based on a democratic centralist structure, principally centralism rather than democracy.Two armed party networks are established.
The territorial network, which encompasses one jurisdiction, and the mobile network, which encompasses a structure as deployed in the form of It's a mobile network.
So it's kind of like a military, you know, a military courts, mobile military courts and things like that.This is what needs to be established.
And it has to follow five necessities, democratic centralism, clandestinity, discipline, vigilance, and secrecy. The next thing you have to construct is the promotion of various leaders.
Gonzalo says no class in history has ever achieved installation of its rule unless it has promoted its political leaders, its vanguard representatives, who are capable of organizing the movement and leading it forward.
The great leadership of Chairman Gonzalo, this is what the party says, who handled revolutionary theory and has the knowledge of history and has a profound understanding of the practical movement, who through a hard line
Struggles has defeated revisionism, the right and left liquidationism, the right opportunist line, and rightism.This is what they credit him with doing.So this is how they're promoting their leader.
The two-line struggle they speak about is the next thing that has to be constructed. To think about this, you think about the Communist Party as a contradiction where the class struggle expresses itself as a two-line struggle between right and left.
The party's not on the right, it's not on the left.The just and correct handling that Chairman Gonzalo makes in the two-line struggle serves to maintain the unity of the party.Play them against one another, situate yourself in the middle.
It is necessarily to organize the two-line struggle to impose the party line. Finally, mass work needs to be organized.The application of the principle, the masses make history, which is a Maoist application.
The development of mass work and the people's war basing itself on just basic masses, workers, principles, poor peasants, The petite bourgeois even, he says, can be neutralized or won over.
And if you do all of this, you've constructed the People's Army, you've constructed the Communist Party, and you're on your way to constructing a guerrilla army.So after you get the party out of the way, That's the one organ, the one tool.
The second tool is the army itself.The army is much more simple.It's responsible for three things.Fighting, mobilizing, producing.For fighting, this is its principal task, which it corresponds to.Its principal form of organization, the army fights.
That's what it does.And if the army is the party, then the party's principal task is to fight. The second thing it does is mobilize, which by this it means it mobilizes mass work of the party.
Things like politicizing, mobilizing, organizing, arming the masses.
And finally, the army produces, in the application of Chairman Gonzalo's principle of self-reliance, he says, the iron legions of the People's Guerrilla Army sustain themselves on Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, guiding thought, which is the basic
foundation of its invincibility.They are forged in a hard life, in a sacrifice, and in the challenging to death which elevate them to revolutionary heroism.
So this is a strange way to think about it, but what he's basically saying is in everything that the army does, it has to do so as guided by the production of thought.
Marx is the first one who sets out for the need of a proletarian army, but he always keeps it separate.
Lenin creates the Red Army, as you know, and establishes the thesis that the people's militia with the functions of the police, army, and administration can come into power alongside the Red Army.
Chairman Mao develops the construction of the revolutionary armed forces with the immerse or rather immersing the masses into immense levels of participation.The formation of the army is based on men and not weapons.
The army is based on peasants, principally the poor, proletariats, petite bourgeoisie.It wrestles weapons away from the enemy and it also uses all sorts of elementary weapons.So military construction is incredibly important.
Armed with theory and practice in the people's war,
The army is organized into squads, companies, battalions in the countryside, and special detachments and people's militias within the cities, and therefore instruction is necessary and indispensable.
Training specializes, elevates people to a different level of struggle.All of this will work to organize courage.Gonzalo says, class character will be organized, bellicosity will be strengthened, because if we fight with absolute unselfishness,
We believe in the full conviction of the justness of our cause.
So this is why he believes that he can increase the power of the military and the bellicosity of the military, because ultimately everybody believes that they're fighting for communism, a very just cause.
So after your peasant's people's war, which never really ever concludes, is wrapping up or at least shrinking, you have to start to build a state.
So Gonzalo does this by applying Mao's thesis in On New Democracy and creates the concept of a joint dictatorship.
So as a state system, a joint dictatorship is that of workers, peasants, principally the poor ones, the petite, bourgeois, and respecting the interests of the middle bourgeois even, while seeking to neutralize their tools and capacity to bring capitalism back.
As a system of government, this works through people's assemblies. There's an important thing for Gonzalo about the fluid aspect of the state.This construction of the new state follows the fluidity of the people's war.
It can expand or contract and disappear in one place and appear in another.It is fluid.The system of support bases, of guerrilla zones, zones of operations, points of action, all this is fluid.It moves around.
He says, we struggle for power for the proletariat and the people and not for personal power.We are against banditry and the sidestepping of support bases.Whether or not this is true, we'll see how the insurgency ends up.
Mao establishes that the People's Committees are materializations of the new state.
They are committees of the United Front, which are led by commissars who assume state functions of commissioning, elected by assembly bodies, representatives, and subject to recall.Up to now, they are clandestine.They march forward with commissions.
It is Gonzalo who creates a party of three-thirds.One of the thirds is communists, one of the thirds is peasants, and one of the thirds is progressives, all sustained by the army.
They apply the people's dictatorship, enforcement, and security, exercising violence firmly and resolutely so as to defend the new power against its enemies and to protect the rights of the people.
The establishment of people's committees and other support bases are of preeminent value. I don't quite know how the parties are supposed to be organized if it's three thirds, like I don't know who makes them up.
Do you always select a third peasants or because in every other communist organization like this we've seen, ultimately it's this vanguard who end up serving in all the positions.So he doesn't go into this and I have no resolution to this either.
In conclusion, to stop talking about his thought, chairman Gonzalo himself says this about his own thought. Marxism has always taught us that the problem lies in the application of universal truth.
Chairman Mao Zedong was extremely insistent on this point, that the Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is not applied to concrete reality, it is not possible to lead a revolution, not possible to transform the old order, destroy it, or create a new one.
It is the application of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism to the Peruvian revolution that has produced Gonzalo thought.
Gonzalo thought has been forged in the class struggle of our people, mainly the proletariat, in the incessant struggles of the peasantry, and in the larger framework of the world revolution.
In the midst of these earth-shaking battles, applying as faithfully as possible to the universal truths, applying as faithfully as possible the universal truths to the concrete conditions of our country.
Previously, we have called it guiding thought, and if today the party through its Congress has sanctioned the term Gonzalo thought, it's because a leap has been made from guiding thought through the development of the people's war.
In sum, Gonzalo thought is none other than the application of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism to our concrete reality.This means that it is principally specifically
is principally and specifically for our party, for the people's war, and for the revolution in our country.I want to emphasize that.But for us, looking at our ideology in universal terms, I emphasize once again, it is Maoism that is principal.
So that's his entire thought.Finally, let's talk about where it all goes wrong. There are three problems that have been identified.I identify one of them, and there's two others that communists care about.
The first and most principal one to me is the weird cult of personality that forms around Gonzalo. The militarization of the party is the second problem.This is completely against Leninism.
The military is supposed to be totally separate from the political party.They're both supposed to be arms of the revolution, but they're not supposed to be together.
Finally, you could take that in grander terms and say the abandonment of Leninism in general Stalinism, maybe you could say, but Leninism in general.
The PCP calls Gonzalo the fourth sword of communism, again after Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and describes him as a guarantor of the revolution.
In reality, while the Shining Path's spread of influence was greater than anticipated, the increasingly brutal tactics that they end up using on rank-and-file members, peasants, their enemies, people who should ostensibly be their allies,
The very peasants that Guzman claims to defend are the ones who end up turning against him.The insurgents followed an ideology that ends up making violence an absolute value rather than a relative or proportionate instrument.
Furthermore, violence is used as a purification method in many cases, such as in small crimes, you were to be beheaded.Like if you stole something, petty theft, you were to be beheaded.
The inflexibility and brutality ends up resulting in an armed revolt led by these groups called Rondas, which are peasant-led anti-communist groups.Specifically, they're anti-Shining Path, but they identify many of them as anti-communist.
Poor, ill-equipped peasant militias that form around small communities, towns, that fight against Shining Path guerrillas. Another significant weakness that the Shining Path has is the inability to find any sanctuary or support.Why is this?
Well, when you ostracize yourself from the entire communist community internationally, despite the fact that you say you're one small part of the grander communist war, nobody wants to help you.
When you describe the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party as revisionist governments, they probably don't want to help you much.
The most significant weakness, though, that the Shining Path has is the inability to fully understand the social norms and practices of the rural peasants and Indians, the populations that they claim to be fighting for.
Think about this, the proclivity that they have for executions and massacres, again, 70,000 to 80,000 dead, 5,000 people responsible for it, at least half of it, the military's probably responsible for the other half, 40,000 people killed by 5,000 at a peak is not great, not at all.
The proclivity that they have for the executions, the massacres, it's antithetical to the peasants' need to protect the economy.This is a peasants' economy.
Additionally, in territories controlled by the Shining Path, they attempt to strangle various cities and towns out by prohibiting the sale of surplus crops.This is to exert power over cities and also to give all the extra food to the Senderises.
So ultimately, by blocking all but subsistence-level economic activity, the Shining Path proves that they're not in any way in the understanding of the needs of the rural peasantry, and that they also aren't trying to improve anybody's desperate situations.
In addition to all this, the Shining Path quickly resorts to murder and assassinations, specifically in order to heighten fear and annihilate dissidents.So not just massacres, assassinations of specific people.
Punishments are severe and pervasive and often entire communities end up disappearing for resisting or defying insurgents.They murder peasants, mayors, members of NGOs, journalists.
They believe that fear in the most violent and retributional form was a sufficient motivation to persuade even the most resistant peasants.
In 1983, three years after they start the war, but the war goes on until 92, 69 people, including women and children, are massacred in the town of Lucanamarca.This is one of their massacres.
Again, the military has many, many massacres to its name as well.But Guzman justifies the massacre by claiming that it was to send a message to the Peruvian armed forces that he was ready to do anything, anywhere.
And he believes and specifically says the most useful recruiting tool is fear.
Finally, the Shining Path's dependence on and reverence of Guzman proves to be the fatal mistake as the organization becomes completely inactive after September 12th of 1992 when he's captured.
This is compounded by the fact that during 18 months preceding his capture, approximately 3,200 Sandoristas and rank-and-file members were either captured or surrendered themselves.
Having lost their comrade Gonzalo, numerous rank-and-file members offered crucial intelligence to the Peruvian Armed Forces that allowed for greater insight into the insurgents' plans.And the personality cult ultimately proves to be Sandero's
Achilles heel in that the general secretary's arrest ends up denting the morale, undermining the belief in the grassroots power of the party, and ultimately leads to their defeat.
