is up all and welcome to modern day debate. We are a neutral, non-partisan platform welcoming everyone from all walks of life. If you're looking for even more fantastic debates, we are all over the internet, including your favorite podcasting platforms like Spotify, TikTok, and if you enjoy debates, it really does help out if you like, follow, or subscribe on YouTube, including tonight's debate, Trump Communism on Trial with our debaters, Dr. Ben and Infrared here to help us find out. And if you enjoy what either of them have to say tonight, both of our guest links are in the description below. You can also tag me in chat at Amy Newman with your burning desire question for either or both of our interlocutors and super chats, get your set to the top of the list. With that, I am going to hand it over to the affirmative for their opening statement. The floor is all yours. So you can just interrupt me if I'm getting close to the limit. So I'll just begin. So Maga Communism is one of the most maligned yet misunderstood phrases on the internet as far as political discourse is concerned. Toward the end of the last year, during the end of the summer, it gained traction on Twitter and started trending, leading to various different political commentators to give their own takes on the apparent absurdity and paradox of this phase. Reaction to the phrase is a good litmus test yet of political sensibilities in my view. Those who react suddenly to the apparent union of ideological opposites fail to grasp the subtlety of its imminent irony. We know that on a superficial level, Maga and Communism seem to be the opposite of each other. Various pseudo-intellectuals fail to appreciate the provocation already inherent in the slogan though. Why should that be the case given that the Maga movement is being carried entirely by the blue collar working class who also happened to be a historical subject of Communism? Now to make a brief comment, I am familiar by the study by Nicholas Carnes, which alleges that the Maga movement is in fact not made up by the white working class. However, the methodological flaws in that study are very clear as far as how they define the working class. According to that study, class is defined by income and not occupation. But when you actually analyze the data on the basis of occupation, you can very clearly see that blue collar jobs that would fit the definition of productive laborers as per the Marxist definition, people who are working with their hands in manual forms of labor that are directly involved in the transformation of nature as per Marxist definition of what labor actually is rather than just the service industry. Although these jobs tend to be called middle class and as by average have a higher income than service jobs, that is what the working class has always actually meant as per the Marxist definition. So the blue collar working class overwhelmingly votes in favor of Trump and overwhelmingly makes up the core of the Maga movement. And we don't actually just need to consult data to understand this because we understand it intuitively and anecdotally. If anyone has any, if you've ever gone to a Trump rally, it's just painfully obvious what kind of demographic dominates the Maga movement, especially compared to other Republicans. Meanwhile, we have plenty of data that shows how there has been a shift and a transition among wealthy suburbanites and white collar professional managerials, but especially the traditional Republican strongholds in the suburbs, the white suburbs moved over to Biden and Democrats in unprecedented numbers from 2016 up to the most recent election and the midterms. So we are seeing a shift and a swapping of class demographics in each respective party. And that much is, I don't think there's room for dispute there. Now, other responses, which attempt to compare Maga communism to national socialism are even more sophomoric. The latter phrase was coined opportunistically to hijack a real existing socialist movement, which doesn't exist in any comparable form in the United States. Moreover, it did so for purposes of assimilating said movement to both the institutions of the German imperialist state and for purposes of waging wars of aggression. Yet the strategy of Maga communism is both counterhegemonic, anti-imperialist, and I would even add, in some sense, at least, anti-government. We recognize in Maga an aim to dismantle the imperialist state machine, known as big government, and a fervent rejection of foreign interventionism. This stands in contrast to the so-called democratic socialist, which by the aforementioned criteria on the significance of the state institutions in war actually do have far more in common with the ideology of Hitler. Now, finally, the real consention of this slogan is that it implies the return to a counter-hegemonic and, in some, revolutionary communism standing opposed to the ruling class institutions reigning over American society at every cultural, informational, and sociological level. This has put it at odds with the so-called progressive left. But what is so progressive about a left that can do nothing but in concrete terms defend the actually existing status quo? What progress, since the defeat of Bernie Sanders in 2016, has it actually made? Anyone serious about communism in this country should know that Maga represents the only remaining counter-hegemonic political force, as Democrats, Rhinos, and Neocons form one globalist center uniting together for an agenda for war. Now, finally, I'll add, my opponent here, Ben Bergus, wrote a book called Give Them an Argument, which was apparently targeted toward everyday right-wingers and right-wing rhetoric. This is severely misguided. The real people who need an argument are, in fact, the Democratic Party in Joe Biden, who people like Ben Bergus, if I'm not wrong here, were claiming can be pushed left, or at least some kind of left-wing force can gain hegemony over the Democrat Party and hijack it for purposes of realizing those aims. Where is that? Where are the results for that? Why don't your arguments work in the direction of the Democratic Party? Basic Marxism tells us that the ruling class will always control the government in a democracy, a so-called democracy. So how are you going to push, even when the Democrats agree with your arguments, they still will not make do on them. Why? Because they're in the pockets of the capitalistic ruling class, which is clear as day to anyone. So where's the argument for Biden? Where's the argument for the squad and AOC who not once have actually sacrificed their careerist and opportunist ambitions for the purposes of building a mass socialist movement in this country? What concrete steps have been taken, besides advocating for people to vote for Biden, to stave off the supposed threat of fascism, which, by the way, has never been clearly defined, has actually been made? None. So I'm not sure if I am close to the end of my time, but I think that's actually all I need. You still had four minutes, but that is fantastic. Thank you so much, infrared, for your opening statement. And with that, we are now going to hand it over to Ben for your opening statement. All right. Thanks, Amy. I'm glad to know that Haas knows the title of one of my books. It's pretty clear that he has no idea what I say in there or anything else that I've ever written or said since the arguments that he's attributed to me that he can push Biden to the left, something about fascism, are pretty hilariously far from the actual positions that I've taken of those issues. I could just go to jackabid.com slash author slash Ben dash Burgess and find out what I've actually said about all those subjects pretty quickly. Okay. But I want to move on from that to get right to the point about why I think trying to attach any sort of pro-working class or anti-imperial politics to the MAGA label is not just a provocation, but actually incoherent. First on foreign policy, Trump was actually a way bigger militarist than Obama and in some ways a bigger militarist than Biden. And to put this in perspective, when I say that, I spent the Obama years constantly arguing with liberals about drones and detention and Obama's failure to end the war in Afghanistan. And I've spent the last year being accused of being a Putin apologist because I want peace negotiations in Ukraine. But if you objectively look at all the things that changed in foreign policy from Obama to Trump, in almost every way as bad as Obama was, Trump was even worse and more aggressive. Trump tore up the Iran deal and assassinated Soleimani, bringing the United States of Iran closer to the brink of war that we've been since the hostage crisis at the end of the Carter administration. US policy has always been to help Israel and screw over the Palestinian people, but Trump was at least in at least one way literally the worst US president ever on that subject. He did what no president had been willing to do since Israel's illegal annexation of Palestinian territory in East Jerusalem in 1967 after the 1967 war and moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, thus officially signing off on that annexation and taking that issue off the table for any future US sponsored peace talks, which is of course very high on the neocon wish list. Here's another thing Trump did. He doubled the rate of drone strikes in Yemen. He lifted all of Obama's policies that in any way put any kind of restrictions or oversights on the use of drones, basically just letting the generals do what they want. And again, what Obama did was bad enough. As far as I'm concerned, Obama is a war criminal who should stand trial at the Hague, but Trump was a worse war criminal. We don't even know how many innocent people were killed by Trump's considerably expanded version of the drone war because he got rid of the reporting requirements. Moving from the Middle East to Latin America, Trump reversed Obama's opening to Cuba and tightened up the embargo on that country. Outside of Cuba, the two presidents were about equally bad in Latin America. Obama backed the coup in Honduras. Trump backed the coup in Bolivia. Bernie Sanders, by the way, who was mentioned earlier, spoke out against both of those. If you want an example of a politician who might be imperfect in various ways and not as anti-interventionist as I'd like, who's about 10,000 times better on any of those issues about foreign policy than Trump or any of the bag of people in Congress. On Afghanistan, Trump pledged to theoretically get out if he made it to a second term. We'll never know if he would have kept that promise. Biden was the one who actually ripped off the bandaid while every single bag of Republican criticized him for, quote, unquote, surrendering and dishonoring America by letting the Taliban take over as American troops were leaving. Oh, and before we finish foreign policy, Trump was far more of an anti-Russia hawk than Obama had been. Trump has acted like a peacenick about Russia now that he's out of office. It's an easy way to court voters for 2024. But when he was in office, he was super aggressive about opposing the Nord Stream pipeline hell. He bombed Damascus while there were Russian soldiers stationed in the city. And let's talk about Ukraine. As hard as it is to remember, back in 2014, Republicans would constantly criticize Obama for being too soft on Putin. One of the things they were always slamming him for was not being willing to send heavy weaponry to Ukraine for their war against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas. Well, by the end of his first year, Trump did exactly that. And moving from Russia to China, that Trump was obviously a huge anti-China hawk, his constant feature of his rhetoric. And right now, just this last week, all the biggest mega Republicans in Congress have been lighted up to claim about how China is an existential threat and how the United States needs to send more money to Taiwan, needs to cut economic links, and so on. Even the mega people who want less aid to Ukraine all say, if you look at their reasons for voting that way, that their reason is that they think China is a bigger threat than Russia. We should focus on China. Moving to domestic policy, Trump was a way bigger union buster than either Obama or Biden. And I hate Obama and Biden. I think those are just mediocre pro-corporate Democrats, and Biden's move to stop the rail strike was despicable. And it showed that even if Democrats are the softer of the two parties of capital, there's still very much a party of capital. But the fact is that Trump was by any possible standards worse. He filled the National Labor Relations Board with hardcore union busters who made it way harder for ordinary working-class people. Whether those blue collar workers Haas is talking about or white collar workers who, by the way, are also very much part of the what kind of collar you wear is not the question. The question is, do you own the means of production? Are you forced to sell your labor to a capitalist to make a living, whether you're slinging coffee at Starbucks or working in a coal mine? But any case, any kind of working-class people who want higher wages or more of a say at their workplace, if they wanted to organize a union, that was made far harder by the Trump administration. Meanwhile, his big domestic policy accomplishment was a tax cut for rich people. And the Trump administration worked constantly a week in workplace safety regulations to protect workers from being injured or killed on the job.  You're attaching it to the flag of escalated tensions with Russia and China, even as you lick the boots of Wall Street and corporate America. You're using the word communism, but you're attaching it to the flag of the worst, most hardcore enemies of the working-class. And again, mainstream Democrats like Obama and Biden are absolutely enemies of the working-class, but Trump and the mega-people in Congress are worse. Last year, all of the biggest mega-Republicans in Congress, your Marjorie Taylor Greene, people like that, Matt Gaetz, voted against a proposal to even cap the price of insulin for diabetics because even capping it, not making it free, just capping it, is too much of a violation for them of the sacred right of capitalists to make as much money as possible. Now, if you want to say lots of working-class people voted for Trump and we should try to appeal to them, I absolutely 100% agree with you. Now, I don't know what this analysis is that supposedly proves that the majority, even of blue-collar workers, voted for Trump. I haven't seen that. I'd be interested to hear about it. But certainly if you just look at exit polls that ask about income, which yes, is an imperfect proxy for relationships to the means of production, but it does give you a rough idea. The majority of people who made less than $50,000 a year voted for Biden. The majority of people made more than $100,000 a year voted for Trump. And there is what Haas is talking about in terms of class-deal alignment, the weakening of those traditional correlations is true. But it's still true, despite that, that the majority of the working-class voted for Biden. Honestly, Trump's most hardcore base of support was from small business owners who hate unions and love tax cuts. But sure, that still leaves probably tens of millions of working-class people who voted for Trump. And even if most working-class people voted for Biden, I absolutely don't think we should give up on winning lots of working-class Trump voters over to the left with better material politics in the future. I don't personally use the C word communism in 2023 because I'm not a larper. I don't get off on triggering people by using words they associate with the failures of the Soviet Union, rather with the kind of socialism we could build in the 21st century. But I absolutely am a socialist. The long-term goal of my politics is collective ownership and workers' control of the needs of production. I'm also a Marxist in the sense that I agree with Marx's theory of history with his core insights about base and superstructure and how modes of production rise and fall throughout history. And I do think that theoretical framework can tell us important things about how to win socialism in the 21st century. I expect we'll get into all that in the Q and A. I certainly hope so, but I wanted to say at least that much to give people a sense of where I stand ideologically. And even sticking to the politics of the here and now, not those long-term goals, I do think we need a class war, not a culture war. I'm not talking about throwing anybody under the bus in terms of social policy. I actually think those polling evidence shows that the majority of working-class Americans are actually fairly social progressive reviews on gay and trans people, abortion rights, et cetera. But I do want to strategically focus on economics and cut out the sensorious nonsense of the identity politics. And I do think a left that does that could absolutely win over some percentage of the working-class voters who voted for Trump. So last point, right? We need to be able to do that, certainly win over some of those voters if we're going to even get the kind of political realignment that would get us Medicare for all of this country and never mind workers' control of the needs of production. But I don't think you get there by lying to people about the fundamental distinction.  