John Slaughter is a fiction writer and a sub-stack writer. He started a bit of a debate here recently when he pointed out that many people in the new right or dissident right are dipping into thinkers like James Burnham and Sam Francis. They take a lot of time to break down and understand the forces of social classes inside our civilization. And that in many ways, this means that we are touching on some, at some level, Marxist critiques of our current situation.
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00:04:05.340So a lot of people have been talking about how there's this woke right, how many or postmodern traditionalists.
00:04:14.040And I guess doing a whole show about Marx probably won't help us to dispel any of those rumors.
00:04:19.180But I do think this is important because, you know, I want to clarify at the outset, neither of us are Marxists.
00:04:24.620Both of us recognize the evils of communism and that Marxist solutions to the problems that he was describing are horrific.
00:04:33.320They've ended up creating tens of millions of deaths throughout the years and lots of misery.
00:04:39.120So this is not a show, you know, espousing Marxism or the glories of kind of a communist revolution.
00:04:46.400But why don't you go ahead and lay out from the beginning for people kind of your thesis as to why you would say that Marx is still something that is taken to an account,
00:04:57.280especially as people start to explore the theories of people like James Burnham and Sam Francis.
00:05:01.980Yeah, of course. I mean, if anybody has actually read Francis or James Burnham, but I would say more so Francis, you can't help but notice the Marxist terminology.
00:05:13.860He often uses terms like the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the means of the means of production.
00:05:19.820And you when you see that, it kind of sets up an alarm bell like, OK, this is very Marxist rhetoric.
00:05:24.940And so what I found was looking at it as I as I sort of because I read through your book and I also read Burnham and I read some of Francis, I didn't quite finish it.
00:05:35.880But what I noticed was that a lot of the critiques coming from Burnham against the managerial elite mirrored in some ways the critiques that Marx had of the bourgeoisie.
00:05:45.440And I think. Oftentimes, you know, a lot of these left wing thinkers, and I think most of us know this, they have they're really good at recognizing the problems of modernity or a current situation.
00:05:59.120That's just their solutions fall flat. And so I wanted to point to the fact that like where Marx is coming from.
00:06:06.740Right. And the time frame he's writing, it's important to understand that so you can see why his ideas are so prolific and how they've infused themselves into the thinkers we're all discussing now.
00:06:18.740So let's go ahead and get some basic context around Marx's critique.
00:06:24.300You know, a lot of people will be familiar with maybe the Communist Manifesto might have have to read that in college.
00:06:31.020Most people probably haven't worked their way through, you know, multiple volumes of Das Kapital.
00:06:35.860But what is the what is the context around his critique? When is it happening?
00:06:41.100What does he get right or where does he have some valid points when we're looking at kind of in the Industrial Revolution and modernity?
00:06:50.540Well, I think you the first thing you have to do if you're going to engage with Marx is you kind of have to go ahead and and toss out, you know, his his dialectical materialism.
00:06:58.980You have to kind of get rid of the philosophical part and look at the more practical application, I would say.
00:07:05.160And, you know, he's writing, you know, during the middle of the 1800s. Right.
00:07:08.600So this is right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution.
00:07:11.360And a lot of people don't take into consideration the impact that had, you know, prior to the Industrial Revolution.
00:07:17.420A man could provide for himself through his labor. He could work the land.
00:07:21.760He could have a trade. And this is these aren't trades in just the sense of we as we think of them today, like plumbing and electric.
00:07:29.380I mean, you could be a candle maker. You could be a cobbler. You could be a blacksmith.
00:07:33.180You could provide for your family through the fruits of your labor with industrialization.
00:07:39.300What happens is machines essentially take over that role.
00:07:43.280And now man is forced to sell his labor as opposed to live off the fruits of his labor.
00:07:48.860And in doing that, you you force people out of their homes into factories.
00:07:56.180And when he's pointing out things like children being crushed and dying in these factories, this isn't hyperbole.
00:08:02.020This stuff is happening. And the the bourgeoisie class and in his terminology are the people that own the means of production are extremely exploitative.
