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Episode 448 - Class Struggle & Identity Politics

An interview with Marc James Léger

00:00 Introduction and Special Guest Announcement

00:13 Mark James Leger on Identity Politics

05:25 Personal Experiences and Public Secrets

10:21 The Impact of Identity Politics on Academia

14:22 Historical Context and Marxism

22:48 The Shift from Class to Identity Politics

29:29 The Professional Managerial Class and Cultural Shifts

40:45 Post-War Cultural Changes and Consumerism

53:32 Emergence of New Social Mores

54:16 The Cultural Impact of Barbie

54:54 Current State of Society

55:33 Challenges in Publishing

56:19 Slide1

56:28 Critique of Bernie Sanders' Campaign

58:02 Slide3

58:05 Obama's Official Portraits Controversy

59:51 Identity Politics and Class Struggle

59:51 Slide4

01:01:47 Slide5

01:03:43 The Rise of Fascism and Identity Politics

01:19:47 Slide12

01:21:28 Art and Identity in Academia

01:33:06 Slide6

01:37:08 Historical Perspectives on Art

01:39:11 Renaissance Humanism and Artistic Evolution

01:40:29 The Shift from Feudal to Bourgeois Art

01:41:39 Romanticism and the Bohemian Avant-Garde

01:43:22 The Rise of Autonomous Art and Van Gogh

01:45:30 Post-War Cultural Shifts and the Petty Bourgeoisie

01:49:06 The Professional Managerial Class and Identity Politics

01:55:41 The Left's Struggle with Class and Identity

02:11:10 Cultural Production and Critique in Modern Times

02:16:31 Slide30

02:17:27 Slide31

02:19:50 Slide33

02:22:59 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Marc on Academia

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Transcript
Trevor:

Welcome back to your listener.

Trevor:

This is the Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove podcast, episode 448.

Trevor:

Got a special one for you today.

Trevor:

It's not the usual panel.

Trevor:

It's just myself, Trevor, and a special guest.

Trevor:

I've got Mark James Leger, who is an author and an academic and a scholar

Trevor:

who talks a lot about Identity politics and, and the role of the

Trevor:

left in its approach to this and class politics and all that sort of stuff.

Trevor:

So Mark has written various books and articles and he's got a slide presentation

Trevor:

and we're going to really get into the weeds when it comes to identity politics

Trevor:

and what's happening in the world today.

Trevor:

So Mark, welcome to the podcast.

Marc:

Thank you.

Marc:

Thank you very much, Trevor.

Marc:

Um, and we're, we're fellow, um, Citizens are subjects of the Commonwealth.

Marc:

So that puts us in a kind of grim situation at this moment

Marc:

as we become kind of the axis of evil at this point in history.

Trevor:

The axis of evil in terms of identity politics or just in

Trevor:

terms of Western civilization?

Trevor:

Yeah,

Marc:

in terms of Western civilization and the role of Canada and the

Marc:

Commonwealth in the world today in terms of imperialism and imperialism.

Marc:

And, uh, Global Capitalism.

Trevor:

Yeah, we've got, uh, well our monarch is currently visiting Australia,

Trevor:

and I can't believe the number of people who are just falling over themselves to

Trevor:

see our king and queen, so uh, that's happening in Australia at the moment, so

Trevor:

yeah, so, so Mark, um, Before we get into it, do you want to just sort of say in

Trevor:

a nutshell your view on what's happened with the left and identity politics, just

Trevor:

as an overall sort of statement, if you like, before we get into details and,

Trevor:

uh, and maybe why you're so interested in this topic and maybe a little bit

Trevor:

of what you've done in terms of writing books and your efforts over the last

Trevor:

few years, just to sort of a broad brush before we get into the details.

Marc:

Um, sure.

Marc:

Um, as I mentioned to you previously, uh, what I'm going to do today is present a

Marc:

sort of, um, hard boiled detective, uh, version of this presentation in the sense

Marc:

that, um, you know, you have the Sherlock Holmes Uh, type of detective who's, um,

Marc:

kind of an Ivory Tower scholar, um, who's different from the, uh, Mike Hammer hard

Marc:

boiled detective of the film Noir Genre, where, uh, you usually have a working

Marc:

class, uh, detective who gets embroiled in a scenario in which he doesn't really know

Marc:

what's happening, but at a certain point, he knows too much, and, uh, he gets caught

Marc:

up, often roughed up in the process.

Marc:

And, um, so this is my case.

Marc:

Uh, this is, so I'm, I'm kind of offering a, a, a sort of a confessional.

Marc:

Or a, no, not a confessional, a confidential.

Marc:

Um, in the sense that what I'm talking about in my books and on an abstract

Marc:

level is also something that I've lived through, that I've experienced.

Marc:

Um, so, um, My interest, technically speaking, I'm not interested in

Marc:

identity politics, um, but I am interested in culture, and of course

Marc:

if you study contemporary art and art theory, um, you can't avoid

Marc:

identity politics and identity issues.

Marc:

They're not only the subject matter of much art, but it's also in terms

Marc:

of how you study art methodology.

Marc:

Um, it's essential in terms of your education.

Marc:

And, uh, because of that, you end up working in departments where

Marc:

people are coming to subjects.

Marc:

from a very subjective points of view.

Marc:

So you will be in a department with feminist instructors, feminist students,

Marc:

you have instructors who are gay, who are teaching queer theory, you have

Marc:

instructors who are teaching post colonial theory, um, and students who

Marc:

are non white, Uh, who may be Indigenous or Black or other, um, and so a lot of

Marc:

these, um, what we call academic culture wars have to do a little bit with the,

Marc:

the, the people who are creating this knowledge and the students who are going

Marc:

to take courses who are interested in it.

Marc:

And almost inevitably, as in any field, there's competition.

Marc:

And in some cases, the competition could be.

Marc:

Somewhat, um, intense, let's just say, and, um, political differences can often

Marc:

hinge on very, you know, what Freud refers to as the narcissism of minor differences,

Marc:

very small differences when you consider When all things are considered, um,

Marc:

but in theoretical terms, they can become sort of like dividing lines.

Marc:

And, uh, so you get this kind of intense, you know, departmental competition.

Marc:

Sometimes it's around new hires.

Marc:

Sometimes it's around, uh, visiting, um, scholars.

Marc:

It could be, Pretty much anything.

Marc:

And, uh, in my case, I've been living, uh, and this is difficult to explain because

Marc:

it, at a certain point, sounds, starts to sound like conspiracy theory or someone

Marc:

with a delusional disorder of some sort.

Marc:

Um, but I will tell you, and I've told other people this, that I've

Marc:

lived a life as a, um, the target of a public secret for 26 years.

Marc:

And it's a long time to be the target of a public secret.

Marc:

And what that is, is you have a small number of people and decide,

Marc:

they decide they're going to sort of give you a hard time, let's say.

Marc:

So you're the odd man out.

Marc:

What, what happens with a public secret is that this can spread to other people.

Marc:

And then that can spread to more people, and so you're constantly almost like,

Marc:

um, a Wicker Man, like that 1960s horror film, um, and, um, it's, it, it began in

Marc:

a context in which people are studying postmodern theory, and at that time there

Marc:

were shows like Survivor, Survivor, Like reality shows like Survivor Island and

Marc:

these kinds of things on television.

Marc:

And it's the sort of thing that you figure that, um, scholars who are studying

Marc:

these things are not going to enact these kinds of things in their daily life.

Marc:

But that's what happened to me.

Marc:

And so I was placed in a kind of simulation situation.

Marc:

Um, and, uh, you know, this was said to me directly, right?

Marc:

But, you know, if somebody tells you this and other people behave that way,

Marc:

there's not a lot that you can do.

Marc:

You can cry wolf and you can scream to the heavens, but not much is going to change.

Trevor:

So is this in the art world, you were an outsider because you

Trevor:

weren't in conforming to To the way of accepted thinking and, and the sort

Trevor:

of factions voted you off the island.

Trevor:

Is that what you're saying?

Marc:

Yeah, um, basically, yeah, it's, it's not so much that

Marc:

I was voted off the island.

Marc:

I was kept on the island, but I was made this sort of pariah, you could say.

Trevor:

Right.

Trevor:

Or, or

Marc:

the, the whipping boy.

Trevor:

Right.

Trevor:

Because of your views on what we're about to talk about with

Trevor:

identity politics and stuff, is it?

Trevor:

Right.

Trevor:

Or the approach to post modernism or whatever in the art world.

Marc:

Yeah, it could be many things.

Marc:

You'd have to ask the people who started this why.

Marc:

I mean, technically speaking, you don't need a reason.

Marc:

Um, there was a person before me in my program who had

Marc:

been the target of something.

Marc:

some of this kind of, um, you know, just gossip and what have you.

Marc:

And then it seemed to have, seems to have transferred to me, uh, as he

Marc:

moved out of the, out of the program.

Marc:

Um, but, uh, what happened is that eventually it became, it

Marc:

spread from one university to another, where I was working.

Marc:

Uh, after 9 11, I was basically chased out of Rochester, New York.

Marc:

I, I left my job in New York for the, for the sake of safety,

Marc:

personal safety, me and my ex wife.

Marc:

And I thought coming to Canada that that would stay behind me, but it managed to

Marc:

seep back in, it managed to follow me.

Marc:

And over the years, there's, there's been all kinds of, you know,

Marc:

shenanigans, you could say, around me.

Marc:

And at a certain point, um, it's a little bit like the Truman

Marc:

Show, if you've seen that film.

Trevor:

Uh huh.

Marc:

Except there's no one in charge.

Marc:

There's nobody, you know, pulling the strings.

Marc:

It's, it's, it's spread horizontally through social media and what have you.

Marc:

And, um, at a, at a certain point it became kind of like Breaking Bad.

Marc:

You know, here we have a person, you can treat him almost like

Marc:

a character in a reality show.

Marc:

What are we going to do with him?

Marc:

What could we make him do?

Marc:

How could we change him in some way?

Marc:

And, uh, this became very aggressive, very violent, there was a lot of criminality.

Marc:

At a certain point, especially around 2016, after 2016,

Marc:

things just became very nasty.

Marc:

So I don't know what the cause, like in terms of like what the reasoning

Marc:

was for the people who started it.

Marc:

Um, I don't, I don't think they know.

Marc:

People don't always have to have a reason to do something that's

Marc:

just, you know, You know, cynical.

Marc:

Um, but, um, over time, I, I kind of didn't talk about it

Marc:

for a long time because I was hoping it would just go away.

Marc:

Uh, but over time it just gets worse and worse at the point where you can't hold

Marc:

down a job, at the point where your mental health is at stake, at the point where

Marc:

you're being aggressed on the street.

Marc:

I, I, I can go to, um, just today to the supermarket and I will

Marc:

experience dozens of microaggressions.

Marc:

between my home and, and the supermarket.

Marc:

Um, so a lot of the things that we're talking about, uh, in terms of identity

Marc:

politics and wokeism and the excesses, I've experienced this in various ways.

Marc:

Uh, because my work as a Marxist does interfere with all of this, what you

Marc:

could refer to as post modern culture.

Marc:

I believe, I believe my

Trevor:

So the microaggressions are because you're perceived as, as a

Trevor:

crazy Marxist who's out to sort of bring communism about or something.

Trevor:

What are they saying, that you're a, like a pedophile or a, or a, a crazy communist

Trevor:

or what, what's, what's the actual?

Marc:

Well, we'll get to the pedophilia, we'll get to the pedophilia in a moment.

Trevor:

Oh, I don't, I mean, I was only, sorry, I was only just,

Trevor:

that's okay, just some, I wasn't really thinking we're genuinely

Trevor:

hitting that territory, but like,

Marc:

We will.

Marc:

We'll get there.

Trevor:

Um,

Marc:

but, but in Rochester, it could have been anything.

Marc:

It could have been because I'm French Canadian.

Marc:

It could have been because I'm working class.

Marc:

It could have been because I'm heterosexual, it could have been

Marc:

because I was the only married person in the program, that was odd to people.

Marc:

And it could have been just, I think, just pettiness, you know, it's a boring

Marc:

town and people are, uh, you know, working with high profile scholars and

Marc:

they feel a little bit like in a rut, so they find some way to have fun.

Marc:

That's someone's expense.

Marc:

And it just, it fell on me.

Marc:

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Trevor:

So, did that transition you from being a scholar in in art

Trevor:

to then a scholar in the topics that we're about to get into?

Trevor:

Is that sort of?

Trevor:

No, no, not at all.

Trevor:

And,

Marc:

um, I, I did, uh, I did a degree in history and then an MA in art history.

Marc:

Um, and this was in the nineties.

Marc:

I was reading a lot of postmodern theory.

Marc:

I had a, an inclination and an interest in knowing these things because

Marc:

those were the predominant, uh, movements in terms of intellectual.

Marc:

Um, trends, but also I have always had, uh, an interest in politics, in left

Marc:

politics and in Marxism in particular.

Marc:

So in that regard, when I was in the program in cultural studies,

Marc:

uh, it, it was actually a visual and cultural studies program.

Marc:

I was the odd man out to the extent that these ideas are considered passe.

Marc:

These ideas are considered, you know, dead white men kind of material.

Marc:

And I wasn't with the program when it came to getting rid of the Marxist approach.

Marc:

So, for me, it was a matter of how to, like, basically learning what I could,

Marc:

which was like, you know, courses on Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and, you know,

Marc:

how to get rid of the Marxist approach.

Marc:

Um, courses in various kinds of, uh, identity streams, queer theory, um,

Marc:

so I was in all of these classes, but I, but I kept a, a Marxist, you could

Marc:

say, resistance, um, to this knowledge.

Marc:

Um, so it was almost, for me, a, something parallel, right, so you would

Marc:

learn, you would learn what you could, but your investments remained leftist.

Marc:

Um, and I think, um,

Trevor:

I'm conscious I'm going to have to rein you in a little bit,

Trevor:

Mark, on some of these things.

Trevor:

So, just back to the initial one, in a nutshell, you've written some

Trevor:

books on, um, your latest one is Class Struggle and Identity Politics.

Trevor:

Prior to that, you edited a book, Identity Trumps Socialism, the Class

Trevor:

and Identity Debate After Neoliberalism.

Trevor:

So You know, what's the elevator pitch of the, of the ideas in this, in these

Trevor:

books that when people say, well, what do you, you know, what's that about?

Trevor:

And you've got 10 floors to tell them, what do you tell them?

Marc:

Right.

Marc:

Um, so as, um, somebody who's doing what's called militant research, engaged

Marc:

scholarship, uh, the question I ask myself, I mean, a lot of this has to do

Marc:

with ideas that were there in the 1990s.

Marc:

But what was interesting is, in the 90s, you couldn't talk about capitalism.

Marc:

You couldn't use the word capitalism in a class.

Marc:

Um, because it had just been pushed so, so, so far into the margins.

Marc:

Uh, but with, um, in the 2000s, with the 2008 banking crisis, with

Marc:

Occupy Wall Street, and the rise of a number of prominent scholars,

Marc:

including Hart and Negri on the anarchist left, and Slavoj Žižek and

Marc:

Alain Badiou on the communist left.

Marc:

There was a kind of renewal of interest in Marxism.

Marc:

David Harvey, uh, um, did a series of lectures on Reading Capital

Marc:

that went, that was online, a lot of people followed this.

Marc:

So people wanted to come back to some of the basics, you could say, and

Marc:

understood that post modernism had, had delivered us a kind of deficit

Marc:

in terms of political, um, traction.

Marc:

So there was a shift away from post modernism.

Marc:

Occupy Wall Street, in a way, kind of encapsulated that moment.

Marc:

And then soon afterwards, the way I understand it, Uh, the way I, I, I

Marc:

experienced it, there was kind of like a rush back to, well, wait a minute,

Marc:

post modernism post had always been interested in leftism, you know, like,

Marc:

let's, let's in some ways not get too far into this, you know, class reductionism.

Marc:

Let's keep the sort of intersectional combination of Identity issues

Marc:

and class issues connected.

Marc:

So the question for me, as wokeism, as we sometimes refer to it, developed,

Marc:

and you really saw the excesses of this kind of, um, uh, identity orientation,

Marc:

um, to what extent does identity politics today, um, affect the left?