What we need to do instead is to tell them the truth about both Biden and Trump, about both mainstream-centrist Democrats and tax-cutting union-busted maga-republicans. And we need to offer them something better. Thank you so very much, Dr. Ben and, of course, Infrared for your opening statements, both of you. We are about to go into 40 minutes of open dialogue. I want to keep on sending love out there and a reminder that if you send in questions, tag me at Amy Newman or send in a Super Chat, we will be reading yours at the Q&A, as well as subscribing and liking. It helps get that algorithm out there and our message for neutral debates even further. With that, the floor is all of yours, gentlemen. I think House is muted. So that was a very kind of diverse array of different jibber jabber talking points. I'd like to go one by one and address the main ones that I've heard and that I took note of, at least, that were significant enough. So the first one was the claim that Trump was more militarist than Obama. Now, this is a non-argument in relation to the topic of debate, because the topic of debate is about maga communism, which is clearly centered on the maga movement, not Trump as an individual. Well, the first Trump- No, Ben, you said you were going to quit this debate if I interrupted you. So I'm going to go through one by one and actually respond to your claims. In that case, in that case, Ava, could we get the two minutes? And if you would like, let's start out with a minute. What about the two minutes for what? Well, because if you're going to go through every single thing I just said, that sounds like a statement. So let's get something to talk to you.  So how long do you want to do it? I mean, I don't think it'll probably just take like five minutes. Okay. If you want to do five minutes, then I'll do five minutes. I can live with that, Ava. That's perfectly fine. If it feels like you're not having a good flow, we can always shorten that or just go back into open conversation. Since you both want it infrared, five minutes. So since this is actually about the maga movement and not Trump as an individual, we actually have to square Trump's policy-making decisions and actions while he was president in relation to the maga movement, the grassroots movement that actually propelled him into office in the first place. Now, first and foremost, the claim that he's a militarist just painfully isn't true. Why? Because Trump didn't start any new wars. He overthrew zero governments during his term, and it's as simple as that. There was no equivalent to the color revolutions of the so-called Arab Spring, Libya, Syria under his presidency. You could say he droned more people. That's not so much Trump. It's the imperialist state machine, which no one president could successfully dismantle. It is true that Trump obviously compromised with rhinos and neocons, who by the way right now are at war with the maga movement and Trump as a person, but that has no bearing on the sentiment that is within the maga movement, which is overwhelmingly anti-interventionist and anti-war. No one denies that Trump staffed his government with Bolton and Pompeo in order to compromise with the Republican Party, which otherwise wouldn't have tolerated his political existence. And many in the maga movement even critique him for that. I'm included in that, right? But that has nothing to do with the actual grassroots counter-hegemonic force that is the maga movement. Now, the question is where did those policies come from? Did they come from the maga movement that actually distinguished Trump's political career in the first place, or did they come from the neoconservatives that are already entrenched in the imperial state machine and which rule, no matter who the president actually is, as Putin pointed out once. Confusing Trump for the traditional Republican Party is just a glaring mistake here. Now, you're saying Bernie Sanders is more anti-war than Trump. Well, anyone can have good rhetoric, but we don't know that because he's never actually been president because he doesn't have the balls to actually have a chance to be president. So we don't know how he would act, but we can actually see the record of how he acts in the Senate and how much he compromised in no-tos to the Democrats' pro-war ambitions. And it's very clear that Bernie Sanders would probably be much more of a war hawk than Trump. And I'll tell you why, because Trump doesn't care about so-called human rights-based pro-democracy interventionism, and Bernie Sanders does. That would automatically make him a more pro-war president than Trump because you mentioned Trump's anti-China rhetoric. But guess what? That's just inflammatory, demagogic, whatever, rhetoric internal to America. When it came to foreign policy, Trump wanted nothing to do with Taiwan. He didn't really himself want anything to do with the Hong Kong protests. He said Taiwan is miles away from China. We have nothing to do with that.  And he had a much better relationship with Xi on a personal level than both Obama and Biden today. Now, the claim that he was a union buster neglects the fact that nobody's been able to organize a mass union movement for decades in this country. That's completely owed to the suppression of unions. It's owed to changes in the relations of production, which make, yes, unions became more established, more politically entrenched, more bureaucratic, and more generally undesirable to the average person who doesn't really want to have be tied down to working at fucking McDonald's for the rest of their life.  You may claim that anyone who's just employed is part of the proletarian class. This is a fundamentally anti Marxist definition. According to that definition, a CEO would be a proletarian because CEOs are also employed and they don't necessarily own any means of production just because they're CEOs. According to this definition, which tries to rank the members of the professional managerial class and the class of unproductive laborers as the same as the advanced segments of the proletariat, which is the productive labor in class. Marxists have always recognized that by the way, because productive laborers represent the general interests of labor. The service industry doesn't represent those interests because the service industry doesn't actually produce any value in the Marxist sense. So you can change the definition of class and then say that Biden has more working class support. That's fine. But all you're doing is changing the name of thing. Meanwhile, in actual reality studies, and you wanted an example of this and I'll give you one.  So the New York Times did a study that in just really quick, I have to get this. Of the 265 counties they evaluated, most dominated by blue collar workers, areas where at least 40% of the employed adults were blue collar workers, Biden just won 15, right? Compared to the rest which went for Trump, Trump by 10 points won by average in workforce in the various counties Biden won. They were 23% blue collar compared to Trump's 30 some percent, right? In the average counties, they both won. Now in another, finally, there's many studies that I'll show you one of the main ones. Got it right here. So it's a study by the John Hopkins University by Stefan L. Morgan, which is called Trump and the white working class. And the result of that study and the conclusion was that 28% of Trump's 2016 voters were Obama voters in 2012. In comparison, the Obama to Trump voters were disproportionately white and working class, whereas the 2012 non voters were disproportionately. So the conclusion was that Trump has a narrow victory in 2016 because of the support of the white working class voters whom he targeted. And that was the result of the study by John Hopkins University. So yeah, so very obviously, anybody who heard what has just said can go back to earlier in the video and see what he said originally and say that they're not even remotely the same claim. Nothing in either of those studies that he mentions provides anything approaching direct evidence that the majority of blue-collar workers voted for Trump and also has is very much the one who's rejecting the traditional Marxist definition of class, which has absolutely nothing to do with whether you're a service worker or you work at extraction or you work in production. It's about your relationship to the means of production. CEOs typically, even though they're employees, do not meet the definition that I just gave, which is that you have that you're not in a position to support yourself through leadership of the means of production. If you're a CEO, you probably do, in fact, have the economic resources from which you could start your own small business and support yourself that way. You're not in that position where you're forced to sell your labor to a capitalist, obviously, but even with regard, so even if we're somehow excluded service workers, i.e., the vast majority of the working class, the vast majority of the poorest part of the working class in the United States, which is an extremely silly thing to do, but even if we are excluded those people, the fact they like this attempt at extremely indirect evidence from looking at the number of counties where you have more people as opposed to the direct evidence about exit polling does not show very much. Now, I would prefer it if exit pollsters ask you, do you own a business or do you have managerial authority in a business or do you neither own nor have managerial authority as opposed to asking them about income level? I think that would be much more clarified, but until that income level, as directly asked of those exit polls, is a pretty good indicator. As rough as it is, that's pretty decent. Now, the idea that MAGA is a counter hegemonic movement is absurd. MAGA is a branded exercise by Republicans. It obviously cannot in any way, shape, or form be separated from Trump as a person. In fact, we've heard this over and over and over again since Ron DeSantis has started to make a play for the MAGA piece with Faithful that Trump is MAGA, which is clearly the majority sentiment. And especially after Trump had been president for four years and his record was very far for being anti-interventionist and very, very, very far from somehow clawing back neoliberal economics. In fact, he was doing the opposite of that. Then I think it was overwhelmingly clear that MAGA is the personal fan club of Donald Trump. There's absolutely nothing about it that's meaningfully counter hegemonic in terms of building alternative centers of power. What does to, as limited and flawed as a way as it can, build alternative centers of power is building labor unions. So workers have a direct form of organization at the workplace, whether blue collar or otherwise. And his NLRB has said, yeah, they're applying lots of other reasons that unions have declined besides government union busted. That's all true. But it is also true that his NLRB was aggressively anti-union to a far greater extent than either Obama's or Biden's. People could read an article by Paul Prescott called Trump Claims He's Proto-Worker, but his labor board is trying to destroy work and organize. As it goes through decision after decision after decision by the hardcore union busters that Trump appointed to the NLRB that have made it much more difficult to organize unions. On foreign policy, listening to Haas say, well, okay, sure. At least he didn't start any new wars. I think saying, you know, I think taking that as the only indication of militarism is pretty absurd on the face of it. I mean, like, well, hey, I mean, if, you know, Obama, you know, there's Libyan the first term, but he doesn't start any entirely new wars in the, in the second term. Meanwhile, I listed off a bunch of countries where Trump's policies were far more aggressive than Obama's Obama's had been. Again, backing out of the Iran deal, assassinating Soleimani, having worse, more anti-Palestinian policies with regard to, with regard to Israel, having, you know, reversing the opening to Cuba and tightening the embargo, expanding the drone war. Now Haas says, oh, is that coming from MAGA or is it, or is it just coming from people who would be in power regardless of who's president? Well, neither one. It's coming from Donald Trump. There is no such thing as MAGA separately from Trump. MAGA is just the name of Trump's fan club. And as far as Trump goes, when Haas says things that sound to me like nothing so much as the kind of thing I would hear from Obama supporters in 2010, oh, sure. You know, we still have drones. We still have indefinite detention, but no one president could be expected to reverse all of that. What do you believe in the Green Lantern Theory? The president could just do whatever they want. That's how liberals talked to 2010. It's almost exactly the same as how Haas is talking now. It completely ignores that what I was pointing out is it's not just that Trump didn't completely end the drone war. He greatly expanded the drone war. There were twice as many drone strikes in Yemen. By the way, speaking of Yemen, he says we don't know if Bernie was some more anti-interventionist than Trump. Well, Bernie Sanders spearheaded a bipartisan resolution to end the U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabia's genocidal war in Yemen. Trump vetoed it. So, yes, I'd say we do know. Trump backs the coup in Bolivia. Sanders criticized that, etc. So, Trump also, last point, Trump severely rolled back the restrictions on the use of drones. That came from Trump. That wasn't just whoever was in office. Can I go now? Okay. So, regarding your understanding of class, I know you're not a Marxist, so you just got this from Twitter or you got this