Leading up to his capture, detectives and state's anti-terrorist branches, the Counter-Terrorist Directorate had zeroed in on a building rented by a ballerina, Maritza Garrido Leca, and an architect named Carlos, can't even pronounce his last name, Incha Tezcui.
try that, in the Circo district of southern Lima.And weeks of surveillance ended up uncovering in the building's trash a psoriasis medication, which was a skin disease that Gonzalo has, as well as his favorite brand of cigarettes.
Up until this point, Chairman Gonzalo ends up eluding the authorities, But they break in and capture him, and on the day of his capture, police fire into the air.
There's a report that one of the police officers actually shoots himself in the foot before the storming of the complex, by the way, finding himself at his desk on the second floor, and they end up finding Gonzalo at his desk on the second floor in a dance studio where he was staying.
He's quoted as saying, you can't take anything away from a man except what he has here, pointing to his head.This cannot be removed, even if he is killed.And even if you do kill him, the rest will remain.
This is what he said when they were capturing him.The guy's nuts.For 27 years, or I don't know, however long it's been since 92, when they captured him,
Chairman Gonzalo has been sitting in a maximum security prison under the control of the Peruvian Navy.In conclusion, in conclusion to all of our Mao episodes, I want to demonstrate Gonzalo absolutely falls into the Maoist line.
Nobody even questions this, that he was a valuable Maoist.
So as far as our task of trying to establish whether or not these guys were Maoists, Marxists rather, the whole point of this has been, let's look at them and see how they all improve on one another.
He departs strongly from Stalin and he agrees strongly with Now, two guys that had minorly disagreed with one another, you can see the major cracks start to begin at this time.There's so many people who we didn't talk about.
We never talked about the Khmer Rouge.We didn't talk about Ho Chi Minh.We didn't talk about any of these Marxists.But we talked about Gonzalo, who is basically credited with synthesizing Maoism into people's war politics.
He reaffirms himself on the universal law of revolutionary violence, takes up the military theory of the proletariat established by Chairman Mao.
People's war, which is universally valid, any country can have a people's war as long as it has a proletariat, which all of them do, and is applicable in many different types of economic situations in accordance with the conditions of each individual revolution.
Gonzalo tells us that first comes the military deed and later the political change.Thus, he reaffirms that war is the continuation of politics by other means.
His largest contribution to Marxist-Leninist Maoist theory is his reconstitution of the People's Party into the organized, prepared weapon ready to wage the People's War.There's your Swords of Marxism, Pete.
That's just brutal, man.Yeah, that one's nuts.It's like, what's your final outcome?Yeah, the Mao, I think...
It's funny, right, because my point in doing these episodes isn't to establish that Marxism is scary or that Marxism is a big threat or anything like that.
It's just kind of simply to, people don't really know a lot about the four people who we spoke about.They certainly don't know much about the final guy that we spoke about.
And it's funny, it seems like in decreasing order, people seem to know things about those guys.And when we get to this point, you go, is this even Marxism anymore? And I just want to establish it definitely is.It absolutely, totally still is.
There's a lot of Stalinists will do it more than Maoists who are more committed seemingly to the violent ends that you're seeing here play out.A lot of the Stalinists want to go, no, that's not real communism, not real communism.Oh, it is.
Oh, it definitely is.And I hope these episodes have helped us learn that.
The disdain for the peasantry.I know, and you know, and you Trotsky had the same.Disdain for the peasantry that.That Guzman did, but Trotsky had.There were some episodes where Trotsky executed some some peasants.
See how that's you have to go into the into the books to find out about it, because obviously it's not going to be publicized.But I mean, just. The massacre, what was it, the 82 or 83 massacre?
69, basically 69 peasants.It was like, when you start breaking it down, I think it was like 10 pregnant women, people over 70, children.I mean, it's, dude, man.
It makes Mao look like a nice guy.Because Mao had this romanticized view of the peasantry that he didn't think they could ever lead a revolution, but he had this romantic, you know, the peasants are, they're fighting this thing.
You know, we owe to them to learn from them.I think it's Mao who says something like, you can't even do communist praxis unless you're taking your notes from the people. And Gonzalo completely flips that one.
I mean, you can go and read the Peruvian Communist Party's website, and you can look at the religious quality of the way that they speak about him.He might as well be the smartest guy on earth.
And that is definitely one of the areas where it goes completely wrong, is that there's a hero worship, a cult of personality that develops, which seemingly develops in a small way
with now in a moderate way with stalin and maximizes itself under someone like guzman.
Will you have at the end of these documents in these previous communist documents that they're saying things like long live chairman gonzalo long live gonzalo thought.He. I guess a lot of, I mean, he was an academic, right?
So it's very much seems like an academic version of what would happen is you'd need, they would want to be worshiped.And, um, you know what I mean?It sounds very much like a, like what an academic would do if he became a dictator.
And the thing about it is it's not like, you know, how they, say, oh, well, you know, Mao's numbers were overinflated.The Soviet Union's numbers were overinflated.This was done so recently that the numbers are right.Oh, yeah.
And no one's arguing that they're not.And this is also the guy we're talking about who's still alive.
Yeah, he is.He's still alive.He's a, I think a couple of life sentences, so he's not getting out, but he's still alive.I don't even know if he corresponds anymore.I can't remember if interview with him.
There's a whole thing, interview with Chairman Gonzalo from beginning to end.It's pretty long.It's like 92 pages.And it's just like a guy talking to him about everything.Like when he asks him, like, you know, do you fear anything?
Like a lot of interesting questions.If you wanted to understand the psychopath. I think the guy is a character.
I believe a lot of these intellectual or artist types who become cult leaders, a lot of them are just cowards, and they don't ever do anything themselves, because they can just get everyone charismatically to do everything for them.
And so when you read it, you see what kind of a character he really is, like the character he tries to play himself to be, like a Stalin Mao ripoff.It's almost very obvious.Because again, the guy's a teacher. You know what I mean?
The guy was a teacher.It's like as if Bernie Sanders became the leader of a terrorist rebel group.You know what I mean?
At least Lenin and Stalin had some street cred, for lack of a better term.
That's right.This guy does not have street cred.I mean, he gets arrested twice as a professor, as a professor in academia already.I mean, lots of professors in this country get arrested for doing stupid shit at protests.It doesn't mean anything.
You know what I mean?They weren't fighting in revolutions.Very important to remember, Chairman Gonzalo did not lead a successful communist revolution.He can't even claim that he did, although he tries.You know what I mean?
Like, if you look at the interview, there's like, yeah, we did this successfully.We're on the right track for our revolution.Didn't even lead one.
Well, how do you expect to lead it if you can't even get the peasantry behind you?
Yeah, he yeah, 100%.He's killing all the peasantry.Yeah, that that is the big mistake is the I think now again with the romantic thing, he viewed the peasants as tools, but as heroic tools.
And I think Gonzalo just, it seems like the way that he approached it was he viewed them as just tools. to do what you need to do with them.The peasants are running this thing.
But since we're the leaders, if they don't agree with us, we have to force them to do the work.So, yeah.Yep.
That thing about killing a cop and taking his gun.That's a that's a wild one.
Yeah, that's a it's gangster stuff.
That's that's wild.That's where I mean, think about it.If you have anybody who's trying to infiltrate, They're not going to do that.I mean, I mean, yeah, yes.Well, I mean, they might, you know, they might they might go that far.
But man, if somebody does that, you can be pretty sure that they're probably down with the program.
It's true.It's how all of the cartels recruit people, is ultimately you have to kill someone who, if you were an informant or something like that, you really would not want to be killing.
Yeah, it is a guerrilla group, a terrorist group, whatever you want to call it.I don't know, whatever you want to call it.Definitely a terrorist group, considering they used acts of terror.
And he says, I mean, he literally says, yeah, we did it to send a message.I don't know what's more terrorism than that.So terrorist group rather than a political
Organ which every other thing we talked about Was trying to establish a political organ and did so very quickly This is the only one where like imagine if the Red Army never fully succeeded in taking over a government of any kind Perhaps it would have ended up like this but this is where it ends up in Peru and
at the very least.And again, we didn't talk about Khmer Rouge or Pol Pot.Wait, is that Khmer Rouge?I don't know if those are different.Cambodia, Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh.
We didn't talk about any of the smaller, mostly Maoist-influenced communists, but a lot of them who didn't succeed, this all kind of ends up going the same way.
massacres, and it takes a very long time for them to be swept out, and lots of peasants and proletariats seem to die somewhere along the way.
In South America you have it being led by an academic, and then in Cambodia they're killing all the academics.
All the academics, that's right, yeah.
Hey, you wear glasses, you might be smart.
Yep, that's right.I want to mention finally in closing, only semi-related for the context of this, Operation Condor is going on at this time when the war is being waged.It's wrapping up, but it's going on.
If you don't know what Operation Condor is, it is basically all of the military governments, for all the listeners, all the military governments in South America that the CIA helped to foment the creation of, that's Operation Condor.
Seem to have occurred in Peru There's no documentation of that that we know of but I'm not I don't want to leave out the possibility that The military action that was taken in response to Sendero was at least in could have been in part a
backed by the CIA.I don't know that as a fact.There's no information to suggest that but you're dealing with a very effective... I just assume it at this point.Yeah, I mean you kind of have to because this has to be...
Out of the ones that didn't succeed, Venezuela, who else succeeded?Chile succeeded for a while.Oh no, that was taken over by a military.Well, Venezuela is the big one.
Other than the ones that didn't succeed, the potential communist governments, Gonzalo's was the most threatening.So you'd have to imagine they took some interest, right?The CIA, you have to imagine, but I can't support that.
I don't know, but it's good to mention for context.
Yeah, I mean, I just assume anything that was happening in South America at that time, considering everything that was going on in Central America and South America, and they basically overthrew Allende in Chile.
And so, yeah, I mean, that's just, I think it's a good assumption.
I mean, I think that when... Like, yeah, the game theory of it is, Number one, would they have had the manpower to partake in messing around in Peru?Sure, of course.Number two, would they have had the time?Sure, absolutely.
It's the CIA, they got all the time in the world.And number three, would they have had the interest to?Absolutely.So, you know, it's possible.Do we want to do one more?There's one more that I think we want to do, yeah.
Is it going to be part five considering who the considering who like the biggest early inspiration of this person was?
I am going to.We could call this a new episode with remnants.We'll call this Hans Hermann Hoppe thought.Let's call it that.Well, I want to do an episode on Hans Hermann Hoppe.
Hans Hermann Hoppe thought as inspired by Habermas.
