The Fundamentals of Marxism: Historical Materialism, Dialectics, & Political Economy

Alyson: Hello, you are listening to Red Menace. This is a podcast where normally we go into a specific work of theory and talk about how that applies to our current situation and how us as Marxists and organizers can use that. Or alternatively, we occasionally go into current events and dive into how we can think about the chaotic situation that we are in in the world today through the lens of Marxism. And today we're doing something that's kind of in between those two things. We are going to be kind of trying to make an introductory approach to Marxism for people who might need something that's not so thoroughly grounded in one book, but more sort of a broader overview of what Marxism is and why it matters for us today. that's really what we're going to be focusing on. It sort of breaks the mold of the two formats we've used in the past. But if you are interested in what we're doing, you can find us on Twitter at The Red Menace. And then you can also find us on Patreon as well, where we have bonus episodes that you can listen to that really get into sort of details about, you know, some of our thought processes behind our episodes, supplementary materials, and also Q&A questions that we go over with patrons to kind of provide more depth for what we're talking about. So if any of that interests you, we are online and you can find that information. But today we are going to kind of try to make a case to you that Marxism is something that you should be considering and understanding and then trying to provide, you know, the tools to understand that. I think pretty much everyone, regardless of their political orientation, is aware that we're living in extremely chaotic times right now. You know, we are at a point where there are mainstream conversations about civil collapse in the United States and And these are thoughts that are not just happening on sort of the radical fringes, but are being talked about by academics, being talked about by politicians, being talked about by mainstream publications. And it's kind of in that situation that I, you know, and I think Brett as well, hope to suggest that Marxism has something to offer for us in this sort of time. And hopefully we can get into what that is a little bit.

Breht: Yeah, and just to talk about this episode, we pitched this as sort of an introduction to Marxism for people who are moving leftward, especially younger or newer people to the left, and they're trying to sort of find their bearings and get grounded in left theory. But there's so much disinformation and just bad, poor understandings of Marxism out there that it can be really hard. And then if you go on social media – You're more likely to run into some obscure sectarian debate than you are some principled outlying of the basic principles of Marxism. So this can be very confusing. So we want to offer this up to help people come into Marxism and learn some of the basics of Marxism. At the same time, we're also sort of summarizing things we've covered in a lot of the theory texts that we've covered so far on this show. And as we were going through it, we realized that it's very hard to make it super 101. Like, you know, the very basic terms we'd have to start talking about, like, you know, what is liberalism versus socialism? And, you know, we're going to touch on that a little bit, but it's almost a little bit more advanced than a complete and total intro. But hopefully it's still introductory enough. And importantly, I think... a broad overview of Marxism that I think this can be used as a tool to help those younger and newer folks come in, a tool for people to summarize what we've talked about on this show already, and hopefully a resource that people can use in their organizations and cadres. just to help catch people up or to remind people of what Marxism is, etc. So regardless of where you fall along the spectrum of Marxism, whether you're completely new to it or whether you're a veteran, hopefully there's something in here that is food for thought and something that you will find valuable in this episode.

Alyson: Yeah, and I definitely think, you know, even if it is something that you're already familiar with, it's good to brush up on kind of these big picture parts of Marxism and not just the details. So hopefully that will be valuable as well. And again, I just think we are living in a time where, you know, it is hard to make sense of the world around us. And one of the things that is incredible about Marxism In addition to being a theory of how to change the world, it also can help us explain chaotic moments like this. And sort of a refresher on that I think can be really grounding in a time where we all feel particularly ungrounded by what's happening around us.

Breht: Absolutely. So the first and perhaps probably the most basic question we'll address today is, It's just the term socialism, communism, and capitalism, particularly in the face of lots of different types of people, especially liberals, using the word socialism. It can be very confusing, and it can muddy the pot for a lot of people. And a lot of people also think that socialism and communism are two different things. So very often when I'm having a discussion with a layperson or somebody who's only sort of partially into politics – You might hear things – or even people that are into politics, you might hear things like, oh, I'm a socialist but definitely not communism. Or I can understand maybe weaving a little socialism into our capitalism, but communism is a step too far. And what that does is betrays a fundamental ignorance about what these terms mean. In the very simplest terms, capitalism is obviously what we're living under now. It's the mode of production and distribution that we all have grown up with our entire lives. It's not just trade, right? It's not quote-unquote human nature. It is a system, a socioeconomic global order. And then socialism and communism and the Marxist sense are related in that socialism is the historical process, the historical development from capitalism toward communism. And although there have been states in the past that have been called a communist or even self-identified as communist, to call them communism is sort of a misnomer because communism is a stateless, classless society. It is the end goal of the Marxist and really a lot of the radical left political project. Right. And as such, we've never reached it. You know, there's been attempts to build socialism, which is really to think about it in concrete terms. It's the transition out of capitalism toward communism. And so it's sort of that bridge and understanding socialism as a bridge and not a destination, I think, is really the crucial thing I want to emphasize here.

Alyson: Yeah, no, definitely. And, you know, it is sort of tricky because there's the what Marxists mean when they use the term versus what the majority of people mean when they use the term, right? And it is worth recognizing that historically socialism as a term has had a very broad meaning, which makes disentangling this stuff a little bit tricky, right? So socialism as a concept definitely comes before the development of Marxism, right? and you had a number of people who called themselves socialists who proposed a variety of different projects. And it's really Marx who intervenes to sort of say, well, all of that may be socialism in some sense, but the socialism that we're interested in is sort of this grounded transition period, this movement of developing communism from the conditions of capitalism, not the various utopian projects that countless people have come up with and called socialism. So there is a broad historical meaning to the term, And in a lot of ways, what Marxists are trying to do is make that meaning more grounded. And I think that's a concept that we'll return to time and time again in this episode.

Breht: Yeah, exactly. And I just think it's really important before we move on just to think of socialism as a historical process and not a sort of list of things you check off to say now we've gotten socialism. And I think that confusion leads to a whole bunch of different forms of confusion that proliferate on the left and on the liberal left and on the radical left. Yeah. I think that's an important thing. And you'll as we talk about dialectics and historical materialism, you'll come to understand throughout this episode how crucial it is to understand so much, including these terms like socialism and capitalism as historically embedded processes unfolding and not as static state of affairs.

Alyson: Yeah, no, absolutely. So do we want to go ahead and sort of dive into the nitty gritty of sort of the philosophy and political economy of what Marxism is and start to get into that?

Breht: Yeah, absolutely. And for this segment, we're going to ask four questions. I'll ask Allison the first two. She will ask me the latter two. And these are just basic, you know, basic, but very important and in a lot of ways, complicated pillars of understanding Marxism. So Let's go ahead and get into these questions. And the first question for you, Allison, is a question that revolves around materialism and idealism. So what do we mean by these terms, materialism and idealism? And why is it that Marxism insists on materialism?