from whatever your DSA, social circles. No, class is not just defined by whether you own the means of production or not. Class is also defined by the means of your subsistence. How do you actually earn a living in relation to the accumulation of capital in the production of value? The working class actually produces value and earns its living because of the actual value of its labor. It actually can reproduce the value of its labor plus producing a surplus value. Most service workers don't actually fulfill that definition. But the whole significance of the service worker thing and the productive labor thing is the reason productive laborers are more the core of the working class. I'm not saying service workers are outside the working class. They just don't fit the strict definition of the Marxist proletariat. And one of the reasons for that is because institutionally speaking, they're more a class of people who are trained to perform. They have to perform certain things. They have to be instilled with specific forms of consciousness rather than actually produce tangible real things, having some direct relationship to the transformation of nature, which is how Marx defines labor. Now, your added thing about CEOs, oh, CEOs don't count because they have enough extra capital to start a small business, well then it would just be defined by income. There's plenty of professional managerials who if I'm not mistaken, you would define as members of the working class, coders and other people, graduate students who probably do have some extra disposable income that would allow them to pursue other endeavors. That is not actually, according to your definition, how class is defined. It's not defined by income, but the relationship to the means of production, having the ability to start a business doesn't necessarily mean you are doing that. So the absurdity of your definition of what class is is very clear. Now, MAGA is not a Trump fan club. It's the only counter hegemonic political force for the sole reason that it is not loyal to the ruling institutions of society. You could say it's loyal to some image, some idea of Trump, which it is, right? But it's not loyal to the mainstream media. It's not loyal to the ruling corporations of society. It's not loyal to Pfizer. It's not loyal to the pharmaceutical industry. It's not loyal. No, it's not loyal to the military industrial complex. It's also not loyal to the sacred institution of so-called democracy either, which is really the most important. We can't really get into the details on YouTube, obviously, about that whole one. But that's why MAGA is counter hegemonic, because it is searching for an America that is not being officially represented by the Gromskyan hegemony within our society, the bourgeois hegemony. That is why MAGA is a counter hegemonic force. You can point out how Trump was beholden to Sheldon Adelson and Pompeo and Bolton and the Neoconservatives during his presidency. Things I haven't denied.  Bolton, Pompeo, the Neoconservatives, and even before then, yes, Sheldon Adelson, when it came to the whole Israel policy. Now, it's true that Trump gave the Neoconservatives more free and rain than they probably would have had under Obama, but that doesn't change. That's just a failure of Trump's own character and individual person. It has nothing to do with the MAGA movement that propelled him into power in the first place, and which is right now the target of all of those three figures that I just melted. Adelson is going to DeSantis. Pompeo wants to run for president himself. John Bolton is an avowed enemy of Trump right now.  Now, the thing is, is that you mentioned something about unions, but really quick. Unions have been politicized for a long time and bureaucratized and they're in bed with the Democrats. It's not surprising that Republicans are against them today. It doesn't mean, by the way, that unions today are even pro-worker. It's very possible that unions are unpopular among workers today, among many workers today, actually. They're bureaucratic and they're, yes, corrupt in many ways as well. The ones that are in bed with the Democrats, which almost all of them are. They're a political institution. Now, finally, you said something about how, oh, I sound like an Obama supporter right now. Now, the crucial difference is that Obama supporters were loyal to the bourgeois hegemony of society. The MAGA movement is not, it's almost that simple, right? I'm not apologizing for Trump. Oh, a president can only use so much. I don't care about Trump. Trump is an individual. He's just a symbol as far as MAGA is concerned. Now, you can say MAGA blindly agrees with everything Trump says, but even if you did, it wouldn't be true because Trump on the V issue, which you can't even mention on YouTube without triggering the censors, but on the whole, let's say, medical issue that you can't talk about on YouTube, Trump supporters went against Trump himself and actually booed him in person. So no, they don't just blindly listen to everything Trump says, but they do trust him in a way they don't trust the ruling hegemony of society. Trump is a chaotic personality. And I think it's better for these people to trust this chaotic TV personality guy who can probably be moved in any possible direction really than the overwhelming force of bourgeois hegemony, the civil society, NGO institutions, the mainstream media, the corporations, the think tanks, the military industrial complex, the politicians, yada, yada, yada, Wall Street, Wall Street in Washington, and so on. I mean, you have all of that on one hand, and then you have this funny, chaotic guy, Trump on the other. I think communists have a better chance working among people who trust the funny, chaotic guy more than they do the ruling bourgeois hegemony of society as a whole. Okay. I gave you the definition of class a couple of times. It sounds like you weren't listening very closely, so I'm going to try one more time. So the definition of class that Karl Marx gives, if you read this book, Capital, is not at all what you said. It is, again, every time he talks about class, he's talking about relationship to the means of production. So the usual way that some of that Marx would put it is the workers own nothing, they own nothing, but they're on labor, they don't own any means of production, so therefore they have no choice but to work for people who do own the means of production. Now, you can criticize this definition on various grounds. I think it can be tightened up. I think some of your examples point to something that's actually real, which is you should also talk about managerial authority and not just ownership strictly speaking, which I think, again, is another problem with your attempt to sort of say under the Marxist definition, CEOs would count. So we need to switch to your non-Marxist definition that's about whether you're blue-collar or not. But that's one criticism. Another criticism is that that some workers do to a certain extent own some means of production, so G.A. Cohen in his excellent book, Karl Marx's Theory of History, gives an example about the, gives an example about the, you know, like a garment worker who might actually have to own their own sewing machine, you know, to bring it into work and maintain it themselves, and suggests like a sort of friendly amendment to the way Marx talks about it, which is, well, you know, workers don't own any of their own means of production, and thus, you know, have no realistic choice except for to go to work, which for the people who do suggests that a modification of that is that workers can't make a living from their ownership of the means of production, which I think is a fair, is a fair modification. Now, I think the part about unions is incredibly revealing that, you know, Haas went from first saying that, well, you know, oh, it can't be right, like I'm saying, that Trump was far more anti-union, that, you know, because that's, this is just a distraction, because really, there are these bigger structural reasons that the labor movement has declined. Now, I don't deny there are bigger structural reasons, but it is undeniable if you look at the NLRB president, Senator Obama, that under Trump, that Trump was far more anti-union.   I think that refutes itself. I don't need to, I don't particularly need to add anything to it, except to say he says he wouldn't be surprised if unions were unpopular. Actually, a majority of Americans say they would join a union if they could. And whereas a tiny percentage of private sector workers are unionized, that is in fact about the ferocious climate of union busting, the fact that labor laws are so tilted against organizing unions in the United States, the ways like all sorts of things that have happened to increase the bargaining power of capital and decrease the bargaining power of labor. Final point, we've heard these repeated claims that there's something counter-hegemonic about the mega as a movement. Of course, it's not a movement. It's a branded exercise for Trump supporters. But we haven't heard anything counter-hegemonic they're actually doing. If you organize a union in your workplace, you're actually doing something that's meaningfully counter-hegemonic. You're setting up an alternative center of power to the power of the boss. There's nothing counter-hegemonic about supporting a politician or using a set of rhetoric or spouting some slogans. We're told in particular that it's counter-hegemonic because they're going against, they have no loyalty to Pfizer, the military industrial complex, or mainstream media. Well, by and large, the most mega-aligned politicians are the biggest anti-China hawks.  So this claim about the military industrial complex is pretty dubious as far as Pfizer goes. I think just same vaccines don't work. That's not anti-Big Pharma. The anti-Big Pharma thing would be saying we should nationalize them or at least not let them profit off of making these that their product should instead be free to everybody. Finally, it's particularly ludicrous to say that mega in particular is counter-hegemonic because mainstream media is a big rhetorical whipping boy for them. Because by that same standard, you can go back to the 1980s, the moral majority would be counter-hegemonic. You could go back to the Nixon administration and Spiro Agnew, who's constantly denouncing the liberal media is counter-hegemonic. Sure, yes, this has been a staple of conservative rhetoric for several decades is the opposition to mainstream media. But again, what do they actually want to do to change media ownership structures, for example, in a better direction? Absolutely nothing. Because not only is there no actual movement here, not only is there no alternative center of power in institutions that has mentions, there isn't even a political program that would I mean do any of these things. What is it that these guys want? What is it that they would support that would actually that would actually meaningfully undermine any of these centers of power? All right, I'm good. Okay, so I'm going to begin this with a quote from Frederick Engels to science definitions are worthless because always inadequate. The only real definition is the development of the thing itself, but this is no longer a definition. So let's take the definition of the thing itself, which is the working class and Marxist time, the people who only had their labor to sell were overwhelmingly the people who were actually producing the surplus value that was responsible for the process of capital accumulation to begin in the first place, they were actually selling their labor as per the Marxist definition. Now, this isn't just because they didn't own or get their money from means of production, it was because they were actually selling their labor. But plenty of industries within the service industry are not selling their labor at all, they're selling performances, and they're selling the immediate performances of use values, which can't be transformed in any kind of value, what's can't crystallize any value whatsoever.  And I'm completely against the service industry. But it doesn't mean you have to you're going to uphold them as the quintessential proletariat of the time, the proletariat is still the blue collar working class that actually produces things and tangibly changes nature, the outside world in some kind of concrete tangible way. This is a base in if you read Marxist capital instead of J. A. Cohen, who rejects Fred Hagel without whom capital is completely meaningless, you would know that significance of labor, why labor in the proletariat is even significant in the first place, even as far as Marxism is concerned, it just doesn't just come from the fact that they don't own anything and they have nothing to lose. There's a great deal more than that. Now finally, with this whole jibber jabber about unions, I said establishment unions. As far as the ability to create new unions, it's pretty rare recently it happened with the Amazon labor union.  It has everything to do with the strategy he pursued in the creation of the Amazon labor union, which I'm not against by the way.   I don't care about these establishment unions. Let them all be destroyed.  They're run by the Democrats and I don't know why I as a communist should have any loyalty to Democrat bureaucracies. Now, obviously, I guess most Americans would say they like unions and they prefer to join unions because they pay better. But 40% of actual union members, only 40% of actual union members say that their membership is quote extremely important. So I'm guessing there's probably something lost in translation there. Regardless, I wouldn't surprise me that Americans want the better pay that unions provide. But there's also more strings attached to that, which among actual union members themselves lead to some kind of contention and ambiguity. But regardless, how can those unions concretely expand without the Democratic party because they're in bed with the Democrats right now? That's the question. I'm not willing to sacrifice building a counterhegemonic political force for the sake of expanding the Democrat run unions. Now, a simple counterhegemonic fact of the Trump movement, which you're neglecting to point out, it's like you want to talk about workers, what about Biden's rail deal? It's like probably the worst rollback on the labor rights of the working class in this country, maybe since Reagan, right, where he made it illegal for federal rail workers to go on strike, destroying their collective bargaining rights. Who were the people in Congress and in the Senate who rejected this bill? It was MAGA people overwhelmingly. And even Republicans beyond that, it was overwhelmingly the progressive Democrats who voted for it. And it was the MAGA people who were at the fore of rejecting it. So that's a simple example of the counterhegemonic force of the MAGA movement. But even beyond the congressional representatives and all those kinds of people, this sentiment among the MAGA movement about sending arms to Ukraine and the escalation of the war into World War III, overwhelmingly critical of the U.S. administration's escalation of that war in comparison to Democrats and Biden. They criticized Pelosi's visit to Taiwan. You mentioned, oh, well, Nixon, you're saying Nixon was also counterhegemonic or his movement was? Yeah, Nixon's voter base. It was counterhegemonic. I mean, that's why Watergate happened.  