Marc:

So what are the, you know, how, does it benefit the left?

Marc:

If not, why not?

Marc:

If so, how?

Marc:

And so in order to answer that question, you have to do a

Marc:

lot of historical analysis.

Marc:

I mean, anyone who's talking about these issues, they can go back to, you

Marc:

know, the Enlightenment era, the era of slavery, the entire 19th century.

Marc:

So you can always, in a way, Um, what's the, I don't, I don't want

Marc:

to say hedge, but you can kind of hedge your conversation with

Marc:

all of this historical material.

Marc:

Um, but if you do it as a Marxist, you would have to do it as a historical

Marc:

materialist, which means in some ways dealing with class struggle.

Marc:

Uh, if you do it as a Foucauldian, a discourse theorist, you can, in

Marc:

a way, place identity, let's say race, at the center of your analysis.

Marc:

So that becomes the placeholder around which everything else revolves.

Marc:

So you don't really have to question, um, the term or the concept in some

Marc:

cases, um, and uh, so for me, the discussion is kind of around the

Marc:

question of class struggle and the place of identity in relation to class

Marc:

struggle, histories of class struggle.

Marc:

And it's very easy to see if you, if you follow the conversation, it's very easy to

Marc:

see that even when the left is discussed.

Marc:

Um, you've discussed the book by Yasha Mounk.

Marc:

Um, it's called The Identity Trap.

Marc:

Um, even a book like Yasha Mounk's book, which discusses at times,

Marc:

you know, Marxism and some of these issues of dealing with class,

Marc:

they're really pushed to the side.

Marc:

They're, they're really, you know, marginalized.

Marc:

And that causes a lot of problems because on the one hand, it's It prevents you

Marc:

from understanding post modernism, which is, in a way, the definition

Marc:

of what he's saying is the identity synthesis, these are all post modern

Marc:

ideas, but you can't understand post modern ideas if you don't understand

Marc:

the Marxism they were reacting to

Trevor:

and

Marc:

in conversation with.

Marc:

And so you have a lot of intermediate, um, stages.

Marc:

So, for example, uh, Eurocommunism, the development of Eurocommunism in

Marc:

the post war period, the, the impact of World War II, the rise of, um, the

Marc:

counterculture, The student movement, in other words, all of the movements

Marc:

we associate with the New Left.

Marc:

Um, they were affinity groups that look a little bit like what we have

Marc:

today, except in the 60s, there was a strong sense of Marxism.

Marc:

There was a strong connection.

Marc:

Red Diaper Babies had parents who were in communist parties or who

Marc:

had fought, let's say, with, uh, the International during World War II.

Marc:

So there was a connection to the macro political left.

Marc:

Through the 70s and 80s, the counterculture became

Marc:

much more conservative.

Marc:

So by the 80s, the counterculture is something like yuppies.

Marc:

They're not hippies.

Trevor:

Is this kind of because stories come out of terrible things

Trevor:

that happened in the Soviet Union?

Trevor:

So people then went, okay, communism bad because gulags and

Trevor:

oppression in the Soviet era.

Trevor:

So that kind of put a bad light on Marxism or communism.

Trevor:

They were sort of thrown in as covered by that sort of oppression.

Trevor:

And I think maybe a little bit in the sort of 80s with Thatcher and Reagan, a lot

Trevor:

of privatisation took place and people cashed in on the sale of public assets.

Trevor:

And a lot of people kind of did okay out of that while, while the commons

Trevor:

was sold off, um, people who bought shares in these utility companies

Trevor:

that were privatised and things.

Trevor:

So, um, It was kind of a combination, I'm just suggesting, of, of, of bad news

Trevor:

coming out of Soviet Union about communism and Marxism, in a sort of a relatively

Trevor:

prosperous 80s period, um, whereby it was sort of then accepted, well, capitalism

Trevor:

and neoliberalism is the only economic, uh, sort of way forward and And it's only

Trevor:

in recent times maybe with the financial crisis and, and what's going on in the

Trevor:

world where there's perhaps a chance to revitalize Marxism or communism because

Trevor:

people are starting to recognize that capitalism has run out of, of low hanging

Trevor:

fruit and cheap tricks and is really starting to struggle in many places.

Trevor:

But what do you think of that?

Marc:

Well, it's fine, but it's very tight, right?

Marc:

It's, it's so tight.

Marc:

You know what you wanted, what you'd wanna do is you'd, you'd want

Marc:

to open it up and let it breathe.

Marc:

And you see a lot of elements there that, uh, you know, have been really condensed.

Marc:

Um, I mean, and I, I, I, I, I mentioned that Mo's book kind of does that, it's

Marc:

kind of a shorthand where Marxism equals a famine in China and a famine in Ukraine.

Marc:

And then that's kind of like the black book of communism.

Marc:

If you're anti-communist.

Marc:

That'll suit you fine, uh, but if, but if you're Marxist and if

Marc:

you're communist, well, there's, that story's more complicated.

Marc:

Um, but what I, what I'm really interested in is how it is that the left

Marc:

itself, right, in, in, um, developed countries, um, which isn't the same,

Marc:

the case everywhere, but how, how the left itself in developed countries,

Marc:

Abandoned that project, how it turned away from class, very deliberately,

Marc:

labor parties, new democrats, but also communists, um, Euro communists, how

Marc:

they turned away from the basic insights of Marxism, and they ceased to be uh,

Marc:

revolutionary parties, they ceased to be committed to Marxism, except in name.

Marc:

Um, so that's kind of, that, that's sort of what interests me, the cultural aspects

Marc:

of this at the same time, you know.

Marc:

The development of identity politics, and that, that would include for me

Marc:

things like ecology, uh, it would include new age kind of movements.

Marc:

It doesn't have to be strictly identitarian, but they're basically

Marc:

single issue approaches to politics.

Trevor:

So, so why, why did the left shift from, from class to identity?

Marc:

Well, um, one, one, um, Question that interests me is that today, when

Marc:

you talk about class, maybe not so much now, but at least 15, 20 years ago,

Marc:

there was this kind of prevalent idea that we live in a classless society.

Marc:

And this goes back to the 1970s.

Marc:

It's not, it's, or even the 60s.

Marc:

Um, that was the, one explanation for this that I like, that I'm interested

Marc:

in, but I differ on certain points, is, um, a person called Barbara Ehrenreich,

Marc:

who wrote a book called Fear of Falling.

Marc:

And in the 1970s, her and her husband, John Ehrenreich, at that time her

Marc:

husband, um, co authored an essay called, um, The Professional Managerial Class.

Marc:

So, they invented a term to describe a way of thinking about the middle

Marc:

class, the professional class.

Marc:

And, um, it's not something that, um, was invented in the 60s, it goes

Marc:

back to the turn of the century.

Marc:

So, professionalism and the professional class really develops around 1900.

Marc:

So, it's the managerial class and it's basically You know, a class that

Marc:

you can distinguish from the majority of working people, as well as the

Marc:

majority of upper class owners of the means of production, basically

Marc:

the capitalist and bourgeois class.

Marc:

And they're in the middle, they're about 20 percent of the population, and so

Marc:

from a strict Marxist point of view, the middle class is working class, because

Marc:

they don't own the means of production.

Marc:

They're employees.

Marc:

even though they're salaried employees, so they have more income than most

Marc:

working people, and they also do work that is a little bit less tedious, a

Marc:

little bit less repetitive, requires more education, more cultural background,

Marc:

and these kinds of things, which makes it so that the middle class often

Marc:

doesn't identify as working class.

Marc:

They rather aspire to being part of the bourgeoisie.

Marc:

So their sense of culture is bourgeois, and they basically come up with a

Marc:

lot of different ways to distinguish themselves from regular working people.

Marc:

And so Barbara Ehrenreich wanted to, uh, answer the question, how is it

Marc:

that the, the PMC, the professional managerial class, went from being

Marc:

relatively and largely progressive in the 1960s to hyper conservative?

Marc:

in the 1980s.

Marc:

Um, so that's an interesting question, uh, that we could get into,

Marc:

uh, further, but I think that's, that's, that's part of the answer.

Marc:

But there were obviously structural, uh, developments that made the professional

Marc:

class change in some ways with regard to the question of this broader universalism,

Marc:

a broader sense of Their, their mission and service is not to themselves as a

Marc:

class, but rather to society as a whole.

Marc:

And so that's one thing that shifted.

Marc:

The PMC became more of a, a class for itself in that, in that time period.

Marc:

And so that's where we get this kind of sense of like being managed by

Marc:

a technocratic class that's post representational, post political.

Marc:

They no longer stand for politics because they no longer stand

Marc:

for things that are universal.

Marc:

And, um, In that sense, they, they've abandoned the ideals of the Enlightenment,

Marc:

but in a paradoxical, in a strange way, they've reproduced the Enlightenment.

Marc:

Because, whereas, after, um, Enlightenment, you no

Marc:

longer had a feudal monarchy.

Marc:

You only had two classes, first and second class, right?

Marc:

In some places, you go to England in some places, and you see

Marc:

buildings from 1900, and there's two entrances, and it says, you know,

Marc:

first class entrance, second class.

Marc:

Um, and, you know, this was part of also the Marxist language, right?

Marc:

Marxism defined everything in this two class system.

Marc:

proletariat bourgeoisie.

Marc:

Um, so with the, with the, the rise to what I would say, predominance of the

Marc:

middle class, the petty bourgeoisie, in the post war period, because of

Marc:

the disasters of World War II, of disasters of Stalinism, disasters of

Marc:

fascism, a lot of young people who were from the middle class, they turned

Marc:

against the middle class because they didn't want to work for capitalism.

Marc:

They didn't want to work for the man, you know, in the 60s sense.

Marc:

Um, and so they were criticizing their class, but at As

Marc:

members of that class, right?

Marc:

Not as, not necessarily as communists.

Marc:

Um, and so this is kind of like an internal revolution within trying

Marc:

to change society by changing lifestyle, by changing, you know, what

Marc:

you're going to do on the weekend.

Marc:

Uh, not in terms of organizing in a mass movement.

Marc:

Um, so it was this kind of like almost, uh, sort of like hippie dream

Marc:

kind of idea of a utopia, right?

Marc:

And so, um, At that point, um, a lot of political parties

Marc:

are thinking in the same way.

Marc:

They're thinking, how do we address, you know, people who don't want to work in a

Marc:

factory, people who would prefer to have more leisure time, who are conditioned

Marc:

to a great extent by consumer culture.

Marc:

They're influenced by rock music.

Marc:

They're influenced by drugs.

Marc:

Um, they don't want the lifestyle of their parents.

Marc:

They don't want the Protestant work ethic.

Marc:

They don't want the Puritanism.

Marc:

And so there's a sexual revolution.

Marc:

There's the feminist revolution.

Marc:

Um, and so parties start to realign or redefine how they

Marc:

think of their constituencies.

Marc:

So we have the point today where the Democratic Party does not have a vision

Marc:

for politics except for the donor class, uh, which is kind of behind everything.

Marc:

But on the front, they Um, there's no, there's no vision for society.

Marc:

It's just all of this piecemeal, fragmented, identitarian, um,

Marc:

virtue signaling to different groups as it, as they come along.

Marc:

Um, so, you know, the, the, it's not only the left that has abandoned

Marc:

universalism, neoliberalism as such has abandoned universalism.

Trevor:

So there was a period where there was a professional managerial class

Trevor:

that did have its eye on The community overall and, and a class based sort of

Trevor:

approach to things that changed that.

Trevor:

So there was one at one point you're saying sort of pre in, in the first.

Trevor:

Half of the, of the 1900s, and then a change sort of Well, let's say in the 60s,

Marc:

in the 60s, this is, from the 60s to the 80s, you can see this shift.

Marc:

And of course, you know, the, the, the revelations of Stalinist

Marc:

crimes in the 1940s played a huge part on an intellectual level.

Marc:

But on a broad, on a broad mass level, let's say for the middle class, um,

Marc:

there was a sense, I mean, um, Aaron Reich makes a great deal of the 1968

Marc:

Democratic Party, National Democratic Party Convention in Chicago, where

Marc:

Mayor Daley, you know, brought out the police and beat up all the protesters.

Marc:

Kind of what's happening now with the students who are

Marc:

protesting the genocide in Gaza.

Marc:

And what she argues is that the media Uh, discovered that a lot of the silent

Marc:

majority, uh, middle America, working class Americans, were not on board with

Marc:

this, with this student rebellion, that they didn't approve of it necessarily.

Marc:

And so, um, there was this kind of like reflection, well,

Marc:

How did we get that wrong?

Marc:

How did we, we were all, all in with the students, but the rest of

Marc:

America doesn't support them, so, you know, what did, what did we miss?

Marc:

And so then there was this kind of investment in, um, the idea

Marc:

of the working man, um, the blue collar working class male.

Marc:

So, what she's arguing is some of this is a projection.

Marc:

Right, so it became kind of convenient to think that the working class is

Marc:

not with this new left tendency.

Marc:

When in actuality, it was more than the journalists and the reporters and

Marc:

the media realized or cared to know.

Marc:

But, it provided a convenient explanation.

Marc:

Um, and it was, and so then you get the creation of television

Marc:

characters like Archie Bunker.

Marc:

And you get this stereotype of the working class, the blue collar working

Marc:

class, as being sexist, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and not

Marc:

really with, you know, not, not sort of a philistine, not cosmopolitan.

Marc:

Um, and this served the conservatives, the neoconservatives who were coming

Marc:

into being at that time, uh, because it said that here we have a base for our

Marc:

conservative politics, even though they misrecognized that base, even though

Marc:

to a great extent, they created it.

Marc:

Um, they, they, it was useful.

Marc:

And we saw the same thing repeat itself in 2016 when Trump got elected for

Marc:

many years Articles in the Atlantic or the Nation or whatever it was.

Marc:

The New York Times, the Washington Post were talking about this kind

Marc:

of racist, uh, working class.

Marc:

So, kind of a scapegoat character.

Marc:

And, um, the, uh, the parallel to that was that the liberal class,

Marc:

uh, is an elite, corrupt class that is mostly self interested.

Marc:

They're not, uh, oriented towards, you know, what you can do for your country.

Marc:

In fact, they just think about themselves.

Marc:

And so the, it was creating this, I, this target, the liberal elite, that served

Marc:

the new right, which was a political phenomenon that attached itself to

Marc:

the, the neoconservative intellectuals.

Marc:

And the new right did something that, um, the conservatives hadn't done previously.

Marc:

Previously the Conservatives were running on policies like small

Marc:

government, less taxes, um, less foreign involvement, um, you know, the

Marc:

typical kind of fis like conservative policies, business interests, uh, cut

Marc:

government spending on social programs and welfare and these kinds of policies.

Marc:

But what the new right added to this conservative tradition, let's

Marc:

say, is a whole host of cultural points, of cultural issues.

Marc:

So you would add to that, uh, Family values, traditional values, uh, hard

Marc:

work, and so, you know, the working man represented this kind of like hard

Marc:

work ideal that is shared between the capitalists and the average person

Marc:

that's not shared ostensibly by the hippies and the new left and the

Marc:

liberal elites, the cappuccino slurping, uh, yuppies and, and those people.

Marc:

Um, well, maybe not yuppies, actually, because the yuppies

Marc:

were the, the result of all this.

Marc:

Um, but, um, So, you know, uh, uh, religious values, uh, um, traditional,

Marc:

uh, marriage arrangements, all these kinds of patriotism, all these kind of cultural

Marc:

points that you can attach to traditional conservative, um, policy points

Marc:

that were not necessarily previously popular with working class people.

Marc:

And that was kind of a construction, it was a gambit, it was like,

Marc:

let's, let's go with this.

Marc:

See how, how far we can take this and if, if they'll take the bait, basically.

Marc:

Um, and so with that, you have then the makings for the response, which

Marc:

we're dealing with now in terms of the quote unquote postmodern left.

Marc:

Uh, the postmodern left reacts to all of these points, right, against all of this,

Marc:

Family values, like, you know, let's go back to women in, in the home, uh, gays

Marc:

in the closet, um, you know, racism, xenophobia, um, so it reacts, it reacts to

Marc:

this in a way that's kind of tailor made.

