The Auron MacIntyre Show - Marxism and the Modern Right ｜ Guest：John Slaughter ｜ 6⧸24⧸24

00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.

00:00:02.320 Rocky's Vacation, here we come.

00:00:05.060 Whoa, is this economy?

00:00:07.180 Free beer, wine, and snacks.

00:00:09.620 Sweet! 0.95

00:00:10.720 Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.

00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.

00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.

00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94

00:00:22.240 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.

00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.

00:00:27.200 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.

00:00:28.720 CRCanada.com.

00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.180 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.720 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:38.160 Before we go ahead and begin, I'd like to remind you that this is election season,

00:00:43.380 which means it's also censorship season for big tech.

00:00:46.560 And if you want to make sure that I and everyone else who works at the Blaze can continue to put out

00:00:51.900 all of the content we're putting out, getting to say whatever we want to say,

00:00:55.320 a great way to do that is to go ahead and pick up some Blaze merchandise.

00:00:58.960 I'm even working now with the guys at the Blaze to go ahead and make sure that there's

00:01:02.640 Orr McIntyre Show merchandise, so that should be in there soon.

00:01:06.580 If you go to Blaze or shopblazemedia.com, you can use the promo code Blaze10 to get 10% off of all

00:01:15.220 of your merch.

00:01:16.220 Again, that's shopblazemedia.com.

00:01:18.900 Blaze10 is the promo code and that'll help support this show and everybody else who is working at the Blaze.

00:01:25.680 All right.

00:01:26.400 So my guest today is John Slaughter.

00:01:29.620 He is a fiction writer.

00:01:30.640 He's also a sub-stack writer.

00:01:32.840 And he started a bit of a debate here recently when he pointed out that many people in the kind of new right or dissident right

00:01:42.240 are dipping into thinkers like James Burnham and Sam Francis who traffic very heavily in class analysis.

00:01:50.280 They take a lot of time to break down and understand the forces of social classes inside our civilization.

00:01:58.460 And that in many ways, this means that we are touching on some, at some level, Marxist critiques of our current situation.

00:02:07.500 John is on here to talk to me about that today.

00:02:10.060 Thanks for joining me, man.

00:02:11.720 Oh, thanks, Lauren.

00:02:12.360 It's great to be here.

00:02:14.240 Absolutely.

00:02:14.680 I actually had the honor of meeting John at the OGC event here recently.

00:02:18.900 So that was really great.

00:02:20.280 Always fantastic to connect these people that you've seen on Twitter or who you've seen on, say,

00:02:25.800 like the Jay Burden show with people in real life.

00:02:29.740 And, of course, he's written a very interesting piece that I think is worth taking the time to break down today.

00:02:34.980 So we're going to jump into that topic, guys.

00:02:37.140 But before we do, let me tell you about JobStack.

00:02:40.240 Hey, guys, let me tell you about today's sponsor, JobStacking.

00:02:43.580 More paychecks, less hustle, working from home.

00:02:46.320 That's what JobStacking is all about.

00:02:48.060 If you're a remote or hybrid worker looking to maximize your earning potential, then consider joining the JobStacking Mentorship Program.

00:02:55.740 The program was designed by Rolf Halza to help you successfully implement a strategy that will allow you to collect multiple paychecks from different jobs without burning out or getting caught by your employer.

00:03:07.120 JobStacking has already helped many people double or even triple their income.

00:03:10.980 Luke Hill, a financial analyst living in the UK, has used JobStacking to stack three jobs and went from making $5K a month to making $15K a month.

00:03:19.980 But JobStacking hasn't just increased income.

00:03:22.600 It's also helping many of our guys gain more independence by no longer being a slave to debt or a single employer who hates their values.

00:03:30.480 Andrew Gustafson, a credit analyst from Australia, is now stacking four salaries, which he used to pay off personal and student debt while buying a home for his family.

00:03:38.880 If you don't currently have a remote job, no worries.

00:03:42.080 The program is also designed to help you land remote jobs so you can get started.

00:03:46.780 So if you want to double your income and stop relying on a single paycheck from a woke employer, go to JobStacking.com slash start now. 0.55

00:03:55.620 That's JobStacking.com slash start now.

00:03:59.160 You can use the promo code ORIN and book your call with Rolf today.

00:04:02.820 All right, John.

00:04:05.340 So a lot of people have been talking about how there's this woke right, how many or postmodern traditionalists.