Alyson: Yeah, so let's go ahead and get into this. And I'll say first, this is sort of a broad philosophical question that we have to wrestle with and a broad question about like how we view theory. So I'm going to try to make this as grounded as possible, but it is going to kind of get into some philosophical terms that hopefully we can work through and we'll come to an understanding of as we tease them out through examples. So if you've heard anything about Marxism, you've probably heard the term materialism, or at least the idea that Marxists are materialists. You know, if you've been on social media, you have probably seen Marxists argue about whether or not some concept is properly materialist, or if it's an example of idealism. And these arguments often sort of take these terms for granted. So, you know, for those who don't have that context, we have to wonder what exactly is materialism and why is it so important to Marxists? So in philosophy, there are sort of several meanings to the word materialism, and Marxism overlaps with some of these meanings while also sort of providing its own. And we need to sort of wrestle with this a little bit. So on the one hand, there's what we could call ontological materialism. So That term ontological comes from the word ontology, which sort of is the study of being. So it's the field of philosophy that is concerned with questions like what sort of things exist, and what sort of nature are there to things, and those kind of fundamental questions about what reality consists of. So materialism in that sense, this ontological materialism, is the idea that our world is made up of matter, it is made up of material things, and that that is the foundation of the world that we live in. So most of kind of the irreligious world today would probably hold on to this view. So from this perspective, you know, we could say the world's not made up of spirits or gods or unknown immaterial forces, but it's made up of matter, molecules, atoms, concrete material that we can experience and even study and, you know, come to some degree of understanding. So this is one sense of materialism. And Marxism generally, you know, agrees with this position of ontological materialism. There have been historical sort of divergences from that, but for the most part, Marxism has pushed back against ideas like religion and spirituality, insisting that the world is made up of a material realm that we can know and study that is grounded and factual. And again, there have been moments where Marxists have flirted with religious organizing as well, but that is the minority experience. So that's one sense of materialism, but it's not the most important sense when talking about Marxism. So when Marxists talk about materialism, they're not usually just referring to this ontological materialism. They're usually discussing historical materialism. And so we need to get into what this idea of historical materialism is. So historical materialism is sort of, as the name would imply, a method of understanding history and the way that societies have developed throughout history. So to put it as simply as I can, historical materialism argues that history is driven not by ideas or changes in values and principles that develop over time, but rather changes in the material conditions of a society. So in opposition to this idea of historical materialism, we have this concept of idealism. And idealism kind of argues that if we want to understand historical change, we need to understand the ideas that drive those changes. All of this is somewhat abstract. So, you know, to kind of pin this down a little bit, I want us to think about a specific example. So we think about a concrete example that I think will be really familiar for our American audience, at least. We can think about the American Revolution and sort of how we, as people trying to understand historical development, can explain the American Revolution. And most of us have been taught an explanation of this in school at various times. And that explanation is largely an idealist explanation. So it kind of goes something like this. When the colonists came to America, they began to develop their own unique cultural identity separate from England. And this identity was based around principles of freedom and liberty. And when these ideas came into conflict with the tyranny and the authoritarianism of the British king, the colonists rose up in defense of liberty and freedom. The revolution was motivated more or less by this kind of noble belief in these great ideas. It was a conflict between freedom and tyranny, and the republic it eventually founded was characterized by a love for freedom and liberty. So this is kind of the story we've been told, right? These heroic people who rose up in defense of these heroic principles. It's about the principles and ideas that drove history forward. Now, a Marxist wouldn't really agree with this explanation because it frames the entire conflict as driven by ideas and happening in the realm of idealism. So in contrast, Marxists would offer an historical materialist explanation of the revolution. And that explanation might go something like this. And let's see if we can tease out some of these differences. So the Marxist might say that when the colonists came to America, they sort of began to engage in forms of commerce and trade that competed with the old monarchical structure of Britain, right? So you have these people who start to become merchants here in America, and their interests are competing with the interests of the king and of the old feudal society in Britain, where taxation and the rule of a monarch is taken for granted. So this independent merchant class... begins to develop here in America, and the needs of this young class find themselves at odds with the right of the British king to, you know, tax, regulate, and even prohibit the free trade of goods. So under this view, the revolution began because of the ways in which the king economically interfered with the development of this young class of merchants. And this young class realized that they needed a new form of government that could allow the development of loosely regulated markets so they could grow rich. So the revolution under the Marxist view then was a conflict between two economic systems, an emerging but still young capitalist system of trade and sort of the old remnants of monarchical feudalism. So the republic then that was founded was built to ensure the dominance of this newly emerging class, an economy that would be favorable to them and laws that would allow them to develop. And this would be the more materialist explanation. So when we're looking at this explanation, we're not looking to what great ideas and principles and beliefs drove history forward, but what material economic changes in how a society functions were pushing things forward. So this hopefully kind of gives you a broad sense of the difference between idealism and historical materialism. historical materialism understands change in terms of material conditions of a society. And material conditions, this term that we're using, refers to sort of the underlying economic realities of a society and how they are managed. So the term not only refers to, say, factories, natural resources, the labor force, or the technology used in meeting the economic needs of society, But it also refers to how all of these realities are managed, how they're divided up and structured. So the material conditions of a society don't simply refer to what kind of products are produced, what sort of work is performed, or what sort of resources are available, but also to who profits from the sale of those products and how they are produced, how work is divided within a society, and how ownership of resources is managed. So when Marxists try to understand a society, they attempt to analyze it from those material conditions and then explain how those conditions shape the rest of society. So, for example, Marxists don't understand capitalism in terms of abstract ideas like voluntary free exchange or economic freedom to buy and sell, but rather as an arrangement where a class of laborers sell their labor for a wage and to a class of capitalists who profit from that working class's labor. So for Marxists, if we want to understand capitalism, we have to understand what these fundamental material conditions of capitalism. So why does all this matter, though? This is, you know, again, all sort of broad, philosophical, and somewhat heady. Why are Marxists really emphasizing this idea of materialism? And the answer to that is that Marxists believe that materialism has really exceptional explanatory power. By looking at the world through a materialist lens, we can understand the actual forces which drive historical change, and we can even understand how change might potentially play out in the future. And even more importantly, Marxists believe that materialism allows us to sort of see through the propaganda we've been fed about how our society functions. If we understand capitalism in terms of material conditions and the way those conditions produce exploitation, for example, then we might be less persuaded by capitalism's appeals to lofty ideas like economic freedom and liberty. By insisting that material reality is more important than ideas, historical materialism allows us to see the way that lofty and abstract ideas have been used to distract us from the actual violences and exploitation of capitalism, and allows us to explain why capitalism isn't really based on freedom or liberty, but on intense forms of oppression and exploitation. So this, in the end, is a very surface-level explanation of what historical materialism mean and what Marxists mean by materialism. But hopefully it's kind of at least provided some clarification for people who have seen those terms but not really known what they mean.

Breht: That's really, really well said. It's a difficult question and you handled it expertly. And another thing I would add to that is just thinking about the idealism of thinking about American history and then as you articulated so wonderfully the Marxist materialist view of the American Revolution. And one of the ways we can see that the materialist view is superior is the sort of contradictions that exist within the idealistic version of American history because you're writing things down like all men are created equal while you have slaves and while you're actively engaged in an ongoing genocide against the native population. If you're understanding the American Revolution in the terms of idealism, those things don't really make sense. You have to do some turning and bending to try to make sense of them and figure out what it was, and you might chalk it up to the hypocrisy of the individual founding fathers. But by understanding it as an emerging class, by understanding it materially, you can see that slavery was a process by which you brought over free labor to jumpstart slavery. capitalism for this new class. And we can see the genocide of Native Americans as a process of primitive accumulation, which we'll define later, a primitive accumulation by which you take over land necessary to build up this new mode of production, capitalism. And so these things make much more sense under that light than they do under the idealist light. And to give one more example, at the risk of being a I think a lot of people at least know the basic outlines of the debate between Hegel and Marx even if you don't know Hegelian philosophy, which I don't think is necessary for this example. But basically Hegelian dialectics was this idea that human societies and history developed through what Hegel would refer to as the absolute spirit. But it's really the sort of increasing clarity of the idea, capital I, and that all the things that happen down on earth is really – subordinate to this overall striving of sort of the realm of ideas to come to completion in the absolute spirit. Marx famously turned that on its head, meaning that he refused to understand the development of societies throughout history as an idea unfolding or an absolute spirit, but rather by the material basis, the economic mode of production, the ways that the basic necessities of life were created and distributed in a given society. And so what Marx did with Hegel is he kept the dialectical sort of and historical understanding of society's evolution, but added or materialized it and rejected the idealism of Hegel. So, again, that might be a little abstract for some, but for others that might help sort of simplify and concretize this dispute, particularly in the realm of German philosophy, which Marxism is. came out of. So however, whether it's Allison or I, whatever sort of made more sense, cling on to that and dive deeper into it. Because I think, you know, people can come to understand these concepts through different paths. Definitely.

Alyson: For some people, I think the historical is a little bit easier. And for some, the philosophical is a little bit easier to get into. But I do, I really like what you're bringing out about the way to see the sort of superiority of historical materialism as it explains these contradictions and sort of the ideas we profess and then the way that society actually behaves. And I also think it often when we see leaders in certain societies or we see a society acting in a way that feels irrational, historical materialism can show us sort of the economic underbelly of what's happening there, right? So one of the things that I always emphasize is that Marxism can kind of explain the rise of fascism in Europe, right? Fascism looks like this incredible, irrational thing that we all look back on and say, how could that have happened? But when we understand the economic emergency that capitalism was finding itself in, We can see how the capitalist class was willing to kind of take these ridiculous, irrational, violent actions because the material conditions were driving it. And, you know, time and time again, we can find all these historical examples, I think, that really show why it is that materialism better explains what's happening around us.

Breht: Yeah, I'm tempted to give a materialist explanation of neoliberalism, but I'm afraid that will take us too far afield. So we'll save that for another time. But absolutely, that's an important thing to understand. And there's lots of things that you can analyze in a much clearer way through a materialist lens. And that's the point, right? The point is to demystify social relations, to demystify what's actually happening. And that's what science does. Science goes into the natural world and demystifies it for us so we don't have to think it's the wind god or the Christ standing up in the heavens looking down on us, but we can actually understand the natural world through natural facts and demystify it in the process. What Marxism does is that same demystifying process, but for societies and histories and their evolution through that time. Exactly. So let's go ahead and move forward. The next one, perhaps one of the biggest questions, but it revolves around dialectics. And on Rev Left Radio, we just did an episode on a book called The Principal Contradiction in which dialectics is really explained. So if you're really interested in dialectics and you understand we're not going to be able to completely dive into all of its nuances in one question, I would direct you over to that recent episode on Rev Left. But the question is, what exactly is dialectics, Allison? Why is such an abstract concept so central for dialectics? for a grounded and materialist theory of history.