Yes, there were counterhegemonic elements in Nixon's supporters. Yes, that's an actual fact of history. And you're laughing right now because you haven't read, you're clearly illiterate on the subject matter. And you're one of those people who think Watergate happened because of Nixon's corruption and not because of the CIA. Dude, keep laughing.  Now formulating a political program is actually the task of Communist partisans. The absence of one right now doesn't mean it's impossible. But when you actually formulate that political program, who is going to be more receptive to it?  And Stalin and Hitler were not in fact the same. Okay. Yes, I could not help myself. I will say that I did say out of the debate if the personal insults started, but I'll give you one. They have a, but yes, I could not help myself but laugh at the claim that Watergate didn't really happen, that it was some sort of CIA plot against this guy who the CIA hated for some reason, even though Nixon was the one who was doing things like bombing Cambodia, like helping to organize the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. That is a very odd thing for somebody who calls myself a communist to say. But in any case, going back to definition class, you note that the only place I talked about G.A. Cohen was to talk about a criticism that I thought was a fair criticism because I had been talking about the way Marx talks about class in capital, not about Cohen. I brought up Cohen because of a point that he makes in Karl Marx's theory of history about like a sort of possible criticism or friendly amendment to that. But if you just read Capital itself, every time he talks about class, it's always an overwhelmingly in terms of relationship to the means of production. Of course, obviously, that Ingalls point about definitions cuts both ways because if you say, I don't like definitions, then that doesn't favor one definition or another. But if you're just looking at the way that Marx throughout the entirety of the 33 chapters of capital talks about class, it's always about who owns the conditions of labor and who is forced to labor for them. The reason that the working class is an important category in Marxism is that it is a category of the population, obviously, that you have, you have laboring classes and all sorts of societies, right? But this is one that has the capacity and the interest to take over, to expropriate the means of production from capitalists and create a society that would not be divided into classes, but would also not just be distributed in crumbs given the way that the forces of production have been developed under capitalism, creating the possibility for that universally shared abundance in the future. On unions, I also think it is pretty funny that less than an hour has gone by since my opening statement, but Haas has already forgotten what I said because he said, oh, what about the rail deal which I actually brought up and talked about in my opening statement? And yes, as I said, in my opening statement, that certainly proves that even if the Democrats are the softer part of capital, they're still very much a party of capital. But I'd like to point out two things about the rail deal and about the partisan contrast as it shows there. One, Haas is trying to have it both ways on a pretty epic scale.  He only cares about independent unions. So if the establishment unions are all destroyed, then that's fine with him. But then he brings up Biden crushes of established unions. Those are not plucky new independent unions. These established rail workers unions as evidence for correctly the fact that Biden is an editor of the working class, which I agree. I said in my opening statement, Trump is the worst one. And of course, a mega is absolutely nothing except for Trump's fan club. But Biden is certainly an editor of the working class.  The unions of various sorts are the only counter-hegemonic force in society. And on the subject of certainly the only one that has the kind of numbers of the kind of capacity and the kind of power that they do, not the only one, but the only one that has all of those things. Finally, this idea that Trump filling the LRB with hardcore union busters who made a whole series of rulings overturning Obama presidents and making it harder to organize unions. Well, that's only making it harder for the bad established Democrat-aligned unions is ludicrous on its face. Of course, that makes it equally hard. In fact, harder for independent unions that don't have the same resources to stand up to that union busted. And final point, I think it would be amazing to get if we had Chris Falls here. And yes, he absolutely was willing to work with people who voted for Trump, which as I said in my opening statement, I advocate to, but and he was right to do so. He himself, of course, would never call himself a mega guy. He's very open about his disagreement with that. And if we had Chris Falls here and say, Hey, Chris, do you think it matters who's sitting on the LRB? Do you think that these LRB rulings have make a difference to how how easier heart it is for an independent union like the Amazon Labor Union to organize warehouses? I think we know what he would say. In fact, the LRB has repeatedly intervened on the side of the Amazon Labor Union, which would certainly not have happened if Trump was still in office. Thank you, Dr. Ben. I am going to say that each of you are going to get one more round and then you're going to get closing statements. So technically, you get two more five minutes before we go into Q&A. But infrared back to you. And then Dr. Ben, you get one more reply. So I just wanted to speak to the baffling ignorance of so-called Dr. Bergus here that he claims that it's extremely odd to think that the CIA was behind Watergate.  So no, it's not an odd view at all. It's a pretty conventional view. You don't have to be an extreme conspiracy theorist to know that the CIA was in fact at odds with Nixon and the Nixon administration. Now, regarding your claims of what Mark says in Capitol about how he strictly defines class, I'm going to actually demand a citation there. Because I know for a fact, as someone who has read all three volumes of Capitol, that Mark's never actually got around to strictly defining class. Ironically, in the last volume, the third volume of Capitol, in the very last chapter, he was planning on it and he broke maybe a few sentences on it. And that's literally where the whole project cut off.  No, he wasn't. He was using class in a way that was not, sorry, that was not precluded by any specific strict definition. But class, as far as Marx and Engels recognized it, in addition to being about relations to production, isn't just about what you own. It's also what your relation to the actual material objective process of production is. And Marx in Capitol makes it very clear what productive labor is, especially when in the second volume of Capitol, he makes it very clear that the unproductive labor of clerks, these other people who belong to a class of parasites, literal parasites in function, don't actually belong to the proletariat in a strict sense. Now, it's the general quality of the labor of the proletariat that makes them uniquely revolutionary according to Marx, not simply because they're repressed and they're marginalized or whatever. It's specifically about the generality of their labor in the era of general commodity production, which means they stand for a class of labor in general. Marx's definition of labor is very clear in his early manuscripts and in his early writing about a transformation of nature, not just the performance of services. Now, the significant thing about Biden's action wasn't that it targeted establishment unions, but that he made it unilaterally illegal for railway workers to strike, regardless of the type of union. That actually makes it worse than what Trump was doing, which overwhelmingly was targeting the establishment unions. So I don't even know why you would even bring that up. Biden made it unilaterally without regard for what kind of union it is, illegal for railway workers to strike, not just targeting establishment unions, but the rights of workers in general, including their collective bargaining rights. There's no evidence that established unions are counter-hegemonic in any way through the... I mean, it's not even true in the post-war period of the history of the United States. What evidence is there is that these establishment unions form some kind of opposition to this imperialist state machine. They have long been assailed by the imperialist state machine, as many astute Marxist observers have been observing for a very long time now. The reason it's hard to form new unions right now is overwhelmingly because of the failed strategies of past union organizers. You could say that it does make a difference who's sitting on the NLRB or whatever. But guess what? According to... I'm a communist, I'm a basic Marxist, and I'm someone who stands against the status quo in general, politics takes precedence.  Because the overall strategy is about smashing the imperialist state machine and destroying the deep state. It's not actually about just doing unions. So the strategy takes precedent over the various specific tactics employed to realize it. Okay. I find it pretty significant that it has continually responds to things that I don't say and ignores to things that I do say. I did not say that it was just about workers being oppressed or marginalized. That has absolutely nothing to do with what I said. He just made that up out of nothing. That has no relationship to anything I said. Anybody who doesn't believe me should be invited to pause and go back a few minutes to the last time I talk and compare what he said to what I actually said. What I said is that the working class has an interest in expropriating capital and creating this other kind of society that would provide this universally shared abundance because of the way the forces of production have been developed by capitalism. So if you look, for example, at the end of the next to last chapter of Capital, Chapter 20, Chapter 32, and look at the last couple of paragraphs there where he talks about expropriating the means of production from Capitalists and then look at the the footnote that he provides there. He talks about how all of these other classes, right, like the class that actually makes up the hardcore of MAGA, the petty proprietors are ultimately reactionary because they want to turn back the clock from, you know, sure big capital taking away the stuff that they have to get back that stuff and restore this petty private property of the ownership of the means of production, whereas only the working class has an interest in going forward to this new and different kind of society based on collective ownership. He also says, oh, that is saying that there's a strict definition of class and capital. Nope, I didn't say that. What I said is that the Ingalls point about not liking strict definitions goes against both the definition that I was using and the definition that you're using. But if you look at the way that Marx talks about class and capital over and over and over, this is very simple. I would invite people to just like if you've got like the Kindle Edition of Capital just search for phrases like conditions of labor in there and you will find over and over and over that Marx will talk about things like the conditions of labor being concentrated in this minority of the population. Everybody else having nothing to sell but their labor. In every single point in that book where Marx talks about he contrasts capitalism with feudalism, it's always about the ways that the, it's always about the relationship to the means of production that, you know, so you look for example at chapter 23 of Capital where he talks, he's got this nice little thought experiment about imagining a single lord and a single peasant and, you know, and the relationship between them and then he says imagine if the lord announced one day, hey, good news, feudalism is over, you're free, bad news, I own this land and now you have to label it for me for such and such many hours a day and the peasant ends up having to label for the lord just as many hours as he did before and it's technically voluntary. But you know, all of that contrast is about ownership and the means of production. I also think if you're looking at volumes two and three, you've got to keep in mind these are nothing like final, you know, works like volume one is. These are things that were left very unfinished and in many cases very unorganized for his bills to do the best that he could with them. Now moving on from Capital, which I'm happy to talk about, it's one of my all-time favorite books ever written, but moving on from that to contemporary American politics has this grasp of what happened with the railroad is extremely flawed in two ways. First, and maybe most importantly, he says, oh, Biden made it illegal for rail workers to strike regardless of what kind of unions they have. Now, what happened was that Biden used the Railway Act, which is the sole previously reactionary, pre-new deal act that was already on the books to impose a contract on unions, which what kind of unions, independent unions, hypothetical unions in the future? No, this is not like a take it away any rail workers ever going on strike ever again decision that somehow being made. This is applying this Railway Labor Act that already existed to impose a deal on a bunch of those establishment unions that Haas says he doesn't care if they're all destroyed, right? We can take away all the power that the American working class currently has, and it's all fine. It's all worth it because the Trump movement is counter hegemonic in the sense that even though there's no source of power that's independent of capital in the Trump movement, even though there isn't even a political platform that would somehow hurt capital, but just in the sense that rhetorically the MAGA movement says things about how they don't like the mainstream media, and they might say rhetorically anti-war things sometimes, that's how cheap a date he is for what counts as counter hegemonic. For that, he's willing to destroy the entire power of the organized working class in the United States. That is not a deal anybody should take. Thank you, Dr. Ben. And with that, it is going to conclude the open dialogue of the debate. I want to thank our interlocutors for stepping into the ring as they're about to make their closing statements. And then we are going into the Q&A. So please keep on sending me those chats and super chats.  And with that infrared, I am handing it back over to you for your five minute closing statement. The floor is all yours. So, okay, I only have five minutes. He said the, okay, you're saying the working class is a uniquely revolutionary because it's interested in expropriating capital. You didn't elaborate why though. You didn't elaborate the actual reason for that. I actually did. I actually said because the general quality of their labor allows them to establish a relationship to production that grounds production based on its material premises, which is what labor is. Whereas capital doesn't ground production based strictly on the use value, the necessity of its material premises, but on abstractions actually, the form of value, which is an abstraction that isn't a specific human use value. It's a quality of abstraction and alienation and its universal form that doesn't care about any particular content. So that's why they're revolutionary. And yes, labor is central to that. Now you said something about capital. Which volume do you cite volume one chapter 29? I looked at chapter 29 of volume one, 28, 23, okay, 23, 23 of volume one. Well, you haven't actually cited and deployed into an argument why that helps your argument that Marx is strictly defining class on the basis of, yeah, okay, interrupted me.  