00:04:14.040 And I guess doing a whole show about Marx probably won't help us to dispel any of those rumors.

00:04:19.180 But I do think this is important because, you know, I want to clarify at the outset, neither of us are Marxists.

00:04:24.620 Both of us recognize the evils of communism and that Marxist solutions to the problems that he was describing are horrific.

00:04:33.320 They've ended up creating tens of millions of deaths throughout the years and lots of misery.

00:04:39.120 So this is not a show, you know, espousing Marxism or the glories of kind of a communist revolution.

00:04:46.400 But 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,

00:04:57.280 especially as people start to explore the theories of people like James Burnham and Sam Francis.

00:05:01.980 Yeah, 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.

00:05:13.860 He often uses terms like the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the means of the means of production.

00:05:19.820 And you when you see that, it kind of sets up an alarm bell like, OK, this is very Marxist rhetoric.

00:05:24.940 And 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.

00:05:35.880 But 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.

00:05:45.440 And 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.

00:05:59.120 That's just their solutions fall flat. And so I wanted to point to the fact that like where Marx is coming from.

00:06:06.740 Right. 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.

00:06:18.740 So let's go ahead and get some basic context around Marx's critique.

00:06:24.300 You know, a lot of people will be familiar with maybe the Communist Manifesto might have have to read that in college.

00:06:31.020 Most people probably haven't worked their way through, you know, multiple volumes of Das Kapital.

00:06:35.860 But what is the what is the context around his critique? When is it happening?

00:06:41.100 What 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?

00:06:50.540 Well, 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.

00:06:58.980 You have to kind of get rid of the philosophical part and look at the more practical application, I would say.

00:07:05.160 And, you know, he's writing, you know, during the middle of the 1800s. Right.

00:07:08.600 So this is right in the middle of the Industrial Revolution.

00:07:11.360 And a lot of people don't take into consideration the impact that had, you know, prior to the Industrial Revolution.

00:07:17.420 A man could provide for himself through his labor. He could work the land. 0.76

00:07:21.760 He 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.

00:07:29.380 I mean, you could be a candle maker. You could be a cobbler. You could be a blacksmith.

00:07:33.180 You could provide for your family through the fruits of your labor with industrialization.

00:07:39.300 What happens is machines essentially take over that role.

00:07:43.280 And now man is forced to sell his labor as opposed to live off the fruits of his labor.

00:07:48.860 And in doing that, you you force people out of their homes into factories.

00:07:53.680 And Marx is is critiquing this.

00:07:56.180 And when he's pointing out things like children being crushed and dying in these factories, this isn't hyperbole.

00:08:02.020 This stuff is happening. And the the bourgeoisie class and in his terminology are the people that own the means of production are extremely exploitative.

00:08:11.900 They're taking advantage of people. You also have the introduction of electricity.

00:08:16.000 So now you can work longer hours. And so it completely disrupts man's ability to provide for himself and his family.

00:08:22.160 And Marx is coming in and offering a solution to that.

00:08:26.180 Granted, his solution points to this utopian classless society in the end, which, 0.75

00:08:31.000 as we all know, is is unsustainable and fanciful.

00:08:36.060 But to understand why his ideas were so pervasive, you have to understand how disruptive that was for people.

00:08:42.780 You know, you even see this in the United States with stories like the story of John Henry.

00:08:47.480 Right. 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.

00:08:56.840 He wins and he dies of a heart attack immediately after that.

00:09:00.960 Right. 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.

00:09:11.120 And to try to stop it and stand in front of it, you know, you look at John Henry, it's a pyrrhic victory.

00:09:16.020 So 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.

00:09:26.640 Yeah, I think there's a couple of good points there.

00:09:28.680 First, the thing that you're talking about when you look at Marx and and discarding part of this.

00:09:33.800 Alexander 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.

00:09:46.040 And 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.

00:09:58.600 And so we can we can discard that portion while still being able to draw something valuable from the text.

00:10:03.840 So I think that's a good suggestion from the beginning.

00:10:05.980 And the other thing that you're talking about, which I think is really critical, is recognizing the disruptive nature of the Industrial Revolution.

00:10:14.660 One 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.

00:10:33.800 It simply means that you also recognize this as a disruptive force, just as Marx did.

00:10:39.060 Marx had actually his solution was to lean into this change.

00:10:44.120 He's actually the first accelerationist.

00:10:45.940 He 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.