Marc:

as an analog, as an opposition.

Trevor:

And

Marc:

when you, and when you end up with this kind of culture war

Marc:

material, which was hugely popular in the 1980s and 90s, if you look at

Marc:

culture in the 80s, it's all, it's all culture war, um, left and right.

Marc:

And, um, so then you get into this kind of like bipartisan, uh, situation that

Marc:

we have today with the, the neoliberals, Seemingly progressive, so you can

Marc:

have extremely conservative Liberals or Democrats who are progressive on

Marc:

social issues, but on everything else, they're basically imposing neoliberal,

Marc:

neoconservative, not even neoliberal, but neocon think tank policies.

Trevor:

Yeah, on economic matters and foreign policy, there's not

Trevor:

a lot between them, both parties.

Marc:

Exactly, yeah.

Trevor:

And the same here in Australia, and no doubt.

Trevor:

And, and, yes, the differences are in the bedroom issues these

Trevor:

days, um, social issues, yeah.

Trevor:

You mentioned that there was And bedroom

Marc:

issues, integration, um, we talk about racial integration.

Marc:

Should we have sexual integration?

Marc:

Should we, should we eliminate the boundary between heterosexuality

Marc:

and homosexuality as some queer radicals would advocate?

Trevor:

You mentioned earlier that it was in the interests of the

Trevor:

professional managerial class.

Trevor:

to shift in this direction, but if in the 60s, 70s, they were still at that

Trevor:

point, um, white, well educated, um, uh, heterosexual mostly What was it,

Trevor:

was it a selfish thing for them to want to broaden, um, acceptance of, of other

Trevor:

races and other gender identities and other sexual preferences and things, um?

Trevor:

Of course not.

Marc:

Yeah.

Marc:

Um, when, when the communists came to power in the Soviet Union in 1917,

Marc:

they, um, legalized sodomy, they made divorce on demand possible.

Marc:

Um, they made, um, abortion available on demand.

Marc:

Uh, they, they passed laws against, uh, racism.

Marc:

Um, so a lot of these issues that we associate with the 60s are much older.

Marc:

Um, so what happens in the 19 in the post war period that isn't the same

Marc:

as previously is the, the civil rights tradition, let's say, from the 50s,

Marc:

the black civil rights tradition, is organically connected to the labor

Marc:

movement, and much anti racism in the United States in the first half of

Marc:

the 20th century was oriented towards communist parties, supported by

Marc:

communist parties, um, with all kinds of, like, difficulties and tensions.

Marc:

I'm not saying it was an easy connection, but it existed as such.

Marc:

So if you were anti racist in the 30s, a person might call you a communist,

Marc:

for example, because the two things were associated and well understood.

Marc:

And with fascism, of course, this kind of racism, this kind of discrimination,

Marc:

becomes, you know, anathema for liberal democracies, even though it persists,

Marc:

right, with Jim Crow, for example.

Marc:

Um But, um, from my perspective, what you, what really changes in the post

Marc:

war period from the previous is that in the 1920s and 30s, let's say, there

Marc:

was a strong sense, if you were working class, there was a strong sense that

Marc:

you belonged to that class and that you didn't belong to, with the well to do.

Marc:

You were on the wrong side of the tracks.

Marc:

You understood that and you fought from that side.

Trevor:

Can I just interrupt?

Trevor:

My father was very working class and, um, my, uh, siblings and I do not

Trevor:

have middle names because my father considered we were working class stock

Trevor:

and middle names were for rich people.

Trevor:

Upper class people.

Trevor:

So, uh, that was, that was his identity, that we were working class, and that was

Trevor:

one of the identifiers of the working class, was to not have a middle name.

Trevor:

You're

Marc:

the Iron Fist, right?

Trevor:

Yes,

Marc:

yes.

Marc:

And so the other fist is the Velvet Glove?

Trevor:

Yeah, Scott is the Velvet Glove, yes.

Trevor:

Yeah, okay, but,

Marc:

but you're one body, no?

Trevor:

In terms of the name of the podcast, is that what you mean?

Marc:

I'm, I'm, I'm just, uh, I have a middle name because, um, I went to a high

Marc:

school where there were five Marc Legers.

Trevor:

Right,

Marc:

yep.

Marc:

So, um, there was, um, Marc Legers.

Marc:

So we needed to distinguish ourselves in one way.

Marc:

So there was Mark Paul Leger.

Marc:

Um, there was Mark, myself, James, also known as Jimmy and Jim Bob.

Marc:

Yeah.

Marc:

Um, Mark Beans, Mark Jaime, who's a tall guy, uh, with black hair, um, who's

Marc:

named after a character on the TV show.

Marc:

That gets smart.

Trevor:

Yep.

Trevor:

Yep.

Marc:

And then there was this other guy called Mark Leger.

Marc:

Who didn't have, nobody used a middle name for him, he just kind of was nondescript.

Trevor:

Right.

Marc:

And so, like, he's probably on a beach in Florida

Marc:

somewhere today, taking it easy.

Trevor:

Yeah, anyway, sorry, I interrupted you because I was just, um, when you

Trevor:

were saying people were aware of their class, um, my father certainly was, yes.

Marc:

Yeah, and it changes a lot in the post war period because a lot of the

Marc:

working class in the post war period is, is being kind of, um, treated a

Marc:

little bit like, not a threat, right?

Marc:

More like a childish class that's sort of susceptible to, you know,

Marc:

whatever and kind of delinquent.

Marc:

Um, so in the post war era, a lot of the culture is petty bourgeois in a sense that

Marc:

it's not trying to do something grand, masterful, Like in the tradition of high

Marc:

art, museum art, but it's doing something that's pop cultural, like the Beatles.

Marc:

And so it's, it's really sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and all of these

Marc:

things are associated with delinquency.

Marc:

And this really serves the ruling class perfectly, because their only worry about

Marc:

the working class is, is their children.

Marc:

and the delinquency, the graffiti that they might do, but they're not really

Marc:

interested in changing the system.

Marc:

So you had a lot of this with the beatniks who, for example, on Ken Casey's bus, you

Marc:

know, the bus was, the bus wasn't going anywhere, it just said further, right?

Marc:

So we're just along for the ride, we're on a trip, and we

Marc:

don't know where it's going.

Marc:

So this kind of like replaces the modernist utopias of the early

Marc:

20th century because they had turned out to be so disastrous.

Marc:

And so the, the 60s left, the May 68 kind of, this generation of 68, they

Marc:

were neither Washington nor, nor Moscow.

Marc:

They wanted nothing to do with capitalism and nothing to do with

Marc:

communism in terms of a state project.

Marc:

Um, so a lot of the postmodern thinkers that we were discussing, um, they were

Marc:

on the one hand leftists, but they didn't want to be indoctrinated into

Marc:

what they referred to as Diamant, which was this Orthodox reading of dialectical

Marc:

materialism, and the primer on this, uh, materialism was written by Stalin.

Marc:

He wrote a, an essay, Historical and Dialectical Materialism, which

Marc:

is a perfectly good explanation of Marxist theory in a nutshell.

Marc:

Perfect for education.

Marc:

Perfect for secondary school education.

Trevor:

And they didn't want that because?

Marc:

Uh, well, for one thing, it's unsophisticated.

Marc:

And Marx is a towering figure, an intellectual figure of the 19th century.

Marc:

You can't understand Marx if you can't understand Hegel,

Marc:

and you can't understand Hegel.

Marc:

You try to understand Hegel, but it's very difficult, right?

Marc:

So, German idealism is the premise for Marxist theory, which is why Marxism

Marc:

has nothing in common with any set of instructions, any kind of instrumental

Marc:

knowledge on how to get from A to Z.

Marc:

It's not utopian socialism.

Marc:

It isn't pragmatic.

Marc:

It isn't mechanistic, because it's Hegelian in inspiration.

Marc:

When you say it's

Trevor:

Hegelian, what do you mean?

Marc:

It's influenced by the ideas of Hegel, who's a German philosopher.

Trevor:

Which means?

Marc:

It means that, um, I mean, the sort of, the tradition of philosophy

Marc:

that is before the Enlightenment is referred to sometimes as metaphysics.

Marc:

Or, or naturalism in the sciences and in philosophy.

Marc:

So this is the Baroque era, the 1600s.

Marc:

In the 1700s, you have the development of the enlightenment, which is,

Marc:

uh, based on a critique, right?

Marc:

You have the right and the ability to critique, um, the powers that be.

Marc:

And you know, you had salons in the 18th century where enlightened despots

Marc:

would invite bourgeois philosophers to, to discuss these kinds of things.

Marc:

Sort of

Trevor:

rational thought could work things out.

Marc:

That was the idea, but from the point of view of, of the

Marc:

bourgeois, the bourgeois thinker, not from the point of view of the

Marc:

enlightened despot who is merely entertaining them for the fun of it.

Marc:

Right.

Marc:

Um, but I wouldn't want to overestimate rational thought,

Marc:

even among enlightenment.

Marc:

Uh, thinkers, especially if you think of, uh, people like Schiller

Marc:

or, uh, Immanuel Kant and Hegel.

Marc:

Those are three of the, the more sort of influential thinkers because

Marc:

they're, they're not postmodern anti foundationalists, but at the level of

Marc:

philosophy, they're post metaphysics.

Marc:

So, what they're moving away from is the dualism that had defined

Marc:

thought for so long, largely due to its anchoring in religious thought.

Marc:

So the notion of universal moves away from this kind of, uh, uh, Saint

Marc:

Paul idea of, you know, there's no, there's no Jew or Gentile, we're all

Marc:

God's children, we're all part of the same spiritual, um, substance.

Marc:

You move away to some extent from this idea and you move more towards this notion

Marc:

of subject, which is a very abstract idea.

Marc:

It's, it's almost religious, uh, but it's, it's trying to, in a way, get

Marc:

away from superstition and dogma.

Marc:

Um, so you have a subject of, of becoming, basically.

Marc:

In, in Kant's, uh, terms, it's the kingdom of ends.

Marc:

In other words, you have the idea.

Marc:

The idea that you, society is a project in this Rousseau social

Marc:

contract sense that, uh, we can create our own destiny, that there isn't a

Marc:

divine providence that has already decided what that project would be.

Marc:

Now you had these debates already between Catholics and Protestants

Marc:

to, to whatever extent, free will and determinism, but now this whole

Marc:

dichotomy is taken out of the religious, uh, And it's brought into a quote

Marc:

unquote scientific realm, so that's it.

Trevor:

Sorry, just circling back, we're at the late 60s, and you said that they

Trevor:

didn't want a sort of a Marxist communism, and they didn't want a Marxist state.

Trevor:

Capitalism, is that right?

Trevor:

In the late 60s?

Trevor:

But they kind of got to the capitalism anyway by the time they got to the 80s.

Trevor:

Yeah, yeah.

Marc:

So just on that, on that, that thought.

Marc:

Was that the

Trevor:

triumph of just Thatcher and And, um, economists from the Chicago School

Trevor:

and propaganda, sort of, um, amongst, no?

Trevor:

No, this

Marc:

is, this is before, uh, Thatcher.

Marc:

I mean, it's almost kind of what made Thatcher in some ways possible.

Marc:

It became, Thatcher was possible because the left had already

Marc:

abandoned its revolutionary project.

Marc:

It had become reformist.

Marc:

And so the conservatives, what they did is they, they saw an opening.

Marc:

You know, they thought, well, they're abandoning the working class, we can like,

Marc:

find a way to, to get them to identify, on the one hand, through patriotism,

Marc:

you know, Thatcher invaded the Falkland Islands for the sake of, you know, Iraq,

Marc:

And so that gave a lot of people this sense of like, you know, um, make England

Marc:

great again, kind of like empire thinking.

Marc:

Um, but, uh, so, you know, that's just like, uh, that's chicken feed, right?

Marc:

In terms of like what you're getting from it.

Marc:

You're getting basically what, uh, W.

Marc:

E.

Marc:

B.

Marc:

Du Bois refers to as a psychological wage.

Marc:

You know, meanwhile, uh, the strength, the organized labor is being decimated.

Marc:

Meanwhile, uh, you're, you're in the process of de industrializing.

Marc:

You're moving in the direction of de industrialization and globalization.

Marc:

But, you know, before that became kind of more, uh, um, concrete.

Marc:

But the, the whole, what interests me is in the post war period, like

Marc:

starting in the 40s and 50s, um, and you have this, you know, kind of

Marc:

coinciding with McCarthyism, for example.

Marc:

Um, I mean, you had, of course, before all that, you had basically The

Marc:

eradication of the organized left with the Taft Hartley Act, with the anti

Marc:

communism, you know, leftists had been, um, chased out of the country, put in

Marc:

prison, um, and then at the same time, after World War II, A lot of these

Marc:

Nazi figures were, you know, brought into North American and Western nations

Marc:

and given kind of like, uh, havens.

Marc:

And so, you know, you had a very deeply capitalistic, deeply anti worker tendency.

Marc:

And so the problem is, is that the left that had supported The resistance to this

Marc:

and the promise of a different system, a better system, was on the one hand, uh,

Marc:

sidelined by Keynesianism, on the one hand, because you had what's known as

Marc:

Les Trente Glorieuses, the, the 30 years of post war prosperity where people's,

Marc:

um, standard of living was increasing year by year, right, in the 50s and 60s.

Marc:

If you were working class You were, you were doing quite well.

Marc:

You could have a house in the suburbs.

Marc:

You could have a house and a car and a nuclear family, uh, and cars

Marc:

were, were, were cheaper every year.

Marc:

Right?

Marc:

Household goods, like refrigerators, were becoming cheaper every

Marc:

year for quite a while.

Marc:

So, um, consumer culture in the West, advertising, was all about

Marc:

eradicating the tradition of working class thrift and self dependence.

Marc:

Um, and getting workers to buy into the fact that, you know, if I'm a company

Marc:

man, Uh, my wages will go up, I'll be able to buy a car, and that's good for

Marc:

my family, and they'll be able to go to school, they'll be able to go to

Marc:

college, which I never was able to do.

Marc:

And so they saw that prosperity in that period.

Marc:

It's really with the 1970s and the economic decline that that starts

Marc:

to be brought into question and then the conservatives have to find a new

Marc:

approach in order to continue making the money that they want to make.

Marc:

But taking some away from welfarism, some away from wages.

Marc:

And so wages have stagnated effectively since that time.

Trevor:

Um,

Marc:

but at the same time, um, and this is what interests me as a cultural

Marc:

theorist, as somebody who studies art at the same time, you have, like, was

Marc:

what I was mentioning previously with high art, like before World War II.

Marc:

There was low art and high art, and you had these kind of like posh spaces like

Marc:

museums and the opera house, um, and workers didn't go to those places, mostly.

Marc:

Um, they may, they may have, they could have if they wanted to, because these

Marc:

were public institutions, like public libraries, but they disidentified.

Marc:

Because they weren't seen as places for them.

Marc:

Uh, in the post war period, with, um, television, advertising, and marketing,

Marc:

and the baby boomer generation, which was the first generation to be advertised

Marc:

to directly as a youth market, you had an identification with consumerism.

Marc:

And so, consumerism is, is not going to offer you Avant garde art.

Marc:

It's not going to offer you Brechtian theatre.

Marc:

It's not going to offer you the most surrealist or, uh,

Marc:

informalist kinds of art.

Marc:

Those are really rare and we only really started studying

Marc:

those things in the 1980s.

Marc:

Um, and so what you have is a development of a petty bourgeois

Marc:

culture, um, a middle class culture.

Marc:

Which is competing with the upper class tradition of high art and high everything.

Marc:

Now if you look at it historically, you realize that even the high

Marc:

things were not so exclusive.

Marc:

But nevertheless, that is part of people's perception of high low.

Marc:

So well before post modernism tried to blur the boundaries between popular

Marc:

culture and high art, let's 1980s, um, well before that, The culture that was

Marc:

dominant, uh, hegemonic, was no longer the culture of the bourgeoisie, it

Marc:

was the culture of the middle class.