But that's what you promised to do, which is interesting. But it's interesting that you're calling the blue collar working class that orally makes up the core of the MAGA movement, petty proprietors, when you just cited J. A. Cohen, who clarified that people who own instruments of production that augment their labor doesn't make them not part of the working class. So that's an interesting contradiction there. You said I have a flawed understanding of the Railway Act, just because Biden exclusively imposed it on establishment unions.  Yeah, because it's the establishment unions who at that time were trying to go on strike.   Now, you're saying that, oh, counterhegemonic is just about not having the right kind of rhetoric. Sorry, counterhegemonic is just about having a specific kind of rhetoric. That's not what I'm saying. But whether you have unquestioning loyalty to the establishment, whether you can see there's a clear contradiction that, yes, the hedge bourgeois hegemony of society is not the site of the kingdom of truth. You can't blindly trust the experts. That matters when you are trying to convince people to get on board with new ideas.  It matters that people are able to question power, be suspicious of power, and act and vote in ways that contradict what the bourgeois hegemony is telling them to. So you can say that's just rhetoric.  Why is the government saying that something that happened a few years ago, you can't really talk about it on YouTube, is worse than 9-11? Because they acted in a way that is clearly not aligned with the bourgeois hegemony. So it's not just rhetoric. It's also action. Even your fellow Democrats recognize that when they say that Trump is the most dangerous, fascist threat to democracy, there is.  I think communism is also a threat to the sham of a democracy. And I want to unite with MAGA in crushing this veneer of a neoliberal democracy and establishing a state by, for, and of the American people. Thank you so very much. I've read for your closing statement. And with that, we're going to hand it off to Dr. Ben for your closing statement. Right, right. Yes. I'm sorry. You did actually ask me a question about 10 seconds before that. So I did pour it out that you were once again saying something that not only I didn't say, but that I'd actually just said in my previous statement, I reminded you that I didn't say, but you can't seem to stop yourself from lying about it, which is interesting. So obviously I'm not making a claim about strict definitions. I said earlier that I'm talking about the way you can talk about an implicit definition, but both of us at various points have made claims about how Marx defined things, but then you pointed out this quote from Ingalls about not liking definitions. And I said, okay, fair enough, but let's look not at the definitions, but at the way overwhelmingly every time that Marx talks about class and capital, how does he talk about it? Now the argument from Chapter 23 was just a particularly vivid example because it was about how somebody in this sort of hypothetical case where it happened in a very quick and simple way would switch from being a member of the peasantry to a member of the working class where the only difference is about what their relationship is to the means of production. Now, is that compatible with the way that you're understanding this? Yeah, fair enough. But I think it is suggestive that over and over and over and over again throughout that book, whenever Marx is talking about class, the stuff he always brings up is about relationship to the means of production. You also seem to have forgotten what the context was of my point about the rail strike, which is not that I think that Biden wouldn't have done the same thing with independent unions. That wasn't my point at all. And I think you know that. I think you must know that. I have a hard time imagine you could possibly not know that. My point was that there's this giant contradiction at the heart of your views.  But then on the one hand, on the other hand, you're getting bad at Biden for crushing establishment unions. Now, I think you've got it right the second time and wrong the first time. You're right to be bad at Biden for imposing the deal on establishment unions.   And so you're just going to focus on that even if supporting it, even if voted that way. You said acted and voted that way means that you're destroyed what little power the working class has in this neoliberal hellscape. I also, of course, did not say that the blue collar workers who support Trump are petty proprietors.  What I said was that Trump's hardest core base of support was not workers at all, but petty proprietors, small business owners, that that's Trump's hardest core base of support, which I think you know is true and is certainly contradicted by nothing you said. Of course, the majority of people who voted for Trump are members of the working class, just like the majority of people who voted for Biden are members of the working class. But just like you can make sense of saying that, for example, that there's a particular sort of importance to certain kinds of PMC layers and the debt to the Democratic Party, I think you can make sense of saying that petty proprietors, not workers who might own the road sewing machine, but people who own their own businesses are the hardest core of the support of the Maca movement. Final point, I don't know how long I've left. I'm just trying to make this very quickly. A little bit over a minute or about a minute now. About a minute. Okay. Final point, just take a long step back from this. Haas admits that the Trump administration's foreign policy was in many important ways, more interventionist, more in line with what the neocons wanted than the Obama foreign policy.  Yet, somehow we're supposed to believe that we're striking a blow against the empire by voting for Trump and other Maca Republicans. Trump is himself a billionaire. His movement and his rise to power was funded by other right-wing billionaires like Peter Teal, but somehow we're supposed to believe that a billionaire who did everything in his power to crush unions, to deregulate, to get rid of workplace safety regulations, to cut taxes for rich people, that the movement behind that guy, because they don't like the mainstream media, they don't like Pfizer, that that movement is so promiseingly counter-hegemonic that for the sake of empowering it, you should be willing to destroy every single establishment union in the United States. That's insane, and it certainly has all of nothing to do with anything that anyone could call a form of socialism or communism. Thank you so very much, Dr. Ben. In fact, thank you, infrared and Dr. Ben for that lively back and forth, because we're about to go into the Q&A section.  Plus, if you like what you're hearing today and want even more fantastic debates, then it really helps us out if you hit that like button, subscribe, and share with the person that you're in a debate with yourself. With that, we are heading in to the Q&A. Keep on tagging me with your questions and super chats at Amy Newman, but $5 from thunderstorm fascism means trade union in Italian. So if I will, I'll respond to that question by pointing out that the whole point is that the precedent Biden set won't just affect establishment unions, it's about the precedent, not just about the specific unions that were affected by it, and plus it proves that they were never a viable medium to represent independent working class power in the first place. Why didn't they go on strike anyway? Because they have no independent power at all, even if it was illegal. They had no independent power. That's why they didn't go on strike in the first place.  Of course I don't. Look at how weak they were in the face of Biden's fascistic acts against them.  I do care about when the government starts stepping in and establishes a precedent to destroy the collective bargaining rights of the working class. I do care about that, which can be used not only against establishment unions, but against the working class in general. That's a very dangerous precedent.  And saying, oh, the petty bourgeoisie Lenin talked about an alliance with the democratic petty bourgeoisie, an element among the peasantry, which was necessary for a united front against the bourgeois hegemony. So you saying the petty bourgeoisie's inherently reactionary contradicts basic communist history. You said stuff about the relations of production, which was gibber jabber, because we're talking about the relationship to the actual process of production, not just to the title of whether you're employed or not. But what actual relation you have to production, where does your revenue actually come from? Where does your income actually come from in relation to production? So that's my answer to the question from the person. Thank you so much for contributing to modern day debate. Yes. Thank you so very much for that response and that super chat thunderstorm. And then back to back spice infrared from Ethan for $2. Infrasel is a clown for banning me.  But thank you so much for contributing to modern day debate. I support modern day debate. So thank you so much for your generous donation to them. That's right. We support all of the audience out there as well as both of our interlocutors, who we're very thankful for coming on. Another $2 super chat from Ethan they want to know has are you role playing? No, Mr. Dr. Sorry, Bergus says that communism is just LARP. And yet democratic socialism, as far as the American working class is concerned, is just as marginal and irrelevant as communism. I choose to the communists with the capital C because they're going to see you as a communist either way. You have to embrace it and actually be honest with people about what you're actually about. So I'm not just role playing. I think communism actually has meaning. And what I would say, what do you sum it up? What is communism actually about? It's actually in the word and people laugh at this and think it's simplistic, but it's not. It's about the common interests of human beings as opposed to profit and money. And it's almost that simple when you actually read it marks as early philosophical measures. It's the real movement to sublate the present state of things to establish a human oriented kind of society. So and it's also about the power of the working class, the political, the social, the cultural, the hegemonic power of the working class. That's what communism means to me. It's not a specific system or a specific end state of society. As Mark said, it's a real movement. Okay. So I've been muted this whole time that we could do a Q and A since I, but I would just say for the first questioner, it's not at all true that fascism in Italian means trade union. It comes from fascism, which means double bundle of stick. It's a much older word than union. And of course, the fascist nearly crushed trade unions. I liked the way that Haas took the opportunity of pretending to answer that question to just do a long monologue, respond to everything I'd said in my closing statement. But there is no precedent that's established by Biden and Volk in the Railway Labor Act. He said the act was brought up from the past. It's existed since 1926. Right. It's been used before. There's no new precedent there. But obviously he can ways if Biden opposed it to steal on establishment unions shows the bind is hideously working class than establishment unions do matter. And we shouldn't say, no, they don't. They were ineffective in responding to that. Let them all go into into the fire. They're not, they're not. Obviously, I really not affected. I've been extremely critical of Biden for this. As I've said in my opening statement, and odd words, you guys talk for like five minutes uninterrupted.  And that's so so that's just nonsense. I also didn't say the petty bourgeoisie was inherently reactionary. I just said that it was the hardest core of Trump's support. Please stop making things up and respond to what I actually said. Do you have any data, citations, anything? Well, I also I just want to say Dr. Ben, I apologize for that. Yeah. Had to have manually unmute because I wanted everything to go smooth. But did you get everything answered that you wanted? Yeah, that's fun. All right, with that, we are moving forward. Thank you for those super chats from thunderstorm and Ethan Osborn. And your responses, Dr. Ben and infrared. Another five dollar super chat coming in from thunderstorm.  I'd like to take the opportunity to respond to that by saying that the Railway Act has been doctor. He's not even going to pretend to respond to it was from 1926. It was clearly used to get it was brought back into existence in a novel way. It was brought back into existence in a novel way very clearly. So it can't it is a precedent because it can be used the new ways very clearly. And there's no reason to think it couldn't be used against not a novel. It's the other forms. It's despicable to use it. Yeah, it's a new way of using that. It's a new way. And by the way, if you're going to take other forms of self organization, there's no reason to think that there's no reason to think that to go back to the argument about the Railway Labor Act that we should also talk about the fact that all of the big mega republicans voted against even softening the deal by adding a couple of goddamn sick days. Yeah, but they voted against the act entirely and which is what I think it's the act. The act is it isn't on the table. They can't out there. Yeah, they did. They voted against the enforcement of that act. They didn't want to add some cookies and crumbs to that act. That whole thing needs to go. I agree with how they voted. That was Bernie. So you agree with the vote of extra sick day Bernie Bernie wanted to add that Bernie Sanders. Yeah, he just did it to cover his tracks. He just says I'm voting for the Bernie Sanders.   