00:10:57.420 So he's actually in some ways a hyper capitalist until it eventually collapses into itself and creates the utopia that actually never comes.

00:11:06.040 But yeah, but a lot of people were talking about the disruptive nature of this.

00:11:10.700 You 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.

00:11:27.420 It revolutionizes the way that people live, it can do all kinds of amazing things.

00:11:33.360 Many of us would have a hard time understanding how to exist without many of the things, the amenities that industrialization has brought.

00:11:41.200 But it also, like you said, seriously disrupts the kind of cycles of life, the natural rhythms of life that existed in more traditional societies.

00:11:51.820 It rips people away from the land.

00:11:55.100 It creates a scenario where people are more likely to be concentrated into cities.

00:11:58.260 They're pulled away from their roots, their heritage, their peoples, and instead are concentrated into these places that are deracinating, they're cosmopolitan.

00:12:08.660 They don't really have that connection.

00:12:11.320 And 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.

00:12:25.140 And so that creates a scenario where people are very alienated from what they do.

00:12:29.680 They lose value.

00:12:31.480 The 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.

00:12:45.140 And so we end up in this scenario where people just take everything, any criticism of the Industrial Revolution and say, this is Marxist.

00:12:55.440 But that's not necessarily the case.

00:12:57.000 In 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.

00:13:14.140 So 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.

00:13:30.360 But 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.

00:13:38.660 No, I think that's absolutely right.

00:13:42.160 I mean, there's even more controversial thinkers.

00:13:46.100 George Fitzkewis was a famous, you know, slavery apologist.

00:13:50.780 And 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.

00:13:59.820 And he says, well, these slaves are provided for.

00:14:03.020 They have housing.

00:14:04.200 They have retirement, essentially.

00:14:05.760 They have medical care.

00:14:07.760 And then look at these factory workers and look at the conditions they are currently living in, right?

00:14:13.020 Like, would you trade one for the other?

00:14:15.140 And his arguments are somewhat compelling.

00:14:17.860 It's hard for us now to look back on that because we are so far removed from being able to provide for ourselves.

00:14:25.080 So in our communities, you know, as you said, these it's deracinates our communities, which used to play a lot of these roles, right?

00:14:32.300 They used to provide for us.

00:14:34.140 You didn't need a retirement plan.

00:14:35.760 You had the church.

00:14:36.640 You had your your family nearby.

00:14:38.440 You had the community at large.

00:14:41.340 You didn't need all this stuff.

00:14:43.560 And 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.

00:14:55.820 Right.

00:14:55.960 Because now they own and control everything and you're at their mercy.

00:14:59.280 And so I think, you know, a lot of right wingers understood that as well.

00:15:05.040 But you have this sort of pivot towards a more libertarian mindset within the American right, especially.

00:15:14.760 And 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.

00:15:29.200 Yeah, 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.

00:15:43.220 And they think that they're all the same.

00:15:44.840 They all have the same core.

00:15:46.140 Of course, you know, people will put, you know, look to the National Socialists and the Marxists and say these are the same thing.

00:15:52.620 Well, they're fighting against the same the same trend, which is this revolution capital.

00:15:58.940 But of course, they're actually ironically, both of them are radically themselves progressive in their solutions to that problem.

00:16:07.340 And neither of them are actually bringing a traditionalist understanding to it.

00:16:11.720 And 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.

00:16:27.800 You know, what what does that new opposition look like?

00:16:31.200 And 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.

00:16:38.280 You mentioned that earlier, but I'd like to go a little deeper into that.

00:16:41.900 Why is the class analysis present in those two inspired in some ways by Marx?

00:16:48.920 And 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?

00:16:59.320 Well, 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.

00:17:07.560 You know, he was a former Trotskyist in his youth.

00:17:10.520 And I think because of that, you know, you can't you can't swim in those waters without getting tainted to some degree.

00:17:16.840 The 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.

00:17:28.720 And looking at this idea that there's going to be this classless society. Right.

00:17:32.660 Because 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.

00:17:44.120 Right. And that that's going to give way to this classless utopia, essentially.

00:17:48.820 But 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.

00:17:57.060 Right. And when you're reading the elite theories, the theorists, they point this out, all of them, that there's always a ruling class.

00:18:04.660 There'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.

00:18:16.800 And then you turn to Francis and Francis uses all of this, the same rhetoric, like I said, from Marx, the same terminologies.

