too yeah yep I can hear all right so welcome this is our first ever stream 1k subscribers oh Canadian anarchist was a 999 subscriber so I don't know we plan on just answering some questions we thought people might be interested in hearing the answers to and if people have any questions during stream just you know tell us but first of all maybe Zoe would you like to introduce it up yeah hi I'm a knocko pack aka Zoe I like how I view my internet name as the actual name and my actual name in real life is the aka I spent too much time on the internet cuck oh me I'm cuck philosophy I make philosophy videos on YouTube Paul yep hi I'm Paul I'm the other minion of red plateaus together with Ivan that's about it yeah and I've been I'm the other minion Paul writes the script I make the videos video bits so we're gonna play dream daddy so come can we create our dad yes let's get to it I have already been playing a little bit but let's start a new game good tip okay I think we're gonna pretend to be five modern minutes okay so like I think Paul maybe you want to handle the questions yeah so sure yeah so I guess the first question is how do you get into making YouTube videos so I began making YouTube videos because I watched far too much Stefan Molyneux as a teenager and thought he was amazing and then I realized he wasn't because I actually started reading philosophy and so I knew I originally started making videos with him as my kind of inspiration like he talks about philosophy I could talk about philosophy as well and then during the process of you making your early videos you're actually studying philosophy and then you go no he's not the chosen philosopher king he is you know leading people astray and so then after my first channel Nioskman had a bunch of copyright strikes I created a narco pack and the idea was that it would like this time I do it seriously have good production values for that very quickly didn't last and then it just became this thing of kind of pedantically responding to Stefan Molyneux as my internet arch-emesis and perhaps in general and that was like the focal point of my existence as a human for several years it's weird to say now that Stefan Molyneux got so much bigger and has become so much more more fascist that there was a few years ago when I was one of the big Stefan Molyneux experts just because I'd actually gone and read like loads of his books I'd listened to hundreds of hours of him it was a weird place to be and then I realized that I should stop making videos about him because it's like kind of inherently soul-destroying and so I started talking about you know anarchism and feminism and now I just kind of make videos about what I want which is I guess making response videos to Stalinists and Maoists rather than Stefan Molyneux so yeah that's how I began YouTube so we do want to pick hair can I mean a lot of these hair options are very successful very true I think I can't can you go for the one down from the current one which looks a bit anime and we can certainly certainly let's Goku wow I I already like pick the cat suit so yeah cock do you want to pick a buddy type and do you want to say how you sure oh man that's tough I think one of the two middle ones is what I want yeah so like okay so yeah the hairy one yeah yeah for sure oh thick tank bod he could be like a tanky all right good so yeah yeah so I actually started out just watching leftist YouTube like a narco pack for example as well as like libertarian socialist rants and bad mouse and for a long time I just felt like I would like to make videos like that myself then I kind of decided to do it specifically on like pop culture and philosophy one of the reasons for that was because I found a Marxist analysis of mean girls and I thought it was really good and yeah that's pretty much it what do you think of these eyes oh um that one is scary a bit too intense maybe maybe the the hard eyes they're not exactly subtle maybe like I don't know right Paul do you want to continue sure so like I initially didn't really watch much YouTube at all I was I spent a long time reading a lot of marks which I feel is the objectively correct amount of marks to read in general I became friends with Zoe through like completely other ways and you know started watching her videos and she introduced me to various left you people in general and their stuff and I noticed that there were there were no like really good introductions to lots of Marxist ideas like some of them there are but many of them there aren't and I figured somebody should make some of them so I did I mean I found somebody who could you know was willing to deal with you know the internet aspect of things and making videos and stuff because yeah I'm not good with technology or dealing with that kind of stuff so yeah it's great to find somebody else who would basically deal with the technology and the people on the internet and then I do do the actual sort of scripts and recording but that's that's kind of it really yeah just asked when my video about bad mouses coming out and the answer is quite some time because the amount of the amount of pedantry involved in the video is pretty extreme and I'm very much a believer in kind of unbelievably over sourced pedantry and so I just haven't had the time to sit down and do the research and get all the foot notes because I've been doing other stuff like teaching and I've been ill for a week so I was planning to spend a week making the video instead I was in bed suffering tweeting about Lenin so I'm not really sure when it's gonna be coming out I'm gonna be recording more videos of me just kind of reading out obscure anarchist texts that people aren't really familiar with unless they're massive nerds in the hope that you know they'll be a greater awareness of the history and how there are more anarchist thinkers than just like quipotkin so yeah that answers that question oh my we are reaching levels of that I did not think possible I like how our dad's like developing as a human very alternative okay I think that was that was that question yeah so what the other questions yeah so the the next one is what is your relationship with Marx and or Marxism and wow that's a big one so when I was a pretentious teenager I only really read Bakunin and Buk Ching and kind of anarchist sources on Marxism and on Marx and that was a mistake and then when I I became friends of Paul and he kind of systematically destroyed my false beliefs and I was like I should actually seriously properly read Marx and when I did I realized how what happened was that there's a long history of people miss reading Marx or reading other people into Marx so Buk Ching for example his background was in Stalinist youth organizations and then in Trotskyist groups which meant when he talks about Marx he's talking about Marx through the lens of these later traditions which are very different to Marx on most stuff and likewise Bakunin kind of reads LaSalle and other state socialists at the time into Marx and whether he talks about Marx he usually talks about him in conjunction with other thinkers who all different views to Marx so as a result I didn't have a kind of accurate understanding of him until I I sat down and read him and then when I actually sat down and read him and read kind of academic secondary literature on him I came to realize that not only did I really like what he was saying but that it could be synthesized with anarchism that you didn't have to view anarchism and Marx as inherently opposed like they do disagree on a number of issues obviously there's a lot of kind of history in terms of how Marx and Bakunin treated one another and the wider disputes between the movements historically in terms of the kind of Marxist conceptual framework as critique of capitalism how he thinks about humans I thought that could be really complementary to anarchist politics and so that's what I'm trying to kind of do I guess with my videos is talk about aspects of Marx that people aren't really aware of in the hope that my primarily anarchist audience will go oh that's cool I might say disagree with Marx about some things like Marx was a proponent of electoral politics but you can there's a lot of other good stuff that you can take from him even if you disagree with him on some stuff it's not like you have to agree with everything you said you can pick and choose and combine things together in interesting ways and as a result I kind of view myself as like an anarchist and a Marxist at the same time in the same kind of vein that Daniel Gorinda's it's kind of like this libertarian communism where you're trying to synthesize so I guess that answers the question oh we can't do the white t-shirt okay cat daddy sorry Zoe do I need to select I like the t-shirt that our dad is currently wearing I I support the t-shirt or the shirt the kitten suit oh the kitten suit okay we need the name you had a who had well I think Marx daddy Marx yeah daddy Marx okay thank you sorry please go on is it my turn yeah okay well I don't really have much to say on this one I don't consider I don't label myself a Marxist but I do like Marx a lot look when I'm interested in continental philosophy it's kind of impossible not to touch on Marx because he's just so influential in so many fields so I guess that's it I mean like I'm not a Marxist but I do I do really encourage people to read Marx he's a he's a really great thing so Paul what's your relationship with Mark so yeah I it goes back to high school I guess I read we did a lot of stuff in history class about the Russian Revolution and one of the things we were encouraged to do was read like the primary sources so of course you know Lenin Trotsky Stalin etc but of course they're all talking about Marx so you end up sort of going back to reading Marx as a result of that and I ended up reading a bunch of Marx we came interested in many of the ideas joined the Marxist Party and youth its youth organization and generally got involved with different forms of radical politics and eventually I got on to writing a PhD thesis on Marx which I complete etc in general I think Marx has still has a bunch of ideas that remain really interesting and important that some Marxist have kept working on in really excellent ways so in particular some of his ideas on political economy theories of praxis and social change certain ideas about human development freedom how capitalism makes us all the free and so forth I think I think that's about it yeah so I started identifying as an anarchist in high school which didn't come with all that much understanding that came later I just knew that I really hated royalty and so from that you know I I started reading a little bit of capital and but it was I didn't really get into him like really but then I started talking to Paul we played Anderson Dragons and I realized that he was a philosopher and that you knew a lot of shit about Marx so he he helped me like figure out what books to read I I did like just a an assignment for for a for a course here where I write wrote a little essay on Marx which he helped that helped me do and so I don't know from from meeting Marx until now I've just read a whole bunch of marks that's my relationship to Marx mainly I I used to have that all like the typical like he had a good analysis of capital etc but that was about it and then now yeah we're here and somebody asked what are good books to understand the Marxist anarchist drift and the whole Marx Bacooning mess there's there's a single massive kind of fuck-off book you should read it's it's called the first socialist schism by Wolfgang Eckhart and it's a super thick book with a ridiculous number of footnotes and it goes through the entire Marx-Bacooning debate and within the first international in chronological order and it goes through unlike a lot of