00:08:11.900They're taking advantage of people. You also have the introduction of electricity.
00:08:16.000So now you can work longer hours. And so it completely disrupts man's ability to provide for himself and his family.
00:08:22.160And Marx is coming in and offering a solution to that.
00:08:26.180Granted, his solution points to this utopian classless society in the end, which,
00:08:31.000as we all know, is is unsustainable and fanciful.
00:08:36.060But to understand why his ideas were so pervasive, you have to understand how disruptive that was for people.
00:08:42.780You know, you even see this in the United States with stories like the story of John Henry.
00:08:47.480Right. You know, he's a steel driving man and he races this mechanical steel driving machine in a race to see who can drive the most railroad spikes into the ground.
00:08:56.840He wins and he dies of a heart attack immediately after that.
00:09:00.960Right. And that story sort of shows that to me, it shows that attitude of what is going on is people can see the world is changing dramatically and you can't stop it.
00:09:11.120And to try to stop it and stand in front of it, you know, you look at John Henry, it's a pyrrhic victory.
00:09:16.020So that's what Marx is sort of responding and critiquing is this exploitative nature of the of the Industrial Revolution and the people that now own these means of production.
00:09:26.640Yeah, I think there's a couple of good points there.
00:09:28.680First, the thing that you're talking about when you look at Marx and and discarding part of this.
00:09:33.800Alexander Dugan has a great term for this is called breaking the hermeneutic circle is breaking this idea of how the text should be read and and the totality of what we're supposed to draw from it.
00:09:46.040And instead, discarding this thing that we know is failed, that we know is not going to be valuable, that this dialectical materialism is just not true and it doesn't lead us to a future that is better.
00:09:58.600And so we can we can discard that portion while still being able to draw something valuable from the text.
00:10:03.840So I think that's a good suggestion from the beginning.
00:10:05.980And the other thing that you're talking about, which I think is really critical, is recognizing the disruptive nature of the Industrial Revolution.
00:10:14.660One of the reasons that reactionaries, you know, those of us who are kind of on a different part of the right are often painted with this Marxist brush is that we are ourselves critical of some of the changes in modernity, which doesn't mean that you are Marxist.
00:10:33.800It simply means that you also recognize this as a disruptive force, just as Marx did.
00:10:39.060Marx had actually his solution was to lean into this change.
00:10:44.120He's actually the first accelerationist.
00:10:45.940He believes, you know, he describes himself as a free trader because it will break down traditional nations and identities faster so that he can get to kind of this global communist revolution more quickly.
00:10:57.420So he's actually in some ways a hyper capitalist until it eventually collapses into itself and creates the utopia that actually never comes.
00:11:06.040But yeah, but a lot of people were talking about the disruptive nature of this.
00:11:10.700You have guys like Thomas Carlyle who are heavily critical of the Industrial Revolution, the industrialization of Britain and what it's doing, because in some sense, obviously, the mechanizing of the economy brings great advancements, brings great wealth.
00:11:27.420It revolutionizes the way that people live, it can do all kinds of amazing things.
00:11:33.360Many of us would have a hard time understanding how to exist without many of the things, the amenities that industrialization has brought.
00:11:41.200But it also, like you said, seriously disrupts the kind of cycles of life, the natural rhythms of life that existed in more traditional societies.
00:11:55.100It creates a scenario where people are more likely to be concentrated into cities.
00:11:58.260They're pulled away from their roots, their heritage, their peoples, and instead are concentrated into these places that are deracinating, they're cosmopolitan.
00:12:08.660They don't really have that connection.
00:12:11.320And also, while it may seem in certain ways that life has improved, like you said, people often lose the dignity of being able to provide in a more classically oriented household, a more traditional household.
00:12:25.140And so that creates a scenario where people are very alienated from what they do.
00:12:31.480The cold hard realities of kind of the Industrial Revolution are often swept under the rug, you know, as just a consequence of this great leap forward, you know, to use another Marxist term or communist term.
00:12:45.140And so we end up in this scenario where people just take everything, any criticism of the Industrial Revolution and say, this is Marxist.