I was going to say marks directly, but yeah, absolutely.So what I what this is it for the listeners.We are wrapping up the series.I don't know for how long, maybe forever.Maybe we'll do it again soon.I don't know.
We'll figure it out at some point, but we are wrapping up on Hans-Hermann Hoppe. And I want to do Hans Hermann Hoppe the way I've done every single other thinker that we've done.
If you remember before we started Marxist, we'd actually just did thinkers instead of like people who killed millions of people.We're going to go back to people who haven't killed millions of people in the form of Hans Hermann Hoppe.
And I want to do a regular presentation of him, but there's going to be at least one section.
where i pull marks out of papa and we can because this i mean this isn't a very revolutionary concept is it jeff diced who writes about it or is it stefan cancela someone else cancela.
Cancela writes about it is great actually about all the areas where. Hoppe basically says Marx is right.
And so I want to, now that we've spent all our time trying to understand Marx, even though we did it from a political perspective, which is absolutely where Hoppe seems to disagree the most with Marx, I still want to talk about all the areas where we can take Marx and understand the Marx that's in Hoppe.
But also Hoppe is just a fascinating thinker and probably the only expressed capitalist that we're going to talk about.So that'll be very interesting.
Yeah, all the other ones were state capitalists, according to the Marxists.
That's right.Yes.That's right.That is actually crazy that I want that noted.Every single thinker that we've spoken about, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Foucault, Eliade, Evola, all of the Marxists.I know I'm missing one.Oh, Gramsci, all of them.
All of them hated capitalism.All of them said capitalism bad, capitalism evil, and here's what it is.Why?Because they're all using Marx's definition of capitalism.Maybe some redefinition occurs.Maybe a different definition entirely is being used.
Maybe we'll find out with the Hoppe episode.Because I think that that's pretty profound, is the only person that we're going to finally be speaking about who if you said the term capitalism, they'd be like, yes, very good.
So I think that's kind of profound.We'll see how that goes.
Yeah, I think covering Hoppa would be good.
And I think covering Hoppa with somebody yourself who does not consider himself to be a Hoppian or be a follower of Hoppa would probably be best because I have talked about Hoppa before, but I've talked about Hoppa with Hoppians, so.
Yeah, I'm going to present some, at the very end, I will this time present a few thoughtful arguments about Hoppa because I finished reading
a book of his already, Theory of Capitalism and Socialism, and I'm doing a tiny bit of Democracy of the God That Failed, although it seems to be a lot of the same stuff.
So I think I have a handle on it, and what's funny is, with a lot of these thinkers, except for the Marxists, which was a nice departure, when I read them, I end up going, oh yeah, I get it, I agree with that.
And I did that with Hoppe like extremely.Like to me, time preference, brilliant idea, the way he uses it to explain civilization, amazing stuff.
So I'm really excited to do it because I learned a lot, probably the most that I've learned of any thinker who I didn't come into already knowing, I learned the most about Hoppe.So I'm very happy and ready to do this one.
She read that section in The God That Failed that the history of like European monarchies from the late 1800s up until World War One.No, I'm just jumping through different keywords that section right there.
You really once you read that you and I actually talked with on this show with dice about it is you realize that. World War One was just basically a to get rid of monarchy, to get rid of monarchy in Europe and to institute democracy.
And yeah, and anyone who I think now that I said that, you could probably go, yeah, OK, yeah, well, that's Marx right there.I mean, you still had you still had monarchy.There was still monarchy, but they weren't they weren't old, old monarchs.
They weren't they became Parliamentary that's right.
Well, didn't we you just heard me say Gonzalo's even says the same thing, right?
So see this is the mark speaking through that idea is very Marxist the whole like The aristocracy ends up losing its but the Royals end up losing their power But the bourgeoisie becomes the preeminent Class in society by taking over those institutions.
Yeah, I mean, there's your there's little stuff like that Hopefully we can highlight
And it's true.I mean, it's once you once you examine it, it's true.Marx was right.Marx, the Marxists were right when they said that.
I mean, it's it's clear as day once you I mean, even if you read like the first couple of chapters of God that failed, you're just like, oh, my God, what they did, the way they set that up.
Oh, yeah.Yeah.Yeah.It's a it's a it was purposeful, too.
It was purposeful, too.I mean, yeah, no doubt.Yeah, it was purposeful.
Anyway, man, you want to talk about TLE and we'll get out of here.
I promised Steppy that the next time that I would be asked for plugs, I would simply say, I'm so tired of plugs.And so all I have to say is, I'm so tired of plugs.
what i do to present these you've really taken the illusion down pete is it used to be you and me voice only we would just do this like this now i gotta read what we said the screen so we got this going on so um this is really this is the last time we're gonna do for a while so let's get let's get maturity ever maybe ever well i mean we're gonna ever do
Well, I mean, on this, I mean, you know that I'm like not going to have a guest and I'm going to be like, Bird, I need someone last minute.Come on and talk about trees or something.
You need a tree guy.I got you.I can do that.I can definitely do that. So today we will be talking about the famous, really infamous Hans Hermann Hoppe.
Some haters who have not listened to previous episodes will say things like, why are you glossing over Hoppe's comments about gays or physical removal or other such things?
And to them, I say, I will speak about those as much as I did about Marx's consistent and repeated use of the N-word throughout various texts. and simply leave it at that.
I'd rather we talk about matters of substance, as we have for all the theorists.Respectfully, go fuck yourselves, and welcome to this episode on Hans-Hermann Hoppe.I give you a quote before we start that I think you'll really like, Pete.Sit on this.
From at-pwease-no.Watching half my muchies praise Hoppe and the other half mock Hoppe, and I'm still sitting here wondering that the guy said bananas a lot.Oh.
Let's begin with the famous quote from Hans Hermann Hoppe that I believe is going to set the tone for the journey, and it goes as follows.I have a banana.You want the banana.I am giving you the banana.You own the banana.
I can't think of a better way to intro the guy than that.I recommend everybody, I think most people know me getting into the episode, most people know me, what Hoppa believes and what I believe clash really consistently and frequently.
My point of me saying this is I am not a Hoppa defender, but I found myself defending Hoppa a lot in this.So let's give it a shot.Very early history.
Can we just interrupt for one second and to just let everyone know that you know Despite the meme you are real.
I Am a real person.That's right.
I'm not actually a bird either That's a weird thing people are like and they when we did the episode where we ate hot Peanuts for the death nut challenge people were like he's not a bird and they really meant that and I was like, I'm sorry I don't know what to tell you.
I'm sorry.I'm not a bird.
I Remember when me and Sal were sitting in Hop Kee in Chinatown, and they took the picture of us sitting there, and I posted it on my Twitter, and you're like, watch.Within a minute, somebody's going to do a birds aren't real.
And it was like 10 seconds.
Within 10 seconds yeah it's it's I hate and I everyone knows I hate birds aren't real.Cuz it's always said to me like I'm supposed to go good unique joke and anyway yeah so yeah. Early on, Hoppe is a left-winger.
He's attracted to Marxism because he says it provided him with a rigorous and deductively derived system that accepted standards of logic.
So the reason why he likes that is, he says, with deductive systems, it's easier to discover whether they deliver the promised goods or collapse.Of course, with Marxism, it collapses.
So he eventually becomes disillusioned by Marxism as a result of the work of Eugen Bamboverk, specifically his writing on the debunking of the theory of exploitation of Marxism, which Hoppe redoes and we'll get into.But before we do that, I want to
With most of these thinkers, especially with all of the Marxist thinkers we did, half of the episode was not about the person we were talking about, but about Marx.
Consequently, in this episode, I want to talk about the influences on Hoppe, really more than I want to talk about Hoppe.So Karl Popper is the first one, kind of a negative influence.Early on, he confronts the work of Karl Popper,
when he's still a social democrat.He credits Karl Popper as being essential in the development of his style of deductive argumentation.
Karl Popper, in order to distinguish his falsificationism from the verificationism of the Vienna Circle, prefers to label his philosophy critical rationalism.This is Hoppe speaking.To do so, however, is highly misleading, if not deceptive.
much like the common US practice of calling socialists or social democrats liberals.For in fact, Popper is in complete agreement with the fundamental assumptions of empiricism.See the following discussion at the end of the text.
You can go on, you can find this document online and check that all out.He explicitly rejects the traditional claims of rationalism, such as being able to provide us with a priori truth
empirical knowledge in general, and the objectively founded ethic in particular.He doesn't think it's capable of doing any of that.And very controversially he refers to Hopper as a skeptic.
He says there's no situation conceivable in which it would be reasonable to throw away any theory.
conceived of as a cognitive instrument of action that had been successfully applied in a past situation, but proves unaccessible in a new application, unless a new one is already, unless a new more successful theory is already at hand.
So Hoppe rebels in his own time against what he refers to as the popular doctrine of Karl Popper, whose popular version, that sentence was really hard to say, of the theory makes two kinds of scientific statements.So this is Popperian logic.
Two statements.The first kind are empirical statements.So these are the things that say something about the real world and what exists.
Statements like these, according to Popper, in principle have to be falsifiable by experience, meaning experience must show that the statement is false. All empirical statements must be falsifiable, at least in principle.
So the positivists, like Popper, claim there is nothing we can really know about reality with certainty.Everything that refers to reality is a hypothetical.And I do want to clarify, these are Hoppe's explanations of theories he doesn't agree with.
I stuck with Hoppe the whole way through.I didn't look up what Popper says about his own beliefs.I'm doing, this is what Hoppe presents to you and argues with.
The second type of statement is an analytical statement, which says nothing about reality at all, and rather is just a matter of a sign defining another sign.
An analytical statement, for example, is simply a sign like bachelor, referring to a sign like unmarried man.There's no cognitive content, they simply refer to one another.
To Hoppe, this implies that mathematical statements, or logical statements, or ontological statements, which are statements about things that are absolutely true, do not say anything about real phenomena.
What he's saying is, Popper's saying, things that are signs defining other signs don't say anything about reality.For instance, mathematics and logic have nothing to do with the real world, and we can know this for sure.
One of Hoppe's major criticisms with the view is his assertion that if this is the case, then there cannot be an ethic as a matter of universality or science.
Positivism and pauperism as a consequence can only have a system of ethics which is a matter of taste for the given time. So obviously Hoppe doesn't like that.There's some people who go, but if that's the case, then don't you have to work with that?
Hoppe doesn't like that.There's other arguments here about why he says this, but Hoppe is convinced that you need a universal ethic in order to reduce and ultimately get rid of conflict within society.
So having something that doesn't do that, unless it's contextual to the time, is useless.