No, he didn't sit here and say Bernie voted against the enforcement of the act, but he also voted for the sick days. So no, he wanted in addition, he only and he pushed for it in Congress because he said alongside this one, we're also going to have another one for guarantee sick days. Bernie Sanders in the Senate voted against the enforcement of the act. The original iteration of the act. Bernie was for it because he wanted to add another stipulation. All right, we are moving forward. Yeah. We got Spice coming towards Ben $5 from John. Why is Ben Burris here? I thought has was debating president. I think that was supposed to be Sunday, but we also want to remind all of our audience out there always trying to attack the arguments, not the interlocutors. However, if you would like to respond to any of that, I don't know enough about the inside baseball, the Steve. President, President Sunday, President Sunday has not gone back to me about when he, because he wanted to arrange a debate that he needed two weeks to plan for. He never got back to me about it. He said he would. So here I am waiting for him to get back to me. So it's that simple. Thank you for those responses and the Super Chat, Jonathan. And then a $5 Super Chat from Barry Schwitzer. Fisken conservatives might vote for Trump, but MAGA are social conservatives, primarily white Christian nationalists. Thoughts from both? I don't, I don't think there it's a specific ideology. I do agree since the majority of people in America are in fact white, it's not a surprise that the majority of, you know, the white collar working class, 57% of them voted in 2020 for Trump up, you know, 10 points from before. But you noticing a trend, it's not about white, it's not about race, Hispanics, you're noticing a 10% point increase since 2016. When they're blue collar, they're voting for Trump, 36% of them in 2020. That's the trend is upwards, right? Even for the black blue collar, it's the same thing. The trend is upwards far more marginally from 9% to 12%, but it's still consistent with the other trends that the blue collar working class, regardless of its race, is starting to go toward MAGA. And that's a trend. Now, the majority of the non-white blue collar working class is still not fully in MAGA, clearly not MAGA, but the trend is in that direction. And that's what the data shows us. So I would not say it's a white nationalist movement or whatever that means. It's an American movement. America is mostly white, but America is also black, it's also Latino, and it's also other things. And it's clear to me that it's an American MAGA, alternative America, non-hegemonic, non-official, unofficial America. You can't be a communist who wants to fight for the working class if you're going to be working within only the official America. You have to work within the unofficial, non-represented America that was left behind by the neoliberal elites. And then the question was for both. So yours, Dr. Banswell? So the claim was that fiscal conservatives might vote for Trump, which they certainly do, the overwhelming majority of people who voted for Trump were just people who voted for Romney in 2012. In 2016, at least, 2020, there were more non-voters on both sides because the voting rates were unprecedented on both sides. It's still the case that the majority of working class voters voted for Biden, but of course, the overwhelming majority of Americans are part of the working class. So that's going to be the majority of both Trump and Biden voters. As far as social conservatives, it's certainly true that Biden did a lot of social conservative things that divide the working class by appeal into petty bigotry. But my biggest objection to them saying it's a white Christian nationalist movement is it's not a movement at all. There's no movement there. There's no alternative center of power there. There's just a fan club of one union-busted billionaire politician. And the purpose of the fan club is to get people to vote for one of the two parties of official America, which is the Republican Party. Thank you so much for those responses. You certainly call for people to vote for Biden. That's hilarious. And that's Super Chat, Barry. And then a Super Chat, $5 from Chris Albanese to both interlocutors from your perspective, who are the best political leaders currently in power anywhere in the world. It's very easy. Xi Jinping. It takes the cake. Xi Jinping, I think second right now, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un. These are, it's very easy for me. You know, Raisi in Iran. I'm a big fan. Ali Khamenei. I'm a big fan of them as well. Obviously, I'm not, I don't really have much against Assad. It's really the counterhegemonic international forces that I think are the best. And I, you know, I don't really like Trump that much, the person.  But I really like how Trump shook hands and met with Kim Jong-un. I'll never forget that. I think that, you know, that is something no other president would have done. And I really appreciate about that, about Trump. It really cements that MAGA isn't, I mean, that's something that Bolton and Pompeii were saying, no, no, no, don't do that. That was all MAGA. That was 100% red MAGA, which Trump did. And I want to strengthen and deepen that element of MAGA.  Yeah. So I think it's pretty astounding to give Trump points for that for, because one, he actually brought the United States and North Korea closer to the brink of war than they'd been for decades. So what you're essentially giving him credit for is calming down from his own temper tantrum. And two, that led to not only no peace deal to finally end the Korean conflict, but the United States never even had a no first use policy for, for Dupes against, against North Korea. That's exactly how, how meaningless that is and how far you have to stretch. If you want to make this impossible case that the guy who doubled the rate of drone strikes, the guy who vetoed Bernie Sanders' resolution to end U.S. support for the genocidal Saudi war in Yemen, the guy who assassinated in Soleimani and tore up the Iran deal and ended the opening to Cuba, was somehow some kind of anti-war pro-peace president. I also find it very, very funny to list Vladimir Putin, who oversees a gangster capitalist oligarchy, who is in fact the direct successor of the people who destroyed the Soviet Union and imposed neoliberal shock therapy on it, as guys to call yourself a communist and say that this guy, Vladimir Putin, who actually in the speech he gave before invaded Ukraine, blamed Lenin for enabling Ukrainian nationalism, that calling that one of your favorite leaders, I think is pretty funny. I think as far as the United States goes, I think the person who's by far done the most to support working-class politics is Bernie Sanders. As far as world leaders go, my vote would be for Lula De Silva, who after being imprisoned under the Bolsonaro regime unjustly and very much with Trump's support, is now out of prison, is trying to end the war in Ukraine, is actually a thorn in the side of U.S. interests in many ways, but is actually somebody who represents a working-class movement and not just some nationalist leader who crushes the working class in his own country, well, sure, having an interimperialist rivalry with the United States, which describes practically everybody who we just heard listed. Interimperialism, this guy knows his Lenin very clearly. The KPR of the Communist Party are we doing a big back and forth now? Communist Party of the Russian Federation supports Putin as a special military operation.  Sorry, I'm very confused about what the format is supposed to be right now. And a two-dollar super chat from Sunflower, I think both sides made good points tonight. Thanks. Thank you so very much, Sunflower, for the support. And you got each a fan out there. And then a $5 super chat from Thunderstorm. Thank you so very much for the support and love thunder. Marx and Engels ideology murdered an estimated 80 million white people in the Soviet Union on purpose. That is simply a lie. If you're willing to believe everything that these state-sanctioned, globalist-sanctioned history books tell you about the Soviet Union, you know, you got to really question, are you really getting the real history? Are you getting what they told you to think? It's simply not true. Stalin is an enemy of the globalist to this day, his image, his likeness as an enemy. Even Lenin is, and Putin has the right to be critical of Lenin because he's the successor of the Russian state. And Stalin and Lenin differed on their nationality policies ever so slightly, but importantly, and I kind of agree with Stalin's orientation more than Lenin. I don't think it's necessarily unfair to say that Lenin's policy on nationalities was inherited from Western social democracy, not really applicable to the Russian circumstances. But regardless, you know, we're talking about Stalin as a person who stood up to the globalist, he stood up to the international ruling elites, and he from scratch built up his own country, industrialized it, turned it into a superpower and enriched his own people like never before in history, gave them literacy, gave them culture, gave them pride and beat the Nazis. I think it's very clear that Stalin was a hero. I'd like to speak to this question. Of course, Putin is the successor not of Lenin or even Stalin, but literally was the handpicked successor of Boris Yeltsin, the guy who did more than anybody else to destroy the Soviet Union and frankly, economically rape the corpse. So, you know, positioning him as a successor to, you know, Soviet communism is pretty funny. Now I do agree that it's absurd to say that Marx's ideology was responsible for the crimes of Stalinism because if you actually look at everything that Marx said about socialism consistently, you know, he's Marx speaks out repeatedly against censorship. A lot of his early writings in the 1840s are about that, which is not surprising because he was the editor of a newspaper that was routinely censored. We heard a claim, by the way, earlier that the existence of democracy is incompatible with communism, which is certainly not Marx's view. In fact, Marx says repeatedly in the 1870s that in the most advanced democracies, which was the Soviet Union, it was democratic. As a result of working class parties taking power electorally, you might not like that. But that's what he says. And whatever he talks about what he means by socialism, again, no strict definitions. Marx doesn't argue like that. But he tends to talk about the society of associated producers. In other words, workers' control of the needs of production, which is now he said communism was pretty difficult, pretty different from what they had in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was the real real movement. Are we doing it back and forth? I thought we're just giving you just kind of a pseudo intellectual who's like, Send him love to both of our inner lockers and thunderstorm. We now have a $2 super chat. What we got spice for you infrared has got his cheeks clap. Well, we can take a poll and we can see what people think. But I think Dr. Ben is no longer a doctor. I've taken his PhD and I've got two PhDs now, one from Ashtar Bear, one from Ben. I've got two PhDs on my back and I'm pretty confident in that. And he's doing the whole, oh, it's not real communism thing. Nobody buys that. It was real communism. Real communism was actually existing real movement of communism in the 20th century. It's very clear. Everyone can see that. Good luck with your democratic socialist LARP, which just means voting for Biden and the Democrats every four years. And thank you so for your super chat infrared for your response, a $10 super chat from Johnny. Ben, why do you think farmers are, I can't even say, farmers own their own farm and they hire workers. So according to your definition, they are the book weeks. Do you not see how sane this is? Okay. So I would say that if you're talking about agricultural labor versus urban, I don't think that's a difference in principle. I think that most farms in the United States are actually, you know, most farmland in the United States has been farmed. As is my understanding, it has been done directly or indirectly by corporate agribusinesses at this point. So certainly people who own those are part of the bourgeoisie. If you're talking about smaller farms, thank you. Oh, sorry.  That's not a moral condemnation, right?  But if we're interested in overall class analysis, trying to figure out what the interests are of, of different social classes, so we can try to think about how to get better political outcomes. So we can think about how to try to go beyond either, as you say, voting for Democrats, which, you know, is not great or voting for Republicans, which is worse because, you know, you're talking about people who are, what's that? Well, I say people should vote, yeah, so because if you're faced with a choice between two enemies, you should cast a defensive vote. And they have a, and I don't know why you'd ask a question, if you don't want to hear the answer. So then they have a, and as far as ways in which Biden would do less damage, we've talked about that extensively, that they have a, that, that, well, of course, Biden, you know, Biden is a representative of one wing of capital. And, you know, again, I was the first one in this debate to bring up his invocation of the Railway Labor Act, and have certainly ridden extents. Over all though, overall, Biden was, you know, Biden did not move as aggressively to crush the working class as Trump did. So I think if you're, and I think they're institutional, no, I mean, that's just true. Biden involved the government. Biden used the government. There are institutional reasons for that, because the strategy is the two parties that you would expect that overall, under most circumstances, you're going to get more aggressive. Trump dismantles regulation. But of course, all of this was you interrupted and be responsible, tried to answer the original question, to go back to the original question. The point about class analysis is that if you want to go beyond having to either vote for the lesser evil or the greater evil, but actually build something better, and you want to think about what kind of movement could build something better, then this kind of class analysis is going to be- But you don't understand what classes are out there. ... relevant that the people who are going to be in the backbone of building something better, not through some supposedly counter-hegemonic branding exercise, but through actually building up institutional power. For example, with unions are going to be not agricultural calculus, but agricultural labors, and that's my answer to the question. Show me the unions. Which ones? What do you even say? The Democrat-run unions? They have a- so unions tend to, you know, like unions, including independent unions, like Amazon Labor Union, which you said earlier. Yeah, that's like the one exception. They have a- that's but like including both independent unions like that, and ones that are affiliated with the most powerful unions. What other ones besides the ale? Both of those. What other- what other independent ones? There's no other. It's just Democrat-run unions. You have to vote for Democrats or are Republicans in election. They'll tend to go for Democrats because they know that the Republicans are going to more aggressive- Even you don't believe that. The Democrats are in bed with the bureaucratic unions. That's a rational defensive thing to do. It's corruption. They- they're a corporation. I don't care if Trump busts all of them and destroys every single union in the United States as long as it's an establishment union. I'm sorry. Trump just outed yourself to be able to work in classes. Trump is busting the unions by dismantling the government and Biden is busting the unions by using government as a cudgel against the workers, whereas Trump is just dismantling government bureaucracy, which I'm all for. I want to dismantle the government, not use it against workers, which is what Biden did. Trump did not do that. Trump did use government against workers. That's all that point about the NLRB is about all the ways that Trump used government against workers. Of course, you mentioned capital earlier. And then it- Capital is all about- Did Trump make it illegal for workers to unionize? And when you answered, has to be Ben's final because it was his question. All right. So neither Trump nor Biden made it flatly illegal for workers to unionize. What Biden did was not set a precedent, but used this hideously reactionary, awful anti-working class railway labor act in precisely the way that's been used before, setting no precedent, doing nothing novel. Meanwhile, people like Bernie Sanders in the Senate and Rashida Jalib at the House did the right thing and voted against his use of the Railway Labor Act. They voted against imposing the deal on workers, but then in a separate vote, they voted in favor of adding the sick days, whereas some Republicans voted against the first thing because they had very few political costs for them. They knew it wouldn't go through. They could get some points from doing that, but then they voted against even adding the sick days, which is pretty pathetic and I think tells you everything about who these people are. Again, if you want to know, which of these is the greater evil? Which of these is going to more aggressively move to crush the working class pretty clearly through Republicans? But that doesn't mean that the Democrats aren't a party of capital. It just means they're the somewhat softer party of capital. Long term, we need to get past both of them. And I think ridiculous branded exercises like mega communism that fly the flag of the greater evil. There's no way shape or form that that could contribute to that. Yeah, the DSA is in a brand. Totally not a brand. All right, on that, we are moving. Thank you so very much, Johnny, for your super chat and your responses, guys. And then a $5 super chat from MIG for infrared. Congratulations on earning your second doctorate. Sounds like you have a fan out there. Oh, thank you. Yeah. The pleasure is all mine. I'm glad for earning that second.  But I guess it's a nice title that will impress losers at cocktail parties. I guess that's what I get, maybe, if even. Thank you. I want this cocktail party invitation. Yeah. So, but anyway, you know, what I really think about this PhD, which is really interesting, is that, you know, obviously it is a precedent when Congress and Rashida Tlaib and the squad and all these people are voting for the rail. Well, you did the same thing. You did the same thing. I want to answer my question. So, no, it is true. No, no, no, no. Mr. Benton, you're not a doctor anymore. Mr. Burgess, I want to answer my question. I want to talk about PhDs and my PhD. Which is not at all before that. We agree. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I gave you, you were given time to talk about and respond to me. Don't stop talking right now. You were asked about, you were asked about farmers and you took it as an opportunity. Go back and try to restart. So, I'm going to actually respond. It's okay. You can keep talking. Can I actually talk about the Railway Act? If I could just ask you just, whatever your point is, finish up next 30 seconds. Yeah. So, I was trying to say is that, you know, it's clear that Bernie Sanders and the squad did vote for the initial Railway Act in Congress that later went into the Senate to be enforced, except Bernie Sanders had some jibber jabber about, oh, I'm also going to attach something for the six days. He knew it wasn't possible and he still pushed for it to be passed in Congress anyway. It was a complete sham and a fraud and saying that these squad and these Democrat progressives opposed it as a complete lie. And that's using government against workers as opposed to dismantling existing regulations. One is substantially worse. One is fascistic. The other you could accuse of being a regulatory irresponsible, but it's not fascism where you're using the cudgel of the law to actually use the precedent of using this kind of act to make it illegal in the name of national security. Most of the squad voted for it. Rashidix Lee voted against it. Bernie Sanders voted against it. And on that, thank you. Bernie Sanders is a senator. He pushed for it to be passed in the Congress. We all have him on record for that. Thank you both of their lawmakers and MIG for that super chat. And then $10 super chat coming in from Chris Morlock. Thank you so much, Cricks. For Ben, if MAGA is a branding exercise of Trump, then why is DeSantis making a major play to co-op this? It's a multi-tier political movement, not fully under the control of Trump or Republicans. Yeah. So DeSantis, who by the way, I hope we can agree is this establishment of an establishment Republican as there is, all the Romney people love him, etc. You're right. He is making a play to co-opt this branded exercise. It's rhetoric. Anybody can use rhetoric. Anybody can try to co-opt that. But also it's been extremely unsuccessful because it's nothing. There's no definition of MAGA apart from Trump. And so what do you hear from the MAGA faithful over and over and over again as Ron DeSantis starts to make this play? No, I'm sorry. This is a no-go. There is no MAGA without Trump. That's a phrase you hear over and over again. And so I'm going to... There is. Well, you're about to give you a chance to respond a second infrared. Just sending a lovely reminder out there that we are about to hit the 30 mark. We're going to be doing some overtime for questions. But if you have... This is the last chance to get your burning desire question is because we value our interlocutors time and we respect them and want them to get out in orderly manner. But sending in a $2 Super Chat, lots of love from... Oh, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. A $5 Super Chat from Emily. Congrats on your double doctorate. Doctor has. Oh, thank you again. The pleasure is all mine. You know, it's really that there's no MAGA without Trump. Well, Trump himself is a brand. It hit Trump, the political actor. He's just a chaotic TV personality guy. Yeah, he's probably going to be immortalized in the MAGA movement's future as a meme. He's a meme in our community, too. But to say there's no future of MAGA without Trump is not true. I don't actually think it's... MAGA is not the endpoint. It's just the beginning. MAGA is a vehicle to realize something greater, which is a counter hegemonic American form of politics, something that has been impossible for decades, at least since Reagan, right, or since Jimmy Carter. There's always been the official, co-opted official version of America, and Trump added chaos to the mix. I'm a Maoist. Mao said when chaos under heaven, situation is excellent. I can really agree with that. So I'm honored to have my second PhD. I'm going to put it right there under my Mao pendulum, and it'll just sit tight, cosily in the corner, and I'll bring it out whenever I have to impress pseudo-intellectuals and midwits who need this form of institutional validation in order to actually hear me out. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you so very much, Emily, for your super chat and for that response. And then Coffee Mom for $2. PSA, if you don't vote, has fans choose for you? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's abuse. The thing is, my fans are... Me and Haas also gave a monologue in response to something that wasn't even a question. Yeah, but that was a hard meeting. That was a question directed toward me now. So to answer that question, if we're not going to actually put an end to that, we don't vote. It's just that we refuse to even pretend to be doing Q&A. You're just giving speeches. So if that's what we're going to do, then yeah, I think that is a crime. This is how we're going to assess the crime. If you don't mind, we'll sess this out because I want both of you. It was technically for infrared, but then we're going to go to Dr. Ben and then you can have the very last just final sentence. Sorry, Mr. Ben. We are going to hand it over to you. I've read that you, Dr. Ben. But infrared, if you would like, because it was for you, but I feel like it's prevalent for both. And so I wanted to vote for you. So yeah, my fans are giga-chads. We don't actually vote as individuals. If we are part of some independent working class party and we want to strategically vote for someone, we'll do it. We don't have that party right now. We're trying to do that with the CPSA. And I'm launching my own organization sometime this month, actually. And maybe we will vote. Maybe we won't as an organization, but voting as an individual is super cucked. I mean, how are you going to vote and pretend you're part of a democracy and you're responsible for the system? You're not responsible with the system we have. The so-called democracy we have is a complete sham. No point in voting as an individual. You should vote as part of an organization. Because if you just vote as an individual, you're basically saying, yeah, I believe in American democracy is a real thing. No, it's not. It's completely fake. Anyone who talks about voting for harm reduction or anything is a fraud. Oh, how humanitarian of you. It's a complete idealistic, anti-Marxist, anti-materialistic, anti-common sense kind of argument. Our votes don't matter. That's what I believe at the end of the day. As individuals, they don't matter. They might matter when we organize ourselves into collective groups and political parties that can articulate an independent interest of the people, a counter-hegemonic one. But at the end of the day, we can't exercise our will by voting if we're going to be trying to take on the ruling class. That's what I believe. And thank you, infrared. And then Dr. Ben, over to you. Yeah, I think that you should vote in order to minimize the harm to the strategic interests of the working class. I am thrilled to hear that Haas is discouraging people who are persuaded by any of his nonsense from voting. Please listen to him. Please do not vote for the union-busted billionaire that he wants to reduce to a chaotic meme. And all right, we're going to move forward. $5 Super Chat. Also, thank you so very much Coffee Mom for the support. $5 from Yellowstone Commie. Haas with the EZW. Got another fan out there. I think it's self-evidence to anyone with a brain. Appreciate your comment. You know, it's just sad that Mr. Bergus didn't do his homework about basic Marxism. Maybe he would have done better. But it's quite sad, you know. But thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you so very much. Yellowstone for the support and that response. And then $5 from Brenton Lengel. Haas, please define fascism. Was that for me? Or I didn't quite catch that. Is that for me? I believe so. Yes. Yeah. Fascism is the terroristic dictatorship of the imperialist state machine in finance capital. Fascism isn't when people with blue hair get offended and their feelings get hurt. Fascism is not when you're opposing the so-called progressive cultural agenda of the Rockefeller Open Society Foundation and the various billionaire NGO philanthropies and academic institutions and their latest cultural trends which have no bearing among the organic changes in culture among the people. That is not reactionary. That's not fascist. Fascism is actually something like what you have in Ukraine where the Azovite terrorists are murdering philosophers and murdering journalists just because they have dissenting views and, you know, banning all political opposition and trying to ethnically cleanse Russians in the name of a pure Western European enlightened identity. That's real fascism. When you have the rule of these lump-in terrorist thug Azovites with this veneer of a bourgeois constitutional order which is in fact in a permanent state of emergency, that's fascism, right? Fascism is not anything like the MAGA movement or Trump which is just a plain old populist movement. It's an ambiguous form of populism which unlike the coward Bernie Sanders actually had the ability to stand up to the status quo and declare a complete secession from the deep state in the establishment. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is fully there with his friend Joe Biden. Thank you so very much, Brenton, as well as that responsive for it. And then a $5 super chat from Emily again. Bernie is Biden's child catcher. Very true, very poignant observation. He's trying to round up all these children to vote for Biden and they get nothing in return. What about the student debt cancellation which never happened, right? Thank you, Bernie. Thank you. The most progressive administration in the history of America since FDR, Joseph R. Biden who may be a clone, by the way. We don't even know. But Biden's funding terrorists in Ukraine. He wants to bring us to World War III. He's engaging in fascist policies against the working class like Trump never did before, right? Biden is trying to censor the freedom of speech of Americans on social media, collaborating with big tech, the state corporate merger that you do find in fascism. Biden's a disaster. The inflation's a disaster. His old administration's a disaster. Thank you, Bernie Sanders and the DSA and all the progressive leftists who waste a people's time telling people to vote for him. By the way, I never tell people to vote for Trump. I don't do that. I want to use MAGA, the MAGA movement. I want to go to them and build a new party. That's my goal. I just think MAGA is the most willing to listen, hear you out when it comes to wanting to build a new party. If there's a new party that comes in America, it's going to come from MAGA. Establishment Republicans don't want a new party. They want nothing to do with MAGA. All of the rhinos are against the MAGA people. It's a complete civil war in the GOP. All the new political stuff is going to come from MAGA.   It's amazing. Oh, it does indeed. I think I answered that question. Okay. You went off on about 10 different topics. One's in the chat if I answered the question. And just rambled on and on and on and on. I thought we were doing Q&A. I don't know. I don't know what's going on here. This is certainly not the format we talked about. Well, is there another actual question? So we can maybe answer a question. Yes, so a $5 super chat from Andrew Saturn. Who needs a pedophile?  He's actually a like underage minors suspected of being trafficked Russian women who he's frequenting his websites. We have proof of this. So this is the person you're getting a question from. It's interesting. But yeah, Andrew Saturn, he could be pretty much confirmed pedophile. This is going to be Mike. He's a confirmed pedophile. He has a lot of trouble with format this guy. So, but Andrew Saturn is a confirmed pedophile. I want that to be on. So, this Wikipedia expert Adam Tehair, aka Has, has swords on his wall like a weeb. We still always appreciate tacking the.   He's my name is Adam Tehyrus. Why does anyone take him seriously? So he's doing a fail docs where he calls me Adam Tehyrus. Andrew Saturn actually targeted an innocent random family just because some 30 year old guy was named Adam Tehyrus, some random guy in Michigan. And he targeted them and attacked them and posted all of it. And it's, you know, sorry, you got the wrong guy. But someone has to reach out to that family and warn them about this fat, disgusting, slovenly pedophile in New Jersey who is targeting random people just because they're suspected of being me. Right?  But anyway, yeah. Thank you so very much, Andrew, for the super chat and your response infrared. And then we are moving forward a $5 super chat from Samir. Dr. Ben, please pull up the data for the percentage of government subsidy farms by state. It's scary over 77% in some mostly red states too. Um, okay. Sure. That sounds right. That there's a lot of government subsidies for agribusiness. I'm not sure if there's a question there. But yes, that sounds plausible. Thank you so very much, Samir and your response, Dr. Ben. And then John R. $8 super chat to both speakers. What revolutionary potential lies in service workers in particular? Make sure to both speakers. What revolutionary potential lies I imagine are in surface of workers in particular? Service workers. Is that it? Yes. Very specific. So I'll very quickly answer this because I've answered it before. I don't actually discount service. Majority of workers are probably service workers. I think the revolutionary potential comes when they're not attached to the workplace and they're not loyal to the workplace.   