Marc:

And so the middle class in the US especially began to see itself as the

Marc:

definition of American culture, like as if it was universal, ignoring the difference

Marc:

between themselves and the working class.

Marc:

What the working class does is basically what we're doing.

Marc:

They'll do it tomorrow or in a few years.

Marc:

Um, you know, they'll catch up, they're late adopters.

Marc:

And so what the working, what the middle class becomes.

Marc:

really good at, they become specialists at this, um, in terms of them being,

Marc:

you know, more cultured and educated, is the creation of new social mores.

Marc:

In addition to, uh, let's say inventions in science and technology and engineering,

Marc:

in the level, at the level of culture, inventing new things that you can do.

Marc:

So, for example, um, you could have, instead of a nuclear

Marc:

family, you could have threesomes.

Marc:

Yep.

Marc:

Uh, you could go to orgies.

Marc:

Uh, you could have, you could get a hula hoop for your kids.

Marc:

You know, these things are almost in the same kind of nudist beaches.

Marc:

Uh, Playboy magazine.

Marc:

They're all in the same kind of headspace of the culture, uh, which is one of the

Marc:

reasons I was, um, mentioning the Barbie, uh, to you because, uh, when Barbie first

Marc:

appeared in 1959, she was very racy as a doll, if you compared her to the, to

Marc:

the dolls on the market at that time.

Marc:

It was sexy.

Marc:

She was wearing a bathing suit.

Marc:

She wasn't a Victorian doll, which is a child, basically, which, which encourages

Marc:

the girl, the little girl to be more like a mother towards the doll, rather than

Marc:

imagining herself becoming a sexual being.

Trevor:

Hmm.

Trevor:

Hmm.

Trevor:

So, um, So we've been dealing with our kind of history of, of progression,

Trevor:

particularly through the 1900s.

Trevor:

So, I don't know, Mark, is this a point where we want to start talking

Trevor:

about where are we at right now?

Trevor:

And, um, or I'm open to you, if you want to talk about some of your

Trevor:

slides or, um, what do you think?

Trevor:

Where do you want to go?

Marc:

Yeah.

Marc:

I think if I, if I bring in the slides, uh, we'll be able to discuss

Marc:

some of the points where we are now.

Trevor:

Yeah, yep.

Marc:

Um, so, okay, so this has been an hour.

Marc:

I'm going to, I'm going to skip my diatribes about my, my books, um, because

Marc:

I had great difficulty publishing my books that are, it's related to this public

Marc:

secret, um, and my books have become a way for people to torture me, basically,

Marc:

at this point, by putting typos in them by reversing some of the things that

Marc:

I've said so that, um, you know, when I, when I sign off on a design PDF for

Marc:

publication, basically the last draft before it goes to print, I get something

Marc:

back that I didn't actually agree on.

Marc:

So this, this is part of the shenanigans, and also having

Marc:

difficulty finding publishers.

Marc:

So, uh, anyways, I'm gonna cut that diatribe short, but Okay, for people

Trevor:

who, for people who are only listening to the audio of

Trevor:

this, uh, on the screen we've got a book, Bernie Bros Gone Woke.

Trevor:

So, um, basically, your critique of Bernie Sanders campaign and

Trevor:

Mixing class with identity didn't work, or he didn't, is that right?

Marc:

Yeah, yes and, yes and no.

Marc:

Um, on the one hand, Bernie Sanders as an individual, um, his, um, platform,

Marc:

his, his, his approach to issues was always the same from, you know,

Marc:

before 2016 through, through to 2020.

Marc:

Um, but because of the criticism, Black Lives Matter criticism, um, of his

Marc:

first, uh, campaign and also because Hillary Clinton Was, was referring

Marc:

to his campaign as Bernie bros.

Marc:

These are all like these socialist white males, um, trying to sort of like get

Marc:

the edge on Sanders through identity.

Marc:

Um, they emphasize identity issues in the campaign of 2020, especially

Marc:

at the level of advertising.

Marc:

So the book is a little bit addressing this, this issue,

Marc:

but it does a lot of things.

Marc:

One of the things that it talks about is the PMC, the

Marc:

professional managerial class.

Marc:

What does it want?

Marc:

Um, why does it operate this way?

Marc:

So it, some of what we were talking about is discussed here.

Marc:

And also, um, the fallout of the, the, how, how Bernie Sanders was

Marc:

pushed out of the, um, election race.

Marc:

Um, and I just, I have, this is the same book, but it's

Marc:

also available, uh, paperback.

Trevor:

And then you had another one, Too Black to File.

Marc:

Too Black to Fail, which is a book about the Obama portraits.

Marc:

Every president has official portraits made before leaving office, and

Marc:

Obama hired two post modern artists.

Marc:

The Obamas and the White House hired two post modern artists.

Marc:

One is Kehinde Wiley.

Marc:

I was bringing this up too in relation to academic freedom.

Marc:

Normally when you request images, As an art historian, for an

Marc:

essay or a book, the artists will ask you for a copy of the book.

Marc:

They may ask you for a fee, but they will not ask you to read your

Marc:

manuscript and to vet your manuscript.

Marc:

So just in terms of academic freedom, these artists, Amy Sherald and

Marc:

Kehinde Wiley refused me images of these paintings, even though they're

Marc:

in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, which is a public

Marc:

collection, and they were paid anywhere between 300, 000 and 500,

Marc:

000 a piece for each of the works.

Marc:

So even though they were well paid, even though these works

Marc:

are in public collections, I wouldn't, I wasn't given permission.

Marc:

to use those images because I didn't allow them to vet the manuscript as a

Marc:

condition for receiving those images.

Trevor:

Presumably that they'd done a portrait, they were, um, had a favourable

Trevor:

view towards the Obamas, and they knew that you were going to write a book

Trevor:

that was not going to be favourable.

Trevor:

Is that?

Trevor:

I think judging by that,

Marc:

yeah, and because I'm this, um, I'm this public figure, um, freak show,

Marc:

reality show, they probably know more about me than I, than I would guess.

Trevor:

Yeah.

Trevor:

Okay.

Trevor:

And then there was, uh, Identity Trump Socialism, which is a

Trevor:

collection of essays that you edited.

Marc:

Correct.

Marc:

And, uh, the subtitle was changed, but the original is The Politics

Marc:

of Emancipatory Universality.

Marc:

So that's, uh, when we talk about universality, I distinguish the

Marc:

universality we have, which is the universality of liberal capitalism, and

Marc:

the universality that is emancipatory.

Marc:

If you consider that liberal capitalism is a system of domination, then you would

Marc:

want to, uh, create a new universality, one that is better than the one we have.

Marc:

The contributors to this book are, uh, leading, leading scholars on the left,

Marc:

um, so, um, that includes, um, just quickly, Alain Bruno Bastille, Barbara

Marc:

Foley, Vivek Chibber, Nancy Fraser, Adolph Reed, Cedric Johnson, Walter Ben

Marc:

Michaels, Jody Dean, and David Harvey.

Marc:

It doesn't get better.

Marc:

Um, nevertheless, one publisher Uh, got back to me after six months and

Marc:

said they couldn't find anyone to write peer reviews for this book.

Trevor:

Wow.

Marc:

So

Trevor:

It must have been heartening at least to get those writers to agree

Trevor:

to a book that you were organizing.

Trevor:

Yes.

Trevor:

So that must have been some heartening moment for you.

Trevor:

It means,

Marc:

it means I haven't been abandoned by the left.

Marc:

Entirely.

Marc:

Um, so yes, it is absolutely heartening.

Marc:

It's, it's, it's a vindication of some of the suffering

Marc:

I've been through needlessly.

Trevor:

Mm.

Trevor:

Yep.

Trevor:

And then the car But

Marc:

that's, that's, that's not what's important.

Marc:

I mean, what's, what's important isn't my, you know, my, my situation, my condition.

Marc:

What's important is these, the issues that affect all of us.

Trevor:

Mm.

Marc:

And so I, I do want to keep the emphasis on, on that.

Trevor:

Yeah, and then your latest one is Class Struggle and Identity Politics,

Trevor:

which fills in some of the gaps in the previous collection of essays.

Marc:

Yeah, absolutely.

Marc:

Uh, when I, when I worked on the previous book, I thought there were terms like,

Marc:

um, terms that are in, in, uh, Uh, widely, widely circulated, um, that are being

Marc:

discussed that are not necessarily covered by that book, and I thought maybe I should

Marc:

add a glossary, but then I thought if I add a glossary and they're not discussed

Marc:

in the book, then what's the point?

Marc:

So I wrote an addendum.

Marc:

of about 50, 000 words.

Marc:

Um, and then it was decided with the publisher that that addendum could become

Marc:

a book on its own, a monograph on its own.

Marc:

So that's what I did with this book.

Marc:

And so you have in the first section a discussion of The most sort of

Marc:

popular concepts on the so called woke left or postmodern left, and

Marc:

that would be privilege theory, intersectionality, critical race theory,

Marc:

decoloniality, and there's one section on identity politics, uh, proper, and

Marc:

then in the second section, I, I go through, um, I, I, it's, it's a, the

Marc:

political spectrum from right to left.

Marc:

So you have fascism and conservatism, liberalism and neoliberalism.

Marc:

Anarchism, Postmodernism, Populism, Social Democracy, and Communism.

Marc:

And I look at how all of these different political tendencies

Marc:

don't approach the issues in the first section in the same way.

Marc:

They really have like a different take and a different gloss on all of these points.

Marc:

And so in the third section, as a Marxist, I discuss what the problems

Marc:

are with postmodern concepts and why, ultimately, these are not the same.

Marc:

Marxist ideas.

Marc:

They will not likely advance the cause of class struggle.

Trevor:

I noticed in what you've sent me, um, quite a few references to

Trevor:

fascism and If we can just divert to that, um, I guess my thinking is that

Trevor:

when, um, identity politics emphasises differences, then we shouldn't be

Trevor:

surprised when people take that line and use it in a nasty way, um, i.

Trevor:

e.

Trevor:

in a sort of a fascist way, that, that, that the sort Emphasis on identity, do

Trevor:

you think has led to a rise in fascism or has made it an easier resurgence

Trevor:

because of this focus on identity?

Marc:

Right.

Marc:

So, um, I mean, the, what you said and the way that you said

Marc:

it has, um, um, two, two points.

Marc:

Two valences.

Marc:

Um, one is the critique that when we talk about identity politics, usually

Marc:

we're talking about the post modern left, let's say, or new social movement left.

Marc:

Um, So the, the image disappeared, I see.

Marc:

Sorry,

Trevor:

yeah, I'll put it back up when we, Oh, okay.

Trevor:

Do you need, did you need that to read, sorry?

Marc:

No, that's fine.

Trevor:

Okay.

Marc:

Um, so, obviously, if you think of, uh, um, nationalist,

Marc:

chauvinist nationalism, um, or white identitarianism, you could say

Marc:

that's an identity politics as well.

Marc:

Um, but these, I mean, these often don't conceive of themselves

Marc:

as identity politics, right?

Marc:

Okay.

Marc:

Uh, right wingers don't write.

Marc:

They don't, they don't, they don't work in the same field.

Marc:

They're not using the same ideas.

Marc:

They're not part of the same line of thought as identity politics.

Marc:

For example, if you think of the way that the Akhi River collective defined

Marc:

that in 1977, or the traditions that pre-exist, the Kaki River Collective.

Marc:

So basically for me, identity politics is something like, let's

Marc:

say, feminism or women's rights.

Marc:

And so, you know, you had suffragettes, first wave feminism in the late 1800s,

Marc:

early 1900s, second wave feminism in the 1970s, and then you have in the

Marc:

1980s and 90s, third wave feminism.

Marc:

And third wave feminism is not in the tradition of universality, and it's

Marc:

not in the tradition of civil rights, therefore it's not part of what you could

Marc:

refer to as the democratic invention.

Marc:

So when democracy was invented, by and large, rights were reserved

Marc:

for propertied white males.

Marc:

They excluded workers, they excluded non whites, they excluded foreigners.

Marc:

Um, and so, The democratic invention is the expansion of what's understood

Marc:

by liberal democracy over time to include issues that affect groups within

Marc:

society, women, racial minorities, religious groups, um, sexual minorities.

Marc:

So identity politics, this is basically the identity

Marc:

politics that I'm talking about.

Marc:

Um, I do in the section on fascism, um, refer to the question of, uh, this right

Marc:

wing identity politics, but it's not really identity politics, it's, it's, um,

Marc:

yeah, well, I mean, you could consider it a politics focused on identity.

Marc:

And that brings you back to classical fascism.

Marc:

Now, classical fascism always has a scapegoat, let's say.

Marc:

It could be, uh, like, if you think of World War II and Nazi

Marc:

Germany, who were the scapegoats?

Marc:

Primarily Jews, uh, but not exclusively.

Marc:

So you had, uh, Blacks, You had handicapped people.

Marc:

It was a eugenics, white, um, Aryan race notion.

Marc:

So people who were unhealthy and sick, you know, there were ideas that we

Marc:

can, we don't have to like help them, you know, we don't have to supply,

Marc:

uh, medical services to these people.

Marc:

Um, intellectuals, artists, there were a lot of people who were

Marc:

scapegoated in Nazi Germany.

Marc:

It wasn't strictly speaking, uh, an identity thing, though

Marc:

the notion of the Aryan race.

Marc:

in Germany, which is a bit different from what you find in Italy, um,

Marc:

was, you know, one of the myths around which you galvanized.

Marc:

Uh, uh, a demogra a demagogical project, but if you look at the, the

Marc:

development of fascism as an ideology, where does it come from, and what

Marc:

is its, um, its self understanding?

Marc:

You would have to go back to the late 1800s and early 1900s in France.

Marc:

Where many of the key figures who developed fascist ideas were coming

Marc:

out of the left, they were coming out of the syndicalist movement.

Marc:

They were all trained in Marxist theory and historical materialism.

Marc:

Now, they weren't necessarily very good philosophers.

Marc:

They weren't like Lennon or Trotsky.

Marc:

They weren't like, you know, writing the best theory, but they were using

Marc:

these ideas and they could communicate with regular working people with

Marc:

those ideas because they were perhaps somewhat already familiar with, with

Marc:

it, with, The notions of class struggle.

Marc:

The same notions that led to the Russian Revolution led the, um, Soviets

Marc:

to choose Lenin as their leader.

Marc:

They understood in the Soviets what class struggle was.

Marc:

They understood basic Marxism, um, and what the fascists realized after World

Marc:

War I or what they, what the, the key takeaway from World War I for the fascists

Marc:

was that workers would rather go to war against other workers from other nations.

Marc:

Going against the Marxist idea, workers of the world unite, workers have no country.

Marc:

Um, and instead they would, they would fight for the French bourgeoisie

Marc:

against the, the workers of Germany.

Marc:

And the Germans likewise, they would work for the German bourgeoisie

Marc:

who are making profits off of war.

Marc:

So they were going to war against each other rather than organizing

Marc:

against their respective bourgeoisies.

Marc:

You have the, a repetition of this.

Marc:

Identity politics.

Marc:

So you have conflict between men and women, gays and straights.

Marc:

Blacks and whites, for example, and often people feeling very inspired

Marc:

if somebody from their group makes it into the bourgeoisie, makes it into

Marc:

the millionaire or the billionaire class, as though somehow that's going

Marc:

to lift you and raise you into, raise you, lift you out of poverty, if only

Marc:

as a psychological wage, because that's likely all you're going to get from it.

Trevor:

If

Marc:

you watch, if you watch a Hollywood film, for example.

Marc:

So you have a conflict that ignores class.

Marc:

Basically, what for Marxists is the fundamental contradiction

Marc:

between labor and capital, which is displaced onto a scapegoat.

Marc:

So instead of the conflict with capital, you have the conflict with,

Marc:

you know, workers from another country.

Marc:

Um, and so, um, the problem is the, the level of complexity is that

Marc:

you can never encounter the labor and capital contradiction directly.

Marc:

It's always mediated by other factors, many other factors.

Marc:

Ecology is one factor today.

Marc:

National differences is another factor today.

Marc:

So let's say the conflict between labor and capital is influenced by nationalism.