The third thing that Hoppe says about a major tenet of pauperism is the idea that scientific knowledge is a matter of the principle of falsification rather than verification.
So, if A then B results in a confirmation, it doesn't result necessarily in a verification. So this swan is white does not mean all swans are white.And they discovered that when they discovered the black swan in Africa in like 1800s.
This was the proof actually they used to use was all swans are white.Well, they found black swans.And so now not all swans are white. If A does not result in B, if not all swans are white, then it is a falsification, but not necessarily a rejection.
Falsification only results in a reformulation of the hypothesis.It doesn't work out, so maybe we have to reformulate the question rather than abandoning the connection between A and B, rather than the rejection of the hypothesis.Something like,
Not all swans are white, maybe some swans are black, but all swans have beaks.
You know, you just find a new way to find a, you know, so rather it does not have anything definitely to show that A and B have nothing to do with one another, but only that we can tell they have nothing to do one another in the assumed states we've put them in.
So the central thesis of the positivists then is there is no knowledge of the world that is non-hypothetical. There's nothing that we can know about the world that does not require some sort of testing.So Hoppe makes arguments against this.
Statements about the real world that are not hypothetical.
First of all, he says, well, if we can find some statements about the world that are not hypothetical, then we've already dispensed with the first part of the argument, that all of them have to be non-hypothetical.So here's some other options.
No material thing can be in two places at once. That's a hypothetical, I mean, but it is demonstrable.No two objects can be in the same place at the same time, and no material thing can be in two places at once.The two opposite arguments.
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points.No two straight lines can enclose a space.And whatever object is green all over cannot be yellow all over.
So examples of where hypothetical statements are at hand, for example, children prefer McDonald's over Burger King.You would need to collect data as to whether or not it is the case, but to suggest the opposite would not immediately be nonsensical.
And so sometimes hypotheticals can be used to pursue truth.Another example would be Germans prefer Spain over Greece as a destination vacation, or other way around, to suggest the opposite, of course, is not necessarily nonsensical.
Until you get the data, you don't know. As it should be clear, there's a major difference in the character between hypothetical and non-hypothetical arguments.And there exists a long history of Marxists and positivists clashing with one another.
Consider the following.Does history have any regularities that can be scientifically known and used to foresee and shape the future?Marxism says yes, and positivism says no.
Let's talk about one such Marxist who plays a big role in the life of the young hopper Juergen Habermas.I know there's ten different ways to pronounce that name.
I'm gonna try Juergen Habermas Habermas Habermas We'll talk about him in discourse ethics
So Jürgen Habermas is one of the most influential philosophers in the world and one of the leading members of the post-war Frankfurt School, a social and critical philosophical movement that seeks to reformulate Marxism in the same way Lenin tried to after Marx's death.
Basically, after all of the classical Marxists die out, there's this a period of time where there are no new thinkers.
And so Habermas arises as one such neo-Marxist, that's how that term is used for everybody who's curious, is the post-Frankfurt School Marxists, who are still Marxists as opposed to what I contend Hoppe is, which is a post-Marxist, but we'll get to that.
Since this episode is about Hoppe... A bunch of people are just like,
Well, listen to this.I told Carl a little bit about my research before and there were some quotes from Hoppe that I'm gonna read to you where he was like, whoa, I didn't know that.Like, I stumped him on it.
So let's see if I can teach other people something about a guy they all already know, then great.
So, since this episode is on Hoppe, though of course Hoppermas should deserve his own episode, I do want to talk about the most prevalent intersections of the theory between Hoppermas and Hoppe.But a disclaimer first, for my own sake.
Habermas is frequently referred to, and he was in fact referred to this way in the interview that I read with Hans-Hermann Hoppe by the interviewer.Hoppe doesn't correct him, though he probably should have, because I know Hoppe knows the difference.
Habermas is referred to by many Austrian schoolers as a postmodernist.This is unequivocally incorrect.
In fact, Habermas has made a great deal of criticism against Michel Foucault, and the most prominent one being his idea of epistemological relativism.You've heard this before.Another name for the concept is factual relativism.You probably heard that.
This goes to... It's a massive oversimplification of the discourse, but it goes like this.Postmodernists claim that there's no such thing as universal truth, but this claim is in itself a universal truth. Now that is Habermas saying that to Foucault.
So we can dispense with the idea that Habermas is a postmodernist.He's a neo-Marxist.
So despite the fact that Habermas and his work deals largely in a field called hermeneutics, which is the interpretation of different forms of communication, whether they be written, verbal or otherwise, at his core, he remains an epistemic rationalist.
I'll get to explaining that. He says disciplines, this is Habermas, such as mathematics, geometry, possibly even economics, are not a matter of interpretation.They are non-hermeneutical.They are logical and rational.
Habermas detracts from the idea that there can be any a priori knowledge found in social sciences, and on this point, Hoppe innovates his own system where he believes he has found a priori science within social sciences.
The most prominent intersection between Habermas and Hoppe comes out of a starting point of Hoppe's innovation, the methodological approach called discourse ethics.Now please, I can't see the timestamp on here.
Note whatever timestamp this is, because I wrote this in my thing, because I tried to explain this to myself three or four times and I'm only kind of confident that I know what I'm explaining here.
So listeners, note this and go back if you don't get it, because I promise I didn't get it and I still am not sure. Jürgen Habermas, alongside Carl Otto Appel, are the originators of the theory of discourse ethics.
Discourse ethics is an attempt to explain the universal nature of morality by evoking the universal obligations set forth by communicative rationality.I'll explain.
It is an epistemic moral theory, meaning it is the justification for a valid moral norm made in fact.The statement is, Things should be this way and things are this way.Habermas wants the should and are comparisons put together.
You know, people say you should act this way or you are acting this way.Those are two different kinds of statements.Habermas seeks to bring the two together with this.
Habermas maintains that normative validity cannot be separated from the argumentative procedures that are used to resolve issues of the legitimacy of actions and the validity of norms that govern interactions.
Basically, validity of a moral norm cannot be justified in the mind of an isolated individual reflecting on the world.The validity of a norm is justified only intersubjectively, and processes of argumentation between individuals in a dialectic.
The validity of a claim to normative rightness depends on the mutual understanding achieved by the individuals in the argument.
Habermas extracts moral principles from the necessities forced upon individuals engaged in discursive justification of validity claims, from the inescapable presuppositions of communication and argumentation.
These presuppositions were the kind of idealizations that individuals had to make in order to communicate and argue even to begin with.
Habermas writes down the rules of argumentation and gives us a rubric for what can be considered legitimate argumentation. Participants in communicative exchange are using the same linguistic expressions in the same way.
No relevant argument is suppressed or excluded by the participants.No force except that of the better argument is exerted, and all the participants are motivated only by the concern for a better argument.
There are a few more presuppositions of what a discourse is.So that was what an argument has to be.This is what a discourse is.The presupposition that everyone would agree to a universal validity of the claim, thematized.
So you can't go, you can't have a conversation about something if you don't accept the presuppositions behind it in the first place.
The presupposition that everyone capable of speech and action is entitled to participate, and everyone is equally entitled to introduce new topics or express attitudes, needs, or desires.
And finally, the presupposition that no validity claim is exempt in principle from critical evaluation in argumentation.
So basically arguments and discourses need to be open, they cannot have restrictions on what is said or who gets to participate in them, in order for them to be a discourse.
The point of a discourse is it's an open environment that basically reacts to the things happening in it.If you close a discourse, it stops being a discourse and it becomes a script or something that isn't open and free to change over time.
So these are all at the center of Habermas's moral theory.
Habermas's discourse ethics attempts to distill an idealized moral point of view that accompanies a perfectly rational process of argumentation, which would be the moral principle implied by the presuppositions listed above.
So everything you just heard, that is the extent of Habermas's morality. All of those things.That if you want to advance, you have to participate in moral argumentation, and that should dictate all of your behavior.
Which, again, you can start to hear, if you know Hapa, you can start to hear where Hapa comes out in this, and I'll get back to that.The presuppositions of communication express a universal obligation to maintain impartial judgment in discourse.
You can't have communication unless you oblige yourself to participate the right way in communication. From this, Habermas extracts the following principle of universalization, which is the condition that every valid norm has to fulfill.
A norm cannot be unless it is a universal norm.All affected by the norm can accept the consequences and side effects
that general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone's interests and the consequences are preferred to those known alternative possibilities for regulation.
It might not make sense now, think about argumentation ethics and we will get back to that.This is the same idea.In other words, when a dilemma is faced, those involved have to gather and try to talk it out.
The discussion is constrained by two basic limits.Conversation must be reasonable and civil, and the goal is a peaceful and consensual resolution.As long as these ideals control what we say, we can call them ethically respectable.
So it is precisely those ideals which Hans-Hermann Hoppe notices and digs into in his theory of property rights, a theory which stems foundationally from argumentation ethics.
But, in the somewhat reverse-ordered way, I want to put argumentation ethics on the back burner and come back to it.It was only after his encounters and influence with Habermas that Hoppe becomes disillusioned with Marxism.
Eugen von Bawerk's critique of exploitation theory, as I said, fuels it and by 1990, Hoppe applies his knowledge of Bomboverk, he does it before this, but this is probably the best work that I read on it from my little cursory glance of it.
He engages with his knowledge of Bomboverk, Mises and Rothbard, three big influences, he makes some very interesting engagements with what he calls hardcore Marxism.This is the part where I got Carr that I thought was very interesting.
So Marx and exploitation.Marxism is a theory that comes out of a presupposition about exploitation in labor. We can all basically understand that.
In his short text, and I recommend everyone read it, it's 15 pages, it's very good, although the text is tight.He's a great writer.Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis, the name of it, Hoppe writes at the outset.
I want to do the following in this paper.First, to present the thesis that constitute the hard core of the Marxist theory of history, I claim that all of them are essentially correct.
Then I will show how these true theses are derived in Marxism from a false starting point. Finally, I will demonstrate how Austrianism and the Mises-Rothbardian tradition can give a correct but categorically different explanation for their validity.
It's really interesting.For a long time, if you would have told me that Hans Hoppe said something like, Marxism is essentially correct, but derived from a false starting point, I would have been like, I don't even know what that means.
It doesn't make sense.But now we start to see the post-Marxism come out.So before we do that, let's hear his explanation of the Marxist belief system.He outlines five beliefs of Marxists.We've done many episodes on Marxists.
You can tell these are pretty good.He knows what he's talking about. Number one, the history of mankind is the history of class struggle.It is the history of struggles between a relatively small ruling class and a larger class that is exploited.
