Speaker 1: Welcome to Nikoda Here podcast. And once again I have
Speaker 1: forgotten to write an intro for I'm your host bia
Speaker 1: along with these chains.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's great to be here. Intro on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this interless episode is I think the first
Speaker 1: episode that well, can I promise this is the first
Speaker 1: episode that was recorded after we learned that Tim Wallas
Speaker 1: was going to be the vice presidential nominee, defeating the
Speaker 1: sexual assault guy and then the other sexual assault guy
Speaker 1: who probably covered up on murder.
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't slack on it. Also coming up a murdered
Speaker 2: ant me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a truly impressive, truly impressive sort of
Speaker 1: set of candidates that party elite were choosing from.
Speaker 2: It's still somewhat surprising that they didn't like fumble. I
Speaker 2: mean that they will still fumble.
Speaker 1: We have months to go, but that's true. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: to be fair, I think, oh god, we figured out
Speaker 1: this guy covered up murder. Is probably the kind of
Speaker 1: thing that like even the Dems like dog shit opposition
Speaker 1: research people were like, hmm, okay, we shouldn't run that guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that tweeting about his murder cover up.
Speaker 2: Let's leave this one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's Shapiro out of Pennsylvania, who is one of
Speaker 1: the other candidates, by the way, Yeah sucks shit, But
Speaker 1: you know, so the guy we ended up with a
Speaker 1: sort of folksy Midwestern actually I think it was just
Speaker 1: a defensive coordinator or whatever, the defensive coach for his
Speaker 1: football team. He's a very sort of folksy guy. We're
Speaker 1: gonna get more into him next week. But the thing
Speaker 1: that I wanted to sort of start our discussion about
Speaker 1: the vice presidential candidates with is attempting to reconcile something
Speaker 1: that I've seen a lot of discussion about sort of
Speaker 1: I don't know, kind of confusion to some extent about
Speaker 1: about how do you actually make sense of the sort
Speaker 1: of two halves of Tim Walls's record, right which, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, he's signing a bunch of distrively progressive,
Speaker 1: sort of welfared legislation being the governor of Minnesota, including
Speaker 1: things like universal free school lunch. I said it was
Speaker 1: lunch of breakfast. I don't remember. It was both. It
Speaker 1: was both, yeah, yeah, And you know the on the
Speaker 1: one hand, you have this sort of sparkling record, and
Speaker 1: then on the other hand, you have you know, him
Speaker 1: puling in the National Guard and deploying it to suppress
Speaker 1: the uprising in twenty twenty, which, lest we forget, started
Speaker 1: in Minnesota. Yeah, that's where the third Precinct burned, and
Speaker 1: also using the police to sort of like horribly brutalize
Speaker 1: protesters against Line three, which is an oil pipeline through
Speaker 1: a bunch of indigenous land that probably I don't know,
Speaker 1: we're probably two years out from like an unbelievably horrific
Speaker 1: oil spill coming out of it that everyone's gonna go,
Speaker 1: how can we possibly have predicted this? It only had
Speaker 1: spilled a million times before, et cetera, et cetera, and
Speaker 1: that walls like rammed through and had people who were
Speaker 1: resisting it like horribly beaten by a cop. So how
Speaker 1: do you sort of reconcile these two halves of this
Speaker 1: guy's record? And there's like a local politics explanation which
Speaker 1: I see bandied about a lot, which is true to
Speaker 1: some extent, And that explanation is that he's not really
Speaker 1: a progressive and he's mostly kind of a moderate who
Speaker 1: she's going along with a pro fairly progressive Minnesota legislature
Speaker 1: as getting credit for just like signing bills. And that's
Speaker 1: kind of true. But it's also I think ultimately a
Speaker 1: cop out because we are on year about one hundred
Speaker 1: and forty of the welfare state, and this shit keeps
Speaker 1: happening every single time. And what's really sort of at
Speaker 1: stake here analytically is that the relationship between the welfare
Speaker 1: state and violence is significantly deeper than the record of
Speaker 1: one guy. And so today what we're going to be
Speaker 1: doing is not really talking about Tim Willson much. What
Speaker 1: we're going to be doing is we're going to be
Speaker 1: going back through some of the history of social democracy
Speaker 1: and trying to understand how it became entangled with the
Speaker 1: sort of use of force with police violence, because I
Speaker 1: think there's a story there that's been completely buried by
Speaker 1: the tidal wave of just like I don't know whatever
Speaker 1: walls takes, and you know, I think presidential elections are
Speaker 1: something that has a tendency to just destroy everyone's analytical
Speaker 1: capacity for like two years. So yes, let's resist that
Speaker 1: and go do something interesting. Yeah, okay, Yeah, So I
Speaker 1: think the place to start with this is this is
Speaker 1: a place that we start, I think not infrequent amount
Speaker 1: on this show, or at least I do. And that's
Speaker 1: the sort of original debates from you know, about the
Speaker 1: eighteen thirties through roughly the eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties
Speaker 1: when it changes about what socialism was going to be.