00:18:26.820 And you can almost trace, in my opinion, that the the managerial elite is sort of an evolution of the bourgeoisie class.

00:18:36.400 And this is something that the the German economist Werner Sombart points out.

00:18:42.840 He was critical of Marx as well. And he said that, you know, where Marx gets it wrong is that capitalism won't ever collapse.

00:18:48.660 What it will do is it will adapt. It's too flexible and it will become bureaucratized.

00:18:53.940 And from that bureaucratization, it will become all encompassing. Right.

00:18:58.240 And this is something obviously that that coincides with Burnham's point about the managerial elite.

00:19:04.640 You know, they've they've replaced the traditional bourgeoisie class, but they're operating in the same manner.

00:19:10.560 And so I think you can almost, in my opinion, you can look at Burnham and Francis and realize that their class analysis is rooted.

00:19:20.660 It comes from the same source. But their recognition is that there's going to be this class is going to exist.

00:19:27.660 The 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.

00:19:39.640 Yeah, 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.

00:19:54.240 I agree with you that there are there are some there's some connections there.

00:19:57.840 And 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.

00:20:08.320 But before we do all that, guys, let me tell you a little bit about the movie Sound of Hope.

00:20:12.700 Hey, guys, I want to talk to you about a wonderful new movie from Angel Studios, Sound of Hope, the story of Possum Trot.

00:20:19.280 It's inspired by the powerful true story of Bishop and First Lady Donna Martin and their tiny Bennett Chapel Church in the town of Possum Trot in the woods of East Texas.

00:20:29.140 Twenty two families from a rural black church linked arms and courageously adopted 77 of the most difficult to place children in their local foster care system.

00:20:39.000 By doing the impossible, the first 76 kids were adopted between 1998 and 2000, and another was adopted in 2011.

00:20:47.560 This East Texas community proved that with real determined love, the battle for America's most vulnerable can be won, as this act ignited a national movement for vulnerable children that continues to this day.

00:20:59.260 The first step to ending the crisis is to raise awareness.

00:21:03.100 I encourage you to order your tickets to see Sound of Hope, the story of Possum Trot today at angel.com slash oran.

00:21:11.120 That's angel.com slash oran.

00:21:13.700 The fight for kids begins on July 4th when Sound of Hope opens in theater.

00:21:19.720 So in Leviathan and its enemies, Sam Francis talks about the tradition, the transition between these different ruling classes.

00:21:28.680 Like 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.

00:21:36.020 But Francis talks about how the modes of production and the economic forces change in between each one of these ruling sets.

00:21:43.040 He says that the bourgeoisie all use things like rule of law and contract law, these ideas of individual rights,

00:21:54.160 as a way to pry open kind of the aristocratic rule and move them and accrue power to themselves.

00:22:01.940 Right. They deconstructed all of the ruling formulas, all the political formulas, to use Gaetano Mosca's term, of the aristocratic class.

00:22:12.880 They kind of broke down all of those pillars of their power, and that's what allowed the bourgeoisie to rise in power.

00:22:20.600 But 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.

00:22:30.600 And so instead of, you know, private property and rule of law, we get rule by experts, rule by procedure, the dematerialization of property.

00:22:43.480 And so each one of these things is used to attack kind of that underlying basis.

00:22:48.660 And 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.

00:23:04.760 In 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.

00:23:15.380 Some 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.

00:23:30.280 But ultimately, the point is that this process is ongoing.

00:23:34.060 And this is why we kind of end up in the managerial mindset.

00:23:37.320 In fact, Burnham isn't really necessarily against managerialism itself, though Francis most certainly is.

00:23:43.920 Burnham 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.

00:23:59.280 Well, 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.

00:24:06.140 And it's not just him, but you see this with Pat Buchanan as well.

00:24:11.780 Their advice sort of is to to turn to more localized communities and economic practices that prioritize the nation or the people over globalization.

00:24:24.720 Right. 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.

00:24:41.980 You know, you see this when you read the Machiavellians, right. It's sort of taking a scientific approach to political analysis.

00:24:48.620 Well, we're going to remove all of our opinions and we're going to look at what is effective and what isn't.

00:24:52.920 And I think that's exactly the way he looks at it.

00:24:57.200 But 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.

00:25:11.080 I mean, I think we all know now that pretty much everything Pat Buchanan said was going to happen has happened.

00:25:16.160 Yeah. 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.