discussions the wider issues in the social movements at the time so it talks about the disagreements within the Romance Federation which there was there were federalists who were became the Jura federation with which Bacooning was a member and they had a disagreement with some state socialists and what happened when when the two organizations split and Marx and Engels sided with the Romance Federation who were state socialists against the federalists who've been renamed themselves the Jura federation so it goes through lots of kind of really obscure stuff like this which you know I wasn't aware of even I'd been reading about it for years so that's kind of the book it's to repeat the name of it again it's the first socialist skism by Wolfgang Eckhart highly recommend it's a big book it's like you really have to plow through it but it is very much worth it if you if you want to understand yeah I can second that like it's it's a bit weak on Marx interpretation but in terms of what the actual organizations were doing and how especially accusations against some of the anarchists or the federalists at the time go it's it's the best book there is oh fired a flaming tennis ball at the police station I approve and that was you all right sorry I like how Daddy Marks was a world child I mean he was daddy let's go economy remember that mark story when he and Engels are running around London getting super drunk and smashing up lampposts and yes run away from the police that's a classic that's a classic but there's a slightly less well-known one of him being super drunk and walking around London pubs and going into these pubs filled with English people and sort of if I remember correctly I might misremember I think it's right basically talking shit about English music food weather everything how everything in English sucks so much compared to Germany and one of his friends essentially having to drag him out before he ends up in a fight so there's um there's an ambitious question here how do we provide adequate medical food medical help food clothes shelter etc. for anyone for everyone at the same time and at the same time avoid that's a bit of a mouthful I think that's a small manageable question we can answer immediately was the kind of thing where in order to avoid ecological collapse you have to abolish capitalism because it's a for-profit growth-based economy and if you want in that system you could grow food and provide medicine and shelter through a federated system of workplace and community councils and kind of decentralized democratic planning in which ecological concerns are built into the planning procedure rather than being externalised because planning and capitalist economies centers around shareholders and proper and business growth and so I think we have the technology to do all these things already existing it's just not being utilized because of the capitalist system so I think it's a kind of thing where that can be overcome through the abolition of capitalism which is obviously the hard thing I think why are you in the communist economic system then you would be able to have an ecologically sustainable society which manages to meet everyone everyone's needs and crucially could automate so much stuff of it and the power that automated stuff through renewable energy but I'm no kind of tech expert on technology it's the kind of question where it would have to be worked out on the ground by you know actual scientists and engineers who know their stuff and are in councils and they can make proposals which are then voted on by assemblies with anarchism it's not like you know one person decides it's we all sit down and with our varying expertise create proposals and implement them through kind of a federated system so I hope that kind of vaguely answers the question yeah I would think so anyone else have anything to say no no not really thoughts on Jeremy Corbyn I mean easily the best thing to happen in British politics for a long time but that's not saying very much either I mean I think it's nice to see actual social Democrats in the political parties again and I hope you know I hope I wish all the best to him and his supporters really but I I have my doubts about what he'll be able to do even when he manages to get into power thoughts on the Venezuelan intervention another kind of small question another very small question I think some of these are not that easy or like there's we don't have any experts on you and you as foreign policy here if you want kind of random facts about 19th century anarchists I can just kind of unload them contemporary international politics let's go down best leftist philosopher philosophy is not a competition you know what it is it's about proving everyone else wrong and why you're right but apart from that apart from that it's not that's not that's not easily quantifiable so it's not also I mean obviously the best leftist philosopher is Karl Marx I mean yeah I'm trying to think of a leftist philosophy superior in terms of philosophy as opposed to other issues in terms of kind of doing accessible philosophy for the humble pros I think Malatesta is very very good because when you read him you initially think there's not really much going on philosophically but if you really kind of create a rational reconstruction and arrange all the different components together that he sets up in different kind of short articles because he mainly just wrote short articles not he didn't write kind of big mammoth books like Marx you're having to really piece things together and when you piece it all together you're like wow this is this hyper interconnected conceptual framework about how to think about society and social change that's a lot more philosophically profound than you initially realize so when you first read it you don't realize the depth and so you and so it's super accessible but then if you're kind of a massive philosophy nerd and jump into it there's actually a lot going on beneath the surface that isn't initially clear unlike when you read Marx but because it's so technical and he's using all this kind of philosophical language and lots of kind of like you know talking a lot about totalities and processes and being versus becoming it's like there's lots of very clear philosophy immediately happening where Manus test is more kind of a sneaky philosopher where you don't realize he's doing all this philosophy and unless you go looking for it I guess I guess I can also add Anton Panakuk who was a really excellent Marxist philosopher and a really well done astronomist I believe yeah in his day but he he wrote some fantastic works relating philosophy and Marxism he wrote on Marxism and Darwinism which was very popular to write about at the time but he's one of the few people who actually did a really really good job of that a really good critic of Kowski a really sort of interesting critique of Lenin as well and really so worthwhile work on sort of the praxis side of Marxist theory yeah I quite a bit more impressive to me than Gramsci who is much more well known. So what I like about Panakuk is how he talks a lot about how struggles develop particular kinds of consciousness and how you have to have the right kind of organizational framework to produce the subjects that will create communism so that you know he advocates direct action and creating workers councils one of his main reasons for doing so is because they're the organizations through which the working class will develop the consciousness and the capacities and the needs that they need in order to actually have a communist revolution such as you know believing in their own initiative as workers having a sense of dignity as workers because they're self-organizing and taking initiative and the kind of to use Marxist language the subjective aspects of social change rather than just focusing on like objective conditions he talks a lot about the kind of human psychology that's really important for changing society and part of why I like this so much is because it's the same as what anarchists argue for just within Marxist technology. Yeah that's one of the things I've found so interesting that a lot of these like humanist aspects of Marx and anarchism are so like you can almost map them one to one I mean you'd probably like disagree on a number of points and sometimes it was because they'd actually like so so there's a Italian anarchist called Coffero and he writes a lot of stuff about how human needs vary socially within a society in between societies and when you're reading it you could be reading Marx and there's reason why which is that Coffero wrote a summary of Marxist capital which Marx himself said was good as often when there's Marx when he's talking about people attempting to summarize his work he's like no this is terrible but with Coffero he's like yes this is good so often you there with the early anarchists they often say things that come from reading Marx or people that Marx read but because citations weren't really a thing at this point you know they don't say this is why I got it from but I think with Coffero it was from Marx even though he was a committed anarchist. Oh shit I've almost forgot Georg Lukacs who is yes just an incredibly important Marxist philosopher and like his essays especially was it ratification and the consciousness of the proletariat I think it is but basically all the essays in history and class consciousness are outstanding and it's really really important his work on ideology on consciousness raising his discussion of the importance of your sort of social positioning and how that influences how you're able to think about and conceptualize the world around you and how that lays the ground the work for raising certain kinds of consciousness that in turn lead to certain kinds of social change I think is really important and it's one of the sort of most important sources for what becomes the Frankfurt School what becomes even like sort of standpoint theory and so on so he really deserved to be mentioned his work is it's really good. Proto-cultural Marxist. Shall we do the next question which is how did you pick your channel name because with my channel name I always have people on Twitter assuming I'm as if it was my name it drives me a bit berserk really but so when I created my channel when I was I think I was about 16 it all kind of phases together when you get to my wise old age of 24 hardly exactly map out which time it was I think I was about 16 and at the time I was kind of sympathetic to pacifism having read its Wikipedia page and some other stuff because at the time I'd kind of stronger version to violence because yeah PTSD and so you will thought well I can't call myself an archo pacifist because people think I'm against violence in all situations when I'm in favor of violence and kind of self-defense situations and so I'll call myself an archo pack to indicate that I'm not a pacifist I'm a pack I'm like sympathetic but not fully committed and instead what happens is everyone thinks you're an archo pacifist and you're like I didn't 16 year old me didn't rethink through the name like when I created my channel I didn't think I'd be doing it in 2019 as a kind of living I thought I'm just gonna make videos why talk about philosophy and stuff and that would be fun and little did I know that it would become like my brand image and people kind of make assumptions about me because of it and I thought about changing my name but I never know what to change it to like what what's a cool name and so I just kind of stick with it and then continue to be grumpy about people thinking I'm a pacifist that's my situation what I want to know is why did you call yourself cuck philosophy I want to know the thought process the origin story well obviously I was like trying to think of a username and I