The primary form of exploitation is economic.The ruling class expropriates part of the productive output of the exploited, or as Marxists say, it appropriates a social surplus product and uses it for its own consumptive purposes.
The ruling class is unified by its common interest in upholding its exploitative position and maximizing its exploitatively appropriated surplus product.It never deliberately gives up power or exploitation income.
Instead, any loss in power or income must be wrestled away from it through struggles, whose outcome ultimately depends on class consciousness of the exploited.
on whether or not, and to what extent, the exploited are aware of their own status and are consciously united with other class members in common opposition to exploitation.
Class rule manifests itself primarily in specific arrangements regarding the assignment of property rights or, in Marxist terminology, in specific relations of production.
In order to protect these arrangements or productive relations, the ruling class forms and is in command of the state as the apparatus of compulsion and coercion.
The state enforces and helps reproduce a given class structure through the administration of a system of class justice.It assists in the creation and the support of an ideological superstructure designed to lend legitimacy to an existence of class.
4.Internally, the process of competition within a ruling class generates a tendency towards increasing concentration and centralization.A multipolar system of exploitation is gradually supplanted by an oligarchic or monopolistic one.
Fewer and fewer exploitation centers remain in operation, and those that do are increasingly integrated into a hierarchical order.
And externally, for example, within the international system, this internal centralization process will, in parentheses, the more intensively and the more advanced it is, lead to imperialist interstate wars and the territorial expansion of exploitative rule.
5.Finally, with the centralization and expansion of exploitative rule gradually approaching its ultimate limit of world domination, class rule will increasingly become incompatible with the further development and improvement of productive forces.
Economic stagnation and crises become more and more characteristic and create the objective conditions for the emergence of a revolutionary class consciousness of the exploited.
The situation becomes ripe for the establishment of a classless society, the withering of the state, the replacement of a government of men over men, by the administration of things, and as a result, unheard of economic prosperity."
And this is where I laughed, and this is where Carr was like, like, what?Hoppe writes, "...all of these theses are perfectly justifiable, as I will show.
Unfortunately, however, it is Marxism which subscribes to all of them, and has done more than any other ideological system to discredit their validity by deriving them from a patently absurd theory of exploitation. I love that.
He's like, I'm the real Marxist.All five of those things, I believe.And it's the Marxists who get the starting point wrong.
And that blew my mind because it's, you never, Murray Rothbard would never have said such a thing about Karl Marx because he didn't believe that about Karl Marx.
And it's a very unique aspect of Hoppe that we can get back to later that there might be more comparisons and conversations to be had between Marxists and Hoppians than either group would like to admit.
Anyway, according to Marx, pre-capitalist systems are characterized by exploitation.Hoppe does not argue with this.Slavery and feudalism are surely systems of exploitation. where the laborer cannot be said to gain from his enslavement or servitude.
Rather, he is reduced in his own utility at the expense of an increase in wealth appropriated by the slave master.The interests of the slave and slave master are indeed antagonistic.So, right now, Hoppe completely agrees with Marx's history.
So far, the antagonistic classes clashing in the way that they do.The same is true of the interests of the feudal lord, he writes, who extracts a land rent from a peasant who works on homesteaded land.The lord's gains are the peasant's losses.
It is also undisputed that slavery as well as feudalism hamper the development of productive forces.Neither slave nor serf will be as productive as he would be without slavery or serfdom.
So let us dispense right now of any argument that Hans Hermann Hoppe is a feudalistic monarchist. This is a ridiculous thing.
He comes out right there and says feudalism is a type of slavery, and it doesn't work, and obviously then we must think about monarchism, as he would use the term, in a very different way, and not allude to like a weird 12th century way of living that we think Hans Hermann Hoppe wants, which he clearly does not.
Get that out of the way. This one is really funny too.Hoppe notes that the problem with this theory, all of the theories of history, is that the erroneous idea that nothing has changed in regard to exploitation under capitalism.
Hoppe agrees with chapter 25 of Marx's modern theory of colonialism, and states that Marx is generally correct, and that there can be no quarrel with labeling such capitalism as exploitative.
So Hoppe comes out and says, yes, capitalism can be exploitative.
It is when it uses the state, and I'll explain the class analysis in more detail after this, it's when we use the state to take things from other people, precisely when capitalism can become exploitative.
Another thing that you don't hear Hoppians really say, you mostly hear them say, that's not real capitalism.And Hoppe does a little bit of that, but he never says real, he calls it clean capitalism, which is a term that I like a lot more.
It might be surprising to hear that from some people, other than Stephan Kinsella, who to his credit is the biggest source that I used in this whole thing, and he's always elucidated this aspect of Hoppe's theory, and in fact he's probably the only one who's ever touched on this that I know of, maybe Jeff Deist has at times too, so credit to those guys for engaging in this the way that they do.
Yet one should be aware of the fact that here Marx is performing a trick, Hoppe cautions us, in engaging in historical investigations and arousing the reader's indignations at the brutalities underlying the formation of many capitalist fortunes,
he actually sidesteps the issue at hand, evading the fact that his thesis is really an entirely different one, namely that even under clean capitalism, so to speak, a system in which original appropriation of capital was the result of nothing but homesteading, work, and savings, the capitalist who hired labor to be employed with this capital would nonetheless be engaged in exploitation.
Indeed, Marx considered the proof of this thesis his most important contribution to economic analysis.
His proof of the exploitative character of a clean capitalism consists of the observation that the factor prices, in particular the wages paid to laborers by the capitalist, are lower than the output prices.
The laborer, for instance, has paid a wage that represents consumption goods that can be produced in three days.But he actually works five days for his wage and produces an output of consumption goods that exceeds what he receives in remuneration.
The output of two extra days, the surplus value in Marxist terminology, is appropriated by the capitalist.Hence, according to Marx, there is exploitation. So what is wrong with that analysis?
The answer becomes obvious once it is asked why the laborer would possibly agree to such an arrangement.
He agrees because his wage payment represents present goods, while his own labor services represent only future goods, and he values present goods more highly.
After all, he could decide not to sell his labor services to the capitalist and then reap the, in quotes, full value of his output himself, which is a very snide thing that I don't like that he said it that way, but he's not wrong.
But this would, of course, imply that he would have to wait longer for any consumptive goods to become available to him.
In selling his labor services, he demonstrates that he prefers a smaller amount of consumption goods now over a possibly larger one at some future date.On the other hand, why would the capitalist want to strike a deal with the laborer?
Why would he want to advance present goods, money, to the laborer in exchange for services that bear fruit only later? Obviously, he would not want to pay out, for instance, $100 now if he were to receive the same amount one year's time.
In that case, why not simply hold on to it for one year and receive the extra benefit of actually having command over it the whole time?
Instead, he must expect to receive a larger sum than $100 in the future in order to give up $100 now in the form of wages paid to the laborer.We're understanding where this is going.
He's constrained by time preference, the fact that an actor invariably prefers earlier over later goods, in yet another way.
For if one can obtain a larger sum in the future by sacrificing a smaller one at the present, why then is the capitalist not engaged in more saving than he actually is?
Why does he not hire more laborers than he does, if each one of them promises additional return?The answer again should be obvious, because the capitalist is a consumer too, and cannot help being one.
The amount of his savings and investing is restricted by the necessity that he too, like the laborer, requires a supply of present goods, large enough to secure the satisfaction of all those wants
the satisfaction of which during the waiting time is considered more urgent than the advances which is still greater lengthening in a period of time production could provide.
What is wrong with Marx's theory of exploitation, then, is that he does not understand the phenomenon of time preference as a universal category of human action.
That the laborer does not receive his full worth has nothing to do with exploitation, but merely reflects the fact that it is impossible for man to exchange future goods against present ones except at a discount.
Unlike the case of slave and slave master, where the latter benefits at the expense of the former, the relationship between the free laborer and the capitalist is a mutually beneficial one.
The laborer enters the agreement because, given his time preference, he prefers a smaller amount of present goods over a larger future one.
The capitalist enters it because, given his time preference, he has a reverse preference order and ranks a larger future fortune of goods more highly than a smaller present one.These interests are not antagonistic, but harmonious.
So that'll get us into his class theory, which is very much like Marx's class theory, except completely flipped behind.Any questions?
I was just going to mention the time preference.I mean, a lot of people give that to Hoppe.But I mean, really, like Bert will be like, if I drop, I love dropping time preference when it comes to labor theory of value.
And Bert will come in and he'll be like, you just dropped the bomb, Bauerk. That's where yeah, it was bomb I work who it really brought that forward and hop and just perfected it So there you go.
So there's and that's funny I didn't write that in there but that is where the intersection of bombard Rothbard who do present different things and Habermas all come together this weird collection of things that that hopper represents all right, so
If Marx's theory of capitalist exploitation and his ideas on how to end exploitation and establish universal prosperity are false, to the point of being ridiculous, it is clear that any theory of history that can be derived from it must also be false.
Or if it should be correct, it must have been derived incorrectly.
Instead of going through the lengthy task of explaining all the flaws in the Marxist argument as it sets out its theory of capitalist exploitation and ends with the theory of history that I described earlier, this is Hoppe, I will take a shortcut.
I will now outline the briefest possible way the correct, that is the Austrian, Misesian, Rothbardian, crazy names he uses, theory of exploitation, give an explanatory sketch of how this theory makes sense out of the class theory of history,
and highlight along the way some key differences between class theory and the Marxist one and also point out some intellectual affinities between Austrianism and Marxism that stem from the common conviction that there does indeed exist something like exploitation and a ruling class.
So that is, he says, I'm doing this because both of us agree on that.So let's figure out how I can grapple with this.So, however,
As Hoppe explains, there's no such relationship as that of the slave and the slave owner, or the serf and the feudal lord, in clean capitalism.
So there has to be... The slave has no control over his body, and he works for the owner, and the feudal lord has no control over his property, which is homesteaded, and he works for the lord.
So where is the exploitation that can be found in clean capitalism? the recognition or the non-recognition of the homesteading principle.
So, everyone has exclusive control over his body and acts in accordance with a principle of homesteading, then exploitation cannot exist.That is how he falsifies it.Let's see if we can find it from the back.
It is logically absurd, Hoppe says, to claim that a person who homesteads goods not previously homesteaded by anyone else, or whom employs such goods in the production of future goods, or who saves presently homesteaded or produced goods in order to increase the future supply of goods, could be exploiting anybody.
Instead, exploitation takes place whenever any deviation from this principle occurs.
Exploitation occurs when a person successfully claims partial or full control over scarce resources that he has not homesteaded, saved, or produced, or that he has not acquired contractually from a previous producer-owner.
Needless to say, exploitation thus defined is in fact an integral part of human history, he writes.