00:25:33.240 And some of the paleo cons and other thinkers kind of try to provide you a way out of it.

00:25:38.320 Get unlimited grocery delivery with PCX Press Pass.

00:25:42.160 Meal prep delivered. Snacks delivered.

00:25:45.320 Fresh fruit delivered.

00:25:47.860 Grocery delivery on repeat for just $2.50 a month.

00:25:51.640 Learn more at pcexpress.ca.

00:25:54.380 So I think the big differentiation here is going to be the way out of it, right?

00:26:00.600 Because 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,

00:26:11.780 the way their analysis has just been way more effective than the kind of political analysis we've had for several decades.

00:26:19.200 The reason that's cutting through now is it does factor in class.

00:26:23.740 It does understand class antagonism.

00:26:26.160 It recognizes the fact that social classes will always exist.

00:26:30.900 This 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.

00:26:40.720 You know, we disposed of the ruling class. 0.90

00:26:42.820 When we started the United States, it's popular sovereignty.

00:26:47.300 We don't have an aristocracy.

00:26:48.860 We don't have a king.

00:26:50.140 We don't have landed nobles.

00:26:52.460 And so therefore, you know, without those formal titles, it just doesn't exist.

00:26:56.440 But the power of these guys is really to say, you know, class does social class does persist.

00:27:02.360 Now, 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.

00:27:18.700 We should make class the unifying factor.

00:27:21.400 Remember, guys, all politics is identity politics, and Marx just wanted your class to be your identity.

00:27:27.440 And so he would go ahead and say, well, we need to identify as, you know, the proletariat, the workers.

00:27:32.880 We need to go ahead and rise up against these other classes. 0.94

00:27:36.460 That is the key is we will organize along these lines.

00:27:40.360 But 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.

00:27:49.940 We 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.

00:28:01.500 Right.

00:28:02.840 No, that's absolutely correct.

00:28:04.720 And 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.

00:28:18.020 He 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.

00:28:27.020 Right. 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.

00:28:39.200 This was this was probably true.

00:28:41.560 You could rise up very easily in America.

00:28:45.860 You can move up that economic ladder.

00:28:48.560 Class wasn't really a thing.

00:28:50.080 But what we're seeing now is that, you know, for my children and a lot of the younger people, that doesn't hold anymore.

00:28:57.580 Right. The the ability to climb up that American dream is gone.

00:29:02.560 And 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.

00:29:23.820 And 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.

00:29:37.920 And 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.

00:29:46.720 And 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.

00:29:57.140 We're just numbers on a spreadsheet.

00:29:58.560 So 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.

00:30:09.040 Yeah, Christopher Lash talks about this and revolt the elites.

00:30:12.740 He 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.

00:30:25.240 But ultimately, what happened was once these classes started to become more concrete, the kind of illusion of meritocracy still stayed around.

00:30:35.980 So 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.

00:30:46.820 All of a sudden, they think that they are they're meritocratic.

00:30:50.160 They got here because they outperformed everybody else.

00:30:53.260 And that means not only are they above those people, but unlike the there is no noblesse oblige because they earned it.

00:31:00.140 You know, a hereditary nobility understood that their nobility was tied to blood.

00:31:05.960 It was tied to a certain type of chance that put them into that position.

00:31:11.000 And 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.

00:31:23.060 I don't owe you anything.

00:31:24.160 You could have made the same choice as I did.

00:31:26.640 You could have worked as hard as I did.

00:31:28.180 They don't have that kind of binding to, you know, to the people that they are now over.

00:31:34.100 And 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.

00:31:47.520 And 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.

00:32:10.580 They 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.

00:32:26.060 And so this becomes a disaster because we've completely ignored class in the way that it ties us to certain obligations.

00:32:32.920 We have these people who are who don't see themselves in any as in any way obliged to those they rule over.

00:32:41.040 They don't see that important connection.

00:32:43.160 They don't feel that chain of custody, that chain of being that would otherwise tie them to their ancestors and to their children.

00:32:49.160 And 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.

00:33:02.920 Yeah, 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.

00:33:16.040 They point out that part of it is alienation, right?

00:33:18.920 This this this hyper capitalist system that obviously has evolved into managerial managerialism and global capitalism, it alienates and destroys communities.

00:33:30.680 It tears up their their traditions.

00:33:33.980 It tears up their their, you know, everything from their religion to their their particularities.

00:33:40.240 You know, you see this now.