Alyson: Awesome. Yeah. So if the last section we talked about was sort of philosophically abstract, this is going to be even more philosophically abstract, I'm afraid. And instead of giving you a one-sentence definition of dialectics, I'm going to try to paint a picture of dialectics and the development of dialectics that I think will make things hopefully a little easier to understand, especially because most of the one-sentence summations of it, especially the attempts at summarizing Hegel, I think are very bad. Yeah. and are an incorrect understanding. So I'm going to try to paint this broadly. So materialism is sort of the central concept to Marxism that we need to understand. An even more difficult concept that is highly related to that materialism is the concept of dialectics. So we're not going to give this the depth it deserves because it is a philosophical rabbit hole that we could do hours on. But we do want to dive into the concept, you know, because it is central. If you want more depth, like Brett said, you can check out that Rev Left Radio episode and also our Red Menace episode on Mao's On Contradiction kind of gets into some of these deeper thoughts about what dialectics is, how dialectics functions. But for now, we sort of have a little bit of work to do in unpacking this concept. So dialectics as a concept, as a form of reasoning even, precedes Marxism by a very, very long time. So in a sense, dialectics goes all the way back to sort of the philosophy of Plato. And if you're familiar with Plato at all, Plato's philosophy, it's written as dialogues where characters are talking with each other. And It's usually one central character, almost always Socrates, arguing with a secondary character, and they're going back and forth with each other. And so this is interesting, because if we think about it, Plato doesn't just present his arguments in writing. He doesn't just say, this is what I believe, and here's why I believe it. But he has two characters arguing with each other, and these characters present opposing ideas against each other. And as they do this, each of them shapes their ideas based on the opposition of the other. These opposing ideas are constantly moving back and forth between each other and refining the central idea that is being developed in the dialogue. And as they are searching for arguments that contradict each other, they come to more realizations about their own position. And by the end of each dialogue, we are usually presented with something close to a coherent idea. But that idea hasn't been shaped just by one person's philosophical reasoning, you know, developed in their head on their own, but by two people who often aren't engaging in a friendly manner, but in a highly oppositional and contradicting manner. And at the end of that, an idea emerges that is the stronger for that opposition. And this is sort of a very early sense of kind of an idealist view of dialectics. So this idea would be taken into more detail by the German philosopher, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who was super influential on German philosophy overall, and who analyzed the way that contradictions between and within ideas sort of shape society. So Brett got into this a little bit already, right? So Hegel has this idea of the geist or the spirit, or the perfect form of the idea being the driving force of European society in particular. And he's analyzing that through this lens of contradictions and opposing forces with each other. Oftentimes, a summary that you will hear of Hegel that I want to problematize a little bit is this idea of dialectics. As you present a thesis, then you present an antithesis to it. They contradict each other. And from that emerges a synthesis. This is kind of the common explanation of it. In a lot of ways, it's based on a mistranslation of Hegel, but it kind of can help you think about this idea that contradicting opposing forces allow us to come to new forms and new ideas. So Hegel's emphasis on dialectics had a major influence on the German philosopher Karl Marx, who's the reason we're talking about all this at all. And Marx studied Hegel. That is really who he positioned himself in the lineage of. And so far, the concept of dialectics that we're talking about with Plato and Hegel is about ideas. It's about abstract concepts in opposition to each other. But Marx really altered this by considering this concept of dialectics as a part of the material forces of history. And this is the famous thing where Marx says he flipped Hegel on his head. Now the idea is not primary, but the material reality is primary. And again, this shouldn't be surprising given that we just talked about so much why Marxism values material reality as a starting point. So all of this should sound a little familiar already based on our concept of materialism. But if we give a little bit more depth, from materialist perspective, historical change is driven and history is advanced because of changes in the material conditions of society, as we already explained. So if we think back to this American Revolution concept as an example, we focused on the way that the revolution was drawn by two competing forces who were in opposition to each other. So the young merchant class of the colony found itself opposed and its interest in contradiction to the old monarchical power of the European state. And history thus was advanced. It was moved forward, not because the contradicting ideas that these people had, you know, leading to a new, better idea, but because the material interests of these two classes found themselves in contradiction to each other. And from that contradiction emerged a bloody, violent revolutionary struggle. And on the other end of that struggle emerged a new society, a republican, capitalist sort of nation that, you know, still exists today and has profound influence on the world. So this is an example of how the Marxist view of dialectics understands opposing historical and material forces as central to the development of historical change. Thus, for a Marxist, having a proper understanding of history is not just about understanding that material reality is primary over ideas, but it's also about understanding that history is marked by constant change and development as a result of opposing and contradicting classes. Marx famously in the Communist Manifesto says that the history of all two, you know, previous existing society has been the history of class struggle. It's been the history of these contradictions playing out. This is to say that the history of change has been the history of material classes fighting with each other and new things emerging as a result of those ruptures. And this is the dialectical materialist view of history. So to make this a little bit more concrete, Not only was the American Revolution a single instance in which history was driven forward by the conflict between two classes, but all of history is a series of these conflicts. Marx argues that the development of republicanism and democracy throughout all of Europe, for example, that occurred during what we think of as the Enlightenment period, was not driven by these new Enlightenment ideas of reason, equality, and truth, but again by an emerging merchant class within Europe that had taken advantage of new navigational technologies to grow rich from seafaring trade. And this class eventually found itself at odds with the old aristocrats and the monarchs again, who had ruled under feudalism, and this led to a series of wars and revolutions. These contradictions emerged and turned into material bloody realities. And these wars and revolutions led to this class establishing republics and democracies that favored trade, paved the way for the capitalist class to emerge as the new ruling class. And history again was moved forward. It was driven by these contradicting economic interests and conflicting forces. And so history, under the dialectical view, is thus a history of change, conflict, and constantly upended realities. Nothing stays the same for very long. No kingdom exists in isolation from another, and the interaction of contradictory forces ensures that change is always occurring. This is the dialectical view. So for Marxists, though, dialectics is even broader than history. It goes beyond that. So Marx's close friend and co-author Friedrich Engels argued that dialectics is actually a matter of nature itself. Engels argued that nature wasn't made up of a bunch of different things existing in isolation of each other, but was rather a set of relationships between things. And to again make this more concrete, you know, we could say like if we're thinking about how an ecologist could understand the world, No ecologist could hope to study a tree without understanding the dirt that the tree lives in, the rain cycle which provides water to the tree, the animals which die and decompose near the tree, providing nutrients to the soil, and so on. For Engels, nature is a bunch of relationships between things. They're all caught up with each other, and it's marked by change within those relationships. Engels says that when we look at nature, we see, quote, End quote. So nature, in the Marxist view, is also marked by this sort of dialectical change. Even as species develop, we see change at play. So Ingalls points out that Darwin's theory of evolution shows us how dialectics plays out in nature. The species we see around us today have not always existed. And in fact, they exist only because of conflict and the need for survival as some species adapt to natural changes better than others. and are able to pass on their traits. So contradiction, opposition, and conflict in nature thus also drive biological change, not just historical change. So now you should at least have kind of a basic idea of what the structure of dialectics is through several examples, and how it relates to history and nature. And you might be asking yourself, like, why does this matter or This is about as abstract as Marxism can get in some ways. If Marxism is really so grounded in the materialist view of the world that values concrete material reality, why does some abstract philosophical notion like dialectics deserve our time and attention? And I think that's a very fair question. And, you know, dialectics, in a way, and this seems contradictory, helps us have a more grounded view of reality. It helps us understand why things develop the way they do, and it brings more depth to our understanding of history. And if we didn't have dialectics, we wouldn't be able to understand these sort of broader patterns of history that develop. We might be able to explain one single society through just a material lens that doesn't have dialectics, but understanding history as a long, drawn-out process requires a view of dialectics. So in a weird way, even though it is this abstract, formal, philosophical concept, it sharpens our more grounded, concrete, material analysis. And again, this is an explanation that has not done near justice to what dialectics is, and we have a lot more resources you can go to for understanding that, but hopefully it's kind of drawn out the structure of it for you a little bit. So if it's a term that you've heard but you've never had an understanding of, you can kind of begin to get an introductory concept of what it means.

Breht: Yeah, it's a very intense concept, but it's actually sort of beautiful once you understand it. And I think pointing to Darwinian evolution via natural selection is a great way that many of us can really comprehend dialectics in nature and then start to apply it to a Marxist analysis or weave it into our Marxist analysis because it can become very clear how dialectics works in the evolutionary situation. You can't understand the rise and fall of the woolly mammoth, for example, without understanding the rise and fall of the Ice Age. And then also once you internalize this and start looking at your own life, you realize that a lot of human beings feel as if we're separate from other human beings, from nature, and really from ourselves. It's almost like we all have split psyches where there's the us that goes through life and experiences it, and there's the us that sits back in the mind, reflects, and comments on it as we go through it. But I think what dialectics offers me and my own self-understanding, and this is also present in ancient philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism and Greek philosophy, etc., is that humans are not separate from the natural world. And in fact, the climate crisis, the ecological collapse we're facing… comes from a sort of bourgeois separatism, a metaphysical static view of human existence and where we are. Religion plays into this, right? A lot of religions, monotheism, for example, has underlying it this idea that humans are created by God, something outside of earth and the natural cycles, and put in it to have dominion over it, which leads to a similar sort of pathology in human minds. But to really think of humans dialectically is to understand the human organism as inseparable from the entire earth and to really view yourself as bubbling up out of the earth, not something alien that is put into the earth. And that at least will help you get your bearings to then start applying that stuff to Marxist analysis. But just to review quickly some of the quote-unquote methodological rules or at least some pillars to highlight when it comes to the dialectic method and how to apply it, just some simple shorthand ideas is that one premise of dialectics is that everything is interconnected. Nothing stands outside of the whole. And so if you're going to try to understand phenomena within a given system, you have to understand that system in its totality and understand the relationship between the individual thing you're studying and all of the things and relationships that surround it. Everything is cause and everything is effect. There is not a single cause and then a single effect that you can disassociate or sort of extract from the overall just flood of cause and effect. Everything turns around and causes something else. Development occurs in qualitative leaps, right? So instead of this idea that history is this slow and steady linear march of progress, what dialectics urges us to think is how things develop in ruptures. So it's not that feudalism seamlessly and linearly leads to capitalism, which seamlessly and linearly leads to socialism, but that capitalism represents a continuity and a rupture from the former system of feudalism. And socialism represents a continuity and a rupture. from capitalism, etc. And then the last thing is understanding the role that contradiction plays in dialectics, which you can think about it in a really simplistic way as sort of the engine. And I don't want to get too deep into why the thesis, antithesis, synthesis notion is flawed. But part of it is this idea that, you know, a phenomenon arises, another thing rises to meet it. And through that conflict or inter-engagement, something new arises. And that is Too simplified. It's like to try to think of the moment a phenomenon arises through contradiction, its opposite also arises simultaneously. It's not that there's this lag or this giving rise to this other thing, but it's actually embedded within itself, the contradiction or the opposite of the thing. Right. And if you were to synchronize it into an image, it would be the yin and yang symbol where it's the white and the black contrasting each other. But the white has a little dot of black and the black has a little dot of white showing the interconnectivity and the inseparability of those things. So those are just some helpful ways to think. And hopefully some of that hits you nice. um and to continue to point to other resources because you know this is fundamentally about trying to learn marxism so we're going to point to our other episodes where we dive deeper into these topics rev left has an episode called emancipation after hegel with todd mcgowan which talks a lot about contradiction the hegelian and marxist versions and even offers a critique of some of the more orthodox understandings of these things. So particularly if you're interested in why Hegelian thesis antithesis synthesis is not right, that book really tackles that. And then, of course, the first episode we ever did on Red Menace was Socialism, Scientific, and Utopia, in which Engels really lays out bourgeois metaphysics and distinguishes that from dialectics and dialectical materialism, which is really helpful to understand this stuff as well. So if you want to learn more, I'd point you in those two directions. Anything else you want to say about dialectics before we move on?