Marc:

So for example, American workers may or may not welcome Workers coming from

Marc:

Latin America and Mexico into the U.

Marc:

S.

Marc:

because the idea is that they'll be taking away our jobs, or that

Marc:

they'll be driving down wages.

Marc:

Um, so nationalism is something that, in this case, benefits the working class.

Marc:

The ruling class either way, regardless of how many immigrants

Marc:

are here, and very often the ruling class wants more immigrants.

Marc:

So the working class ends up being put in a xenophobic situation where,

Marc:

because they feel that they're going to bear the brunt, even if it's not true.

Marc:

They feel they may be the ones to bear the brunt, so they don't

Marc:

show class solidarity, which is what they should be doing.

Marc:

And so maybe they're not getting the right kind of cues from their leaders.

Marc:

If that's the direction they're going.

Trevor:

Yeah, so is one of your critiques of this movement that, that the left

Trevor:

gets distracted by these issues, which is an advantage for capital,

Trevor:

because the issue of, of the power imbalance between capital and labour.

Trevor:

Is always pushed to the side by these, these other fights that are confusing

Trevor:

and distracting the issue, taking away from the root cause of the problem?

Marc:

That's the million dollar question, right?

Marc:

That's the, that's the real question.

Marc:

And this is the question that is tearing the left apart right now.

Marc:

Um, and because it's tearing the left apart, it's bad for society altogether.

Marc:

Um, and this is basically the question that I ask myself and that I want to

Marc:

be able to answer as best as I can.

Marc:

And, um, in the book Identity Trumps Socialism, I have an essay

Marc:

that I contributed to that book.

Marc:

It's called The Uses and Abuses of Class Reductionism.

Marc:

for the left.

Marc:

So, um, there, there are many ways that you can answer that question.

Marc:

And that's why if you have a definition of woke or a definition of identity

Marc:

politics, it really won't serve you because it's, it's too, it's too packed.

Marc:

First of all, you have a whole historical development.

Marc:

You have many moving parts.

Marc:

You have a system, a process that's not complete.

Marc:

So it's not as though you can.

Marc:

You can sort of, like, map out the history of what happened in the

Marc:

70s and know all of the parts and put them all in the correct place.

Marc:

Because for, for one, the person doing the analysis is coming to it from a certain

Marc:

perspective, and they're a living subject.

Marc:

They're, in a way, interacting with that history.

Marc:

So that history is being, uh, rewritten, as it were.

Marc:

But this is the question that I would want to answer, and the essay

Marc:

I sent you, uh, by Ellen Mikeson's Wood, she, for me, is one of the

Marc:

leading thinkers on this question.

Marc:

It's called, Why Class Struggle is Central, and so the the key

Marc:

point is that class struggle for a leftist is central to the analysis.

Marc:

It's not exclusive.

Marc:

So because you're doing class analysis, it doesn't mean that you're ignoring

Marc:

questions of gender and race and sexuality and nationality and religion,

Marc:

but it means that you're going to be thinking about these issues in relation

Marc:

to the development of capitalism.

Marc:

Um, so you, in the Obama book, there's a chapter I wrote called,

Marc:

um, Racialism and its Discontents.

Marc:

And, um, in that book I, I propose a kind of almost, um,

Marc:

abstract, ahistorical typography of different types of racialism.

Marc:

And so that would be people who make race politics.

Marc:

Um, uh, essential rather than class politics.

Marc:

They would make race politics essential and central to their analysis.

Marc:

And so I look at different, uh, types in relation to the Obama era and afterwards.

Marc:

So you have, uh, race activists, race managers, race brokers.

Marc:

Um, you have intellectuals who are anti racialist.

Marc:

And you have the section that I, that I developed as Cultural Marxism, because

Marc:

Cultural Marxism, not, and I'm not using the right wing understanding of that

Marc:

term, I'm using the Cultural Studies version of that term, which pre exists

Marc:

its appropriation by the far right.

Marc:

And, um, yeah, I kind of, I'm skipping this, but, um, I was cancelled by

Marc:

a publisher because I had a chapter on cultural Marxism, and they said

Marc:

that I didn't explain that it comes from the right, and why should

Marc:

I when it comes from the left?

Trevor:

Wow.

Marc:

But people who are being influenced by this woke stream, they're

Marc:

afraid, basically, to get into the weeds on these points that are really

Marc:

deeply well developed in the world of postmodern and cultural theory.

Marc:

But it's just at this moment, at the moment of Black Lives Matter,

Marc:

it was as if it was a mot d'oeuvre.

Marc:

You had to center Black lives.

Marc:

And if you were progressive, you were doing that, and you

Marc:

weren't questioning that.

Marc:

And so that really isn't my project as an intellectual.

Marc:

My project as an intellectual is to say, well, what does it mean to

Marc:

center black lives rather than class?

Marc:

Is it going to help black people if you center black lives rather than class?

Marc:

My argument is that it will not.

Marc:

So on that level, I agree with Yasha Munk.

Marc:

On that level, I think if you have a gender first or a race

Marc:

first agenda, you're going to get in all kinds of problems.

Marc:

And one of the problems these days is that the problems you get into are quite

Marc:

amenable to the establishment, right?

Marc:

So you have a figure like Obama, which Yasha Moonk has no problems with.

Marc:

And I can't, I can't understand that.

Marc:

How can you be a liberal and agree with a person who condones torture?

Marc:

Agree with a person who condones, uh, banksters who

Marc:

make off with everybody's money?

Marc:

Um, et cetera and so on, who, who destroyed Libya?

Marc:

Um, so it makes no sense, but you know, this is the, the, the man, one of the

Marc:

many paradoxes that we live in today.

Marc:

Um, so the, the, the term that, uh, Nancy Fraser uses to define this is

Marc:

kind of like, um, toxic mix of identity politics with neoliberal policy.

Marc:

She refers to it as progressive neoliberalism, uh, which

Marc:

is kind of an oxymoron.

Marc:

But what you have is basically Wall Street interests.

Marc:

Pentagon interests, um, the tech industry in the United States, combined with

Marc:

identity issues affecting women, um, sexual minorities, LGBTQ, um, IA and trans

Marc:

issues is a hot topic these days, um, and all of, and, and, uh, race issues, so

Marc:

all of these things can be combined with, um, neoliberalism in a very toxic mix.

Marc:

And one question, one question we're asking ourselves is Uh,

Marc:

these days is, is Wokeism over?

Marc:

Is Wokeism finished?

Marc:

Um, it seemed that, it seemed as though it's, it's, like it's heyday, let's

Marc:

say, was, I agree with Monk about this, was like, not, 2014 until about

Marc:

nine, uh, 2020, when I was writing all these books, around 2019, 2020.

Marc:

Um, So why has wokeism fallen out of favor, is a good question.

Marc:

Has it fallen out of favor?

Marc:

Um, one of the ways that Well, we've had a, we've had time to catch up

Marc:

with some of this and to see where it leads and to see what it offers us and

Marc:

how, what kind of damage it can do.

Marc:

Um, so, um, and I'm, I'm sure many people are, continue to be committed to it.

Marc:

I gave you in the, um, The PowerPoint, um, statistics from my association,

Marc:

the University's Art Association of Canada, where you look at the topics

Marc:

that are discussed at conference

Trevor:

and, uh, Let's bring that up.

Trevor:

Do you remember what slide number that one was?

Trevor:

There it is.

Trevor:

That's it there.

Marc:

So, um, these are themes that are discussed at conference by

Marc:

the University's Art Association.

Marc:

So this is art history professors as well as studio artists, like

Marc:

painters, sculptors, and so on.

Marc:

Um, and looking at the, there are a few, a couple of them.

Marc:

maybe two, three hundred presentations at conference every year.

Marc:

And so I just looked at the themes that were discussed.

Marc:

I have breakdowns that are more subtle than this one.

Marc:

This is the most basic of all the breakdowns, but you see at the top there

Marc:

that labor and class issues are at 3.

Marc:

7%.

Marc:

Now, if you add, um, neoliberalism, activism, you could add, um,

Marc:

another four percent there.

Marc:

But those people talking about class are not necessarily talking

Marc:

about it from a leftist perspective.

Marc:

Um, and if they are talking about labor, let's say, there's going to be a variety.

Marc:

Most likely, it's going to be a social democratic leftism.

Marc:

It's not going to be a socialist or Marxist communist leftist.

Marc:

Leftism.

Marc:

So already there's that.

Marc:

But then if you look at the identity topics, race is at 54%,

Marc:

then nationality, diaspora, uh, 9%, gender, 9%, LGBTQ, other identity.

Marc:

If you get into body politics, very likely you're still talking about,

Marc:

uh, race and sexuality and gender.

Marc:

Most likely.

Marc:

Not necessarily.

Trevor:

Mark, this is all from, what, what's the conference?

Trevor:

It's an art conference, is it?

Marc:

It's the, uh, annual conference of the University's Art

Marc:

Association of Canada, uh, in the U.

Marc:

S.

Marc:

It, the equivalent is the College Art Association.

Marc:

Right.

Marc:

It's the official, it's the University.

Marc:

Association of University Professors in the Arts.

Marc:

So that would include art history, visual studies, as well as studio arts.

Marc:

So the practicing artists, in addition to like art critics and theorists.

Trevor:

Do people not create art anymore that doesn't have some sort

Trevor:

of underlying statement to make?

Trevor:

Do they not create art just because it looks beautiful?

Trevor:

Like is everything got to have an underlying

Marc:

cause?

Marc:

This, I mean, this, uh, this pie chart is beautiful.

Marc:

Um, I made it using Canva, so the design was made by somebody before me.

Marc:

But, um, yeah, it's, uh, ever since the 1980s with, uh, post modernism, in

Marc:

the 60s and 70s, uh, you had a lot of what was known as neo avant gardists.

Marc:

And all of these, uh, very important figures of that

Marc:

period, they were all theorists.

Marc:

So, they wrote essays that explained their work, and in that

Marc:

way, they bypassed criticism.

Marc:

So, they would, instead of writing criticism, they would

Marc:

support each other's work.

Marc:

They wouldn't say, this is good or bad.

Marc:

They would explain what they're doing.

Marc:

So, a minimalist sculptor, for example, would have an essay, uh, uh,

Marc:

somebody doing institutional critique would have an essay with his work.

Marc:

So, you'd have really good work, or her work, and, and good writing.

Marc:

And so, what happened in the 1980s, after that Is that the period of theory it's

Marc:

it was sort of like theory Overboard and a lot of art became I mean since the 60s

Marc:

and conceptual art art was dematerialized So you moved away from uh objects

Marc:

instead to situations and happenings You know like hippie kind hippie kind

Marc:

of events and then you had a lot of uh artists who were trying to bypass

Marc:

um And then we had the museum system.

Marc:

So you had conceptual artists who were making, uh, multiples

Marc:

instead of unique objects.

Marc:

Uh, this is on the radical side let's say of art.

Marc:

And then, uh, performance art.

Marc:

So like, Yoko Ono was a performance artist, in the avant garde sense, and she

Marc:

influenced John Lennon for example, made his work His bed in, I don't know if you

Marc:

remember his Give Peace a Chance bed in.

Trevor:

No.

Marc:

Um, this would have been late 60s.

Marc:

Is this like

Trevor:

an interview where they're lying in bed?

Trevor:

Is that what you mean?

Trevor:

Yeah, yeah,

Marc:

exactly.

Marc:

And it was about It was about peace and so they were doing a news

Marc:

conference and so it was basically it was a form of performance art.

Trevor:

Ah, I thought that was just an interview.

Trevor:

There we go.

Marc:

Yeah, it was an interview but it also had a poster campaign,

Marc:

Give Peace a Chance, uh, and this was all over the place, you know.

Marc:

Um, And, uh, so that's an example of this kind of, uh, you know,

Marc:

post museum kind of art practice.

Marc:

And so, a lot of art today, since around 2000, is in, is in the

Marc:

area of, uh, socially engaged art.

Marc:

So it, it, it looks more like social work.

Marc:

actually, than it does anything that you'd see in a museum.

Marc:

So it's artists working in collectives, they'll go, they'll work

Marc:

with City Hall, they may work with homeless people, they may work with

Marc:

people needing abortion services.

Marc:

That's referred to as socially engaged art.

Marc:

Um, but um, that's not necessarily what's driving all of this, and I'm saying

Marc:

here you've got more than 75 percent dedicated to identity topics, but it's,

Marc:

it's a little bit more complicated because It isn't just identity, it's

Marc:

also movement, moving away from any kind of left, right, and center.

Marc:

Well, there's never really any right wing analysis of art anyways, but moving

Marc:

away from, moving away from liberal and left analyses of art, um, towards, these

Marc:

would be macro political tendencies, like socialist interpretations of art.

Marc:

Um, so moving away from that kind of Marxism.

Marc:

and phenomenology and structuralism and semiotics, which were all like part of

Marc:

the postmodern mix, towards these new tendencies, like intersectionality,

Marc:

very trendy, decoloniality, very trendy.

Marc:

So if you're doing intersectionality, you can't discuss just

Marc:

gender, let's say, in art.

Marc:

You're going to want to discuss gender and race, maybe the histories of racism in a

Marc:

country, in relation to specific artists.

Marc:

Indigenous artists, a lot of, uh, discussion on of decoloniality.

Marc:

So, for example, um, on this point, uh, if you go to the uac, the, the,

Marc:

the, the previous website for the UAAC, um, it would have, uh, um.

Marc:

Some writing in an Indigenous language.

Marc:

Now, I looked it up and I couldn't find which Indigenous language,

Marc:

so I don't know if it's a mixture.

Marc:

I couldn't, I couldn't do a Google translate.

Marc:

Um, and also, at conference, you'll have, um, people, before

Marc:

they give their presentation, they'll do a land acknowledgement.

Marc:

It, it became very trendy.

Marc:

to do a land acknowledgement.

Marc:

And so now, like, you're going to hear a land acknowledgement by

Marc:

about 150 people at conference.

Marc:

And you have to ask yourself, like, what is this?

Marc:

What is this about?

Marc:

You know, it's very strange.

Marc:

I'm sure Indigenous people find it very strange.

Marc:

And, um, on this point, um, there was some request and a little bit

Marc:

of pressure put on the board of the association to make a statement,

Marc:

uh, regarding the genocide in Gaza.

Marc:

So what they came up with is, because, uh, you know, there you also

Marc:

have a settler colonial situation.

Marc:

So the UAAC, when it comes to settler colonialism in Canada, they're

Marc:

completely, of course, against it and completely in favor of decolonialism.

Marc:

But when it comes to the Gaza genocide, They couldn't make a statement against

Marc:

Zionism, against settler colonialism.

Marc:

They, they made a statement respecting the rights of everyone

Marc:

to their opinion and students.

Marc:

So, you know, you get these kinds of, um, these for me are, are the problems

Marc:

you have when the field as such hasn't really come to terms with the limitations.

Marc:

of postmodern theory.

Marc:

It hasn't understood what the attack on universalism and enlightenment

Marc:

and progress, notions of progress, what does it mean when you, when

Marc:

you turn away from these, um, not accidentally, programmatically, right?

Marc:

And that, so that, that includes liberalism and it includes

Marc:

socialism, both of them.

Trevor:

We have in Australia very common for any public event to begin with an

Trevor:

acknowledgement of the traditional.

Trevor:

Indigenous owners and, uh, particular tribes are often mentioned in

Trevor:

that and, uh, respects are paid to Elders past, present and emerging.

Trevor:

And that happens, uh, football events, um, meetings of any sort, um, uh, Not

Trevor:

only at the start of the meeting, but then each individual speaker that gets up

Trevor:

will commence with a reference to this.

Trevor:

Very, very common.

Trevor:

I mentioned earlier that our King and Queen are in the country.

Trevor:

And apparently at Parliament House, one of our Indigenous parliamentarians

Trevor:

basically got up and made a scene and told him to give back the country.

Trevor:

The end.