We should just reduce the labor hours and have real jobs, right? So more people can have them. Then that's where they're revolutionary. When they want to be emancipated from their dumb, demeaning, slave-like, service-like jobs, that's the revolutionary potential. But when they're like Starbucks baristas who say we want to be like the Twitter employees who have all these amenities and all these privileges. And we want to basically be happy working at Starbucks. And Starbucks is a beautiful job. We just want to make it better with more rights and stuff. That's when they're counter-revolutionary because they're trying to do trade union, craft unionism, which is a reactionary force among the working class, basically trying to escape the generality of the predicament of labor, create these new institutions where they can be coddled and be separated from the working class and also loyal to the Democrats, which is what in practice happens, especially with the Starbucks labor union. So it's different potentials.  But when they love their jobs and just want to unionize them and be coddled within those jobs and institutionalize those jobs as an arm of the fascistic Democratic Party, that's when they're a reactionary. So there's two elements and tendencies among service workers. I think the one I pointed out first is the majority. Majority of service workers hate their jobs, want to be emancipated from it. A minority of the most privileged ones, the Starbucks ones, you don't see the Dunkin Donuts workers doing this Starbucks shit, right? Starbucks ones want to unionize because they want to institutionalize their job.  They don't want to institutionalize it or be attached to it. So that's my answer. Okay, well, that might be the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life, just to. So Haas acknowledges that the majority of the American working class is in service work, and it sounds like he's opposed to any effort by the majority of the working class to get more control over the wages and conditions in which they work because anything in service work that's doing that is just reinforcing the existence of service work. Obviously, as far as automation goes, whether we're talking about industrial production, whether we're talking about slinging coffee at Starbucks, whether we're talking about anything else, automation under conditions of collective ownership and control by the workers is great because it just means that there's less hours that everybody has to work. That's equally true in both of those sectors. Of course, automation under capitalism often plays out in a much more destructive way. The idea that what there's something that's like different about Starbucks than Dunkin' Donuts because the clientele is pretty ludicrous. In fact, I think that- They get paid way more on average. That they have that Dunkin' Donuts workers, I hope, will surprise Haas. And if they did, I would certainly support their unionization efforts. It sounds like he would not, which is maybe not surprising. No, they're not going to do that. I think tonight has been trying to argue that the fan club of a union-busted billionaire is somehow counter-hegemonic because they don't like the liberal media. And to add on to the question- Oh, my God, Haas. Yeah, to add on to the question. Amy, are we going to do the bill here or not? I do want to say, and most people don't want to be tied down to their jobs. Or are we going to just take turns answering the question, which, by the way, has already gone- Getting angry, getting angry, Mr. Ben. You're getting angry, Mr. Ben. Because this is getting insufferable. It would be nice if- We are way over, it's over time, then was already agreed upon. You sound a little bit angry, Mr. Ben. I just be quiet for two seconds, and let's stick to the format that we agreed to. You sound a little angry, Mr. Ben.  I think- But you have yet to- We're really in the format here.   Are you going to cry? You're yelling now.  Because right now, you are breaking- Calm down, Mr. Ben. ...the agreement that we had about the format. And you were just going odd and odd and odd and odd. Here's that soy Starbucks rage. And I'm asking your moderator to please moderate. Mr. Ben, calm down. And- Oh my God. Haas. I am trying, I am- We're at the end of it. Stop, stop, stop. We're at the end of it. Okay, I'm slowing you guys apart. Please, both of you, please. Mr. Ben. Stop. Stop. I'm sorry, I'm not going to go for this. Okay, rage of an imbissel. Okay. Okay, I muted both of you. I muted both of you. I love you both. We are about to be- Oh. Muted myself too. I muted you both. We are about to- I'm going to unmute you. I asked you both to unmute. Just try. We are really, really over and over time. I'm trying to look for just anything that is an actual question, but I'm going to start, I think, just skipping over the fanfare and the ad-hams, though I love all of the support and energy that the entire audience has been given and send in love. Give me. Yeah, we're going to be moving fast because I'm skipping how many times we have a- How many times we have- Okay, how about Franklin? Ben, what's worse? Among us co-ops being surprised by Trump or nuclear war? Nuclear war is worse. And as far as how we got to this point, Trump actually did a lot to escalate U.S.-Russia tensions. He set heavy weaponry to Ukraine, which Republicans had criticized Obama for not doing. He's trying to have it both ways and move towards pretending to be pro-peace. Now that he's out of power, it's a convenient way of getting votes. But as far as what actually took us to this point, a lot of that does have to do with Donald Trump's policies as president. Hugh, has, have you spent significant time in any of these anti-Homogene countries? If not, why? From Brenton, $5 Super Chat. Ozz is muted. You have to, you have to actually, I can only give you the permission to unmute yourself. Oh, okay, sorry, I just saw that. So the question was, sorry, can you repeat that? Absolutely, the question is, has, have you spent significant time in any of these anti-Homogene countries? If not, why not? I have rarely left the U.S. mostly because I think I traveled to the Bahamas once when I was a child. In my adult life, I just can't afford it. I plan on, I mean, I don't know if I can go to Russia. I plan on going within the next two years, same with China, but you know, I've had a childhood vacation outside the U.S. like once, I think, I don't even know if it was outside the U.S. I don't even know if it was the Bahamas. I just don't remember. But I've just never really been outside the U.S. I'm actually an American. I care about America, right? But I also care about being counter-hegemonic and fighting the globalist deep state reigning over us. And I could recognize that the states, these other countries are fighting the hegemony. So I support them, right? They're fighting the enemy of the American people the way I see it.  He's not really a serious political leader in any capacity. He's just a TV personality who spoke enough truth for working class people to start rallying behind him. You know, it's just things like that. You know, I support counter-hegemonic forces. I don't support, you know, privileged Starbucks baristas, relative to other service workers trying to create new bulwarks and fortresses of the hegemony in the form of these unions, talking about harm reduction and improvement conditions. It's not going to happen.  They want to emancipate themselves from that job. And Mr. Ben wants to tie them down and enslave them to these humiliating anti-human nine to five wastes of human time. Because it's better, it's easier to control them and, you know, control their consciousness and indoctrinate them into becoming Democrats and agreeing with everything Pfizer in the media says. So, yeah. Thank you so much for that super chat and your response. And then once again, doing a little bit of looking for not ad-hums and looking for good questions. Uh, from $10 from Bizart, the does has considered himself an Arab Muslim who supports Trump. Trump did a Muslim ban, moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, bombed Syria and killed Somalia. Um, again, it was, it was the people in Trump's administration who Trump, who are now against Trump openly that bombed Syria. Trump was the only person to speak out and tell the truth about how Assad and Russia were fighting ISIS during his electoral campaign. But, you know, um, as far as the Muslim ban, it's a nothing burger. That was really a whole lot of nothing.  That's the truth. Uh, do I think MAGA people are more racist against Muslims and Arabs? No, I just don't think they've met a whole lot many. And they just know about, they knew about ISIS. I'm against ISIS too. The Obama administration funded al-Qaeda in Syria and in Libya. So they didn't know a whole lot about Muslims.  As far as my experience is concerned, MAGA people treat me like a human being at the end of the day. Liberals, you know, look at me. I'm an Arab Muslim man. And they look for every opportunity to, you know, exploit that fact of my racial background to use it against me. And leftists are the same way, actually, you know?  My experience with MAGA people has been very positive. And I think they're more open-minded to Islam than liberals are. That's just my experience. And I think we're coming down to the last few super chats. I really do want to thank both of our interlocutors for going over time, for doing it for the audience. Another super chat from Brenton Langel. Five dollars. Thank you so much. Just want to acknowledge, has attacked Ben on voting for Biden and then argues for voting strategically? No, I don't argue for voting at all as an individual. I argue for organizations to potentially vote if it's strategically beneficial to them, just like Glennon did. That's not someone who believes in democracy. That's like strategy. And it's not based on harm reduction, by the way, but what's going to bring the organization to power is what matters. So the DSA, for example, say vote for Democrats for harm reduction, not vote for Democrats because we need to seize power for the working class. So it has nothing to do with voting individualistically or making moral arguments for voting. I don't believe in voting as an individual, but organizations can make decisions to vote, especially where it matters. This is part of Marxism-Leninism. But the most important thing is voting for your own people, like your own independent party. That's usually what we're talking about here. Like, yes, tell your party to vote for your own party's candidates. A Communist Party candidate is running for local office. Who's your local? Yeah, you got to tell your people to vote, of course. As for voting for one of the two major parties, I can't really see a scenario in the U.S. where that would be appropriate, even for an independent organization or party. But there's no eternal rule. The point is against individual voting. That's my point. Thank you so very much, Brenton, and your response infrared. And then our last two of the night, from Braun, $5, ask Ben if he believes in the labor aristocracy has knows what to do next. No, I don't think that's a useful theoretical construct, but I'm also very curious if these McDonald's workers that has doesn't want to allow to unionize. Plenty of McDonald's workers have been fired for trying to unionize. It sounds like he would be on the side of the bosses who fired them because he thinks those unions would tie them to the jobs. Somehow, even though the actual effective unions is to give people more time off from those jobs, I'd be fascinated to know if you think McDonald's workers are trying to organize unions are part of the so-called labor aristocracy. Yeah, I'm not going to stop McDonald's workers from unionizing. I'm just not going to waste any time as a communist pretending that's the labor movement of the working class and using all my resources to go and do it. Like the CPSA uses all the resources to go and try and organize baristas. I would not do that for any segment of the service industry at all. It's a waste of time. I'm not going to sit here and help McDonald's stop. I don't care what the outcome is. It has nothing to do with me. It's that simple. Thank you so very much. This is going to be our last super chat question. I do want to send a super thanks to everyone who has sent in super chats. There were a bunch more support for both of you guys. I think it was a lively debate and the audience loved it. Way wet. This is basically the double Q&A time. And so I really do want to thank you guys for basically sticking around. But the last question of the night from Mark Reed, a $5 super chat has, can you explain what CS and V is in the labor theory of value and explain the relationship between them? So if you're referring to the generation of surplus value and constant capital and variable capital, variable capital also has to have the quality of being able to produce the surplus value, which initiates the process of capital accumulation. Now, in the beginning stages of capital, Marx doesn't really explain the kind of material basis of why this is. He just explains that it's something that happens. But he very clearly understands later in capital, and especially through in the run receipt and so on and so forth, that why this happens is because value and capital is nothing more than the crystallization and estrangement of real labor, the process by which mankind on a social level transforms the natural world. How surplus value actually comes to be produced, it's not simply the difference between constant and variable capital. Go do your homework again and read about it. Because the production of surplus value, and this is especially clear in the whole disputes about the transformation problem, is much more subtle and complex than that. Because you're dealing with the transformation of something at a local level to a social level and an aggregate level, right? That's where the surplus is actually being produced. So go ahead and do your homework again, because you clearly are not up to speed on it. And all right, with that, it's going to come to our conclusion on tonight's debate of Trump, Trump Communism on Trial. I do want to thank everyone out there for joining us on modern day debate. We are a neutral, nonpartisan platform welcoming everyone from all walks of life. If you're looking for even more fantastic debates, we are now all over the internet, including your favorite podcasting platform, like TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, Hi, YouTube. So if you enjoy the show, please don't forget to like, follow, or subscribe. It helps the algorithm send us out to even more people and get a wider audience, including tonight's debate on Trump Communism on Trial with our debaters, Dr. Ben and Infrared, who were here to help us find that answer and gave us two scoops of Q&A. I so much thank you. Plus, if you like what any of our guests have said tonight, all of their links are in the description below. You can find them right down there. Finally, if you're looking for even more fun after the show, feel free to check out our MDD Discord, which often throws after parties around the topic. And with that, I am Amy Newman with modern day debate. We hope you continue having great conversations, discussions, and debates. Good night.