00:12:57.000In fact, many right wingers will quote, you know, someone like Uncle Ted saying, you know, the Industrial Revolution and its consequences are a disaster for the human race, not recognizing, you know, that they are mirroring certain aspects of Marx's observations in that moment.
00:13:14.140So there's a way in which a lot of people will just qualify or classify any criticism of this period, any criticism of this great upheaval as fundamentally Marxist.
00:13:30.360But we would say these criticisms are correct, but we have entirely different understandings of why they're a problem and what the solution would be.
00:13:42.160I mean, there's even more controversial thinkers.
00:13:46.100George Fitzkewis was a famous, you know, slavery apologist.
00:13:50.780And in his work, Cannibal's All, one of the things he does is he compares the life of the average slave to the factory workers at the time.
00:13:59.820And he says, well, these slaves are provided for.
00:14:43.560And what the Industrial Revolution does is it it takes all that flips on it on its head and leaves people essentially at the mercy of this bourgeoisie class again in Marxist terms.
00:14:55.960Because now they own and control everything and you're at their mercy.
00:14:59.280And so I think, you know, a lot of right wingers understood that as well.
00:15:05.040But you have this sort of pivot towards a more libertarian mindset within the American right, especially.
00:15:14.760And with that, the any critique of any any critique of capitalism, period, gets you labeled as a leftist or Marxist, even though the the real right wing position would be to look towards a more traditional lifestyle.
00:15:29.200Yeah, and this is why so many people don't recognize, you know, they think of, you know, these different responses to kind of a capitalist revolution.
00:15:43.220And they think that they're all the same.
00:15:46.140Of course, you know, people will put, you know, look to the National Socialists and the Marxists and say these are the same thing.
00:15:52.620Well, they're fighting against the same the same trend, which is this revolution capital.
00:15:58.940But of course, they're actually ironically, both of them are radically themselves progressive in their solutions to that problem.
00:16:07.340And neither of them are actually bringing a traditionalist understanding to it.
00:16:11.720And I think that's what a lot of people are trying to do now is to understand how you could bring a more traditionalist critique of this back, since all of the ideologies that themselves are somewhat progressive that tried to battle against liberalism and have failed.
00:16:27.800You know, what what does that new opposition look like?
00:16:31.200And one of the things that a lot of people, myself included, have found valuable has been the work of guys like James Burnham and Sam Francis.
00:16:38.280You mentioned that earlier, but I'd like to go a little deeper into that.
00:16:41.900Why is the class analysis present in those two inspired in some ways by Marx?
00:16:48.920And why has that been proven so effective in kind of evaluating our current situation in a way that our current political analysis has failed to do?
00:16:59.320Well, I think, you know, with Burnham, it's it should be somewhat obvious to anybody who's actually read Burnham or paid attention to his life.
00:17:07.560You know, he was a former Trotskyist in his youth.
00:17:10.520And I think because of that, you know, you can't you can't swim in those waters without getting tainted to some degree.
00:17:16.840The difference being is that Burnham was willing to look at the critiques that he probably took out of being a Trotskyist and realize the failures, again, of of something like Marx or, you know, or Trotsky.
00:17:28.720And looking at this idea that there's going to be this classless society. Right.
00:17:32.660Because that's that's the big push, as you mentioned earlier, Marx is wanting to push forward and thinks that capitalism is going to collapse under its under the weight of its own internal contradictions in his terms.
00:17:44.120Right. And that that's going to give way to this classless utopia, essentially.
00:17:48.820But the reality of that is that that's not possible. And we know that's not possible because we know that that sort of class is inherent.
00:17:57.060Right. And when you're reading the elite theories, the theorists, they point this out, all of them, that there's always a ruling class.
00:18:04.660There's always an elite that's going to exist. And that elite class can't be gotten rid of just because of the fact that you want it to, which is essentially what Marx what Marx is hoping for.
00:18:16.800And then you turn to Francis and Francis uses all of this, the same rhetoric, like I said, from Marx, the same terminologies.
00:18:26.820And you can almost trace, in my opinion, that the the managerial elite is sort of an evolution of the bourgeoisie class.