Speaker 1: There's always been to some extent, like a bunch of
Speaker 1: different kind of understandings of it, but something that you know,
Speaker 1: what you'd call the sort of left wing of the Democrats,
Speaker 1: which is like everyone at that point, right, and the
Speaker 1: anarchists kind of agree about. And basicthing that Marx agrees
Speaker 1: about with sort of the anarchists at the time is
Speaker 1: that socialism is you know, it's the free association of producers, right,
Speaker 1: you know, it is the work class abolishing itself, but
Speaker 1: then also like being the people who directly run the
Speaker 1: new society that's sort of brought about by this thing
Speaker 1: without sort of the stage or sort of political mediation,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. And even you know, people like
Speaker 1: Angles who are like arch statists, right, like Angles, you know,
Speaker 1: uses the theoretical justification for like every time a socialist
Speaker 1: picks up a machine gun to shoot someone, and that
Speaker 1: works for the state, Like that's Angles's justification for But
Speaker 1: even he's talking about how like one day the state
Speaker 1: will be like put on a shelf in a museum
Speaker 1: and people will walk past and look at it and
Speaker 1: then like walk by it because it's like it's a
Speaker 1: tool of a bybegone era that nobody needs anymore. And
Speaker 1: in this period, it's very clear that socialism is we're
Speaker 1: just directly controlling the mesa production and it's directly democratically
Speaker 1: managing their lives. But this becomes less clear as the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds go on. Something that David Grayer points out,
Speaker 1: and I think I've quoted this on the show before,
Speaker 1: but it's important here. While this is sort of going on, right,
Speaker 1: there's two kinds of breds in the development of the
Speaker 1: state and the development of sort of socialist idiology. One
Speaker 1: is a move in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties.
Speaker 1: Socialists start watching states build railroads and this drives them
Speaker 1: completely nuts. It just obliterates their brains. It's like this
Speaker 1: and the Post Office just like absolutely nuke their brains.
Speaker 1: And they start going, Okay, hold on, but what if
Speaker 1: instead of workers directly managing in their affairs and having
Speaker 1: you know, workers coordinating like the production of society, what
Speaker 1: if instead the state did that? And socialism was literally
Speaker 1: when the state did things, and this is something that
Speaker 1: like even Angles is like pretty hostile to in the
Speaker 1: sense that like he's a status to some extent, but
Speaker 1: he also is very wary of doing things like calling
Speaker 1: state on enterprises socialism, right because like, well, no, obviously
Speaker 1: that's not necessarily true, because like you could just have
Speaker 1: capitalists state owned enterprises like lots of places US and
Speaker 1: includingly importantly sort of Bismarck's Germany in this period, which
Speaker 1: we will come back to in a second.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and lots of the places that people on Twitter
Speaker 2: think are socialist paradise Is today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, are just these sooe like state on enterprise hell hooles.
Speaker 1: We've i talked about this extensively with China elsewhere. And
Speaker 1: this sort of like shifts the conception of what people
Speaker 1: think socialism is and you get these more sort of
Speaker 1: reformist trends in sort of socialist circles. You get your
Speaker 1: cot Skis, your burn Steams, people who think that like,
Speaker 1: you don't need a revolution. You can sort of just
Speaker 1: like you can vote your way into the state owning
Speaker 1: property and that will somehow achieve socialism, or you can
Speaker 1: sort of like stabilize capitalism and make it not bad anymore. Now,
Speaker 1: that's what's happening on the socialist side. So there's this
Speaker 1: sort of project of like autonomous workers control over everything,
Speaker 1: right that that had been the original socialist project is
Speaker 1: being eaten away on one hand from its own parties.