Alyson: Yeah, just that it really is worth diving deeper. Dialectics is super hard to wrestle with, but it is also, I think, maybe the most rewarding concept in Marxism in some ways. Once you start to really grasp some of these core ideas, it really does change how you look at the world around you in a really fundamental way. and how you interact with that world. And I think that that is just very rewarding. And I definitely think, you know, getting that depth for why thesis, antithesis, synthesis is not correct is important, because I've seen like official, like organizational pamphlets from good organizations that present that view of dialectics. And, you know, it is worth getting past that and pushing back against it and refining it. That concept can be somewhat useful for understanding a very formalistic meaning of it. But ultimately, you know, for the reasons that Brett got at, it's insufficient. Also, synthesis is way too nice of a word for how that thing actually emerges at the end of the process would be the other concern with it. But yeah, it's really worth diving into. And I think there's a lot of resources available to you for that. So we can go ahead, maybe move to our next question then, which, you know, kind of bridges the philosophical with the economic some and has to do with this idea of political economy. So what is the political economic outlook of Marxism? And sort of what's the relationship between the political philosophy and the Marxist theory of history and the philosophical underpinnings and dialectics? How do these all come together?

Breht: So, yeah, big question. I'm going to try to do a very sort of understandable, hopefully simplified version, and then I'll take your response. We can go from there. So just just kind of parse these three things out. Political economy, historical materialism and dialectical materialism. Right. Political economy is, as it sounds, an analysis that understands the economic basis of politics and their inseparability and therefore analyzes politics and economics as sort of a single field of study. The political economic outlook of Marxism is one in which most things, from how our daily lives are structured to how our government is run to the very ideas that populate our minds, are ultimately rooted in or confined by the mode and relations of production that dominate at a given time. Historical materialism is this basic understanding applied historically in order to understand how societies evolve and change over time. Historical materialism is sort of the science of Marxism. It is the claim that history is the result of material conditions rather than ideas or the machinations of great men. Historical materialism allows for us to understand how human societies evolved from slavery through feudalism and into capitalism and how the dominant modes of thinking and behaving in each historical epoch were actually reflective of the underlying realities of how human beings went about creating and distributing the necessities of life. It allows us to understand the American Revolution, for example, not as an outgrowth of new ideas thought up by brilliant so-called founding fathers, but rather as an historical product of British colonialism, chattel slavery, class interests, primitive accumulation, and the burgeoning capitalist mode of production. Now, if historical materialism is the science of how societies evolved through history, dialectical materialism is the philosophical framework and method of analysis employed by historical materialists operating in the concrete world. In simpler terms, historical materialism is the science of Marxism and dialectical materialism is the philosophy of Marxism. That might be a sort of helpful starting place to really dive into these two concepts and understand sort of where they differ and how they're related. dialectics pushes us to grasp all phenomena as intrinsically interconnected inseparable from the things in relationships that surround it constantly unfolding in a historical process that has a past present and future and pushed forward by the engine of contradiction which arises simultaneously with the phenomena itself Moreover, historical materialism allows for us to turn around and understand the historical development and arrival of dialectical materialism as a method of analysis and mode of thinking itself. So again, these are very sort of complex concepts, but we can start to see how you can think of political economy as sort of the initial object of Marx's study. You can think of historical materialism as the scientific understanding of how societies evolved through history. And you can understand dialectical materialism as the philosophical framework that helps us think through those other things. And that's my best way of explaining these complicated ideas. Allison, do you have anything to add to that, to correct, to challenge, anything?

Alyson: No, I mean, all that I think makes sense in terms of definition. You know, I think it's sort of interesting. This is why it's so hard to explain Marxism in a way. It's because there are all these facets to it, right? Like you can read parts of Marx that are these incredible in-depth, like economic analysis of this is how money works or this is how value works or And oftentimes have to wrestle with that. And it's hard to sometimes think like, how does this very specific economic analysis tie to like this broad philosophical observation about the interconnectedness of all reality, right? It can be very, very difficult to understand how those things come together. And I think, you know, this idea of framing it from the scientific component and also the sort of philosophical component can help you understand how they work together. And it's important to recognize that like Marxism is like a coherent, self-contained view of the world. Right. It's not a set of like collected ideas which have come together and, you know, just sort of are randomly and eclectically bound together by Marxist choosing to believe them. But it's a worldview. It's a comprehensive theory of reality. And that kind of is part of what binds these three things together. You know, I hope in the future, Red Menace will get a little bit more into sort of those political economic details, because we've really looked very heavily at the philosophical and the historical scientific component of it. But the political economic one can be a little undervalued sometimes because it's difficult. And that's where you get weird things like diagrams and marks that you have to wrestle with. So, you know, hopefully we'll get more into that in the future. But I think it's important to understand that all these disparate things that can feel abstract and disconnected are part of a comprehensive view about what reality is.

Breht: Yeah, and it's also important to understand that Marxism is inherently open-ended. And Marxism is so fundamentally misunderstood by right, left, and center that it can be very hard to just start Googling this stuff and try to find a good answer. For example, the recent debate between Zizek and Jordan Peterson, right? It happened two years ago or something, and then Jordan Peterson… Fell off the map for a while because he was really humiliated. But what Peterson tried to do is he got famous in part by being a critic of Marxism, right? So he rose to international fame by being one of the most cutting and biting critics of so-called neo-Marxism or cultural Marxism, etc. And then when he got into that debate with Zizek, we saw firsthand how he had no fucking clue what he was talking about. So how does somebody who doesn't understand Marxism so obviously – How does that person rise to become a global combatant or a competitor, an opposition figure, intellectual dark webber that takes on Marxism? And that's precisely because Marxism is not simple to understand. The people who are invested in the status quo have no real interest in understanding Marxism. Historical materialism and dialectical materialism undermine the bourgeois order directly and It's much easier and our society allows much more room for people to be sloppy critics of Marxists than they allow for Marxists to actually articulate their worldview. This is why once you say you're a Marxist, you're expected to know everything about history, everything about economics. You're held to this incredibly high standard. But if you're an opponent of Marxism, you can be the laziest, shittiest thinker and you will be propped up as a brilliant intellectual in our world precisely because of the sort of ideological fallout. from any sort of critique of Marxism and even the interests that are served by muddying the water and just confusing people about Marxism. Those serve concrete interests. And that's why I think you see this dynamic of Marxists have to know everything. Critics of Marxists can be absolutely ignorant and still be held up as real thinkers. And I think that speaks volumes. Yeah, it's super frustrating, honestly.

Alyson: So we can go ahead and go into the next one, maybe, which is a question that our listeners are probably familiar with, but that, you know, is worth sort of thinking about in the context of what we're doing here today. So this last question, then, is, is Marxism just one theory among others? Or is it distinct in some way? And why is it that Marx says that Marxism is a science? And what's at stake in that claim?

Breht: Right. So first of all, I'll point you to some other resources to keep in mind going forward. On Rev Left, we did an episode, this ruthless criticism of all that exists with JMP, where we talk about Marxism as a science. We go through the criticisms of the possibility of Marxism being a science, etc. And on another episode, Allison and I went actually on to a libertarian socialist podcast and debated the status of Marxism as a science. And so we had two interlocutors and me and Allison were on the same side defending Marxism as a science. And that was almost two hours long, if not longer. So these debates are out there. We have extra resources that you can go to. This is a big question. And it's actually up there with dialectics as far as a difficult thing to grasp and to wrap your mind around. And it's particularly something that in my experience and the experience of others becomes a real impediment to people claiming Marxism because people aren't comfortable saying, with this claim that Marxism is a science precisely because they don't understand it and the water is so muddied around it. So having said that, those are some external resources, but here's my best attempt to answer that question. And I'll start with this. Marxism arose out of and reacted to the German philosophy, the British economics, and the utopian socialism of the time. But rather than lose themselves in metaphysical speculation, post hoc economic rationalizations, or vague socialism rooted in abstract ideas and first principles, Marx and Engels sought to apply the scientific method to an analysis of not only societies and their evolution through history, but to the development of the capitalist mode of production itself. So they did not want to just be stuck in this philosophical realm of speculation, but they wanted to actually fundamentally and concretely understand these processes. By so doing, Marx and Engels ushered in the first ever scientific understanding of capitalism, where it came from historically and the concrete mechanisms by which it dominates, but also by which it undermines itself. There is simply no better understanding of capitalism than the understanding of it laid out in Das Kapital, in part because, unlike the political economic thinkers of their time and ours, Marx and Engels refused to simply operate within its given parameters and sort of try to make sense of it from the inside out, and instead took a meta-perspective on it as a historical process with a concrete beginning and an inevitable end. And as a side note, you can think about – and this helped me when I was trying to wrap my head around this stuff. You can think about Marx and Engels doing for society and history what Darwin did for evolutionary biology via natural selection. That can help some people, especially with a science background. I know that helped me. So in simple terms, and I'll repeat that, what Darwin did for biology, Marx and Engels did for political economy. Namely, they historicized it and they discovered the mechanisms and laws by which it develops over time. And by so doing, they separated their theory from philosophy, from speculation, from idealism, and from being just another set of ideas or philosophies that people could pick and choose from. Historical materialism, as I said before, is the science of Marxism, and by virtue of this science, Marxism separates itself from all other ideas in political philosophy. As Marx himself said, quote, the philosophers have only hitherto interpreted the world. The point is to change it. This is, I think, reflective of Marx's turning away from pure philosophical speculation and toward trying to ground his understanding in a scientific analysis. Now, of course, enemies of Marxism on the right, center, and left have always and will always bend themselves into pretzels trying to dethrone Marxism from its pedestal of science and claim that it is just another dogma or ideology among many. And it would be true that if Marxism could be demonstrated to be non-scientific, it would be demoted to just another interesting development of German philosophy as well as just another set of abstract political beliefs alongside conservatism, liberalism, fascism, and anarchism. Moreover, since Marxism has been and continues to be by far the most effective weapon that working, colonized, and oppressed people have in fighting back against the brutalities of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, it is in the raw and obvious interests of defenders of the status quo to slander and demean Marxism status as a science. and understanding base and superstructure and ideology, we can see how these ideas and this attempt to dethrone Marxism as a science can even happen within the realm of academia and science itself. You can think of, you know, works by like Karl Popper, which tried to, you know, ineffectively and ultimately incorrectly, but tried to dethrone Marxism as a science by, you know, reaching towards things like falsifiability, etc., which we've talked about in those other episodes. But much to the chagrin of its enemies, Marxism remains an open-ended and scientific methodology for understanding the development of capitalism, the contradictions that exist within it, and how to best confront it at any given moment in any given set of conditions. With all of that said, I do not mean to argue that Marxism can't be held dogmatically, that it can't be stripped of its scientific rigor in favor of bland doctrinarism and lazy thinking. It can and it does and it's easier for people to hold something dogmatically than it is for them to think about it scientifically. But this is true for all sciences. There are plenty of people in all fields who hold on to bad, discredited or disproven ideas within science and this has always been the case. But the solution to this does not lie outside of the scientific methodology. It comes from within the scientific method itself, which is why the best critiques of Marxist dogmatism, revisionism, and errors actually come from Marxism itself, not from the outside. And as dialectics reminds us, progress within a field happens in qualitative leaps or ruptures, not in a slow and steady march of linear progress. Darwin represented a rupture within the field of biology. Einstein represented a rupture within the field of theoretical physics. And Marx and Engels represent a rupture within the field of social science and history. What do you think about that, Allison?