00:33:41.400 I always tell people that you can track the destruction of a region by the loss of its accent, right?

00:33:46.760 I mean, I grew up in the Deep South my whole life.

00:33:48.900 I have almost no accent.

00:33:50.260 Most of the people I know don't have them.

00:33:52.420 My parents, my grandparents, though, have very strong and distinct regional accents.

00:33:56.540 Right.

00:33:57.280 And you can kind of see how that how that has affected everybody just by listening to the way they talk.

00:34:03.120 But when you look at, I think, Christopher Lash's point about about the excuse me, about about the.

00:34:19.960 Sorry, I had a I had a brain fart for a moment, the meritocracy aspect.

00:34:23.600 Yeah, 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.

00:34:34.180 Right.

00:34:35.200 That's the attitude people need to realize that these elites have.

00:34:38.760 Right.

00:34:39.480 Greed is good.

00:34:40.420 It's all about the accumulation of wealth.

00:34:42.400 It's all about maximizing efficiency.

00:34:45.000 That's all they really care about.

00:34:46.480 They don't care about you or anybody, what you're you know, that you're losing your community or that you're losing your culture.

00:34:53.220 That doesn't matter.

00:34:54.580 Right.

00:34:55.240 But that is it doesn't have to be that way.

00:34:57.340 And 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.

00:35:17.720 There can be a ruling class that cares about more than that.

00:35:20.740 But 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.

00:35:34.060 It's a blessing.

00:35:34.560 And because it's a blessing, it is your job to make sure that you do the most with it.

00:35:41.840 So 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.

00:35:50.140 We understand that there are critical failures in Marx's work, that it leads to very evil ends.

00:35:57.680 We're not embracing much of, you know, what Marx prescribed.

00:36:03.200 We'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.

00:36:14.560 You know, we're not pursuing that kind of line of flight.

00:36:19.660 That's not the way we're we're trying to resolve the problem.

00:36:23.420 As people on the right looking at this, though, what do we see here?

00:36:27.160 You've kind of already alluded to it in a few different ways.

00:36:30.000 But if we're saying, OK, look, class is unescapable.

00:36:33.840 There will always be a certain level of class conflict.

00:36:37.060 There 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.

00:36:47.840 So we can't just we can't just dismiss it in the way that kind of the American solution has been.

00:36:53.920 But 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.

00:37:04.900 What is the right wing solution?

00:37:06.480 You've talked a little bit about the possibility of hereditary, you know, the return of hereditary understandings.

00:37:14.260 One 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.

00:37:32.700 Right. There was a certain level of natural aristocracy that was going to arise.

00:37:36.940 Our founding fathers, I think, indicated pretty often that they were looking towards natural aristocracy as the replacement.

00:37:44.260 And that but that often that would create a hereditary form of this.

00:37:48.420 So there wasn't a formal creation of, you know, barons or or, you know, counts or anything like this.

00:37:56.360 But there was basically this understanding that there would be these these great families that would rise up on their own.

00:38:02.300 They would create certain levels of achievement and they would guide communities, even if they would did not receive some formal landed title.

00:38:10.660 They would in many ways act as kind of the hereditary aristocracies of old.

00:38:16.520 But, 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.

00:38:26.780 How 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?

00:38:39.700 Well, 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.

00:38:50.060 I would use the example of contrasting the French Revolution, the American Revolution.

00:38:54.820 Right. The American Revolution is not a revolution from the bottom.

00:38:58.420 Right. These founding fathers are not they're not even middle class.

00:39:02.620 These people are ostensibly aristocracy.

00:39:05.740 And 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.

00:39:21.580 And 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.

00:39:29.140 Right. 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.

00:39:37.680 That'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.

00:39:50.380 Right. Because prior to that, you know, they kind of functioned as the House of Lords or something in a sense.

00:39:57.720 Right. Because they're not they're not elected directly by the people.

00:40:01.700 So moving forward in order to establish something that looks like a proper aristocracy, I think you have to go back to that.

00:40:10.620 You have to somehow establish that divide where the the mass of people are not electing these individuals.

00:40:17.260 But then on top of that, I think the real path forward is to look, you know, as Moscow talks about the the social forces.

00:40:25.160 Right. As things change, you know, 50 years ago, nobody knew that the tech bros were going to become such a powerful social force.

00:40:33.420 Right. 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.

00:40:40.220 But 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.