00:18:36.400And this is something that the the German economist Werner Sombart points out.
00:18:42.840He was critical of Marx as well. And he said that, you know, where Marx gets it wrong is that capitalism won't ever collapse.
00:18:48.660What it will do is it will adapt. It's too flexible and it will become bureaucratized.
00:18:53.940And from that bureaucratization, it will become all encompassing. Right.
00:18:58.240And this is something obviously that that coincides with Burnham's point about the managerial elite.
00:19:04.640You know, they've they've replaced the traditional bourgeoisie class, but they're operating in the same manner.
00:19:10.560And so I think you can almost, in my opinion, you can look at Burnham and Francis and realize that their class analysis is rooted.
00:19:20.660It comes from the same source. But their recognition is that there's going to be this class is going to exist.
00:19:27.660The the difference is it needs to be restructured and properly ordered so that the ruling class actually has skin in the game and cares about the people that they're they're ruling over.
00:19:39.640Yeah, that's really critical. I want to go ahead and talk a little bit more about the distinction between the managers and the bourgeoisie, because I think there is important notes there that exist in Francis that do differentiate them, though.
00:19:54.240I agree with you that there are there are some there's some connections there.
00:19:57.840And very importantly, I want to dive into, of course, the way in which we would see classes as better structure, the actual right wing solution to this class conflict problem.
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00:21:19.720So in Leviathan and its enemies, Sam Francis talks about the tradition, the transition between these different ruling classes.
00:21:28.680Like he said, all of the elite theorists, all of these guys recognize that there will always be a ruling class and that this is inescapable.
00:21:36.020But Francis talks about how the modes of production and the economic forces change in between each one of these ruling sets.
00:21:43.040He says that the bourgeoisie all use things like rule of law and contract law, these ideas of individual rights,
00:21:54.160as a way to pry open kind of the aristocratic rule and move them and accrue power to themselves.
00:22:01.940Right. They deconstructed all of the ruling formulas, all the political formulas, to use Gaetano Mosca's term, of the aristocratic class.
00:22:12.880They kind of broke down all of those pillars of their power, and that's what allowed the bourgeoisie to rise in power.
00:22:20.600But then the managerial class comes in and the managerial class in a similar function attacks all of the foundational pillars of the bourgeoisie's rule.
00:22:30.600And so instead of, you know, private property and rule of law, we get rule by experts, rule by procedure, the dematerialization of property.
00:22:43.480And so each one of these things is used to attack kind of that underlying basis.
00:22:48.660And over time, what we see is that this process, while all while kind of liquidating capital and allowing for the escape of capital also removes the connection between the rulers and the rule.
00:23:04.760In each one of these steps, it reduces accountability at a certain level or connection between kind of the people in charge and those that they manage.
00:23:15.380Some of this is due to massification, its scale. Some of this is due to the mechanisms and the and the the ruling formulas, the way that they bind people or the way that their stories are no longer particular to particular to specific peoples.
00:23:30.280But ultimately, the point is that this process is ongoing.
00:23:34.060And this is why we kind of end up in the managerial mindset.
00:23:37.320In fact, Burnham isn't really necessarily against managerialism itself, though Francis most certainly is.
00:23:43.920Burnham is more explaining a historical process that he thinks might be inevitable as where Francis, I think, is more one who is trying to better understand the mechanisms by which the managers rule so that there might be under undermined.
00:23:59.280Well, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, when you look at Francis, obviously, you know, I would I would label him, you know, with the paleo cons.
00:24:06.140And it's not just him, but you see this with Pat Buchanan as well.
00:24:11.780Their advice sort of is to to turn to more localized communities and economic practices that prioritize the nation or the people over globalization.
00:24:24.720Right. And I think that's where, you know, that's where Francis's critique or is, I guess, more valuable, so more valuable than than Burnham's, because like you said, Burnham is just kind of he's in that Machiavellian tradition.
00:24:41.980You know, you see this when you read the Machiavellians, right. It's sort of taking a scientific approach to political analysis.
00:24:48.620Well, we're going to remove all of our opinions and we're going to look at what is effective and what isn't.