Alyson: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really good summary. And I think the important thing to you is sort of the self correcting idea, right? Marxism has the ability to be critical of dogmatism within Marxism, because you're right. Like, if you are, you know, familiar with Marxism at all, you've probably met people who are super dogmatic about their Marxism and who use You know, especially if you're online, like, really just frankly cringey terms like the immortal science of dialectical materialism or whatever. You know, you may have seen this before, and that kind of dogmatism does exist. But that dogmatism is bad precisely on Marxism's own terms. Because Marxism is anti-dogmatic. Marxism, in its understanding of dialectics, recognizes that change is a constant. We can't hold the exact same doctrinaire views because reality is constantly in flux. It is constantly rupturing. It is constantly changing. And holding on to the same ideas is, in fact, a contradiction of Marxism itself on a certain level. So if we want to correct that dogmatism, Marxism gives us the ability to do it internally. And that is, I think, a very valuable thing. And I think the other thing, too, is that the attempt to demote Marxism from the, you know, status of a science to just another idea is often done in a way that's meant to sort of look like it's being charitable to Marxism, right? So for people who have a background in, you know, the academy, a way that this often sort of gets framed that you might recognize is this claim that, you know, it's not that Marxism is wrong, it's that it can just explain a few things. And we need these other external theories, we need Foucault, or we need you know, some other theorists in order to explain these other phenomena. And in that way, you know, it is an attempt to undermine the explanatory power of Marxism by suggesting that materialism isn't in fact a demystification of reality, but is in fact just one more explanation of reality that might be useful for researching it in some way. So often there can be a really benign framing to that argument against the scientific status of Marxism. But if we lose that, we lose that core demystification that makes materialism powerful in the first place. The idea that materialism is not just one interpretation among many, but that it is in fact teaching us something about reality, about truth that can be held onto beyond sort of relativistic notions of reality and truth being matters of interpretation or subjective sort of experience. So it is, I think, very important to hold on to that scientific concept, even when those who are criticizing it are trying to frame it as like, no, I like Marxism, but it's just limited in these ways. We need to understand the philosophical undermining that can be happening with that move.

Breht: Yeah, and to study the history of Marxism is to study in its best strains the constant updating, expansion, and challenging of Marxism within it. So two people that jump to mind as theorists who operated within Marxism but challenged it from within and by doing so expanded and updated and moved the science forward are people like Frantz Fanon and Silvia Federici, right? Federici in Caliban and the Witch, right? was really operating with historical materialist and dialectical materialist perspectives, but was challenging this idea that capitalism was a wholly progressive move forward from feudalism and actually showed in lots of ways how you can even think of the dawn of capitalism as a sort of counter-revolution to some of the egalitarian impulses within the late feudalist order. And in a similar way, Frantz Fanon, in Wretched of the Earth, He even opens the text with saying in the colonial context, we have to stretch Marxism a bit. And what did Frantz Fanon do? He applied Marxism to the colonial context, something that as somebody who was a colonized person, Frantz Fanon could understand in a way that Marx and Engels could never understand. And so by operating within the tradition, by challenging it, by updating it, we can see the open-ended scientific nature of Marxism and we can see – How it is open-ended and is constantly developing and the best sort of pushes for Marxism to move forward are precisely – or come precisely from within it. And that leads us I think to our next question, which is the contributions of Lenin and Mao to Marxism because … In the ways that Silvia Federici and Frantz Fanon theorized Marxism and expanded upon it, Lenin and Mao did the same thing but also put it into practice in world historical ways. So, Allison, you want to try to tackle this first and I'll add some more things as we go along?

Alyson: Yeah, I think there's a few ways we can look at this. On the one hand, like Lenin and Mao are another example of sort of questioning Marxism and updating it in some ways, right? I think we can think about the ways that each of them challenges core ideas within Marxism. Lenin challenges Marx's idea that the revolution would be in the industrialized sort of center of capitalism, and Lenin says actually colonized capitalism. sort of countries are in a unique position to challenge imperialism and capitalism. So we see Lenin updating Marx's ideas there. And, you know, Marx really emphasizes the primacy and oftentimes even like the sole function of the proletariat within a revolutionary struggle. And Mao challenges that as well by arguing for a place for the peasantry within a struggle as well. And so these are thinkers that both are kind of by pushing back against Marx in a way, making Marxism stronger. And we see that sort of self-correcting thing. But Lenin and Mao are also important because they lived in a different time than Marx, right? And this is, I think, really central to understand. Marx was involved in organizing. He was part of the First International. He saw revolutionary struggles take place around him through things like the Paris Commune, and he saw the failures of those struggles. But Marx didn't get to engage hands-on in a revolutionary moment. in the same way that Lenin and Mao did. And with Lenin and Mao, we see two thinkers who weren't just on the theoretical level challenging some of the precepts of Marxism and expanding it, but lived in a revolutionary context where they were able to put it into practice and to develop a practice of Marxism that, you know, could show us how Marxism can actually go about changing the world. For Lenin, in a lot of ways, that looks like this development of the concept of the party, the way that you organize to create a new society, and his critique of spontaneous ideas of revolution. For Mao, we can look to the concept of the mass line, and the cultural revolution, and the way that you can combat... the remnants of capitalist society once you've had that revolutionary moment take place. And so in both of them, we see people who lived in a later context than Marx, where capitalism was at, you know, more extensive contradictions, largely around questions of colonialism and imperialism, and where that allowed them to push back against dogmatism within Marxism, and to show that by pushing back against that, Marxism was stronger because of the successes that both of them achieved. So while, you know, we need to study Marxism, we need to think about these concrete and also philosophical ideas that are ethical, core of Marx, we also need to understand the historical development of Marxism. And whether or not you think the USSR or the People's Republic of China were positive experiments overall, you still need to understand that these are historical moments where these ideas were put to the test that need to be studied.

Breht: Yes, absolutely. As Alison said, they put Marxism into practice in their own specific conditions. They proved its effectiveness in changing the world, and they updated the science of Marxism via their concrete struggles in these world historical revolutions against capitalism and imperialism. One of the interesting things, you know, Allison's mentioning Lenin and Mao's contributions and Mao's cultural revolution. Mao and the Chinese Communist Revolution came after, obviously, the Bolshevik Revolution. Mao was watching how it played out, the first ever successful long-term proletarian revolution in Russia. And he was seeing how the bureaucracy was taking over, how the state itself was sort of becoming separate from the people. The Soviet Union, after Lenin's death during Stalin's reign, had this idea that class struggle had ended in the Soviet Union, and that is a sort of anti-dialectical way of thinking. So Mao, challenging that anti-dialectical way of thinking with dialectics, insisted class struggle continues under socialism, and in fact it can often intensify. The Cultural Revolution was one of the strategies employed, one of the experimental strategies employed by Mao to counteract that movement within the socialist and communist movement that he saw rising in the Soviet Union. This obviously led to a huge dispute, and we can get in different episodes about the Sino-Soviet split, etc. But I really think that's a great way to understand how… Even in an ostensibly socialist project, there's still this creeping bourgeois metaphysical static understanding of things. And Mao challenged that. And he not only challenged it theoretically, he put into practice the experiments that might fight against that tendency within the movement. I think that's beautiful. And then the other things that don't really get talked about with Lenin and Mao's contributions is precisely and particularly their contributions to dialectical materialism. While it's obvious that Marx and Engels consciously understood dialectics and dialectical materialism and were trying to put it into practice, it really wasn't fully formalized as a philosophy of Marxism until Lenin's materialism and imperial criticism in which he really sort of – does the work of laying out the logic of dialectical materialism in a really new and exciting and deep way. And then Mao, of course, with things like on contradiction, deepened our understanding of the role contradiction plays within dialectical materialism. So you see from Marx and Engels through Lenin and Mao, not only the putting into practice of ideas and all of the other stuff, but also a refining and making explicit the logic of the philosophy they're using to analyze, which is something that doesn't get talked about as much as Lenin's imperialism and Mao's mass line, but I think are really just as important and really things that Marxists today trying to come up with strategies in our present conditions can look to and learn from.

Alyson: Yeah. And I think, you know, even like outside of the context of like revolutionary struggle, like the thing that I always come back to when I read Lenin and Mao on the more philosophical side is like these are important philosophical contributions more broadly that they don't get recognized for. Right. Like when you really dive into especially the simplicity of some of Mao's articulations and dialectics. and his intervention into like Western philosophical debates about empiricism versus rationalism. Like these are thinkers who are engaging in philosophical discourse that just totally gets ignored by philosophy, you know, to the detriment of mainstream philosophy in many ways.