Speaker 1: But then on the other hand, as sort of David
Speaker 1: Gerrer points out, the capitalist class realizes that all of
Speaker 1: these sort of autonomous institutions that the working class is building,
Speaker 1: like your unions and your giant political parties have their
Speaker 1: own sort of welfare system. The state realizes that you
Speaker 1: can replicate these and use it as like a direct
Speaker 1: buy off to stop these people from revolting. I'm going
Speaker 1: to read a passage from David Graeber's Utopia of Rules ottovon.
Speaker 1: Bismarck's reaction to socialist electoral success in eighteen seventy eight
Speaker 1: was twofold on the one hand, banned the Socialist party,
Speaker 1: trade unions, and leftist newspapers on the other, while when
Speaker 1: this proved ineffective, socialist candidates continued to run and win
Speaker 1: as independents to create a top down alternative to the
Speaker 1: free schools, workers associations, friendly societies, libraries, theaters, and the
Speaker 1: large process of building socialism from below. This took the
Speaker 1: form of a program of social insurance for unemployment, health
Speaker 1: and disability, etc.
Speaker 3: Etc.
Speaker 1: Free education, pensions, and so forth. Much of it watered
Speaker 1: down versions of policies that have been part of the
Speaker 1: socialist platform, but in every case carefully purged of any
Speaker 1: democratic participatory element. In private, at least, he was utterly
Speaker 1: candid about describing these efforts to buy out working class
Speaker 1: loyalties day as conservative nationalist project. When le regimes later
Speaker 1: did take power, the template had already been established, and
Speaker 1: almost invariably they took the same top down approach, incorporating
Speaker 1: locally organized clinics, libraries, mutual banking initiatives, workers education centers,
Speaker 1: and the like into the administrative structure of the state.
Speaker 1: So there's two interesting things here. One is that the
Speaker 1: developments of the things that are going to become the
Speaker 1: body welfare state. This is implemented not by you know,
Speaker 1: all these sort of policies that we're talking about Walls doing. Now,
Speaker 1: these were originally implemented not by the left, but very
Speaker 1: deliberately by Auto von Bismarck. Like the arched late nineteen
Speaker 1: th early twenty century conservative the guy who was literally
Speaker 1: responsible for the foundation of Germany. Right, Like, that's that's
Speaker 1: his project. He is the guy who creates the nation
Speaker 1: of Germany and thus will forever live in infamy. Is
Speaker 1: one of the most evil people in human history. The
Speaker 1: line directly from him to Hitler is incredibly straight. But
Speaker 1: the second part of this is what social democratic politics
Speaker 1: turns into, right, which is the this effort to sort
Speaker 1: of centralize all of the sort of autonomous institutions that
Speaker 1: the working classic constructure and to centralize all of that
Speaker 1: activity into the state. Right. You know, this is like
Speaker 1: having your sort of clinics be state run, having your
Speaker 1: libraries be state run, having your like mutual banking things, like,
Speaker 1: all of these things that had been independent institutions are
Speaker 1: folded into the state.
Speaker 3: Project.
Speaker 1: By folding these things into the state, Graver's interested in
Speaker 1: the extent to which they become deuocratized and the Serb
Speaker 1: democratic elements vanish entirely. I am less interested in that here,
Speaker 1: and I am more interested in the extent to which
Speaker 1: it ties all of these things to state violence. Now, James,
Speaker 1: do you know what else is tied to state violence?
Speaker 1: That was a master stroke me. Matt did not have
Speaker 1: that one written down, came up on the cuff.
Speaker 2: Absolutely fantastic. Please tell me me what is connected today?
Speaker 1: It is the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 1: We are back. So we've gotten into sort of how
Speaker 1: these things that used to be mutual aid, right, these
Speaker 1: are these sort of programs that were developed by working
Speaker 1: class institutions to support each other, where we're sort of
Speaker 1: folded into the state. And now we have to get
Speaker 1: into the reverse of this process, which is how violence
Speaker 1: was folded into social democracy in the eighteen hundreds. And
Speaker 1: this is something I think is kind of well known
Speaker 1: among the extremely nerd left, but I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's very well known outside of that. But in the
Speaker 1: late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, everyone who is
Speaker 1: like a Marxist in any stripe is a social Democrat.
Speaker 1: And this is true equally of reformists like Burnstein and
Speaker 1: also people like Lenin right, like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks,
Speaker 1: both are splits from like the Social Democratic Labor Party
Speaker 1: is it social Labor Party was I forget the actual
Speaker 1: name of the Party of the Swift, but it was
Speaker 1: a social democratic party of like Russia. Right. This is
Speaker 1: the thing that all of the communists and all the
Speaker 1: socialists like split from these sort of social democracy things,
Speaker 1: which means that inherently, and this is something that you
Speaker 1: can see reflected in the ways that they come to
Speaker 1: power and in the ways that they sort of govern
Speaker 1: len It is communism and social democracy are both just
Speaker 1: two variants of the same thing, and you can see
Speaker 1: this most clearly either ways they come to power the
Speaker 1: way they embark on this project of centralizing power, violence, production,
Speaker 1: and the organization of society into the state. Both of
Speaker 1: them take power by machine gunning their enemies and the
Speaker 1: left with the newfound power of the state. Alongside this
Speaker 1: sort of Russian revolution, there is the German Revolution, and
Speaker 1: the German Revolution is defeated when the Social Democratic Party
Speaker 1: of Germany, which had been the party of angles right
Speaker 1: like Marx like write stuff about their platform like this
Speaker 1: is the premier social democratic party in the world. They
Speaker 1: take power by stopping the revolution, slaughtering the communists and
Speaker 1: using the sort of proto fascist freikorps to like just
Speaker 1: kill them all. This is how Rose Luxembourg is killed.
Speaker 1: So the first social democratic government to come to power
Speaker 1: in Europe, since I guess technically there was about two
Speaker 1: months in eighteen forty eight when there were also Democrats
Speaker 1: in France, but that lasted very very brief amount of time.
Speaker 1: We see, So the first time they come to power
Speaker 1: is in Germany. And in Germany they come to power
Speaker 1: in this blood bath that you know, sort of destroys
Speaker 1: like the rest of this like armed left and attempting
Speaker 1: to centralize politics and military power in the hands of
Speaker 1: the state. This is how they defeat the revolutionary movements
Speaker 1: in Russia. Basically the same process happens. Right, There's the
Speaker 1: first Revolution, which is the February Revolution nine seventeen, and
Speaker 1: then the Bolsheviks take power in the Second Revolution, and
Speaker 1: the moment the Bolsheviks take power, they spend basically the
Speaker 1: entire rest of the Russian Revolution in the Russian Civil
Speaker 1: War just straight up slaughtering every single other left wing
Speaker 1: faction in the entirety of Russia, which ends in sort
Speaker 1: of the Massacre. And oh yeah, oh yeah, they tell
Speaker 1: a lot of Ukrainian leftists they are killing anarchists from
Speaker 1: like Azerbaijan to like fucking Spain, like.
Speaker 2: A prominent appearance in Spain killing anarchist in May nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty seven.
Speaker 1: Yeah, in the sort of immediate Russian context. Right. This
Speaker 1: is solidified by the massacre at Kronstat where the Bolsheviks
Speaker 1: sealed there sort of opposition to any kind of like
Speaker 1: autonomous working class. Right. For the Bolsheviks, the working class
Speaker 1: is going to be directly subordinated to the Bolshevik Party
Speaker 1: and to that platform, and any dvashu or any attempt
Speaker 1: to sort of like manage yourself like autonomously is just
Speaker 1: going to be stamped out, right, And Lenin's attempt to
Speaker 1: do this is going to be sort of like followed
Speaker 1: by Stalin doing this even more. Yeah. And so what
Speaker 1: you have here, right, what collective ownership is in social democracy,
Speaker 1: And this is true of both the German social Democrats,
Speaker 1: who are what we think of social democrats today, right,
Speaker 1: they're sort of like electoralists, they're like capitalists, and also
Speaker 1: the Bolsheviks. What collective ownership is is the state owns things,
Speaker 1: and if you try to do anything about this, they
Speaker 1: shoot you. So this is sort of the origin of
Speaker 1: like these two forms of social democracy. There's also sort
Speaker 1: of more liberal forms of this. Right. FDR does not
Speaker 1: conceive of himself as a social democrat like he thinks
Speaker 1: of himself as a liberal when the American liberal tradition
Speaker 1: is a bizarre one. But you know, we actually talked
Speaker 1: about this in my episode about the time that Wizards
Speaker 1: of the Coast, the creators of Magic the Gathering deployed
Speaker 1: the Pikertons against the guy for revealing what was in
Speaker 1: a magic product too early.
Speaker 2: Amazing. I think it also has some route I think
Speaker 2: in like this kind of I mean the examples that
Speaker 2: I'm most familiar with the British like post eighteen thirty
Speaker 2: two Reform Act, right, like of like this paternal state benevolence. Right,
Speaker 2: they all line the same thing, right, which is state
Speaker 2: trying to buy off co opt resistance and doing so
Speaker 2: in a way that like it's carrot and stick.
Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, there's elements of this in Leninism too, right,
Speaker 1: Like Lenin's like great theoretical contribution to whatever is. When
Speaker 1: Lenin talks about like trade union consciousness, people bring this
Speaker 1: up a lot because like, yeah, like there is obviously
Speaker 1: issues with just like all of your organizing being you
Speaker 1: make a trade union and then your trade union becomes
Speaker 1: the afl CIO and tries to actually not he tries
Speaker 1: to successfully overthrows Allende and installs Pinochet right like there's
Speaker 1: a thing there. But when Lenin is talking about trade
Speaker 1: union consciousness, the thing that Lenin believes is that they
Speaker 1: need like middle class petite bourgeois, like fucking theorists to
Speaker 1: come in and teach them what socialism is. And this
Speaker 1: is an explicit part of their theory, right, And this
Speaker 1: is that same sort of paternalism that they have to
Speaker 1: be like led, even the sort of vanguard working class
Speaker 1: needs to be led by these like theorists who I
Speaker 1: don't know, emerge from like Lenin's friend group in exile
Speaker 1: in Switzerland do whatever, and FDR's sort of policy works.
Speaker 1: I think it's not really understood how similar FDR's stuff
Speaker 1: is to like how the New Deal is seen at
Speaker 1: the time, even by people like outside of the country,
Speaker 1: as compared to like the others from massive social people
Speaker 1: say he places as opposed to sort of Soviet communism
Speaker 1: or even like fascism like Nehru. The guy who is
Speaker 1: going to become like the founding Prime Minister of India
Speaker 1: has this whole thing in like nineteen forty one, where's
Speaker 1: look at the New Deal and he's going this is
Speaker 1: either going to produce communism or fascism. So, like the
Speaker 1: New Deal is a fundamental rewriting of the American social contract.
Speaker 1: And a big part of it is he's doing the
Speaker 1: same thing that the social democrats are trying to do,
Speaker 1: which is that he's trying to centralize everything into the state.
Speaker 1: He's trying to centralize partially this is welfare benefits, right,
Speaker 1: He's trying to centralize like unions very specifically into the state.
Speaker 1: And he's also trying to centralize violence into this state.
Speaker 1: Because before this, the US, I mean we've talked about
Speaker 1: sort of Blair Mountain on behind the Bachelor's before, right,
Speaker 1: Like there are just open wars between the like literally
Speaker 1: capitalist armies and sort of union armies, armies formed by
Speaker 1: labor unions, not like the union army. Like you need
Speaker 1: to clarify this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, the great anti capitalist of the union army.
Speaker 1: And a big part of what FDR is like running
Speaker 1: on like part of his platform is like, Okay, we
Speaker 1: need to end this like era of gun thugs, right,
Speaker 1: Like we can't have these fucking like robber barons running
Speaker 1: around with their private armies killing people. And like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's obviously good, right, But his solution to this is, again,
Speaker 1: we're going to centralize all of the violence into the police,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately for sort of the rest of us. Right,
Speaker 1: if you're going to maintain like a capitalist system, somebody
Speaker 1: has to be pulling the triggers, and that's now the
Speaker 1: police instead of these sort of like private armies. And
Speaker 1: the other part about this bargain is that the unions
Speaker 1: also have to basically disband their armies. Right, because the
Speaker 1: miners are Blurbountain, right, they have like seventeen thousand guys,
Speaker 1: like all of them have rifles. They will go out
Speaker 1: and they will fight. They have machine guns, like they
Speaker 1: have cannons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's FDR who begins the gun control in
Speaker 2: the US with the National Firearms Act of nineteen thirty four. Right,
Speaker 2: Like they talk a lot about prohibition are of violence, right,
Speaker 2: but what happens at Black Mountain is why you have
Speaker 2: the NFA.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so what you have it's the same process,
Speaker 1: the process of sort of turning mutual aid into state programs. Right.
Speaker 1: Walls is very explicitly doing this, right. I saw people
Speaker 1: talking about how like, oh, he's achieved the dream of
Speaker 1: the Black Panthers, like free breakfast program by like making
Speaker 1: it into the state, and it's like, no, you don't understand.
Speaker 1: The reason the panthers were doing that was to build
Speaker 1: the roots of an autonomous society. The reason the state
Speaker 1: is doing that is so that you don't fucking revolt
Speaker 1: and you don't do twenty twenty again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these are different things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is something that as the US welfare
Speaker 1: state cycles through, you get various versions of this. There
Speaker 1: is another version of this that is the products and
Speaker 1: services that support this podcast by centralizing all of your
Speaker 1: money into their pockets and the music of the higher
Speaker 1: security guards. We're back. So the Great Society was just
Speaker 1: Johnson's sort of like big We're gonna end poverty thing.
Speaker 1: You know, he's doing the Vietnam War at the same time,
Speaker 1: so you know, those are the sort of domestic kind
Speaker 1: of returns. The stuff in the central station of state
Speaker 1: violence is now being projected out and in the US
Speaker 1: it's always happening, right. The US fundamentally is a project
Speaker 1: of colonial expansion, going from fucking one coast to the other,
Speaker 1: killing everyone in your path and seizing their land. And
Speaker 1: the contradiction of this right the fact that like the
Speaker 1: people who nominally want sort of welfare state also normally
Speaker 1: are like revolted at the fact that they're burning millions
Speaker 1: of people alive, and like Vietnam, Cabodia and Laos, Like,
Speaker 1: this contradiction is kind of what terrors a part of
Speaker 1: social democractic politics and what replaces it is. You know,
Speaker 1: like if social democracy is a carrot and a stick, right,
Speaker 1: neoliberalism is just the stick. It's just more prisons and
Speaker 1: hit you with the thing instead of this sort of
Speaker 1: like more genteel process of while we're still hitting you
Speaker 1: with the stick. But also here are these handouts if
Speaker 1: you don't like oppose us. Yeah, so we've talked about
Speaker 1: these examples. I want to kind of move into some
Speaker 1: more modern examples of this because I think everything I've
Speaker 1: been saying is old, right, but this stuff is still
Speaker 1: happening today in the social democracies that exist, right. Like
Speaker 1: one of the biggest examples of this is there's two
Speaker 1: kinds of social democracies that people point to, depending on
Speaker 1: where in the political spectrum they are. One is like
Speaker 1: the Nordic countries, right. And this never worked on me
Speaker 1: because one of my foundational experiences, like as an activist,
Speaker 1: when I was like a little baby at fifteen year
Speaker 1: old in twenty thirteen was talking to someone who had
Speaker 1: a mounted cavalry charge done against them by the Swedish
Speaker 1: police because they were doing an anti fascist action and
Speaker 1: they got trampled by fucking horses because that's what the
Speaker 1: state is. And you know, so like that's like kind
Speaker 1: of on the one hand, but the thing that we're
Speaker 1: seeing right now is, you know, the remains of the
Speaker 1: welfare state being paired with this incredible, like rabid anti
Speaker 1: immigrant violence, right, and this is the thing you see
Speaker 1: in place like France too, right, where you still sort
Speaker 1: of have the welfare state. It's also this unbelievable violence
Speaker 1: against sort of non white people and anyone who's trying
Speaker 1: to like enter the country. Yeah, I think it's was
Speaker 1: it Sweden or was it Denmark that had these laws
Speaker 1: were like they would like seize the property if any
Speaker 1: immigrant who came into the country.
Speaker 2: Jesus, I don't remember that. I know more people who
Speaker 2: have migrated to Sweden. I think it might have been anymore.
Speaker 2: I'm not familiar.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're also part of the sort of broader like
Speaker 1: European border project, which is unbelievably violent, and you're getting
Speaker 1: this with walls too, Right, he's signing on to sort
Speaker 1: of Kamala Harris's like fucking terrifying fascist border violence. And
Speaker 1: that's again because like all of this project is tied
Speaker 1: in with state centralizations. Well, okay, so what happens when
Speaker 1: you centralize the state. The answer is it starts enforcing
Speaker 1: its borders. Yeah, in order to sort of like create
Speaker 1: underclasses of incredibly dispossessed and incredibly battered and brutalized people
Speaker 1: who can be splitted for labor.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like people who are insecure with respect to the state, right,
Speaker 2: so they can be ye by the state or by capitalism.
Speaker 1: This important the state. Yeah, and you know, obviously, like
Speaker 1: the US is sort of one of the global pioneers,
Speaker 1: but like the norder, social democracies are also really sort
Speaker 1: of part and parcel of the system. The other things
Speaker 1: I want to turn to here is is Latin American
Speaker 1: social democracies, because I talked about this at length in
Speaker 1: the Brazil episodes. Right, Brazilian social democracy Lula's like first term, right,
Speaker 1: has simultaneously this massive sort of push and social spending
Speaker 1: and then also enormous like a budget increases for the military.
Speaker 1: There's this incredible unbelievable spike in police violence, like rate
Speaker 1: of police killings is way worse than the US. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is true, and like fucking all of these places,
Speaker 1: right Like, this is truly how the crew worked in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty was because the Bolivian government kept just like
Speaker 1: handing money to the police over and over again, and
Speaker 1: the police like did a cue against them.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: This is also true in Venezuela, which is like unbelievable
Speaker 1: rates of police killing like terrifying.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, I was there after the revolution, but I
Speaker 2: saw some of this happening, right, the revolution going from
Speaker 2: spontaneity and work is controlled on people's control to a
Speaker 2: degree to like being cot which happens in almost every
Speaker 2: revolution that we've seen. Yeah, right, it begins with the
Speaker 2: people and then it becomes co opted by the state.
Speaker 2: It's whild to see like the equipment and weapons of
Speaker 2: their police on one hand, and then the poverty of
Speaker 2: yeah folks that they are policing on the other.
Speaker 1: And then this has also been Omlo's thing in Mexico, right, like,
Speaker 1: even though he came in on the like hugs not
Speaker 1: Bullets campaign, which for something comprehensible reasons, you still see
Speaker 1: like the fucking Washington Post writing about Omlo talking about
Speaker 1: how he was doing like hugs not bullets, Like she
Speaker 1: never she there was not a single day where he
Speaker 1: implemented that shit. She came in and immediately was like, Hey,
Speaker 1: the army, do you want control of even more of
Speaker 1: the country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, it was very funny when Omla came in,
Speaker 2: right and he was doing get like hugs not bullets
Speaker 2: the English translation. And then simultaneously I was getting press
Speaker 2: releases being like, we have deployed several thousand more troops
Speaker 2: to the Tijuana area, come to the parade, and I
Speaker 2: was like, good, no, look are they huggers? They send
Speaker 2: in their tactico cut.
Speaker 1: Lula does this exact same thing in Haiti where he
Speaker 1: goes to Haiti and he plays soccer with these kids
Speaker 1: and he says, we will show them another way. And
Speaker 1: then just like in the back route are all the
Speaker 1: armored vehicles from the resilient occupation of Haiti.
Speaker 2: It's just like, well, oh my god, this showing them something.
Speaker 1: Think yeah. And so the tie between this absorption of
Speaker 1: socialist politics into the state, you know, and this sort
Speaker 1: of centralization and increasing of state violence is something that
Speaker 1: continues to today. And you know, we're now kind of
Speaker 1: in the last decades, probably too strong, but roughly decade
Speaker 1: we're kind of seeing social democrats like who want to
Speaker 1: break out of this in the form of the kind
Speaker 1: of like moderate abolitionists. So these are the people who are,
Speaker 1: you know, whose thing is like, Okay, we're going to
Speaker 1: defund the police and we're going to like reallocate their
Speaker 1: resources to like funding welfare programs. And this is like,
Speaker 1: obviously this would be good. But if you know anything
Speaker 1: about what happened after twenty twenty, none of this stuff
Speaker 1: ever happened, right, No one ever defunded the police, right,
Speaker 1: Like there was no sort of movement.
Speaker 2: We defunded the libraries.
Speaker 1: And yeah, but even on a fundamental level, like, I
Speaker 1: don't believe that this can work. And the reason I
Speaker 1: don't believe that this can work is because in order
Speaker 1: to have a state that functions, you need an apparat
Speaker 1: of violence it can inflict on its subjects. I'm going
Speaker 1: to turn here, Oh, this is a joke. You're probably
Speaker 1: not going to get.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: No, I'm going to turn here to feigned political philosopher
Speaker 1: Brennan Lee Bulligan. Quote. Laws are threats made by the
Speaker 1: dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It's just
Speaker 1: a promise of violence as an act in the police
Speaker 1: are basically an occupying army. You know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Is I'm aware of this, dude. He plays a ton
Speaker 2: yes dragons on the internet.
Speaker 1: Occasionally he says something that's right. And you know, the
Speaker 1: important thing about this is that, you know, without without
Speaker 1: the thread of violence behind it, right, laws are just suggestions.
Speaker 1: You can't have a state without an apparatus of violence.
Speaker 1: You can't stay in power without one. And this has
Speaker 1: always been the sort of central contradiction of soci democracy. Right.
Speaker 1: In order for Walls to have his sort of like
Speaker 1: pretty sparkling programs, he needs to have the cops to
Speaker 1: destroy you if you attempt to do anything different. And
Speaker 1: this is what twenty twenty was, right. Twenty twenty was
Speaker 1: was the most serious uprising in the US, like the
Speaker 1: most serious like challenge the authority of the sort of
Speaker 1: drychnically anti black like settler American state, right, and it
Speaker 1: was something that promised something different and even in you know,
Speaker 1: and that meant that everyone, whether you were a fucking
Speaker 1: like hardline fascist or you know, you were Tim Walls, Right,
Speaker 1: your one goal was to smash it and was to
Speaker 1: deploy state violent. The state violence you had in your hands,
Speaker 1: which in this case was a National Guard, was to
Speaker 1: send them in to make sure that these people never
Speaker 1: fucking burden their police station again. And that's what happens.
Speaker 2: It's like obviously, like the ability to have I've been
Speaker 2: thinking about this a lot because I've been writing a
Speaker 2: book and I'm really trying to get it finished, so
Speaker 2: I've been writing it a lot. And like when a conflict,
Speaker 2: be it one within a country or between countries, stops
Speaker 2: being between states or about what the state should do,
Speaker 2: and stops being about weather the state should be, then
Speaker 2: we see the entire state system like pivoting on all
Speaker 2: its suggesting morals right and just being like, no, we
Speaker 2: cannot allow this to happen. And I think we've seen
Speaker 2: that domestically to a degree in the US.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But like the state can't abolish itself, state won't abolish itself.
Speaker 2: The scene qua non of the state. Its ability to
Speaker 2: lock you up, beat you up, or shoot you up
Speaker 2: if you do what they don't want, and that will
Speaker 2: always be the state as a matter. If it's got
Speaker 2: like a hammer and sickle or like your based fucking
Speaker 2: Vasha or Alassat or whatever, like the state will still
Speaker 2: come and kill you if you become a threat to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's the solution to what hopefully will be
Speaker 1: the title of this episode. Why did Tim Walz call
Speaker 1: the National Guard? And the answer is to make sure
Speaker 1: that you're never going to be free.
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