One can acquire and increase wealth either through homesteading, producing, saving, contracting, or by expropriating homesteaders, producers, savers, and contractors.There's no other ways. Both methods are natural to mankind, he writes.
Alongside homesteading, producing, and contracting, there have always been non-productive and non-contractual property acquisitions.
The ruling class, which may again be internally stratified, is initially composed of members of such an exploitation firm.
and with the ruling class established over a given territory and engaging in the expropriation of economic resources from a class of exploited producers, the center of all history indeed becomes the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited.
History then, correctly told, is essentially the history of the victories and defeats of the rulers in their attempt to maximize exploitatively appropriated income and of the rule in their attempts to resist and reverse that tendency.
So Hoppe remarks about the intellectual affinity between Austrians and Marxists in historical investigation.Both oppose a historiography that recognizes only action or interaction.Both of them
Reject the idea that those things are economically and morally on par.
Both oppose a historiography that adopts value neutral stands, like thinking one's own arbitrarily introduced subjective value judgments have anything to do with the historical narrative.They both reject that.
Rather, history has to be told in terms of freedom and exploitation, parasitism and economic impoverishment, private property and its destruction, otherwise it is told falsely.So this is very interesting.
It's inverted Marxism in a lot of ways in the way that Hoppe thinks about it.
While productive enterprises come and go, he writes, because of voluntary support or absence of voluntary support, a ruling class does not come into power because there is a demand for it, nor does it abdicate when abdication is demonstrably demanded.
One cannot say by any stretch of the imagination that homesteaders, producers, savers, and contractors have demanded their own expropriation. they must be coerced into accepting it.
And this proves conclusively that the exploiting firm is not in demand at all.Nor can one say a ruling class can be brought down by abstaining from transactions with it in the same way that one can bring down a productive enterprise.
For the ruling class acquires its income through non-productive and non-contractual transactions, and thus is unaffected by boycotts.
Rather, what makes the rise of an exploitation firm possible, and what can alone bring it down, is the specific state of public opinion, or, in Marx's terminology, a specific state of class consciousness.
Again, it's funny, he's like, I'm going to use this word, but the Marxists call it this.So he's just saying, I should be calling it this, but because all of you are going to be like, we're not Marxists, I'm going to call it something else.
It's funny how he really knows his audience very well.Hoppe agrees with Marx that competition within the ruling class, such as the class, well, the ruling class being the class that gains well through non-productive and non-contractual means.
brings about a tendency towards increasing centralization.We talked about that.However, again, he finds issue with Marx's understanding placed squarely on Marx's exploitation theory.Marxism sees such a tendency as inherent in capitalist competition.
Yet it is precisely so long as people are engaged in a clean capitalism that competition is not a form of zero-sum interaction.A homesteader, the producer, the saver, the contractor, don't gain out of another's expense.
Their gains either leave another's physical possessions completely unaffected, or they actually imply mutual gains, as in the case of all contractual exchanges.
Capitalism thus can account for increases in absolute wealth, but under its regime, no systematic tendency towards relative concentration can be said to exist. An exploiter creates victims, and the victims are potential enemies.
It is possible that this resistance can be lastingly broken down by force.However, more than force is needed to expand exploitation over a population many times its own size.For this to happen, a firm must also have public support.
a majority of the population must accept the exploitative actions as legitimate.
This acceptance can range from active enthusiasm to passive resignation, but it must be acceptance in the sense that a majority have given up on the idea of actively or passively resisting any attempt to enforce non-productive and non-contractual property acquisitions.
The class consciousness must be low, undeveloped, and vague.Only as long as the state of affairs lasts is there room for an exploitative firm to prosper, even if no actual demand for it exists.
Only if, and insofar as the exploited and expropriated develop a clear idea of their own situation and are united with other members of their class,
through an ideological movement that gives expression to the idea of a classless society where all exploitation is abolished, can the power of the ruling class be broken?
Only if and insofar as a majority of the exploited public becomes consciously integrated into such a movement and accordingly displays a common outrage over all non-productive and non-contractual property acquisitions, shows a common contempt for everyone who engages in such acts, and deliberately contributes nothing to help make them successful,
Can its power be brought to crumble?"That whole thing right there, and I'm not done, but that whole thing right there is Hoppe's theory of the withering of the state.That is Hoppe's Leninism coming out right there.
How can we actually make it crumble?Well, in very much the same way Marx says, only we got the classes wrong.
It's not the capitalists who we actually work with to advance our own best interests, it's those who allow for illegitimate acquisitions of property.The state.This is how you get the anarcho in the capitalism.
Everybody always goes, they're contradictions.Not when you read this. If you accept clean capitalism as a different form and you're not Noam Chomsky who says all capitalism is statism, same way they're around, then you can get both parts out of that.
So that was very enlightening to me.Now that we understand Hoppe's Austrian class theory, which upholds the Marxian dialectical binary, we have to explore one more of Hoppe's biggest influences.
And I referenced argumentation ethics before as it was related to discourse ethics, but there's also one other methodology that we have to touch on that we've been touching on the whole time.
And in order to best understand Hoppe's intellectual genealogy, where he came from and how he thinks, we have to talk about praxeology.
It is the dual application of two non-contradictory methodologies, praxeology and discourse ethics, that form the root of Hoppean theory.
Murray Rothbard writes, Praxia, and this is your first Murray Rothbard quote on the show, by the way, from me, at least. Praxeology is a distinctive methodology of the Austrian school.
The term was first applied to the Austrian method by Ludwig von Mises, who was not only the major architect and elaborator of this methodology, but also the economist who most fully and successfully applied it under the construction of economic theory.
He's still writing, Praxeology rests on the fundamental axiom that individual acts individual humans act.That is, on the primordial fact that individuals engage in a conscious action towards chosen goals.
This concept of action contrasts with the purely reflexive or knee-jerk behavior, which is not directed towards goals. The praxeological method spins out by verbal deduction the logical implications of that primordial fact.
In short, praxeological economics is the structure of logical implications of the fact that individuals act. Let us consider some of the immediate implications of the action axiom.
Action implies that the individual's behavior is purposeful, in short, that it is directed towards a goal.Furthermore, the fact that his action implies that he has consciously chosen certain means to reach his goals.
Since he wishes to attain these goals, they must be valuable to him.Accordingly, he must have values that govern his choices.
That he employs means implies that he believes that he has the technological knowledge to certain means that will achieve his desired goals.
Let us note that Praxeology does not assume that a person's choice of values or goals is wise or proper or that he has chosen the technically correct method of reaching them.
All that Praxeology asserts is that an individual actor adopts goals and beliefs, whether erroneously or correct, that he can arrive at them by the employment of certain means.
Praxeology, again, in short, Praxeology is the assertion that an aspect of human behavior, or what it means to be human, is that a person has values, goals, and therefore a value system, and a means by which he seeks to achieve them.
Whether or not he can is not part of it, only whether or not he believes he can.All action in the real world, furthermore, must take place through time.
All action takes place in some present and is directed towards the future, immediate or remote, attainment of an end. If all of a person's desires could be instantaneously realized, then there would be no reason for him to act at all.
Furthermore, that a man acts implies that he believes action will make a difference.In other words, he will prefer the state of affairs resulting from action to that of no action.
Action, therefore, implies that man does not have omniscient knowledge of the future, for if he had such knowledge, no action of his would make any difference.Hence, action implies that we live in a world of an uncertain or not fully certain future.
Accordingly, we amend our analysis of action to say that man chooses to employ means according to a technological plan in the present because he expects to arrive at some goals in the future.
Very interestingly in there, if you didn't hear it, is his idea... that human action and praxeology means that we live in an uncertain future, which is quite the opposite of the Marxist understanding of the future, which is quite certain.
It's only how we get there that is uncertain.So you can see another unique aspect of Hoppe where he blends those two things together and Rothbard agrees with him.
So it's very interesting that even Hoppe manages to convince Rothbard of argumentation ethics using those two types of theories. The theory of Rothbard's, and it might not be Rothbard's directly, this is called demonstrated preference.
A man's actual choices in action indicate the praxeological nature of his actions.Can you hear the echoes of Rothbard and Hoppe?The area where it becomes most clear is in the discussion of time preference.
For me, where Hoppe says, time preference is a universal category of human action.
The fact is, time preference, which when used by Austrians and specifically Hoppe, is derived from the praxeological observation of human behavior universally, known as demonstrated preference.
Forms the basis, this forms the whole basis of Hoppe's sociopolitical theory, and it also happens to be the exact point that Hoppe uses to debunk the presuppositional stance of Marxism on exploitation.I repeat,
What is wrong with Marx's theory of exploitation then is that he does not understand that the phenomenon of human preference is a universal category of human action.
That the laborer does not receive his full worth has nothing to do with exploitation, but merely reflects the fact that it is impossible for a man to exchange future goods against present ones, except at a discount.
So to Hoppe, clean capitalism does not result in exploitation.And it would be nonsensical to suggest that it does because at its basis, the laborer demonstrates his preference towards the capitalist over working for himself.
He prefers to take a wage today because he believes that his wage will get him more than what he could get on his own.The snide comment that Hoppe makes about, well, you don't have to work for the worker.
Use yourself and your own labor 100% and get what you want from it.But he's right.To Hoppe, a situation where the laborer chooses the capitalist is not exploitation.It is a natural consequence of individual human action.
It is a matter of a choice made by a laborer, taking into account his time preference.Let's get to argumentation ethics, the crux of everything for him, the beginning of all of his thoughts we'll do at the end.
Now we understand discourse ethics and praxeology.We have acquired the tools necessary to understanding how Hoppe arrives at argumentation ethics backwards.
For Hoppe, he is seeking to do what sounds utterly contradictory, from a Marxist base where Marx is essentially correct, a retooling of the concept of exploitation that utterly warps and yet totally clarifies many of Marxism's other major tenets.
We have to realize one thing about American libertarianism. It is totally dominated by Lockean presuppositions and theories.
Argumentation ethics was not met with praise or applause by most libertarians when Hoppe originally formulated it, and it is not in any sense a popular theory among most American libertarians.
Its adoption is irrelevant to its content, but I figured it would be interesting to shed some light on the undividedness of American, or rather, the dividedness of American libertarians, even on core methodological approaches.
So this is a quote from Hoppe. It has been a common quarrel with the natural rights position.Thank you, Stefan Kinsella, for this quote, by the way.If he hears this, he's going to be like, I wrote that.
It has been a common quarrel with the natural rights position, even on the part of sympathetic readers, that the concept of human nature is far too diffuse and varied to provide a determinate set of contents of natural law.