Breht: Definitely. All right. So let's go ahead and move on to our sort of final segment, which is tackling some basic terms. We have about five of them to just tackle and try to give a brief, succinct, but hopefully somewhat thoughtful and in-depth definition of these terms to help you concretize and deepen your understanding of Marxism and the roles that these concepts play within our analysis and methodology. So, Allison, do you want to take the first one, which I think is primitive accumulation?

Alyson: Yeah, so we can talk about this. So primitive accumulation is one of those terms that you might hear come up in discussions of Marxism, especially on the more theoretical or academic end of things. It's a very popular concept. And it's one that's actually very grounded, I think, and very interesting that we can use to think about historical materialism and the way it can demystify things. So the question of primitive accumulation within Marxism is perhaps I've simply thought of the question of how it was that capitalism developed. What was it that allowed the development of capitalism, the development of the capitalist class and its sort of securing of power? And I think this is actually really concrete example of demystification that we can kind of look at. So Marx, in his critique of sort of Adam Smith's political economy, he sort of mockingly paints sort of the capitalist explanation for where capitalism comes from. And his story that he tells us goes something like this. He says, and to develop kind of this new society based around these principles of freedom and exchange. And it was a result of the honest, good, sweat-of-the-brow kind of labor of some people that was better than others. And this is kind of, you know, like a story that we've heard a lot, a little bit. We hear about capitalists becoming capitalists because of the kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality, especially in the United States when neoliberalism, we really leaned into this myth of like hard work being how you get to these positions. And the story that capitalists were telling about where capitalism came from kind of played into the same idea. And Marxism is going to push back against this, right? It's going to try to demystify this because this story isn't the truth. So when we talk about primitive accumulation and Marxism, we talk about this idea that, in fact, the emergence of capitalism wasn't about competition or some people working harder than others. It was about violence. It was about class struggle between different classes. And we've kind of looked a little bit, right, talking about the American Revolution or the development of republicanism within Europe, the way that these societies came about because of violent revolutions against feudalism. But even beyond those revolutions, there had to be a total destruction of the sort of ways of life that existed before capitalism. So when we sort of get into this idea of primitive accumulation, we get into the details of how capitalism didn't come about peacefully. It didn't come about through cooperation and voluntary exchange. It came about through coercion and manipulation in many ways. So an example that Marx gets into that many people aren't aware of is this concept of enclosure and the bloody legislation. So under feudalism, obviously, peasants didn't live what we would necessarily describe as a good life, but there were some aspects of their life that were sort of interesting and alien to what we see now in capitalism. So while peasants obviously worked fields on land that was controlled by a feudal lord or by some aristocrat and paid tribute out of what they were producing in that context, there was also land that was held in common. You know, we call this the commons, where peasants could grow their own food as well and, you know, gain the ability to have some level of subsistence beyond the direct exploitative relationship of serfdom. And one interesting thing that we see happening, and Marx points to this as a very grounded example of primitive accumulation, is during the period of time where these new republics are being formed, where parliaments are rising up, and where we're seeing a capitalist society emerge, especially in England, a set of laws called the Enclosure Laws were passed, which basically made it illegal for peasants to farm on this land. The commons was enclosed and they lost access to it. Now, why would that happen? What role would that play? Well, as capitalism was developing, there was sort of a need to push people into cities so that you could have an urban workforce to work in these new industrialized factories that were being founded. And so, in fact, in order to force people to do that, peasant life had to be made unlivable. It had to be made impossible. And this kind of legislation was an example of how all of that was closed off so that people would be forced to move and integrate into this capitalist system. The development of capitalism then didn't occur as this sort of peaceful organic transition, and it didn't just occur as revolution against the monarchs. It also occurred through the manipulation of the populace, the artificial construction of an urban workforce, and really violent interventions into the ways of life that people had. And this is one way that we can sort of begin to de- You know, other thinkers like Better Ricci, for example, who Brett previously mentioned, also look at the way that capitalism had to eliminate previous forms of life. She looks at the way that, you know, women began to be enclosed within houses so that they could do domestic labor for a male workforce. force, and also the ways that slavery and colonialism were necessary processes for the establishment of capitalism. In order for the capital necessary for this emerging class to function, they had to enslave massive parts of the world. They had to justify genocides. And so the story of the emergence of capitalism that we get into with this idea of primitive accumulation is one of violence, one of revolution, one of struggle, that demystifies the story we've been told of hardworking people with lofty ideas. And so primitive accumulation, I think, is one really grounded example of how demystification works and how when we start to think as materialists, we see a kind of horrifying reality of the beginning of capitalism that we've been, in a certain sense, lied to about by those who educated us.

Breht: Yeah, wonderfully said. And one of the examples Marx gave about the enclosure process was peasants would go out into the woods, the forests, and collect firewood to obviously warm their homes, cook their food, etc. And one of the laws that got put into place in this primitive accumulation process is was to make that illegal. So going out and taking wood from nature became illegal because that allowed peasants independence from the broader system. One of the things on top of pushing people off their land and into cities for factory work, on top of disciplining and enclosing women inside of households for the maintenance of the labor force, There's also a devastation of communal bonds that existed under the feudalist order. And we enter into this period of hyper-individualism where everybody's competing against everybody else on the marketplace and gives rise to alienation and all this other stuff. So to understand that process is very important, and particularly to understand slavery and genocide as part and parcel with primitive accumulation I think is very, very clarifying and works against some idealist conceptions of of American history and really just capitalist history broadly.

Alyson: Yeah, definitely.

Breht: All right. The next term, which will bleed into the one following that, is vanguardism. You want to take that, Allison?

Alyson: Yeah, so vanguardism is another term that I think is worth talking about. It hints at a debate within Marxism. And again, if you've seen sort of leftists argue with each other, you might hear the term used kind of as an insult or as a pejorative, right? As an accusation that gets made against people. And it kind of carries with it this connotation of elitism, right? Like having this elite vanguard above the working class who guides things. And I think we can do a little bit of work sort of disentangling that and thinking through what the Marxist notion of vanguardism is and why that's kind of a misrepresentation. So, you know, again, this term, it gets at an idea that sort of a leadership is necessary in the broadest sense. And then in the Leninist sense, it gets at this idea of a professional revolutionary leadership. So let's think about the development of this. So Marx himself was somewhat unclear about organizational structures. If you look at Marx's work, you're not getting the kind of grounded, like, this is how we organize a party that you get with Lenin. So drawing from Marx himself an idea of vanguardism is a little bit tricky. But also, if we historicize Marx and if we think about his historical situation and place him within it, it might get a little bit easier to wrestle with. So Marx was a part of the First International, right? And the First International was publishing things like the Communist Manifesto. And on that level, at the very least, it's very clear that Marx, through his practice as a grounded philosopher who was part of the movement, believed that there needs to be some level of leadership guiding things. You can't just allow the movement to develop spontaneously. Correct ideas need to be applied, and there needs to be a leadership through organization overseeing that. And again, that idea is underdeveloped in Marx, but it is still somewhat there. And then vanguardism really comes into its own through Lenin. And if you want way more depth on this question, you can listen to our episode on Lenin's What Is To Be Done, because it gets into a lot of that depth. But this is really where we start to see sort of these ideas of vanguardism become very important. But in Leninism, Lenin suggests that it is the job of revolutionaries not to just allow the movement to spontaneously develop in whatever direction that it needs to, but the job of revolutionaries to steer it in a productive direction and to make sure that it develops correctly. And in order to do this, Lenin suggests that a vanguard of professional revolutionaries is necessary. And it would be incorrect to understand this as meaning, you know, sort of a bunch of intellectuals who stand above and beyond the revolutionary movement of the masses and dictate it without any insight from the masses. Because Lenin actually suggests that the job of the revolution, you know, really is to bring in these workers and make them into professional revolutionaries. So there is a goal of pulling people up to that level. And Maurer finds us even further with the mass line, where the party vanguard isn't above and outside of the masses, but is in constant conversation with them and taking in their ideas. and, you know, becoming stronger because of them. So the vanguard doesn't imply elitism necessarily. It doesn't imply a lack of touch with the masses. As we see it developed, it implies a huge faith that the masses can be developed into these professional leaders, and the idea that a revolution is not a spontaneous act.