just thought what are all leftists into it was actually just I was I was watching a contra points video with my girlfriend and their contra points was talking about this channel called red pill philosophy and I just I just jokingly said that I'll make a channel called the cuck philosophy so that it was just like a twist on that so I remember watching red pill philosophy years ago there was a subreddit called bad philosophy and he was routinely posted to it because of how terrible his quote philosophy was because it's often just him walking around with a camera actually talking about why women are bad and should have sex with him but at the same time are bad if they do have sex with him it's kind of this kind of inherently contradictory misogynist conceptual framework yeah I always wish misogynists were at least kind of philosophically rigorous in the hatred of a woman I remember when I when I first saw an archipax sort of name I thought it was a reference to I didn't even really listen to that point like I got into hip-hop later you know I I wasn't down with the kids really I mean clearly not right and I was I was so disappointed I should have just said yeah it's because I'm a massive two-pack fan exactly I'm the two-pack of anarchist philosophy on YouTube despite being familiar very like middle-class background it's I'm basically like two-pack my parents weren't in the Black Panthers though hey nobody's perfect okay if the Black Panthers were in the UK they probably would have been right no no they definitely they would have like counter demonstration my dad is slightly racist so like one time he he he says to me he says did you know that in Africa they like big bums and he's comes out of this of nowhere that we're just sitting there he's out of nowhere makes this mad remark and I just don't want to say in response I just sit there in silence and I do the I do the English thing where you deny that it's happening as it's happening don't acknowledge it you just continue to drink your tea and smile and wait for all to be over yeah we had the I don't know we had a hard time finding a channel name yeah so we eventually decided something plateaus for I don't quite remember how but partly because it's a funny reference to the dozen water is a thousand plateaus it started as an anagram of your name yeah but you're supposed to say that right but anyway and then we had to play play around with basically different color names and we figured ready socialist so we should go with that yeah that is a much superior name to mine is it though like I think I think red plateaus is it is like a superior brand in March then another parent it's not image it's in March it's the left variation of of red pill somebody oh it's the left libertarian I think but they've asked me what your future videos so other than my response to bad mouse's video my communism is important making a video nitpicking Chomsky and kind of again extreme amount of pedantry so he Chomsky makes a number of claims about what anarchism is or what anarcho-syndicalism is aren't strictly speaking historically accurate and so I was going to do a kind of hyper pedantry response where you point out these slightly wrong because it's kind of it's a way it's the thing where if you make a video called really obscure facts about syndicalism no one will watch it but if you call it response to Chomsky then people watch it so when you're a youtuber it's it's this weird thing where you have to frame things in a way that people actually watch it and a lot of videos are kind of actually just a package for the info dumping that you want to do anyway but if you we won't get any views if you call it what it is because of the algorithm I've just revealed the dark world of being a lefty youtuber that's really true though I mean I learned a lot from response videos when I was just getting into leftism people just I think people learn more easily when they watch a response video rather than just a straight sort of putting forth of theory yeah and also I think people really like response videos because people like conflicts on the internet they like oh yeah kind of people being destroyed and in my videos I try not to go for the whole kind of I'm destroying you thing more kind of like I'm systematically proving you're wrong in a slightly passive-aggressive way as opposed to like kind of amazing atheist style response videos this dress chumps yeah we're facts and logic there's always an absence of a facts and be logic curious that I find the whole aesthetic of rational mandem very interesting in the way in which it's about like they'll talk a lot about logic but clearly I've never actually studied for more logic and they can't actually even make like logically valid arguments what the same time talking about how inherently logical and rational they are and one the interesting thing that happens with men is that so they'll have emotional experiences but because they they view themselves as being rational men it means that they'll view their emotional responses as rational responses so when they have some kind of weird internal feeling of oh this is bad when women do this it's not an emotional response because they've been socialized to be sexist instead it's because they're rational and then they then after as a result of that come up with a very elaborate after the fact narrative about why they think the things they do which doesn't confront the fact that they're an irrational human who has profound prejudices instead it's because they care about science and you know they'll find all the things they want to keep that view of themselves as a rational being rather than as a kind of inherently emotional being that is able to be rational although obviously thought and emotional interconnected if you look at the science but yeah I think you were the one who I first heard use the term performing rationality yeah yeah which is what all the YouTube a fierce seems about is the is a performance yeah because you know like if you want to actually make a rational response video about feminism you'd go to the library you'd get about 10 books and you'd read them all systematically reconstruct the core arguments then you go through point by point showing why they're false again with with citations of your history books or biology books and you'd have this kind of profound understanding of the topic and insightful responses instead what happens is they find the worst possible representative of the ideology they can find which is usually a teenager on the internet who's just kind of working things out and isn't philosophically rigorous isn't an academic isn't intellectual they just go on tumbler and they're then attacked and torn apart very easily in a way where it's all about the person who's doing it trying to show through it that they're smart and know things even though in doing this they're demonstrating that they're not actually interested in being rational and having a rational response to the world because if they were they would actually go and read you know serious feminist scholarly works they don't do that and there's a reason why yep so I feel the previous question sort of already covered the at least always bits of what we're working on now and what we plan to do afterwards so it might be sensible to just sort of go to that question yeah do that before the others so first of all I guess do you have anything you'd like to add to that sorry about what you're doing now and plan to do in the future well that I so in my computer I have a folder where I have all my scripts and there's a very large folder called in progress and which is all the things I begin bit of a finish and so at some point I need to kind of go through and finish a bunch as one video which I'm working on for a while I'm not sure when it's gonna be done it's a it's a deep video it's it's a tour of my house where I live during the holidays not in term time at uni which is my dad's house and so it's a tour where each room I go through a different horrifying thing that happened so it's this family dark video but the idea is that it's meant to demonstrate how when you're in this environment you're in this kind of environment of pain and suffering because of the things that have happened there so even if you're not currently having a horrific experience you kind of are because the back there's just bad vibes everywhere in the carpets and in the ceiling so I've got I've got a bunch of kind of like me talking about my extreme life experiences and mental health problem videos which I kind of it's like my weird form of therapy so I'm gonna be doing those at some point and I've also got there's loads of videos identity politics I want to make so actually there's one video I'm working on which is a response to cuck but it's actually a nice response don't worry I hope so it's not it's not I will destroy it and it's here are some thoughts I had after watching your video which I liked which video is it identity politics one okay yeah nice so I'm basically gonna be kind of arguing for how you can do identity politics without committing yourself to essentialism and this is through using basically Marx's theory of human beings where queer culture or you know that culture ever that their forms of human practice which would produce particular kinds of people so rather than you viewing your queer your queerness as being this inherent essence it's something you can kind of actively produce and crucially consciously produce so you can go I'm gonna engage in these activities and as this kind of a person like you know consciousness raising for example or you know going to like a queer nightclub yeah and into doing you you develop an identity but it's not a it's not an essentialist one it's something that's continually produced and reproduced over time through the activity you're engaging in so I'm gonna be talking a lot about gay powers and gay needs and what that means I'm looking forward to that that sounds really good nice need to write it so yeah so what what's everyone else gonna be working on well my next video is gonna be on a door culture industry and the emoji movie I've I've already recorded the audio so I just have to edit it and make the video after that I don't really know yet it'll just depend on whatever idea I come up with so for us our next video is probably going to be a video on Marxist analysis of the impersonal domination of capitalism so specifically the cut the ways in which we're dominated by sort of impersonal capitalist type market forces after that we sort of plan to continue our series with as of the current series we're doing now which is sort of human development freedom markets analysis of different ways in which capitalism makes us unfree and then from that the last episode in that series will be an episode on communism we also have planned a couple of response videos to stuff like Marx on justice and maybe a response to Prager use video on Marx which is so incredibly bad it's actually hard to figure out where to even start because they make right they don't even support most of their claims there's a claim that he writes something capital that is just plain false there's like quotes they've taken half the quotes so it sounds like it's he says something different than something else he says and it's just like it's amazing like it's completely what's the word it's completely incompetent in a certain way and it lacks any kind of like minimum levels of sort of decency with respect to dealing with your subject matter in like anything like an academically responsible way much less any other kind of responsible way so we're figuring out how to do that and we're figuring our next series once we're done with the one also of human development freedom capitalism and communism the next series is going to be Marx's views on the fear of praxis history and social change which we feel is not very well understood and we may have to do source kind of like spin-off episodes where we explain the different variants of these in different strands of Marxism because there's this really weird thing that I think I've only ever seen in internet Marxists or like among contemporary internet mark which is this idea that Marxism is a single like tradition where they all basically agree with each other and seem to be part of the same thing and it seemed like blissfully unaware that there's you know there's Trotskyists or Stalinists there's Maoists and not only are these people and these movements things but they're supposed to disagree with each other about lots of really important stuff both theory and sort of strategy so it was quite amazing to me when I first started watching some of the Marxist youtubers who seem to think that for example if you're stillness that's basically the same thing as being a Maoist with perhaps a slight shift in emphasis so yeah like I said we might have to end up doing videos of explaining some of the differences between different strands of Marxism to even make sense of some of this stuff sorry just to interject we met we we just met our first dad I like I like I mean I think our Marx daddy would make a move yeah I mean I'm I'm not I'm for this I look as a dog as well I like how we are literally developing the gay powers of exactly we are now so yeah communally developing gay powers oh sorry go on I think I was done with with the question we have a lot of stuff yeah we have a lot of stuff planned and we probably have stuff planned for years already but yeah I think that covers a lot of it a question from chat is there any way for mls and anarchists to work together who I guess people can kind of guess my response if they follow me on Twitter no not really but um well see the the basic problem is that there's often this argument of oh you know we we have the same ends we just have different means well means our ends right like if your end kind of revolutionary moment is creating workers councils based on the force appropriation the means production by the workers themselves crucially outside of the state and independently of it that's a different short-term end than the short-term end of creating a worker state or seizing the existing state and converting it into a worker state so there's there's a fundamental disagreement there which means well how can you work together given that you have fundamentally different short-term kind of immediate revolutionary goals now there might be you might be able to work on certain kinds of things like I know you can both do anti-fascism together but once you get into any kind of serious biz moment but there's revolution a potential revolution then I don't really see how especially given the very long and proud tradition of Marxist-Leninists betraying the anarchist movement so I haven't read about this in a while so don't quote me but as far as I remember in Cuba for example there were anarchist trade unionists who worked with and supported the kind of Marxist aspects of the Cuban Revolution but then when those mark those when they won the anarchists were then totally screwed over their unions were forced to close down their press was forced to close down and many anarchists were imprisoned or fled the country and you have similar things in China and in Russia actually it's much more extreme during the Russian Revolution then in Cuba and that much more people killed much more anarchists are killed in the Russian Revolution by state socialists than the Cuban one and given that history and given the fact that Marxist-Leninists not only routinely defend this but make jokes about it and they make memes about it they actively support it and will defend it and say it's a good thing and given that I just don't I don't see the potential and the other main reason why I don't see the potential for working together is that we believe in different kind of organizational frameworks even in terms of immediate short-term organizing so you know anarchists are against democratic centralism they're against having a central committee they're against having you know the kind of party leadership they're against forming you know parties full stop they advocate totally different ways of making decisions and organizing large groups so anarchists historically in favor of a kind of federalist system where each group joins the Federation but is again has an independence of it and can make their own decisions isn't forced to adhere to what's being decided at the assembly of all the people within the Federation each each subsection of the Federation goes yes we're gonna follow this decision and if not they can leave as opposed to come some kind of like party discipline system where you don't have a say so yeah that's my view briefly put other I'm not sure what people say honestly I agree with most of that yeah I mean there's certain sort of individual issues that anarchists and MLS can like work on together different kinds of protests and strikes but when it comes to actively building revolution it there seems to be too much of a gap there I don't know maybe Paul could add anything no I pretty much agree like the question I think is similar to if yes can anarchists organize with you know well-meaning liberals or social Democrats like well yes on some limited campaigns and so on but at a certain point when you're looking at how to like structure mass organizations how to which kind of more long-term goals you set for yourself question is about which course of action to prioritize for which reasons it becomes really hard to to work together in more systematic ways beyond individual issues and beyond individual campaigns because there's just too much that you disagree with them about and we should of course remember that social Democrat were the first to sort of crush the councilist uprising in Germany right and you're literally killed Rosa Luxemburg it's worth keeping in mind for enthusiastic social Democrats as well I guess social democracy has a body count but there's also the thing to keep in mind of how like a lot of contemporary Marxist loneliness groups and not all of them just a significant number of them are kind of quite weird cults you actively try to take over other social movements so you know if you're trying to do your on-the-ground you know activism around immediate issues of reform and the local Marxist loneliness cult terms up trying to sell their newspaper and recruit people and take over your campaign well how can you work with them given that you're not working them on equal terms so I think it's sort of a case-by-case thing like there are definitely some Maoist groups who I think are you know doing good things and even America who aren't cults who are full of genuinely you know nice people who just have different beliefs to me and maybe we could you know you could work on certain things with them but definitely couldn't work with the cult end of the Maoist or Stalinist kind of organizations yeah that that is certainly a thing do you think Makno was a good anarchist I've seen a lot of people who don't really support him I haven't read enough books on Makno to answer that question that's the date of my reading list I'm yet to really get to I'm stuck in like syndicalism at the moment I'm yet to read all the Makno stuff so I kind of don't have a horse in the Makno race I will say that I do like the platform I think there's a lot of good stuff in the platform but my main knowledge of Makno is what's in the the organizational platform of libertarian communism and the flag is great the flag's pretty good as well that that's my critical support for Makno good flag platform's good other than that I don't really know enough kak paul I mean same here for me really yeah what's your thoughts on Rosa Luxembourg that's another question from chat um I know Paul have you do you know more about Rosa Luxembourg than maybe because I haven't read about her in a very long time no I think she's um one of the most important Marxist thinkers that there is um I mean there are there are many sad things about her dying um but one of the sad things about it um I mean obviously the sad thing is that she was murdered and died way too young but one of the sad things is that she she died quite early before the sort of split between left communists or left Marxist and council communists sort of on the one hand with the more sort of more Stalinist line of Marxist on the other hand occurs and it would have been really interesting to see how she reflects on that split because she's often claimed for left Marxists partly because she has a very good critique of Lenin um although based on we should say somewhat limited knowledge of what was occurring in Russia but it would be really interesting to see how she developed those ideas had she continued to to live but I think her work on the mass strike which in in interesting ways actually a recapitulates earlier stuff that some important anarchists have said or had written about without I think knowing too much about what they've written is excellent I think her work on political economy was groundbreaking and absolutely essential for later Marxist theories of imperialism going through Lenin, Bukharian, Quaman, Gruma and others and she has some I believe some really good work on the theory of history as well that's not very well known but um it's a long time since I looked at any of that so I'm gonna not say too much about it um but I think her critique of was a critique of Kalski was really excellent her critical engagement with Lenin I think is really important um and her work on the mass strike is it's just outstanding sorry I might have no not Kalski I mean Bernstein sorry as I mean aren't they all the same German social democrats um well I mean as you know I cannot remember names so I'll just apologize to everyone listening I like this is a legit thing like like I I'm just awful with remembering names I only remember names of their 19th century anarchist I mean other than that I don't like I'll meet people I remember their name but I'll read um yes I've got a very selective memory when it comes to names sadly I just have no memory when it comes to names but there you go but yeah no I really like Rosa Luxemburg um she writes well as well which is nice because I like how we're not very good at being kind of YouTubers doing a Q&A because we consistently say oh I haven't read enough about this or here's my kind of you know remarks based on what I read a few years ago as opposed to the kind of what you're meant to do which is have total confidence because I know everything I'm the source of all human knowledge um like so like kind of the cycle of the card does oh thoughts from Manitesta's critique of syndicalism so I can talk about this at length this is like so long this is my phd I can talk about this so Manitesta's often often construed as a anti-syndicalist and this is entirely wrong so before the development so explicit anarcho-syndicalism develops after world war one and kind of Russian revolution before that you have anarchists who call themselves revolutionary syndicalists such as Poginski and Puget now prior to the development of revolutionary syndicalism as a self-identified movement which develops out of the Bostutravae and the CGT and then they unify to form new CGT which then adopts revolutionary syndicalist politics with the Charter Charter of Émile which I think is like 1905 or 1906 now prior to that anarchists had been advocating very similar views to what would later be advocated by syndicalists in the first international onwards and after the first international a lot of people get into insurrectionist anarchism and belief in kind of anarchist unionism falls in popularity in France and in Italy it's still big in Spain but it it's not as big there's also growth in insurrectionist anarchism in Spain as well and what happens is in the 1880s Popkin starts writing articles where he says we need to be doing revolutionary anarchist unionism like we'd advocated in the first international and then so this is 1881 then there's the great London-Doclan strike which as far as I remember is 1885 and Malatesta was in London for the Doklan strike and he witnesses it and in response to this he goes wow unions are really cool and we should be actively involving ourselves in unions in order to push them in anarchist direction and he thinks that a revolution could emerge out of a labor struggle out of a strike and then what happens is that as revolutionary syndicalism develops as a self-identified movement Malatesta has concerns about well loads of anarchists are jumping into the revolutionary syndicalist movement and he was worried that the anarchist movement would lose its independence it would be subsumed into revolutionary syndicalism and cease to have an independent existence and one of the main premises of revolutionary syndicalism was the idea that syndicalism was sufficient into itself by which they meant that you didn't need a distinct other kinds of organization other kinds of politics in order for the revolution to be successful you just needed to have syndicalist unions workers would join them and they'd develop class consciousness and you'd be able to have a revolution now Malatesta disagreed with the idea that syndicalism was sufficient into itself and he advocated that you have specific anarchist organizations which exist parallel to the unions which instill anarchist ideas into the membership and what Malatesta was against was having a exclusively anarchist union because if he thinks he thinks that if you have a union which is explicitly anarchist in its statutes then what will happen is either two things either it will be a specific anarchist organization that calls itself a union but in reality isn't or it will be a union that has explicitly anarchist politics where most of the membership aren't actually anarchists they're just there because they want increased wages or improved conditions etc and he thinks therefore as a result you should have a neutral union so it's it's politically neutral and in parallel to that have a specific anarchist organization which is involved in it and when Malatesta critiques syndicalism he's critiquing the ideas that the idea that syndicalism is sufficient unto itself and he's also critiquing the idea that you should have an explicitly anarcho-sindicalist union as opposed to just a standard union and that he was against the idea that the general strike itself would be the revolution and what's important to remember is that a revolutionary syndicalist anarchist syndicalist and revolutionary syndicalist would consistently view the general strike as what would lead into expropriation social revolution as opposed to them being identical but some revolutionary syndicalists did talk about them as being equivalent and Malatesta critiqued that he was like no it can't just be a general strike it has to be an insurrectionary general strike where the general strike is the launch platform for the force for expropriation of the capitalist class um so that's my thoughts on Malatesta's critico syndicalism the cliff notes yeah yeah it's more in depth in my phd which you can fund on patreon um thoughts on gun ownership and their role in politics that's another very simple i've been talking too much that's what i should talk kak um well i'm personally a pro pro gun i guess um i think especially in the united states i don't know maybe maybe you would disagree but i think that the the the prospect considering the sort of state of american politics and the the sort of nature of the police force here i think it's a very scary notion for only the cops and the military to to have guns yeah that seems like a well from a european perspective it seems like a very um specifically american perspective like it's not something most people actually worry about here i think especially in norway because people the cops don't actually carry guns yeah but yeah i see the problem in the united states paul yeah i mean yeah i mean i basically agree with with kak for the us i think norway is quite different partly because our cops don't typically carry guns and also because our cops kill a lot fewer people um but also like despite norway having really strict gun laws and regulation there are a lot of guns in norway because hunting is is very common and very popular as is shooting as the past time so the actual guns per um per person is is reasonably high in norway despite having very strict regulation yeah that's true so i i've never actually seen a gun in real life other than like when you see cops carrying them around when they're in kind of counterterrorism mode so i what gets me about america is the idea that you can go to a massive supermarket and when you're getting your cheese and your crisps you can also buy a a weapon um like in walmart and that just blows my mind it's like you know what's what do you get from the shops today so i got i got a gun um and some light snacks i just that that just weirds me out that's all i view about gun ownership in america just it confuses my english mind yeah absolutely like with your like cheese crisps and skittles like the three main food groups yeah and then maybe tea for like the design that's all a human really needs to survive there's a couple boxes of nine mil and you and you have your gun as well to defend yourself from people who try to take what's rightfully yours your chips and those are precious it's like you need guns to defend your right to property which in practice means owning lights you know snacks let's not get too deep into skittles discourse but yes certainly um i think uh we can um take the next question paul do you have um what's the next one i mean yeah our next the next question we had lined up was like how have your political views developed as time went on right oh well i can tell my origin story or the story of your dog secret my dog secret i had terrible politics but an anarchist bit you it's not yeah i'm nice like by the man um i was in a lab and an anarchist they were keeping there gave me a pamphlet um that's why i was i was politicized through conspiracy theories um like i was really into alex jones and zeitgeist all that kind of stuff like i had watched all the major 9 11 truth of documentaries when i was like 15 16 and i thought yeah i believed in it um i remember i watched of the um i think it's called something like abomination which is an alex jones documentary and it just blew my mind i was like oh wow this is so amazing it's so deep and i really watched it recently and it's unbelievably hilariously bad um but teenage me had a lack of taste um and through that i then discovered you know the youtube algorithm recommended and it recommended me stefan mooney and i was like oh wow and i got into like mra stuff like i was really into anti-feminist i'd watched all of girl rights what's videos and thought oh wow this is great feminism is irrational um i was very sexist at the time um this is when i thought i was a man hilariously and then i got into anarchism um because my philosophy a level teacher gave me a book on anarchism and i read it and was like oh wow this is way better and then i then started reading kropotkin and researching the spanish civil war and realized that i'd had really terrible politics and it took a while for me to like unlearn all the anti-feminism it was through kind of knowing feminists at university that kind of just blew my mind because they were super nice friendly people who were kind of committed to human emancipation um and so i then kind of unlearned all the all the mra stuff and um then you know you wake up one day and you realize you're that was a bit weird um so i was like a fundamental political change because obviously when i was younger i i was you know didn't think i didn't know trans people existed and would have kind of said terrible things about it had i uh been on certain sections of the internet i was lucky that certain kind of message boards didn't exist when i was growing up um because otherwise you know i would have got even deeper into the belly of the beast um and so then i got you know super into anarchism as like an obsession like you just read about it and then i started reading about marxism and go oh you couldn't combine it and also like started reading more stuff on anti-racism um and it's kind of over time it's like i feel like i've just become a better anarchist like i've i've learned more about what racism is or what sexism is because when i first got into anarchism i was what i guess you'd call a mannequist um like you know i felt like you know his gender really that important our women really oppressed you know class first kind of thing and that's part of why i make so many videos about uh identity politics and kind of attacking like malachism and socialism it's because i used to be one there's a problem oh sound shit okay brief break i suppose i think it's oh it's back up it's back up now so when did the sound cut off is then the question uh must have been very recently yeah it was um well it started lagging around the time that anarcho pack was uh finished yeah i don't have to retell my origin story okay so um sorry i was in the bathroom so i guess it's tax turn okay um so i guess i sort of started being interested in politics first through uh right libertarianism that's that was like what i identified as for a very brief time um because i just watched a bunch of like uh and ran videos and thought wow she's really reasonable but then um i think i sort of then went into just being a social democrat around the time that um that uh bernie sanders was becoming popular um and that led me to go on uh lefty poll which is a bit embarrassing in retrospect but it uh it sort of uh brought me over to the like the anti-capitalists and from there i try to figure out if i'm if i'm like like what strand of socialist slash communist i am uh and i guess it was mostly youtubers like uh anarcho pack and libertarian socialist rants and bad mouse and people like that who uh brought me over to anarchism um um and now i kind of i still have sympathies with anarchism but i don't explicitly identify as one i guess i'm i'm sympathetic to kind of all both anarcho-communism and anti or non-statist forms of uh marxism i guess that's it pal yeah so um as i mentioned i started reading what's about like lots of essentially the marxist classics when i was in high school and i became sort of rough broadly speaking a kind of dross gifts i guess we've all had to talk about which wasn't big in that country at the time like it's not like i grew up in the uk where like the far part of political leftist is like 37 different kinds of drosskism um but in any case uh in any case that happened i then sort of drifted more towards the sort of left marxism um and as part of that right and then joining like a marxist political party and the youth organization um and at the same time i i don't remember exactly which happened first but i started reading various stuff like anti-racism feminism and so on stuff by the lgbtq rights and so on um and when you were part of that party and that youth organization it was always just assumed that you should be you know against you know against sexism against racism etc and be a feminist etc and it took these things very seriously in practice as well very often um and when i'd read some of the anarchist texts i'd read sort of like the classics like the big books or not big books but like the books you get sort of told of by um they're written by like bakunin kropotkin and so on but they don't have a whole lot of strategy in them um so for a long time i didn't really know much detail about different kinds of anarchist strategy um because again they're mostly written in like so-called minor writings right they're in they're in articles they're in shorter pamphlets they're in letters and so on um because the debates about this are happening within the movement they're not happening in sort of like the spin-off quasi-academic treatises that say kropotkin will write um which is much more for you know if you want to know more about this particular thing or what that's the specialized thing you could read that but for like the actual movement debates it's in you know like newspaper articles and so on so it took a while last time at all before i started reading a bunch of more of those texts um which though it helped me a lot with um and malatesta especially malatesta i remember it's like yeah i know bakunin kropotkin um like goldman etc and it's always happened i was like no you have to read malatesta you have to read this book this is the objectively correct book that you should be reading the book is the method of freedom um it's the book that you know if you haven't read you need to change that about who you are as a person like it's it's so good um because it's just because what's so good about malatesta is that most of what he writes really short so you can dip in and out and in the method of freedom most of the texts are a few pages like the really big texts are like kind of 20 25 pages but the vast majority of them are like two three four maybe eight so they're very short and then there's and you can and the book chants malatesta's intellectual development so you can read the only malatesta and then see him develop his kind of syndicalist views then his critique of syndicalism which is naturally a critique of syndicalism as i've said and also is like the platform debates and the latest stuff he says you know as he's responding to real historical events on the ground and different contemporary issues so what you what's really good about it is that you appreciate the extent to which he was actually responding to the actual situation on the ground so for example either there are articles in which he advocates anarchists working with republicans to overthrow the monarchy because if you overthrow the monarchy and have a republic you'll have better rights which enable trade union organization which was illegal under the monarchy and so it gives you all these really nice kind of concrete his or strategy for this situation as opposed to a lot more kind of anarchist stuff and strategy which is a lot kind of broad brushstrokes and more vague like we're going to have a revolution and here's what it's going to be like well malat most of malatesta stuff is a lot more nitty gritty like there was this strike that happened here's what i think about it and that's what i kind of really appreciate about it because obviously when we develop strategy now it's in response to what's going on right now as opposed to the big brushstroke stuff yeah and what i think is essential about specifically the method of freedom collection is that it has introductions to the different parts that explain that tell you exactly who malatesta is responding to what he's arguing for and why he's doing it so if you just read a bunch of malatest articles called it looks like for example his say critiquing syndicalism as a thing whereas what he's actually doing is critiquing one particular kind of a particular piece of syndicalist theory so that the existing unions can do stuff better and so on and you don't necessarily know that until you've read the introduction and then understand the text in light of that so one of the really great things about the collection is that it tells you it gives you sort of the necessary context or the context you need to understand what that is doing in each of the texts and if you want to go super nerdy the guy who's editing all this together he's called david to kato and he is a book called making sense making sense of anarchism arico malatesta's experiments with revolution and it's a really good beat book to read in conjunction with the method of freedom anthology which to kato himself you know put together because there's a lot of crossover between it so you know you can read the chapter in the book which discusses a particular period then you can read all the things malatesta wrote in that period which in the anthology and that's what i've done and i i highly recommend it as a kind of intellectual experience yeah same here and just to finish up the thing of my sort of political development right i mean i generally have problems with precise like labeling you are you know you're going that box you go in this box um but i guess i identify world-less libertarian socialist and drone balls sort of anarchist and and marxist ideas uh yeah for me uh like i said i started out just realizing i really hated royalty and um i got into like anarchist reading groups that developed into an organization that's been going on for a while now but i also realized that i'm not very good at being active with people so i've mostly been like studying theory or modding facebook groups and making videos uh so i don't know that that was my um that was my sort of where it began and as time went on i guess you know i'm sort of converging into this libertarian socialist thing which i always already were but it i'm just getting more well read and hopefully you know a better activist as well developing my powers so there's not much more to it than that i think i'm still appreciating the surrealism of kind of in-depth discussions about leftism while this video game is going there we now that i look back at it and i'm going like oh my god this is amazing how is this game going? what happened so far what's the progress right it is our daddy close to getting laid have they gone laid i've been keeping track i've been so distracted by the intro don't think i introduce myself oh no sorry i make thumbnails um and we've met like three different gods so far uh we made a good impression on on two of them but the last one is like this rich guy with these creepy kids class enemy yeah we didn't make a good impression but it's whatever i don't think i think that's right for marx daddy unless he's kind of looking for like a sugar daddy to pay for him to be able to write capital i'm sure people have written like marx and engels homoerotic fan fiction like there must be corners of the internet where that's happened with such excellent beard how could they not i mean somebody uh on twitter replied to your uh tweet zoe with this is all i ever wanted the question mark i approve of the sentiment wait what tweet is that response to um my tweet what i said you know we're gonna be talking about marx while playing a gay dad dating game um there are some questions from chat i guess could look at uh what would you think of marxism lenonism moism if they did away with representative democracy in favor of direct democracy anyone um well a very brief thing i can say is so there's a text uh mal wrote uh there's a section of it called ultra democracy in which mal basically says that the the majority of the members of the group shouldn't have a say in decisions about how the group is run but should implement the policies that have been decided by the leadership so they can make decisions about how do we implement the policies they can't implement make decisions about um what uh policies are are in fact implemented um and this is a text which you know not many even malice might be aware of it's kind of historically significant to read for kind of what exactly mal actually did think about decision making procedures um in a in a revolutionary situation yeah so they're probably thinking of the the you know the shining path people made their theory of marxism lenonism malism which is like a 10-point thing i don't know i i don't know enough about it but that may be what they have in mind when people call themselves marxist lenonism malice they usually think of think of that i think so it's this specific thing that the shining path peruvian communist party uh adhered to and yeah for myself i don't know much more about it than that uh did we have any more questions paul uh we have at least okay actually i i think i can answer say something about the last question okay that was one like would you like malism if we did away with represent and like implement a direct democracy right mm-hmm and i have a heart i'm seeing how that would still be malism in any like really significant way because part of the traditional commitment of malism of malism and i remember this as i read the he says oh he refers to um when i was back in high school sort of considering marxism and that was one of the first parts i read and i was like okay that's a very clear statement of of what they are for organizational everything's what mal was for and it's a very good reason why i'm not for them um because one of the things that traditional committed to is essentially a centralized dictatorship at the top with more or less bottom-up democracy at the bottom and i don't think those two things are long-term reconcilable for one but i also think that if you do take what's almost called direct or also bottom-up democracy seriously you can't also have these kind of authoritarian top-down uh commanders or what is often called democratic centralism and if you don't have that anymore it's hard to see how it would still be malism at least in any kind of sense that actual malice would recognize so would i be for it i mean i might be for it depending on what else it does but i'm not clear i'm unclear whether it would still be malism if that were really the case but i don't know the example that i've even just talked about um i'd have to look at that in more detail and i would say is that were malice to start being like yeah we've been thinking and we're totally in favor of direct democracy and pre-figurative politics i would think oh great you know i wouldn't i would be very supportive of them them going in that direction i would just go well at what point are you doing something else as opposed to still being malice that's kind of a it can be quite a tricky conceptual question yeah okay so uh poll uh unless there's yeah there's um there's one sort of last question we had which is what's the overall goal of your channel right so what's the main thing you're trying to do the forceful expropriation of the capitalist class um by the workers themselves is my bold ambition um meaning for all i think i think my actual ambition is kind of like hopefully make people think more intellectually about left-wing politics like even if they watch my channel and aren't persuaded by it they'll at least think wow this there's some depth here it's something to take intellectually seriously um i kind of view it as like you don't watch me if you're looking for a kind of a nice accessible cuddly introduction that's super fun like you watch me if you want me talking for 20 minutes in far too much detail about some quite obscure stuff with lots of footnotes and it's more kind of a you know do you want to learn more about this topic here's a thing that's you know watching that will systematically reconstruct it as opposed to what you show your friend when you're trying to get them into it in the first place so i think other people are much better at doing that than i am like you know i would recommend people watch kark or red plateaus or libertarian socialist rents over me when they're first getting into it um because i i think i know some people can be put off by the the lack of kind of snazzy production values and excitement um so i kind of see my role as well i'm not good at doing the snazzy production values and the excitement but i am good at philosophy so i'll focus on that and and trying to kind of provide systematic accounts of certain interesting topics and making kind of rigorous philosophical arguments for certain confusions in the hope that i'll persuade people to think differently or at least take a position more intellectually seriously than they used to i guess that's kind of what i'm trying to do but what the other main thing i'm trying to do is kind of make people realize that you can have really serious class politics but also doing identity politics um class politics identity politics aren't usually exclusive you can do both and i'm trying to demonstrate that by actually doing it so often when i talk about marks i might use examples which are from identity politics to illustrate the idea so i can my video and false consciousness i deliberately explained it in terms of internalized sexism um and kind of a you know dynamics and abusive relationships as opposed to the traditional example if you have the work of in the factory and their alienation um so i guess they're the main things i'm trying to do right cut well i mean one obvious goal is uh spreading post-modern neomarksism but also just um i guess i want to introduce sort of uh philosophical ideas in an accessible way that people otherwise might not encounter or i often do ideas that are from um thinkers that are very difficult to read um and also just i want to push back against some of the hostility and i guess misrepresentations of continental philosophers um i guess post-modern ones in particular um yeah and and also obviously sneak in some like anti-capitalist sentiment as well yeah i'll be right back yep paul do you want to talk about yeah so i mean i guess you can add to this even but um so i guess the the first thing we're trying to do is to explain a certain bunch of sort of marxist ideas specific ideas that were really important to marx that just aren't introduced or talked about anywhere much on the internet and that don't seem to be well known outside of essentially academia so if you go and read about sort of what academics write about marx where you go to say conference or something stuff like oh marx has a theory of human development and flourishing or something or marx has a certain conception of freedom is not like these views are not particularly controversial the details about interpretation will sometimes be but the broad view isn't but then you go on the internet or among sort of many sort of organized marxist and they just in many cases just don't seem to know much about these things in general at all um so one of the main goals of our channel is to explain certain parts of marx's thought that of marx's thought that just aren't very well understood among well anyone on the internet or most people on the internet that we know of so he talks about some of it so he talks about some of it yeah but like I'm not sort of counting Zoe because I'm complaining about this from before she started making those videos and I started making those videos because I became friends with Paul so and sort of connected with that right we'd like to explain a bunch I think a bunch of important ideas in socialist theory both on the sort of more marxist side and on the more anarchist side depending on how much we end up getting time to do and so on and I think that's that's partly tied to the broader project that me and Zoe and a few other of our friends are committed to which is taking the the most important or the most what we think are the best ideas in marxism and anarchism and trying to form a synthesis between them that can be useful for sort of long term social change yeah and then the key thing is for long term social change as opposed to you know academia or for prestige like it's for the movement that's why we've got youtube videos as opposed to focusing on energies on conference papers yeah this shit is not useful for an academic career I'm just telling you yeah I don't think I have much to add to that I think so what do you think of Simone Vile and her views on marxism I know absolutely nothing about that topic is my views yeah I'm gonna have to flee the ignorance as well I will I will self-crit and remedy this I was this great shortcoming in who I am as the human being I was actually recently told to to read Simone Vile and her criticism of marxism but I haven't got around to it yet so I can't say did you did you answer the question on vaping oh that's a very important question that strangely mentions an anarchist state will vaping be illegal in the anarchist state I think we'll have a kind of tiered system where the people's commissars can vape because the kind of economy there's limited resources and so you know people with kind of key positions for the development of praetarian power get to vape but the actual workers won't be allowed to because it prevents you from working for very long hours because of the breathing difficulties yeah it'll be like caviar if they're going to meet their kind of production quotas vaping won't be allowed but it's actually very important for kind of bureaucrats to be able to vape that's my kind of critical position on the subject so the anarchist state is to disagree I'm going to have to disagree about that because I have a very strong intuition I have a very strong heartfelt belief and by belief what I mean is objectively correct assessment based on pure rationality and logic that an anarchist state is a contradiction in terms and since everything follows from a contradiction it follows that vaping will be banned you have to have done homologic to really appreciate the just how bad the joke was yes yeah or you can probably do category theory and think of initial objects this is what happens when we have like a mathematician on board yeah yeah I was thinking of uh yeah if if the anarchist state in like in the lendiness sense it's a special depressive force it's like of exercising force over of one class over another then it would be of course the exercise of oppression over the of the vaping class over the non-vaping class the vaping class what's the classes defined in terms of your relationship to vaping exactly there are three classes those who own the vape shop those who vape and those who do not vape but in in terms of the idea of an anarchist state I can say something super obscure so um in so before Bakunin joins the first international he writes a text which is him theorizing about what the politics of the group one of the secret societies he founded would have and I think he wrote this in I can actually check where he wrote it I have my mad note system just a second let's all just appreciate the fact that the boss man has been writing his prose too hard and it's time for us to rise for a right okay can I also mention a comment by I'm not quite sure what the name is dick that says vaping will be banned and not banned right so I have found my notes so I can give the date so in 1868 um wait a minute because I get there's two different texts 1866 1868 and he uses different language between them if you get it wrong the internet will judge you exactly and I can't be wrong about obscure Bakunin texts I will never be able to leave my room again everyone will know and judge um because I promise I don't have a consistent note system here we go I found yeah so it was in 1867 to aim um no it's like oh this is so confusing it's 1868 there we go my notes aren't very aren't well organized enough so I have the quote so um he says quote that um he advocates the free federation of agricultural industrial associations the new revolutionary state organized from the bottom upward by means of revolutionary delegation and embracing all insurgent areas in the name of the same principles irrespective of old frontiers and national differences uh will set out to administer public services not to rule over peoples this organization rules out any idea of a dictatorship and custodial control so in 1868 he explicitly advocates um a revolutionary state and I went and checked the original french and he does use the term revolutionary state in french as well um this is in his program and purpose of the revolutionary organization of international brothers um and then once he becomes more involved in the first international his language shifts um and so for example at the basal congress of the first international which as everyone knows was september 1869 um Bakunin says quote I'm a resolute opponent of the state and of all bourgeois state politics I call for the destruction of all national and territorial states and the foundation upon their ruins of the international working men's state so he continues to advocate then 1870 he stops and starts just calling it um the commune so there's a there's a shift over two years from him calling for a worker's state to him calling for the abolition of all states in favor of the commune but his description of of the revolutionary state and the commune are identical um what changes is the language he uses to describe it because he's coming into contact with state socialists who mean different thing by the state who um have a different you know view on strategy so to differentiate himself from it he changes his language is my theory so that's some that's some obscure anarchist facts that's that's what the person asking about vaping wanted to know I think that's what they wanted did they have a take did Bakunin have a take on vaping I don't know um what Bakunin thought about vaping given it hadn't existed yet but I'm sure he would approve um because he smoked a lot um when he was in prison he smoked so much that as far as I remember he like he lost all his teeth um when he was in prison for malnutrition smoking loads of cigars really yeah he participated in uh in uh insurrection and then was imprisoned and he was handcuffed uh to this thing in the in his jail cell which meant he could barely move um he didn't have a very good time in prison um yeah didn't he lose all his teeth because of scurvy as well yeah yeah oh so it was because of vaping it wasn't because of vaping but he just smoked a lot when he was in prison is what I was remembering it's there for I assume he would be in favor of vaping um so I we Zoe and I we have this dream that at one point and I hope our listeners are paying attention now that at some point somebody will make like an HBO style series about the main players in the first international and it one of the things we'd really like to see there is how Bakunin managed to always have loads of cheap cigars around no matter what he was doing whether he was fleeing from the police or spending time in jail um we think it's a very important question that we'd like some sort of TV to answer that we mainly want this HBO like uh drama of the first international so we can be hired as historical advisors so it's like we would have we will make everyone read Wolfgang Eckhart and give them like all the cast must attend by lectures on anarchism yeah I mean like they don't even have to pay us we we will just be there we would happily do it for you I just give us food and we'll be happy a food rent and we'll be like this is the dream yeah like our lives are like downhill from here basically uh we'd also like to see that time when Bakunin shows up at the Marx household and like eats all their food drinks and like the middle of the night everyone else has personally gone to bed but these like old motherfuckers uh end up being like a drunken fistfight uh on the floor because they're so drunk they can't even stand anymore Bakunin and Martin's have to be wailing on each other it'd be a good show I mean I would watch the hell out of it and especially there would there would be the very exciting point when um you have the you have the the split and you have the formation of the Sintium International because then you get to film when Manatesta first meets Bakunin and Manatesta was super ill and Bakunin went into daddy mode and not in that way um and he um like you know wrapped him up in blanket and looked after him and and asked him to join his secret society you know usual things and Manatesta then survives even though he thought he was going to die and then there's there's discussions in the Sintium International because there were disagreements between different members of the Sintium International about strategy not all of them were anarchists and the Belgians for example weren't and there was lots of attempts to try and create kind of unity of action uh and Gileam you know is like before the meeting to Manatesta like you know make sure you don't say anything too extremely anarchist or trying to make compromises and you know not destroy the organization etc and it begins and Manatesta immediately goes on this rant about how you have to abolish the state and how anarchism is the only truth more revolutionary and you can kind of just imagine Gileam like you know hitting his head going oh no Manatesta you're ruining my careful real political strategies and the point is I want to see this on film with like good actors and high production values um because I was really excited by the the Marx film or about the writing of the Communist Manifesto that I watched that and was like I've waited my whole life for this this is the dream was it good it's really good despite inaccurately representing Proudhon but other than that it's amazing yeah I mean it it's imperfect like these things are always going to be but like basically in terms of like giving an image of Marx and some of his ideas it's excellent I don't know some people seem to really hate it well they're just wrong I thought it was great objectively I mean you used reason and logic and you came to the objective well if we apply dialectical materialism to the Marx film I think you'll find that it is objectively great do you think that rejection or critique of the Marx film is in fact undialectical and revisionist well I think it reflects a fundamentally kind of pretty bourgeois attitude right I like the idea of kind of marxist cults where you're forced to watch the Marx film like a weird stylist group just like we watch it every night so can we watch something I have to know maybe that's why we shouldn't create the HBO TV series yeah like don't encourage them yeah it'll become part of the kind of education program oh you say that but there's already that Karl Marx anime right like yeah the Karl Marx anime is amazing I love the I love the end credit so much where there's the fading in of the the the Chinese like a state flag yeah it's a really subtle suggestion that the the culmination of Marx's ideas is A. Maoism and B. like the current existing Chinese state we have our we have our fifth dad the brooding man from the coffee spoon yeah I like his jacket and he looks he looks very daring I like our Marx oh he's quite arrogant but maybe Marx is into that okay he likes a confident man yeah I like how Marx is getting to an argument with him in true Marx fashion because he really is biography it's often like he meets people and he just gets into really heated arguments with them and tells them why they're terrible and wrong it's like he's not very good at like making friends he's not and even like the books he writes it's like like germ nadiology or something like why is there like a long as critique of sterner it's like god damn it I like the memes are based on this where it's uh angles you know sure we need to include this stuff on standard mark's response goes you know on my gravestone it will say here lies car marx destroyer of max because I identify strongly of marx's attitude because obviously I do this bit on the internet comment section like it's really good that marx didn't have the internet because if he did he would have spent all his time having arguments for people who are wrong and need to be shown they're wrong didn't have to make a reality show just to like uh what's it called as looks as well like people who spend more money than they have like end up in tragic situations because they spend all their time commenting on the internet yeah marks couldn't go get a job at the train station I think marks could have been really good at youtube because this thing would be like all response videos yeah so like maybe he was just like like way more ahead of his time that anyone has realized sterner is wrong about part 102 it would be a very long video series and people would be like can't you just leave sterner alone he's gone a bit obsessive and marx's like no no he's basically thunder foot of left book yeah thunder foot responding to a need to sarkeesian would be marx responding to max sterner it's another video more like thunder if thunder foot knew how to deal with yeah arguments arguments and yeah evidence and minor details the point is that it's more the idea of like mo you know you keep making videos about this person yeah but imagine him like with the merciless style and like the actual flair he had when he writes because he can't really write he's super sassy as well yeah like marx being sarcastic is like precious gold oh what what what just happened with the dad we said that we love to drink whiskey and he's sitting on us so he wants to get a sweet to your health what is the reason marx makes such a thorough analysis of capital when hegel basically makes the same analysis in philosophy of right is marx just filling in some empirical facts so a question from chat yeah i'll deal with that so so basically like to give a good answer like here's what you can do to whoever wrote that like write us a long thing explaining exactly which analysis you think marx has there and how it's similar to which analysis you take hegel to be having in the philosophy of right and if we have time we'll explain to you why it's all wrong basically he doesn't have the same analysis of value or most of anything that hegel has in the philosophy of right and one of the main things that's different for example is that marx's idea of socially necessary labor time doesn't exist prior to marx because he invents that and that's a really key part of his theory and it's one of the many things that he has that's just isn't there in any of the left Ricardians that is in part building on and is not there in hegel either and they just don't have the same analysis of capital or value or many other things really they do have a similar definition or a similar conception of needs specifically what the term how the term needs is used but that's in turn actually building on work that adam Smith did and adam Ferguson but yeah so in other words i'm sorry about your question is wrong all right but i realize why that's not a very nice answer right because it doesn't sort of help anyone understand anything any better but again if you give us more detail then we can try to respond to it and with more detail as well i shouldn't be saying this because i god damn it i keep saying yes to doing too much stuff but but if yeah if you write it down we'll we can try to they've claimed the the discussion in our hegel course at uni the lecturer didn't think there was a meaningful difference between hegel and marx's analysis well that's the case your lecture was just wrong that was like obscenely wrong i'm sorry you had to deal with that person whoever they were yeah pro tip your lecturers at universities often don't know a huge amount because they're they're often forced to cram right the lectures last minute and so to the if you don't know how universities actually work as a student you can think are they must be the total expert on this and often whams is they're told you're going to be giving this lecture series they've had to panic write lectures um in time for the for the students yeah and that's especially hard when you're dealing with texts that are that use a lot of words that were used differently at the time than they use now and that are dealing with lots of really like complex and evolving ideas and marx and hegel are like really fantastic examples of writers who are extremely hard to read um and there's a lot of secular literature that has a lot of internal inconsistencies and disagreements that is literature not necessarily their work and it's it's very hard to get a good understanding of these things and if you have a lecture especially if they're part-time or something they're trying to do some of their own research they might not be an expert in this field at all they have to do a certain number of lectures on this thing or they're on this person or on these people that they barely know they have very little time so they typically read a bit of secondary literature typically the introductory stuff some of the primary texts if they can manage and then do the best they can but but often they are not experts on the thing and sometimes they frankly really screw up and what's amazing is because the students don't realize this they just totally trust their lecture lecturers um because they kind of have an idea of what academia and universities like which doesn't correspond to reality which then changes how they experience the reality of university oh my god this is getting uh are we getting laid it's we are we are getting laid excellent that that is like really good timing Robert's intense expression it's not every day you get to see marks get laid I mean do we want to stop or do we want to keep going so I think there's a math c question for Ivan which I feel should I don't quite understand it but I feel this is I can't yeah you're the only one who can answer I guess it would be a partial order if you think of it in terms of like uh something like that but you know I have to okay so I have to I don't remember the exact definition of a pre-order but okay so it's a pre-order if it's reflexive and if it's transitive yeah you know like I would say uh I don't know I just think of it as the uh like roughly as the prime ideals of a ring but yeah that's uh something to think about when I'm high you think so so Mark appears to have turned down his his hot date and now there's another man we didn't turn down the hot date but okay we didn't have sex I thought it was a little bit early perhaps yeah PG-13 we got to explore the other daddies too that's true if you don't want to commit to one daddy you want to find out about the all the different varieties of daddy before you commit for sure I think we want to play the field this is what they're saying still want to get your swirl on that was the mathy question I I would say I think of it as kind of a scheme which is basically just a space where stuff can intersect and you can have curves in that oh we've been talking for two hours oh my god oh shit yeah um we have done all the questions have we not we have we have yeah done all the questions so shall we finish because two hours is a significant video experience it is certainly as of yet well I've enjoyed myself um and I I'd like the the dating game it's a movie you too yeah uh any closing remarks anybody want to say something I'd like to um say thank you to Zoe and cock philosophy for coming thank you thank you for having me thanks for the invite being great talking to you to you both um and yeah that's that's it for me I want to say before we go I mean yeah I want to say thank you to Sina for for taking control over uh the dream is that game and I also have my thanks to send for the the gay decision making yeah there's a reason we're playing this game today all right cock anything you want to say um I guess not I've I've enjoyed myself and uh yeah yeah cool well goodbye audience I feel like you know on a children's show whether everyone waves goodbye good night good night