Trevor:

And what the hell was he doing here, sort of thing, and people are shocked

Trevor:

by this, and I sort of think to myself, well, how can you, on the one hand, be

Trevor:

fully accepting of, of, uh, these sort of acknowledgements of country, and then be

Trevor:

shocked when one of these people then, um, you know, comes out and says to the king,

Trevor:

um, not happy with your colonial project, and, um, yeah, people would just, um,

Trevor:

Double standards, I guess, in that sense.

Trevor:

Not acknowledging the contradiction inherent in, in observing these

Trevor:

niceties all the time, but then inviting the king who represents

Trevor:

the complete opposite and expecting people to remain silent about it.

Trevor:

So, yeah, so, um, There's, um,

Marc:

yeah, there's a slightly different case in Canada.

Marc:

I'm not a specialist on on the question, so I don't want to say the wrong thing,

Marc:

but I've heard Indigenous scholars do the opposite in the case of Canada, saying

Marc:

that hunting and fishing rights were guaranteed by the Queen, and so in that

Marc:

case they're quite happy to acknowledge the monarchy, which isn't necessarily

Marc:

recognized by contemporary governments.

Trevor:

Um,

Marc:

so, you know, it, it, it can, it can vary, but I, I, we, Canada can

Marc:

do you one much better, um, in 2023.

Marc:

Yeah, in September or October, I don't remember the date.

Marc:

The entire, The Canadian House of Commons rose up and applauded a

Marc:

Ukrainian Canadian member of the Waffen SS, the Galicia Division in Ukraine.

Marc:

Um, and of course Canada's involved with Ukraine and NATO against, uh, Russia

Marc:

in, at this moment, mostly in Ukraine.

Marc:

Um, so obviously that's the reason for it.

Marc:

And then there was a little bit of a scandal, barely a scandal.

Marc:

Um, and it's, you know, kind of makes sense because the Deputy Prime Minister,

Marc:

Chrystia Freeland, is someone who has a family background associated

Marc:

with this, uh, Ukrainian Nazi past

Trevor:

that

Marc:

happened.

Marc:

She has renounced to some extent, but she's also held up signs that say

Marc:

Slava Ukraini, which is a right wing term in Ukraine that is associated

Marc:

with the Banderists and so on.

Marc:

So she hasn't fully dis dis separated herself from it.

Marc:

Um, and then the question was, did the Trudeau government know who this man was?

Marc:

They claimed afterwards that they didn't, but clearly they did.

Trevor:

And

Marc:

so that's kind of an interesting sort of Trump, basically a Trump

Marc:

moment in the Canadian, in Canadian politics, because what they said

Marc:

before the parliamentarians got up and applauded was that this man fought

Marc:

against the Russians in World War II.

Marc:

And so after that, they all got up and applauded.

Marc:

I guess they don't know.

Trevor:

The Russians were on our side.

Marc:

They were.

Marc:

And they liberated Europe at the expense of about 20 million Russians.

Trevor:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Trevor:

It's that sort of gaslighting, isn't it?

Trevor:

Okay, let's get back, um, I mean, we've got all the time in the world, but I

Trevor:

am sort of wanting to gear it towards some, um, where do we go from here?

Trevor:

If, if we are saying that, that the left has made big mistakes, and is

Trevor:

continuing to make those mistakes, how does it turn around in a direction that

Trevor:

you think would be Could we go, um,

Marc:

yeah, could we go to the slides again?

Marc:

Yeah, yeah.

Marc:

And

Trevor:

go,

Marc:

and go backwards a little bit?

Trevor:

Go backwards, yeah.

Marc:

Um, like, I'm interested in this question, obviously.

Marc:

But, uh, I think you can't, you know, you can't really talk about the future

Marc:

if you don't talk about the past.

Marc:

Oh, right, this one here.

Marc:

Um, and, uh, and the present, right?

Marc:

Because if we don't know where we are, we need to have what Frederick

Marc:

Jameson, a Marxist scholar, referred to as cognitive mapping.

Marc:

Right?

Marc:

We need to have a big picture of what's happening in the world.

Marc:

Right?

Marc:

And where we are, and on that basis, we might be able to move forward, but

Marc:

if we misrecognize where we are, we're going to have a lot of, I really kind

Marc:

of, I'm always annoyed with this, let's have a national conversation about race.

Marc:

Right?

Marc:

On, um, the Oprah Winfrey show or something.

Marc:

And so the question is, why do we have to begin at zero every time we have

Marc:

a national conversation, or worse?

Marc:

Like, why do we have to begin at minus ten?

Marc:

Now, there's a, a need for that simply in terms of basic pedagogy.

Marc:

Basic pedagogy, you have to not presume that the people you're

Marc:

addressing know what you know or know very much about the topic.

Marc:

So the idea is to assume.

Marc:

Uh, you know, help people, um, you know, come to a sense of where to start with

Marc:

some of these and maybe where to go.

Marc:

However, when you get to university, it's a completely different game.

Marc:

When you get to graduate school, MA programs, PhD programs, there it's a

Marc:

very different game as well, because there you're really creating the

Marc:

leadership class when it comes to the middle class and the professional

Marc:

managerial class of the future.

Marc:

And so this is where, um, you know, you're going to have what you might

Marc:

refer to as window dressing, like, you know, all of these woke topics, and then

Marc:

you're going to want to know, well, is there something behind it, like, is this

Marc:

really a class agenda that is, you know, presented as a, an identity agenda?

Marc:

And this is what a lot of people would tell you.

Marc:

For example, Adolph Reed, they'll say that the, the culture

Marc:

war is a class war, right?

Marc:

And it's a class war against the working class.

Marc:

So how do, you know, how do you understand that?

Marc:

And you'll have very sophisticated identitarians and diversitarians.

Marc:

And racialists who will oppose this vehemently.

Marc:

And they may have good grounds to do so.

Marc:

Indigenous people may have good grounds to do so.

Marc:

And so you need to hear those arguments.

Marc:

And you can't always, um, you can't always in some ways, you know, address

Marc:

them exactly on the same terms.

Marc:

So this is where you get what's known as theoretical noise.

Marc:

Right, like ideology clash.

Marc:

Um, but, um, one of the things that has inspired my work, um, when I, when I

Marc:

stopped teaching around 2006, um, it was interesting because at that point I was

Marc:

sort of compelled by the need to offer courses to students to discuss new ideas.

Marc:

But when I stopped teaching in 2006, I can kind of just focus.

Marc:

on what I want to do.

Marc:

Like, you know, what is, what do I find interesting for a research project?

Marc:

And so one of the things I wanted to do is get back to, um, thinking about

Marc:

class and class analysis in relation to art and culture, which had been pretty

Marc:

much, um, bankrupted to the extent that the only kind of Marxism that you

Marc:

had with post, the postmodern left was what's, what's known as cultural Marxism.

Marc:

For good or bad, that term is a term you could apply.

Marc:

A cultural studies approach, in other words.

Marc:

So this is one of the things I came up with, which is a combination of

Marc:

the ideas of two different people.

Marc:

One is Peter Berger, who's a theorist of the avant garde, the historical avant

Marc:

garde, and the other is a sociologist, French sociologist called Pierre Bourdieu.

Marc:

Um, both are very well known, one in art history, the other one in sociology.

Marc:

And what I did is I combined their ideas.

Marc:

So what you see as the fourth section of this graph is not in Peter Berger.

Marc:

The first three, the graph itself and the first three parts were invented by Berger.

Marc:

And the fourth one is what I gleaned from Bourdieu that I added.

Marc:

to Berger's analysis.

Marc:

So he's interested in how the, how art has changed over time, how we

Marc:

understand art in the way that it's made.

Marc:

So in the first, uh, section you would have, um, sacral art, so

Marc:

the Middle Ages through to about the Renaissance and even earlier

Marc:

Dynasties, like let's say in China.

Marc:

In the Baroque period, starting with the Renaissance, you have classical courtly

Marc:

art, and it isn't the same kind of art.

Marc:

One of the reasons it's not, is because much of the older art

Marc:

was made for religious purposes.

Marc:

And so, for example, a painting or a sculpture that's in a

Marc:

cathedral is made as a cult object.

Marc:

It isn't made as a work of art.

Marc:

It isn't made There are a lot of

Trevor:

images of the Virgin Mary and that sort of thing.

Trevor:

Is that what you meant?

Marc:

Yeah, exactly.

Marc:

Or, or, um, even the church itself.

Marc:

The Gothic cathedrals, let's say, or Romanesque cathedrals.

Marc:

Um, and the mosaics, let's say, in a Byzantine.

Marc:

Uh, or Eastern Orthodox Church.

Marc:

Um, so with the Renaissance and, uh, the Baroque period, which is this next

Marc:

section here, you have people like Louis XIV, Who's a humanist, right?

Marc:

He's influenced by the Renaissance humanism.

Marc:

He's going back to the age of the the ancient Greeks when it comes to sculpture.

Marc:

So he's doing things like Michelangelo was doing, which is basically naked human

Marc:

bodies, you know, in the Sistine Chapel.

Marc:

You would never have seen this in the Middle Ages because it was sinful.

Marc:

But with Renaissance humanism, you have this reinvestment in antiquity

Marc:

and pagan themes, and basically the achievement in terms of art on this kind

Marc:

of humanistic level, which celebrates the artist as almost a divine figure,

Marc:

like Michelangelo or Raphael or Leonardo.

Marc:

And so, and these are, um, these are also sponsored by the court, but they,

Marc:

they have a more secular orientation, and you have the development of academies,

Marc:

So, the artist is no longer working in a medieval guild, the artist is now

Marc:

working or being taught in an academy, and you're really looking for the best

Marc:

artists, you know, and so the courts of Europe will be competing between

Marc:

themselves to see who can attract the best artists, and if they have something

Marc:

like this, then we want something like this, and of course that continues today

Marc:

with museum competition and biennials.

Marc:

Um, that shifts around.

Marc:

1800, when you have the, basically the end of the feudal era, the beginning of

Marc:

the liberal democratic bourgeois era.

Marc:

So you're moving away from academies that were, um, sponsored by the monarchy.

Marc:

Let's say like Shakespeare, who was, uh, uh, one of the, the king's players,

Marc:

kingsmen, uh, working for the queen and not doing anything that would

Marc:

offend the queen or the monarchy.

Marc:

So then you have the bourgeois period.

Marc:

So the patron is no longer the monarchy, it's no longer the church, it's the

Marc:

average middle class person, and they want paintings for their home.

Marc:

So these are basically commodities.

Marc:

They're no longer cult objects, they're no longer objects that

Marc:

you find in the palace of a king.

Marc:

They're everyday objects in a sense, and they're on a commodity market.

Marc:

Now there were markets for art before this time, but what changes is that the artist

Marc:

is no longer thinking about what they're doing in terms of You know, something

Marc:

that is oriented towards, um, the academy and the kind of training and the kind

Marc:

of criticism you find in those places.

Marc:

And they become, in a way, detached, uh, much as the Gothic novelists

Marc:

like Mary Shelley or, uh, Byron, um, you know, the, the authors of

Marc:

vampire and Frankenstein novels.

Marc:

in the early 1800s, or Charles Baudelaire, the poet Maudsit.

Marc:

These were all what you can consider the spoiled brat children of the bourgeoisie.

Marc:

So they were all romantic.

Marc:

They didn't believe in superstition and they quite enjoyed insulting society.

Marc:

They quite enjoyed insulting the bourgeoisie with their

Marc:

philistinistic, materialist values.

Marc:

The bourgeoisie are oriented more towards making money and justifying that need

Marc:

to make money in terms of the wealth of nations, in capitalist, liberal terms.

Marc:

But the children who are culturalized are, or they don't have to be children, they

Marc:

can simply be, you know, on their own.

Marc:

They're thinking more in terms of individualism, which comes out of the

Marc:

Kantian definition of art, and a little bit the Hegelian definition of art.

Marc:

And as the 19th century becomes more Uh, informed by Marxism and

Marc:

Socialism and Anarchism, they more decidedly turn against the bourgeoisie.

Marc:

And so they become radicalized, and this is what's known as the Bohemian, uh, era.

Marc:

And, uh, the Bohemian avant garde, so, all of the art movements we study,

Marc:

like Impressionism, Post Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, um, they're all doing

Marc:

radical art that changes every five years and it doesn't look like anything

Marc:

the academies are doing, which is considered this kind of, you know, very

Marc:

expensive for nothing bourgeois stuff.

Marc:

So you'll get a figure like Van Gogh, who comes out of that, uh, that moment

Marc:

that we still today identify as avant garde and making art that's autonomous.

Marc:

He's not even making his art for the, for the market.

Marc:

The market's not interested in Van Gogh.

Marc:

They won't buy, nobody will buy his paintings.

Marc:

His brother is, you know, pulling his hair out trying to find buyers for his,

Marc:

his crazy brother's crazy paintings.

Marc:

But he thinks they're good, you know, he thinks they'll

Marc:

be maybe recognised later on.

Marc:

Well his brother

Trevor:

was an art dealer of some sort I think, is that right?

Trevor:

Yeah, exactly.

Trevor:

He had some sort of expert eye for these things.

Marc:

Absolutely, yeah.

Marc:

And there's a logic to what Van Gogh is doing, and if you're following

Marc:

Impressionism, you see how they're breaking down, they're making their

Marc:

brushwork visible, It's not about the subject matter, it's about the

Marc:

form and the treatment and the color.

Marc:

So if you take those concepts, it's easy to understand Van Gogh.

Marc:

It's simply what would have been considered shocking at that time because

Marc:

it had this whole idea that art should innovate and that should it it should

Marc:

do something different every decade wasn't was a new phenomenon at that time.

Marc:

Today, it's so cliche that no artist would, would even think to

Marc:

talk about their work in that way.

Marc:

A postmodern artist has nothing to do with that.

Marc:

So this is the autonomous idea of art.

Marc:

Art for art's sake, basically.

Marc:

And that leads into end of the century decadence.

Marc:

Um, you have the decadence movement, a lot of these artists who are symbolists, for

Marc:

example, they go back to representation, but with all these weird themes, you know,

Marc:

these kind of like strange mystical themes that the bourgeoisie loves to indulge.

Marc:

So if you see the film Moulin Rouge, for example, uh, this is kind of like

Marc:

that period where the bourgeoisie is going to the Moulin Rouge and hanging

Marc:

out with these bohemian artists.

Marc:

Maybe smoking opium and living a kind of offbeat lifestyle away from

Marc:

the, you know, the wife and kids.

Marc:

And so, you know, that kind of continues through to around the post

Marc:

war period, to about the 1940s and 50s.

Marc:

Then you have a shift to what I'm describing as The moment

Marc:

at which the petty bourgeoisie, um, gains cultural ascendancy.

Marc:

So, you know, you could think of popular culture in a way as petty bourgeois.

Marc:

Um, you have mass culture on the one hand, which isn't the same thing

Marc:

exactly as, um, middle class culture.

Marc:

Um, so the petty bourgeoisie is more likely to be familiar with

Marc:

classical novels, for example.

Marc:

Uh, they may like, uh, classical music.

Marc:

But they may not have the time or the interest in reading a lot of

Marc:

novels or in going to the concert.

Marc:

And so they might be looking for an easy version of these ideas.

Marc:

And so you get a kind of cultural watering down.

Marc:

Uh, where on the one hand, the working class has more access to culture.

Marc:

And on the other hand, the upper class has the same culture as everyone else.

Marc:

They have this kind of popular culture, mid cult.

Marc:

And so that's why postmodern ideas are so popular, because everything

Marc:

these days is kind of in the middle.

Marc:

Nobody wants to be, um, you know, the kind, nobody wants to be confused

Marc:

with, you know, Somebody who thinks they're avant garde or that they're

Marc:

like a master artist or, you know, so all these things you learn in

Marc:

college to not, to not reproduce.

Marc:

So we have a situation today where culture is networked through social media.

Marc:

It's culture industry in the traditional sense.

Marc:

Culture is not an autonomous art, it's an industry.

Marc:

And, you know, there's government grants for art, there's biennials,

Marc:

there's museums, it's a system, and it includes universities.

Marc:

And people in these, Uh, industries are like workers.

Marc:

Some of them succeed, some of them become blue chip artists,

Marc:

but that's only about 2%.

Marc:

The majority will not, they're like people who want to be

Marc:

basketball players in the NBA.

Marc:

Only a few will make it.

Marc:

The majority will not be known, the majority won't make it, and they'll get

Marc:

jobs at a lower level, let's say working in a museum or something like this.

Marc:

And so, they may They may choose to organize in an artist union, um, they

Marc:

may choose to collectivize in some way in order to have representation with

Marc:

the government, but they're basically, they're not living from their work.

Marc:

They're living from another job and they'll make their work in

Marc:

their spare time, most likely.

Marc:

But also at the level of ideas in the mode of consumption, the

Marc:

mode of consumption has changed.

Marc:

I refer to this as post enlightenment.

Marc:

It's not only that.

Marc:

Uh, today's culture rejects the Enlightenment, the notion that we're

Marc:

moving towards progress, the faith that we're moving towards progress.

Marc:

There's, there's a lot of despair in the 20th century with fascism

Marc:

and Stalinism and with the culture industry that makes it seem as though

Marc:

these are all systems of domination.

Marc:

These ideologies and these industries, they're really systems of domination.

Marc:

Um, and so, you know, where do you go if not in this traditional

Marc:

avant garde van Gogh direction?

Marc:

You don't really want to go in that direction.

Marc:

You want to not repeat the same things that have led us to this moment.

Marc:

And so, at the level of, um, the middle class, the professional

Marc:

managerial class, the way I understand it is you have a conflict.

Marc:

You have, uh, what I refer to as a conflict between two factions

Marc:

of the same middle class.

Marc:

Um, on the one hand, the creative class, Basically the educated,

Marc:

apolitical faction who identify with progressive neoliberalism.

Marc:

They think Obama was a good president.

Marc:

They think Clinton would have been a good representative because she's a woman.

Marc:

Um, they're kind of They're basically kind of in the tradition of what you

Marc:

might consider, um, a yuppie or a hipster.

Marc:

Um, so for example, many of these people are against the genocide,

Marc:

uh, in Gaza, because it's a clear case of, uh, human rights.

Marc:

abuse and criminality.

Marc:

It's deemed a genocide by the ICC and the ICJ.

Marc:

They don't have a problem with it.

Marc:

But then you ask them about what's happening with NATO vis a vis Russia

Marc:

and China, you ask them about the half a million people who've died in

Marc:

Ukraine and they don't have an opinion.

Trevor:

They,

Marc:

there are no protests for what's happening over there.

Marc:

It's almost as though because Putin is so anti gay, he's so

Marc:

regressive and reactionary.

Marc:

that it's okay to be against Russia.

Marc:

It's good to be against Russia.

Marc:

And the goal is to decolonize it.

Marc:

So to basically take a federation and to divide it into smaller nations.

Marc:

So that's NATO's plan.

Marc:

And a lot of the creative class is, I think, uh, you know, lacking

Marc:

in wherewithal when it comes to some of these kinds of points.

Marc:

Basically, they're, they're interested in what, um, puts butter on the bread.

Marc:

And then, against this, you have an activist, uh, class in the PMC.

Marc:

So, this activist class is more the people in the tradition of the 60s student

Marc:

movement, who understand these kind of geopolitical the problem of imperialism,

Marc:

of neocolonialism, but also very oriented to identity issues at the same time.

Marc:

So they want to combine all of these things in, you know, what you can think

Marc:

of as an intersectional, uh, combination.

Marc:

So a lot of the colleagues I've had who are in, uh, socially

Marc:

engaged art, for example, um, I came up with this graph in 2008.

Marc:

So, I've been on this class critique of identity politics since that time, but at

Marc:

that time when I was writing my essays, no one was offended by any of my work.

Marc:

In fact, I was being asked to contribute to projects and so on.

Marc:

And it's only around 2016.

Marc:

Uh, after Black Lives Matter and after this kind of like great awokening,

Marc:

as it's known, that I, and this cancel culture phenomenon, that I

Marc:

started getting the cold shoulder.

Marc:

I started getting, you know, more aggressive kinds of, uh,

Marc:

responses and so on and so forth.

Marc:

Um, so I haven't, I haven't changed my, changed my tune,

Marc:

but the culture has changed.

Marc:

Now, it could be that things will change again, but, so here you have,

Marc:

um, the petty bourgeoisie So you

Trevor:

just described two versions of the, of the creator class, or

Trevor:

the managerial professional class.

Trevor:

One, well, one that, um, understood Palestinian Gaza as a genocide, but

Trevor:

didn't see Um, sort of understand Ukraine very well, and one that did,

Trevor:

but both of them still shackled by, um, identity issues, is that right?

Marc:

Right.

Marc:

Absolutely, yeah.

Trevor:

Yeah.

Marc:

Um, the main difference is that, let's say the creative class,

Marc:

the hipster faction, the yuppie faction, they understand identity

Marc:

issues in this very kind of self, self, uh, selfish kind of like.

Marc:

Uh, yuppie notion of advancement.

Marc:

So it goes along with entrepreneurialism, it goes along with, let's say,

Marc:

black capitalism, Lenin feminism, red capitalism, this kind of thing.

Marc:

Um, and also these very woke kind of films and topics, let's say.

Marc:

And one of the reasons I wrote the Obama portraits is in 2009 when

Marc:

they came out, or whatever year, No.

Marc:

Um, 17.

Marc:

Um, no.

Marc:

Was it, is it 17?

Marc:

What, what, what was Obama's last year?

Marc:

2016, right?

Trevor:

Yeah.

Trevor:

We had, uh, Trump for four years and we've just had Biden for four,

Trevor:

so it would've been exactly right.

Trevor:

So,

Marc:

so

Trevor:

end of 2016, brain relapses.

Trevor:

Obama is finished.

Marc:

Right.

Marc:

And so after his two terms, after doing like all of the terrible things

Marc:

he did, I was reading articles.

Marc:

In this racialist, uh, BLM sense that we're, you know, very laudatory.

Marc:

And I, I couldn't understand it, you know, how can, how can people writing,

Marc:

um, uh, for Hyperallergic and other websites be so, like, forgetful so soon?

Marc:

And it was because, you know, after a film like Black Panther came out,

Marc:

I don't know if you, if you know this film, Black Panther, it was the

Marc:

first Marvel, is it Marvel Comics?

Marc:

It was the first Marvel Comics superhero film with a lead black figure.

Marc:

Black Panther.

Marc:

And so it was kind of like this, um, you know, finally we've arrived, you

Marc:

know, finally in terms of Hollywood and in terms of like the presidency, you

Marc:

know, black issues are on the table.

Marc:

But I mean, for the majority of working class black people,

Marc:

it's not really an advantage.

Marc:

In fact, it's quite the opposite because Obama oversaw At that point, it's now

Marc:

been superseded, but at that point, Obama had overseen the largest transfer

Marc:

of wealth from the working class to the billionaire class in human history.

Marc:

Um, so, you know, these things are, these things are kind of like symbolic

Marc:

achievements more than anything else.

Marc:

I'm not discrediting them.

Marc:

I'm not saying they don't have, um, But I'm just saying, don't

Marc:

be, don't be bamboozled, uh, you know, by, by this culture.

Marc:

And so, um, what was your question again?

Trevor:

Um, well, I was really like, where do we go to from here is where

Trevor:

I was, you know, wanting to get to is, Is there a, a way of, of fixing

Trevor:

the left to bring it back to, um, class issues as a central concern?

Trevor:

And capital and labour and understanding that and spending more

Trevor:

time on that than on class issues.

Trevor:

Is there, is there a way that that can happen?

Trevor:

Um, perhaps as people see more and more, um, You know, a key goal of

Trevor:

identity politics is representation.

Trevor:

You know, we want more.

Trevor:

Black women in power, for example, but you see cases where, um, you know, a daughter

Trevor:

of an immigrant becomes the immigration minister in the UK and then wants to

Trevor:

send, um, illegal aliens to Rwanda.

Trevor:

Or you see, um, uh, women get into position of power, but

Trevor:

then want to institute policies that are very anti women.

Trevor:

And, uh, Obama gets into power and, you know, uh, looks after

Trevor:

Wall Street, not Main Street.

Trevor:

So, you sort of, I see that we're going to be just disappointed by a lot of minority

Trevor:

people in power, that people might begin to understand, you know what, just getting

Trevor:

one of these people in power isn't enough, they have to be there with the right, um,

Trevor:

ideology in their head, um, to actually change things for the better, so, um,

Trevor:

maybe if enough of that happens, people will say, Okay, we've got representation

Trevor:

but we still have a problem.

Trevor:

It's more an ideology change that needs to happen here.

Trevor:

I don't know.

Marc:

Yeah, the, the, the thing is, one of the things is the, the left

Marc:

has an advantage in terms of numbers.

Marc:

But the right has an advantage in terms of capital.

Marc:

They have, with the billionaire class, a lot more money than we do at the moment.

Marc:

And so they can influence a lot of media, um, especially mainstream media.

Marc:

And so if you, if you bring that back to the, uh, the PMC, the middle class,

Marc:

what I'm arguing is that, I mean, Ellen Mikeson's wood, um, her work's very good

Marc:

because what she was saying is that.

Marc:

These identity topics, one of the problems with them is that

Marc:

they obscure these class issues.

Marc:

David Harvey has said the same thing.

Marc:

David Harvey's a Marxist, uh, geographer who wrote one of the first

Marc:

books on postmodernism, one of the first critiques of postmodernism,

Marc:

and Fred Jameson wrote one in 1984.

Marc:

So the Marxist critique of postmodernism goes back to the early 80s.

Marc:

Um, and a person who influenced me, Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist

Marc:

philosopher, he was criticizing people like Foucault, um, Derrida,

Marc:

who influenced Spivak, uh, Lyotard, he was criticizing these French thinkers.

Marc:

as they were coming out, as their books were coming out in French back in the 60s.

Marc:

Um, so there's been Marxist criticism of postmodern ideas, as long as

Marc:

there have been postmodern ideas.

Marc:

In academia, especially in the United States, less so in the

Marc:

UK, um, in academia, the Marxist critique was kind of waylaid.

Marc:

To a certain extent.

Marc:

And by the 1990s, you didn't hear about it much anymore.

Marc:

And if you think of people like, um, Harvey and Jameson, there was a feminist

Marc:

feeding frenzy against these two guys.

Marc:

And Mike Davis, for being reductionist, for being, for having a, a kind of naive

Marc:

understanding of reality, which itself was kind of a, Uh, a flawed argument, but it

Marc:

was coming from feminist psychoanalysis, and it was coming from post structuralism.

Marc:

And so all of the fancy doodads that you can want from academia, you can use those

Marc:

to dismantle and deconstruct the Marxist left, which was in some ways viewed

Marc:

as this kind of white male preserve.

Marc:

Um, and so that didn't really shift until after the 2000s.

Marc:

And so with Black Lives Matter and the Women's March and Me Too around 2014,

Marc:

all the post modernism came, came rushing back and Hollywood has jumped on it,

Marc:

for example, like going after Polanski.

Marc:

Polanski, we hadn't heard about his rape case.

Marc:

You know, for many years, then lo and behold, he's become public enemy

Marc:

number one for the, on the Me Too, uh, radar, along with, uh, Woody Allen,

Trevor:

uh, for it.

Trevor:

So, so, so Mark, when does it change?

Trevor:

Does the left just keep doing what it's doing?

Trevor:

Well, what I, what I want to Or how will it change, or when will it change?

Marc:

What I want to address, what I want to address is the liberal

Marc:

class has a need for this view of the working class as being unsophisticated.

Marc:

So they need that because you're going to want to teach them courses,

Marc:

right, at the undergraduate level.

Marc:

So you have to think that I've got something to offer these unwashed

Marc:

worker type people who are like, masturbating to porn too much, uh,

Marc:

which is, you know, we're not going to get to it, but that's kind of like

Marc:

one of the themes in the Barbie movie.

Marc:

Ken with his, Ken with his, um, Ken, when he tries to recreate, um,

Marc:

uh, Ken world or whatever it is to take over Barbie world, he's kind of

Marc:

coming from this working class, you know, porn scape universe, right?

Marc:

And that's kind of like the way the film introduces.

Marc:

A class element into, uh, the film without addressing it directly.

Marc:

Um, but what, so the liberal class has a need to see the working class.

Marc:

as on the end of their pedagogical imperative.

Marc:

And that pedagogical imperative can change every season with new directions

Marc:

like intersectionality and decoloniality.

Marc:

You're always going to have the edge as the middle class because you're constantly

Marc:

changing the things that are problematic and the ways of going about it.

Marc:

And there's a whole sort of social media feeding frenzy where people are, uh,

Marc:

uh, uh, uh, what's the word, prosumers.

Marc:

They're creating the content.

Marc:

The platforms are reaping the benefits, but every person gets to create content.

Marc:

So if you're being interpolated, not at the level of solidarity, but at the level

Marc:

of allyship, then you have something special that you can bring to Twitter.

Marc:

You have something special that you can bring to Facebook, which is

Marc:

yourself, right, your embodiment.

Trevor:

So you're saying the incentives are working against the professional

Trevor:

class in Educating up and coming No,

Marc:

in favour of the professional class, insofar as they think of

Marc:

themselves as a class in itself and not a class for a new social project.

Trevor:

Yeah, but working against them from providing a class

Trevor:

critique, and rather, so they're incentivised not to provide the sort

Trevor:

of thinking that you're providing.

Trevor:

Yes,

Marc:

they're incentivized to avoid class analysis to a large extent.

Marc:

I mean, that's why I had a lot of problems.

Marc:

I couldn't finish my PhD thesis on this ground.

Marc:

But ignoring that, um So should we be

Trevor:

pessimistic?

Trevor:

Should we just be

Marc:

It's worse than that.

Marc:

It's worse than that.

Marc:

Because if you want to have a class analysis in addition to these other

Marc:

issues, which are all important issues, There's a myriad of methods.

Marc:

Radical democracy, left populism, autonomous Marxism, intersectionality.

Marc:

There's tons of ways that you can include class that are not Marxist.

Marc:

In fact, they're anti Marxist.

Marc:

In fact, they're part of the reactionary anti Enlightenment tradition.

Marc:

And so I refer to this as micro fascism.

Marc:

It's micro politics.

Marc:

that has a culture war, fascistic, anti universalist, anti human rights dimension,

Marc:

but it's completely legitimate if you think of it in terms of empowerment,

Marc:

if you think of it in terms of discourse theory, which is premised on

Marc:

Nietzschean nihilism and will to power.

Marc:

And so all of this kind of subjectivism gets, gets legitimized through theory.

Marc:

And so this is a complicated academic series of layers that makes it so

Marc:

that people who are on the activist wing, let's say the diversity, um, DEI

Marc:

mandating, uh, shifts to, to departments and universities, they're legitimized.

Marc:

They're, and not only that, but, I find it, it's odd that they don't

Marc:

see the contradiction between what they're doing and what's, you

Marc:

know, what's happening with, let's say, the charge of anti Semitism.

Marc:

Because this kind of like Zionist anti Semitism is the apex of wokeism.

Marc:

I would say, you know, and so one might hope that this would enlighten some people

Marc:

as to its, its limitations, you know, but I don't see it happening anytime soon.

Marc:

And I guess that was

Trevor:

my question.

Trevor:

It is, you've answered it there is, you just don't see it happening anytime soon.

Trevor:

Because you have,

Marc:

you have such zaniness.

Marc:

on the far right, right?

Marc:

We have, we have far right movements popping up all over the place.

Marc:

Um, we have one in Canada with Pauly Eve.

Marc:

And, uh, can you imagine Trump, the person who tried to coup his

Marc:

own country, up for election again?

Marc:

And then, if you legitimately go after him with an impeachment attempt, Or with

Marc:

court cases, you have people on the left, in the DSA, the, you know, these are, this

Marc:

is the left in the US, the DSA, who, who are criticizing lawfare against Trump.

Marc:

It's like, if you can't use lawfare against a fascist who tried to

Marc:

coup his own country, I mean, you know, what do you love about it?

Marc:

Yes, they say this has never been done before.

Trevor:

And the answer is, well, nobody's ever done what he's done before.