00:40:50.860 And 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.

00:41:05.160 And you're probably going to see more Marx's ideas become more popular again because it's going to be just as disruptive.

00:41:11.120 So 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.

00:41:18.980 Yeah, 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.

00:41:32.580 You know, there are people were not objectively poor enough to really be bought into this kind of need for a class revolution.

00:41:41.380 But 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. 0.99

00:41:51.300 And then all of a sudden you get rid you automate all those jobs out of existence.

00:41:55.980 Right. You want you want to you want a class revolution. 0.99

00:41:59.240 Just wait till that happens.

00:42:00.480 Yeah. And if you're not willing to and this is kind of where, you know, I think studying somebody like Bismarck is so important.

00:42:07.980 Right. Because Bismarck is is a contemporary of Marx.

00:42:11.480 Right. And one thing that Bismarck understood, you know, his realpolitik is he looked at these socialist revolutions.

00:42:18.600 He saw what the people were really concerned about and he cut the legs out from under the socialists.

00:42:23.380 He said, OK, well, you're worried about, you know, retirement and pay if you get injured or something like that.

00:42:30.480 That 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.

00:42:37.980 And we could argue that, you know, he's sort of the precursor to the modern, you know, welfare state.

00:42:43.480 But 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?

00:42:57.520 Which kind of goes back to why we should look at Marx in the first place, you know?

00:43:02.500 Yeah. 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.

00:43:21.620 And 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.

00:43:33.100 Before 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.

00:43:40.860 And 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.

00:43:47.020 Can we continue to have creative destruction and stable hierarchical societies is is unbridled capital always going to bring us here?

00:44:03.200 Should 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?

00:44:24.180 No, I'm very much in the cyclical history camp.

00:44:29.600 I don't think that I think what we need to be doing is preparing for that system to collapse.

00:44:36.100 Now, I don't obviously don't mean in a Mad Max style.

00:44:39.980 I wrote a piece a while back on catabolic collapse because, in my opinion, that's where it's headed.

00:44:45.560 You know, you're going to see the power of the federal government recede more and more.

00:44:50.960 And 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.

00:45:00.380 I 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.

00:45:08.940 I think we need to prepare for the fact that it's probably inevitably going to slowly decline.

00:45:13.320 But in that decline, those opportunities are going to come.

00:45:17.240 And 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.

00:45:27.180 Because as catabolic collapse occurs, those positions that you get are going to increase in influence and power.

00:45:34.700 And 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.

00:45:45.600 Like it can only go so far and then it's going to fall in on itself.

00:45:49.300 Well, I certainly agree with that.

00:45:52.160 I said very much the same thing in my book, so I'm 100 percent on board with your analysis there.

00:45:58.720 All right, guys, we're going to move over to the questions of the people.

00:46:01.640 But before we do, John, can you tell people where to find your fiction, your nonfiction, everything you do?

00:46:08.640 Yes, of course.

00:46:09.340 Yeah, you can find all my writings at on Substack at Texas John Slaughter at Substack.

00:46:15.020 I'm on Twitter at John J. Slaughter Esquire.

00:46:19.300 I recently had a story published in both editions of The Double Dealer.

00:46:24.020 So if you don't know, The Double Dealer is a really great literary magazine that some of our guys have started back up.

00:46:31.380 So check that out when you can.

00:46:34.220 Fantastic.

00:46:34.900 All right, guys, well, we're going to go ahead and wrap things up here.

00:46:38.980 But I want to thank everybody for watching.

00:46:42.080 And of course, thank John for coming on.

00:46:44.480 If 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.

00:46:51.800 If it's your first time on this channel, you should go ahead and subscribe, turn on the notifications, click the bell because, you know, YouTube's like, oh, you subscribe to this guy.

00:47:00.460 But do you really want to watch him when he goes live?

00:47:02.360 So make sure that you go ahead and do that so that you can hang out with us while we're doing the shows.

00:47:06.980 Of course, if you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you can go ahead and subscribe to The Oren McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast network.

00:47:13.980 And then if you would like to go ahead and pick up my new book, The Total State, you can do that on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, and order it from your own local bookstore if you'd like to support them as well.

00:47:27.280 Thank you, everybody, for watching.

00:47:28.760 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

00:47:31.140 Thank you.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - June 24, 2024

Marxism and the Modern Right ｜ Guest：John Slaughter ｜ 6⧸24⧸24

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript