WEBVTT - Why Tim Walz Called in the National Guard in 2020 0:00:03.960 --> 0:00:06.480 Welcome to Nikoda Here podcast. And once again I have 0:00:06.559 --> 0:00:08.960 forgotten to write an intro for I'm your host bia 0:00:08.960 --> 0:00:10.600 along with these chains. 0:00:11.320 --> 0:00:13.760 I mean, it's great to be here. Intro on. 0:00:15.600 --> 0:00:19.240 Yeah, and this interless episode is I think the first 0:00:19.280 --> 0:00:23.040 episode that well, can I promise this is the first 0:00:23.040 --> 0:00:27.400 episode that was recorded after we learned that Tim Wallas 0:00:27.480 --> 0:00:31.040 was going to be the vice presidential nominee, defeating the 0:00:31.120 --> 0:00:33.680 sexual assault guy and then the other sexual assault guy 0:00:33.680 --> 0:00:35.000 who probably covered up on murder. 0:00:35.400 --> 0:00:37.520 Yeah, don't slack on it. Also coming up a murdered 0:00:37.560 --> 0:00:37.879 ant me. 0:00:39.280 --> 0:00:42.239 Yeah, that was a truly impressive, truly impressive sort of 0:00:42.520 --> 0:00:45.960 set of candidates that party elite were choosing from. 0:00:46.240 --> 0:00:50.720 It's still somewhat surprising that they didn't like fumble. I 0:00:50.760 --> 0:00:52.159 mean that they will still fumble. 0:00:52.200 --> 0:00:56.000 We have months to go, but that's true. Yeah, I mean, 0:00:56.240 --> 0:00:59.080 to be fair, I think, oh god, we figured out 0:00:59.080 --> 0:01:02.360 this guy covered up murder. Is probably the kind of 0:01:02.400 --> 0:01:05.880 thing that like even the Dems like dog shit opposition 0:01:06.040 --> 0:01:10.040 research people were like, hmm, okay, we shouldn't run that guy. 0:01:10.200 --> 0:01:12.760 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that tweeting about his murder cover up. 0:01:12.800 --> 0:01:13.760 Let's leave this one. 0:01:14.360 --> 0:01:16.880 Yeah, that's Shapiro out of Pennsylvania, who is one of 0:01:16.920 --> 0:01:19.840 the other candidates, by the way, Yeah sucks shit, But 0:01:20.400 --> 0:01:21.720 you know, so the guy we ended up with a 0:01:21.800 --> 0:01:24.880 sort of folksy Midwestern actually I think it was just 0:01:24.920 --> 0:01:29.240 a defensive coordinator or whatever, the defensive coach for his 0:01:29.280 --> 0:01:31.960 football team. He's a very sort of folksy guy. We're 0:01:31.959 --> 0:01:35.920 gonna get more into him next week. But the thing 0:01:35.959 --> 0:01:38.560 that I wanted to sort of start our discussion about 0:01:38.600 --> 0:01:43.279 the vice presidential candidates with is attempting to reconcile something 0:01:43.280 --> 0:01:45.840 that I've seen a lot of discussion about sort of 0:01:46.160 --> 0:01:48.160 I don't know, kind of confusion to some extent about 0:01:48.200 --> 0:01:52.040 about how do you actually make sense of the sort 0:01:52.080 --> 0:01:54.960 of two halves of Tim Walls's record, right which, on 0:01:55.000 --> 0:01:57.360 the one hand, he's signing a bunch of distrively progressive, 0:01:58.080 --> 0:02:02.560 sort of welfared legislation being the governor of Minnesota, including 0:02:02.560 --> 0:02:05.880 things like universal free school lunch. I said it was 0:02:05.960 --> 0:02:08.520 lunch of breakfast. I don't remember. It was both. It 0:02:08.560 --> 0:02:10.840 was both, yeah, yeah, And you know the on the 0:02:10.880 --> 0:02:12.880 one hand, you have this sort of sparkling record, and 0:02:12.919 --> 0:02:15.600 then on the other hand, you have you know, him 0:02:15.639 --> 0:02:17.720 puling in the National Guard and deploying it to suppress 0:02:17.720 --> 0:02:21.040 the uprising in twenty twenty, which, lest we forget, started 0:02:21.080 --> 0:02:25.160 in Minnesota. Yeah, that's where the third Precinct burned, and 0:02:25.400 --> 0:02:28.400 also using the police to sort of like horribly brutalize 0:02:28.400 --> 0:02:31.440 protesters against Line three, which is an oil pipeline through 0:02:31.440 --> 0:02:34.560 a bunch of indigenous land that probably I don't know, 0:02:34.560 --> 0:02:37.560 we're probably two years out from like an unbelievably horrific 0:02:37.600 --> 0:02:39.359 oil spill coming out of it that everyone's gonna go, 0:02:39.360 --> 0:02:41.320 how can we possibly have predicted this? It only had 0:02:41.440 --> 0:02:44.880 spilled a million times before, et cetera, et cetera, and 0:02:44.919 --> 0:02:49.160 that walls like rammed through and had people who were 0:02:49.200 --> 0:02:51.760 resisting it like horribly beaten by a cop. So how 0:02:51.800 --> 0:02:56.280 do you sort of reconcile these two halves of this 0:02:56.320 --> 0:03:01.720 guy's record? And there's like a local politics explanation which 0:03:01.760 --> 0:03:03.760 I see bandied about a lot, which is true to 0:03:03.800 --> 0:03:06.200 some extent, And that explanation is that he's not really 0:03:06.200 --> 0:03:09.440 a progressive and he's mostly kind of a moderate who 0:03:09.480 --> 0:03:12.720 she's going along with a pro fairly progressive Minnesota legislature 0:03:12.960 --> 0:03:16.680 as getting credit for just like signing bills. And that's 0:03:17.639 --> 0:03:20.160 kind of true. But it's also I think ultimately a 0:03:20.200 --> 0:03:24.040 cop out because we are on year about one hundred 0:03:24.040 --> 0:03:28.120 and forty of the welfare state, and this shit keeps 0:03:28.160 --> 0:03:32.919 happening every single time. And what's really sort of at 0:03:32.960 --> 0:03:36.120 stake here analytically is that the relationship between the welfare 0:03:36.160 --> 0:03:40.560 state and violence is significantly deeper than the record of 0:03:40.920 --> 0:03:43.960 one guy. And so today what we're going to be 0:03:44.000 --> 0:03:46.520 doing is not really talking about Tim Willson much. What 0:03:46.560 --> 0:03:47.880 we're going to be doing is we're going to be 0:03:47.920 --> 0:03:50.680 going back through some of the history of social democracy 0:03:51.240 --> 0:03:54.280 and trying to understand how it became entangled with the 0:03:54.320 --> 0:03:57.040 sort of use of force with police violence, because I 0:03:57.040 --> 0:03:59.200 think there's a story there that's been completely buried by 0:03:59.240 --> 0:04:02.600 the tidal wave of just like I don't know whatever 0:04:03.240 --> 0:04:07.960 walls takes, and you know, I think presidential elections are 0:04:07.960 --> 0:04:10.520 something that has a tendency to just destroy everyone's analytical 0:04:10.600 --> 0:04:13.680 capacity for like two years. So yes, let's resist that 0:04:13.760 --> 0:04:17.880 and go do something interesting. Yeah, okay, Yeah, So I 0:04:17.880 --> 0:04:19.880 think the place to start with this is this is 0:04:19.880 --> 0:04:23.080 a place that we start, I think not infrequent amount 0:04:23.200 --> 0:04:25.560 on this show, or at least I do. And that's 0:04:26.120 --> 0:04:29.279 the sort of original debates from you know, about the 0:04:29.320 --> 0:04:33.760 eighteen thirties through roughly the eighteen seventies early eighteen eighties 0:04:33.760 --> 0:04:36.920 when it changes about what socialism was going to be. 0:04:37.640 --> 0:04:40.400 There's always been to some extent, like a bunch of 0:04:40.440 --> 0:04:44.680 different kind of understandings of it, but something that you know, 0:04:44.680 --> 0:04:47.080 what you'd call the sort of left wing of the Democrats, 0:04:47.080 --> 0:04:49.040 which is like everyone at that point, right, and the 0:04:49.080 --> 0:04:51.760 anarchists kind of agree about. And basicthing that Marx agrees 0:04:51.800 --> 0:04:54.039 about with sort of the anarchists at the time is 0:04:54.040 --> 0:04:58.360 that socialism is you know, it's the free association of producers, right, 0:04:59.160 --> 0:05:01.440 you know, it is the work class abolishing itself, but 0:05:01.480 --> 0:05:04.719 then also like being the people who directly run the 0:05:04.760 --> 0:05:06.640 new society that's sort of brought about by this thing 0:05:06.680 --> 0:05:08.599 without sort of the stage or sort of political mediation, 0:05:08.680 --> 0:05:11.680 et cetera, et cetera. And even you know, people like 0:05:11.800 --> 0:05:15.120 Angles who are like arch statists, right, like Angles, you know, 0:05:15.680 --> 0:05:19.359 uses the theoretical justification for like every time a socialist 0:05:19.360 --> 0:05:21.400 picks up a machine gun to shoot someone, and that 0:05:21.800 --> 0:05:24.120 works for the state, Like that's Angles's justification for But 0:05:24.160 --> 0:05:27.240 even he's talking about how like one day the state 0:05:27.279 --> 0:05:29.159 will be like put on a shelf in a museum 0:05:29.200 --> 0:05:30.840 and people will walk past and look at it and 0:05:30.880 --> 0:05:33.080 then like walk by it because it's like it's a 0:05:33.120 --> 0:05:36.560 tool of a bybegone era that nobody needs anymore. And 0:05:36.680 --> 0:05:41.760 in this period, it's very clear that socialism is we're 0:05:41.839 --> 0:05:44.839 just directly controlling the mesa production and it's directly democratically 0:05:44.920 --> 0:05:49.960 managing their lives. But this becomes less clear as the 0:05:50.000 --> 0:05:53.400 eighteen hundreds go on. Something that David Grayer points out, 0:05:53.400 --> 0:05:54.960 and I think I've quoted this on the show before, 0:05:55.000 --> 0:05:58.599 but it's important here. While this is sort of going on, right, 0:05:58.960 --> 0:06:01.640 there's two kinds of breds in the development of the 0:06:01.640 --> 0:06:04.799 state and the development of sort of socialist idiology. One 0:06:05.200 --> 0:06:08.200 is a move in the eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties. 0:06:08.839 --> 0:06:12.800 Socialists start watching states build railroads and this drives them 0:06:12.839 --> 0:06:16.320 completely nuts. It just obliterates their brains. It's like this 0:06:16.440 --> 0:06:20.040 and the Post Office just like absolutely nuke their brains. 0:06:20.400 --> 0:06:22.880 And they start going, Okay, hold on, but what if 0:06:22.960 --> 0:06:25.840 instead of workers directly managing in their affairs and having 0:06:25.880 --> 0:06:29.080 you know, workers coordinating like the production of society, what 0:06:29.160 --> 0:06:33.520 if instead the state did that? And socialism was literally 0:06:33.600 --> 0:06:35.720 when the state did things, and this is something that 0:06:35.760 --> 0:06:37.960 like even Angles is like pretty hostile to in the 0:06:38.000 --> 0:06:39.919 sense that like he's a status to some extent, but 0:06:39.960 --> 0:06:42.640 he also is very wary of doing things like calling 0:06:42.640 --> 0:06:45.480 state on enterprises socialism, right because like, well, no, obviously 0:06:45.560 --> 0:06:48.520 that's not necessarily true, because like you could just have 0:06:48.960 --> 0:06:52.000 capitalists state owned enterprises like lots of places US and 0:06:52.000 --> 0:06:54.839 includingly importantly sort of Bismarck's Germany in this period, which 0:06:54.839 --> 0:06:55.960 we will come back to in a second. 0:06:56.880 --> 0:06:59.120 Yeah, and lots of the places that people on Twitter 0:06:59.240 --> 0:07:01.520 think are socialist paradise Is today. 0:07:01.360 --> 0:07:04.159 Yeah, are just these sooe like state on enterprise hell hooles. 0:07:04.160 --> 0:07:07.560 We've i talked about this extensively with China elsewhere. And 0:07:07.839 --> 0:07:11.520 this sort of like shifts the conception of what people 0:07:11.520 --> 0:07:13.600 think socialism is and you get these more sort of 0:07:13.640 --> 0:07:17.160 reformist trends in sort of socialist circles. You get your 0:07:17.240 --> 0:07:20.160 cot Skis, your burn Steams, people who think that like, 0:07:20.200 --> 0:07:21.800 you don't need a revolution. You can sort of just 0:07:21.880 --> 0:07:24.360 like you can vote your way into the state owning 0:07:24.400 --> 0:07:27.800 property and that will somehow achieve socialism, or you can 0:07:27.840 --> 0:07:32.720 sort of like stabilize capitalism and make it not bad anymore. Now, 0:07:32.840 --> 0:07:34.840 that's what's happening on the socialist side. So there's this 0:07:34.920 --> 0:07:39.200 sort of project of like autonomous workers control over everything, 0:07:39.400 --> 0:07:41.880 right that that had been the original socialist project is 0:07:41.920 --> 0:07:44.840 being eaten away on one hand from its own parties. 0:07:45.360 --> 0:07:47.080 But then on the other hand, as sort of David 0:07:47.080 --> 0:07:50.840 Gerrer points out, the capitalist class realizes that all of 0:07:50.840 --> 0:07:53.760 these sort of autonomous institutions that the working class is building, 0:07:54.320 --> 0:07:56.640 like your unions and your giant political parties have their 0:07:56.680 --> 0:07:59.640 own sort of welfare system. The state realizes that you 0:07:59.680 --> 0:08:02.000 can replicate these and use it as like a direct 0:08:02.000 --> 0:08:05.000 buy off to stop these people from revolting. I'm going 0:08:05.040 --> 0:08:08.840 to read a passage from David Graeber's Utopia of Rules ottovon. 0:08:08.920 --> 0:08:12.560 Bismarck's reaction to socialist electoral success in eighteen seventy eight 0:08:12.600 --> 0:08:15.760 was twofold on the one hand, banned the Socialist party, 0:08:15.880 --> 0:08:19.760 trade unions, and leftist newspapers on the other, while when 0:08:19.760 --> 0:08:22.920 this proved ineffective, socialist candidates continued to run and win 0:08:22.960 --> 0:08:26.680 as independents to create a top down alternative to the 0:08:26.720 --> 0:08:31.480 free schools, workers associations, friendly societies, libraries, theaters, and the 0:08:31.560 --> 0:08:35.160 large process of building socialism from below. This took the 0:08:35.200 --> 0:08:39.000 form of a program of social insurance for unemployment, health 0:08:39.000 --> 0:08:39.839 and disability, etc. 0:08:40.040 --> 0:08:40.160 Etc. 0:08:40.520 --> 0:08:44.240 Free education, pensions, and so forth. Much of it watered 0:08:44.240 --> 0:08:46.160 down versions of policies that have been part of the 0:08:46.200 --> 0:08:50.120 socialist platform, but in every case carefully purged of any 0:08:50.160 --> 0:08:54.200 democratic participatory element. In private, at least, he was utterly 0:08:54.280 --> 0:08:56.800 candid about describing these efforts to buy out working class 0:08:56.840 --> 0:09:00.800 loyalties day as conservative nationalist project. When le regimes later 0:09:00.880 --> 0:09:03.680 did take power, the template had already been established, and 0:09:03.720 --> 0:09:07.120 almost invariably they took the same top down approach, incorporating 0:09:07.280 --> 0:09:12.080 locally organized clinics, libraries, mutual banking initiatives, workers education centers, 0:09:12.080 --> 0:09:14.680 and the like into the administrative structure of the state. 0:09:16.880 --> 0:09:22.400 So there's two interesting things here. One is that the 0:09:22.440 --> 0:09:24.000 developments of the things that are going to become the 0:09:24.000 --> 0:09:28.120 body welfare state. This is implemented not by you know, 0:09:28.280 --> 0:09:30.839 all these sort of policies that we're talking about Walls doing. Now, 0:09:30.880 --> 0:09:33.880 these were originally implemented not by the left, but very 0:09:33.880 --> 0:09:36.959 deliberately by Auto von Bismarck. Like the arched late nineteen 0:09:36.960 --> 0:09:39.880 th early twenty century conservative the guy who was literally 0:09:39.920 --> 0:09:43.320 responsible for the foundation of Germany. Right, Like, that's that's 0:09:43.320 --> 0:09:45.280 his project. He is the guy who creates the nation 0:09:45.360 --> 0:09:47.760 of Germany and thus will forever live in infamy. Is 0:09:47.800 --> 0:09:50.120 one of the most evil people in human history. The 0:09:50.200 --> 0:09:54.080 line directly from him to Hitler is incredibly straight. But 0:09:54.160 --> 0:09:57.480 the second part of this is what social democratic politics 0:09:57.480 --> 0:10:00.880 turns into, right, which is the this effort to sort 0:10:00.880 --> 0:10:05.480 of centralize all of the sort of autonomous institutions that 0:10:05.520 --> 0:10:07.880 the working classic constructure and to centralize all of that 0:10:07.960 --> 0:10:12.160 activity into the state. Right. You know, this is like 0:10:12.240 --> 0:10:14.000 having your sort of clinics be state run, having your 0:10:14.000 --> 0:10:16.480 libraries be state run, having your like mutual banking things, like, 0:10:16.520 --> 0:10:20.880 all of these things that had been independent institutions are 0:10:20.880 --> 0:10:21.680 folded into the state. 0:10:21.720 --> 0:10:22.120 Project. 0:10:23.320 --> 0:10:25.840 By folding these things into the state, Graver's interested in 0:10:25.880 --> 0:10:28.079 the extent to which they become deuocratized and the Serb 0:10:28.160 --> 0:10:31.800 democratic elements vanish entirely. I am less interested in that here, 0:10:31.840 --> 0:10:33.440 and I am more interested in the extent to which 0:10:33.440 --> 0:10:37.680 it ties all of these things to state violence. Now, James, 0:10:37.679 --> 0:10:39.720 do you know what else is tied to state violence? 0:10:40.600 --> 0:10:44.920 That was a master stroke me. Matt did not have 0:10:45.000 --> 0:10:46.840 that one written down, came up on the cuff. 0:10:47.920 --> 0:10:51.199 Absolutely fantastic. Please tell me me what is connected today? 0:10:51.480 --> 0:10:54.079 It is the products and services that support this podcast. 0:11:01.040 --> 0:11:04.800 We are back. So we've gotten into sort of how 0:11:04.920 --> 0:11:07.880 these things that used to be mutual aid, right, these 0:11:07.880 --> 0:11:10.800 are these sort of programs that were developed by working 0:11:10.800 --> 0:11:13.520 class institutions to support each other, where we're sort of 0:11:13.520 --> 0:11:15.880 folded into the state. And now we have to get 0:11:15.880 --> 0:11:18.280 into the reverse of this process, which is how violence 0:11:18.360 --> 0:11:21.360 was folded into social democracy in the eighteen hundreds. And 0:11:21.400 --> 0:11:24.200 this is something I think is kind of well known 0:11:24.360 --> 0:11:26.800 among the extremely nerd left, but I don't know if 0:11:26.800 --> 0:11:31.040 it's very well known outside of that. But in the 0:11:31.120 --> 0:11:35.000 late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds, everyone who is 0:11:35.040 --> 0:11:38.000 like a Marxist in any stripe is a social Democrat. 0:11:38.040 --> 0:11:41.400 And this is true equally of reformists like Burnstein and 0:11:41.440 --> 0:11:44.560 also people like Lenin right, like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, 0:11:44.880 --> 0:11:47.520 both are splits from like the Social Democratic Labor Party 0:11:47.559 --> 0:11:49.600 is it social Labor Party was I forget the actual 0:11:49.679 --> 0:11:51.000 name of the Party of the Swift, but it was 0:11:51.040 --> 0:11:54.400 a social democratic party of like Russia. Right. This is 0:11:54.400 --> 0:11:56.040 the thing that all of the communists and all the 0:11:56.040 --> 0:11:59.520 socialists like split from these sort of social democracy things, 0:11:59.520 --> 0:12:02.240 which means that inherently, and this is something that you 0:12:02.240 --> 0:12:04.400 can see reflected in the ways that they come to 0:12:04.400 --> 0:12:06.120 power and in the ways that they sort of govern 0:12:06.679 --> 0:12:10.240 len It is communism and social democracy are both just 0:12:10.360 --> 0:12:13.240 two variants of the same thing, and you can see 0:12:13.240 --> 0:12:15.079 this most clearly either ways they come to power the 0:12:15.080 --> 0:12:19.640 way they embark on this project of centralizing power, violence, production, 0:12:19.880 --> 0:12:23.560 and the organization of society into the state. Both of 0:12:23.600 --> 0:12:25.920 them take power by machine gunning their enemies and the 0:12:26.000 --> 0:12:28.520 left with the newfound power of the state. Alongside this 0:12:28.520 --> 0:12:31.559 sort of Russian revolution, there is the German Revolution, and 0:12:31.760 --> 0:12:35.320 the German Revolution is defeated when the Social Democratic Party 0:12:35.360 --> 0:12:37.800 of Germany, which had been the party of angles right 0:12:37.960 --> 0:12:41.000 like Marx like write stuff about their platform like this 0:12:41.080 --> 0:12:44.680 is the premier social democratic party in the world. They 0:12:44.760 --> 0:12:49.160 take power by stopping the revolution, slaughtering the communists and 0:12:49.280 --> 0:12:52.080 using the sort of proto fascist freikorps to like just 0:12:52.200 --> 0:12:54.680 kill them all. This is how Rose Luxembourg is killed. 0:12:55.360 --> 0:12:57.880 So the first social democratic government to come to power 0:12:57.880 --> 0:13:01.400 in Europe, since I guess technically there was about two 0:13:01.440 --> 0:13:05.240 months in eighteen forty eight when there were also Democrats 0:13:05.280 --> 0:13:09.680 in France, but that lasted very very brief amount of time. 0:13:10.120 --> 0:13:11.600 We see, So the first time they come to power 0:13:11.640 --> 0:13:13.560 is in Germany. And in Germany they come to power 0:13:13.559 --> 0:13:16.800 in this blood bath that you know, sort of destroys 0:13:17.000 --> 0:13:19.559 like the rest of this like armed left and attempting 0:13:19.600 --> 0:13:22.600 to centralize politics and military power in the hands of 0:13:22.600 --> 0:13:24.600 the state. This is how they defeat the revolutionary movements 0:13:25.400 --> 0:13:28.600 in Russia. Basically the same process happens. Right, There's the 0:13:28.600 --> 0:13:32.040 first Revolution, which is the February Revolution nine seventeen, and 0:13:32.040 --> 0:13:34.720 then the Bolsheviks take power in the Second Revolution, and 0:13:34.760 --> 0:13:37.960 the moment the Bolsheviks take power, they spend basically the 0:13:38.080 --> 0:13:40.480 entire rest of the Russian Revolution in the Russian Civil 0:13:40.480 --> 0:13:43.719 War just straight up slaughtering every single other left wing 0:13:43.760 --> 0:13:46.880 faction in the entirety of Russia, which ends in sort 0:13:46.880 --> 0:13:49.480 of the Massacre. And oh yeah, oh yeah, they tell 0:13:49.520 --> 0:13:51.840 a lot of Ukrainian leftists they are killing anarchists from 0:13:51.880 --> 0:13:56.640 like Azerbaijan to like fucking Spain, like. 0:13:56.640 --> 0:13:59.480 A prominent appearance in Spain killing anarchist in May nineteen 0:13:59.559 --> 0:13:59.920 thirty seven. 0:14:00.400 --> 0:14:02.520 Yeah, in the sort of immediate Russian context. Right. This 0:14:02.559 --> 0:14:05.559 is solidified by the massacre at Kronstat where the Bolsheviks 0:14:05.600 --> 0:14:08.280 sealed there sort of opposition to any kind of like 0:14:08.320 --> 0:14:12.440 autonomous working class. Right. For the Bolsheviks, the working class 0:14:12.480 --> 0:14:16.360 is going to be directly subordinated to the Bolshevik Party 0:14:16.880 --> 0:14:19.400 and to that platform, and any dvashu or any attempt 0:14:19.440 --> 0:14:22.640 to sort of like manage yourself like autonomously is just 0:14:22.680 --> 0:14:25.200 going to be stamped out, right, And Lenin's attempt to 0:14:25.240 --> 0:14:27.640 do this is going to be sort of like followed 0:14:27.680 --> 0:14:31.480 by Stalin doing this even more. Yeah. And so what 0:14:31.560 --> 0:14:36.119 you have here, right, what collective ownership is in social democracy, 0:14:36.160 --> 0:14:39.200 And this is true of both the German social Democrats, 0:14:39.240 --> 0:14:41.120 who are what we think of social democrats today, right, 0:14:41.160 --> 0:14:44.560 they're sort of like electoralists, they're like capitalists, and also 0:14:44.600 --> 0:14:49.880 the Bolsheviks. What collective ownership is is the state owns things, 0:14:50.080 --> 0:14:51.720 and if you try to do anything about this, they 0:14:51.720 --> 0:14:54.320 shoot you. So this is sort of the origin of 0:14:54.360 --> 0:14:56.680 like these two forms of social democracy. There's also sort 0:14:56.720 --> 0:15:01.320 of more liberal forms of this. Right. FDR does not 0:15:01.960 --> 0:15:04.400 conceive of himself as a social democrat like he thinks 0:15:04.400 --> 0:15:07.200 of himself as a liberal when the American liberal tradition 0:15:07.520 --> 0:15:10.560 is a bizarre one. But you know, we actually talked 0:15:10.560 --> 0:15:15.760 about this in my episode about the time that Wizards 0:15:15.800 --> 0:15:18.320 of the Coast, the creators of Magic the Gathering deployed 0:15:18.320 --> 0:15:22.120 the Pikertons against the guy for revealing what was in 0:15:22.160 --> 0:15:23.480 a magic product too early. 0:15:26.400 --> 0:15:29.800 Amazing. I think it also has some route I think 0:15:29.840 --> 0:15:31.520 in like this kind of I mean the examples that 0:15:31.520 --> 0:15:34.760 I'm most familiar with the British like post eighteen thirty 0:15:34.800 --> 0:15:40.400 two Reform Act, right, like of like this paternal state benevolence. Right, 0:15:40.680 --> 0:15:43.880 they all line the same thing, right, which is state 0:15:43.960 --> 0:15:46.960 trying to buy off co opt resistance and doing so 0:15:47.240 --> 0:15:50.080 in a way that like it's carrot and stick. 0:15:50.160 --> 0:15:52.960 I guess, yeah, there's elements of this in Leninism too, right, 0:15:53.000 --> 0:15:56.400 Like Lenin's like great theoretical contribution to whatever is. When 0:15:56.440 --> 0:15:58.840 Lenin talks about like trade union consciousness, people bring this 0:15:58.920 --> 0:16:00.640 up a lot because like, yeah, like there is obviously 0:16:00.720 --> 0:16:03.480 issues with just like all of your organizing being you 0:16:03.520 --> 0:16:05.720 make a trade union and then your trade union becomes 0:16:05.760 --> 0:16:07.800 the afl CIO and tries to actually not he tries 0:16:07.840 --> 0:16:12.840 to successfully overthrows Allende and installs Pinochet right like there's 0:16:12.880 --> 0:16:14.960 a thing there. But when Lenin is talking about trade 0:16:15.040 --> 0:16:18.520 union consciousness, the thing that Lenin believes is that they 0:16:18.600 --> 0:16:22.960 need like middle class petite bourgeois, like fucking theorists to 0:16:23.000 --> 0:16:26.120 come in and teach them what socialism is. And this 0:16:26.200 --> 0:16:27.960 is an explicit part of their theory, right, And this 0:16:28.000 --> 0:16:29.600 is that same sort of paternalism that they have to 0:16:29.600 --> 0:16:31.760 be like led, even the sort of vanguard working class 0:16:31.800 --> 0:16:34.960 needs to be led by these like theorists who I 0:16:35.040 --> 0:16:38.640 don't know, emerge from like Lenin's friend group in exile 0:16:38.840 --> 0:16:46.640 in Switzerland do whatever, and FDR's sort of policy works. 0:16:46.800 --> 0:16:51.240 I think it's not really understood how similar FDR's stuff 0:16:51.440 --> 0:16:54.560 is to like how the New Deal is seen at 0:16:54.560 --> 0:16:56.600 the time, even by people like outside of the country, 0:16:56.640 --> 0:16:59.800 as compared to like the others from massive social people 0:16:59.840 --> 0:17:01.800 say he places as opposed to sort of Soviet communism 0:17:01.920 --> 0:17:04.840 or even like fascism like Nehru. The guy who is 0:17:04.880 --> 0:17:08.480 going to become like the founding Prime Minister of India 0:17:08.680 --> 0:17:10.720 has this whole thing in like nineteen forty one, where's 0:17:10.760 --> 0:17:11.879 look at the New Deal and he's going this is 0:17:11.880 --> 0:17:14.679 either going to produce communism or fascism. So, like the 0:17:14.720 --> 0:17:18.440 New Deal is a fundamental rewriting of the American social contract. 0:17:19.359 --> 0:17:22.040 And a big part of it is he's doing the 0:17:22.040 --> 0:17:23.600 same thing that the social democrats are trying to do, 0:17:23.640 --> 0:17:25.840 which is that he's trying to centralize everything into the state. 0:17:25.880 --> 0:17:28.280 He's trying to centralize partially this is welfare benefits, right, 0:17:28.320 --> 0:17:32.160 He's trying to centralize like unions very specifically into the state. 0:17:32.640 --> 0:17:35.480 And he's also trying to centralize violence into this state. 0:17:35.560 --> 0:17:39.360 Because before this, the US, I mean we've talked about 0:17:39.400 --> 0:17:41.560 sort of Blair Mountain on behind the Bachelor's before, right, 0:17:41.600 --> 0:17:44.280 Like there are just open wars between the like literally 0:17:44.320 --> 0:17:47.800 capitalist armies and sort of union armies, armies formed by 0:17:47.840 --> 0:17:50.840 labor unions, not like the union army. Like you need 0:17:50.880 --> 0:17:51.600 to clarify this. 0:17:51.680 --> 0:17:54.560 Yeah, yeah, the great anti capitalist of the union army. 0:17:54.800 --> 0:17:56.760 And a big part of what FDR is like running 0:17:56.800 --> 0:17:58.399 on like part of his platform is like, Okay, we 0:17:58.440 --> 0:18:00.840 need to end this like era of gun thugs, right, 0:18:00.880 --> 0:18:04.359 Like we can't have these fucking like robber barons running 0:18:04.359 --> 0:18:06.280 around with their private armies killing people. And like, yeah, 0:18:06.280 --> 0:18:10.359 that's obviously good, right, But his solution to this is, again, 0:18:10.440 --> 0:18:12.919 we're going to centralize all of the violence into the police, 0:18:12.960 --> 0:18:15.320 and unfortunately for sort of the rest of us. Right, 0:18:16.160 --> 0:18:19.760 if you're going to maintain like a capitalist system, somebody 0:18:19.840 --> 0:18:22.280 has to be pulling the triggers, and that's now the 0:18:22.320 --> 0:18:25.199 police instead of these sort of like private armies. And 0:18:25.240 --> 0:18:28.040 the other part about this bargain is that the unions 0:18:28.080 --> 0:18:31.000 also have to basically disband their armies. Right, because the 0:18:31.000 --> 0:18:33.680 miners are Blurbountain, right, they have like seventeen thousand guys, 0:18:34.080 --> 0:18:35.719 like all of them have rifles. They will go out 0:18:35.760 --> 0:18:37.439 and they will fight. They have machine guns, like they 0:18:37.440 --> 0:18:38.119 have cannons. 0:18:38.720 --> 0:18:41.480 Yeah, and it's FDR who begins the gun control in 0:18:41.520 --> 0:18:44.359 the US with the National Firearms Act of nineteen thirty four. Right, 0:18:44.560 --> 0:18:47.520 Like they talk a lot about prohibition are of violence, right, 0:18:47.560 --> 0:18:50.199 but what happens at Black Mountain is why you have 0:18:50.240 --> 0:18:50.760 the NFA. 0:18:52.320 --> 0:18:54.920 Yeah, and so what you have it's the same process, 0:18:54.960 --> 0:18:59.240 the process of sort of turning mutual aid into state programs. Right. 0:18:59.400 --> 0:19:02.120 Walls is very explicitly doing this, right. I saw people 0:19:02.160 --> 0:19:05.040 talking about how like, oh, he's achieved the dream of 0:19:05.040 --> 0:19:07.960 the Black Panthers, like free breakfast program by like making 0:19:08.000 --> 0:19:09.880 it into the state, and it's like, no, you don't understand. 0:19:10.080 --> 0:19:12.320 The reason the panthers were doing that was to build 0:19:12.320 --> 0:19:14.480 the roots of an autonomous society. The reason the state 0:19:14.560 --> 0:19:17.280 is doing that is so that you don't fucking revolt 0:19:17.320 --> 0:19:18.920 and you don't do twenty twenty again. 0:19:19.480 --> 0:19:21.040 Yeah, these are different things. 0:19:22.400 --> 0:19:25.240 Yeah, and this is something that as the US welfare 0:19:25.280 --> 0:19:28.960 state cycles through, you get various versions of this. There 0:19:29.000 --> 0:19:31.040 is another version of this that is the products and 0:19:31.080 --> 0:19:34.400 services that support this podcast by centralizing all of your 0:19:34.440 --> 0:19:36.680 money into their pockets and the music of the higher 0:19:36.680 --> 0:19:49.840 security guards. We're back. So the Great Society was just 0:19:49.920 --> 0:19:53.520 Johnson's sort of like big We're gonna end poverty thing. 0:19:53.960 --> 0:19:56.520 You know, he's doing the Vietnam War at the same time, 0:19:57.960 --> 0:19:59.480 so you know, those are the sort of domestic kind 0:19:59.480 --> 0:20:01.120 of returns. The stuff in the central station of state 0:20:01.200 --> 0:20:03.040 violence is now being projected out and in the US 0:20:03.119 --> 0:20:06.320 it's always happening, right. The US fundamentally is a project 0:20:06.359 --> 0:20:09.400 of colonial expansion, going from fucking one coast to the other, 0:20:09.480 --> 0:20:11.959 killing everyone in your path and seizing their land. And 0:20:12.119 --> 0:20:14.320 the contradiction of this right the fact that like the 0:20:14.320 --> 0:20:19.160 people who nominally want sort of welfare state also normally 0:20:19.200 --> 0:20:22.720 are like revolted at the fact that they're burning millions 0:20:22.720 --> 0:20:25.520 of people alive, and like Vietnam, Cabodia and Laos, Like, 0:20:25.680 --> 0:20:27.919 this contradiction is kind of what terrors a part of 0:20:27.920 --> 0:20:31.879 social democractic politics and what replaces it is. You know, 0:20:32.080 --> 0:20:35.400 like if social democracy is a carrot and a stick, right, 0:20:35.480 --> 0:20:39.720 neoliberalism is just the stick. It's just more prisons and 0:20:39.840 --> 0:20:42.600 hit you with the thing instead of this sort of 0:20:42.640 --> 0:20:45.639 like more genteel process of while we're still hitting you 0:20:45.680 --> 0:20:47.600