Trevor:

That's why, that's why it's unique.

Trevor:

Or

Marc:

he doesn't really mean it.

Marc:

Or he's not really a fascist.

Marc:

Because he was just recently at a Catholic church fundraiser, accompanied by, you

Marc:

know, people from the Democratic Party.

Marc:

Um, and they're in the same, and he used to be a Democrat.

Marc:

So arguably, the billionaire class, the money class, all this fascism.

Marc:

It's just a different kind of window dressing.

Marc:

It's just a different form of symbolic, um, culture war type nonsense.

Marc:

And so I think a lot of people don't realize the threat of, uh,

Marc:

this, these far right movements.

Marc:

But the point is, is, you know, there's a, there's a, there's a saying that goes,

Marc:

um, every fascism is a failed revolution.

Trevor:

Right.

Marc:

And so what we're seeing is, Not only a left that is programmatically

Marc:

non revolutionary, right, they don't want to talk revolution,

Marc:

that's the old left, so ever since World War II we've been new left.

Marc:

And so we don't even have revolutionary theory on the table.

Marc:

If you talk about Antonio Gramsci, who was a leading intellectual in the

Marc:

Italian Communist Party, he invented the notion of hegemony, concept of hegemony.

Marc:

And he said, you know, the revolution worked in, uh, Russia for very

Marc:

specific reasons, because they had to do their own anti feudal work.

Marc:

Revolution.

Marc:

They hadn't gotten rid of their monarchy at that point.

Marc:

So really the Communist Revolution was kind of like their

Marc:

bourgeois revolution in a way.

Marc:

And, uh, but the same thing, the Communist Revolution can't happen

Marc:

in a European country that is more developed, where people are more

Marc:

educated, and where the working class by and large gets by a little bit

Marc:

better and a bit, a bit more easily.

Marc:

They're more likely to be tempted.

Marc:

Either, if they're not conservative, like the, the problem with the

Marc:

south of Italy at that time, in the north of Italy, where there's a lot

Marc:

of workers and they're unionized, they're not going to be revolutionary.

Marc:

They're going to be tempted by social democracy.

Marc:

And so basically what you see in the US with the United Auto Workers and with

Marc:

unions, uh, like the, the, uh, Teamsters.

Marc:

identifying with the Trump Republicans, the Metal Workers Union, identifying

Marc:

with the Trump Republicans.

Marc:

You have the American Federation of Teachers, identifying with the regime

Marc:

in Kiev, which is a far right regime.

Marc:

The UAW, the same.

Marc:

So basically what they're presenting American workers is

Marc:

what's known as corporatism, where the social democratic left, the

Marc:

unionized left, is the left wing.

Marc:

Of the neoliberal agenda.

Marc:

And so it's, it's not surprising that, you know, when it comes to the DSA uh,

Marc:

they're kind of, they're, you know, they're saying, class class class.

Marc:

But their main representative is the, AOC, she's a member of the DSA, they

Marc:

should have kicked her out a long time ago, because she's going along

Marc:

with these genocides and these NATO World War III plans, um, and this,

Marc:

you know, failed Biden administration where nothing was done for health care,

Marc:

for student debt, for infrastructure.

Marc:

It's a disaster.

Marc:

It's one failure after another.

Marc:

Um, you know, you know, she's towing the line.

Marc:

So this is the best that the DNC has in terms of a representative,

Marc:

not at the local level, but at, but at this major ideological level.

Marc:

Why didn't they dump her?

Marc:

They should have dumped her a long time ago.

Marc:

Um, so, you know, they're trying to sort of maintain this sort of like,

Marc:

we're not going to achieve anything with revolutionary sectarianism.

Marc:

We have to stay within the mainstream.

Marc:

We have to operate.

Marc:

You know, on terms that are not of our choosing.

Marc:

And so it's always this kind of, um, it's always this game of kind of

Marc:

positioning, which is a very middle class or aspirational, uh, middle class kind

Marc:

of rhetoric, which is very good because you can have all the social criticism.

Marc:

in the world.

Marc:

You can be the best and the brightest when it comes to social criticism, but

Marc:

really when it comes down to it, your, your function, your structure in the

Marc:

system is to maintain the middle class as a kind of de facto intellectual

Marc:

cultural establishment, which is basically working against the working

Marc:

class because you're working against the radical left, program, programmatically.

Trevor:

Mark, I want to head to winding up, so Did you have anything

Trevor:

key idea that you wanted to get across that we've missed so far?

Trevor:

Was there any one thing, um, that you feel that we just didn't get

Trevor:

to, that you would like to, or flag for a discussion at another time?

Marc:

Could we look at some of my cartoons just before we go?

Trevor:

Yeah,

Marc:

yep.

Marc:

One of the things that, um, I, I lament, if we, we can go forward.

Trevor:

Yep.

Marc:

One of the things I lament is that there isn't a lot of good

Marc:

cultural production of films.

Marc:

Um, and I, I was cancelled for this cartoon, um, by a publisher.

Marc:

Um, There aren't a lot of good films that are addressing the

Marc:

contradictions and the problems with these issues we're discussing.

Marc:

Um, I don't know very many.

Marc:

If you look at a film from the 60s, I think it is, called Putney Swope.

Marc:

Very good film by Robert Downey Sr.

Marc:

It's a, you know, you could use that film to criticize, uh, Ibram Kendi

Marc:

and his mismanagement of his well founded School at Boston University.

Marc:

20 million dollars, I think, you know, sort of completely wasted or I don't know

Marc:

the specifics, but something like this.

Marc:

You have, we can go forward a little bit.

Marc:

You have the film American Fiction, which is about a black writer and they

Marc:

won't let him write his books unless he makes them more sort of street.

Marc:

You know, so he ends up calling his, he ends up calling his book,

Marc:

Fuck, because that will sell.

Marc:

Whereas, you know, something more subtle won't do as well.

Marc:

But you know, I know a few examples, but I don't know very many.

Marc:

So, you know, once in a while, I, I, I, I just tinker around with memes

Marc:

that I put on the internet, hoping that they'll, hoping that they'll,

Marc:

you know, maybe, you know, Um, make someone, make someone think and laugh.

Marc:

And so, um, moving, moving on again.

Marc:

Um, I just want to show a few from my Ken Lum series, which are named

Marc:

after a Vancouver artist called Ken Lum, who made photo conceptual art.

Marc:

And, uh, I thought these would be kind of interesting as, uh, PMC

Marc:

types, like today's PMC types.

Marc:

Um, just kind of a few.

Marc:

What do

Trevor:

PMC?

Marc:

Well, there's a tradition in the, if you can go forward, PMC

Marc:

is Professional Managerial Class.

Marc:

Oh, sorry.

Marc:

So, these kind of contradictions between the kind of activist and

Marc:

the creative sectors of the PMC.

Marc:

Just a few more.

Marc:

Yep.

Marc:

Yeah, so this is, you know, this was about kids, uh, LGBTQ constituencies

Marc:

being, uh, referred to as children.

Marc:

It's one of my, uh, pet peeves, but we'll just, we'll

Trevor:

just skip it.

Trevor:

Keep going?

Trevor:

Uh, yes, please.

Trevor:

So we're looking for cartoons, is that what we're looking for?

Trevor:

Um,

Marc:

well

Trevor:

I'll just keep going until you tell me to stop.

Marc:

They're kind of like editorial cartoons, uh, but they're,

Marc:

they're not actually cartoons.

Marc:

They're, they're more, uh, Okay, so this one here is, um,

Marc:

I'll, I'll do the forwarding.

Marc:

This one here is, uh, this was by Ken Lum.

Marc:

So he's a photo conceptual artist from Vancouver, and this is,

Marc:

uh, an example of what he does.

Marc:

So he has a photograph with a text.

Marc:

So this is in the, um, Vancouver School of Art, like Ian Wallace

Marc:

and Jeff Wall, for example.

Marc:

I can't really describe it to you, but this is the inspiration.

Marc:

And so I did a kind of poor man's Ken Lum, and these are real works.

Marc:

Um, is this advancing?

Trevor:

Uh, it just delays about four or five seconds, I think, so it should do.

Trevor:

We'll just Or if you want to I'll do it then.

Marc:

Can you advance one, please?

Marc:

So, you know, Ken Lum's, these are real pieces, they're quite large

Marc:

and they're in, they're in museums.

Marc:

So if you wanted to glue your hands to them, or throw, uh, tomato

Marc:

soup on them, you could do that.

Marc:

I'm not suggesting you should, but I'm saying you could.

Marc:

Uh, whereas the things that I do, they're just digital, they're

Marc:

on, they're, they're only online.

Marc:

Um, so, um, one more.

Trevor:

Yep, um, there we go.

Trevor:

Uh, one more from that.

Marc:

Uh, one more from

Trevor:

that.

Trevor:

Yep.

Marc:

And one more.

Marc:

Uh, yep.

Marc:

And one more.

Marc:

Okay.

Marc:

So, um, what comes after this is what I refer to as my Ken Lumpen series.

Marc:

In other words, uh, the middle class as a Lumpen.

Marc:

Uh, Middle Class, the Lumpen Petty Bourgeoisie, borrowing a phrase from,

Marc:

a term from Marxism, Lumpenproletariat.

Marc:

So, this, this person, she's saying, um, I'm a specialist in

Marc:

diversity and sensitivity training.

Marc:

I work for DNAology.

Marc:

com on how to market the notion of hybridity and flexible identity training.

Marc:

In ways that do not offend specific groups of people, there are many problems in

Marc:

the world, but one of them is that people don't know who they are or what they want.

Marc:

That gives our products and services an advantage on retailers, hardware

Marc:

stores and travel agencies, since what we offer goes to the core

Marc:

of a consumer's sense of self.

Trevor:

Right, okay.

Trevor:

Next one?

Marc:

Yes, please.

Trevor:

Yep, I think because

Trevor:

the um, thing was so large it's

Marc:

It could be the 14 hour time delay.

Trevor:

Yeah,

Marc:

but it should be.

Marc:

So this young woman, uh, this young woman says, I'm homeless now because

Marc:

my parents can't afford my rent.

Marc:

It's hard to keep my laptop charged to finish coursework.

Marc:

I'm not against the privilege theory and whiteness studies I'm learning in

Marc:

social science class, but I don't think that because I consider capitalism

Marc:

to be a more determining factor in social life Than Heteropatriarchy

Marc:

that I'm socially conservative.

Marc:

I can do without some of the people in my classes, they can go fuck themselves

Trevor:

The problem is though, mark, nobody's got an attention

Trevor:

span or a vocabulary to, well, this

Marc:

is how a person might person with this, do they this?

Marc:

This is how a person might feel in a situation of distress.

Marc:

Uh, where on the one hand, you know, you're, you're being taught.

Marc:

I, so the previous image when I posted it on my blog, um, shortly after, or

Marc:

almost the same day or the day after, a book, a proposal to a publisher,

Marc:

a leftist publisher, was refused.

Marc:

And in my paranoid universe, when I'm cancelled or refused

Marc:

something, it could be because of something I said or something I did.

Marc:

So I was trying to imagine who is this person who saw the previous Cartoon and

Marc:

and you know didn't didn't accept my book for publication because I said they can go

Marc:

fuck themselves You know anyway, so this guy he's a publisher He's a commissioning

Marc:

editor, and he says it's true I do very well as a course instructor and publisher

Marc:

of books even if sometimes I get called a trot and a tanky Basically, I see my

Marc:

work as managing a plurality of interests and constituencies Into something that

Marc:

approximates a leftist social movement.

Marc:

The days of armed struggle are over, and I think that the revolution is confronting

Marc:

our traumas about race and sexuality.

Marc:

Human rights are overrated.

Trevor:

And this is, you're saying that this is just a common, sort of,

Trevor:

common person that's in the PMC class.

Trevor:

Well,

Marc:

these are, these are types, these are, these are people who are, you

Marc:

know, sort of dealing with this creative class, uh, uh, lifestyle class structure.

Marc:

They're, they're in the middle class, but they're also dealing

Marc:

with these, um, uh, activism issues.

Marc:

So I'm a left wing freelance journalist.

Marc:

It's a tough market, and the best way to survive is to cover all the

Marc:

bases and avoid making enemies.

Marc:

This business is basically game theory applied to your social and work life,

Marc:

which means that Cold War liberalism is still the name of the game.

Marc:

I've decided to settle for social democracy and intersectionality

Marc:

so that I can pay my rent.

Marc:

So, um, if you think of, uh, Yasha Munk, because I just read his book, a lot of

Marc:

what he's proposing, uh, if you think of his discussion of prisoner's dilemma,

Marc:

for example, he's basically advocating that we use things like game theory and

Marc:

prisoner's dilemma, these very formal.

Marc:

paradigms to think our way out of wokeism.

Marc:

And so this is, you know, an example of somebody who would be doing

Marc:

just that, but maybe not, maybe not in the way that one might hope.

Trevor:

I mean, that one does have a point though.

Trevor:

One of our problems is that, uh, if you're a journalist who wants to,

Trevor:

um, um, promote ideas that are not approved of by the owner of the of

Trevor:

the media organization, then you just won't have a job for much longer.

Trevor:

So people are forced to sort of toe a line.

Trevor:

Um, and if they're not independently wealthy, they just have to toe a line

Trevor:

that comes down from above, don't they?

Trevor:

It's difficult for journalists to be, to go against the grain.

Marc:

Well, I would take that as a compliment.

Trevor:

So, um, Mark, I am conscious of, of sort of trying

Trevor:

to wrap this up, so Oh, could we

Marc:

do just one more?

Marc:

No, not the next one.

Trevor:

Next one, okay,

Marc:

yep.

Marc:

I think this, um, the one after the next one, because I think that's my best one.

Trevor:

Yep, next one.

Marc:

Yeah, oh no, not that one, the next one.

Trevor:

Okay, so not this one, next one, yep, okay.

Marc:

Yeah,

Marc:

yeah, I don't know if this one's gay or not gay, he might be gay.

Marc:

Um, I have a PhD in gender studies, but what I work in now is a new

Marc:

fifth wave feminism field called critical comedy studies, which

Marc:

is also known as revenge studies.

Marc:

Okay.

Marc:

Most comedy pretends to quote unquote tell it like it is, but what an intersectional

Marc:

approach reveals, regardless of your standpoint, is that most comedy

Marc:

is a form of epistemic violence.

Marc:

Although comedy is impossible to escape, and you wouldn't want to live in a

Marc:

society that takes itself too seriously, only socialized forms of punishment

Marc:

are able to bring about equality.

Marc:

We're working with the campus human resources department to root out jokes.

Trevor:

Ah, the new left has no sense of humour.

Trevor:

Is that what we're saying, Mark?

Marc:

It has its own form of humour, and some of it involves torturing people.

Trevor:

Yeah.

Trevor:

Alright, Mark.

Trevor:

Well, I do need to wind this up, so, Well, we've covered a fair bit, I think.

Trevor:

Um, I'll have some links in the show notes.

Trevor:

Um, and we do chapters with this podcast.

Trevor:

So people listening to the audio would have been able to see some of the images

Trevor:

on their app as they're listening.

Trevor:

listening to the audio podcast, so that's good.

Trevor:

So, well, Mark, good luck with your writings and your work.

Marc:

Could we ask, do we have any questions in the chat?

Marc:

No,

Trevor:

that's, all we've got is just what's on the right there, so nothing.

Trevor:

Okay, well,

Marc:

hello to Don, Tuvi, Alison, Cordis, James, Leanne, and Don Tuvi.

Trevor:

Yes, thank you for watching in the chat.

Trevor:

Um, yeah, so yeah, well Mark.

Trevor:

That was something different and your knowledge on on

Trevor:

these things is encyclopedic.

Trevor:

That's for sure.

Trevor:

So thank you for that.

Trevor:

Um, I'll have links in the show notes for some of your stuff so people

Trevor:

can see what you're up to and um, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Marc:

Thank you very much, Trevor.

Marc:

It's my pleasure.

Trevor:

No worries.

Trevor:

Okay, everyone.

Trevor:

We'll be back next week with the usual panel discussion.

Trevor:

Bye for now.

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The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove
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