Furthermore, its description of rationality is totally ambiguous because it In that it does not seem to distinguish between the role of reason in establishing empirical laws of nature on the one hand, and normative laws of human conduct on the other.
In the traditional Lockean and later natural rights conception of self-ownership, we are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights that are self-evident, or a priori.
The argument by Hans Hermann Hoppe, a modern proponent of argumentation ethics, goes that an individual cannot consistently logically deny in the course of argumentation any of those things which the argument presupposes.
Doing so performs a performative contradiction, going all the way back to Habermas. Hoppe notes that since scarcity exists, conflicts arise over the use of rivalrous goods between different agents.
Agents can then choose to resolve their conflicts in a non-violent way by engaging in argumentation.
Agents can then choose to resolve their conflicts, therefore presupposed in the act of argumentation are norms contingent with a goal of non-violent conflict resolution.
Hoppe then argues that since argumentation requires the active use of one's body, All universal norms for resolving conflicts over the human body, aside from full self-ownership, are inconsistent with argumentation.
Hoppe states that if argumentation praxeologically presupposes the norm that both the speaker and the listener are allowed to engage and exercise exclusive control over their respective physical bodies in order to settle a disagreement,
then it follows that propositions propounded by such argumentation cannot contradict that same norm without falling into performative contradictions between actions and words.Again, this was not without controversy.
Murray Rothbard, Walter Bloch, Stephan Kinsella all go on to defend the theory.Bob Murphy and Roger Glong have rejected the theory and it remains a very contentious topic generally.The final thing we have to talk about very briefly is covenants.
because this is where he falls into what Murray Rothbard has a good term for that we'll get into later.The last thing we need to briefly touch on are the covenant communities.Now, we have a partially separated Hoppian theory from Marxism.
It has very strong roots, but of course it's only a jumping off point for Hoppe.And much more American libertarianism has been influenced and put into that system than the original continental theory that Hoppe comes from.
We can talk about the end result of a system of argumentation ethics, a private property society governed under private law structures.
The market specialty is producing things that people want, and certainly this is true of conditions like community and order. A main means of achieving them is the right of exclusion, which in a market economy, property owners can always exercise.
This allows owners to keep up their value of their property and to encourage civilized behavior. Part of the terrible trend of modern government has been to trample on the right of exclusion.That is essentially what civil rights law does.
Employers cannot hire or fire as they see fit, teachers cannot kick students out of school, businesses must accommodate customers who are detrimental to the long-term interest of the firm, and in light of this, cultural decay and rotten behavior are to be expected.
Even the right of parents to be the ultimate judge of their own household is under attack. The covenant is a crucial market institution that affirms the right to exclude.
Groups of people, usually with one founder, lay out all sorts of rules which all people who are part of the group must adhere to.
The ultimate owner determines the rules based on consent, and there are competitive markets for covenantial property arrangements themselves, offering varying degrees of strictness.
So again, this is the biggest controversy that Hopper runs into because this leads into, well then how do you get the people out who you don't like and what kinds of people.
So again, these are all things, alright go fuck yourself, you deal with it, you talk about it yourself, I'm not here to, you know what I mean, I'm not here to say if it's right or wrong but it is the basis of his theory.
This is where the biggest controversy really begins, and Murray Rothbard refers to a tendency known as Hoppe-phobia.
Quote, Although he's an amiable man personally, Hoppe's written work seems to have the remarkable capacity to send some readers up the wall, blood pressure soaring, muttering and chewing the carpet.It is not impolite attacks on critics that does it.
Perhaps the answer is Hoppe's logical and deductive mode of thought and writing, demonstrating the truth of his propositions and showing that those who differ are often trapped in self-contradiction.
To Hoppe and many other libertarians, especially within the Austrian tradition, a monopoly doesn't imply a big participation on certain markets, but when there is a lack of business freedom to enter a certain market or produce certain goods or services, we can see the current moving towards monopoly.
And you can see that in services like law.
Under this perspective, monopolies can't appear, at least by definition, on a completely free market since they are always the result of some state policy that bans some kind of competition on the market or subsidizes competitors with certain markets.
Coercive monopolies are detrimental to consumers since prices go up and quality tends to go down.
Similar to Rothbard, it's Hoppe who conjectures that if services now provided by the government could be provided by free market private insurances and law agencies, they would do a better job providing protection and resolving disputes more peacefully than what happens under the current monopoly of the state.
So there is so much more that we could probably talk about Hans-Hermann Hoppe.It's undeniable that Hoppe represents a unique fusion of ideas that would otherwise have been totally foreign to libertarianism.
And besides, again, Stephan Kinsella, very few people have touched on a variety of influences that inform Hoppe's work, as well as potentially bridging the communication and opening it up to Marxists and other groups that we could have dialogues with.
Hoppe has more in common with his perceived enemies than we have been led to believe. by everyone other than Hans-Hermann Hoppe, evidently, because he's the one who suggests in his writing.Marx is right about a lot.
And it seems like the people who come after him all want to say that he didn't say that.It's right there.An area which I have neglected to mention is a main thesis within Democracy, The God That Failed.
That is, the dynastic monarch is more like the owner of a country than a president or other democratically elected official.It's an interesting argument, and I think it's massively overblown by Hoppe's detractors.
And there's that so you agree with that is that what you're saying i don't know but i think. I mean, I don't know if I agree with it or not.He says that's what he believes.So yeah, I agree with it.
I mean, I don't think that it's a great society necessarily, but it's what he believes.
And I certainly think, as I said before, he is not a hereditary monarch, maybe, but he's not a serfdom supporter, which seems to be like if you find a monarchist, a real monarchist supports
serfdom because serfdom is a consequence of monarchy, real monarchy, real old-school monarchy, where the king is the only legitimate landowner.Of course that would be the case.But, you know, Hoppe doesn't believe this.
Hoppe says monarchy in probably the same way that Curtis Yarvin says monarchy in the original Greek sense, monarchy, just one leader. It doesn't imply all of the dynastic and nobility and nothing like that.So I don't personally agree with it.
And being at least postmodernist sympathetic, I don't agree with a lot of what I just read to you, but it's good stuff.And it is a legitimate advancement on Marxism.
Well, it seems that the whole thing about monarchy is what Yarvin calls formalism.It's knowing knowing who to shoot.Yeah, if things go bad, but but it's also the person who owns everything, who has a has a stake in all of it.
And that's, that's kind of what when you read democracy, the guy that failed, you're getting at would be a most like an ideal monarch. Because you're not right.Yeah, there's no monarch.
There's gonna be it's like a monarch on paper.It's this is how it should function Correct.
Yeah, so and that's I think that that's when We are been start saying that would be like a perfect example of anarcho-capitalism because you you'd have millions of monarchs who would own yeah, yeah and have total control over what they owned and No, and no one else could tell them what they wanted it what they could do with it
Yup.Yeah, it is.I was really pleasantly surprised by Hoppa because I grew up on Twitter over the past four or five years in the current of like Hopper haterdom, which was very popular around the time Dave Smith interviewed Christopher Cantwell.
It was around that very same time, not that I'm saying there's necessarily a relation, but I just remember that period of time was where libertarianism started to tear just slightly.
And though Dave is a real hit maker, I don't know if he caused the tear.Maybe he did, maybe he didn't.But that's when I got in and I was looking around and going, oh wow, these people don't really like Hoppe.
People don't trust him, people think that he's a... entryist, things like that.And then I actually read Hoppe months ago, and then for this, and I was very pleasantly surprised that it lines up more along the lines with most theories than not.
Continental theory, Hoppianism is absolutely something I think you can grapple with the general trend of continental theory.I think you could have been a Marxist and became a Hoppian.
I think you could be a Hoppian and become a Marxist, and I wouldn't be too surprised one way or the other.
I mean, I know which one I prefer of the two, but they are very closely related, mainly because both of them choose to see the world as exploiter versus exploited in a class sense, that these groups work together to do that thing, that ultimately there's some kind of class consciousness, some universal set of essences and values that the classes represent, that they're all acting out, which is different from the cathedral, and which is different from autonomously self-assembling
power structures, which is something like Nick Land or Deleuze would say exist in society.But it is good.And it is post neo-Marxism, right?It is after Habermas.It's what can we do now that Habermas had his influence?
We need to keep moving with theory.It doesn't stay stagnant, you know?So I appreciate Hoppe for that.And more than other libertarian thinkers, and I struggle to think of libertarian philosophers outside of michael schwammer really
I struggle to think of many outside of Hoppe and humor who aren't derivatives of Hoppe or humor, who are alive.And that's not an offense to anybody to say it's sometimes a slow moving thing, libertarianism.
And we're starting to see libertarianism move into the postmodern, which I really am excited about because I think I can make influences there.
But we are moving and it's nice to see that Hoppe is an undeniable part of libertarianism's advancement towards theories that make sense for right now and today, which is something that LP people would not give to him.
It's something that a lot of American libertarians are not willing to give to Hoppe, but I am.So, I've done it.Go fuck yourself.That's the third one.
What's funny is I didn't listen to this today because we were We were gonna do this.I just happened to come across it today and I'm like, I'm gonna listen to it as a Speech version of what must be done then.
Yes the hopper that hopper has and I thought you mean Lennon didn't you mean Lennon cuz Lennon wrote a similar didn't he name of Lennon have the same name to it?
Well, I remember and remember.Okay, so yeah.Okay.And Democracy, the God that failed.Was there another book that sounded like that?It came out in 1950 called the God that failed.
That was a bunch of former communists coming forward and confessing their sins and saying what they got wrong.It seems that Hoppe is very, very Marxist adjacent.
Yeah, he's like, you know how Aaron is not really a Marxist, but will say he is and will believe the things Marxists believe?It's the same idea.
Aaron even believes some of the shit that's coming out of his mouth sometimes.
I know! I love it.I love it.I do.I love it because I just love the divergence of thought that happens on that show and it's all stupid nonsense from all of us, but it's kind of different from each of us.Yeah.
Do you feel like over this journey, I asked the listener, but I also ask you, we've learned about Marxism.Like, can you say now, I think I know what Marxism is.
I think that if I say what I actually think, people will be mad at me.Because every once in a while, I'll be like, there'll be one of those threads, who do you admire?You're four people that you admire the most.And I'll throw a Lennon in there.
Lennon, yeah.And people lose their shit.I mean, they literally lose their shit.And it's like after you.
It's so weird, because you think about Lennon.It's a weird one to lose your shit over.It's a weird one. I mean like I get it, you don't like Marxism and Lenin killed some people.A lot of people killed a lot of people and a lot of theories are bad.