00:24:52.920And I think that's exactly the way he looks at it.
00:24:57.200But when you turn to guys like Francis and sort of the paleo cons, they have more of a more of a reactionary approach to it because they're looking at and they're seeing the destructive nature of it.
00:25:11.080I mean, I think we all know now that pretty much everything Pat Buchanan said was going to happen has happened.
00:25:16.160Yeah. And I don't know. I think that moving forward from that, that's really that's really all you can do when analyzing this is to realize that Burnham kind of gives you the scientific approach to it and tells you how the mechanisms work.
00:25:33.240And some of the paleo cons and other thinkers kind of try to provide you a way out of it.
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00:25:54.380So I think the big differentiation here is going to be the way out of it, right?
00:26:00.600Because what we're saying and the reason that I think that these thinkers have been so critical to changing the way that the right understands our current situation,
00:26:11.780the way their analysis has just been way more effective than the kind of political analysis we've had for several decades.
00:26:19.200The reason that's cutting through now is it does factor in class.
00:26:26.160It recognizes the fact that social classes will always exist.
00:26:30.900This is tough for a lot of Americans in particular because so much of our kind of personal understanding is built on this idea that we eliminated class.
00:26:40.720You know, we disposed of the ruling class.
00:26:42.820When we started the United States, it's popular sovereignty.
00:26:52.460And so therefore, you know, without those formal titles, it just doesn't exist.
00:26:56.440But the power of these guys is really to say, you know, class does social class does persist.
00:27:02.360Now, as we pointed out earlier, Marx's solution to the problem of social class persisting despite the Industrial Revolution and all the upheaval it created was to basically say, well, we should organize along lines of class.
00:27:18.700We should make class the unifying factor.
00:27:21.400Remember, guys, all politics is identity politics, and Marx just wanted your class to be your identity.
00:27:27.440And so he would go ahead and say, well, we need to identify as, you know, the proletariat, the workers.
00:27:32.880We need to go ahead and rise up against these other classes.
00:27:36.460That is the key is we will organize along these lines.
00:27:40.360But for reactionary, the answer is to say, well, it's not so much that we have to get rid of class or we have to organize along class.
00:27:49.940We recognize that class is going to be a constant inside particular peoples and instead order that class, those classes in a way where they are beneficial to the people as a whole.
00:28:04.720And it's kind of funny because Werner Sombart actually in in his book, I think it's called just capitalism, I believe, written in 1902.
00:28:18.020He makes the point that one of the things that prevented the United States from falling into the same socialist trap that you saw in Europe was this idea that there was no class.
00:28:27.020Right. That because Americans didn't see class, Marxist talking points basically didn't hold, especially because at that time period and for a long time for for you and I both.
00:28:50.080But what we're seeing now is that, you know, for my children and a lot of the younger people, that doesn't hold anymore.
00:28:57.580Right. The the ability to climb up that American dream is gone.
00:29:02.560And with that happening, the the importance of class and the reality that class exists, whether you want it to or not, is becoming more and more real for people, because if you can't move up the ladder yourself, you're going to have to accept the fact that there are going to be people that are above you insofar as class is concerned.
00:29:23.820And the real goal then is to make sure that you're putting people in those positions or encouraging people in those positions to have a sense of noblesse oblige and to prioritize the people in their communities.
00:29:37.920And this is also why, you know, the the the upper class, there needs to be a connection between them and the people they rule over.
00:29:46.720And this is also why, you know, the globalization of capitalism is so dangerous, because we're just we all just become sort of widgets in the economic machine.
00:29:58.560So I think understanding that class is real is going to become imperative for the generations coming up because there's going to be no way to avoid it anymore.
00:30:09.040Yeah, Christopher Lash talks about this and revolt the elites.
00:30:12.740He said that when the Americans kind of discarded the idea of class, the good news, like you said, is that people for a long time were able to climb and it did make them more resistance to that Marxist rhetoric.
00:30:25.240But ultimately, what happened was once these classes started to become more concrete, the kind of illusion of meritocracy still stayed around.
00:30:35.980So even though you had a lot of these guys who are going to, you know, like Harvard or in Yale only because of their parents, that they wouldn't be able to lead themselves out of a wet paper bag.
00:30:46.820All of a sudden, they think that they are they're meritocratic.
00:30:50.160They got here because they outperformed everybody else.
00:30:53.260And that means not only are they above those people, but unlike the there is no noblesse oblige because they earned it.
00:31:00.140You know, a hereditary nobility understood that their nobility was tied to blood.
00:31:05.960It was tied to a certain type of chance that put them into that position.
00:31:11.000And so they had a tie to the people that they were hereditarily bound to rule over in a way that someone who simply, oh, well, I just kind of outcompeted you in the market.
00:31:24.160You could have made the same choice as I did.
00:31:26.640You could have worked as hard as I did.
00:31:28.180They don't have that kind of binding to, you know, to the people that they are now over.
00:31:34.100And they don't even recognize the ruling class nature like they know, oh, well, I may run a business, but they don't recognize themselves as then in some kind of distinct social class that gives them both powers and responsibilities.
00:31:47.520And like you said, the globalization itself is very much a disaster because that means that each one of these people raised into basically this ruling class, not only do they not have those classic ties of nobility, but they also aren't even tied to the specific people from whom they drew the resources and everything else to arise to their positions of leadership.
00:32:10.580They see themselves as part of a global leadership community, and all of the things that they're doing are for the betterment of that global network and not so much the individual people that actually gave them, you know, the ability to rise up through the ranks.
00:32:26.060And so this becomes a disaster because we've completely ignored class in the way that it ties us to certain obligations.
00:32:32.920We have these people who are who don't see themselves in any as in any way obliged to those they rule over.
00:32:41.040They don't see that important connection.
00:32:43.160They don't feel that chain of custody, that chain of being that would otherwise tie them to their ancestors and to their children.
00:32:49.160And this means that they're more than willing to go ahead and betray the people that they normally should be ruling over, because really, at the end of the day, they don't have as much in common with them as they do other ruling elites across the globe.
00:33:02.920Yeah, I mean, that's that's I think one of the most dangerous parts of the globalization, you know, and as you brought up earlier, you brought up Kaczynski and this goes to a little as well.
00:33:16.040They point out that part of it is alienation, right?
00:33:18.920This this this hyper capitalist system that obviously has evolved into managerial managerialism and global capitalism, it alienates and destroys communities.
00:33:57.280And you can kind of see how that how that has affected everybody just by listening to the way they talk.
00:34:03.120But when you look at, I think, Christopher Lash's point about about the excuse me, about about the.
00:34:19.960Sorry, I had a I had a brain fart for a moment, the meritocracy aspect.
00:34:23.600Yeah, the meritocracy, when you look at that and you realize that we were all raised in that environment, you know, I know you and I both probably saw the film Wall Street and we were all told greed is good.
00:34:55.240But that is it doesn't have to be that way.
00:34:57.340And I think that's the big thing that I want to kind of enforce to younger people is that don't think of class in a negative connotation just because the only interface you have with upper class is that is this sort of hyper, you know, greedy sort of Wall Street element.
00:35:17.720There can be a ruling class that cares about more than that.
00:35:20.740But as you said, there has to you know, it's ironic, but it kind of has to go back to some sort of hereditary class where you feel that, you know, God has gifted this to you.
00:35:34.560And because it's a blessing, it is your job to make sure that you do the most with it.
00:35:41.840So as we look at the legacy of Marx and people approaching him from the right, like we said, we've kind of broken the hermeneutic circle.
00:35:50.140We understand that there are critical failures in Marx's work, that it leads to very evil ends.
00:35:57.680We're not embracing much of, you know, what Marx prescribed.
00:36:03.200We're certainly not wanting to accelerate capital to the level of exacerbating its contradictions and then creating a collapse into some kind of, you know, imaginary utopia.
00:36:14.560You know, we're not pursuing that kind of line of flight.
00:36:19.660That's not the way we're we're trying to resolve the problem.
00:36:23.420As people on the right looking at this, though, what do we see here?
00:36:27.160You've kind of already alluded to it in a few different ways.
00:36:30.000But if we're saying, OK, look, class is unescapable.
00:36:33.840There will always be a certain level of class conflict.
00:36:37.060There has to be the social classes do actually need to actively be taken into account when we're trying to understand society and our duties and roles to each other inside of it.
00:36:47.840So we can't just we can't just dismiss it in the way that kind of the American solution has been.
00:36:53.920But we're also recognizing that, you know, Marx's attempt to just organize across one class and use it to eliminate the others and free everyone is a failure.
00:37:06.480You've talked a little bit about the possibility of hereditary, you know, the return of hereditary understandings.
00:37:14.260One thing that I think is interesting in the American tradition is that while, you know, we didn't have hereditary monarchies, there was a certain level of understanding that when you you have these aristocrats who had earned this.
00:37:32.700Right. There was a certain level of natural aristocracy that was going to arise.
00:37:36.940Our founding fathers, I think, indicated pretty often that they were looking towards natural aristocracy as the replacement.
00:37:44.260And that but that often that would create a hereditary form of this.
00:37:48.420So there wasn't a formal creation of, you know, barons or or, you know, counts or anything like this.
00:37:56.360But there was basically this understanding that there would be these these great families that would rise up on their own.
00:38:02.300They would create certain levels of achievement and they would guide communities, even if they would did not receive some formal landed title.
00:38:10.660They would in many ways act as kind of the hereditary aristocracies of old.
00:38:16.520But, you know, if there was a failure to hand that torch, you know, from one generation to the next, then perhaps people wouldn't be bound to fail aristocracy in the same way.
00:38:26.780How would you like to see people on the right re approach class in a way that reinstates that natural hierarchy, but doesn't in a way that's beneficial to the people of America today?
00:38:39.700Well, I think first the first thing I would try to remind people of is it as you as you alluded to, there sort of was an aristocracy in the United States.
00:38:50.060I would use the example of contrasting the French Revolution, the American Revolution.
00:38:54.820Right. The American Revolution is not a revolution from the bottom.
00:38:58.420Right. These founding fathers are not they're not even middle class.
00:39:02.620These people are ostensibly aristocracy.
00:39:05.740And so when this revolution revolution occurs, you're transferring power from basically the the you know, the the king, King George to an aristocratic class that already exists, as opposed to in the French Revolution, where it is more from the bottom up.
00:39:21.580And you just you get the great terror. Right. Because it's just as we know, most revolution revolutions end up worse than than they started.
00:39:29.140Right. Whatever they're trying to fix, they make worse. The reason America works, I think, in part is because you're giving it over to this class that already exists.
00:39:37.680That's aristocratic. But that being understood, I would say, you know, solution wise, one of the big things that killed the American aristocracy is the direct selection of senators.
00:39:50.380Right. Because prior to that, you know, they kind of functioned as the House of Lords or something in a sense.
00:39:57.720Right. Because they're not they're not elected directly by the people.
00:40:01.700So moving forward in order to establish something that looks like a proper aristocracy, I think you have to go back to that.
00:40:10.620You have to somehow establish that divide where the the mass of people are not electing these individuals.
00:40:17.260But then on top of that, I think the real path forward is to look, you know, as Moscow talks about the the social forces.
00:40:25.160Right. As things change, you know, 50 years ago, nobody knew that the tech bros were going to become such a powerful social force.
00:40:33.420Right. Now they are. And so I think we need to look forward and I'm not sure what those social forces are going to be.
00:40:40.220But we need to look forward to what they are and try to encourage the type of people we want in those roles so that as those social forces approach, they can get into those positions of power.
00:40:50.860And I think that might be the best path forward, because a side concern is that if AI is able to do what they say it's going to do, we're going to go we're going to relive the industrial revolution again.
00:41:05.160And you're probably going to see more Marx's ideas become more popular again because it's going to be just as disruptive.
00:41:11.120So it's good to get out in front of it now and try to put those peoples in positions that are going to take care of people in case these things happen.
00:41:18.980Yeah, there's a certain irony where that in the United States was not really subject to a communist revolution due to, in many ways, the the level of wealth that had already obtained.
00:41:32.580You know, there are people were not objectively poor enough to really be bought into this kind of need for a class revolution.
00:41:41.380But what happens when you import, say, I don't know, 20, 30, you know, 40 million illegal immigrants to do a bunch of jobs Americans won't do.
00:41:51.300And then all of a sudden you get rid you automate all those jobs out of existence.
00:41:55.980Right. You want you want to you want a class revolution.
00:42:00.480Yeah. And if you're not willing to and this is kind of where, you know, I think studying somebody like Bismarck is so important.
00:42:07.980Right. Because Bismarck is is a contemporary of Marx.
00:42:11.480Right. And one thing that Bismarck understood, you know, his realpolitik is he looked at these socialist revolutions.
00:42:18.600He saw what the people were really concerned about and he cut the legs out from under the socialists.
00:42:23.380He said, OK, well, you're worried about, you know, retirement and pay if you get injured or something like that.
00:42:30.480That I'm going to give you that. And doing that was enough to to stall, you know, he could have probably done more and done better.
00:42:37.980And we could argue that, you know, he's sort of the precursor to the modern, you know, welfare state.
00:42:43.480But regardless, I think looking at how he approaches things, you can kind of see, OK, we need to take a realpolitik view of this and say, what can we do to prevent these things and not be married to the ideology?
00:42:57.520Which kind of goes back to why we should look at Marx in the first place, you know?
00:43:02.500Yeah. Ironically, there is a lot of guys during, you know, as the socialist revolutions are building up, who get very angry at at union leaders who actually successfully negotiate better living conditions for their workers because it because it undercuts the need for communist revolution.
00:43:21.620And so that the successful union leader that's actually bettering the lives of the workers is reducing the need for the communist revolution is therefore an enemy of the revolution.
00:43:33.100Before before we wrap things up here, I do want to ask you one more thing, because I'm always fascinated about this and I spent a long time thinking about it.
00:43:40.860And I'm not sure if I have the answer yet, but I always like picking the brain of people who are thinking along this lines.
00:43:47.020Can we continue to have creative destruction and stable hierarchical societies is is unbridled capital always going to bring us here?
00:44:03.200Should we be exercising more influence in the effort to maintain that or is that a losing battle and you simply have to learn to adapt like you were talking about, maybe putting getting out ahead of market forces and placing aristocrats in in those areas, trying to ride the wave, ride the tiger as if it were, rather than than detainment?
00:44:24.180No, I'm very much in the cyclical history camp.
00:44:29.600I don't think that I think what we need to be doing is preparing for that system to collapse.
00:44:36.100Now, I don't obviously don't mean in a Mad Max style.
00:44:39.980I wrote a piece a while back on catabolic collapse because, in my opinion, that's where it's headed.
00:44:45.560You know, you're going to see the power of the federal government recede more and more.
00:44:50.960And as it recedes, opportunities for local authority to establish more power is going to come up and that is going to be that path forward.
00:45:00.380I don't think we should be trying to keep the system going or to better it or to just, you know, do the maintenance, the necessary maintenance on it.
00:45:08.940I think we need to prepare for the fact that it's probably inevitably going to slowly decline.
00:45:13.320But in that decline, those opportunities are going to come.
00:45:17.240And one of the one of the things I've been trying to urge people to do lately is that getting into local positions of power, no matter what they are, are going to pay dividends in the future.
00:45:27.180Because as catabolic collapse occurs, those positions that you get are going to increase in influence and power.
00:45:34.700And I think that's that's where we have to go with it, because I don't really see, you know, and maybe it's maybe it's because I'm a Christian, but I see all of this is like sort of a Tower of Babel.
00:45:45.600Like it can only go so far and then it's going to fall in on itself.
00:46:34.900All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap things up here.
00:46:38.980But I want to thank everybody for watching.
00:46:42.080And of course, thank John for coming on.
00:46:44.480If you'd like to read his most recent piece on Mark's or anything else that he's done, you should definitely check out his Substack.
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