Breht: Yeah. And notice how the concept of vanguardism is not a product of armchair speculation or it doesn't come out of academia. It comes out of the concrete struggles of first the Russian and then the Chinese people fighting against and putting into practice Marxist ideas. So they're not just sitting back thinking of fun ideas. They're actually testing and running experiments in real time in, as JMP would call it, the laboratory of revolution. And learning these things and then the next revolution picks up on what they learned, discards what didn't work, carries forward, expands and updates what did work. And that's precisely that path from Marx to Lenin to Mao that we see. And for all of the caricatures about vanguardism and the vanguard party – It really is not about a leader standing on top as a dictator of the people or handing down dictates to helpless people that are toiling at the bottom. But really think about vanguard parties and people in that party as servants of the people. In Maoism, we hear a lot of serve the people, feed the people. It's about really subordinating your own individual life and your own individual wants and career ambitions or whatever, submitting all of that for the emancipation of working people, of colonized people, of oppressed people. It's really not a dictatorial thing. It's a more service-oriented idea. And critics of vanguardism, critics of the vanguard party, they proliferate. They're everywhere. But nobody on the left that really hates Lenin and really hates Mao, they've just not been able to cash out their so-called critiques and superior ideas properly. in actual progressive revolutionary movements that challenge and overthrow capitalism. So it's very easy to sit on the sidelines, to caricature, to throw tomatoes at people on the field doing the actual work. But as Marxists, we don't value ideas in a vacuum. We value those ideas put into concrete struggle. How far do they get us? That does not mean that vanguardism and the party form are the end-all, be-all of revolutionary strategy. It's just that at this point in the historical development of socialism, those things have proven objectively to be more effective than the ideas of its critics. And so that is what we value more than abstract ideas. We value the effectiveness in concrete struggle. And that's where these ideas come from. And that's why they're important. And that's why they're held up by us, not as dogma, but as, you know, sort of scientific principles that have worked in the past that may, as an open-ended science, need updating and revision as we go forward and operate in new conditions under new, you know, sort of forces, but are still so far in our history, really effective weapons in our struggle. And that's important. And this bleeds into the next slide. Sort of idea, which is just the party and vanguardism and the party and the vanguard party. They're very connected. This idea really comes out of Marx talking about the fact that the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself. And so the next question is, OK. How does the working class one become conscious of itself and then how does it organize to pursue its interests? And the party is Lenin's conclusion in a lot of ways of that. And the party can be understood as organized working class militants rooted fundamentally in the masses. And one of the things I really want to emphasize there is when I say that the Vanguard Party is a mass party. It's rooted fundamentally in the masses. Meaning there are plenty of people who call themselves the vanguard party. There are plenty of little micro sects and cadres around the world who think of themselves as the vanguard. But because they're not rooted in the masses, that claim is meaningless. And so I think that's an important component of it. And all of the caricaturizations by anti-communists right, left, and center try to obscure this reality. They try to turn it into something evil or nefarious. And for a lot of people, it works, particularly with Americans who have been really brainwashed by these ideas of we're against big government and rugged individualism. And even people who explicitly reject those notions implicitly sort of bring them on board when they start talking about authoritarianism. Because Organized people organizing with with solid leadership and being able to coordinate their efforts means effective combating of the forces that oppress and anybody not invested truly and deeply in the overthrowing of those forces are always going to try to denigrate and caricaturize this movement because it is and it's been proven to be the most effective route to challenge these forces. So those are just some of my initial thoughts. Vanguardism and the party form really do go together in a lot of ways. And I would just urge people to be on the lookout for constant caricaturization and to really think critically about what it means. And more importantly than anything, to actually put it into practice, because once you put it into practice, a lot of the speculation falls away. You can see how the mass line works. You can see how building the party is fundamental and an essential part of being able to effectively combat terrorism.

Alyson: the oppressors the enemies the capitalists the imperialists etc yeah and i think also when thinking about sort of those like anti-communist caricatures of the party it's important to think that like when we talk about the party in the communist context we're not talking about like a political party like we have in a bourgeois republic right so people will point to the fact that under various socialist states the communist party was sort of the only official electoral party that existed but but it's different than sort of what you would think about, right? So with the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party today, no matter what you and I or the rest of the people believe, the Democratic Party doesn't care and it doesn't give a shit and we don't have a way of influencing it, right? And you can see this for a fact because the popularity of policies like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal is exceptionally high, but they'll never find themselves in the platform of the Democratic Party because the Democratic Party is a group of bourgeois leaders who just tell you, here's our slate, vote for it. But the party that we're talking about in a communist context is not that. It's exactly like you say, Brett. It's a mass party grounded in the people. Democracy is expressed internally through the party, through decision-making, through voting, through allowing people to have an actual influence on what the party is and does. And that is super different than the bourgeois parties, which we largely have no daily interaction with, except when election time comes around and they say, Here's our slate. Vote for it. You don't get a lot of say. We're talking about something that is profoundly grounded and concretely democratic internally in how it relates to the people and the masses. Yeah.

Breht: infinitely more democratic than bourgeois parties. And in this topsy-turvy world, things often get turned into their opposite. So the very forces of bourgeois anti-democracy will call vanguardism and the party authoritarian when you really look at it, it's precisely the opposite. And that's true of so many things in our culture. And that leads well into the next term, which is ideology. What is ideology? I've said this before I think on this show, but there's a sort of colloquial understanding of ideology, which is just any set of ideas that somebody holds on to. Oh, that's a democratic – you have a democratic ideology or you have a republican ideology, etc. But that's not how we mean it in the Marxist term. In the Marxist terms, it's something more diffuse, something more subtle, something that operates oftentimes well beyond the conscious recognition of the people who are sort of regurgitating it. Marx says, and I think this gets at the sort of the core pillar of the Marxist idea of ideology, Marx says, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. And then later, somebody who did work on this front, Althusser, he said, ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence, sort of Pointing at the idea that ideology sort of fills the gap between how things appear to be and how they really are. And to maintain a status quo, to maintain the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, there has to be obscurantism. There has to be, as we've talked about all throughout this episode already, a muddying of the water, a mystifying of social relations, a mystifying of... of history in order to solidify the rule of the bourgeois ruling class. And ideology is the mechanism by which those ideas proliferate through the people. It manifests in our common sense. It manifests in our popular culture. It manifests in our folk worldviews. One thing I like to talk about is You'll always hear – you'll hear people sort of regurgitate things that they've heard like communism goes against human nature or Che and Fidel were sociopathic murderers who burned books and killed gay people. And then you sit back and you're like … OK, does that come from somebody who has read a single book on what they're talking about? Does that come from intellectual research and independent thinking? Or is that just something that they've passively absorbed throughout their life and are regurgitating it as if? It came from their own independent, critical intellectual faculties. And that's the nefariousness, the insidiousness of ideology is it operates as if it's common sense. It operates as if it's the conclusion of really disciplined reasoning. But in reality, it's completely detached from concrete reality. And it often is meant to obscure, not to illuminate, not to demystify. Another way to think about it is ideology can be seen as sort of the superstructure of a given mode of production. Maybe superstructure and base analysis can help you understand how ideology operates. You can think of ideology as being in a lot of ways sort of maybe even synonymous with the superstructure. That can be a subtle and more nuanced debate, of course, but it points in the direction of understanding ideology in Marxist terms more. Althusser would talk about ideological state apparatuses, and he was thinking of things like education, the media, the church, even laws, things that might formally exist outside the state or the government as such but transmit its values. They end up disseminating ideologies that reinforce the control of the dominant class, which under capitalism is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some quick and easy examples here. Pledge of Allegiance in schools, right? It seems relatively innocent. We all did it as children. But if you actually look at the content of what we're saying every single day, it's very ideologically infused. And schools also operate as basically training you to be a worker. It segments your day in the way that it will be segmented when you grow up. And your teacher stands in to train you how to relate to your boss, right? You know, ask when you can go to the bathroom. At this time, you do this. I tell you what to do, etc. Prosperity gospel within American churches, right? There's this absurd contradiction between classic Christianity, which emphasizes in the words of Jesus Christ, the meek, the vulnerable, the innocent, and this idea of greed at all costs. And how do you solve that contradiction? Through the ideology of prosperity gospel, where actually God wants you to get super, super rich, right? And so we see in these subtle ways and a million more how the ideas in people's heads aren't necessarily as bourgeois philosophers and economists would like us to think the conclusions of self-interested and rational individuals, but are rather ideas promulgated and handed down subtly. from the underlying mode of production in the ruling class. They become our ideas and all of a sudden you're in a workplace with a co-worker who's just as poor and struggling as you talking about how their boss just works harder and that's why they earn it and unions aren't a good idea because our bosses already take care of us, etc. It's really insidious. It's really nefarious and it's one of the bulwarks, I think importantly, that the capitalist world order has in to maintain its order that doesn't necessarily rely on brute force. Because after feudalism, humans wanted to kind of put the absolute explicit violent force a little out of view. And ideology is obviously a way to do that. But that's not to say that ideology didn't obviously exist in slave societies. It's not to say that ideology didn't obviously exist in feudalist societies. It doesn't. And it continues to exist in a capitalist society. Part of the front that we fight on Right.

Alyson: Yeah, and I think ideology is interesting as a concept, too, because it's one of those things where, like, really concretely, once you start to think about the world as a materialist, you start to see these things, right? You start to realize that these things that you have totally taken for granted as ideas or even, yeah, common sense little phrases or idioms that we tell ourselves are all kind of about reinforcing this specific order. And it's a very eye-opening experience. Once you can kind of start to see the world through that lens. So sort of the last term that we had is one that we've thrown around for sure on our show before. And that, you know, is a term that you will see get thrown around as a pejorative on the left quite frequently that is worth thinking about, which is this term revisionism and what that means.

Breht: So I actually have very little for this because I think it's just pretty obvious once you give a definition. I think the basic idea when somebody calls somebody a revisionist is that it is liberalism masquerading as Marxism or anti-Marxism dressed up in the garb of Marxism trying to convince you that their liberal ideas are actually ideas that come out of Marxist methodologies and Marxist analysis. Dogmatism often masquerades as materialist analysis. That's a form of revisionism. Opportunism within our movements is a form of revisionism. In Maoist China, he talked about the capitalist rotors, right? People within the party trying to put the Chinese people back onto the road of liberalism and capitalism. And we can debate whether that happened or not. But that's the idea of revisionism is basically in the simplest terms revisionism. It's liberalism or at least anti-communism or anti-Marxist ideas masquerading as if they are principled Marxist ideas. And it can be very nefarious inside of movements and inside of organizations where you're really trying to struggle together to find a proper line strategy to move forward with. And people are dressing up their ingrained liberalism, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, as if it's principled Marxist analysis. And that can be very dangerous.

Alyson: Yeah. I also think one thing to really focus on is the word revisionism, you know, invokes this idea of like revising something. And I think people get caught up in a sort of dogmatism they see there, right? Where they hear someone accused of revisionism, and it's like, oh, you're revising some doctrine within Marxism or whatever. Mm-hmm. And that's not really what we're getting at, right? And I think ideology can help us understand this, right? No matter how committed we are to the cause, we also have an ideological underpinning in capitalism. Like Brett said, like we are raised with this. We learn it in school. We learn it all the time. And as long as that ideology is operating, even the most committed radical can still hold on to these mistakes and these forms of liberalism that undermine the position of the movement. And when we talk about revisionism, we're not talking about like, oh, you're like some, you know, like you're revising Marx in some way, you're throwing out the sacred doctrines or whatever. We mean like, no, you are importing these ideologies in a way that is harmful and will undermine what we're trying to do and what we're trying to build here. And I think it's very important to understand that it's not a dogmatic claim. It's one that is more practical.

Breht: uh in its orientation i think that's an important thing to consider with it definitely and you know and it's really important what allison said is that ideology can continue to exist when you even when you're committed principled radical and this happens to me a lot and i think it's a form of bourgeois individualism where there'll be times when i just genuinely internally get discouraged um i look out at the I'm not making an impact. We don't have the forces necessary to do anything. Maybe you'd just be better for my mental and emotional health if I just recoiled back into my personal life. And, you know, that's something within me that I then recognize and fight against, of course. But, you know, it's so ingrained. It's so inbuilt that, you know, if you're not sort of. at the highest levels, this shit can creep in and really start to do damage to how you live your life and your basic principles, oftentimes without you even recognizing it. So it's one thing to be angrily calling everybody else revisionist. I think it's more oftentimes beneficial for you to look within yourself and see how the revisionism and opportunism affects and ideology might manifest within yourself. And then that can give you a better understanding of how it operates in others, how you can go about weeding it out of yourself and others. And it's a constant battle. You don't just click in and all of a sudden you're done and you've transcended your conditioning and your liberal brainwashing. It's a lifelong struggle. And a lot of times people grow up, they get maybe even a little economically comfortable, and then they just let that take them over. And then all of a sudden you'll start seeing their politics shift more and more towards liberalism. This happens right now with like the new left where the new left wrote that letter a month or two ago chastising the new new left and saying we have to vote for Biden, etc. A lot of these people were hardcore Marxist revolutionaries ready to take on the government and do a revolution when they were in their 20s. But then a lot of them found ways into academia. They started selling books. They got pretty comfy in their life. And more importantly, they got out of the working and poor classes up into the middle upper class. And their politics shift. This is not them consciously betraying their earlier selves. It's that ingrained momentum. Of liberal conditioning taking over, particularly when your financial situation shifts, which is why so often we see revolutionary movements be underpinned by either the incredibly oppressed or the young right people that haven't been able to find comfort in their systems or the people where the system just doesn't allow any comfort at all. And one of the problems and one of the reasons it's so hard to organize effectively as a radical militant left in the U.S. is precisely because of the super exploitation conducted by imperialism and the siphoning of relative wealth and resources back to the global north that can then be turned around and used to pay off segments of the working class, often the white working class and often labor aristocracy embedded within whiteness and embedded within the idea that, okay, my personal income is $100,000 a year. Am I really committed to overthrowing the system? Because I'm pretty fucking comfy and I would like to add a deck to my house next year, you know? So that shit does happen. And it's something to be on the lookout within yourself as well as within others.

Alyson: Definitely. Awesome. So do we want to move into sort of the last thing that we were going to look at a little bit, which is thinking through these two other sort of fields of left-wing thought, anarchism and sort of social democracy?

Breht: Yeah, I'll give my super quick thoughts and then I'll let you take it. The way I see social democracy, anarchism, and Marxism sort of interrelating is I see Marxism as sort of the trunk of the tree, right? Marx's critique of capitalism is sort of the starting point for both anarchism and social democracy. Anarchism arose in the early debates, like really formally, right, theoretically in the early debates between Bakunin and Marx revolving around the state. Bakunin had a lot of shitty ideas revolving But then obviously there's other anarchists that had better ideas and it was updated over time, etc. But I really think it's important to understand anarchism as sort of an outgrowth of early, early Marxism and then sort of a challenging of some of the core tenets of Marxism within that era. relatively radical revolutionary movement, which is why the two dominant strains of true revolutionary leftism in the world today are anarchism and Marxism, but they share the same roots, I would argue. And social democracy can be seen as another outgrowth of Marxism. Sometimes social democracy is slandered by anarchists as Marxism and critiqued as if critiquing social democracy is part and parcel with the critique of Marxism proper. which is interesting and confused in its own way. But social democracy, I think, can be understood as a dominant strain of revisionism within Marxism. We saw it appear during the time of Marx and Engels when they were competing with people. We saw it in the works of Rosa competing with Bernstein, Lenin competing with Kotsky within the inner disputes of the Communist Party during Mao's era. etc. And so we still see it today, right? People using the term socialism to just mean left liberal social democracy. And it's really social democracy can be seen, unlike anarchism, as an abandonment really of the revolutionary aspect of Marxism and a A mistaken belief that through the democratic institutions propped up by liberal capitalism, we can eventually build a world that Marxists and anarchists want to see, which is a world free of class and domination and exploitation. I see social democracy as a revisionist offshoot of Marxism, and I see anarchism as kind of growing from the same roots and then turning around and challenging each other on a few really basic disputes, which then evolve over time. With Lenin, you see anarchism shift to compensate and address Lenin's notions of the vanguard party and the really existing conditions of democracy. The Soviet Union and then anarchism shift again in relation to Maoism. And so I think that sort of dialectical back and forth between Marxism and anarchism is always there. But the thing I respect in anarchism is that it maintains the revolutionary edge and the refusal to compromise with bourgeois capitalism and social democracy chops that revolutionary edge off of Marxism.

Alyson: Yeah, no, definitely. It's similar to how I look at it. And I was sort of framing it in my notes as sort of the way that there's agreement and disagreement, right? So I think you get at in anarchism, there is this agreement with Marxism about the need for a revolutionary orientation, right? That is very much shared. But there's this sort of philosophical divergence that happens about what the state is, right? So... For anarchists, these concepts like the state or hierarchy are kind of absolute, right? They're trans-historical, they extend across all history, and they are, no matter what their particular instance might look like, they are broadly problematic, broadly inherently violent, and have to be opposed in a certain way. Whereas Marxism has sort of a different view, right? Like for Marxism, hierarchy or the state doesn't have any value in and of itself. It depends on what class it's being used in the defense of. And so hierarchy in defense of the capitalist class or the state in the defense of the capitalist class is something a Marxist would condemn. Whereas a Marxist would recognize that for revolutionary organizing, you need some level of hierarchy or that a proletarian dictatorship needs a state. And so the state isn't understood as sort of this trans-historical, inherently problematic concept, but it's understood in the specifics of each given state in relation to sort of the class struggle. And so I think that's one way we can see anarchism. And then with, you know, sort of social democracy, we see this total break with Marxism on the question of revolution and sort of an error of taking sort of this particular list view of the state too far. Right. Like social democracy ends up saying, well, this particular state controls. could be used in this way, you know, for progressive ends, and we could infiltrate it in a certain sense and use it. And you sort of get so over-focused on the specifics of one state that you miss the broader class focus that states play, period. And that kind of gets obstructed and obfuscated there a little bit. So that would be one issue there. in the same way. There's social democrats who think of themselves as Marxists in some sort of really bizarre manners, but there's not the same sort of philosophical rigor often. It's more pragmatist in its orientation, where anarchism, I think you do see more of the philosophical tradition. And even outside of the materialist components of anarchism, there is a lot of theoretical depth to even those more idealist forms of it. So that's sort of another component that I think about there in terms of differentiating them.

Breht: Yeah, I think that's great. I have nothing else in my notes. Is there anything else that you want to touch on before we wrap this episode up?

Alyson: No, I don't think so. I think this is a lot for people. So hopefully this is helpful. I mean, like the goal is that this can be a tool for you to really wrestle with these ideas and start to, you know, if you're new to Marxism, if you're just curious what Marxism is, or if you have friends who are curious what it is, this can hopefully be Sort of an introduction and a starting point. It obviously, you know, we're doing our best with it. It's not going to function in and of itself without any other additional resources, but hopefully we pointed towards some of those potential resources and this can be useful.

Breht: Yeah. And I would just urge you, if there's some things in here that you don't understand, don't ever let that discourage you. I remember 10 years ago, I lived in the basement of a friend's house and he had a whiteboard for one of his walls. And I remember writing, literally writing out historical materialism and Googling it and writing the definition and then dialectical materialism and writing the definition and every day getting up and looking at it and trying to think what that means. And then, you know, doing more graphs and then trying to understand basin superstructure. And it took me years and years and years. to understand even the level of understanding I have now, which is by no means a complete knowledge. And you'll never get to a complete knowledge. But to struggle through things, to be able to engage with material that over the first, second, even maybe third and fourth passes, you don't fully comprehend, but you continue to still dive and find new resources and struggle and think critically about it. That's the process of learning. Not everything is going to snap the first time you hear it. It's a protracted process. And and I think that's an important important to keep in mind, particularly if you hear some of this stuff and get discouraged. I've been there. I'm still there in a lot of ways. There's still plenty of stuff I don't understand. And so don't be too hard on yourself. Just continue to engage, continue to think critically and continue to try to suss through different resources and come to a better and better and better understanding. That's all you can hope for as a human being.

Alyson: Yeah. And I mean, likewise, I've been wrestling with this for years and constantly realizing I misunderstood this thing or I had this thing wrong and being open to just growing, right? Like we're going to get things wrong. We're going to misunderstand things. And that's part of how we become better in our grasp of things. So being, you know, generous with yourself as you wrestle with these things is very important because everyone has to go through that self-correcting process when they're learning something like this.

Breht: Absolutely. All right. So for next month, the end of October, we will go back to current events and there will be plenty to talk about right before the election. And so I'm excited to talk about that. And then going forward from there, we're just going to have to honestly see, I think, how the election plays out because it could demand us perhaps leaving theory aside for a month or two and continually sort of analyzing what's going on because it could get very, very chaotic in about a month here. Yeah. So yeah, stay tuned for that. Thank you to everybody who supports us on Patreon, everybody who shares our episodes. We really want you to take this episode and try to give it to people who are genuinely interested in learning about Marxism. That's part of the point of this. And we hope people utilize that and spread that around. So thank you again for the support. And we will be back next month to talk about this terrible empire in decay. Enjoy. Good night.