So you know what Lenin was good at?Writing.He gets you pretty fired up.As Hoppe says, he'll get you mad about all the brutalities of capitalism.I like that line too.Yeah, that's what'll happen.
What's funny too is people will be like, they'll either lose their shit on Lenin, they'll lose their shit on Stalin. Stalin, obviously, but like they'll be like and Trotsky.He wanted to have worldwide communism.
Like, do you have any idea the people he executed?I mean, remember the Lenin's purge?
Yeah.Yeah.Trotsky was in a lot more people would have gotten cleaned out.
Lennon's purge was suggested by Trotsky.
That's who.Next time we get together for one of these do Trotsky because he is.
Oh, yeah, he's great.And then, you know who we could do after Trotsky, Irving Kristol. And think about it, we just did Habermas, so we already did not a neoconservative, but a political realist.
Neoconservatism is kind of the logical conclusion of political realism if you're not an anarchist.You basically have to admit, yeah, we should probably control the world if no one else is going to.
And so it would be interesting to see how you get from Marx to Irving Kristol To george bush.It was just I whatever I mean suggestions we could do it on my show.
I don't care Markster erving crystal is not a huge chump No, but people don't know the connection.
They just know they've heard it.They've heard that it comes well They've heard the trotsky.
Oh, they're all the neoconservatives came out of trotsky.Okay, what does that mean?
Yeah, and they go, uh, they both believed in world government and it's like not Maybe a little more than that.So yeah Pretend maybe your listeners will hassle you in a few months.Hey, where did he go?We miss him.
Maybe they want you know outside of the You know the murderers and everything like that that I even have to say that's friggin retarded The thing that really upsets me the most about like Trotskyite Marxism is that to think that the workers in the United States would ever be down with it and
Yeah.Yeah.Or anywhere.But yeah.
Yeah.But I mean, especially the United States, because what the hell was his name?The American journalist who he's he's actually buried in the Red Square.What's his name?John Reed.I can't remember.
Oh, and Red Square journalist.
He loved.Yeah, he. It's John Reed.
Yeah.John Reed.Yeah.Yeah.
He, um, before address Thompson, there was John Reed.Hmm.Okay.
Whatever that means.I don't, I don't know what the hell that means.Jesus.How are you?Hunter S Thompson was not a commie.Um, but, um, Reed went to he was there.
He was in Russia in 1917, and he was convincing Lenin's faction, Bolsheviks, that the United States worker would side with the Soviet worker.What year?
Like the early 1900s, maybe?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.This is right there.This is we're talking 16, 17, 17.
Yeah, by then, if you talk on maybe 1899, 1905, yeah, I don't know.Yeah, but by 1917, the labor movement suffers until about the 60s for a long time.Yeah, that's funny.I don't think so.But if we ever do Trotsky, I will make sure to highlight that.
Can Trotskyism work for the American worker would be a good topic, actually.I don't even believe classes exist, let alone Trotsky's theory of classes.
What what's funny is there was a a Russian made.I don't know if it's still on Netflix, but it was a Russian made documentary.It was 10 or 12 episodes on Trotsky.And.
It was it was really interesting, it started with him in Mexico hiding and he's get he. agrees to the interview that ends up where he ends up being assassinated and everything like that over a series of interviews and everything like that.
And it it goes back.And I think I told you this before.The the movie makes doesn't really shit on Lenin. It actually paints Lenin almost sympathetic because, you know, you know, he got sick at the end of his life and everything.
He was suffering for a while.Everything almost makes him sympathetic.But it makes Stalin look like I mean, like almost like a hood.I mean, which Stalin was.He was a bank robber.He was.Yeah.
Upstage coaches.He did all sorts of crazy shit.Yeah.But that was like the person in that movie who got painted the worst in the miniseries with Stalin.I mean, 100%.
Well, Stalin's the one who orders the ice picking.Is that how it goes?Right.Sounds the one who kills him.
Oh, yeah.Yeah.Yeah.Yeah.But it's a good it's an interesting documentary.
They put some like it's from it's Netflix on Netflix.
Yeah. It's um, they uh, well, it was it's originally a russian movie.
So it was on russian tv first and then I fucking love jacobin Can I tell you I love jacobin because if you search netflix's trotsky you get a jacobin article That's entitled netflix's trotsky is terrible history.
I love jacobin so much jacobin is the only website a guy named where a guy named benjamin stevens can tell a bunch of russians whether or not their depiction of a russian figure is accurate Amazing
Yeah, it's yeah, but it's a it's interesting show.
I mean they do some supernatural stuff where Trotsky keeps being I mean goes to Christmas past kind of stuff where Trotsky keeps Getting visited by people he killed and had killed and everything like that But I bet you that might have happened to Trotsky.
He was a nut.Oh, yeah, he was He was might have been seeing stuff We're gonna get people like are you really not doing this anymore and you're just gonna talk about Trotsky for the last three minutes
Oh man, I could talk about it.I don't care.He was the most fascinating character of the 19th century revolution.Well, are you sure?
Have you ever heard of Willie Munzenberg? Dude, look up, when you're on free time, look up Willy Munzenberg.He was the German controller of the communist propaganda arm of the Russian communist government during the 1917.
He was, like, working internally in Germany to destabilize the German government so that they wouldn't go to war with the Russians.Um, really wild story.He's, like, him and, um, now I'm forgetting the guy's name, but, uh, Rules for Radicals.
You know that, uh, what's his name?
Like him, Saul Alinsky, like they're the guys who came up with the theory of political propaganda, like how you propagandize.
So there's some very interesting figures from that revolution that I, you know, my show with Bushido that I'm going to get back to, I still have to touch on.And we stopped on Willy Munzenberg halfway.
Now we got to get into how he covers up the famine and all that stuff.So there's some really interesting characters, all in very insidious.
Yeah, well, yeah, he lasts until after the revolution, and he's helping to cover up the earliest parts of the famine and the Red Terror.Yeah, it's wild.But yeah, I'm really giving people too many tastes of too many thinkers now at this point.
They're like, how are you gonna stop this?Just keep going.
I hit them with Hoppe as a Marxist, they're spinning, and now we're talking about Trotsky and Willy Monsenburg.
The first time I picked up my phone when we were doing tonight is I'm like, OK, I just figured out what the title of this is going to be.Oh, yeah.Well, you know, it's just going to be something that is just absolutely going to piss people off.
So, you know, because you have to do it.Yeah. And people who are sympathetic to Hoppe.I mean, the Hoppe hate is so... I mean, Hoppe said completely fucked up shit.Rothbard said completely fucked up shit.
A couple things that Mises wrote where you read and you're just like... And then let's not forget Karl Marx's meticulous and varied use of the n-word in many different documents that he wrote.
A lot of people say a lot of stupid and bad things, and we should judge them on their output, more than on what they say.
He liked to say Jewish niggers a lot, didn't he?
He really did!That, and the other one, he really, one time he was like, he had a German competitor, and he was like, I don't like the guy, and you know what?I bet you that his grandmother had sex with a black dude.
Like, that's what he says, like that. It's wild, way worse, way worse than anything that Hoppe's ever said.And the worst thing we all know, well, I don't know, we all know, I'm putting this on everybody else to make their own decision.
My least preferable thing I've ever heard Hoppe say is about physically removing gays.And he doesn't even really say that. He doesn't say that at all.It's an implication.It's just an implication of it.It's the implication.Yeah.
But the fact is the whole thing is based on exclusion, which many other groups are perfectly happy to do to begin with.And it's just a natural aspect of exchange and human behavior is the fact that you sometimes need to exclude certain people.
Again, do I agree with it or disagree with it?I don't know.But if that's what you're attacking Hop on, the fact that people have the right to say no.Yeah. Come on.I mean, yeah, come on.
Way worse.Can you anyone who defended the Baker?Understands what exclusion is.
Mm-hmm and the people who didn't defend the Baker would throw you in prison for saying mean things to people So there's not really a huge point and trying to reason with them.Yeah So, but yeah, there's your hopper.There's your Marxism.
There's your fascism.We did a little fascism Yeah, we did a little post-modernism.What else did we do?That was it because Marxism Post-structuralism, that's right.Egoism, we did some Stirner.This was a very good series.
This was a really interesting exploration where we didn't talk about a single capitalist of any kind until the very end.People said they really liked this series, so I do, if I can plug one thing.
Boy hmm bird at timeline earth org is my email address.Send me what you thought about the series as a whole if you listen to all the episodes and also include in that email if you want to email me.
If i could have done one other episode who would you wanted me to do it on.
Cuz i have my own show into the cave where i can very easily do an episode on a person with pete as the guest i'm sure he would if you wanted to just be the exact same thing could do that so send me an email about it.
Let me know who you want me to do next cuz i'm very happy to do more this is the only way i read these days how i read based on what you tell me.
The next time we do this, I'm going to come up with somebody so bizarre.You're just going to be like, why?
Why would we do that?I got bizarre people.I got a dude who argued that suicide is preferable to living and then killed himself.I have a couple of really weird thinkers.
I mean, that is somebody who is committed. Yes, who really believes what he says.That dude is committed.I mean, probably needed to be committed, but was definitely committed.
Holy shit.Definitely committed.
You know what's funny, though?Yeah.What?In the past year, I've made friends with people who openly talk about killing themselves.
Like if things get just coronavirus is a sickening thing that coronavirus in the mail.
I think people I don't think I think these people had these thoughts before Really and they have thoughts that are just like, okay Well, I mean if this is all there is then and if things are getting that bad, why would I stick around?
Yeah this well this guy whose name i can remember it was paul something but i can't remember his last name i'll find it at some point his works just got translated into english from german that was his.
It's from the seventies or sixties maybe earlier than that but they just got translated radical pessimism is the idea that it's called it's very kind of sad but it's great writing so yeah we could do that.
We could do... I already did Juan Posadas, who believes that aliens are Marxists.I really would like Hoppe to give me an opinion on whether or not he thinks aliens have private property law systems.
That would be really good.If I... If for some reason I go to PFS this year, I'll ask him.Just remind me.
Yes, please do.Remind... So there's this guy, Juan Posadas, who believes that because Marxism is universal, aliens would be Marxists.Because you believe in a universal system, do you believe that aliens would have private property law systems?
That would be a good question.He's probably going to say aliens don't exist, to which I'll be like, oh.But you could also get it out of him that Hopper believes aliens exist, which would be a great episode for him to come on my show and talk about.
It would be much better.Well, actually, we'd have to give that one a pause.
Yeah, that's right.I'll surrender it to pause.That's right.That's right.
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